THOUGHT FORMS
Stories by Jeffrey Thomas
ISBN: 978-1-937128-91-3
This eBook edition published 2011 by Dark Regions Press as part of Dark Regions Digital.
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© Jeffrey Thomas 2011
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Premium signed and limited print editions available at: http://www.darkregions.com/books/thought-forms-by-jeffrey-thomas
With thanks to Bobbi Sinha Morey, who enabled this story to see the light of day, by typesetting a manuscript once called “Tulpas”—written by hand between 3/3/84 (Friday, 2:24 AM) - 11/28/87 (Saturday, 6:06 AM).
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do now know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?”
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Chapter
1
He’d had a bad dream.
He sat on the back door stoop. He wished he had a cigarette to draw on thoughtfully in consideration of his dream, but he didn’t smoke. Movies and books, and generations of human behavior perhaps now instinctual, made such props and posings seem mandatory. It was a little chilly as April night closed in, but his dark blue windbreaker was sufficient—today it had almost been hot. He was eager for spring, and summer beyond that. His favorite time of the year, spring, when life came back. But it was still chilly enough for cigarette smoke to be a warm comfort in his internal hearth—except he didn’t smoke.
The pulley on the metal line that stretched across his yard hissed, his dog’s chain clipped to it. She pranced delicately through a minefield of her own waste; apparently like a spider, able to negotiate its web without getting stuck. She circled in her instinctual dog ritual, beating down tall grass that wasn’t there, before posing to dump her load. Or wasn’t that why dogs turned in a circle before they curled up to sleep, to beat down grass that wasn’t there in an instinctive routine? He contemplated this partially, idly, while still contemplating his dream, at least able to draw on the crisp night air in thoughtful consideration.
He had lain down for a nap at five, fully dressed but for shoes. He hated himself for taking naps—besides screwing up his sleep patterns and thus being bad for his body, he recognized his naps as being chunks of escapist narcolepsy. His bedroom was always closed off and smother-ingly warm in the cold months, an irresistible womb. He would eagerly anticipate coming home from work and drawing all night, starting a new oil painting, making a prop for a video movie…and he would come home and stall, make coffee, pace his livingroom, play Atari. Snack, watch TV.
Meekly he would finally crack that door, trying to fool himself into still believing he would create. But there lay the bed, a sea of bed, and he walked to it like Virginia Woolf. The narcotic effect was so extreme that sometimes he bounced into his bedroom fully energized for creating, and the sight of the bed sapped him with shocking contrast. He seldom resisted its gravitational pull. He would lie down still feebly lying to himself—just an hour, then I’ll get up and draw. Sometimes this was true. But too often it was three, four hours. He would get up, make coffee, pace, play Atari, snack, watch TV. Back to bed. His empty bed proved more alluring than an empty canvas.
This had been a particularly unpleasant nap.
He squinted at it in his mind as if at a painting he had done while in a fugue state. He felt deeply unsettled, to his very spirit, as if some rough punks had mocked him in the street and he had done nothing but bring the humiliation and stifled fury home with him to poison every moment of his night. One of those things that his subconscious morbidly, masochistically clung to and wouldn’t let go.
Actually, though, the dream wasn’t difficult for him to analyze, as it was largely based on fact.
He had been a boy again. Four. That had been 1961. Happy Days, he thought. The year his parents were murdered.
His dream didn’t fill the gaps in his memory of the incident—or if it had, his waking mind had been cheated. What he remembered of the dream was basically just what he remembered of the night. He was sleeping in this very house, in the bedroom he slept in now. A scream awoke him from his four-year-old’s dreams (in his dream he had dreamed he was dreaming). He got out of the bed, ran in his slippers to the kitchen, saw his father crash against the kitchen table, groping at the chairs for balance, blood snaking down his face bright in the bright kitchen light, and then his father’s eyes met his and he screamed again as someone out of view apparently seized his father by the ankles and yanked his feet out from under him, dragged him and a tipped chair to the floor with a terrible crash. His father wailed (to him?) for help as he was dragged out of sight behind the stove, himself in turn dragging the fallen kitchen chair after him. Ahigher-pitched banshee shriek now. Four-year-old Ray turned and ran for his mother’s bedroom…not crying, just terribly confused. Like it was a dream.
His mother was there. Cowering…in a corner, close to the floor. She had lost a lot of blood, so much of it splashed across her that its source was hard to determine. Her hair ends dribbled. She rasped and shrank from her son feebly. But then she realized who it was. And with one gesture she showed her son the most concern and compassion she had ever showed him in his short life, and ever would—she shakily pointed across the room to a window. Ray looked to it. Just a screen kept the night out.
Summer bugs clung to the mesh. His mother was urging him to escape, so as to survive, knowing she and her husband would not.
Ray looked back to her and her arm fell. She stared at him, mouth open wide, maybe dead already…or maybe she lived long enough to watch her son fumble open the screen and scamper out into the bushes below the window.
