He moved slowly, his vision limited to what the torchlight provided. Keeping close to the wall he was able to determine that there were openings to other tunnels, at more or less regularly spaced intervals, and he began to keep count as he passed them. The last thing that he wanted was to get lost down here. Some of the openings were blocked by heavy wooden doors, bound in iron. He ran his hand across their rough surfaces, feeling the cold metal of the hasps. The first one he found he tried to open, but it didn’t budge, nor did any of the ones after that. After he’d counted three tunnels and five doors, he turned and made his way back. He stood at the tunnel from which he’d first emerged, feeling content with his explorations. But there was one thing more that he felt he had to do. Lowering the torch to the ground, he stood for a moment, savoring the anticipation. From somewhere ahead he could feel again the current of air, blowing against the side of his neck like a whisper in the dark. He cupped his hands around his mouth, drew a deep breath, and shouted out, at the top of his lungs “HELLOOOO!” An instant later he was assaulted by the echoes, his own voice plunging down on him, as it seemed, from many lofty heights. It sounded as though a score of others were answering his greeting, an unseen host, all of them in possession of his own voice. And then, before the echoes had died away, a fresh chorus was taken up, raining down like a summer shower. “HELLOOO,” they called as one, and they were his voices, the voice of the aging hippy that had joined him for tea, and the stuffy Oxford professor, and the shrill, jittery, yet somehow theatrical voice of the dandy in white that he’d met in the woods on the last day of school. And with them a bombardment of laughter, the high pitched chuckles of naughty children, and the polite, understated laughter of dinner party guests, and deep, throaty, raucous guffaws, like Santa Claus when he’s been getting into the egg nog. It was deafening. The dark had bunched together, and while his vision was just as impaired, (the impossibility of any light, forever, always), he felt that dark shapes were massing, just beyond the flickering torch light. And with that laughter ringing in his ears and in his head, he fled, stumbling all the way back up the tunnel, through the storeroom, the kitchen and the lower levels of the house, until he threw himself off the porch into the emerald cushion of the grass, where he lay gasping and sweating, the sun’s hot tongues licking at his shivering body. He could still hear the laughter, floating through the open doorway. It seemed as though the house itself were laughing at him. As though his fright was just the best side-splitter it had heard in a good long while. That was the first and last time he took the tunnel into the basement unescorted.
Of course, as fascinating as Tad found the house itself, it was nothing compared to its occupants. The place had a personality of sorts, and moods, as did the woods themselves surrounding Daddy’s abode, but on the occasions that he came for a visit and Daddy wasn’t around, it was as though the building in the clearing was dozing, resting its eyes while its master was away. When Daddy was at home, the lethargy vanished and the place pulsed with the same lunatic life that he did. He was the mad caretaker, the conduit through which it all flowed.
A new cycle had begun in Tad’s life, the friendship with Daddy its fulcrum. As June wore on, his days went something like this. He would get up early and join the family for breakfast. Daisy sat beside him with her usual sour expression, pushing food around on her plate, while Walt and Casey stolidly shoveled it in, ever the trenchermen, occasionally telling each other the latest ethnic-humor-based quips and generally ignoring the two youngest members of the family. Marta sat near, beaming at her boys, and filling their plates each time they emptied them. Tad ate sparingly. He liked to save most of his appetite for teatime. Sometimes during breakfast the phone would ring and there was no one on the other end. At such times, Walt Surrey could usually be predicted to say, “Some folks don’t have nothin’ better to do than call you and hang up!” Each time this happened, Daisy got a point. They had added this new phrase to the hat at the beginning of the month, and it was proving beneficial to her. When the exercise in family unity had ended, Walt drove off to work and Casey headed out to play ball with his friends. Marta retreated into the kitchen, and Daisy to the attic. Sometimes before Tad left the house he would try to visit with Daisy, but more often than not he left her alone. He knew his sister better than anyone, and he could tell when she didn’t want company, which in these times was an even more frequent occurrence than usual. This bothered Tad. He worried about her, and he didn’t like her becoming so withdrawn. Also, he felt that Daze was the sole person that he might have been able to talk to about Daddy. She remained the only one who he’d spoken to about the whole business, and her insights may well have proven invaluable, particularly as they would be coming from the viewpoint of an impartial and unconnected bystander. But no sooner had Marta begun to clear the plates then Daisy would vanish up the stairs like a ghost, so in this matter Tad had only himself to consult with. With the sun still swelling over the trees, dispelling the night’s lingering vapors, he would set off to find his friend, dressed in the same pair of ratty jeans and ancient sneakers that were so broken in that he could hardly feel that he was wearing them. And in his pocket he carried the same silver watch that had once belonged to his grandfather.
