by Allyson Bird
The Collective line jerked in Shaka’s head, sending a wave of pain through each of their bodies. Payden was holding tightly to the line, as he would a stress ball that he opened and closed in his hand. Instead he strangled the link between them, trying to maintain his composure. But Shaka herself had lost it, jumping to stand to her feet. The others followed her lead. She was angry. They all were. “You simple troglodyte! You try to teach us false history and lies, and now you want to punish Payden by saying mean things to hurt him.”
“Troglodyte. A mighty big word, for such a small….”
“No!” She held out her two first fingers and her thumb, pointing only at him. “You will not speak again.” As she spoke, the room rippled, their collective energy surrounding the man. As he tried to open his mouth, his lips sealed shut, then disappeared altogether, leaving an empty spot below the man’s nose where his mouth had once been. “You have talked enough. We won’t listen anymore.”
The man put his hands over his missing mouth. The collective members all stood, staring at the man who had seemed to have so much power before. But now he simply looked like a pathetic man trying desperately to hold on to the little bit of power that he had in that classroom. They did not pity him, however. No, that was reserved for those who did not wield power the way this man always had. No, instead, they realized how insignificant he really was, how very small he was in a vast system of Mr. Jeffersons.
Shaka walked over the white man, placed her hand over his missing mouth. “Remember this moment. This is not a dream. Know us!”
I awoke in my bed, not knowing where I was or remembering when I had laid down the night before. In fact, I didn’t remember anything after class the prior day, or more importantly, anything past the odd dream I had just had of my students. Had I dreamed it all?
I touched my mouth absently, making sure my lips were exactly where they should have been and that they had not gone missing. Of course I was being ridiculous. Those students couldn’t be trusted to tie their shoes, let along amass the brain power to do something so astonishing. But it had all seemed so real. So very real.
Maybe I was just uneasy, as my night’s reading had made me anxious and discontented. I had been reading The King in Yellow and had had a nightmare. That was all.
Beside me my alarm went off, signaling the arrival of morning and another day at Booker T. Washington High School.
Thomas Jefferson Jr. was ready for it.
STONES, MAYBE
BY URSULA PFLUG
God knows what they farmed, Peter thought. Stones, maybe. And turned away from the winter fields towards the water and the marina office: a little brown painted clapboard house with a pitched roof and small casement windows, a screen door, one large and three little rooms inside. It always reminded Peter of the cabins at Camp Wawanesa. He’d go to camp for two weeks in August before the family came here all together, to stay at Myrtle’s marina. Since he no longer used it as the office perhaps he should open a little sailing camp, with rows of bunk beds. The counselors could smoke up in the store room, looking out at the water, although, he thought, they usually did that in some locked room they’d swiped the keys to, a woods clearing, or beyond a place with a name like Cedar Point, on a scrubby, secluded little beach or island. Likewise where they went to have sex, discreetly, because getting caught meant getting fired. Although the kids always knew, he remembered, gossiping about things they were too young to understand. Had anyone known about Peter and Marti, either the other employees or any of the customers?
Probably.
The little house, situated as it was between the road and the boat launch, was intended to be the official entry point to the marina, containing in its large front room a solid brown desk and an equally solid oak swivel chair, the kind Peter remembered only the principal got at school when he was young enough to be impressed by principals. Now he was at an age where he could be one himself, figured it to be just another kind of job; not so different from sailing school really, just fewer water hazards. Better pay, though, and more regular. Peter went inside, sifting the dusty stillness. Nothing happened here, ever. Not since he and Marti used to come here to make love.
