He tried telling his mother and grandmother this.
“You keep your eyes on this world,” his grandmother would say. “No, you don’t go looking into others, or looking for them either.”
“You’ll go blind,” his mother would repeat. “Why can’t you just look at something else?”
Sal looked at the sun anyway, but only when it was dark orange and low in the sky. He would try to look when it was high up and yellow, but it hurt his eyes. When the sun was setting, he liked to make pictures out of the patterns it cast on the clouds. When there were big, puffy clouds, they looked like orange sheep prancing about a fiery pasture. When there were thin stripes of clouds, they looked like rivers of flame running into the sun – or maybe they were running out. Sometimes he saw eagles, or herds of horses, or people, or creatures he had no name for.
Today, the clouds were patchy, some voluminous, some thin and wispy, all criss-crossing all over each other. Squinting into the aerial landscape, Sal began to make out shapes in the clouds about the setting sun. He saw hills and fields and rivers and even a forest.
There were animals today, too, but they were in the smaller fields and he couldn’t tell what they were. Sheep maybe, but you had to be careful with clouds; when they were all white and puffy, they always looked like sheep. In fact, as he looked closer, straining his eyes to the field closest to the sun, he thought the herd was more cow shaped than anything. Their heads were square and he thought he could see longer tails on some of them.
How intricate the patterns were tonight! So many different types of clouds were clustered together. They almost made an entire town. On the hills and fields he almost thought he saw houses and people and dogs and cats and some water, a lake or seashore perhaps. He could even see the crests of the waves.
There must be a real storm coming, Sal thought, one with all kinds of rain and wind, and maybe even some snow.
He stared and stared at the orange and white paintings in the sky, and then it occurred to him that he recognized some of the features. That one hill (a giant cumulus mass) looked like the hill beside his house. If the animals were cows indeed, they could be his neighbor’s who always grazed in the little pasture by Sal’s house. And there! His house was beside them. Then a smaller cloud drifted out of the house-shaped one. It was a person-shaped cloud. Why, that could almost be his mother! She stood in the yard looking about and calling–he could see the cloud open its mouth and cup its hands around it. He waved to her, and called out, but she went on looking and looking.
He tried to run towards his house, for he was sure by now that his mother was calling for him, and it was time to come in for dinner. As he ran, the sun sank lower and lower. Within a few minutes it had slipped over the edge of the world, and the hill, the house, and his mother disappeared in the shadows.
He looked about him. The sun had sucked most of the light down with it, and it was already deep twilight. He could see enough, though, to wonder at the landscape. There was a forest, close and black, and an obsidian lake that looked like stone. He turned in a circle and saw that hills surrounded him, even where a moment ago the sun had been. His house was not sitting atop any of them. As he looked at the trees and the water, he realized that they were not the trees and water that he knew.
“Mother!” he called.
There was no answer.
“Mother! he called again.
And there was a whisper, a high whispering laugh, from the shadows. It was not his mother.
Then the twilight vanished, and, in the dark, there were voices and movements in all directions. Dinner was indeed ready, and he was just in time.
TWO
Shark
Nobody liked Josiah.
Under the sun, he was a bleached bone laying on the sand. Like a skeleton buried on unhallowed ground apart from decent folk, he kept away from the living flesh. When the sun went down, he was a shadow on the edge of our bonfires, a silence outside our ring of laughter and flirtation and drinks, lots of drinks.
He was always on the beach. Every weekend, every night, every day. Nobody invited him. They didn't need to; he wasn't really in on the parties. He just shared the space. I guess he just liked the water.
A skinny kid even in the baggy clothes he wore to school, in swimming trunks he was skeletal. In the light of the fires at night, he looked like a snowy ghoul.
"Shark," the girls called him, and giggled.
They laughed to cover up their unease, because he was someone who made people uneasy.
He was a shark, no doubt about it. Not that he was vicious, at least, not in any way we could tell. Really, he just looked like one. There was a pointed look about his face, cheek bones all sticking out at unlikely angles, and a razor of an upper lip. He had a finlike crown, smooth and narrow which, situated atop a stretched frame, always stuck up above a sea of heads.
He moved like a shark, too, in a stalking kind of walk with a pronounced grace about it. He had the kind of grace that you almost wanted to watch, if only it didn't make you so nervous.
"Shark," they would say, and laugh. They laughed together, because laughter in number is safer than laughter alone.
As creepy as he looked prowling the sand, indoors he was a goldfish.
He was the type of twerp I'd give wedgies to, and push into the lockers in the hallways between class. He was the type who had his name scrawled next to funny remarks on the walls of the toilet at school. He was such an easy target, taunting him wasn't even much fun. It was just an imperative of the social food-chain.
I intended to keep my place on it.
This year, as soon as the sun rose on the first day of summer, I was on the sand and in the water. College was coming, and scouts would be there either to usher it in or to bar the way. I wanted to start training early.
