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CW: violence.
There was a door.
That’s the best place to start, I guess, given that there’s no good place to start.
Luke and I were drinking bourbon and smoking in his attic bedroom. He’d brought me to his family compound in northwest Wyoming right after we were discharged. I was more thankful than I knew how to say for his friendship, for his generosity in giving me that initial sense of direction. After our last few months in Zabul Province, seeing some of the worst things humanity can do to one another, I was broken. Luke, kind as he was, bore witness to that. He saw my night terrors and pillow-muffled cries in the weeks after I fired on that IED’d-up teenager in Shah Joi—the kid’s face bearing no hint of triumph, just fear and desperation. Luke saw my lack of an anchor, of any family in West Virginia I cared to return to in the shape I was in, and brought me to his home.
That night, I sat in a green office chair and Luke propped on his bed, reclined against the yellowed sheetrock. A shaded desk lamp emitted an amber glow, the only light in the room. As we joked and bullshitted, the smoke haloed his head. After some time, it thickened and spread until it seemed to cover his entire body. I finally worked up the courage to ask.
“You told me, if I came here, you’d show me something worth fighting.”
“I did.” He sipped from his glass, slowly. Luke was never in a rush.
“In Zabul—you said, I know it seems meaningless—all of them sure we’re the enemy, and us just as sure that they’re the enemy. But there is an enemy.”
“That’s right, Sorrel. I said that.” I heard the click and catch, saw the cherry as he lit another amidst the haze.
“So, we’ve spent the past month fishing.”
“And doing well. I still can’t believe you snagged two whitefish. They take a delicate approach. I bet it’s been—”
“Whitefish aside, I don’t figure that’s why I’m here.”
“No, I suppose it’s not. I just thought you needed some time first to rest and recalibrate.”
“Think I’m as recalibrated as I’m liable to get.” I refilled my glass.
“Fair enough.” He took a long draw, exhaled, leaned forward, a masthead parting fog. Luke was straight out of casting for a Viking movie—yellow mane to his shoulders, beard to match, six-and-a-half-feet tall, stout as oak. And, incongruously, kind as Ferdinand the Bull from that picture book. “You’re sure you want this, Sorrel? It can just be a fishing trip. Honestly, there’s no hard feelings if you just needed to decompress before you journey elsewhere.”
“I’m sure.” I wasn’t sure, of course, but I knew I needed something to ground me. I needed one thing in this world to feel certain about.
“Okay, then. It’s just—I’ve never brought someone in like this. It’s hard to know where to start.”
“At the beginning, I reckon?”
He chuckled. “No one’s got that kind of time. It goes so far . . . well, here, I guess. You were a college boy before Afghanistan. You’re a reader. You know the Chesterton quote about the door?”
“Humor sneaks under the door—”
“Oh god, do I wish. No, not that one. The other quote. I’ve had a few too many, and I’ll get details wrong, but it’s something like, Older children are excited if a story begins, ‘There was a door, and behind it was a dragon.’ But the youngest children are excited by a story that simply begins, ‘There was a door.’”
“We’re not children, Luke.”
“No, Sorrel, we’re not. We haven’t been children for a long time. Regardless—there is a door.”
His voice was thick with bourbon and tar, heavy as moon rock, not quite of this world. He leaned back, nearly disappearing, as I asked,
“And behind it?”
“Something else.” He unscrewed the lid, tilted the bottle. “Something worse.”
We talked into the night. Or Luke talked, and I listened and gaped and questioned, and while I can’t say I was excited, I was enthralled. I tried to grasp what he said, my old reality now too slippery, wriggling out of my hands like a whitefish, gone downstream in a silvery flash. I don’t know why I believed what Luke told me that night. I suppose it was some alchemical mix of knowing his character from our years in service together, my desperate need for meaning, and some latent awareness within that had felt the outlines of this truth, but didn’t have the knowledge to cover it in flesh. Luke’s family did. By the end of the night, I told him I was in. His expression unreadable, he said, “Then we’ll start tomorrow.” He clicked off the light, his cigarette the last dim glow amidst the darkened haze.
I don’t think I slept an hour that night. I started at the ceiling, every creak in the rafters, every rasp of wind, every animal sound in the surrounding old growth distorted in my mind. What other secrets had this world been keeping?
• • • •
For that first month, every breakfast had been the same since the September day I arrived at Luke’s home. We woke early, slouched over oatmeal and eggs at the starburst Formica table, sipped coffee from chipped mugs, and planned the day’s fishing. Occasionally another family member, one of a brood of cousins, or Luke’s older sister Thena, would pop in briefly, but we stayed clear of the rest of the compound deeper in the woods.
The morning after our talk, breakfast was different. I woke to the side-by-side ATV starting and found Luke outside, his breath ghosting the air. “Hop in. It’s time to really meet the family.”
