by John Shirley
They should have been expecting me.
They’d received a letter, posted a month earlier. It contained a
note from Mom and a short letter from me. Mom’s note referenced a
meeting she’d had when they’d signed the new agreement about my
college fund: “You said he could come and visit you any time,
Karl, long as I informed you a few weeks ahead, and I’m doing so.
You don’t answer phone calls, you neglected to give me your email
and I use a landline, so I don’t text. Yes, there are still people
with landlines. I hope you remember that invitation. You were looking
at your phone when we were talking and I couldn’t tell if we were
on the same page or not.”
I almost didn’t go to Dad’s house. I was only in San Jose for a
few days, to do some post graduate research, and I thought I should
see him, but he hadn’t written back to Mom or called. I wasn’t
sure I’d be welcome. But since having the dream—an acutely bad
dream--I was troubled by the feeling that I really ought to go see
him. At least once. Yes, he had pretty much abandoned me, when I was
a little kid. But—why not get some closure?
On a summer day just before sunset, with the crickets starting to
stridulate, I got out of the taxi next to the mailbox, suitcase in
hand. The taxi drove away before I could tell the guy to wait.
Because I was suddenly not sure that my dad still lived here. The
house had peeling white paint and the hasty look of houses built way
back in the 1960s. The lawn had become knee-high weeds. There was a
Tesla parked in the driveway but it was missing a wheel and grass
grew up around its axles.
The house’s window blinds were all closed. This was the address,
all right, Dad had moved here after the divorce from my mother about
sixteen years earlier—but was he still here? I glanced at
the open mailbox—saw it was overflowing. Several pieces were
moldering on the sidewalk. Mostly junk mail. I noticed a rain-browned
envelope sticking out from the rest in the mailbox. It showed my
mother’s return address.
“Christ!” I took the letter out, and looked it over. Addressed to
my dad. The date confirmed it was definitely the letter. It’d been
in the mailbox about six weeks.
I looked at the house again. It seemed very, very still. But the sun
chose that moment to dip behind the horizon, and the evening darkened
all at once, so I could see light glowing around the edges of the
blinds.
Carrying the envelope I went to the door, put down my bag, and
knocked. I waited. No response. I looked for a doorbell. Where the
doorbell should be, not quite fitting in the gap, was a thimble sized
receded disk of glass. One of those front door security cameras.
There was a tiny little speaker under the lens.
I waved at the camera. “Hi! It’s Cedric! Your son, Dad! Anyone
home?”
I waited. No response.
“We sent a letter a long time ago! Look!” I held it in front of
the camera. “More than a month ago!”
I waited a full minute, then knocked again, harder.
The door clicked, and I figured it was unlocked now. I picked up my
bag, opened the door and called, “Dad?”
I stepped through into an empty dining room, musty, and smelling of
decaying old food. A Roomba was bumbling around the old amber-yellow
carpet. Beyond a food prep counter was a small kitchen, with dirty
dishes piled in the sink, cabinets with their doors wide open, an
avocado green refrigerator, and a clean tile floor.
“Dad?” I called again. I could hear electronics humming. The
carpet ran through a doorway into a living room, cluttered with
entertainment systems and devices I didn’t recognize. I walked in,
saw my eleven-year-old half-brother sprawled on the sofa. I’d never
met him, but I’d found a couple of his selfies online.
He’d been plump in the photos; now he was bloated. He was wearing
his underpants, and t-shirt that was much too small for his pink
belly. His hair was matted and thick with grease.
“Leroy?” I said.
He didn’t look up at me. His focus was on a screen of some kind,
propped on his raised knees. I could see the Bluetooth pods in his
ears making it hard for him to hear me. He had a phone in his left
hand and every so often he thumbed it. It looked like a game,
something of the Candy Crush variety.
I dropped my bag on the floor, tapped him on the shoulder--and he
startled. “Whuh!”
