Ronald Malfi - Floating Staircase

I floated into the living room. Even in the dream I had the detached feeling associated with feverish hallucinations. My feet hardly touched the carpet; my head was a helium balloon. A brutal wind whipped about the living room and bullied the curtains over the front windows, and I wondered only vaguely where it was coming from. From my vantage I could see the back of Jodie’s head as she sat on the sofa. I went to her, listening to her words . . . and realized she wasn’t actually talking; she was singing softly and tenderly and lovingly and handsomely. It was the way my mother used to sing to me when I was a child:

A, you’re adorable

B, you’re so beautiful

C, you’re a child so full of charms

D, you’re delightful

E, you’re exciting

F, you’re a feather in my arms . . .

I placed a hand on her shoulder. Her voice stopped cold. I looked down at her lap . . . where the undeniable image of a young boy cradled in my wife’s arms quickly blinked out of existence.

—Where’d he go? I asked.

—He’ll be back, Jodie said quietly . . . and began humming.

—Was he . . . ? I began.

—Yes, she said. It’s him.

—I thought it might be.

Her humming was soothing.

—You sound so beautiful, I told her.

This made her smile: I could feel it radiate from her and did not need to see it.

—Thank you, she said.

—Too bad I’m dreaming, I said.

—No, Jodie said. You’re not.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When you withdraw from the world, you find that the world withdraws from you, too. Then all that’s left is the Grayness, the Void, and this is where you remain. Like a cancerous cell. Like a cut of tissue, diseased, in a Petri dish. You glance down and there it is: this gaping gray hole in the center of your being. And as you stand there and stare into it, all you see is yourself staring back.

I was you, Jodie said. Isn’t that funny?

You have been set aside, replaced by air, by molecules, by particles of electric light. You have been erased, removed. There is almost a popping sound on the heels of your disappearance as these molecules filter into the space you occupied only one millisecond beforehand, covering up both space and time and eradicating the whole memory of your human existence. You are no longer.

Isn’t that funny?

When you withdraw from the world, you find that you were never really there—that you were never really in the world—because nature does not know extinction, and if you no longer exist, that must mean you never existed in the first place.

I returned to the land of the living on a Wednesday. The house was quiet and Jodie was at the college. Another snowstorm had come and buried the town, and the distant pines looked like pointy white witches’ hats.

The house was freezing. The thermostat promised it was a steady sixty-eight degrees, but I knew better than to trust it. My illness had left me drained and cotton headed, and my mouth tasted like an ashtray, so I went to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on the stove.

By the time I’d finished my second cup, I was feeling better and decided that I would head over to the Steins’ to ask them about the Dentmans. After my visit to Veronica and David’s house in West Cumberland on Sunday, it was obvious that something was terribly, terribly wrong with that family. The bizarre descriptions I’d given the make-believe Dentman family in my notebooks had not even lived up to the real thing. Adam had told me all he knew about them, but that wasn’t enough. The Steins had been their next-door neighbors; surely they must have some insight into the family. I was hungry to find out as much about them as I could, not just for the sake of my own writing but to satisfy my increasing curiosity.

The story I was laying out in my notebooks depicted a troubled young boy held captive in a basement dungeon by his mentally disturbed mother and an uncle who found a sick pleasure in physically hurting the child. When the child becomes old enough to speak his mind, the uncle—my David Dentman character who, for the sake of continuity, retained his real-life counterpart’s name—knows something must be done, so he murders the boy and makes it look like an accident. That was about as far as I’d gotten, having already filled up three notebooks with my frantic scribbling, but I wondered just how on the mark I’d been about them . . .

The telephone rang. The voice on the other end was as old and rough as an ancient potato sack. “Is this Travis Glasgow?”

“It is. Who’s this?”

“Well, Mr. Glasgow, my name’s Earl Parsons, and I suppose I’m Westlake’s answer to Woodward and Bernstein. I got a phone call from Sheila Brookner—what she called a tip, so to speak—and she said we had ourselves a celebrity in our midst.”

“Sheila Brookner?” I intoned. Then it occurred to me. “Oh.” She was the librarian who’d let me into the archived newspaper room. For one crazy moment I thought this guy was calling about the articles I tore out of the papers.

“She said you came by the library doing some research for a new book or something like that.”

“Hmmm. Something like that.” I considered his Woodward and Bernstein comment, then said, “You’re a reporter.”

Earl Parsons laughed—the sound of a stubborn old tractor trying to start up in cold weather. “Well, now, you say it like that and you’ll give me a swelled head. I’m actually a retired mill worker, but I do much of the freelance writing for The Muledeer, seeing how the town’s so small. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my contemporaries on the paper are made up mostly of journalism students from the college.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s not often we get someone famous like yourself coming to live in Westlake.” Another rumbling chuckle. “Never, actually.”

“I think you use the word famous too generously. I’ve written a few horror novels.”

“One of which I’m reading right now,” Earl said, perhaps trying to impress me, although I didn’t think he was lying. “Creepy stuff, for sure.”

“They’re certainly creepy,” I said.

“I’d like to write up a nice human interest piece on you, if you’d let me. You moving out here’s probably the biggest news since Dolly Murphy won the pie eating contest last fall.”

I thought of Elijah Dentman drowning in the lake behind my house and how that had surely been bigger news but didn’t say anything.

“Understand I don’t mean to be a nuisance,” Earl motored on. “If you had the time—and weather permitting—I’d like to meet with you for an interview.”

I was about to say that wouldn’t be a problem when movement in the living room caught my attention. Seeing that it was the dead of winter, there were no windows open in the house . . . yet the curtain covering the front windows appeared to be billowing out as if manipulated by a breeze. I felt something solid click toward the back of my throat, and for a couple of seconds I could formulate no words.

“Of course,” Earl said, no doubt interpreting my silence as disapproval, “if it would be too much of an inconvenience . . .”

“No,” I finally managed. The word came out in a squeak, but I didn’t think Earl noticed. “No, that’s fine. I’m flattered.”

“How’s tomorrow sound?”

“That’ll be fine.”

“I work out of the house so you’d have to come—”

“Just stop by here,” I told him. My gaze was locked on the curtains. They were made of a semitransparent material that dulled the daylight on the other side to a melancholic nimbus. Through the fabric I could make out the undeniable shape of a small child, an ethereal silhouette against the front windows but behind the curtain, the curtain covering him up like a death shroud.