fugue

On the evening of Halloween, Jason held hands with a ghoul beside a pond. Their inverted, elongated reflections walked together upon the water’s placid surface. In the distance, somewhere near the pond’s center, far beyond where their stretched bodies could reach, a fish splashed lightly, flashing its tender white belly. Along the shore, reeds whistled gently as cool fall air nudged them to and fro. No one else walked beside the pond this evening.

Award-winning neurobiologist; groundbreaking research; and of course, Nobel Prize Winner — these phrases repeated in Jason’s head. He remembered late nights poring over spreadsheets of data, his face alight with the pastel glow of an outdated monitor; MRI scans of countless brains clicked through his vision like he had his own internal stereoscope. 

Click. 

The ghoul he held hands with had stopped walking, in fact, to pull out her own stereoscope — a faded red ViewMaster they’d found at a thrift shop together about a year ago. The ghoul was six years old then, and had trembled and turned red as the ViewMaster when Jason surprised her with it the next day. She even smiled. Yet she said nothing. 

“Which one is it this time, Tabitha?” Jason asked.

Tabitha looked up, some of her ghoul makeup smudged around her eyes where the ViewMaster pressed against the sockets. The smudges made her eyes appear to sit at slightly different heights. She held up a luminous green hand and signed, A-L-I-C-E.

“Wonderland,” Jason said, as he took in the surroundings. The setting sun cast livid tangerine swells across the sky and kindled the pond into a watery flame. He loved this place, the way it granted him perspective. Work could wait. His research wasn’t going anywhere. It was time to spend Halloween with his daughter.  

“We’d better get going. You want to get first pick on all the candy tonight, yeah?”

Tabitha nodded, but her face was still pressed into the ViewMaster. 

Click. Click. 

Jason smiled — one of his daughter’s many quirks, she couldn’t leave a task uncompleted if she could help it. It caused her almost physical pain, a trait she inherited from her mother, Victoria. Jason wandered toward shore, letting Tabitha cycle through her stereoscopic disc. He considered her mother’s sudden disappearance a couple years ago, and Tabitha's subsequent development of muteness; for all his accomplishments as a neurobiologist, for all his knowledge (he had traced the entire brain map of her muteness, understood all the connections), he still couldn’t fix it. Neither could the psychologists, nor the psychiatrists, nor the chi healers, nor the spiritualists and psychics. 

Truth be told, he hadn’t wanted a kid — neither of them did. Maybe that’s why Victoria disappeared. But she took nothing with her, not a scrap of her belongings…it was a cold case right from the start. She had gone for a walk one autumn evening, and then, simply ceased to exist. At first there was a huge rush of energy from their families, the police, the community, the symphony Victoria played for — news coverage, everything. But after a year everyone’s attention waned, and after two he got the sense he was pestering the detectives every time he called to inquire if any new evidence had been found. The world revolved through its seasons, but a part of Jason existed in an eternal autumn: withdrawing, tenuous, unfinished. 

Dingy bits of algae and dead, curled leaves drifted across the water, following some unseen current. Jason peered down into the water, and beheld a face unlike his own. 

He knelt to inspect; surely this was a trick of the twilight. As he drew closer, the face rippled into focus: a gaunt, eyeless thing, mouth agape over a throat that was wrenched open, the esophagus hanging limply. He stared into empty sockets that seemed to expand into an infinite darkness.

Jason lurched, and the world fell away from him like an orange rolling off the edge of the dinner table. Slender, delicate fingers with callused tips picked it up and peeled away a long hair.

“I think she likes this orange more than any of her toys,” Victoria had laughed.

In the distance, somewhere near the pond’s center, a fish splashed lightly, barely audible over the clicking of a ViewMaster.

#

Falling leaves dropped gently around Jason. He blinked, as though waking from a dream. He laid in a forest of some kind, with sunlight filtering through a mosaic canopy of browns, purples, reds, and oranges of every hue. Leafy musk permeated the air, and his throat was dry enough to make him cough as he sat up.

Where was Tabitha? 

A yowl warbled through the gnarled tree trunks. It sounded faint, human, and pained. Jason sprinted in the direction of the yowl, crunching through underbrush and snapping off twigs, branches that clawed at him weakly. Louder now, the yowling. Ahead, he saw a break in the trees.

“Tabitha!” he yelled, breaking through the treeline and into a glade filled with golden, swaying grass and smooth white stones arranged in a galaxy-like spiral. The voice could no longer be heard. It came from here, he was sure of it, but the glade was empty. He looked up, his mouth agape. It wasn’t the sun that had been lighting the way, but a preternatural sphere: half sun, half moon, swirling endlessly into itself, flames consuming stone consuming flames. This roiling mass ebbed low in a twilit sky scratched raw with ribbons of violet, splashes of rose, pink, burnt orange, and gauzed with dark gray clouds.

Someone tittered in his ear. He stumbled away, but no one was there. No…something was there, he just couldn’t look at it straight on. From his peripherals, a slender woman’s figure constellated into view. If he looked directly at her, his vision blurred and she disappeared entirely. She was, however, very much there. And she was watching him.

