The Other Place

(CW: Death of a loved one)

The Other Place

“He went down that way, James.”

           I didn’t bother asking how this man knew my name. I was too busy trying to slow my breathing. Trying to slow the beating of my heart. Trying to tell myself that what I was seeing was normal, that it was all okay and that I hadn’t had some sort of Carroll-esqe break from reality.

I tried—as hard as I could—to tell myself that having this conversation with the man pointing down the mossy, red-bricked path was completely normal. That the only thing odd about him was his three-piece suit, a ratty, fern-colored velvet get up that would have been at home in one of those British melodramas my wife used to binge watch.

Sure, maybe I was put off a bit by the frayed cuffs and the heavy stains around the knees and elbows. And maybe I was being overly judgmental about the ragged collar on the man’s dingy white shirt. I am a bit of a neat freak and normally those things would really get to me.

           I mean, sure, the cut of the suit was maybe a hundred- or a hundred-fifty years out of style, but what did that matter? Style is some sort of weird merry-go-round, right? Fashion comes and goes and swings around in a swash of ever-changing calliope music and language and, well, personal preference, I suppose.

           Hell, I was standing there in front of the velvet-suited man dressed much the same way I’d dressed on a daily basis as a 90’s teen—faded jeans, one of my old, black t-shirts, and a pair of dirty gray Chucks that had just under a million miles on ‘em.

           So, yeah, it’s safe to say that while I noticed the man’s style, it wasn’t exactly the real focus of the weirdness I felt when he spoke.

           The problem wasn’t the little wagon the man was toting behind him either. As a father, I could explain that away just as easy as pie. I’d done the same thing loads of times, back when Finn had been really little.

           Quick jaunt to the supermarket on Plum Street?

           I’d toss Finn in the wagon and take a nice, leisurely five-block stroll from our house on New York Avenue to pick up eggs or milk or bread or whatever.

           But the man in the fern suit did not have a child in the wagon.

           He had a machine.

           A small, iron gadget with dark, well-greased, whirling gears and large, clicking lugs and two of those clear-glass Edison bulbs my wife had liked sticking out either side of the contraption.

           I watched the gears roll, smooth and steady and almost noiseless in their rotation. I saw the lugs move, ratcheting on and on, clicking and grinding and almost as noiseless as the gears. I watched as the lights switched on and off, stuttering each time before jumping to brilliant, amber life. I even watched as this little pipe on top of the contraption—no more than eighteen inches in height—began emitting short, small puffs of gray-white smoke.

           For one brief, insane moment, my mind believed that the little machine in the wagon was breathing for the man in the velvet suit.

           And I could even explain that away.

           It would be odd, for sure, but not without precedent. Iron lungs had been a thing, after all.

           But even that wasn’t the true source of my, well, shock, I guess you’d call it.

           Not even close.

           The true source of my shock was the fact that the man who’d just given me directions did not have a head.

           At least, not as I understand the term.

           From toes to neck, he was just as normal as could be. He sported a pair of well-loved, round-toed, coffee and cream ankle boots, and the ratty, fern suit, which appeared now to have been patched in several places. The vest, on closer inspection, seemed to be a deep, maroon tweed, complete with a golden chain which looped through one of the buttonholes before disappearing into a small pocket that just had to hold a watch of some sort. There was the dirty linen shirt and the collar that should have been stiff. There was a brilliant purple bowtie hanging roughly in place around the collar.

           And above that? Where the neck and skull and mouth and eyes and ears should have been?

           There was a wrought-iron gas lamp.

           That’s right.

           A lamp.

           An elegantly twisted piece of black iron rose from the collar and split into fore and aft segments. The aft segment curled and curved in on itself. The fore section made a larger, more looping version of the same curl before ending in a small shackle and hook and leaded-glass lamp with a nice, warm glow flooding from within.

           “No more than ten minutes ago, I’d say,” the man said. “Came racing through in a great hurry, James. With his hair on fire, if you know what I mean. Nearly upset my wagon.” The man turned his shoulders and pointed down at the little, puffing machine with a thin, gnarled hand.

           “I’m sorry,” I said.

           The shoulders shrugged and the lamp at the end of the twisted piece of iron swayed gently. “It happens, James. Especially with young ones.”

           The man’s voice was low and even and…smooth. Like my great uncle Henry’s voice. Not his regular voice, I mean. The one Uncle Henry used on stage, when he and his band were busy crooning.