The old-timers understood when he told them why he came back. Because it was there, because his great-grandfather built the first version of the marina eighty years before, an eye on tourism as an upgrade from farming the stony unforthcoming fields. His parents and his brother, and even Aunt Myrtle no longer thought the old family farmstead on the water important, so why did he? Maybe because of that, because of them no longer wanting it. “Our family throws everything of value away,” Peter had said, when his father had asked, perplexed; maybe one had to be eighty to understand a thing like that. Yet Peter understood, just as the seniors did. Was he so prematurely aged, inside, to believe something only very old people believed otherwise? “Someone has to stop it,” he’d said stubbornly, and bought the land back from the stranger Aunt Myrtle had sold it to. The stranger had taken a loss, sold it to Peter for less than he’d paid Myrtle, who had inherited, along with Peter’s father.
“I wanted nothing to do with it. It going for even less should’ve been a sign,” his father had said, but Peter hadn’t cared. He didn’t want to be a doctor in Toronto like his brother Mark, who lived in a fancy condominium sixteen floors above Lake Ontario. He’d miss skipping stones from his private beach. What woman who wanted a family could resist this unkempt shoreline, these stony beaches? You’d look after toddlers here and not go stir-crazy, a stone’s throw from the lake. But Marti was gone, a goner. And if Peter chose to sell, he’d take a loss too, and lose his shirt. And so he stayed, year after year.
Usually he didn’t stay long, going back outside almost immediately to re-caulk the rental boats or back across the gravel road to the farmhouse to do his bookkeeping. He put the new computer on the main house’s kitchen table when he upgraded, and not in the little office building at all. He told himself it was so he didn’t have to heat two buildings. Most people who wanted him had learned to call at the house phone.
Peter remembered Myrtle telling him the office was spooky when she’d heard he was buying the place. They never saw one another much, although she only lived one township away. But she’d called him up, invited him to dinner when the news had broken of the sale going through. She looked good in her new blue sweater, better than she had when she’d run the marina, running around in old sneakers and an older anorak, her face drawn, always behind on the work and the bills. “The old people always said it was haunted,” Myrtle said over salmon and white wine, “although I never saw or heard anything.”
“It’s not why you sold?” Peter asked.
“Oh no. It’s a money sink; the farmhouse is log. It’s never been re-chinked, because the repairs money always goes to the marina buildings across the road, it being the income generator. Ostensibly. And the barn’s fallen down so bad no one will ever get it up again.”
“Nobody’s going to farm, Myrtle. Don’t need the barn.”
“But you already know all that, you already know we all think you’re crazy to want it. Especially because you had to buy it, as me and your dad didn’t.”
“It’s my childhood,” Peter said, “and our family history.” Myrtle had just rolled her eyes at his sentimentality. She had a gift shop in Buckhorn now. It didn’t make any more money than the marina, but it was a lot less work. Like Peter, she’d never married or had kids. The marina required a man, and Myrtle’d had to hire them, although Peter had come and helped most summers when he was in college studying tourism, which was probably when he’d cemented his attachment. And then he’d bought it a few years later. Was it the second summer Marti came, or the third? He should be able to remember a thing like that.
All blonde and blue, like sun on water.
He hadn’t thought anymore about the alleged ghost until the old-timers started stopping by. He’d laughed, shrugged, been too busy with the business end to listen to old people’s tales of
nameless fears. Horror meant, after all, wondering how to pay the mortgage on the property in the winter months when there was no income, hoping his summer savings from all those boat rentals to tourists would stretch till spring. But if the oldsters had been right about one thing perhaps they could be right about two, for today Peter didn’t just feel the spiralling sense of dusty, empty mystery he’d gotten used to and learned to enjoy, but something new and a little menacing. The always present sense of mystery had acquired an extra tone, emanating, Peter was suddenly quite sure, from the kitchen he’d just left, more specifically from an institutionally painted green kitchen cupboard that he saw through the open door. But he didn’t go into the kitchen, not yet, rather just glancing down the hall and through the door, at the cupboard, its door hanging ever so slightly ajar.
