“But …”
“Speak the words. Only then I will grant you …
“Serenity ...
“Stillness ...
“Siiiiiiilenccccce ...”
While the final sibilants insinuated themselves into my mind, I fell into dream: a dream of a hidden megalopolis, its tremendous stones resting, sleeping, waiting beneath the waves, its massive structures, its tortuous thoroughfares of great stone ramps, its behemoth citadels that dwarfed all mortal trials in petty grandeur and foolish grandiosity. For endless hours—in the dream—I wandered through broad avenues, with bas-reliefs incised into the living stone, with statues standing free at intersections, with murals on every surface … all depicting such wondrous horrors, such loathly terrors that they cannot be named … we mortals have not the words, have not the consciousness of the words, would not dare speak the words if they existed.
Yet I suddenly knew certain words, a litany of rhythmic utterance beyond all meaning and beyond all hope that would open an imprisoning gateway and recall the mighty city to the surface. Awaken the sleeping god—behemoth, leviathan, kraken, Cthulhu, by whatever outré name known—and restore the Outer Ones to their ancient place within the universe. Condemn humanity to be toyed with, to their suffering agonies of slavery, torture, and eventual, inevitable death.
And all the time I knew it was a dream, just as I had known my voyages through space, the voices and the words I heard there were not, because there were no sounds except the touch of water on time-polished stone. No clack-hiss-buzz-pop-screech.
In my dreams, I never hear the sounds. Only when I awaken do they return to launch once again their insistent attack.
In that monstrous city, there were no sounds. Blessedly, no sounds.
I could choose silence … and death. Or live forever with that which pounds inside my head. Neither a blessing; both a curse.
Living is Choice.
Choice is Hell.
I awoke when the sun first broke over the distant mountain crests and shattered through my window. Immediately—more rapidly than immediately—the sounds resumed. Immediately I struggled to ignore them.
I went at once to my computer and began to write, to record what I had heard, as best I could.
I know that I cannot continue as I have, slave and subject to the random firings of nerves, interpreted by my brain as sounds.
In my bathroom cabinet are the bottles of pills my doctors have prescribed to help me sleep. There are enough, I think, to bring me what I most devoutly wish. Provided that what I experienced was a dream, and that I am not cursed to live forever, should I fail to make the choice expected of me.
Someone once wrote:
By the silence
I will know
That I am dead.
There are enough to grant me that.
But … what if …?
I am not mad. I know the difference between Dream and not-Dream.
And thus … Perhaps ... Perhaps ...
***
SPIRIT BOX
Kristen Harmon
She liked ghosts, and I liked her.
My uncle was in the business of metal detectors and Civil War junk, so when she asked about ghost soldiers, I asked her to drive around battlefields with me.
That’s how it got started. At the end of the spring, just before I dropped out of college my junior year, we decided to rent an attic apartment at the top of an old white Spanish-style mansion called Beuna Vista, near Antietam battlefield. She had always wanted to live there in that square white house with wide, flat windows, topped with curved arches like eyebrows, and a crown on top of the house—a widow’s walk. She thought she had a memory of living nearby with a kind lady she called her grandmother.
Wait, she’d told me the first time we drove up the ridge and nearly past the house. She’d seen a handwritten sign taped to a huge, round, rusting mailbox at the end of a long gravel driveway. It was the kind of sign that was always intended to be overlooked.
I eased off the gas, let the car coast to a full stop, and grinned at her when it started drifting back down the hill toward the house, on its own. I had just finished rebuilding it, a Pontiac Fiero that I’d reclaimed from my uncle’s grown-over backyard, next to a rusted pile of Confederate mortar shells and a charred forest of dumped Christmas trees I’d stuck standing straight up in the ground and burned. The Fiero growled and barked under my feet every time I pressed the gas pedal and shifted gears to power up and down the mountains at the state lines, but it was bad-ass. Spray-painted a matte black. I loved it and called it my Beast. At the very last second, I braked and idled in front of the house, and the car shook and rattled its shell and bones.
