Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The house had two floors, an attic and a basement.

  The previous owners had lived downstairs, had fixed it up nicely, painting directly over the wallpaper in each room. The second floor apartment—with its peeling and water-stained wallpaper, cracked and preg-nant livingroom ceiling, one bedroom with a leaky ceiling, and a giant hole in the wall of another bedroom where the plaster had bulged out and finally fallen away—was now vacant, but the last tenants had kept the wife’s mother up there. Her obese cat, fond of sharpening his nails on wallpaper, and two small dogs fond of shitting on the kitchen floor, hadn’t helped keep the place looking decent. Ray’s aunt and uncle were afraid to move someone else up there until they put a little money into repairs, but they didn’t have a little money, and that was alright with Ray because he wanted the whole place to himself. Anyway, Paul wanted the apartment once he finally learned to drive, but right now it was too far for him to bike ride from the house to his job at Rim Corp, and because of their different shifts Ray couldn’t give Paul a lift on his way to his own job. Paul wouldn’t leave that place no matter how Ray urged him. Ray believed Paul was too dependant on that place, too afraid of change, trapped by his own fears.

  Especially since the layout was nearly exact, the contrast between the upstairs and downstairs apartments was all the more striking. But Ray liked it upstairs. He had a key, and he sometimes carried his portable black-and-white TV up there, sat in the kitchen to draw in an interestingly different environment. He was anxious for Paul and himself to film scenes up here for their video movies. The old woman hadn’t left much furniture, but she hadn’t had much to begin with. She had left a mess, whereas the downstairs couple had cleaned up for him. He supposed they hadn’t thought it necessary, since new tenants weren’t moving in upstairs.

  The kitchen tiles were grimy, the windows unwashed, the cobwebs strung along the crack-squiggled ceiling horrendous. In the adjacent two-story shed through which one had to pass to climb the back stairs into the attic (there was a second way in at the front of the house), the old woman had left all kinds of junk treasures too dismal and faded for even the lowest class of flea market.

  Ray sat tonight at the upstairs kitchen table, his portable set running The Fury, of which he only watched the highlights since he had it on tape.

  On the table was a heap of old newspapers he’d dug out of the second floor shed. He was mellowing out from today‘s excitement—he had painted his bedroom black.

  It had been a pastel lemon yellow, the only room so unappealingly painted by the couple (maybe they’d been high that night), and out of lazy acquiescence Ray had tolerated it, hesitantly tacking up his posters, hanging his paintings, hoping that would help things. Nope. The other two bedrooms didn’t appeal to him as much in shape or format so he had suffered it, promising himself he’d get around to painting it a restful pastel green. Colors had a psychological influence, and green was used in hospitals because it calmed the human mind. But when black crossed Ray’s mind, the exciting prospect gave him a rare charge of initiative to pursue the project. His friend Dicky was highly amused at this choice but was similarly excited enough to offer his help in selecting materials and in the actual painting.

  Ray had desired a glossy rather than matte look, and bought two gallons of glossy black exterior paint (though even with two coats he ended up using only one gallon). Now, he contemplated what to paint the trim: the baseboards, the inside door, and the two little closets over his sliding closet. Light blue sounded nice. Dicky suggested white. Ray almost chose a metallic, chrome-like color—but the choice was inevitable. Red. The colors of the yin and yang: black/death, red/life. Ray desired a lacquered, oriental mood. He selected a dark, rich, blood-like glossy red. Dicky could only laugh.

  Dicky used a brush to paint around the window frames and baseboards, Ray used the roller to cover the large areas. They finished the first coat in no time, leaving only the area closest to the white ceiling. They took a walk, talked of their lives…Ray smelling pine trees, reminded of childhood cook-outs, and inspired to ask Dicky if he noticed how smells and tastes, sights and sensations grew less acute as childhood was left behind, how spaces shrank and time speeded. Dicky said he felt this way, too. Back at the house Ray showed him his most recent artwork, including a pen and marker portrait of silent actress Theda Bara, the Vamp. Dicky shook his head. “Why you aren’t making a living of this I don’t know.”

