THE HAUNTED RUIN

He had walked away from too many women he placed on pedestals, only to grieve all the more for having put them out of reach. In this instance, at least, his body had dragged him over a line and up onto a perfumed pillow. Neither of them spoke in the darkness. They lay side by side, yet did not kiss. Something would have to happen next. She would either have to send him away or they would soon fall asleep.

They fell asleep.

Michael drifted in and out of one of his strange, themed anxiety dreams. It began with terrifying flying saucers that looked like shredded clouds. Seeing them fly toward downtown, he happened upon a former coffeehouse waitress he once knew heading in the same direction. Her face was still pretty and youthful, although her hands had aged considerably. She told him she was again working as a barista and that he should come to visit at her new place of employment. Michael soon set out to find her, but was abruptly lost in a honeycomb of flimsy buildings made out of plywood. They were so close together there was no differentiating between being inside or outside. Every turn put him at a step-up into another place of business still under construction; only cash registers and staring counter help were on hand to icily greet him. An occasional exit faced out onto a barbed-wire fence cordoning off a street, but beyond this he was left with only crawlspaces between walls to escape his guilt over not buying anything.

“Michael…?” Emma was nudging his shoulder, standing over him in shadow. “Those television people are snooping around outside the house,” she whispered.

He caught only the end of it. “It’s the pumpkin stealers,” he grumbled.

“What?” she said.

He was not inclined to explain.

“We can’t stay here tonight,” she insisted.

He sat up to puzzle over her melodrama.

Emma snatched a repacked suitcase at her feet. “I know where we can go and not be disturbed. Grab the pumpkin and follow me.”

A disoriented Michael climbed off the bed and navigated the gowns in the floor to the doorway, and then proceeded on to the front room. Incommoded by the jack-o-lantern, he managed to wedge himself between a stuck seat and broken glove compartment latch in Emma’s car. She pulled away from the curb without turning on her headlamps, although nothing was seen of the television news van on the street. Once they were down the block, they sped off toward the old highway. The accomplice would not ask where they were going, either in a specific or general sense. He was never one to ask a question to which he did not already know the answer.

They drove further than they had ever driven together. The road ahead began to splinter, growing darker and narrower with each change of direction. Without the benefit of signs, Emma was charting a winding course deeper into the woods. Michael imagined every bush to be home to a snake, and every farmhouse to be home to a plotting serial killer. He could only justify his irrational fear of rural landscapes by quoting Sherlock Holmes on the subject: “The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

After the better part of an hour of driving, Emma finally stopped at a small house off a gravel road. There were no lights apart from those supplied by the car, which she left on to dash onto a porch; her shadow loomed large on the front door as she rooted around in her purse for a key. With the way clear, she rushed back to shut off the car engine. “Bring the jack-o-lantern,” she said.

Michael got out to the trebly cries of crickets: one for each star in the blackest sky imaginable. For some reason (and perhaps because of his dream) he was thinking of The War of the Worlds, where a couple had sought refuge in an abandoned country house from a night sky raining with Martians. He passed into the dark residence to hear Emma going through a cupboard. Placing the pumpkin on a table, he asked the obvious, “Is there a light switch?”

She stayed in her clandestine vein. “That would only draw attention.”

The guest glanced around to appreciate none of the windows had curtains or blinds. A scratching sound was slower making an impression. His eyes threaded the darkness to an exterior room off the kitchen, where a mongrel with cocked ears was peering in through a screen door.

“That’s the neighbor’s dog,” she explained, adding pointedly, “He’s not allowed in the house.” Emma finally moved over to the table with a scrounged-up candle and matchbook, and on lighting the former placed it in the jack-o-lantern. Light trickled up faded wallpaper vines to lay bare a room as stark as the windows. “Come,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

She led the way with the torch, flinging her shadow back over her shoulder like a cloak to darken personal effects lining a hall. The pumpkin was set down on a dresser in an unassuming corner bedroom before she leaned into a large chest of drawers with a mind to shove it; Michael pitched in to help uncover a crumbly gash in the wall. It was puttied and painted over in a child’s tempera paints.

