Terror Incognita (4 page)

What had that lightning bolt done to this window?

It had to be a corresponding dimension he was looking out into. A parallel universe, an alternate interpretation of the same space. Somewhere far away but in this same space there was another old house with an attic, and it was as though he himself were now standing in the attic of that alien building gazing out. This idea so shook him that he had to look wildly around him to convince himself that he was still here in his mother’s attic. But the sun still shone warmly at the opposite end. Nothing else had changed around him.

A bird flapped by out there, closer than the others had been. Its movements were unexplainably frightening, unnatural. Awkward or just too weirdly different. How could a creature without real wings fly? It was dark, but he had seen the creature well enough to know that it was identical to the one he had found in his mother’s rain gutter.

Alan sought to comprehend how the creature he had discovered had blundered into his reality. The murmur of a pigeon behind him made him realize that in the doppelganger house, a window must have been left open also. The bird-thing had come into the alien house that way, and exited through the diagonal window. The attic window of that house must not be boarded, and thus permitted exit. But when the creature broke out through the glass to take to the sky again, it had entered into
his
 dimension, and died, either from its injuries or because of the different conditions of Alan’s world.

That meant that the window in the parallel house had been altered, also. Their views had become switched, traded. The alien window must look out, now, upon the more plentiful roof tops of his New England town. Distant church steeples, gentle hazy hills...

He had to board the window back up again. As his father had done, when he had discovered its secret.

Alan took new nails from the toolbox, filled his pockets. He didn’t want to near that window but he couldn’t leave it like this for his mother to find. What if something else came through that broken hole? What if she stuck her hand through the hole to see what it looked like translated into the reality of that other realm?

Alan picked up one of the fallen boards, moved to set it back in place. Closer to the window now, and looking further down, he saw the dark face that was out there, peering in at him.

He cried out, dropped the board, tore desperately into the sunny end of the attic.

It was several minutes before he could go back. He smoked a cigarette, gazed at the dark window from a distance. At last, determined, he returned. He picked up the board, set it in place. He didn’t look out there this time. He looked only at the grain of the board. Then of the next one. And on, until he had sealed that window closed for the third time in its history.

*     *     *

Outside the house, he mounted the ladder once again. Now it was actually becoming darker as evening approached in his world. He had found a can of black paint in his father’s work shop, and had taped a brush to the end of a broken broom handle.

But when he reached the roof, he couldn’t help but strain to gaze into the attic through the window once more.

He saw several things then. He wouldn’t be able to reflect on all of them until later...but this time he could see inside.

The interior of that other attic, pretending it existed within his mother’s house through the two-way trickery of the glass, glowed red not with dusk but with dawn. It was the rising sun, not the setting sun, that had streaked that alien sky. More light entered the parallel attic now than before, permitting him to see inside. It was not boards that had darkened the view earlier, but merely the pre-dawn gloom. The alien window had never been boarded.

But these were the realizations Alan made later, after he had painted the window panes black. At the moment he stared through the mysteriously altered glass, his mind registered only one thing.

And that was the face of the creature—the
being
—inside that attic, gazing out at him. It was the same dark face he had seen outside the window before. When he had been inside his attic, it had been atop its ladder peeking in at him. And now that he was atop his ladder, it had changed places with him, and was inside its own attic.

As they locked eyes in that moment, the being lifted a board in place, meaning to nail it there. To shut out the terrifying visage it had witnessed.

That was when Alan began to paint...trying not to see the face as he did so.

Because the face was not human. Not remotely human. But more horrifying than this fact was Alan’s realization that—despite its terrible distortions—that face was in effect his own.

ELIZABETH RISING

It was a hilly graveyard. That was the thing.

Dean trudged up a flight of stone steps set into the central hill, the stones pitched and slanted by decades of frost heaves, tainted green by a century of having been steeped in the rich dark soil of Elysium Fields Cemetery.

The steps paused at an earthen landing of sorts before the next rising swell. He stopped here a moment. To either side the narrow landing trailed off down the hill as a path, bordered by evenly spaced and similarly twisted trees. The tree closest to Dean had an empty bottle of Canadian Club wedged in its crotch at about Dean’s crotch level.

Jerks, he thought. No reverence for the dead. But what did he expect when so many people didn’t even have a reverence for the living?

Perhaps Dean would have thought himself morbid for exploring the graveyards of New England had he not been chased, so to speak, into these quiet places on the outskirts of towns by those who lived within such towns. This was a refuge for him. The only kind of place, it often seemed, where he could feel at peace amongst his fellow beings.

That was why the bottle dismayed him. Sometimes those of the race of tormentors found their way into these sanctuaries. From atop the first tier of the hill Dean gazed out across the sprawling graveyard below for signs of others. But there were no others here this early summer evening. No children riding bikes, no old people tending to the boring neat ranks of newer graves on the boring flat section cleared and leveled in recent times. Good. They might not be tormentors themselves but they would make him feel self-conscious. They must all be home with their families, preparing suppers, Saturday cook-outs. Good. That left Dean here with his family.

Had one come up the granite steps then they might have thought that dappled shadow from the line of trees had fallen across Dean’s face. Until he moved, and the shadow went with him. The purple birthmark covered half his face, making a living yin and yang of it. In contemplating this stain, this anomaly, this blight on him, Dean had thought of himself as a mere portrait of a person, half his face painted in a shadow he could never walk out of.

But this was a place for shadows. See? The lowering sun was already drawing long shadows like taffy out of the silhouetted grave stones. Early evening or night was the time to come, except in those cemeteries so given over to night partiers that he had had to forsake them. He came in the very early morning, and rainy or snowy days were good. Beautiful in such a melancholy way. Though he had only been to this graveyard once before, they were all magically linked. They were all the necropolis he called his home town.