Taped to the box with an old-fashioned clear yellow tape, the kind with threads, and written in blue ball-point in spindly WWII cursive, the sign said, “Historic Mountain Resort Beuna Vista now open to quality tenants; enquire at front door.” Green tree pollen dusted the top of the spreading rust on the mailbox, the kind of rust that looks like it’s peeling back to a dry red bone. It was almost pretty, and I sneezed.
Finish-seen this before, she said, looking up at the house. She looked down at her hand and spelled out the name of the house as if she’d read it somewhere a long time ago and was trying to remember. B-e-u-n-a V-i-s-t-a, she repeated, a frown on her face. It’s misspelled. Supposed to be Beautiful View. In Spanish.
Isn’t the view supposed to be what the house sees? This was the actual view: the slopes and squares of the farms and yellow and black squares of the national park below us.
[SIC] she told me, with a smile.
I smiled back, thinking I understood, but puzzled as to why she didn’t use the sign that meant touched-in-the-head.
Not sick, she explained with both air brackets and air quotes. S-u-c-h a-s i-t w-a-s. Means original contained a mistake. That’s how it was written. No corrections. Left as is.
Who couldn’t love a girl who knew how to add in air brackets? She always liked to explain things to me; I was the college student, and she wasn’t. She’d graduated from the deaf school two years after me, and she worked at the used book and DVD warehouse.
Now means Screwed-up View?
You’re sick. She laughed.
S-i, s-i, I’d told her, with a two-handed bowing down.
Latin, silly, she’d said. But she’d laughed.
I still remember what she looked like at that moment, the spring sun on her face, the chilly wind blowing in from the open windows. It’s always sunny and cold, in my mind, when I think about her outside that house.
It turned out that Beuna Vista had only two owners since it was built in the 1920s, and the Earnshays, an elderly hearing couple were the second ones. They didn’t know who had named the house or why, except it used to be a sanitarium for TB patients. While Stella stood outside on the house’s patio and wrote back and forth with the Earnshays, I waited outside, leaned back against the Beast, and tilted my face up to the bleary spring sun.
Echoing me, Stella leaned back on the peeling black wrought iron rail, and I caught myself worrying that it would give way and she would fall off the patio. I could almost see it happening, and for a moment it was like it already did happen but then that moment folded in on itself and was gone. Falling in love like this felt like a trippy fever coming on, but I’d take it.
The stucco on the outside walls on the first floor had been painted recently, the pox scars of a bad plaster job bubbling up and flaking here and there. I wanted to get a black Sharpie and circle those crusted bumps because I swear they moved, but maybe it’s just the shadows from the studded branches of the nearby trees or it’s that same broken blood vessel floating by on the wall behind my eyes.
She walked back to me and my matte-black behemoth, a huge smile on her face. It’s perfect, she said. Looks like a barge—big, wide, slow. And it did look like a white boat on top of that grassy mound.
So that, she told me, was the first thing you have to do if you’re goin
g to try to recover lost memories like we did for her that summer; you have to get an appropriately becalmed apartment. She’d been reading about spirits, shamans, and mediums in the back room of the book warehouse. Recovering lost memories seemed to her like resurrecting dead people; if you could recover a memory, then there also would be the person. She believed that all will reveal itself, if you let it.
I feel LaLa is nearby, she said to me before we drove away. She’s waiting.
She’d gotten into the whole repressed memory thing through her boyfriend Nix, one of those guys who everyone liked but there was something off about him. For me, it was the way that he watched people watching him tell a joke or a story. There was something blank behind his face—that’s the best way I can describe it.
Of course, we didn’t tell anyone what we were doing. It sounded crazy. It was crazy. At least my cover story of setting up some kind of themed tie-in with my uncle’s junkyard was socially acceptable. And I really had always wanted to set up a battlefield ghost tour; that was never a lie.
