A Bright House

“It was like a record being played at a slower speed, and we could not understand what we were trying to say to one another. I would have got up and run, but I felt so heavy and my girlfriend was now clinging to me in hysterics” ~ testimony from an electromagnetic aberration experience, Kent UK, 1966

Doug Fenton should have known better. The high school vice principal should have known much, much better, than to find himself involved in such a way. A man of his standing in the community, married with four children, envied by many for his world travels, wit, passion for education... for him to be parked on a rainy Friday afternoon, after school, in the heavily wooded provincial park region of Magregor Point... for his thinking that he had driven far enough out of town, though it was only ten minutes at county backroad speeds, was a part of the hind kicking that hindsight would surely bring.

Fenton should not have been reclined in the driver seat, eyes closed, all senses attuned to the hot young mouth administering to him. The pelt of hard rain on roof and windshield. The moving swirling tongue, light scrape of teeth, his moans too loud in the close air within the vehicle, his eyes catching sight of the baby seat in back. He knew intrinsically, as lost in the momentary physical pleasure as he was, that this was beyond wrong; that he would instantly come crashing down after she finished him. Ah, but in spite of the confusing blend of emotions, finish him she did.

He pushed back against the seat, gripped the steering wheel with a left hand and her shoulder with the right, then released. He heard a sound above his own, and the rain, to his left. There his swiveling vision caught a young man’s form, wearing a black raincoat, astride a bicycle, aiming a camera into the driver’s side window. The young woman lifted her head from his lap, eyes stunned as the intruder snapped several quick frames and instantly wheeled around and away on his bike.

Though Jenny was able to will herself into the emotional armor of consecutive years, she was unable to will the telephone to ring. Showered, some laundry under way, she kept herself just busy enough with household cleaning to avoid burning eye holes into the silent phone. When the clock struck ten, she reached the threshold where hope faded and she then had to decide whether or not to call Ray at the hotel. So readily did the self doubt and cynicism arrive, with an ease and nasty hint of truth that pushed aside all of the recent good feelings that had sprung up in her mind like tiny green shoots. Just past ten, a sardonic weariness triumphed. She would not call him.

It was safe to assume that Ray’s day had been heavily emotional; a phone call from her would be intrusion. It would reek of desperation. Her overt neediness through the simple punching of numerals at a late Sunday hour, could undermine and even destroy what had been hinted at within their chemistry of the day before. The hefty resolve of it sat like dead weight across her slender shoulders, and she slid open one of the back doors to sit outside beneath her tree. An emphatic dropping of her body into the chair contained all of her frustration; she wanted to break through the bottom of the seat and continue to fall, forever. She left the door open in order to hear the phone, should the miraculous favor her miserable little existence.

At first, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she didn’t see the shed’s broken window panes. The lower limbs of the massive tree were obscuring the top portion of the frame. The night air hung still and heavy, almost room temperature but thickly cloying somehow. Distant siren wails caused her to send hopeful thoughts to those who may have been injured, and she mused that some day the sirens would be for her. She settled into the chair, pulled her knees up so that her bare feet could rest upon the forward edge of the seat, and suddenly took note of the blacker than black jagged holes that had punctuated the visible half of the shed window. Her physical reaction was a bolt of forward momentum, legs down instantly to standing; she turned to reach through the open door where the yard light switch and her fingers combined to illuminate the damage.

Jenny’s heart rate began to climb. Thought worms began to squirm. She had never been victimized by property crime, although it was rampant in her downtown east neighborhood. She didn’t even have an alarm system installed. What would they take from her spartan belongings? The only items that carried emotional worth for her, were stored in that shed. She slipped into a pair of running shoes that she kept near the kitchen doors, then retrieved the key for the shed’s yard facing door lock.

Gingerly she stepped across the grass, within the angled rectangular porch light, and saw that the shards had been flung quite some distance into the yard. Two of the pane muntins had been buckled outward. They jabbed at her jangled senses. Should she go around back to the lane? That was obviously the point of entry, as the yard door and lock appeared to be intact. Should she simply call the police and play it completely safe? Anger entered the emotional fray and bolstered her weary self pity. She approached the glass littered area directly beneath the window and could smell something horrid. Rotting and gamey.

From the open kitchen door, an unfamiliar sound startled her churning thoughts. The phone was ringing. Jenny abruptly wheeled about and almost ran to answer it, not even bothering to sound casual. She was breathy, “hello?“, and felt light headed when she heard Ray’s voice against her ear. “Jenny. I apologize for the late hour.” (“it’s okay” she interrupted) “It has been a long and heavy day” he continued, sounding worn. “I wanted to check up on you before calling it a night, to see how you are.”

“How I am” she stated bluntly and without even a hint of control, “is that I need you to come over here as soon as you can. Something has happened. I think my shed has been broken into and that is where I keep all of Scott’s things.” Ray didn’t skip a beat; “Okay, hang on, let me grab a taxi over, and please don’t investigate anything before I arrive.” She agreed through a tidal wave of relief, hung up the phone, and locked the back doors before sitting down to wait for the man who was effortlessly becoming a vital player in the theatre of her life.

