It’s a fascinating thing, the blur of the bygone lands left unexplored out the passenger window of a speeding car. The lives lived, the people becoming themselves, evolving in their own ecosystem, giving little thought to how fleeting their impact is on each passerby. The shadows elongated in front of me as we drove deeper into obscurity. Virginia and Bryce hooted and hollered in the backseat behind me fueled by a whiskey soaked infatuation with the infinite barrage of trees they found oddly tantalizing. They did more hooting than hollering. They had a real knack for hooting. I begin to feel lonely in the car amongst my closest friends; a product of the time spent in my own head. I finally spoke up, breaking a silence that only existed in my ears.
“I reckon we’ll be there soon,” I said. Madelyn, the driver, turned and looked at me. She stared at me for far too long for someone tasked with the job of driving. She had a blank expression, perhaps with the slightest tinge of confusion that only the most hyperbolic of caricature artists would render into a look of real emotion. I figured it best to not speak again. And perhaps it was best if I decided not to reckon again either.
We’d booked a vacation home out in the backlands only three days prior. It was a weekend excursion that I accepted out of some emotion tangential to boredom. Boredom doesn’t carry the consistency or longevity of what I felt. I suppose I felt lost, despite only ever traveling on mapped land. Madelyn, Virginia, Bryce and I had all graduated from college together about a year ago, and we’d stayed friends since, but even past the deadening of the daytime whisky, they had something in their eyes that I never seemed to possess: Purpose. And so I piggybacked onto their much needed vacation to just live another day in my increasingly nomadic life. Perhaps the life of luxury to another, but I’ve found that the prison of routine is ripe with structure on which to stand on, and every day the wind blows me further into the abyss.
“D.J. can you read the instructions from the airbnb guy?” asked Madelyn with newfound peasantry in her voice. I was happy to be tasked with something.
“D.J., can you read English?” asked Bryce from the back. He laughed.
“Duh Doy,” I shot back, the picture of articulation.
“D.J. you can read though, right? I mean it’s not in Furbish.” said Madelyn with a chuckle. My father had made me bilingual with English and Furbish when I was a child because he thought the Furby was the way of the future, and my friends never let me forget it. He was wrong about a lot of things.
“Alright, let’s see,” I said to myself, opening up a piece of paper from the glove box. The old man who had rented the house to us sent instructions in the mail on old parchment paper. He seemed an eclectic man. I began to read the letter aloud “It says ‘Oh dear houseguests of pleasant disposition I’m sure. I look forward to welcoming you to my home. When you get to Burlap Road take a right and then take a left and then take a deep breath and take in the forest for the wonders that it has to give. There will be a bridge to cross, but you’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. Then finally you’ll come to a fork in the road and you’ll need to take the road less traveled. Get out of the car and count the footprints. Then you’ll arrive at the homestead. If there’s a hunchbacked man speaking nonsense words on the front steps, you’ve come to the right place. If not, you’ve still come to the right place provided you’ve followed the directions.’ And it’s signed ‘Douglass J. Von Clifferton.”
“Sounds easy enough,” said Virginia, with an uneasy chuckle. As we got deeper into the forest, the surroundings became less recognizable in an indescribable sense. I felt on edge drifting through the trees as if something sinister had done well to mask itself in serenity. We followed the instructions up to the bridge, and then followed the instructions over the bridge as well. When we got to a fork in the road, Bryce and Virginia got out to count the footsteps. They returned to the car with expressions drawn half with confusion and half with hilarity.
“There’s only one single footstep on the left and then nothing on the right,” said Bryce. Madelyn laughed and decided to go right. We weaved up a hill and I watched the setting sun place a glow on the untraveled road in front of us. It had become apparent that we’d found a corner of the world that had kept itself clean from the viral spread of civilization. At the top of the hill was a beautiful two story cabin that had such an inviting air to it that the natural pessimism in me could see it only as a trap. But while I continued on my path of increasingly antagonistic thoughts towards our vacation, I could hear the others gasp in excitement.
There was no hunched man on the front steps, but as we parked the car, an old man came out the front door. He had a familiar, albeit not that friendly face. He felt like a figure from a bad dream that wasn’t quite a nightmare. He had a thin narrow nose and long wiry limbs. His eyes were almost glossy, but he was not blind.
