Slee—eep in heov—enly peace.
"That was very .good," she said without turning around. As usual the sound of her voice led you to expect that any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides. Instead she switched off the electric organ, after which gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.
"We didn't hear Old Jack singing with us," she said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion I was about twenty or twenty-one, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Aunt Elise's holiday punch, and felt like answering: "Who cares if you didn't hear Old Jack singing, you old bat?" But instead I simply stared her way, drunkenly taking in her features, with prejudice, for the family scrapbook of my memory: tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in an old portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream. I had no worry about my future ability to recall these features, even though I had secretly vowed this would be the last Christmas Eve I would view them. So I could afford to be tranquil in the face of Aunt Elise's taunts that evening. Anyway, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt's stories. "And this time a true story, Auntie. One that really happened."
"All right," she answered, adding that "maybe Old Jack would like to come over and sit with us."
"Too old for that, thank you. Besides, I can hear you just fine from—"
"Well," she began before I'd finished, "let me think a moment. There are so many, so many. Anywho, here's one of them. This happened before any of you were born, a few winters after I moved into this-neighborhood with your uncle. I don't know if you ever noticed, but a little ways down the street there's an empty lot where there should be, used to be, a house. You can see it from the front window over there," she said, pointing to the window beside my chair. I let my eyes follow her finger out that window and, through the fog, I witnessed the empty lot of her story.
"There was once a house on that lot, a beautiful old house with more floors and more windows than this one, more of everything. The house was lived in by a very old man who never went out and who never invited anyone to visit him, at least no one that I ever noticed. And after the old man died, what do you think happened to the house?"
"It disappeared," answered some of the children, jumping the gun.
"In a way, I suppose it did disappear. Actually what happened was that some men came and tore the house down brick by brick, shingle by shingle. I think the old man who lived there must have been very mean to want that to happen to his house after he died."
"How do you know he wanted it?" I interjected, trying to spoil her assumption.
"What other sensible explanation is there?" Aunt Elise answered. "Anywho," she went on, "I think that the old man just couldn't stand the thought of anyone else living in the house and being happy there, because surely he wasn't. But maybe there was also another reason," said Aunt Elise, drawing out these last words and torturing them at length with her. muddled vocal system. The children sitting on the carpet before her listened with a new intentness, while the blazing logs seemed to start up a little more noisily in the fireplace.
"Maybe by destroying his house, making it disappear, the old man thought he was taking it with him into the other world. People who have lived alone for a very long time often think and do very strange things," she emphasized, though I'm sure no one except me thought to apply this final statement to the
storyteller herself. Tell everything, Jack. She went on:
"Now what would lead a person to such conclusions about the old man, you may wonder? Did something strange happen with him and his house, after both of them were gone? I'll tell you, because one night, yes, something did happen. "One night—a foggy winter's night like this one, oh my little children—someone came walking down this exact street and paused at the property line of the house of the old man who was now dead. This someone was a young man whom many people had seen wandering around here off and on for some years. I myself, I tell you, once confronted him and asked him what business he had with us and with our homes, because that's what he seemed most interested in. Anywho, this young man called himself an an-tee-quarian, and he said he was very interested in old things, particularly old houses, And he had a very particular interest in that strange old house of- the old man. A number of times he had asked if he could look around inside, but the old man always refused. Most of the time the house was dark and seemed as if no one was home, even though someone always was.
"Imagine the young man's surprise, then, when he now saw not a dark empty place, no, but a place of bright Christmas lights shining all fuzzy through the fog. Could this be the old man's house? Lit up with these lights? Yes, it could, because there was the old man himself standing at the window with a rather friendly look on his face. At least for him it was. So, one last time, the young man thought he would try his luck with the old house. He rang the bell and the front door slowly opened wide. The old man didn't say anything, but merely stepped back and allowed the other to enter. Finally the young antiquarian would be able to study the inside of the house to his heart's content. Along the way, in narrow halls and long-abandoned rooms, the old man stood silently beside his guest, smiling all the time."
"I can't imagine how you know this part of your true story, Aunt Elise," I interrupted.
"Aunt Elise knows," asserted one of my little cousins just to shut me up, saving my aunt the trouble. She went on:
"After the young man had looked all around the house, both men sat down in the deep comfortable chairs of the front parlor and talked a while about the house. But it wasn't too long before that smile on the old man's face, that quiet little smile, began to bother his visitor in a peculiar way. At last the young man claimed he had to go, glancing down at the watch he had drawn from his pocket. And when he looked up again. . .the old man was gone. This startled the young man for a moment. He checked the nearby rooms and hallways for his host, calling "sir, sir" because he never found out the old man's name. And though he could have been in a dozen different places, the owner of the house didn't seem to be anywhere in particular that the young an could see. So the antiquarian decided just to leave without saying goodbye or thank you or anything like that.
