Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1)

by Michael Stiles

  Forest of the Mind

  By Michael Stiles

  Forest of the Mind

  Copyright 2012 Michael Stiles

  All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  For Mei

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 – Terwilliger Awakes

  2 – An Empty Apartment

  3 – Meat-Man and the Gnome

  4 – The Bald-Headed Men

  5 – At the Guru’s House

  6 – Big John

  7 – X-Ray Vision

  8 – In the Buick

  9 – Doris and Her Uncle

  10 – The American Dream

  11 – Buddha’s Head

  12 – Tomato Soup

  13 – Mrs. Findlay’s Crazy Neighbor

  14 – A Meeting with the Guru

  15 – The Gnome Returns

  16 – Danny Makes a Deal

  17 – Spiders and Darkness

  18 – A Pleasant Talk with Dingleberry

  19 – The Miracle of the Vistula

  20 – The Houseguest

  21 – Kingfisher

  22 – The Society of the True Judgment

  23 – A Mysterious Illness

  24 – The Four Zoas

  25 – A Change in the Plan

  26 – A Classy Affair

  27 – June Gloom

  28 – A Bleak Landscape

  29 – Bloody Razorblade

  30 – Terry and Candice

  31 – What Happened to Rodney

  32 – The Shovel

  33 – Someone at the Door

  34 – Monticello

  35 – Burlap Bags and Fingernail Scratches

  36 – A Letter and a Phone Call

  37 – In Union Square

  38 – A Fair Trade

  39 – Time to Get Going

  40 – A Surprise for Mr. Jin

  41 – A Man Selling Trinkets

  42 – Under a Green Blanket

  43 – The Girl Who Seldom Blinks

  44 – Oxtail Soup

  45 – Terwilliger’s City

  46 – Revival

  47 – In the Ladies’ Room

  48 – Points of Light

  Epilogue – Freedom

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  New Mexico, 1947

  Jimmy’s father had to stop the car because of the dead bodies all over the road. Jimmy, sandwiched between his grandparents in the back seat, squinted into the rising sun to see why they were slowing down. His mother, in the passenger seat, gasped and put a hand over her mouth. The road was blocked by a truck that had tipped over in the middle of the highway. And people had spilled out of the back of it.

  His father turned off the car.

  “Stay in the car,” his grandfather said. The two men got out and walked over to the people that lay on the ground near the truck. There were five or six of them lying there, stained bright red by fresh blood. They look like Indians, Jimmy thought. They must have all been riding in the back.

  Jimmy’s mother and grandmother were both crying now. They watched from the car as the men examined the bodies, pressing their fingers against wrists and throats. None of the bodies showed signs of life. Jimmy’s father had blood all over his hands.

  Although his eyes were growing blurry, Jimmy saw that one of the Indians was moving. The man kicked feebly and managed to roll over onto his back. Jimmy’s father ran over to the man, getting down on his knees next to his head and saying a few words to him. All of the rest seemed to be either unconscious or dead.

  Jimmy looked to his left and saw another Indian lying in the ditch right next to the car. His face was smeared with blood and dust, and he was looking right at Jimmy. A pool of blood was soaking into the ground next to his mouth, which hung open in a silent grimace. Jimmy wanted to call to his grandfather, who was wiping his hands on a handkerchief, but he couldn’t make his voice work. Jimmy just stared at the Indian in the ditch, and the Indian stared back. After a minute, it dawned on him that the man hadn’t blinked once since Jimmy had first seen him.

  Jimmy was starting to feel strange. Even though the desert air was absolutely still, it felt like the world was spinning slowly around him—very slowly at first, then faster and faster. He knew it was his imagination, it had to be, but Jimmy thought he could see the spirits of the Indians leaving their bodies and standing up. They leapt into the air and flew in circles around the car. They pushed inward on him, trying desperately to touch him.

  Looking that dead Indian in the eye, Jimmy felt the spirits entering him. The sensation was the most terrifying thing he’d ever experienced. How come his father wasn’t running back to help him? Couldn’t he see the ghosts swirling around the car? He needed to cry out, get his mother’s attention, but he couldn’t move.

  Once they had entered his mind, they began to show him things. Two men’s faces—one bald and full of anger, the other kind and smiling. The two faces grew large and became luminous, then disappeared in a flash of light. Jimmy then saw a younger man, different from the other two, walking down a city street in the rain. He was looking for something, but Jimmy thought the man himself didn’t know what it was. He was short, with a dark beard, and he had a haunted look about him. Whatever he was looking for, Jimmy somehow knew it would change the world forever if he found it. Then the city faded away, and in its place Jimmy saw lights—thousands of tiny yellow lights flickering in a vast darkness.

  One by one, the spirits of the Indians were drawn away into those little lights. Soon Jimmy was alone again.

  He rubbed his eyes and looked around, and was amazed to see that nothing around him was any different. His mother and grandmother were still sobbing as they stared at the bodies outside. Jimmy’s father was walking back toward them wearing a grim expression; his grandfather still stood by one of the bodies, looking down at it sadly. Nothing had changed. No time had passed.

