An Unseasonably Warm Day

An unseasonably warm day in January

            On an unseasonably warm day in January, while walking his dog, Raymond was overcome with nostalgia.  “Nostalgia” is an inexact expression for the sensation that Raymond felt – an impression not quite a memory, not quite an idea, a presence, rather, rooted in some part of him previoulsy inaccessible.

            The sun was bright and the low banks of snow along the sidewalks were eroded into spiny white ridges, crystalline pinnacles leaking water onto the concrete underfoot.  The dog pranced and tugged at its leash and the passing cars splashed through gutter-side puddles.  Raymond felt warmth on his brow and the backs of hands.  He had removed his stocking cap and stuffed it into his coat pocket with his gloves. 

            Patches of ice resisted the bright light.  Some parts of sidewalk were glazed with compacted snow that had grown a brittle frozen surface.  Raymond kept his head down, watching the way ahead of him.  He didn’t want to slip and fall.  With surprise, he noticed that his dogs flanks and belly were smeared with black gritty mud.  Apparently, the animal had danced through mud and dirty water that he had not noticed.  – More attention, Raymond thought. I must pay more attention.

            And with that idea, he inhaled deeply since cool, moist air is good for focusing the mind.  He smelled cold water, snow exhaling moisture as if the whole white landscape were breathing.  His tennis shoes had a slightly acrid odor, a faint stench from the old white socks that he was wearing.  The faint tincture of sweat colored the scent of the water – really not so much a scent as a feeling, a sense of cool liquid trickling across wet pebbly gravel.  He inhaled deeply again.  He was walking up a slight slope, the concrete sidewalk rising ahead of him and a tiny bit of exertion was required, something almost unnoticeable except that his breathing had become deeper and more regular.  – It is like I am running again, Raymond thought, as if I were running to improve my strength and endurance.

            Raymond hadn’t run for many years.  He didn’t jog and made no attempt to exercise.  But, when he was in High School, forty years earlier, he had been the captain of the track team and, in early Spring, before the season began, had spent many nights running, an hour every evening under the moon and stars.  Raymond wanted to be strong and fast for his senior year, and so, he ran along the country roads near his home in late February and March to condition himself for the track season.  At first, it had been cold and breathing the icy air was difficult.  But, then, the nights warmed a little and, sometimes, the air was vivid with the odor of meltwater and the cool scent of the big banks of snow gradually collapsing into themselves as winter turned to spring.  His tennis shoes were sweaty and his feet stank and he was wearing sweat clothes that he kept in a foul-smelling bag near the backdoor of the split-level house where he lived with his parents and siblings.  Dogs barked at him from dark, lonely backyards.  He supposed that, to the hounds, he was a moving odor, a smell passing by in the night.

            The road on which he was running ran through a swampy area, an old gravel pit that pond water had reclaimed, and the asphalt was mightily frost-heaved, big billowy ripples underfoot.  He didn’t jog, but sprinted, running down the center of the road to avoid the ice that lurked along the shoulders where piles of snow were oozing onto the lane.

            It came back to him now.  The dog pulled at her leash.  It had all come back to him with that breath of air sucked down into his heart: it was something that he had never mentioned to anyone, something that he had forgotten for many years, a memory that made no sense.  He had been running one night, just before the first week of track practice, and it must have been rather warm during the day, although the nights still were below freezing, clear and frosty.  He was running and he felt that the conditioning had been successful, that he was very strong and that his stride was swift and fast and long, very long.  As he stretched out, increasing the length of his stride, he began to leap a little, lifting both legs off the ground to glide over the humps that hidden ice below had heaved up on the road.  At first, Raymond leaped only a yard or so, hurtling over irregularities in the asphalt.  But with each leap, he seemed to fly farther and farther through the air.  Several times, it seemed to him that he was on the verge of taking flight.  Then, he pushed off hard against the asphalt and lunged upward and, this time, he didn’t put his feet back down on the asphalt at all.  Instead, the lunge sustained him in the air, holding him three or four feet above the road.  He was flying, not rising or falling, simply sliding through the air with his feet in their stinking tennis shoes hanging below him, idle and useless like the talons of a hawk riding thermals over a remote and empty canyon.  Raymond sped through the air effortlessly for about two or three hundred yards.  It was too easy and did nothing to improve the strength of his thighs and calves and so, reluctantly, out of a sense of duty, he let his shoes touch the ground, felt the impact in his ankles, and, then, was running again. 

