by S G Dunster
Ordinary. Routine. The possibility I would make a fool of myself by referring to something that wasn’t there, or someone who was something else, fueled most of my concern. Not the fact that I was seeing things I shouldn’t.
So I sat back down in my desk and focused, calmly and intently, on the white expanse of marker-board along the classroom wall, to bring everything back into focused reality. A blank space, soothing and uncomplicated is difficult for a mind to make into anything.
By the time she got to me, the forest had mostly faded and it was a hand, not a grasping branch, that reached down toward me as she handed back my paper.
“Thanks,” I said.
She held on to it for a second, looking down at me with that concerned expression I so hate.
“What?” I asked, tugging at it.
“I wanted to bring your attention to this,” she replied. With her other hand, she touched a few lines of writing she’d made at the top, circling a scrawled letter C. “You didn’t write the assignment I gave. You can’t just choose to do whatever you like. You’re a talented writer, Logan, but please keep to the assignment next time.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You will be,” she wheezed.
I stared at her, and gave my paper another little tug. “What?” I repeated.
But it was happening again. “You’ll be sorry all your life, boy.” Her voice warped like it had been slowed with a video editor. Her grey eyes went dark, her hair frosted over and became a shock of white, bushing out like a mane around her head. Her nose and chin swelled and sharpened. She rose up above me like one of those time lapse movies of a tree growing, towering, glowering down on me.
My heart beat loudly in my ears. The spit in my mouth warmed.
The mouth opened, revealing an irregular line of stained teeth. “You do see.” The voice was low, breezy, hollow. Like it had been thickened by a good mouthful of peanut butter. An old man’s voice.
“M-Mrs. Sanders,” I tried.
“Don’t be a fool.” The thing gave me a slow, awful smile.
I was clutching my desk. As its hands raised, fingernails like claws—overlong, curled, yellow—extending toward me, I stood and shoved the desk into her . . . him . . . it. She went down, too, shouting. Members of the class gasped, shrieked.
She was Mrs. Sanders again, pale, mouth gaping, on the floor, clutching her legs.
Aspen Winters rushed over. “Are you okay?” she yelled. “Mrs. Sanders. I’m going to . . . we’re . . .” She turned and shouted at me. “Go get Ms. Smitt, dickbrain!”
I ran. I wanted to run home without looking back, but I ran to the nurse’s room first and leaned my head in. “Ms. Smitt, Mrs. Sanders is hurt,” I gasped. I turned, the rubber sole of my well-worn running shoe squeaking with melted ice on the linoleum floor, and pounded for the doors.
I ran out into the sludgy rain, down the sidewalk of Bridge Street. What did I do. What did I do? I whispered the words as I ran, coughing and tasting blood in my throat.
I slowed only when I reached the cozy line of buildings near the end of Bridge Street. The old brick fronts were cheerful with flowers and empanadas and the chatter of women having their nails and hair done. The theater and the bowling alley were empty, waiting for the influx of evening entertainment-seekers. My favorite place, the used book shop, had its door edged slightly open. More out of instinct than anything else, I ducked inside. I stood in the doorway, shivering. What had I done?
“Logan,” Michael said. “You’re out early.”
“I’m . . . I . . .” My teeth were chattering, and I was shivering so hard I couldn’t stand up straight. I clutched my stomach.
“You all right?” he flicked his gaze up and down me. “You sluffing school?”
“I . . . I . . .” I needed to go home. Talk to my mom. Before the school called. But I just couldn’t face it. Couldn’t quite understand what had happened, even. The horror of it was like a blockage in my brain. I kept seeing the vicious face, over and over again. Beak like a raven, eyes dark and malevolent.
I’d hurt her. Mrs. Sanders. My teacher.
I’d probably broken something.
I’d hurt her. Just like my Dad had hurt me.
There was a great choking mass in my throat that was rising. I turned before the tears welled up and started falling down my face. I walked back to the secluded corner where the fantasy and sci-fi novels were kept.
“Logan,” Michael called after me.
