UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 6

November arrived and began picking the leaves off of the trees. After a week, the woods looked skeletal and naked, shivering silently in the cold. Frost lay upon the lawn each morning, glittering in the pale sun, and the rim of the pond froze. I stood there one morning wondering where the frogs went each winter, missing their nightly chorus of peeping voices. The yard seemed so quiet without them.

The days seemed old and tired, surrendering the reins to long winter nights. When the sun did bother to show his face, he remained low on the horizon, too exhausted to climb into the sky. Most of the time he remained hidden behind a gray and featureless sky, providing a little week light before allowing darkness to fall. As the weeks ticked past, the hours of light grew rare and precious.

Denise and I watched the skies like the cast of a 1950s saucer film. But the invasion we anticipated was not an armada from Mars. Daily massings of heavy, dark clouds were beginning to threaten snow, and we wondered when the first wave would begin to fall.

And as The Anniversary approached, Denise also began to watch my face. I, in turn, frequently stared at the Bend in the Road.

November 16^th came again, as it did each year. Yet that year, I was there, not light years away in Manhattan. The night before I dreamed fitfully, tossing about in my sleep. In the morning, I was up before the sun, watching the darkness slowly retreat.

After a bitter cup of coffee, I stood out on the edge of the lawn, staring across the field. Above, the sky was a low-hanging ceiling of lead. I could feel the weight of it pressing down on my shoulders. The pines were whispering to each other, and without any conscious thought on my part, my feet just carried me there.

I came down across a field of fallen hay, away from the house. Scrabbling over a low stone wall, I slid down a short, wooded slope, my feet unsteady on the carpet of dead leaves. The trees gave way abruptly to the road, and just across the way towered an ancient maple, its naked arms holding up the heavens.

The scar was still there, cut deeply into the truck of the tree. The bark had partially grown back, but it still looked vicious and ugly, a twisted bite taken by metal teeth. I kneeled, pressing my fingers against the wounded wood. My own heart seemed loud in my ears.

I closed my eyes, and opened them fifteen years earlier.

Maria was preparing to leave, and so we shared an early Thanksgiving together. November was the month that winter drove her from the mountain, and it was always a somber occasion, particularly in those later years. Cancer had already consumed both my grandfather and uncle Stephen, and we were the only family Maria had left. So the final weekend of her “mountain season,” we always drove up to share a final, quiet dinner, toasting the occasion with her homemade dandelion wine.

We left on a Sunday, late into the afternoon. My mother was angry because she had made brunch plans for Monday morning and had hoped to get home early. But my father had been delayed—as always—by a long list of Maria’s last minute chores.

The clouds had been circling all day, and as evening came, they began to weep an icy rain.

“I swear, Mike, she waits until the last minute intentionally just to keep us there longer.”

I sat in the back seat, not really listening to the latest incarnation of my parent’s continual Mountain Hollow argument. My head was pressed against the window glass, thinking about how little separated me from the cold rain.

“She’s seventy-three years old for Christ’s sake,” my father replied, lighting a cigarette. “She forgets things.”

“She’s always been that way. And you’ve always been more like her groundskeeper and handyman than her son. She treats us all like house staff.”

“Not this again.”

Then we entered the Bend. I was watching the wipers sway back and forth across the windshield, seeing little of the gray world beyond the glass. I was thinking about Lisa Dryer, the apex of my seventeen-year-old ambitions. My mind was barely even there, in the car.

“Well, it’s true,” my mother insisted. “It has always been ‘Mike could you fix this’ and ‘Mike could you do that.’ And while we were always doing the grunt work to keep the place running, Stephen and Ellen were always sitting around with her acting like plantation owners. You’d be fixing the reservoir and your brother would be drunk on his Manhattans, playing that stupid piano. And now she still treats you like a servant.”

“Damnit, Jackie, could we not do this now…”

I could never clearly recall the next twenty seconds of that day. Even now they remain for me like a nightmare only half remembered, a dream that changes in small and subtle ways every time you re-examine it. And I have re-examined it, countless times.

I saw a movie once, about a man who walked away from a plane crash where everyone else died. I could relate immediately to the strange guilt he was feeling that he was alive and the others involved were not. But that’s really all just part of the mystery of life. Sometimes you are spared, only to have worse grief later in your life. If there’s a pattern, it’s not an easy one to predict. It’s beyond our eyes’ ability to see.

