The Homecoming

by Andrew Pyper

  “All the dents and scratches are on the inside,” I say. “It was a fight to get out.”

  Not that it makes a difference now. This is the page of Belfountain’s story we least want to turn but have to. A trail of blood, not bread crumbs, has led us here. And inside is where the witch lives.

  48

  THE CEILINGS ARE LOW AND composed of perforated particleboard that looks like domino tiles. On the walls, randomly placed landscape paintings (some higher than eye level, some at the waist). Oils of frothing seashores and sunlit groves, all unsigned but probably the work of the same artist, considering the consistent palette of colors. The first rooms off the hallway are bedrooms of identical size, not quite prison cells but equipped with only the simplest comforts: single beds, corkboards spotted with thumbtacks over foldout desks. Put together, it suggests a place that’s part bomb shelter, part Siberian hotel, part mental hospital.

  “You think Dad did those paintings?”

  You’d think that Franny would be more urgently interested in what might have gone on here. Yet her question is the one I’m most curious about too. There’s the overwhelming sense that we are closer to our father now than we’d ever come in our lives under the same roof with him. No matter how awful or strange the things that occurred here, these halls were his true home.

  “They’re his,” Bridge answers before I can.

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “Because he thought he was an artist. Just not the normal kind.”

  “So the paintings—”

  “A hobby,” she says. “His real work is what he made here.”

  Once we’re past the bedrooms, the hallway meets another running off to the left. We shine our lights down its length and see that it’s the same one where we’d seen the old woman when we’d come down from the walk-in freezer. There’s the blood on the floor and walls, now dried into footprints like a choreography map. The metal rim around the porthole window where I’d pressed my nose glints sixty feet away. Which makes where we’re standing now the exact spot where the Tall Man had appeared.

  The hallway we’d entered through continues ahead before coming to a wall. The entire complex, from what we’ve discovered so far, is shaped like a T.

  “Straight, or down that way?” I ask.

  “This room looks bigger than the others,” Bridge says, starting down the hallway to the left and slipping through the first doorframe.

  “Bridge!” Franny calls out, but I’m ahead of her, almost tripping over a nest of wires and some kind of electronics component of black dials and knobs. I lurch through the doorframe and my headlamp flashes over Bridge’s back, standing rigid, a few feet inside.

  “You okay?”

  I bend and pick up a steel strip of the kind that houses power cords and wield it in front of me. But as I stand and play my light over the space we’re in, I can’t spot the witch or the Tall Man. Yet what I can see stops me the same as it stopped Bridge.

  “It happened here,” she says.

  The room is double the width of the ones with the beds but much longer, maybe forty feet from one end to the other. Aside from a few desks and toppled office chairs, the only furniture is a number of similarly shaped boxes set upon stainless steel platforms, each set waist-high, their legs on wheels like gurneys. The boxes themselves are made of brownish metal, with electric cables feeding out of their sides, some of which lead to outlets in the wall and others to computer terminals on the worktables (or used to, as most of the computers lie smashed on their sides on the floor).

  The number of boxes, angled and body-sized, puts me in mind of a showroom in a discount funeral home.

  “There’re names on them,” Bridge says, walking between the boxes and letting her hand stroke their curved metal lids.

  Eight. The same number as the combined Quinlan families.

  “This one says Jerry,” Bridge says.

  Franny passes me to join Bridge before she too stops at one of what, considering their metallic smoothness, I don’t think of as boxes anymore, but pods.

  “This one’s yours,” Franny says.

  She’s looking at me strangely. Her mouth hanging open in a consuming, skeletal way that reminds me of the Tall Man.

  I can see my name on the pod even before I start to approach. AARON. Spelled out in those adhesive letters on a gold foil background you see stuck on roadside mailboxes.

