Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

“House belonged to my father,” he said matter-of-factly. Same as his sister had. “There something I can help you with, Mr. Glasgow? You come all this way from Westlake?”

“I was just bringing by some things.”

Dentman swiveled around to the cardboard box. He seemed to recognize it immediately.

Perhaps he had been the one to pack up the boy’s belongings after his death. Too easily I could picture those immense, steel-banded arms cramming those boxes full of stuffed animals. The image should have been comical, but thinking of it now while standing in this house, I found it utterly terrifying.

“You a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

“Strohman send you here?”

“Who’s Strohman?”

Dentman advanced toward the box, popped open the lid, and peered inside. He chewed on his lower lip as he did so. The dim light in the house struck him then in just the right fashion, causing the sheen of beard stubble at his chin and neck to glitter briefly. Disinterestedly, he faced me. “The cops send you out here?”

“Of course not. I found that stuff in the basement and thought I’d bring it by. I guess that was a mistake,” I added after swallowing what felt like a chunk of granite.

“You bought the house as is.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The house. Bank should have told you. Anything in there’s yours now, not ours.”

“You misunderstand. I’m not here to complain. I just wanted to—”

“Glasgow’s a cop,” he said. “I know that name.”

“I’m not a cop. You’re thinking of Adam Glasgow who lived across the street from you. He’s a cop and he’s my brother.”

“He send you out here?”

“No,” I insisted. My apprehension was quickly being replaced by anger. “Listen, David, I just wanted—”

“I think you better listen,” David said, taking a step toward me. Instantly, I felt my bowels clench. “My sister and me moved here to get away from what happened in Westlake. We sure as hell don’t need nobody coming around reminding us about it. You understand?”

“I understand that you’ve got me pegged completely wrong.”

He jabbed a finger at me, so close to my face I could almost count the hairs on his knuckles. “You’re standing in my house right now, friend. Uninvited, far as I’m concerned. You best consider that next time you want to crack wise.” He toed the screen door open with his boot. “Think it’s time for you to go. What do you say?”

As I headed for the door, I cast a look over my shoulder at Veronica. She’d been silent the whole time, and I hoped I could read her expression to help explain this bizarre confrontation. But Veronica was no longer there, most likely having retreated into another room while I wondered whether or not her brother was going to box my eyes shut.

“Look,” I said to David, pausing on the other side of the door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I swear.”

Except for slamming the door in my face, David Dentman offered no response.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The fever came, shuddering and without mercy, and I spent the next two days in a web of mind gauze. My dreams—what dreams I could remember—were erratic and paranoid, shot by a director on a bad acid trip.

In one, I was running down a dark, narrow corridor, the walls and floor and ceiling tightening up the farther I ran, until I had to drop to my hands and knees and crawl like an infant. I crawled until I came to a tiny door, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The door appeared to be comprised of many small wooden blocks of varying colors, woven together like bamboo stalks in a raft.

I pushed the door open and squeezed through the opening. As if the doorway were a living thing, I felt it constrict around my rib cage. Ahead of me, the darkness shifted. Shapes—or the idea of shapes—moved closer to me, then farther away, tauntingly alternating their distance. A light illuminated a little antechamber. Directly in front of me, nestled in a web of tree branches, dead leaves, and old sodden newspapers, were four hairless, sightless critters, grayish in color like a waterlogged corpse, moving only slightly.

I was trapped between walls, between realities, like the hidden bedroom in the basement. There is clarity here. I smelled something sickeningly sweet and thought of chamomile tea. Then, from behind me, I heard a great rushing, rumbling sound and felt the walls all around me beginning to quake. In that blind, frantic instant, the corridor in which I was trapped filled with cold water, so cold it burned my skin. And I drowned.

In another dream I was shivering and wet, a towel draped around my shoulders like a cape, with Detective Wren asking me what happened that night by the river. Behind him in the creeping dawn, uniformed police officers patrolled the wooded paths and blocked the area off with yellow tape. I heard the boats moaning in their moorings and smelled the diesel exhaust breathing in off the bay.

Suddenly, Detective Wren’s arms were burdened with paperback novels. He dumped them on a table that instantly materialized between us, and we were in an interrogation room, with greenish fluorescent lights fizzing and colorless cinder block walls.

—These your books? he asked. You write these books?

I nodded.

—How’d you come up with this stuff?

I said I didn’t know.

—Everything you wrote in these books happened last night at the river, said the detective. He was a big guy with oily skin and sharp, soul-searching eyes. Everything you wrote down in these books happened just like it did by the river, boy, Detective Wren went on, which makes me think this thing, see, maybe this thing was planned.

I sobbed and said I didn’t do it on purpose.

Detective Wren looked at me with disgust. Then his face slackened and purpled, and his eyes peeled away and readjusted themselves at either side of his rapidly narrowing head. His arms retreated up the sleeves of his rumpled suit, and his trousers loosened around his waist until they dropped straight to the floor. What lay exposed were not legs but the tapered, intestinal body of an eel. I watched in horror as Detective Wren slithered out of his suit, an enormous man-sized eel that snaked its way down the muddy embankment before splashing into the dark river. It raised a dorsal fin like a shark and zigzagged through the inky tide.

Then David Dentman was glaring at me, one hand palming the side of my head as he repeatedly slammed my skull down on the steps of the floating staircase.

I awoke, my throat rusty and my flesh sticky with sweat, with Jodie’s cool hand on my forehead smoothing back my sodden hair. There was a sunset burning on the horizon, and through the bedroom windows, the trees looked like they were on fire. I stared at the side of the street where Jodie stood talking with Beth in the snow. Something cramped up inside me. Before I could scream, the cool hand withdrew from my forehead.

Dreams. . .

Then something about a castle of cardboard boxes, of boating piers stacked one on top of the other until they formed a ladder straight into the heavens. At one point I dreamt I was married to a woman with a monster growing in her belly, and my name was Alan, and we lived by our own special lake in a different part of the country. Even in this dream, I could feel the heat of imaginary summer on my back and shoulders, pasting the shirt to my body and causing my skin to practically char and sizzle. Confused fever dreams.

There was one moment in my dream when I crept from my bed and floated down the hallway. Downstairs I could hear the faint phantom sound of someone talking in a low voice. I glided across the landing and gripped the banister with both hands. I peeked over the side. I could make out only a fleeing shadow against one wall. So I turned and floated down the stairs to the foyer. There, the voice became slightly more audible, and I knew with intuitive certainty that it was Jodie.