As he dodged ruts in the faint, mile-long trail into the woods, I peppered him with questions. The cousins, on their brief visits to the house, had been indistinguishable in waders and coveralls, one evasive bearded guy after another, mumbling half-sentences into their coffee. Luke’s sister Thena was the only one who’d stood out. An angry white scar ran half the length of her jaw under her right ear, which was usually hidden by her hair. Red? Maple? Specificity sounds too desperately poetic, and generality doesn’t touch her. Fire? Fire blazing above faded, muddy camo? That’s as close as I can get.
When we’d first met, Thena had been distant, bordering on suspicious, casting sidelong glances, dodging any questions I lobbed her way. After a week or so of Luke and I fishing and me leaving well enough alone, Thena turned mildly flirtatious, though it was obvious that was more for her amusement than any genuine attraction. That first breakfast after the talk, she changed again, ramping abruptly into outright hostility.
Twelve of us gathered around a battered oak table in the huge kitchen/dining room. Another half dozen milled around between counter and fridge, refilling coffee, grabbing jelly or Tabasco. Everyone was livelier, more talkative than our prior encounters. Uncles, cousins, Luke’s mother—too many to keep names straight. I knew Luke’s father had passed years back, but didn’t know how, leaving his aunt Sascha as the acknowledged leader of the family. That morning, she sat at the head of the table, Luke and I next to her on one side, Thena across from us. Luke cleared his throat.
“Aunt Sascha, you remember we talked when I got back home, and I laid out my case for Sorrel’s appropriateness. You said I could proceed, and we had our first real talk last night. He says he’d like to join.”
Thena slammed her mug on the table, sloshing coffee onto her eggs. “Luke! What the actual fu—”
Sascha laid her hand gently on top of Thena’s. She quieted, seething behind thinned lips.
“Is this so, Sorrel? You believe you understand our work?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Thena exploded, “Oh, Sascha, you know he doesn’t understand anything! There’s no way he—”
Sascha stood up, which objectively wasn’t much of a change. She was maybe five-foot-one, maybe ninety pounds soaking wet, maybe sixty or seventy years old, and maybe possessing the most gravity of any person I’ve ever met. Sascha shifted the world with a small change in posture, then spoke softly, with genuine warmth.
“Thena, dearest, you’re upset. We might as well hear your objections.”
“Yeah, we might as well. Sascha—the Veil is family, right? Family only. There’s no way he understands what he’s getting into. There’s no way to know we can trust him. He’s—”
Before I knew what he was doing, Luke reached across me and pulled my shirt up above my stomach. He pointed to the wide scar running the length of my left ribcage, the pitted hollow at my side. “That’s from where he came back to drag me out of a firefight in Arghandab. I trust him.” He let my shirt fall. I looked down at the floor.
“It was nothing. You’d have done the same.”
“It wasn’t nothing.”
We clinked mugs. Thena rolled her eyes and continued.
“Fine, you trust him. Then why the hell would you do this to him?”
“He wants—”
“He doesn’t know what he wants. He’s a child.”
“I’m maybe a year younger than you, Thena. I have seen some things.”
She spat, “You don’t know what you haven’t seen.”
“I know what Luke told me last night.”
“You heard it. You don’t know it.”
Sascha waited patiently, head tilted. I felt like punching a hole through the wall, like running away into the woods, like crawling under childhood blankets. I didn’t know how I felt.
Thena, spent, folded her arms across her chest, her anger past articulation. The rest of the family sat silently, no more opening cabinets or clinking jars. Sascha spoke.
“Sorrel, you’re about to cross a line that isn’t easily uncrossed. You understand there’s no easing into this life?”
“I do.”
Thena laughed under her breath.
Sascha nodded. “Then, we begin.” She gestured to the cousins to bring the equipment, to begin heating the iron. “Do you need to be strapped down?”
“No, ma’am.”
And I didn’t. I didn’t budge an inch as the branding iron pressed into the flesh beneath my right collarbone, didn’t tear up as the skin sizzled and bubbled, didn’t grimace at the smell of my own body burning as Thena stormed out muttering, “Idiot,” not knowing whether she meant Luke or me.
Afterwards, Sascha handed me a small tin holding a plastic bottle of lemon juice and a shaker of sea salt. She patted my shoulder. “Luke will show you what to do, Sorrel. Welcome to the Red Veil.”
• • • •
Clear across the country in northeast Tennessee, that looming door waited for me, though I didn’t know it yet. What happened there leading up to the month I was initiated and began my training with the Red Veil, we pieced together later, after gathering some particular records: a series of smartphone voice memos and a spiral-bound weekly wall calendar from Iris Mortuary. The memos were recorded by Thomas Lupton, a young, aspiring insurance salesman, living in Knoxville. The calendar entries, logging her daily activities, were written in blue ink in a cramped hand by Tobithia Holt of Frog Catch Lane, Scruggs County.
