A Bright House

Jenny opened the door to a Ray who was wearing what he wore on the fateful Friday of his first visit to the diner. He had his wavy hair free, looked haggard but ever so viscerally gorgeous in some way because of it, and she smiled at his taciturn expression. “Thank you so much for coming over like this. Please come in. I’ve calmed down a little... I’m thinking a raccoon got into the shed, or something.” Ray stepped into the foyer. “Not a problem, Jenny. You have a flashlight ready?” She nodded and beckoned him to follow her into the kitchen. “Do you want me to go have a look, alone?” he asked, motioning for the flashlight. She picked it up from the table and handed it to him, but shook her head as she spoke “I’d like to unlock the door and go in first, if you’ll be in charge of aiming this.” Ray accepted the torch. “Do you have a light fixture in the shed?” Jenny moved toward the back doors, speaking over her shoulder. “There is a bulb with a little chain.”

Within six paces taken from kitchen to yard, Townes stopped suddenly and reached to touch Jenny lightly on the shoulder. She halted, turned, followed the beam of light that he played across the glass shards where they fanned out beneath the broken window. As the moon had given Jenny a halo when they engaged in their clairvoyant session on the islands, so then did her kitchen ceiling light frame Ray. She looked from the glass to him. Watched him take a deep breath and hold it, closing his eyes. Like a wild creature he seemed to taste the air, assess the unseen with his unusual ability. “Ray?” He stood still for long seconds, letting the flashlight beam drop to pool at his feet. “Not a raccoon” was all he said, exhaling. His mood seemed to shift into an anxiety that she could also feel; it compounded her own and replaced the calming effect that his showing up had created. “Let’s look, then” he almost whispered, lifting his hand to illuminate the narrow granite slab path to the shed’s door.

Ray stood directly behind Jenny as she keyed the heavy padlock. He noted the strong odor around them, felt himself slipping gradually into his flow of thought-visuals. When she lifted the lock free of its hasp, he once again touched her shoulder. “Let me go in ahead of you, please.” She started to say something and held her tongue. His eyes were oddly dull, his voice flat. Jenny moved aside to allow Ray access to the door, which he pulled open very slowly, then trained the light beam onto the floor of the threshold. The stench seemed to roll out at them, so powerful as to almost be seen.

Ray leaned into the door frame, aimed the light, focused intently and widened his eyes. “Oh... my...” he then shifted his gaze upward to where a jagged hole had been torn out of the corner where roofline and rotting lane doors met; the upper edges of those vertical planks bent inward, splintered. He coughed, raising a free hand to his mouth. “What is it?” Jenny pushed in through the doorway to stand beside him, eyes and nostrils burning. She gasped at the sight of ribboned canvas sheeting, all the strewn belongings that had been stored and protected for years, suddenly defiled, and moved to go for the dangling light bulb chain. Ray’s voice was hard and loud : “No.” He did it a third time, placing his light fingers atop a shoulder, stopping her in her tracks.

“Let’s take it slow here” his breathing had become somewhat labored. He moved the oval of light from point to point across the array of damaged cardboard boxes, some of which had been overturned and torn to shreds by what appeared to be a jagged cutting tool. What were obviously Scott’s belongings; clothing, fishing gear, a ball glove, photo albums, had been scattered all over the middle of the floor. The flashlight picked up some nasty details; defecation in blobs that further defaced the remnant’s of Scott’s life. Jenny stifled a sob and muttered “I can’t believe it... who would do this?” Ray stepped forward over and through the strewn items to pull the light bulb chain. The old shed came to ugly reality with sixty watts. “Vengeful thing, aren’t you?” Ray asked as he bent at the knees to retrieve something from the floor. Jenny looked over at his curious words, tears welling, and was shocked by the length of the golden tipped feather that he held up between them.

The third consecutive farmstead dream arrives in a way that finds Kevin aware more fully that he is in fact dreaming. This time he chooses to stay where he is standing, to wait. Everything is detailed as before, though an invisible sun is noticeably lower in the pale yellow sky. Kevin surmises that should he keep dream-visiting this cursed place, it will eventually become a night time setting; not a comforting thought as he stands in the crop field and keeps his vision fixed on both identical sets of buildings.

After the horror of the second dream, albeit morbidly fascinating when he reflected on its details later, Kevin had awoken not to barking but his own thrashing in the sheets. He rose immediately and went to the bedroom window where Whisky was sitting on his haunches, silently staring at him from the yard next door, linked in some bizarre way to these new troublesome nightmares. For this third visit, Kevin is consciously attempting to leave the astral setting but cannot summon the energy required. There is a rich loamy smell this time, that hangs as a fog bank would and sickens him with teases of horrible memories that may reveal themselves inevitably, against his will.

In the dream itself, Kevin isn’t aware of what he is clothed in until several stretches of time have fanned out in fear ripples from his epicenter. It gradually dawns on him that he is inside an oversized pair of coveralls. They are oil stained at the knees, are cuffed as though a much larger man had loaned them to Kevin; this is the suggestion that hits his stomach hard. The hinted unveiling of his actually belonging to this place in some awful undefined way... as he looks at the lines of forest perimeter that box him in between the horror farms, peripheral motion catches his attention. There she is again. Same woman. Same dress. Same waving and then summoning.

