Elsinore Canyon

by J. M.

  What was coming, the sigh or the nuclear explosion? “Who was the girl?”

  Dana scrunched her eyes shut as if dredging the distant and sunless depths of her memory. “Ahh, I believe it was a freshm—”

  Dana and I became friends that day. “It’s not my fault my mom’s a lawyer,” she said kittenishly as we took turns at the water fountain afterwards. We ate lunch with each other every day that week. She told me she planned to go into her family business, that she loved music and dancing, all kinds, that she wasn’t sure whether to go steady with Bobby Swiacki since he was off to Uni High and they’d practically never see each other, that she was beginning to wonder whether some of those things they said were sins actually were. People thought I knew Dana better than anyone because she and I were constant companions, but to me, her essence wasn’t the literal things she shared with me in her confidences and ramblings; it was her sheer high-spiritedness. It was expressed in her laugh, her energy for a fight, her flying hair, her bouncing step and her curious eyes, but that was just the outward show. It seemed the depths of her heart launched her to corresponding heights, where she reveled among clouds and sunbeams and stars. No one could join her up there. You could only watch and wonder.

  I explained to her the mechanics of a spinal cord injury. I told her how my parents had died and how my now-childless, open-hearted, patient, very Catholic, ever-caring and utterly maddening grandparents had taken me in, how I was trying to figure out how to get back into surfing and scuba without a pair of functioning legs. She came running to me one afternoon after school when I was at office duty. She’d been raking in the rose garden and hit a big long worm. She brought it to me in her hands, just one side squirming. “Look,” she said, “like you said about your spinal cord.” We put it out of its misery by dropping a book on it.

  It turned out she didn’t go steady with Bobby Swiacki. She went steady with Walt Smith, for a year. When he broke up with her, she found me in the rose garden and flung herself on my shoulder and cried for half an hour. Then the summer before our senior year, Phil Polonius’s mom died in a car wreck in Hawaii and he came to live with his dad, and Dana started talking about Phil. He was a year younger than us and went to a different school, but it wasn’t long before everyone knew him. I’ll never forget the Saturday afternoon I saw him and Dana in town, the two of them cruising along an empty sidewalk on his skateboard. He stood behind her, his fingers resting on her waist as she balanced easily, safe in his touch while the breeze blew her hair back against his chest. Her red tights skimmed past lawns and buildings.

  When the news about Mrs. Hamlet’s death hit, everyone in the upper grades at Maroveus was running around claiming to know something, claiming to know Dana, everyone wanting a piece of her, even in this. That was the thing with Dana’s popularity. People who weren’t close to her knew she was awesome, but they didn’t know why. She was a rock star to them, a glittering being they would take with any and all faults. But to me she was a true friend and a real girl, and near faultless.

  OUT OF THE BLACKNESS

  Six weeks dragged by after Mrs. Hamlet’s wake, and I heard scarcely a word from Dana. This was incredibly strange and upsetting. For four years, we hadn’t gone a day without communicating, and now all I got from her were one-liners (“Too sad to talk”) or emoticons or a promise to call me soon. No one else got a call back or a message, not a blip of her online although she must have finished her classes electronically. No one heard anything about or from Phil Polonius either. As for graduation, it had come and gone like a soft swell on a warm sea. Never had anything I’d anticipated so much and for so long passed so trivially.

  An invitation arrived in my inbox. A file with a parchment background and elegant lettering, requesting my company at a reception in Elsinore Canyon, from the Hamlet family. No occasion or honoree—a belated graduation party, something subdued? I would be starting a pre-med program at UCSD in September, after my usual summer visit to my uncle’s Santa Barbara ranch. So I synched my dates and planned a detour to Elsinore Canyon on my way north. With my car packed, I headed up the Coast Highway once again, this time under a juicy blue sky.

  When I pulled up at the Hamlets’ place, the front was full of cars like the last time. Like the last time, Marcellus greeted me. He rolled up in a golf cart and waved me over. “Horst! I need to talk to you.”

  “What’s going on? I was coming for the…”

  “You’ll see. Come on, I want to show you something.”

  Had I misread the invite? “Hey, I could change my shirt—”

  “No need. We’re going down to the adobe.”

