Under the yellow beam, Jaimie let his hand slowly caress the dictionary’s pages. The sensuous texture ran under his hand as if he had put his hand out the window of a moving car, the subtleties of the air winding through his fingers, whispering through the Ls, alive and instructive, past “ligan” and “ligate”.
Soon his hand fell on “lonely.” A tingle of recognition swept through him. This was the word he was. With so few people around, he was no longer diluted with what was accepted as normal. A survivor among so many hiding, missing, silenced and dead, the boy was finally less alien. With no bullies, no judging eyes, no whispers and rude remarks, Jaimie felt more calm and less self-conscious then he ever had. He hadn’t been aware how self-conscious he had been until the Sutr virus killed his tormentors.
The boy might even have been grateful for the plague, except the fever had his father now.
Howls rose in the distance, as if the dogs were telling him they were lonely, too. Out in the cold without masters, they understood this feeling. It was the first he’d identified in himself. Jaimie knew he was different, sick in the way the one-eyed king is sick in the Kingdom of the Blind. The boy wasn’t a king, though. He knew what “retard” meant, though the bad words had not hurt him like the ones he found for himself in the dangerous pages of his dictionary. L had lonely and loneliness. Tonight, he discovered that these words had the power to open himself to the feelings they described.
The other dangerous word — a word that had made him feel — he’d found in a medical dictionary. “Aspergers” hit him like a hammer out of the dark.
Jaimie knew. He had recognized himself in that moment just as he recognized the feeling behind the definition of loneliness. For so long, the boy had been comfortably numb. His emotions had been as slow and dull, as an artificial limb. Had the Sutr virus lit that part of him on fire? Was it responsible for these feelings bubbling up?
Why not? He’d already seen the seeds of black specks growing in the aura of the truck driver at the grocery store. He’d then seen its black claws sinking into the head librarian. He’d seen the virus boiling through his father’s etheric, settling down deeper, closer to the skin, arriving as sure as anything is sure.
The dogs howled again, but there was something else that was closer. Gunshots, spaced minutes apart, but coming in batches. The reports came in a chorus, two bass, one alto and another pop, pop, pop staccato that had a grating, soprano whistle at its edge. Jaimie had heard these sounds many times while his father watched old movies. There was a western with Mr. Clint Eastwood that had featured a weapon that made that high-pitched shriek with each shot: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He couldn’t tell how far away the sounds were. They seemed to move in a circle through the night. Gunfire, he thought. Such a poetic image for the chemical discharge and flame at the end of a weapon.
Soon another sound arrived that made Jaimie feel the loneliness more deeply. It was closer than the howls of the dogs. It was even closer than the circling gunfire. It came from downstairs, like a short bark. Jaimie got out of bed, thinking perhaps Steve, Mr. Oliver’s German Shepherd, had returned home. He found his way to the staircase in the dark, navigating around the unfamiliar shapes of a chair and a small couch as he walked through Mr. Oliver’s study toward the stairs.
Doug. They were calling him Doug now, like he was family, as if moving into his house had somehow made them the old man’s kin. Maybe family isn’t just blood, but geography, the boy reasoned, though he was sure the dictionary would say that was wrong.
The boy crept down the stairs, not bothering with the flashlight in his hand. It wasn’t barking. It was his father, on the couch in the living room, coughing.
Jaimie pulled a rocker out of a corner and sat beside his father’s dark form. He was propped up, a large pillow underneath him. The glow of a streetlight outside illuminated the room enough that Jaimie could see his father glowing red, burning with fever. He reached out and touched his forehead, which roused his father from his fitful sleep.
“Hi,” Theo said. “You probably shouldn’t be near me right now, son.”
Jaimie rose from his seat immediately but returned a few minutes later with a cold, wet cloth. His father began to protest but fell back on his pillow and broke into a series of short, ragged coughs again, rumbling from deep in his lungs.