Dean continued up the next section of steps.

He regretted not having his camera this evening, but now that he had discovered this wonderful new place only a few towns over from his, he could come back here any time. His apartment above an elderly couple was decorated with framed enlargements of photos he had taken of interesting monuments, and statues whose white eyes glowed at him without judgment.

He reached the broad level summit of the hill. Here, phallic monuments thrust at the deepening sky, smaller stones clustered around these looming leaders. The stones themselves in graveyards seemed like beings to Dean, quiet but sentient things. Had the people below them known Dean in life, they too might have mocked him, but death makes people benign. Now, transformed, they were his friends and he studied their lettered faces, touched their pitted skins.

On its far side, the plateau dropped off fairly steeply toward a pond ringed by dark woods, this body of water so perfectly round it was almost startling. Dean’s first impression, gazing down at it, was that at some long distant time a meteor had crashed here. Some heavenly object. This was Elysium Fields, after all. He imagined that a dense migration of souls had failed to escape earthly gravity, and come plummeting back in a comet trail of flaming ectoplasm to bury themselves again in the ground...leaving this bowl to fill with the tears of their fellows on high, who had witnessed the ethereal tragedy.

Dean glanced over his shoulder to confirm his solitude, and then started down the slope.

Somehow there were graves along the slope, most of the stones leaning as if to topple down toward the pond. Dean imagined that the coffins must be buried almost at an angle. Maybe space had been scarce at that time, before the cemetery’s expansion.

But there were more numbered disks in the ground than there were full markers, and Dean had seen enough potter’s fields in his day to know one when he was in it. No wonder they were hidden over here on the dark side of the hill. Even in this haven for outcasts, there were outcasts. This was the stained half of the hill’s face.

Most of the disks were nearly grown over. Who knew how many were fully covered? Dean wondered if he himself would become a disk. An anonymous number. Did it make a difference?

He was drawn, however, to a full-sized marker of greenish-stained white stone down almost at the water’s edge.

The pond was still, its surface a flat scummed expanse like a floor of murky green glass Dean imagined he could almost walk out across. A dragonfly or two bobbed along the vast corrupt skin. He had never seen a body of water so uniformly and thickly filmed in scum, but looking back up the hill, he wondered if it had to do with those cheap potter’s field coffins buried in the slope. Coffins rotted away through the years. Releasing their putrefied contents...their liquefied freight...to stream down through the soil of the hill slowly but inevitably into the waters of the pond.

There were old candy wrappers down here at the shore. A tangle of fishing line in a low branch from a bad cast. The worm at the end of it had long since been eaten away by insects. Dean saw the ripped corner of a rubber’s wrapper. This grave had had company over the years, however hidden. In fact, it had been given another epitaph of sorts on its blank side. “Ricky and Rhonda,” it read, in an amorous spray of black paint, contained in the outline of a black heart. All sorts of offerings, then. Everything but flowers.

Dean moved around the stone to read its actual inscription, which faced out upon the pond.

It read:

Elizabeth Rising

“Pretty Betty”

1865-1890

Erected by her friends at

Bluedale State Hospital

“Pretty Betty,” Dean repeated to himself in a whisper. And then, “Elizabeth Rising.”

A prick at the back of his neck. He slapped at it, looked into his hand. A mosquito smashed there in a stain of his own blood.

*     *     *

Dean had never before been to the Bluedale Library, but libraries were a secondary refuge for him. Though they attracted live people, they were quiet enough and he had learned which were the least occupied times of the day.

Dean waited until no one else was at the desk before he approached the librarian, who was the only male librarian he had ever seen, an elderly man who didn’t look threatening.

“Excuse me, ah, do you have microfilm or records or something of the
Bluedale Gazette
 for 1890?”

“I have a niece with a wine birthmark,” the old man smiled, arching his brows over the rims of his glasses. “It covers most of her thigh. She doesn’t wear shorts. Always wears black hose. I’m sure her husband has seen it, though. Up close. I’m sure he doesn’t mind, either. I wouldn’t mind; she’s a very pretty girl.”

Dean was so horrified by these casual revelations that for a moment he was struck dumb. He considered turning away and walking out but he was too meek a person to be rude. “It’s hard, I know. I’d wear black hose over my head if I could.” Trying to joke.

The old man liked the joke, chuckled. “Well, Gorby has helped us get used to those things, right? At least he still serves that purpose.”

“Yeah, I guess, huh? Um, the
Bluedale Gazette...”

“No, no. We lost all our old papers and a lot of our older books in the fire of ‘27. You’d be better off going to the
Gazette’s
 office. Know where that is? You’re not from town; I’d recognize you.”

“Especially with my face, huh?” Dean joked. His laugh trembled a little.

“Right. Uh, what was it happened in 1890 that you wanted to look up? I’m a walking encyclopedia on Bluedale. Often thought of writing a town history like they’ve published for Eastborough. Nice book like that.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t know. A mental patient died that year. She’s buried over in Elysium Fields...”

“Pretty Betty,” the man said, with strange fondness, as if he had known her personally. “Yeah, she’s buried in Elysium Fields. She was also killed in Elysium Fields. In fact, almost right there where her grave is.”

Dean was too fascinated now to be resentful toward the man. “She was killed? Murdered, you mean?”

“They found her floating at the water’s edge. Face down, naked. She’d been drowned. Of course they couldn’t test a body then like they can now, but it was clear enough she’d been raped. She’d been punched a few times and all.”

“God...that’s terrible.”

“She was always escaping from the hospital. As often as not she’d return on her own. But it’s funny that someone would’ve raped Betty, because she’d give herself to you readily enough. They say half the young men in Bluedale had her at one time or another. She gave the clap to half of the ones she went with, too. I’ve never seen a picture of her, if there ever was one, but they say she had the face of an angel.”