by Doug Draa
He turned off the light. He briefly considered that maybe flashlights were bad for old photographs.
And while he stood there in the dark, he considered his options, some of which were, he knew, very traditional in a situation like this. They included:
Running screaming into the night.
Or making his way to the master library upstairs by candlelight and spending the evening poring over ancient, blasphemous, eldritch, forbidden, and crumbling tomes in arcane languages (which he would somehow be able to read), until he had ventured into truly forbidden territory which sufficiently altered his mind that he was no longer even remotely sane and all the more willing to invite in tentacular spooks from outer space, while incidentally discovering in a climax of mind-blasting horror what precisely the former owner of this house (of sinister repute, both the owner and the house) had been up to.
Calling in a team of professional ghost busters with their instruments and their technobabble, which would ultimately lead them to yadda-yadda—see, previous paragraph.
Going out into the back yard and digging up that grave with his bare hands.
Or just lying out there and listening to the voices from out of the ground.
Or waiting for the power to come back on and then watching TV. Something he could relate to, like Big Bang Theory, because he, too, was an awkward genius that nobody understood. This option included calling out for pizza, even if it was quite a ways for a delivery. First he’d have to find his phone.
Or none of the above.
What actually did happen after that was a little hard to follow. For one thing, he lost track of time. It was dark. It stayed dark. He wondered if the sun would ever rise. He thought he remembered distinct instances of sleeping, on a couch, or in a huge, canopied bed, and of getting up several times to go to the bathroom—fortunately the plumbing worked, even if the electricity didn’t, and he laughed and repeated to himself the old joke in a comic-geezer’s voice about, I have an old man’s bladder. Imagine how upset he was to discover it missing. But it was still dark, and more than once he made his way down to the kitchen by candlelight and ate whatever he could find that didn’t require cooking. And always, he avoided looking at the photo on the wall, or any of the ones in the album.
Now what was interesting was that he had the distinct sense that it was his album, and he began to remember how he had taken those photographs, one by one, and under what circumstances, which was very odd indeed, because he hadn’t taken them. He, the inventor and entrepreneur and the subject of rude Photoshopped pictures on Facebook had done nothing of the sort, and those weren’t digital photographs anyway. He had no idea how to use the sort of antique equipment that must have been employed in the creation of those pictures, even if, during his ruminations, he had found a whole room full of cameras and metal basins and bottles of chemicals.
Once he actually heard someone knocking loudly at the front door. He saw the gleam of headlights in the driveway. But he didn’t answer it. That was for someone else, in another time.
He hadn’t come here to be normal, he kept telling himself.
Time to break out the old loincloth and go swinging through the vines.
But that was not what he did—this not being loincloth weather—as he made his way slowly upstairs, through rooms filled with his own stuff, glimpsing by candlelight his comic-book collection, his movie posters, the glass case containing the Aurora model kits of the Frankenstein Monster and Dracula he’d built as a kid—as he was the sort of person who went through life accumulating, never letting go of anything—then into another room filled with his trophies, for innovation, for excellence, for making lots and lots of money and keeping most of it from anybody else—and after that the room full of stuffed, mounted heads, which brought back to his consciousness like bright bubbles of memory rising from a dark pool the vivid recollections of how exactly he had killed each one of these creatures. And yes, the pterodactyl was a joke, a clever fabrication given to him by a friend one Christmas after he’d returned from an expedition to Mato Grosso in 1922 and they’d both sat up reading aloud passages from The Lost World and getting a jolly good laugh over it. He found a closet filled with old suits and put one on, because a gentleman, even at home, had to maintain a certain standard. His fingers seemed to know what to do with the stiff, detached collar, even if his mind didn’t.
He was a gentleman, despite some of the things that went on in that room filled with cameras and metal basins and sinks, and even though they didn’t involve, exclusively, photography.
There was a room of knives. The walls were covered with them, each in little sheaths. Thousands of them.
And then it seemed that he was riding in the passenger car of a train, the steam engine whistling and roaring, as he gazed out the window past a landscape that seemed to twist over tabletops and along the lintel of a door and through tunnels and up spiraling flights of stairs until he found himself disembarking at the final stop, which was an old-fashioned wooden train station in the middle of an impossibly flat landscape covered with perfectly regular gravestones as far as he could see.
At the same time he was in the room where the toy train’s track came to its terminus, where moonlight streamed in through a window, and he heard the sound of a foghorn from across the bay. Why would they blow a foghorn on a moonlit night? He wasn’t sure, but they did.
“Choo! Choo! End of the line!” someone said.
“Who the hell is there?”
“We have our little hobbies. Wanna see?”
He followed, by candlelight, as the Other led him to a higher loft, the true attic of this part of the house, a long, low room under the eaves, and for just a moment what he saw looked, impossibly and absurdly, like something he’d seen in the dark once in that scenic metropolis of Shell Pile, New Jersey, a soft-shell crab farm out in the middle of a field, consisting of row upon row of rectangular tanks stacked on top of one another in a metal framework. But these were not tanks. They were boxes, white cardboard boxes, like gift boxes, the kind you’d get a doll or new suit in, carefully stacked row upon row on metal shelves.
