by David Herter
Again, you find your uneasiness lifting, this time by the comic book you hold in your hands and by Wilson’s promise to take you to The Island of Dr. Moreau in Pelican Bay. Your turn to the peculiar corner and the low door you had found that first day. Mom swears she still can’t see it till it’s opened. But you can never unsee it.
Laying the comic book on the bed, you approach the door, kicking some toys out of the way. You drop to your knees.
As you crawl through the gateway your curls brush the low wood, the confines reeking pleasantly of varnished wood and old paper.
* * *
You named it your fort the first time you saw it. That first day, Mom called it a hidey-hole and didn’t let you go in.
Instead, she and Clarissa had pondered it from the outside for at least ten minutes before Clarissa cautiously crawled in. Even after it was cleaned out Mom was hesitant to allow you in here alone, but you forget that now. It’s your favorite spot in the house, not scary at all. The entrance is just your size, and after the entrance the ceiling opens up and the space with its angled walls reminds you of a fun house mirror, with light from the small window and a bare lightbulb for when it’s night, like now.
The walls are solid, but one is of dark teak, in five planks that don’t match the rest. If you press your nose against it you can smell the wood and something else—acrid, sharp. If you press your ear against it the entire house becomes a sounding board, delivering up voices vague as baby birds, as well as gnomic footsteps, and the glassy whir of water running through the pipes.
The crates smell of pine. Mom found them for you at one of the swap meets on the beach. The top carton is mostly Mad and Cracked and Robot Slayers, but right now you’re interested in the crate below it, so you set the first aside then rummage through the second, through Star Treks and Dr. Spectres until you reach a vein of Classic Comics Illustrated and, eventually, The Island of Dr. Moreau.
You lie down on your side, propped on your elbow. You turn the pages until you reach a view of the island.
Time is tide. Time is tide.
You remember the eight windows of the laboratory and how the doctor had invited you to look out the glass.
Time is tide and the beating of a heart. And a tide pool … Well, Bally, time in a tide pool is time stopped.
But Dr. Moreau doesn’t look like the Doctor much, even though his laboratory now and then looks like the Doctor’s, and his island, too, at least in the first few pages. You care less about Moreau than the beast men, who might be ghosts if they were in Capitola. Pigs and boars especially. Flipping the pages you find them laid out on tables and caged behind glass walls, and you think of the pig chained in the backyard; the pig which Clarissa once told you had been called Doc Trips.
You remember the slither of its chain and its snuffling against the brick wall. And now it’s back. Your stomach goes cold. It’s back because Wilson somehow broke the barrier and brought something with him. Dropping down from under his Winnebago.
You hear something behind you and drop the comic book. You glance over your shoulder at the entrance, toward the crooked door; toward your bedroom and the wash of lamplight on dark wood; stare even when you want to blink, and the light wavers with tears, and you continue staring at the doorway and the wavering light, willing yourself not to blink.
Them the light from the bedroom blinks, just once.
And comes that familiar smell: a firecracker held to the nose.
This while the whir of the GE fan goes flat just for a moment, as something passes in front of the blades. And the floorboards creak.
You blink.
You crawl back to the door and the edge of your bedroom, squinting against the lamplight.
The Robot Slayer looms at the window in his red-and-blue Velcro suit. “Those aren’t California plates, Ballou.” He rubs his jaw with a hand no smaller than the honey-glazed ham in the fridge.
* * *
“When did he show up?” Ragnar’s voice, deep and dark, resonates against the glass.
“This afternoon.”
“That vehicle once had writing on the side. True You 100s. But it’s not much different than the armored transport from Sea City One.”
Your soldiers, sand dollars, and starfish seem brighter, and the room incrementally smaller, and you, larger. “Mom said he died in Dem Bien Phu.”
The Robot Slayer rubs his jaw; the sound is that of sandpaper on coarse wood. “I was at Dem Bien Phu. I spent thirty-five issues fighting in ‘Nam, Ballou, and I didn’t see your Uncle Wilson there.”
“He gave Mom a shot.”
