Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  He saw the tiles sloping up, the leaves and sticks fallen from the higher branches of the oak that grew close beside the house; he noticed a stranded softball, its white leather gleaming softly in the moonlight. No one was there.

  After he switched off the constellation lamp, Webern curled up in bed and squeezed his eyes shut in a semblance of sleep. But it was no use.

  The visits continued infrequently over the next week. Sometimes the ghost would fall silent for a day or two at a time. Sometimes its footsteps sounded more like waltzing—one-two creak, one-two creak. Sometimes Webern felt eyes on him, ones he couldn’t see; sometimes he heard a tune, high and faint—a familiar lullaby. But even when he dug an old Ouija board out of the pile of games in his closet, he couldn’t get the apparition to appear. One day after school, he decided to write the ghost a letter. He used a blue pen on a clean sheet of notebook paper, and drew a border of tattered roses around the edge.

  Dear Mom,

  I know I’m too old to believe in ghosts. But if you’re there, really there, I wish you’d let me see you. I promise I won’t be scared. You always told me I was brave. I wasn’t then, but I am now.

  Love, Bernie.

  Webern speared the letter on a branch of the oak tree that grew right beside his window, where it would be visible from the roof. The paper rustled there like a dry white leaf all afternoon.

  That night, he lay on his elbows under the blankets with a flashlight and read all his old picture books. He remembered how the words had sounded in his mother’s shy, quiet voice, how her fingernail, pink and smooth as a tiny seashell, had traced across the glossy pages. Footsteps paced back and forth above his head in the rhythm of the words.

  When he woke up, Webern found himself surrounded by a half-dozen open picture books; the handle of his flashlight had left a red imprint in the side of his face. Webern climbed out of bed and scrabbled quickly over to the window. He threw back the curtain. His note was gone. Another one hung in its place.

  Webern opened the window. The ghost had written with charcoal, and the black marking smeared and rubbed off on his hands as he removed the letter from the tree branch. Webern eagerly smoothed the paper on the window sill and focused on the messy black words.

  “Dear Son,” the letter read. “I will never leave you. You can see me whenever you want. You just need to close your eyes.” Beneath this was a sloppily drawn smiley face: a nose, a mouth, and two large scrawled X’s were all they’d bothered to draw in.

  The letter was written on a page torn from a book; behind the charcoal writing, Webern saw blocks of printed text. He turned the page over. On the back, he saw a familiar picture. A frail boy and girl walked hand and hand through a dark forest; all around them, menacing yellow eyes peered down from the trees.

  Webern slowly turned toward the picture books on his bed. One of them, the book of fairy tales, lay facedown on his comforter. He went to it and turned it over. He ran his finger down the ragged edge where the page had been torn out, then sank down on his bed.

  He couldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t move. He could hardly think. A single thought just repeated in his mind, over and over: They were here. In my room. They were here. In my room.

  The world was dark, but it was not haunted. There was no ghost—there never had been. When a person died, she stayed dead. He had always known that, but now the knowledge moved through him like a poison. His mother wasn’t on the roof. She was in the ground. He lay on his bed, perfectly still, for a long time. In the house below, he heard his father eat breakfast and leave for work. Then he heard the house’s stillness.

  When Webern got up again, the sun was setting, and his room burned orange-red. His head hurt, and his hands felt limp and sweaty. But he knew what he had to do now. He knew he had to be brave. Webern took off his pyjamas and dressed himself in the darkest clothes he had—his hands shook as he did up the buttons—then went downstairs and sat on the sofa to wait. As soon as twilight had dimmed into night, he went into the garage. He found the gallon jug of gasoline and carried it to the back yard. If Willow and Billow thought they could make a game out of his grief, they were wrong. He would not be haunted like this.

  Webern stood in the shadows beneath the oak tree; its branches spread in a dark canopy above him, like India ink spilled on the sky. From where he stood, he could just barely see them crouching up there in the treehouse. In the darkness, the twins’ eyes glowed like cats’ eyes, sly and golden.

