Unholy Dimensions (39 page)

“Well, why did Grand-dad board it up in the first place?”

“When your grandparents owned the house there was a big thunderstorm one time, and I guess a lightning bolt struck that window. I remember that night...I was about eight, I think. It was terrible. The whole house shook. I don’t know what the lightning did to the window, though. Maybe it scorched the glass black or just cracked it.” She shrugged.

“It isn’t cracked. One piece is broken off, is all. Recently, too; I saw the broken pieces in the gutter.”

“I don't know.” She shrugged again.

“Well, I’m gonna pull the boards off. The attic is real dark down in that end and there’s no electric lights. It could use a little sunlight.”

His deceased father’s tool box in hand, Alan returned to the back hall, climbed up past the second floor, up into the attic.

Alan pulled the uppermost board off first, using the back of a claw hammer. The first thought that struck him as he looked out through the glass was how quickly it had become dark. It was only five thirty in the afternoon, and here it was summer. Maybe a thunderstorm was brewing.

He glanced over his shoulder, into the opposite, roomier end of the attic. That end of the attic was awash in golden sunlight. Dust motes swam lazily in the slanting mellow beams.

Alan jerked around to gape at the diagonal window. After a moment of confused hesitation, he began to pry off the next board down. It was nailed thoroughly and he really had to lever and strain, splintering the wood, but at last it clattered at his feet.

The sky out there was almost entirely black, but closer to the horizon was streaked in startling reds and purple. Alan saw a distant cluster of birds or perhaps bats cross the bands of laser red.

Could that be an approaching storm, or was the earth more in shadow in that direction as the sun sank? It seemed far, far too great a contrast to be that. Strangely alarmed, Alan pried off the next board with several great jerks.

“Dear God,” he breathed, stepping back from the window. He clutched the hammer tightly before him as a weapon or merely for reassurance that reality had not abandoned him without leaving some sort of hand hold.

The roofs of neighboring houses should be out there. Trees bushy between them, and familiar church steeples rising against a backdrop of gentle hills.

Should be...

Instead, the distant hills were jagged rocky peaks, ominous in the red glow of twilight. Red and purple light glistened on a lake or large pond in the distance, where he knew none should be. In the foreground there were weirdly gnarled and tangled trees, the closest ones showing him that
their branches were thorny and leafless.

Alan wanted to scream, up there in that claustrophobic space, the ceiling close to touching his head, the walls slanting in toward him, dust coating his lungs. He wanted to turn and bolt from there. And yet, he was riveted. Mesmerized. Too afraid to move. Reality indeed was not as it seemed. If he moved, what terrible revelation might next yawn wide before him to engulf his sanity?

Without stepping nearer to the window or reaching to tear free the last board, he looked more closely out upon what could be seen at present. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the scene, and he decided he could make out a few rooftops here and there after all...amongst the thorny trees and across the dark lake. None of these houses or buildings had any windows lit, however, despite the deep gloom.

A breeze stirred the twisted trees; Alan felt it through the broken corner of window, and though the breeze was merely cool he shivered as though it were an arctic gust. He realized then that he could also hear this hallucination as well as feel it; he heard the scrape of those barbed-wire branches against one-another as the breeze stirred them. And there were the distant cries of birds, perhaps. Very faint...but he wished, from their odd child-like quality, that he could not hear them at all.

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 rooftops 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 tool box, 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.

What Washes Ashore

Marsha
was sorry she had wandered so far in this skull-drilling heat in a place she didn’t know, which for all its bleakness didn’t look known by any. The small houses were silvered from the salt air, warped and bloodless, rows of bleached skulls on display. She had wandered beyond the coffee shops and gift stores tacky or trendy, the miniature art galleries and the expensive little restaurants that crowded the more tourist-favored streets of this seaside town. Marsha didn’t hold those bustling, colorful streets in disfavor, but this afternoon she had felt the need to be alone.

Well, the need to escape the anonymous crowds, at any rate; she was traveling alone to begin with. She took on these missionary-like missions to far-flung ally companies eagerly, welcomed the time away from her tiny office, her bosses, her co-workers. She normally stayed in a hotel in the course of these excursions, but a co-worker had a summer cottage here, a mere half
hour’s ride from the host company. It was quaint, humble, not actually within view of the ocean but that was fine with Marsha, who had never been the volley-ball type. She had been reluctant to accept, not wanting to feel obligated to friendship or worse with this male co-worker, but had decided it might be nice to have a cute little cottage all to herself.

Today her work was over; tomorrow she flew back home. This time was her own, and her own time was of the greatest importance. So she had set out on foot, in sneakers and blue jeans and a crisp new t-shirt, short red hair and big dark glasses, free of her sharp-edged dark suits and ant-black shoes. She had forsaken her rental car, stopped at a coffee shop along the way to buy a large ice coffee to take with her on an aimless walk...

She had turned into one less-peopled street, then into another less-peopled than that. And on, until there were no shops, just houses, closing in on narrow streets more like alleys. From a tiny cage-like screened porch, an old woman who looked headless with her upper body lost in shadow waved at Marsha dreamily. Marsha gave a little wave back. A dog, unseen, had growled at her from beneath another porch – she assumed, or perhaps behind a screened window – as she passed by.

But in this street, there were no old ladies, no dogs, no strewn bright and broken toys. The houses looked derelict, abandoned; the windows and doors of several were even boarded up. As Marsha started down this street, sweating now and wondering if she should turn back (her coffee was gone but she carried the cup with her, not wanting to litter), she took note of an old faded barber pole outside one of the boarded-up structures. And then her gaze traveled from this point to the window of another establishment, next door. This one wasn’t boarded up; a large shop window, dusty but unbroken, faced out into the arid street. What did its sign say? Was it a laundry? A few more half-hearted steps through the broiling air and Marsha could read it.

ALL WASHED UP.

She smiled faintly. That was for sure. Was it a joke – a comment on the state of this little sub-neighborhood? She drew closer to the glass, which blazed back the molten sun.

On display inside the shop window were tables and chairs and angled boxes spread with mostly sea shells, along with decorative bits of driftwood and a blistered buoy or two.

Sea shells. Marsha had been taught an enthusiasm for them by her mother, who had a fine, museum-quality collection. It was something that they had in common, something they had been able to talk about. They had never talked about much. (“She’s cold, your mother,” Brian had said.

“She’s British. It’s her reserve,” Marsha had told him.

“Even British people can be passionate,” he had countered. “Or there wouldn’t be any more Brits brought into the world, if you catch my meaning.” He said this last bit in his favorite, Monty Pythonish caricature of a British accent.

He meant it about me, more than my mother, Marsha reminded herself now. He thought I was cold. He told me so. “I never know what you’re feeling.” “Do you even love me?” “You never even smile, Marsha!” The guilt trip. The accusations. She had left it behind, now. And he had cried, tears and all. “You’re like your mother, you know that?”)

But they talked about sea shells, she and her mother, from when Marsha was a child. Her mother didn’t stroke her hair, didn’t giggle and nudge her. But Marsha liked to believe that the dry, formal genus and species names they both uttered were like an encrypted language of affection. The touching of bony surfaces, crusted rough or smooth as mother-of-pearl, were like caresses traded. She liked to believe...

Marsha craned her neck from side to side, attempting to look further into the shop, but it was charcoal gloom. The displays were filmed in dust. Could this place still be in business? If it was indeed open, could enough tourists stray far enough to make this “business” anything more than a hobby, like selling one’s own preserves at a fair?