He hid in the bushes for a few minutes, afraid to make a noise, afraid to run. He decided to peek up over the edge of the window, perhaps for more instructions from his mother, seeing as how she was in such a concerned mood. What he saw of his mother was her on her back, arms flung out slack, and someone apparently dragging her out of the room by the ankles—whoever it was out of view. Now his mother was gone, too, having left a smudged wet path across the floorboards after her.
Ray turned and ran through the fern bushes, off toward the woods.
Now the dream had become more of what you expected from a dream—absurd and dissonant, more fictional. When he emerged from the other end of the woods it was day, and he was older, probably nine. His cousin Paul was there, probably seven. They played Frisbee on a shady country back road with no cars to endanger them, while across the road was a farmhouse with a goat tied to a gnarled ancient apple tree, nibbling grass amongst the green fallen fruit, much of it rotting. An old couple, blatantly New England in character, sat in rocking chairs on a porch watching them. They didn’t speak, just rocked in the gentle breeze. Paul spun the Frisbee high; Ray looked up at it from below, the sun making it translucent, and it looked like a flying saucer. It became a flying saucer in a way, because it flew away high over the woods in the direction of Ray’s house and didn’t come back. Ray was amazed at Paul’s talent and laughed, “Great throw!”
“Go get it,” Paul said.
Ray looked back into the woods doubtfully, his laughter gone. He knew where the flying saucer had landed.
That’s where he woke up—contemplating the way back into the woods.
It wasn’t all that difficult for t
wenty-six-year-old Ray to decipher that last bit. He had been raised since four by his uncle and aunt, Paul’s parents. They had inherited this property. Ray had lived with them up until he was twenty-six, never owning his own apartment. Now that the previous tenants had moved out, Ray had asked his uncle and aunt if he could rent the house of his parents. He had just moved in two months ago.
It was an eagerly anticipated new life for him at first, a welcome change in the sterile winter he hated. Perhaps he had expected too much, but the magic had dulled a great deal in just two months and he was back to naps and winter sterility. He hoped spring would rejuvenate his new house again, bring it to life the way it should have become. The only difference right now between his bedroom at his aunt’s house and this house was that this place was bigger and had given him a nightmare.
Also, he had always loved being alone—alone in his bedroom, alone with his art, alone on walks and in museums—and so he hadn’t anticipated such a sad, enduring loneliness. He had Paul sleep over as often as he could talk him into it. Oh, he loved having a whole house to himself, but he had it to himself in those times when he needed to share a little. No more opening his bedroom door and seeing his aunt out there in her nightgown watching television.
The dog was new—almost. She belonged to another cousin who was living with her husband in Greece for as long as he was stationed there in the air force, so actually he was just babysitting the dog indefinitely, just as his uncle and aunt had taken him in. She was a timid but playful creature, rusty red like Ray’s hair, smallish, with a single white blaze between her eyes like a pony. Kelly. Ray adored animals but he had a short temper with them sometimes and something in Kelly’s behavior irritated him once in a while. She seemed especially mindless, dove for the dry dog food he kept in the back hall almost every time he brought her in from outside, no matter how much he yelled at her for it.
She liked to get wound around trees so he would have to venture into her mine field (maybe she wasn’t so dumb after all—revenge for his bad temper?). But he loved her and she was his only constant companion in the house.
Watching her unconsciously, Ray focused back on the first half of his dream. Why did it unsettle him so? Ha—a stupid question. His parents were butchered and then left hanging from ropes upside-down above the very step he sat on now, and he wondered why he was unsettled? But there was more to it.
Ray had never particularly loved his parents because they had never particularly loved him, to his recollection. His father had been a constant drunk, constantly unemployed, who had beaten him a few times. Mostly extra-hard spanks, but also hair-pulling, arm-wrenching and once he remembered a cane smack against his leg for talking back to his mother. A raging, stumbling, contorted-faced ogre. Ray remembered a lot of running to bed and pretending to be asleep when his father’s car pulled into the drive at night, but listening to the fighting all night long. And his mother often accompanied her husband on his drinking excursions, leaving Ray with his beloved aunt and uncle, who had bought him more toys than his real parents. Young though he was, Ray had felt disgust for his mother for being victimized by his father, for joining him instead of controlling him.
He remembered having to sneak food when they both fell asleep drunk because they hadn’t fed him. He remembered his drunken mother and father bringing home drunken friends, a woman who his father would paw and slobber over or a man who would paw and slobber over his giggling mother. He remembered once when his father was passed out drunk, coming in on his mother and another man naked under the blanket of his mother’s bed. They told him to go play. His father and mother fought a lot about that time and other times like it. Ray would lie in bed and listen to their roars and cries and the smashing of furniture; the fighting of monsters.
So the four-year-old Ray had felt only a numb confused fear rather than a traumatic horror at the unsolved, apparently unmotivated killing of his parents. A disorientation, as in a dream.
But now he was unsettled. Very. To his soul.
