The Secret of Ventriloquism

by Jon Padgett

  I now could see myself in third person—Kroth, an imposing and dapper, bow-tied, older gentlemen with a shaggy, well-trimmed quaff of grey hair. My mouth opened and spoke the house’s secret name. And I felt a great cracking noise.

  When I came to myself again, the Origami figure had disappeared, and the house’s structure was changing before my eyes. The sterile brightness of the room was fading, the hanging halogens winking out like stars at dawn. In their place, dingy lamps appeared, white walls bleeding into thin particleboard. The flawless looking brick floors morphed into an unpleasant gray shag carpet. The vaulted ceiling sagged into a low, wrinkled one.

  While the house was still righting itself, still awakening by degrees, I stepped outside. Night had fallen at last, and the cicadas were shrieking all around me in large cypress trees, blanketed with Spanish moss. The air was heavy with moisture. I felt no need to look back at the house as I approached our car, which was parked outside on a red dirt road. My wife was undiminished and fast asleep within.

  I settled into our car and counted my fingers again. Five on each hand no matter how many times I looked away and recounted them all. My assumption had been that I was still dreaming. But now I had the heady, chilling (but not altogether unpleasant) realization that I may not have been dreaming at any point. Which begged the questions—where were we now? And where had we been?

  After some minor trouble and travel through a nondescript town called Daphne, I found the Interstate again. I headed back towards the beach, my head oddly tranquil as Margaret awoke, smiled and took my (now unaltered) hand.

  “You’ve been out for a while, baby,” I said. “Hey, did you have any weird dreams while you were out?”

  Margaret looked at me quizzically. “Not that I can remember. Was I talking in my sleep?”

  “Well, yeah. You seemed kind of scared at one point, y’know?”

  “Huh.”

  “Feeling okay now, babe?”

  “Actually, yeah. Feel like I’ve already had a good night’s sleep. We close?”

  “Yep. And I think this vacation is gonna be great.”

  “Know what, hon?” she asked, giving my hand a squeeze, her almond eyes flashing in the headlights of an approaching car. “I do too.”

  And it has been great. In fact, it’s been the best vacation we’ve ever had.

  I’m writing this now on the balcony overlooking the Gulf waves in the cool morning light. I feel calm and well rested. It’s tranquility at odds, I know, with the uncanny events at “Court Hill.” Speaking of which, Margaret has no recollection of our near accident on the Interstate, let alone anything about the Origami house. I wonder what our return home will bring. Things feel so different now between Margaret and me here at the beach. I can’t recall us ever getting along so well.

  I’ve kept my cell off the whole time. Haven’t even been tempted to check my messages or go online, even to check on the kids. I can’t help wishing we could stay here permanently, as unrealistic as that sounds.

  Confession: I don’t miss the girls at all, and I think Margaret feels the same way. That’s terrible. I know. I should really erase that thought.

  ~

  Postscript.

  Some days later. Something’s wrong with Margaret. I think she may be falling apart all over again, just like she did post-Flight 389.

  The trip home itself was uneventful until we passed over the bay bridge. I could feel Margaret shifting uneasily next to me.

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “What’s weird?”

  “That big greenhouse thing.”

  We were passing through Foyle’s central business district. Sure enough, the handful of mid-size skyscrapers and hotels seemed to be surrounding a glassed-in edifice I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Huh,” I replied. “Must be something new connected to the aquarium.”

  “I thought I saw people on a boat going down a river in there.”

  “You okay, babe?” The double, vertical lines of anxiety had appeared between Margaret’s dark brows. Hadn’t seen those since the morning we left for the beach.

  “Yeah, just... things look kinda different. I dunno, like we’ve been gone for years instead of days.”

  “Well, a wise man once said, ‘home looks different in the afterglow of a successful vacation.’”

  Margaret scowled, the scar under her eye pinching. “Who said that? I’ve never heard that.”

  And then the cold hard distance was back between us again, as if our dream vacation never had been.

  We picked up the girls, both of whom were louder and more temperamental than ever. Within minutes, Margaret was screaming at them to shut up. The girls sulked and pouted for a few minutes before the whining and bickering amped back up. And Margaret screamed at them again.