“Ah greetings!” he shouted out to us across the driveway. He had a cheery tone to his voice and spoke in a manner reminiscent of a past decade that never did happen. “The guests have arrived,” he then said in a loud voice with his head pointed back at the house. But somehow it was clear that no one else was around. Madelyn walked over to me and whispered near my ear.
“I thought the homeowner was gonna be, like, away,” she said with a slightly concerned voice. I agreed with her. The old man’s entire demeanor made him very unwelcome to our group.
“Who amongst us here is the withered soul of whom will be sharing their room with this old man?” he asked with a chuckle that didn’t do enough to imply he was joking. Virginia told him that his listing implied that there were three bedrooms so we’d be fine letting him have his own if he was to stay. He agreed to that resolution with thinly veiled reluctance. He invited us into the house and told us to make ourselves at home. We placed our bags in the two bedrooms upstairs and the old man shouted up to us while we settled. “The house is yours for the weekend,” he said. “Just don’t touch the items labeled ‘Mother’ for those belong to another.” The only thing labeled ‘Mother’ in the whole house was an extremely rotten grapefruit. We had little interest in touching it.
The old man told us he needed to finish his task and we just nodded in compliance. He began to relentlessly wash one old raggetty dish towel in the sink and mutter to himself, “gotta be pure, yes, gotta be pure,” over and over again.
I looked around the house. It was well decorated and all the wall art was Baroque portraits where the main figures all had their eyes closed. The whole living room was lit by candles and a fireplace. They provided slight illumination to the fancy furniture that gave off both wealth and precariousness. We walked out to the porch while the old man washed his rag. The view was breathtaking. It felt as though we were lording over an enchanted land. For a moment, all four of us, in congruence, felt that the oddity of the elderly man in the other room was worth it.
Bryce pulled out a bottle of whiskey and we passed it around in silence for a minute. Then Virginia finally spoke up. “Yo,” she said slowly. “This is weird.” We all laughed. It felt good to laugh and drink and let all the tension out as I lay my eyes on the meadows down below. I looked over at my friends and became extremely aware of the moment I was in. It was nice to be so aggressively present. But then the old man walked out onto the porch and sat next to us.
“The world out here is peaceful, no?” he asked, sitting down. His long slender fingers grasped at the air in front of him as he spit out each syllable with anguish.
“Quite,” said Virginia with an awkward smile. She was trying to hold up a level of politeness towards the intruder of our trip. “So do you live out here?” she asked, trying to break a heavy tension.
“No one can live in one place, despite how hard some try,” said the old man. His last word was met with a deafening silence. I took a sip of the whisky. We tried to carry on and talk normally as we would without a strange elderly man in our presence, but everyone felt watched and judged by the most bizarre of onlookers.
“No one ever has the time to truly start over you know?” said the old man in an ill timed and unprompted excursion into the philosophical. We all sat in silence and tried to lose ourselves in the beauty of the view in front of us that was meeting us with increasingly diminishing returns. I got up from my seat and drew the attention of the entire group all begging that I’d do something drastic to break them from their awkward captivity.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I said. Bryce, Virginia and Madelyn all hit me with a cutting look of let down.
“It’s the first door on the left,” said the old man. It was absolutely not the first door on the left. In fact, there weren’t any doors on the left at all. I finally did find the bathroom and I used my time in there as an escape from the situation outside, but found that I could only hide for so long. As I left the bathroom, I heard uproarious laughter coming from the back porch. I couldn’t make out the words, but they seemed to be having a grand old time. Virginia and Bryce were, as expected, hooting while Madelyn and the old man were hollering. I was excited to see how things had changed, how the fog had lifted.
But as soon as I got outside, everything came to a screeching halt. Madelyn looked at me with a silent closed mouth smile that teetered on the edge of a grimace and Bryce slowly sipped his whisky. The old man just stared out into the distance. The energy on the porch remained stagnant like that for a while until my group finally decided to go to bed. We wanted to have a grand day the next day and we were tired from our day of traveling. The old man warned us that sometimes he screams when he’s sleeping and we found that this was the most unsurprising thing we’d heard all day.
Bryce and I took one room and Virginia and Madelyn took the other. Everyone in our tight knit friend group had dabbled with sleeping with one another in the past, but at this period, we decided to split the genders up when selecting our sleeping arrangements. And Bryce and I weren’t in much of an experimental mood. I drifted off with my mind filled with the hope that the rising sun would replace the prior day’s oddity with a newfound relaxation.
