DarkTalesfromElderRegionsNY

by Hieber, Leanna Renee

  Tim drained his second cup, tightened his own boots and the buckles on his overalls, pulled on his gloves and decided it was time to drop the rake. Even though it was coming on seven months since Daniel had been released, these last few weeks starting the clamming season was the first chunk of real time Tim was spending with his nephew. Knowing what to say and what not to say wasn’t easy. Especially when you had a no-holds barred big mouth as Tim prided himself in having. Sure, they had seen each other around the dinner table —when Tim had been home for dinner and not on some construction job or driving a truck, as he routinely did during the off-off winter season when there was nothing to be fished and nothing to be built. But, the dinner table was not a place to discuss the inner workings of his nephew’s mind. It was where Tim complained about the latest commie pinko plot to take over the world and where Judy told them about the antics of her latest batch of kindergarteners, about the latest bullshit with the PTA, and where she shared her big plans for their summer garden, having already started a mess of seedlings in their greenhouse the week before Daniel had been released. Daniel never spoke too much. Even though he lived in their home, he never spent much time with them beyond maybe watching the odd television program. But, since Daniel’s tastes ran more toward reruns of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and some horrendous thing called Voyagers, while Tim’s tastes ran towards Hill Street Blues and Taxi, they didn’t really spend moments of substance by the old boob box. Daniel spent the dribbles of free time reading, when he wasn’t sanding the bare walls of the basement, laying down coats of sealant on the floor and walls, and finally painting his living area with a coat of dusky blue that reminded Tim of the aircraft carrier Tim had spent quality time on in the South China seas little more than a decade earlier.

  “No worries Uncle Tim. It’s a place to put my head for now, even if it is just a small mattress and few blankets.”

  “Hey, kiddo, you’re not still on the inside. I told you, we got the nice carpet down —not that stupid indoor-outdoor crap your Aunt put down there to hide the crummy floor— after you did all the work on sealing it—” he slapped Daniel again on the shoulder and motioned for his nephew to start roping.

  Their spot was a clam bed a few hundred feet away from the shipping channel marked by red and green buoys. Tim and his other crews had left this bed alone last season so the young little necks and cherrystone clams had a chance to grow to legal size. In the stern of the boat, in a trunk built into the aft deck —a contraption that doubled as a seat— Tim had two dozen green mesh bags for the clams to be sorted into, one kind specifically for cherrystone and another separate type for littlenecks. There was something Zen about being on the water, Daniel thought. Was it the ballet of sea gulls overhead? The slight breeze buzzing past their ears? The rattle and vibration of the rake emanating up the poles? It probably was everything at once Daniel thought with a smile to himself, shoving down any lingering offense or annoyance he felt about his Uncle’s crude jokes.

  After having the rake on the bottom for about ten minutes, his Uncle nodded. The rope attached to the rake end was what Daniel grasped, since his Uncle felt the rake was full enough to bring up. Daniel firmly wound his gloved hands around the rope and began to pull with the force of all his weight as Tim yanked on the poles. Tim managed the handle and aluminum poles with a grace only known to clammers with years of experience, being sure to keep his grip steadfast on the poles and to keep everything at that certain angle so as the rake kept hold of its contents. As he took in the rope, it plopped onto the deck between Daniel’s feet. Daniel was sure to not get his feet tangled in the winding rope. The surface of the water broke as the rake appeared. The rake was nicknamed a “bubble rake,” as it was shape like the bubble of a tear drop, but was open and lined with teeth so to grip the sea bed and “rake” it. With a quick shake, still in the water, Tim was able to wash most of the mud and debris through the grates of the rake cleaning the clams a bit in the process.

  “You need to start spiffing up the place,” Tim huffed.

  Daniel quickly grabbed a large plastic sorting basket while Tim hauled up the rake to turn it over into the basket. Tim paused, balancing the heavy load at that sweet angle so as not to spill out the money into the drink, and nodded approval as Daniel held the basket firmly so every last clam landed where it was supposed to.