Ragnar turns to you. His eyes are gray, almost luminescent. “Good, Ballou. That’s good you realize it.” A moment later, he turns back to the window. “It’s possible the truck is stolen. From what I’ve heard of this fellow Wilson’s M.O., that wouldn’t be too far-fetched. I’d imagine he has a rap sheet as long as my arm.”
“The ghost,” you say, “the pig’s ghost. It’s back.”
Again, the sound of sandpaper on coarse wood. “Remember when I drove it out, I said it might return?”
“Mom says Madame Coutzie drove it out.” You remember the old lady’s wild hair stringed with beads and the pounding of her drums. “She promised it wouldn’t come back.”
“My method was the stronger one, Ballou, derived from an East Indian shaman whose life and soul I had the pleasure of saving. But even that method was not infallible.”
“He brought something with him. I saw it drop down to the gravel.” You shut your eyes, squeeze them tight. “I didn’t run.”
When you open them, the room is empty.
* * *
You lie in bed for a long time before sleep, listening to the house.
* * *
And when you look again, the room has changed. Your posters are gone and the shape of the room itself is somehow different. Or the moonlight has changed it. When you sit up you find no Centurions and Saracens, no sand dollars or starfish, no bookcase or big-mouthed jars containing your beach rocks. Everything is gone, except for the fan.
You throw back the covers and sit up, swinging out your legs.
No, no, no, says the fan, shaking its head as you rise and walk past, feeling like your chest is full of helium.
Before leaving the room, you look back at the boy sleeping in the bed.
Descending, you wonder if he’s dreaming you.
* * *
You tiptoe down the hall, past the living room. The television is a window upon a glowing snowstorm. The front door is not locked. Stepping through, you feel the chill of night. It howls, the night; faintly howls in a wandering way that says it thinks everyone in Capitola is asleep and not listening. And the surf at this hour speaks anything but your name, ignorant of you, with a largeness that you find suddenly terrifying, and at your shoulders. It speaks the secret name of the night.
Under your feet, the gravel is cold but not sharp. You approach the vehicle and the side door, but end up walking past, walking with your reflection around the front where the windshield stares blind at the palm tree; around the dead side where the low smell of eucalyptus tickles your nostrils and the scent of plasticky water recalls the sea.
As you walk past the ladder there comes faint the crying of gulls and the more nervous whine and chitter of the shearwaters.
Back at the door, you climb the steps, pull open the door, and enter.
The interior is larger than expected, the walls angled like those of your bedroom.
On the nearest table, in a bolt of moonlight, glittering gems are piled, giant diamonds and rubies. Beyond is a huge kitchen with a stove and fridge, and a bright green cupboard that reminds you of Wilson’s mug.
You drift to it the way you do in dreams. You see your hand reaching for the knob, then you’re sliding open the long door, revealing nine large-mouthed jars in a bolt of moonlight, each containing a dead bird, wings spread, beak pointing upward, as though it drowned while trying to struggle out.
&nb
sp; The cry of the gulls is louder. Their wings brush the ceiling. And behind you, someone begins breathing.
You’re about to speak Ragnar’s name when Wilson rises into another bolt of moonlight. His Marlboro Man face is oddly waxy, though the eyes sparkle. “Good morning, young Ballou.” He nods to the silver flask and green mug. Steppin’ Out. “Do you wish a drink?”
His left sleeve is rolled up. At the crook of his elbow sits a tarantula the size of a child’s hand.
“I would recommend vodka over the toxins in those jars.” The tarantula twitches. It climbs slowly to his shoulder. “They are the end line of my experiments, and quite lethal.” He lifts his right hand as though it’s anesthetized, gesturing slackly to the green book sitting beside the mound of treasure, and at the same time seeming to draw the cries of the shearwaters from the air. “Mysteries of the Pacific Coast. Mysteries being another name for ineluctable strangeness, the emanations of a land that meets the ocean with an aura of madness, here at the end of the great continent of America.” He moves out of the moonlight. “There’s quite a tale in those pages, though your mother removed the best one. Excised it, with a razor blade. In Nineteen—”
“You’re not Wilson.” You search the dark for his face.