“It looks like a comet,” he remarked.

Emma ran her fingers over the flaking tail. “This gouge was made by a meteorite years ago. It punched a hole in the roof and passed straight down inside the wall.”

“Is it still in there?”

Turning to the door, she tapped a small black rock being used as a stop with her shoe.

“Then the art is a commemoration of the event?”

“It’s in need of repairs,” she explained. “I was hoping we could touch it up together.”

Michael said nothing as his host disappeared down the hall with an imploring smile. He could only think they were at a family home, and perhaps Emma had been the one who painted the picture as a child.
She quickly reappeared in the doorway in her bare-hosed feet; a cardboard box filled with tempera paints and brushes was in her arms. “We only have blue and white," she lamented. The materials were set down beside the mural. “I should like to add some stars, too.”

The pumpkin was removed to the floor; its light pushed the shadows higher on the walls to make a hole suitable to crawl in. The collaborator joined Emma at the baseboard and was handed a brush. It seemed strange she should have dragged him out into the middle of nowhere for the purpose of retouching a child’s painting, but it was not in his nature to question any scheme of hers, or even to have a plan of his own. His unease about there being nothing between them and the dark countryside but thin plates of window glass subsided after a few minutes. The young woman was still in his old sweater, which grazed his sleeve like another shadow in the room. Rhapsodic flicks of her dripping casein blue stood in for conversation until she at last confessed what he was pained to suspect.

“This is Evan’s house.”

The painter did not look up.

“He’s a commercial photographer,” she stated flatly, “and taught me everything I know about a camera. We’ve dated since high school.”

The guest was compelled to ask one relevant question. “Where is he?”

“He’s away in Idaho for a photo shoot.” She then added, calmly, “Though he’s driving back tonight and should be here sometime late tomorrow morning.”

Silence returned, edgier than before; the painter’s brush, by contrast, was less keen.

Emma was getting good at reading his moods. “I know so little about you, Michael.”

It was par for his acquaintance that little background was solicited or given. Knowing him required sharing a kind of orphanhood with him: one of Dickensian self-invention.

Emma persisted. “Tell me something about yourself?”

“There isn’t much to tell.”

“But you write so much. You must have a lot to say.”

“I live mostly out of a sack: a toothbrush, a change of socks…”

“Then you’re between destinations?”

“No destination,” he replied. “Only the in-between part.”

“But what are your aspirations? Where do you want to be in ten years?”

He shrugged. “I’ll know when I get there.”

His answer dismayed her. “But you’re looking at it the wrong way round, aren’t you? The future is not a point of arrival. It’s a point of departure. You create your future from here—not there.”

He could no more refute her shrewd observation than he could explain why he gave the future so little thought. Dropping his brush into the cup of water, he leaned back to escape the overheated air of the pumpkin; a pair of eyes passed high over one of the windows.

“Jesus!” he yelped.

Emma peeked back, unworriedly. “It’s probably a deer. They like staring in when there’s a light.”

A knock arose on the front door and dispelled that possibility.

Michael would not panic if Emma was not going to panic.

The unexcited resident put down her paintbrush before venturing back into the dark end of the house. Snippets of a friendly conversation escaped a gap in the door, but it was more tone than distinct words. On re-latching the door chain, she reappeared in the doorway. “It was only a neighbor. He thought we were burglars.”

“The dog’s owner?”

“No.”

Seizing on her weary state, Michael stood up to join her.

Emma moved to re-cover the mural with the chest of drawers. “The stars can wait ‘till later,” she sighed.

The painter, pitching in another shoulder, did not argue.

She gestured with a nod. “Why don’t you get ready for bed?”

Michael followed her gaze to a connecting bathroom behind him.

With no further instructions, she stepped out into the hall to pick up her suitcase and disappeared behind another door; the home invader was left alone to look out his bright fish bowl.