THE SUBLIME

Michael had drifted down into a hollowed-out place, where only his heavy breathing marked it in any sensate way. His thoughts (perhaps only his barebones awareness) were empty of content, as if in anticipation of a partition falling away from the bed…

Thump. Thump. The glass doorknob rocked.

His eyes shot over the limbs of his little cousins sleeping around him, but they were too much of a tumbled-down ladder to hoist him out of sleep.

Thump. Thump. The bedroom door opened with a scrape against the floor.

Aunt Valerie peeked through the crack to see the children head-to-knee on the large bed. “Someone will have to sleep on the couch in the living room,” she announced. “There are too many kids to fit into one bed.” Her eyes fell on her young nephew. “Michael, since you’re the tallest, will you do it?”

The boy nodded obediently.

The aunt led the way down the stairs with a pillow and blanket under her arm. The house was dark, and all the adults had retired to the various bedrooms for the evening. On reaching downstairs, the open casket of Michael's grandmother was visible in the living room.

Aunt Valerie explained softly. “We thought it best to leave the lamp on.”

The boy sat on the corner of the couch and gazed across the room at the serene expression on his grandmother’s face. His aunt was slow in leaving after fluffing-up the pillow, but on seeing her nephew was not scared to be alone in the room with the dead body, she returned to the stairs. Her unhurried steps soon found the landing at the top, whereupon the only other light in the house was turned off.

“Goodnight, Michael,” she called down.

The child reclined after a few minutes, and with the sense his grandmother was only sleeping peacefully. Her profile was still, like the beginning of a gentle dream. Words half-spoken by him trailed off in the darker regions of the house, and perhaps to find some part of her still clinging to Earth. “Is that you, Granny?”

His eyes reopened in a lost second to see his grandmother as before.

In the hot happy summers he spent at her country store, she tore off long sheets of butcher paper for him to draw on. The white paper under his sweaty wrists flowed over the crisp-edged table to flap in the breeze of a fan. Looking up from his crayons, he expected to see her working at her stove under her dried bean mosaics, but she was lying on a bed whiter than his paper and being fed through a tube in her stomach.

“Your Granny has run you out of your bedroom,” she said.

He shook his head no, and turned back into sleep.

The darkness, seeking to reestablish its domain, poured like ink over his drawing. He could no longer see his way to finish it, so wrapped himself up in it like a blanket. The lines of crayon smelled glorious in his nose, although he could not remember what he had drawn.

He opened his eyes, thinking it a beautiful black swan. “Is that you, Granny?” he asked.

The Sublime answered, Thump. Thump.

The faint knocking stirred some tangible part of him and sent him meandering back to the surface. “Who’s there?” The words gave him form, although he did not actually hear them coming from his mouth.

Michael raised his hand to his muzzy face to discover an unexpected obstruction. A raised ridge indicated it was not a part of his cheekbone but a blindfold. On pushing it away, a crystallized haze of catheters came into view. They protruded from his wrists, arms, and pelvis, and wove themselves into a silken web over the bed. The cadmium orange candle was somehow rekindled on the nightstand and doubled the number of tubes on the facing wall in scarab green shadow. The sleeper was slow to appreciate the context in which he found himself. Flame-licked furniture leapt up in a blur around the bed, though none of it corresponded to fractured memory. The scale was off; veneers looked more plastic than wood. Additionally, dresser, chest, wedged chair, and bed were visibly (if inaudibly) shaking. The sensation had him feeling the side of his face again to find another foreign body: earmuffs. On pushing them away, a thunderous noise, like a blast furnace, poured out of the walls. The druggy man sat up more easily than he would have thought and pulled the sticky catheters from his skin. Several were beaded with reddish-purple flecks, while others were filled with dark yellowish bile. His bodily fluids, by some means and for some reason, were being converted into dehydrated crystals.

Plunging over the side of the mattress, the tremors were felt more keenly through the floor. They pulsed up into his kneecaps to tickle the hairs in his nose. He planted on all fours to still the spinning, thumping planks under him. More glassy tubes encircled the bedposts. Their ends converged on and disappeared into a hole over the headboard, creating the semblance of a hoist.

Thump. Thump.

This set of knocks was clearly coming from inside the closet. Michael crawled into the dim hole to rest his forehead against the nailed-shut panel and managed a cry. “I’m in here!”

No response was forthcoming.

Feebly, he pried at the secret door until it gave with a crack; the candlelight jumped at his shoulder to elbow its way down a dark crawlspace; it glinted off the handle of an old suitcase. The man squeezed into the narrow gap to snatch the object, and on dragging it back into the closet unclasped it. A pile of blackened ashes filled the primary compartment, and a bundle of schematics were tucked inside the lid’s puckered, moth-eaten, velvet sleeve. Taking the heavy pages in hand, he let them scatter in his lap. Several appeared to be elaborate designs for a box apparatus similar to the one in the hall painting. One page—though more particularly one line of bold text—surrendered to scrutiny:

Phone does not ring.

Michael clambered to his feet and doddered back to the edge of the bed. He picked up the phone receiver from the nightstand. Static, mimicking the noise in the wall, poured out of the earpiece. “--- -- - ---- - - --- - - - --- ----- - ---- - -- ----- -- --”

“Hello?!” he yelled.