Why? Ray wondered about instincts. Did he subconsciously love his parents in some inexorable, obligatory instinctual way? Because he was supposed to love his parents, just as they had cared for him, seen to his needs—themselves, out of some instinctual, imposed sense of duty? He seemed to remember sloppy wet kisses, the grizzled cheek of his father—less clear, the goodnight kiss of his mother. Ray now wondered, at the age of twenty-six, if for all these years he had only allowed himself to focus on the bad memories as a defense mechanism. Maybe his mind had even enhanced those memories, because the memories seemed too sharp and immediate…he had friends who couldn’t remember a single incident up until the age of five. Even his close cousin Paul couldn’t remember shit beyond five.
He had never suffered psychologically for the lack of his natural parents, because the aunt and uncle he had fantasized were his parents were right there to embrace and nurture him, to make his fantasy come true.
But now he was alone in his own house, his first house, where only he lay beyond each door, and he was left to contemplate the fact that finally he had followed the flying saucer back through the woods, back in time, to its destination…and he felt something he had never felt before. It almost amazed him that it had taken this long. Though he couldn’t say he was sorry that he had ended up with his aunt and uncle, he felt for the first time that he had lost his parents…
Kelly came prancing toward him jovially, proud of her creation no doubt. Ray sighed, dismissed the issue of the dream (consciously). He was preparing to rise but stalling out of weary laziness when Kelly stopped short and looked sharply toward the driveway. She growled low in her throat. Ray turned his head.
Someone was standing in the direct center of the head of his driveway.
The dirt driveway sloped up from the stoop on which he sat to a narrow country road,. It was a fairly long drive and there were no street lamps along this stretch of road so the person at the head of the drive was darkly indistinct, a shadow. Ray felt a bit of a tug on his heart to see that it wasn’t one of Kelly’s frequent false alarms. He didn’t like that he couldn’t see the person well and yet they could see him in his pool of back door light. He could pretty much tell, however, that it was a woman or a girl.
It wouldn’t have seemed strange, except that Ray’s house was the only house along this piece of road but for a farmhouse a good stretch along, and a new house under construction, still a bleak skeleton. Kids tore along this road in the summer, inevitably, but most nights it wasn’t unusual not to hear a car pass for two hours. Just a lonely train that rumbled under a bridge beyond that farm. You might see a bicyclist in the day, even a serious jogger. But not too many lone pedestrians at seven o’clock in the evening.
Maybe a hitchhiker who hadn’t anticipated the low percentage of potential rides along this road. So what was she doing here, considering whether to ask for a ride?
And for how long had she been standing there under the sticky-budded branches of his ancient chestnut tree, considering him? It made him feel vulnerable. Unsettled.
Ray had now been staring back at her for over thirty seconds. It seemed rude of him, but she could only be staring at him. Was it a friend fooling him? Mm—could be. Angela, or Terry—the girlfriends of his two best friends, who had become his friends as individuals. It might be more like Terry to be pulling this, and he could imagine her boyfriend Dicky hiding in some bushes snickering, his car parked down the road.
Ray couldn’t see much, but it didn’t look like Terry. At least he didn’t think it was Terry.
Back to nervousness. Disorientation. A minute had passed. The dark form hadn’t moved that he could tell. He felt as though in a circus spot-light, under a microscope, every nervous twitch of his muscles exposed to the amusement of his shadow-protected audience. That dark face might be smirking at him in humored disgust for all he…he sensed he was being mocked. Maybe a mocking challenge.
Kelly had continued to rumble. She too waited for the figure to make its
identity and intentions clear. Now she barked twice, and twice again—a jarring sound that shocked Ray, but he didn’t turn his head—before returning to her disgruntled rumbling.
Kelly had inspired Ray to finally call out. The most important thing to do was modulate his voice properly; he didn’t want to sound shaky and afraid, nor firm and authoritative because that would imply fear, too. He had decided on a casual, cool voice. But it still came out a little uneven around the edges.
“Can I help you or something?
Why didn’t he expect an answer? He didn’t get one. It was as if he hadn’t asked anything, and for a moment he almost wondered if he had only thought he had spoken. But he knew he had. And nothing had changed.
Whatever wasn’t established, one thing was—unless it was a joking friend, this person was rude. Even a shy, timid hitchhiker would have replied. So Ray didn’t feel guilty at the anger that was boiling up in him, his outrage at being made to feel nakedly afraid. The person had to be purposely intimidating him. There was only one recourse; he wouldn’t humiliate himself by calling out again. Whenever he received a phone call and asked hello once and got no reply, he never asked hello again—he’d hang up promptly. Ray was very paranoid about prank phone calls; he considered them personal attacks. From a mocking, faceless tormentor…
Ray stood. He stepped toward Kelly and took her chain as casually as possible. She rumbled, didn’t want to go at first, but obeyed. Ray no longer looked up the driveway; he took Kelly into the house.
Once Kelly was inside the house he forgot her totally, strode with taut determination to his bedroom, groped in the dark, lit it, opened the top right drawer of his desk where his Smith and Wesson nickel-plated .357
Magnum lay on the plastic bag he had bought it in. It was loaded with the .38 special loads he used for target shooting; not as powerful as .357’s, but the .38’s were semi-brass jacketed hollow-points. Ray hefted the pistol out, shut the drawer, and rode a foaming rapids of adrenalin back through the house, back to the back door.
Thought Forms Page 1