Jason stood, watching at a slant. 

“Where am I? Where is my daughter?” he asked.

The figure giggled, causing its hazy body to vibrate into a kind of static. When it settled, Jason could make out more of it. He knew its face.

“Victoria?”

The figure wisped away like cigarette smoke from a car window that’d just been opened. Menthol. He smelt it on Victoria’s breath during their roadtrip to Nashville. She curled up in the passenger seat apologetically, a lit cigarette crooked between her fingers. She hated smelling up his car and always felt guilty about it, even when he told her he didn’t mind, so long as she gave him a drag.

“Victoria, wait!” He ran from the glade, following the wispy trail as best he could through the forest. At times she’d appear in the distance, ghostly white, her chin inclined toward the canopy, sauntering, only to disappear behind a tree trunk; other times his name was hissed into his ear, but when he turned she’d be out of focus, a blur of static receding deeper into the forest, and occasionally he’d lose her entirely, and have a moment of rest — his forehead glistening with cool beads of sweat, pants torn, stained, and frayed from forest bracken, he’d have the sense he’d forgotten something crucial. But his memory oozed forth and hardened like tree sap, and each time he was on the cusp of something, the yowling beckoned, or Victoria appeared, bathing her ankles in a crystal clear forest stream, or the fragrance of menthol and pine gusted from the swish of her dress just beyond a shrub and pulled him by a hook through the nostril. 

Jason lost track of time and place. He’d pause his search only to snatch ripe red forest berries from the vine and masticate them viciously, their pink juices dribbling down his chin, or to stoop and drink greedily from the burbling streams, then stand and lick his lips clean of a briny mix of water and sweat; if he was lucky he would catch a fish and plunge his teeth into its soft white underbelly, ripping away chunks of flesh before tossing it aside, still wriggling, and continuing on. 

First the urgency, then the name, then the face, then finally the entire memory of his daughter receded, until all that remained was a maddening pressure behind the eyes he couldn’t quite place. 

He continued this way for quite some time. Overhead, the sun-moon roiled. A cool wind caressed the land, bearing with it always a new season that never really was. The trees dropped their colorful leaves in swaths only to regrow them again, every more variegated and resplendent than before. The rot of decomposing leaves nourished fecund soil which fed new life into the forest’s perpetual abscission; it was a place that was ever teetering, losing its balance, rolling downward, drifting softly into an endless autumn.

#

When Jason finally left the forest, he was emaciated. His clothes were tattered, his skin smudged and scabbed. He found himself in a small, empty village, full of compact brick cottages with thatched roofs. As he hobbled through the main street, he noticed fresh pumpkins and leafy garlands bursting with berries and acorns adorning the doorways of the homes. Yet, as far as he could tell, no one else was there. 

He came upon a town square, and sat beside a fountain to rest. Water trickled from a large centerpiece, sculpted into a chrysanthemum in half-bloom. Light and shadow drew over him in succession as the sun-moon completed a revolution above. His mind held nothing now, not even the memory of his frantic search for Victoria. He knew only the single-minded exhilaration of pursuit. 

Jason peered into the fountain basin. His cheeks were gaunt, his hair outgrown and matted, his eyes sunken. A crooked grin tore across his face, and he began to laugh. He leaned back, a full-bellied guffaw gripping his entire body, and before he knew it, tears were streaming out of his eyes. He fell to his knees and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

Something clawed at his skull, something he should remember but just couldn’t bring to the surface, it was agonizing, unbearable. He drew up suddenly, anchored his arms against the sharp edge of the fountain, he’d bash his head open, he’d break this thing out —

A cello fugue lilted through the town. Jason froze. Bach’s Cello Suite No.5. Victoria’s favorite piece to perform; he saw her fingers trembling out a steady vibrato, her bow gliding across the strings. Victoria! That’s why he was here! He remembered now, he had seen her, so long ago — how long had it been? Nevermind, she was here, it was her! 

He tore off toward the music, his spindly legs barely carrying his tottering weight. He rounded the corner of a cottage and she was there: Victoria, seated upon a stump in an immaculate white dress, back turned, elbow see-sawing in and out as she worked the bow, nourishing the air with robust legato. 

Jason shook as he drew near. He could see her clearly and directly now. Would she disappear again if he came too close? How; in a wisp? With a laugh? Or would she simply blink from existence? Maybe she wasn’t really there at all.   

Jason placed his hand on her shoulder. Victoria kept playing, but turned her head slightly, leaning her cheek toward him. He inhaled sharply, brought his fingers up to caress her cheek. He remembered the way her cheek fit his palm; it’d fit this way so many times before — in the dark corner of a haunted house, in a hotel elevator, in the comfort of their bed, beside the dim flicker of a dying campfire, in the hospital bed when she was…

Victoria rose suddenly and kissed him and held him, the way she’d kissed him after the first concert where she’d come to see him play the piano. It was soon after they’d started seeing each other, when he was still a musician alight with the dreams of making a meager living busking and gigging, and she was a classical cellist enrolled in music college with dreams of one day playing in a symphony. They’d joke sometimes about forming a musical duo and traveling from city to city together, staying in one place only long enough to make enough money to get to the next. And though they laughed it off, both of them knew a part of them longed for such a life, money and status and achievement be damned.  

