Donald planned to move the spirit house to his trophy room just outside of the city at the end of the week. He only allowed himself to visit the facility once a week, always on different day. His self-imposed restriction was necessary not only because he was capable of spending long hours in the company of his most prized acquisitions, but also for security reasons. While he was very careful about his peculiar little hobby, the federal government kept surprisingly sharp tabs on the international smuggling trade. So, until his next planned trip, the newest addition to his collection would remain right where it was.
That night, Donald had most unusual dreams.
He dreamed that his locating agent, Carl, had sold him out to the Feds. The entirety of Donald’s private collection had been seized by the principal of his former high school, and Donald himself had been incarcerated inside of an abandoned and cryptic museum. He had awoken drenched in sweat, and sure that he was not alone in his enormous bedroom. His head and body ached madly, and his stomach twisted in knots. He got up, took a few swigs of both water and Pepto-Bismol, and tried to get back to sleep. It took him a full hour of lying there awake in the dark, but he finally managed to fall back into slumber.
When he awoke from his irregular night, Donald was exhausted. He pulled himself out of bed and left his home for some fresh air, attributing his disturbed sleep and upset stomach to the recent stresses of work. His profits were in the black for seven quarters straight, but things around his office were tense with his two highest paid managers. Each was vying to overtake the firm’s largest client account, which Donald was planning to forfeit at the end of the month and had yet to name a successor.
Shortly after leaving his apartment, Donald noticed that his symptoms had slowly begun to disappear. He stopped and bought a cup of coffee from a street vendor. Not long after, aside from being a little tired, he had forgotten the sleepless night and moved on with his day. He was, after all, a busy and important man. If he didn’t show up at the office at some point that morning, Thomas and Quincy were liable to be at each other’s throats by lunchtime.
But first, he had a stop to make.
Donald found himself seated inside the bland office of Carl Sundry, who was, as usual, much too busy for his own good. In fact, Carl never did manage to get off the telephone, so Donald had written him a note and left the scrap of parchment from the spirit house in an envelope on the desk. His agent gave a thumbs-up and shrugged apologetically.
After spending the rest of the day in the office of his architecture firm (thankfully without incident), Donald found himself back in the comfort of his extravagant loft. However, it did not feel as welcoming as home usually did after a long day at the office, especially given the fact that he’d had such a short night.
For one thing, the apartment was unusually cold. The digital readout on the thermostat argued that the temperature had not strayed from its usual sixty-eight degrees, but Donald’s visible breath said otherwise. Confused, he opened a few windows into the warm night air, and made himself a note to call the property management company in the morning. He paused, looked at the spirit house, still adorning his coffee table like an oversized foreign birdhouse, and remembered that his complaint would have to wait until after he’d relocated his recent acquisition.
Donald took the time to fawn over his new spirit house for a few minutes, but found that the routine was noticeably less enjoyable at the moment. As if the house had been under a sort of glamour, it now looked vacant and devoid of the warmth that had been present only the night before. That, and he was feeling a bit peaked once again. He rubbed his arms and blew warm air into his palms, deciding that a hot shower sounded like an excellent way to unwind and escape the frosty chill of his home. Perhaps it was the cold that was dulling the enjoyment of his new possession.
The steaming water was indeed refreshing. Mist hung heavily in the air of the stylish, Spanish-tiled bathroom. Donald let the almost scalding water jet over his face and closed eyes while he breathed the warm vapors and relaxed. Only when his mind had cleared did the face of the Taiwanese handler pop into his head. No matter how hard he tried to again clear his mind though, he could not get the face of the grinning dealer who had sold him the spirit house out of his mental space. All he could think of was the man’s stupid, yet uneasy grin as he watched Donald pack up what could easily have been the least profitable major sale he would make all year.
What the hell had he been grinning for? Donald toyed with this thought for a few moments. Because of his elation he had not, at the moment, registered the peculiar happiness of the storekeeper as he happily took a financial screwing.
It was during these interesting musings that the water ceased to spray at a comfortable level of heat. There was no gradual change in temperature; almost immediately, the spray turned cold as ice. Donald was hosed with a stream so frigid that it was painful. He screamed and dove for the water control valve, jerking it to the off position.
“What the cheap fuck?” he shouted, hammering a fist angrily against the still-hot tile. It was then that he became aware of the second presence in the bathroom. A dark figure stood outlined in the immense steam, perhaps five feet from the door of the shower. Donald jerked backward unconsciously, lost his footing, and slipped forcefully down onto the tiled bench seat. All at once, he found himself unable to speak. He was overcome with such fear and utterly naked helplessness that all he could do was watch the hazy figure in frozen terror.
In the time it took Donald to blink his eyes, the figure was within inches of the glass barrier. He whispered a few frightened mutterings before his bladder contributed to the slick shower pan underfoot. At least he had been in the shower. Thank god for miniscule miracles.
