Stupefying Stories: July 2013 (Stupefying Stories II)

by Russ Colson

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I find that difficult to believe. I would have opened the door immediately.”

  “You have a lawyer’s instinct, but I have no problem subletting my closet for free.”

  “That’s not it,” Crispin said defensively, though Trafoire was probably nearer the truth than he would like to admit. “I would want to know the identity of the person occupying my closet. It seems incredible that you wouldn’t want to inquire further.”

  “Well, my friend,” Trafoire said, leaning back in his chair and gesturing toward the entryway, “if you feel so inclined, be my guest.”

  Crispin rose determinedly from the sofa and walked to the closet. He wasn’t about to be intimidated by anything as malleable as common courtesy. Why should such a beautiful apartment be marred by the spectral presence of a mute squatter? And yet, as he stood before the door, his hand poised to grasp the doorknob, he felt a terrible uneasiness; and he wasn’t certain if that sensation was created from within, or was being projected from elsewhere. He was normally not a man to be intimidated, but in these circumstances felt incapable of opening the door. He tried forcing himself to do it, but his hand simply wouldn’t respond; it was if a primitive instinct stayed his hand and refused to be overridden by reason.

  He returned to the living room, smiling at his own foolishness. Trafoire laughed good-naturedly at his failure, as if he’d been expecting no other result, and told him not to feel bad about it. He’d experienced the same failure, after all.

  “All right, I believe you,” Crispin said as he sat again. “But what was written on the paper?”

  “Would you like to see for yourself?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Trafoire rose, vanished into the bedroom, and returned a moment later holding a folded scrap of paper. This scrap he handed to Crispin on passing, and then he resumed his chair.

  Prepared to find an exotic plea for leniency on the part of the closet’s inhabitant, he was surprised to find only one word: Indigene, scrawled in tiny, fragile letters, as if written in darkness, perhaps. Unfamiliar with the word, he gazed up into Trafoire’s enigmatically smiling face and begged for a definition.

  The old anthropologist’s smile broadened.

  “It means inhabitant, or someone indigenous to a location,” he said.

  “That makes perfect sense,” Crispin said, handing back the paper, “and it makes no sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, does he ever come out? Does he eat your food, use your facilities? How does he survive inside a closet?”

  “As far as I know, he doesn’t venture beyond the door. And I’m afraid I don’t know what he eats, or how he survives. He’s simply there.”

  “Why on Earth don’t you evict him?”

  “Well, Windom,” Trafoire said, holding up the paper, “he obviously was here first. Not every dilemma is a legal matter, you know. Sometimes it’s a matter of philosophy. As an academic, I’m all too familiar with the dangers of propriety. Sometimes you just have to let the world be what the world chooses to be. There really are no absolutes.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Positive,” Trafoire said, then laughed loudly at his own paradox. “But let me finish signing these papers before we lose our focus. One can never tell about overseas travel these days.”

  Crispin nodded, reaching down to retrieve the papers he’d brought, but the little man’s face still haunted his thoughts. What a strange, bewildering situation.

  Before Crispin left the apartment Trafoire handed him a key to the front door, and he immediately regretted agreeing to return to feed the man’s fish while he was away. Had he know about the little man before—

  “The instructions are with the food in the cabinet below the aquarium,” Trafoire said, patting the lawyer on the shoulder as he opened the front door.

  Crispin glanced back briefly at the entryway closet, still wondering why the thought of the little man disturbed him so much, but then he shook Trafoire’s hand and walked into the hallway, the signed papers in his valise and the key to the front door in his breast pocket. After the professor closed the door, and as he walked toward the elevator, Crispin couldn’t help contemplating his own passage through doorways, nor could he forget that strange word: indigene.

  ¤

  Trafoire’s predicament, if one could call it that, elicited several moments of contemplation for Crispin as he walked down the street searching for a taxi: as an academic, and as the unusually reserved one as he knew him to be, Crispin wondered what Trafoire’s belief actually was in the matter. Did he truly believe the little man deserved to be left unmolested? Certainly he must have known it to be an invasion of privacy, so why was he content to let the matter rest?

