Shadows Out of Time

Suddenly Clifford’s “broadcast” is interrupted by crashing underbrush and the terrifying apparition of a wild-eyed, wildhaired, and wildly bearded old man in a torn black robe who grabs hold of Thomas by the front of his jacket, lifts him off the ground, shakes him, and screams incoherently, saliva flying, so that Thomas can only make out a few words, something like “I’ve seen! Don’t! Don’t let it start! No! Don’t begin!” Thomas is screaming himself and struggling, too, but Clifford, for all his self-absorbed pedantry, does not panic. He hits the stranger over the head and shoulders several times with a heavy branch until there is an audible crunch, which must be wood breaking because the black-robed figure disappears down the hillside, still shouting, arms waving, not visibly impaired.

After that, the two boys sit side by side on a large boulder, breathing hard. Thomas whimpers softly. Clifford, who is too embarrassed to admit he’s peed in his pants, can hardly berate Thomas for being a sissy. After all, he, Clifford, is supposed to be the hero of the day.

What they finally decide to do, or at least Clifford decides and Thomas goes along with it, is not to tell their parents, for fear that they might never be allowed into these woods again. The danger is, after all, past. The “fucking lunatic” (Clifford’s term) must have been a random drunk, bum, hobo, or whatever, who continued down the hill, ran out into the highway, and either got hit by a truck or taken away by the police, and, in any case, would not be coming back.

So it is that a few days later, after the usual round of vacation activities, a trip to the local lake, to the beach, to the art museum in Rockland, lots of stops at roadside antique shops, etc. Clifford and Thomas find themselves again decked out for insect collection, ascending the same hills, minus the lunatic this time, and their explorations really hit the jackpot.

They come upon an enormous house in the woods, a mansion, a castle, like something out of an impossible dream, a pile of gables and turrets and towers and gaping, dark windows that seems to cover the entire ridge line and extend beyond it — definitely not what you expect to find in the Maine woods. Oh, crumbling farmhouses are common enough, abandoned by dirt-poor farmers a century ago who broke their backs hauling stones out of their fields to build stone fences along the edges (commoner than even the farmhouses), only to die of exhaustion or give up in despair when the wretchedly thin soil yielded nothing. The boys’ mother actually encouraged them to enter such houses to look for antiques. The prize find so far was a Revolutionary cut-tin lantern. Runner-up was a crate of magazines from the eighteen hundreds. Sometimes there were bottles or dishes.

But this is on a whole different order of magnitude, a massive combination of mountainside and edifice and ruin, covered with vines, with trees growing through the roof in places, so that it sometimes looks more like a natural formation than a building; or, in Thomas’s fancy at least, like an enormous monster sleeping there, waiting, very possibly, for him.

Clifford, for once in his life, is almost speechless, and can only say, “Holy shit…”

But to Thomas, the place is calling out. It is like something out of a dream, something vast and thunderous, arising, breaching like a leviathan from the depths and darkness of lost memory, something he is already a part of, so that climbing the cracked and leaf-strewn steps and pushing open the heavy front door is like yielding, allowing himself to sink without resistance into that black abyss where leviathans lurk, and it seems the right thing to do, something inevitable, even as, far away, he hears his brother yelling, “Hey! I wouldn’t do that if I were you!”

The door swings open in absolute silence and the darkness swallows Thomas up, and that is the last we shall hear of Clifford other than to say that when Thomas Brooks, an ordinary boy with an ordinary name, vanishes from human ken forever, his brother cannot account for what happened. When the story of the “tramp” slips out bit by sobbing bit, the conclusion is that maybe it was Clifford who was hit on the head a few times and got mixed up. Nevertheless, Thomas is gone. Milkcarton photos, reporters, tabloids, all are without result except to generate publicity for professional psychics, who can’t find Thomas any more than the police can.

The hilltop is searched, of course. There is no mansion, castle, palace, or even a ruined farmhouse. So the family never vacations in Maine again and Clifford grows up to be a particularly obsessed entomologist.

The end.

II

But that was not the end. It’s not that simple.