Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

My arms and legs could not move. Yet in another dimension, they were moving, not lying still on the floor of my workroom but taking me toward the woods. I witnessed both processes impartially, both the internal (walking into the woods) and the external (lying on the workroom floor), thinking that the only previous time such an experience had been given to me was when I had burst open the sea chest and looked at the photograph she had directed to be put on my desk. The air was sweet, perfumy, both in and out. The lights had all gone out and the fields were dark. At some point in the immeasurable, unreckonable amount of time since I had stood up to see why the mare was terrified, night had come. I was walking across the dark field toward the cottonwood trees; I parted thick weeds, I walked out onto a grassy root-hump and jumped easily across the creek. My body was light, a dream-body. There was no need to run. I could hear the telephone, owls, crickets. The night air was soft, so sweet it seemed liable to catch in the trees, like fog.

I passed easily beyond the next area of fields and entered the woods. Birches gleamed like girls. Who had turned the lights out? My right index finger registered the sensation of polished boards, but it was touching a ghostly maple. Leaving it behind, I walked on a mulch of leaves. The gradient began to change. A deer plunged deeper into the woods somewhere to my right, and I turned in that direction. Uphill. Through trees closer and closer, high life-breathing oaks with bark like rivers. I touched the flank of a dead maple, down across my path like the corpse of a soldier, and lifted myself with my arms so that I sat on it and then swung my legs over and let myself fall onto the springy floor again. My knees absorbed the shock. There was still the light problem, but I knew where I was going.

It was a clearing. A clearing perhaps sixteen feet across, ringed with giant oaks, the ashes of a fire at its center. She was there, waiting for me.

Magically, I knew how to get there: all I had to do was drift and I would be taken, my feet would guide me.

When the trees approached too near, I shoved them aside with my hand. Twigs caught in my jacket and hair, pulling at me as a thorny weed had captured my foot outside the Dream House. Leaves stirred in the thick perfumy air. Where my feet had been were sucking black holes. On the perpendicular sides of trees hung glistening mushrooms, white and red. I waded through ferns as high as my waist, holding my arms as if they cradled a rifle.

There was a darkening of the spirit. Going closer to where I had to go, I saw the edges of starlight on the bark-rills and began to be afraid. When I passed through a gap, it seemed to close behind me. The breathing life of the forest expressed an immensity of force. Even the air grew tight. I climbed over a lightning-blasted trunk. Living stuff coiled around my boots, golden roots proliferated over them. I stepped on a mushroom the size of a sheep’s head and felt it become jelly beneath my weight.

The rough hand of a tree brushed my face. I felt my skin tear along my jaw, and crack like a porcelain cup. Branches closed over my head. The only light leading me was from leaves and ferns themselves, the light plants produce like oxygen. Another tree clicked into place behind me, blocking the way back. I went to my knees. By scraping along the soft damp forest floor I got beneath the lowest, branch of the sentinel tree. My fingers touched grass and stones; I pulled myself into the clearing.

When I stood, my shirt was green with moss. The bandage was gone from my left hand. I could feel snapped twigs and dried, crumbling leaves in my hair. I tried to brush them away, off, but my hands could not move, my arms could not lift.

The trees jostled and whispered behind me. The blackness was edged and pierced by a thousand sharp silvery lights on leaf-edge and the curve of tendrils. The clearing was a dark circle with a darker circle at its center. I could, move, and went forward. I touched the ashes. They were warm. I smelled woodsmoke, and it was heavy and sweet. The dense forest behind and before me seemed to grow taut. I froze beside the warm ashes, bent forward over my knees and in total silence.

What will happen after she comes back ? Rinn had asked me, and I felt a terror deeper than that of the first time in the woods. A high rustling whistling noise was coming toward me from where the leaf-light was strongest, a whispery sound of movement. My skin felt icy. The sound dragged toward me.

Then I saw her.

She was across the clearing, framed between two black birches. She was unchanged. If anything had touched my thin layer of cold skin, I would have cracked open, I would have shattered into a heap of white cold fragments. She began to move forward, her motion slow, unstoppable.

I called her name.

As she drew nearer the noise increased — that high whispery whistling scratched in my ears. Her mouth was open. I saw that her teeth were water-polished stones. Her face was an intricate pattern of leaves; her hands were rilled wood, tipped with thorns. She was made of bark and leaves.

I threw my hands back and felt smooth wood. Air lay in my lungs like water. I realized I was screaming only when I heard it.

“His eyes are open,” a voice said. I was looking at the open window above my desk, the curtains blowing and small papers lifting in the warm breeze. It was day. The air was its normal w, unperfumed. “His eyes are wide open.”

Another voice said, “Are you awake, Miles? Can you hear?”

I tried to speak, and a rush of sour fluid poured from my mouth.

The woman said, “He’ll live. Thanks to you.”

I sat up suddenly. I was in bed. It was still daytime. The telephone was ringing downstairs. “Don’t worry about it,” someone said. I turned to look; beside the door, her pale eyes reflectively on mine, the Tin Woodsman was closing a book. It was one I had given Zack. “That phone’s been going all night and morning, I guess. It’s Chief Hovre. He wants to talk to you about something. Was it an accident?” On the last sentence her tone changed, and her head tilted up. In her eyes I saw the fear of a complex betrayal.

“What happened?”

“You’re lucky you weren’t smoking. Pieces of you would probably be on top of Korte’s barn by now.”

“What happened?”

“Did you leave the gas on? On purpose?”

“What? What gas?”

“The gas in the kitchen, dummy. It was on most of the night. Mrs. Sunderson says you’re alive because you’re up here. I had to break a window in the kitchen.”

“How was it turned on?”

“That’s the big question, all right. Mrs. Sunderson says you were trying to kill yourself. She says she should have known.”

I rubbed my face. It was unscratched. The bandage was still on my left hand. “Pilot light,” I said.

“Blown out. Or gone out. Both of them. Boy. You should have smelled that kitchen. So sweet .”

“I think I smelled it up here,” I said. “I was sitting at my desk, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor. It was almost as though I left my body.”

“Well, if you didn’t do it, it must have happened by itself.” She seemed relieved. “There’s something wrong with this house. Just when you got home two nights ago, all the lights went on, all over the house.”

“You saw that too?”

“Sure, I was in my bedroom. And last night, they all went off at once. My dad says the wiring never was any good in this old house.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be keeping away from me?”

“I said I’d leave as soon as you were all right. See, I was the one who found you. Old man Hovre phoned our house. He said you weren’t answering your phone. He said he had important news for you. My dad was asleep, so I came over myself. It was all locked up, except for the porch. So I pushed up the window in the front bedroom downstairs, and that’s when I smelled the gas. I went around to the kitchen and broke a window. To let air in, Then I held my breath and climbed in and ran into the living room and pushed up the window. A little later I came up here. You were on the floor in the other room. I pushed open the window in there too. I thought I was going to be sick.”