The figure raised a spastic appendage to the face of the fogged glass and began to etch erratic symbols onto the surface. Donald wouldn’t have been able to decipher their meaning, even had he not been scared completely out of his mind. He simply tried his hardest to somehow push backward with his spine and through the ceramic wall behind him to the safety of his bedroom.
After finishing its intricate design on the door, the wispy figure slammed a palm on its surface. The hand was black as wicked midnight and the force with which it struck the heavy glass made Donald jerk his head backward to connect sharply with the thick tile. He slumped over, unconscious.
When he came to, Donald’s head throbbed with a worse ache than any hangover had ever lent him. A crusting of blood was caked over the swollen lump at the rear of his skull. He was shivering uncontrollably, and had to drag himself forcefully from the basin of the shower. Unknown hours must have slipped by, because the bathroom was no longer warm at all. Donald was completely dry, and so cold that he could barely make himself stand. How long had he been out, he wondered?
When he finally managed to slump into his bed, the clock told Donald that it was well into the early hours of the morning, and that he had been lying naked in the base of his bathroom for almost seven hours. Nausea crept into his belly as he considered the health consequences of such a night’s rest. Try as he might, he could not will himself to stop shivering as he lay beneath his covers. But fortunately, at some point, he must have again slipped into sleep.
His dreams over the next few hours were even harsher than those of the night prior.
Donald found himself seated on a long wooden bench in a dark hall. When he stood, he saw that the stark, wood-finished room was surrounded by multiple windows. The windows of his perceived prison, however, held no glass. When he looked into one he saw not the expected vast emptiness of space, but rather a room filled with people. They were praying and wearing crimson robes. At the head of the candle-lit room towards which all of the bald men were facing, sat an object that Donald recognized well. It was a rather crudely fashioned ore statue of Buddha: the exact one that now sat on a low shelf in Donald’s private collection room across town. He watched as the monks bowed and chanted, offering the statue reverent respect. Donald had purchased the s
tatue from a European man in Beijing who had procured it from a local monastery that was not exactly heavily-guarded.
With a cold stone falling into the pit of his stomach, he stepped away from the window and moved to another. Through this windowless pane, he saw a young man working under the glow of burning night oil with a knife and a block of wood. The wooden device he was creating looked to be a pointed, angular musical instrument. After a moment, Donald recognized the flute as being from his personal collection, as well. He watched as time slipped before him and the man, much older now, passed it down to his son. Again the flute passed forward through multiple generations, until it rested on the mantle upon which it presently sat in the collection room. Donald couldn’t even remember where he had picked the primitive kazoo up. He only knew that it had been a steal.
He was just about to visit another of the glassless windows, when Donald was pulled from his uneasy slumber by the ringing of the telephone. Though his spastic arm knocked the cordless phone from its cradle, the ringing had brought him just enough out of sleep to see that he was late to the office. Even though he owned the company, it was still bad business for the boss to pull a no-show. He groaned and could not stop himself from coughing.
Tired, and looking haggard as hell, Donald threw a fresh shirt on and blazed for his office. That day, he had trouble keeping his mind from straying to the scenes of his early morning dreams. Even though he had felt much better after leaving his apartment, his mind had trouble letting the sleeping visions leave his thoughts. By the end of the day, he had actually begun to dread his return home.
Upon arriving at his apartment that evening, though, Donald was extremely happy to find that the temperature had returned to normal. Apparently, the building managers had taken care of the issue without need for his complaint. The blinking red light summoned Donald to his answering machine, where he found that the call which had awoken him that morning had been none other than Carl, responding to Donald’s request for translation.
Whether or not guilt for his rude inattention to Donald the previous day had anything to do with it, Carl had nonetheless quickly produced what his client and friend had requested.
“Donnie. It’s Carl. Listen, man. I had my friend in Chiang Rai take a look at a fax copy of this and I think that our mutual acquaintance in Taipei may have been…playing a bit of a joke on you.” He cleared his throat and continued. “Direct translation: ‘Home is here forever, to he who claims to own without right’. And there’s a brief inscription at the bottom that says: ‘Conscience is the spirit that confines us all’. I’d like to come by and take another look at that thing, if you don’t mind. A reevaluation of sorts. Just in case you decide to turn around and make a quick buck on it. Which, as your agent, I highly advise you do. I know it’s pretty, but a new Benz would be much prettier, no? Call me.”
Donald was used to cryptic answering machine messages, due to the nature of his hobby, just not usually cryptic in the sense of eeriness. Perhaps he would reconsider putting the spirit house back up for sale. God, he hoped it wasn’t an elaborate fake. Whatever the case, Carl would sort it out. All he really wanted right now was to make an appointment with his bed. But still, its presence called to him.
He made his way over to the spirit house and sat at the table. Interestingly, he thought, the house seemed to have even less color about it than Donald remembered seeing the night before. Where he had remembered it being polished jet two nights ago, it now looked a faded slate gray. Donald stared hard at the empty depths of the hollow home and shuddered. It looked…hungry. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and exhaled heavily. When he pulled his hands away from his eyes and reopened them, a figure of living shadow leaped out of the house at him and toppled him over backward in his seat. His head hit the second unyielding surface of the day, and Donald was catapulted into unconsciousness.