Kevin is so immersed within the dreamscape, he has no conscious knowledge of the reality of his bed or of having left the confines of triple dimension illusion. Looking up at a strange yellow sky that is alive with rapidly moving thunderheads, he is reminded of sped up footage from horror movies. Hammer films. The Night Gallery. For as far as he can see in any direction, the unrecognizable crops are dappled by ever shifting sunlight and cloud shadow, though he cannot find the sun.

As with many of Kevin’s dreams, he finds himself completely naked, but this time he isn’t in school or on the main street of Kincardine, slinking desperately in hiding as he searches for something to cover up with. He is there standing, nude, fearfully, in the midst of wind waving crops. Broad green leaves that resemble rhubarb are scraping gently against his knees and calves. He sees a farm some distance away; the silo and barn, the two level house and its wind breaking trees.

Strongly compelled to turn away from it, he notes with some shock an identical array of buildings in the opposite direction, equidistant. Kevin looks at his body; the skin is a luminescent pale exaggeration of its normalcy. He is ghostlike in almost glowing whites. Fear is now scratching at his throat, burning his lungs. He pivots several times to face each of the identical farmsteads, looks to the sides of this vista at thick forest that reminds him of the local provincial parklands; dense inscrutable growth. It seems his only option is to approach one of the houses, but which?

In answer, a lone figure steps into view from around the side of one of the homes. A woman in a long flowing dress. She takes several steps around the building and then stops to wave at him. First one hand, then both, waving as though to gain his attention. He stares across the distance, fear mounting, and her motions become two handed scoops of urgent beckoning. His heart has dread, but there are no options but to walk to her. Kevin forgets his nudity, strongly pulled toward the summoning woman whose features and details clarify as he approaches.

From a hundred yards he can see her piled high hair, the floral pattern on the wind swirled dress, the yellow slippers. She smiles and nods a knowing approval. Her gaze is fixed keenly into his eyes as he walks free of the strange crop field and into the back yard’s uncut blades. She doesn’t seem to notice his alabaster nakedness. Kevin recognizes her in a wordless shapeless intensity. She says two words when he gets within a hundred feet, turning slightly away, her eyes then facing the front of the house. He picks up his gait as she walks on thin aged legs around the right corner of a large veranda, saying the words again. “Dirty world”...

At the front of the wood frame house with the peeling white paint, Kevin reaches the wide porch step to see the elderly woman positioning a sturdy wicker chair in the middle of the open area in front of the entrance door. She looks down at him with a vaguely terrifying look of recognition, almost lovingly. She remembers him? “Please come up here and tighten this for me” she has a raspy timbre, almost a man’s voice. Kevin follows the vision track of her pointing index finger, to a large hook screwed into the veranda ceiling planks.

He wants to speak, say anything something, and cannot. Instead he obeys her seemingly minor request, moving up the steps, avoiding her eyes to the best of his willpower, for they are glazed with something mad and shiny. She places rake thin arterially etched hands upon the arms of the chair and nods with intent approval as Kevin climbs into the chair’s seat. He shouldn’t be able to reach the hook, he thinks suddenly, for the porch has a very high ceiling. To his surprise he is able to grasp the hook and turn it with a minimum of effort. It turns and turns into the plank, finally buried all the way to its curve and unable to be screwed any further. “Good boy” she rasps, looking up at him as he avoids her eyes and steps back down to the porch floor.

“Good Kevin” and she reaches with a bony hand for his face, palm forward and fingers suddenly crooked into a talon like gesture. Here, he becomes dream aware in jolted knowing, jumps back and away from the old woman’s hand to fall hard down the steps behind him. His head concusses the ground but he is lucid enough to see her coming toward the stairs, and with a wordless scream he regains his feet to launch into a dreamworld lope of heightened speed. Into the woods just past the huge barn, Kevin is able to cover large amounts of territory with each running stride as his every molecule demands it of him; flee.

He is running blindly away. Trees and tangles of knee high shrub and weed that don’t seem indigenous to such a prairie setting. He is able to deftly weave around trunks, bushes, uneven dips and mounds in the forest floor. The landscape becomes less a part of the dream detailing and more familiar as the forested regions of his hometown, coming back as a beacon dimly in his mind, running, running. He won’t risk losing momentum to look behind him, lest she somehow be there keeping pace, gaining ground, that insane shine in her eyes that inexplicably know who he is. “She knows my name” he gasps, deeper into the trees now. “How can she know my name?” his lungs are beginning to flame, his pace is inexorably slowing, and worse... there are peripheral movements all around him, down low in the growth.

They glow in a similar pale shade of his dream body. They dart about the tree trunks and offer fleeting horrible glimpses of their featureless faces as he stops and drops. To his naked knees in coniferous needles that litter the ground, he raises both hands to clutch at his face, where he can find no mouth with which to scream himself awake. He clamps his eyes shut, feels blindly for any recognizable feature of his previous self, and becomes aware of a distant sound. Not located within the terror locale, but far off in a mirror to the old woman’s beckoning hands. This call grows in volume. It carries a flooding awareness of escape. It is the barking of the dog next door.