Floating Staircase

by Ronald Malfi

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Those searchlight eyes addressed me again, taking in every nuance of me as if to catalogue it for later reference. Just when I became certain she’d tell me to get the hell off her property, she pushed the screen door open farther and motioned me inside.

  The place was small and cramped, furnished in a tawny shag carpet straight from 1975 and mismatched furniture that hung around like strangers forced together in a waiting room. The walls were almost completely barren, and the windows had their curtains drawn. I could faintly smell coffee brewing from the kitchen nook. The whole interior was dimly lit with wood-paneled walls, and something about it reminded me of a church confessional.

  “I didn’t think I was going to find the place,” I commented, trying to sound conversational.

  “Who sent you here?”

  The question caught me off guard. I stammered, “Uh, no one.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To bring this to you.” The box was growing heavier and heavier in my arms. I shifted it uncomfortably.

  “Set it on the table,” she said, motioning in the general vicinity of a circular card table by the front door.

  I set the box down on top of several envelopes addressed to David Dentman. Until just then, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might still live with her brother.

  Stuffing my hands into the too-tight pockets of my jeans, I faced Veronica. She was unhealthily thin to the point where it looked like her drab little housedress (which looked homemade) was still on its hanger. Her arms were long and emaciated; fat blue veins were all too visible beneath her skin. She’d tucked her ratty hair behind her ears when I wasn’t looking, and I could see now the railroad scar that began high up in her hairline, dipped along her left temple, and hooked around underneath her left ear.

  It was all I could do to find my voice. “I didn’t know what to do with them. The boxes, I mean. There were so many, and I couldn’t just get rid of them. And anyway, I thought you might . . . maybe . . . I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “David put them down in the room, didn’t he? Behind the wall?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In the basement. What . . . what is that room?”

  In the kitchen something sizzled, and I could smell the coffee overpercolating.

  Veronica didn’t say a word. She just pivoted, barefooted, and practically floated like a ghost out of the room and into the kitchen.

  I held my breath and heard the coffeepot rattle and cupboards opening and closing, their hinges just as vocal as the screen door’s. In her absence I scanned the rest of the room. The whole place had the smell, the feeling, of someone who’d lost a child: that closed-off-from-the-world stagnancy, like uncharged batteries. But there was something else, too . . . something that took me more than just a few seconds to work out. And then I suddenly knew what it was. There was a complete lack of any personal effects. No photos, no magazines, no books, no bric-a-brac. The only thing in the entire room that didn’t serve a strictly functional purpose was the television, which was muted and tuned to QVC.

  Veronica returned, cupping a mug of steaming black coffee between her hands like a nun carrying the Holy Eucharist. Wordlessly, she extended it to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, aware that I was talking just a hair above a whisper. As if to speak any louder would send this fragile creature scurrying for cover.

  “Do you want something from me?” she said. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “No. I told you, I just wanted to bring back some of Elijah’s things.”

  She cringed at the sound of his name.

  “I haven’t gotten rid of anything,” I went on. “All that stuff is still in the basement. My wife wants me to get rid of it, but I came to make sure you didn’t want it back.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  Somewhere out in the front yard I could hear a vehicle approaching. Veronica whipped her head toward the door. The engine died and I heard a car door slam. When she turned to me, she looked like someone who’d just witnessed a horrible car accident.

  “Is that David?” I said. “Your brother?”

  “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “It’s not good that you’re here.” She grabbed the coffee cup from me, sloshing thick brown sludge onto my hand and scorching the skin. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  The front door opened. I hadn’t realized just how gloomy the house was until the sun broke in like the finger of God. I winced. The figure that paused in the doorframe was hulking and broad-shouldered, the silhouette of a lumberjack or a walking cement truck.

  I nodded once compendiously in the man’s immediate direction.

  David Dentman entered the house, allowing the screen door to slam against the frame behind him. He was light skinned and broad featured, with sandy-colored hair and very clear, somber eyes, the color of which I’d never seen. He wore a chambray work shirt cuffed to the elbows, exposing a pair of sunburned arms that could have been pythons sliding into his sleeves. “What’s this?” he asked no one in particular.

  “My name’s Travis Glasgow,” I said, stumbling over my words. I was sweating profusely, only partially due to the fever I knew was working its way through me. “My wife and I moved into your old house in Westlake.”

  “Glasgow,” he repeated, tasting the name. One of his big catcher’s mitt hands disappeared behind his back to dig around in the rear pocket of his dungarees.

  For one heart-stopping second I was sure he was going to produce a knife and take a swing at my face. Instead, he fished out a worn leather wallet nearly as thick as a paperback novel and tossed it on the table beside the cardboard box.

  “House belonged to my father,” he said matter-of-factly. Same as his sister had. “There something I can help you with, Mr. Glasgow? You come all this way from Westlake?”

  “I was just bringing by some things.”

  Dentman swiveled around to the cardboard box. He seemed to recognize it immediately.