  “It’s been weeks now and you’re not on the sofa any more,” he continued, “which is cool. We still have to get those windows taken care of though. And I think your paint job is…” He took a moment to wipe his forehead with the back of his gloved hand, leaving a grimy streak, but he smiled as the basket was filled with a good healthy haul. “Let’s just say Dr. Peterson would be proud that you’re expressing yourself,” Tim puffed, sweat dripping down his face. Daniel began sorting as Tim lowered the rake again.

  Just prior to the end of the school term, before Aunt Judy’s days could be spent at needle-point and catching up on the drama of the daytime soaps she had missed watching during the school year, Daniel’s Aunt had brought home three milk crates full of paint. She said the crates had been donated to her class by some parent who didn’t understand what “age appropriate” paint was for kindergarteners. While she was cleaning out her classroom, she had come across the forgotten crates in the back of her supply closet. In all her years teaching kindergarten, whenever she did ask for donations, she had always gotten the basics —glue, popsicle sticks, pretzels, empty toilet paper tubes. This time, from a parent who worked in the paint department of Pergament, she got three crates of house paint, spray paint, and rustoleum. Most of the paint had already been partly used to paint test strips in the store, but there were a few unopened, albeit dented cans. There was not every color of the rainbow, but there were a fair number of shades —mostly somber dark blues, greys, greens, the odd shades of purple, a sort of metallic brown. There were only three bright colors in the entire batch, one dinged spray can of crimson, a half gallon of a rather uncomfortable yellow, and a tiny jar the size of Daniel’s palm of brilliant gold. Aunt Judy was going to throw away the crates if Uncle Tim couldn’t find a use for them. She knew he needed to paint the boats before clamming season. Over several cans of Coors, Tim railed on her for being so ridiculous as to think he could paint his boats with piss yellow rustoleum and purple house paint. Judy told Daniel to put the crates by the curb, but he brought them into his basement room instead. As his Aunt and Uncle fought, Daniel closed his eyes and began filling the largest wall of his room with swirling images that came to him from his dreams. He had loved to paint in his high school art class and had been lucky enough to be given a nub of charcoal and a few sheets of paper during one of his therapy sessions at Willowbrook. In his excitement to make the visions from his dreams realized in some form, he forgot to ask his Aunt and Uncle’s permission to use the paint on their basement wall.

  ~III~

  June 7th 1984

  The Yellow King stood over me. a hood covering his head. His mask obscuring his face. But I could see the swirling, undulating, twisting marks covering every inch of his pallid, yellowed flesh—both sides of his neck down to his partly displayed collarbone, the backs of both hands down to the fingertips and up to his forearms which poked out from his robe like two sticks of bone. The only bit of him not tattooed were his eyes, staring at me from behind his mask, and the palms of his hands. I didn’t know why he was called the Yellow King, but his title surfaced in my mind despite him wearing a robe of many colors.

  I was reminded of what Saruman said to Gandalf: the white cloth can be dyed. The white page can be overwritten, and the white light can be broken... To which Gandalf replied, and then it is no longer white and he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

  I knew the Yellow King was wise even though his light had been broken, punctured by the darkling stars. He stood on a mound of shifting, shimmering coins, all gold and bronze and silver, some bright, some tarnished black or green with time, the colors se
emed reflected in his robes.

  The King told me his proper name, but as I write, it’s beginning to leave my mind. Charles? Charlotte? No that’s not right. It couldn’t be Charlotte. He was a he and not something monstrous, something of both genders. The colors moved across his robe like a kaleidoscope and then I saw how the stars began to shine more fully in the sky above. As they shone above, they flickered as dark points on his robes as though mirrored in a dark pool.

