Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  “I think you should pull out that little gun you own and point it right at him and tell him to get out of your life. But that’s only what I think.”

  “And .. . that’s your solution,” Cali said, having to smile despite herself. The wine brought a whole new buzz, and now Bev was getting goofy.

  “Tell me about the murder.”

  “You know I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Damn. How about a hint?”

  “All right. It involves the kind of people we hate.”

  “You mean rich people with inheritances?”

  “Yep.”

  “So it was a money murder?”

  “Bev. No. It was a murder. That’s all.”

  “A woman killed her boyfriend who treated her like shit half the time?”

  Cali looked at her telephone, as if she had no idea what crazy person was talking on the other end. Then she hung it up. The warm sisterly feeling was gone. Cali didn’t want to talk about the homicide. She didn’t really want to talk about anything. She just wanted someone to talk to. Someone who would just listen.

  She went to feed her cat, and afterward she opened up her notebook computer on the couch to check her email. Sitting in her inbox: twelve notes she hadn’t opened in a few days, just because she hadn’t wanted to write back to anyone. She looked through them, deleting as she went. And suddenly a ding sound went off. and a pop-up window arrived on her laptop’s screen. It was Bev, sending an Instant Message to her.

  Sorry for digging! Bev wrote.

  Hi, Sneaky, Cali wrote back.

  Hang up the phone on me, will you? So what’s the deal?

  The deal is, I don’t want to talk about any of this. How are the girls?

  Getting competitive for my bathroom, that’s how they are. And Jimmy’s not keeping up with math, and Mike blames the teacher. You know who I blame.

  Jimmy’s not going to be a math whiz, I guess.

  You guess good. He can still do better than a C. So you okay?

  Of course.

  You didn’t sound all that okay on the phone.

  If I tell you something, Cali wrote. Then stopped herself.

  Bev wrote back: If you tell me something, I will keep it a secret. I promise. Remember the promises I’ve always kept?

  True.

  You love him?

  I don’t know.

  He hurt you?

  No. Not hurt. It’s something else. Something I haven’t really talked about with you. Or him. Yet.

  Several seconds went by before she wrote anything further.

  Then Cali typed in: I think it’s getting worse.

  Worse?

  Like when I was eight and I couldn’t stop it. Like in church when I started that fit.

  Oh, Cali.

  It’s taking me over again. I had a blackout, only not quite a blackout. Something else took over. It wasn’t good. It was pretty awful. But it happened after. It happened when I was in his car. After dinner. And then up here. Someone took me over and used me for something, Bev. I don’t know what. I can’t really explain it.

  But it was like those fits, only I didn’t start attacking anyone. It wasn’t like that. It was ...

  Oh my God.

  It was sexual. It was awful I feel really dirty. I feel really disgusting.

  I’ll get in the car and drive up tonight. You shouldn’t be alone. Not after that.

  No, I’m fine. I have Gelfling.

  A cat is not going to make you feel secure.

  Yes, he is. He’ll sleep next to my face and I’ll have cat dreams all night and feel completely secure. Seriously. I’m fine now. Just shaken.

  Not stirred.

  Absolutely, Cali typed. ‘Night, Sis.

  ‘Night, noodle-nose. Call me tomorrow.

  Will do. And thanks, Cali typed. She was about to write “Nighty-night” when a new Instant Message appeared on her screen.

  18

  It’s me, the message read, but the sender’s identification was some screwy set of symbols that were unreadable.

  Me who?

  Me the one who lives inside you now. POOR OLD LADY SHE SWALLOWED A FLY I DON’T KNOW WHY SHE SWALLOWED A FLY PERHAPS SHE’LL DIE.