I raised my voice. “Leroy, it’s me, Cedric. Your half-brother.
Dad said I could visit.” I waved the letter at him. “We sent him
a letter but it’s been stuck in your mailbox for over a month…”
“Whuh?”
I smiled at him. “Do pardon me…” I reached down and took a
Bluetooth pod out of one of his ears.”
“Hey!”
“I’m Cedric, dude.”
“Whuh?” He absently touched the screen in front of him.
“You already said that, bro. Here I am, your half-brother. It’s a
fait accompli—I just showed up. You don’t remember hearing about
a Cedric in your family? As in, we’ve got half our DNA in common?”
He squinched his already squinched up eyes even more. “Yuh…”
I bent over and looked at the screen on his lap—it appeared to be a
transparent pane of glass in a gray plastic frame, and nothing
more—except images that came and went when he touched it. “How
do you talk to that thing? I don’t see a keyboard.”
“Voice,” he said.
The image currently on the screen was of an athletic looking young
dude of about twelve, very handsome, his eyes glittering with
intelligence. “Who’s that?”
“’s me,” Leroy said, frowning.
“Oh, like an avatar?”
“’s me.”
“Whatever you say, little brother.” I set his Bluetooth pod on
his chest and went to find Dad.
I walked down a short hallway. And something darted in front of me.
It looked like a shrunken, translucent, hollow-eyed version of my
half-brother—glimpsed as it slid into a crack in the wall. It was
as if the crack vacuumed the thing in. And it was gone.
“Leroy!” I blurted, stopping in my tracks.
I shook my head. Either it was my imagination going loopy or it was
some kind of projected electronic image. Maybe the kid was pranking
me somehow.
I walked on, feeling…odd. Faintly nauseated. Like there was a
high-pitched sound bothering my ears but it was so high-pitched it
was inaudible—just beyond the range of hearing. Yet I could feel it
vibrating against my ear drums.
To the right was a bedroom or a den, I couldn’t tell which because
it was jammed with a jumble of mismatched items; electronics, some
plugged in on little metal tables, some in wobbly, dust-coated stacks
in the corner. There was a sofa, covered with other gear, and tilted
back in a Lay Z Boy easy chair was my dad, looking like a larger
version of Leroy, but with a beard. He was shaped like a bowling pin,
with his narrow shoulders and bulbous middle—a bowling pin wearing
a sweat stained bathrobe. His eyes were trapped in pouchy swollen
skin around the sockets.
Dad’s hands were busy, one on tapping at the transparent screen
held on his lap by a mechanical arm extending from the wall, the
other on the keyboard under another screen set up on little metal
table beside the chair. A strong smell of sweat and piss came off
him. He was flicking his eyes between me and the screens, his lips
moving. There was a cooler beside him filled with generic packages of
food, and crumpled wrappers. I stepped into the room, stepping over
old interlinked PCs, a linked system all in one room, and caught his
reluctant gaze.
“Dad—” I waved the envelope at him. “This letter from me and
my mom, confirming your invitation and my plan to come today? It’s
been turning yellow in your mailbox for a month. You want to read
it?”
Dad muttered something. Glanced at me, looked back at the screens,
kept tapping and typing as he said. “Not a good time. Should’ve
checked. I’ve almost got this done.”
“Almost got what done, dad?”
“A new kind of WiFi. Revolutionary. Can’t talk about it.”
That wasn’t implausible. He had a successful WiFi boosting
start-up, some years back. Lost control to investors but retained a
decent income from some tech spin-off. “So this is not a good
time--when do you want me to come back?”
“Another week, maybe two. Maybe a month.”
I noticed pill bottles on his metal table. One of them was Adderall.
Nettled at his dismissal of me, after I’d made the trek here, I
said, “Hitting the stealth meth, dad?” I pointed at the Adderall
bottle.
“Not meth.”
“It’s the gradual kind of meth but it’ll get you. I don’t
know why I’m talking to you like I’m the adult here.”