  Perhaps he had been the one to pack up the boy’s belongings after his death. Too easily I could picture those immense, steel-banded arms cramming those boxes full of stuffed animals. The image should have been comical, but thinking of it now while standing in this house, I found it utterly terrifying.

  “You a cop?”

  “Do I look like a cop?”

  “Strohman send you here?”

  “Who’s Strohman?”

  Dentman advanced toward the box, popped open the lid, and peered inside. He chewed on his lower lip as he did so. The dim light in the house struck him then in just the right fashion, causing the sheen of beard stubble at his chin and neck to glitter briefly. Disinterestedly, he faced me. “The cops send you out here?”

  “Of course not. I found that stuff in the basement and thought I’d bring it by. I guess that was a mistake,” I added after swallowing what felt like a chunk of granite.

  “You bought the house as is.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The house. Bank should have told you. Anything in there’s yours now, not ours.”

  “You misunderstand. I’m not here to complain. I just wanted to—”

  “Glasgow’s a cop,” he said. “I know that name.”

  “I’m not a cop. You’re thinking of Adam Glasgow who lived across the street from you. He’s a cop and he’s my brother.”

  “He send you out here?”

  “No,” I insisted. My apprehension was quickly being replaced by anger. “Listen, David, I just wanted—”

  “I think you better listen,” David said, taking a step toward me. Instantly, I felt my bowels clench. “My sister and me moved here to get away from what happened in Westlake. We sure as hell don’t need nobody coming around reminding us about it. You understand?”

  “I understand that you’ve got me pegged completely wrong.”

  He jabbed a finger
at me, so close to my face I could almost count the hairs on his knuckles. “You’re standing in my house right now, friend. Uninvited, far as I’m concerned. You best consider that next time you want to crack wise.” He toed the screen door open with his boot. “Think it’s time for you to go. What do you say?”

  As I headed for the door, I cast a look over my shoulder at Veronica. She’d been silent the whole time, and I hoped I could read her expression to help explain this bizarre confrontation. But Veronica was no longer there, most likely having retreated into another room while I wondered whether or not her brother was going to box my eyes shut.

  “Look,” I said to David, pausing on the other side of the door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I swear.”

  Except for slamming the door in my face, David Dentman offered no response.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The fever came, shuddering and without mercy, and I spent the next two days in a web of mind gauze. My dreams—what dreams I could remember—were erratic and paranoid, shot by a director on a bad acid trip.

  In one, I was running down a dark, narrow corridor, the walls and floor and ceiling tightening up the farther I ran, until I had to drop to my hands and knees and crawl like an infant. I crawled until I came to a tiny door, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The door appeared to be comprised of many small wooden blocks of varying colors, woven together like bamboo stalks in a raft.

  I pushed the door open and squeezed through the opening. As if the doorway were a living thing, I felt it constrict around my rib cage. Ahead of me, the darkness shifted. Shapes—or the idea of shapes—moved closer to me, then farther away, tauntingly alternating their distance. A light illuminated a little antechamber. Directly in front of me, nestled in a web of tree branches, dead leaves, and old sodden newspapers, were four hairless, sightless critters, grayish in color like a waterlogged corpse, moving only slightly.

  I was trapped between walls, between realities, like the hidden bedroom in the basement. There is clarity here. I smelled something sickeningly sweet and thought of chamomile tea. Then, from behind me, I heard a great rushing, rumbling sound and felt the walls all around me beginning to quake. In that blind, frantic instant, the corridor in which I was trapped filled with cold water, so cold it burned my skin. And I drowned.

  In another dream I was shivering and wet, a towel draped around my shoulders like a cape, with Detective Wren asking me what happened that night by the river. Behind him in the creeping dawn, uniformed police officers patrolled the wooded paths and blocked the area off with yellow tape. I heard the boats moaning in their moorings and smelled the diesel exhaust breathing in off the bay.

  Suddenly, Detective Wren’s arms were burdened with paperback novels. He dumped them on a table that instantly materialized between us, and we were in an interrogation room, with greenish fluorescent lights fizzing and colorless cinder block walls.

  —These your books? he asked. You write these books?

  I nodded.

  —How’d you come up with this stuff?

  I said I didn’t know.

  —Everything you wrote in these books happened last night at the river, said the detective. He was a big guy with oily skin and sharp, soul-searching eyes. Everything you wrote down in these books happened just like it did by the river, boy, Detective Wren went on, which makes me think this thing, see, maybe this thing was planned.

  I sobbed and said I didn’t do it on purpose.

  Detective Wren looked at me with disgust. Then his face slackened and purpled, and his eyes peeled away and readjusted themselves at either side of his rapidly narrowing head. His arms retreated up the sleeves of his rumpled suit, and his trousers loosened around his waist until they dropped straight to the floor. What lay exposed were not legs but the tapered, intestinal body of an eel. I watched in horror as Detective Wren slithered out of his suit, an enormous man-sized eel that snaked its way down the muddy embankment before splashing into the dark river. It raised a dorsal fin like a shark and zigzagged through the inky tide.