"But he didn't get as far as the front door when he stopped dead in his tracks because of what he saw through the front window. There seemed to be no street anymore, no street lamps or sidewalks, not even any houses, besides the one he was in, of course. There was only the fog and some horrible, tattered shapes wandering aimlessly within it. The young man could hear them crying. What was this place, and where had the old house taken him? He didn't know what to do except stare out the window. And when he saw the face reflected in the window, he thought for a second that the old man had returned and was standing behind him again, smiling his quiet smile.
"But then the young man realized that this was now his own face, and, like those terrible, ragged creatures lost in the fog, he too began to cry.
"After that night, no one around here ever saw the young man again, just as no one has ever seen the house that was torn down. At least no one has yet!
"Well, did you like that story, children?"
I felt tired, more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I barely had the strength, it seemed, to push myself out of the chair into which I'd sunk down so deep. I brushed up against bodies and shuffled slowly under the stares of remote faces. Where was I going? Was I in want of another drink? Did I have to find a bathroom for my old body? No, none of these served as my motive.
It could almost have been hours later that I was walking down a foggy street. The fog formed impenetrable white walls around me, narrow corridors leading nowhere and rooms without windows. I didn't walk very far before realizing I could go no farther.
But finally I did see something. What I saw was simply a cluster of Christmas lights, innocent colors beaming against the fog. But what could they have signified that they should seem so horrible to me? Why did this peaceful vision of inaccessible and hazy wonder, which possessed such marvelous appeal in my childhood, now strike me with all the terror of the impossible? The colors bled into the fog and were sopped up as if by a horrible gauze which drank the blood of rainbows. These were not the colors I had loved, this could not be the house. But it was, for there at the window stood its owner, and the sight of her thin smiling face crippled my body and my brain.
Then I remembered: Aunt Elise was dead now and her house, at the instruction of her will, had been dismantled brick by brick, shingle by shingle.
"Uncle Jack, wake up," urged young voices at close range, though technically, being an only child, I was not their uncle. More accurately, I was just a friendly elder member of the family who'd nodded off in a chair. It was Christmas Eve, and as usual I had had a little too much to drink.
"We're gonna sing carols, Uncle Jack," said the voices again. Then they went away.
I went away too, retrieving my overcoat from the bedroom where it lay buried in a communal grave under innumerable other overcoats. Everyone else was singing songs to the strumming of guitars in the living room. (I liked their bland music infinitely better than the rich, rotting vibrations of Aunt Elise's cathedralesque keyboard of Christmas Eves past.) Foregoing all rituals of departure, I slipped quietly out the back door in the kitchen.
Though I do not remember very much about it, I must have gone to Grosse Pointe, to the empty land on which my aunt's house once stood. So many things I can remember so clearly from long ago—and at my age—but not this thing. Leave out nothing, Jack. Remember. I must have gone to Grosse Pointe, to the open land on which my aunt's house once stood. But I do not remember what it was like that Christmas Eve. Remember, Jack. How thick the fog must have been, if there was fog and not merely a slow descent of snow, or nothing. Would those old lights be there? You shall remember.
But I must have gone to Grosse Pointe that night, I must have gone there. Because what I do remember is this: standing before the door of a house which no longer existed. And then seeing that door begin to open in a slow, monumental sweep, receding with all the ponderous labor of a clock's barely budging hands. Another hand also moved with a monstrous languor, as it reached out and laid itself upon me. Then her face looked into mine, and the last thing I remember is that great, gaping smile, and the words: "Merry Christmas, Old Jack!"
Oh, I'll never forget the look on his face when I said these words. I had him at last, him and his every thought, all the pretty pictures of his mind. Those weeping demons, those souls forever-lost to happiness, came out of the fog and took away his body. He was one of them now, crying like a baby! But I have kept the best part, all his beautiful memories, all those lovely times we had—the children, the presents, the colors of those nights! Anywho, they are mine now. Tell us of those years, Old Jack, the years that were never yours. They were always mine, and now I have them to play with like toys according to my will. Oh, how nice, how nice and lovely to have my little home. How nice and lovely to live in a land where it's always dead with darkness, and where it's always alive with lights! And where it will always, forever after, be just like Christmas Eve.
The Order of Illusion (1984)
First published in Fantasy And Terror #4, 1989.
