The Croning (12 page)

Kurt’s was a position that required extensive travel—the company outsourced its manufacturing of electronic components to Taiwan and China, which was incidentally how he met Winnie. The youngest daughter of a minor Hong Kong executive, they’d sat adjacent at a dinner party. The marriage date was arranged a mere six months later.

Kurt’s job also necessitated absolute secrecy and draconian security procedures. He showed Don the back of his left hand. “The company implanted a chip under the skin, right there—microscopic, like a grain of rice. It has my security clearance, medical information. They track it via satellite so I can move freely throughout our office and from building to building. There are a dozen checkpoints, sealed doors, security elevators, you name it. It’d be a flaming nightmare without this puppy.”

“Are they tracking you now?” Don said. He looked at the ceiling.

“Uh, no, Dad. That’d be an infringement of my privacy. I’m on vacation for Pete’s sake.” It was always difficult to tell whether Kurt’s exasperation was a reaction to Don’s dry needling or impatience with his father’s presumed ignorance. Kurt was far from stupid, but even farther from imaginative.

“Yeah, but how do they know where you are, who’re you’re talking to? Jeez, this could be a nest of commie spies.”

“I signed a nondisclosure form. Standard procedure. The penalty for violating that is about twenty-five years and forfeiture of my left nut, minimum. Besides, we provide ops a detailed itinerary of where we’re going and what the purpose of the visit might be. Bloody hell, this tea tastes like rotten leaves. Winnie, you don’t have to drink that.” He gently extricated the teacup from Winnie’s hand and slid it across the table. Her eyes glinted dangerously, a glint that subsided almost in the exact same instant. Kurt remained oblivious. “We got any of that coffee left?”

6.

Holly and her girlfriend Linda arrived around nine o’clock during a respite in the weather. Holly, independent and rugged as ever, piloted the ancient Land Rover her mother once shipped to South Africa for a six-month odyssey across the Dark Continent; she’d bequeathed it to Holly as a college graduation gift. Don guessed the engine had clocked enough miles to reach the moon and slingshot back to Earth.

Holly leaped from the truck and seized her father in a bone-crushing embrace. Short and stout, her hair a shaggy blonde shot with gray; her tanned face bore the pits and pocks of an adventuresome existence. Like her mother, she possessed a quality of essential agelessness, a quirky, youthful passion toward life that did not engender frailty, be it physical or otherwise. Her eyes flashed with bleak humor, no doubt born of twenty-odd years as an elementary school teacher.

“Hullo, brother,” she said when Kurt ambled onto the porch, smoothing his fantastical hair. She socked him in the arm, hard, and Don winced in sympathy; he’d roughhoused with her when she was a teenager and even then her scarred fists were clubs.

Kurt grunted and rapped his knuckles on her forehead and Don stepped between them to defuse the semi-playful aggression before matters escalated and his children were rolling in the mud pulling each other’s hair and biting; his role of referee had become reflexive over the years of broken noses and bruised egos. Nothing changed; they would hit the big five-oh come December, and yet they reverted to adolescence at the drop of a hat. The friend, Linda, joined them on the porch. An attractive, albeit hard-bitten, woman with a buzz cut. She wore a heavy flannel shirt, khakis and logger boots. She shyly said hello to everyone and her voice was quite soft; she meticulously enunciated in a fashion that suggested European nativity.

Rain closed in again mere moments after the luggage was unpacked and piled inside the front entryway. The house had many smallish windows, but the structure was built to 19th century standards. The rooms, staircases and connecting halls were low-ceilinged, narrow and dark, especially in dismal weather. A house of nooks and crannies, funny doors and storage cabinets in unusual and unexpected locations. Throughout childhood, Holly expressed an abiding fear of certain rooms. She complained of scratching and whispering emanating from her closet and the staircase that led to the attic. Some nights she refused to sleep in her own bed.

The cellar was right out because she swore that once when she ventured down to fetch a jar of preserves, the venerable tomcat Boris (whom they’d inherited along with the house) had chuckled from his perch high up on a wine rack, and crooned,
I’m a good kitty
. Boris wandered off one day not long after that alleged incident and they didn’t get around to bringing home another cat, despite the perennial mice problem.

Kurt had mocked Holly by saying maybe what she heard was one of Mom’s little people. Don immediately shushed such talk with uncustomary bluntness. Mention of The Little People, so called, was strictly verboten around the Miller household. He knew from bitter experience precisely how sensitive his wife was regarding even the most innocent slight of her decades-long investigation into the existence of uncontacted tribes and hidden cultures. As a man well-acquainted with similar foibles, such as cryptozoology, he tended toward sympathy.

