Whither Away So Early

Author's Note: Whither Away So Early

Whither Away So Early is the result of a gothic fiction English course and the theory of gothic space. It plays with a Lovecraft voice that's old enough to be its father, an even older fairytale, and a modern townhome. STET the confined style, reader; confinement is the blood (sherry?) of this story. Further:

Consider nature as oppression and artifice as a defense against oppression. It is natural to be curious and impossible to hide from the natural world what is artificial. A wolf might fool a little girl, dressed as a grandmother, but it doesn’t fool the axe of the lumberjack. Whither away so early, Little Red Riding Hood?

To Nathan. From a scrawling in the drywall.


Caffeinated beyond a biological need for sleep, Nathan, wearing socks, awaited a body temperature that would convince the shedding of his polyester bedspread. In the morning hours that crept toward a Thursday dawn, bedroom walls were the sagely gray of Dorothy's Kansas. Eve had left the television on in the sitting room outside and its malevolent whisper was passing through Nathan's open doorway.

The town-home suite was an unfurnished cement that gave hollow weight to noise and allowed conversations to extend beyond walls; allowed the mystery of human privacy, in unanimous understanding, its broadcasted revelation. Nathan knew, for example, that through layers of gyp-rock that supported his pillow there was a woman who dabbled in acoustic guitar, a stairwell, and a failing marriage. In contemporary flair, the architecture had sacrificed any desire for secrecy. As in many other communities, the lifeblood of Forest Crescent was its stream of gossip, incorporeal in that deadbolt locks and Venetian blinds were useless to ward the jaws of the rumor-mill.

Nathan folded aside the quilt and stepped into the dark on sweaty cloth. In the sitting room there was only a mug that Eve had used to sip the last of a Kahlua bottle before late evening shut her, sleepy, behind the door of the brown bedroom opposite. The television was its dormant, black self aside the shadows of modern furniture that ran the length of the carpeted floor. In absence of its dialogue drone, Nathan located the source of the whispering, like careless led on the surface of paper, as a peculiar white rectangle on the far and vacant wall. He was careful not to approach. It was assumed until now that the two-inch breadth of plaster, angling in the symmetry of an archway, was a fortification of the drywall. Where the graying surface met in a seam, a fresh, white border had been flattened to a length at which it sealed the archway with cement.

Stumbling backward in the darkness of 3:00 am, Nathan toppled a tower of cardboard used recently for storage. Here the steady whisper became an abrupt hush. The silence was cause for a panicked Nathan to cross the unfurnished room in three flighted bounds, lock his bedroom door to the grayscale of night, and plunge into the comforting warmth of a polyester bedspread.

The subtle sound of a toothpick trying its way into the lock of the bedroom doorknob brought Nathan to an upright start of goose-down and reverberating nightmares. It was five hours later and the early autumn light was peeking through the narrows of the window covering.

"Eve?"

"Breakfast." Called the door, making the nuance of an unlocking click.

"Your brother left early. I thought to bring you breakfast in bed." Chimed the voice, lower than his own but with the melody of an experienced song.

Evangela was smooth and lean and cat-like when she stepped into the room, arms balancing the precarious plated assembly of sausage and egg. The lapels of her mock Japanese robe were scarcely fastened by the lazy knot of its sash. In the room of dying plants she could have been a purple lilac, bending toward the crevices of sunlight that would spare the decay of her winter season. A taste, a quench.

“Curse him if he stays late, too. His employer has him leashed.” She ranted, and stepped to the bedside with a rattle of silverware.

"Shit. Thursday, isn't it?" Said Nathan, distracted."Ninon has errands?"

"Groceries." He told her, catching the plate in his lap and pressing a fork into the egg flesh. "You know her and sherry."

Eve spent a time in settling herself on the sofa chair. When she tossed Nathan a mandarin orange, he left the peel and the innards on the window ledge uneaten.
"Awful." She mouthed, disguising the food with a delicate hand over her mouth. "Suppose when I am old and withered I'll have more self respect than her, grace of God be it that I live that long."

"Well, if drunk means happy, Eve. You can't say no to sick grandma."

When Nathan knocked that evening, the shell of something answered Ninon's door in a flannel nightgown and yarn slippers. The preternatural moonlight on his grandmother's porch framed a quaking monster against the liquid woods on every side. Lip curling like a wild thing of the nocturnal world, Ninon made a rabid gesture for Nathan's shoulder, striking him on the red sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt. He stood, and, in the autumn chill, let her try to hug him.

Her name was skewed baby talk for 'Nonna', the Italian word for grandma. She told him once that Ninon made her sound like a French seductress. Fancy, he thought, that a woman so elegant in her graces might die to the rigidity of Parkinson's tremor. Insisting on an isolated life, Ninon's fountain of youth was two bottles and a McCain's frozen cake every Thursday. Chocolate. When she had finished an aided goblet she could move, even speak, without pressure of her crippling biology, and in that wooded refuge there was no one to judge a broken woman's talents in either.

"What is it I hear of this girl you have?" Ninon asked when there had been due time for transformation. The glass of sherry was habitually refilled.