  19

  Cali stared at the words on the screen. She quickly went to her Buddy List on the screen and blocked all Instant Messages. Telling herself it was just the usual Internet nut, she checked for shoes at Bluefly.com. She didn’t find the shoes she wanted but ended up buying an Amy Chan purse she’d been lusting after for nearly a month and then went to look at books at Barnesandnoble.com and bought a few mysteries, including two of her favorites, Carolyn Hart’s latest cozy mystery, and a book called Houses With Spirit: Investigations into the Paranormal by Jack Fleetwood and the PS I Vista Foundation. She had met Fleetwood twice, at conferences in Manhattan, and he had been urging her to join him and a few others for some investigation up the Hudson Valley. Which she had decided was the right thing to do. Get out of town in a few days. Get away from all this.

  Get away from the Getaway.

  Maybe I need to read up on it before I commit to anything.

  Then she got offline and shut down her laptop. She checked the latch and dead bolt on her front door and checked all the windows. All locked. Outside her bedroom window, a siren was howling. She glanced out at Wayne Street and saw the usual drunks hanging out on the corner, near the bar that seemed to be open at all hours; then across Grove to the brief line of shops there.

  One o’clock and all is well

  Then she went to get her gun, putting it on her bedside table just in case she got scared.

  Just in case someone was thinking of bothering her.

  She slept that night with Gelfling, her cat, snuggled under her arm, but even in the comfort and warmth, it took another three hours to fall asleep.

  In her dream: a little boy’s voice whispered, poor old lady, she swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  Someone took a pitchfork and rammed it into the freshly turned earth.

  For some reason the words came to Frost Crane in, not a dream or a vision, but a voice.

  The voice was his own, and he said the words aloud, and he said more, but it felt like he was spilling, as if he had opened his lips and the pins and toads of someone else’s mind were pouring from within him:

  Pitchfork threatens. Fire burns. Birds fly. Glass breaks. Nail holds. Bird wings. Step closer. Wild birds. Red sun. Shall not, shall not, shall not.

  And then he began chanting something, some kind of prayer or hunting call, a series of words within a rhythm that he could not understand.

  That was the beginning for him, and it struck him rather late in life, this talent.

  Unlike his love for gambling, in this game it always came up aces.

  2

  “We dream through our lives.

  “Lulled by television and movies and books, these fictions of heavens we allow others to give us while they sell Coke and Tide and Mercury Sables, while they take our own dreams away, and these beautiful celebrities who we believe are fully awake while we dream, living the lives we know we can’t awaken to.

  “Then one day, when we wake to what our lives have become, we long for the dream again. We find other dreams. We search for dreams. We pay for dreams. Words like freedom and illusion mix together until we think we’re all individuals sitting down on a Monday night to watch the latest TV drama or on a Thursday afternoon, a television judge presiding over the lives we can’t possibly live, when in fact, millions of us are there; or in the theaters, as we watch Tom Cruise make love, or Arnold Schwarzenegger make war, or Katharine Hepburn knowing there is no difference between the two. Our dreams live our lives.

  “We take the dreams available, because we have lost what brought us to the dreaming in the first place.

  “The voices came to me and they said things I don’t understand. And now others are trying to make so
mething out of them to say that I can prophesy things. This is crazy. I know it. All I’m saying is we all know these things, what will happen in the near-future, maybe a few minutes from now, because I’m convinced that time bends somehow within our consciousness, so that we can sniff out the near-future (not the future, because I did not predict the train crash outside New Haven except ten minutes before it happened, and I only happened to be on television in Hartford then by the slightest coincidence, so if I hadn’t let it out of my mouth then, maybe I wouldn’t have made the ‘CBS Evening News,’ and maybe I wouldn’t have undergone these damn tests and this damn study and maybe I’d be living a normal life again.)