  Again we were standing in that boat from the other night. But, I also saw the boat. I didn’t just stand there in front of the king who told me to call him Char-something. I was looking at the boat. It looked like a cross between a Viking ship and a gondola from a tourist ad to come see Venice. The entire prow was carved with the same twisting, moving shapes that had been tattooed on the King’s flesh and had been emblazoned on his robes. They reminded me of stars twining and circling, ripples on the ocean, the flight of thousands of sparrows, clouds in the sky, and ink twirling in water. As the boat rocked on the sea, every so often a carving would flit across the surface of the wood and sparkle for a moment, golden, clear. Always it was the same symbol, something just beyond my memory.

  It was the same symbol from that dream the other night —the thing branded into my hands. It was the same symbol on Jonathan’s weird little artifact, or whatever he called it. The thing he threw into the fire at Pouch Camp that summer. The little piece of clay he said was something from his Indian ancestors. Not Indian —Native American. Jonathan would get so pissed when we called him an Indian. His blasted eyes would glare and flicker. Like the colors across the King’s robe.

  Then I noticed the King’s eyes were like Jonathan’s —one yellow and one greenish-bluish-greyish. One brilliant, the other dead. Like Dad’s were in that dream when I woke up in the snow.

  “Call me Char—” Karen? No, that’s not right either. It had a “ch” sound, not a hard, “k.”

  The King told me his name that I can’t remember and stepped forward, reaching out his tattooed boney arms towards me offering me an embrace. And he did hug me, holding me tighter than I remember being held since Dad left. I felt the weight of his thin arms—a strength that I didn’t expect—around me. I felt tears hot on my face and then I was in the boat alone.

  I woke up crying on the mattress on the floor. There’s time before Uncle Tim comes to get me. Lots of time.

  ~IV~

  When Tim came to the top of the basement stairs to holler down for Daniel to put his clothes on, there was a funny smell in the basement and a sound that reminded Tim of church. Come to think of it, the smell reminded him of Sunday services too. It was cloying, sweet, smoky, and god he hoped his nephew wasn’t smoking a joint. It had been years since Tim did any of that —not since Vietnam— but god he so did not need to explain to Judy, or to the good doctor, that Daniel had gotten stoned on Tim’s watch.

  “What the fuck, Dan? You ready to go? Got your panties on?” Tim thundered down the basement steps to find Daniel dressed from the waist down, chanting something in a low voice, something that sounded like Karen, sitting cross legged like a deranged hippy on the floor in front of that damned mural the kid had started painting using those fucking paints Judy had brought home. On the desk by the window was an ashtray with something smoldering inside. Tim hastily walked to the ashtray to discover a small smoking cone of incense. Tim let out one of his laughs and saw his nephew visibly recoil. The boy didn’t move, but he did stop his low, incessant murmuring. Tim stepped back toward the basement stairs. An uncomfortable anxious feeling quivered in his gut and for some reason that was beyond him, he didn’t want to be so close to his nephew at that moment.

  Tim didn’t mind Daniel lighting incense. He supposed it was to cover up the smell of the paint. Likewise, he didn’t mind his nephew using the paints. He had told the kid to start livening up the place, but Tim had really meant with furniture. Tim would have liked to have been asked to paint the fucking wall. But, whatever. Doctor’s orders. Be creative. But, shit, there was an entire garage full of Judy’s dumpster diving finds that she had promised she’d refinish, sell, or dump that Daniel had free range to pick through. The kid had found a desk, lamp, a kind doorless wardrobe for his clothes, and a sort of end table that really looked more like one of those fucking over-the-bed tables they had in hospitals. The only bed-frame in Judy’s horde had been missing the important frame bits —it was just a head-board and a cock-eyed foot-board that had nothing to hold it up, and Daniel had gotten turned off from the weird smell that rose out of an overstuffed armchair. So, the kid had had the box-spring and mattress on the floor, for now and he borrowed one of the more uncomfortable chairs from the kitchen to use at his desk. The kid had given up rummaging around any further and started spending all his free time writing in that journal, reading a battered volume that he always stuck under his pillow, and adding to that fucking mural. As Tim stood there watching his nephew, the grey-haired man felt as though he had been smacked across the face with a wet towel.

