An urban hike is an intimate exposure to the hidden realities of any city. Magnificent and disturbing details come into focus, enriching the insignificant blurs one experiences from the cab of a traveling car. The granular landscape is an existence beyond the scope of normal perception, yet easy to find, if one is willing to stop and look.
My brother Randy has an entrenched hatred for me. It is without a doubt something undeserved. I’m quite reserved and introverted, not one to seek out a confrontation. When he gets frustrated, he gets violent, and in most cases, I am the recipient of that violence. The worst occasion was when he smashed my face against the bathroom wall, breaking the wall tile and my nose, shattering my eye socket. The orbital fracture has healed, but the vision in my right eye is eternally blurred. My mom often complains about having to pay full price for a pair of glasses with only one corrected lens. “It should at least be half off,” she would say. If it was up to me, I would rather wear a patch.
Last Tuesday I heard my brother fuming, cussing and ranting about his history teacher, as he stormed through the front door.
“That bitch!!”
His teacher, Ms. Williams, had embarrassed him by insisting that he identify who the President was during Reconstruction. Randy, after much goading, genuinely convinced himself the he knew the answer, and blurted out, “Thomas Jefferson!” The teacher responded that he was off by fourteen presidents. The entire class laughed. Randy did not like being laughed at. Later that year he would be expelled for punching Ms. Williams in the gut.
I snuck downstairs and left through the basement door. I didn’t have the fortitude to deal with him at that moment. I’m the exact opposite of Randy and I figure that is a part of the hatred. He’s a constant failure in school. I’m a straight A student. He’s eighteen years old and still a freshman. Quite frankly, he’s dumb as hell.
I was thinking of these things, not noticing how far I had walked, submersed in mental anguish. My feet were aching and I noticed I was a good distance from home. I wasn’t sleepwalking, but I wasn’t walking with a purpose either. I awoke and noticed that I was in front of a dilapidated house. The front of the house was buried under overgrown shrubbery. Only the doorway could be seen. There might’ve been two windows, maybe even a hundred windows, but one would never know unless you went inside. The left side of the roof had fallen in, exposing the skeleton rotted framework. The front road was massive; the house was more than a hundred yards from the road.
I was dumbfounded. Mom had routinely driven down this road to get to the hobby store. She as an avid jeweler, constantly making beaded necklaces and bracelets for friends and strangers alike. I had never noticed the house. It was a mystery in plain sight. How much have I missed by simply not looking?
I heard a shrill bark. There was a three-legged dog standing in front of me. It had a bulbous red sore under one of its eyes. It barked several more times and then proceeded to trot off to the broken-down house. I watched as the dog’s size diminished with the distance traversed. He entered through the doorway. There was no door. The dog entered and then a light appeared from inside, dull and faint at first, but growing in size and intensity to a point where the light cascaded through the shrubbery, and then in an instant, disappearing. The house had a darker appearance thereafter.
I was drawn to the phenomenon of what I had just witnessed. I had to figure it out. Did the dog explode into a mass of dissipating light? I tentatively made my way towards the house. The sun was fading fast, falling behind the distant trees. I would step forward, stop, think about turning around, and then step forward again. This pattern I repeated until I reached the cracked and crumbled sidewalk. The smell of mold and rot was overwhelming. My nostrils burned with stench. The sky was now pale and vague; darkness was near. A cold wind blew across my neck.
A woman screamed from inside, deep under, below the first floor. It was loud but muffled. Without thinking I ran inside to help. A door shut from behind. The open doorway was no longer without a door. A dark mahogany door had replaced the void. There was no door knob. I was trapped. I heard the scream again, louder and clearer than before. I looked around. It was a small living room with a loveseat and a table against the far wall. There was a set of windows draped with filthy white satin, printed with yellow daffodils. Across one of the curtains, was a splatter of blood.
I left the living room and walked into the kitchen. The floor and walls were yellow. The cabinets were light blue, but spotted with black and green mold. Chairs were overturned and strewn across the floor. Again, there was a pattern of blood painted across the wall to accent the tackiness of the room. The appliances were gone. All that was left was the bare unmatched white floor, the void of what used to exist- a home, happiness, and family to eat and commune with one another. Behind the space that used to be a refrigerator was a door.
There was a little light coming in through the window over the sink. I opened the door. I could see the beginning of the stairway but the rest descended into darkness. I stared, unsure of my resolve. Maybe I hadn’t heard a scream. It was all in my mind. There was no one in distress, in need of help. I started to shut the door, but as I went to grab the knob, something pushed me from behind and into the darkness. The door slammed shut; the light was extinguished. I fell against my shoulder and tumbled half-way down the stairs. I heard glasses crash against the basement floor.
I was lying crooked and broken against a set of wooden stairs. I could feel a draft coming up from below and felt that my head was hanging in air where a step once had existed. A hand brushed up against the back of my head. I tried to pull myself up, grasping at anything, trying to find the railing. The hand grabbed at my shirt and tried to pull me through the staircase. My shirt stretched tight against my chest. I elbowed back against the force, hitting the step further down, sending a spike of pain through my arm. The hand let go and I fell further down the stairs. I crawled and felt my way to the bottom. I felt I was safer on solid ground.
I heard the scream again, intense and directly beside me. A small ball of light became visible in the middle of the basement. It expanded outwarded and I saw a woman lying face down on a table surrounded by a group of people, or what I thought was people. As the light became brighter, I saw that the people were only floating torsos, with no legs. They were suspended in midair, their backbones hanging down through their bodies. Their faces were absent of emotion or life; eyes black and bulging. They encircled about the woman and began speaking in unknown language, or at least unknown to me. It didn’t seem intelligible.
The ones with their backs turned towards me I could see had a huge tick like creature fastened to the back of their necks. One of these creatures unborrowed itself from its host and leapt to the floor. The torso fell to the floor and rolled over on its side staring directly at me. The blackness in the eyes faded. Her eyes were astonishing. A mutilated corpse with beautiful green eyes.
The creature crawled across the floor and up the table. It latched onto the woman’s neck. Her body shook violently for a few excruciating minutes and then stopped. The creature’s body moved up and down, growing and ballooning, filling itself with blood. The woman levitated in the air, her legs dangling lifelessly above the table. She lifted her arm as if controlled like a puppet and pointed at me. The torsos turned and looked at me. They chanted.
One of the torsos floated over and handed me a daffodil. When I looked up, I saw that it was my brother. He smiled and floated back over to his spot in the circle. They all turned back toward the table and the newly infected, or initiated woman and began chanting again. They bowed their heads in reverence.
The door to the kitchen opened. I ran up the broken steps and through the kitchen to the living room. The door was gone. My path was clear. I dashed through the opening and ran out onto the grass. Up ahead was the three-legged dog. It trotted back toward the street. I followed it. When I got to the street the dog turned back and ran back into the house.
It took me an hour to get back home. I unlocked the door and walked into the house. Randy was asleep on the couch. The television was loud and obnoxious. I went over and shook Randy. He opened his eyes. They were black as coal. I handed him the daffodil and went to bed.