            For the next three nights, Raymond experimented with flying.  It was impossible to take-off  at first, but the longer he ran, and the faster his breathing, the stronger and more confident he felt and, ultimately, after a half-hour or so, he was able to lunge upward and, then, glide through the air for fifteen feet at first, then, thirty feet, then longer and longer, until, at last, he shot through the air, gliding a yard above the road, shot into the darkness like a cannonball.  On his last night running alone, Raymond was able to ascend forty or fifty feet upward and, from that height, could survey the entire landscape passing below:  the suburban houses and lawns, the groves of trees, the swamp where a film of ice still remained veiling the bogwater. 

            He was tempted to tell someone about his experience but felt a certain shame.  There was something pathetic and indolent about his feet hanging below him uselessly, tucked up a little toward his torso so that they would not scrape at the asphalt.  Out of embarrassment at his poor useless feet, Raymond didn’t mention his night-flights to anyone.  Later, he forgot about the experience. 

            – Maybe it was just something I dreamed, Raymond thought as he walked his dog through the bright, unseasonably warm afternoon.

            A month later, Raymond’s dog ran away.  An intruder had opened the gate to the kennel where Raymond kept his dog.  Or, perhaps, Raymond had forgotten to properly latch that gate when returning the dog to her quarters after her walk.  It didn’t matter.  The kennel was empty and it made him sad to see his dog’s silver bowls for food and water standing forsaken on the concrete.

            When it became apparent that Raymond’s dog was not going to come home to him, he thought that he would have to make the best of things.  With an old friend, he drove down to Iowa to a casino and spent more money than was prudent gambling.  Raymond was divorced and his children grown and he thought to himself that he had nothing on which to spend his money now but his own pleasure.  He could travel because the dog no longer claimed his attention.  Nothing confined him to home.  At the casino, Raymond chatted with a middle-aged lady who was playing slot-machines.  She invited him to the bar for a drink.  Raymond’s friend was playing blackjack and ignored them when they gestured that he should join them.  The lady told Raymond about some places in Belize where there were beautiful beaches and forests full of brightly colored parrots and hummingbirds.  She said that there were terrible diseases in the jungles and that it was imperative to have many vaccinations before going to Belize.  This intrigued Raymond and so he got the shots – it wasn’t as painful as he feared – and spent two weeks at an all-inclusive resort near Punta Gorda.

            When he returned home, Raymond checked the kennel in his backyard.  For some reason, he thought that his dog might have returned.  But the kennel was empty and dark and, even, the smell of his lost dog was fading.  It was a cool night with the moon bright in the sky, eclipsing the little floral clusters of stars hanging overhead.  On the highway returning home from the airport, Raymond had seen a bad accident and he felt a little bit shaky, as if, perhaps, he had picked up a trace of one of those diseases that the lady at the casino had warned him about.

            He unlocked his house and went inside.  The air was musty, confined, and smelled bad.  Perhaps, he had forgotten to take out the garbage before leaving for Belize.  But the trash bins were empty.  Raymond took a bottle of vodka out of his freezer and poured himself a shot.  The fluid slid from the throat of the bottle a little syrupy with cold.  There was nothing worth watching on TV and Raymond began to feel very tired.  It had been a long day.  – Amazing, he thought, to begin the day in a bungalow beside a sea that was unimaginably turquoise with the birds chattering in the fruit trees and, perhaps, a jaguar stalking the emerald-green shadows of the rain forest and, now, to be back home, thousands of miles to the north, among the fields full of corn and soybeans, beneath the old blue dome of the water tower hanging like the sculpture of a storm cloud over the little town where he lived.

            Soiled by travel, Raymond decided to take a shower.  He went upstairs to his bathroom, ran the water until it was the right temperature, and, then, triggered the cascade of shower water into the tile and glass stall.  Steam swirled around him and fogged the mirror.

            When he stepped out of the shower, Raymond reached for a towel on the rack next to the stall.  The towel was moist in his hand, damp as if it had just been used to wipe dry someone’s torso and back.  He recoiled.  Why was the towel wet?  He slung the towel back over the rack and lifted the other one hanging there by its side.  That towel was dry and warm. 