  When Dicky had gone the paint was already dry, and alone Ray applied a second coat and used an edger to carefully bring the glistening black up to the ceiling. Black flecks in his hair, on his cheek and bare chest. The black finished, Ray stepped back and admired his latest painting. By now it was night, and this room was night within night, a glistening, obsidian void which altered his perception, did something to space and dimension. A room inside a black hole in space.

  Later still he started the red trim, but by now he was tired and irritable, and got red drops on the floor where the plastic drop-cloth didn’t cover. All he did was the door. It looked painted in blood.

  Now, after much washing and scrubbing his hands with steel wool, he unwound upstairs. He would sleep in one of the other two bedrooms until his work was done—the third, middle, bedroom being his studio. He felt a nervous restlessness even now, knowing there was still so much work left to do. He hated incompleteness…disharmony.

  He wanted bamboo blinds, and to paint oriental characters in a few spots, like down one panel of the door, on the closet doors over the main closet. Dicky’s girlfriend had suggested the calligraphy. He wanted to externalize his spiritual aesthetic. Until it was finished he was yin without yang.

  Ray sighed wearily, gently turned a brittle yellow page of an old newspaper. Old was an understatement. The New York Fireside Companion, “A Journal of Instructive and Entertaining Literature.”

  November 10, 1884. Under a drawing was the caption, “‘Poor boy! The gal has broken his heart—broken his heart!’cried Tom, helplessly looking at Steve.”

  “Poor boy,” muttered Ray.

  Elsewhere, concerning “Fashion Chitchat for the Ladies”: “That short dolman and mantilla shapes will be worn all winter for the promenade is quite certain.” Ray smiled with a warm, sad nostalgic envy.

  In the back of The Seaside Library, from 1880, back issues were advertised. Novellas, apparently. One was “A Little Aversion.” There was

  “His Great Revenge,” First Half, and “His Great Revenge,” Second Half.

  “Must be revenge,” Ray observed.

  Ray supposed that someday someone would come across his hundred-year-old copies of Oui and Hustler, the articles he’d collected from the Enquirer and others, on possessed girls and twins born connected as one.

  He heard Kelly barking downstairs.

  He sat there. He listened.

  She wasn’t stopping.

  The movie wasn’t playing so loud that he wouldn’t hear a car pull into his drive—or had he been too engrossed in the papers?

  He should go check, but he sat. Listened. There were no lights on but for this room, and he was almost afraid to venture into the livingroom to look out the window. Kelly kept barking. Ray gave himself a jolt of incentive and got up, turned down the volume of the TV. Before, Kelly had seemed to be barking in the kitchen directly below, but now she seemed to be barking at the other end of the house, in the bedroom where Ray was temporarily sleeping. To Ray it became obvious—someone had knocked on the back door, and getting no response they were now trying the front door.

  Only, Ray hadn’t heard any knocking, and even with the volume down he still didn’t hear any knocking. Just Kelly, barking.

  All of Ray’s guns were downstairs.

  His eyes flicked nervously, randomly around the room. Grimy cobwebs stirred in a breeze he didn’t feel. On TV there was a commercial imitating Flashdance, the sweaty young women in their workout leotards all smiling and blissful in their world. He didn’t hear what the main girl was saying. Kelly was sudde
nly barking in the room beneath his feet again.

  Ray crept into the silent bathroom, avoiding looking into the mirror.

  He didn’t like mirrors, the way they watched you, and he always expected to see some apparition standing behind him in that reversed universe. He stepped into the bathtub and peeked around the curtain down into the dirt driveway that ended at his back door.

  Though the outside light wasn’t on and there were no streetlights on this stretch of road, Ray was sure he’d see if there were a car in the drive other than his own. He could vaguely make out his.

  Kelly’s barking terminated.

  It was almost an unpleasant shock to him. He listened, stepped out of the tub, paused by the kitchen table. It was now dead still downstairs.

  That fucking dog—she was crazy. Probably heard that skunk that sometimes got into his trash can in the open garage. His nerves began to unclench.

  He heard the faint ring of his telephone downstairs.