"Eve? Ninon, she's my brother's wife." Nathan said, but he wasn't surprised by her choice of conversation.

"You two look so much alike. Doubtless you could fool her."

"They're married." He asserted. When Ninon spoke again, all suggestion of her illness had been taken by the sweet influence of cheap liqueur.

"You're taller. You're broader. He won't keep her if he drowns himself in books, you know."

"Well, she's no bigger in the belly, so you can give up on great-grandkids for the time being."

This statement silenced her. If it weren't for the look of controlled wisdom in her eyes, Nathan would have thought it the Parkinson's that had done the evil.

“And is there anything new with—?”

“No. No, there’s nothing new. I don’t know. Talk to him yourself.”

“Well, he has a new job, doesn’t he?”

“If he does, he hasn’t said anything. Call him if you like.” Nathan replied. This routine was common practice; everywhere he went there was an overwhelming interest in the menial changes of his brother’s life. It was small talk for the sake and purpose of just that, but it was killing him as it had done slowly for the last six months.

"Next week bring your brother." She told him at the door.

He nodded a liar's nod. Ninon had established every wall with a crucifix, 'house blessing', she called it. If only by proximity, the collective Jesus stare kept him from answering in full.


Where canary grass dunes became the manicured slope of fenced perfection, Nathan pulled a right and continued over the mess of speed bumps. Through the gated causeway was a civilized gathering of taupe structural frills and windows, large, like picture frames. Each dioramic house gave shadow puppet shows to the sleeping valley, their windows the free-for-all dream of any kid with a telescope. It was later than Nathan expected and his own house, lamp-less save for a flicker of light in the sitting room, wore the expression of dormancy. The hour of night provided a treble-sharp corruption to the whistle of his sunroof and to every other sound of the evening.

He stepped across the bark mulch to the entrance of Number Twenty, through the foyer, down the stairwell, and into the basking glow residing there. All was once more slumbering, out of boredom or necessity, and left Nathan to address the scrawling vendetta that stared at him from across the room: a door. Where there had been the white allusion to an archway there was now a distinct doorway, round, medieval and gothic in design. The source of the slow light was a hairline indication that some means of flashlight or lantern had been managed in the room beyond. Did he wake his brother and Evangela to include them in the terrific discovery? How in God’s name could there be a room just there without an intrusion into Ira and Karen’s property next-door?

Nathan made for the television remote and drowned the familiar whisper in trance-music videos offered on channel twenty-four. He positioned himself on the couch so that he could see the flicker of motion that twinkled in the door’s frame. After fifteen minutes, in the same panic as yesterday’s evening, he locked himself in the paper-thin stronghold of his bedroom—losing sleep to the neon allure of the numbers on his clock radio.

There is a certain charm in waking up at 2:00 in the afternoon; skipping breakfast, lunch, and submitting to the waste of a day’s productivity. Nathan never opened his blinds anymore, and so the weak orange radiance that fell through their slivers was only a reminder of nature’s guilt trip. It's called “God Speaks” when light shines that way through the clouds of a horizon. Nathan determined that his window was issuing judgment before rising, yawning, and turning the dial on an electric heater. Eve was upstairs, maybe, and would make him feel worse by showing a dazzling contrast to his pajamas. He didn’t care. Maybe he would tell her about the door, and his brother, if he was home.

“The door,” he thought, and opened his own, turning groggily into the sitting room where the unfurnished portion of the basement suite was full of uniform white tool-marks in the drywall. He dreamt it, he was sure now, and the rest of the week would go on this way. There was no doorway to be witnessed.

“Funny.” He told Eve, in the kitchen, then. “Was it three or four days that a person becomes delusional without sleep?”

She was rinsing dishes, her eyes to the wall, and he was leaning on the island counter. They were surrounded by cluttered surfaces and wilted indoor plants.

“I think four. And you can die if you don’t sleep properly for ten. I saw it on House.”

"Then I think I’m starting to die. Maybe I have the plague.”

She smiled at his reflection in the tiles bordering the sink. “You were like a log when I went into your room this morning. Consider your claim of insomnia doubted.”

“You came into my room?” He asked.

“Well, you were sleeping late. I thought something was wrong. And I needed your laundry.” She said, filling the cramped aisle of kitchen with the smell of Palmolive oranges. A bracelet and her wedding ring were laying golden on the cutting board. She had a box full of similar treasures that was hidden away from burglars in a forbidden niche of the crawlspace.


When you’re in your early twenties, time can cheat you for days at a time. Mid-week is a tip-toe relationship between hustle and laze, juggling obligations and struggling with the itch to live free for the hell of it. It was easier for Nathan in that basement suite, he knew, and his years were getting on, but the effortlessness of a sheltered lifestyle appealed to the androgens in him; he would rather sit on leather couches, get drunk and watch hockey games. This mentality governed a ruthless pace at which Thursdays came and went, as well as a sworn, blood-born burden of inherited liability. This following Thursday found him in haste, digging through the garage freezer for a battered stockpile of identical cakes that he would share in devouring when he arrived at Ninon’s. The bottles for delivery were on his passenger seat already, chilling in the overnight air.