  I transferred to his cart and collapsed my chair against the back. The walls of the main house grew higher, the paving weedier while we whirred down a path towards an adobe cottage, Marcellus spelling out his story all the way. “Routine rounds two days ago. And then it happened again yesterday.” I’d never known Marcellus to be a bullshitter, and I couldn’t think of a reason why he’d be doing it now, especially about this. We reached the adobe and he punched a code into a console next to the arched wooden door. A bleep and a flicker of lights. We went in.

  I’d been in the adobe before. It was the oldest building on the property, a rectangular knob on the edge of the cliff, with the waves smashing on rocks below. Mrs. Hamlet had made it her sanctuary. A staircase inside, also of brick, led upward to a hinged trap door cut in the flat roof. You could push it open with a stick and walk out under the sky. I noticed a few books were lying open on the floor, as if they’d been dropped or thrown. “Did you try to read up on it?” I said.

  “Very funny.”

  “No, I just—”

  “All right, all right, books on the floor. Hold that thought. For now, you might want to turn on your camera. Prop it up. Somewhere secure.”

  “What should I aim it at?”

  “Your choice.”

  I turned on the camera in my phone and balanced it upright against a soapstone sculpture. Marcellus lowered himself carefully into a club chair and took a slow breath.

  “So,” I said. “Do you see anything right now?”

  “Not yet.”

  I was starting to feel stupid. “Maybe it’s you she wants. Fuck!”

  Black—the place had gone instantly, totally black. And silent. Some sensation I tried to approximate—being hit by an airbag, coming out of surgery blind—I felt squeezed by a palpable, stifling, nothing: an inky smack that plunged me inside my own heart. “Hey,” I said. My voice sounded distant and disembodied. “Marcellus!”

  “Yeah!” Another voice on the ocean of ink.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I sounded panicked to my detached ears.

  “I’m not doing a fucking thing!”

  Where the hell was the floor even? Queasy, I reached backwards—clumsy like never, hit my knuckles, thrust back on my rims with such force that I tweaked my elbows in-side out. My chair bolted in reverse. BANG. Some small, dense piece of furniture hit the floor.

  “Horst!” Marcellus was still somewhere across the room.

  I held a hand in front of my face. No difference between dark and darker. “Marcellus, I can’t see anything.”

  “That’s what it does.” He was breathing hard now.

  God—damn, something fluttered at me nearby. I helicoptered my arms through the thick air. Another item hit the floor—a vase, it felt like.

  “Now what, man?” bawled Marcellus’s voice.

  “I knocked something over. Wait, it’s not all dark in here! There’s—”

  Another flutter out of the corner of my eye. “There’s something over here.”

  “No, look over there, by the door!” Where was the door? Something darted somewhere. And then it happened. A blink, a ringing in my ears, and Mrs. Hamlet ignited out of the blackness. Life-size, 3D, animated, the only thing visible in the room. The—only—thing. I was in another dimension where only I existed, and she was in another. I could see her but I couldn’t reach her.
<
br />   Of course it wasn’t Mrs. Hamlet, but I didn’t know how else to think of the thing I saw.

  My voice still felt spooky and detached. “It’s looking at me.”

  “Then talk to it, man.”

  I had seen Mrs. Hamlet’s urn on the day of her wake, with her portrait over it. I had watched them pour her ashes into the sea. And now she stood in the adobe in her sculptured white blouse and tight navy skirt and gold jewelry, all put together the way she always looked out in the city. I wasn’t thinking of it then, but I’ll tell you now that Mrs. Hamlet was a raging milf. Looks included, her imitators couldn’t come close, and her admirers couldn’t either; she had a way of scaring you back to a ten-foot perimeter through sheer force of her quality. That’s why there was no mistaking the thing in the room. It was Mrs. Hamlet—except for one uncharacteristic thing, her mournful expression. She looked as if she was peering into the grave of someone she loved.

  “What are you?” I said. I stopped moving as she—it—raised her brows at me. At. Me. I couldn’t do much more than mew. “Mrs. Hamlet? If it’s you, tell us why you’re here.”

