Sitting up, I felt the familiar fear swelling inside me, wringing my throat dry, damming my voice completely. I rose to run, but for the first time while playing Curtains I hesitated. After all, was this not what I’d wanted? What had all those games been for if not to reach this moment?
I heard the far-off voices of the neighbourhood kids, and their words sounded to me like some foreign tongue. If I were to flee, what would I be racing toward but a world that seemed to have no slot for me from the moment I entered it?
Children of seven can be very wise indeed.
“You . . .” I rasped, “you won’t hurt me, will you?”
The shape stilled itself. Was it demonstrating passivity?
I took a step forward, but only one. The shroud’s only motion was the gentle lift and drop of its breathing. I neared it, reaching out at first to touch it, but ultimately resisting. Instead I sat down cross-legged before it.
For a long while I just basked.
I asked the curtained thing more questions but received only crinkling in response.
“We need something . . .” I mused.
4
Twenty-eight recipe cards, all but two bearing a letter of the alphabet, printed as tidily as I was able at that age. The final pair of cards was emblazoned with the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ This gamut was spread in a semicircle pattern upon the basement floor. An upturned plastic tumbler sat half-concealed under the hem of the Curtain, approximately where a hand might be.
It was all the “something” we needed; crude, but serviceable enough to open the gates of communication.
Being a child, I was bursting with curiosity and fraught with impatience during our first attempt to converse. Squatting before the Curtained thing, I would blurt out a question and would then endure the tedious process of the cup being dragged at an agonizing pace toward a desired letter. Upon reflection, this procedure must have demanded a monumental effort on the part of my companion. To cause an object to shift when one is scarcely more than breath and drapery demonstrated immeasurable will, a sparkling clarity of desire, a mathematical precision of intent.
My initial questions provoked the longest of these response times, undoubtedly because the thing in the Curtain was also new to the procedure.
In response to my request for its name, the wraith spelled out:
C N
A R
P O
R C
I
“Your name is Capricorn?”
YES
“My name is Michel. I want to be friends with you. Do you want to be friends with me?”
YES
“Okay, okay good. Capricorn, did you used to live in this house?”
NO
“Do you know this house?”
NO
“Did you know who I was, before today, I mean? Do you know who I am?”
YES
“Capricorn, are you a ghost?”
NO
“What are you then?
“Capricorn, what are you?
“You’re not gonna tell me what you are?”
NO
“Why not?”
S W
H O
“You’re going to show me what you are?”
YES
“Okay then. When will you show me?”
S N
O O
5
In the afternoons that followed our initial séance, Capricorn would always warn me when it was time for my father to be home from work so that I could gather up the letter cards and the cup. I would return the sheet of dusty plastic to its proper home, hide the cup and cards, erase all traces of my crimes against nature. By then my anxieties over Capricorn not returning for our next sitting had been eased, for Capricorn had already proven itself loyal. All that was required to resume our chats was my flinging the Curtain toward our designated corner.
We were always careful to operate out of earshot of my mother, who was often occupied with company, with chores, with the idle white noise of afternoon television.
The weeks passed, and although I was extremely anxious to see just what Capricorn was, I was also content with our automatic conversations, during which Capricorn shared, in one scraping, tar-paced letter at a time, its memories of crooked and awful things, of things bodiless-yet-alive. I don’t know whether Capricorn was initiating me into its world or merely entertaining me. Perhaps it was doing both at once. Either way I came to know Capricorn, honestly know it. And it became quite apparent that Capricorn also knew me; knew what I loved and what I feared, intuited which secrets I yearned to hear.
Indeed, Capricorn knew just what to feed me.
“Who are you talking to, Michel?”
The shock of my mother’s voice, the shame and terror of having been discovered . . .
I snapped my head around to see my mother perched on the wooden stairs. Her wiry frame was arched over the railing as she peered into the dim corner where I sat communing. She shifted the basket of laundry she was bearing, moving it from one bony hip to the other. While she did this, I shot a sidelong glance to the corner, petrified that the evidence of Curtains was still hunched and breathing there.
But Capricorn had dissipated.
The plastic sheet was now carpeting the floor, secreting the cards and the tumbler in its grubby folds.
“. . . playing . . .” I rasped.
“What’s that you said?” Mother was now passing through my sanctuary on her way to the washing machine.
“I said I was just playing,” I said.
“That’s nice. What are you playing?”
I shrugged. Mother went about her task.
As she puttered at the far end of the basement, I began a pantomime of games I thought a boy my age might enjoy: war, comic book hero, savage jungle. Anything. I realized then just how little I understood my peers, how rarely I’d ever observed them at the school playground or during trips to the park with my parents. Trying to imitate the throes of a normal child at play felt rigid and forced and woefully unrealistic, but my mother never caught on.
