The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Read online

  Oskar could only shrug.

  “As a boy, lying in bed one winter night, I saw strange violet light fluttering through my window curtains. So, I got out of bed and went to the window to look outside. Our house was at the edge of the forest, and the light came from within the trees. As I watched, the light emerged in the form of a hovering globe, large enough to contain a person’s body...and I thought I even saw a body, curled inside it like a fetus in the womb, but it was indistinct because of the globe’s brilliant ultraviolet light. Or maybe the figure was indistinct because it was an unfinished soul, yet to be born into the material world...or else, a departed soul not yet ready for the spirit world. In any case, I was too amazed to feel fear, as this floating sphere moved across the back yard, closer and closer to my window. And then...” The proprietor blew both his hands open.

  “What happened?” Oskar asked, to humor this person whom he now knew to be a madman.

  “The sphere exploded in a blinding flash. There was no sound, and the glass of the window was unbroken, but this was the result.” With both hands, he touched his disfigured face.

  “How do you account for that?” If there were anything at all to it, Oskar thought, he could only imagine ball lightning.

  “I’m sure it was some manifestation that had strayed from Sesqua Valley. It isn’t so far from here.”

  Oskar had to restrain himself from shouting when he asked, “So what is it about this Sesqua Valley?” If his daughter had become obsessed with the place, real or imagined, he now suspected it had as much to do with this man’s influence as Julian’s.

  “People talk of places where the veil is thin, or the veil is ragged with holes, but I see it as a tapestry. Woven into the tapestry is a very realistic, mundane landscape that tricks the eye. But the tapestry is a curtain, and if you reach out and nudge it aside, you’ll find a doorway behind it.”

  “A doorway to where?”

  The proprietor gave a try at a grin, which made Oskar flinch in his guts. “Places like Sesqua Valley.”

  “I’d better go,” Oskar sighed, and he started to turn away. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  As if he hadn’t noticed his guest withdrawing, the scarred man said, “She couldn’t afford buying it, but I let Aliza have a whiff of the air of Sesqua. A free sample, if you will. It’s all I’ve ever allowed myself, after all, and God...the things I saw, just from that one taste.”

  At the renewed talk of his daughter, Oskar wheeled toward the proprietor again, and snapped, “What are you going on about now?”

  The man pointed at an object resting inside the glass display case.

  The object was in itself not so remarkable, and this was no doubt why Oskar’s eyes had merely skimmed over it before. A glass mason jaw for canning, with a screwed on metal lid. Yet on closer inspection, he realized the glass was not tinted with color, as he had at first thought. It was colorless, but trapped within the jar was a faintly stirring smoke or gas, mauve in hue. How was it possible to trap something like that? How long could it be retained? The mauve mist swirled subtly but restlessly, as though it wished to find a means of seeping out of its prison.

  “Julian brought that to me. It’s a kind of fog that appears when new souls are born into the Valley, or vanish from it forever. Much concentrated, it’s the atmosphere...the very essence...of Sesqua Valley itself.”

  “And you let my daughter breathe in some of this...this stuff?”

  “Yes,” the burned man beamed.

  “Yeah? Well, I think you’ve been snorting too much of it yourself. Or something else.”

  “I told you, I’ve only ever had a whiff. I don’t blame you for not believing me, sir, but if you were only to experience it for yourself.” And having said that, an idea obviously occurred to the man, for he then said, “I’ll let you have a taste of it! A gift to the father of my sweet friend Aliza.”

  Oskar was tempted to erupt again, but as he studied the old mason jar once more, he found himself mesmerized by the way this condensed fog churned, turned in on itself, as if billowing in reverse, like an amorphous flower blooming and decaying and blooming again in a never-ending cycle.

  “Let me try it, then,” he murmured.

