by Various
Well, that was weird.
I scrawled a reply on the bottom of his note, thanking him for putting up with me again, and inviting him south for a visit. I didn't know what else to add. I threw my suitcase into the car, grabbed the haunted mansion trophy off the table where I'd left it, and headed home.
There's not much to say about driving I-5 south, almost the full length of California's vertical dimension. Once past Mount Shasta, it's all farmland. This is where most of the nation's vegetables are grown—it's a straight-line journey through grapes (and wineries), avocados, cherries, peaches, onions, lettuce, cabbage, and a few crops that no city dweller can ever be certain of. Just outside of Santa Mira, for instance, there's a field of large green things like seedpods. A faded billboard promises: "Stay at the Santa Mira Inn for the best sleep you'll ever have." But nobody ever does. The town is dead.
The drive stays flat until you finally hit a long row of mountains, like a wall separating Los Angeles from the rest of the world. It might be intentional. The highway arrows up into them, abruptly transforming into a challenging squirm called the Grapevine. If there's going to be weather anywhere in Southern California, it'll be in the Grapevine first. Wind. Rain. Snow. Fire. Yes, there are warning signs—they are permanent installations. Naturally, everyone drives through The Grapevine at eighty-five miles per hour—otherwise the trucks will honk at you to get out of the way.
I got home just before dawn—still amazed that there's a five o'clock in the morning too. That's never made sense to me. One five o'clock per day feels right, not two. And that first one always occurs at the most inconvenient time.
Unpacked the car, pretended to be happy to see Dogzilla (the hairy avalanche), fell into bed, and didn't return to what passes for consciousness until half-past Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
I usually need two days after a convention—or a trip of any kind—to detox, debrief, catch up on email, and restore my biological rhythms. The longer the trip, the longer the recovery period. This trip, only three days, I expected to be approaching normal by Thursday or Friday. But no, my sleep patterns remained disrupted. My dreams were stranger than usual, filled with troubling surreal visions.
I dreamt I was in a Quentin Tarantino movie involving black-leather-clad Japanese hoodlums arguing tautology, then having car chases in an abandoned parking structure. I was worried if my earrings were symmetrical.
I dreamt that the creepiest of the Baldwin brothers was trying to seduce me into wild demonic sex. It was tempting until I realized it was Stephen Baldwin.
I dreamt that I was visiting my girlfriend—she was terrified because a stalker was trying to get to her. I locked the apartment door behind me. She was cowering in her bed, whimpering. I closed the bedroom door and started to push the vacuum cleaner in front of it so no one could get in. While I was doing that, a torn scrap of lined paper was pushed through the crack between the door and the jamb. It had a childish drawing of a house and words written in a childish scrawl: "Help me!"
I dreamt that we were hiking up a strange mountain. There was a huge cluster of cars parked haphazardly and a crowd of people looking up at the snowy white slope as if they were being called by something high in the mist. My sister wanted to climb up and look for our missing friends. I told her no, that if she went up there I'd never see her again. But she went anyway. The Sheriff's department arrived and blocked off the road so I couldn't follow.
Then I dreamt that I was working at the computer in my bedroom, when a cop tapped on the glass. I went around to the back door and joined him in the back yard. Some neighbors were there too. They were complaining about terrible noises of machinery all night long. I was about to explain when I noticed the back gate was open, the garage was open and empty, and the back yard was missing a large shed that had been there. The pool was missing too. Instead there was a sinkhole where everything had been, revealing a whole underground level I never knew existed. I was afraid to go down into it and look.
I dreamt I was in a dark car with someone who was going to tell me THE SECRET. The bad guy's name was Pocket and—
But then Dogzilla started whimpering from a bad dream and I had to wake up.
The dog whimpers in her sleep. She whines. She kicks her feet as if running. Sometimes, even a growl. I watch the sleeping dog and wonder—does a dog know it's living in the ephemeral moment of a dream? Or does it whimper because it doesn't know the difference and is terrified by the unreality of the experience?