  Yet Jimmy felt different, as though he’d aged twenty years in an instant. He had seen the future laid out in front of him. Though the details were already slipping out of his memory, he was filled with a hope and a sense of life that he’d never imagined before. The spirits of the Indians had opened a door in his mind, and through it he had been able to see beyond life and death.

  Jimmy looked back at the dead Indian at the side of the road, who still stared blankly back at him. The man’s face hadn’t changed, but somehow he no longer looked like he was in pain. Jimmy understood now. In that brief moment the Indians had told him all their secrets, secrets about life and death and fear and hope. He understood everything.

  Turning to his mother, he tried to think of how he would explain it to her. He had to find a way to tell everyone.

  1

  Terwilliger Awakes

  The gnome was sitting on the foot of his bed when he woke up.

  Edwin Terwilliger awoke to find the creature perched on the bed next to his feet, gazing at him with its one red eye. Couldn’t it just let him sleep?

  “What do you want?” he asked it. Tried to ask, but his mouth felt like he had someone’s old socks in it, and the question came out as an unintelligible grunt.

  The gnome didn’t answer.

  Ed was lying in a bed in a small room with white-painted concrete walls, harshly illuminated by fluorescent lights. His right leg was stiff and sore.

  Someone was whispering nearby. Ed twisted his head in the direction of the sound. There were two blurry human for
ms, one light and one dark. The dark figure was very wide.

  “Should work better this time,” the dark blur was saying in a breathless voice. He sounded like one of those large people who are always breathless even when they’ve been sitting still. “I’ll test him this afternoon.”

  “We’ll talk later,” said the narrow one. “He’s awake.” The big man moved out of Ed’s field of view, after which an echoing clang shook the room and rattled his skull. The gnome still sat in the same spot on the bed.

  “Mr. Terwilliger,” said the man who had stayed, leaning close to look into Ed’s eyes. “Can you hear me? It’s Dr. Engel.”

  Ed struggled to focus on the speaker, a thin, homely man with heavy plastic-rimmed glasses and a high hairline. He spoke to Ed with exaggerated enunciation, as an adult might speak to a particularly slow child. The doctor didn’t even glance at the gnome; he couldn’t see it.

  Ed tried to ask for some water. All that came out was a frog-like rasp.

  Dr. Engel motioned to someone in the corner Ed hadn’t seen before—a pretty young woman in a white uniform. She left through a metal door behind the doctor, allowing it to close behind her with another head-rattling clang. A moment later she came back with a little paper cup of water—Ed moaned as the door slammed a third time—and held the cup just out of his reach, forcing him to sit up partway to take it from her. Head pounding, he managed to prop himself up on one elbow and take the cup. His hand trembled as he drank; he was so weak that he could hardly hold himself up. Swallowing the tiny mouthful of water, he held out the cup, grunting to the woman for more.

  Four or five tiny cupfuls later, having washed down most of the fuzz in his mouth, Ed felt somewhat more communicative. Dr. Engel sat down in a wooden chair next to the bed as the young woman left and shut the door. She eased it closed this time, to Ed’s relief.

  Glancing down again, he saw that the gnome had disappeared. “Where am I?” he asked in a voice that vaguely approximated his own.

  The doctor pursed his lips and looked at him in a bird-like way. He reminded Ed of an oversized, balding sparrow. “Ed, what’s the last thing you can remember?”

  Ed tried to recall how he’d come to this place. His brain felt full of fog. What he could remember made his stomach turn sour. “Eleanor. She was―” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  “Yes, your wife was murdered,” the doctor said, in a matter-of-fact way that made Ed want to smack him. Then he changed the subject abruptly: “Do you know what month it is?”

  “What? I don’t know. October.”

  “October of what year?”

  The questions were making his head pound. “This year. 1967.”

  Dr. Engel arched his eyebrows as if this was the most interesting thing he’d heard all day. “Is it, now?” He took some more notes, and Ed was pretty sure the man was smirking. “I’ve been speaking with your friend, that gray-haired fellow,” Engel said while he wrote. “Mr. Kajdas. How do you know him?”

  Ed didn’t feel like explaining who Tom Kajdas was. Kajdas was with the FBI, and Ed had met him when Kajdas had been sent to investigate Eleanor’s disappearance. This doctor probably knew all that anyway. “He’s a friend.”

  “Good,” the doctor said. “Mr. Kajdas will be driving you home once you’re discharged. We couldn’t find anyone else to claim you. Oh, and I’m sorry about your wife.” Engel tucked his clipboard under his arm and stood up to leave.

  “Wait,” said Ed. He started to sit up, but his leg was too stiff to move very far. “You haven’t told me anything. Where am I? How come I can’t remember anything? What’s wrong with me?”

  The doctor barked a short, rude laugh. “You’re as crazy as a goddamn cockroach, that’s what’s wrong with you. You were having psychotic episodes and taking heroin. You thought you were being hunted by some yellow demon and an army of bald men.”

  “Yellow?”

  “Yellow. When your friend brought you here, you were having an argument with an imaginary garden gnome.”

  “The gnome,” Ed said thoughtfully. “I hate that thing.”