Making fun of himself, distancing his own fear, Peter went through the remaining rooms, looking at all the stuff the previous owners had left behind, which, in seven years he’d never brought himself to get rid of. It helped him think, he always told himself, when he was looking for a new angle on how to make a go of things. Objects from before, belonging to strangers, things that retained this alien sensibility of another life, someone’s life beyond his own, unknowable, unreachable, yet here, made concrete by abandoned items: huge bags of pesticide, fertilizer; the previous owners grew corn and tomatoes to see to the cottage folk in addition to running the marina. Peter looked at the gargantuan, heavy bags leaning in a corner, too heavy to lift, really, even shove aside. What to do with the herbicides, the five-five-five? He knew he could unload them on local farmers who’d be glad for the stuff, but the thought of it running into the ditches bordering his own land, contaminating his own well water, the well water of his children-yet-to-come, elicited a profound distaste. He composted religiously, had a heap the size of a small shed. The neighbours were covetous, but Peter, who didn’t grow a thing, was saving it for the wife.
The newly strange kitchen still called, and so he went back, if only to see there was nothing there. A sink, a hotplate, no refrigerator; he’d taken that up to the main house when the compressor on his own had fried. “Kitchen cupboards, panelling, click-handle latches that lock and pinch your fingers. Kitchen cupboards that have never belonged to a family, never been tamed by children. The moment suddenly framed and put in a late-night movie where it’s difficult to breathe, or maybe like you’re under water, you open that door. Your rational mind tells you there’s no danger but your instincts tell you otherwise; you can feel your heart pounding, pumping adrenalin. You’d shut it except you’ve already started opening it, can’t stop now. Somehow you have to complete the motion, as though, now, you are in one of those dreams where everything is hyper-real. Open the door. Hand goes in. Hmm. A paperback book.” Late winter and he was talking to himself: suggestible, susceptible, cabin fever taking a wrong turn. He shut up, acutely aware that should anyone walk in on him, which no one would, not in a million years, they’d think him barmy. As if everyone didn’t already, a little, just for buying the place.
But what about Marti? What would she think, if she chose this moment to return?
Peter took the book out of the cupboard. It was called The King in Yellow, and Peter remembered Marti reading it. She hadn’t brought it with her; she’d found it here. It was strange, she said, like nothing else she’d ever read, but she couldn’t stop—maybe he’d like to read it too? He hadn’t given it another thought; every cottage on the lake was lined with musty paperbacks after all, but then she’d disppeared, leaving the book here and not in the shelf under the window with the one dollar used copies of Agatha Christie and Steven King and John Grisham.
What could it possibly mean? He turned it over and over, unable to let it go in spite of the fact it elicited a profound terror, a kind of childhood nightmare panic. His hand shaking, he at last replaced it gingerly, as though he’d been caught going through someone else’s cupboards, which in a way he had; he couldn’t remember ever cleaning them out in any methodical way. He glimpsed a few plates: green plastic, a tinfoil pie plate, some loose spoons. But it wasn’t those objects which gave him the creeps, only the book. Being terrified of a book was even worse than talking to yourself; thankfully he had no audience unless he included the broken aluminum coffee percolators on the counter, the black-capped chickadees in the cedar outside the little window above the sink.
He left the room, bewildered. It was only a book. He could go back and get it, throw it into the middle of the lake, put it in the trash, use it for kindling in his wood stove. There were a million ways to dispose of it. But he didn’t. On the one hand it was too ridiculous, and on the other, he was afraid to touch it again. They’d come and find him, dead of heart failure in the spring, his body frozen. It would be a balm to whoever discovered him; decomposition wouldn’t have set in, or at least not much.
Peter sat down behind the heavy, scarred oak desk, made doodles of ducks and frogs on the unused memo pad, waiting for his hand to stop shaking, his heart to settle down. Because of a book. He thought of the warnings of gap-toothed, patched together oldsters dropping by the last few summers, never spending a penny, just wanting to yarn. They told him all the lake’s old stories, stories he’d shared with his tourists. Probably some of them kept coming back because of it. Hearing the stories, they’d feel part of something.