A gentle touch and a soft reassuring word are usually enough. "It's okay, I'm here now. It's all right. You're good. You're safe." Dogzilla calms down immediately and resumes snoring.
If only there were someone to do that for me when I'm having one of those dreams.
Okay, let me get to the weird part now.
As others have reported, my house exists in a state of permanent chaos. I'm not a hoarder, but a half-century of books, comics, records, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, computer software, and various electronic toys have piled up. That's not the half of it. There's also all my author's copies and files of magazines and articles from the time before the Internet. Boxes and boxes of stuff. I have everything safely packed—I just can't find any of it when I want it.
That's not the point.
The point is that in the ongoing battle for organization, there is no brag shelf, no display case, no marvelous shrine to the wonderfulness of the occupant. (Okay, there are a lot of pictures of my kid everywhere, but who doesn't do that?)
So the few trophies I do have—
Let me interrupt myself here. My autobiography (a work in progress) is going to be titled If You Had Wanted Me to Write Nice Things About You, You Would Have Treated Me Better. Several chapters will deal with various instructors in junior high, high school, and even college who used their personal dislike of me (somewhat justified—I was an awkward, unpleasant know-it-all geek before it was fashionable) to deny opportunities and acknowledgments I believed I had fairly earned. The result was that I have a jaundiced attitude about awards, acknowledgments, and anything that ends up looking like a popularity contest. It comes from an adolescence infused with the usual wash of self-esteem issues and alienation.
So—the few trophies I do have are stashed in a narrow glass bookcase (from IKEA) in a dusty corner of my bedroom, mostly out of sight of visitors, almost as if I'm embarrassed to have them on public display, embarrassed to have them at all—which may actually be the case. There's that condition they call "the impostor syndrome" where a successful person is unable to experience the joy of his own achievement, feeling instead that he's faked it so well he's fooled everybody. (That's me. I'm faking the writing.) The last time a fan confronted me at a convention and said, "You're a terrible writer!" all I could think to reply was, "Shhh. Don't tell my publisher."
That glass bookcase, that's where I put the Stoker Award. Not too far from my bed, but in my line of sight only if I rolled away from the glare of the south-facing window. I figured a week or two of marveling that someone had handed me an award and then I'd fall back into my usual pattern of grumbling at the keyboard and growling at the neighbors' kids who have decided that my lawn is a better place to play than their own.
As I said before, the little mansion has a front door that opens, revealing the recipient of the award. If the door is closed, the trophy is a beautiful sculpture, but I wanted any casual observer to see that this elegant piece of art was also an earned honor. So I put the trophy on the shelf with the door open.
The next day, finally unpacking the suitcase, gathering up the dirty laundry from my trip, I noticed that the door to the little mansion was closed.
I didn't think anything of it. I was preoccupied with detergent, but by the time I finished loading the machine with the obligatory acknowledgment that "normal is just a setting on the washer," I was frowning.
As a child, I had a mild case of OCD—actually, I had CDO, the letters had to be in alphabetical order. I had to touch things a certain number of times to make sure
they had been properly touched, books had to be placed square on the shelf, comics had to be stored by issue number in precise stacks, closet doors had to be pushed all the way shut. I still have a residual need to see all the CDs sorted by artist name and DVDs and Blu-rays alphabetized by title. It makes them easier to locate. And I still push closet doors all the way shut.
So if I leave a door open—even a trophy door—it's a deliberate choice.
Am I still obsessive-compulsive? Yes, a little bit, enough to notice things like this, and that's another thing Dr. Morgan and I talk about all the time. Never mind, that's not relevant here. What is relevant is that the door to the little house was closed. And I hadn't closed it.
