The Secret of Ventriloquism Read online

  Of course, no one buys anything in the flea market. There are no clerks in the sale-nooks. But many of the sales materials are within easy reach, daring you to touch them. Now that you are no longer in danger of coming into contact with the other passengers, it’s more tempting than ever. But you do so at your own risk.

  The marketplace narrows, and the warehouse in which it’s housed starts to fold in. You’ll eventually find yourself in something like a trailer home in its atmosphere and width. What follows is the final and least pleasant aspect of the Indoor Swamp tour. But arguably the most thrilling. The flea market nooks disappear, replaced by rather drab looking rooms but for one or two disturbing objects within them.

  Perhaps there is a room that contains a worn, vintage tea party set with frilly dressed dolls, but one of those doll’s heads gradually rotates completely around, going from an expression of knowing, smiling perversion to an open-mouthed, silent O of horror and back again. Its eyes follow you as the doll’s head slowly spins. Or the next room, a bedroom, might contain a large, black, corroded barrel in the place of a bed. A barrel that you are certain contains something so poisonous that you can feel and smell waves of sharp, nauseating dread peeling off of it. You may not be able to keep your eyes off such a barrel, not even to blink. Whatever is within might burst out, you think, like a Jack-in-the-Box the instant your attention shifts away.

  The track propelling you forward through the tour slows to a crawl here. Long periods of low-ceilinged, claustrophobic tedium between rooms, punctuated by moments of panic. And then a final, dark room ahead. A room containing a kind of roaring abyss. After which you’ll find yourself filing out with the crowd into a multi-level parking garage. The large, glass doors go dark and lock automatically as you and your fellow tour-goers exit.

  You might find yourself frustrated, confused and deflated. You wouldn’t be the first to dislike or even despise the Indoor Swamp. It’s not for everyone. But you won’t be able to resist a return trip.

  On later visits to the Indoor Swamp you might find yourself staring through the greenhouse windows with longing. Those buildings and those slivers of sky around you look so bright. The busy, outside world seems so engaging. What a relief it would be, you might think, to be anywhere else beyond these glass walls. But you’re filing back onto the long, flat boat. Making your way down the artificial lagoon. Skimming through the crummy flea market. Creeping along the trailer-hallway, viewing one disturbing mise en scène after another on your heavy way to that final abyss.

  On subsequent visits, you might start voicing your complaints aloud to any of your companions who will listen. You’re within your rights to do so as long as you don’t break the “NO TOUCHING” rule.

  “What are we doing here?” you might ask.

  Don’t be surprised when you receive no response from your fellow tour-goers. They’ll be wrapped up in the moment or in daydreams about the thrilling bit before or the chilling bit ahead.

  You may eventually begin to talk to yourself. And you may even have a hard time remembering certain things. How exactly did you arrive at the Indoor Swamp in the first place? And where do you go once you file into the multi-level parking garage at the end of the Indoor Swamp tour? You may find yourself after hours wandering through that half-lit labyrinth. So many other forlorn figures are slumping or staggering there, up and down dim stairwells and along empty parking spaces. It’s a struggle to recall which vehicle you arrived in, let alone where you parked it. You may decide to simply wait in front of the large, glass entrance to the Indoor Swamp until the lights switch back on and the automatic lock disengages.

  Sooner or later, you’ll accept that the Indoor Swamp is the only show worth experiencing, or at least the only one you can access. Then you’ll no longer gaze with longing at the buildings and slivers of sky beyond the Indoor Swamp’s greenhouse windows. You might as well be in a real swamp in the acrid fog or in thin sunshine that never warms. Sooner or later, you’ll be wrapped up in the moment or in daydreams about the thrilling bit before or the chilling bit ahead. It’s the Indoor Swamp itself that has your full attention now. The descent as the Indoor Swamp flora shrinks into the dingy flea market below. The never available knickknacks within the Indoor Swamp flea market. The terrifying tableaus inside the innermost trailer-depths of the Indoor Swamp.

  One day leads into the next in the Indoor Swamp. One familiar scene folds into another familiar scene in the Indoor Swamp.

  The Indoor Swamp. It’s a ride you can’t miss... no matter how terribly you wish you could.

  Origami Dreams

  “I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember… if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.”

  -Leo Tolstoy

  “Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We’ll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there’ll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else...”

  -Shirley Jackson

  N—,

  I’ve made an odd discovery in the midst of my annual tidiness cleaning. You may remember those with some fondness, I hope. I was dusting the old hardwood underneath my bed when I noticed duct tape hanging from the box-screen. I peeled the rest of the semi-sticky material down, revealing a hole perhaps the size of a dime. My curiosity piqued, I stuck an index finger inside and came into contact with a folded, small cluster of papers, torn at the edges. I ended up needing to tear a much larger hole in the box-screen and pulled the paper figurine out, lined sheets that were crafted into a small house, origami-style.

  I am disquieted, being the only owner of the box-screen in question and having lived alone for years before (with the sole exception of our all too brief years together). Moreover, the pages within don’t appear to my expert eyes to be more than several years old, and, as you know, I’ve lived in this ranch-style house for thirty years and more.

