Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

  She passed in front of a double window as she crossed the hall at the rear of the house. The next door was partially open. Samantha pushed it wide to reveal a study or library. Two freestanding shelves of books were filled over capacity; narrow spines were stacked flat between upright books and the shelves above them. A depowered computer sat on a small desk. As Samantha leaned against the doorframe and tried to decide if it was worth the effort to examine the computer, she noticed movement outside.

  The window looked out on a shallow back yard, bordered at the back by an alley. The lawn formed a fat ‘L’ rotated and flipped, allowing space for two cars to park on gravel. A midnight blue late-model sedan was parked there already, alongside of which a newer, bronze car pulled up. A blonde woman in her thirties exited the car and walked determinedly toward the side entrance.

  Samantha’s heart raced. She thought the woman looked familiar from some of the photos—though older now. Samantha became instantly aware of her role as intruder. Welcome intruder or accidental intruder—she was clearly cognizant for the first time that it made no difference what eccentricity or confusion had led the dead woman to name her as next of kin. Samantha had no right to be here.

  Samantha heard a key clack in the latch and then the mild protest of weary hinges. Several footsteps on hardwood floor followed. Samantha padded gingerly down the hallway towards the top of the stairs. A floorboard creaked beneath her. She caught her breath.

  There was waiting silence below.

  ‘Hello?’

  Samantha knew she should respond. It would be much worse if she were found creeping around or hiding. But she held her breath fast, unwilling to let it go.

  You have to speak. You have to say something.

  Samantha tried to announce her presence, but the sound was strangled in her throat, and she managed only a small bleat.

  The voice came up the stairs again, closer, more nervous. ‘Hello?’

  Samantha exhaled forcefully and marched to the top of the stairs.

  The blonde woman looked up at her; fear and confusion and instinctual defensive anger wrestled across her face. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.

  Samantha tried to respond, but didn’t know how to introduce herself. ‘I…I…’

  Anger won: ‘And what the hell are you doing in my mother’s house?’

  The mortician—Douglas—picked up their coffees from the barista and brought them to the small, round table. Feeling unusually indulgent, Samantha needed five words ending in vowels to order her drink; he had ‘house: black’. Samantha waited for Douglas to settle in his seat before she spoke, but it soon became clear he would never be ‘settled’. He fidgeted and looked around him constantly.

  ‘Peridot—with one ‘r’—is her married name,’ she began. ‘A marriage that I think was a point of contention. Something at least was wrong between them, I think they were estranged.’ Samantha frowned at the echo of her own situation with her father. ‘Some of this is conjecture as she was not in any mood to converse with me, and I was only too eager to get out of there, so I may have missed something. But I gathered they weren’t in contact with each other much after the daughter’s marriage. Which might explain how the mother got the name wrong—which led to her getting her daughter’s contact information wrong when she pulled it off the internet instead of asking for it directly. She was avoiding contact with her daughter, but still had to list her as her beneficiary. When she came across another woman with the unlikely name of ‘Samantha Perridot’, she just pulled that information and used it.’

  Samantha paused to take a sip. Complexly sweet, viscous coffee slipped over her tongue and down her throat. Douglas stared embarrassedly at his drink, occasionally rolling a quartet of finger pads against the cup. Samantha regretted asking him to join her. She knew it was a pointless distraction, but for once she actually wanted to talk to someone and, of the two (living) people she’d met in Meadowlark, he was the only one willing to listen. She expected she’d never see him again anyway, so she felt no embarrassment. She was, however, disappointed at his distracted lack of enthusiasm. He agreed readily enough to leave with her from the funeral home, but apparently he wasn’t at all accustomed to being asked to accompany anyone anywhere, and had failed to anticipate the problem of actually providing social companionship. Samantha was mostly irked that he kept shooting sideways glances at the other patrons. He can’t possibly be embarrassed to be seen with me, can he?

  ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she continued, ‘It really is so obvious a mix-up I can’t believe I didn’t think of it the whole drive over.’