  “I don’t believe in the normal or the ordinary. I think that’s Death. I think the ordinary human life is like the shit of existence, and it lives under my feet, and I refuse to step back into it, to become mired into that cosmic crap known as the human heart or the human condition, because in fact, as we all know, it sucks. Can you watch your father lose himself to Alzheimer’s (as I have and as many of you have), watch a man who is balanced and steady and sharp, a man who took care of his family, damn it, and did good most of his life, a man with conscience and care, a man who loved his son and whose son loved him, who now has no idea whose face belongs to who and is unsure as to whether he ever had an existence before ten minutes ago? Or a woman who once you looked up to as “mother,” who guided and prodded you and created a sense of the wealth of the world and the sights to be seen and the love to be nurtured, who has become bitter and cold, and then breaks parts of her body just to feel the pain of life rather than the numbness of the everlasting pills? Is that where ordinary life leads?

  “I have felt it myself, in the world I lived in before the moment of my liberation. The moment before I got the smell of it, the voices that came into me and took me out of this human excrement called ‘ordinary life,’ where the weak thrive and the strong are crushed and people who call themselves good and Christian and kind are out there stomping on people, stomping on them, while I have to watch it in silence (before the voices, mind you, before I HEARD WHAT I HEARD) and just be ordinary and typical and shut my mouth up with my own fist to keep from saying what I’m really thinking.

  “Well, you can tell where this is going now, this ramble, this brutal spit in the eye of the world that I find reprehensible and lacking. My mother, dying by her own mind, into an ordinary sunset, and my father, his mind in some other dimension as he treats me with the kindness of one who can’t remember, and my wife—my ex-wife—suing me for this, suing me for that, well, she can have the ordinary house and the ordinary doom.

  “I will tell you a secret, Dear Diary.

  “I will show you my soul.

  “My soul is a good one. Despite my nastiness in this little leather bound book. My soul is a good one, and for 98 percent of all life I intend to do good and be kind and generous, but there is 2 percent of me that is completely monstrous. Now, think about this: Most humans are monstrous at one time or another of their lives. I don’t mean they all murder, though I would guess a lot have murder in their hearts. But most humans have done bad things; some, more than others. Some, inadvertently. Hell, you’d have to be one of those Hindu monks who can’t even kill mosquitoes for fear of harming karma and the universe, if you lived your life without doing something bad. So, let’s say I live until I’m seventy-five. That’s pretty much what I’m planning. So out of seventy-five years, I do good, say, sixty-eight of those years. This is not a bad life, right? And let’s say, seven of those years, I do some bad stuff. Nothing major. Not like pushing a button to send off a nuclear warhead or something. Bad in a way that maybe only I know it’s bad, and maybe whoever was the immediate recipient knows it’s bad. Okay, so I do bad stuff for seven years total of a life of seventy-five years.

  “Does that make me bad?

  “Monstrous.

  “Give you another what-have-you: say a guy is twenty, and robs a store. In robbing the store he shoots—and kills—the cashier. The guy gets caught, and by twenty-one he’s serving a life sentence. Now, twenty years later, he’s out. Some people call this fair, some call it wrong, but think about it: if the guy lives ‘til ninety, the murder of the cashier was not his life. It was a little monstrous moment, am I right? It was a mistake which seemed right—for him—-at the time.

  “Another thing I’ve learned in my whole ‘fabric of reality shredding.’ Maybe life is predetermined, and you can’t go against your fate.

  “Of course, I wouldn’t tell this to anyone, but I have to write it here, because I am beginning to suspect this is true. After all, the voices tell me about things that are going to happen. I believe I’m affecting reality by speaking about them. But maybe it’s all written down somewhere, and we just step in the dogshit of existence.

  “You with me on this?

  “Maybe the guy who shot the cashier was acting a part, and his real life was about prison, and his real life was about getting over the monstrosity of his youth.

  “Just one little thing I’d thought I’d share: I awoke one day with blood on my fingertips.

  “I have no idea whose blood it was. Maybe it’s mine. Maybe it’s not.

  “I wallow in the extraordinary. These voices I claim for my own personal revelation, and every one of you in the world could have this, as well, if you’d open yourself to it. Just open your mind to what can come from it, let your body be a doorway to a higher consciousness, you fools, and know that to be like this is to be cursed above the ordinary and to be exalted beyond the pulp of flesh and blood.”