He didn’t respond to that. Kept tapping and typing, his mouth loose
and very red in his gray-black beard.
I went on, “Hey—you want me to leave, fine, but I don’t have
anyplace else to stay in this town tonight and I’m on a tight
budget. Okay if I just stay here tonight? Leave in the morning. Maybe
you’ll get a chance to unhook in the morning we’ll have a
chinwag, as Mom likes to say. Does anyone say chinwag in this country
besides Mom? Anyhow…”
“The garage.” Tap tap, type type.
“What about it?”
“Stay in there. Electric heater, a cot. Some packaged food. Spare
PC you can hook up. Games.”
“You know how mom is, she’s kinda Luddite. Or machine minimalist
or whatever. So I never got into it. I do have a cell phone here, and
I have a laptop at home but that’s it.”
Tap. Type. Tap. Type.
“Uh—how about upstairs? Looks like there’s an attic room.”
“Filled with servers.”
“Servers? Like rows of big computers? Really! The garage it is.”
I shrugged, tossed the water-stained envelope onto the corner of the
little metal table and turned away, deciding I’d should see if
Leroy’s mother was here. Best say hello so she didn’t think I was
a home invader.
Marjorie was farther down the hall, in a bedroom, panting in puce
yoga tights as she pumped away on an exercise bicycle, tilting on its
platform, and turning its handlebars to veer virtually through the
digital canyons she was seeing in her VR goggles. She was in early
middle age, in good shape, her shoulder length hair striped pink and
neon blue. Her muscular limbs were bronzed from the tanning lamp I
could see over the bed in a corner. A vibrant contrast to her
housemates.
She couldn’t see I was here so I called out, “Marjorie! It’s
Cedric!”
She yipped in startlement, and clawed her VR glasses off.
“Um…” She stared at me, mouth open. “Who?”
“Cedric—Leroy’s half-brother. We’ve never actually met but
I’m sure my father complained about having to contribute to my
tuition--”
“Oh, god he used to spew the venom over that, alright, ha!” She
climbed off the bike, dabbed her forehead with a small towel, and
looked me over in the most candid way anyone’s ever done it. She
cocked her head toward a juicer on a table beside her bike. “Want
some smoothie? Energy greens.”
“Naw, I’m good.”
She reached out and patted my upper arm, in a way that told me she
was checking for muscles. “Look at you! You almost look healthy!”
“Uh—thanks?”
“Did you see that human slug who calls himself my husband, yet?”
she asked, in a tone another woman would use to say something
pleasant. Her auburn eyebrows bobbed. Her blue eyes were a little too
close together; this and her small nose and wide mouth gave her a
slightly simian look.
“I saw dad. He seems really, really caught up in something.”
She glanced at the ceiling. “Or it’s caught him.”
I didn’t think about that remark until later. I went on, “I’m
not a needy guy. Mom’s partner Kathy was a wonderful parent. But
dad hasn’t seen me since I was little, wouldn’t even do a video
talk, you’d think he’d have the decency to say, ‘Hi, son, how
are you, get your degree yet? Nope. We wrote to him. He didn’t
answer back to tell me not to come, and I was in town, so…”
“You expected decency from Karl?” A small dry laugh at
that. “Like expecting a cool drink from a dried-out well. Only
reason I stay here is because it’s free, and he leaves me alone,
and lets me order in the food I want, and I’ve got my gear all set
up.” She straightened proudly, and went on, “I’m training,
see.”
“For…?”
“The international virtual bike races! I was number three in
California women’s league last year. I’ve still got something
left.” Majorie sighed. “My poor Leroy—Karl got his obsessions
into Leroy’s head when he was eight. Took him out of school, just
brainwashed him with his bullshit. Kid is a crackhead for games and
social media. Pretends to be a grown up online…” She cocked her
head and looked at me speculatively. “You’re staying? Where you
going to sleep?”