  The rest of the way home, between the family drama scenes, I noticed how odd Margaret was behaving, staring at the grocery stores, gas stations, shops, and parks with growing alarm.

  “That wasn’t an abandoned lot. A park there?” I heard her murmuring to herself.

  Things got worse once we reached our neighborhood and our house.

  “Where are you going? This isn’t our street. That isn’t our home,” Margaret said, almost hysterical. One of the girls started to cry.

  “Baby, just... just hold it together. We’ll be inside soon.”

  “But where are we? Where the fuck are we, Jack?”

  Our two-story home sat among the others in a semi-rural neighborhood, just as it always had.

  “What’s wrong, mommy?” One of the twins asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong sweetheart. Mommy’s just tired.” I reached over to pat Margaret’s hand, and she tore it away.

  “Don’t touch me and don’t try to make this alright, Jack. There’s something wrong here. Something wrong with everything.”

  It was dark, but the house did look slightly different to me as we pulled up to it. It could’ve been my imagination, but the two-story, sprawling edifice seemed elongated and shorter.

  “Look, we’re all tired and stressed, sweetie. Let’s just get the kids inside, eat a bite and go to bed.”

  “Stop fucking telling me what to do, Jack,” she said, exiting the car and storming towards the back door, fumbling with her keys.

  Margaret is now in the guest bedroom. I can hear her talking to herself. I’m going to call the psychiatrist tomorrow morning. This behavior isn’t entirely unprecedented, but I haven’t seen her this bad in a decade—maybe not even then. She’s delusional. There’s nothing different about our house.

  As I sit here in my study, though, I’ve got to admit that a couple of things do seem off here. The picture window next to the living room looks onto unfamiliar, untidy shapes in the darkness. I can’t place them. And some of the corners near the fireplace look askew somehow.

  It occurs to me that maybe I'm dreaming. I keep counting my fingers and only come up with five on each hand no matter how many times I look away and count again. I’m sure it’s just nerves and disappointment. Worse than usual post-vacation depression. Maybe things will look up tomorrow.

  ~

  A good while has passed since my last entry. I’m not sure how long.

  The morning after my last entry, Margaret was still agitated but no longer talking, her eyes wide, staring at everything (even me and the kids) askance. At breakfast, when pressed, she would only ask me a series of questions.

  “Did you notice how many smokestacks there are in town? When did Municipal Park become that large? Do you remember so many ranch style houses on Cypress Street?”

  I didn’t answer, lost in thought, busily trying to get the girls ready for school. The girls. They looked different post-vacation somehow—older, one skinnier than I remembered. Both strange in mood and personality.

  I had trouble getting them off to the bus. Had completely forgotten the routine. TV, breakfast, clothes, tooth brushing, what else? In no time I was late for work. Margaret offered no help at all
, staring at the breakfast table, uneaten oatmeal in front of her, muttering.

  I left soon after, directing the girls to wait for the school bus. I didn’t conduct my typical goodbye ritual, distracted by the odd landscape outside.

  Margaret was right after all. The neighborhood, the streets, everything around our home appeared altered. An aging playground where a corner shoe store had been. An empty parking lot backing up to what might be a warehouse of some sort. Unfamiliar. I had quite a time just navigating the streets, many of which had peculiar names.

  Instead of going straight on to work, I decided to drive to the University Library near my law firm. Once there, I haunted the reference department—scanning through the shelves of the Special Collections behind the circulation desk, rolling through miles of microfilm. All in an attempt to find any hint of what was happening to our city. I wasn’t surprised that Court Hill on the eastern shore had never existed—only the small, rural hamlet of Daphne. Nor did I ever find any reference to a Daddy Longlegs ghost or Origami house or any interesting or applicable cases that related to my weird experience. But I was certain the changes in everything were related to it somehow.

  Time passed. Again, I’m not sure how much because I began experiencing sudden jumps from one day to another. I know I didn’t go back to the law firm that week, and I don’t remember getting any calls or messages of concern from my peers. I didn’t bother contacting them either. Each day I simply returned to the university library, spending my time online in the small study offices within the reference department.

