And when he thought that word, ghost, he remembered that this was the room that was haunted. My mind, he thought, is shaped like a map of these cairns.
What cairns? The room flickered around him. He found he couldn’t move his arms—and then, unexpectedly, he knew now he could, but he had to move them carefully if he was to keep them from breaking off. He moved them so slowly it was as if they weren’t moving at all. There were shapes all around him, and he moved his arms through them so slowly that he did not disperse them; they were all his own shape, all the places his body had been in the room, a strange, fleeting rustling in the air, time overlapped and smearing together. There were other shadows too, and perhaps these were the ghosts the others had meant. But he was more frightened by being surrounded by a dozen versions of himself, some paralyzed, some moving so fast they could barely be perceived.
And there was a sound too, a moaning that part of his mind knew he always had heard, a moaning he had thought to be caused by wind through the gaps in the walls, but now he wasn’t so sure. When he brought his ear close to the outer walls, the moans weren’t any louder and maybe softer. There was wind whistling through the gaps, but this moaning, moans, and not just any moans, his mind told him, but the moans. Part of him was terrified to realize this, but another part was more terrified because it wasn’t sure what exactly it was that had been realized.
He fell back on the half mattress. Around him the room throbbed, and his own shapes circled him, and the moans grew. He felt it all swirl around him, the room growing darker and darker until it seemed there was no room but only blackness and the moans.
Then for one brief moment there was Little God over him, slapping him, and Big Dig there beside saying, “What else was in it, do you think?” and the improbable Fawnstar—Fawnstar?—rubbing his temples. He turned his head weakly to one side and retched, but nothing came out, then he drily retched again and blacked out.
He awoke in the hospital, his rucksack stuffed into the space beneath the end table. Eventually the nurse came and nodded and smiled and spoke to him like this wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation. He apparently had been speaking to people, speaking for hours, or his voice had; he had—so the doctor told him—been only technically dead rather than actually dead. An important difference, the doctor claimed, especially for him. What was it that he had ingested exactly? How had he gotten to the hospital? Had he walked? Had someone dropped him off?
After a few days he felt all right. Eventually they let him leave, though he had nobody to pick him up. His rucksack had all of his possessions except for his notebook, and when he went back to the house to get it, he found the place abandoned. The porch was as it had been—boarded over to form a room, same stack of broken chairs, same half mattress—but his notebook wasn’t there. The rest of the house was an empty shell mostly taken by fire, apparently a long time before, though he didn’t understand how this could be.
For years he forgot about it. He wandered through the rest of his life, dabbled a little in this, a little in that; for a time he was a step away from the street. He learned to hide his accent, then learned when it was advantageous to bring it out, even exaggerate it. He published a number of articles, then a book, then another.
Then, suddenly, it became clear that he knew just enough about any number of things for someone to decide he might be useful. He was hired to wear a suit and tie and sit in a room for eight hours a day with five other people, considering ethical and political problems, some practical, some abstract. A question would be posed, and they would think it through aloud until their voices were hoarse. They talked and argued, and a microphone with a green light in the center of the table recorded the discussion, and, presumably, someone transcribed it, and it was shared with the people who had paid to have the question discussed. It was a strange profession, and sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t in some very special sort of hell.
And then one day, in the middle of considering the best way to warn people thousands of years from now—when perhaps language no longer even exists—that an area is dangerous, that the ground and air and water are shot through with deadly but invisible poison, he flashed. He remember the trip, the ghosts in the room, and the moans; and all of it, despite the time passed, was so vivid, so real, that for an instant he was sure he was still in the porch room, flying. My mind is shaped like a map of these cairns, he thought. The moans were terrible, and he could feel his vision tunneling down to darkness, and knew he would soon black out.
Until a hand touched his shoulder. “All right?” the woman next to him asked, a behavioral psychologist who often acted as if she were in charge, though whether she actually was, nobody seemed to know. The woman was looking at him with what he suspected was supposed to be relaxed calm, though it was slightly too studied to come across that way. His vision still throbbed slightly. She looks like Little God, a part of him thought, though he knew that part of him was wrong; Little God and this woman were not remotely alike.
Aloud, he didn’t express any of this. Aloud, he said, “Fine.” Then he began to speak not to the woman beside him or to the rest of the group, but to the microphone with the green light on it. Recording something changes it, he thought, and imagined aloud black basalt monuments, leaning columns that would be perceived as threatening to collapse, electrical barriers somehow powered by lightning and by machinery capable of staying functional for thousands or tens of thousands of years, the slow release of noxious gasses and smells, and, above all, stone carved and sculpted just right so that the instant it was touched by the slightest wind, it would begin to moan.
And then he opened his mouth and let the moans, lodged inside him all these years, come out.