Later, I told the police it was a deer, and sometimes, when I close my eyes to remember the accident, I actually see a deer—a large buck diving out from the woods into the pool of our headlights.

But the problem is, my father had hit deer before. You could barely avoid them in that part of the country. You learned to be cautious, particularly as dusk, watching the sides of the road for the green pinpoints of their eyes, reflecting your lights. You slowed down when you saw them, in case the panicked animals decided to dart out into your path.

Most of all, you learn that if one does get in front of you, the best thing to do is to hit it. It’s better to injure the animal, and damage the car, than to swerve off the road and get yourself killed.

My father knew this. He would never have jerked the wheel like that—my mother would never have screamed like that—just for a deer.

It all happened so fast. Dad snapped the wheel so suddenly that the car began to fishtail in the muddy gravel, tires spinning uselessly. The car lunged forward, leaping off the road. For a few seconds, we were weightless, hurtling through open space.

My face slammed into the back of my mother’s seat so hard I saw an explosion of colors and blackness before my eyes. My nose broke and I tasted blood. In the wake of the impact, we had come to a sudden halt, and the engine was making a terrible sound like a child’s scream. I skipped in an out of consciousness, like a stone skimming over the surface of a pond. I remember wondering why I felt the rain on my face.

I remember Maria’s voice, shouting my name. I remember the ambulance ride. Then, I remember nothing until waking to find my grandmother at my bedside, and I learned my parents had died.

Fifteen winters later, a thirty-two-year-old man stood from beside the tree, and walked to the middle of the road.

I stood there for a long time, motionless, listening to the wind in the trees and watching the sky lighten. I was standing exactly where he had been standing all those years before

Dad would never have swerved for a deer. But he would have swerved to avoid hitting a young man, little older than his teenage son, standing pale and dazed in the middle of the road. And concentrating, I could almost see him, looking as if he had just stumbled out of an accident of his own. Shock made a mask of his features, and his hair was wet with mud and rain.

No.

It was a deer. I saw a deer.

Shivering, I turned my eyes up to the sky, suddenly wondering how much time Denise and I had left before the first snow.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 5

Later, in bed, I lay awake, staring up at the ceiling. Around one in the morning, Denise rolled over and propped her head up on her arm.

"I heard the two of you telling ghost stories there, in the dark. Is that why you can't sleep?"

I sighed. "I was wondering if you heard."

"You don't actually believe in any of it, do you? I mean about the mountain being dangerous?"

I shook my head.

"It's tragic, certainly, but not frightening."

"Yeah, but I understand where the fear comes from."

"You do?"

I stared up at the ceiling. "Sure. People died here, and they died badly. That kind of thing makes people uneasy about a place. That's where ghosts come from."

"It's nonsense."

"Well, yeah, but it's also human. Tonight, watching Elijah leave, I realized that I was afraid of that stupid bend in the road…really afraid of it. Hell, I break out in a cold sweat every time I drive around it. I'm just as afraid of it as Ellen Conkley was of the mountain."

Denise snuggled closer, and put her head on my chest. "That's different. Your parents were killed on that bend. Of course it makes you nervous."

"Yes, but it's just a stretch of road, and this is just a mountain. But when people die somewhere…those places become haunted for the people left behind. It's easy to laugh at old Ellen, because it was a long time ago and we never knew the Schroeders. But the bottom line is that her uneasiness and mine are basically the same."

She seemed to consider this. “You are awfully philosophical for one in the morning.”

I chuckled.

Then, after a few moments, she confessed. "You know, I dreamed about them…the Schroeders."

"Really?"

"Sort of. I mean, I dreamed I was out in the garden, and when I looked up, there was a family standing there under the oak tree, watching me."

"How did it end?"

"I don't remember," she said. "But I wasn't afraid. Just sad."

The very next day, the entire shape of my life changed.

Denise returned from her new doctor beaming and nervous. “There’s no turning back now,” she said.

For the first few seconds, my mouth went numb and my brain was tripping over itself. Shock, terror, and elation were swirling around my head. My heart jumped into high gear. Then I grabbed her and we held each other for the longest time, crying and laughing.

“I’m going to be a father,” I said, finally. It hadn’t really sunk in.

“Well, technically…” Denise began, patting her abdomen, “…you already are.”

I kissed her forehead, and pulled her to me. “How can I be so scared and so happy at the same time?”

She laughed. “I know the feeling.”

“I love you, Denise. More than anything.”