  Life, such as it was, became a blur. Late nights returning home found Margaret locked in the guest bedroom or standing in front of the living room’s picture window, unmoving and staring at the alien world outside. The mornings, too, bled into one another. Redundant stress patterns. The children becoming even stranger to me.

  And then one morning the girls weren’t in their bedroom at all. Or anywhere in or around the house.

  I went into a panic, of course, and pleaded with (and eventually railed against) the local police force—the Second District. I think they’ve blocked my number, but I’ve continued sending them stern letters with unheeded warnings. But the school doesn’t have a record of either of the girls anymore. One evening I came home from the library and found I couldn’t even remember their names. I still can’t. Nor have I been able to find any documents, birth certificates or otherwise, to prove they ever existed. Their bedroom is now a storeroom. All that remains of them are broken images and a hollow grief. Margaret offered no help.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said one night, her voice no more than a whisper, the scar under her dark eyes shining in the moonlight. “They weren’t my girls. Not at all. And you... you’re not my Jack. Not anymore.”

  Margaret was standing in our living room day and night by then, blankly staring out of the picture window. And when she wasn’t at the window, she was asleep on the living room couch—flat and diminished. I tried to get her help, tried calling shrinks in town dozens of times, but a peculiar forgetfulness always got in my way. I would set up an appointment for her in the morning and then fail to remember all the details of it after a hard day at the library. Late that night or even a week later, I would realize with a start that I still needed to get help for Margaret. Between those moments of lucidity, though, my head spun with esoteric details about Foyle and the surrounding area. What had happened to the children, to me, to Margaret, to our lives? I was possessed with a driving need to find out.

  I discovered how much Foyle itself was changing—an encroaching industrial area once well to the north of town merging into an ever growing city park. The air quality had worsened, leading to days of thick, toxic fog growing in length and severity. My health—never a problem before—began declining, leading to frequent coughing fits. I even managed to secure some old oxygen tanks from somewhere (I can’t recall). But my research continued unabated, paradoxically the only respite I had from my home-based grief and horror.

  The gaps or jumps in time increased in frequency and severity. Hours or even days passed without my being conscious of where I had been or what I had been doing.

  It was following one of those time gaps that I realized Margaret, like our girls before her, had disappeared from the house. I fell immediately into a profound depression that led to the brink of suicide. While I was lucid one morning, I made myself insulate every untidy crack or crevice in the house. Bath towels and plastic bags lined the bottoms of the front and back doors. I headed to the kitchen with the intent to open the oven and extinguish its pilot light, and then, with a start, I found myself back in the library. A new, frenetic energy had possessed me in the interval, and I was back on the search. I ordered and consumed interlibrary loan books on lucid dreaming, ventriloquism and environmental disasters in between doing research on a local, abandoned paper mill that I felt sure was connected somehow.

  Once, I became aware of my surroundings while on my way to the library. I was backing out of the driveway and spotted the figure of Margaret staring vacantly out of our living room window. But when I dashed into the house, no one was there.

  And then one day I woke up to find a strange woman sleeping next to me in my own bed, who claimed to have lived with me as a partner for years. She said her name was N— and called me Sol. I responded with angry denials and threats. After the woman finally left in confused, astonished tears, I spent the rest of the day screaming and sobbing and gasping on the couch of the living room, as if I had lost Margaret and the girls all over again.

  Not long ago, I forced myself to drive out to my law firm, which I hadn’t seen since our last vacation. Instead, I found myself parking as usual behind the university library. My law firms—both old and new—were simply gone. When I looked up the agency addresses in the reference department, I saw that both had been replaced by a shabby dentist’s office and a second-hand clothing store respectively. The partners, associates and paralegals I worked with were no more. Now aging, shabby librarians and a handful of vacant undergraduate assistants were my coworkers. Everyone called me Mr. Kroth, and my reflection confirmed the man I had become: an imposing but dapper, bow-tied, older gentlemen all in tweed with a well-trimmed quaff of increasingly white hair. I counted my fingers. Five fingers on each hand. But in lucid moments at home I have heard a rustling and something strange about the corners of the sitting room—an untidiness. A filth smoldering or unfolding within and around the fireplace. But only in my peripheral vision.

