by Jeffrey Ford
“Tell me about it,” he said and then rolled closer to kiss her.
They kissed and then lay quiet, both listening to the sound of the leaves blowing outside. She began to doze off, but before her eyes closed all the way, she said, “Who’s getting the light?”
“You,” said Bill.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ve got an early shift tomorrow.”
“Come on? I’ve gotten the damn light every night for the past two weeks.”
“That’s ’cause it’s your job,” she said.
“Fuck that,” he said but started to get up. Just then the light went out.
She opened her eyes slightly, grinning. “Sometimes it pays to be haunted,” she said.
Bill looked around the darkened room and said, as if to everywhere at once, “Thank you.”
The light blinked on and then off.
“Maybe the bulb’s loose,” he said.
The light blinked repeatedly on and off and then died again.
“That’s freaky,” she said, but freaky wasn’t going to stop her from falling asleep. Her eyes slowly closed and before he could kiss her again on the forehead, she was lightly snoring.
Bill lay there in the dark, wide awake, thinking about their conversation and about the lamp. He thought about ghosts in Miami, beneath swaying palm trees, doing the Lambada by moonlight. Finally, he whispered, “Light, are you really haunted?”
Nothing.
A long time passed, and then he asked, “Are you Olive?”
The light stayed off.
“Are you Pinhead?”
Just darkness.
“Are you Tana?” he said. He waited for a sign, but nothing. Eventually he closed his eyes and thought about work. He worked at Nescron, a used bookstore housed in the bottom floor of a block-long, four-story warehouse—timbers and stone—built in the 1800s. The owner, Stan, had started, decades earlier, in the scrap paper business and over time had amassed tons of old books. The upper three floors of the warehouse were packed with unopened boxes and crates from all over the world. Bill’s job was to crawl in amid the piles of boxes, slit them open, and mine their cargo, picking out volumes for the literature section in the store downstairs. Days would pass at work and he’d see no one. He’d penetrated so deeply into the morass of the third floor that sometimes he’d get scared, having the same feeling he’d had when he and Allison had gone to Montana three months earlier to recuperate and they were way up in the mountains and came upon a freshly killed and half-eaten antelope beside a water hole. Amid the piles of books, he felt for the second time in his life that he was really “out there.”
“I expect some day to find a pine box up on the third floor holding the corpse of Henry Miller,” he’d told Allison at dinner one night.
“Who’s Henry Miller?” she’d asked.
He’d found troves of classics and first editions and even signed volumes for the store down below, and Stan had praised his efforts at excavating the upper floors. As the months went on, Bill was making a neat little stack of goodies for himself, planning to shove them in a paper sack and spirit them home with him when he closed up some Monday night. An early edition of Longfellow’s translation of Dante, an actual illuminated manuscript with gold leaf, a signed, first edition of Call of the Wild, and an 1885 edition of The Scarlet Letter were just some of the treasures.
Recently at work he’d begun to get an odd feeling when he was deep within the wilderness of books, not the usual fear of loneliness, but the opposite, that he was not alone. Twice in the last week, he’d thought he’d heard whispering, and once, the sudden quiet tumult of a distant avalanche of books. He’d asked down below in the store if anyone else was working the third floor, and he was told that he was the only one. Then, only the previous day, he couldn’t locate his cache of hoarded books. It was possible that he was disoriented, but in the very spot he’d thought they’d be, he instead found one tall slim volume. It was a book of fairy tales illustrated by an artist named Ségur. The animals depicted in the illustrations walked upright and had distinct personalities, and the children, in powder-blue snowscapes surrounded by Christmas mice, were pale, staring zombies. The colors were odd, slightly washed-out, and the sizes of the creatures and people were haphazard.
Without realizing it, Bill fell asleep and his thoughts of work melted into a dream of the writer Henry Miller. He woke suddenly a little while later to the sound of Allison’s voice, the room still in darkness. “Bill,” she said again and pushed his shoulder, “you awake?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I had a dream,” said Allison. “Oh my god…”
“Sounds like a good one,” he said.
“Maybe, maybe,” she said.
He could tell she was waiting for him to ask what it was about. Finally he asked her, “So what happened?”