There were the days when, again, he had trouble finding the house. When this occurred, he had little recourse but to shout curses at the trees and continue blundering forward, growing ever hotter and more irritated. Such occasions were even more bothersome because they presented him with yet another question to be answered. If there was some mischievous, malevolent force that aligned itself against him at such times, then what was its source? Was it Daddy that controlled it all, wreaking this silent brand of havoc? Could this be another one of his mysterious abilities? It seemed like his style, another form of mental confusion, to try and rile Tad before allowing him an audience. Like the voices, and the clothes, and the time manipulation, all meant to throw him off. Was it the house that was playing these games, masking its presence from him, choosing its own time to reveal itself, while laughing at him all the while? He thought this possible too. Or there was a third option. It could be that the very woods were shifting around him. And if that’s the case, then I’m in the worst position of all, because that means that my surroundings themselves are a possible threat to me. And that means that I’m entirely at their mercy. Perhaps what bothered him most of all is how rapidly he had come to entertain such notions, when not so long ago he would have dismissed them as childlike fantasies. Think of it. The woods themselves alive. This is the effect that hehas had on me. But usually, sooner or later, he made it to the clearing with the tall, tall grass, and he would swim through it toward Daddy’s looming castle, making use of the breast stroke he’d learned in gym class at Feral Middle School. Dripping with sweat, he’d climb wearily up the steps onto the creaking boards of the porch. And as tired and worn down as the trip there might have made him, he still felt the same rush, each time before he stepped through the doorway with no door. It was the expectation and the knowledge that anything, anything, could be waiting for him.
If Daddy was at home, usually he could be found somewhere on the ground floor. Tad would hear him before he saw him, and sometimes it was the ranting of a Southern gospel preacher that he heard, or the drawl of an ornery Texan, or the mile-a-minute prattling of an expert auctioneer. He never knew which Daddy he was going to get, either in terms of dress, or speech, or mood. It was the very epitome of manic-depression. Sometimes the man would be overjoyed to see him. He would bound over from whatever it was he’d been doing and shake Tad heartily by the hand, pumping it up and down till Tad feared his arm would be pulled out of its socket. He would clap the young man on the back, and take his head between his hands and speak nonsense long and earnestly into his face, overcome with emotion, tears streaming from his bulging eyes. It was all so incredibly over the top that Tad couldn’t say whether it was genuine or performance. He felt that it must be real. Daddy would have to be the best actor in th
e world for it not to be, better than the best. But he would look into the man’s eye and see a glint, like a nervous tick, there at the corner, and he couldn’t tell. He just couldn’t tell. Sometimes it would be the exact opposite. He would arrive to find his friend sprawled across the furniture or lying on the floor, nearly comatose, in a state of the most severe depression. He could barely be coerced to speak at such times, ignoring Tad’s attempts to engage him in conversation and uttering pathetic muted moans. But even this was sometimes misleading. He might find inspiration, seemingly from nowhere, and leap to his feet, within seconds becoming as lively as ever. But his frantic mood swings aside, it is still difficult to tell exactly why Tad felt the attachment that he did, even with his lack of a ready peer group and the ever deepening desire to escape from the rest of his family.
Another reason might have been that Daddy was just an extremely fascinating person to be around, even if Tad hadn’t arrived when he was in the middle of some elaborate project in which the young man could instantly take part. It was engrossing just to sit and talk with him, to hear him speak in his many voices and tell his many tales. Daddy, it seemed, had been a world traveler at one point, visiting countries and territories in the most remote corners of the world. He boasted of having adventures on all seven continents, and being one of the greatest linguists alive. When Tad demanded that he prove it, he responded by greeting him and speaking conversationally in over a dozen languages. Of course, Tad couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it all sounded perfectly genuine. What was difficult to determine was exactly in what capacity Daddy had visited all these places, and done all these things. He spoke with enthusiasm of the great European capitals, roaming the ruins of ancient Greece, spitting off the Great Wall of China, driving dune buggies through the ruins of Stonehenge. Big game hunting in Ghana and Tanzania. Masquerade balls in Frankfurt. Tad would sit and listen with rapt attention, his cup of Pumpkin Spice growing cold on the floor beside him, as the wild-eyed man would postulate with sweeping motions, miming the stalking pose of the Kalahari bushmen and filling his lungs to demonstrate the mating call of the bull elephant. It was all so absurd, and yet he spoke of it with such conviction, clenching his fists, overturning the furniture, filling the room with noise and bluster. And while he spoke, Tad could see it all unfolding around him, the tall grasses, and the liveried servants, and the constellations scattered by astral winds across the boundless night sky. He felt himself a million miles away, flung out from the wretched West Virginia woods onto the road, with traveling companions whose names he did not know and a different costume for every day, sleeping under bridges and galloping on horseback through the surf of an ocean, the uncharted depths of which sucked at the legs of his mount and crashed on the rocks of his memory, obliterating them once and forever. Daddy spoke, and his words were a gateway to an unsung time, previously penetrable only in his wildest imaginings, now so near that he could reach out and grasp it and leap through, leaving behind his home, face, and name, reborn. It was the Summer In Between when Daddy spoke, and it seemed that it could last forever, ninety some odd days until he was due back, to step out onto the Willow Road and follow his footsteps to the realities of high school and the tumble into the impending zit-riddled awkwardness of adolescence, as unavoidable and uncontestable as his mother’s Governing Principles of Family Life. And most of the time, while Daddy was doing his thing, his large, bald headed companion would be sitting near, saying nothing, sweating in the summer heat, his knitting needles making their endless clacking, and every once in awhile nodding his head up and down, as if to say that it was all true, so true, and just the way that he remembered it himself.