  When unfolded, I found the papers contained words, mostly filled out in a miniature, spidery longhand, that resemble neither your elegant script nor my careful cursive. These pages seem to be in the form of journal entries, though I question their nonfictional authenticity for reasons that will become obvious. I wonder if you’ll have any insight on who wrote them or how they came to be squirreled away under the mattress that I’ve slept upon for so many years. The following is a transcription of the text.

  This dream was special, the journal began, and I want to remember the details as I can recall them.

  The days before our trip I had put in more hours at work than usual. I was supervising the movement of law library materials from the old firm to the new one. Trying to get everything done before the vacation, which of course just made things worse. I left an hour early, though, much to the relief of my coworkers. Margaret was standing at the picture window when I pulled up to the house, and soon we were on the Interstate and through the Foyle tunnel, towards the beach.

  As Foyle receded, frowning behind us over the bay bridge, our mood became more relaxed. Margaret smiled, I think for the first time in weeks.

  We just dropped the girls off to spend a week with their grandparents.

  “I love em,” Margaret said with a sigh. “but thank Christ they’re gone.” When she smiles, her eyes always crinkle—brown and almond shaped, the speckled, dark scar under one a reminder of Flight 389, the tragedy that plunged our lives into chaos over a decade ago. Margaret’s neighborhood engulfed in fire and black smoke. I remember.

  Nodding, I took her hand, and for once she didn’t withdraw it. Within fifteen minutes—a sunset-sky clearing above the brisk but manageably trafficked superhighway—a hint of actual tranquility started to kick in.

  Now, more than ever, we needed this break. The past year was a bad one. The tenth anniversary of the plane disaster
. My big move from one law firm to another. The twins’ constant whining and demands. I had lost myself in work. Sex fell off to nothing, and the fights had escalated.

  Yeah, Margaret and I needed this break. Never mind that I always felt let down by the time we returned, waterlogged and vaguely depressed. I've often thought that the ideal vacation would be one in which nothing at all notable happened. Too often, though, “breaks” of this kind—those borrowed realities—are haunted by the idea of relaxation rather than the real thing. I was hoping this time things would be different. In the past, I’ve always hoped that.

  The Interstate rumbled beneath us. Twilight. Margaret had fallen asleep next to me, and before I could think of pulling over I found my head also nodding off.

  Next thing I knew our car was jerking upwards with an awful scraping sound as I awoke to find I had dozed and crossed the median.

  Margaret screamed. I’m sure I did too.

  An eighteen-wheeler, a blur of cars, SUVs and trucks whirred past us, horns dopplering to the left and right. A feeling of weightlessness. Time seemed to slow as I wrenched the car back and forth. And then everything... changed. The vehicles that had been careening around us were now traveling in the same direction as our car. It was as if the previous chaos had only been a kind of intricate illusion that cleared in the blink of an eye.

  Margaret was no longer digging her nails into my arm, screaming, but now sat calm, silent and staring in the seat next to me. The Interstate, too, looked different. It was smaller and less trafficked, with only two instead of six lanes of traffic. More like a country highway.

  At the time none of this seemed strange. I just remember looking for a turn I needed to make. I was in the left lane as a green exit sign popped up—hidden in the deep brush to my right. I made the sharp turn and realized almost too late that a beat up pickup truck was barreling the wrong way up the exit ramp towards us. I swerved onto the shoulder to avoid it, our car shuddering to a stop. The truck also screeched to a halt on the shoulder across from us. A wide-eyed, shock-haired young man got out of his pickup and ran towards our car. I started to drive on, thinking at first that he was drunk or enraged, but it became obvious the kid was upset for a different reason.

  I rolled down the window and asked him if he was okay.

  “Our house,” the boy—no more than sixteen—said, adolescent voice cracking. In spite of his young age, his shaggy hair was solid white. “He’s in our house.”

  “Who?”

  “Daddy Longlegs,” he replied, eyes wide.

  “Your house is infested, son? You’ve got spiders?”

  “No, sir—not spiders. Daddy Longlegs. A kind of ghost. Mama says only someone with six fingers on one hand can drive Daddy Longlegs out.”

  Funny as it sounds, that’s the first moment I considered I might be dreaming. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an active dream life. And recently I’ve started training myself to become lucid during them.

  Instead of responding to the kid, I immediately counted the fingers of my right hand and turned my head away for a moment. Then I counted them again, an exercise I had made a habit of repeating several times during the day and night. The idea: if you’re dreaming, you’ll count either more or less fingers than your hand has when you’re awake. In this case, I counted six fingers.

  There’s a peculiar flush of pleasure that comes when you realize you’re dreaming, that a kind of temporary reality is yours to control. This time, not only had I become aware of the dream—the dream itself had reminded me to count my fingers through the shock-haired boy. This was a peculiar one. A special one.

  I considered changing the dream’s narrative by force of will in that moment, but I was curious to see where my untethered imagination would take me. Besides, a life of dreaming had taught me that if I resisted the dream-flow, I might awaken prematurely. I knew I was more than likely asleep in my own bed with Margaret by my side, perhaps the night before our “real” vacation took place. Anyway, I thought. A lucid dream can be a vacation of a sort itself—a kind of borrowed reality—if mindfully experienced.