She drew close to him and he put his arm around her. She whispered, “Lothianne.”
“Lothianne?” said Bill
“A woman with three arms,” said Allison. “She had an arm coming out of the upper part of her back, and the hand on it had two thumbs instead of a pinky and a thumb, so it wouldn’t be either righty or lefty. The elbow only bent up and down, not side to side.”
“Yow,” said Bill.
“Her complexion was light blue, and her hair was dark and wild, but not long. And she wore this dress with an extra arm hole in the back. This dress was plain, like something out of the Dust Bowl, gray, and reached to the ankles, and I remembered my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Donnelly, the mean old bitch, having worn the exact one back in grade school when we spent a whole year reading The Last Days of Pompeii.”
“Did the three-arm woman look like your teacher?” asked Bill.
“No, but she was stupid and mean like her. She had a dour face, familiar and frightening. Anyway, Lothianne wandered the woods with a pet jay that flew above her and sometimes perched in her tangled hair. I think she might have been a cannibal. She lived underground in like a woman-size rabbit warren.”
“Charming,” he said.
“I was a little girl and my sister and I were running hard toward this house in the distance, away from the woods, just in front of a wave of nighttime. I knew we had to reach the house before the darkness swept over us. The blue jay swooped down and, as I tried to catch my breath, it spit into my mouth. It tasted like fire and spread to my arms and legs. My running went dream slow, my legs dream heavy. My sister screamed toward the house. Then, like a rusty engine, I seized altogether and fell over.”
“You know, in China, they eat Bird Spit Soup…,” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. “The next thing I know, I come to and Lothianne and I are on a raft, in a swiftly moving stream, tethered to a giant willow tree that’s growing right in the middle of the flow. Lothianne has a lantern in one hand, and in the other she’s holding the end of a long vine that’s tied in a noose around my neck. The moon’s out, shining through the willow whips and reflecting off the running water, and I’m so scared.
“She says, ‘Time to practice drowning’ and kicks me in the back. I fall into the water. Under the surface I’m looking up and the moonlight allows me to see the stones and plants around me. There are speckled fish swimming by. Just before I’m out of air, she reels me in. This happens three times, and on the last time, when she reels me in, she vanishes, and I’m flying above the stream and surrounding hills and woods, and I’m watching things growing—huge plants like asparagus, sprouting leaves and twining and twirling and growing in the moonlight. Even in the dark, it was so perfectly clear.”
“Jeez,” said Bill.
Allison was silent for a while. Eventually she propped herself up on her elbow and said, “It was frightening but it struck me as a ‘creative’ dream, ’cause of the end.”
“A three-armed woman,” said Bill. “Rembrandt once did an etching of a three-armed woman having sex with a guy.”
“I was wondering if the noose around my neck was symbolic of an um
bilical cord….”
He stared at her. “Why?” he finally said.
She was about to answer but the bedroom light blinked on and off, on and off, on and off, without stopping, like a strobe light, and from somewhere or everywhere in the room came the sound of low moaning.
Bill threw the covers off, sat straight up, and said, “What the fuck?”
Allison, wide-eyed, her glance darting here and there, said, “Bill…”
The light show finally ended in darkness, but the sound grew louder, more strange, like a high-pitched growling that seemed to make the windowpanes vibrate. She grabbed his shoulder and pointed to the armoire. He turned, and as he did, Mama the cat came bursting out of the standing closet, the door swinging wildly. She screeched and spun in incredibly fast circles on the rug next to the bed.
“Jesus Christ,” yelled Bill, and lifted his feet, afraid the cat might claw him. “Get the fuck outa here!” he yelled at it.
Mama took off out of the bedroom, still screeching. Allison jumped out of the bed and took off after the cat. Bill cautiously brought up the rear. They found Mama in the bathroom, on the floor next to the lion-paw tub, writhing.
“Look,” said Bill, peering over Allison’s shoulder, “she’s attacking her own ass. What the hell…”
“Oh, man,” said Allison. “Check it out.” She pointed as Mama pulled a long furry lump out of herself with her teeth.
