Lunch and dinner were not forthcoming. Daylight narrowed to a pencil, which meant the sun had dropped through the winter sky to disappear behind a copse. In its failing, a tint of apple peel filled the upstairs. A lambent sky conspired with the late formation of clouds to rush in a prescient dusk. The fog had evaporated in the previous hour. Its peculiar opacity was taken up without a break by ensuing night.
The bed in the room opposite still possessed a box spring (if not a mattress) but the weary prisoner believed it should be tolerable for the evening.
Waxing shadows saturated every wall in the room, and though they were no longer seen to move, movement of a kind stirred within them. The house was nonetheless silent where the manufactured storm had yet to sound.
The first disturbance issued from outside the house. Liam rose from his unrested sleep and dashed to the bay window; an untucked flannel shirt identified the moonlit individual standing below him as Howard.
The gladdened captive fled downstairs, but his liberator never materialized at the front door. Nor did he venture to the north side of the property and the rear door.
An absence of motion light on the stairs convinced Liam that he dreamt the episode, so he returned upstairs—Howard was still seen against the bramble below the bay window.
“Force the front door!” his friend urged.
It was not clear if the intended rescuer received this communication, but he tracked toward the front of the house. His inciter returned downstairs, where again he did not meet with the motion light.
Heavy footsteps were heard under the portico; Liam exclaimed, “Force the door!”
A boom and loud crack followed—but the wrong door was breached.
“The other door! The other door!” implored the prisoner.
No response came, but faint disembodied footsteps sounded from the walls. Liam toured the downstairs. The wall hole blinked where someone intercepted its light source. His friend’s name was shouted into the opening, but this again produced no response.
By the time he returned up the dark stairs, his eyes were better adapted to the shadows. Faint light emanated from the far bedroom with the ruptured floor. Where before this light was connected to the motion detector, it was now identical in character to the candlelight in the unseen room. Again, his summons garnered no reply—and yet this light dipped in intensity where it was briefly intercepted.
The prisoner retreated to his makeshift field cot. Fretting over house noises provided excuse to remain vigilant, even while regions within his mind succumbed to the normal architecture of sleep. He re-envisioned the hidden house as comparable to these divisions…
A waiting room was visible through the French doors of an examination room, but the dreamer preferred the exit favored earlier by the doctor. Only a corridor communicating with a empty lobby was ceded, which was shared with a connecting hospital.
Utility lighting made for murky corners and piss-yellow hospital walls. It did little to illuminate an oil painting hanging next to copper-plated elevator doors. The dark opening of a cave was depicted in this picture, and also a large displaced boulder. This pairing suggested The Resurrection.
Stylistically the rock face reminded Liam of Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, in that it looked more invented than observed, where sienna tones poured over foam-sculpted shapes of theatrical lightness.
An enormous clock occupied the center of a plaster frieze over this decoration. In lacking a floodlight, its hour lagged in the early morning shade. Human figures, attired in togas and flowing cloaks, moved in profile across its flanking friezes, and seemed linked to the themed painting. Perhaps these were early Christians inhabiting a purgatory for those asleep in Christ: wanderers into his dream realm who, in profile, did not meet his gaze but looked steadfastly to places of their ascension.
A duffle bag sat in the floor below this procession, alongside a row of fiberglass-molded chairs of mid-century design. A cast-metal vending machine with robust pull levers completed this idea.
Liam, hungry, fished in his pocket for change. Among bits of lint, three quarters were found. The coins were fed into the machine, whereupon a sleeve of cheddar cheese crackers dropped from the slot—
These were a ruin of stale dust.
The diner’s attention returned to the duffle bag. Perhaps the item’s owner stepped outside for a smoke.
A large plate glass window was approached in search of this individual, yet the panes were as impenetrable as the painting’s rock crevice.
Presently something struck the window—Liam lurched away. The plate glass shuddered in its loose caulked trough, but nothing of what hit it lingered close by. A second strike occurred, and the distressed man was convinced that this attacker bore talons. Yet with the third blow, feebleness was apprehended in the assault. A fourth charge revealed no clawed fiend but, instead, a bird’s beak.
Liam looked to the white linoleum floor in front of the chairs, thinking this attacker was a determined owl that, shrouded in midnight, repeatedly dive-bombed the window in pursuit of a mouse seen in the lobby. In finding no scurrying rodent underfoot, the searcher’s comprehension of the action nevertheless improved. The fifth strike was categorically that of a bird, but without frantic, repelling wings to make it a living creature. These birds were dead before meeting the obstacle of plate glass. They were being—one at a time—thrown.
This was an attempt at communication. A second glance was spared for the unzipped duffle bag—several inky decoys of crows were heaped inside it.
Their discoverer mumbled, “Howard—?”
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.