  Willow and Billow had been living up there for weeks, amongst cicada shells and rusted nails and rotten knotholes, coming out only at night to move like ghosts through their own house or across its tilted roof. They were there. In my room. He imagined them standing over his bed like two bad fairies delivering a curse—saw their spindly fingers moving like insects, like the wind, toward his neck, and he knew what he had to do. He had to drive them out. He didn’t care if it was cruel.

  Webern moved toward the trunk of the tree and awkwardly, nervously, splashed the bark with gasoline. Up above, he heard the twins stir. Maybe they could smell the diesel. He certainly could.

  For a moment after he doused the tree trunk, Webern stood in silence. The empty gasoline jug hung heavy in his hand. His father would be home within the hour. But there was nothing the old man could do to stop him now.

  Webern reached into his pocket for the match.

  The orange flames whooshed up the oak, and the whole backyard flickered with a hellish red light. Webern backed up. He wanted to run away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off what was happening to the treehouse.

  He could see Willow and Billow clearly now. They danced in quick circles on the uneven planks, and for a horrible moment, Webern thought that they wouldn’t leave the treehouse at all—that they would just swirl faster and faster until they merged with the flames. But then, at the last possible moment, the twins flew out the window; they leapt up onto the roof of the house just as the wooden treehouse walls caught ablaze. The girls tore away like shadows fleeing from the light; they scaled the sloping roof and disappeared over the other side.

  Webern turned his eyes back to the treehouse, which now burned with a steady, rushing brilliance, like a comet descending through the sky. As a fire engine’s siren wailed in the distance, Webern glimpsed Wags, framed in the treehouse window. For the first time since Webern’s sixth birthday party, the little boy in lederhosen was the size of a normal child.

  “Wags!” Webern screamed. His heart pounded in his ears. “Wags! Wags! Jump!”

  But Wags just grinned. He saluted, snapped the straps of his lederhosen, and in a shower of sparks, vanished into the consuming fire.

  All of Wags’s acts had to do with falling—falling or flying, which were really just two halves of the same thing. Wags had concocted a routine with a stepladder, which Webern fell down bump bump bump, hitting his head on each rung, and together they had rigged up an elaborate system of wires and pulleys above his freak show stage, so he could glide, Peter Pan style, up one side and down the other. A swing hung over the little stage now too, and they planned to add a basket, like the ones beneath hot air balloons, that could be raised and lowered with a nearly invisible clothesline.

  Wags incorporated Webern’s old unicycle in the show, and Webern cleaned the chain and patched the tire, which he hadn’t done for years. In one version of the routine, the unicycle bucked forward to throw Webern in a slow motion trajectory (assisted by the pulleys) out over the heads of the audience; in another, he pedaled absentmindedly even as he floated higher and higher above the newly shined seat. Unlike most of his fellow clowns under the big top, Webern had always hated falls, even the ones that sent him thumping onto a padded mat or splashing into a tank of water. But as he trained with Wags, falling unfolded for him, in all its permutations. He learned the classic clown fall—catching one toe behind the other heel—and the best way to dive from a height into a handspring on the
ground. He learned to lean too far backwards and circle his outstretched arms in the air—“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

  Webern’s skin was dotted with bruises, a harlequin checkerboard of black and blue. But as Wags he was indestructible.

  That night, Webern performed perfectly. He split his act into five minute segments, and as the bored crowds filed past his little booth, he took great pride in the startled looks that rippled their unshockable faces. He climbed and tumbled and climbed again and now and then he floated, and even flew. Even after the show under the big top began, people still packed into the space in front of his stage. Their laughs were flabbergasted at first, incredulous—what was this guy supposed to be, the Wingless Soaring Wonder? But as the act went on, the cynicism fell away. The laughs deepened, the crowds stayed longer, despite the barker waving them on. Sometimes a child yelled encouragement, or a lady covered her eyes in disbelief.