“I’m fine,” I tossed over my shoulder. “Just . . . cold.”
I could feel his eyes on my back. I turned into the shelves quickly to get away from them.
The smell of coffee and old paper—there can’t be a more grounding smell. I breathed it in deep, holding it, letting it out, as I leaned against the bookcase. I took a few moments with the jumble of spines on the shelves. Here was an island of comfort and reality.
I ran my eyes over the titles. I wanted something. I needed an escape. Maybe some Card or Asimov—something classic, something satisfying. I’d picked through these shelves hundreds of times, but perhaps there was still something in a jacket so battered maybe it was unrecognizable the last time I looked. Or maybe something had been hidden behind a stack of books that got moved. I need something, I thought. I need something. An escape. Something to keep me safe and contained. Something to take me away from this bad, bad thing.
There is a brass cat sitting in the corner where the line of bookcases rest against the northern wall. It’s been there since I can remember. Years, I guess. Its broad, smiling face, the tail whimsically curved around its feet, are probably as familiar to me as my own face.
In the haze of my peripheral vision, I saw it move. I hesitated, heart thrumming in my chest, and turned to see.
It stretched its brassy back, flicked its tail, and looked up at me, eyes hooded, smiling as if it knew something I didn’t. It fixed its gaze on my shoulder, and its metal haunches gathered as if it were about to leap.
“No.” I took a stumbling backward step, colliding with the bookcases behind me. “No.” I leapt into the corridor that runs through the center of all the shelves. I ran to the front of the store, keeping my eyes fixed on the familiar, comforting sight of the front door and the stacks of “new releases” piled around Mike’s desk.
The door was shut. I couldn’t open it.
“Hang on. I just locked up.”
Mike was bent over his ledgers. He does all his accounting by hand.
“Can you—” I choked. I rattled the handle, and a feeling condensed around me. The air smelled different—musty moss and lichen and loamy soil instead of musty books—and I had a sense the towers of books were, in fact, massive tree-trunks.
Michael looked up at me, and his face was somehow longer, his chin more pointed, and his eyes were watery-pale with hollows around them. It wasn’t Michael. The face was oddly familiar . . . but not Michael’s.
I opened my mouth, maybe to yell, but no sound came out. I grabbed the key sitting on the desk, struggled with it for a few seconds. I could feel him come up behind me. Not him. Something. Something, coming up behind me.
I flung the door open and ran out, letting it slam behind me in an explosion of bells. I ran as fast as I could down the sidewalk.
It was chasing me. Not any one thing; it was the feeling of things changing, of being what they’re not, that stayed like a dark presence on my heels. I ran. The wind was howling. Only it wasn’t wind. It was the howling of something else.
I ran across the street, finding a path through the jagged mountain-range of plowed snow that divided two lanes of traffic and veering around an old Volkswagen—Mrs. Ellison, who would probably give my mother an earful later. My goal was the building on the southeast corner of Bridge and Main. I grabbed the doorknob. The doorframe has been painted over so many times that the door doesn’t open if you pull gently, but I wrenched it hard enough that it flew open immediately and slammed back against the brick exterior of the
building with a rattling of glass.
The studio was full. It was my mom’s watercolor class with the usual dozen or so students, ages ranging the full spectrum from Caitlyn the third-grader to Mary the 83-year-old retired assistant principal. Mary gave me her famous glare—the one that kept middle-school boys in line for twenty years—and turned back to her pear and bowl of grapes.
“S-Sorry,” I chattered, letting the door slam behind me. “Sorry if I disturbed you guys. Mom, I’m going to—” I jerked my thumb in the direction of the stairs that led up to our apartment.
She glanced up and gave me a puzzled look. “All right?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I walked past the long table where her young art students sat painting in watercolors. Caitlyn gave me a squinty, gap-toothed smile and swung her feet, which didn’t quite reach the floor.
“I’ve made something for you. It’s in the fridge,” Mom said absently. “I’ll be up in . . . when this session’s over. I cancelled tonight’s pottery class. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I could still hear the howling outside, only now, it sounded more like . . . just wind. And as I went up the stairs, her cell phone rang. Elvis. That’s my mom’s ringer. And I knew. I knew it was the school calling.