Again he found himself in the long, dark hallway lined with empty windows. This time, he felt himself being pulled like a marionette to the window furthest in, to the point where he saw light in the distance.
What he witnessed through the splintered frame was a small boy, no older than ten, dressed in a sack cloth, working vigorously with metallic carving tools atop a table piled with wood. Donald watched the days pass by in flashes and the wooden pieces began to take shape into an ornate building structure. Walls were laboriously planed and put together, windows were framed into the walls, and eventually a doorway was added to each end. The final touch was a small box, a mouse-sized casket that the boy fashioned with all the skill of an artist hard at work. Even though it was small and unimportant to the structure overall, the boy seemed to put more care into the creation of this vessel than any other part of the spirit house. Once the box was inserted, the wispy, cloud-like spires were tacked into place with long, thin nails and the boy added coat upon coat of finishing oils.
At the end of construction of the object that would centuries later adorn the kitchen table of Donald Martindale’s apartment, a burly man entered the room and inspected the structure. After intense scrutiny, the angry man began to shout at the young artisan, though it was silent to Donald’s ears. He continued to shout, before raising a hand to the child, who pleaded insistently.
The young boy pointed out the small, but carefully crafted addition in the backmost room of the house. The man stopped his screaming to inspect it, and when he lifted the lid of the box, he was suddenly pulled with the force of an enormous vacuum into its tiny depths, disappearing completely. At this, the boy grinned, and gave the box a gesture that, while foreign to Donald, was well understood to be a triumphant obscenity.
Carl’s words echoed in his head: Home is here forever, to he who claims to own without right.
Direct translation.
And then the boy found Donald’s eyes. A hardened look came across his face to replace satisfaction. He shook his head gravely at Donald before raising a hand and pointing into the distance. Words pounded into Donald’s ears as he felt himself flung backward into the darkness. “You claim to own without right.”
At once, Donald found himself again in the long dark gallery, seated on the slender wooden bench. This time, however, when he turned to face the window behind him, he saw a familiar, contemporary scene. Modern artwork adorned the lofty walls, and long windows ran from floor ceiling, showing a multi-million-dollar view of the cityscape beyond. It was his apartment. He was looking out into his immaculate and tastefully decorated living room. From his vantage, everything seemed to be sized for a giant.
To his horror, he realized that he also saw the tilted chair resting on its side, empty. Donald reached down and pinched himself. He did not need the pain however, to tell him what he knew in his heart to be true. He was inside the spirit house, and would not be leaving again. Because even though they were not visible to the naked eye, there were indeed doors and windows in the spirit house. Donald could sense them.
And, with mounting terror, he sensed something else.
He was not alone.
The Spirit of Christmas
“No—no—no—no—NO!”
Barton Doyle was out of his front-row seat, waving his flimsy baton at the stage, and boiling with rage. “Maryann, you twit. I said, stage left! Stage left!” He swung the conductor’s wand in a series of manic zig-zags, apparently a tactic that should have adequately clarified his wrathful instructions.
Maryann, the petite young woman playing the role of Martha Cratchit, lifted the hems of her simple dress and frowned. “But, you didn’t. You said…”
“Are you calling your director a liar?” Barton was now seething, standing right at the end of the stage and looking up at his actress like a demon ready to leap up from the first rung of hell and pounce upon her.
Aside from the rest of the Cratchit family on stage, fifteen or twenty other faces presented themselves from the curtains.
“No, Barton. I’m just saying that…”
“What? Just saying what, Maryann?” The balding dire
ctor leaned forward with one hand cupped to his ear. “I’m certain it will be something full of profound importance and wit. What’s that? I can’t hear you. Well, is it safe to say that you’ve expired your thinking capabilities tonight? For the sake of everyone’s sanity, pray tell, is there hope?”
Maryann bit her quivering lip and looked at her feet.
Something gave an uncomfortable twitch in Barton’s chest and caused him to wince. When it was gone, he continued, finger waggling. “My goodness, girl. It’s a minor miracle you can even remember your lines, you over-paid halfwit!”
One of the younger men stepped out from the curtains to put an arm around Maryann and led her away. He whispered consoling things to her but did not dare cross glances with the fuming director.
“Well, what are all of you idiots looking at?” Barton rapped his baton fervently at the lip of the stage. “We’ve got a show opening tomorrow night. Christmas night, people! I’m assuming you’re all familiar with our savior’s day of birth? Would you like to disappoint him by putting on a half-assed production of Charles Dickens’ greatest literary achievement? You probably would enjoy that, wouldn’t you? Well, I won’t allow it!”
Again a bolt of pain shot through his torso, radiating into his left arm. He took a deep breath, and when all was fine, threw up his hands in disgust.
Chasing the Sandman Page 16