“The garage, I’m told.”
“Ick, you don’t want to sleep out there. You can bunk with
me.” She looked affectedly casual.
“I…no, I feel like, you know, some privacy tonight. Got books in
my bag to read for my master’s.”
“Books? Physical books?”
“Yeah. A couple.”
“Huh. Well, think about it. If you get restless…” She reached
out and stroked my little soul-patch beard with the tip of her
finger. “You’ll know where I am. There’s two bathrooms by the
way—one’s mine, you go through that door. The one at the other
end of the house is unspeakable. They tend to pour buckets into it,
if you know what I mean…”
I grimaced and said, “Well—maybe see you in the morning.” I
went to the door—and then turned back to her and asked, “Um—is
there some kind of holographic system here, or projection? I saw
something. It looked kinda like Leroy, if he were a ghost. I thought
maybe the kid was pranking me.”
“Oh. That.” Her expression went blank. She rubbed her hands
slowly together. “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe it’s a prank.” She went
back to her bike, straddled it, and put on her VR goggles again.
“Just ignore all that stuff. That’s some serious advice, Cedric.”
She told the system, “Race restart.” And she began peddling.
The garage was poorly lit, dusty, stored chockful of outdated tech
and mysterious cardboard boxes. There was a folded-up metal-frame
cot. Several shelves contained stacks of Eternally Edible packages,
a vile tasting but allegedly nutritious product. There was a large
flashlight hanging from a nail on the wall.
The cot smelled of mildew. Setting it up, I caught a glimpse of
movement from the corner of my eye. I looked—and saw what looked
like my father, but hollow-eyed, his face a bit warped, flitting
across the reflective glass panel of the garage door. Then gone.
Just ignore all that stuff, Marjorie had said. That’s
some serious advice…
Probably just a distorted image of myself, trick of the light thing,
I decided. Had to be.
I looked around for blankets, found a few folded in a box, made up
the cot as best I could and stretched out on it, trying to sort
through my feelings.
Why had I come here? For real—why?
It probably wasn’t just the nightmare about Dad. The dream of him
as a hollow-eyed apparition, a phantom Dad screaming to be let out of
a cage. The steel cage was coruscating with red sparks with energy,
each spark making him cringe in pain. Please, Cedric—get me out!
I am not a guy who believes in supernatural dreaming. But I did
think maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. My
therapist thought so too. That’s when I told mom, “Let’s write
him a letter…”
Now I was sorry I’d come. I felt nothing, after my brief encounter
with my father, except a painful emptiness.
I took my phone from my pocket, and thought dourly, the sad little
kid in me needs his mother. But though I pressed speed dial for my
mother, I didn’t get her on the phone.
“Hello, Cedric,” said the man on my phone’s screen. A very
odd-looking man.
“What the hell,” I mumbled, punching a button ending the call.
“Fat-fingered Face Timing with some rando?” Maybe all those
servers in the attic were messing with my cell.
The man’s face vanished from my phone--and reappeared. “Don’t
do that, please, Cedric,” he said. His voice was professorially
orotund. “This is the most expedient way for us to talk. I’m here
in the house with you. Your father’s house on Spruce Street. But I
can speak more clearly through this device.”
Suppose you removed the skin from a human, head and all, and hung it
on a hanger. That’s what this looked like. Sort of melting, head
stretched out like something from a Modigliani painting. His eyes, I
saw now, were sockets—with a light in each one, way to the back.
“You’re staring aghast,” he said, his lips moving floppily.
“Let me try something.” The face shifted, becoming almost normal;
almost like a living human being. “Is that better, Cedric?”
“My dad is doing this,” I said, my mind flailing for
explanation.
“No, Cedric, I’m simply someone wishing to speak to you. This
contact is not some hack from your father. But he’s here.
Look around. We can nudge him into the garage.”