Voice Memo: Locking In, September 8, 1:28
Okay. So, I’ve been listening to Salescast, and Trevor was talking about ways to grow your skills and, y’know, I’m already doing a lot of what they said. Motivational clips to start the day, reframing challenges as opportunities, stuff like that, but one thing they said that I haven’t tried is voice recordings, like a daily journal of your process. How do you prep for clients, what’s your mindset as you connect? How do you, uh, debrief and determine what went right or wrong? And you grow from that, right? So I’m starting that today. And in spite of how rough it’s been so far, yeah—I’m feeling hopeful. Health insurance is a good thing. I’m selling something that people need. I’m selling them a sense of certainty.
Trevor says the first step, when you start out with this recording, is to be honest about your current status. So, honestly, it’s absolute shit. I’ve been on the job here in Knoxville two months, and sales are barely trickling in. The first month I blamed the prospects, but I’ve gotta be more accountable. If everyone in the office is closing better than me, then I’m the problem—so it’s time to work on me.
• • • •
Thena and I visited Thomas’s cramped apartment after the incident. We entered the tiny bathroom where, from the acoustics, he likely stood at the lime-encrusted mirror and made these recordings. A flypaper strip hung from the ceiling, dotted with fuzzy black husks. Grimy mustard linoleum peeled up where the floor abutted the tub. A faded inkjet photo of Kobe Bryant with Mamba Mentality!!! written at the bottom was taped above the sink. Great things can start in tiny rooms, sure, but.
An hour or so north, on the same day, Tobiatha wrote:
Iris Mortuary Calendar: September 8
Missed Kingsberry something terrible today. Watched Price is Right three times. Bob Barker was handsome as ever. Ate a mater sandwich for lunch. Mayo and pepper on white bread. They chittered at me for growing them the old way. You’d think they’d like things done the old way. Ha! I laughed when I told them that, but they never laugh back.
• • • •
After my branding, Luke taught me what to do. Every day, I had to use the sea salt and lemon juice to irritate the brand as it healed, to amp up the keloid process. The sigil was defensive, protective, and for it to work effectively, the scarring had to be well defined. It hurt like hell, of course. After the irritation, I’d spread on Neosporin, trying to ignore the throbbing pain as Luke and Sascha initiated me further into the Red Veil.
Even Sascha didn’t know how far back the Veil went, as records only tracked so many prior centuries. But their family knew no history without it.
They brought me deep into the compound, below the surface, basement, and subbasement, past the clinic and armory, and farther down into narrow tunnels leading to the reading rooms. It’s not my place to reveal all they contained, but I can say this much.
There are things meant to stay outside our world. Things whose forms are written in a different language, incompatible with the language of our universe. Some of them, at times, seep in by circumstance. Others actively seek a way in, conspiring, pounding against the paper-thin walls of our reality. We’ve yet to encounter any that mean us any good, or that can exist here without our world tearing and rending around them. So, we try to bar them entry, or—god or whoever forbid—if they’ve entered already, we try to end them and minimize the damage. It’s no more or less than that, and it’s far too much.
Thena, once during that first week, checked on my brand and confirmed Luke had taught me correctly. “Even an idiot doesn’t deserve for that shit to get infected.”
Which I took to mean I was still an idiot, sure, but once I was in, I was their idiot.
Voice Memo: Paint the Day, October 2, 0:57
So, I’ve not been as regular recording these as I said. Really, I’ve not been doing a lot of what I said. I’ve sure as hell not been selling. From how Pete looks at me from his office over his stupid bifocals, I know I’m gone if things don’t improve. The Salescast guys say it’s good to vent frustration, and to be as specific as possible, to paint the picture of your day, and that can help you notice patterns holding you back. So here goes.
I spend half my days cold-calling disconnected numbers. When someone actually answers, it’s a quick hangup, or the same monologue every time—“you’re the twelfth call just this morning and don’t you have something better to do than harass people while they’re trying to watch Wagon Train and I’ve told you people a dozen times to take your name off my list.” That’s half the day.
The other half is worse, going door-to-door through government housing and subsidized apartments for the elderly, for these grouchy old men in sweat-stained UT baseball caps and old crones in faded housecoats. They bitch about the world going down the toilet while I nod, but the minute I start a pitch, they shoo me away. That’s my day.
That’s my sorry ass life.
• • • •
I spent most of my time in the reading rooms, Luke and Sascha guiding me through the intricacies of the texts, the gathered histories of the Veil’s past encounters. At first, I expected I’d learn foolproof techniques, surefire methods to deal with the predictably reoccurring situations I’d face. But most of the incidents bore little resemblance to one another. It’s like that Vonnegut character said: History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised again.