“Now don’t get all sentimental on me,” she replied. “I’m the one whose supposed to get all moody the next few months. You’re supposed to remain strong and wait on me hand and foot.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sounds good to me.”

And I meant it. I had never been happier.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 4

Elijah Conkley was forty-two, and still lived alone with his mother. I had heard the rumors about him in town, and about the falling out he had with John Hambly over his relationship with Hambly's eighteen-year-old son. But I didn't waste a lot of time thinking about it. Conkley had always been very helpful to me, and generous to a fault. Even if the rumors were true, they had no affect on my friendship with him.

About eight years ago, the Conkley's lost their house at the base of the mountain in a fire. Halfway up the hill was a second Conkley home, where Ellen Conkley had once lived as child. After the fire, Elijah and his mother had refurbished that house, and now were our closest neighbors.

In late October, Elijah came up the hill in his old pick-up truck to invite the two of us to dinner. He was dressed the same way I had always seen him, in Dickey's work pants and a faded flannel shirt. It was the assigned uniform for his generation of upstate New Yorkers.

He came bearing an apple pie, still warm and cinnamon scented. We accepted it gratefully.

I offered a beer in return, and we sat together in the dining room, beside the wood stove. It was my favorite room in the house. From its wide windows you could look down over the lawn and the orchard, down into the valley below. It was a beautiful view.

"You all settled in?" He asked, tilting back his beer.

I nodded, enjoying the sunset as it spread itself over the hills. "Pretty much. We're all unpacked, at least."

"I have to say I was pretty impressed to see you've mowed the lower fields. Not bad for a city boy."

I smiled. "I had a little trouble getting the tractor started. The thing's got to be at least thirty years old."

"Older, I expect." He turned his eyes towards the view. "I remember riding it around when I was a boy, thinking it was old then."

I finished off my first can. "Another beer?"

"Don't mind if I do."

I excused myself to the kitchen, and rummaged about the refrigerator, returning shortly with two cans of Genesee. "I'm a little worried about the new well. I mean, the house has always gotten water from the reservoir my grandfather built up stream, but we always shut that down for the winter because it froze up. I'm hoping the new well is deep enough to get us through the winter."

"It should be. I don't think you'll have any problems there."

Outside, the edge of the sky had gone from red to purple, and the first stars were beginning to shine. "How about firewood? You got enough to get you through April?"

I nodded. "I think so. Both of the sheds are full. I've been splitting so much wood lately that my arms and shoulders are all built up. It's better than going to the gym."

He smiled, slightly, but in a way that gave me the impression he was thinking about something else. As he sipped his beer, I could hear Denise in her new home office, typing away at the computer. She was now almost two weeks late, and she had an appointment with a gynecologist over in Cobleskill the next day. Neither of us wanted to make too much of it, but we were both hopeful. In many ways that was what this move was all about, finally getting to the business of starting a family.

"Anything else about the place?" Conkley asked quietly. I couldn't read his expression.

"Else? No, not really."

Absent-mindedly, he chewed his thumbnail. "Nothing…strange?"

"Strange? What do you mean by that?"

He said nothing for a few moments, as if sifting through his vocabulary to find the right words. The light had almost completely gone out of the room, leaving only the outlines of objects and his face.

"What exactly are you asking me, Elijah?"

He seemed a little embarrassed. "Nothing, really. Just that no one's spent a winter in this place since just after the first World War. Who knows what you might run into."

I shrugged. "Well, we've got the 4x4, and chains for the tires, so even if no one plows the road for a day or two we should be all right."

Conkley shook his head. "I don't mean the snow. Hell, we know how to deal with snow round here."

"So what do you mean?"

He spread his hands. "Nothing. At least to say, I don't rightly know. My Grandma Ellie always told us to stay off the mountain in the winter. I had to swear to her once I wouldn't come up here past Thanksgiving. She was afraid of it, I think."

I was silent a long while, trying to absorb what he had said. I was thinking of Maria, and a comment she had made once when I asked her why she didn't stay through Christmas. It was a mild year, and there was little snow, but she had been firm about leaving. "The mountain is dangerous in the winter. You should remember that."

I think my silence made him a bit nervous. He forced a laugh to try and lighten the mood. "Then again, that Ellie was a superstitious woman. If you opened an umbrella in the house, or came in the front door and left out the back, she'd box your ears for it. I remember before my sister was christened, Ellie put a horseshoe under her cradle to keep bad luck away. Come Friday the thirteenth, she wouldn't even get out of bed."