  “Yes, please do! Here, sit down.” The proprietor dragged over an old wooden chair with an Art Deco design. Oskar did as instructed, while his host went around behind the counter to slide open a panel and extract the glass jar. He came around in front of the counter, set the jar down for a moment, and unscrewed the lid almost all the way. He had to strain at first, so tightly was the lid, with its rubber-rimmed seal, screwed on. Turning toward Oskar, extending the jar, the man asked, “Are you ready, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Open it!”

  The burnt man gave the lid one last twist, uncovered the mouth of the jar, and thrust it directly under Oskar’s nose. He jerked his head back a little, but before he could protest, or ask how he should do this – if he should draw in a big lungful – the proprietor was already snatching the jar back again, clapping on the cover and tightly screwing it in place.

  “That’s...” Oskar began asking, but he never got to “it.”

  When he opened his eyes, it was to find his forward view entirely occluded by roiling mauve-colored fog. So thick, he couldn’t tell immediately if it were close to his face, or if he were observing a wall of clouds miles away.

  Having gained consciousness to discover himself squatting on his haunches, he leaned forward from this crouch and in looking down found that the fog lay below him, too. Vertigo swept over him, as if he teetered at the edge of a skyscraper’s roof, and he jolted back. His spine came into contact with an unyielding solid surface, and he twisted around to examine it.

  Oskar found an immense black column at his back. It appeared to be covered in many layers of blistering and peeling black paint. As he watched, new tears appeared in the black skin, shredded strips falling away into the writhing mist below. But then he realized that at the same time, old tears were healing up and smoothing out. This continuous, seething phenomenon was like an endless process of growth and decay, creation and destruction, occurring simultaneously in an unknowable balance.

  Looking up, he saw shadowy dark limbs branching off from this immense central pillar. Chancing a look down again, as brief rifts appeared in the fog he spotted similar branching limbs below him. It was then he understood that the vast column was in fact a colossal tree trunk, and he was balanced on one of its mighty boughs.

  Though, he considered, maybe this wasn’t so much a tree itself as one great root of a tree, burrowing through a nourishing soil of ether, and feeding something much more vast up there beyond these clouds.

  The restless black bark of the tree or root made no rustling sound, as he might expect, but he did begin to detect a sound from somewhere apparently high above him. It was faint, muffled by distance or the fog or both, but it seemed to be piping music, as from a flute or group of flutes.

  The music inspired Oskar, as if its very intention was to call to him. He was reminded of Julian’s pan flute in Aliza’s apartment. In fact, might that even be Julian playing up there? If so, Oskar needed to see him...talk to him...

  So Oskar looked around him for smaller branches he might use like the rungs of a ladder, in order to climb higher into the fog. He didn’t find any, and the nearest bough was quite a ways above him. At last, though the thought of touching it with his bare skin initially repulsed him, he reached out and found handholds in the sloughing/reforming bark. Hoisting himself up, he dug the toes of his shoes into the bark as well. He pulled himself upward, one hand over the other. At one point, a wound in the bark began closing on his hand, tightening around his fingers like a mouth, so that he had to jerk his hand away violently lest it become trapped. He crawled up, up, until at last he reached that higher bough, and he threw a leg over it, swung himself up and straddled it, huffing from his efforts.

  When he lifted his head to
survey his immediate surroundings, he saw that he was not alone on this titanic tree branch.

  A naked woman crouched on her haunches further away from the trunk than he. All around where she was hunkered, smaller limbs branched off from the bough like capillaries from a major artery, but none of them bore leaves. She held onto one of these thin branches with one fist to help support herself in her perch. The woman’s head was lowered so that her long inky hair fell in curtains to obscure her face. The skin of her body was not just pale, but white as paper. Yet little black veins appeared and disappeared across her bare skin, looking like fleeting swarms of centipedes. Oskar realized it was a phenomenon like the tree bark: tiny cracks opening and just as quickly healing in the whiteness of her skin.

  “You are lost,” the woman spoke from behind her obscuring hair.

  “I’m following the music,” Oskar stammered, trying not to sound afraid.

  “You must go that way,” the woman replied, pointing downward...back the way he had come.