  This hideous, one-story ranch-style house no longer resembles the expansive two-story Margaret, the girls and I once lived in. I would move if I could concentrate or moderate my compulsive need to research the strange phenomena going on in and around Foyle. But my mental lapses are starting to increase in frequency and length. I might be laboring at the library when the idea of taking a trip out of town—perhaps to the beach—occurs to me. And suddenly I’ll awaken in the middle of the night, sweating, to discover the next morning that another week has passed. At times I seem only a part time spectator of my own life, as in the kind of dreams that shift from first to third person and back. Watching the sad, lonely old Esoterician going through his rounds as his jumbled life and health falls apart. At these times I am not in control of my own actions, and Kroth appears to be subject to a kind of unwanted mania—writing and talking to skeptical, local officials about the arcane, environmental transformations and conspiracies and crimes that seem to be taking place all over this despicable city.

  Some days I feel more lucid than others, though, and at these times the bottom drops out of my mood. I call in sick from work at the library and spend the day puttering about the house, trying to remember what it looked like before Court Hill and the Origami changed the foundation of its existence. On these days I imagine killing myself in the most vivid ways every time I close my eyes. On these days I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at all the unclean corners of this alien house. I know it’s changing by degrees—u
nfolding perhaps. In no time at all, it seems, a nervous mania or mental lapse assails me, and I’m swept days or weeks away again out of my body and mind. I’ve become a helpless spectator of an unfamiliar reality, unable to take any but the most trivial action.

  I am aware that the insane often insist on their sanity, and I am doubly aware that these experiences of mine seem like mad ones. If these are indeed delusions, they are of a kind and consistency about which I’m unfamiliar. As when I tried to seek psychological help for Margaret, I can’t seem to concentrate on arranging permanent or even palliative mental healthcare for myself. I’ll dial the number of such a provider and forget why I called or start to engage the hapless individual on the other side of the line in nonsense about factories, mutated skeletons, corrupt police-cultists, even ventriloquist dummies. Only after I hang up do I remember that I need help, desperately, and then the sorry routine repeats itself.

  ~

  Just yesterday, I woke up to find a vestigial nub of a sixth finger on my right hand. The sight of it enraged me, and I started trashing the inside of this mocking house—all its awful Hummel figurines and cheap, floral themed paintings—and for a time I felt like me again. I even willed myself into Kroth’s old, sensible Volvo and hit the Interstate for the beach. But as I crossed the Foyle Bay Bridge, my resolve began to waver. I could sense the Kroth-self struggling to get back to its important work. I could sense my foot struggling to hit the brakes, and my hands trembling with a desire to take the next exit so I could turn back towards Foyle and its university library. Instead, through sheer force of will, I slammed my foot on the gas and swerved across the median. I don’t know if the impulse was suicidal or borne out of sick curiosity or was simply beyond my control altogether.

  I veered to avoid oncoming traffic in spite of my fervent wish to die at that moment. Just as so long ago (it seemed), vehicles blurred around me, their horns dopplering left and right. Weightlessness. I clenched my eyes closed in a last attempt at oblivion. But when I opened them again, I was traveling down a familiar country highway. All the traffic moving in my direction. In spite of the fact that I knew it was still mid-morning, everything was suffused in an orange-pink twilight. As I had before, I veered to the right and found myself on the Court Hill exit, but there appeared no shock-haired boy driven truck barreling towards me. Instead, I continued down the exit and found a rough, gravel street and, from a strangely vivid memory, made a sharp right. Court Hill itself looked unrecognizable. No quaint downtown area of any kind—no cobbled streets or well-manicured squares. No quaint city hall building, peculiar streetlight-signs or any sign of a lake. But I did see hills and gullies covered in thick waves of kudzu—the impossible hills surmounted with slender, tall houses, which stared at me with a dreadful, collective presence. They had awakened. And in spite of a spectral, twilit beauty, an intrinsic bleakness infused everything, as if even the green life surrounding me had become an expression of its opposite. Some of the houses—which appeared to be replicas of each other—I noticed had residents inside them. Like my poor Margaret, they stood empty eyed on the other side of tall, thin windows.