As I mock-played, all the while praying that my mother would not spot the plastic tarp in the corner, it became clear to me that Capricorn’s and my arrangement was no longer safe. I had grown too dependent on my mother’s routine, which, as that day proved, was more unpredictable than I’d presumed. The risk of discovery was too great. I hoped for just one more opportunity to ask Capricorn how we could alter the accoutrements of the game, maybe find a less conspicuous set of speaking tools.
Later that evening I was blessed with access to a new and even stranger avenue.
6
Exactly how I became familiar with the concept of spirit-traps was unclear to me at the time. I just remember convulsing awake one night after an unrelenting horror dream (with which my boyhood was choked) and simply knowing what spirit-traps were. I also knew that I needed one of these devices. It was as though I’d received some form of nightmare gnosis, a direct transmission from some far haunted corner of the mind’s midnight.
If I wanted to keep Capricorn nearby, a spirit-trap was an absolute necessity. So, during a paradoxically cheery and temperate morning, I began my quest for a suitable candidate. I knew just what I wished to use but had to rummage for hours before I finally culled it from its musty cardboard coffin, its bedding of yellowed newspaper.
The music box had belonged to my mother when she was a girl. She used to joke—somewhat sombrely—that she no longer had any use for jewellery now that she was a stay-at-home-mom. This ornate crate had been occulted in a linen closet when I was still in diapers.
It was an oblong box of lacquered cherry wood. Its lustre and shade made it look as though it had been sculpted from clotted blood. Opening the lid had once caused a tiny ballerina figurine to spin while a metal spool chimed ‘Für Elise.’ But the figurine had since broken from her stem and the spool was badly dented, so now the box only plunked out a blunted, atonal song while a severed ballerina leg wobble
d hypnotically upon a spiral of rusted metal.
I snuck the music box up to my room and stashed it in my closet, where it remained for many hours. After I was confident that both my parents were asleep, I rescued my fledgling spirit-trap and moved to the basement in gingerly, cat-quiet steps.
I played Curtains one last time that night. I’d employed the sheet solely to explain my idea to Capricorn, at which point Capricorn spelled out that it had been the one that had planted the whole notion of spirit-traps in my mind. However, Capricorn did congratulate me on my selection of the music box.
When I asked how Capricorn had managed to communicate with me without the cup and cards, it spelled out
S
D M
R E A
Capricorn informed me that our bond was now strong enough for me at least to begin to disinter some of what was being transmitted, signalled to me, through all those panic-inducing dreams it had been sending me for years.
There would be work to do, a great gruelling amount of it, but I knew that in time these signals would be received, in a clear declarative manner.
I did experience a heartsickness when I thought of just how many lessons had already sluiced unused through my young mind, but Capricorn assured me that I must not look at what had come before, nor even at what was yet to be. The Now was all there was, all there has ever been, all there ever would be.
And with that, my companion slithered out from under its shroud, squirmed into the felt-lined interior of the music box, and slammed the lid shut. I slipped the polished brass clasp into place and carried the spirit-trap back to my room, relishing how cold the wood now felt in my hands.
It was somehow obvious to me that the only sensible place to conceal the box between dusk and dawn would be underneath my pillow.
7
The portability of the spirit-trap meant that with my school backpack and my bicycle I was free to transplant my cellar communions to any location I wished. Needless to say, a measure of secrecy was vital, but I was a very cautious child in many respects. Discretion was second nature to me.
The remainder of that summer was enchanting. All through the Dog Days I was blessed by the Bradbury magic of hiding amongst screaming cicadas, of basking under great gunmetal thunderheads as they blotted out the sun, of savouring the shaded circles of sycamores whose boughs hooked Hellward in Reaper-scythe cascades.
Always, in each of these high Gothic environs, Capricorn was near to me. We had no real conversations during those weeks when Capricorn’s only embodiment was a well-polished box of wood, a box that, even during an August swelter, was perennially headstone-cold. But I talked a lot to it regardless.
During that time I was learning, or rather trying to learn, how to remember the teachings buried in my dreams. I did not write them down, for I had been warned in one of my nightmares that material evidence of our conversations would only led to unworthy eyes peering into my world, or worse; to prosecution. So I kept it all within my skull, but I did whisper to Capricorn everything I could remember from the previous night’s dream, as well as what I thought it might mean.
These sessions, during which I would be confessor and the spirit-trap would serve as my priest, would yield a tangible boon: my reward came in the form of being able to experience a variety of altered states.
Capricorn was skilled at moving me, or rather moving the inner me, to unknown and unnamed plateaus. (Little did I know how important this was to become.)
These far-flung states were not unworldly locations. I never slipped out of the Earth like a modern Alice down so many rabbit holes. Instead, they were fresh and opulent aspects of this world, traits that nature hides from profane eyes. It was as though Capricorn had enabled me to turn over a dull boulder and disinter constellations of stars that had been concealed there.