  At the end of the evening, as he performed one final time, Webern spotted Silly Billy out in the audience, slouched in one corner, smoking a post-show cigarette. Webern knew then that he had outlasted the other clowns, that he was still out on his humble stage as the big top darkened, as the bleachers folded up and the tent poles swooned to the ground. When Webern took a bow, he watched Silly Billy applaud. Then the Parliament cleared out, and almost at once, crewmen started dismantling the tent all around him.

  Webern carefully unstrung his ropes and pulleys; he folded up his stepladder and wheeled his unicycle offstage. When he finally glanced up from what he was doing, he saw that Venus de Milo was standing on the sawdust right in front of him. She blew a pink bubble of chewing gum. Then she popped it and pulled it back into her mouth with one deft motion of her tongue.

  “So that’s what you’ve been cooking up.” She nodded to the pile of ropes and pulleys. “I was starting to worry, seeing a guy like you stringing up ropes all day.”

  “What do you mean, a guy like me?”

  “You know. Heartbroke.” Venus took a step toward him and lowered her voice. “A girl doesn’t like fellas sneaking out in the middle of the night. Makes her feel cheap. But I’ll forgive you this time, on account of what you’ve been going through.”

  “Get as mad as you want.” Webern coiled the ropes. “I’ve been busy, but I’ve never been better, Venus. You don’t need to make any exceptions for me.”

  “Oh, sure. That’s why you’re dressed up as a Nazi boy scout, throwing yourself around like you want your skull cracked. When was the last time you ate at the cookhouse, Bernie?”

  Webern tucked his thumbs in the straps of his lederhosen. “I eat.”

  “You eat, maybe, but you sure don’t talk. Ask how somebody else is doing for a change, why don’t you? You might learn something.”

  Venus’s heels left marks in the sawdust behind her, a trail he didn’t follow.

  Webern walked back to the boxcar by himself. Even now that he was back down on the ground, he still felt weightless, as if he might lift off with his next step or find himself drifting in slow motion down a bottomless well. In the distance, he heard porters shout directions as they loaded animal cages onto the train and lashed tent poles and canvas to the flatbeds at the back. Despite the late hour, the air was hot and dense as steam. The sky was yellow, the eye of a storm.

  Webern paused at the door of his boxcar. His hand rested on the knob. He felt an odd impulse to knock. The foreignness of everything—the worn wood of the step, the iron wheels of the train—swept over him in a wave. I don’t live here. I don’t live anywhere. He shook his head and went inside.

  The boxcar was spic and span, the cleanest it had been in weeks. Laundry was folded up and put away, his clown notebooks made a tidy file at the back of his desk, and the ragged-edged rug looked like it had taken quite a beating. Marzipan had even set up the chess set on the coffee table. But the most noticeable difference was that every trace of Nepenthe had vanished. Her rock candy aquarium—turned cloudy and overgrown with crystals in her absence—no longer rested on the windowsill, and her stack of newspapers didn’t stop the door. Even her pink robe was gone.

  Marzipan rose from the sofa and offered him a glass of Scotch. In the mirror, Wags was clapping his hands. He put two fingers in his mouth for a wolf whistle and punched the air victoriously with his fist.

  “That was great, old buddy! Just like we practiced. You hit the mark every time. And that bit with the ladder—that was gold.”

  “Where are they?” Webern asked. “All her things?”

  “That old junk? I told Marzipan she could chuck it.” Webern looked at Marzipan, who shrugged. Wags’s tone grew serious. “I mean, I know you’re sentimental and all, but trust me, we need the space. Between the costumes and the equipment we’re getting—”

  “Equipment?”

  “Well, sure. Tricycles, bicycles—fake fruit, toy guns, a pair of rubber arms. Plus a coffin—you know how the kids love Halloween—a Tesla coil too—you name it, we’re gonna need it. Boy oh boy. It’ll be jam-packed.”