  “You’re in Santa Rosa Mental Hospital, just outside Bakersfield. Today is the sixth of December, 1968.”

  Ed gave that a few moments’ thought, watching the doctor’s face for any sign that he was making a joke. “Did you say ’68?”

  “You’ve been staying with us for the last six months while we’ve been trying to fix you.”

  “1968,” Ed mumbled, working through the math in his head. Something was wrong with that. “You say I’ve been here six months?”

  “Give or take a month.”

  Ed ran through the numbers one more time. “But the last thing I remember was more than a year ago.”

  “You don’t remember having this conversation before?”

  “I don’t remember ever seeing you before.”

  Engel shrugged. “Memory loss. That’s not unusual.”

  “It’s unusual for me.”

  “Feel okay other than that?”

  Ed glared at him.

  “Good. I wouldn’t worry too much. Things will start coming back to you.” The doctor patted him on the shoulder, bringing about another wave of nausea and causing Ed’s opinion of him to fall yet another notch. “We’ll need to get you walking around again. Nurse Gilmore will get you up and about.” He nodded once in a way that was intended to be encouraging. A moment later, after enduring another teeth-jarring clang from the door, Ed was alone in the small white room.

  The young woman came back. She was pretty, but that fact barely registered with Ed as he reflected on what the doctor had told him. More than a year of his life had gone missing.

  “That doctor said I’ve been in this bed for six months,” he said as she helped him sit up.

  “Oh no,” she said, smiling. She appeared to be one of those people who smile too much. It gave him the willies. “You’ve only been in bed the last few weeks. I think the last stages of the treatment were a little hard on you.”

  She helped Ed to his feet and supported most of his weight as he tested his legs. The right one was stiff and aching. Two wobbly steps were all he could manage before slumping back onto the bed.

  “Leg’s sore,” he said.

  “Probably just from layin’ in bed too long,” the nurse said brightly.

  Ed looked down and saw an ugly pink scar on the outer edge of his right thigh, just above the knee, where his thin leg poked out of his hospital gown. “Right,” he said.

  * * *

  Some time later—it was impossible to tell time in this windowless world of artificial light—another man came to see Ed. This one didn’t look like a doctor. He was monstrously fat and looked like he was not in the habit of using shampoo. As soon as he spoke, Ed recognized him as the out-of-breath man he’d heard before. He sat Ed in a chair and asked a lot of questions while shining a bright light into his eyes. The light didn’t annoy Ed nearly as much as the questions, but both were nothing compared to the spoiled-meat stench of his breath. Ed half expected to see maggots squirming in the back of the man’s throat.

  “Have you and I ever spoken before?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed replied, trying not to gag. His eyes were watering from the light.

  “Yes or no?”

  Ed tried to give the fat man a withering look, but his inquisitor merely gripped Ed’s head more tightly with his sausagy fingers. “No,” said Ed.

  This went on for what seemed like hours. Ed didn’t know the answers to most of the questions, but the man continued to ask them anyway. The last thing the man said, though, was stranger than any of his questions.

  “Unconquerable peppercorn.”

  This seemed like an unusual thing to say, but before that thought sank in, Ed found himself completely unable to move. It was as if every muscle in his body had contracted at once. He slumped over sideways, rigid as a board. The man calmly prodded him with his finger and continued to shine that stupid light into his eyes.

&
nbsp; “Good,” said the fat man after several minutes of prodding and shining. “Symmetric doghouse.”

  Ed’s muscles went slack at once; he had to grab the arms of his chair to keep from rolling out.

  “What was the last thing I just said?” the man asked him once he was firmly seated again.

  Ed scowled in annoyance, his eyes watering. “You haven’t said anything. You just came in a second ago.”

  The fat man switched off his light and put it in his breast pocket. “Good enough.”

  * * *

  Ed awoke to the sound of someone yelling. He sat up and looked around, eyes wide in the semi-darkness, before realizing that he was the one doing the yelling. His head was humming again, and a burning smell, like a struck match, filled his nose. He knew that feeling. It meant the gnome was coming.

  He sat there a long time, sweating and waiting for it to arrive. The noise in his head grew louder, more urgent.

  It appeared on the floor in the corner. One moment there was nothing there; then Ed blinked, and there it was, glaring at him with its one good eye. A portion of the left side of its face and its eye had been chipped off years before, when Ed had thrown it off the balcony of his apartment during an argument with Eleanor. He had always despised that gnome, ever since Eleanor had fallen in love with it after seeing it on a street vendor’s blanket in the city. He had always suspected she cared more for that ceramic gnome than for him.

  The creature watched him for a long time. Then it did something it had never done before. It flickered. Like a fluorescent light with a bad electrical connection, the gnome flickered, disappeared for a second, then reappeared looking as solid as ever. It stood there a long time, watching him with its horrible red eye. Then it flickered again and vanished.

  Ed stayed awake after that, certain that it would come back. It always did. He waited for what felt like an hour at least, but there was no other sign of the creature for the rest of the night. He was still waiting when an orderly arrived to bring him his breakfast of liquefied fruits and meats.