And then inevitably just before the old guys left they’d ask some version of, “Have you felt it yet?” A knowing grin. “It gets everyone sooner or later; you’ve just held out longer than most.” But Myrtle had never said anything about it getting her, although perhaps she’d been too embarrassed to admit it. Maybe for Myrtle it hadn’t been the book but something else. The percolator parts, perhaps, or the tin spoons.
It had certainly gotten Peter, whatever it even was. He drew another duck, another frog. He’d forgotten how intrinsically inescapable fear could be, how impervious to the ministrations of the rational mind. He’d have to remember that when the children came. Night terrors came at age three or four. How did he know that? Had he really spent the winter skimming copies of “Today’s Parent” he’d surreptitiously swiped from his GP’s office?
He would’ve liked to leave, to walk down to the marsh bordering the lake west of the beach, say hello to the real frogs, following his usual spring patrol, but it was too early in the year; the spring peepers wouldn’t be awake yet. Tiny dogwood-climbing frogs with suction cups for toes; in two months he’d wish he could shut them up, calling for a mate all through the night. And so, without frog songs to keep him company, it was once again back to the kitchen; at least his breathing was normal now. On the cracked and chipped counter there were three bent aluminum coffee percolators, but there wasn’t one whole, usable one among them; while the coffee basket that was missing in one was there in another, of course it didn’t fit.
For the hundredth time Peter played with the percolators. If he had a stem for the one with the coffee basket that fit, and a lid for it, instead of the twisted, non-fitting mess he held aloft, distastefully, between finger and thumb, he could make coffee, actually work down here instead of up at the house. And then if Marti snuck back through for old times’ sake, he’d be there. She wouldn’t come to the house, she’d come here, drawn to the bags of 5-5-5, where they’d done it, in great haste, before the boaters returned at sundown. And he’d talk to her, just as now, he’d already started talking to himself again, not even aware of it. “Hate to throw things away that will have a later use. I could buy cheap plastic for the kids when they’re old enough to use sand toys, the kind of things I sell and then have to clean off the beach every fall, already split and faded. Truth is, these old metal percolators will be perfect; you can use the coffee baskets as sieves. These will last for years–they already have.”
Of course, there was one small snag in this offspring fantasy; you had to have a mother first. And as far as women go, there hadn’t really been anyone besides Marti. Not exactly mother material.
He was
holding the book again, had removed it from its cupboard nest without even realizing it. He’d been right to be spooked by the mostly empty cupboards, to leave them alone. They were haunted, he was suddenly quite sure, by the demonic powers of this seemingly innocuous thing he was holding in his hand just now. He dropped it in a hurry, shaking again. Damn. He needed something to keep him from talking to himself, from thinking a cheap paperback book called The King in Yellow was a dimensional portal activated by human touch. As he was thinking now. He needed an extra little job for the winter, when the marina was closed, as now. And it would help with the more conventional panic over the bills. Never mind the market gardening; that would be the wife’s thing.
He and Marti shouldn’t have had sex on the 5-5-5 bags. If they had gone to the house, she’d have stayed. “In our family we throw everything of value away.” Weren’t those the words he’d used, to his own father? Get into hopeless debt buying back the marina, throw Marti away, as though the property wasn’t useless without her. Wifeless. Kidless. Barren.
He’d thought she was that kind of girl, adventurous, finding odd locations a little thrill. And maybe she had; but sex in a store room is the kind you enjoy and then move on from. It was so stunningly clear; why hadn’t he seen it before? “There’s always a part of you that knows the truth, however hard you try to shut it up,” Peter told the book sadly. Perhaps, he thought, it was the haunting that had value in this place, and not the stony beach, the blue still lake, the loons calling from between the piney islands. “We always throw everything of value away in our family,” he whispered again. But not the marina, and not the book. He’d keep it forever now, treasure it for its moment of insight. He hadn’t asked her to stay because she was a mess, even though he’d known by then he loved her.