I nodded, only half listening to him. I sipped my beer. "Maria once told me the mountain was dangerous in the winter, too. Why do you think they both thought that?"

Conkley paused, looking straight at me. I could feel his gaze even if I couldn't see his eyes. "It's on account of them, I expect."

"Them? Who?"

He turned his head in the direction of the old oak tree. "Them graves. The Schroeders."

"The graves? Okay…now you've lost me."

He sighed. "It's just that they all died up here over that one winter. It was a real bad one, the way my Grandma Ellie told it. They got snowed in up here with no one to help them. When the spring thaw came, the TB had killed them all." The tone of his voice became a little softer, further away. "She made a real horror story of it. Was her dad who found them, all cold in their beds."

He tapped his fingers on the table. "Anyway, no one's spent a winter up here since."

"So what exactly was she afraid of? Ghosts?"

He shook his head. "No, not likely. Like everyone else, I guess she was just afraid of something she couldn't put a name to. Afraid of what happened up here that winter. Maybe, just afraid."

"Afraid of tempting fate."

He nodded. "Exactly."

I took a deep breath. Admittedly, sitting there in the dark, the idea of the Schroeders dying one by one, snowed in, made me feel more than a little uneasy. And it was hard for me to imagine Maria, who had always been as hard-headed and practical as they come, afraid of ghosts. I couldn't help but wonder if there was something else.

But Conkley laughed. "Any way, never mind me. A few beers and I turn into an old woman. To tell you the truth, I've been up here in the winter many times. Used to hunt in the woods all the time. It's just superstition."

I agreed, and we talked a little while longer, about other things, just to clear the air. Then I walked him out to his truck, promising that Denise and I would make it down for dinner the next Sunday.

"Good. I'll tell my mother. She'll be real happy to have more than just me for company."

I smiled. "Okay. Take care, Elijah. Thanks."

He waved, starting his engine. And as I watched his truck roll down the drive, I realized I was holding my breath as he neared the bend. Only as his headlights disappeared around the long curve did I exhale.

I had my own ghosts, I guess.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 3

I found her standing in purple shadows, as the sun fell red behind the hills.

It was the end of our first week living at Mountain Hollow. The house had accepted our presence and seemed grateful to have permanent residents for the first time in its existence. Denise seemed happy too. She had set up her office in about a third of our bedroom, and after spending most of the day there, went out into the fresh air to work in the remains of Maria's flowerbeds. I had seen her out the window several times, trimming the last flowers of autumn. Then, suddenly, she disappeared.

Stepping outside, shielding my eyes against the red-orange glare of the sun, I finally glimpsed her beneath the old oak tree, a shadow moving in a shadow.

The oak leaves crunched under my feet. She had raked a mountain of them off to the side, exposing the dry grass that lay over the graves.

The five of them had slept here, under the oak tree, for years before even Maria came.

Stephan Schroeder returned from the Great War with all his limbs intact, but had lost something altogether different on the battlefields of France. Call it his mind, or perhaps, his spirit. When he came back to his family, he did so two years after the war had ended, shell-shocked and pale. People had told Maria that his eyes had looked hollow and vacant, and that most of his memories were gone. He never spoke, and spent most of his time just staring off into space. There was no explanation given for his long absence. People just assumed he had been convalescing somewhere. In more ways than one, he really had died over there in Europe, and what came back was no longer the boy his family had sent off to war.

He did not come back alone. He brought death with him.

By the time he shuffled up the long dirt road in his threadbare uniform to rejoin his family, he had already lost most of his weight. He was a pale and glassy-eyed skeleton that barely ate and spent most of the day sleeping. At night, sometimes, he screamed, or wandered the starlit fields like a zombie. He coughed a great deal and had trouble breathing. Sometimes he coughed up blood. At first they thought his lungs were damaged by mustard or chlorine gas in the trenches.

But then, his younger sister fell ill with the same symptoms. Agnes, they say, had been a real beauty, but the consumption fell on her like blight. She wasted away much more rapidly, bleeding from the mouth and frequently gasping for breath. Stephan lingered, but death quickly silenced her.

Paul, the youngest, was the next to fall ill. After he died, the parents toppled like dominoes. In the space of a year after Stephan came home, tuberculosis had killed them all.

