(In which we clean up the aftermath of an avian assault, explore for heretofore undiscovered sources of light, and a foo dog bookend is sacrificed to further the plot.)
Jacob Warren grumbled
as he shuffled through the papers from the insurance company. Most of his words
were incomprehensible, the only exceptions being the expletives and something
about an “act of God.” Elizabeth looked up from the book she was reading,
finished her mouthful of egg and toast, and raised one questioning eyebrow at
her father.
He halted his
muttering and cast the papers onto the table. “It’s going to be okay,
‘Lizabeth,” he said. “It’s only the cost of a couple of windows. Even if they
don’t pay, I think we can afford it.”
Elizabeth swallowed noisily,
unsure what to say. She felt somehow responsible for the hullabaloo of the
prior week, and had made sure she had done the majority of the cleanup of the
broken glass and bird droppings, though she had drawn the line at the disposal
of the actual bird carcasses. Three of the banded ducks (identified as a
species known as Harlequin ducks) had died in the area of the front window and
in the front room, two from broken necks, one from lacerations. One of the
hummingbirds (bee hummingbirds, as it turned out) had also been injured in the
entry of the police, as had a larger black-and-white seabird known as a Gannet,
which had been struck by a police car in their driveway. None of the chaffinches or kiwis had been
found.
The birds' corpses had been
photographed and collected and taken, first to the police station, then to
Cornell to be examined and dissected at the veterinary school. She had been
correct in her assumption about the bee hummingbird, that it wasn't a local
species. It was native to South America, and it didn't migrate. And the Gannet
was a seabird that thrived in the North Atlantic. None of the scientists who
had questioned her could offer any explanation as to why such birds were in
Upstate New York, or why they would be acting so aggressively.
Her father had been beside himself when he returned home on the night
the birds invaded. He had expected to find a dark, silent house still dripping
from the storm, not a driveway full of police cars with lights still flashing,
and certainly not a badly shaken daughter who wasn't due to arrive until the
next week. Her mother, in the e-mail exchange, had mis-keyed 28 instead of
18 for the date of Elizabeth’s arrival, a single errant fingerstroke that had allowed
her father to think he had no obligations for another ten days. He had spent the
evening at Hollis Ward's house for a low-stakes poker session with a few
friends, blissfully unaware that his daughter was not only in town, but under
assault by birds.
Jacob had called her mother
to express his frustration, international phone rates be damned; Elizabeth had
eavesdropped, ready to jump in if things got too heated. But he had been
defused early on; though they had divorced, her parents remained amicable,
friends in truth as well as name. She often wondered why they had even split
up, they were in contact so often. She had asked her mother as much, but Helen
Wilson was an expert at stonewalling.
On the morning after the
incident, Elizabeth had searched the perimeter of the house for evidence of the missing birds, but between the rain and the police there was not a feather nor a track
to be found. She spent the rest of that day glaring into the trees, jumping
every time crow cawed or a raptor’s shadow crossed the ground.
But none of the local birds
were paying her any undue attention, and after that first day she settled into
a sort of mental truce with them: they wouldn’t bother her, and she wouldn’t
start taking skeet-shooting lessons.
Elizabeth and her father had
since fallen into an easy routine: she would wake first and make the coffee
while he showered, they would eat together and then she would get dressed while
he made their lunches. He would drive them to the bookshop where they would go
about their respective jobs, meeting up for lunch at the picnic table behind
the store, and then home to make dinner together.
She had started working at
the bookstore the afternoon after her arrival. Her father had wanted her to
rest, to recover from what she had been through. But beyond a few bruises she
was physically unharmed, and those were, she had to admit, pretty much
self-inflicted. And when he saw how much she wanted to get away from the house,
he could not in good conscience make her stay there.
Her job was to set up a
digital inventory of the bookstore’s catalogue, one simple enough to be used by
even the most technophobic of her father’s employees. It would be a lot of data
entry, requiring much time to be spent in the stacks of the store and in the
storage space her father kept for overflow. This suited Elizabeth just fine.
The idea of a summer spent poring through books, reading snippets from any that
piqued her interest, sounded like a little bit of heaven.
It had been years since she
had spent any significant amount of time in the shop, and she was surprised how
little had changed. The regulars were still there, older and grayer, but she
was relieved to find there had also been a bolus of newer customers,
high-school kids and hipsters in their early twenties who came in to browse or
to place special orders. She had been convinced that her father's store would
be dying, but he seemed to have enough loyal customers to keep him afloat. For
the time being.