The Window
He was all but asleep. Or he was asleep and then the sound woke him. Or he was dreaming and never awoke at all. All three possibilities occurred to him later, when he was telling the story to a friend after realizing he had nothing to show for what he’d experienced, or thought he’d experienced—no proof, nothing but a dull and slowly fading sense of fear. Without proof, he began to doubt himself. For surely what he thought had happened couldn’t have actually happened, could it? Wasn’t it better to think he was dreaming or crazy than to think that things like that could happen?
He had been in the bedroom, down the hall at the far end of his apartment, when he had heard a noise. The lights were off, but they had been off for just a few moments, so he didn’t think he was asleep yet. Even if he was, he was pretty sure he had woken up immediately. If not, how was he to explain the fact that he was later standing there, in the living room, staring.
Sleepwalking? the friend he was trying to explain it to speculated.
But no, he wasn’t a sleepwalker, he’d never been one, no history of it in his family either. His friend had been watching too much TV. He hadn’t dreamed it. Even if part of him hoped he had.
He had been in the bedroom when he had heard the noise. The air conditioner wasn’t on even though it was a hot evening, the sort of evening when he usually would have turned it on—if it had been on, even on low, he wouldn’t have heard the noise. He remembered it being hot but couldn’t remember feeling any discomfort—which was surprising, he had to admit, but there it was. He had to tell it as he remembered it if he was to have any hope of making sense of it. He had to trust his impulses—if he didn’t trust them, what, if anything, was left for him to rely on?
Just tell the story—this from his friend. The friend did not understand that this was all part of it for him, that sorting through the tangled impressions was something he had to do to know how much to trust what he was telling, how much to believe what he’d experienced. But yes, all right, he would try to tell it the way the friend wanted to hear it: clean. He would do his best.
He had been in the bedroom when he heard a noise. At first he thought it was from outside, a bird banging against the living room window—that was the first thing that had come to his mind, a bird striking the windo
w hard, once, twice, a third time. But then it had kept up, and the sound had changed too. For a moment he lay in bed, drowsy, just listening, a little curious but also half asleep, not really taking it in. For a moment his mind went from thinking about a bird on the outside of the window to a bird on the inside of the window. And then his mind focused and he realized that no, it wasn’t a bird: there was someone in the house.
Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He wasn’t sure what to do. Even as it was happening he couldn’t quite believe it. He got up, left the bed, and made for the bedroom door, but once there he hesitated just shy of the sill, waited. He didn’t know how exactly he was supposed to act, what he was supposed to do. Should he call the police? No, his phone was in the living room, where the noise was coming from. Should he stay in the bedroom until they were gone? No, there were too many things that he couldn’t afford to have them (whoever they were) steal. He had no gun, no weapon of any kind, and the kitchen, where he kept his knives, was in the other direction.
In the end, he simply grabbed a book from the nightstand, the largest and heaviest in the stack, and moved as quickly and silently as he could toward the living room.
At first, with the room mostly in darkness except for the slight light shining through the windows, he didn’t see anything. The room was a strange crisscross of lighter and darker shadow, some parts of it visible, others not visible at all. The end window was up, propped halfway open. There was a smell to the room, bitter and pungent, that he wanted to take as the smell of the outside air. But no, it was more than that.
At first the room seemed empty. He stood in the doorway hesitating, wondering if he’d just been imagining the noise. But then he saw something move. One of the shadows in the far corner flowed out, and he saw a dim, vague shape. It was more or less the size of a man, though crouched and almost toppling forward in a posture he felt would be difficult for a man to maintain. But maybe what he was seeing was partly shadow rather than body. It moved slowly, seemingly unaware of him. It traveled slowly along beside the wall. It knocked against the objects near the wall, rattling them—this, he realized, must have been the sound he had heard—but it seemed to be unaware of this too, and did little to alter its course. Instead it simply pushed forward the objects rattling in its path.
He tried to speak, but his throat was dry, and all that came out was a kind of inarticulate barking sound. Somehow the intruder didn’t seem to hear this. It continued to move forward, around the edge of the room, at exactly the same pace it had been moving before. I should be afraid, he thought, then suddenly he realized he was afraid—that was the strangest thing. He felt as if the fear was happening to another person, like I was at a distance from my body, observing it.
Maybe it was a dream, his friend said.
No, he said. Yes, of course he had considered this, but no, he didn’t think it was a dream—though he would prefer it if it had been. But that wasn’t all, he said to the friend, that wasn’t the worst yet, he said, just be quiet and listen, that’s only the beginning.
He spoke aloud, but the figure didn’t notice, and he felt a strange sort of distanced fear—as if the fear was all around him, but he was swaddled from it somehow, insulated. He had, of course, already been afraid. The moment he thought someone else might be in the house he had been afraid. But this, this wasn’t the same sort of fear. This fear was of another order entirely.
