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

by Douglas Clegg

  His shoes hurt—they were the two-hundred-dollar pair Maria had bought for him in the city, and he never had liked them. They were too formal. If he had his way, he would’ve changed into an old pair of sneakers. Into a ragged pair of jeans, the ones he could still fit into from college, the ones that made him feel young. At thirty, he was feeling old and ragged himself, but in khakis and hurting shoes and an Eddie Bauer shirt and a sweater—and it was all cast aside in his mind because he felt the presence within him, the Other, perhaps his own insanity.

  He walked down Willowbranch, up Orchard, along Pepper Lane, into Belleview, until he came to the hills, the place where the suburban blight had not yet touched, and he went up into them to find the origin of the presence that had drawn words out of his mouth as he had sat with his brother and his brother s lover, and his mother- and father-in-law, and his wife at the dining room table and told them, in a booming voice, ‘The madman is among us, the murderer, he comes as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he is ravenous and here already only you sleepers refuse to wake,” and then the profanities, and then he had run from the table to the kitchen, which was when his wife dropped the first china plate. But this was only his beginning with the gift that had appeared from nowhere, the mind within his mind awakening.

  He became known for his predictions, for his ability to speak with the dear departed; that was the showbiz side of his life. He wrote a book called Touching Tomorrow, which sold in a half-assed sort of way. but it got him on Oprah, and by the time his second book came out, this one titled The Spirit Realm: The Afterlife and How To Communicate with Our Loved Ones, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks, rising to a solid spot at number three. For anyone else, all of this would have been wonderful, but Frost s ex-wife managed to get all the money that taxes and the lawyers and an unscrupulous business manager hadn’t managed to get; to say nothing of a rather leaky contract from Frost’s publisher.

  And also, his gambling. He gambled in Connecticut at Foxwoods, he gambled at Atlantic City, he gambled in Reno and Las Vegas, and he even gambled online.

  He was sure the voices would help him win, but it didn’t always happen that way. Sometimes, if he was playing the one-armed bandit, he’d plug the quarters in and come up with a good thousand-dollar win on an investment of maybe three or four hundred dollars; but he didn’t stop there. He’d plug the thousand back in and then end up losing a few hundred more. It was like farming—sometimes the crop was good, sometimes it was wasted, but he was a farmer after all, and putting the coins in the machine was just like pitching hay with the pitchfork; it seemed useless at times, but it rewarded him at other times.

  Sometimes it was a thousand more dollars; sometimes it was a bad crop.

  The voices never came to him when he gambled. The fabric of reality never ripped apart in the casinos.

  Was he poor? No doubt he felt poor, but his bills were often covered, and he lived modestly and chintzily, biting pennies as if he could draw blood from them, and then using those pennies to turn into quarters for the slot machines.

  5

  And it should’ve been enough, he knew. To wake up from the dream of his life, to the truth.

  But, of course, the voices didn’t just tell him good, sweet things. The voices told him about the shadows, as well. They asked for favors. They wanted a servant.

  He found he could not resist the voices inside him.

  And one dawn, he found himself standing over the dead body of a young woman.

  He remembered her from a dream. He remembered her with her long, elegant fingernails with beautiful, small, and perfect designs upon them. Her face, so fresh and sorrowful, as if she’d just lost a great love of her life and now was reduced to being at a crossroads—a bus station, perhaps, with a light rain falling, and her life was nearly half over, she would think, but he knew that her life was nearly over.

  The voices again, yes, he was sure they had brought him to this woman with one desire:

  To take away her hurt.

  And now, looking down at her, he wasn’t sure how much of it he had dreamed and how much had been his own doing.

  She was dead, but more than that, she was mutilated.

  He pressed his hands against the sides of his scalp and massaged, hoping the blood would go to his brain and he could remember what had happened. He had a slight panic, not from fear of discovery but from the fear that he had no control. That the voices were the power, and he was merely the pawn. But something had bent in time and reality, he was sure. Something had curved in the light of day—he had not killed her, but somehow his encounter with her had turned liquid and her molecules had shifted and boiled and turned around, and he vaguely remembered that her flesh had become like Turkish taffy in his fingers, and he had pulled the sweet, flowing thickness from her and spun the sugary confection of her life around and around and around in his hands. He had not killed her, but he had somehow made her atoms change their orbits and melt against each other, and the voices had managed it all, had orchestrated it, but they had not been the power.

  He had been the power.

  Her clothes were torn, her face barely recognizable. He didn’t know if he had done the damage to her. He only knew he stood over her as the sun’s first light came up, and he was in the woods. His body covered with sweat. His sweatshirt stained with what he presumed was her blood. He thought he might have tried to save her, perhaps from something that had lured her into these woods—some psycho who had brought her here, a demon lover who had then murdered her. And Frost had come upon her.

  Or did I kill her? How could I not remember that? How could the voices come into me and do that?

  And she was still there. Lingering. He felt her presence amid the great forest.

  She was dead, but not dead.

  Her voice was within him now.

  All right. This is how you collect the voices, he thought. Not every time, but sometimes. You bring them into you.

  You taste their souls.