           “Did he say anything?” I asked in spite of the strangeness.

           I didn’t get an answer at first. Instead, the man bent over the machine in the wagon and began tweaking a few small, brass knobs and levers. When he was apparently satisfied, he pulled himself back upright.

           “There, that’s better,” he said.

He turned, looking at me, I suppose.

“You had a question?”

I nodded. “The kid, Finn, I mean, did he say anything?”

The lamp swayed more as the figure nodded, a gesture that started at his shoulders. “He didn’t really stop to talk, you know, but yes, I believe that he was yelling something as he went by.”

“What?” I had to resist the urge to begin racing down the path. It was hard work, that. Finn had a good ten-minute lead on me. Closer to fifteen now. And whatever he had been yelling as he raced by probably didn’t matter all that much. But, still…

“What was he yelling?”

“I’m going to find her again.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s what young Master Price was yelling as he went tearing by. That he was going to find her again.”

My desire to race down the path ended with those words, replaced by…

Hell, I don’t know…

A gut-wrenching, soul-crushing emptiness? Anger? Love?

All of it at once, I suppose.

Its hard to describe how I felt in that moment, when I heard the man speak those words.

He’s going to try to find her.

Again.

Jesus.

His mother.

My wife.

Evelyn.

A woman we’d buried just twenty-four hours earlier.

He’s trying to find her, my mind screamed.

And he’s come here to do it.

One moment he’d been in the house, in his room, the one just above my little home office. And then?

I could still hear the back screen door scree-ing open and bouncing and rattling shut.

And Finn had been off. Down through the dead and browning backyard and through the forest of leafless trees that made up most of our property in Burdock.

He’d raced to the Twins.

That’s what he called them.

The Twins.

A pair of hoary old oak trees—massive ones—near the back edge of the property line.

The Twins were a doorway of sorts. At least, that’s what Finn had been trying to tell me for most of the past year. A doorway that led to somewhere else. Someplace special. A place he’d said he had discovered right about the time Evelyn had started getting really sick.

“It’s a portal, dad. A door!”

He’d begged me to go with him. To go see for myself. Begged for months.

“You come out on this path, dad. And you take it down, out of the hills. To the first town. There’s a man there. A doctor. And the doctor says…”

Fanciful stuff, that.

The doctor says he can help mom is what he’d said. The first time. The second time. The fortieth time. Unable, even at the end, to let go.

I stood there on the path I hadn’t believed in, right next to the velvet-suited man with the gas lamp for a head, remembering the one time I had gone with Finn, down through the trees and to the Twins.

It had been about a week earlier, maybe thirty hours before Evelyn had closed her eyes and passed into whatever world is next for us sad-sack human beings. I’d walked out the back screen door with Finn. I’d followed him into the woods and we’d picked our way through the tangled underbrush and twisted thickets, getting poked and prodded and snagged and listening as the dry carpet of twigs and leaves crushed and cracked beneath our shoes.

He'd taken me all the way to those massive oaks and I’d done exactly what he’d asked. I’d stood in front of them, holding his hand, and walked right on through to the other side…

And we’d come out exactly where I knew we’d come out, four good-sized paces from a small, bubbling crick and about thirty from the overgrown service road that marked the back of our land.

I’d looked down at him then, had seen the scrunched up look on his face and the bits of branch and twig and leaf stuck to his clothes and in his dark brown curls.

“Sorry, buddy,” I’d said, not really knowing what else to say.

He’d looked up at me, confused and not all that far away from tears. “We’d didn’t do it right.”

He’d let go of my hand and he’d circled back around the oaks. He’d stood between them. He’d looked at me. And then he’d tried it again.

And again.

And a third time.

Ten more tries in a few minutes.

He’d just kept on going, circling around and marching his little butt right between those trees.

And each trip had ended the same as the first.

He’d stop.

He’d look around.

And then he’d look up at me.

There’d been hope, at first, in his little freckled face. I’d seen it there, just as plain as could be. That childlike confidence that all parents wish was indestructible. The ‘it’s gonna work this time’ kind of hope.

But then…

Jesus, man.

