Terror Incognita

by Jeffrey Thomas

  He couldn’t see into the attic through it, either. The panes might have been painted black inside, for all he could tell. The most he could make out was his own curious face reflected in the dirty glass, staring back at him.

  * * *

  When Alan stepped up into the attic a small creature hopped behind a box of books, thrashing its upper limbs. He gasped, became a frozen pose framed in the threshold. Then he heard the cooing, and saw the white droppings on the floor boards. Damn pigeons; how had they got up in here? Why did his mother have to throw bread out for them and encourage them to congregate? When he came further into the attic he saw that a window in this end had been propped open with a board. Mother. She must have done that to let some air in while she was up here one time, and had forgotten to close it again. Alan sighed. He’d have to close it and catch each pigeon individually and carry them outside. Yet another project. Maybe he should just go home, he thought.

  For now he left the window as it was, and moved into the darker end of the attic, where the walls angled closer together...

  It was no wonder he couldn’t see through the window from the outside. It was thoroughly boarded up on the inside. This also explained why he hadn’t been able to recall the window from the inside from his boyhood; it had apparently been covered like this for many years.

  Leaving the attic to borrow his father’s old toolbox from his mother, Alan first gave her hell about the pigeons up there, and then asked, “Why did Dad board up that slanted attic window? On this end of the house, up over the back door?”

  “Oh, my father was the one who did that. Your father started to take the boards off once so the attic would get more light, but then he changed his mind and boarded it back up again.”

  “Well, why did Granddad board it up in the first place?”

  “When your grandparents owned the house there was a big thunderstorm one time, and I guess a lightning bolt struck that window. I remember that night...I was about eight, I think. It was terrible. The whole house shook. I don’t know what the lightning did to the window, though. Maybe it scorched the glass black or just cracked it all.” She shrugged.

  “It isn’t cracked. One piece is broken off, is all. Recently, too; I saw the broken pieces in the gutter.”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged again.

  “Well, I’m gonna pull the boards off. The attic is real dark down in that end and there’s no electric lights. It could use a little sunlight.”

  His deceased father’s toolbox in hand, Alan returned to the back hall, climbed up past the second floor, up into the attic.

  * * *

  Alan pulled the uppermost board off first, using the back of a claw hammer. The first thought that struck him as he looked out through the glass was how quickly it had become dark. It was only five thirty in the afternoon, and here it was summer. Maybe a thunderstorm was brewing.

  He glanced over his shoulder, into the opposite, roomier end of the attic. That end of the attic was awash in golden sunlight. Dust motes swam lazily in the slanting mellow beams.

  Alan jerked around to gape at the diagonal window. After a moment of confused hesitation, he began to pry off the next board down. It was nailed thoroughly and he really had to lever and strain, splintering the wood, but at last it clattered at his feet.

  The sky out there was almost entirely black, but closer to the horizon was streaked in startling reds and purple. Alan saw a distant cluster of birds or perhaps bats cross the bands of laser red.

  Could that be an approaching storm, or was the earth more in shadow in that direction as the sun sank? It seemed far, far too great a contrast to be that. Strangely alarmed, Alan pried off the next board with several great jerks.

  “Dear God,” he breathed, stepping back from the window. He clutched the hammer tightly before him as a weapon or merely for reassurance that reality had not abandoned him without leaving some sort of hand hold.

  The roofs of neighboring houses should be out there. Trees bushy between them, and familiar church steeples rising against a backdrop of gentle hills.

  Should be...

  Instead, the distant hills were jagged rocky peaks, ominous in the red glow of twilight. Red and purple light glistened on a lake or large pond in the distance, where he knew none should be. In the foreground there were weirdly gnarled and tangled trees, the closest ones showing him that their branches were thorny and leafless.

  Alan wanted to scream, up there in that claustrophobic space, the ceiling close to touching his head, the walls slanting in toward him, dust coating his lungs. He wanted to turn and bolt from there. And yet, he was riveted. Mesmerized. Too afraid to move. Reality indeed was not as it seemed. If he moved, what terrible revelation might next yawn wide before him to engulf his sanity?

  Without stepping nearer to the window or reaching to tear free the last board, he looked more closely out upon what could be seen at present. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the scene, and he decided he could make out a few rooftops here and there after all...amongst the thorny trees and across the dark lake. None of these houses or buildings had any windows lit, however, despite the deep gloom.

  A breeze stirred the twisted trees; Alan felt it through the broken corner of window, and though the breeze was merely cool he shivered as though it were an arctic gust. He realized then that he could also hear this hallucination as well as feel it; he heard the scrape of those barbed wire branches against one-another as the breeze stirred them. And there were the distant cries of birds, perhaps. Very faint...but he wished, from their odd child-like quality, that he could not hear them at all.

  What had that lightning bolt done to this window?

  It had to be a corresponding dimension he was looking out into. A parallel universe, an alternate interpretation of the same space. Somewhere far away but in this same space there was another old house with an attic, and it was as though he himself were now standing in the attic of that alien building gazing out. This idea so shook him that he had to look wildly around him to convince himself that he was still here in his mother’s attic. But the sun still shone warmly at the opposite end. Nothing else had changed around him.