  6

  He buried her deep in the woods—and by midafternoon he jogged back to his Chevy Suburban and felt the forgiveness of the dead woman with the razor grin on her face. Her voice was gathering together with the others within him. It was a power surge.

  Don’t do this often, he made a mental note. Don’t do this, but when you do, you grow a little, don’t you? You feel a little more about things. You are more connected.

  He felt her grace and was redeemed.

  After another hour or so, during which he drank himself into a state of oblivion with a phenomenally foul malt liquor, he wasn’t sure if he had really done what he remembered doing. Had he buried a woman at all, or had the fabric of reality shredded a bit and he had seen someone else doing this? He could not be sure, although, as he knew that he himself was a basically decent person, he would not normally be a party to murder. Or, if he had murdered a woman, he would not hide her body in some wooded area. He would no doubt go to the authorities, primarily because he didn’t like messes. Perhaps it had been a movie in his head: Perhaps the voices had transported him in his mind to a murder victim, but he had not in fact been there at all. Perhaps even the bit of blood on his sweatshirt (which he sliced into thousands of bits with a box cutter and then put each bit in various trash bags so that no one would ever sew the sweatshirt back together) had been imagined and was part of the hallucination that the voices brought to him.

  He decided that he must’ve imagined it all; it must’ve been a blank spot.

  Later, he knew there were other blank spots in his life like this. Times he could not account for his behavior. There were tastes in the back of his throat just as he opened his eyes to find himself driving to some unknown location, not remembering why he was on the road at all.

  And then, when the shit hit the fan, so to speak, it was because of a middle-aged woman named Cathy who had nearly been killed by a bus and he had told her—moments before—what to do if the bus came at her. He didn’t know her from
Adam, as they say, but that didn’t matter. The voices came out of him and told her which way to jump should the bus arrive too soon, and she had stared at him like he was crazy (people often did). But, apparently, the three-fifteen bus had arrived a few minutes early, right around the next corner of Oak Run and Graymeadow Drive, and she had indeed jumped a little to the right rather than her instinct, which was to scream and get hit, and her life had been spared. Now, this should’ve been a minor thing—for even the voices had been vague—but when Cathy told the story of her brief run-in with death (and the beginning of her lawsuit against the city bus line), it grew into a more prominent prediction.

  It made its rounds, as gossip often does, until it became a local legend.

  Then, when the voices came out of him again (against his will, mind you, because Frost did not want the attention), they came out big and blaring, and this time it was about schoolchildren at some school he had never heard of—a fire, the voices, said, and Death, and this, oddly enough, brought Frost to Hartford, Connecticut, for a local television broadcast about prophecy and second sight, and that was when he met Jack Fleetwood, who wanted to study him at some place called PSI Vista. It was also within that live broadcast that Frost had let the voices predict the train crash outside New Haven, a few minutes before the crash occurred.

  This made him famous, and his desire to get away from ordinary life intensified.

  Of course, he needed money for this.

  PSI Vista offered him ten thousand dollars to stay at their headquarters for three months. He had laughed at first at the offer because he knew that as a best-selling author he should be worth more, but within him, he knew that he wasn’t, and that he would need a fast infusion of easy cash in order to get by until Christmas. Ten thousand smackeroos would be a nice amount to take to Foxwoods and play the slots and turn it into maybe a hundred thousand clams or more. Then he could take that money and turn his life around. These are the things he told himself.

  The PSI Vista headquarters were nothing more than a crumbly brownstone on Jane Street, two blocks from the Hudson River, in Manhattan. It was the home of Jack Fleetwood and his daughter, Miranda, an annoying teenager who seemed to have read every book ever written—at least, she knew all the ones Frost had ever heard of. Frost occupied the top-floor bedroom for his stay. A staff of three others worked the first two floors during the weekdays, and sometimes interesting guests dropped in. There were lots of books and videos about ghosts and psychic phenomena, and Frost enjoyed spending time going through it all. It felt educational, although some of it sounded suspiciously like bullshit to him. Still, it was cozy and clinical at the same time, with the vast library at the basement and first-floor level, as well as the two bedrooms and an office on the second floor, and the large suite on the third.

  The only therapy that Frost refused during his stay was hypnosis; however, he was happy to talk about anything he knew about his extraordinariness whenever asked.

  7

  Interview Six

  Subject: Frost Crane

  Q: So let’s get back to the nature of your experience.

  Subject: You mean, the sweats?

  Q: Sure. The fever. The feeling you get just before it comes on.

  Subject: I feel like I’m going to vomit, basically. And then I feel good. Not just good, but so good, it’s like I took a drug and I don’t ever want to not feel that way. The sweats are only in the beginning. The cold feeling, too. And then I start to feel warm and bright.

  Q: Bright?

  Subject: Yeah, bright. Like a thousand flashbulbs go off, you know how that happens? I mean, you know how sometimes if you use a flash on a camera and it goes off, it does more than just light everything up, it sort of scorches it with light? It makes it brighter than it’s supposed to be, and then you look at the picture later, and it looks just like normal light, but when you were there, taking the picture, it’s like that flash painted over everything with this brightness. Like an essence of brightness.