Another movement caught at the corner of my eye—and there was the
ghost of my dad, squeezing out from a crack in a concrete wall: eyes
like bruises with little lights in them, mouth gaping, beard
streaming, squirming along the top of a row of cardboard boxes, like
an undulating caterpillar. The thing looked desperately
around—panicky, mouth quivering. I heard it whimpering.
“Got to be a projection,” I said.
“No,” said the man in the phone screen. “It’s a ghost—a
lost soul. Go over to it. Put out your hand. You can feel it—subtle
though its substance is.”
I snorted, and said, “Suggestion, placebo effect—that what
you’re counting on?” But I crossed the dusty space to the thing.
It seemed aware of me, its head flapping frantically on its body as I
approached.
I didn’t want to touch it. But I made myself. I wanted to get to
the bottom of this. Prove this was all some trick.
I pressed the fingertips of my left hand into the thing—and I felt
a sort of very gelatinous substance, which made my hands feel as if
they’d touched dry ice. And the dad-thing reacted, cringing,
twisting itself, to escape my touch. But just as it pulled away, I
got a powerful hit of something I can only describe as the essence of
a human mind. A flashing series of memories, faces, situations—all
of them resonating with an ill-defined familiarity.
It was my father’s mind. And there was a mutual recognition. I
heard his voice say, I’m sorry, Cedric. I’m really sorry. I
should have—
That’s where it cut off. And the squirming subtle bodied
thing wriggled away at great speed toward the door into the house. It
squeezed under the door, and was gone, but for a dissolving wisp of
mist.
“Cedric?” The voice from my phone.
I took a long shivery breath, and looked at the cell phone screen.
My voice came out a croak. “Who are you?”
“In life I went by the name Demetrious Calas.”
“In life…”
“I died, as you would call it, in 1977. Thereupon I was assigned
to the next pneumic plane, but because of my history in computer
science, I was called back to this cruder level to try to rescue
souls trapped in electronically generated fields.”
“Souls trapped in…what?”
“Souls become trapped on Earth in several ways. One is just a slow
giving up on one’s soul, as millions of people do every day. They
simply fail to nourish their souls—souls are nourished by
self-awareness and empathy. Their souls loosen from them, wander the
world for a time, and essentially melt away. Another sort of soul
becomes emotionally trapped, due to trauma or unspeakable loss. But
in modern times many souls are abandoned in favor of fixating on
phones, social media, and the addictive madness associate with those
devices. Souls shrivel, and break away. That’s what’s happened to
poor Leroy.”
“He’s…lost his soul?”
“Yes, Leroy and your father are what we call—empty bottles.
Leroy is soulless, poor thing. Yet his soul has its own separate
being now—quite undeveloped, but it’s there. You saw it wandering
the hallway, I believe.”
“Look, the soul is a supernatural concept—I don’t subscribe
to—um…”
“The soul is not supernatural. That’s a common
misconception. It’s a material being, but a very subtle one.
It is biological—but an unfamiliar biology. It is a
consciousness that grows within the body of a healthy person. If we
live intelligently, and ethically, the soul is cultivated within us.
Souls will someday be found to exist within the realm of science.”
“Yeah? Science doesn’t believe in heaven and hell.”
“Such places don’t exist. But there are subtle psychic
landscapes, low on the scale, which have their own spiritual ecology,
their own food chain. And predators. Some spirits become
trapped in those psychic landscapes, because they were predatory in
life, or parasitical. Such places are hellish. Higher pneumic planes
are more elevated—with a civilization that would be hard to
describe.”
I snorted. “This is bullshit. I’ve stumbled into some kind of
weird VR videogame, right?”
“What did you feel when you touched the soul of your father?”
“Oh, that…” I felt a deep pang thinking about it. The fear in
him, the loneliness, the regret. “It was…”
“It was real wasn’t it? Didn’t have the taste of things
that are true?”
“It…” My gut twisted as I thought of the lost soul of my
father. “Yes.”