After the Earnshays got over the fact that we were both deaf, that we had drivers’ licenses, and that I was still at that time a college student, our new landlords kept their views to themselves. We knew that the religious Earnshays gave us the side-eye, an unmarried college-age guy and a girl living together in the darkest, warmest part of the house.
I didn’t want to ask my parents for the deposit money, so I sold my cranky beast of a car for almost nothing. God, walking off the Mason-Dixon Used Car lot felt like I’d left my balls behind. It almost felt like the car, now parked under an old cat-eye lamppost, watched me go.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened differently if I’d kept my metal babe, my matte-black chariot, and worked at the liquor store instead for the cash money. But then that would have meant that I’d be away from her more often. It would have been the same thing at the end.
After our deposit cleared and we moved in on the first hot day in May, the Earnshays left us a chatty, relieved-sounding note to say that they were related to the Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights—even though the Earnshaws were made up—and anyway, a “w” was not the same as a “y.” W is the new Y, I told Stella. Just call me R-A-W. She always smiled when I said that. You’re funny, she’d say. And that was everything.
I made a lot of fun of the Earnshays to Stella, but that gave her the idea to re-read the novel that summer, and she did, curled up in the window seat of the widow’s walk in the one cool, rainy week in June. It’s probably still there, right where she left it. We seem to have been the last and only tenants the Earnshays took in. They never did anything with the house except the clipping and cutting back of the landscaping and other stuff on the outside. As far as I know, they left everything inside as it was when we lived there—and before us, just as the first owners had left it.
Most afternoons at 1:15 p.m., Mrs. Earnshay walked around outside in huge wrap-around black shades and a blue denim work shirt, the sleeves always buttoned at the wrist, no matter how hot or chilly the day. One day, an especially bright and windy day, she wore a fleece hunting balaclava mask with her wrap-around shades. When I saw her, it took me so long to figure out who or what she was, my heart pounded, and I felt like I was lost. Mrs. Earnshay looked like something too carefully inhabiting those shabby clothes, an imposter with a round head and flat bug eyes.
Mrs. Earnshay’s daily constitutional seemed to consist of not much more than checking each of the tiny, aging, boutique trees in the front, pausing, but not touching, each set of knotted branches, dying back one by one like strange hands on the lawn.
They had no visitors even though they went to a church down in the valley and there was a sepia-toned picture of two small children in vintage hats and coats, a boy and a girl, on a round wooden table in their hallway. We only saw the inside of the main house once, when we gave them the check, and after that, we took the freshly-cut, still green, wooden stairs up to our door in the widow’s walk. The one window that we could see from the stairs was always shuttered and dark. Of course that also meant they could never see who was on the stairs up to the widow’s walk apartment.
I saw in the paper Mrs. Earnshay died this past fall, releasing her skin promptly at 1:15 p.m. The obituary mentioned that the house’s original owners, Adrien and Lara Cuvelier, had originally built the house to be shared with her family, but their boat sank on the crossing over the Atlantic. After Lara died of influenza in the house, Mr. Cuvelier allowed it to be used as a sanitarium for WWII patients until the Earnshays, a young couple with two children, bought the place. Mrs. Earnshay had been a nurse stationed in this sanitarium.
The Earnshays probably didn’t know how easy they had it with us as tenants. We kept mostly to ourselves. Stella quit her job, and we stayed up most of the night, slept through most of the day. But the mail was obviously sifted through before being neatly stacked just outside the apartment door, each bill facing upwards, the addresses all to the right. I’d left college and hadn’t yet paid off the balance from the previous semester, so my mail had a tendency to pile up.
We spent those days and nights together in what now feels to me like a warm, sleepy haze, the hot late afternoon sun streaming in through the windows, the spiky pattern of the succulents—Stella’s plants—moving slowly across the room.