Elizabeth liked the routine;
she liked the job. She even enjoyed being back in her hometown, though she
missed the rush of the city, of being able to get whatever you wanted at
whatever hour you were awake. There were still some of her old friends in town
for the summer, and though she spent some time with them she found that their interests had
changed and diverged from her own, and hanging out with them felt more like work than her actual job did. Mostly, it was her
and her father, and a lazy summer stretched out in front of them.
*******
Something was wrong.
Elizabeth had one foot outside her bedroom door. She had paused
mid-step, her brain still misted in a state of half-sleep, on her way to the
bathroom. Something was nagging at her brain, something out of place.
It took a minute of standing there, in her cotton pajama pants and
undershirt, listening and feeling and smelling the night air before it
occurred to her what it could be.
The light.
The upstairs hallway was windowless, with a stairway at one end and a
blank wall at the other. But despite this, it was somehow brighter than her
bedroom, which had moonlight streaming in. She tiptoed to the bathroom,
scanning the hallway for the source; had her father left a light on? Or bought
a nightlight? This last idea seemed unnecessary; she could navigate this house
in total blackness, as long as her father hadn't stacked a pile of books
somewhere. Which, she had to admit, he was wont to do.
There was no source of illumination in the bathroom, other than that
which spilled through the window. Elizabeth could hear her father making his
old-man sleeping-noises, the low and paced susurration of his breathing
punctuated by the occasional moist crunch as he cleared his
throat or mumbled from within the trenches of his dreams.
Poking her head back out through the door, she confirmed the
differential of brightness between the hallway and this additional room. It
just didn't make any sense. She walked back down the hall, reached into her
bedroom to grab her glasses, then exited and closed the door behind her to
minimize any light bleeding through. She began pacing, first toward the
stairway, then back towards the blind end; oddly enough, it seemed to be brighter
at the closed end of the
hallway.
The wall here was unadorned, free of the photographs that hung on
spaces between the doors. This end of the hall was occupied only by a narrow,
long-legged end table holding a pair of ceramic bookends in the shape of
foo-dogs, propping up some ornamental texts. She picked up one of the bookends,
keeping her other hand on the tomes to stop them slumping over. In the dim
light, she could just make out the figure’s scowling face, the twisted
tongue protruding over the exaggerated teeth. She saw the faint reflection
of light in the shine of the figurine's face.
She could see the brightness of the light in the hallway, she could see
the reflection of the light in the bookend, just not the source of the light
itself. How was that possible? How could you see all the signs of something but
not see the thing causing them? Had the light died and bequeathed all of its
possessions to the things left behind?
Her father erupted with a sudden elephantine snort. The
muscles of Elizabeth’s arms clenched with surprise, her fingers squeezing on
the statuette. It popped out of her light grip, evaded her fumbling grab, and
struck the edge of the table, then bounced to the floor and cracked.
She muttered an epithet through clenched jaws, savoring the clipped
consonants as they slipped through her teeth. Her father didn't appear to have
woken; there were no further noises from the direction of his bedroom. The
figure had broken, the head and part of the torso liberated from the
remainder of the body. She crouched down to pick up the two largest pieces and
padded the palm of her hand across the floor to search for any smaller fragments.
Her eye was drawn to a glint off a single sliver abutting the wall,
where it must have skidded after the fall. She tried to pick it up by pinching
it lightly between her thumb and forefinger, but it seemed to be caught on
something. She released her grip, pushed on its broad top side with the pad of
her index finger, and slid it away from the wall; it came easily when she
pulled. She held it up, and was surprised to note it was larger than it
had first appeared-it was closer to fingernail size than the small
line she had first glanced.
As she considered this discrepancy, fatigue started to cloud the edges
of her mind. She tried to remember what time it was...two or three in the
morning, at least. She should get back to bed. She'd been up too late every
night this week, reading or playing rummy with her father. This could all be
swept up in the morning. The master bedroom had its own bathroom, and her
father wouldn't be up before she was, so there was no real danger of anyone
cutting a foot on a stray shard.
She took one step back toward her bedroom, unconsciously closing her
fist around the ceramic piece as she did so, spiking its sharp edge into her
palm. A short, high-pitched yip escaped her, and she dropped the fragment onto
the floor. As she bent down to retrieve it, she again noticed the shine
of light off its edge. She shook her
head; was she really going to
go to bed without figuring out where that light was coming from? That
wasn't like her. Not at all.
Kneeling down to stretch her arm under the end table, she placed the
splinter back onto the floor next to the baseboard. The shine definitely seemed
brighter here, the brightest she had seen it. She gave the chip an
experimental little push toward the meeting of the baseboard with the wooden
floor. Half of it disappeared.
