Stories About Things (4 page)

How intricate the patterns were tonight! So
many different types of clouds were clustered together. They almost
made an entire town. On the hills and fields he almost thought he
saw houses and people and dogs and cats and some water, a lake or
seashore perhaps. He could even see the crests of the waves.

There must be a real storm coming, Sal
thought, one with all kinds of rain and wind, and maybe even some
snow.

He stared and stared at the orange and white
paintings in the sky, and then it occurred to him that he
recognized some of the features. That one hill (a giant cumulus
mass) looked like the hill beside his house. If the animals were
cows indeed, they could be his neighbor’s who always grazed in the
little pasture by Sal’s house. And there! His house was beside
them. Then a smaller cloud drifted out of the house-shaped one. It
was a person-shaped cloud. Why, that could almost be his mother!
She stood in the yard looking about and calling–he could see the
cloud open its mouth and cup its hands around it. He waved to her,
and called out, but she went on looking and looking.

He tried to run towards his house, for he was
sure by now that his mother was calling for him, and it was time to
come in for dinner. As he ran, the sun sank lower and lower. Within
a few minutes it had slipped over the edge of the world, and the
hill, the house, and his mother disappeared in the shadows.

He looked about him. The sun had sucked most
of the light down with it, and it was already deep twilight. He
could see enough, though, to wonder at the landscape. There was a
forest, close and black, and an obsidian lake that looked like
stone. He turned in a circle and saw that hills surrounded him,
even where a moment ago the sun had been. His house was not sitting
atop any of them. As he looked at the trees and the water, he
realized that they were not the trees and water that he knew.

“Mother!” he called.

There was no answer.

“Mother! he called again.

And there was a whisper, a high whispering
laugh, from the shadows. It was not his mother.

Then the twilight vanished, and, in the dark,
there were voices and movements in all directions. Dinner was
indeed ready, and he was just in time.

TWO

Nobody liked Josiah.

Under the sun, he was a bleached bone laying
on the sand. Like a skeleton buried on unhallowed ground apart from
decent folk, he kept away from the living flesh. When the sun went
down, he was a shadow on the edge of our bonfires, a silence
outside our ring of laughter and flirtation and drinks, lots of
drinks.

He was always on the beach. Every weekend,
every night, every day. Nobody invited him. They didn't need to; he
wasn't really in on the parties. He just shared the space. I guess
he just liked the water.

A skinny kid even in the baggy clothes he
wore to school, in swimming trunks he was skeletal. In the light of
the fires at night, he looked like a snowy ghoul.

"Shark," the girls called him, and
giggled.

They laughed to cover up their unease,
because he was someone who made people uneasy.

He was a shark, no doubt about it. Not that
he was vicious, at least, not in any way we could tell. Really, he
just looked like one. There was a pointed look about his face,
cheek bones all sticking out at unlikely angles, and a razor of an
upper lip. He had a finlike crown, smooth and narrow which,
situated atop a stretched frame, always stuck up above a sea of
heads.

He moved like a shark, too, in a stalking
kind of walk with a pronounced grace about it. He had the kind of
grace that you almost wanted to watch, if only it didn't make you
so nervous.

"Shark," they would say, and laugh. They
laughed together, because laughter in number is safer than laughter
alone.

As creepy as he looked prowling the sand,
indoors he was a goldfish.

He was the type of twerp I'd give wedgies to,
and push into the lockers in the hallways between class. He was the
type who had his name scrawled next to funny remarks on the walls
of the toilet at school. He was such an easy target, taunting him
wasn't even much fun. It was just an imperative of the social
food-chain.

I intended to keep my place on it.

This year, as soon as the sun rose on the
first day of summer, I was on the sand and in the water. College
was coming, and scouts would be there either to usher it in or to
bar the way. I wanted to start training early.

But as early as I started, Josiah was ahead
of me. That first day he was there, standing in the waves, two
minutes after the sun had cleared the horizon. I didn't wave or
call to him; guys like me usually didn't even look at guys like
him, even when we taunted them they were invisible.

But he looked at me as I ran over the sand.
It was hard not to look back because he was the only one on that
long beach.

He looked at me with these blank eyes, and he
yawned.

The yawn stretched.

Then he smiled. I'd never seen him do that
before.

The smile stretched.

He just stood, waist deep in the surf smiling
and yawning, teeth glinting in the morning sun, hands hanging at
his sides. I squinted at him.

Did that kid always have extra teeth?

I looked at his arms and realized they
weren't so much hanging by his sides as glued to them.

I looked back up to his face. There wasn't
much of one left. His head had grown forward over the mouth, the
pointed crest of his skull elongating. The small black eyes sitting
in ivory skin just looked at me. The mouth with rows upon rows of
teeth continued to smile.

The shark dove. A fin wove back and forth
between the waves a few times, before it disappeared.

People who live by the ocean don't worry
about shark attacks. Most swimmers and surfers couldn't stay out of
the water even if they did worry. "What are the chances?" they
always say. Every summer, a few arms are lost and maybe a life or
two, but with all the tourists crowding the waters, really, what
are the chances?

But the tourists and the swimmers and the
surfers and the people that live by the ocean don't
know
the
sharks. And the sharks don't
know them.

I don't go down by the water anymore. I can't
imagine I have a friend there.

THREE

The chimes laugh.

The window shade, coarse and old, chafes
Mort’s fingers.  
Tug. Release.  Tug.
 Release.
    But it only moves down,
brushing the chimes as it goes.  The rude, tinkling chuckle
continues.

Again, he reaches up to the rolling mechanism
at the top of the window and fiddles with it.  It crumbles a
little, but doesn’t move.  Like the nail holding the chimes in
place, like the hinges on the front door, like the keyholes, like
the screws on the filthy toilet, like the whole damn house, it is
rusted in place.

