The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  In the intense brightness between two bare trees a small, dark figure appeared. Its face and chest were hairy. It stared at him and blinked once, twice, and then disappeared.

  He moved left, then right, trying to get another glimpse of the creature through the trees. But there was nothing. No monkeys around here, of course. He thought about a goat, the way the eyes had looked, but that made no sense.

  He went on his way and came upon a dead fox and dead squirrel staring up at him, their necks broken. A few minutes later he found a deer with its throat torn out.

  At the edge of the forest, only a few feet from the road that went into town, branches hung low from a broad and ancient trunk. From each branch hung what appeared to be a small fur coat. He picked up one and discovered the attached mask. Despite the awful smell of the fur, he held the eye holes up to his own eyes and saw what he’d been seeing all along: the brightness between the bare trunks, as if the air burned with a white heat, the colorful border the leaves made.

  OCT. 27

  1914: Dylan Thomas is born in Swansea, Wales.

  Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire …

  The next day Cal went back to the forest. Perhaps to look for the animals he’d seen yesterday, or for something less tangible. The night before there had been a raging, frosty late October wind which had finished stripping the trees. Long, bare trunks stood about as if in shock. Quarrelsome birds flitted from limb to limb as if unhinged by the abrupt change in their landscape.

  He thought of unexpected deaths, or the sudden outbreak of a war. Frosty fingers in his hair.

  The icy wind came up and tore claw-like at his chest, face, and hair. The end of death and the beginning of the grieving, he thought. He felt as if he had lost a week’s time while he’d been asleep.

  If one of his children died, the forests would all be like this. If one of his children died, there would be no more need for forests. How could he look at his children knowing that they were not permanent? Even if they lived past him, they would never be again as they were right now.

  He’d never seen a wood in just this condition, this balance of colored leaf and bare branch. It seemed a place of mystery, of comings and goings. There should be a way to preserve such a wood for all time, never-changing, as a monument to all we have lost.

  A man stood on the other side of the forest, watching him.

  “I’m not going back,” Cal shouted to him. “You can tell them I’m okay but I’m not going back. And tell them … tell them I’m sorry.” The man turned and left.

  Cal walked through the colors until he had walked out of the forest completely.

  And walked abroad in a shower of all my days …

  OCT. 28

  1922: Mussolini comes to power in Italy.

  The family had lived in a small cabin a few miles up the road from this one. He’d gone to high school with two of the sons. In a few months he was going off to college. They, of course, were staying here on this mountain, and probably would never leave it.

  The boys’ father was legendary, and as he thought back about that man now, Cal realized how much he resembled the duce with his swaggering walk, rough-hewn bald head drawn with a sneer. The man was a contractor, and did well because he was efficient, he knew how to plan things, he knew how to drive his workers, he knew how to deliver. Not that you could tell by the shack they all lived in. Cal had always wondered what the man did with his money.

  From talking to the sons, and from what he’d heard later, Cal understood that the man also applied those methods of efficiency and discipline at home. The boys weren’t allowed to go anywhere, do anything, or say anything, unless their father had decided those things in advance. Even the smallest infraction of independence brought immediate punishment.

  But for their father punishment had to be part of a grand design in order to be valid. So back when the boys were only seven or eight their father had set them to constructing a building with a tower in their back yard, a building which they would erect, then tear down, then erect again (usually with some small variation in the plan) every year.

  What they tore down could not be thrown away. Duce had bought a truckload of lumber and nails and other materials when they were small, and he had no intentions of buying any more. Nails were pulled out carefully and put aside for straightening, boards were eased off to minimize cracking. Occasionally new items were added to the pile, but only if he had been able to obtain them for free.

  Even at seven they were out there sawing and nailing uneven boards together to make a partially finished structure which looked like ancient earthquake damage. When it came time to take the structure down they were able to remove only one nail at a time, using all their strength to pry it loose. But straightening the nails with the big hammers he had given them proved to be even more time consuming.

  As the years passed and the older boys’ skills improved the structure became gradually more elaborate. Each summer a very different sort of tower rose above the treetops to be commented upon by the townsfolk. Box, or round, or octagonal shaped, or some shape the boys had never heard of before, but which their father insisted must be real because he’d thought it up.

  As the boys worked through their last years of high school, the building materials began to deteriorate to an extreme degree. Boards split or flew apart from the impact of the hammers. Nails had bent so badly they’d taken to sawing them in half in order to get a straighter but shorter nail, which would barely hold two pieces of wood together.

  That last fall before the sons disappeared, the structure sagged and was put together with materials whose splintered, jagged edges thrust in all directions. One of the boys said it was a picture of their father, but of his inside and not his outside.

  The father was enraged at how the boys had not taken care of their building materials all these years, and every afternoon Cal could hear the shouts, the cries, the hammer blows, the screams. The boys came to school sometimes with small, perfectly round holes in hands or forearms, blood still oozing.