  Then David Dentman was glaring at me, one hand palming the side of my head as he repeatedly slammed my skull down on the steps of the floating staircase.

  I awoke, my throat rusty and my flesh sticky with sweat, with Jodie’s cool hand on my forehead smoothing back my sodden hair. There was a sunset burning on the horizon, and through the bedroom windows, the trees looked like they were on fire. I stared at the side of the street where Jodie stood talking with Beth in the snow. Something cramped up inside me. Before I could scream, the cool hand withdrew from my forehead.

  Dreams. . .

  Then something about a castle of cardboard boxes, of boating piers stacked one on top of the other until they formed a ladder straight into the heavens. At one point I dreamt I was married to a woman with a monster growing in her belly, and my name was Alan, and we lived by our own special lake in a different part of the country. Even in this dream, I could feel the heat of imaginary summer on my back and shoulders, pasting the shirt to my body and causing my skin to practically char and sizzle. Confused fever dreams.

  There was one moment in my dream when I crept from my bed and floated down the hallway. Downstairs I could hear the faint phantom sound of someone talking in a low voice. I glided across the landing and gripped the banister with both hands. I peeked over the side. I could make out only a fleeing shadow against one wall. So I turned and floated down the stairs to the foyer. There, the voice became slightly more audible, and I knew with intuitive certainty that it was Jodie.

  I floated into the living room. Even in the dream I had the detached feeling associated with feverish hallucinations. My feet hardly touched the carpet; my head was a helium balloon. A brutal wind whipped about the living room and bullied the curtains over the front windows, and I wondered only vaguely where it was coming from. From my vantage I could see the back of Jodie’s head as she sat on the sofa. I went to her, listening to her words . . . and realized she wasn’t actually talking; she was singing softly and tenderly and lovingly and handsomely. It was the way my mother used to sing to me when I was a child:

  A, you’re adorable

  B, you’re so beautiful

  C, you’re a child so full of charms

  D, you’re delightful

  E, you’re exciting

  F, you’re a feather in my arms . . .

  I placed a hand on her shoulder. Her voice stopped cold. I looked down at her lap . . . where the undeniable image of a young boy cradled in my wife’s arms quickly blinked out of existence.

  —Where’d he go? I asked.

  —He’ll be back, Jodie said quietly . . . and began humming.

  —Was he . . . ? I began.

  —Yes, she said. It’s him.

  —I thought it might be.

  Her humming was soothing.

  —You sound so beautiful, I told her.

  This made her smile: I could feel it radiate from her and did not need to see it.

  —Thank you, she said.

  —Too bad I’m dreaming, I said.

  —No, Jodie said. You’re not.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  When you withdraw from the world, you find that the world withdraws from you, too. Then all that’s left is the Grayness, the Void, and this is where you remain. Like a cancerous cell. Like a cut of tissue, diseased, in a Petri dish. You glance down and there it is: this gaping gray hole in the center of your being. And as you stand there and stare into it, all you see is yourself staring back.

  I was you, Jodie said. Isn’t that funny?

  You have been set aside, replaced by air, by molecules, by particles of electric light. You have been erased, removed. There is almost a popping sound on the heels of your disappearance as these molecules filter into the space you occupied only one millisecond beforehand, covering up both space and time and eradicating the whole memory of your human existence. You are no longer.

  Isn’t that funny?

  When you withd
raw from the world, you find that you were never really there—that you were never really in the world—because nature does not know extinction, and if you no longer exist, that must mean you never existed in the first place.

  I returned to the land of the living on a Wednesday. The house was quiet and Jodie was at the college. Another snowstorm had come and buried the town, and the distant pines looked like pointy white witches’ hats.

  The house was freezing. The thermostat promised it was a steady sixty-eight degrees, but I knew better than to trust it. My illness had left me drained and cotton headed, and my mouth tasted like an ashtray, so I went to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on the stove.

  By the time I’d finished my second cup, I was feeling better and decided that I would head over to the Steins’ to ask them about the Dentmans. After my visit to Veronica and David’s house in West Cumberland on Sunday, it was obvious that something was terribly, terribly wrong with that family. The bizarre descriptions I’d given the make-believe Dentman family in my notebooks had not even lived up to the real thing. Adam had told me all he knew about them, but that wasn’t enough. The Steins had been their next-door neighbors; surely they must have some insight into the family. I was hungry to find out as much about them as I could, not just for the sake of my own writing but to satisfy my increasing curiosity.

  The story I was laying out in my notebooks depicted a troubled young boy held captive in a basement dungeon by his mentally disturbed mother and an uncle who found a sick pleasure in physically hurting the child. When the child becomes old enough to speak his mind, the uncle—my David Dentman character who, for the sake of continuity, retained his real-life counterpart’s name—knows something must be done, so he murders the boy and makes it look like an accident. That was about as far as I’d gotten, having already filled up three notebooks with my frantic scribbling, but I wondered just how on the mark I’d been about them . . .

  The telephone rang. The voice on the other end was as old and rough as an ancient potato sack. “Is this Travis Glasgow?”