“But you’re quite aware that we’re dreaming, both of us. Tomorrow I’ll be Uncle Wilson once more, Ballou, and we’ll pretend we don’t remember it. How does that sound?”
You sense his smile.
“Nineteen fifty-nine. Some nine years before you were born. I began to throw the fetes here at the House of 31 Sparrow Lane. And they were amazing, vast affairs.” He’s talking again like the Doctor, and even steeples his hands below his chin; the tarantula is lost in the shadows. “Twenty, thirty youngsters. More? Head parties, let’s call them, before people knew what head parties were. So many flocked here. I use that term with a knowing smile, Ballou.” His voice becomes wistful. “She liked to wander of a night.”
“Stop being the Doctor!”
Wilson vanishes, and you have the book in your hands, Mysteries of the Pacific Coast. You open it like you’ve done so many times before, only this time to a page you’ve never seen. A black-and-white photo of your house takes up half of it. In wintry light, the Doctor stands in his white suit holding an umbrella, surrounded by dour children in old-time clothes.
The girl at his side is your mother.
From the shadows, the Doctor’s voice intones, Your mother is a memory who swallowed a bird, Ballou.
When you wake, early sunlight streams through your bedroom window. Tossing back the blanket, you feel no astonishment at the gravel strewn across the sheets.
* * *
Downstairs, you wonder at your dream. You sweep up the grit at the base of the staircase, but before you can look for more the telephone rings in the living room. On tiptoe you run in, seeing the couch and Wilson’s body under a blanket. As you lift the heavy handset—silencing the phone but for the echo of its jangle in the yellow plastic—Wilson stirs.
His hair is ragged, like he’s slept a month in Diem Bien Phu.
“Lila, hon? You there?” Clarissa.
Through the hair you see the glint of Wilson’s eye.
You strive to whisper. “It’s Ballou.”
“Hey, kiddo. Your mom awake?”
Without saying a word, Wilson tells you he remembers everything about your dream, about being the Doctor, and showing you the missing page from Mysteries of the Pacific Coast, only he’s not going to say anything out loud about it.
“She’s still asleep.”
“How is she? Tell me, B.” And to your silence: “That uncle of yours still there?”
He’s not my uncle. You force it out: “Yes.”
Wilson yawns and sits up, throws back the blanket, shaggy like a bearman in T-shirt and boxers. His hairy legs are like something from the Doctor’s laboratory.
“Is he there with you right now?”
A pause. “Uh-huh.”
“I get it. So you don’t want to talk. Are things okay, B? Things okay with your mom and you?”
“Yeah,” you say flatly, while Wilson stretches and yawns. You can see down his gullet.
He let the ghost back in. And brought something with him.
“If they aren’t, just say, Mom’s asleep.”
“Okay.”
“She hasn’t seen him for seven years, and he wasn’t that nice to her when he left.” A pause on the other end. “I have to work, otherwise I’d come over and check up on you, kiddo. You and your mom. You tell her to call me when she gets up.”
“I will.”
“Bye, B.”
“Bye.”
You set the handset in its cradle.
* * *
You fix yourself a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, devour it, slurping the sweet milk afterward, all the while listening to the silence from Mom’s bedroom and the sound of Wilson prowling the first floor.
When you dare to approach him he’s in the Celestial Room, where the drawers of the old desks now gape like tongues. “Morning, Scout.” He’s on hands and knees in the closet, feeling the boards. “You know what this room was called way back when?”
You tell him, knuckles white on the jamb.
“Yeah, had a couple other names, too. And all of them came from seeing stars. I suppose your ma and that friend of hers been through here with a fine-tooth comb.”
You don’t want to say that they haven’t, that you’re not sure; that they spent most of their time in the upper floor that would become your bedroom, and in the barn. You remember the scent of bleach and the grit of dust in your eyes.
“You want to help? Become a junior explorer?” His smile tells you he wants to pretend that nothing happened in the dead of night.