“That’s it for me,” he said, backing away from the bathroom doorway.
“Bill, here comes another. It’s alive.”
“Alive?” he said, sitting down on a chair in the kitchen. “I thought it was a mohair turd.”
“No, you ass, she’s having a kitten. I never realized she was pregnant. Must be from the time you kicked her out.”
Bill sat there staring at Allison’s figure illuminated by the bulb she’d switched on in the bathroom.
“This is amazing, you should come see it,” she called over her shoulder to him.
“I’ll pass,” he said. He turned then and looked through the open kitchen window, down across the yard toward the old man’s house. For the first time he could remember, his neighbor wasn’t there, reading the big book. The usual rectangle of light was now a dark empty space.
Later, he found Allison sitting in the wicker rocker, beneath the clown mobile, in the otherwise empty bedroom. The light was on, and she rocked, slowly, a rolled up towel cradled in her arms. “Come see,” she said to him, smiling. “The first was stillborn, and this is the only other one, but it lived. It’s a little girl.”
He didn’t want to, but she seemed so pleased. He took a step closer. She pulled back a corner of the towel, and there was a small, wet, face with blue eyes.
“Now we have to name it,” she said.
IN THE HOUSE OF FOUR SEASONS
At a large coffee table set upon a hillock within a grove of birch, Mrs. Gash, seated on the ground with her legs drawn up beneath her, pieced together a jigsaw puzzle depicting performers in a ring. Her concentration was such that she had obviously forgotten I was there, and holding in her fingers a piece that bore the image of a white horse’s head in her fingers, she used the back of that hand to rub her nose as a child might, unthinking, as if lost in a game or being told a story. I leaned upon the arm of the divan, my elbow propped on two pillows, my legs curled up off the ground. After a sip of coffee, I watched a pale violet butterfly light upon a white branch. It was a perfect afternoon of serenity and the slightest breeze. That night, we were to set paper boats, holding lit candles, adrift on the glassy waters of the large pond, and again I would witness the miracle of constellations above from a cave at the bottom of the sea.
Spencer didn’t see us in the driving snow. He expected us to be waiting for him at the dining table in the forest, and he trudged along through the drifts, pushing his silver cart. He hadn’t a second to react when I leaped from behind a tree and smashed him across the head with a heavy branch. Both of his lightbulb eyes instantly shattered; there was a crackle of electricity, and black smoke billowed from the rectangle that was his mouth. “Treachery,” he said in a manner devoid of urgency. He reeled away from my blow, head dented on one side, and then Andre came forward with his own branch. Being more powerful than I, he took what was left of the brass servant’s head clean off. It hit the snow and rolled, shooting sparks.
Once the brass globe was cool enough to lift, Andre picked it up and carried it to the silver cart, where I’d cleared the bottom shelf of dishes. I helped him load it upon the conveyance and then pushed the cart toward the table in the forest where Lenice was waiting for us. While I labored through the gathering drifts, my hands freezing on the cold metal of the cart, Andre stayed behind to drag Spencer’s body out of sight. By the time he caught up to me, I was sitting with Lenice and breaking the news to her that we’d done in the mechanical man. She began to cry, and I asked her if she wanted to escape the House of Four Seasons or if she would prefer to be buried alive beneath a slowly growing avalanche.
Andre lifted one of the platters off the cart and brought it to the table. “We’d better eat before we begin,” he said over the wind. “We don’t know when there will be another chance.” The snow increased with every passing minute.
“Good idea,” I said.
Lenice stopped sobbing, composed herself with a deep breath, and lifted the top of the large serving dish. I could tell by the smell before I even got a look that it was mutton again. And then Lenice let out a scream. I looked down at the platter and instead of the usual big roast leg of lamb we were usually served at lunch, there was a baby expertly carved, crafted, and created out of mutton. Pungent steam rose from it. Cloves for teeth and pearl onion eyes stared up. The action of lifting the lid had made its little legs kick and its arms reach up. The lamb baby was wrapped in a diaper of lettuce, and its hands were lobster claws, bright red.
“Dig in,” said Andre and pulled off an ear.
Lenice gagged.
