Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  For ten or fifteen minutes, we ambled along quietly, looking anywhere but at each other, until we came to a break in the tree line beside us, and there Carolyn turned to enter the woods. It wasn’t a beaten path she led us down, like I expected, but a cement walkway that went straight up to a white one-story building with cornflower-blue trim around its windows and four pillars holding up an overhanging roof. On either side of the walkway stood rows of pots for flowers, which were just starting to push their way out of the soil. When Carolyn stopped in front of the building, she bowed her head and whispered something, then raised her head again and opened the front door.

  From the outside, the place looked a bit like the VFW Hall back in Temperance, and I half expected to find a slew of old-timer veterans inside, sitting on folding chairs around cafeteria tables, arguing about politics and sharing their faded war stories. But what I found instead were rows and rows of blue-cushioned chairs and, at the back of the darkened room, an altar flanked by tall blue-glass lanterns.

  “Is this a church?” I whispered, immediately adopting the hushed tone sacred places inspire, and Carolyn turned her wrinkled face toward the ceiling, as if some kind of spiritual force roosted in the rafters. Slowly, she turned in a circle, then looked down at me again and shrugged.

  “We call it a temple,” she said. “A place for healing. It’s where your grandfather did much of his work. Right here within these walls.”

  “My grandfather?”

  Carolyn nodded.

  “I don’t know much about him,” I said. “My mom never talks about him, other than to say she had a falling-out with her family years ago. She doesn’t even have any pictures of him around the house. Who was he? What was he like?”

  Carolyn frowned at that, and shook her head. Then she pinched her thumb and forefinger together and ran them across her lips like a zipper. I nodded. I understood that whatever story my mother had told—whatever spell she’d cast over so many of us—prevented Carolyn from giving me the answers I wanted. At least direct answers.

  Carolyn was taking in the place with a nostalgic gaze now, as if she’d been frozen in a cryogenic chamber for years and had only woken from her deep sleep upon my arrival the day before. I didn’t get any of her good feelings about the place, though. The room was strange. Spooky. Even if the grandfather I’d never met had done some kind of work in this place, I wanted to leave instead of lingering in the temple’s weird blue shadows.

  “I can tell you a few things,” Carolyn said when she eventually reached the altar. Her back was to me, so her voice was slightly muted. “The cracks in your mother’s story continue to widen, allowing me to slip some things through. Things that won’t disturb the story’s essence.”

  I bit the corner of my lip, then said, “What kind of things?”

  “Some say this is a holy place,” Carolyn said, raising her hands, palms up, as if she were about to invoke a god. “Some say that the ties between this world and the one beyond it are stronger here. Your grandfather always said he could feel the energy he needed to heal people more when he came to this place.”

  “He was a healer?” I asked.

  “He was,” said Carolyn. She sounded proud of this fact, as if he’d been a judge or a police officer, some authority figure out in normal society.

  “Could he really heal people?” I asked.

  “I saw him do it every summer,” said Carolyn, nodding with the firmness of a true believer. “Right here in this room. I hear he sometimes did it in Temperance, too, for people he trusted to keep his secrets. But always here, every summer, people would come to him in the temple and he would heal them.”

  “How could he do that?” I asked.

  “Do you, as I suspect, know what it is to reach across to someone?”

  I nodded and said, “I do.”

  “Well, it’s like that,” said Carolyn. “The same way you can see the thoughts inside someone if you reach across to them. Just like that, he could see inside people, could see what made them ill. And sometimes he could take their illness out of them.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know how, really,” Carolyn said, turning to face me again. “I was never able to do that, you see. It’s far beyond my abilities. But the way it looked, he’d touch them wherever they hurt and would somehow pull the sickness toward his fingertips, like a magnet pulls metal. And when he had all of the illness in his hands, he’d jump back and walk it to the front door over there and he’d scatter the sick on the wind. You could see it all go away. You could see it all fly off like ashes.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Carolyn said, “Serious as a heart attack.”

  “Could he stop one of those, too?” I asked, thinking of my poor dad clutching his chest in his tree stand a few months earlier.

  She shook her head. “Your grandfather always said that those are too quick. One of the things that happen too fast for a healer to catch hold of.”

  “Too quick,” I repeated, grimacing at the bad luck I’d had to be born into a family like this one.

  “Too quick,” Carolyn repeated. “Too quick for him to save even his own wife when one took her.”

  “I wish you could tell me more,” I said.

  “I wish I could too,” said Carolyn. “But despite the cracks in your mother’s story, it’s still a strong one. Come on. There’s another place I want to show you.”

  We left the temple and took up another path nearby. This one led us away from the cottage-lined streets into the thick forest surrounding them, where the trees towered high into the sky. They must have been a hundred years old, at least. You didn’t see much old-growth forest like this outside of protected areas any longer, and being inside here, beneath such grand old trees, made me feel small and more like any other human being, which was a comfort.