You shake your head and retreat. With each step you’re more anxious. You hurry to Mom’s room and lay your hand on the knob, turn it, pushing open the door into a room all canary yellow from sunlight. But for some strands of auburn hair she’s lost in the blankets.
When you touch the slope of her shoulder, you’re relieved to feel warmth through the fabric. “Mom?”
It’s partly her voice and partly not, when she groans.
“It’s nine-fifteen, Mom.”
At this she pushes back the blankets far enough to show her gummy eyes. “Gotta sleep some more, Bally.” She squints against the sunlight. “You can make your breakfast.” Then she’s retreating into the sheets.
You remember the dream: Your mother is a memory who swallowed a bird.
You run upstairs to your fort. You need to know what Wilson’s up to without him seeing you, and you can do it best from here. In these strange and comforting confines, you press your ear to the wall and shut your eyes, and the teak planks invite your ear inside. As always it’s dizzying, this entry into the vast sounding board of the House of 31 Sparrow Lane, every surface poised like a drum waiting for the drummer to strike it. You hear a faint peck-peck, of a gull or shearwater striding the shingles over your head, then a hoah that’s the sound of air touring the crawl spaces, then a sense of stillness in room after room that’s like a rung bell forever, then—you startle at the sound—a thud. You recoil, heart pounding, return, pressing your ear to the cool wood, at first lightly, then with firmness. Another thud, then something sliding across hardwood, hitting carpet and still going. You shut your eyes. You trace it to the first floor where the hallway ends, perhaps near the grandfather clock, but this isn’t the clock. Something smaller. Though you want to pull back you clamp your eyes tighter. You imagine you can hear his grunt, can almost hear—if you press even closer to the teak, press so that your ear and the teak are one—his breathing. And you’re suddenly sure that in the next instant, too close and too intimate to bear, you’ll hear his whisper from the other side of the wood, his clever eyes having noticed your attention, and his Marlboro Man face slithering through the wood floor by floor to your side. Hey, Scout, he’ll say, I know you’re there. I know you’re spying. And … I
can’t have that, can I?
Your pulse pounds in your ear. The air tingles on your skin, and you know that if you were to open your eyes and look over your shoulder, you’d find the fort gone and the Doctor behind his desk.
Sometime later you hear the decisive bang of the front door. Your eyes snap open.
Heart in your throat, you scramble out into the blue of your bedroom. At the window you’re in time to see Wilson climbing down from his mobile home, hat on his head, nothing in his hands.
Whatever he’s taken is stowed now.
* * *
Mom gets up before noon. She has rings under her eyes and her hair is mussed. But she smiles in the old way when she sees you, and kisses you on the cheek, and everything is almost okay.
“I was tidying up the place, Lil’.” Wilson affects a bow, like Alfred on Batman. “Some gopher or such tracked gravel through the house.” He winks at you.
Only now do you notice the boxes Wilson has stacked by the couch. Old books and magazines, several straw-covered wine bottles, a table lamp with a bamboo shade. “You shouldn’t touch that stuff,” you say, and to Mom, “He shouldn’t.”
She rubs her eyes, but that doesn’t do much for rings the color of bruises. “I don’t quite feel the greatest.”
Wilson strides to the nook beside the fireplace. It has a hidden door just like your fort. You’re upset that he found it so easily.
Mom murmurs, “Tea, maybe.”
“Lapsang souchong.” You take her hand and lead her into the kitchen.
While she seats herself at the table, you bring down the tin of Oriental tea and the metal canister to catch the leaves. “Clarissa called, Mom. She wants you to call her.”
Clunk, clunk—glass on glass sounding two odd notes in the hall behind. Wilson pokes into the kitchen clutching a string of dusty blue glass globes threaded with twine. “Hey, Lil’. Why’s this not in a museum?”
“That what you’re going to do today, Wilson?”
“How could I not?” He grins.
You feel suddenly angry then light-headed at the thought of Wilson prowling through the house, room by room, floor by floor. “No, Mom!”
“Bally, what’s got into you?”