What had happened to their dream? He remembered medical bills stacked on the kitchen table, fights, Victoria in the hospital again, they were there because…he couldn’t remember. A dark sheet had been cast taut over his memories, with a face pressing through in a silent scream. He was so close to hearing it, he just had to grip the sheet tightly, rip it open, see what lay beneath…

“We can finally live our dream now, you know,” Victoria said. “Come, let’s play together. The People are waiting.”

“The People?” 

Victoria grasped his hand and led him to the town square. 

Waiting there, seated in an arc before the fountain, were thirty to forty townsfolk. They wore all black, had pallid skin, and sat ramrod straight in old wooden chairs. Victoria led Jason down the aisle. Each of the townsfolk, men, women, and children, had heads that vibrated and blurred if Jason looked at them straight on, yet when he watched from his peripherals they seemed to be aging, old to young to old again, over and over. Victoria continued guiding him toward the chrysanthemum fountain. Placed before it was a cello, its maple body gleaming in the perpetual twilight, and beside it: a grand piano, pristine black and practically glowing.

  They played for the People, and the People adored them. Afterward, they bowed amidst applause, and retired into the forest where they made love, then fell asleep in each other’s arms beneath the twilit canopy. In the morning they rose and traveled for some time through the forest until they arrived at another town, this one with a smooth, spinning globe as its fountain centerpiece, and its own People. They performed, bowed, retired to the forest to make love and fall asleep, and rose again.

Years passed; they traveled and played, traveled and played, and were thoughtlessly happy. 

#

One morning, Jason awoke to one of the People peeking out from behind a tree, watching them sleep.

“We’ll be playing tonight. Please be patient, and let us rest,” he said.

A little boy stepped out from behind the bush, his face aging and unaging.

“Please sir, I need your help.”

Jason glanced over at Victoria, but she was fast asleep. He could never remember one of the People talking to either of them before. They listened, they applauded, they returned to their autumnal homes, nothing more. 

“How can I help you?”

The boy turned and started through the forest. Jason turned to wake Victoria, but she was gone. 

“Wait!” he yelled, starting after the boy. “Did you see the woman I was with just now, did you see where she went?”

He caught up to the boy, and a silvery frigidness snaked into him, like mercury injected into the veins. His body was overtaken by a precise density. He was moving without his volition. The boy never turned around as Jason’s body followed him out through the treeline, down a plain path and over a hill blanketed in fallen leaves. They came to a stop next to the shore of a pond. 

“I’m so lonely. I wish to play with her next.” The boy pointed down into the water.

A wretchedness welled in Jason’s stomach, unlike anything he’d ever known. Behind his eyes, the old pain roared to life. There were coals behind his eyes, he was sure of it, good God it burned! A face, a dark sheet pulled taut, suffocating…stuck in the sap, trapped in a resinous prison, forever — who was it that screamed, what writhed in amber?

His body was moved closer to the water’s edge. Terror seared through him. His stomach cored out into a fathomless abyss, the pressure behind his eyes split his head apart. 

He peered down into the water. He saw nothing.

Click.

A young girl rippled into view. She was standing near a shore just like the one he stood upon. Her eyes were pressed into a red ViewMaster.

A primal moan echoed from the abyss inside Jason as a horrid face gnashed through the dark sheet pulled taut over its violent scream for so long: a wretched thing, gaunt and eyeless and pallid; this face was his own.

Memories avalanched. Health complications; settling down to get a degree; unplanned pregnancy, the pained hospital delivery; holding Tabitha for the first time, Tabitha clutching his finger in her infant hand; her first words; fatherly pride, unexpected but welcome — embracing and rocking Tabitha at night after Victoria’s disappearance; muteness; Tabitha beaming while holding up her first perfect spelling test; Saturdays at the thrift store where he found her ViewMaster, luminescent green ghoul paint —

Click. 

“Call for her. She’ll listen to you. I’ll bring her here when she’s near.” 

“No! No, I’ll do anything, just don’t bring her here, don’t let her see me like this…” Jason sobbed, “Don’t bring her here! This can’t happen to her!”

Click.

“I tire of you, husk. Now call.”

Click.

Jason screamed, pressing against the terrible weight that had overtaken him. His fingers dug deep into his neck. He squeezed, and wrenched, and the boy cackled as a breeze shook a spray of leaves from the trees of the twilit forest. Jason fell to the shore, lifeless and alone. 

#

Click. Just as Tabitha reached the final slide of the Alice in Wonderland disc, she felt a warmth suffuse her throat. It startled her up from her ViewMaster. A light splash echoed from somewhere near the pond’s center.

“Dad?” she said, looking expectantly toward the shore.