  A bird flapped by out there, closer than the others had been. Its movements were unexplainably frightening, unnatural. Awkward or just too weirdly different. How could a creature without real wings fly? It was dark, but he had seen the creature well enough to know that it was identical to the one he had found in his mother’s rain gutter.

  Alan sought to comprehend how the creature he had discovered had blundered into his reality. The murmur of a pigeon behind him made him realize that in the doppelganger house, a window must have been left open also. The bird-thing had come into the alien house that way, and exited through the diagonal window. The attic window of that house must not be boarded, and thus permitted exit. But when the creature broke out through the glass to take to the sky again, it had entered into his dimension, and died, either from its injuries or because of the different conditions of Alan’s world.

  That meant that the window in the parallel house had been altered, also. Their views had become switched, traded. The alien window must look out, now, upon the more plentiful roof tops of his New England town. Distant church steeples, gentle hazy hills...

  He had to board the window back up again. As his father had done, when he had discovered its secret.

  Alan took new nails from the toolbox, filled his pockets. He didn’t want to near that window but he couldn’t leave it like this for his mother to find. What if something else came through that broken hole? What if she stuck her hand through the hole to see what it looked like translated into the reality of that other realm?

  Alan picked up one of the fallen boards, moved to set it back in place. Closer to the window now, and looking further down, he saw the dark face that was out there, peering in at him.

  He cried out, dropped the board, tore desperately into the sunny end of the attic.

  It was several minutes before he c
ould go back. He smoked a cigarette, gazed at the dark window from a distance. At last, determined, he returned. He picked up the board, set it in place. He didn’t look out there this time. He looked only at the grain of the board. Then of the next one. And on, until he had sealed that window closed for the third time in its history.

  * * *

  Outside the house, he mounted the ladder once again. Now it was actually becoming darker as evening approached in his world. He had found a can of black paint in his father’s work shop, and had taped a brush to the end of a broken broom handle.

  But when he reached the roof, he couldn’t help but strain to gaze into the attic through the window once more.

  He saw several things then. He wouldn’t be able to reflect on all of them until later...but this time he could see inside.

  The interior of that other attic, pretending it existed within his mother’s house through the two-way trickery of the glass, glowed red not with dusk but with dawn. It was the rising sun, not the setting sun, that had streaked that alien sky. More light entered the parallel attic now than before, permitting him to see inside. It was not boards that had darkened the view earlier, but merely the pre-dawn gloom. The alien window had never been boarded.

  But these were the realizations Alan made later, after he had painted the window panes black. At the moment he stared through the mysteriously altered glass, his mind registered only one thing.

  And that was the face of the creature—the being—inside that attic, gazing out at him. It was the same dark face he had seen outside the window before. When he had been inside his attic, it had been atop its ladder peeking in at him. And now that he was atop his ladder, it had changed places with him, and was inside its own attic.

  As they locked eyes in that moment, the being lifted a board in place, meaning to nail it there. To shut out the terrifying visage it had witnessed.

  That was when Alan began to paint...trying not to see the face as he did so.

  Because the face was not human. Not remotely human. But more horrifying than this fact was Alan’s realization that—despite its terrible distortions—that face was in effect his own.

  ELIZABETH RISING

  It was a hilly graveyard. That was the thing.

  Dean trudged up a flight of stone steps set into the central hill, the stones pitched and slanted by decades of frost heaves, tainted green by a century of having been steeped in the rich dark soil of Elysium Fields Cemetery.

  The steps paused at an earthen landing of sorts before the next rising swell. He stopped here a moment. To either side the narrow landing trailed off down the hill as a path, bordered by evenly spaced and similarly twisted trees. The tree closest to Dean had an empty bottle of Canadian Club wedged in its crotch at about Dean’s crotch level.

  Jerks, he thought. No reverence for the dead. But what did he expect when so many people didn’t even have a reverence for the living?

  Perhaps Dean would have thought himself morbid for exploring the graveyards of New England had he not been chased, so to speak, into these quiet places on the outskirts of towns by those who lived within such towns. This was a refuge for him. The only kind of place, it often seemed, where he could feel at peace amongst his fellow beings.

  That was why the bottle dismayed him. Sometimes those of the race of tormentors found their way into these sanctuaries. From atop the first tier of the hill Dean gazed out across the sprawling graveyard below for signs of others. But there were no others here this early summer evening. No children riding bikes, no old people tending to the boring neat ranks of newer graves on the boring flat section cleared and leveled in recent times. Good. They might not be tormentors themselves but they would make him feel self-conscious. They must all be home with their families, preparing suppers, Saturday cook-outs. Good. That left Dean here with his family.

  Had one come up the granite steps then they might have thought that dappled shadow from the line of trees had fallen across Dean’s face. Until he moved, and the shadow went with him. The purple birthmark covered half his face, making a living yin and yang of it. In contemplating this stain, this anomaly, this blight on him, Dean had thought of himself as a mere portrait of a person, half his face painted in a shadow he could never walk out of.