Okay, I'm getting old. I'm absent-minded. Sometimes I walk into a room and forget why I entered. It's because my head is still thinking about the story I'm working on, or how I'm going to reply to the harangutan. (In that dreadful online discussion forum. I have no patience with screechweasels.) Maybe I closed the door while I was dusting—except I don't dust. The dust will still be there six months from now, but the story I'm writing won't be if I stop writing for something as ephemeral as a misplaced layer of dust. Dust is eternal, I'm not.
I'll allow for the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, in my absent-mindedness, maybe I did shut the door to the House of Usher. Shrugging, I opened the glass case and very carefully reopened the front door of the award. And yes, I did take a moment to reread the acknowledgment within. Hey, this one had to be fairly earned. I wasn't even trying for it, right?
The next morning, while searching for a lost shoe under the bed, reaching, stretching, and finally grabbing it, I came up facing the trophy shelf.
The door was closed again.
Normally, I keep the front door and the window in the back door open. I get a nice cross-breeze through the screens. I only close the doors and windows when the heater is on—that's two weeks in February—or when the air conditioner is on—that's April through October.
But I am not so obsessive-compulsive as to close the front door of a sculpture inside a glass case in my bedroom because I'm worried about the draft. That would be overkill.
Maybe there was a spring in the door—?
No. It's just on a hinge. There's no way it could be closing itself. An interesting mystery, yes?
I reopened the little door and went off in search of coffee.
The next morning, the door to the House of Usher was closed again.
Okay, this was becoming annoying.
To tell the truth, I didn't care anymore if the door was open or closed. I just didn't like the not-knowing.
Remember the expensive camera I took to Italy? The one that caught that strange unexplainable photo? There's an attachment for it that clicks off photos at preset intervals, so you can do time-lapse photography. I installed a 128-gigabyte SD card (talk about your future shock), locked down the tripod with duct tape, strategically placed a couple of LED lights, pointed and focused the camera, and left the device to snap exposures once per second.
Then I reopened the door.
I slept in the back room that night, just me and the stacks of boxes containing files, books, CDs, and DVDs. It was the first night in a week I didn't have a disturbing dream.
In the morning I felt more alive than I had in a long time. Even before coffee. By the time I remembered I'd left the camera running, the SD card was filled with just a smidge more than 25,600 photos, over seven hours of surveillance.
Popped the card into the computer, copied the photos over to an empty hard drive—yes, I do have that kind of gear close to hand, that's why my friends call this place Electric Davidland—and skimmed through them.
The photos were time-stamped, of course. That's automatic. The first hour's worth of photos showed the door on the little mansion open. Then, shortly after one in the morning, it closed. I examined the photos carefully—a series of sixty-seven separate shots showing the door slowly closing. You could barely tell the difference between one photo and the next, but cumulatively—there was the evidence that I wasn't crazy. The door was actually closing. At one photo per second, it had taken over a minute for the front door of the haunted mansion to swing shut.
Maybe it was a trick of the light, maybe it was a shadow, maybe it was just dirt or a reflection on the glass case, or an artifact of the LED lights perhaps—but maybe also there was an impression of darkness in the photos, a vague blur, an intimation of something else in the picture—something behind the door, just out of sight.
Maybe something was pulling the door closed. But just as likely, maybe the way the door was mounted in the frame, not quite straight, caused it to swing shut by itself. I had a closet door like that when I was a kid—only that one always swung open. No, I wasn't afraid the monster was opening it, most of the monsters were scared of me by then. I was more concerned the nighttime closet might open onto some terrible dark world from which I might never return. That's why I was so concerned with keeping the door all the way closed, pushing it to catch with a satisfying click.
I hate mysteries. I hate not-knowing. I hate the unexplainable. It annoys the hell out of me because it shatters my sense of the orderliness of the universe. The universe is a vast incomprehensible machine, but it's only incomprehensible because it's vast—not because it's incomprehensible. At least, that's what I want to believe.
I considered my options.
I could tinker in Photoshop, adjusting contrast and levels and brightness, attempting to enhance the details of some of the photos.