It seemed to him that the old mysteries had been made for another universe, and not the one he came to know. Yet there was no doubt that they had once deeply impressed him. Intoxicated by their wonder, by raw wonder itself, he might never have turned away from the golden blade held aloft by crimson hands, from the mask with seven eyes, the idol of moons, from the ceremony called the Night of the Night, along with other rites of illumination and all the ageless doctrines which derived from their frenzies. How was it they failed him? When was the first moment he found himself growing impatient with their music and their gyrations, when the first moment he witnessed these mysteries and descended into another kind of wonder?
Before his disillusion was discovered, he walked out on his old sect. He did not waste any time, however, in casting about for a new one. Unfortunately the same problems arose with each of them: they all, in his view, were nullified by their own profoundness and by a collection of mysteries that failed to break the surface of the bottomless soul, failed to place themselves at eye level with things. These mysteries thus condemned all that lay outside of them to triviality, whether deserving of this fate or not. Injustice was their essence and their power. Had these routines of enlightenment actually been intended for a universe not undermined by mockery and confusion? But to bother even with the dream of such a place was useless, especially when he could conceive a plan more to his purpose. This entailed nothing less than the invention of a cult, a solitary one to be sure, better suited to his profane vision.
He set out to locate a site of worship, a place abandoned, old, isolated, and decayed. Actually there were many such places to choose from, and, by a completely arbitrary means of selection, he soon managed to settle on one of them. This numinous structure—bashed in roof and battered walls—he cluttered with the fetishes of his new creed. These consisted of anything he could find which had a divine aura of disuse, of unfulfillment, hopelessness, disintegration, of grotesque imbecility and senselessness. Dolls with broken faces he put on display in corners and upon crumbling pedestals. Thin, lifeless trees he dug up whole from their natural graves and transplanted into the cracked tiles of the floor's mosaic; then he hung lamps of thick green glass by corroded chains from the ceiling, and the withered branches of the trees were bathed in hues of livid mold. As were the faces of the dolls and those of various mummified creatures, including two human abortions which were set floating in jars at opposite ends of an altar draped with rags. His vestments were also of rags, their frayed edges fluttering like dead leaves about to fall. Standing before the altar, he raised his arms over something that smoldered, which was his own dried excrement upon a tarnished plate. He glanced about at the defunct forest of which he was king, at the brittle twisting branches (some of which were adorned with hanging dolls and other things), at all the various objects of refuse he had added to his collection, finally at the green waters of those two occupied jars glowing upon the rags of the altar, and he widened his mouth to speak, and he said... nothing. So distracted was he with a gruesome contentment: his old wonder had been ravaged and his hunger for mockery fulfilled.
But this contentment did not last; how could it? Illusion throws its invisible shimmer over all things, no matter what level of debasement they have struggled to win. Whatever may appear, sooner or later, will appear in greatness. Thus, gradually, the pathetic, lusterless world he had made, and labored to make low, had rebelliously elevated itself beyond its surface decrepitude and assumed a kind of grandeur in his eyes. The naked limbs of what had once been trees and now were empty objects, hollow abstractions mocked by the sarcastic verdure of the green lamps, underwent transfiguration to inherit the suppleness of all symbols and the dignity of a dream. Each of the disfigured dolls, vile and insane mimics of the human nightmare, gave up their evil and revealed themselves as the protectors of countless inexpressible mysteries and myriad secret enchantments. And the precocious corpses upon the altar no longer drifted about pointlessly, embalmed in their wombs of foggy glass, but hovered serenely in becalmed fathoms of infinite wonder.
His effort to strip away the finery of objects and events, and to exist only in the balm of desolation, was a failure. The experiment had only resulted in the discovery of a deeper stratum of preciousness in things. And having revealed this substratum, his eyes began to attack its treasures with all their savage wondering. Everything became newly subject to a mockery that was not of his own making, and to an onslaught of confusion that threatened to violate his precious world of death and dolls. But was there perhap
s a more profound source of mockery and confusion that could be excavated beneath the deceptive wealth which he had so quickly exhausted? If there was, he did not possess the ambition, at this point, to seek it out. Dropping to the shattered mosaic of the floor, collapsing under the now lovely doll-hung trees, he lay abject in ragged robes of despair throughout a full day and late into the night.
But toward the latest hour of evening he was disturbed by distant sounds. He had been away from his old sect so long that at first he did not recognize the peculiar clamor of the ceremony called the Night of the Night. When he walked out into the cold air outside his solitary temple, he saw the gyration of shadows upon the summit of the hills. How could they persist in their madness, he wondered. Nevertheless, for reasons beyond explanation, he joined them.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 13