At the time I believed that the world was changing, that it was shedding its bland garb in favour of a far more fabulous pageantry. It took me a long time to appreciate that what was actually shifting and heightening was my perception of the same dull terra firma. It took me longer still to grasp the fact that a shift in perception is actually the only change that is needed in life.
August transformed those cicada songs into an elaborate chant, a mantra that spun out from shaded groves like glinting threads, veining the earth with astral light. I saw faces of lichen and learned the language of the stones.
I wanted that rich land for my home. But I was told to be patient, that I would one day be granted lessons in the secrets of these laws.
My journeys invariably ended too early. After being flung back to the solar-lit world of houses and so many people, everything in my life would feel . . . diluted. It was a thick place, where everything seemed to have been pinioned by unseen millstones in order to keep things sluggish, slavish.
I bided my time each evening, enduring the forgettable dinnertime discussions between my parents and me, trying to feign interest in television or my comic books, all the while pining for the next morning when I could escape and again have Capricorn part the veils for me.
This process went on for so many consecutive days that I think I began to take it for granted that this routine would not be disrupted, not until school resumed in September of course.
But a trick ripped me from my weird rubric early, horribly early.
The trick was architected by my parents, but I do not believe their intentions were in any way malicious.
Shortly before Labour Day weekend, my mother announced that we had to fetch my father from the real estate office where he worked. Thinking nothing of this—Capricorn was securely stashed beneath my pillow—I joined her for what I’d assumed would be a brief drive downtown.
After my father was in the car, my parents revealed with great glee that they had rented us a cottage up north for the final week of summer vacation. The trunk was burdened with luggage that my mother had secretly packed while I was engaged with Capricorn.
We drove off. Panicked, I pleaded with my parents to turn back so that I could collect something important that had been left behind.
“I packed some of your toys, a few books, and your clothes,” my mother assured me. “Anything I might have forgotten will still be there when we get back. If we don’t leave now we’ll get stuck in rush hour traffic.”
I fell mute and stared out the window as the gulf between Capricorn and me broadened.
8
Stunningly enough, it took less than twenty-four hours for me to all but forget about the spirit-trap.
Were this a fiction, I would wax here about how I longed for my spirit-trap throughout that entire week away, how I crept out of our rented cottage in the dead of night to howl my pain to a gibbous moon, confident that my cries would somehow reach my boxed companion back in the city.
But life is never that rich nor that tidy. It is a messy, multitudinous thing, rife with calls for the attention of a young boy. And when all is said and done, that is just what I was that summer: a seven-year-old boy, a child, one just as susceptible to the temptations of summer afternoon swims and ice cream as you were in your formative years. I make no apologies for this.
On the second night of our stay, my father took me down to the pier where a band of teenagers were lighting off fireworks. Watching those tadpoles of sulphurous light squiggling down and dissolving just above the black lake water was miraculous to me. I stood with my hand inside my father’s, my head reclined to drink in all those artificial shooting stars, and I felt right. It might have been the first time I had ever felt truly slotted into the world, ever known a sense of belonging.
That night set the tone for the remainder of my holiday. The entire week was a kaleidoscope of bright, simple pleasures. I did think about Capricorn now and again, usually at night while lying alone in my rustic bedroom. At first my thoughts would be tinged with homesickness, but after a day or two of rural exploring and playing my attitude toward Capricorn began to shift. Curtains and the thing born of it were no longer as
important to me.
Perhaps it was the degree of my divorce from my haunted home life, or the new sense of acceptance that I felt when actually talking to my folks instead of scuttling up inside my own head, but I began to worry over what I had done. I actually came to view Curtains and Capricorn not as accomplishments, but as aberrations. They started to feel wrong. Even the once-loathed prospect of returning to school had assumed a more appealing lustre.
But our holiday came to an end, and my parents delivered me back into the underworld I’d so eagerly bored my way into earlier that summer.
Not until my father took the highway cut-off nearest to our street did my appropriate feeling for Capricorn return: fear.
As my mind conjured palpable memories of just what I had waiting for me beneath my pillow, panic wrung my throat dry, my blood began to roar in my ears.
Our front lawn was overgrown and our mailbox brimming over with bills and advertisements. The porch light had burned out. (As I write this, a part of me is there on that porch as my mother sardonically reprimands my father for being too slow while he fumbles with his house key in the dark.)
My mother let out a sigh of relief once we crossed the threshold.
“I’ll take these bags,” she said. “You go help your father with the others.”
I moved down the driveway, glancing over my shoulder, watching the lights go on inside my house one room at a time. The warm glow brought a measure of comfort.
“You excited about school tomorrow?” my father asked as we lugged the last of our baggage into the foyer.
Before I had a chance to answer, my mother called out, “Jean? Jean, call the police!”
“What’s wrong?” my father returned, letting the suitcases drop.
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