I covered the dish and took it away from the table to set it at the edge of the clearing. When I returned, I told Andre to fetch Spencer’s head. He pulled the brass dome from the second shelf of the cart and laid it on the dining table. Tilting it to reveal an opening beneath the metal jaw, he reached in and said, “We need the brain. From that I can make a bomb.”
Above the howling wind, sounds came from beneath the covered dish at the boundary of trees, and with each muffled cry, Mrs. Gash doubled over in pain as if something were breaking inside her.
The day Brown and I went fishing in the stream that ran from the bottom of Lookout Hill and snaked its way throughout the environs of the entire House to the sand dune at the farthest western extremity, he leaned very close after dropping a line baited with a bit of mutton and whispered, as if the very trees might be listening, “Denni, you know, I’ll be honest, I find Ima quite an interesting lady. I dare say, if I may be somewhat base for a moment, I’d like to get my head up under her flowers and snowflakes and run riot in her most intimate of areas. But she is always with that damn fellow. My god, how do I get her alone?”
I laughed. “Are you serious, Brown?”
He stared at me strangely. “You won’t tell him, will you?” he said. There was another pause, his voluminous visage went red, and he forced a laugh. “Of course, I’m joking…but…tell me that you, yourself, haven’t envisioned an encounter with that generous breast.”
I walked alone through the forest at sundown, the red and yellow leaves falling around me. A strong breeze blew from way off deep in among the trees where, no doubt, if I continued I’d come to the limit of the House of Four Seasons, where marvelous nature became a painting on a rock wall, a dark emptiness beyond which there was…what? An owl hooted in the distance, and I recalled what Ima had told me about his/her life in our session that afternoon—how when he was born she’d been sold by his parents to a traveling circus, billed as the Heshe from her tenth birthday and forced to endure the stares of strangers. I contemplated
how difficult it must have been to rise to the level of distinction he had, world-renowned therapist and proprietor of the remarkable facility we now inhabited.
“How did you do it?” I’d asked her, thinking I might discover the secret to piecing together my own blasted self.
“Always being of two minds, I let them both work for me,” she said.
An owl called again, and the distinctive sound brought another memory, one of fire and revenge, which was only quelled when Mr. Susan’s voice summoned me back for dinner.
I had the others to my room, and we lay on our backs near the edge of the pond, staring into the perfect blue while Mr. Brown raised his voice just a notch above the tumbling waterfall and read to us from his book, The Gilead. It was the story of an immortal man and his search for Death. In this wretched character’s second century, he’d lost the ability to fall in love. Trying to get the State to use the electric chair on him, a device he believed would circumvent the antique magic of his curse by dint of modern science, he murdered a young woman and her child in cold blood, bludgeoned them with a tree branch. He was tried and convicted. When they finally strapped him into the electric chair, put the bonnet on his head, and threw the switch, instead of scorching the life out of him, it blew up, starting a fire and killing all those who had sought to bring him to justice. He walked away without so much as a singed eyebrow.
“Time had made him a monster,” said Andre.
“But you sympathize with him, don’t you, even a little?” asked Lenice.
“The part about him killing the child?” asked Brown.
“No, his plight,” said Lenice with a touch of exasperation.
“Hold on,” said Mr. Brown, “how come you’ve got a waterfall in your room and I don’t, Denni?”
I met my fellow patients, as Ima referred to us: Mrs. Gash, Mr. Susan, and Mr. Mutandis. With the dappled sunlight falling upon us through the thick green canopy overhead, we sat at the dining table in the forest and were served a lunch of soup, cold mutton, candied carrots, and tippers fried in wine sauce. The waiter, a mechanical man made of polished brass—large lightbulb eyes set in a round head with a seam of rivets from ear to ear across the crown and only three articulated digits on each hand—did the honors. Once we were seated, he came down the forest path, pushing a large silver cart on wheels, which held all the utensils and china and serving dishes. Mrs. Gash thought him a delightful novelty and clapped when he perfectly poured her a glass of wine. To this the metal servant bowed and said in a tin voice, “Spencer, at your service.” Then he ambulated away, a cloud of blue smoke issuing from a small hole at the back of his head.