  Douglas said nothing.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Douglas started. ‘Oh, uh—!’ He coughed to buy time. ‘I can’t believe you came here,’ he said finally. He scowled at the inappropriate comment.

  Samantha noted his embarrassment and dismissed any unintended offense with a flick of her fingers. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘No, I can’t believe it either. I don’t know how I let myself be drawn in like this.’

  ‘We have to—hrmph!—we have to accept our traps.’ Douglas shook his head slightly as if he didn’t understand what he’d said or why he’d said it. He put one hand up to the side of his face as though to hide it from the staff behind the counter.

  ‘Excuse me, Douglas,’ Samantha snapped, ‘but would you rather not be here? Is it some sort of problem for you to be seen with me?’

  Instead of jumping to apologize, Douglas shrugged. He fairly whimpered, ‘It’s just… now that you know you don’t belong here, why do you stay?’

  Samantha’s lips pinched tight. ‘I won’t be staying long, I assure you.’ She bent to pick her purse up from the floor.

  ‘Look, no.’ As Douglas reached across to touch her arm, he hit his cup and nearly knocked it over. He drew both hands back hurriedly and steadied the mug, then cursed as the sloshing hot liquid scalded his hands.

  The bitter humour of Douglas’s clumsiness and resultant pain softened Samantha’s demeanour and she waited as he patted himself with a paper napkin.

  ‘I just mean…’ He crumpled the napkin in his fist. ‘You could have left that house and got on the interstate. And you didn’t stay to see me.’

  Samantha smiled sympathetically. No matter how light or incidental she might characterize this experience, there was no pretending their interaction would progress beyond sharing a coffee.

  He parsed the meaning of her smile and deliberative silence. ‘That’s all right. I don’t have to understand it. Today is different, that’s enough.’

  She appreciated his acquiescence, opaque as it seemed. ‘What do you think I want?’

  Douglas shook his head and trembled and murmured before responding, ‘I’m not a priest. I can’t tell you why people die.’

  Samantha frowned. The comment twisted in her side unexpectedly. ‘That’s not…’ she faltered.

  ‘Ahh!’ Douglas growled exasperatedly. He rolled his eyes. Then, for the first time, he smiled. ‘Most of my conversations are one way.’

  Samantha tittered. ‘I would expect so.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Douglas paused and leaned forward, ‘I’m a good listener.’

  Samantha laughed lightly.

  ‘Look, there’s…this is stupid, I know it’s stupid, but there’s something I want to give you.’

  It fit.

  The polka-dot tea dress so inappropriate as burial garb tugged nicely at Samantha’s figure, slimming the waist, hiding the hips, and boosting the bust. Samantha was surprised, but didn’t know why she should be: there was no way to judge the woman’s shape under a sheet on a gurney, and no reason to try. The dress almost certainly dated from when the dead woman was much younger, anyway. Samantha twirled as she looked at herself in the motel room bathroom mirror. You have to twirl in this kind of dress.

  The daughter had decided to override the dead woman’s selection of apparel; Douglas tried to impress upon the daughter the importance of ‘the deceased’s wishes’ but to
no avail. She refused even to take possession of the dress; ‘Burn it,’ she said. Douglas had no plans for so dramatic an action, but he had been about to put it out with the rest of the trash when Samantha reappeared at the funeral home. Samantha wasn’t sure why he chose to give the dress to her. She guessed his irritation with his communication skills frustrated him to the point where a senseless, showy gesture seemed somehow appropriate. But as soon as he handed the dress over to Samantha he seemed tortured, as though the act was some sort of betrayal of professional ethics. Samantha was not sorry she left immediately after accepting.

  Samantha wished she were home to see her reflection in a floor-length mirror. With the right shoes… she mused, and then laughed at the thought. The dress was too awful to consider for any occasion. Maybe that’s why she wanted to be buried in it: She was afraid someone would see it in her closet!