Yet Michelle had pursued the topic with evangelical zeal, albeit in quasi secrecy, as only cryptobiologists such as her once great friend and mentor Louis Plimpton and the more radical members of the scientific community like renowned kooks Toshi Ryoko and Howard Campbell could be trusted to keep a straight face while discussing such esoteric theories. Thank the heavens she’d later given up before it wrecked their marriage and drove herself or Don, or both of them, to lunacy.

These days, Don didn’t often think of Michelle’s quest, that apocalyptic obsession she’d cultivated during her early years at university of proving the existence of a particular extant family of men, likely tribal, who dwelt on the hinterlands of civilization—the Antarctic, deep in the jungles of New Guinea, or the amid the wastes of the Gobi, or, if her painstakingly collated sources were to be trusted, in
all
of these places. The theory was absurd, of course, and would’ve gotten her laughed out of mainstream academia had she not also demonstrated reliable brilliance in traditional research, or if she hadn’t written two nonfiction books that sold sensationally and garnered overwhelming critical praise. The powers that be chuckled at her Hollow Earth theories and wrote them off as regrettable, but perhaps essential kookiness in an otherwise genius scientist.

To the twins, the mountains of data, dry as chalk and coupled with thousands upon thousands of hours logged on planes, boats, and in hard library seats, had always boiled down to “Mom’s looking for little people!” Cute when the kids were kids and Michelle’s optimism and humor were peaking, less so with each passing year, until finally at a family dinner she’d grimly announced sans preamble that her research (thank the gods a sideline to her real work) had all been a wild goose chase and was officially terminated. Henceforth, her spare time would be devoted to a genealogical survey of her extensive family tree. Afterward she drank half a bottle of white wine and fell asleep on the living room floor. The subject was seldom mentioned in the wake of that extraordinary evening and within weeks everyone stopped talking about it altogether.

As for Holly’s contention she’d heard the cat talking, Michelle scoffed; as with many old houses, the pipes knocked and moaned, shrews nested in eaves, and above all, kids were endowed with hyperactive imaginations.

Don seldom reproached his daughter, however. He too dreaded the attic and the cellar. There were other little incidents, a string of them, in fact, that he wrote off as a product of his phobias, or, when expedient, promptly forgot. He’d become very good at putting these unpleasant details from his mind until the next time Michelle went away and it was late and the power flickered and something bumped in the night—a tipped chair, a cracked vase, the tinkle of glasses moving in the kitchen cabinets, things of that order. Items went missing; food, forks and knives. The knives bothered him; it was always the big ones, the butcher knives and the cleavers. Sometimes Thule whined like a puppy and glared at the walls and the ceilings.
Then
Don’s fears came home to roost.

He bustled room to room clicking on lamps. The cheery glow comforted him, although the light could only do so much as the cubbies and corners lay in deepest shadow. His foremost lament regarding life at the old Mock residence was the fact he couldn’t utterly banish the darkness.

Soon chaos descended. Luggage lay strewn from the front door to the landing below the attic which doubled as a guestroom. Kurt and Winnie agreed to accept residence therein, although he grumbled at the tight quarters, predicting he’d whack his skull on the beams. Holly told him to
shut it
and be a trooper. He responded with a colorful epithet. They preferred to converse while each was in a separate room, if not on a separate floor, which necessitated shouting, and set the dog to barking and bounding up and down the stairs. Michelle loudly admonished them to lower the racket because she was hung over. The phone rang off the hook. As it was never for Don anyway and Michelle refused to answer the bloody thing, he appointed Holly receptionist pro tem, and she in turn passed the buck to poor, shell-shocked Linda who walked around in a daze with a pencil stub in hand.

“Argyle is coming for dinner,” Linda said. “He’s bringing champagne.”

“In this weather?” Don said as thunder rumbled. Argyle Arden was a phylogeographer who’d retired from Caltech, then again from Saint Martin’s, and currently served the Redfield Museum as a consultant. The kids still referred to him as Uncle Argyle.

“He won’t drown,” Michelle said. “Besides, we can’t leave him alone in that huge house of his; we’re bound to lose power. Can you get that suitcase for Win, dear?” She’d drawn Winnie, Holly, and Linda away from Kurt on some pretext or other. They sat on the leather couch in the parlor with a box-worth of photo albums spread open on the chairs and the floor. The quartet seemed perfectly content to camp there indefinitely.

