Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

wonderful locks, in Mickelsson’s opinion, though one could open them as easily with a bent paper clip as with the key. He found himself making small chests and boxes with drawers and secret compartments, felt linings, mirror tops—all pointless foolishness, things he had no use for, but his hands worked on, warding off evil, and when his basement shop was cluttered with these objects, he packed them one inside another, as well as he could, crated them up for delivery by Greyhound, and shipped them away with a birthday card (though her birthday was in August) to his daughter. In this way he used up nearly half the keys. He made a lockable winerack, crudely routed with a grape and satyr design, for Ellen and The Comedian, then a crazily elegant rosewood Kleenex-box holder, also lockable. These too he shipped. He made a pecky-cedar, silver-hasped box to hold Jessie’s gloves, on the top of which, in a circle around the lock, he routed, in careful Gothic lettering, as on a hymnbook, Jessie’s Gloves.

One night he had another of his terrible dreams about the people who had lived here before him, the Spragues. When he awakened, bolt-upright in the darkness, the memory of it shot away from him, so that he was able to catch before they vanished only a few images. He saw them young, playing with a child—their child, though they were brother and sister. “No wonder!” he said aloud, as if the dream were the truth. He had a sense, somehow, though he could call back no images, that they’d kept the child hidden, for all practical purposes a prisoner in the house. He saw the child lying in a bed, very white, his hair standing out, waxy, from his waxy skull. Then the dream went vague; he could remember nothing, though he had a feeling that what he’d lost was long and elaborate. Sudden distress came over him and he got up and turned on the light, remembering something more. He stood before the dresser and looked into the mirror as if to steady himself with the image of his own face, but what he saw was, as in a witch’s mirror, the dream: the old man up on the roof, standing, bent over so that he looked almost hunchbacked, lowering something by a rope down into the chimney—cleaning out the flue, no doubt. The old woman came out into the yard below. It was a warm summer day. She seemed to have something hidden behind her back. When she drew it from behind her, Mickelsson saw that it was a gun of some kind, a rifle or single-barrelled shotgun. She raised it to her shoulder without a sound, aiming upward, and he saw the old man give a sudden jerk of fear, violently wobbling, about to fall, shouting. He reached out his arms, changing into the fat man, and the inside of his mouth was dark. There was an explosion. It missed him, and she reloaded. Though he had all the time in the world, he did nothing to escape. She fired at him again, and then he was falling, all bloody, sliding—not very fast—toward the eaves, then over, mumbling something, and he fell toward the ground, inert. As he hit, Mickelsson woke up.

He went down and locked the doors, checked the windows; then, after a while, went back to bed.

The weather grew still colder, so that the packed snow on his front walk and on the road was squeaky underfoot when he went out to the mailbox, or out to his car to drive furtively to Susquehanna for groceries (the Jeep was still not fixed) and to see if Donnie Matthews had returned. He did not mean to keep watching for her, and though it took every ounce of will he possessed, he did not go up to make sure she didn’t answer her door. The FOR RENT sign in her window, black and red, told him the apartment was still empty. There was never any light on, no apparent change. He stood thoughtfully sucking at his teeth. He’d lost weight. Would that please her? He’d lost so much weight, mainly from forgetting to eat, that the crotch of his pants hung low.

Each time he went down he saw—to his dismay—people he knew. Tim, Charley Snyder, the friendly, gray-suited banker, and once Lepatofsky and his daughter. (She smiled and waved at him, making some sort of sign in the air, a letter in an unknown alphabet.) For all his misery, guilt, and dread, he was beginning to feel like a native of sorts. A household familiar in the sense that a rat is. He might eventually get his life in order, it seemed to him, if he never again had to drive to the university. The very thought of facing Jessie, for whom he’d hardly raised a finger, or facing Tillson, who must know that Mickelsson was professionally washed up—the very thought of pretending to care about ideas before his freshmen and, worse yet, graduate students—gave him fevers and chills.

Sometimes now he went out with the new gun, looking for something to take a shot at, a squirrel or rabbit or just some posted sign two or three years old. Occasionally he would leave the road and wander in the woods awhile, trying to lose himself as he’d always been lost when he’d hunted with his father in his childhood. It was difficult here. Every few rods he would come to a break from which he could look down at the familiar valley, the viaduct, the frozen river and still, dark pines. (Higher on the mountain, up beyond the Spragues’ house, there would be no such breaks; but he disliked it up there. The ground rose too steeply, the brush was too thickly tangled; the mist and darkness made him uncomfortable.) For the most part as he moved through snow and trees, the shotgun broken over his arm, on safety, he hardly remembered that he’d