I’ve survived a lot in my forty-odd years of life. I lost my last grandparent when I was just about Finn’s age. I lost both parents long before I hit the big three-oh. Mom died in one of those freak car accidents that really was just bad luck. And Pop blew his own brains out just a few months later after deciding that living without mom was a burden he wasn’t outfitted to shoulder. Two of my best buds from high school had bought the farm over in Iraq. Jake got himself tagged by a sniper’s bullet in 2005 and Ryan had driven his hummer over a roadside IED in 2007.

I’ve seen a lot. Been to more than my fair share of ERs and funeral homes.

But I’ve never seen anything that ripped me up inside nearly as bad as watching hope die, live and in color, on the face of my nine-year-old kid.

“Sorry, dad. I thought the doctor could help…” His voice had drifted off, his eyes had started to tear up. He’d had to bite down on his bottom lip to stop it from quivering.

And I’d done the only thing that I could think of right then. I’d squatted down and bear-hugged the kid. I’d wrapped my arms around him and held him as tight as I could manage as his trembling evolved from a barely contained shaking to great big earthquaking sobs and wails.

And throughout it all, Finn had kept mumbling, through the tears and screams and sobs and snot.

“I thought he could help her.” That’s what he’d said.

He’d believed it, too.

Believed it with every fiber of his seventy-pound being.

He’d believed in that way more than I’d believed in his magical doorway through the Twins.

And that was, as it turned out, the key.

Believing.

He’d needed a place, a happy, safe space, where he had no troubles. Where there was nothing to worry him. A place where his mother was not being eaten alive by the cancer her doctors had diagnosed after weeks of feeling ‘just a bit off’.

Finn believed in the place beyond the Twins and it was there at his beck and call, ready to provide him with whatever it was that reality was denying him.

Finn believed.

He believed and this place, whatever or wherever it was, sprang to strange life.

And that’s how I’d finally gotten through.

I believed.

Because I needed to.

We’d been at the house and Evelyn’s brother Archie had gone upstairs to talk to Finn and next thing I know the back screen door was banging and Finn was racing for the tree line.

If I’d stopped to think about it, I’d probably have asked Archie not to go upstairs. I don’t blame him for trying, but it’s unlikely Archie came within a football field of saying anything even remotely comforting. Not really his fault though. He’s a Marine. He’s been a Marine since the day he’d graduated high school and his idea of comforting probably involved some variation of ‘get up, rub some dirt in it, and keep moving forward’.

I’d chased Finn down through the woods and I’d raced right between those big honkin’ trees without pausing and…

…I’d popped out of the gray nastiness of a late Maryland fall drizzle and out into a dazzlingly golden summer day, on the redbrick path, at the edge of a forest populated by impossibly large oaks and birch and maples.

I’d felt my heart race at the sight, loads faster than it had been bumping along during my mad dash from the house.

The path I’d found myself on led, just as Finn had claimed, down through hills of foot-tall emerald grasses and to a small village that was only barely visible on the distant horizon.

I’d taken no more than three steps when I’d realized that the man with a lamp for a head was standing off to the side, brushing bits of dirt from his knees and closing the front cover of the gas lamp.

“You should get going, James,” the man with the gas lamp head was saying.

I looked at him and saw that the chain attached to his tweed vest did indeed have a watch on one end. He peered down at it, popped it back in its pocket, and straightened his velvet jacket.

“And I had better get going,” he said. “The missus will be worried.”

I started to walk off down the path when he stopped me, his hand on my shoulder and surprisingly strong.

“That child of yours…”

“Finn?”

“Yes,” he said. “Finn. He is in danger here, James. In grave danger.”

“But…” I don’t know what I was going to say. Danger? How could Finn be in danger here? Those seem like obvious questions to ask. They just never came out of my mouth.

The man with the gas lamp head leaned in close, the light in his lamp dimming ever so slightly. His voice shifted, changed to something less booming. Something more like the hiss of some venomous serpent.

“The Visk is coming, James. The Visk is coming and the Visk does not brook interference…”

He let go of my shoulder and pulled himself erect. The flame in the gas lamp head grew large, flickered, and went out with a small puff of black smoke. The little machine in his wagon sputtered, squealed, and screeched to a halt, the bulbs on both sides extinguished and the tiny smokestack trailing only wisps.

I backed away from him, my heart pounding again.

I turned.

I ran.

Down the path.

Heading for the village in the distance. And Finn.

With the gas lamp man’s words racing after me.

“The Visk is coming, James…”