  The path led us deep into the woods, until suddenly we entered a shaded grove where rows of park benches surrounded an old stump. A stump that was so wide and flat on top, it looked like it served as a platform for people to stand on. To speak from.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Inspiration Stump,” said Carolyn, smiling. “When people come to Lily Dale for the summer, these benches will all be full, and the mediums will take turns standing in front of the stump to give messages to the visitors. We used to stand on the stump itself, but over the years it was being damaged by the constant wear, so we put that little ornamental fence around it, see, and now we stand in front of the stump to draw on its energy. It’s a sacred place. You can see more clearly from it, you can hear better because of it, you can feel more than usual.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

  I looked back and forth between Carolyn and the stump, cautiously considering whether I wanted any of those things to happen. I was already too open to the things of the invisible world. They already wandered into my line of sight at random moments, flickering to life like optical illusions, whispering in my ears at night. Why would I want to open myself up even further to their communications?

  In the end, though, I knew Carolyn was trying to give me something she couldn’t explain in words. So I moved toward the stump slowly and stood in front of the little wrought-iron fence surrounding it. When I looked back, Carolyn had already taken a seat in one of the empty rows of benches. Sitting with her hands clasped together on her lap, she nodded at me like a teacher might, encouraging me with a smile. “Actually,” she said, “I think you should do something we don’t do in Lily Dale any longer. I think you should get up on the stump.”

  “On the stump?” I echoed, raising my eyebrows as I looked at it.

  Carolyn nodded vigorously. “Yes,” she said. “The stump. No one has to know about it. It’ll be between you, me, and the spirits.”

  “Um,” I said, trying to be polite. “Okay. Maybe it’ll…inspire me.” The thing had an aura of magic about it, sure, especially when Carolyn
talked about it. But really it was just an old stump in the middle of an old-growth forest.

  All the same, I lifted one leg over the fence, then the other, and went up a set of stairs, one, two, three, stopping just before I stepped onto the surface of the stump itself. I stared at it for a moment. A slab of stone had been placed on top of it, smooth and gray. And as I stared down at that slab, a strong wind picked up and blew through the grove, moving the trees back and forth, rattling the new leaves as if spirits rustled through them, urging me to take the last step, urging me to let them help me.

  Wincing, worried that I might be electrocuted when my foot finally touched it, I took the last step onto the stump’s surface. And when I stood on top of the stone slab, I braced myself for whatever might come next.

  At first nothing happened. But after a minute the soles of my feet began to feel warm, as if I were standing on a heated floor. And the longer I stood there, the hotter they grew. Then the heat began to travel up the length of my body, inch by inch, moment by moment, until it reached my ankles, my shins, my knees. Then both of my legs seemed to catch fire. There was no real fire, though, just that faint heat and then sparks flashing, until it looked like my legs were made of fire instead of flesh—two pillars of volcanic light—and I looked down, helpless, frightened.

  The fire continued to travel up my torso, my chest and my arms, my neck. Then I was drowning in flames, choking on fire. Light flared behind my eyes, opening up like a series of fireworks, the way it sometimes felt before one of my migraines. I wanted to jump off the stump, to avoid whatever was coming next, but I couldn’t move no matter how hard I tried. I tried to scream, but when I finally forced my mouth open, another voice—the voice of the boy whose mother had died in the Living Death Tree back in Temperance—that boy’s scream was the one to come out.

  Dobry Jablonski screamed. The old woman—his mother’s friend Lisbeth—had already managed to pack his meager belongings: a wooden whistle his father had whittled for him, a shirt his mother had made for him. Now Lisbeth was sealing up the shack in which his family had existed together for several years after moving to Temperance, Ohio, where Dobry’s father had said they would make a better life. They’d only been there a year before his father had begun to cough up blood, though, and within months Dobry and his mother had buried him. Dobry’s mother, too, was now dead. Whether his eyes were open or closed, though, Dobry couldn’t help but still see her hanging in the tree where she had died for him. Even now, days after she’d been buried, when he went near the Lockwood orchard, he could see his mother’s ghost in the tree.

  “You must stop this, right now,” Lisbeth said as she shook him by his narrow shoulders. The boy had begun to scream when she removed a portrait of his parents from the wall. “You have already said something terrible, done something terrible. Something that you cannot take back. If you cannot control yourself, you will do so again without thinking. How many people do you want to hurt?”

  Dobry didn’t know what she was talking about, though. “To name a thing,” Lisbeth told him, “brings the thing into your possession, under your control. But a great responsibility is undertaken when you do this. To be a master of something, or someone,” she added in a dark tone, “means you are bound to them as much as they are bound to you. You did not think of this when you made your curse, did you?”

  Lisbeth shook her head, disgusted, and left him standing there as she moved to bar the windows with planks of wood. “No,” she muttered as she put a sense of order to the shack Dobry’s father had built, wiping the last crumbs from the table so that vermin did not invade. “No, how could you think of this? You do not know better. Your mother did not teach you this part. Your mother, she is shaking her head in heaven right now, regretting what she did not tell you. Now, though, you will learn from Lisbeth. And from others like us.” Lisbeth stopped to look around the room one last time, and to tuck a few strands of sweaty gray hair back under her babushka.

  “My mother is not in heaven!” Dobry shouted. She was still here on earth, still caught in the tangled branches of the apple tree where she had died for him.