At about 4AM, I was shaken awake. Bryce was standing over me. “You gotta get out of here, man,” he muttered. “You can’t be here.”
“What?” I said back, still in the haze of sleepiness.
“You gotta leave. You can’t be in here,” he continued. I couldn’t break his frantic grasp. “You really shouldn’t be in here. We told you,” he said. I was too tired and freaked out to try and reason with him so I grabbed my blanket and left the room. I walked slowly down the stairs and laid down on the living room couch. The steady overhead fan lulled me back to sleep.
I was awoken by sunlight creeping into the upstairs bedroom. At first I was a little confused, and then I was very confused. I looked around and saw that I had woken up back in the bedroom in the bed next to Bryce’s. He looked at me, still a bit sleepy and said, “good morning man, how’d you sleep?”
“Fine,” I said back in a voice so soft it was barely out loud. “Didn’t-” I started up, but then decided to forget it. I put some clothes on, and we headed downstairs.
“Good Morn, fine young men,” said the old man when he saw us. He was sitting up on the couch with the tired still filling his eyes. Bryce looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to comment on his annoyance towards our host.
He walked past me and whispered, “I’m gonna need a beer if I’m going to deal with this guy. You want one?” I obliged, strictly because my confused mind was in need of an alteration. We spent the day drinking and trying to avoid the weird old man. Madelyn and Virginia got up and we played some music and hung out. The old man kept mostly to himself except when he asked us to queue up a song called A Tone for Your Sins which was just an eight minute long B flat. That was a small price to pay to get to enjoy our day in the beautiful house without his sinister cloud of peculiarity hanging over us.
When the sun went down we made a fire. It burned away the wood and its smoke made an aspiring reach for the moonlight. The world felt primitive as our natural light source illuminated the trees around us, revealing just enough to prove that there was a world outside of just that moment. Bryce was sitting very close to the fire. “It’s quite hot,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. I agreed with him.
“Why don’t you back up a bit?” asked Virginia, but Bryce dismissed her and took a sip of the handle of whiskey before passing it to Madelyn. We talked a bit about the world around us, about anything that came to mind. Eventually the old man came outside from the house and pulled up a seat next to us. “Hot,” he said, as we all looked at him. “Have you folks enjoyed yourselves so far?” he asked.
“For the most part,” said Virginia. The old man nodded his head subtly. There was a small silence quickly broken by the old man.
“When I was in my 50’s, quite a while ago, I woke up to myself digging feverishly in that forest over there. There was just enough moonlight to see. Everything felt wrong, but I just kept digging. As I was doing it, I felt a very vivid memory of having done the same thing before. It was like a déjà vu, except I couldn’t quite put my finger on either the past moment or the present moment. It was as though I tapped into some sort of collective and primordial human trauma. There was blood all over my clothes and the hole never seemed to get any deeper,” he began to raise his voice. “I just kept digging and digging and digging and digging and digging.” He abruptly stopped and there was silence. I found myself out of breath. Then he spoke again. “Then I woke up in my bed. It wasn’t a dream, but it wasn’t a memory. There’s a filled in hole over in that forest, but I’ve never had the heart to unearth what it might contain.”
We all looked at each other and then turned our focus to the fire. We tried not to think about the old man who’d hosted our vacation in an unwelcome manner. I felt a need to get away, so I told the group that I was going to grab another drink and made haste for the house. As I walked away, I felt a tension in myself lift, and then I heard an explosion of laughter. The chatter around the fire was loose and jovial. I looked back and saw their enjoyment. I saw Bryce and Virginia and Madelyn, and as I squinted in panicked confusion, I saw myself. I was sitting there with the rest of them laughing about something out of earshot. I shook off the image and walked into the house.
I got to the fridge, but next to it was an old dish towel that was filthy. I took it to the sink and washed it, but it wouldn’t get clean. Without thinking I began to mutter to myself, “gotta be pure, yes, gotta be pure.” It felt natural, yet confusing. I looked to my left and saw a mirror next to one of the cabinets. I saw myself with a thin, angry nose, an elderly wrinkled face and long wiry limbs. I stared at it.
In that moment, I realized something. I genuinely did not know if I was a lost young man getting a glimpse into the insanity of his future or a crazy old man getting a glimpse into the wayward nature of his past. But either way, I knew destiny was final.