  From the relative safety of the basement stairs, Tim was able to really take in what his nephew had been painting. The mural seemed to be a sea of stars and planets, like something out of Cosmos. But superimposed over what would be a normal thing for a twenty-something kid to have in his room— something that would be damned cool had some of the paint been that dayglow stuff and if he had one of those wacky lava lamps or blacklights to amp it up— was something that was so uncool that it made Tim a little queasy. In white chalk, Daniel had begun sketching a figure wearing what looked like a deeply hooded monk’s robe. The figure’s face seemed twisted, obscured, not natural. The arms were skeletal, but covered with a thin skin full of designs, vine-like shapes, and symbols. The figure stood on something that Daniel hadn’t yet finished sketching. A platform? Tim didn’t know. The most bizarre thing? The figure didn’t have eyes—they were just empty black spaces in the gaping face, and the hands seemed somehow wrong, long, like claws.

  Tim shuddered to think of how that figure would look amped up under a blacklight. So not cool.

  Daniel’s bare-chest was streaked and spattered with paint and what looked like ink. Lying on the floor beside where the kid sat staring at his handiwork was his journal and several opened cans of paint. Also lying at his feet was a long strip of what looked like canvas on which Daniel had begun painting something totally alien to his Uncle: a series of symbols. The only thing that looked remotely decipherable as English was a word that was equally unknown to Tim: Carcosa.

  Tim would have to let the doctor know. Until Daniel turned around and smiled, acknowledging his Uncle and quickly snatching up a shirt to pull on over his paint smudged torso, Tim wasn’t sure if they would be dealing with a relapse.

  “Sorry, Uncle Tim. I woke up a while ago and had to get my dreams down. Dr. Peterson said to do that and then there was time… I didn’t want to wake you and Aunt Judy up.” Daniel stood up and began pulling on and lacing his boots. “Sorry. I got caught up. I should’ve come upstairs to fix the coffee.” Daniel gathered up his waxed-canvas shoulder bag, wrapped his journal and his father’s fountain pen inside the oilcloth, and he put the symbol covered piece of canvas on the desk that stood in the room’s corner, facing one of the high, chicken-wire covered windows.

  “Not a problem, kiddo. Your Aunt put the pot on already. I got the sandwiches and all you need to do is shove something in your face before we head out. You good here?” Tim wanted to reach out and give his nephew a hug or a pat on the back, something to show affection but not too much, Tim was a man and not one of those touchy-feely commie pinkos. But the black eyes from the chalk-drawn figure seemed to follow Tim as the grey-haired man stepped toward his nephew. Again, Tim backed up a pace, the hair on his neck bristling uncomfortably. Daniel’s face twitched almost imperceptibly. As it did, the boy’s mouth curved down into a snarl and he bared his teeth for a fraction of a millisecond—and then he was smiling normally in his routine quiet, half-smile sort of way. Tim doubted
whether he had really seen that snarl.

  “Sure, Uncle Tim. Ready for a day on the boat. The blisters are almost gone, see?” He held up his ink stained, chalk-dusted hands for his Uncle to inspect in a way that was almost childlike. Tim patted Daniel on the shoulder and stepped aside for his nephew to head upstairs. For some reason that Tim couldn’t place, he didn’t want Daniel to follow behind. He wanted Daniel to walk up front where Tim could keep an eye on the boy. Tim swallowed down a strange squirming anxiousness that rose in his chest.

  ~V~

  Unlike the day before, the dawn that morning rose clear and brilliant. Yesterday’s red dawn had cut their day short a bit when a squall blew up about mid-morning. Fighting the swells that came in off the bay wasn’t fun, but it was better than sticking it out and staying on open water during a thunderstorm. In the dark, pre-dawn Daniel spent the short drive to Lemon Creek telling his Uncle about the different tie-downs they had had during the storm the night before. As they drove, it occurred to Tim that Daniel wasn’t getting more than two or three hours sleep each night—if that much.