Elizabeth blinked rapidly, moving her face forward and back in the space
under the end table, trying to find the missing edge of the fragment. The
baseboard appeared to form a solid joint with the floor: there was no crack
into which the piece, which had to be a quarter-inch in thickness, could
disappear. She forked her index and middle fingers into a V and nestled them
around the visible portion of the piece, advancing the tips of her fingers into
the joint, feeling for a ridge or a depression. She felt something brush the
top of her fingers, scratching at the nail bed, and looked down to see what it was.
Her
fingers had disappeared.
Not all of them, not even all of one. But the two that had been probing were gone, up the first joint. The wood was still visible around the fingertips, without a discernible
gap; the baseboard simply continued right up until the border of her skin
interrupted it. Elizabeth made her fingers advance and retreat a few times to confirm
that this wasn't her imagination, her digits growing and shrinking in small
increments like a stop-motion movie.
Standing up, she cleared the books from
the top of the end table and slid it away from the wall, then lay down flat on
the floor and pushed her face up to the place where her fingers had disappeared. She inched herself closer by
minuscule increments until her glasses were right up against the wood; she
shifted them to her forehead, and pushed herself a small bit closer.
It was as if someone had aimed a flashlight right at her face. She
started abruptly, twisting her neck and breaking the visual connection, the
ghost-images of light-circles flickering in her retinas. Sitting up, she rubbed at her eyes, and the glowing splashes
slowly faded from her vision. Elizabeth returned to her
prone position and squinted her eyes into slits, opening her eyelids
slowly to allow for a more gradual entrance of the light.
The light didn't seem quite so dazzling to her now-adjusted eyes; she
could only align one of them at a time with the opening, so lost the
advantage of depth perception, but she was able see a few inches into the gap. The
wooden boards of the hallway floor continued through the area of the wall,
disappearing under the edge of a blue-grey rug. Vague shadows, suggestive of
furniture, played on the floor. A slight breeze was palpable out of the crack,
just barely registering on the skin of her face.
Elizabeth remained in that position for a few minutes, waiting for
something to happen, some noise or motion or change in the intensity of the
light, until her neck grew stiff and she had to sit up. She had more questions
than she could count, but all were variations on the same theme: was that a
room behind the wall? Complete with a rug and some sort of light? The farmhouse
was old, to be sure, but not old enough to be affiliated with the underground
railroad. But if the room she was staring into had electric light, that would
mean there was a light bulb, which means someone had probably been there within
recent memory. How long would a light bulb last? Years? Decades?
Did her father know about this room? He had lived in the house for over
twenty years; if it was there he must
know about it. He had painted every corner and re-wired every socket of it
piecemeal over the past two decades. There was simply no way this could have gone
undiscovered.
A floorboard squealed as she stood up. She reached up as high as
she could and began to run her fingers along the wall, feeling for a
handhold or a ridge or something to allow for another view into this space,
maybe to flip a secret switch to allow the wall to rotate out or something. The
theme from "Scooby-Doo" started to loop crazily in her head.
Elizabeth had probed her way down to waist height when she felt a sudden solid
coolness on her right hand. She heard a thunk and a rattle at the same time,
hitting her ears a split-second after the vibrating sensation penetrated her
brain. She could feel something smooth and metallic. She outlined the
protuberance with her hand, letting her fingers slide over its unseen curves.
She knew what it was well before she finished full exploration: a doorknob.
As soon as she thought this, she realized she could not only feel the
knob, she could see it as well: a rounded bronze doorknob, no keyhole.
Identical to the others in the house.
She felt something shift in her vision, the kind of off-balance feeling
that strikes when losing track of how many stairs are left on the staircase.
And then she could see the door entire: the molding around the door, the door
itself. It differed from the other doors only in its color: it was painted
white, the same shade the upstairs doors had been when she was a child, not
their current mahogany brown.
Elizabeth considered waking her father. She considered knocking on the
door. She considered putting the end table back in its place and going back to
bed. But, after a moment's hesitation, she gripped the doorknob, twisted
clockwise until it clicked, and gave a small push, letting it swing open on
silent hinges.
The opening of the door revealed many things, most of which would have been
unremarkable under other circumstances: a twin bed, a dresser, a rocking chair,
blue walls decorated in the manner of a baby or toddler's room, a pile of
stuffed animals casually tossed onto the floor. But there was something else,
perched on the bed, holding an open book across his thighs.
A man.