Early mornings, we covered combat training, most of which, for me, was a matter of shaking off the rust of the past few months. There were more subtle, advanced forms I’d learn from Thena and their eldest cousin over the next few years, but they all agreed that I was capable enough to handle myself on that end for the moment.
The arcane workings were another matter entirely.
• • • •
Iris Mortuary Calendar, October 29
Kingsberry come down to visit today! Just for a bit, but Lord it’s good to see his face. I know he stays busy up there with his work. Fried bologna sandwich for lunch. Fell asleep watching Drew Carey and woke up to Bob Barker. They love their games. They chittered at me, pushy as can be. I told them, No—I’m not gonna call nobody. Makes me feel bad to do it that way. They’ll show up on their own.
• • • •
Luke and I sat on the roof, sipping moonshine under the late October sky, he for enjoyment, me to ease the pain.
“Well,” he said. “That was one piss-poor attempt.”
The first three fingers of my left hand were still smoking, blackened at the tips, shiny and stinking with one of Sascha’s salves where Luke had doctored me after my latest failed attempt at a working.
“Wasn’t my best moment.”
“Sad to say, but so far, it probably was.”
We laughed until tears snuck from the corners of our eyes, until I caught my breath enough to agree. “Yeah, it was. When the hell am I gonna be able to do this?”
“Honestly, Sorrel, it’s not a linear process. At some point, you catch it and a leap happens. For most people, this is the hardest part.”
“For you, too?”
“Hell no. The weapons stuff was harder for me. Of course, I was ten or so then. But the workings always came naturally to me.”
The gap I was trying to make up had never occurred to me, stepping clumsily into this family who’d breathed this impossible stuff since childhood, like fish who’d never conceptualized life outside of water. And here I’d come, floundering into the deep end without gills.
“Luke, how old were you when you got your brand?” I asked.
Thena’s voice preceded her as she stepped around the corner of the roof to join us, tumbler in hand, asking, “Which one?”
“What?”
“You haven’t seen ’em? Show him, Luke.”
Luke pulled off his hoodie and t-shirt, and in the fall moonlight, an intricate web of thin white lines covered his entire torso. He pointed to the one below his right collarbone. “That one there, at twelve, like the rest of the family.” Thena nodded, pulled down the neckline of her shirt to reveal the same brand as mine. Luke’s fingers traced the lines as he talked, “This one at fourteen, this one at sixteen, and well, yadda yadda, you get the idea.”
“If he dropped his pants, you’d have to listen to fifty more stories about those. I’m still not convinced they’re safe.”
“Might not be,” Luke said. “Might be necessary, though.”
I tried not to let the shock show on my face. Was this devotion or cruelty? “Did—did someone make—”
“Oh god, no. After the first one, all the rest were my choice.”
“How much protection do you need?”
“Plenty, but these aren’t just protection. Most come from the family’s studies, but I adapted some myself.”
Thena tipped her glass towards Luke. “Star-fucking-pupil.”
He returned the gesture. I tried to toast them as well, but my glass slipped through my damaged hand, bounced and rolled off the roof, shattering on the gravel below. Thena gut laughed, “And his sidekick, Cinder-Fingers. Jesus Christ.”
It felt good to laugh that hard for that long with two people I was growing to love. It felt good to not know it would be one of the last times I’d do so. The sky above seemed to hold nothing but possibility, and our own voices echoing towards the still-friendly stars.
Voice Memo: A Real Change, November 15, 1:04
Like I said last time, I’d been thinking about a change, and today the opportunity came. Trevor says you’ve gotta be ready to pounce on opportunity, like our ancestors, not like meek little punks waiting for life to just give you something. You have to take, and today I took my chance. It’ll sound stupid and boring, but I’ve gotta be honest about my current standing. Which is at the bottom, still.
So, today Pete asked for volunteers to cover Scruggs County, an hour north, in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Wide spot in the road, at best. No one even made eye contact with him, but I shot my hand up. Jake and Alice looked at me like I was insane, but what else was I gonna do? This is my last chance.
After the meeting, I invited Max to lunch—he’s been with the agency the longest and used to cover Scruggs. We ate pecan pie at Shelby’s Deli, and he gave me so much helpful advice. I told him I didn’t understand why it was so hard to sell certainty in an uncertain world, which I’d thought was a pretty good line I’d come up with. But he said, “Thomas—you’re not selling certainty. You’re selling companionship.” And a lightbulb went off. I think I’ve got it now.
• • • •
By mid-November, my hand had healed enough to practice workings again, but they weren’t going any better. Luke reassured me that was normal, that for most folks it takes being present at an encounter to make the switch flip.
