by E. A. Axelberg
A reporter for many years and then a copy editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, E. A. Axelberg sub-sequently turned to writing poetry. Her poems have been published in journals such as the North Dakota Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Porcupine, and Taproot Literary Review. Here the Georgia author is with an eerily suspenseful short-story debut.
The unavoidable sight of the three-story house hulking over what had been her beloved side garden served only to fuel Neelie’s determination to get away. The key stuck in the side-door lock, and she unloosed some choice invective, as much at the looming edifice next-door as at the balky lock. The tumblers had been sticky for a while and she’d been meaning to administer a squirt of graphite. Simple enough, but like so many things since Michael’s death, it somehow had not happened; so many things as stuck as the tumblers. Fiddling with the knob, she glanced again at the brick domicile next-door that had meant the loss of so many trees. Six thousand square feet, the distinctly unneighborly structure was, and painted a hideous matte carmine that only made its intrusiveness more obvious in the verdant little postwar neighborhood. (The Rapunzel house, a neighbor’s little girl called it, in reference to the grandiose turret that rose at one corner.) Adding insult to injury, the house, which had risen conqueringly on the site of a modest and pleasant bungalow, was now empty, the owner’s fiefdom cut short by bankruptcy, word had it, or some such ignominious crash-and-burn consequence of intemperate times.
The lock would not work. Neelie felt a lump start in her throat; the slightest frustration was too much these days. Finally, with a bit more finagling, the bolt shot home. Winston, a bloodhound mix—all dewlaps, legs, and soul-deep loyalty—had already installed himself in the back of the Toyota with the quickly assembled pile of camping oddments. Neelie slid into the front seat and viciously turned the key in the ignition, seeing again in her mind’s eye the gorgeous westering sun that—before the steroid house had risen a year earlier—would at this time of afternoon just be glinting through the tops of the oaks and tulip poplars that were no more.
“Okay, Winston, we’re off. In more ways than one.” The dog pressed forward from the backseat, licking her ear, as Neelie fastened her seat belt, shaking her head at the unlikeliness of this expedition. Crazy and juvenile as this impromptu flight seemed, it would at least, she thought, offer escape from home—when home was no longer refuge or comfort—and a spartan solitude that would suit her better than the stark loneliness that had stalked her through every room since Michael’s death. Again last night she had not been able to sleep, could not read, could settle to nothing—and couldn’t write. And relatively inconsequential as it sounded, the affront of the house next-door, the needlessness of it and the literal shadow it cast, even to the point of dealing a death blow to her beloved sun-loving peony bed, tormented her out of all proportion to its importance.
As surely as Michael had left her, so had her ability to write; her very livelihood. The laptop that now was used only for e-mails, the yellow legal tablets she’d liked for first drafts, now were their own source of torment. Writer’s block? It was more like an infernal Hoover Dam. Her publisher, the soul of understanding, was losing patience—Neelie was now far behind on the second installment of The Ringing Room, not to mention the first. Bereave, she knew, derived from the Old English for “robbed.” She’d been robbed of Michael, robbed of words. And now, she lived in shadow.
Neelie turned up the car radio, grabbed a crisp local McIntosh from the little knapsack of food on the passenger seat, and slipped Winston one of his favorite dog biscuits, peanut butter. The sun was sinking lower as they drove north. Neelie felt the tiniest prickle of apprehension. The wit’s-end tactic of stealing away to a refuge had come upon her in the bright light of a benign early-fall day; the notion of nightfall, and of how isolated she would be in her getaway, she had pushed from her mind, reasoning that she would have Winston and her cell phone. It would be an adventure, just an overnight, and she would put some words on paper.
