Floating Staircase (16 page)

Except for slamming the door in my face, David Dentman offered no response.

T
he fever came, shuddering and without mercy, and I spent the next two days in a web of mind gauze. My dreams—what dreams I could remember—were erratic and paranoid, shot by a director on a bad acid trip.

In one, I was running down a dark, narrow corridor, the walls and floor and ceiling tightening up the farther I ran, until I had to drop to my hands and knees and crawl like an infant. I crawled until I came to a tiny door, like something out of
Alice in Wonderland.
The door appeared to be comprised of many small wooden blocks of varying colors, woven together like bamboo stalks in a raft.

I pushed the door open and squeezed through the opening. As if the doorway were a living thing, I felt it constrict around my rib cage. Ahead of me, the darkness shifted. Shapes—or the idea of shapes—moved closer to me, then farther away, tauntingly alternating their distance. A light illuminated a little antechamber. Directly in front of me, nestled in a web of tree branches, dead leaves, and old sodden newspapers, were four hairless, sightless critters, grayish in color like a waterlogged corpse, moving only slightly.

I was trapped between walls, between realities, like the hidden bedroom in the basement.
There is clarity here.
I smelled something sickeningly sweet and thought of chamomile tea. Then, from behind me, I heard a great rushing, rumbling sound and felt the walls all around me beginning to quake. In that blind, frantic instant, the corridor in which I was trapped filled with cold water, so cold it burned my skin. And I drowned.

In another dream I was shivering and wet, a towel draped around my shoulders like a cape, with Detective Wren asking me what happened that night by the river. Behind him in the creeping dawn, uniformed police officers patrolled the wooded paths and blocked the area off with yellow tape. I heard the boats moaning in their moorings and smelled the diesel exhaust breathing in off the bay.

Suddenly, Detective Wren's arms were burdened with paperback novels. He dumped them on a table that instantly materialized between us, and we were in an interrogation room, with greenish fluorescent lights fizzing and colorless cinder block walls.

—These your books? he asked. You write these books?

I nodded.

—How'd you come up with this stuff?

I said I didn't know.

—Everything you wrote in these books happened last night at the river, said the detective. He was a big guy with oily skin and sharp, soul-searching eyes. Everything you wrote down in these books happened just like it did by the river, boy, Detective Wren went on, which makes me think this thing, see, maybe this thing was planned.

I sobbed and said I didn't do it on purpose.

Detective Wren looked at me with disgust. Then his face slackened and purpled, and his eyes peeled away and readjusted themselves at either side of his rapidly narrowing head. His arms retreated up the sleeves of his rumpled suit, and his trousers loosened around his waist until they dropped straight to the floor. What lay exposed were not legs but the tapered, intestinal body of an eel. I watched in horror as Detective Wren slithered out of his suit, an enormous man-sized eel that snaked its way down the muddy embankment before splashing into the dark river. It raised a dorsal fin like a shark and zigzagged through the inky tide.

Then David Dentman was glaring at me, one hand palming the side of my head as he repeatedly slammed my skull down on the steps of the floating staircase.

I awoke, my throat rusty and my flesh sticky with sweat, with Jodie's cool hand on my forehead smoothing back my sodden hair. There was a sunset burning on the horizon, and through the bedroom windows, the trees looked like they were on fire. I stared at the side of the street where Jodie stood talking with Beth in the snow. Something cramped up inside me. Before I could scream, the cool hand withdrew from my forehead.

Dreams. . .

Then something about a castle of cardboard boxes, of boating piers stacked one on top of the other until they formed a ladder straight into the heavens. At one point I dreamt I was married to a woman with a monster growing in her belly, and my name was Alan, and we lived by our own special lake in a different part of the country. Even in this dream, I could feel the heat of imaginary summer on my back and shoulders, pasting the shirt to my body and causing my skin to practically char and sizzle. Confused fever dreams.

