Floating Staircase (32 page)

Axe in hand, I pushed through the trees, swatting branches out of my way, chopping at them when I could. Somewhere very close a flock of blackbirds took flight, startled by my presence. I was no longer running, and I could hear Adam crunching through fallen branches, closing the distance. He was still calling my name.

Consumed, driven, I broke through the last of the winter-brittle trees, my chest heaving with each breath. Before me: the lake. Directly before me: the floating staircase. Unlike the first time, there was no ice on which to walk. I hardly paused to consider this. Instead, I look another step right into the water. The ground was muddy and congested with reeds. My foot sank quickly in the mud. The water was an ice bath; I felt the chill race up through my body and explode like a rocket at the base of my skull. Possessed, I would not be thwarted.

“Travis,” Adam yelled. The crunch of dead twigs grew louder, nearer . . .

I waded out to my knees, my hips. My whole body shook, rattling apart the way I thought David Dentman's truck might when he gunned it past sixty. From nowhere, the weight of the axe increased by about fifty pounds, and I needed two hands to hold it. The water level rose to my chest, and I slung the axe over one shoulder. My teeth chattered a mile a minute. I was no longer taking steps but rather sliding along the silt at the bottom of the lake. How deep did it go? I had no idea. And I didn't care—I could walk across the bottom of the ocean floor right now.

Back on land, Adam finally cleared the trees and staggered to the lake. He shouted my name over and over again. I could hear Beth now, too.

I did not turn to see if either of them was pursuing me into the water, but I didn't think they were. Anyway, it didn't matter. The floating staircase, that prehistoric beast, crested out of the placid surface of the lake only a few yards ahead of me.

Splashing behind me: I turned and saw Adam stomping through the water.

There were stairs under the water. I climbed, the axe still slung over one shoulder. The wooden planks were weathered and beaten and ugly, brittle like diseased bone. I rose with them out of the freezing murk. The wind was unrelenting. The water had kept me preserved; now, the flesh exposed to the air was rendered immediately numb. Still, I mounted the steps, bullying straight to the top.

Something thumped against the framework of the staircase from beneath it. Under the water. Submerged.
Trapped,
I thought.
Trapped.
All feeling gone from my body, I approached the uppermost step, standing on the one just below it. The plank covering the top step was splintered and not completely nailed down. It had been pried up in the past.

I lifted the axe over my head. Somewhere—any-where, everywhere—Adam shouted my name. I was distantly aware of my bladder giving out . . . and of warmth that spread from my crotch down my inner thighs.

I brought the axe down. The plank suffered a fatal gash. The dulled blade crashed through the sun-bleached plank, splintering it down the middle. The two halves remained nailed to their respective sides of the frame, a ragged eyelet chasm hollowed in the center. I dropped to my knees and, with my one free hand, pried both halves of the plank from the foundation. I couldn't feel my fingers, and it was difficult to instruct them what to do. My palm was bleeding again, too. There was blood on everything, everything.

“Travis!”

Rending both sections of plank free from the platform, I tossed them over the side of the staircase and into the water—
plink, plink!
—and peered into the abyss I'd created. Below, my reflection stared back at me, framed within a rectangle of black water.

Find an anchor.

Gripping the axe handle in both hands, I leaned over the opening and rammed the head of the axe below the surface of the water. I would break this whole goddamn staircase apart if I had to, shred it with my bare hands, my frozen fingers, my bloody palm, anything to save him, anything to save my—

The axe blade struck something and knocked it loose of something else.

Whatever it was, I could feel it thumping along the handle of the axe as it floated and bobbed to the surface of the water. Squinting at the brackish murk of the water, I waited for it to surface. Waited.

And then it did, coming right to the top, right up through the staircase's hollow frame, and floated near the surface of the black water, framed in that rectangular chasm.

Floating.

My grip on the axe failed, and I let it sink beneath the water. I could not take my eyes from the thing in the water. Numb, frozen, a ruined man lost finally in the doldrums of his own paranoia, I stared at it, and no one could take it away from me by denying what it was . . .

A rib cage.

T
here are filaments of me that twinkle like sapphire. Calmly, I watch as my dozen-fingered hand smears trails through the ether. I am in a place somewhere far beyond conscious thought. Sitting at the kitchen table of my childhood home, I watch my mother prepare a chicken dish, dressing it with green peas and garlic, humming softly. She does not know I am there—I am a ghost, a shade, a shadow. I have gone willingly to the other side, have exchanged myself for another, have claimed a place at a table of the eternally absent, the eternally damned.

A scatter of feet on the floorboards. Whispers fall like cobwebs.
What's the most horrible thing you've ever done?

I am shuffling along a desert highway. Steam rises in visible waves off the roasting blacktop. With each step, tar pulls like taffy and sticks to the soles of my shoes. I wince as I gaze at the horizon. Tufts of unruly weeds sprout in patches down the center of the blacktop. As I approach, I see they are not weeds at all but clumps of hair. There are people below, submerged in the hot tar of the highway, with only their scalps rising like the bulges of humpback whales. It is possible to grip the hair, hot and brittle as it is from the sun, and pull. There is a sense of withdrawal, of surrender, as the sticky pavement yields and the buried corpses, amidst a gurgle of bubbling tar and an acrid methane stench, are liberated from their underground prison.