After the final death, the neighbors had set fire to the house, to prevent the epidemic from spreading. It seemed to work. No one else fell victim after the Schroeders died.

I'm not sure where Maria heard the story, probably from Ellen Conkley, who lived at the base of the hill and had her entire life. But she told me it one summer as we stood there under the long shadow of the oak tree, looking down on the five white stones, neatly lined up in a row. Even then they looked worn, chewed up by time and cruel winters. Now you could barely make out any of the inscriptions, unless you made a rubbing of them. But you could see the dates, and that their lives all ended the same year.

Denise's eyes looked red in the reflected sunlight, and I put my arms around her heavy wool sweater. Together, for a time, we watched our breath form puffs in the rapidly cooling air. My nose started to run.

Then, I noticed the flowers. Denise had laid them neatly upon each of the graves.

She sensed the question in my silence, the way that couples often do. "They seemed so lonely out here, buried under the leaves. I almost felt like they were staring at me all afternoon. So I decided to say hello, and spend a little time with them."

"Maria did that, sometimes," I said. "She'd put flowers on the graves. She said there was no one else to look after them."

Denise nodded. "I guess they are ours now. We've inherited them."

For some reason I thought of my parents, and Maria, lying elsewhere. "I suppose so."

She said nothing, and we watched the sun go down together.

"Let's get inside before we freeze to death," I said.

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 2

September 22^nd was a perfect day.

The leaves had started to turn, and trees enclosing the narrow road up to Mountain Hollow looked like they were on fire. When Maria first came this way, more than sixty years ago, only a narrow, unpaved trail connected the farm to the outside world. There were deep ruts in it, and it had lain unused for so long that high grass and saplings were consuming it. Maria was recuperating in these hills, recovering from a long illness I'd never learned the specifics of but assumed was psychological. My aunt Lila had drown the year before Maria's “illness” began, and the way Maria avoided the subject of her sickness it was clear she felt ashamed off it. So she came upstate for the summer, and spent her days hiking her way to better health. I had inherited her journals, along with the house, and when she wrote of first stumbling across this overgrown path it was almost as if it was calling to her. So she changed direction and followed it two miles back into the hills. That was when she first saw it.

The farm had been abandoned for more than two decades, the fallow fields slowly swallowed up by long banished trees. For some reason, looking at that ruin, Maria had fallen instantly in love. She had come home. Listening to her tell it, Maria hadn't found the farm...it had found her, and in her heart at least she never left the mountain again.

On a day like that day, anyone could see why. Sunlight slanted through boughs of golden leaves as the road wound steadily along the banks of a fast moving stream. The stream bed descended the mountain in steps, forming a long series of clear pools and tumbling waterfalls. All around, the hills rose up defensively, shutting out the rest of the world. There was just you, the forest, and rare glimpses of a perfect blue sky. I had the windows rolled down and the air was that perfect, impossible balance between just warm enough and cool enough to be crisp, the kind of weather you see in a New York autumn maybe just a half dozen days a year. It was beautiful.

But still, I felt that same sick twinge around that final bend.

The road turned unexpectedly and quite sharply there, rising in a great scythe of a curve. It had always been a treacherous thing, that turn. It had taken lives.

As always, Denise watched my expression closely as I entered the bend. As always, I tried to make my face an expressionless mask. As always, my heart pounded and my throat went dry. No matter how many times I drove it, it was always the same.

Then, suddenly, we were free of it. The sky opened up, dazzling. The forest fell back from the house, leaving a large slope of emerald grass. I used to hate that lawn, being left with the responsibility of having to mow the damn thing with my grandmother's ancient push-mower. As soon as Mountain Hollow became mine, I bought a comfortable riding mower for it.

We drove under the gate, with the wrought iron "Mountain Hollow" sign my uncle had given Maria for one of her birthdays. Beyond stretched a long, straight drive, between parallel lines of towering poplars my grandfather had planted decades before I entered the world.

That day, driving up the road, I think I saw Mountain Hollow the way Maria had first seen it, all those years ago. It was only a picture in my head, but it was so vivid it nearly supplanted what actually lay before me.

No poplars then, no white picket fence. Just a forlorn and abandoned ruin lingering under a dazzling summer sun. She must have fought her way through the high grass and tangled briars. The fields would have been full of buzzing grasshoppers and those wild raspberries she loved so much.