  Her eyes held mine, imploring. My heart sank. She was asking me for something, and I discovered at that moment there is nothing more terrifying than a desperate being reaching out to you from the depths of torment. I felt—I knew—I couldn’t do a thing for her. My chest was thick, implanted with her loneliness and need. “What do you want?” I asked, fearing her answer. “Tell us.”

  I still didn’t know where Marcellus was. The room was deadly quiet without our voices, and black except for her. I had no idea if she—it—could see, but if she could, she would have seen my hands frozen on the rims of my chair and my shoulders stiff, ready to bolt the moment I could command my muscles again. She rolled her eyes around the room, that same unspeakably sad expression, then turned and walked—or floated, I couldn’t say because she moved through the blackness, no floor, nothing.

  A soft click, a creaking sound…

  The roof door swung up violently by itself and a horrid tongue of light shot down into the room, its blue edges boiling and lapping over the steps. The door wide open but no sky visible? God, was something coming in? Stop, Mrs. Hamlet! She was moving toward the ghastly light, she was in it. She took a step upward. Another. Christ, that cold shade blanching her hair, her face, her shoulders, her hands…What the hell did she want up there? Up she went, bending her knees as if she was climbing, twisting as the steps twisted, all the way to the top. Without pausing or looking behind, she walked out onto the roof. Go get her, yell—the door swung shut and the blackness in the room cleared, the ocean roared back to my ears. I rolled slowly, then quickly, then burst over to the steps in my chair and crawled up as fast as you could run. Marcellus was on top of me as we both shot through the door onto the roof. I sat propped on my palms while he ran stiff-kneed around the edges. The blue sky, the rocks and scrubby bushes of the canyon, the ocean—all of it looked exactly as usual.

  My chest was pounding, blood pumping through valves at full capacity. “Whoa.”

  Marcellus limped over to me. “Sorry I didn’t tell you about the darkness thing. I didn’t want to plant anything in your mind.” He wiped his bloodless face with a handkerchief. “You need a hand?”

  “No thanks.” We made our way back into the room and pulled the roof door shut. I got into my chair. I was now able to see the results of my panic. A vase lay in pieces on the carpet—I had smashed it into a wall—and a tiled table lay on its side. “Okay, I believe you,” I said to Marcellus. “Is there a security cam in here?”

  “Oh yeah, oh yeah. But check your own camera there.” I rolled over to it. Still leaning against the sculpture, the red eye glowing. I looked at the file: Marcellus and I talking, then a beep, an error screen, and Marcellus and I coming down the stairs. No ghost, no darkness, no vase flying through the air. “I got it on analog, too,” Marcellus said. “You’ll see. Static.”

  Static. Nothing but static, sure enough. We were going over the security footage in his office in the main house ten minutes later.

  “So, have you tried, whatever, touching it?” I asked.

  “Yesterday I sat on the stairs and tried throwing books.”

  “Books—oh.”

  “I didn’t even know where they landed until later. She vanished where she was—wherever she was.”

  “Christ, you’ve got guts going back down there. Why are you showing this to me?”

  “I want to make sure someone else sees what I’m seeing before I go to Dana.”

  “Why me? Why not Polly?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  Marcellus looked at me as if I was too stupid to bother calling stupid.

  “Okay, I had to ask.” “Polly” was what we all called Mr. Polonius. We also called him Pokey, Bubbles, and Doofus McGoodhair. He was very diligent at managing whatever it was he managed and serving the Foundation, and lord knew he was devoted to Mr. Hamlet, but a more bombastic, annoying busybody and cockeyed schemer you have not met. And that style of his. Three-piece suits, pocket-watches, a rippling stand of grey and brown hair that looked like an accordion sitting on his head. He also had an odd sort of pride in his height even though it wasn’t sufficient for his weight. But his father had worked for Mr. Hamlet’s father, and it all amused Mr. Hamlet, so Polly was kept around despite everyone else’s dislike of him and Mrs. Hamlet’s well-known intolerance of fools. “Your man Polly,” she used to say.

  “It’s not just the obvious thing,” Marcellus continued. “Between you and me, I think Polly’s days are numbered here. At least—as he would say—his influence is on the decline.”