  Crispin couldn’t live with such a dilemma without seeking to resolve it; though, of course, his training in the law always informed his opinion in these kinds of situations. Still, even between a reserved personality, as Trafoire possessed, and a more dynamic personality, which Crispin certainly possessed, there must be some happy medium from where the proper action could be executed. Trafoire was traveling to investigate some academic mystery half way around the world—why shouldn’t he be curious enough to attend to the mysteries in his own apartment?

  But it was a private matter, between him and his inexplicable roommate. Crispin knew he shouldn’t judge the man’s motives, for he was a learned man, and must have sound reasons for his inaction.

  Crispin finally hailed a car just as the weather seemed as if it would worsen. He dearly wished he didn’t have to return to attend to Trafoire’s aquatic menagerie, but he was bound by his word.

  ¤

  Crispin’s first act on returning to Trafoire’s apartment was to cast a wary glance at the entryway closet. The door was closed, and except for the monotonous humming of the aquarium’s filter pump he perceived no other activity.

  He walked quickly into the living room, ashamed of the superstitious fear that plagued him. It was just a closet door, after all, and could do him no harm. The uptown traffic had been much more of a hazard. Still, he was determined to see to his duties and leave as expeditiously as possible.

  He opened the pantry below the dazzling glass bowl of aquatic life, wondering why Trafoire stocked it with such unpleasant creatures; bulbous snails and black eyed eels slithering through the rocks at the bottom. Even the selection of fish was strange, a curious gray species void of the simple beauty of angelfish or tetra. A deliberate stocking of the unusual. But Trafoire was an unusual man, possessing strange powers of persuasion. Why Crispin had agreed to this business he had no idea, but he found the prescribed containers of food and opened the heavy covering at the top of the glass. He dumped in the correct amount, sealed the containers, replaced them, and watched the eels and pale-eyed fish agitating the water as they fed. Watching them feed was decidedly unpleasant. He closed the cabinet and turned away from the aquarium, wondering if he should wash his hands.

  When Crispin gazed up, having forgotten where he was and the peculiar circumstances of his previous visit, he caught his breath at the sight of the little man peering at him from a crack in the door of the closet.

  His hands froze in a ridiculous pantomime of cleaning, like a stunned raccoon.

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment, the gnomish man and Crispin, until the man slowly closed the door and the lock caught with a clack.

  Crispin should have ignored the incident, as Dr. Trafoire seemed so eminently capable of doing; and since it was the professor’s apartment he knew he should honor the man’s philosophy toward the little man. But the entity’s presence in the apartment did more than just annoy him; it infuriated him, if only because the little man seemed to be taking full advantage of Trafoire’s charity and didn’t have the good graces to thank his host. Such bad manners were unforgivable in less onerous circumstances.

  Crispin therefore approached the entryway closet in a bad humor, intent
on letting Trafoire’s squatter know his opinion of the intrusion.

  He stood by the door, prepared to turn the doorknob to confront the closet’s occupant, but the same disturbing feeling stayed his hand. Frustrated by his reticence, and determined to keep the feeling from turning him away, he leaned close to listen, and then softly pressed his ear to the door’s veneer.

  At first all he could hear was his own heartbeat, but then he detected other sounds; a wheezing, as if from some monotonously whirling machine, the rush of a strong wind washing against the door, and then a soft, almost imperceptible laughter as if from a distance. This laughter enraged him even more. Was the little man laughing at Crispin?

  He couldn’t bear this thought any more than he could bear to think of the little man’s insouciance toward Trafoire.

  He grasped the doorknob firmly and twisted.

  But the doorknob wouldn’t turn; it seemed stoutly locked.

  He rattled the knob in annoyance, taking a moment before realizing that the door possessed no true locking mechanism, only a simple catch found on most closets. How was the little man keeping him from turning the knob? Certainly the frail figure he’d seen didn’t possess the strength to do so. But still the knob wouldn’t turn.