  The sheriff found the sons’ father a day or so after the sons disappeared. He tried to suppress the details, but of course being a small town the story was circulating even before he got back to his office. Someone had taken two shiny ten-penny nails (they were well-preserved, as if they’d been saved with care), and used them to nail the man to a tree stump, through his testicles. Then a noose had been thrown around his neck, and tied to the back of a tractor.

  No one ever saw any of the sons again.

  OCT. 29

  1929: “Black Tuesday,” the Great Depression begins.

  Cal figured that with the money in their savings and the investments Linda’s father had made for her, along with monthly checks he would send out of his secret account, Linda and the kids would be able to live fairly comfortably for a year or more. Cal’s secret account was also a source of secret shame for him. When Linda had received that first check she must have thought he’d planned this disappearance for some time. He knew how much that would hurt her. She was probably thinking that their entire married life had been a lie. He needed to send her a letter, explaining, and letters to the kids– those letters were seriously, seriously overdue– but he just didn’t have the words yet, all he had were the words for his fantasies and obsessions, and he knew he would only scare his family with those.

  Cal’s secret account had been set up by his mother in the local bank. He’d known about it for years– a lawyer had sent him a letter when he’d turned thirty– but he’d never touched it up until now. She had put this money aside years ago, and thought maybe Cal could most use the money when he turned thirty, since that was the year her own life had begun to turn bad. The note from the lawyer relayed his mother’s own words for the source of these moneys: “Here and yonder,” she’d said. Mostly “yonder,” he suspected. From the men she’d met on her travels. Her own “escape money.”

  Linda was probably thinking this secret account had bought him his freedo
m, while he felt it had simply paid for this interim insanity.

  His mother had passed on to him her fear of poverty. Whenever times were especially hard– although as a child he might not realize it himself, as long as there was some food on the table– she would say “the wolf’s at the door,” and he would imagine a real wolf, scratching, slavering. He hadn’t been frightened until she said those words, and then he was terrified.

  “I want a new bike,” Parker would say.

  And half-kidding, half-not, Cal would stare at the front door with alarm on his face and say, “Do you hear that? That scratching? That’s a wolf at the door, son. The wolf’s at the door.”

  “You’re scaring him!” Linda had objected, and he had pretended not to know what she was talking about.

  The last time he said that to Parker, Linda grabbed their son and stalked out the door, that scratchy door, the one with the wolf behind it. Cal had been ashamed. Then he had walked over to that door she had just slammed, that scratchy door, and put his face up to it. He could smell the thing through the door: that stench of poverty and despair. And he could hear that thing breathing on the other side of the door, that wolf-thing with its long jaw and massive curved teeth designed to scrape the flesh from the bone, because sometimes flesh was all that was left to be had.

  The wolf’s at the door.

  He doesn’t care who you are now or what you might have been. Once he gets that particular smell he is unstoppable. He scratches, he drools, he tears the door apart.

  And when he gets inside he feeds on your children, and what’s left of your hope.

  And he leaves you there alive.

  OCT. 30

  1938: Orson Welles panics America with his broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

  “You look at those folks in the magazines and the newspapers, and on the TV and movies, and you just know they’re not like us. None of those folks are anything like us.

  “They do everything they can to let you know they’re aliens. I’ll give ’em that much. Doing things differently than anybody you ever knew. Havin’ lives like in some storybook somewhere. Maybe they even read those storybooks before they came here, using those super telescope things of theirs.

  “But they’re rotten to the core, they are. Evil bugs, is what they are. Cause all they want to do is make you feel different, and something less than they are. They just want you to feel bad all the time.”

  Aliens could have landed here centuries ago and blended into the population, just as old Ikey was always telling him. Who could tell? Lord knows, there was much about human behavior Cal couldn’t understand at all.

  Sometimes shaving, wondering how he could have done such a terrible thing to his family, Cal would find himself staring at his tongue, the pale pink end of it, and thinking how much it looked like a feeler probing up out of the hidden depths of him. And how soft his eyeballs looked. And how mysterious, how impenetrable the thoughts of his alien brain.

  OCT. 31

  Halloween

  The cabin was secluded enough, of course, that trick-or -treaters were unlikely, but then he thought about the handful of houses within a couple of miles of the place, and the children coming by, being disappointed, and suddenly the most important thing in the world was not to disappoint that handful of children. So he bought twenty dollars worth of treats from the grocer’s, handing a sucker to a bored-looking teenager going out the door, who looked at him, of course, as if he were crazy.

  But the trick-or-treaters didn’t come, and he was turning off the lights, getting ready for bed, when there was the softest of knocks at his door.

  When he opened the door he found a small blonde-haired boy in a military costume, his tiny face smeared with a repulsive-looking black and green grease paint, standing there waiting. He dropped a couple of huge handfuls of lollipops and candy bars into the boy’s bag. The bag sagged down almost to the ground and the small boy staggered with the weight. The boy looked up at Cal, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a square of gray paper which he handed him.