            When he had toweled the moisture off his skin, Raymond put on a bathrobe.  He stretched out his hand to the other towel, the one that had surprised him by being wet.  It was damp, unmistakably damp.  Someone had wiped themselves with that towel.  There was no other explanation.  A shiver of fear ran up his spine.  Was there someone in the house with him?  Someone hiding in the empty rooms stuffed with all of his old and familiar stuff?  He sniffed at the towel to see if it betrayed an odor.  Nothing.  It was damp, almost wet.  He wasn’t imagining things: someone had recently used that towel. 

            Raymond made a tour of his house.  Everything was where it was supposed to be.  Nothing was out of place.  The rooms were empty and dull in the light from the fixtures overhead.  Outside, he heard sirens.  The cops were being called to help someone or to make an arrest somewhere.  Should he make a report to the police?  But about what?  That one of his towels was mysteriously moist? 

            Raymond went to bed.  Despite the long day, and the memories of the cramped flight, the exhaustion induced by busy airports, the highways and the dark open country, he was unable to sleep.  He sat up in his bed, turned on the light, and tried to read.  But it was no good.  Something was wrong.  And, as soon as he thought to himself “it’s wrong, something is wrong,” he fell asleep.      

            When he woke the next morning, the enigma of the wet towel was forgotten.  He showered again, dressed, and went downtown to the local McDonald’s where he had coffee with some of his cronies.  He told the other men about Belize.  They laughed and asked him if he had diarrhea from his trip.  “Oh no,” Raymond said.  “I feel great.”

            After nightfall, Raymond’s concern about someone invading his home and using his towels returned.  This time, he searched the house very carefully, beginning in the cold room under his porch where boxes of books and old musical instruments that his children had played in High School were stored.  The trumpet and trombone were ice cold to his touch.  No one had held them for twenty years.  Then, he stood in the center of each basement room, scanning all the corners for traces of the intruder.  His washer and dryer were white as tombs and still.  Spider webs blurred the corners of the utility room.  Nothing was moving.  He went upstairs and carefully inspected each room there.  Finally, he climbed the steep stairs into his attic and stood among the crates of dusty Christmas tree ornaments and racks of musty clothing.  It was dim in the attic and the light bulb overhead seemed struggling to hold its own against the gathering darkness.  But nothing seemed to be out of place.

            At McDonald’s, a couple days later, Raymond mentioned the matter of the moist towel.  The other men laughed at him and said that he was “losing his marbles.”  Raymond laughed with them and pretended to agree: “maybe, it’s time for the Home,” he said.  Someone asked if the towel had felt warm to his touch.  “I don’t think so,” Raymond said.  “Probably, a peeper,” one of the guys said with a guffaw.  “Hiding behind the shower-curtain looking at your junk,” he added.  “Could be,” Raymond said.  The topic was the Super Bowl game and Raymond’s remarks were beside the point.  The men reverted to their opinions about the football game and Raymond sat silently, at his accustomed end of the table, nursing his cup of coffee.

            One by one, the men stretched, grimaced about going home, and left the restaurant.  Raymond had nowhere in particular to go.  He thought that he might stop by the hardware store if it were open this early and buy a couple of axe-handles for self-defense.  A retired schoolteacher with whom Raymond had taught remained at the table strewn with fragments of the morning newspaper.

            “No shitting me,” Raymond said to him, “what do you think?”

            “About what?”

            “The thing with the shower and the towel,” Raymond said.

            The retired schoolteacher toyed with the sports page draped across the formica in front of him.

            “Are you sure you didn’t take two showers that morning?” the schoolteacher asked him.  “After all, you were exhausted.  From all that travel.”

            “I don’t think so,” Raymond said.

            “Maybe, you went in the bathroom, you know, kind of in a stupor.  Took a shower and, then, your mind got distracted, you forgot, and so you did it again.  Mechanically, without thinking.”

            “Boy, I don’t think so,” Raymond said.

            “Do you sometimes forget to shut the door to your car?  You know, because something distracted you?”

            “I suppose so.”

            “Leave burners on at the stove?” the schoolteacher asked.

            “All the time,” Raymond said.

            The schoolteacher made a clucking sound with his tongue.  “Yikes!” he said.

            “I’ll tell you what I’ve done,” the schoolteacher continued.  “I’m taking my shower.  You know, in the AM, and I grab for the shampoo bottle and, you know what?”

            “What?”

            “I just can’t recall if I’ve already washed my hair or if I’m doing it all over again.”