  But this was a place for shadows. See? The lowering sun was already drawing long shadows like taffy out of the silhouetted grave stones. Early evening or night was the time to come, except in those cemeteries so given over to night partiers that he had had to forsake them. He came in the very early morning, and rainy or snowy days were good. Beautiful in such a melancholy way. Though he had only been to this graveyard once before, they were all magically linked. They were all the necropolis he called his home town.

  Dean continued up the next section of steps.

  He regretted not having his camera this evening, but now that he had discovered this wonderful new place only a few towns over from his, he could come back here any time. His apartment above an elderly couple was decorated with framed enlargements of photos he had taken of interesting monuments, and statues whose white eyes glowed at him without judgment.

  He reached the broad level summit of the hill. Here, phallic monuments thrust at the deepening sky, smaller stones clustered around these looming leaders. The stones themselves in graveyards seemed like beings to Dean, quiet but sentient things. Had the people below them known Dean in life, they too might have mocked him, but death makes people benign. Now, transformed, they were his friends and he studied their lettered faces, touched their pitted skins.

  On its far side, the plateau dropped off fairly steeply toward a pond ringed by dark woods, this body of water so perfectly round it was almost startling. Dean’s first impression, gazing down at it, was that at some long distant time a meteor had crashed here. Some heavenly object. This was Elysium Fields, after all. He imagined that a dense migration of souls had failed to escape earthly gravity, and come plummeting back in a comet trail of flaming ectoplasm to bury themselves again in the ground...leaving this bowl to fill with the tears of their fellows on high, who had witnessed the ethereal tragedy.

  Dean glanced over his shoulder to confirm his solitude, and then started down the slope.

  Somehow there were graves along the slope, most of the stones leaning as if to topple down toward the pond. Dean imagined that the coffins must be buried almost at an angle. Maybe space had been scarce at that time, before the cemetery’s expansion.

  But there were more numbered disks in the ground than there were full markers, and Dean had seen enough potter’s fields in his day to know one when he was in it. No wonder they were hidden over here on the dark side of the hill. Even in this haven for outcasts, there were outcasts. This was the stained half of the hill’s face.

  Most of the disks were nearly grown over. Who knew how many were fully covered? Dean wondered if he himself would become a disk. An anonymous number. Did it make a difference?

  He was drawn, however, to a full-sized marker of greenish-stained white stone down almost at the water’s edge.

  The pond was still, its surface a flat scummed expanse like a floor of murky green glass Dean imagined he could almost walk out across. A dragonfly or two bobbed along the vast corrupt skin. He had never seen a body of water so uniformly and thickly filmed in scum, but looking back up the hill, he wondered if it had to do with those cheap potter’s field coffins buried in the slope. Coffins rotted away through the years. Releasing their putrefied contents...their liquefied freight...to stream down through the soil of the hill slowly but inevitably into the waters of the pond.

  There were old candy wrappers down here at the shore. A tangle of fishing line in a low branch from a bad cast. The worm at the end of it had long since been eaten away by insects. Dean saw the ripped corner of a rubber’s wrapper. This grave had had company over the years, however hidden. In fact, it had been given another epitaph of sorts on its blank side. “Ricky and Rhonda,” it read, in an amorous spray of black paint, contained
in the outline of a black heart. All sorts of offerings, then. Everything but flowers.

  Dean moved around the stone to read its actual inscription, which faced out upon the pond.

  It read:

  Elizabeth Rising

  “Pretty Betty”

  1865-1890

  Erected by her friends at

  Bluedale State Hospital

  “Pretty Betty,” Dean repeated to himself in a whisper. And then, “Elizabeth Rising.”

  A prick at the back of his neck. He slapped at it, looked into his hand. A mosquito smashed there in a stain of his own blood.

  * * *

  Dean had never before been to the Bluedale Library, but libraries were a secondary refuge for him. Though they attracted live people, they were quiet enough and he had learned which were the least occupied times of the day.

  Dean waited until no one else was at the desk before he approached the librarian, who was the only male librarian he had ever seen, an elderly man who didn’t look threatening.

  “Excuse me, ah, do you have microfilm or records or something of the Bluedale Gazette for 1890?”

  “I have a niece with a wine birthmark,” the old man smiled, arching his brows over the rims of his glasses. “It covers most of her thigh. She doesn’t wear shorts. Always wears black hose. I’m sure her husband has seen it, though. Up close. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, either. I wouldn’t mind; she’s a very pretty girl.”

  Dean was so horrified by these casual revelations that for a moment he was struck dumb. He considered turning away and walking out but he was too meek a person to be rude. “It’s hard, I know. I’d wear black hose over my head if I could.” Trying to joke.

  The old man liked the joke, chuckled. “Well, Gorby has helped us get used to those things, right? At least he still serves that purpose.”

  “Yeah, I guess, huh? Um, the Bluedale Gazette...”

  “No, no. We lost all our old papers and a lot of our older books in the fire of ‘27. You’d be better off going to the Gazette’s office. Know where that is? You’re not from town; I’d recognize you.”