7:30 AM the next
morning
John Walker
looked out what used to be his grandfather’s bedroom window at the ghostly
mist that had settled on the land the evening prior. From his second story perch
and through the haze, he canvassed his childhood home, tracing the vast property
that was now his by virtue of Amos’ will. Immense oaks and elms dotted the
otherwise barren, steeply-sloped meadow to the south that fell down to the
shores of the Allegheny river eight-hundred feet below. To him, they stood as
tall and twisted gargoyles, sworn to a golem secrecy, never laying hint as to
why so many from his family had tragically fallen. Across the meandering
waterway, an early-morning sun fought its way over a maple-covered ridge, its
rays captured in the fog that blanketed the land like the moist earth that would
drape Grandpa Amos’ casket later that morning. Even the serried
evergreens that stood rank-and-file at the meadow’s southern edge seemed to
call out to him with a distant familiarity.
A knock at the
door broke him from his reverie, and Barbara poked her curly, blond head into
the room. The sheet of glass in the window appeared to take on a thin crust of
ice in her presence. Her beauty, he had painstakingly come to realize, was an
antithesis to her acerbic personality; a cross between a swan and a cobra. And
no matter what came out of her mouth, it was laced with a poison for which he
had no antidote. “I’m going to try to get some breakfast made up,” she
said in a condescending tone. “I want to eat before that idiot you call a
friend gets here. Don’t suppose you’d want anything?”
With a towel he
was holding, John wiped the remnants of his shower from his damp forehead and
fidgeted uneasily. Though having spent almost nine years with her, he felt
uncomfortable and self-conscious standing there in only his underwear. He’d
been told by many female students that he was a good looking ‘old man’. He
exercised regularly but not as obsessively as she, so he was in good health. His
eyes were a deep, emerald green that always held a classroom’s attention. His
smile, wide and cheery, reflected what used to be his natural demeanor, and his
almond hair had receded a bit early but was cut short and well groomed, giving
him the appearance of dignity beyond his thirty-four years. He was self-aware
only because despite his appearance, she rarely seemed attracted to him once her
TV journalism career had taken off.
“No thanks,”
he replied after a long silence, casting his eyes from the floor back out the
window. “I’ll grab something later on.”
There was a
momentary silence. It was the kind of silence between a crack of lightning and
the thunderous rumbles that follow, then she struck. “I really don’t know
why the hell you have to have that poor excuse of a man come over here. You’re
going to be seeing him at the funeral, isn’t that enough?”
John met her
cold, blue eyes—the pale color of asphyxiation—momentarily but then was
compelled to look away. It was still difficult to look into them, as if he were
a vampire looking into a mirror and seeing no reflection. His reflection had
been absent for some time now. The callousness, the apathetic glimmer they
conveyed, even in the face of defiled vows unsettled him. It was as though her
eyes were accusing him of their failed marriage. “Look,” he said with
a slight quiver in his voice, “Bill was close to Amos, too, and he’s the one
who found him dead. He’s still shaken up about the whole thing.”
“Oh
yeah, like he’s the emotional type who’s going to fall into a deep
depression over this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d gone out for beer
after he reported it.”
John gave her a
caustic stare of his own. “Look, you’re only going to be here until
tomorrow. Can’t we at least try to behave like civil adults until then? Is
that too much to ask?”
“Keep that
hick away, and I’ll be as civil as you want me to be,” she replied.
It was
unbearably difficult to keep the anger and resentment towards her in check, and
John could feel his animosity boiling on his tongue. “Look, this is not your
little condo on the bayfront, this is my house now, and I’ll have over
whoever I damned well plea—.”
Before he could
finish she disappeared behind the oak door, not waiting around for the end of
the rebuttal. It closed with a loud thud. He pursed his lips angrily and
wrung the towel in his hand in quiet frustration. Finally, he let out a long,
heavy sigh. He was upset at himself for not having more composure. Barbara
seemed to get a sick enjoyment from setting him off like that, so whenever she
could accomplish it, it was a sort of victory for her. She always seemed to know
which buttons to push, when to push them, and though he had promised himself not
to let her get to him, he wasn’t in the mood to play her games.
Actually, she had done him a favor by leaving. At least they wouldn’t
end up in an oral fist-to-cuff. With the funeral services and burial that
morning, it would be just too much to handle.
Maybe she
actually did have the capacity for a bizarre sort of sympathy. Though her
mannerisms spoke of a need to stay and cut his wounds a little deeper, she chose
instead to withdraw herself. Was it still possible for the woman to possess even
a minute inclination deep within herself for sympathy towards him? He knew
better.
After she left,
the room slowly began to warm as the sun finally began to break through the
retreating fog, and a harsh light chased the drabness from the room. Without
much conviction he threw on some jeans, crawled into a over-sized Gannon
University sweatshirt, and groomed his hair at a full-length mirror that was
probably as old as Amos was before he’d passed on.
After dressing,
John paused outside the bedroom to take in the emptiness of the enormous halls,
once cluttered with the stuff of life, love and loss. In his mind’s eye he
could still picture the wonderful times: running excitedly down the hall to his
mother’s bedroom after a tiny fairy had slipped into his room during the night
and exchanged his tooth for a shiny, new dime; having Grandpa Amos pull him
around the polished, wooden floors on a bed sheet while recounting the story of
Aladdin and his flying carpet; standing at the bathroom sink drinking glass
after glass of water to wash away nervous hic-ups before his very first date.