After the episode passed, Theo settled back and gave his son his thanks. “Your mom fixed the curtains for me so I could watch TV. Key Largo was on. I love Bogart movies, but a movie about people trapped in a hotel by a storm and bad guys with guns…seemed a poor choice. I watched it anyway. Hadn’t seen it in years.
“It would have been great to see Some Like It Hot again. That’s one of the best comedies of all time. Two guys dress up as women and Marilyn Monroe’s in it. Tony Curtis was pissed off because the director used all the takes that were good for her but weren’t necessarily the best for him.” Another coughing fit came and went.
“After Key Largo, I opened the curtains. I’ve been watching the house. Doug went out late and still hasn’t come back. What the old guy is up to at three in the morning, I have no clue. I think Mrs. Bendham is worried. She’s waiting up for him, too. I saw her outside in the garden looking up and down the street. She was wearing a mask.”
Jaimie hadn’t seen Mrs. Bendham since her husband died. He turned and looked through the big bay window at his own house. Beside it, in the Bendham house, a light was on. He saw a shadow move back and forth. He squinted and could just make out the silhouette of the old woman’s high pile of hair. She sat in a chair in front of her window. Jaimie wondered if she could see him. He waved but she did not wave back.
“Too dark in here for her to see in,” Theo said. “Doug’s got a pretty fancy place here. The windows are tinted, so it’s hard for anyone to see in, anyway.”
Jaimie examined the glass before returning to the seat beside his father.
“I tried calling dad — Papa — again. Even at two and three in the morning, it’s the same.” At this he attempted to mimic an automated voice. “All circuits are busy, please try again later…” and then fell into another coughing fit. When he recovered he said, “I think there’s plenty of room for hope left, you know. It’s just a flu. All societies through the ages… They have all had epidemics.”
And most of them are dead civilizations, Jaimie thought. The boy kept watch on his own house, its dark face looking blank and abandoned. He’d read in stories that houses were lonely sometimes, too. He could see his bedroom window, like a black eye. The last time he slept there he wasn’t bothered by this new knowledge of loneliness. He knew thousands of words and their definitions, but only two had weighed him down so far. The sharp slice of the words “Aspergers Syndrome” had left him cut with self-recognition. The word loneliness settled on him like a lead apron.
And now they were living in Mr. Oliver’s house, giving him their food and not allowed to eat as much as they wanted. He had overheard his mother say to Anna, “This will be hard on Jaimie. He’s not good with change.”
Anna had replied, “This is harder on me. Jaimie doesn’t get what’s going on.”
His sister was wrong. He wished he could bring himself to tell her so. People made assumptions about him. They were always wrong.
“Look at that streetlight,” Theo said. “Despite all this, that streetlight is still coming on and going off when it’s supposed to. Somewhere there’s someone keeping things going. It’s only the flu. Things look like they’re jumping the rails here, but — ” he broke into another quick series of coughs that produced nothing — “things aren’t so bad. We still have water. People underestimate what a triumph that is. Without the wonder of plumbing, our lives would be much more complicated.”
The boy reached out and felt the wet cloth on his father’s forehead. The fever had already heated through. He turned the cloth over, got up again and, after a moment’s banging search in the kitchen, returned with a cereal bowl full of co
ld water. He’d seen his mother do this, once or twice a year. When Anna took over the couch and the remote control to the television, she often missed a week of school because of flu (regular flu they called it now).
Jaimie watched his father carefully as Theo coughed, reached down to a box of tissues, blew his nose and cleared his throat. He seemed more animated now, so Jaimie settled back. He rocked and watched the dark square of his bedroom window across the street.
His father talked to him until dawn, and through the night, as his father’s fever peaked and pushed him into delirium, Theo Spencer spoke of the Gateway to the Spirit World.
Let go of what you know
“The gateway is hidden on the East coast,” Theo told his son. “It doesn’t look like much, but at night, in the right spot, it feels like you’re floating in space. The sky’s so clear, the Milky Way seems much closer to Earth there.”