Then the figure passed before a window—not the open window, he explained to his friend, but a closed one—and the fear rushed closer. For when the figure crossed into the light, he realized he could see through it. It was the shape and size of a human but indistinct, its edges blurred somehow, as if it were not existing here precisely at all, but instead existing somewhere else, in a place that happened, somehow, to overlap with this space. Its edges were blurred, and even within its boundaries its features were shifting and unclear, as if he was watching something in the process of becoming real. Or, another part of him thought, ceasing to be real. But even then, with the figure indistinct, he could tell it was the size and shape of a human but not human at all, and he was terrified of what it might be.
The figure seemed to be shining slightly, vaguely glowing, though a moment ago in the shadows it hadn’t been. And this luminescence seemed to be emanating from somewhere within its person, right about where the head, such as it was, met the body, such as it was. This puzzled him for a moment until the figure moved farther, and he abruptly realized that what he was seeing was coming not from the shape at all, but from behind it, that he was seeing through it to the streetlight shining outside. That he could see through it.
Almost without knowing what he was doing, he hurled the book at it. The book struck but went right through, not even slowing down, and struck the window behind it, making it shiver before then falling to the floor. The figure stopped abruptly as if it had finally heard something, and turned to face the window, its arms twitching, but it paid no attention to the book itself. When it continued, it was moving more quickly, heading toward the other window, the one that was open.
A moment later and it was starting through the opening, squeezing through it before he had thought to move. He rushed toward the window itself and reached it with the figure halfway in and halfway out, eager to close and lock it as soon as the figure was out. But in his rush to shut the window, he managed to close it right on the figure itself.
But just as with the book, the window passed right through the figure. He felt no resistance at all, as if the figure wasn’t really there. For a moment the window was open and the figure stretched out across the sash. Then the window was closed and the figure split, bisected by a piece of glass.
Considering the way the book had passed through it, he expected the figure to just keep going, to move slowly out through the glass and away into the night until it became lost among the other shadows. Instead, it hesitated for a moment and then suddenly began to flail its limbs. A moment later it divided into two halves, one on either side of the glass. The one on the outside fell down somewhere into the bushes and was lost. The one on the inside slipped down the sash, spilled onto the floor, and lay still.
When he rushed over and turned on the light, he found the wall and floor where the figure had been were covered with what looked like a swath of blood. That was all that was left of it.
He called the police, reported an intruder. He waited patiently for them to come and while he was waiting stayed staring at the bloody wall and floor. The color of the blood, he noticed, seemed to be fading, the stain diminishing as well. As he waited and watched it faded entirely, leaving only a dampness on the floor. Then that too faded and was gone.
By the time the police arrived, there was nothing to suggest there had ever been anything there at all. Had there been? He had to wonder. Had he perhaps dreamed it all?
If not, what on earth could it have been?
Whether he had dreamed it or not, he admitted to his friend, he hadn’t slept that night, nor the next, nor the next, because he kept expecting it to happen again. He was afraid to go to sleep, afraid to turn off the light. He felt that by closing the window on it he had made it aware of him somehow, and now he could feel it somewhere, just out of sight, trying once again to become real, starting to push its way back into the world. He had hurt it, and now it would hurt him. He lay awake, listening to his heart pounding in his chest, waiting for it to come. So far it hadn’t. But it would come again, he felt that somehow, feared that, and when it did he knew that this time it would come for him.
Which was the other reason he was telling his friend the story: not only was he trying to figure out what had happened to him, whether it was real or not real—he wanted at least one other person in the world to know what had happened, what he thought had happened, so that at least one person in the world would know later why he had disappeared. Soon it would come for him, though he didn’t know how. Soon it would be his blood on the floor and wall. Perhaps it would fade and perhaps
it would not, but in either case it wouldn’t matter, at least not to him, because by that time he would be dead or gone or both.
Click
I.
He had been given a notebook to write in, and the lawyer had loaned him a brushed-steel mechanical pencil with golden accents that he claimed were real gold. “I am loaning you this,” his lawyer told him when he handed it over, “so you will know how important and serious the matter is, and so you will do your best to remember everything you possibly can and write it all down as it actually happened.”
The lawyer leaned down close and looked at him without blinking, his eyes steady. He doesn’t blink as much as normal people do, the man thought. Sometimes he felt as if the lawyer was not even a person at all, as if he was simply pretending to be a person, and not very well.
“Life and death,” the lawyer said. “That’s how important this is.”
All right, he told the lawyer. He would do his best. He would try to remember.
And that is exactly what the man is trying to do. Anything that you remember, the lawyer had said. If he felt compelled to write down something but didn’t understand why, he shouldn’t try to figure out what the thing meant, he should just write it down. They could sort it out later. I’m your friend, the lawyer insisted, I’m on your side. Other people, the lawyer claimed, might try to insinuate things, to convince him that certain things had happened. It was better to let the real things come back on their own instead of making up things that never happened.
A Collapse of Horses Page 18