            “Really,” Raymond said.

            “Has it ever happened to you?”

            “How would I know if it had?”

            The schoolteacher grinned: “Good point.”

            “Maybe it’s time for the Home,” Raymond said.

            “Yikes!” the schoolteacher said again.  “Don’t say that.”

            The schoolteacher’s cellphone buzzed loudly.  It was set to vibrate.  He fished the phone out of his coat pocket.

            ‘It’s the ball-and-chain,” the schoolteacher said, glancing at the display on the phone.

            “Well, I’ve got to be going,” Raymond said.

            “It’s late.  Look at the time!” the schoolteacher said.  “Yikes!”

            That night, while watching TV, Raymond tried to remember if the towel had been cold or warm or just room temperature.  He recalled with distaste the limp, sodden terrycloth.  He seemed to remember that the wet cloth had been chilly, shocking to the touch.  But wasn’t there also a faint admixture of warmth, a vein of warmth, perhaps, pulsing very slightly in the wet mound of towel? 

            Raymond knew that there was a crawlspace in the finished basement, an anomaly in the lay-out of the rooms beyond the utility roomwhere his furnace and hot water heater crouched on the bare concrete floor under the serrated ceiling of  steps descending from upstairs.  Past the appliances, there was a narrow tunnel-shaped hiding place between the foundation wall and the panels in the basement rec-room.  He had discovered the little crawl space thirty years ago, when his kids were small, and they had sometimes played in that chilly tunnel between the concrete blocks and back of the wood-paneling.  What if someone else knew about that hiding place and had concealed himself there?

            The hot water heater was wreathed in silky cobwebs.  The furnace made a sulky, fitful coughing sound.  A couple of boxes of old toys and books placed there when he had cleaned-out his kids’ bedrooms blocked the passage.  It was dark and the light from the bulb by the furnace seemed to dissolve in the gloom opening into the tunnel.  Raymond pushed the boxes aside and crouched to creep into the little passageway. 

            Beyond the cardboard boxes, there was broken glass strewn on the concrete.  Apparently, his kids had hidden bottles of vodka and whiskey in that space and, when they were empty, someone had broken them.  The air smelled faintly of wet stone, alcohol, mildew.  Raymond cleared a path through the shattered glass and, sighing heavily, crept forward between the panel-board and the concrete block wall.  When his body brushed the concrete blocks, he felt a tingle of cold.  The icy earth outside was leaning heavily against the breastwork of the foundation wall, shedding cold through the concrete into the crawlspace. 

            Raymond remembered that there was a place eight or nine feet down the tunnel where the paneling to the rec room was loose.  It was possible to displace the paneling and look between the studs into the finished room.  He traced his hands against the rear of the paneling.  It was shaggy with web and dust.  With a push, Raymond slid the paneling aside and looked into the rec room.  He had left the lights burning in that room when he came downstairs and it was bright, so bright that his eyes, which had become, accustomed to the gloom, reacted by squinting.  From behind the wall, Raymond saw the pool table, the TV in its cabinet, some book shelves, a round table with pub stools.  From this angle, crouched on the floor, looking through the opening in the paneled wall, nothing looked familiar.  The distances between chairs and other furniture seemed elongated in some dimensions, foreshortened along other axes of perspective and the tiles on the floor glittered with an unearthly radiance, reflecting the light from the fixture overhead.  The pool table seemed to slope slightly, as if the floor were slanted.  The entire room had a peculiar sideways list, a deflection as if it were a cabin in a ship that had run aground on some savage reef at sea.  Who could live in such a place?  How could anyone reliably find their way through the shoals of chairs and bookcases?  From his hiding place, the rec room looked like the surface of a alien planet.

            Raymond slipped the panel back in place and looked down the tunnel.  Six or seven feet ahead of him, there were some pipes that protruded into the crawlspace, a water meter eyeing him with bland dials and, beyond, a big elbow of sewer conduit blocking the way.  It didn’t seem feasible to penetrate any deeper into the tunnel, although it appeared to him that the crawlspace continued an indefinite distance ahead, wrapping itself around the foundation of the house. 

            Ten minutes later, standing in the rec room, Raymond shook his shoulders, shrugging off the cramped space from which he had just emerged.  He scanned the bookshelves next to the pool table.  Whose books were these?  The title on the book’s spines didn’t seem familiar to him at all.  Perhaps, they were remnants of the textbooks that his kids had used in college.  Or, maybe, these books were things that his ex-wife had abandoned when she left him.  On one shelf, there were dust-covered stacks of old National Geographic magazines.  Had he once subscribed to the periodical? 