The apple orchard was there, then, and the pond brimming with frogs. But the barn must have been collapsing in upon itself, buckling under its own weight, wood rotting and beams exposed. An army of field mice called it home. The empty stables, long deprived of any livestock, might still have been filled with the lingering scent of manure, and gray papery nests of wasps buzzing treacherously in the shadowy corners of the ceiling.

Climbing out of my car, I experienced the eeriest of feelings, something akin to déjà vu. I found myself wondering if, sixty years before, Maria had stood where I was standing now. Had she, in her mind's eye, seen the neatly rebuilt and painted barn, the trimmed lawn, and the ruined stables converted into the mountain cabin that I saw now? As I stood seeing what was, did she see what would be, and did the lines of our vision cross each other somewhere in time?

It was almost like staring at each other.

And nearly in unison, separated by those many decades, Maria and I whispered "I'm home."

UNQUIET SLUMBERS, PART 1

Unquiet Slumbers

Andrew Logan Montgomery

“I lingered round them…listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

-Emily Bronte; Wuthering Heights

Maria had always said the mountain was dangerous in winter.

We never called her "grandma." She wouldn't allow it. She was the kind of woman who insisted she was sixty-eight well into her ninties, as if iron will could hold back time. Until the very end she dyed her hair jet black and flirted with all the local farmers, more Scarlett O'Hara than Vivian Leigh had ever dreamed of being. Mountain Hollow was her "Tara," three hundred acres of empty woodlands and fallow fields that in her mind was some fairy kingdom, a Promised Land that God had led her to. She had spent every summer of her life there for more than forty years, lingering until the last of the leaves had fallen from the trees. Then, that last winter, she lingered too long, and the first snows caught up with her. The doctors said it was a stroke. Later I learned the truth.

Denise resisted the idea at first, but I think she saw the city was slowly killing me. It was her world, not mine. I remember the moment clearly when she gave in, the way women give in when in reality they are just giving you permission. No surrender was involved. We were lying in Maria's old featherbed, all the windows open. Cool mountain air washed over our naked bodies. I remember the frogs singing from the pond behind the barn, their chorus carried in on the breeze. It was one of those moments--moments that never came in Manhattan--where I felt completely at peace. Tranquility had settled over every nerve, and my mind floated serenely on the glassy surface of sleep.

My arm was around her, my fingers twined up in her hair. "We don't make love like that in the city," she murmured, her cheek resting against my breastbone.

I smiled in the dark. "It's the mountain air."

I could feel her smiling too, but only for a moment. "No, it's you. You're happier whenever we are up here."

I chewed on this awhile in silence, listening to the sounds coming in from the dark. There was a part of me here, left behind like old luggage long before, suitcases packed with memories. I was only really complete when I came back here. Outside, the frogs had been joined by an owl. I think it lived in the barn, terrorizing the field mice that nested in the hay.

"Your childhood is here. You spent every weekend of every summer here. Whenever we come up here, you become young again."

Memories turned over in my mind. I can't remember if I smiled or frowned in the dark. "My mom had always hated it, always hated getting torn away from the social scene. But Dad--Dad was the dutiful son. His mother held court here every summer, and he could never say 'no' to her."

"But you loved it."

"Yeah, I did. I do." I thought about all the times I had trudged around through the woods, or slept out in one of the fields under the stars. There had always been a kind of magic in this place for me, and there was hardly any place I could go here were I didn't cross paths with the ghost of my childhood self, or--for that matter--the ghosts of Maria and my parents. Maybe in the end, that was the part of me that was really lived here...all the dead Mountain Hollow had consumed.

We both lay there quiet for a long while, and Manhattan was a million miles away. Outside, on the lawn, stealthy shadows were passing. The deer were coming for the apples again.

"I know I've been pretty adamant about it," Denise began, "but I've been thinking a lot about it. There's really no reason why I can't move my office and set it up here."

Stunned, I rolled over and propped myself up on my elbow. "But could you actually do that? Leave the city?"

She shrugged. "It's not like it's going anywhere. If I wanted to visit, I could always drive down there."

"But you love the city."

"And I love you." She tapped my chest. "But I know that you are miserable down there. You've got too much of your grandmother in you. Your heart is here."

I think one of the deer had stopped outside to listen to us, hearing our low voices out on the lawn. I could feel eyes watching me from out in the dark, inhuman eyes, silent and breathless.

"I've never spent the winter here though.” I felt a twinge then, a soundless, insubstantial dark like a cloud passing across the moon. “Maria always used to say that the mountain was dangerous in the winter."