  My hands are on the edges of the lid before I’m aware of moving close enough to reach for it. The idea that, if I lift it open, I will find myself inside arrives with such force it holds me still. I’m here, breathing in the bunker’s filtered air, my body at my command. Yet the unseen contents of the pod have overtaken these formerly reliable tests of reality. If the cool metal at the ends of my fingers is a coffin, the dead man within is more present and alive than the one who is about to look down on him.

  “You have to,” Bridge says.

  The lid rises and it’s me doing it. It’s me, aware of how I’m about to be ruined like the child who nudges open the door to his parents’ bedroom to witness who they truly are, the things they do that cannot be understood.

  There is no body. Only water.

  So lightless in its steel container that it appears black as bitumen, reflecting my headlamp without allowing any illumination to penetrate the surface. I place my palm on it and I feel its resistance, the whole weight of my hand held up as if it were no more than a sheet of paper. The lid falls fully open, and the vibration sends a half dozen silver ripples inward from the sides that blend and diminish within seconds, leaving the liquid smooth once more.

  I’ve seen isolation tanks on TV, read magazine features on spas that feature individual tubs filled with saline water so that you rest on the surface and meditate or sleep or, as I’m sure I would, bang on the lid and demand to be let out. The pod in front of me is like those in some respects, but unlike them in others. The screen, for instance. How the whole interior side of the lid is transparent plastic, semicircular, glowing faintly blue.

  “Here,” Franny says, picking up a narrow console from the floor. Two cords run from it to the side of the pod. “Maybe these do something.”

  The console has three dials on its face and two switches. She tries the first of these. Nothing. When she flicks the second, it begins.

  The pod’s curved screen comes to life. Images—some moving, others still—sharpen into focus. The quality of the visuals is unlike anything I’ve ever seen: three-dimensional but without the cutout fakery of the effect when seen through the glasses they hand out in cinemas. This has a genuine suppleness and veracity. There’s a soundtrack too. Speakers I can’t see but must be located both in the pod’s lid and beneath the water’s surface, as it comes from all around, causing the water to tremble slightly so that the motion gives it the appearance of an oil slick sliding and spreading over its surface.

  It takes longer than it should to recognize what it is. Once I do, I watch. Franny and Bridge come to stand on either side of me.

  “What is it?” Bridge asks.

  “It’s the movie of my life,” I say.

  49

  IN FACT, IT’S SOMETHING BETWEEN a slideshow and a movie. A combination of images appearing for differing lengths of time—some remain on screen for close to a full minute, others flashing so quickly I can hardly make them out—and a similarly varied range of sounds. Phrases of music, effects both quiet and deafening (a shattered glass, crashing tide, orgasmic moan). Pieces of random-seeming facts conveyed in a neutral, androgynous voice, like excerpts from AM radio advertising. Together it’s disconcerting, transfixing. Simultaneously unlike lived experience and an amplification of it. Like a dream. Like art.

  Some of it is shaped as scenes with compressed beginnings and ends. Lisa Gerber breaking up with me at my locker in eleventh grade. Mom letting me hold Bridge for the first time in her maternity-ward room. A fistfight I lost to some guy who thought I was looking covetously at his girlfriend (I was) from the other side
of a pool table.

  Most of it, though, is vaguer, less coherent than a story. Snapshots. Pictures of faces (friends growing up, a favorite med school prof, ex-lovers) and buildings (the Cape Cod–style house where we grew up, my high school viewed from the parking lot). Younger versions of Franny and Mom. Images that are discernible but also muted in some way, blurred or fogged or bleached. The thudding machetes and gurgled screams from overseas. Places on bodies where surgical steel split skin but never the patients’ faces. Close-ups that are too close up to take in the whole.

  The picture that takes my breath away most is the fuzziest of all of them, but it remains on the screen longer than the others.

  There are the tortoiseshell glasses set upon a small, bluish nose. The hair finger-combed to the side. The cheeks, round and smooth. Harmless.

  His voice too. Subdued, slightly Southern flavored, polite. Speaking some of the words and sentences I remember best.

  Strong enough for a spoon to stand up in it . . .