            After midnight, Raymond woke up.  He stared into the darkness.  Something had aroused him, but he didn’t know if it was a dream or a sound in a dream or a sound outside in the alleyway or a sound coming from the basement.  He didn’t move, straining to hear.  His attentiveness brought him fully awake.  Was there an intruder?  The silence was oppressive and seemed to hum.  Maybe that was just the blood coursing through the veins in his head.

            It was fifty years ago, sixty years, perhaps.  Raymond remembered the book, a paperback volume of ghost stories edited by Bennet Cerf.  Who was that?  Raymond vaguely recalled a black-and-white TV screen.  What’s my Line?  Bennet Cerf was a panel-member, a wit.  Did he wear a bow-tie?  On the book’s cover, all ragged and dog-eared, there were some trees, grey limbs reaching up into a grey sky.  Raymond recalled reading the book in bed, with a flashlight under the covers.  Most of the stories didn’t make any sense to him.  The ones that were supposed to be the most frightening were about things that he didn’t understand.  The book belonged to his father.  There was an introduction by Mr. Cerf that was full of puns and obscure jokes.  The last fifteen or twenty pages of the book were vignettes, anonymous ghost stories of the kind that people used to tell around campfires or during long midnight drives cross-country.  One of the stories came to mind.  It was vivid as if Raymond were hearing it for the first time:

A young woman was troubled by a re-occurring dream.  In her dream, she was riding in the country, gazing out at a pretty landscape of trees and fields.  She saw a lovely cottage standing among old elm trees at the end of a long driveway.  For some reason, the cottage excited her and she turned into that driveway, passed under the shade of the trees and stopped next to the house.  The cottage was compact, neatly maintained, and seemed comfortable and homey.  In her dream, the young woman got out of her car, walked to the front door, and knocked.  It seemed to her that she would never be truly happy unless she could find a way to own this cottage in the country and live there.  She heard someone coming, footfalls behind the door, but, before the door opened, she always woke up, sad and tantalized. 

The young woman had this dream for several years a couple times a month.  The house always appeared to her in its pastoral setting.  She approached the door filled with a desire to buy the house, knocked, footsteps sounded within, but she always opened her eyes to her familiar bedroom, before the door opened. 

One day, the young woman was driving to visit a friend who lived in the country.  To her amazement, she saw the cottage that she had visited so many times in her dreams standing at the end of a long driveway shaded by elms.  Pinching herself to see if she was, in fact, awake, she drove down the driveway and parked next to the cottage.  The air was warm and smelled of lilacs.  As if in a trace, the young woman approached the door and knocked.  It was just as it was in her dream.  Footfalls sounded on the other side of the door, and, then, with a creak, the door opened.  An old man with a pleasant smile and white hair stood inside.  The young woman stammered out her name.  She asked: “Is the house for sale?”  “Oh yes,” the old man said.  The young woman said that she would like to buy it.  “But you should know something,” the old man said.  “What?”  “I’m afraid this house is haunted,” the old man told her.  The young woman was puzzled.  “Haunted?  By whom?” she asked.  “By you,” the old man said, quietly shutting the door.    

             

            The next morning, Raymond searched the house carefully, room by room, stooping low to look under furniture and beds.  Nothing.  Whoever had been creeping about the house after midnight had been careful to leave no trace of his presence.  He sat in front of his TV set.   Perhaps, the intruder would think him oblivious to the world while watching TV and might emerge from hiding.  The house creaked and moaned like old houses will, but nothing emerged.

            Raymond went into his basement and crept along the dank passageway in the crawlspace.  He passed the point where the panel could be displaced into the rec room and knelt at the obstruction made by the meters and the thick bend in the sewer pipe.  It seemed to him that with some effort, he might be able to squeeze past the meters and, then, slither over the knuckle of the big pipes.  Of course, it was possible that the passageway’s obstructions made it strictly one-way – in other words, perhaps, there was no reversing his direction once he passed those obstacles.  Raymond thought about this for awhile.  Undoubtedly, he told himself, there will be other places farther down the tunnel where I can find openings into the rooms of the house.  Recently, the structure had become porous, or so, it seemed, and, certainly, there would be gaps in the walls, fissures through which he could wriggle.  In the gloom, he imagined each room in the house and, for the first time, it seemed to him that there were gaps in the familiar spaces that he brought to mind, shadowy intervals where he couldn’t remember the terrain of wall or floor – probably,  those holes in his mind were some kind of opening between the hidden tunnel and the home’s interior.