“Look.”
None of the boxes had lids. Inside each, surrounding by crumpled wrapping paper the way a new doll might be wrapped, lay the corpse of a child. He knew each of them. He remembered them. He knew their names. He had gently placed pictures of every one of them into his album.
Now some of them were starting to shrivel up or blacken, which made him sad, because he remembered how beautiful they had been.
But no, he argued, he hadn’t done any of this. That was someone else. It was as if his memories and that of some Other were getting all mixed up now, but he was sure, no, that he had never been in this room before the Other had tricked him into it; and that was not his own picture on the wall in the kitchen with a face that faded away; and the children in the boxes did not call out to him and demand to know why? Why? Why did you hurt me? He hadn’t hurt anyone. They were having such fun. Like the joke with the pterodactyl was such fun. No one asked him Well, what about that guy you buried in the Pine Barrens near Shell Pile? And he did not have to explain, as one might to a child, that to get where he had gotten, much less to hold onto what he had obtained, whether it be a perfect Aurora model kit of Dracula or a million dollars in hoarded rare gold coins that nobody else knew about, much less his legendary gazillions in the stock of ___, well, sometimes you have to do things that just have to be done, however unpleasant; so no one asked him about the fire in the sweatshop in Bangladesh either, and no one even said, Who do you think you are kidding? Do you really think you can just hide away from the world and from the past forty years of your life with your head in the fucking sand? That doesn’t work very well for ostriches either.
That’s not a good idea.
Good? Bad? He knew that he was not a bad man, and who was to judge anyway? Some things were beyond judgment.
He ran out of the loft, back down into the lower part of the attic, where the toy train was, where he could see a distant lighthouse out a window across the bay, and somehow, miraculously, his phone was right there, by the chair, where he’d dropped it, still on and glowing.
The last good idea he had involved scooping up that phone off the floor and pressing in a number he knew. His youngest daughter. He hadn’t spoken to her in a very long time. He sensed, he hoped, that she didn’t hate him quite as much as everybody else. If only he could just speak to her—
“That’s not a good idea,” the Other said.
“Yes, it’s a very good idea!” he said, “a very good idea.”
The phone was ringing.
“A very good idea!”
“Daddy? Is that you? What’s a good idea?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and then he couldn’t think of anything more to say.
Someone took the phone out of his hand and threw it across the dark room.
But of course there was no one in the room with him. He was standing there, alone, wearing an old-fashioned suit, and in the upper loft were boxes and boxes of dead children, whose names he knew.
* * * *
Later, there was a loud knocking at the door and he looked out another window and he saw the policemen down there in the driveway, and he laughed at the ridiculous jalopies they’d come in and the absurd uniforms they wore, like something out of an old, silent movie, but he knew they’d never find him, because he was here now and he was part of the house and he could just fade into the darkness until they’d gone away.
“Boom,” he said.
THE FORGOTTEN, by D.C. Lozar
Jake ripped the paper out of his notebook and crumpled it into a tight wad. The evening drizzle was getting serious, and splattering droplets had smeared much of what he had written. The writing exercise had been to describe a place that held special meaning to him. He sat on an overturned metal bucket with his back against the dead fig tree. Lightning had long ago split its trunk in two, and its charred branches offered little shelter from the rain. He tried again to imagine what his parents must have been like on their first date under this tree. He thought he heard them in the gentle rumble of thunder. He squinted, trying to see them in the twilight shadows. Rain blurred his vision, and he felt a lump forming in his throat.
He was not going to start crying. He hadn’t wept when they died, and no stupid assignment was going to make him start. Jake wondered why he had come here. He could have stayed in his room and written from memory. It was his birthday, and he was acting like a baby.
An icy breeze blew across his neck and sent a chill down his back. If he didn’t get inside soon, he was going to catch a cold. He slid his notebook, his pencil, and the wad of paper into his backpack. They would be worried about him. He should go back. Still, Jake stayed on his metal bucket and stared at the crumbling homes that lined this forgotten park. Boarded windows and locked doors didn’t keep the ghosts out. The rain fell heavier now. His toes squished inside his sneakers as he stood up.
Raindrops clanged against the overturned bucket, echoing the hollow feeling in his chest. He turned to face the splintered trunk that had been the heart of the fig and wondered if he would ever be able to see it the way his parents had described it. When they told him bedtime stories, his favorites had always been about this tree. This spot was where they fell in love, where they had decided to have him, and where he had played in the grass as a toddler.
Since his parents died, Jake had learned that happy endings didn’t happen. He had learned about social services, government run homes, and how most people didn’t care if it was your birthday. Jake missed being held. He missed being loved and most of all he missed being wanted. His therapist said he needed to explore these feelings, to write them down, and to start with a positive memory.
A flash of light and the deep growl of thunder pulled him back to the present. Jake hugged himself with shivering arms and took a step down the garbage littered path toward his new temporary home. It was dark now, and the trail was muddy. He hoped he could remember his way back. He took another step and something made him stop. He had forgotten something important that he couldn’t leave behind. He stopped and thought as the rain rolled down his face.