Denise sighed. "That was before the county paved the road. You said yourself it was impassable all winter long. But since the Conkleys moved in down the hill the county plows in the winter, or at least up to their place. If we moved in, the county could just plow the rest of the way up."

I nodded. "Yeah, but the house could be cold. It's old."

Denise laughed. "Why are you fighting me on this? You can't tell me that you haven't dreamed of moving up here for years."

"You know I have."

"So stop fighting me and let me graciously sacrifice living in the city for you. I'm trying to make a grand gesture here."

I said nothing, but could see possibilities unfolded in my mind.

"Besides, you've been toying with the idea for awhile now. Last year you installed the new wood stove in the living room and had the attic insulated. I'm not blind, you know."

I kissed her. "No one has ever accused you of that."

"So…?"

"So…?"

"So let's give it a shot. If it's too cold, or if I decide I can't stand living in the middle of nowhere any longer, we can go back."

"You're really serious about this, aren't you."

"What part of what I am saying don't you get?" She flashed me one of her devious smiles. "Besides, you've always said the city is no place to raise a kid, and maybe it's time we started thinking seriously about a family."

"A ha!" I laughed. "Now I see where this is going."

Denise shrugged. "We've put it off too long."

I raised my eyebrow. "You're serious?"

"About which?"

"About both."

"Yes…very serious."

Gently, I rolled her over on her back, her skin velvety against mine. We lay belly to belly in the dark, a very familiar heat building between us. "When were you planning on getting started with this?"

"No time like the present."

And we started making a baby.

WRITERS, SHAMANS, AND FOOLS

master shaman, i have come

with my dolly from the shadow side

with a demon and an englishman

Tori Amos, "Sister Janet"

Once upon a time, long ago, I knew this strange kid. His family moved around every year, and he was perpetually the "new kid" in school, reluctant to make strong attachments he knew would be broken before the end of the year. Despite this, he was never really lonely. He had friends no one else could see.

He would wander, often, into the desert; there amidst the scorpions and rattlesnakes the dust would whisper to him, and he heard voices in the wind. The ghosts of long dead Native peoples would tell him their stories. The sun and stars sang to him tales of long ago. A little bit older, his family resettled back east, and the wooded landscape of rural New York was so very different from the one he had grown up in. Still, he would often disappear for hours to wander lost in the mountains, returning from such meanderings starry-eyed, dazed, and slightly out of it. But it wasn't chemicals secretly getting him high. He was just out talking to the trees.

Then of course his family did the worst possible thing you could do with a kid like that. They gave him an old manual typewriter. And parents--let this be a warning to you. If you are concerned about your children dabbling in occult forces, don't worry about the ouija board or the Tarot cards. Whatever you do, keep them away from pens and paper and keyboards. Take away their paint brushes and their clay. Because after they gave the boy his keyboard, he no longer went out to the spirits.

The spirits now came to him.

I have often felt, when I sit down to write, that I should be beating a medicine drum, drawing chalk circles, or chanting invocations. Like any shaman, I am preparing for an out-of-body experience, a journey to the Otherside. My spirit leaves my body and flows through the clicking of the keyboard, channeled to some nether realm where the voices come and tell me their stories. I can lose hours, skip meals, forget to sleep. Screw heroin, alcohol, or sex. No one fully understands addiction the way people compelled to create do.

At times I feel certain there must be some grand celestial waiting room out there, where all the unwritten songs, the unimagined paintings, and the untold tales are all lined up waiting for some poor fool to pick up a pencil and let them out. They are there, whispering, scratching at the walls of reality, waiting to be born. "Come get me. Let me out." Because inasmuch as people concerned with commercial success will tell you something inane like "write what you know," the best stories--the real stories--just come through. They almost seem to be using you as a passage into the world. I won a playwright's competition when I was 17, and I remember the director asking me if I had personally experienced the events in the tale. I hadn't. I didn't know anyone who had. And I had no flipping clue where it came from. All I knew was that an English teacher knew I liked to write, challenged me to enter the competition, and I sat down to knock off a story. There was no plotting. No scripting. No laying out scenes. The voices just started whispering.

I am not a writer. I am a secretary who takes dictation from the ghosts in his head. And thus it is rather difficult for me to be lonely, or to even imagine what lonely feels like. Like any medium, I am not looking to fill the silence, but instead looking for silence where and when I can.