A spindly current of electricity traveled down the phone cord, up follicles on his forearm, and ended with a crackle in the blanket. Rising up, he tautened against the bedpost before slamming the phone down. The receiver missed the hook and tumbled down the side of the nightstand; its cord snagged the candleholder and pulled it over the same brink. The punchy man bent down to retrieve the struggling candle, and only then spotted a bare knee poking out from under the bed skirt. He stuck a finger in, thinking it made of plaster, yet fell away with a shriek to discover it was covered with bristly, translucent hairs. The traced-out limb twitched deeper in the shadow to betray the burrow of a giant flesh-colored spider! Michael’s eyes shot up to see the last of the candlelight twist in the glassy braid—the ghastly creature was lifting the bed like a trapdoor! Darkness, jumping from the wall like a goblin, pushed the room down into abrupt, smothering silence.

“Goddamn it!” Michael cried, bolting up off the floor to latch onto the dangling end of the phone.

Static—now the only thing heard—continued to pop in the earpiece; it mirrored the creak of the spider’s pulley! The panicking man counted the seconds it took to reconnect the receiver to the hook. With the source of the noise cut-off, his labored breathing set him off starkly in the pitch. Cautiously he probed for the toppled candleholder in the floor and brought it back up to the edge of the nightstand, whereupon it was rejoined with the book of matches. The wick was swiftly relit and the cacophony rushed back in to reclaim the room. Nothing more stirred under the bed skirt, and all four bedposts were mercifully returned to the ground. The shot of adrenaline served as an antidote to the lingering effects of the Eszopiclone, although shadows continued to bob and weave in the monstrous dance around him.

Another less pronounced shadow, that of a crumpled piece of paper, was at the foot of the nightstand. The vibration made the phone number written on it unreadable, but a string of numbers sprang to mind. Michael braved the phone once more, and with the last digit released on the rotary, a muffled ping alerted him to the presence of a second phone in the room. He reached under the pillow to fish out a cell phone; the queer static was now coming from two earpieces. The candle flame, reacting to a disturbance in the air, whipped the shadows around the room into greater frenzy. What had been under the bed was now more dangerously elsewhere on the premises. The resident was certain he had dialed a Stonesthrow exchange, so wisely disconnected both phones.

There was some small clarity in his thinking, enough for him to return to the dark closet and tear open a dry-cleaners bag at the end of a row of hangers. It contained a sports jacket and a pressed pair of trousers. On dressing, Michael dropped the cell phone into the coat pocket and stumbled over something else. The coiled strand of hair, like the scrap of paper in the floor, caught too far back in his mind to grasp its meaning, although it too had tactile significance. The schematics were hurriedly collected off the floor and replaced in the suitcase. He had forgotten about the blanket still covering the window, so stepped around the bed to pull it down. The black panes were as polished as tumbled hematite, yet he could make out blue-tinged tree limbs in the courtyard below. With suitcase in hand, Michael moved over to unblock the bedroom door and stepped out into a darker, quieter hallway. His eyes quickly adapted—not to darkness but to the same deep, throbbing cobalt light he had seen out the window. It was seen distinctly on the stairs, but it was only on reaching the living room its source was located. The resident peered up his cockeyed banister in disbelief. Something incomprehensible was piercing the house down through the attic.

Amid the rubble, the spaceship’s contours were impossible to understand, like an Escher print where, when presented with a double-perspective problem, the eye, incapable of closing the gap posed by the infinity, merely flip-flops from one orientation to another. Even allowing for this imprecision, the slender craft appeared to stretch up into the starry sky without end. Its internal illumination pulsed in sync to the ruckus upstairs, but beyond a draft whistling down through the western façade exposed to the elements, the vessel itself was profoundly silent. The part in contact with the floor resembled the exoskeleton of a flea, while the ultraviolet guts resembled molten glass. Tiny stratified fibers, projected in a globe-like array around a seeming center, shone to prismatic effect. The house beyond it was otherwise flat and treacherous in the deep blue chroma. Using reflections throw off by the otherworldly light, he honed in on what he presumed to be the doorknob on the backdoor. Something dark just then darted between the craft and the far wall. His head flew around to lock on the looming shadow of a bookcase, and then that of a chair. He traced the former back to its source, but could find nothing of the chair. He froze in terror, studying the unassuming silhouette in an attempt to detect telltale signs of his intruder’s presence, but the outline remained resolutely chair-like. Michael stepped once more toward the kitchen, and in a blink the form on the wall leapt up to the ceiling to become the shadow of a nonexistent chandelier.

The resident did not wait for the next transformation but dove in the direction of his exit. He ably reached his car in the half-light and tossed the piece of luggage in the backseat. A trellis of wisteria crawled up into the glare of the headlights, but stopped short of the roofline. From there the formidable spaceship dominated the view. The slender craft stretched away into iciness, making the black sky around it appear to fold like paper. Turning the ignition key, the driver glanced up at his bedroom window—something just then walked between the wispy candle and drapes. At first it appeared to snuff out the wick, but the creature had only re-covered the window with the blanket. Michael waited a second or two, as if to figure out why, but nothing more happened. Determined to leave, he started slowly down the alleyway to reconnect with the street.

The house quickly shrank in the distance behind him, yet he could still see the deep blue blade of the alien ship in his rearview mirror. It appeared to curve with the Earth, though it too was soon sinking below rooflines. Each half-block offered up only a minimum of landmarks, and mostly trees dripping with wet streamers of toilet paper. The decorated branches reached into the high beams to guide his car before fading back into oblivion in the taillights. Some unspeakable calamity had decimated the remainder of the landscape, leaving only chimneys and a few clinging walls behind. The car’s headlamps found an occasional unbroken window, although the driver could not help but think his monster was keeping pace, hopping from house to house to blot out a candle with a blanket.