  Webern started to say something, then hesitated. He took the glass of Scotch from Marzipan. Two ice cubes floated in the amber liquid. He sank down on the couch. It occurred to him that there was no reason he couldn’t be happy. He remembered the night he’d walked through Goldenland past dark with Dr. Show, how for the old ringmaster the shadows had restored everything to its former glory. At the time, Webern hadn’t understood that he was free to live in his imagination, too. But now he did. This was what it was to be a master—to be king of the clowns. He glanced at his wrist. The acrobat watch had stopped ticking.

  “We’ll actually have some space for once,” Wags was saying. “And time. There’s time enough for everything, now—everything we ever wanted to do.”

  “Yeah.” Webern sipped his drink. “Years.”

  The knock came then: one, two. One, two, three. Webern didn’t move from the couch.

  “Whoever could that be at this time of the night?” Wags strained theatrically to see around the frame of the mirror.

  “I told you they would come,” said Webern.

  The knock was louder the second time. One, two. One, two, three. Marzipan got up and answered the door.

  Willow and Billow did not look the way that Webern remembered. They wore their dogcatching uniforms, blue denim with cursive names embroidered on the pockets, not stained white shirts, and their hair no longer hung long and tangled with weeds. Billow’s bob, short and black, curled tightly as Bo-Bo’s once had done, and she stood with her legs wide apart, her short thick arms crossed firmly over her broad chest. Willow moved with the peculiar grace very tall women possess; her neck ducked and swerved, her pale chin-length hair tossed in the light. They were opposites still, as they had ever been, but time had softened this opposition, touched it with a sisterly resemblance. Both had the same Bell nose, small and upturned, and their eyes were wide spaced and pale: the same windows in two different houses.

  “Bernie Bee,” said Willow. She held a paper bag. She set it on the floor.

  “Bernie Bee,” said Billow.

  Webern finished his drink in one swallow. The half-melted ice cubes slid down his throat.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  The twins looked at each other. They spoke into each other’s eyes.

  “We came to bring you salvation,” they said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The train rolled like black fog through the night.

  Willow and Billow sat side by side on Webern’s bed, picking dog hair off of each other’s clothes. They did it without thinking, the way he would scratch his elbow. He remembered the way they had played as children, how they gibbered in a language only they could understand, then shrieked in fits of laughter, how they held tight to each other’s hands and spun and spun until their own force tore them apart. But this was not the play of a child mesmerized with the perfect toy of her
twin. It was something ragged, something clutched and cherished beyond all reason: a kind of nostalgia, a tragic stubbornness. They stopped their grooming and grasped hands together, a single prayer.

  “I’m not scared of you anymore.” Webern’s words hung in the thick air of the boxcar. Someday they’ll be the only family you’ve got left.

  “Bernie Bee,” said Willow. “God the Father knows what’s in your heart.”

  “Lord Jesus gives a brand-new start,” murmured Billow.

  Willow turned to him. Her pale eyes, open unnaturally wide, pierced him.

  “Will you make a brand new start?” she asked. Billow’s lips moved to the rhythm of her words. “Will you drink the blood of Jesus? Will you suck the marrow from his bones?”

  “I don’t remember that being in the Bible.” Webern looked at Marzipan, who sat beside him on the couch. Her hands were folded, but the expression on her long rubbery face was skeptical.

  “Will you die on the altar of his Word, and be born again?” Willow drew a cross in the air. They were picking up speed. The train screeched as they rounded a bend in the track.

  “Hell’s no,” Webern said. It sounded like something Nepenthe might say. He said it again. “Hell’s no.”

  Billow stood up. She took a boxcutter from the pocket of her coveralls.

  “Lord Jesus didn’t fear the cross.” Willow shook her head. “The saints didn’t fear the lion’s jaws.”

  Billow reached for one of the pillows on the bed. She used the boxcutter to slice a deep gash in the centre of the pillow, then thumped it. White feathers snowed down.

  “When you die, your soul falls out, cracks to pieces on the ground.” Willow plucked a feather from the air. “Only God can take a million things, piece them into angel’s wings.”