What had he forgotten?
He had his notebook, pencil and backpack. But there was something else he needed.
He turned back toward the tree to see if he had left something, and he felt his feet go out from under him in the slippery mud.
The fall seemed to take a very long time. He felt a crack that sounded as loud as thunder and felt a pain swim up his leg that made him scream. It hurt worse than anything. Tears rushed to his eyes and were washed away by the rain.
Crying, he tried to sit up. Something was very wrong with his leg. His foot was going the wrong way. He tried to catch his breath. In an emergency, you weren’t supposed to panic. He had to think clearly and develop a plan. He had broken something. No one knew where he was because he had snuck out. It was dark, too dark. He was sitting in a puddle. His underwear felt gushy. He shivered.
The rain played a sad melody against the old pail, drawing his attention. The fig tree was a dark shadow, its gnarled branches reaching for him like claws. Why had he come here?
Something moved. There was something in the night, in the storm, and it was coming up the path. Jake covered his eyes and squinted. He was scared. Should he call for help or try to hide? He heard voices. They sounded familiar, and they were calling for him.
“Jake!” a woman’s voice called, worried and tired. “Are you out here?”
“Come on, Jake,” complained a man’s voice. “It’s miserable out. Tell us where you are.”
He tried to yell to them, but his voice was hoarse from the pain and all that came out was a groan. He thought about waving, but he needed his hands to stay upright.
“Every time he runs away, he comes back to this tree. If he’s not here, we’ll have to call for help.”
“I still don’t know how he got past me.”
“His therapist said he might act out. They’ve been dredging up some old memories,” said the woman. “He misses his family.”
“Sometimes it’s just better to forget the past, you know?”
The woman’s flashlight swept over the tree, the pail, and then stopped. “Oh, my God.”
Jake tried to shield his eyes from the light. His arm went out from under him, and his torso slid back into the mud. He howled at the pain in his leg.
Warm hands grasped his neck, lifting it, supporting his head. The woman had deep blue eyes, and Jake smelled vanilla perfume. He tried to remember her name. A green golf umbrella moved over them and blocked out the rain.
“Did you fall? Are you hurt?” There was concern in the woman’s voice.
“I forgot something,” he choked out the words. He was so glad they found him. He didn’t even care if he got in trouble.
“I think he broke his leg.” A middle-aged man in a bright yellow coat came into view. Jake had played cards with him. He was funny. “Put my coat over him. I’ll get help.”
Heavenly warmth enveloped Jake as they laid the yellow rain slicker over his chest. It smelled of cigarettes and coffee, but Jake loved it. His leg still throbbed, but the pain was better now that someone had found him. He watched the storm swallow the man.
“We should have been watching you closer.” The woman tucked the corners of the raincoat around his shoulders and laid his head in her lap. She ran her warm fingers through his hair and moved it out of his eyes. Her face was kind. “Does it hurt?”
“I was trying to do the assignment, but I couldn’t remember what the tree looked like.”
“I know, dear. That’s why you always come back here. Just rest. Sam went to get help.”
Sam. Jake smiled. He remembered Sam.
<
br /> Jake felt warmer now. The shivering stopped. The metal bucket rang out a happy pitter-patter song. He didn’t feel bad about coming anymore. He had wanted to see the tree.
But what had he forgotten? Why had he turned back?
“It’s my birthday today.”
“I know. Did you like the cake?”
Jake nodded, but he couldn’t remember it. Had they sung for him? Had he liked it when people he didn’t know sang?
“It was a pretty special day wasn’t it?” She patted his shoulder and smiled. “I mean, not everyone can live as long as you.”
A flash of lightning burned an afterimage of the fig tree into Jake’s mind. He could see it then, his metal walking cane, the thing he wasn’t supposed go anywhere without.
He had forgotten how much he needed it.
Jake cried.
COFFEE WITH DAD’S GHOST, Jessica Amanda Salmonson
My dad came to see me last night in a dream. I was sitting in a coffeehouse reading a University Press monograph on Japanese silent movies, lightly penciling notes in the margins of the hefty tome. I was thinking, “This has got to be a dream. But don’t I actually own this book? I wonder where I put it.”
At first I didn’t recognize him as who expects to see their dad so many years after he’s dead. And he was so much younger than when last we hung out. His hair was slicked back and he looked like a member of the Sharks or the Jets.
He had a cigarette between two fingers, unlit, as there’s no smoking indoors; I bet that surprised him. Coffee without a cigarette. The rest of the pack was rolled up in a shirt sleeve, partly I suspect to show some of his tats.
“This coffee cost eight bucks,” he said. “What the fuck?”
“Well, times have changed,” I warranted.
He sat down, hung the unlit cigarette on his lower lip, where it flopped up and down as he talked. Though he was unexpectedly young, those were the same pale blue eyes. He’d been a good looking old fart. As a young man he was splendid, in a greaser sort of way. “Did you know all the faggots go to Hell?” he said. “The whole place is fabulous.”