  Check-out time at the motel had passed before she’d even returned to the funeral home, so Samantha had already paid for another evening. She could think of no reason to stay beyond whatever loss of ‘value’ she would incur from abandoning the room. Still, she felt no impetus to leave. She’d have to drive home straight into the sun or wait until dark, and neither option appealed to her. Maybe I should go back to town. She twirled again. When else am I going to have a chance to wear this out? She laughed aloud knowing she would never brave that effrontery.

  After she had taken off the dress and hung it in the closet, Samantha’s mood dimmed with the evening. Conscious of the change, she shot a glance at the closet and referenced Bradbury aloud with a sneer, ‘The Wonderful Polka-Dot Dress.’ She stepped briefly onto the balcony but hated to think of anyone in the motel or the restaurant or at the gas station opposite watching her. She lacked the concentration necessary to let vapid television programming distract her. Samantha sat on the end of the bed wondering what it was that was bothering her.

  There was the dream to consider. Ah, yes—the dream. Some aspects of which happened to be…prophetic. Samantha was no longer sure which things she saw duplicated from dream to reality. Certainly there had been the sense that she had seen the downstairs of the house in her dream, and that sense still permeated her feeling towards the experience, but she could no longer characterize the details of the dream as memories. Certainly the upstairs was completely wrong; yet the symbolic idea of the closed doors as the warning she had chosen to ignore—not to be distracted, and thereby caught—now seemed to Samantha the strongest appeal to a supernatural or psychic phenomenon.

  But there was little meaning to parse from the rest of the dream. Samantha knew she was potentially to blame for that, as she compromised the search for whatever waited under the table in the corner of the breakfast nook. The phrase ‘a willow, a willow cat’ was almost certainly the construct of her subconscious processing the sounds of the air conditioning. She could think of nothing that sounded like the mysterious phrase that might mean anything, and taken on its face there was no such thing as a ‘willow cat’. She saw no evidence of a cat at residence at the house, and no example of ‘cat’ as decorative theme. She remembered the horse chestnut in the front yard; she searched her memory of her brief glance into the back yard and remembered a scraggly fir on the corner and a low fence choked with ivy, but no willow tree. ‘Pussy willow’ seemed the most straightforward interpretation, but again, Samantha remembered no such plants growing outside nor any examples of the plant presented in a vase or otherwise represented in the house.

  Samantha reminded herself that there was no reason for her presence here. She tried to force herself to understand that whatever motivation spurred her to come to Meadowlark was hers alone, that the mistake occurred without intent and her wilful misinterpretation of the chaotic lurching of the universe bore sole blame for her suffering. But the criticism provided no clarity. Unease churned in Samantha’s mind of its own accord and she chided herself, I am worrying about worrying. Nothing more. But the unshakable sense of falseness to the approbation only further soured Samantha.

  There is still a piece missing.

  Samantha decided she must return to the house the next day and look in the breakfast nook.

  You’ve got a piece missing.

  Samantha got angry. She went to the gas station and bought the worst bottle of wine she ever consumed.

  Her sleep was not dreamless, though the dream was of nothing.

  She did not dream of falling through black space, she dreamt of void.

  She did not dream of her being in the void; the void was all.

  She dreamt of perfect void wherein the only existence was an impersonal perception of beginningless, endless, pointless, meaningless nothingness.

  When she woke, the first thing she saw was the polka-dot tea dress hanging in the closet. She thought she might have been crying, but her pillow was not wet. The rumbling of the air conditioner failed to soothe her.

  Samantha had forfeited her keys to the house and begging re-entry from the daughter was clearly futile. She drove through the alley behind the house to make sure the daughter’s car wasn’t parked in the gravel lot. Thoughts of a hidden key or forcible entry played about in her head as she parked on the street. She tried her luck first at the front door in the hope that the daughter had assumed that Samantha had entered through the side door and neglected to check the front, but her hope was in vain. Samantha turned and casually stepped sideways as she looked to see if anyone was watching. She discreetly tried each window on the porch, but they, too were locked. She tried the locked side door and pulled on the padlock on the storm cellar entrance in the back yard.