* * * *
She recalled the somewhat sheepish message she’d left on Abby’s answering machine before she left. She knew her best friend would be at work so she’d get the machine and not have to explain in person what, even to herself, sounded a childish expedition. “Hey. It’s me. I just wanted to let you know I’m going to get a few things together and...” she’d hesitated “...go on a spontaneous little camping trip to that abandoned chapel I told you about off Old Quarry Road—the place I found a few weeks ago? Anyway, yes, I know it’s nuts, and yes, probably illegal—I mean, I have no idea who owns that land—but I just can’t stand the house tonight. I’m also actually going to get some work done if it kills me; just put some words on paper even if they’re pure crud. I just ... I just had a feeling about the place; well, you remember—I told you. Anyway, just wanted to let somebody know in case a crazed homicidal maniac comes calling. I’ve got Winston with me, and of course my cell phone. I’ll give you a ring later. Bye.”
Abby would be bemused, Neelie thought, but not too concerned, familiar as she now was with Neelie’s quixotic state of mind over the past several months.
She’d found the tiny chapel a few weeks before, when a crisp, cool blue-sky Sunday had made her restlessness and loneliness even more acute than usual. Driving north into the hills—Winston with her always—was one soothing antidote she’d come to rely on.
Going along Old Quarry Road, flanked by forest on either side, she’d thrown a hubcap, hearing the clatter through the open car window. She’d pulled over onto the shoulder of the little-traveled gravel road, between two huge stands of rhododendron, retrieved the hubcap, and begun walking back along the verge, Winston bounding happily beside her. The sun was warm and bright, and the woods seemed alive and revitalized, past their summer torpor and kindling to the equinoctial chill that would soon let them flaunt their true colors. She pulled off her fleece jacket and tied the arms around her waist. Winston barked his approval of the day and the place, shambling off into the woods a distance. Neelie laughed, her chagrin at the hubcap forgotten.
She called to Win and spied, a bit to the east, down a slight slope and farther into the forest, some anomalous something in the landscape.... Winston came barreling past her, then spun back, grinning. The intoxicating scents of humus, leaves, something spicy and resinous, a tantalizing whiff of woodsmoke, made her reluctant to head back to the car, and as she scuffed and slid through the woods, the visual dissonance resolved into a section of roofline almost totally obscured behind a guardian screen of hemlocks and huge boxwoods. Neelie glanced back as she heard the muted drone of a car passing on the road, so amazingly near yet far. She’d driven down Old Quarry countless times; you would never know there was anything back here.
She’d pushed on, for sheer fun and delight in the day, past another thicket of rhododendron, and stood staring. Dark green boxwoods towering higher than any Neelie had ever seen crowded up against two pale green glass arched windows nearly covered in porcelain vine and orange-berried bittersweet. Stepping around, she could see three more little gothic windows, with their heavy tracery of vines, along each side. Remarkably, all were intact. She could just glimpse, at the back of the chapel and a bit farther into the woods in a little glade, a cemetery plot, its few rough granite headstones aslant, so slumped in years of forest duff and newly fallen leaves, they looked like eroded teeth.
Intrigued, Neelie pushed through the undergrowth—calling to Winston so he wouldn’t stray too far—and saw the barest remnants of a rail fence around the little plot. She squatted down to read the first stone she came to. EARLENE LAWSON, 1910-1950. One quite close to it was broken but legible. Neelie gently brushed a drift of leaves away to read MERLE LAWSON, 1907-1950. At least the one, whether husband or wife, had not had to live very long without the other, Neelie thought with a bitterness that caught her unawares. Winston came loping in from wherever he’d been exploring and was hard by her side, sniffing the ground ecstatically, then raising an irreverent leg against a sassafras growing near one of the headstones.
Neelie walked to the other markers and again crouched down, touched by the homeliness of the little plot. CHANCE LAWSON, 1940-1950. She stood up, baffled and disquieted. RAYLEAN LAWSON, 1932-1950. Breathing “Hey, Win, good boy,” as though it could stave off the air of unreality that suddenly seemed to pervade the clearing, she methodically rubbed a bloom of lichen off the surname and death date on the last stone in the grouping. It was legible, but just barely, and for good measure she felt the indentations. MARTIN LAWSON, 1930-1950.