“Let me be clear,” he said, as we sat in the reading room. “I don’t mean some bullshit’s going to happen where you have a dramatic face-off with something, and you go all Super Saiyan in the heat of the moment. I mean that there’s something about being in the presence of this stuff that seems to rewire you a bit, that opens you up somehow.”
“Okay, so when’s this first encounter? When will I be ready?”
“It’s not about being ready. Ready never comes. It’s about what the world needs.”
A few weeks later, the world revealed its need.
Iris Mortuary Calendar, November 22
Dusted the taxidermy room. Took a minute to find it this time. I just about giggle with joy when I look on what Kingsberry’s done. Made chicken and dumplins for dinner. They chittered as I ate, talking about how hungry they were. I told them something’ll show up soon, but I don’t rightly know what soon means to them.
• • • •
For Thanksgiving that year we had pheasants instead of turkey, and it was delicious. You never went hungry at the Veil, like we were fattening ourselves up for every possible slaughter. The day after, Luke woke me up by dropping two newspapers on my chest, issues of the Scruggs County Sentinel. “Take a look.”
He’d circled one article in both papers in red pen, each of them appearing on a features page about the Scruggs County Fair. I read the first one.
August 4, 2015
Holt Wins Fortieth Ribbon with Fabulous Fox
Kingsberry Holt, 84, of Frog Catch Lane, once again captured the blue ribbon in the Scruggs County Fair taxidermy contest. Mr. Holt, as most attendees know, has won this event for forty consecutive years, and this year’s entry again showed off his considerable skill: a red fox captured in such lifelike fashion that it looked ready to leap off its mount and dash back into the woods.
Ben Stapleton, head of the judging committee stated, “Mr. Holt has a real gift. He’s able to capture the vitality of these creatures like nobody else. I’m already excited to see what he’ll enter next year.”
The second article was dated two years later.
August 5, 2017
Holt Removed from Competition
At last year’s county fair, it was a surprise to all when Kingsberry Holt failed to place in the taxidermy competition for the first time in four decades. Ben Stapleton, head of the judge’s committee that year, said at the time, “It was a shock, but Mr. Holt’s work has shifted slightly away from his traditional strengths. I’m sure by next year he’ll rally and be back to the same old prize-winning Kingsberry.”
Sadly, that wasn’t the case this year, as Mr. Holt’s approach has continued to decline. When his entry was unveiled the judges immediately rushed to cover it back up. Unfortunately for Mr. Holt, and for any children present, his creation, which is truly difficult to describe, bore no resemblance whatsoever to his past heralded entries. Holt attempted to plead his case, and as the situation escalated, deputies escorted him off the grounds in what appears to be a sad end to his history-making career.
Luke tossed me my pack as Thena poked her head into the room. “Move it, boys. Time’s wasting.”
Luke nodded at me. “This is it.”
On the drive to the airport, I asked a thousand questions between pounding black coffee and choking down two hard-boiled eggs. I got no answers that satisfied me.
Voice Memo: Scruggs Success! November 29, 1:02
This is the change I’ve needed, and who would have thought it’d happen in Scruggs County? I’ve closed twenty policies in two weeks, more than I did in three months in the city. I’ve been trying everything Max told me—tone down the aggressiveness, let the conversation breathe, repeat their names—and it’s like magic. That lightbulb going off was the real deal—I’m not selling certainty. I’m selling companionship. The figures I rattle off, the policy details—all that matters less than my smile. My mouth matters less than my ears. I just drive these backroads and find the loneliest people I can, nod and listen—or pretend to listen—repeat a few words back, slide the paperwork in front of them, hand them a pen, say, “Then what happened?” or “I declare!” and nudge them into a signature. They feel heard. They say I’m like family. It’s like a kind of backwoods mentalism.
• • • •
The Veil had been around long enough, and had invested well enough, that we took the family’s private plane from Wyoming to Tennessee, which eased any concerns I had about getting through security. But I still had other questions.
“This is an encounter?”
“Sure is,” Luke said. From everything we can tell, Kingsberry Holt is getting close to something. We don’t know if it’s intentional, or if he’s just developed some, well, weird habits that are drawing attention. Maybe he’s just stumbling around in ignorance. Maybe he’s reached out to something, or something’s reached out to him.”
“And you figured this out from two articles?”
Thena swallowed a chaw of beef jerky. “Sascha and the family have other ways of divining. They haven’t been wrong yet. We don’t gas up the jet for random podunk National Enquirer-looking shit.”
Over the next few years, Thena and Sascha would teach me these methods of divining events. One future midnight, sweat cooling on our bodies, sheets twisted at our feet, Thena and I stared at the ceiling and debated the best name for these events: encounters, doors, incidents. “You should really just call them clusterfucks,” I said. She patted my cheek and said, “See, you have learned something.” But that night was years and encounters away.
