Floating Staircase(8)

Just a dream . . . a bad dream . . .

Beside me, Jodie slept soundly. Her feet and legs, warm to the touch, were pushed against my own legs beneath the sheets. I watched her for a moment, my eyesight acclimating to the lightlessness of our bedroom.

There was someone else in the room with us.

This realization dawned on me not as lucid thought but in the rising of the hairs on the nape of my neck as I sat up. It was a purely instinctual awareness, tethered to some sort of primal foreknowledge, and I had no rational explanation for feeling it. Nonetheless, I was suddenly certain of a strange and unseen presence.

I stared across the room at the open doorway. It was too dark to see anything for sure. If I gazed into space long enough, I could convince myself of anything.

Quietly, I peeled away the covers and climbed out of bed. In the darkness, the house was even more alien to me. I found my way along the upstairs hallway, one hand dragging along the wall, until I came to the winding stairwell. Around me, the house creaked in the wind. I peered over the railing. Ghostly rectangles of moonlight shimmered on the carpet. Somewhere in the belly of the house, a clock loudly counted out the seconds.

My breath caught in my throat as my gaze fell upon a small figure in the farthest corner of the downstairs foyer—a blacker blur among the darkness. I studied the contours of a head, a cheek, the slope of a neck. Yet the longer I stared at the figure, the less discernible it became, like when you look directly at a distant star as opposed to catching it peripherally. After another dozen or so heartbeats, the shape was one of many among unpacked boxes and displaced furniture.

Downstairs, I pulled my parka on over my undershirt and pajama pants, then climbed into the sneakers I’d left by the front door. One hand was already digging around inside the parka to locate my cigarettes and a lighter.

When I stepped out into the night, I was accosted without mercy by the cold, making me suddenly and completely aware of every single molecule that fabricated my body. Even from within my parka, my arms broke out in gooseflesh. Shivering, I could feel my testicles retreat up into my abdomen. I lit the cigarette with shaking hands and sucked hard, savoring it.

I studied Adam’s footprints in the pearl-colored snow while my mind slipped back to our conversation from earlier. It was something I didn’t feel like revisiting now. I meandered around the side of the house and came to stand beside an outcrop of trees, the bitter wind temporarily blocked by the angle of the house. The yard looked expansive, surreal, untouched. Before me, spread out like a stain on the snow, my shadow loomed enormous. The purity of the territory.

I thought I saw a figure move in the darkness a few yards ahead of me: it passed briefly from the sanctuary of the trees and across the lawn, its form silhouetted for a moment against the backdrop of the moonlit lake. I froze, watching for several seconds, anticipating the figure’s return. But when it refused to reappear, I began doubting my own eyes, just as I had back in the house.

I headed to the backyard. Most of the trees here were firs, doing their best to blot out the moon with their heavy winter cloaks, but farther back and in studded rows stood tall oaks, now leafless and skeletal. From my vantage, I could make out a glitter of moonlight on the frozen surface of the lake.

I continued on through the stand of trees toward the water. The wind was relentless, biting into every available square inch of flesh, and I hugged myself to keep warm. Tears froze against the sides of my face and burned down the swells of my cheeks. Closer to the edge of the lake, as the embankment sloped gradually down toward the water, the snow thinned out. Stepping on it, I broke through a frozen layer of crust, and my sneaker sank several inches. A moment after that, ice water permeated my sneaker and shocked my foot.

“Shit.”

My sneaker made a squelching, sucking sound as I liberated it from the freezing slush. I leaned against a tree for support while doing my best to wring out the leg of my pajama pants. My toes were already growing numb. Directly ahead of me, the lake opened up like a tabletop, the frozen surface nearly reflective. That odd structure rose straight through the ice, the color of milk in the moonlight. From this new perspective I could see just how large it was. And it was certainly not a rock nor a crest of stone. It was man-made.

The structure was only twenty yards from the shore, and I needed a better look at it. Against my better judgment, I advanced through the thinning snow and stepped onto the frozen lake. Cautious, I treaded lightly, testing the strength of the ice beneath my feet. For a split second I was plagued by images of drowning in black water, trapped beneath the ice and struggling for breath as my lungs cramped up. I imagined thrusting upward through the water, seconds away from unconsciousness, slamming my head against the underside of the frozen lake, desperate to break through and liberate myself from inevitable death.

But the ice felt sturdy beneath my weight. I inched forward, sliding more than walking, too guarded to actually lift my feet from the ice.

As I closed the distance, the monstrosity took shape: perhaps ten feet high, four feet wide, immense, structurally sound, constructed of faded boards of wood. It was layered—beveled—on one side.

It was a staircase.

Confounded, I paused just a few feet from it.

A staircase rising straight out of the lake.

Made of planks of wood, weather soured and spotty with frost-whitened mildew, it looked like the same type of wood used to build the deck of a house. It was not resting on the ice but rising up through it, just as Jodie had observed from the bedroom window earlier that day. The ice around its base had melted, leaving an open moat of sludgy dark water perhaps four or five inches wide surrounding the entire structure.