The remainder of daylight was concealed by a brooding storm when he finally set upon the drive, hitting speed bumps at 60 kilometers. The perfect hill was lined with lamp posts, some shattered and others the quiet black of malfunction. Rabbit warrens on the opposite edge of the fence-line housed creatures that fled at the indication of notice, leaving only a bramble stare of Himalayan blackberry, prickly and irritable on all fronts. He stopped the car on the sensor at the mouth of the roadside and waited for the hallmark of Forest Crescent’s gated community to swing lethargically open.

A minute passed and the gate remained motionless, Nathan's headlights illuminating the limp iron bars that were to be, time and again, a nuisance. Slamming his door, he made his way into the rain and put his weight against the gate’s right limb. It was sleek and black like a contemporary appliance but would budge only slightly before deciding on a rattling defiance. Somewhere without the blare of a radio station, thunder sounded.

“Fuck!” he swore, vainly. “Fucking prison!”

He said this to no one, finding amusement in the idea of a natural disaster isolating all of the high-maintenance mother hens in their Columbia Cabinet kitchens. The Strata Council, a band of semi-retired yuppies who suckled subliminal monthly fees from all property owners, had heralded the gate as an ingenious method of crime prevention. A simple power outage was keeping them from their tanning appointments, and a gradual line of SUV’s crowded the asphalt slope.

It was comical, how frail the housewife empire became in the robbery of its electric vitality. Forest Crescent, as vehicles glided back to the exteriors of their garages (neither would they open for the lack of electron gold), became a husk of artificial defenses—bowing in all directions to the surrounding wild and to, in this instance, the reminder of nature’s conquest. Seven minutes of very poor driving found Nathan back at Number Twenty. He could have walked home in five, and was dejectedly irate when he called to the shadowed hall.

“Evangela, you here?”

“Power’s out.” Her voice came from a crook in the dining area. None of the clocks gave their usual night-time ambiance and he could have been a blind-man for his worth at navigation.

“We have any flashlights or anything?”

“We have … this.” She stifled, tossing the switch on a yellowed lantern. It was a dust-laden blue with a large, black carrying handle. Resulting of the decades-old flashlight was Eve’s face in a seductive gleam, corrupted by the jack-o-lantern shadows of her beauty.

Nathan touched the light-switch dial instinctively on their way downstairs, the stepwork creaking under the duo’s feet. It wasn’t until they both stood upon the throw-rug of the landing that Eve’s hands, cold as hooks, went to tickle Nathan with fear—the way a girlfriend does in a movie theatre or the way a child buries his fingers in parental pant-legs. A voiceless agreement had them both angling their heads to see, on the far side of the sitting room and in a slick of refracting light, an archway.

“Nathan!” Eve gasped.

“I know. I see it. I’ve … seen it.”

“Do you suppose?”

“What? That it leads somewhere?” He asked.

“That we should call someone. Half the neighborhood is playing cards by candlelight.”

“No. … no.” he stated, already on his way across the floor. He let his hand out behind him in a motion for Eve to give him the decaying lamp-light. In its beam, the door, never as it had been seen prior, was revealed in a splendor of ornate and gem-studded inlay. It was surely elaborate, and in his curiosity to know if it had been painted there, Nathan put his hand upon the shimmering surface. The handle at his waist was curving and cold.

“Open it.” Eve commanded. She was taken with powerless marvel and showed little reluctance in taking the last few strides into the accommodating alcove.

“You want me to?”

Without an answer, he went ahead and turned the handle in a downward motion, pulling the space-shuttle-thick archway into an open position and exposing for all its grandeur the capacity of prohibited knowledge beyond.

Evangela had her hand on his waist and her chin on his shoulder. When she gave a series of screams—not screams of surprise, but shrieks of agonizing realization—Nathan was taken by her hypnotism and a ringing in his ears. He did not know exactly what he looked upon, that pranced in the doorway to the tune of Eve’s mating roar. He would later tell the Strata Council that it was an abomination of anything natural while chicken-clucks from his audience praised the creature’s path to hell.

In this room with a single candle there was a collection of rough, matted hair that heaved like a childhood tornado. The mass of which hung from the skeletal frame of something Cro-Magnon, though in the shimmering, jeweled presence of the door it was plain to possess a snout and a lupine jaw that closed with drool. Looking like a scolded dog, it interrupted its course of stamping on an ink-spill parchment floor to stare. The whisper was a scrape of overgrown talons on nesting paperwork.

Nathan heard the sliding-glass break, then, in the manner that a soldier hears a gun-shot underwater. First an axe and then the heroically poised Fireman, Ira from next-door, bolted into the sitting room from the balcony. There was a moment’s clatter before a Good Samaritan militia had the beast surrounded and slain, shaking Nathan, holding Eve, and closing passage forever to that impossible room—where acts of Satanism birthed demons unkind to civil tradition. Nathan didn’t let his vision break with tears. The silver of the drywall seams were soaking blood, like sherry.