M. didn’t sleep well that night. Laying in an unfamiliar darkness she had not yet had a chance to fill with comforting rationalizations, she felt old thoughts encroach at the edges of the mundane ones. The darkness itself seemed to have a streaming edge that dissipated into a still darker darkness. Worse yet, though she knew they were asleep there in the other reaches of the house, she did not feel like D. and P. were in the house any longer. Or perhaps that she was still in the same house. Instead she felt A.’s presence. She felt T.’s too. And S.’s. All the ones now so far out of reach, unsettlingly close. You’re doing it again, M. You’re thinking too much. You’re going to call them back. Leave them there. Leave them.
She nearly fell out of bed in her haste to get out of the room. To find the kitchen with the pretense of getting a glass of water. Maybe to find D.’s room and slip into bed with him, though she knew that would be a bad idea. She went to the study instead, to try to find P. All she found was his cot, a folded wool blanket, and a pillow. The upper half of the dutch door was open and moonlight fell through the opening across a bookcase. She cradled herself against the cold air as she read the spines of the books. What language were they written in? Arabic? Some kind of gobbledygook she never knew P. was able to read. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she glimpsed one in english script. “Regeneration from the Void” or something. But upon closer inspection, she could not find a single title in english.
One of the dogs barked outside. She peered across the dutch door to see if she could make out which one. She liked P.’s dogs, except for one. It was the black one, Thane, she wasn’t too fond of. It wasn’t friendly or playful or affectionate like the others. It just followed P. around, like a shadow. She found Clark, the australian shepherd, staring anxiously at something around the corner of the house. Then he bolted. She stepped out into the yard almost automatically. The coldness of the flagstones stung her bare feet. She felt the bare flesh of her arms and neck prickle with gooseflesh. Come here, Clark. Come back. I don’t want to go any further. But she did. The dog had stopped barking and for all she knew could have gone back into the house through whatever open door had let it out, but she went anyway, around the corner of the house toward the back, where the foot of the hill ended in a steep wash. There she was confronted by a most terrible sight.
Rising out of the dark hillside beside a massive oak stood a tower-like structure built out of the same stones as the house. It was a complicated structure that, in the dark, seemed utterly incoherent to her senses. It wasn’t particularly high or imposingly large, but she could not for whatever reason believe what she saw. Where a staircase rose she could find no terminus. A wall seemed to project from the side of the structure, serving no purpose. The windows were tall narrow apertures that seemed to be fixed impossibly deep into the masonry. No light shone from its interior.Â
What the fuck, P. What the fuck.