  Indignant, he knocked furiously, hoping the noise might disarm the occupant.

  “You have no right to be in there,” he found himself saying. “This isn’t your apartment. You don’t belong here!”

  Crispin waited a minute before pressing his ear to the door again. This time he heard nothing. Puzzled, he listened more closely, but the odd array of sounds had vanished. He stood back, wondering what this meant, before grasping the doorknob again and twisting it.

  The knob turned freely in his hand.

  His wrath had obviously intimidated the little freeloader and he pulled the door open briskly, prepared to scold the man for playing games.

  But when the door fell open, he was presented with nothing more than an empty closet.

  Approximately five feet deep, and equipped with a hanger rod and shelf at the rear, the space was completely empty. No coats, no shoes, no boxes—and no little man. At this point his anger subsided, replaced by an uneasy curiosity. He was certain he’d heard distinct sounds coming from inside, and now he was confronted by the prosaic reality of a common storage space.

  He turned, appraising the apartment, but everything was quiet. Only the odd fish drifted slowly in the waters of the aquarium.

  He turned again to the closet and considered the possibility that some false front stood hiding the proper environment of the little man, so he stepped into the space and began pressing his palms against the walls, first the side walls, and then the wall behind the hanger rod, then above the shelf. But the walls held firmly, and he was left studying the empty shelf without the least notion as to the deception he was facing.

  Then the door closed suddenly behind him, leaving Crispin in complete darkness.

  A terrible, sickly electricity flowed up his spine as he turned, fighting the panic that threatened to unnerve him. Immediately his rational mind informed him that the little man was playing a trick, perhaps to punish him for his outburst. He needn’t panic, really. He reached out in the darkness and felt around until he touched the doorknob. He clutched it firmly and tried turning it, but it held frozen.

  “Open this door!” he said, dropping his fist onto the unseen wood. “I won’t be treated this way! Open the door!”

  He cursed viciously, the echo of his voice hurting his ears.

  After another moment he tried the doorknob again, and found that it turned easily in his grasp.

  At last, he thought, he’ll listen to authority!

  When he opened the door and peered beyond the jamb, however, his legs refused to move his body beyond the threshold.

  The vision swimming before his eyes was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Trafoire’s apartment and its elegant furnishings had been replaced by an undulating satire of itself, a watery pool seen through the wavy perception of a funhouse mirror; and within the depths of this psychedelic environment swam hideously proportioned fish with gaping, bulbous eyes, and monstrous eels bearing elongated jaws filled with dense rows of dagger-like teeth. When one of these eels twisted its body and began swimming toward him, he slammed the door on the vision and fell to the back of the closet.

  What was this madness? And how was he transported to this place?

  He pondered the situation a moment, relying on his professional skills to think rapidly, and found a likely explanation.

  He’d been mistaken, that’s all. His panicked mind had created some delusion.

  Reluctantly, Crispin moved to the front of the closet again and turned the doorknob. He held his breath as he opened the door only a little bit and peered beyond.

  The world was an inverted bowl of jelly, the apartment filled with giant eels sliding through the boiling medium like sea serpents cresting the Atlantic. The water, if it was water, swarmed with crayfish-like parasites bearing ugly human faces. Some barrier seemed to keep the appalling sea from pouring in through the door, but also kept him from even mildly entertaining the idea of leaving the closet. Again, one of the eels turned toward him and he closed the door with a cry.

  He now found himself in an untenable position, placed there by either his own self-righteousness, the little man’s reaction to his intrusion, or a combination of both.

  He stood in darkness for quite a while, unable to find a solution to his dilemma, and finally he sat on the floor of the closet beneath the shelf with his knees drawn up against his chest as he tried desperately to think.