“I wasn’t expecting you here but it may be providential. We’re
looking for a way to switch off the house’s electrical system—shut
down everything at once. I hoped to persuade Marjorie to do it. But
she refuses to talk to me. She retains her soul but it’s a
shriveled little thing that gets smaller every day.” Calas sighed.
“We haven’t got enough telekinetic finesse to throw the circuit
breakers. Now that you’re here, you can do this yourself. You
simply go to the fuse box and shut down the house’s power for three
minutes.”
“The house…my dad’s soul is trapped in it?”
“Yes, within the strong electromagnetic field he’s set up for
his experiments. It’s energy systems and electrical fields
constitute a trap for souls.”
“I had a dream about my dad…”
He nodded. “So I understand. Now you know what your dream was
about.”
“So is my dad aware of his…his soul…wandering the
house?”
“The man you spoke to is no longer your father, in any important
way. It is aware of its separated soul, yes. But its cognition
has decided the soul is an illusion.”
“Wait.” Did I understand Calas right? “Are you saying that my
dad and my half-brother…are being haunted by their own souls?”
“Yes. Depending on what you mean by your father and your
brother. Your father’s body and brain, your brother’s body and
brain—they are haunted by their own souls.”
“They are their own ghosts?” I was tempted to say, Aren’t
we all, in a way?
“Yes. Their souls can never return to their bodies. They
have become ‘ghosts’.”
I went through all the obvious reality checks then. Am I awake?
A pinch confirmed it. Have I been drugged? Had a whole period
of drug experimentation, in the past—this was not that.
It felt as if I’d known about these things on some level, but had
to have it shown me in person, to believe it.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“Trust me? To persuade you to turn off the lights for three
minutes? What other motive would I have than the one I’ve
described? I have been assigned to set two souls free.”
“And once they’re free?”
“I’ll escort them to the next plane. They’ll be sorted out
there.”
“I don’t know…”
“I have an idea. I’ll try to pull my appearance together a little
and come to you in person. Then you’ll know I’m what I say I am.”
“Actually—please don’t do that.”
“Oh I must insist!”
Someone behind me touched me on the shoulder. I jumped and spun on
my heel.
“Sorry,” Calas said. “Didn’t meant to startle you.”
Before me was the ghost of a short, wide shouldered, dark-eyed man
who seemed to droop, his wide face warping and reshaping, over and
over. A pale fogginess about his body was shaped like a robe.
“I’ve been in this plane too long,” Calas said, his voice
coming through distantly, echoing faintly. “Having trouble keeping
a human shape. It’s hard work being dead, in this world. In mine,
it’s a breeze. Reach out and touch me, now.”
“I don’t think so, no…” I said, starting to back away.
But he reached out and took my hand and I felt my fingertips within
the membrane of his being—and was shocked by a flashing of
memories; images of a life in this world and in another. First there
was a sense of a child gazing up at a smiling man with a black
mustache. His father. Then his mother, wearing an ornate shawl,
thousands of life images flashing by like shuffling cards, interwoven
with warmth and sadness and humor. Then came a gathering
darkness—followed by an intelligent beam of light, which became a
tunnel, leading to a plane on which beings floated in shifting,
abstract energy forms. They were symmetrical, like living emblems. I
could see Calas’s essential spiritual self—and knew instantly I
could trust him.”
I drew my hand back and found I was gasping. Overwhelmed by having
just directly experienced another being’s otherness.
Calas turned away—and in the process seemed to go through a
doorway, shrinking to a point and vanishing. Yet I sensed him still
close by.
His voice came from my phone. “Are you satisfied, Cedric?”
I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll turn off the electricity—for
three minutes.”
“I recommend that you block the house door into the garage, first.”
I was afraid to ask why. I blocked the door with the cot, grabbed the
flashlight, and went to the fuse box in the corner of the garage. I
glanced at my watch, noted the time, and threw the circuit breakers.
The room went pitch black.