  Kelly barked once and stopped after another half bark, obviously startled but quickly calming. Ray was oddly relived to hear her bark again, as if he had thought something had happened to end her previous barking so abruptly.

  Ray plunged into the hall and downstairs to his own apartment, pausing in the hall to flick on the outside light. He’d feel better if he left it on. He snatched up the receiver after its fourth ring, brought it to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  It was a busy signal. No question about it.

  “What the fuck? Hello? Hello?” Ray hung up, picked up the receiver again. His regular dial tone. How could your phone ring and when you picked it up you got a busy signal? Some fuck-up—it sounded feasible.

  He hung up and set about making himself some coffee. He’d stay down here for now in case someone tried to call back, and he’d put out the light upstairs and lock the vacant floor later.

  Kelly had come into the kitchen and growled when he entered, but he’d ignored her. Now he looked down and saw her watching his face, her eyes timid and nervous as usual, as though she continuously expected him to hit her. Her eyes seemed to plead with him now more than usual.

  “You have to go out?” Ray said. She pricked her ears. While his water boiled he went and found his .38, nuzzled it in his waistband. When his coffee was ready he brought Kelly outside and sat on the door stoop to drink it.

  Kelly went about her business without distraction. If something had been out here it hadn’t left a spoor to attract her attention.

  She finished up and came prancing to Ray, her chain hissing on the pulley line. At the foot of the driveway she came to a stop and looked up the drive, lifting her nose and sniffing the air.

  Ray turned his head, followed her gaze up the drive.

  Beyond the reach of the light over the back door, the road was black.

  But Kelly snorted and sniffed exaggeratedly, and now Ray’s consciousness accepted a smell that had been there all along, and it wasn’t good.

  Sort of garbage-like. Skunk into his trash again.

  Ray returned inside, set down his mug and found a flashlight. He went outside and crept to the open maw of his dirt-floored adjacent garage.

  The feeble, low-battery pool flowed over disheveled piles of lumber, a rust-consumed barbecue grill on its side, an old washing machine, the gouged wall where Ray threw knives and shurikens at pages from magazines. And his trash can, upright and intact—undisturbed.

  Ray turned and faced the driveway. Kelly lifted her nose high and snorted loudly at the air again as a cool breeze rustled.

  What might be lurking at the head of the drive, behind the thick chestnut tree on the right, or behind another? The possessed girl, dead of starvation, naked and bruise-eyed, lips blood-flecked, crouching behind a bush so that her vertebrae stood up like lizard spikes on her back.

  Ray switched the flashlight to his left, drew the .38. The pebbly dirt of the drive crunched as he followed the path as stealthily as he could.

  Kelly waited behind, taut at the end of her chain.

  Near the top of the drive, Ray shot the flashlight behind the chestnut tree, then quickly to the narrower trees on the left. Nothing. He proceeded to the head of the driveway itself and now the road lay before him, black like a crevice through these woods.

  Ray’s light didn’t reach far. To the left he saw nothing. He turned to the right. He had noticed the increase in that smell, now a stench, and already he knew what it was—a dead skunk. Only the form he spotted in the road just beyond the reach of his beam was larger than a skunk…

  Ray caught his breath…advanced a few steps gingerly, as though afraid the form would awaken and spring up. He advanced only far enough for his flashlight’s glow to begin to touch.

  At this distance the beam was anemic, but Ray could tell the lump wasn’t a human—his first instinctual impression. A dog, looked like. It was almost in the gutter, and part of it glistened in his beam. Ray stole closer, and when he was assured the thing was dead he went right up to it, stood close over it. He had to hold his breath—he stuck the pistol in his belt and cupped his hand over his nose and mouth, let in only a little air.

  It was still poisoned.

  Scrawny hairy legs like a dog’s, but they ended in hooves. It was a goat. The eyes were glazed, the tongue out, blood flecked and crusting all around the mouth and nostrils. It had been obliterated through the middle and hindquarters, its insides all on the outside—heaps of red pulp, chunks smeared away from the body, the smears printed with tire tracks. Poor thing—it had blundered out into the path of some drunk punks out for a wild night cruise, no doubt. Ray was reminded of a recent case where a young man had struck a pedestrian and dragged his body for miles, getting out several times in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge him.