But they are only ragged scalps, decapitated from just above the eyes, and as each one comes loose, I fall backward at the ease of their surrender and slam down hard on the pavement.

I think,
Somewhere there is a great and mysterious sea where people struggle to stay afloat while the magic of the water gradually makes them insane.

I am wandering the desert highway, collecting scalps like gypsy treasure.

My fever broke by the end of the week.

Jodie was in the kitchen cleaning the stove. She seemed surprised to find me standing in the archway. “I was just going to make you soup.”

I went to her and hugged her, kissed the side of her face. Soon my neck was damp from her silent tears.

On a Tuesday, two men in navy-blue coveralls arrived in a truck that said Allegheny Pickup & Removal on its side in bright orange foot-tall letters.

“What's this?” said the fatter of the two men. “Some sort of secret passageway?”

I watched as they cleared out all of Elijah Dentman's things—his bookcase, his writing desk, his trunk of toys, his tiny bed. I helped them carry the boxes out and load them into the truck, my personal relief seeming to grow as the room in the basement cleared out.

“Your kid lives down here?” asked the fat man's partner. When I didn't answer him, he must have suspected the worst, and both men worked the rest of the hour in deferential silence.

After they'd gone, I spent some time gazing at the hollowed-out room. It felt like I was looking into my own coffin. Jodie briefly appeared beside me. I wondered if she felt like she was staring into her coffin as well. Or maybe she was looking into mine, just as I was. Rubbing my back with one hand, she handed me some hot tea, then felt my forehead to make sure my temperature wasn't coming back. It wasn't.

She wanted the room sealed up, but I decided on a better solution: I tore down the walls, those blind panels of Sheetrock. Particularly the one with the sage-green handprint on it. It was backbreaking work, and when I finally finished I was covered in white powder. Jodie laughed and said I looked like a mime.

We did not talk about what happened that day after the cops dropped me off at the house—a day now two weeks gone. While I'm sure the image of her husband straddling the floating staircase, smashing it to pieces with an axe, would be burned in my wife's memory for a long, long time, she was good about putting it all aside and loving me again. It had been a frightening thing, but I suppose it was also a necessary one; the revelation that day had shaken reality back into me, which was just what I'd needed. I'd needed to know if I had been right or if I had been wrong.

I had been wrong.

After I cleaned the basement, I took my writing notebooks—the ones in which the initial stirrings of Elijah Dentman's make-believe story still lingered, unfinished—and tucked them away in one of my trunks.
I tried, kid,
I thought.
I was trying so hard that I was searching for something that wasn't even there.
And at that moment I wasn't sure if, in my soul, I was talking to Elijah Dentman or to my dead brother, Kyle.

Yes, it had been a rib cage. And I had stared at it, fascinated and dumbstruck by my own premonition, because
I was right; I was right; I was right,
and my work was done, and the writing was done, and the boy was saved. I had saved him. I had championed him, vindicated him.

Adam had clambered out of the lake and up the staircase, nearly losing his balance twice. When he reached me, he threw his arms around me and held me tight against him. I could feel his heavy breathing as he held me, could feel his hot breath against my freezing neck.

“Look,” I'd said, not even bothering to point.

Adam had peered down and did not say a word. He did not say a word for a very, very long time. Finally, he said, “It . . . it looks like . . . is that . . . ?”

“Yes,” I said.

Quieter—in my ear: “How did you know?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “It just occurred to me. Just now.”

“But how?”

I turned my head in his direction. Our faces were close. “A ghost. I think a ghost told me.”

Adam appeared confused and scared . . . but somewhat relieved, too.

“I'm not crazy,” I'd told him then.

Adam glanced down the shaft of the hollow staircase. “Look.”

Confused, I saw a second object float to the surface—more bone. But not just bone—another rib cage.

“Adam . . .” My voice was thick, my throat too tight to articulate properly.

We both stood there and watched as countless bones drifted to the surface of the water and bobbed there, carnival prizes in a barrel, eventually crowding the hollow shaft. Among them were skulls. Tiny skulls.

Thinking about all this, I closed the trunk and climbed the stairs where a nice lunch was waiting for me.

Animals. Animal bones. There were even the remnants of a dog collar affixed to one of the larger skeletons, the band black with slime, the little brass nameplate dull in the overcast light. Still, I thought I could make out one word on it—
Chamberlain.

“Wait,” Adam said. “What are we looking at?”

“The mass grave for Elijah Dentman's pets,” I said. Then I collapsed onto the stairs, extremely weak and unable to maintain equilibrium.

With one hand, Adam gripped my shoulder and kept me from toppling into the cold, black waters.

That night Jodie came home. I promised her I was done and was putting it all behind me. Something broke inside her, and she cried in my arms. At first I was terrified, but then, in holding her and in feeling her hitch and sob against my chest, I knew she was okay. She needed to cry and I let her. In that moment, it occurred to me that I hadn't held my wife in some time.

(Two nights after the incident, a violent thunderstorm accosted the town and thoroughly demolished the weakened structure of the floating staircase. In the morning, all that remained were the bone-colored planks of wood that had washed up along the frost-stiffened reeds in the night.)