On the plane, I said, “Okay, then. I’m ready.”
Thena leaned over. “Thought Luke told you. Ready’s not on the menu. You’re here, and that’s enough. Your job is to stay down, follow orders, and learn. Let the adults handle this.”
Luke patted my shoulder. “Might not have been the nicest tone there, but she’s right. This should be a simple enough job, but we don’t take chances. You’re here to watch.”
And so, I did. I stayed down. I followed orders. I watched as it all happened.
• • • •
The December morning Thomas eased his car onto Frog Catch Lane, he was making a voice memo and forgot to turn off the app. What follows is excerpts from that recording, interspersed with our experience of the event.
Voice Memo: Frog Catch, December 1, 14:47:01
Another beautiful morning in Scruggs County, and another day, I have no doubt, of success. Today it’s Tobiatha Holt, 83 years old. Lives alone out here, and god this isn’t the middle of nowhere—you can’t even see nowhere from this place. It’s 11 a.m., and a great day to close, like your boy’s been doing since this transfer. In fact, it’s going so well I’m viewing a new apartment next Wednesday, a place that finally won’t need roach traps.
I’m wearing my lucky checkered turquoise shirt today—of course I still love Trevor and the Salescast guys, but I’m branching out into more self-awareness work now, too. Shayla on The Mindfulness Minute talks a lot about colors, and she said turquoise conveys compassion and clarity, and that’s exactly the vibe I want to send to these old folks.
As Thomas creeps down Frog Catch Lane, we hear on the recording the crunch of gravel under tires, pinging on the undercarriage. We hear Thomas pumping himself up for the sale, hollering the chorus of an early aughts rap song with a few words no white boy should say. We hear him pull the car into the driveway and turn off the engine, hear him mumble, “Kobe in the fourth. Black Mamba. Let’s do this,” and open the door. We hear him get out, lean back in, rummage in the backseat for his briefcase.
Then the chittering explodes around him.
Chee-chee-chee! Chee-chee-chee!
A crack as he jolts and his head hits the doorframe, gravel grinding as he stumbles and whirls to meet
“Motherfu—Jesus Christ, what the—stupid ass birds—”
Thomas doesn’t know the names of these birds—guineas—as they skitter around him, their wide gray bodies low to the ground, tiny white heads bobbing, chee-chee-chee; doesn’t know they’ve been used by moonshiners for decades as watchdogs for revenuers. We hear them scatter, flutter, chittering around him as he proceeds up the gravel walk. He steps onto the creaking weathered porch and knocks.
Tobiatha’s home, as we saw when we arrived later, was a centuries-old two-story farmhouse, paint peeling off in plate-sized sheets, nestled by willows and magnolias, with a shoulder-high hedge at the front, grown wild and unruly with time.
On Thomas’s memo, the door swings open and the conversation begins.
“Ms. Holt?”
“Who are you?”
“Ms. Holt, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m—”
“Alright then, we’ll talk in a minute, but these commercials’re almost done and my story’s got ten minutes left. You can come in and wait but you hush till it’s over.”
A door swinging closed, the shuffling of house slippers, the tap-tap of Thomas’s wingtips on worn wooden floorboards, a plop into a recliner, a squeak as it swivels, the complaining springs of decrepit couch cushions as Thomas settles in to wait.
Minutes pass with the TV’s blare. End music swells, the chair swivels.
“Now what did you want, Mr. . . .?”
“Lupton, ma’am, but please call me Thomas. You have a beautiful home, Ms. Holt.”
“Pish, it’s seen better days. Kingsberry kept it nicer when he was here, painted, cleaned the gutters, but I’m too old for that now.”
“Who’s Kingsberry?”
“My older brother. He—well, you’ve just about made me go off rambling. You go on and tell me why you’re here.”
“Tobiatha, I’m here to help you with your health insurance, but I’d love to get to know you first.”
“Well, that’s awful sweet. We can all use a little help sometimes, and ain’t too many people try to help older folks. But—if you’ve really got the time, I’d love to show you something first. I don’t get much company and it’s really something to see.”
A squeak of springs, a strained exhale from her rising, shuffling house-slippers, tapping wingtips.
We were still five hours out as they entered the hallway for the first time.
“You started to say something about Kingsberry?”
“I did. Kingsberry was my brother, and a fine hunter. More than that, he was the best taxidermist this county’s ever seen.”
The click of a light switch, Tobiatha saying, “Aren’t they beautiful?”, Thomas’s gasp.
Thomas wasn’t from this culture, had never seen this much death in one place, but we can tell from the conversation that follows what he’s looking at. The room is covered floor-to-ceiling in animals, stuffed, posed, mounted. Three dozen deer heads line the walls, fifteen turkeys pose along the baseboards, peacocks flash many-eyed plumage, bobcats crouch at the doorway, ducks arrested in flight, foxes frozen mid-dash.