“What the hell am I doing,” I muttered. But I clicked on the
flashlight, directed on the circuit breakers. I didn’t want to look
anywhere else, just did not want to see ghosts in that dark room.
I immediately heard my father shout--must have been loud, coming
through all those walls. “What the fuck!”
My father’s body and brain shouted it, anyway.
I felt a difference in the house—the vague sick feeling was gone.
The half-heard buzz had gone silent. Those servers were turned off.
But I was still afraid to look around in the dark garage.
I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. I waited.
A minute passed. A second one. Then a rattling and pounding came at
the door to the garage—it made me jump. My nerves were raw. Someone
was pushing at the door. The metal framed cot was slowing them
down—but a hard shove pushed it back. I saw a flutter of two
anxious ghosts around the door, Leroy and Dad, like hysterical
toddlers in spectral form.
I looked at my watch.
“Less than a minute remains, Cedric!” came Calas’s voice.
“Right.” I went to the cot, straddled it, braced it against the
door…
Dad started shouting, “Turn those breakers back, turn ‘em
back!”
The ghosts cried out, echoingly, “No don’t no don’t no don’t!
Don’t turn them back—don’t—”
And then their voices faded out—and so did the ghosts. More
accurately, they were getting smaller, as if in the perspective of
distance, then they spun around and went down a kind of glowing
drain—and were gone.
And that’s when my father heaved himself against the door, and it
banged hard on the cot, knocking me aside. I fell, rolled on the
concrete, and he stampeded past me, running to the power box,
yelling, “Oh God oh God oh God it has to be salvageable!”
The lights came on; the hum returned. My father, what was left of
him, rounded on me and said, “Why? Why did you turn off the power!”
“To save your soul,” I murmured. Not even loud enough for him to
hear.
But he stormed past me and ran through the door and I heard his feet
stamping up the stairs as he hurried to the servers in the attic
room.
In a few moments he shrieked, “Nooooo! It’s gone! It’s
all gone!”
I didn’t wait for him to get downstairs. I heard Calas on my
phone. “You have succeeded. I took them onward—I came back to say
good bye and thank you.” I looked at the phone, saw his face--a
proper face, not melting-- looking back at me.
“Where are they going?” I asked, sitting up. “Dad’s soul—and
Leroy’s?”
“Neither up nor down but onward. Thank you. I’ll see you ‘round
the mountain.” And his face vanished.
“Time for me to vanish too,” I muttered, standing up.
I found my baggage, had to dodge past Marjorie, on my way to the
door. She was gasping, weeping, “What’s going on? What happened?”
“You really should get out of here,” I told her, backing away,
out the front door. “Before you lose your soul too.”
Then I strode off, in a feverish hurry to be away from there, calling
a cab as I went.
#
I didn’t go back for two years. I tried to talk to a philosophy
professor, an existentialist, about what had happened in the house.
He suggested I get medication for hallucinations.
I do know that it seemed as if a weight had been lifted from me, when
I walked away from that house. And it had to do with setting my
father and my half-brother free.
But I kept wondering what was left of my half-brother. Just a kid,
after all.
The question troubled me. I tried calling my dad’s number. It was
no longer in service.
Mom’s partner is an assistant prosecutor. She called certain
police contacts, who talked to Child Protection Services. We got some
of the story, off the record. It seems Marjorie took Dad to court,
got half of his money and half the house. The house was mostly
gutted, when she was done. She refused to care for Leroy, called him
“a little monster.” My father was evicted from the house, which
now stood vacant. No more was known.
One drizzly November morning, I went back to the vacant house, and
knocked on the door. I knocked just in case there were squatters in
the house.
There were. A man and his little boy. They were eating scraps of
Eternally Edibles, wandering from room to room, dragging broken
electronics by the wire. Dad and Leroy were filthy, and muttering
endlessly.
They are quite physically alive. But in their way…they are haunting
that house.
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