Depth of Field

by Brian S. Wheeler

  Nothing passing along the window motivated Owen to argue the point. Flat Knob was a corpse of a town. The wooden buildings rotted. The brick buildings crumbled. Flat Knob had not generated a new nickel since Mr. Raymond’s plastics plant locked its doors. Listless and frightened people composed the community. Flat Knob was a skeleton in need of cremation.

  “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Raymond, but why offer me a place to stay?”

  Chandler finished a turn before answering. “Us monsters have to stick together. And I thought you could use a little time to consider your next step. I hope you choose not to simply run away from Flat Knob.”

  Owen chuckled. “You’re not making me feel any better about the place. Besides, why stick around and give everyone another chance to burn me?”

  “I hope, if anything, you linger around Flat Knob to deny them that satisfaction,” Chandler growled. “I hope you don’t give whatever rumors are spreading out there an ounce of legitimacy by fleeing from them.”

  Owen felt surprised when Chandler twisted the car through familiar turns to coast to a stop across the street from Homer Turner’s empty home. Floodlights illuminated the corner lot. Several giant waste canisters stretched across the yard. A team of men wearing orange hard hats congregated around a backhoe, whose engine rumbled to life as Chandler rolled down his window. Owen smelled the oily, black smoke drift into the vehicle as one of the men stepped next to Chandler’s sedan.

  Chandler frowned. “Is there some sort of delay?”

  The man leaned his head close to the window. “We just wanted to make sure you still wanted us to do this in the middle of the night. If we wait until daylight, we might be able to get some salvage.”

  “I want to do it now so everyone hears it.” Chandler’s eyes blazed. “My enterprise may be far from what it once was, but this is no salvage operation. I can afford to feed myself plenty longer. I want it torn down. And I want it burning by morning. Do we understand one another?”

  “Sure do, Mr. Raymond.”

  The man turned and waved a hand. The backhoe crawled to one of the home’s corners where it lifted its front scoop before descending it to crash through the roof. Owen heard the home crack and pop. The backhoe continued its demolition as windows shattered. Chandler waited long enough from his sedan’s comfort to watch a wall collapse before he once again shifted the car into gear and guided it back out of Flat Knob.

  “I took great pleasure in that, Mr. Masters.” Chandler sighed. “I just wish I could knock all the rest of those homes down.”

  * * * * *

  A narrow, single-room guardhouse stood at the end of the lane leading onto Chandler Raymond’s estate. No sentry manned the structure when the sedan’s headlights fell upon the structure’s single, empty window. Owen took a quick breath, once more anticipating a pale face to appear and grin jagged teeth at him. No face appeared, and Owen hoped that those shadows his camera had summoned did not follow him.

  Chandler put the car into park and grunted as he stepped out of the sedan. Owen noticed that his host limped as he made his way to the gate closed across the lane. Chandler cursed as he worked at a padlock and a bundle of chain in his car’s headlights. Removing the chain, Chandler grunted and pushed open the gate before returning to the car.

  Owen noted how Chandler’s breath labored. “Why don’t you let me hop out and get the gate behind us?”

  Chandler shook his head. “No. No. I am host. I’ve been tending to that gate since the guardhouse went empty.”

  The sedan rolled beyond the gate, and Owen held his breath as Chandler repeated his lock and chain ritual in reverse. Mr. Raymond’s breath slowed as they moved into a thick wood. It was early autumn, and yet Owen noticed all of those branches scraping at the car and knotting overhead remained devoid of any foliage. The car moved through the woods and turned onto a circular drive before a home that was like none other Owen had before seen, a home that Owen failed to believe could ever have been built with any enterprise conducted in Flat Knob.

  Chandler Raymond’s home looked like a crystal castle of cubes. Glass panels accounted for all of the home’s exterior walls. The home was a series of blocks pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, a two-story building of corners and light. Exiting from the car, Owen thought he could gaze upon every space within that home. There were no curtains to hide any of the rooms’ corners. Ample lighting chased away any interior shadows. Anyone might peer from that tangle of wood upon whatever intimacies might have unfolded in the estate. Owen thought it a poor home in which to find privacy or refuge.

  Owen took a step towards the front door to follow his host, but he froze at the howling and barking that erupted from the forest.

  Chandler held up a hand and shouted. “Fuey! Fuey! Platz!”

  A pair of dark German shepherds bounded out of the wood. For a brief moment they displayed their teeth to Owen before both of the dogs set themselves down before their master’s feet just a step in ahead of the front door.

  “Those dogs will be fine with you now, Mr. Masters.” Chandler stretched to scratch at both dogs’ ears. “They’ve seen you have my welcome.”

  “And if I didn’t have your welcome?”

  Chandler paused before he stepped into his home. “Then those dogs would be at your throat well before now. I’ve found the dogs to be a better deterrent than a gun.”