The attic—I haven’t yet described what it looked like inside—was what you’d expect of an old attic. Gouged wooden floors, old bedsteads—now gone—having screeched and scratched across the splintering boards. One bed: a fold-out full-size futon, lumpy and scratchy with cheap dollar store sheets that never got washed enough.
Stella preferred the long window-seat of the widow’s walk, which opened out onto a terrace with a rail like a crown on top of the house. Lots of narrow windows up there, the wooden sills stained and rotting from rainstorms decades long gone. The breeze swept down the valley on the other side of us and up to the top of the house even on the hottest nights that summer. I bought her a porch chaise cushion to soften the old wooden seat.
I painted the sepia walls white to give it a fresh look when we first moved in. Stella scrounged up old blue and green apothecary bottles from Goodwill and used those for decorations. Some still have sprigs of Stella’s flowers in them. You can see them even now in the windows.
I feel like I’ve been here for a-g-e-s, she’d said, with a rare, contented, smile. It’s ours.
But there was a corner where I wouldn’t look even on the hottest, brightest nights, the full moon or the snow shining straight in. She’d just left Nix, and I took it slow that summer. I was there for her, and her alone. Together we were enough.
I’d always had a crush on Stella, with the warm brown hair and the white tank top she always wore, the one that barely covered her perfect, loveable, body. And that summer, she was there, finally, with me.
But not totally. Sometimes she startled so badly at nothing—a shadow or a touch—that I began to wonder why she didn’t trust me. Wasn’t I enough? After everything I’d done for her? Other times she couldn’t settle down and focus. She couldn’t understand why LaLa wasn’t coming through the way she thought she would when we moved in.
Stella didn’t have anyone; her bio parents had been druggies or transients, no one really knew. All she knew was that they had come to town in a Vega the color of mustard and stopped first at the drive-in for a foot-long hotdog and tater tots. Deafness had saved her, she said. She’d been placed in a large foster family near the school for the deaf. Her foster mom was fantastic, but she had that kind of unfocused warmth that wasn’t particular to anyone. Foster mom hugged everyone the same: long, full-chested, and fresh-bread-warm.
But instead of Lala, the kind woman who she thought might have been her grandmother, Stella dreamed often of old-time soldiers marching and running below us, parting like water around the stone and mortar foundation of the house. She said she wondered if they wanted her to follow them.
Maybe this—a pathway, she told m
e one night, when we sat outside, dangling our feet over the edge of the walkway at the top of the house. So they know where to go.
At the time, I thought maybe the most important thing to do was to just let this fixation sweat itself out like a summer cold. I hadn’t had that much real experience with women beyond what I taught myself with her, long and slow and short and quick, on the dollar store sheets. Seeing her close her eyes and lift herself up to me: I thought that was everything she needed.
But as June warmed up into July, she stopped chatting as much and seemed to be moving slower and slower. She perked up whenever we talked about what should be done next to get in touch with LaLa. When we planned our scouting adventures, she seemed more like herself, like the outgoing, vivacious, smiling girl I’d known as Nix’s girlfriend in high school.
So if LaLa wasn’t coming to us, we’d have to go to her. What we had to do next was to get something to track changes in the environment. Stella’s new theory about our house was that it functioned more like an eddy in a stream, spooling down from some other spiritually active site like Antietam, but not staying still. We couldn’t use the spirit boxes my uncle rigged up from Radio Shack parts and sometimes sold in his shop; spirit boxes sent out white noise and scan radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields for possible spoken responses from the ether. That was out for two deafies like us.
So I bought an EMF meter from Sears for $27.25, intended to measure electromagnetic activity. At college, I’d declared a history major, then became a sociology major, and then started an engineering major just before I’d dropped out. I didn’t have a strong enough math background. But reading the manual for the EMF—all those terms: dosimeters, milligausses, field, axis, geomagnetic measurements—brought back a charge that I’d been missing. I’d been a little bored.
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