  And Ray believed he knew from where the goat had come; the nearest house to his was that farmhouse with the apple tree in the front lawn. An elderly couple—they had geese you sometimes had to brake for as they waddled across the road in a parade, and Ray had read in the paper that some fucking asshole had once deliberately blazed his car through them, squashing several. They had a goat; he’d seen it out back in a chicken-wire pen, and if this were the same one then the elderly couple had lost another pet to the raging machines of man.

  Ray remembered that dream he’d had about the murder of his parents, and then playing Frisbee in the road in front of the farmhouse with his cousin Paul.

  The goat had no collar. It might be the same, but he’d never seen their goat up close, just as he had never seen the couple up close—mostly just sitting in their rocking chairs on the front porch, watching him drive past.

  When had this happened? The blood was already congealing—it couldn’t have been what set Kelly barking.

  What to do with it? Drag it further out of the road, and call on its apparent owners in the morning? Ray decided to simply leave it. He wondered how long it would lie here…who picked up squashed skunks, woodchucks and cats. Maybe the old farmer would see it while driving along. Ray still felt almost an accomplice’s guilt about leaving it, but he turned away and walked back to his driveway.

  He vaguely considered videotaping it in the daylight, incorporating it into his and Paul’s latest movie. They liked the grotesque, the macabre.

  But as he pulled his car out the next day to cash his check and pick up some groceries, all that remained of the goat was a dull smear and a few loose chunks of meat in the gutter, which bugs would no doubt feast on. It looked as if a tribe of army ants had already nibbled the goat into oblivion. Ray hoped that whoever had hit the thing in the first place had a nice big dent in his car, and had gotten a good scare out of the incident.

  Maybe that was the person who had removed the body—disposing of evidence, his mind blackly joked.

  Ray drove off in his car.

  ««—»»

  Until today, Ray had never necked with a girl—except at twelve or thereabouts, a little bit with his cousin Jan—nor really held hands with a girl
, or touched a girl’s breasts.

  During lunch, Ray, Heidi, and the kid who handled shipping on the far side of the stock room, Russ, stood around in the stock room and got to talking about movies. Ray talked enthusiastically; he loved movies.

  Heidi expressed her fear of gory movies—she preferred the Star Wars trilogy.

  “I like kung fu movies,” Pete said. “You ever see Enter the Dragon?

  Man! Bruce Lee with those numb-chucks—unreal. Oh-oh, watch out, don’t forget Heidi can do karate!” Pete snatched up a broom and poked it at her like a spear. Heidi assumed a stance and when an opening came she lunged in playfully but accidentally hit Pete in the nose. Everyone laughed. Heidi asked if he were okay. Ray felt a little embarrassed for her.

  His eyes seized every available opportunity to study her. Early today he had been reaching with a cardboard tube across a table to flick a light switch on and Heidi had appeared beside him, said, “I wonder if Ray is ticklish.” She tickled his side.

  “No! I am!” he laughed, squirming away.

  At the end of the day the four of them moved to the parking lot together, as Pete had to give Russ a ride home today in his van. Heidi told Russ, “You should get a rich girl with her own car.”

  “Yeah, I want to be a gigolo, too,” Ray said. “I’ll work the octoge-narian crowd.”

  Heidi fell in beside Ray and put her arm around his shoulders, her breast soft and pliable against his arm. “What about the young girls like me?” Her eyes sparked mischievously behind her flashing glasses.

  In the lot, her arm now off him, they gathered about Pete’s van. With her head down, Heidi said, “I don’t want to go home—let’s go get an ice cream or a six-pack or something.”

  “Yeah,” Ray agreed.

  The four decided on ice cream. Heidi said, “Does anyone want to drive with me?”

  “Yeah, I will,” Pete joked. He had to drive his van.

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” Ray offered.

  Heidi and Ray didn’t talk much as they followed the dusty van.

  Inside the ice cream and sandwich shop, the four took stools at a counter. Heidi deliberately, obviously waited for Pete to sit beside Russ so she could sit to Ray’s left. His mind was humming with blank excitement, growing.