  “It just so happens,” I said, “that I excel in the exorcising of ghosts, demons and the like. What town is this?”

  “Court Hill. Just follow me, sir. Poor mama’s about to wriggle out of her skin.”

  “A wise man once observed, ‘You’re never upset for the reason you think.’”

  As I followed the boy’s battered truck down the wooded, country highway, large chunks from my dream life started coming to mind. I recalled one of the dream characters I often “played” was a dapper, older librarian. He specialized in learning secrets, usually of an occult nature. A name came to me: Solomon Kroth, Esoterician. I smiled with private amusement.

  As we took a right turn into a downtown area, I began to feel certain that I had visited this picturesque resort town before. The architecture was in a preserved art deco style. Cobbled, Spanish moss covered, oak lined streets, well-manicured squares. I somehow knew that beyond the quaint City Hall lay a midsize lake, lined on three sides by dense forest. There were combination street light/clocks atop signs that proclaimed “Court Hill” in fancy script.

  The next turn we made revealed gullies full of delicate ivy and crystalline hills topped by houses of unusual size and structure. It occurred to me that such geography was impossible in the flat, swampy mire I knew actually surrounded the east bank across from Foyle. Had I been awake, I thought, Court Hill would probably resemble one of those semi-rural towns—the kind that contain only a small grocery store and maybe a couple of combination convenience store/gas station/fast food establishments... the kind that dot the highways of the deep south.

  The boy’s truck finally turned into a long driveway between natural hedges, both sides of which almost met above us. As we drove down it—an unusually long way I thought—I counted the fingers of my right hand again, and the number of fingers once more added up to six. I remember thinking that was odd. There had also been an unusual, real-time consistency to the events so far, without the sudden leaps from one scene to the next so typical in dreams. The lighting that surrounded us, though, had remained in a static, twilit state ever since we had pulled off onto the shoulder of the exit ramp. Darkness had never fallen. That at least was reassuring.

  At last, the haunted structure came into view within a large clearing. It was a slim, tall cottage with a prominent front door set between two narrow windows. The house couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet wide and jutted up from the ground like a spearhead. Ivy or kudzu grew over three quarters of the very high peaked gable.

  I remembered Margaret for the first time since we pulled off of the Interstate and turned to ask her what she thought of the place. But she was staring at the house in front of us, mouth open, terrified. Without thinking, I placed my six-fingered hand on her stomach and muttered some arcane phrase under my breath. Suddenly, I could see through her eyes, as if gazing through binoculars. The cottage before us was unfolding like deconstructed origami paper. Within seconds a stick figure loomed over our car where the house had stood, a figure so thin it hurt. A razor sharpness in those limbs.

  I did something to Margaret’s arm then—squeezing a pressure point, I think. Whatever it was, she fell asleep, her form becoming flat and diminished. I opened the car door. The cottage had resumed its original form through my own eyes, but I could feel the giant, sharp, stick figure in every excruciating angle of it.

  In spite of the supernatural turn of events, I smiled, knowing I was only inhabiting a borrowed reality, a new but temporary story and stock set piece. And now, I thought, it was time to take control.

  “Houses dream, did you know that?” I asked the shock-haired boy who followed me, head bowed (perhaps in prayer). “All things dream, to one degree or another. And sometimes our waking selves share dreams of the darkened hollow, the deep forest, city squares. Like them, houses dream, and when those dreams are nightmares, we call them haunted. This is such a house.”


  “But what does that have to do with Daddy Longlegs?” The boy asked. “He comes through the corners. Makes you hear and see things that hurt.”

  “Those sights and sounds are manifestations of this house’s dreams, son, and houses dream so slowly. Those dreams could last for decades or until the house falls apart or burns down leaving a cold heap of ashes that animals and children shun.”

  We entered the house, which consisted of one large and very high single room. It was meticulously neat in there, painted white. Bright halogen lights hung from the cathedral-style ceiling.

  “So do we burn it down?” the boy asked. “Mama ain’t gonna like that.”

  “No indeed. We must wake it up.”

  As we approached the center of the house, I heard a rustling from the walls and ceiling, as if from an epic rodent infestation.

  “Do you hear that, my boy?” I asked. “That is the house talking in its sleep.”

  A kind of sterility was at odds with the eerie presence of Daddy Longlegs (or the Origami, as I had internally dubbed it). I avoided certain corners that looked sharp-edged or untidy. I closed my eyes, listening to the continuous rustling around me. And I understood it.

  “I know its name now. Son, you’ll want to leave and collect your family. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone, and your problem will be solved.”

  The boy nodded and left. And when I turned back from the front door, I felt the house unfolding around me. The spectral figure of the Origami loomed. I (as Solomon Kroth, Esoterician) was undaunted.

  “This dream is over.”

  I expected to wake up in my bed then, basking in the glow of a fascinating and satisfying dream fantasy. Prepared at last for a successful, real world vacation. But I didn’t awaken.