The end is coming, I thought, as I climbed the narrow flight of stairs to our apartment. It had happened, finally—the thing we’d both tried hard not to see was coming.
You can’t un-see things, no matter how hard you try.
Chapter 2
I opened the door to the kitchen and was rewarded by a blast of humid, toast-scented air. I walked in hoping I was wrong, but there was Lil seated at the particle-board table, on one of the mismatched stools, a tower of buttered, jammed toast at her elbow. Her sculpting slab, as usual, rested in the middle of the table.
Mom’s going to flip. Lil and me ousted from school on the same day? I dug my hands into my hair, scratching at my scalp. And the . . . thing that happened. Finally. The thing we’ve been worried about. I took a deep breath and blanked my face. Lil would know, of course—she can see in the tiniest lines and micro expressions exactly what I’m thinking. But I wanted a few minutes to gather my thoughts.
“What are you doing home?” I walked to the table and snatched the top piece of toast.
She looked up from what she was doing and glared. Her arms were grey above the elbow. From the shape of it—a figure, hunched slightly, with a peaked hat. The Grey Man, one of her favorite fantasy characters.
“That’s not the question you meant to ask,” Lil replied. “Give that to me.” She snatched at the toast, but I waved it away from her.
“There’s more bread in the fridge. And yes, it was exactly what I meant to ask, you colossal pain in the butt.”
“There’s no more potato bread, and I used up the last of the elderberry jam.” Lil rose from her stool and grabbed my wrist. “And the question is not what I’m doing. You can see what I’m doing, Logan. Don’t be stupid.”
After a brief scuffle in which I became liberally endowed with clay and elderberry jam, I finally dropped the crumpled piece of toast back onto the top of her leaning tower. “Fine,” I said, slouching onto the tallest of the stools. It doesn’t leave enough room for my legs under the table. “Why did you return early from school today, Lil’ Seamus Somers?”
Lil hates her full name. I don’t blame her. Her mother’s never had much judgment, about names or anything else. I’ve sometimes wondered if it was intended—the play on the homophone—Shame us. Lil was born out of wedlock, and we’re all from a tiny Mormon town. There’s things about Lil’s family I don’t know; things my mother won’t tell me. It’s not made up, either. The whole thing—diminutive preface and all, complete with the apostrophe—Lil’ Seamus Somers is right there on her birth certificate.
It brought a scowl—a real one. “I didn’t get sent home. Band class got out early. You’re in a jerky mood today. Who spit on your term paper?”
I glared right back, putting a front on the fountain of extreme weariness that poured through me. Term papers. How unimportant they seem now. “How did you hear about my term paper? Listening through doors again?”
Lil shrugged, picked up the crumpled piece of toast and shoved it in her mouth clay and all. “Being a member of this household,” she said around a mouthful of crumbs, “I am affected by all controversies and dramas having to do with my fellow household members.” She gave me a long, level gaze, her scowl melting away. “Are they going to do it?”
“What?” I tilted the stool and rested my back against the wall.
“Start putting you on the poison. Like your dad. It’s what ruined him. You know that.”
There was a sour taste at the back of my mouth. “I don’t know, Lil. But shut up about it, please. I can’t think right now. Bad grades aren’t a reason to take Lithium.” Even as I tried to suppress it, the image came: my father sitting rigid in his chair, those blank walls around him . . .
I swallowed and shut my eyes tight. It had been months since I’d visited him. Months. I was a terrible son. Yeah, bad grades won’t make people put you on heavy psychotropic meds. But maybe shoving a desk into a teacher will.
I was turning into him.
Lil was playing with her clay again. I tried not to watch, but I really couldn’t help it. Lil’s hands are magic. As the shape began to form folds and features, I was caught again—not by things changing like they shouldn’t, but by Lil’s piece changing like it should, under her furious, fast fingers. First a cloak, then bony claw-ish hands. Folds of tattered tunic and trousers hanging off the knees in pristine wrinkles. Peaked Robin Hood cap with a disheveled something tucked in the brim. I looked closer. It was a spring dandelion, the lash of petals spiked with dew. Only Lil can sculpt dew.