Jaimie couldn’t understand how this could be true. He went back and forth in the rocking chair, watching his house across the street and listening to his father do battle with slippery ideas in a boiling brain.
“I want to tell you something. It’s a confession,” his father said. “Just in case.”
Jaimie tapped his temple, meaning that he’d remember.
The boy wondered if that was why it was called “the temple”. Since the brain was the church of memory, perhaps some forgotten poet had likened the power of memory to a temple. Was that how that couple of square inches of each person’s head got the name temple? Later, someone applied the term to anatomy. Jaimie did not approve of homonyms, but he liked the anatomist’s whimsicality.
“When things get bad, Jaimie, we’ll have to run,” his father told him. “We’ll escape to Papa Spence’s farm. It’s a long way and it will be dangerous. It’s most of the way across the country, but we’ll make it. You’re going to love Maine. All those little towns with a view of the sea…that’s a food supply, too, son. It’s not just about the view.”
Jaimie nodded to show he was listening.
“When I was a boy, there were a couple of towns nearby Poeticule Bay where I’d go play baseball sometimes…well, villages, really. Your grandfather used to call them ‘not so much villages but wide spots in the road.’ There was this chant we’d do at little league games. All these little towns had baseball teams and, somehow, the rhymes caught on. The one I remember wasn’t about my hometown, Poeticule Bay. Strange. I remember the chant for those wide spots, up the road.” Theo chanted, in a voice that started out surprisingly strong.
“Squirrel Town Squirrels!
Mink Cove Minks!
And nobody goes to Sandy Cove ’cause
Sandy Cove stinks!”
Theo Spencer’s voice was a rasp at the end, but he was determined to continue to speak, as if afraid that if he slept, he would not return from the empty dark. Through his fever, he told Jaimie how to find the stone. “The gateway,” he called it.
“You’ll need a compass. From your grandfather’s house, at the back step, walk southeast from the back door. There’s a special place. The gateway is the only safe place I know. We’ll go there together or I’ll meet you there.” He gave his son the instructions twice, even though he suspected Jaimie was incapable of forgetting anything.
* * *
When his father laughed, Jaimie tried a smile. His was an awkward attempt that only showed his top teeth. His smiles caused his classmates to ridicule him.
As the sky bled from black to gray to blue, Theo told his son stories of Poeticule Bay. Jaimie’s grandfather had first worked for a grocer at a groceteria. “It was really a sort of general store. Papa liked the word ‘groceteria’ better. It’s like a grocery store except each customer tells you what they want and you go get it for them from shelves behind the counter. A generation before that, people would have called it a mercantile.”
Groceteria. Jaimie approved of that word. All those vowels made it musical.
“I think Papa Spence would have stayed in the grocery business forever. The original owner was a butcher so he learned how to cut meat, too, but mostly, it was a really social job. I’m sure that’s what he liked best, talking to the customers all day about the weather and whose cow got loose on the road the night before.”
Jaimie took the washcloth from his father’s forehead, noted that it had heated through again, and wet it in the cold water in the bowl at his feet. He wrung it out and put the cool cloth back over Theo’s forehead and eyes.
“Better,” Theo said. “Thank you.”
Jaimie nodded and his father continued. “The groceteria was in Shell Cove, before the move to Poeticule Bay. I grew up in Shell Cove until I was ten. We didn’t do any moving around until my father’s business burned down. There was a garage next door. They were doing some welding on a wooden floor and poof. Everything was gone. Your grandfather lay in a snowbank and cried because all that he’d managed to rescue from the groceteria fire was the record book full of debts he owed.”
“Later, Papa Spence became an insurance salesman but that didn’t last too long. Papa still thinks insurance is a big scam. The way things are working out, I guess he was right about that.
“Anyway, we moved a few more times until he got a job as a lumberjack outside of Poeticule Bay. Our new home was another wide spot in the road called the Corners. They called it that because two country roads met out there to form an intersection and that’s where the general store was. Your grandfather was better with numbers than he was with an axe and saw, so the owner put him to work in the office.
