Lo & Behold

I was there at the end; at the new age of paranoia, the disintegration of hope in the South. Almost two hundred years of Reconstruction and we fell once again, this time alongside our whole country. Division ran rampant, riots ensued, and our leaders sniped and spat on each other.

At least that’s what Father tells me. Perhaps that’s why, even as a boy, I always tried to partake in the second era of our nation’s rebuilding.

The sound of browning leaves scuffing on the road where Moses “Mo” Lincoln walked alongside, and the breeze that accompanied it, were the first signifiers toward the first ever Autumn of what he thought of as the “New World.” He understood a certain amount of melodrama to be implied in this name, as the government officials on all the TVs and on all the radios he came across were always rambling about the pandemic ending next month, next month, next month… for the past four or five months.

But Mo was never much one for governmental allegiance; he loved the grand-ole’-U-S-of-A, but ever since the bizarre redness of a blood moon he encountered on his fourteenth birthday, he’d always kept watchful eyes on the world around him. Something about the mahogany tint of that glowing orb had given him anxiety, and the message that the world was not to be trusted.

And in the years to come, the message would continue to ring true in his ears—in-between the rambunctious leather-belt beatings of his old man and in the spaces of time occupied by his mother’s quietude amidst his verbal abuse, the voids would be filled by assurances that the outside world was somehow colder and bore even less sympathy than the one confined to the hardwood walls of the Lincoln household. Recognizing this on any day, even at the ripening age of twenty-eight, the scrawny Mo’s cigarette burns that he wore on his shoulders would tense up, to the point where he could swear he felt them pop open and drip pus down his shirt.

Such voices diminished, however, in his seventeenth year, when at a party he indulged in the proposition of a female companion—one hit of cocaine, and she would please him. He expected her to put up her end of the bargain, he did not expect her end to be somehow the less enjoyable action he performed that night.

As the white powder from some abandoned shack from Tennessee slid up his nostrils and dripped down to the back of his throat, his heart palpitated and pupils grew, but most importantly he found an internalized sanctuary that he would only continue to chase. With this a newfound confidence coursed through his psyche and, after the ecstasy of the young girl whose name Mo could no longer remember, he would destroy every mirror in the poor girl’s house before exiting in an adrenaline-fueled release of his ennui.

In this chase for chemically-bound peace, he would spend his twenties not living but floating from town to town and job to job, hoisting up his connections and spending his lightly-earned finances on the next trending high, all under the guise of legitimacy.

Throughout these years, in the more downtrodden moments between the inhalations of poisonous smoke and the injections of concentrated tar, Mo would oftentimes have epiphanies, those close to that of his first exposure to the world of narcotics, epiphanies that typically notified him that the entirety of his lifestyle was a mistake, and that where he was, typically in places worn down and in depressive state, working for the smallest of wages and chasing sex from the most decrepit of women, was not any true way to live.

These revelations were shortsighted, however, whereas Mo would usually dismiss these concerns as miniscule as he picked up the glass pipe that he usually kept near him.

I wear a white dress, with red thickness dripping down it.

Such contents never seem to expire, nor cease to emerge from my veins. But they also never hit the ground; they flow like an everlasting river that knows no end. Upon close inspection you can see it coursing, but the stream never thickens, the drops never form.

My heart does not beat, and I do not breathe. Yet the pain never subsides.

Even in silence I can hear my grandparents’ grieving, my son’s wailing; these sounds are both above and below me, simultaneously. And it’s from this that I deduce that I am not any semblance of being that occupies the house, but I am the manor itself in which I’d passed.

Sweat tearing down the chin of Mo (which he would wipe with his mask), he shoddily recalled his final revelation, the one that brought him to this Georgian road with his knapsack on, stretched across his shoulder.

He was in a bathtub; he’d like to claim it was his own but he couldn’t recall whose it was.

He hadn’t bathed in a good long while and the water was brown; his legs were stretched over the edge of the tub and he was listening to a radio, one that he’d fiddled and adjusted until he got what sounded like a daily news special.