But
unfortunately the scale of life was not without the unmerciful counter-balance
of inevitable pain, and suddenly the pleasant thoughts seemed to seep from him
like a mortal wound. John had begun to feel that life, his life, was destined to
be one of no present, no future, all past. Nothing but memories. And a lot of
those memories were stored up in the attic. He needed some of them to cheer him
up. He decided it was time to reminisce.
The light in the
back of the attic clicked on, and soft currents came to life. John climbed the
stairs, rustling silvery cobwebs that hung down from the splintered, dry rafters
with the gentle wind of his presence. He looked up at the naked beams and
underbelly of the roof. Rusted roofing nails protruded through the ceiling like
miniature stalactites in some old, forgotten cave. He made a mental note to buy
insulation.
At
the top of the stairs a cool, cavernous room smelling of mothballs and squalid
air came into full view. It was filled with the remnants of two old bikes and
their dismembered parts, clothing racks heaped with plastic-wrapped suits and
color-faded dresses, books caked with the sediment of untold, forgotten seasons,
an old, cracked full-length mirror, boxes of odds and ends, several cloth-draped
pieces of furniture and a decrepit, black trunk.
A lot of the
things stored up there John remembered from his youth, but there was an
abundance of memorabilia he could not recognize. He never realized just how much
of a pack rat Grandpa Amos was.
He decided to
start at the object closest to him, so he knelt down at the old black trunk and
disengaged the two latches. It opened with a whining creak that filled the
attic.
He began sifting
its contents. A stack of black and white pictures in tarnished-brass frames were
piled up on the left side of the trunk and photo albums and miscellaneous
bric-a-brac on the right side. He pulled out the old photographs, put his back
to the trunk, and sat on the dusty, wooden floor with the stacks of pictures
nestled between his arms and his chest like a cuddled baby. He leafed through
various photographs of a younger and more vibrant Grandpa Amos and Grandma
Edith, faded pictures of Amos and his new wife at Ellis Island in New York City,
having just arrived from Oban, Scotland in 1939, distant relatives that John had
never met, and a few of his father, Dennis. One in particular caught his
attention. It was the only one that wasn’t in a frame. He turned it over, and
on the back was inscribed in shaky, black ink: To my darling wife and son.
Keep smiling! I’ll be home soon. October 11, 1967.
The picture
saddened him because his father never made it home. He had been killed in an
ambush while doing a mine sweep two days after the picture was taken. Within
five years his mother would follow. Doctors had said she died of ovarian cancer,
but he knew that she was dead before that. She had really died of a broken
heart, never fully getting over Dennis’ death. From that time on, John had
been raised by his grandparents.
With a heavy
breath, he put that picture on the floor next to him and again turned his
attention back to the chest. He spent the next fifteen minutes entranced in
snapshots, old newspaper clippings and odds and ends found throughout the truck
with a quick but often glance down at his father who smiled up at him from the
photograph.
Finally
exhausting those, he foraged around at the bottom of the chest and came across
an archaic, leather-bound satchel hidden under an old pair of golf shoes. The
covering was hard and dry and felt like sand paper. He curiously examined it and
slapped away some of the dust. On one side a barely perceivable cross was etched
in the worn leather. Figuring that it must have been a Rosary purse, John opened
it. He stuck his hand inside and felt the coldness of metal. He pulled from
within its confines a black skeleton key with a horned serpent engraved on its
head. At first it looked like any of a number of old skeleton keys with a
similar shape but on a larger scale and with six differently spaced teeth.
But no sooner
had he pulled it from its satchel when something strange began to happen. A
surge of hot energy shot up his arm. It was weak at first but grew in intensity
as if it was connected to a power source, and someone was turning up the
voltage. John’s pulse began to race, and he could feel beads of cold sweat
forming on his forehead. He wanted to let go of the key, but somehow couldn’t
make his fingers listen to his mental shouts. His breath caught in his throat.
Suddenly,
without warning, the room began to spin, disappearing in a whirl.
What the hell
was happening?
He couldn’t
see anything; all was a blur. Up, down, back, forth, like some morbid carnival
ride, rocking, shaking, buzzing, convulsing, going mad, he thought he was going
mad.
With all his
might, he somehow mustered the strength to relinquish the forced iron grasp. He
heaved the key to the floor, and it disappeared under one of the clothes racks.
Everything
stopped. No more spinning and bucking, no more current of energy. Everything was
the way it had been only a scant few seconds earlier, as if nothing ever really
happened at all.
John stared at
the floor with an unsettling dread as he stroked his trembling hand. Was it a
hallucination? No, he felt it—didn’t he? The key zapped him, and the room
spasmed around him—didn’t it?
Come on,
he urged himself. You’re a rational man, don’t be stupid. Maybe the
culmination of recent ill-events in his life had finally taken their toll. He
was going bonkers. He then realized that it was a good thing that he’d taken
extra time off from teaching—he’d need it. He rubbed his eyes to ease a
fast-forming headache.
But even as he
was trying to convince himself that what had just transpired hadn’t really
happened, something sour settled into the pit of his stomach. Something that
scared him. He no longer felt alone, though his was the only body in the attic.
Something felt—close by, just out of reach, just out of sight. He looked
around apprehensively but saw nothing.
He suddenly lost
his appetite for nostalgia and left the attic, uneasily resisting the urge to
look behind him.
©2003 StoriesByEmail.com
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