  Lisbeth folded her hands in front of her stomach and said, “This too is because of you, now, isn’t it?”

  And Dobry began to scream louder and louder, as if his voice could shatter every word she’d said.

  Lisbeth is a red-faced hag, Dobry thought as the old woman loaded him into a car she had borrowed to complete her final duties to Dobry’s mother. I followed them, claiming the backseat quietly, hoping the boy and the woman wouldn’t notice my presence inserted into their lives from the future, a watcher brought there by way of an ancient tree stump in Lily Dale, New York. They were seers too, after all.

  When Lisbeth climbed into the driver’s seat, she turned the ignition over and over, but the engine whinnied as if it would never start. And then, finally, it roared to life, making the vehicle shudder.

  Dobry watched the woman from the corner of his eye as she looked ahead at the rutted roads, driving them toward Warren, the city where Lockwood had promised to put Dobry in jail for stealing apples. Her face looked like melted wax. It dripped with age, the skin pooling in various places: under her eyes, beneath her jawline. Lisbeth had been his mother’s best and first friend in Temperance. She had appeared on their doorstep only days after their arrival in that little scratch-in-the-earth place, bearing gifts of thread and yarn for his mother and a basket of food that would last them several days. Dobry could remember how his mother hadn’t acted surprised by Lisbeth’s sudden appearance, could remember how Lisbeth had told his mother, “Welcome, fellow traveler,” and how his mother had smiled and said she’d worried there wouldn’t be others like her where they were going. Dobry thought his mother had meant she’d feared there would be no Poles in Temperance, but while Lisbeth did share the kinship of their homeland, it was something else his mother had referred to. He could see that now. Too late, as always.

  At ten years old, Dobry learned what his mother had been talking about. This was when his father, after dying, began to come to him in his dreams, and sometimes even in Dobry’s waking hours, when his eyes were wide open. His mother had told him the truth then, when it was clear that he was like her. “You are a lucky one,” she’d said.

  And Dobry had said, “What’s a lucky one?”

  “Someone who sees,” she told him.

  “Everyone but the blind can see,” Dobry countered.

  His mother had shaken her head slowly, her gaze steady. She put a finger to the side of his face, near his left eye, tapped it gently on the thin bone of his temple. “No,” she said. “I am not speaking of sight. I am speaking of visions. Not everyone sees what you see. Not everyone sees what you will come to see in your lifetime, child.”

  In Warren, Lisbeth took Dobry to the train station, and they boarded the line to Erie, Pennsylvania, where an hour later they transferred to go on to Jamestown, New York. Dobry felt anxiety flutter within his stomach like a caged bird after they stepped down to the platform there, in a much bigger city than he’d ever been to. He looked around at the bustling station and asked, “Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

  Lisbeth held one hand over his head, as if she might lower it to affectionately stroke his hair. After a moment, though, she thought better and took the hand away. “You will see,” she said. “Be patient.”

  Later that afternoon, she hired a driver to take them out of Jamestown, a city full of smoke and the noise of factories and the clamor of cars and trains. It was more than Dobry could take in all at once. The fields of Temperance were what he’d become accustomed to. But the streets of Jamestown soon fell away from the car windows, and after a while Dobry looked back to find the city buildings jutting up like the peaks of lean black mountains in the distance.

  He didn’t see me there, behind him, looking over his shoulder. He pinched his lower lip between his teeth for just an instant, then looked back at the road in front of him.

  Ahe
ad, the road wound and dipped as the car traced the outline of a lake. Surrounded by trees, Dobry couldn’t see anything but a flurry of leaves float past, and the clouds of dust that formed in the road behind the car, sparkling like molten gold whenever a beam of sunlight passed through them.

  Later, after falling asleep against Lisbeth’s side, Dobry blinked awake as the car pulled into a gravel drive that curved around the front of a three-story hotel: an inn with its shutters still open, the eyes of the house staring as they approached.

  The hotel had a wide front porch held up by white pillars, and in all of the windows the shades were half drawn. The land around the building looked like it belonged in a park, manicured to perfection. And the tall trees cast the perfect shade against the inn’s white walls. People sat along the wide wraparound porch at small tables, drinking glasses of iced tea, wearing formal clothes, boaters and bow ties, the newest fashions. A man standing on the front porch took a watch from his jacket pocket to examine the hour. He twisted his mustache, clicked the lid shut, and slipped the watch back into his pocket. It reminded Dobry of the silver pocket watch Lockwood had given him. Out of guilt, Dobry assumed, for destroying his family. It sat in his pocket like an anchor now, mooring him to the day his mother had been killed.

  “Where are we?” Dobry asked.

  “You are in Lily Dale,” Lisbeth told him. “You will be at home here. And now your mother—maybe she will come out of that tree and rest peacefully.”

  Lisbeth took Dobry into the hotel, where a room had been prepared for him. She instructed him to clean up while she attended to making a situation for him. He didn’t understand what she meant by making a situation, but he did as he was told. The only alternative was to run away, and since his mother had trusted Lisbeth, Dobry decided he should trust her too, no matter what he thought of her melted face and oily gray hair.