  The first floor turned around a set of barren walls raised in the home’s heart. Owen followed Chandler as they made a circumference of that first level, and he saw no doorway or arch upon any of those four interior walls to suggest entrance to a chamber enclosed in the estate. There were no shelves lining any of the interior walls. No painting of any kind hung from them. Not a single plant suspended from the ceiling to take advantage of the light the exterior glass would’ve amply provided during the day. Other than a small alcove that housed a small kitchen, there was nothing at all within the first floor that might’ve attracted any attention. There was only the night, and the barren trees, framed by the glass walls, to provide any interest to the eye.

  “I used to crowd this home with silly treasures,” Chandler spoke as he pulled vegetables and fruits out of the kitchen’s small refrigerator, “but age has turned my tastes simple. The view through the glass seems to give me pleasure enough in my later years.”

  Owen stared at the trees while Chandler crammed the fruits and vegetables into a processor. He expected to see white faces peering into the home at any breath, leering at walls that shrouded so little of Mr. Raymond’s estate. The trees twisted and knotted together as the wind swayed. Owen heard the howling of dogs. He hoped that the morning’s light might cast such a barren grove in better light.

  Chandler offered Owen a tall glass of a green drink he poured out of his processor. “Forgive me for such simple fare tonight, Mr. Masters. This is an old man’s drink. Formulated more with the intention of holding death back a little longer than for taste.”

  “It’s fine,” Owen emulated his host and sipped from the bitter drink. “Healthy will do me good.”

  “You’re gracious,” nodded Chandler. “You’re car has been destroyed in the fire. On the counter are the keys to another car in the garage. You have full use of it until you get back on your feet. You must be exhausted. I’ll show you upstairs to your guestroom.”

  The pair of German shepherds accompanied Owen up a flight of stairs onto the second story of the home. Glass once again composed the exterior walls, and Owen again noticed how the rooms were arranged around the four interior walls that rose from the first floor, still bearing no indication of a doorway. Chandler guided him into a room in possession of a wide bed. But there were still no blinds or curtains on that exterior, glass wall, and Owen wondered if his host was truly so isolated as to not worry about any face appearing in the wood.

  The dogs didn’t follow their master back to the first floor after Chandler bid Owen a good night. Instead, the canine sentries waited for their guest to burrow comfortably into the
bedding before jumping onto the foot of the bed and curling against Owen’s legs. Owen stared into the woods while his eyelids grew heavy, still dreading to think that faces remained lurking in the shadows rising between the trees. Yet before morning arrived with a sliver of light, sleep delivered Owen to deep, black rest.

  Owen slept so soundly that he failed to hear the howling of the dogs.

  * * * * *

  Owen found the estate deserted of host and dogs in the morning. A note on the counter informed Owen that Mr. Raymond would be gone all day attending to business a couple counties down the highway. Owen was encouraged to make himself at home.

  Yet there was little in the home to occupy Owen’s attention. He peeked into all of the upstairs bedrooms searching for a television, but all of those rooms remained as empty as the first floor. Owen saw that only his room held a bed and furniture of any kind. He scanned the glass walls to consider the outer trees, but the grove looked as twisted and gnarled during the day as it had during the night. For many minutes, Owen simply paced around the home, his attention pulled stronger and stronger towards those four interior walls at the heart of the Raymond estate.

  Owen felt along the walls for any switch or recessed latch. His fingers tripped no mechanism, and no secret door slid open to reveal access to any inner, hidden chamber.

  Determined to give his mind something to distract himself from sinister thoughts, Owen grabbed the keys left on the counter and helped himself into a SUV waiting in the garage. The camera remained slung around Owen’s neck as he locked the estate’s gate behind him and took to the county back roads. He didn’t know where he was going. He had never before seen those vistas and turns. He drove according to whim. He lost himself in the simply process of driving, and Owen’s sense of place did not return to him until his car jolted upon a narrow and rough roadway.

  He wrestled the car to the side of the road and clutched that strange camera as he exited his vehicle and stepped into another grove of trees. Rather than the barren branches at the Raymond estate, the limbs of that grove spread a thick canopy of green. Vegetation pulled at Owen’s steps. Ambient noises of wildlife were abundant. Owen allowed himself a smile when surrounded by environs, that after his week, felt much more alive than dead. He pushed ahead senseless of direction, thankful to feel the dread that congested his skull clear from his vision.

  Much of that dread returned to him the instant Owen heard the mumble of a trickling creek. Instantly, he knew the camera had once more guided him.

  The mill waited for Owen a step beyond the last line of the grove’s trees. It appeared more ruined than it had even in his dreams. Time had eaten gaps into the walls. The mill leaned precariously to a side. The water wheel no longer turned, and spray-painted initials marred its surface. All of the windows were boarded. Owen felt like the empty doorframe towards which he cautiously peeked alone supported the mill’s weight.

  Owen waded through the creek to peek through the empty slats in the mill’s walls. The interior held only a hasty, hobbled scaffolding to shore up some of the building’s mass and further shadow. Any equipment the mill may have once held had been relocated years ago. Owen knew that the mill that arrived in his dream had only been used for one purpose. He knew that the mill that manifested in his sleep was but a container of dark, a chest in which to become lost, only a doorway to the comfort of an opium den’s oblivion.