  A castle in the middle of an endless wood named Belfountain . . .

  Have to go, have to go. I’ll see you when I see you.

  “Daddy,” Bridge says.

  When his image is replaced by another, I’m finally able to pull my attention away from the screen. The other pods all have cords running out of them connected to consoles with dials and switches. All of them individual movie houses to float in. Each with their own show, their own life.

  Franny scans her headlight over the other pods as Bridge and I do, as if measuring to see if any have moved on their own since we entered.

  “What are they?” she asks.

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “You think I—you think we were made in those things?”

  “No. Not physically, anyway. But maybe in some other way.”

  “What way?”

  “Our past. A version of it. The stuff we think makes us who we are. It’s all here.” I point to the pod two over from us labeled FRANNY. “And that’s you.”

  As Franny approaches the pod, horror reshapes her expression in a rictus of anticipated pain, but her body shuffles closer anyway. Her limbs advancing with the terrible need of the undead.

  “Aaron?” Her hands grip the pod’s lid as she looks back at me.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “We can wait. Come back later. We can walk away and—”

  “I’m going to be inside here, aren’t I?”

  Franny stares at the pod and I honestly don’t know what she will do next. I’m not sure she will ever move again.

  “I always knew you could fit me in a box,” she says finally. “I just never thought I’d be around to see mine.”

  She starts to shake with the same wracking, noiseless sobs as Bridge and me. As I watch her, I can see that, for all of us, it’s equal parts confused emotion and panic.

  She opens the lid.

  Over Franny’s shoulder I watch a few seconds of her slideshow-movie on the pod’s screen before looking away. It feels like an invasion of privacy, or something even deeper than that, more perverse. There are things I know will be there that I don’t want to see. All the years of doing whatever she had to do to buy a fix, the pornography of addiction. The long stretches of nothingness mistaken for bliss. Nate will be there too. The fragments of a brief life poorly recalled, a child loved and neglected and lost.

  “None of this is real, is it?”

  Based on her words alone it isn’t clear whether Franny’s question is asked of our being here or the authenticity of the images played out over the screen. I can only tell what she’s referring to by how shattered she is. The “real” is her. The Mr. Turtle pool she loved. Eli Einstein, her middle school crush. Nathaniel Quinlan, her son.

  “He can’t—he can’t take my baby away from me! Not a second time. He wouldn’t do that, would he? He wouldn’t do that to his daughter?”

  She closes the lid on her pod and backs away from it as if expecting something to push its way out from inside.

  I open my arms to Franny. She enters my embrace as accidentally as a ghost ship floats sideways into harbor.

  We only separate when we hear the soundtrack of Bridge’s life.

  One-ah, two-ah, three-ah . . . diarrhea!

  Air rushing past ears, then the crash. Bubbles squirming up to the surface, followed by the density of the water, muffled as the grave.

  The Day My Big Brother Saved My Life. More coherent than any of the other memories contained within my pod or Franny’s. The movie playing on the screen looks and sounds more vivid, more simultaneously poetic and terrifying, than what I carry with me.

  Tick-tock! Tick-tock! Tick-tock!

  Jump to:

  Me and Bridge playing Hook and Wendy, dill pickles for swords.

  Jump to:

  My face, twisting, at the realization that my sister can’t breathe.

  Jump to:

  The X-Acto blade in my hand. Bridge’s point of view looking up at me, her breathing calm, and whatever she conveys through her eyes settles me, lets me bring the blade to her throat.

  Jump to:

  Darkness.

  The screen and speakers are lifeless for so long I assume the show’s over, that this is how Bridge’s story begins and ends for her. But then there’s a voice that comes up out of the black water of the pod. Dad. Walking next to her through a breeze-cooled forest, speaking against a backgrounded concert of birdsong.

  Where does the path lead after it ends?

  Bridge closes the lid.

  Both of us look around. Franny isn’t here.