  3

  Frost Crane awoke from the dream that had been his marriage of eleven years, the dream of what his job had been, of what his future had been, and was plunged into a brief reality. The reality came back, at times, like a burp of cosmic proportions, and while he tried to make this burp happen often, it only came to him now and again. But when it did arrive, it illuminated the landscape of life for him.

  The phenomenon began with curses.

  Frost knew the moment he said them that he’d regret the string of obscenities just loosed from his clenched soul. They’d just drawn up and thrown themselves out at Maria, and she had taken it like a good soldier with a minimum of china destruction and only one major obscenity back at him.

  “You loser,” she said, and crossed the small kitchen to the sink, the plate she’d been carrying dropped to the floor, smashed with cranberry sauce and marshmallow-fucked yams and wishbone—yes, Thanksgiving, he thought as he watched her, this had to happen during Thanksgiving dinner with her mother and father in their dining room, with a baby in the crib, with his brother and his brother’s boyfriend probably trying to decide when exactly they should leave, and with the two pumpkin pies Maria had fixed still cooling on top of the Hotpoint stove.

  “I just can’t do it anymore,” he said.

  “Now?” she asked. “Now? Right now? You couldn’t have done this yesterday. You couldn’t have done this the day after tomorrow, after they’d left? It had to be today. Five o’clock. Before the pumpkin pie?”

  His hands felt heavy with nothing to hold. “I feel dead.”

  “You feel dead,” she said. “Well, that’s news. Just hold it in. Just now. Hold it in. Forget about feeling dead. For one hour. For one hour in eleven years, you go to that dining room with me and you forget about how you feel.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I am a fucking loser.”

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Someone else?”

  “No. I told you. It’s uncontrollable.”

  “This need?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed, turning to him again. Her face was slick with tears and perspiration, and her light brown hair clung to her neck. “Please tell me this is a prank. Some kind of joke? Please don’t tell me this is about getting me back for the time with the percolator.”

  “No. It’s not. I’m sorry.”

  “Christ,” she said. “Why don’t you go for a long wal
k? Through the garage. You don’t need to go back in there. I’ll tell them the truth. I’ll tell them. I’ll make it work.”

  “It doesn’t work,” he said.

  And then the voice came through him again. A wind, is what it felt like. An inspiration.

  An obscenity.

  4

  His walk was a long one, after all.

  He had begun believing that what he’d felt was insanity. He didn’t feel any different when he went into the garage, around the mess of their bicycles, the Maytag, the boxes of books he’d never unpacked four years before when they’d moved in, and then, when he pressed the button, the garage door swung open—twilight there among the sticks of trees. It was arctic cold—and all he had on was a red sweater his mother had given him the year before as a Christmas gift. His mother, still the fanner’s wife. The farmer was dead—Frost’s father, who was equal parts laborer and warm papa to a brood of children, of which Frost was the middle child. His mother, hair pulled back, wrinkles like lines of corn, ever the farmer’s wife. The bales! she would say when he and his brothers were out working. Pitch the hay. Pitch it, boys, you Frost, your back, use your back, you’re strong, pitch, supper’ll be good! Now he was removed from it all, the sweater a reminder of his mother’s industry: The wool was from their sheep. The wool was her love, and it held him in the world he’d stepped into after leaving the farm to his older brothers: He was a suburban farmer now, but it was time to pitch the hay and harvest and shuck and make the new crops grow, the crops of suburban quiet, the harvest of discontent. The suburban homes along the stretch of blankness called Willowbranch Drive were undisturbed by the chill—the straggles of trees at the edge of the curbs, the abandoned tricycle at the edge of a quarter-acre lawn, the glimpses of other families at their windows with wineglasses, with pies, with all the things that each had and believed that only they owned it.