He stands firm. Dream heightened fear begins a thickened pounding of his heart; it thuds inside his chest beneath the dirty oversized coveralls. Kevin has an impulse to bolt for the opposite farmstead but realizes in that moment that she may very well be there also. Some form of mirrored embedded hopelessness is being shown to him, perhaps the flaws of his thinking in the world of the awake. He is young and bright enough to recognize the cusp of the symbolic suggestion in these dark new visits. As he watches the two handed come here motion from the distant figure, it occurs to him that she is also walking in his direction.

His feet are rooted like giant elms, down into that sickening fragrant soil. The wind picks up and kisses his nostrils swampy, dank, ripe with promises of unfolding fear. There is no way to even move, then. Kevin’s mind is alive in the split realities, analyzing itself as she ceases her beckoning wave and begins to casually walk into the rhubarb like crops. At least his home based reality has an escape plan; an exit to his fruition in London Ontario’s vastly more stimulating environment. This is utter helplessness. He has no desire to learn more about the woman, the farmstead, her reasons for wanting to die with a rope and Newton’s law.

At a point where she is still several hundred feet away, Kevin wheels around to view the other house, barn, silo, vehicles; nobody is visible and his every wish is to move in that direction but his feet are like anvils. He looks down to see that he has sunk to ankle level in the stink of the earth. His attempt to lift a foot free, fails. He cannot move. Looking back at the woman brings bursting terror when he sees that she is less than fifty yards distant, in the blink of an eye... dimly, back there somewhere in the household that he despises, Kevin realizes how badly he needs to urinate. He looks at the woman’s madness glazed eyes and she is saying something when he lets his bladder go into the coveralls, bending at the knees to squat and cower.

“You’d rather go run around out there” she is loud, hoarse, terrifying. “Out there with the others like you. Like how I used to be.” He squats and shames himself, begins to cry and attempt to speak or shout but can’t find enough air, and hears her coming to within steps of his pathetic form. As he looks up through the thick leafy growth and sees her looming there, eyes blazing with anger, veins standing forth in her brow, she appears younger still than in the second dream. She could be fifty, or slightly less. An awareness of each astral visit’s later day time stamp and the reversal of her years frames an awful ill defined question. What does it mean? What is she saying? Kevin fights to make a waking sound. He is sinking into the rich brown soil, suddenly to his knee caps, and spreads both shaking hands out to grab at thick plant stems. They prick his skin with transparent razor sharp needles that he hadn’t seen. “You stupid boy” she seethes. “Where is your camera?”

That single question acts as a dimensional gateway. The mention of a possession from his actual world, and one that he is emotionally attached to, sucks him down instantly into cool black earth past his thighs, waist, chest, up over his chin and eyes and back to his urine wet bedsheets. “Fuck...” his quavering voice lost to a horizontal vertigo, the pillow case soaked, his underwear soiled. He must act; this can’t continue apace. What can he do? If he kept dreaming of that place night to night, where was it all taking him? He rose gingerly, shamed and still frightened, to walk to the bedroom window even as his gut told him not to. Through a gap in the tall trees between their yards, Kevin could behold his neighbor, Bradley, hunched over the unmoving form of a once beautiful and vivaciously alive dog named Whisky.

“What... what is that?” Jenny stared at the feather in Ray’s fingers, easily as long as his forearm, and from there she looked at his eyes. They were unfocused, the pupils dilating in on the object in his grip. She took in the damage that littered the shed floor, felt an almost floating sense of release that was both wrong and inevitable. One of the photo albums had been torn apart at its spine. She looked from Ray and the feather to an old Polaroid of Scott with his fishing buddies of many years removed. “Thunderbird”, Ray said, trance voiced. He stepped back and turned toward the ripped up section of wood plank where one of the shed lane doors had been smashed into, broken away. Ignoring Jenny, seemingly in clairvoyant receiving mode, Ray ran the fingertips of his free hand along the jagged edges of wood. She asked quietly “what do you mean, thunderbird?”

He kept his back to her, one hand feeling the damaged plank edges, the other holding that massive feather. She scanned the littered floor and damaged boxes for another, but it was the only one. He spoke in a monotone with his head tilted up to look at the large hole that had been punctured into the old building. “Totem animal. Legend. Perhaps fact because of so many contemporary sightings... but I want to say, and I know this sounds crazy, this has a direct tie to your Scott. There is an intimate link here.”

He turned then to face her, sweat beads beginning to dot his forehead. “I know you loved him dearly, truly, but how well did you know him?” That question from any other person would have cut her to the quick, deeply offended her, but coming from Ray Townes in that raw moment, it was out beyond ego or personal injury. “I loved him” she offered, darting her eyes back to the fishing photo before refocusing on Ray. “Will you let me look at his things?” he asked gently, coming more fully into the space they occupied. Jenny nodded through a gigantic rippling fatigue, sadness, simmering anger. “What time is your flight tomorrow?” Ray looked down at the feather in his fingers, turning it slowly to examine its texture and coloration. “I have to be at the airport for nine in the morning, at the very latest.”

Jenny nodded again. “Will you stay here tonight?” The abruptness, the calm tone of it, took her by surprise but Ray seemed to have already known he would answer as he did.

“Of course.”