  “Because of Dr. Claudia?”

  Marcellus nodded. “Anyway, Dana trusts you. You’re a good kid, Horst, don’t argue. I’d leave the whole thing alone, but something about it. Ah, hell.”

  “What?”

  “It scares me.”

  “That’s not so odd.”

  He leaned on his desk and took a deep breath.

  “Are you okay, Marcellus?”

  “I’m fine,” he said with a touch of annoyance. “You should get out to the party. Big announcement coming up in ten.”

  I rolled towards the door, then paused. “How is Dana? And how’s Phil?”

  “Those two look pretty ‘on’ right now, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen in September.” Phil, the humble genius, had graduated from high school a year early. He was going to Pepperdine, Dana was off to Stanford.

  I mumbled. “See you later.”

  I rolled into the big main hall, which was filled, as on my last visit, with gently milling guests. Dana had to be here somewhere. A chill crept up my spine. It moved ahead of my thoughts and shaped itself around Dana and what I would say to her. Dana, whom I hadn’t seen since that day at her mother’s wake, that moment she gave herself to Phil’s arms. My heart knotted with dread, was I crazy, had Dana changed, would she pity me, my face strenuously composed into blandness and ease, held firmly above the tight, hard lump between my ribs. I rolled forward.

  WE’VE…SEGUED

  In the droning crowd, I saw a few people I knew, a few people you’d see in the news. It turned out I wasn’t overdressed, but what on earth was the occasion? Waiters were making the rounds, while people were politely waving them away or grasping champagne glasses without sipping. The apparition from the adobe wove through my thoughts as I peered into one sour face after another.

  Ging ging ging ging ging. “Everyone!” called a familiar mic’d voice. A big screen overhead blinked on. A camera zoomed over the top of the crowd and tightened in on a couple at the far end of the room: Mr. Hamlet and Dr. Claudia. I wasn’t surprised at their flawless appearance, but their mood was completely different from six weeks earlier.

  On the screen, Mr. Hamlet wore an expectant little smile as he tapped a knife on a goblet. Dr. Claudia beamed away at his side in a white and gold outfit. “Thank you!” she shouted.

  Dr. Goldenthroat. The perfect c
hoice for your speaking needs. “Thanks for being here,” she said. Her running-for-mayor smile widened under her heartbreaking eyes. Was it something in her physiognomy or was she truly and eternally sad? I felt sorry for thinking “Goldenthroat.”

  “I know,” she began, “that it wasn’t so long ago that we were all gathered here for another reason.” Words carefully spaced, gentle yet emphatic rises and falls. “But I’m happy to tell you today that we’ve…segued…into another sort of consolation. Sometimes tragedies open your heart to new opportunities. God never shuts a window without opening a door. So this wonderful man and I have gone through a door together”—a climactic rise—“and joined our lives!” Joined, business? Home? She couldn’t mean anything else. A circumspect silence hung over the crowd and she smiled back in. “We’ve just let the news leak out, so most of you probably already know. But today we want to make it official with all of you here. Garth Hamlet and I were always blessed to be part of the same family, and now we’re blessed even more. We are now a unit—husband and wife!”

  Hundreds of salivary glands smacked at once—Dr. Claudia must have been looking into that number of slack mouths. Over the gasping and rumbling, someone in the crowd spotted her a golf clap. She dipped her head and continued. “And we want to invite you all to follow us through on this new part of our journey together. You’ve been part of our shared grief—still are—and now we’d like you to be part of our shared happiness.” She turned to Mr. Hamlet. They paused to lock eyes, and then went in for a kiss—love-struck gaze, slo-mo, and then he was bending her backwards like a tango dancer while she laced her arms around him and came up with a little “Whoop!” An appreciative chuckling arose from the crowd, and the waiters whipped through again. Down below, Dr. Claudia and Mr. Hamlet disentangled themselves and gave a triumphal wave, which finally roused enough cheers for them to make it off stage. “Oh!” Dr. Claudia shot her hand up as if she’d suddenly remembered something. “One more thing!” The crowd paused. “I’ve gained something else wonderful.” She lifted her champagne glass. “To Dana, the daughter I never had!”