As eccentric as Daddy was, Tad found him to be equally knowledgeable. Sometimes the two of them would go for walks in the woods in the afternoons after tea, and Daddy would speak to him of the habits and preferences of the surrounding fauna. He knew the secret ways and names of all the furred and feathered forest dwellers, and he seemed to take pleasure in having an attentive listener, to whom he could speak for hours about their hunting tactics, and mating rituals, and hibernation tendencies. For Tad, who had always felt that special connection to the outdoors, having lived in such close proximity to it all his life, having such a person as a guide was a true pleasure. He asked questions eagerly, and there was no question, seemingly, that could stump his companion. Daddy knew everything, and it was obvious to Tad, watching the man as he spoke, that he felt the same rapport with his surroundings that Tad did. Often they would return to The Bottoms, where Daddy would steer Tad safely around the marshier paths to the firmer sections, and they would sit on the banks while Daddy talked about the food chain, and how each rung was as essential as the last, unfailingly, from top to bottom. And Tad would sit, and nod his head, and listen.
At other times they explored the house together. Sometimes they were able to convince Stitch to put up his knitting long enough to join them, and the giant would trail along from room to room, fending off physical and verbal jabs from Daddy with a sort of good natured laziness. Sometimes they played hide and seek, restricted to the first floor. “If we use the whole house we’ll never find each other, don’t y’know,” Daddy had confided to Tad, in one of his loud whispers. “We might even have trouble finding ourselves, after a while.” Tad understood what he meant. Even with the other floors and the subterranean levels off limits, the first floor was so sprawling that a single round might last for hours, there were so many places to hide. Hiding in the house could be an uncomfortable prospect. Tad might find a good spot, in one of the interior rooms, away from the windows, where natural light did not penetrate. Without the benefit of candlelight, by late afternoon he found it to be very dark indeed. Waiting silently to be discovered in those dusty rooms, full of barely seen objects, crouching behind or underneath the furniture, Tad would swear he could feel the steady pulse of the house as it waited with him, trying to still its breathing and heart rate just as he himself was. Listening for the heavy tread of Stitch’s boots or the off-key pattering of Daddy’s shoes or swish-swish of his slippers across the floor, Tad discovered that he wanted to be found. It was an irrational fear that came on him at such moments, that somehow he would spend eternity in hiding, while around him the others continued vainly searching for him, until eventually they gave him up as lost. Or a different fear would come over him, but equally unsettling, that he was being sought out by monsters, embodiments, perhaps, of the very house itself. It had spewed forth these creatures from its innards to seek him out and drag him into some previously unseen torture chamber below the ground, where they would gleefully strip away his soul and everything he held dear. And each time this fantasy came to him, kneeling down behind some object, waiting for the game to end, the forms of the beasts that hunted for him changed, becoming in his mind all the many terrors that since his childhood he’d kept in a special hidden place, all dredged up at once and morphing from one to another more rapidly than his mind could fully grasp. At such times he could scarcely contain his relief when Daddy threw back the closet door, or darted around the end of the couch to find him quivering, with a sheepish grin, anxious to move back to the more sunlit portions of the house, where at least you could ease your mind by seeing what else was in the room with you.
There were other games or activities, all of them inventions of Daddy’s. Sometimes he would be hunting for a certain object that he needed urgently, though of course, as vague as ever, he either couldn’t or wouldn’t say what the importance of it was. This was another quality that Tad appreciated. To understand the nature of a game is sometimes to destroy the essence of it. That is a major difference in the functioning of a child’s mind as compared to that of an adult. Adults forget the happiness that can be achieved in the simple joy of doing something, even if the activity doesn’t necessarily make any sense. In other words, they abandon irreverence and forget how to use their imagination. Daddy was a being forged of irreverence. He thrived on it and it blossomed around him, and fo
r Tad, this was a source of never ending delight. It was another form of escapism, like the games that he played. He was just relying on Daddy to give him direction instead of himself, and Daddy was a continual source of inspiration. He could always be counted on to produce an activity that ranged from the mildly bizarre to the completely zany. Tad was only too pleased to forget the dysfunctions of the Surrey family for a time and go hopping along in the wake of the man in the costume, while all the while the other resident of the house continued with his ceaseless knitting projects, and did not speak, but only sat, and nodded, while his fingers went on about their work.
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