But as early as I started, Josiah was ahead of me. That first day he was there, standing in the waves, two minutes after the sun had cleared the horizon. I didn't wave or call to him; guys like me usually didn't even look at guys like him, even when we taunted them they were invisible.
But he looked at me as I ran over the sand. It was hard not to look back because he was the only one on that long beach.
He looked at me with these blank eyes, and he yawned.
The yawn stretched.
Then he smiled. I'd never seen him do that before.
The smile stretched.
He just stood, waist deep in the surf smiling and yawning, teeth glinting in the morning sun, hands hanging at his sides. I squinted at him.
Did that kid always have extra teeth?
I looked at his arms and realized they weren't so much hanging by his sides as glued to them.
I looked back up to his face. There wasn't much of one left. His head had grown forward over the mouth, the pointed crest of his skull elongating. The small black eyes sitting in ivory skin just looked at me. The mouth with rows upon rows of teeth continued to smile.
The shark dove. A fin wove back and forth between the waves a few times, before it disappeared.
People who live by the ocean don't worry about shark attacks. Most swimmers and surfers couldn't stay out of the water even if they did worry. "What are the chances?" they always say. Every summer, a few arms are lost and maybe a life or two, but with all the tourists crowding the waters, really, what are the chances?
But the tourists and the swimmers and the surfers and the people that live by the ocean don't know the sharks. And the sharks don't know them.
I don't go down by the water anymore. I can't imagine I have a friend there.
THREE
The Dinner Bells
The chimes laugh.
The window shade, coarse and old, chafes Mort’s fingers. Tug. Release. Tug. Release. But it only moves down, brushing the chimes as it goes. The rude, tinkling chuckle continues.
Again, he reaches up to the rolling mechanism at the top of the window and fiddles wi
th it. It crumbles a little, but doesn’t move. Like the nail holding the chimes in place, like the hinges on the front door, like the keyholes, like the screws on the filthy toilet, like the whole damn house, it is rusted in place.
Mort yanks on the shade. It rises an inch or two, then stops.
Was it always stuck?
Grandmother Morris made that window a decorative nook long ago. Mort had only ever seen the chimes hanging with some dried flowers over the closed shade.
Dead flowers crunch under foot. The shade sands his finger. The chimes laugh.
He never asked.
He never asked about the window with the chimes. He never asked about the flowers or the shade that was never opened, or about anything in the run-down mansion or the wild lands about it at all.
He didn’t ask because he didn’t care.
As a child left unsupervised for long summers in a too-old and very likely haunted mansion, Mort would have much rather been at home watching a movie about a too-old and very likely haunted mansion. He explored the house, not out of curiosity, but out of boredom and a desire to avoid the too-old and very likely crazy old woman who made decorative nooks out of unused windows.
He never found anything interesting.
The flowers slip underfoot. A drop of blood stains the sharp edge of the shade. The chimes giggle.
Crazy woman!
When he couldn’t avoid his grandmother as a child, he did his best to ignore the funny way she talked and the crazy stories she told, none of which he remembers now.
His mother said that Grandmother Morris was old and could do or say whatever she wanted. She said that he was put off by his grandmother because she was very old and children are often put off by the very old. But, she had told him, they really should respect their elders anyway.
Mort showed respect with silence.
If he could help it, he didn’t talk to her at all. And because she was funny like that, she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t talk much to him either, except when neither one could avoid the other.
The first thing he did when he moved in after she died was take down all flowers and the silly trinkets. He would have removed the chimes too, but like the shade they were stuck. The nail and the chain on which they hung had rusted, and held fast when he tugged.
I’m going to cut them off with a chainsaw!
But that must come later. For now, he is determined to make the shade, and the entire house, functional. It is a window none will see, in the washroom that hasn’t been used since there were servants living in an attic that hasn’t been used since the rest of the house forgot it.
But he will not have it broken. He will not live in a rusty old antique. He was not a child who thought old things were curious. He is not an adult who thinks they are quaint. He liked–then and now–things that work, and serve their purpose. That way, the world makes sense. That way, the world is functional.
But Mort doesn’t like to make things work. He just likes them to be working when he needs them.
The shade defies him.
Two buttons on his shirt hang loose. One pops off as he reaches up to beat on the roll at the top of the window. It rolls behind the toilet and pings against the porcelain. One fist opens to tug at the tie that feels like a choker, but it already hangs limp around his collarbone. Frustrated sweat drips from the once-pressed silk armpits .
Fuck it. Couldn’t see shit anyway, it’s so dark.
One sweaty hand tears the tie off completely and drops it to the dead-flower-strewn floor.
Nothing worth seeing through that window anyway.
Somebody disagrees.
The creeping shadows out on the lawn think there is something well worth seeing through the attic window. The shadows had always kept a close eye upon the ancient charm that hung in the old house. It had been still for a long time. The bells were on the inside of the window, untouched by the wind, and somebody had been very careful not to let them stir for many years.