  He wasn’t certain how long he sat in the lightless confines of the closet, though time seemed oddly affected by his environment. He tried reading his wristwatch, which had a backlight feature, but failed to make it work. Perhaps the watch wasn’t functioning at all. This thought made him wonder whether or not he was still in a familiar environment; after all, he couldn’t verify any part of the space he inhabited in such darkness. Perhaps he wasn’t even in the apartment—perhaps he had been transported to a nether dimension featuring some perverse interpretation of the hideous denizens of Trafoire’s aquarium. Of one thing he was certain—whatever lay beyond the closet door was not part of the world to which he belonged.

  Dare he attempt to enter it? Surely Crispin would be devoured by the monsters swimming in its realm. And yet, perhaps there was another answer—

  Perhaps the little man had cast an illusion on him, so that he only believed he had left his world for another. Perhaps the apartment, Trafoire’s perfectly ordinary apartment, lay beyond the door and only an illusion prevented him from entering it again.

  Crispin stood, certain this must be the case. But what if it wasn’t? What if he stepped beyond the threshold and found himself drowning in that terrible sea? His last perceptions of life would be the sensation of those vicious teeth piercing his flesh—

  Still, what was he to do, stay in that small, dark, confining space forever? What would he eat, or drink?

  He had no other option but to move toward the unseen door, clutch the doorknob and push the door open.

  The watery dimension vibrated strangely before his eyes, the fish studied him eerily, the eels flexed their jaws in anticipation—

  Terrified, every muscle in his body trembling, he drew a breath, emitted an inadvertent whimper, closed his eyes and leapt from the safety of the closet—

  When he opened his eyes, still fearful of being devoured, nothing of the bizarre environment remained. In fact, quite to his surprise, the first sight he beheld was of Dr. Trafoire standing by the aquarium and gazing at him with a stupefied expression.

  Crispin stared about the apartment, found everything in perfect order, then met Trafoire’s gaze again, wondering why Trafoire had abandoned his sojourn overseas.

  In due time he realized his mistake—Trafoire’s return had occurred according to schedule. His sojourn in the closet had apparently lasted
a ridiculously long time, though it seemed as if he’d been away only a few minutes.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t attend to your fish as often as I might have,” Crispin said, admittedly in a daze.

  “Are you all right, Windom?” Trafoire said.

  He inhaled deeply, finally realizing that he stood once again in the world to which he belonged.

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “I don’t understand—why were you hiding in the closet?”

  Crispin laughed now, but only as an exercise to discharge the tension in the room. He explained what had happened, concluding with his theories of dimensions and other seeming nonsense. Trafoire listened patiently, his hand to his chin, then nodded as if what the lawyer said made perfect sense.

  A creaking of hinges behind him caused Crispin to turn. The little man stood staring behind the half-closed door, one eye shining brilliantly. He may have been mistaken, but he believed he detected a slight nod from the little man’s ugly head before the door slowly closed again.

  Crispin stood staring at the closet door, quite mesmerized. He did manage to speak, though, as a new suspicion crept into his conscious appraisal of the matter.

  “Tell me, professor,” he said, turning back to Trafoire. “In your professional opinion, do you believe there are some environments human beings simply cannot inhabit?”

  Trafoire glanced at the entryway closet before replying with a knowing smile.

  “And aren’t meant to inhabit,” he said. “Yes, absolutely.”

  Lawrence Buentello has published more than sixty short stories in a variety of genres. He is the author of the short story collections “The Cube Root of the Universe” and Other Stories and A Miracle for Every Occasion, and the novel, The Bridge of a Thousand Leagues. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.

  FOR THE LOVE OF A GRENITSCHEE

  By Mark Wolf

  Oh, my God! What the hell have I bought?

  I stared in befuddlement at the desert creature placidly chewing a Gnorth palm nut while I pulled the sleeve up on my clay-colored rough-spun Gnossian robe, to consult my wrist-reader. I tabbed through its myriad programs until I found the one I was looking for: The Galacticas Compendium of Beasts. I thumbed through it until I found a small picture of the beast in front of me and its description.