  Cal looked at the square: it was a kid’s drawing in reds and blacks of a cat– recognizable because of the shape of the head and ears, the long spiky whiskers– but the belly had been torn open, the entrails pulled out and strung out into an ornamental border around the picture.

  Cal thanked the boy and closed the door.

  A few minutes later there was an even softer knock at his door, so soft he thought it might have been just a change in air pressure against the old wood panels. He opened the door and there was a very small girl dressed in a miniature bridal gown, her dark hair wrapped in a veil the color and texture of deadened skin, her cheeks heavily rouged, her lips caked with scarlet lipstick.

  Cal dropped the candy into her open bag carefully, a piece at a time. She looked up at him and smiled an open-mouth smile, then handed him a photograph.

  It was a photograph of a girl– this little girl, he thought, although it was hard to tell with all the makeup– in a pretty pink dress with a lacy collar. At first he thought there was something physically wrong with her face, then could see it was simply a matter of expression. Her eyes were crinkled slits, and her mouth a long thin line under tension, as if a screw had been inserted into her lips and over tightened. He had never seen such anguish expressed in a photograph before. Then he could see, in the lower left corner of the photograph, just a bit of a man’s forearm, the man’s hand obscured, hidden somewhere inside that little girl’s dress.

  Again he thanked the trick-or-treater, and closed the door.

  An hour later, after he’d already climbed into bed and turned out all the lights, he heard another knock at his front door, this one so soft it might have been the sound of blood pulsing once through his ear, or the sound of a single thought falling into place.

  He got out of bed and staggered to the door, not even bothering to cover himself, wondering vaguely if it might even be a dream, as he opened the door and saw not a form, not even a shadow, but just a slight variation in the darkness in front of him.

  A tiny hand came out of that darkness bearing a jet-black square and the voice behind it said, “Won’t you read me a bedtime story from my book of dark?”

  Cal took the book, but the pages were like mirrored metal covered with soot that came off on his hands. And when he looked into the book he saw his own face, his frightened face waiting apprehensively for the words of the story he was about to read.

  NOV. 1

  1871: Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, is born in Newark, New Jersey.

  People around there were still pretty bitter about the Civil War. They’d have to battle a peculiar sort of inferiority complex the rest of their lives. Civil wars were like a battle between two halves of the self.

  Every night Robert E. Lee and the armies of the South came riding up his spine, swords drawn, intent on sawing off his head at the base of his neck, so that they might pretend his head had never existed.

  NOV. 2

  1947: Howard Hughes’ huge wooden airplane the “Spruce Goose” has its one and only flight, lasting approximately one minute.

  Dear Jenny,

  Dear Parker,

  I’m very sorry. I know that leaving you was a terrible thing. I’m not asking you to forgive me– I don’t even think you should forgive me. What I’ve done is very wrong. And right now I don’t really have the words to tell you why I did what I did. I have a little bedtime story for you, though:

  Once upon a time there was a giant goose made out of wood

  who was afraid to fly. He was scared of the water below

  him. He was afraid of the people who were watching him.

  He was afraid of the air itself, afraid it wouldn’t hold

  him up, and afraid if he ever caught fire then the air

  would make him burn even faster.

  One day his fear of flying got so bad the giant wooden goose hid away from the world forever. But termites got into the wood, and
ate the giant goose’s brain while he slept.

  The moral of the story? There are worse things than flying, even when flying terrifies you.

  I love you very much,

  Dad

  NOV. 3

  1868: Grant defeats Seymour.

  1896: McKinley defeats Bryan.

  1908: Taft defeats Bryan.

  1936: Roosevelt defeats Landon.

  1964: Johnson defeats Goldwater.

  1992: Clinton defeats Bush.

  Once a man claiming to be ex-president Johnson came to town and stayed in the one hotel. Everybody knew the man wasn’t really Lyndon B. Johnson, but they played along, even giving the man his meals for free. They treated him like an old father, a patriarch, and they simply couldn’t ask such a man to pay for things.

  Out on the street they greeted him as “Mr. President.” Both the mayor and the president of the bank called on him, seeking his advice.

  Then one day Mr. President skipped town and was later found on the outskirts of town, murdered.

  The whole town turned out for the stranger’s lavish funeral. At least twelve speeches were given memorializing this man no one in fact knew at all, not even his real name.

  The local bank president paid for a plaque to be hung in the hotel lobby. It said “President Lyndon Johnson slept here.”

  NOV. 4

  1922: the entrance to King Tutankhamen’s tomb is discovered.

  When he got there he found the two children deep in play: running, jumping, calling out and laughing for all they were worth– for no discernible reason, as if they were simply overjoyed at being alive. A funny place to find kids playing. But then a graveyard was a funny place for him to be having a picnic.

  The town seemed to have more graveyards than the average, but most small towns must feel that way. The population of the dead in such places would always outnumber the living.