  She recalled the two keys on the small metal ring she had used to gain entry the day before. Those were not her keys. They were an extra set. From a neighbour…? But if her keys weren’t with her personal effects at the hospital where she died, then where are they? Samantha sighed. Probably inside the house, where they won’t do me any good.

  She walked over to the parked blue sedan. There, in plain sight on the driver’s seat, lay a jumble of keys on two interlocking key chains, one attached to a stylized goose advertising a Northern resort, the other latched to a coiled pink plastic ring. Samantha was surprised only momentarily before she interpreted the evidence with instinctual ease and certainty: The dead woman was independent and strong, so she drove herself to the hospital. But she was not isolated or demure, so she had someone drive her car home so as not to pay for long-term parking. That person had left the keys on the seat for her anticipating her return—which meant the woman would have had to have been able to access the keys in the car. Samantha tried the car door, but it was locked. She felt around in the wheel wells and found a magnetic key holder on the driver’s side rear. Samantha retrieved the keys from the front seat and entered the house through the side door.

  She opened the door slowly and took four soft steps into the hall. She listened. The house breathed restfully. Samantha took another four steps and looked into the living room and the sitting room beyond. She felt certain she was alone in the house. She walked to the painted wooden door that she knew led to the kitchen without sparing a glance up the stairs.

  Inside was just as she expected: the metal cabinets with visible brushstrokes on their dull, saffron-coloured doors, the narrow, slotted double doors hiding a pantry, the sharp-angled behemoth of a refrigerator. And the breakfast nook crammed tight into the far wall, bathed in sunlight.

  Samantha felt her heart beating quickly. Though she knew that this is where she needed to be, and that what she had come for waited in the corner, she was scared. The fright of her dream resurfaced; Samantha knew if she saw that face again—But why would you see that? Because!—Because God knows what’s waiting!—she would scream through years of heavy sedation. She summoned her courage. There’s probably nothing there, she thought, and then frowned knowing that possibility might be most terrible of all.

  Samantha went to the alcove and kneeled. She bent and leaned forward on her wrists. She couldn’t help but pause to
listen, and felt relieved when she heard no voice. She shimmied forward on knees and elbows beneath the table. She couldn’t see behind the swollen arc of the foot of the bench-leg. She inched further forward. Her breath fluttered in shallow gasps. She turned her neck and pressed her cheek flush against the wall. And she saw, in the corner, stuck behind the bench-leg, hidden for who-knows-how-long, a brown, hardback book.

  Samantha dislodged the book from its resting place. She backed out from under the table and squeezed onto one of the benches. The faded gold imprint on the spine had been rubbed nearly to obscurity, but Samantha could still make out the title and author:

  O Pioneers!

  —

  Willa Cather

  Samantha chirped and then sighed with delight.

  ‘A Willow Cat,’ she said.

  The front cover cracked at the spine as Samantha opened the book. She flipped the pages and dry mustiness tickled her nose. She turned again to the beginning and saw there was an inscription on the first page. It read:

  To my darling daughter,

  Sorry I won’t be there for your birthday this year.

  I know one day you’ll travel farther than I ever could.

  Be kind to your father this summer!

  Love,

  Mom

  Samantha’s head flushed with warmth. Tiny sparkles of light bloomed in the air from nothing and floated languidly about the kitchen. She remembered how the light from her dream shifted in the air itself and saw it all around her. Thousands of stars attended her patiently, yet she could make out every detail in the room past them and through them. They lingered and then phased between seconds, becoming invisible without leaving. Samantha looked down at the book and saw several words exploded with small blue asterisks; her tears moistened the page.

  Samantha understood that the inscription was written from the dead woman to her daughter years ago. She wondered if the train ticket in the display case marked some event that drew the mother away. She felt a small, sad tug wondering if the woman’s brief absence had begun the fissure between mother and daughter.