She sat back on her heels. A car wreck? Neelie mused. A fire, or illness that somehow swept through the family? “Win, how horrible. What on earth happened?” Three other headstones closer to the periphery of the plot bore the names ROPER and TUCKER, with the most recent death date 1959. Kin, she supposed. The afternoon sun filled the glade for a moment in a wash of golden light. After her initial unease, Neelie felt only a sense of mercy and peace, not menace, in the little space. Still, she was intrigued and resolved to go through the microfiche files in the offices of the Buckleyville Courier, or get in touch with the county historical society, to find out what she could about the Lawson clan.
She turned and crunched back to the front of the church—for such it obviously had been despite the lack of steeple or any cruciform decoration. It was very small, only about sixteen by twelve feet. Warped clapboards slumped on what Neelie could see of the stone foundation. The roof was of shakes, sun-curled to a froth and weathered silvery. She pushed through the tough billows of boxwood to the door. It was wildly off plumb, sagging into the jamb, with an old-fashioned round knob that turned perfectly easily in her hand. Grasping it, she wrenched the door upward a tad and pushed in, Winston roistering past her into the tiny room. It was empty of pews, empty except for a wooden lectern in one corner and in another a large, dusty wooden desk with a chair nestled neatly to it. A clouded oval mirror, frameless, hung on the pine-paneled wall at the altar end.
The church had obviously been unused for a very long time indeed; why had teenage vandals not reveled their way through it? Neelie wondered. A pleasant watery green light filtered in through the vine-covered windows, and a shaft of sun, autumn motes swirling through it, slanted in through one of them. Neelie laughed out loud when Winston for some reason suddenly sat down facing the lectern, as though someone he adored were declaiming. His tail thumped as he looked back at her. Neelie laughed again in sheer delight at the lovely day, her discovery, Winston’s goofy gladness.
She walked over to the desk and chair—absently tracing a heart in the film of dust—and thought what a perfect, if perfectly eccentric, place it would be to work—a totally different setting; no distractions. There was something set-apart and appealing about the little chapel, peacefully abandoned in the forest. She walked outside again with Win, pulling the door to with an absurdly proprietary feeling. Fishing in the dangling pocket of her jacket, she pulled out her cell phone and snapped a picture of the little chapel, at least as much of a picture as she could, given the cloak of trees. She was delighted to see the service bars steady on the screen, and sent the picture to Abby, with the message “Having a great day with Win in the mountains. Found this great old chapel! Talk to you later.”
She gave a last look around, feeling almost conspiratorial, and unaccountably content. She drove home—the dog in tongue-lolling tiredness on the passenger seat—closer to happy than she’d felt in months.
* * * *
Smoking furiously and luxuriously after her two-month abstinence, Margaret carried the carefully kraft-paper-wrapped canvas over to the old leather chesterfield. Gently, she loosened the tape at the back and pulled the stiff brown paper away. Simmie’s happy chatter in the next room receded to some far place as Margaret gazed again after so many years on the melancholic face....
Neelie sighed. It was torturous, and the pages were essentially unusable, but at least she was priming the pump, putting words down on paper. She was settled at the little wooden desk with her laptop, the good old Coleman lantern blazing away; she’d lit it immediately, while dim green daylight still suffused the chapel, in a bid to make the transition to night, when it came, a bit less noticeable. The little portable radio was on low, tuned to the classical station, interference somewhat marring the conversational charm of Peter and the Wolf. She’d also brought along a big flashlight, set upright and ready to illuminate the far side of the chapel. Her overnight gear—sleeping bag, double-width foam pad, radio, toilet paper, food, water, and a few other oddments—was otherwise unceremoniously clumped at the altar space; she’d wanted to get down to work. Work, she told herself, lent an element of rationality, if not practicality, to this wild expedition.
