***
I cannot always tell anymore. It used to be easy, there was a sharp distinction between the two. But the difference has become progressively less pronounced, the distinctions blurred, since Kathy left.
I have no visitors now. They, too, left with Kathy. And if I go into town I am avoided, whispered about, the butt of nervous jokes. Now children tell horror stories about me to frighten their little brothers.
And their brothers are frightened.
And so are they.
And so are their parents.
So I leave the grounds as little as possible. When I go to the store, I load up on groceries and then stay inside my little domain until my supplies run out and I must venture forth again.
When I do make the trek into town, I notice there are names carved into the gates outside of the driveway. Obscene names. I never see the culprits, of course. And if they ever see me coming down the wooded drive toward them, I'm sure they run like mad.
They do not know that their town is on the outskirts. They do not know that my house is on the border. They do not know that I am the only thing protecting them.
The last time I went for supplies, the town was no longer the town. It was the fair. But I didn't question it; it seemed perfectly natural. And I was not disoriented. I had intended to go into Mike's Market when I came to town, but after I reached the midway I knew that the funhouse was where I was supposed to go.
I heard the funhouse before I saw it. The laughter. Outrageous, raw, uninhibited laughter. Continuous laughter. It came from a mechanical woman—a fifteen-foot Appalachian woman with dirty limbs and dirtier clothes and a horribly grinning gap-toothed mouth. She was hinged at the waist, and she robotically doubled over, up and down, up and down, with Appalachian guffaws.
The woman scared me. But I bought my ticket and rushed past her into the funhouse, into a black hole of a maze that twined and intertwined and wound around, ending in a grimy colorless room with no furniture and with windows which opened on painted scenes. The room was built on a forty-five-degree slant and the door entered in the bottom right corner. I had to fight the incline to reach the exit at the top left.
Through the fake windows I could still hear the Appalachian woman laughing.
The door at the top opened onto an alley. A real alley. And when I stepped through the door, the funhouse was gone. The door was now a wall.
The alley smelled like French food. It was narrow and dark and cobblestoned, and it retained the lingering odors of souffles and fondue. There was a dwarf hiding in one of the doorways, staring at me. There was something else in another doorway that I was afraid to acknowledge.
The tap on my shoulder made me jump.
It was the Appalachian woman, only she was no longer mechanical but human and my height and not laughing. With one hand, she pointed down a dark stairway that opened into the ground on the side of the alley. The other hand held a rolling pin. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she commanded.
I stepped down the stairs and it was cold. But that was not the only reason I shivered.
I turned around, intending to climb back up.
The woman was still pointing. I could see her silhouette against the overcast sky above the alley, framed by the stairwell entrance. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she repeated.
I started down.
The hallway was long, extraordinarily long. And dark. Doors opened off to each side, but somehow I knew that they did not lead anywhere. At the end of the hall were two rooms, one of which was lighted, one of which was dark.
I moved forward slowly. On the side, through the other doors, I could hear whispers and shuffling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw furtive shadows, dashing, darting, following. I stared straight ahead.
I grew frightened as I drew closer to the end of the hall, my fear focusing on the lighted room. It wasn't logical, but it was real. I was supposed to turn off the light, but I was afraid of the room with the light in it. The dark room was scary only because it was dark. The lighted room was scary because something was in it.
I reached the end of the hallway and ducked quickly into the darker doorway. I was breathing rapidly, my heart pounding so loud I could hear it. Trembling, I reached around the corner into the other room and felt for the light switch. I flipped it off and—
I was in an Arizona farmhouse with a man and two children I had never seen before but who I knew to be my uncle and my cousins.
I was eight years old. I lived with them.
My uncle looked out the window of the empty farmhouse at the dry dusty expanse of desert extending unbroken in all directions. "Get us something to eat," he told Jenny, my female cousin.
She went into the furnitureless kitchen and looked through each cupboard. Nothing but dust.
"Whoever lived here didn't leave no food," she said. She waited for my uncle's reply, and when he didn't say anything she shrugged and picked up a broom leaning against the wall. She began to sweep some of the dirt out of the house.
We slept that night on the floor.
The next day, my uncle was up before dawn, riding the tractor, attempting to till that dry useless soil, attempting to grow us some food. Jenny was hanging curtains, determined to make the house livable.
So Lane and I went out to play. We walked around, ex-|- plored, talked, threw dirt clods, decided to build a clubhouse. He ran off and got us two trowels, and we started digging. Both of us wanted a basement in our clubhouse.
After nearly an hour of digging in the hot Arizona sun, I our tools struck wood. We dug faster and deeper and harder I and found that the wood was part of a trap door. I turned to my cousin. "I wonder what's under it."
"Only one way to find out," he said. "Open it."
So I slid my hands up under the board and pulled up. A cold chill ran through me as I saw the stairway descending into the ground. The stairway that led to a hall. I turned around and my cousin was no longer my cousin but a grinning, gap-toothed Appalachian woman. "Turn off the light at the end of the hall," she said.
I stood in front of Mike's Market, disoriented. I did not know where I was. What happened to the hallway? I wondered. Where was the woman? It took me a minute or so to adjust. Then I realized that this was reality; the fair, the alley, the hallway, and the farm were not.
And I began to be afraid. For before this, the occurrences always seemed like dreams. Even when they started happening in the daytime, they were clearly illusions juxtaposed onto a real world. But now the illusions were becoming ordinary, the surrealism real.
I was losing the battle.
If only Kathy were here. Two of us could hold the tide; two of us could dam the flood. We might even be able to have some semblance of a normal life.
Now, however, I was alone.
And they were getting stronger.
***
Last night it was the spider.
It had been a long day with no occurrences. At least, no malicious occurrences. I'd spent the day clearing a path through the woods to the pond. The old path had become overgrown with weeds through disuse and inattentiveness. Although the day was cool and even somewhat overcast, the work was hard. And by the time I was ready to quit, I was hot, tired, and sweating like a pig.
I deserved the bath.
I decided to use the third floor bathroom, the small one with just a toilet, tub, and sink in a space the size of a closet. The water felt soothing and good, so I leaned back and relaxed, getting comfortable. I fell asleep in the tub.
When I awoke, something was wrong. The bathwater was still warm by this time but not warm enough to stop goose bumps from popping up on my arm. Scared for no particular reason, I hurried to unstop the drain, then arose from the tub and grabbed a towel to dry myself.