  We scan the long room with our lights, both wishing for and dreading a glimpse of her rising up from behind one of the pods where she’d been hiding.

  I can tell Bridge is holding herself back from calling out for her the same as I am.

  We back away from Bridge’s pod and turn to face the doorway where we came in. Stepping as quietly as we can over the scattered wires and equipment, our beams concentrated on the wall on the opposite side of the hallway like a spotlight awaiting the appearance of a stand-up comedian.

  We’re paused in the doorframe, stretching our necks forward to peek around the corner, when a figure steps into the spotlight.

  “You need to see this,” Franny says.

  50

  WE FOLLOW HER TO WHERE the bloodied hallway meets the one we came in through. She heads to the left, the direction we didn’t go, where there are only two rooms. One is a kitchen: cupboards ripped from the walls; a still-running fridge that emits a rank, meaty odor as I pass; a table and floor littered with the empty packaging of frozen waffles and corn dogs.

  “Eggos and Pogos,” Bridge whispers.

  The other room is an office. Filing cabinets lining one wall, and on the other side a wooden desk, heavy and broad as the kind school principals sit behind. This is where Franny goes. Spreading out a number of files over its surface like a magician showing a set of oversized cards before impossibly revealing the one you’d selected while her back was turned.

  “I found these in that first filing cabinet,” she says. “The one marked ‘Subject Summaries.’ ”

  She’s been crying. But as before, her tears make no sound, as if her feelings come from a deeper place than that.

  “We should go,” Bridge says.

  “She’s right, Franny. We’ve been here too long. We can think this through and—”

  “Read this,” she says, picking up one of the files and offering it to me.

  The file’s blank cover opens on its own like the fairy-tale books at the beginning of the kids’ movies of my youth. The narrator’s voice-over reading aloud the opening words.

  FRANNY QUINLAN

  Subject Profile

  Birthplace: Seattle.

  Current residence: Seattle.

  SUMMARY

  Frances Quinlan (“FRANNY”), 31, sister to AARON and younger sister, BRIDGE. Middle c
hild of the Eleanor Quinlan family. Troubled, restless childhood. Initially shoplifting, school truancy, allegiance to rebellious social groups. As early as middle school: drugs. Daily pot use escalating to heroin and crack cocaine after high school. Adulthood of severe addiction.

  Son, Nathaniel (“Nate”), born five years earlier from START POINT. Father a fellow addict (unnamed), moved east, no contact since prior to birth. Nate is recalled only vaguely but powerfully: sweet-faced, angelic. Asthmatic.

  Nate dies in rooming house while being overseen by fellow addicts as FRANNY was out seeking crack cocaine. Even after her return to the rooming house, it takes over two hours—following a hit from her pipe—for FRANNY to remember the child and find his body.

  This latter fact is KEPT SECRET by the subject.

  FRANNY employs various coping mechanisms that allow her to appear “recovered.” In addition to her (so far) successful drug-free life since Nate’s death, she has resolved to devote her remaining years to helping other addicts. She insists that she’s “changed.” She sometimes believes this, but at other times her inner weaknesses remind her—

  * * *

  Franny reaches over and turns the page, and the next one. When she stops, she stabs her index finger into a page with the header “Origin Identity.”

  “Now this,” she says.

  LYNN WEST

  Origin Identity of FRANNY QUINLAN

  Birthplace: Sacramento, CA

  Current residence: Los Angeles

  SUMMARY

  Lynn West (“WEST”), homosexual, unmarried but since 2012 in on-and-off relationship with Nadia Pender, San Diego high school teacher. Long-distance relationship resulting in multiple breakups and jealousy. Currently works as sound editor in film production, primarily animation. Non-drug user. No children.

  Raised as one of four children in fundamentalist Christian household. Only West child to remain committed to her faith. Historically, WEST has dated exclusively using Christian social media apps. Seeks husband (see: Facebook feed)—a posture presumably for the benefit of her parents/family (possibly also employer?) to whom she has not “come out.”