Neelie glanced up as a hemlock branch brushed against the nearest window. Winston lay quietly on the floor near her. “Some crazy adventure, huh, boy? My butt’s practically numb. This is not the most comfortable chair.” The dog thumped his tail in sympathy. She glanced around after folding the sleeping bag on the chair to make a rather voluminous cushion. The chapel actually looked snug and cozy in the dimness, the gloaming lending an unearthly aspect to the place. Neelie hoped she’d hidden the car well enough behind a rhododendron thicket that it wouldn’t be noticed, either by a sheriff’s deputy or someone with more sinister motives. No one had passed on the lightly traveled road as she’d gathered up her things and lugged them to the chapel, which looked exactly the same as it had those few weeks earlier, with one mildly disconcerting exception. The round metal doorknob, which had been a dull, dirty matte black, had this time shone with the muted brightness of imperfectly polished brass. Scrabbling to catch the sleeping bag as it started to slide to the ground, Neelie had put it down to her remembering wrongly, or to weathering, or atmospheric pressure, or some trick of acid rain.
When, awhile later, Neelie broke from her work—suddenly conscious of how loud the fretful chittering of the laptop keys sounded in the silence—she was startled to see that full dark had descended. She glanced at her watch and realized she’d been working for almost two hours, a benison of self-forgetfulness and productivity, no matter how revision-needy the output. Win was stretched out on the foam pad near the desk, his eyes, however, alert to her movements. The Coleman lantern emitted a low hiss and faint odor; the oval mirror, like a milky eye, faintly reflected its light.
The spartan simplicity of the whole crazy enterprise pleased her. The chapel actually felt very protected and protective, even cozy, and the fact that she had been able to put some semi-coherent words, one right after the other, on paper was practically cause for rejoicing. She put her fingers on the keys again and started typing.
* * * *
“Outside?” Winston clambered to his feet in tail-wagging assent. Neelie stood up, a bit stiffly, stretched, then rummaged in her pack for the leash. She didn’t want to take the chance of his haring off into the woods after a raccoon or some other night creature. Picking up the flashlight, she stepped outside with the dog, beyond the enshrouding boxwoods and rhododendron; the woods’ enveloping darkness was dense and palpable, but the night was clear and Neelie knew there would be a full moon later. A wind had sprung up, shivering the rhodies and swaying the silver-tipped hemlocks into a mute, dreamy dance. “It’ll probably be too bright to sleep,” she said blusteringly to Winston, who, all nose, was straining on the leash, pulling eastward in the direction of the road.
“Buddy, how about it? Please.” But the hound was bent on exploring, not on attending to business. Glad of the flashlight’s strength but unnerved by the absolute blackness to either side of its path, Neelie let him quest a short way, sniffing compulsively and pulling on the leash. “Okay, Win, it’s now or never; we’re heading back in.” Oblivious, the dog strained ahead mightily and she tripped, sprawling harmlessly but sending the flashlight to land with a thunk a few feet away, its beam fixed at a drunken angle. Neelie swore, the leash still around her wrist, the bemused Win at the other end of it, waiting for her to collect herself. She pulled herself up, grabbed the light, and aimed it downward onto the stone she’d stumbled against. CHARLES LAWSON, 1927-1951.
“What on earth...? Why separate from all the others?” she asked herself aloud. Neelie stared at the headstone as a gust of wind shook a nearby laurel to its roots. The air seemed degrees colder, its movement sharper, erratic and somehow restless. Neelie was grateful to see Win at last lift his leg against a sapling near the gravestone. She pulled him in closer and almost ran back to the chapel. Once inside, she turned the radio up, grabbed a PB&J and some decaf Earl Grey from the Thermos, and set determinedly to work again.
* * * *
Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, playing softly, made a plaintive counterpoint to Winston’s snoring. His leggy length was stretched out beside her on the double-width foam pad she’d shared with Michael on so many camping trips. She laced her hands behind her head, tired but not sleepy, and closed her eyes against the bright moonlight that suffused the entire chapel even through the forest canopy.
Michael had loved the woods. Neelie thought back to that impossibly mundane Tuesday morning; he’d been running so late he’d just barely slowed by the door of her study at home—hiking the knapsack with his class materials onto his shoulder—to remind her about the zoning meeting that night; they wanted to get there early this time. She’d half turned, distractedly, kissing the thin air—yes, bye, have a good day—and turned back to the computer. She’d gotten up to fix a cup of tea a couple of hours later when the phone rang; a fellow teacher of Michael’s at the college, a good friend of theirs, haltingly, flatly telling her that Michael had been hit, broadsided by a teenager who’d run a red light, going fast, and asking did she have someone who could be with her....