Mort yanks on the shade.  It rises an
inch or two, then
stops.          

Was it always stuck?

Grandmother Morris made that window a
decorative nook long ago.  Mort had only ever seen the chimes
hanging with some dried flowers over the closed shade.

Dead flowers crunch under foot.  The
shade sands his finger.  The chimes laugh.

He never asked.

He never asked about the window with the
chimes.  He never asked about the flowers or  the shade
that was never opened, or about anything in the run-down mansion or
the wild lands about it at all.

He didn’t ask because he didn’t care.

As a child left unsupervised for long summers
in a too-old and very likely haunted mansion, Mort would have much
rather been at home watching a movie about a too-old and very
likely haunted mansion.  He explored the house, not out of
curiosity, but out of boredom and a desire to avoid the too-old and
very likely crazy old woman who made decorative nooks out of unused
windows.

He never found anything interesting.

The flowers slip underfoot.  A drop of
blood stains the sharp edge of the shade.  The chimes
giggle.

Crazy woman!

When he couldn’t avoid his grandmother as a
child, he did his best to ignore the funny way she talked and the
crazy stories she told, none of which he remembers now.

His mother said that Grandmother Morris was
old and could do or say whatever she wanted.  She said that he
was put off by his grandmother because she was very old and
children are often put off by the very old. But, she had told him,
they really should respect their elders anyway.

Mort showed respect with silence.

If he could help it, he didn’t talk to her at
all.  And because she was funny like that, she didn’t seem to
mind.  She didn’t talk much to him either, except when neither
one could avoid the other.

The first thing he did when he moved in after
she died was take down all flowers and the silly trinkets.  He
would have removed the chimes too, but like the shade they were
stuck.  The nail and the chain on which they hung had rusted,
and held fast when he tugged.

I’m going to cut them off with a
chainsaw!

But that must come later.  For now, he
is determined to make the shade, and the entire house,
functional.   It is a window none will see, in the
washroom that hasn’t been used since there were servants living in
an attic that hasn’t been used since the rest of the house forgot
it.

But he will not have it broken.  He will
not live in a rusty old antique.  He was not a child who
thought old things were curious.  He is not an adult who
thinks they are quaint.  He liked–then and now–things that
work, and serve their purpose.  That way, the world makes
sense.  That way, the world is functional.

But Mort doesn’t like to make things
work.  He just likes them to be working when he needs
them.

The shade defies him.

Two buttons on his shirt hang loose. 
One pops off as he reaches up to beat on the roll at the top of the
window.  It rolls behind the toilet and pings against the
porcelain.  One fist opens to tug at the tie that feels like a
choker, but it already hangs limp around his collarbone. 
Frustrated sweat drips from the once-pressed silk armpits .

Fuck it.   Couldn’t see shit
anyway, it’s so dark.

One sweaty hand tears the tie off completely
and drops it to the dead-flower-strewn floor.

Nothing worth seeing through that window
anyway.

Somebody disagrees.

The creeping shadows out on the lawn think
there is something well worth seeing through the attic
window.  The shadows had always kept a close eye upon the
ancient charm that hung in the old house.  It had been still
for a long time.  The bells were on the inside of the window,
untouched by the wind, and somebody had been very careful not to
let them stir for many years.

Now they stir.  Now they tinkle,
laughing gleefully.  And the shadows remember the sound. But
they had never forgotten it.

Who forgets hunger?

No.  Though the people no longer
remember their dues, the shadows do.

For almost a hundred years they had waited.
They had hid, shadows in the shadows catching only what the
could.  No one knew the appropriate calls anymore.  No
one remembered what was due the darkness.

But someone had rung the bells, somebody had
struck the tones that called out the shadows for their
sacrifice.  They were hungry and came swiftly out of the
trees, over the lawn, following the ancient summons.  Careful
in their excitement, they crept towards the house. They growled in
hunger and ground their teeth in anticipation.

Mort lay in an ancient bed under blankets
that smelled a little like potpourri and mold.  The creaking
of the old frame hid the long nails scratching on the steps.

He was miserable and cold.  But despite
his discomfort, he was tired and soon fell asleep.  He slept
deeply and without waking.

FOUR

"Don't look 'round," Julie says.

My head turns. Her hand claps to my face to
stop the movement.

"That sound," she says, "do you hear it?"

The wind blows the chill into our faces. It
hums the melody of the season, the hiss and rasp of leaves, the
score of autumn.

"That's the leaves blowing over the ground,"
I say of the quiet rasping beneath the wind's moan. "It's just the
dead leaves being scraped over the dry cement of the sidewalk." I
don't know why she is frightened of it.

"Not that, the other."

"What?"

"The sound that's under the leaves."

"Julie–"

"Listen!"

I do. There is only wind. There are only
leaves. That is all there is to hear. So I listen to it.

Single leaves scratch over pavement. Piles of
hundreds, thousands rustle together. Late comers crinkle softly
through the air as they fall. Remnants of a light frost crunch in
their folds, as they skim across the ground.

Shwee, shwee, shwee
, they whisper with
dry, creaky fingers scraping dry, creaky fingers.
Hsch, hsch,
hsch,
they caw softly, aged hands sanding the rough cement.

But Julie stands beside me, more still than
the trees around us, eyes wet and wide. Those tears were not
whipped up by the chill wind.

I put my arm around her. She is frozen even
under layers of fleece. I rest a hand on her cold cheek.

"Shh, shh," I whisper, but she sniffles, and
tears run over my fingers.

She's never cried before, at least, not that
I could see. I didn't think she was one of
those
girls.