There was one moment in my dream when I crept from my bed and floated down the hallway. Downstairs I could hear the faint phantom sound of someone talking in a low voice. I glided across the landing and gripped the banister with both hands. I peeked over the side. I could make out only a fleeing shadow against one wall. So I turned and floated down the stairs to the foyer. There, the voice became slightly more audible, and I knew with intuitive certainty that it was Jodie.

I floated into the living room. Even in the dream I had the detached feeling associated with feverish hallucinations. My feet hardly touched the carpet; my head was a helium balloon. A brutal wind whipped about the living room and bullied the curtains over the front windows, and I wondered only vaguely where it was coming from. From my vantage I could see the back of Jodie's head as she sat on the sofa. I went to her, listening to her words . . . and realized she wasn't actually talking; she was singing softly and tenderly and lovingly and handsomely. It was the way my mother used to sing to me when I was a child:

A, you're adorable

B, you're so beautiful

C, you're a child so full of charms

D, you're delightful

E, you're exciting

F, you're a feather in my arms . . .

I placed a hand on her shoulder. Her voice stopped cold. I looked down at her lap . . . where the undeniable image of a young boy cradled in my wife's arms quickly blinked out of existence.

—Where'd he go? I asked.

—He'll be back, Jodie said quietly . . . and began humming.

—Was he . . . ? I began.

—Yes, she said. It's him.

—I thought it might be.

Her humming was soothing.

—You sound so beautiful, I told her.

This made her smile: I could feel it radiate from her and did not need to see it.

—Thank you, she said.

—Too bad I'm dreaming, I said.

—No, Jodie said. You're not.

W
hen you withdraw from the world, you find that the world withdraws from you, too. Then all that's left is the Grayness, the Void, and this is where you remain. Like a cancerous cell. Like a cut of tissue, diseased, in a Petri dish. You glance down and there it is: this gaping gray hole in the center of your being. And as you stand there and stare into it, all you see is yourself staring back.

I was you,
Jodie said.
Isn't that funny?

You have been set aside, replaced by air, by molecules, by particles of electric light. You have been erased, removed. There is almost a popping sound on the heels of your disappearance as these molecules filter into the space you occupied only one millisecond beforehand, covering up both space and time and eradicating the whole memory of your human existence. You are no longer.

Isn't that funny?

When you withdraw from the world, you find that you were never really there—that you were never really in the world—because nature does not know extinction, and if you no longer exist, that must mean you never existed in the first place.

I returned to the land of the living on a Wednesday. The house was quiet and Jodie was at the college. Another snowstorm had come and buried the town, and the distant pines looked like pointy white witches' hats.

The house was freezing. The thermostat promised it was a steady sixty-eight degrees, but I knew better than to trust it. My illness had left me drained and cotton headed, and my mouth tasted like an ashtray, so I went to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on the stove.

By the time I'd finished my second cup, I was feeling better and decided that I would head over to the Steins' to ask them about the Dentmans. After my visit to Veronica and David's house in West Cumberland on Sunday, it was obvious that something was terribly, terribly wrong with that family. The bizarre descriptions I'd given the make-believe Dentman family in my notebooks had not even lived up to the real thing. Adam had told me all he knew about them, but that wasn't enough. The Steins had been their next-door neighbors; surely they must have some insight into the family. I was hungry to find out as much about them as I could, not just for the sake of my own writing but to satisfy my increasing curiosity.

The story I was laying out in my notebooks depicted a troubled young boy held captive in a basement dungeon by his mentally disturbed mother and an uncle who found a sick pleasure in physically hurting the child. When the child becomes old enough to speak his mind, the uncle—my David Dentman character who, for the sake of continuity, retained his real-life counterpart's name—knows something must be done, so he murders the boy and makes it look like an accident. That was about as far as I'd gotten, having already filled up three notebooks with my frantic scribbling, but I wondered just how on the mark I'd been about them . . .