“This—I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Kingsberry was one of a kind. Lord, I miss him.”
“Oh, is he—”
“He’s been dead over a year now.”
You can almost hear Thomas gird himself, hear a hint of his teeth grinding, and we know from other recordings how much he hates when dead relatives get dredged up, how easily it turns into an endless litany of passed third cousins and departed great-aunts with no end in sight.
“Kingsberry sounds like he was quite a man. I’m sure he’d want you taken care of now that he’s gone. Can we go back in the living room, Tobiatha? I’d like to show you something.”
“Of course we can, honey.”
Light switch clicking off, shuffle and tap, the TV’s insistent voices, plop, squeak, and swivel.
“Now, what do you want to show me?”
Papers rustling, couch creaking as he reaches out with a brochure. “Tobiatha, I can help you with your health. I can help you get more things covered.”
“What things?”
“Vision, dental—”
and a wet flapping sound cutting him off, Tobiatha giggling as she says, “I don’t have teeth, and I see just fine. Oh, that reminds me. I wanna show you something. Did I tell you about my brother, Kingsberry?”
Exhale and rise, shuffle and creak, Thomas’s muffled muttering, barely audible, “Okay, some dementia here. Work with it. Might even be easier.” Tobiatha’s voice carrying from a few steps ahead.
“You just won’t believe this, Thomas. Kingsberry, he won so many prizes for taxidermy that I think he finally just got bored. He said he wanted to try something different, that he was tired of seeing this world the same old way. I think you’ll just be amazed.”
The click of the same light switch, the same room, but Thomas’s gasp is different this time. I can tell you what he saw, as later we caught afterimages ourselves before we burned the place to the ground.
Thomas steps into the room, and the room is wrong. Antlers and tongues and ears, lips and hooves and claws in soft places, in the wrong places. Bobcats don’t have this many eyes, opossums don’t make these expressions, almost humanlike in their petrified suffering. It should be jackalope-kitschy, should be ridiculous, but the creations have an unearthly gravity.
Thomas hunches and groans, vomit splatters on the floor, Tobiatha soothes him.
“It’s alright, sweetie. It’s too much beauty for most folks. I think it was that beauty that drew ’em here. Let’s go back to the living room.”
This, we think, is when we arrived. I know I said we’d been five hours out, and the time doesn’t match, but time was different in that place. Even with the recording, we don’t really know how many trips they made up and down that hallway to the taxidermy room, or how long each one took.
Shuffle, squeak, swivel, Thomas whispering to himself to pull it together and close, Days of Our Lives, distant chittering somewhere, and before Thomas can begin,
“Did I tell you about Kingsberry?”
“Yes, ma’am, you did. He sounds wonderful, and I know he’d want you taken care of, so—”
“Oh, he does, and himself too, and he took care of all that before he died.”
“A policy?”
“Not what you’d call a policy, I don’t reckon. More a relationship.”
“Yes, exactly! That’s how I see it, too, Tobiatha. It’s not just numbers. It’s a relationship.”
By this time, as best we can tell, we’d parked the car halfway up Frog Catch Lane, grabbed our gear, and cut into the woods. It was a gorgeous day, too beautiful not to notice even amidst the circumstances, the sky impossibly blue. We crept through gray trunks and thorny underbrush, Thena on point, me in the middle, Luke at rear guard. We didn’t speak, other than the time I whispered, “Why this approach for a simple job?”
Luke whispered, “Told you, we don’t take chances. And simple—simple is relative.”
As we arrived at the edge of the woods, Thena motioned for us to stop, made eye contact with Luke and tilted her head to the yard. They knelt slowly, fired six silenced rounds into the guineas. We hustled along the hedge to the house.
Swivel, creak, chitter, shuffle down the hall again. “It’s really something to see, Thomas.” Muttering. Chittering, closer, and now a muffled thump from above.
“Tobiatha, did you say you lived alone?”
“It’s complicated, sweetie. There’s so much I want to tell you, but I don’t know how much you’ll understand. I don’t rightly understand it myself. I’ve just learned to be grateful for them.”
“Who?”
Thena eased open the screen door to the back porch. She tried the kitchen door, found it unlocked. As she turned the knob, Luke whispered, “This isn’t right,” and gestured back at a plastic bucket of tomatoes growing outside, just below the porch. Ripe. Red. Flourishing, in December. Thena shrugged, led us inside the kitchen, weapons drawn.
We cleared the area, progressed past the enclosed staircase on our left at the entrance of the living room, and found the space empty except for the overcrowded furniture, years of saved butter containers and newspapers, and the blaring TV. Thena dug in the recliner, found the remote, clicked it off. In the silence, we heard distant voices down the hallway.