  Something in that thought hurried Owen to take several steps away from the mill. Something motivated him to raise that camera and center it upon that dark doorframe upon which the mill’s ruin leaned.

  Though the illumination that drifted through the wood’s surrounding canopy was sparse, Owen made no effort to adjust the shutter speed to optimize the light. He knew there was no use in fidgeting with the frozen aperture ring. He paused shortly to center that doorway in the camera’s lens before pressing that shutter but once. Owen knew that the camera would gather the light and shadow however it must. He had carried that camera to that place, and that would be enough for that lens to burn what shadows the camera craved onto the film.

  Owen took a very lengthy detour back to Chandler Raymond’s estate to stop at the county seat, where a pharmacy promised one-hour film development. The staff first thought the store’s developer machine had been broken when it returned only a single, black and white photograph from the film roll Owen had handed them. They offered Owen a refund, but he declined, and the woman who accepted Owen’s cash scolded him for wasting such film for only a single picture.

  In the parking lot outside of the pharmacy, Owen locked all of the SUV’s doors before pulling that black and white photograph from its cardboard sleeve. The picture deftly captured the mill hidden amongst the trees’ shadow and light. One’s imagination could hear the creek mumbling across the water’s rocks, could hear the ruined boards crack as the mill leaned one inch after another closer to the ground, could see how time ruined all things. Owen took a breath as he peeked in the empty doorway. He so expected to see it that he didn’t even shudder. The sight of it sent no chill bolting down his spine.

  Owen thought it was amazing how a person could become accustomed to so many things.

  A face peered from around that doorframe, a white smudge of a leering grin that laughed at Owen before, with a wink, vanishing back into the photograph’s dark.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 13 – Curse Cage

  Owen ripped that black and white photograph of the mill into pieces and tossed them out of his window during his drive back to Chandler Raymond’s estate. He hoped that doing so would discourage anything that lurked in the picture’s shadows from following him back to his host. Still, Owen couldn’t resist the urge to peek into his mirrors and towards the guardhouse as he locked the gate again behind the vehicle. His eyes scanned the woods as he rolled in front of Chandler Raymond’s glass home, certain that at any moment a white face would peek back at him from between the trees.

  He saw none of those faces before knocking softly on the estate’s front door. Chandler and a different pair of German shepherds happily greeted him and escorted him inside, where Owen shared in another of his host’s health potions.

  Chandler offered Owen a refill. “I hope you were able to catch your breath a bit today, Mr. Masters. I trust you didn’t experience any complications from the smoke inhalation, and I hope you steered well enough away from Flat Knob.”

  “I only took a drive to clear my head,” Owen nodded. “The drive did wonders for my soul.”

  “And did any ideas come as to your next move?”

  Owen frowned. “I’m afraid not.”

  “I mentioned you dilemma to my attorney today, Mr. Masters,” Chandler gazed through his glass walls at the surrounding woods as he heard dogs howl. “He is very interested to discuss your situation with you. He is particularly concerned that the school district may have played a strong part in fanning the hatred that led to your fire. He is concerned at how casually the school district chose to soil your reputation to destroy your career. He is of an opinion that the district owes you sizeable compensation for the harm they chose to inflict. He believes the school owes you more than enough to take care of any financial concerns the future may hold for you.”

  Owen hesitated to respond. It sounded too good to be true. He didn’t know how far Chandler Raymond could be trusted.

  Chandler mistakenly assumed Raymond’s silence rose from a different source. “Surely, you can’t feel like you owe that community, that school, those people an ounce of sympathy. Flat Knob hated you from the start, Owen Masters. They hated you the moment you stepped into their village of ruin. They hated you sitting behind a teacher’s desk and dare telling any of them, any of their children, one thing about the greater world. They were always looking for a reason to put the flame to you. They always called you ‘monster.’”

  “But why help me?”

  Chandler turned his gaze away from his glass wall and grinned at Owen. Owen immediately thought of th
ose faces that leered at him from the confines of black and white photographs.

  “It’s smart of you to ask that,” Chandler replied, “and I will be honest and tell you that my motivation is in no way connected to you. Think what a lawsuit the size of the one you can bring against that school will do to Flat Knob. It would bankrupt the whole damn community. It would finish the pit that town’s been digging for the last century. It would go ahead and finish Flat Knob’s grave. Ask yourself, Owen, do any of those students, do any of their ilk, deserve any better?”

  “They don’t.” Owen was surprised by how quickly he answered.

  “So you will meet with my attorney?”

  “I will.”

  Something unclenched from Owen’s heart the moment he agreed to do so. He would twist no more artificial smiles while standing outside of his classroom’s doorway. He would never again beg for common, decent behavior. No more would he choke on his regret or his disappointment. It was his time to force Flat Knob to give him what he had always deserved.

  Dogs howled in the trees beyond the glass walls, and Owen’s thoughts drifted to other topics.