            It was surprisingly easy to slither around the meters and, then, corkscrew past the bent pipe.  Tiny cracks in the inside wall illuminated the crawlway.  He came to several sharp turns, probably the corners of his house and the murky tube continued, tighter and more constrained, ramped downward, it seemed.  The twists in the passageway confused him.  He could no longer recall whether the outside wall was to his right or left.  In the depths below the house, it seemed that the embrace of the earth and concrete blocks was equally cool on both sides and he could no longer orient himself by touching a wall to see if it were warm or cold. 

            Raymond’s progress was slow.  The pathway was strewn with fragments of timber, broken studs, discarded shingles, clots of milky-looking drywall.  After creeping a long time, Raymond came to place where it seemed that an electrical socket had drooped sideways, the fixture hanging from its rectangular niche suspended by a thumb-thick loop of cord.  He bent down and looked through the opening.  At first, he was confused.  The room looked unfamiliar, brightly lit in comparison to the gloomy elongated closet where Raymond was crouching.  After a puzzling over the perspective – he seemed to be viewing the room from overhead, from a corner just beneath the ceiling (what was a wall socket doing there?) – Raymond decided that he was on the second floor of his house, peering down into a spare bedroom that he and his wife had converted into a den for watching TV.  The curious thing was that the lights were on.  He hadn’t been in that room for a long time.  Had he left the lights on or had the intruder entered the house while he was exploring its passageways and switched on the lamp by the TV?  He held his breath and watched the empty room for a few moments.  Everything was still, motionless.  The TV set looked old.  Raymond remembered that  it was a set that he had hauled out to the dump four or five years earlier and replaced with a wide-screen flat TV.  What was it doing in this room again?

            Looking down the passage, Raymond saw some other cracks in the wall, presumably opening into other rooms.  He wondered if these rooms also existed in some earlier time.  The passage-way seemed steep now, almost like a ladder and, as he clambered up the narrow chute, pieces of aluminum ducting clinked under his body.  He had to be quiet, silent, but it was impossible to move without disturbing the sharp angles of discarded ductwork.  He could see where the tin-shears had snipped through the metal.  It wounded him a little, and he was bleeding from his knee and elbow, leaving a slime trail behind him like a snail. 

            One crack opened onto his kitchen, although the perspective was strange.  The opening was behind a refrigerator and so, Raymond wasn’t clear how he was able to see through the bulk of that appliance which blocked his way, and, yet, which didn’t impede him from watching over a round kitchen table.  That table was the place where his daughter had done her homework.  Raymond recalled his son sitting at that table playing a game-boy.  Perhaps, his wife was standing by the stove, humming to herself.  He looked carefully, gazing through the refrigerator to see if he had left a range turned-on at the stove.  Raymond thought that he smelled a faint odor of fire, something burning, but he couldn’t see well enough to determine if he had forgotten to shut off the range.  Something flickered in a remote doorway, something white, twitching.  Was it his dog Penny’s tail?  He hoped that the dog would come around the corner and trot into the kitchen and he waited for a long time, but the tail remained without attachment to any animal, wagging at the edge of the threshold into the kitchen.

            Raymond found his way back into the house.  He must have crept down the passageways mechanically, distracted by his thoughts, because he couldn’t remember how he had wriggled over the sewer pipe and the meters and made his way into the basement.  The experience in the tunnels had exhausted him and he took a long nap.  In the evening, while he watched TV, he heard the house creaking and groaning; it seemed to rotate on its timbers, twisting slowly as the wind’s impact were turning it on its foundations.  Twice, in the middle of the night, he opened his eyes to hear footsteps in secret passageways in the walls.