“Which one?” Don morosely eyed a full set of matching designer luggage.

“The heavy one.” Michelle waved absently.

They all looked heavy to him. He decided this was his cue to slip away and take his arthritis medicine with a belt of Glenlivet he’d cunningly cached in the pantry behind a row of mason jars and cans of stewed vegetables. He didn’t indulge much these days; just when stressed. He poured a triple, estimating this would suffice as an anesthetic until Argyle arrived to rescue him from the clutches of his wife and children.

Kurt stumped into the kitchen and caught him red-handed. “For the love of Christ and the Apostles, hand that over quick!” He barged into the pantry, snatched the bottle and reduced its contents by a quarter. “I hope you haven’t become a closet lush, Dad,” he said after wiping his mouth with his knuckles, then registered they were currently holed up in a pantry the length and width of a janitor’s closet. “Literally.”

“Well, gee, son. I don’t guzzle whiskey like soda pop.”

“Yeah, yeah. I need to mellow. My blood pressure’s through the roof the last few weeks. We might lose a contract to Airbus and the machinists are threatening a walk-off. Another strike! Can you believe that garbage? They get a sweet new contract three years ago and look how they repay us. Extortionist bastards.” Given Kurt’s lofty position and the attendant responsibilities, hypertension seemed an obvious occupational hazard.

“Ah, well,
I
live with your mother.” Don retrieved the bottle and had another dose. Before he knew it, the bottle had run dry and he was beginning to take the entire hullabaloo quite philosophically. He and Kurt eventually emerged, snickering at their own witticisms like a pair of prep school cadets, and tackled the daunting task of dragging a half dozen bags up the stairs, a chore that proved surprisingly hilarious, all the more so when Kurt admitted five of them were his.

After the second trip to the attic, Don slumped on the double bed, which Michelle had taken pains to beautify with new sheets and a counterchange quilt, and tried to catch his breath. He considered himself in decent shape for a flabby-assed geezer. He ran every other day and lifted a set of dumbbells Kurt had left in the garage. This, however, was a bit much. He put his head between his knees. Thunder crashed much closer than before. From this height, the crow’s nest as it were, the storm was impressive. The roof seemed as if it might be torn apart at any moment. Gray, bloodless light came through a single window smudged with grime and fly droppings.

The room was crowded by racks of mothballed clothes, bookshelves crammed with moldy picture books and magazines such as
Life
and
Time
—and an array of antique dolls. Aunt Yvonne had been a collector; some of the dolls went back to the Civil War; she’d even acquired a wooden Indian, the kind shopkeepers once set on the sidewalk. It waited in the shadows, dust-caked, its termite-riddled aspect rather ghoulish, hatchet-edged and emaciated; the portrait of a Cherokee chief cut down by starvation and smallpox, an angry soul condemned to haunt the attic.

Tucked in an alcove was an ancient Westinghouse projector alongside dozens of film canisters whose labels were mostly illegible due to yellowing and that awful Mock handwriting. Those few that proved comprehensible were pure argot:
Hierophant Exp. 10/38; Mt. Fuji Exp. 10/46; Crng (Beatrice J.) 10/54
;
Astrobio Smt. 5/76(keynote T. Ryoko & H. Campbell), Ur-trilobite organizational patterns (L. Plimpton) 8/78, Ekaltadeta spinal column, Duin Barrow 11/86, CoOL 9/89
, and so on. Stacked in the corners were dusty wooden crates and steamer trunks papered with stamps from exotic ports of call. A handful of these objects were newer, holdovers from Michelle’s expeditions to Africa, Malaysia, Polynesia, and a dozen other regions.

Several oil paintings lay under canvas, propped against an easel, and largely unfinished; the labors of an unknown artist. The pieces were disquieting. Impressionist work; the subjects were deformed humanoids dwarfed by unwholesome man-beast figures and indistinct objects of unremittingly baroque dimensions. These latter struck him as tribal renderings of anthropomorphic gods and the cyclopean ziggurats wherein such beings would naturally dwell, the whole as filtered through the lens of someone possessed of a Western European sensibility. Possibly someone with a psychological disorder or a deviant fetish for the grotesque. He’d avoided mentioning the paintings to Michelle for fear she’d form a morbid attachment to them and insist on hanging the “masterpieces” in prominent locations.