I stared at the face: narrow chin, large, slightly-protruding eyes with hollows around them, high forehead, thin, lanky locks of hair.
The Grey Man is one of Lil’s permanent fixations. She’s sculpted him in dozens of mediums, in countless positions and states over the years I’ve known her. She’s almost religious about it. I don’t know who he represents for her, but whatever it is, it’s important. And private. She doesn’t talk about it. Just makes him. Over and over.
The face. That was the face. The Grey Man’s face had taken over Michael’s at the bookstore.
I sat, feeling a bit dizzy, and put the heels of my hands on my eyes. My brain was getting rambunctious all right. Tapping uncontrollably into my unconscious and not letting go.
Even as I thought it, something in the room changed. A thickening. The condensation of otherness—like the wave of nausea just before a stomach empties. It had followed me from the bookstore, then. I wasn’t free of it. It was going to happen again. Things were going to change. I was going to hurt people.
“Lil,” I said, my voice hoarse, “Can you please . . . will you please take it away?”
Lil paused. Her eyes widened. “You see it.” She stood and stepped back. “Look, Logan. Look at him.”
I stared at her, my jaw gaping open. “What are you talking about?”
“The Caldera. You see it. You’ve joined it. You can feel it all around us—”
“Lil. This is not a story. I’m sick.”
“You’re not sick. Look at him.”
For some reason, maybe desperation, clinging to those words, You’re not sick, I did. I looked.
A feeling lanced through me, like a rip of the fabric in the atmosphere that existed between us. And I felt it, I heard it. The Grey Man. A rich musical voice speaking in a language I didn’t know.
He unfurled and stood up straight.
The clay sculpture.
I stood suddenly, too, tipping over the chair.
There was a noise in the room now, not just the clay man’s mutterings—something odd like the buzz of a fly. Or the far-off moaning of a bad storm.
“You can see it. And hear it, too.” Lil came around the table to me, looking at me now l
ike she’d seen the moon for the first time. “You can hear it. Finally. We’ll go and find the Grey Man now. We’ll go to him. Look at him, Logan. Listen to him. Can’t you see? He needs help. And we can help him. It’ll help you, too, to tell his story—“
I grabbed my hair. “No.”
The door crashed open, and Mom ran into the kitchen breathless. “What happened? I heard a thump like someone falling.” She looked from the chair on its side on the floor, to me, to Lil, to the thing we were both staring at.
“Logan can see it,” Lil said quietly—more to herself than an answer to Mom’s question. “It’s happened.”
“No.” Mom echoed my tone and timber almost exactly. “No, Lil. You will not add to this. You will not make it worse. You’ve driven each other over the edge. Both of you. I should’ve said no. I should’ve said no when Adrian dropped you off here. I knew this was coming.”
Tears quickly coated her cheeks. She crouched down by the counter, her face in her hands. For some reason I was calm.
I looked back down at the Grey Man. He had stopped moving. He was, once again, merely a cleverly constructed lump of clay.
Lil stood slowly and walked across the room. Not to my mom. Not to comfort her. Never that. She went to the shelf above the windowsill and took down my notebook—the one I’d crafted downstairs at the paper press of odds-and-ends pulp, thick with a thousand pages of words—stories, maps, poems, and sketches. We’d made it together, Lil and me, as kids. It was a world of strange things—exotic trees, impossible houses with unending floorplans. Tropical islands with magnetic forces that levitated them above the water’s surface. Dolphin nymphs. Talking crows. Sentient lizards. An old grey man. We’d spent the bulk of our summers creating our world together—me telling in words, her telling in pictures—and it got fatter and fatter. Now it was as thick as the scriptures that sat on the other end of the shelf. It was pretty fabulous, actually. People liked to pick it up, leaf through it. We’d been told we needed to get it published someday.
