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

its age and dinginess, knowing they would never find anything as nice. The next piece of wallpaper was light brown and dark brown, again made to look like cloth, and the next was what had probably once been wine-red, with an intricate stripe and flower pattern. All three of these oldest pieces had been, almost certainly, paper for a livingroom. It was perhaps at this point that the room had begun to change functions: the next two pieces might be either livingroom or bedroom (one green, one blue), and the next two seemed patterns one might pick for a diningroom. The most recent, no longer at all like cloth—a bright pattern of chickens, corncobs, and yellow dots, then another of teapots and salt-shakers—could only be paper for a kitchen.

He felt a pang of regret that he’d so casually violated those generations of decisions: happy renovation, then gradual, almost unnoticed declines; regret even that he’d scraped away the hex sign on the door between the livingroom and kitchen. “Well, no matter,” he told himself aloud, then stopped to listen.

The house around him was as still as a dried-out seashell.

He looked at the pieces of wallpaper again, startled for some reason. A tingling came over him, some chemical change that increased rapidly, then came rushing up his spine like a spring bursting out into the light through the side of the mountain. The room changed its color and a rumble filled his ears: it was as if he were fainting. He reached out to steady himself and had the illusion, all at once, that he was seeing the whole history of the house: weddings, funerals, births, deaths, battles. … In the rush of images one detail stood plain: a boy with gloved hands throwing a poisoned, apparently dead rat into the stove, then widening his eyes, covering his ears against the animal’s screams. Pain shot through Mickelsson, as if he himself had become the burning rat—but it was something else, something that doubled him over and filled him—filled the whole room—with a high wind of emotion, something like insane rage. Almost at once, the feeling subsided, the vision passed.

He stood blunt-witted, motionless, staring at the vivid bits of wallpaper. All was well; silent. He could hardly believe the thing had happened to him—certainly nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He felt frozen, as when one awakens from a nightmare unable to move a finger—the body’s memory of ancient millennia, someone had once claimed; the stillness that saved our small forebears from passing sabretooths.

It came to him that he must have fallen asleep on his feet. It was a dream.

Now he was able to move again, first his hands, then his shoulders and head. His spine felt icy.

He shook his head, staring hard at the pieces of wallpaper, sorting them like cards, unconsciously testing, he realized after a moment, like a child fearfully teasing a snake behind glass to see if it will strike. Nothing, not the faintest stirring now. He closed his eyes, reaching up to rub the back of his neck where it ached as if from a cramp, and remembered Tim Booker’s joke about the man who’d stayed in the house all night “and his hair turned white.” For some reason—as if, without his help, his mind were snatching at alternatives to the nightmare—he thought of the swan-and-water-lily wallpaper in his bedroom when he was a child. Blue, white, and silver. He remembered his grandmother combing her long hair, then remembered his bachelor uncle’s cough, at six in the morning, when he got up and dressed and, grumbling to himself in Swedish, went out to start chores.

Still a little shaky, but oddly sober, Mickelsson wandered again to the livingroom, squinting, trying to call back more. It was as if he’d buried the nightmare already, deep in the gloomiest room of the brain’s ancient dungeon. He sat down, sucking at his pipe, unaware that it was out. His stomach was filled with dead butterflies.

He thought of Jessica Stark, the remarkable way she’d smiled when he took her hand, reopening possibilities. He must tell her about all this—the two men on the road, the trucks, the hex that was a face. …

He remembered something more: his grandfather, one gray afternoon, standing in his black suit at the rural mailbox, a package of newly arrived books under one arm, probably more volumes of Martin Luther. His head was tilted, listening to faraway, muffled thunder as if he imagined the thunder to be speaking.

Suddenly the thought broke through again: What was behind that sudden, dreadful nightmare? Just some childish image of death? Small-boy idea of Hell?

What of the possibility he’d been stubbornly refusing to acknowledge all this while: that it had not been a nightmare? He raised his drink.

When he’d sipped, he check-reined his head back, trying to work out the crick in his neck, and the next thing he knew he was sitting on the couch with his two hands closed lightly around the whiskey glass, and outside the windows it was mid-day. He’d been dreaming something, some room full of beautiful colors. Someone had said, “I’m sure you’re not guilty!” Moving his head by accident, not yet awake, he’d shattered the dream, scattered it back into electrons. He would never dream that exact same dream again.

8

Thomas’s Hardware was the most prosperous business, possibly the only prosperous business, in Susquehanna. Owen Thomas, the proprietor, was shy and retiring, fine-featured, scholarly, a man of forty or so, with a daughter majoring in art at Penn State, whom he mentioned proudly, with careful restraint, whenever reasonable opportunity arose. The store was a pleasant place, bright and airy, for though it was crammed with goods—tools, rope, pipefittings, hasps and hinges, woodstoves, picture frames, drawer after drawer of bolts, screws, nails, racks and display cases of fishing equipment, Coleman stoves, hunting knives and guns—it had sixteen-foot ceilings of light gray stamped tin and large, uncluttered front windows. It looked out on the parking meters,