Stefan couldn’t bring himself to say the word dead, and in the course of too few heartbeats Neelie made the shattering, surreal inference. And suddenly all sound, and everything in her sight, was grotesquely deformed, looming and receding thickly, sickly, like something in a funhouse mirror. It had taken her months even to crawl out into something close to sunlight again.
Neelie opened her eyes, pulled to the present again by the sudden loud burst of jarring percussive notes in some atonal contemporary piece coming from the radio. The moonlight was still preternaturally bright; a wind at intervals made a humming sound as it caught a loose section of something in the eaves or roofing. Neelie reached out to stroke Winston, who raised his head slightly, then lay back again with a sigh.
She realized she hadn’t called Abby back. It was ten-thirty, she saw as she pressed the number on her cell phone and waited. She was a bit surprised to again get the answering machine; Abby was something of a homebody and generally came straight home from work.
“Hey, it’s me again. Meant to call you again earlier, but I forgot. Just wanted to let you know I’m at the little old chapel, hale and hearty. I’ve actually been able to dope out some pages for my book; they’re not good, but they’re words on the page, so I’m very happy about that. Win and I are getting ready to hit the sack—sleeping bag, that is—although I don’t think we’ll be able to exactly get much sleep—this is not the Hilton—and we’ll take off probably at daybreak. I’m actually having fun, as goofy as it sounds, but I’ll be ready for some creature comforts again—like, a hot breakfast and a bath?! Anyway, talk to you tomorrow. Bye.”
As she snapped the phone shut, Neelie realized with a tiny whisper of apprehension that the instrument had given her a sort of bravado; that the thought of having the cell phone ready for any contingency had, at least subconsciously, made this expedition perhaps safer-seeming that it otherwise would have been. She started to turn on the big flashlight again, to serve as a serious nightlight, then realized that if by wild chance some teenagers or miscreants were prowling the woods, it would serve, for heaven’s sake, as a beacon.
Jittery for no reason, she stroked the good Winston. She had him; and she was being silly, in any case, she thought; something benign presided over this chapel, she was sure of it. She sighed. She had Win, but not Michael. She lay back again, plumping the makeshift pillow and feeling her eyes prickle slightly. Of course she would not be here, engaging in such an outlandish business, showing less sense than a child, if Michael were alive. Naturally. She would be lying next to him in their bed.
She turned and vehemently stabbed the radio-station search button till it brought the distracting mindless chatter of a talk show, some commentator ranting about liberal theology.
* * * *
A low growl pulled Neelie from her fitful doze. In an instant, she was sharply awake, a jolt of adrenaline making her heart thud.
“What is it, boy?” Winston was half sitting up, tail thumping. His rumble changed to a pleading whine. Neelie scrabbled for her phone; 3:30 a.m. If possible, the moonlight was even brighter than before and the wind stronger, keening around the corners of the church, which was aswirl with tossing shadows from the bobbing hemlocks and rocking hardwoods. Neelie realized that the radio was silent. She wrenched the volume control; nothing, and the batteries had been fresh. Feeling the blood drain from her face, she reached for the flashlight; it clicked instantly to life but trapped her in a bleached halogen halo beyond which was inky blackness. She hesitated with her finger on the on/off switch, looking toward the door and willing her eyes to adjust, when the light flickered, then went off. Winston, his growl lower but somehow more threatening, stood up slowly, hackles raised, and stalked, with what almost seemed reluctance, toward the lectern. Neelie stood transfixed as she watched the dog’s wary progress. He sat down suddenly a few feet from the stand, quiet, for a moment dipping his head in an almost chastened way, then looking up. “Winston?” Neelie almost breathed the word. He turned his head for a moment, but distractedly, then resumed his staring stance.