“I don’t know, really. I can’t rightly see them, but they help me. They keep me company. You know it’s not good for a person to be alone.”
“Who—”
“I think it was Kingsberry’s work that called to ’em.”
Chittering, a dull thud.
Thena led us through the living room, towards the hall, when two thumps sounded closer behind us, above us. Luke drew up in the rear, yelled, “Shit, Thena, here!”
I knew what Kingsberry Holt had looked like in life from the articles, and I would know what his last creations had looked like from the later flashes we’d see, and as he lurched and sloughed down the stairs towards us, he was an unholy melding of the two. Whatever had reshaped him into some eldritch science project, whatever else he was by then, he was still meat. Thena leaned past me; she and Luke fired round after round into him, while I stood, stunned and useless. He stumbled back, screeching, pinwheeling god knows how many appendages, and slumped wetly to the floor at the base of the stairs.
I choked out, “Was this what y’all expected?”
Thena turned to Luke, said, “How did he do this to himself?”
Luke, inspecting the corpse, said, “I don’t think he did. I don’t like this, Thena. We need to move.”
“They do make things strange. Time gets strange. You know us old folks can hardly keep the days straight anyhow. I’m not too fond of how things move, though—rooms going all cattywampus. But they keep me alive.”
“They—”
“All I have to do is feed them.”
The light switch clicking on.
We turned the corner, raced down the hall. No—we tried to race, but it was outside our control. Some steps we rushed as if pulled by a current, others we crept as if our feet were mired in pitch, until we finally,
finally catch up to them at last. We hear Thomas screaming but his mouth is closed. Tobiatha—what? Glitches? Wavers? The air thickens, turns oily as we peer over their shoulders into the taxidermy room, now empty except for a huge mound of crumpled insurance brochures, tattered and torn white dress shirts, rust-stained slacks and khakis, and on top, ravaged as the rest, a checkered turquoise shirt. Tobiatha speaks.
“I’d been wondering for a while who that one belonged to. Always thought it was pretty.”
Thena’s grunt, the crunch of her rifle butt smashing into Tobiatha’s nose, the confused grappling as Luke twists Thena around, yelling, “She’s not the problem, Thena! We’ve gotta move!”
A pulsing hum in the air. Tobiatha saying, “It almost tickles. You can tell they’re happy when they’re about to feed.”
Luke pulled us both away and we bolted, slowed, raced, froze down the hall, time tearing and patching, and I still jolt wake at night wondering what might have been different if we’d paid more attention to the tomatoes. We dashed into the living room, hurdled the corpse, leapt up the stairs three at a time. Luke kicked open the entrance of Kingsberry’s workroom, and we stepped into a maelstrom, air whipping relentlessly. And there it was.
There was a door. An encounter, an incident, whatever you deign to call it, but above us in the slanted attic a circle burned, the ceiling flaking upwards into sparks and ash, and there in the opening, not the brilliant blue of December, but a muddy blackness, the air itself like an overturned rock revealing botflies and maggots and worse; a festering pestilence in the corpse of the world; the writhing, teeming heavens looming over all.
Luke pushed Thena and I back towards the exit, shouting, “Go!”, then turned and began yelling other words, unknown to me, into the gaping maw above. Chittering ascended the stairs behind us, the air pulsed, took on that same oily feel, a shuddering stream of haze undulating past us towards Luke, recognizing the threat. His clothes began to smolder, intricate glowing lines rising through the cloth, lines that matched the pattern of his brands. I looked at Thena, who I’d thought incapable of tears, as she grabbed my arm and dragged me away, as we nearly tumbled down the stairs in flight. As we stumbled into the yard, the entire second story exploded outward in brilliant blue flames, stuttered and froze at the terminal edges, vacuumed back in on itself, and was gone.
Thena slumped onto her knees in the grass, pushing the backs of her hands against her eyes, muttering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Other than that incrimination of herself, or Luke, or me, we sat in silence for a while, ashes wafting down, clinging to our eyelashes. I started to say, “I should’ve—” but her glare stopped me. We both knew I didn’t know anything.
At last, she rose, and we gathered all the evidence we could, pulling the singed calendar off the kitchen wall, stepping over Tobiatha’s denervated husk to retrieve Thomas’s phone from his empty slacks, witnessing the dying afterimages of Kingsberry’s creations before we struck the match.
On the drive to the airport, I tried to ask Thena, “Have you ever—”
“Not like this.”
And that was all we said. She stared ahead, drove us towards the lowering sun, into the hollow heart of the horizon.
We flew back to Wyoming. What else was I going to do? I realized by then that the best this world could offer me was companionship amongst the uncertainty. That’s the best it can offer any of us.
Some days it’s almost enough.