I could set up the camera again, with better lighting—this time taking twelve photos per second and wirelessly sending them directly to the computer's hard drive.
I could also answer the phone, check my email, skim through Facebook, feed Dogzilla, do some laundry, pay the phone bill, rip a few CDs to my music player, get new shock absorbers for the car, go to a movie, finish unpacking my suitcase (no, I had not yet emptied it), return my editor's phone calls, or even get back to work on that book.
It's all about priorities.
Coffee first. Then shower. Then errands.
I have a rule. I have to get out of the house every day—even if it's just long enough to empty the mailbox. Then all the other minutiae of life. Like more coffee. And writing. Especially writing. And coffee.
So I put the mystery on the Scarlett O'Hara list. ("Fiddle-dee-dee. I'll think about it tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.") Maybe I could Google it later. "Why does the door on my Stoker Award close by itself?" I wonder how many others have asked that question on Google. (I have a bucket-list fantasy, that on December 29, 2017, Google will have a logo celebrating the 50th anniversary of that episode of that TV show, with tribbles falling down the whole page until it fills up with purring furballs.) (I do have a smidge of ADHD, why do you ask?)
But see, this is how life works. You're so busy living it, you don't notice what's really happening around you. Human beings are trapped in the bubble of real-time. We can't perceive things that happen too fast—like kids growing up—and we can't perceive things that happen too slow—like waiting for the line to move.
Later, after another 1797 words on The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello, I wasn't thinking about anything at all. I turned off all the lights, then stumbled through the dark toward my bedroom.
I keep thinking that I want to wire up the house with smart lights that turn themselves on when you enter a room and off again when you exit—but if I had done that, I would have missed the little flash.
My bedroom is at the end of a short hall that passes the bathroom on the left. Visible from the hall, straight ahead, is the glass shelf where I've stashed the trophy. Maybe it was—no, I don't know what it was—but just as I started down the hall, I thought I saw a tiny light in an upstairs window of the little mansion. It flickered out so quickly I wasn't sure I'd seen anything at all.
Astronauts on the International Space Station have reported seeing flashes of light inside their eyes, even whe
n their eyes are closed. So far, the best explanation is that cosmic rays are causing it. Maybe it's Cherenkov radiation created when the cosmic-ray particles pass through the vitreous humor of the eye. Or it could be some kind of interaction with the optic nerve or even the visual centers of the brain. It has to be one of those things—because I don't think there's a little haunted mansion on the International Space Station. And I'm pretty sure I was not hit by a cosmic ray. Okay, maybe I could have been, but the timing was awfully suspicious.
I was too tired to worry about it just then. I was so tired I barely noticed. All I wanted was that part of the bed Dogzilla wasn't claiming. It wasn't until after I had sprawled, rearranged the pillows, sprawled again, and gotten into a position that passed for comfortable, staring upward into darkness, that I realized I had actually seen something.
Or maybe not.
Memory plays tricks, rewriting experiences, filtering and tweaking and hammering the relentless torrent of stimuli into convenient and comfortable patterns. Except the flicker hadn't been either convenient or comfortable.
I saw what I saw—a quick glimmer of light in a second-story window. Very quick and mysterious. And ominous too.
"Right," I said to the darkness. "I knew I was going to get senile someday. I just didn't know it would be today." Yes, Gordon, I'm long past the point where dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse is an option—neither one of those now—but I like to think I'm not so decrepit as to need a keeper. Just the same, these unexplainable little moments were enough to create the first glimmers of self-doubt.
When my mother turned ninety, the Department of Motor Vehicles renewed her license automatically. Not a good idea. We'd seen her drive, and her Buick had multiple dents and dings. We called a family meeting and decided to alert the DMV that Mom was now driving by ear. They called her in for a driving test and another mobile accident zone was subsequently removed from the streets of the San Fernando Valley. I only mention this because my son has now begun looking at me oddly and insisting that he drive me wherever I have to go. So, maybe.…