            The next morning, Raymond made himself two peanut butter sandwiches and put a banana with a can of Dr. Pepper in a paper sack.  He stashed a phillips-head screwdriver in his belt and went downstairs to the crawlspace.  Creeping through the passages seemed to have become second nature for him and he moved quickly and with agility.  As he contorted himself to pass between the meters and sewer pipe, Raymond felt lithe, competent, almost agile.  He was moving with great speed and assurance.  It reminded him of how he had learned to fly fifty years before, running on the country roads in the darkness of early spring.  After penetrating deeply into the maze of tunnels, Raymond stopped and used his screwdriver to stab a hole through the tunnel’s wall.  It was hard work, particularly since the tight enclosure constrained him from putting the full force of his arms and shoulders into the point of the tool.  For a time, Raymond feared that he was knifing his way into the wall that was drowned in the icy dirt around the house and that nothing would be visible through the cleft that he cut in the side of passageway.  In fact, that opening might destabilize the wall and, perhaps, the cold soil would begin to flow like dark water into the tube of the crawlspace and bury him alive.  But, after ten minutes of shoving and stabbing, Raymond’s screwdriver pierced the wall, and, leaning on it, he levered open a peephole.  He couldn’t recognize the room, but that was, probably, a function of his peculiar perspective.  He seemed to be hanging upside down like a bat and the furniture dangled from the floor that was above him like a ceiling.  This was an ideal vantage, Raymond thought, to catch the intruder in his house and he thought that he would sit quietly for an hour, or several hours, hoping that the home-invader would appear in the room that he was watching.  With his eye glued to the peephole, Raymond silently munched on his soggy peanut-butter sandwiches.  He peeled his banana and ate it.  Then, he remained at his post, gazing into the empty room for a long time.  His eye seemed to become enormous and awful, a vast orb of perception that held the whole house in its gaze and made a globe around all things.  When his eye became tired and closed, he vanished from himself and the world went away also.

            He must have been sleeping.  He was thirsty and his mouth felt dirty.  He drank some of the Dr. Pepper.  He couldn’t really drag the opened pop can with him through the tunnels so he left it behind with the banana peel and the crushed paper sack.  The tunnel twisted sharply and seemed to drop like chute into the earth.  He skidded and slid downward for a very long time.  Now, there were many branches to the crawlway, dark twisting boreholes that opened to one side or the other of the main passageway.  The network of passages was very complex.  It was like writhing through some enormous brain pitted like Swiss-cheese.

            Raymond was surprised to feel that he was covered with blood.  In some places, the sides of the tunnel were studded with nails driven inward from the exterior walls.  His clothing hung in shreds over places where his skin also seemed to be shredded.  But It was like flying over the country road: Raymond was ecstatic and felt no pain.

            The tunnel dead-ended at a sump.  Wan light was rising from the bottom of that pit.  Raymond dropped into the hole and found that he had fallen upward into a kind of cupola.  The cupola was open to the wind and stars and the moon.  It took him awhile to reverse his perspective so that he was not seeing the snowy landscape upside down.  The cupola was very small and seemed to fit over his head like a helmet.  Extending away from the little dome-shaped turret, there was an expanse of shingles, some of them cracked and fissured.  Across the alleyway, Raymond could see his house standing in its snowy lawn.  The owner of that house had been derelict – it had snowed but no one had shoveled the sidewalk.  Raymond gasped with horror.  In the darkness, he saw black figures creeping around his house.  The shadows were going in and out at the front door, crawling through the windows, clambering over the snowdrift to enter at the back.  Raymond tried to choke down his horror but he couldn’t.  Noiselessly, the black shadows swarmed through doors and windows invading his home.

            The car was in the garage.  Raymond’s car grinned at them with the smug, self-satisfied look that a well-garaged vehicle shows to the world.  The sidewalks hadn’t been scooped and they were icy under the undisturbed sheet of snow.

            The neighbor lady came onto her porch in fuzzy-looking slippers and a blue bathrobe.  “Can I help you?” she asked.  The retired schoolteacher and his two buddies nodded to her.

            “Have you seen Raymond?” the retired schoolteacher asked.

            “I thought he went to Florida or something,” the neighbor lady said.

            “His car’s in the garage,” the schoolteacher said.

            “I thought one of his kids gave him a ride to the airport,” she said, shrugging.

            By way of explanation, one of the men said: “We haven’t seen him for almost two weeks.”

            They searched around the shrubs by the porch.  After a couple minutes, one of the men found an axe-handle tucked into a hiding place between two bushes.  One of them jimmied the door open.

            The retired schoolteacher sniffed at the still air in the house and gagged.  He covered his mouth and nose.  “Yikes,” he said.