  Q: Like it’s hyper-daylight?

  Subject: More like the light ripped off the skin of the world, and it’s what’s underneath everything. It’s light, only most people don’t get it. Most people are ordinary. But see, I get it. I get the brightness, and I get to see under things. But it’s like a ton of flashbulbs all going off, and it’s only a glimpse, and the feeling fades fast. I kind of feel cold again, when it’s gone.

  Q: And the voices come then?

  Subject: Right. After the brightness is gone. Like whatever rips back that skin has gotten out. Or sort of like—I guess—when you open up a helium balloon. You ever do that? You open up a helium balloon and suck it in, and for maybe ten or so seconds you start talking like Mickey Mouse. That’s what it’s like. Brightness and Mickey Mouse. And a little bit of pitching hay.

  Q: Pitching hay?

  Subject: I grew up on a farm. My least favorite chore was making sure the animals got fed, and making sure the stables and bam were cleaned out. But I usually got stuck with it. I hated it. But sometimes, when I was digging the pitchfork into the horseshit or the hay, I’d just go on autopilot and time would pass. Sometimes for hours. I wouldn’t even know that more than twenty minutes had passed, and sometimes whole days went by if I was just using the pitchfork. That’s what this is like—it’s like something that you start and that it just goes on without you even knowing it’s happening.

  Q: And the rage. Want to talk about that?

  Subject: I wouldn’t call it rage. Not exactly. Q: What would you call it?

  Subject: Maybe fury. Fury at having to get the silence. The darkness. To not be in that light with those voices anymore. It’s like being alone after your best friend leaves you. It’s like locusts in late summer. That’s what my mother would’ve called it.

  Q: Locusts? On the farm?

  Subject: It was like that. She used to say “It’s a locust summer,” and that meant it was like when the locusts came down in a dry August and just devoured the crops, the time my father had gone away, and it was just my brothers and me and my mother, and she said “I feel so alone,” and then when she was feeling alone again, she would call it a locust summer, because it’s like everything is going wrong at once and the locusts are raining down and the noise is loud but you can’t do anything about it.

  Q: So ... do you mean, when the voices leave ...

  Subject: I mean what I mean. It’s like the noise of the world comes back, and what kept things clear in my head—the voices—they’re gone.

  Q: Do you understand everything the voices say?

  Subject: No. Not hardly. Only sometimes. Like that whole train thing. I said it, but when I was saying it, the voices were saying other things to me. It’s like what I say is confusing because what they say is so clear.

  Q: They don’t say things directly. Things you’re going to see?

  Subject: You still don’t get it. I don’t see things like that. I hear them.

  Q: You heard the train accident?

  Subject: No. Christ, you still don’t get it. Okay, this is just too hard to explain unless you’ve been there. The voices are saying things to me that are creating images as soon as they say them. Just words. Just chants. And when I say them out loud, sometimes they become real.

  Q: Do you mean to say you believe you caused the train accident in Connecticut?

  Subject: I mean to say. What a phrase. It’s so ordinary. This is not about ordinary. This is about different. This is about better. This is about special. And yes.

  Q: Yes?

  Subject: Yes, I caused the train accident because of what I said. The voices and the brightness give me the power so that my words create reality.

  Q: You “create” reality?

  Subject: I told you it’s hard to explain if you’re not in it. I mean I can make things change in life if I say what I connect with in the bright moment. When the voices are there. I can bend the way things work. For just a second.

  Q: So the train, and the woman who al
most got hit by the bus: by saying what you did, you caused those things?

  Subject: I brought them into being. Yes. It was my will. My will does this. I am the one who opens the place within myself so that I can hear the voices. They would not exist without me. They are my choir.

  8

  After three months of living in the brownstone, doing all the tests, speaking at the lunches that brought in contributions to PSI Vista, Frost Crane had to go home again. He hated saying good-bye to Fleetwood’s daughter, Miranda, who at sixteen was already becoming voluptuous and sensual without seeming cheap to him. He had been something of a star—a celebrity—at the Foundation, among its tweedy members and art-house curiosity-seekers. But that would all change—he was out the door with a few thousand in his pocket, and even that he soon lost after a bus ride down to Atlantic City to participate in one of his favorite pastimes.

  This time, home wasn’t a nice suburban house outside Boston. Maria now owned the house. She owned everything they’d ever had together, and then some. This time, home was a little studio apartment in Albany, New York, and a job he loathed in the state tax office, and he felt again like the little man with the little ordinary life, and he knew that he might as well be dead, because the voices weren’t coming to him very often.

  And then the phone call arrived from Jack Fleetwood and, a week later, the check and contract, and suddenly October was looking good to Frost Crane again as he thought of the adventure to come: a few days in some mansion and possibly the chance to escape the ordinary forever.

  9

  From Frost’s Journal

  “What’s probably the craziest thing to do, is the very thing to do (aphorism # 210).

  “Go where angels fear to tread (aphorism # 211).

  “Someday I need to collect all these little platitudes and put them in a book. I think they’d be useful to people, particularly people like me.