“Winston!” she yelled. “No!” The dog whined as though torn between allegiances. “Okay, buddy, guess what?” She spoke in a near-shout blustery with bravado. “Three-thirty or not, how about we get all our stuff togeth—”
There was a movement at the periphery of her vision. The mirror hung a bit askew on the altar wall. The movement she had seen had been reflected there, and it had not been shadow play. The dog barked sharply, his hackles an atavistic bristle. Neelie fumbled for the cell phone again, her hands trembling. She punched frantically, almost tripping over Winston’s collapsible water bowl as she ran toward the door. No service, read the screen display. The hound bolted past her and sat growling, then barking frantically at her, barring the way out.
“Winston! What are you doing?!” The dog crept toward her, growling and whining in that pleading way she’d never heard before. She felt another sound rising above the moaning of the wind that seemed to be everywhere at once—singing, full-throated, unaccompanied, raw and rough.
Heaven is here, where hymns of gladness Cheer the toiler’s rugged way, In this world where clouds of sadness Often change to night our day. ... Neelie turned, as though bidden. Something barely perceptible, milky, smoky, shifting, and amorphous, filled the oval mirror. The movement resolved for just a moment into an image that could have been two heads, facing, or a ragged heart, discernible for an instant before the shapes melted away again. Heaven is here, where misery lightened Of its heavy load is seen, Where the face of sorrow brightened, By the deed of love hath been....
The tossing shadows in the chapel suddenly became more volatile, the vines on the windows trembling as though a current coursed through them. Neelie watched as Win ran back to the lectern, looked back at her, then looked slightly up again, to parson height. In a near faint of disbelief, thinking surely she must be dreaming, Neelie slowly backed toward the door, which seemed almost to be straining to hold against some titanic pressure. Winston bounded from his post and stood guard, barring the way out as the shrieking wind and the earnest singing melded into an otherworldly cacophony. Again Neelie saw a shape in the mirror that this time resolved into Michael’s face.
She ran for the door, and the big dog leapt straight at her, knocking her down to strike her head on the rough floorboards, where the hectic moon shadows played over her face.
* * * *
Good morning, Buckleyville. It’s seven-fifteen, and folks, you’ll definitely want to find an alternate route with that jackknifed semi on Twenty-four. It is causing a real mess, and authorities are saying...
The radio blared its workaday tidings as daylight strengthened in the chapel. Neelie opened her eyes to see Winston inches away, his muzzle resting between his paws. He wagged his tail. “Good boy, my Win,” Neelie said weakly. She sat up slowly and looked around her, at the lectern, the mirror, the nylon water bowl, the sleeping bag, her Thermos mug on the desk. All so impossibly normal. With an odd sense of calm, she stood up and went to her computer. She had turned it off before going to bed; it was now on, in sleep mode, and the flashlight was on, vying with the growing daylight. She retrieved her cell phone and turned it on, the service bars steady. She opened the laptop to call up “Room”; as if in a dream, the keys to the story had come to her and she wanted to limn the plot points while they were fresh in her mind.
On a whim she flipped open her cell phone to check her e-mail. The subject line of the first unread message was LAWSON FAMILY. It was a response to her inquiry to the county historical society and sketched the sad tale of an entire family massacred in the chapel by an estranged son, who was executed only a year later. He’d never denied the crime and never given an explanation for his deed, although he had always been deeply troubled, according to accounts—”evil; he had demons,” one relative had avowed; the same relation who’d insisted Charles Lawson be buried away from the rest of the clan, in unhallowed ground, and who’d not allowed his funeral in the chapel.
There was one other e-mail, with no wording in the subject or sender fields. She opened the message. I’ve never left you, never will. But you have all that you need—your own strength and smarts and courage and perseverance—to take you forward into the rest of your life. I will always be there to protect you, to look after you. To cheer you on, most of all. I love you. Love is more powerful, always. Work through it. Love, Michael.
Neelie felt no surprise, only a kind of exultant certitude and a calmness she’d thought lost for good. Winston nudged her, ready to go. She would finish her book; and with a rock-solid sureness, she knew it was time to sell the house, too full of memories, and move on into the rest of her life, including the teaching job she’d been shying away from. She felt more than equal to it now.
“Come on, boy, let’s go.” She smiled and began to gather their things.