The telephone rang. The voice on the other end was as old and rough as an ancient potato sack. “Is this Travis Glasgow?”

“It is. Who's this?”

“Well, Mr. Glasgow, my name's Earl Parsons, and I suppose I'm Westlake's answer to Woodward and Bernstein. I got a phone call from Sheila Brookner—what she called a tip, so to speak—and she said we had ourselves a celebrity in our midst.”

“Sheila Brookner?” I intoned. Then it occurred to me. “Oh.” She was the librarian who'd let me into the archived newspaper room. For one crazy moment I thought this guy was calling about the articles I tore out of the papers.

“She said you came by the library doing some research for a new book or something like that.”

“Hmmm. Something like that.” I considered his Woodward and Bernstein comment, then said, “You're a reporter.”

Earl Parsons laughed—the sound of a stubborn old tractor trying to start up in cold weather. “Well, now, you say it like that and you'll give me a swelled head. I'm actually a retired mill worker, but I do much of the freelance writing for
The Muledeer,
seeing how the town's so small. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that my contemporaries on the paper are made up mostly of journalism students from the college.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It's not often we get someone famous like yourself coming to live in Westlake.” Another rumbling chuckle. “Never, actually.”

“I think you use the word
famous
too generously. I've written a few horror novels.”

“One of which I'm reading right now,” Earl said, perhaps trying to impress me, although I didn't think he was lying. “Creepy stuff, for sure.”

“They're certainly creepy,” I said.

“I'd like to write up a nice human interest piece on you, if you'd let me. You moving out here's probably the biggest news since Dolly Murphy won the pie eating contest last fall.”

I thought of Elijah Dentman drowning in the lake behind my house and how that had surely been bigger news but didn't say anything.

“Understand I don't mean to be a nuisance,” Earl motored on. “If you had the time—and weather permitting—I'd like to meet with you for an interview.”

I was about to say that wouldn't be a problem when movement in the living room caught my attention. Seeing that it was the dead of winter, there were no windows open in the house . . . yet the curtain covering the front windows appeared to be billowing out as if manipulated by a breeze. I felt something solid click toward the back of my throat, and for a couple of seconds I could formulate no words.

“Of course,” Earl said, no doubt interpreting my silence as disapproval, “if it would be too much of an inconvenience . . .”

“No,” I finally managed. The word came out in a squeak, but I didn't think Earl noticed. “No, that's fine. I'm flattered.”

“How's tomorrow sound?”

“That'll be fine.”

“I work out of the house so you'd have to come—”

“Just stop by here,” I told him. My gaze was locked on the curtains. They were made of a semitransparent material that dulled the daylight on the other side to a melancholic nimbus. Through the fabric I could make out the undeniable shape of a small child, an ethereal silhouette against the front windows but behind the curtain, the curtain covering him up like a death shroud.

Him,
I thought.
Elijah Dentman.

“How's noon strike you?” It was as if Earl's voice were coming from the moon.

“Fine.”

“Hey! Terrific! I'll see you then, Mr. Glasgow.”

“Good-bye,” I mumbled and hung up.

My palms were tacky with sweat, and that awful taste was back in my mouth. Slowly, I closed the distance between the kitchen and the living room. With each step I took, the shape of the child behind the curtains—the child I knew to be Elijah Dentman or whatever remained of him in this world—took on the shape of the holly bushes outside, pressed up against the windowpanes and shaking in the wind. Once I reached the curtains, I did not have to sweep them aside to see that I had mistaken these bushes for the ghost of a lost child. Their horned leaves scraped against the glass like grinding teeth.

I bent down and put my hand over the floor vent that was beneath the curtains, covering the expulsion of cold air that was streaming through the vent. The curtains stopped moving. I held my breath. A second later, a stiff, crinkling sound emanated from somewhere behind me. I turned my head and saw one of my notebook pages flutter and ripple. The page didn't actually turn, but it looked like it wanted to.