Now they stir. Now they tinkle, laughing gleefully. And the shadows remember the sound. But they had never forgotten it.
Who forgets hunger?
No. Though the people no longer remember their dues, the shadows do.
For almost a hundred years they had waited. They had hid, shadows in the shadows catching only what the could. No one knew the appropriate calls anymore. No one remembered what was due the darkness.
But someone had rung the bells, somebody had struck the tones that called out the shadows for their sacrifice. They were hungry and came swiftly out of the trees, over the lawn, following the ancient summons. Careful in their excitement, they crept towards the house. They growled in hunger and ground their teeth in anticipation.
Mort lay in an ancient bed under blankets that smelled a little like potpourri and mold. The creaking of the old frame hid the long nails scratching on the steps.
He was miserable and cold. But despite his discomfort, he was tired and soon fell asleep. He slept deeply and without waking.
FOUR
Leaves of Trees
"Don't look 'round," Julie says.
My head turns. Her hand claps to my face to stop the movement.
"That sound," she says, "do you hear it?"
The wind blows the chill into our faces. It hums the melody of the season, the hiss and rasp of leaves, the score of autumn.
"That's the leaves blowing over the ground," I say of the quiet rasping beneath the wind's moan. "It's just the dead leaves being scraped over the dry cement of the sidewalk." I don't know why she is frightened of it.
"Not that, the other."
"What?"
"The sound that's under the leaves."
"Julie–"
"Listen!"
I do. There is only wind. There are only leaves. That is all there is to hear. So I listen to it.
Single leaves scratch over pavement. Piles of hundreds, thousands rustle together. Late comers crinkle softly through the air as they fall. Remnants of a light frost crunch in their folds, as they skim across the ground.
Shwee, shwee, shwee, they whisper with dry, creaky fingers scraping dry, creaky fingers. Hsch, hsch, hsch, they caw softly, aged hands sanding the rough cement.
But Julie stands beside me, more still than the trees around us, eyes wet and wide. Those tears were not whipped up by the chill wind.
I put my arm around her. She is frozen even under layers of fleece. I rest a hand on her cold cheek.
"Shh, shh," I whisper, but she sniffles, and tears run over my fingers.
She's never cried before, at least, not that I could see. I didn't think she was one of those girls.
I close my eyes, and breathe in.
Scree, scree, scree.
So quiet it is almost lost beneath the groaning zephyr murmuring over the foliage. I hear... It is not like crispy leaves tumbling together, or crispy leaves brushing over the ground, or crispy leaves clinging to branches. It is like... nails being scraped over a blackboard half a mile away.
Or.
Or... something... else.
Scree, scree, scree.
My hands drop from around Julie.
"You hear it, don't you?" she asks.
"No." No. No, no I don't. Only suggestion. Only the suggestion of something else... not something else itself... No.
Scree, scree, scree.
I don't want to open my eyes to that sound.
"John?"
Her voice is quiet. It shakes.
"John, please."
She knows. She can see me hearing it.
"We have to go home," she says.
The hand on my arm, gripping just above the elbow doesn't shake. It squeezes hard, like a frozen clamp. That grip, desperate and insistent, forces my eyes open.
"Don't step on the leaves," she says. Julie never whines, not ever, she doesn't plead or wheed
le. But now, a high-pitched terror-strain is creeping into her voice. "Don't run."
"What is it?"
"They. They live in the trees. They only come out in the autumn, when the leaves are falling. It's their camouflage."
And I thought she was an indoor girl because she didn't like to get dirty.
Our hands are cold, frozen together like ice.
"We should have worn gloves," she says. "They can smell our skin."
We should put our hands in our pockets, and we both know it. But fear has cemented them together.
The house is ahead of us. My strides lengthen.
"Please," she whimpers, "don't run."
I look over at her.
"Don't move," I say.
Our feet freeze to the sidewalk. I extend one hand slowly, very slowly, to her back.
"It's just a leaf," I say, "just a leaf."
She nods, and the tiny movement seems like it will shatter her icy form. The leaf shifts.
The veins of the brown, dead thing sticking to her fleece are too prominent, like those on an old woman's hands. The maple points are too long, like nails.
I blink and a desiccated hand moves another millimeter up Julie's back.
But it is too thin, too brittle. I blink, and it is a leaf again. I start to draw back my hand.
Julie laughs. It is a choke of a giggle that she can't stop; she clamps her hand to her mouth and stifles the noise. Tears are still running, and she is a melting and trembling ice statue now.
The thing on her back moves up another millimeter.
"It's just a leaf," I say.
"The fingers of trees."
I blink.
The leaf is a hand as thin as paper.
Paper... cuts.
I bat out one hand, and the thing flies off of her. We grab hands again. One, two, three steps to the house. Then the door slams behind us.
We stay inside now, during autumn, drinking coffee by a fire like an old couple. We close the curtains and lock the doors while we wait for the winter to destroy the camouflage.