“Eventually Papa owned his own sawmill. Papa has a way with people. He made the owner a friend and then the owner became his business partner. He’s social in a way I never was.” Theo lifted the washcloth to peer at Jaimie. “I guess you take after me a bit too much in that way. We both prefer books to people.” He sighed and repositioned his cold compress.
“I always stuck close to the family. Your Uncle Cliff, well…he was always off doing other things. Cliff is my older brother by five minutes, but he may as well be ten years older. Identical twins aren’t really identical. While I stayed with Papa and Nana, my brother went off to boarding school, Christian summer camps and later, science camps. I don’t remember him going to the Corners much. Thanksgivings, probably.”
Jaimie shrugged and focused on the outline of his father’s chin moving up and down in the dim light. He couldn’t see any of the Sutr virus blackness through his father’s aura, but he guessed that was because it was too dark. Jaimie felt more comfortable not knowing how the disease was progressing.
“We moved into Poeticule Bay, but Papa bought a farmhouse in The Corners. It was a very old house then, but I was quite a bit younger than you are now, so I guess it’s right to call the farmhouse ancient. A hole in the middle of the kitchen floor could drop you to the shallow basement when your grandfather took over the old place. He paid a couple yahoo lumberjacks to live there one summer and work on fixing it up as a cottage. The family went there every weekend and that’s how I got the best friend I ever had. That’s how I started in on my greatest regret.
“That boy I befriended? We found the Gateway together, but only he went through it.”
That night, Theo Spencer told his son the secret of the Gateway. The way his father spoke, Jaimie thought of it as arcanum arcanorum, the secret of secrets. In Latin it referred to Nature’s secret, the knowledge that held the key to everything else there was to know.
To Theo, it was his first and last confession about the boy he killed.
Secrets hide where ghosts go
“D’Arcy sounds fruity,” he said when anyone called him by his given name. He preferred “Kenny”, short for his last name. Kennigan.
Kenny had three older brothers who had earned a reputation for being bad from The Corners to Poeticule Bay. They bragged that even the cops in Bangor were scared when they came to town. Of the three, it seemed two were often in jail for some petty crime. Mostly
, they broke into the cottages of summer people.
The Corners had a population of just a couple of hundred in winter. When the summer people came, they roared up and down Black Water Lake in motorboats. That left many vulnerable cottages the rest of the year. Kenny’s older brothers often enjoyed the luxuries of rich strangers’ cottages for days at a time.
Two of them were caught (twice) by the sheriff because they left tracks in the snow all the way back to their shack on the ass-end of The Corners. After that, whenever there was a break in anywhere near Black Water, the sheriff came knocking on the Kennigans’ door first.
Kenny’s father drank. His brothers, whenever they were home from the detention center, enjoyed beating their little brother. Kenny stayed away from home as much as possible. He had a pellet gun, so he walked the old logging roads looking for things to shoot: birds, squirrels and snakes. Kenny wished his targets were his brothers. He imagined it wasn’t just a little pellet gun for plinking in his hands.
Kenny was headed home in the late afternoon one Saturday when he saw a boy about his age with a bow and arrow. The boy had set up a fancy straw target. It was pretty big, but the boy missed consistently. Kenny watched him from behind some trees before he stepped out into the field and waved hello.
“Maybe you should start with the side of a barn,” Kenny suggested.
Theo Spencer smiled and pulled back the bowstring, intent on showing the townie boy his archery skill. He let a white target arrow fly. It missed, flew well past it and was lost in the field’s high grass. “For your information,” Theo said, “I’m trying to hit the grass behind that big circle thing.”
“Can I try?” Kenny said.
“Can I try that?” Theo asked, indicating the pellet gun in the boy’s hand.
They exchanged weapons. They didn’t talk much. They just enjoyed playing with the gun and the bow and arrows, experimenting with the unfamiliar. After some time passed, Kenny said, “No wonder the Indians lost all that land.”
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 15