  “But what’s up that way?” Oskar asked her, motioning at the mists above them.

  She lifted her head, and the hair slid away from her face to reveal a beautifully formed nose and mouth, the latter with blue lips, but there was only blank skin where eyes should have been. Yet even as Oskar took this in, eyes did open in her face – not as if eyelids were parting, but more as if entirely black orbs had surfaced in a bowl of milk. There were three of them, the third obsidian eye being in the center of her forehead.

  “That is one way to Sesqua Valley.”

  “One way?”

  The sphinx answered him only with cryptic silence.

  “Who are you to tell me which way to go?” Oskar asked her, trying to sound challenging to bolster his courage. “Which way are you going?”

  “Neither way,” she replied, staring unblinking with her three black eyes. “I am an In-Betweener.”

  “Why shouldn’t I keep climbing?”

  “It isn’t for you.”

  “Maybe my daughter has gone up there.”

  “She hasn’t. I’d have seen her.”

  “Did you see Julian go that way?”

  She tilted back her head to gaze upward. The shifting mists cleared somewhat between Oskar and the woman, and he realized that behind her white body two great wings were folded against her back, layered in feathers the same glossy black as her hair.

  “I know that boy...but he went back to the Valley another way.” She fixed him with her eyes again. “You must return now.”

  “Why?” he demanded.

  The woman’s three eyes sank back into the bowl of milk. She lowered her chin to her chest, and the hair fell in front of her face. She answered, “Because the air returns to your lungs. The blood returns to your brain. Your eyes open to your world.”

  Oskar’s eyes opened to see the terrible and tragic visage of the burned shop owner, hovering directly above his own face. Staring intently into Oskar’s eyes, the man asked, “Are you all right?”

  “My God,” Oskar croaked.

  “Mm,” the scarred man said, nodding in satisfaction. “You saw. You know it wasn’t just some drugged vision...you know it in your gut. Now you believe me.”

  He moved back to allow Oskar to sit up. Oskar found himself on a narrow twin bed, in a room in back of the antiques and curios shop. It had the looks of being the shop owner’s own apartment.

  Oskar lowered his head into his hands – his palms pressed into both eye sockets, his elbows propped on his knees – and sat that way for long minutes while the burned man silently watched him.

  At last, Oskar said, “I never believed there was anything beyond here.”

  “Make no mistake...there is no heaven, there is no hell. Not the way we were taught. It’s nothing like that.”

  “But beyond here...” Oskar said again.

  “Oh yes. Beyond here there’s so very much.”

  “It’s where she wanted to go, to be with him. But she didn’t know the way. Or...or she knew the way, but that one taste you gave her...like the taste you gave me...it wasn’t enough to get there.”

  “I’m sorry,” the shopkeeper moaned, spreading his hands. “If I’d have known what she was going to do to herself, I would have given her the entire jar – free of charge. I swear it!”

  At last Oskar sat up straight, removing his hands from his eyes. “How much do you want for it?”

  “Well, I...” It appeared as though the man now regretted having said he would have given away the mason jar for free.

  “Just tell me,” Oskar said firmly.

  “Uh...so rare a treasure...”

  “I said tell me.”

  “Three thousand?” the burned man whimpered, cringing back a little as if he expected Oskar to explode in wrath.

  Instead, Oskar only nodded thoughtfully and murmured to himself, “She never even thought she could ask me for the money.”

  His sister and his niece did most of the work decorating the funeral parlor for the wake, mounting many of the photos Oskar had found on boards supported by tripods. Aliza as a baby in her dead mother’s arms. Aliza on a tricycle. A bicycle. Proudly leaning on her first car. Oskar ached to see how few of these photos included himself.

  They had also mounted some of Aliza’s sketches and oil paintings. One of these showed a vast black tree swathed in gauzy mauve mist, with a group of diminutive satyr-like beings clambering up its flaying/mending bark. Another painting was a portrait of a young man who was both handsome and odd-looking at once, in an indefinable way. When Oskar had first seen this in her apartment, he had thought it was unfinished because of the boy’s seemingly empty eyes. Now he realized the eyes were not unfinished: they were meant to appear as brightly silver.

  Oskar had with his own hands added only three items to the mementos present in the room. On a small table near the head of the casket he had placed a flute made of slender lengths of bone, a red pinecone, and an odd greenish-stained statuette.

  Oskar and his sister wept in each other’s embrace. His sister, a Catholic, whispered in his ear, “She’s in a better place now.”

  Years ago when his wife had taken her own life, his sister had tried to console him with these same words. At that time he had muttered back to her, “All is nothing.”

  This time, he replied gently, “Not yet.”

  When the viewing hours came to a close, Oskar told the funeral director that he needed a few minutes absolutely alone with his daughter, so he could say his personal goodbye. Of course, his wish was respected.

  Alone in the room, Oskar stood over the open coffin, gazing down into his daughter’s face as if with some expectation he couldn’t fully define. As if she might yet open her eyes. She didn’t look as unnatural as some corpses he had seen at wakes. Those had been mostly old people who had succumbed to wasting diseases, their faces unnaturally packed and painted. Aliza didn’t appear joyful – which was what her name meant – but she did seem to be smiling in a very subtle and enigmatic way.

  Oskar produced the glass mason jar from a pocket of his overcoat, and began unscrewing its rubber-sealed lid. As he did so, he said to her softly, “I don’t know where you are right now, my baby. But I know where you wanted to be.”

  He held the jar close to her face, just under her nose, and then gave its cover a last turn.

  The mauve gas billowed out eagerly, like a genie released from its bottle at long last. The mist obscured Aliza’s face entirely for several moments, like the caul sometimes found covering a baby’s head at birth, before it began to disperse. Oskar held the jar at arm’s length, and he held his breath until the mist finally thinned out and mostly vanished from sight. When he could no longer hold his breath, however, he gulped in a deep swallow of air.

  Opening his eyes, Oskar found he was already situated on that higher branch upon which the In-Betweener squatted, as if he had earned a more advanced starting position as a return explorer.

  “You again,” the woman said, her three e
yes materializing out of blankness. “Lost again.”

  “Not as lost this time,” he replied.

  The entity nodded, as if she could see this. “A few moments ago I saw the woman you asked after last time.” She pointed into the swirling mists above their heads. “She was climbing in that direction.”

  Oskar smiled. “Thank you,” he told her. “That’s all I needed to know.”

  This time he knew better than to try climbing up in pursuit of that constant, distant piping. Instead, he sat on the bough to keep the In-Betweener company for a short time, until his lungs were clear, and the blood flowed back into his brain.

  Curious about the long silence, the funeral director returned to the room fifteen minutes later to find Oskar slumped unconscious on one of the room’s leather-padded chairs.

  “Sir?” the director asked, patting Oskar’s arm. “Sir? Are you all right?” He sounded increasingly frantic. “Should I call you an ambulance?”

  Finally opening his eyes, from which tears had flowed down the sides of his face, Oskar looked up at the man and his lips spread in a tremulous smile.

  “It’s okay now,” Aliza’s father told the man. “She’s found her better place.”

  – For W. H. Pugmire

  THE DOGS

  There were two conditions March needed fulfilled when he entered into his search for a new apartment. One, was that pets be permitted. Some places, he had found, allowed dogs under a certain weight, or only of certain types, excluding such breeds as pit bulls, Akitas, and so on. This apartment building, a former factory in the heart of the city, followed the latter policy, but fortunately March’s dog was a three-year-old retired greyhound, Snow, white mottled with faint brown. His wife had stayed on in their house. She had let him take the dog.

  To determine the second condition, March took a sheet of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it against the brick walls of the apartment he was shown in the old factory, which like his dog had outlived its original purpose. He placed the sheet against one spot, spread flat under his palm, then another. Progressing from room to room, though the third-floor loft was mostly all one large room. The worn boards creaked under his feet as he shifted about.