The news was to Mo what it was to many, which was nothing more than a white noise machine that for Mo would cause the screaming to subside just enough for him to relax.

The water was warm and the tenseness in his muscles began to loosen as he sighed and sank deeper into the tub.

It was in this moment of a more natural peacefulness that the hand of fate came down and interrupted in shattering news, whereas the deejay-news anchor would announce the new ways of the world, or at least those in America.

He spoke of illness and death, of a pandemic that could cause worldwide decay, should precautions be dismissed. Mo’s eyes opened up, as he went on about the need for facial masks and the appropriation of physical distance. But it wasn’t until Mo heard of the susceptibility of the elders (and for some reason the youth?) that he had a prolonged version of one of his many epiphanies.

For the image of his dearest mother was conjured in his mind’s eye, the second the anchor said “elders” and the ways his father would look at her when she so much as whimpered or sighed during her husband’s violent digressions upon their son; it was a look of dark clouds without a drop of rain, an impending threat.

It was such a look that brought Mo to this stretch of road (highway?) as he made use of his hitchhiker’s thumb at every opportune moment and awaited the convenience of a plug with which he could charge his drained phone.

He’d hitched rides before and he was certain he’d hitch them again, but never on this particular pavement whose name he could not recall. Therefore, he could hardly foresee nor predict how unlucky his circumstances were to be, both in the lack of kindness in strangers that passed, and in the malintent of one particular carload of strangers that seemed eerily friendly.

It was in this vehicle, a worn-down Toyota that stopped in front of Mo (where he saw Confederate stickers on its rear-end), where three genuine men of the olden South gave grins that (retrospectively) should have swayed Mo to keep walking. They were forty-or-fifty, some kind of age that was muddled by the nicotine smell and the cheapest of liquor on their breathes.

Although they would prove to be many things, the only word that rang in Mo’s psyche was Hicks as he walked into the driver-rear-end side door, and the leading hick accelerated with eyes shifting in the rearview mirror’s reflection.

Mo was never much one for conversing but, in the name of hospitality and gratitude, he’d willing feign such interests by means of transportation. So he asked what the gentlemen were up to, what brought them on that road, and how far they were from his hometown, images of his mother conjured up once more.

This would lead to the first signs of dismay that Mo would notice, the vague one-worded answers and the clear disinterest in anything the young man had to say.

Naturally uncomfortable in these situations, he cast his gaze around the vehicle and, noting that the man in the passenger seat and the man beside him were still giving the same grin of contempt and pity as they stare unsubtly at Mo, Mo became somehow more aware, less certain, and afraid.

Not seconds but milliseconds after his own establishment of fear, there was another sliver of time where Mo knew that the man beside him knew about Mo’s own awareness, and, deducing that Mo may be luckless but not stupid, punched Mo square in the jaw and, as Mo fell back, began gripping the end of Mo’s torn and tattered jeans.

Mo, still in the shock of his understanding, kicked the redneck in the face in a knee-jerk reaction, to which the driver pulled over to the side of the road once more, the sound of the skidding tires piercing the ears of all the men within the vehicle.

My pain is not solely confined to my physical (spiritual?) being.

My heart is not only tattered by the blast, for it bears a heavy weight, the kind that can only be remedied by actions outside of my power.

Then there is my mind; I feel as though my brain is in itself suffocating as if it were being smothered by cloth that’d been soaked in boiling water. It is as though there were psychological claws digging into the crevices of my cranium. With this comes the anger and sorrows that only someone who has been deemed inadequate by God himself can feel, the helplessness and self-pity that I am destined to wallow for this eternity, quite possibly the next.

The wind no longer cries my name; for it simply cries victim.

There was a moment where Mo locked eyes with the Sun, as if asking some brand of higher power through the keenness in his own eyes, begging for an answer as to why such unfortunate circumstances had been doused upon him since the day of his birth, why he was perpetually targeted by the man who gave him life, by psychological disease and narcotics. By a mother who just sat there.

But such questions did not distract Mo from the greater problems that had brought him to the pavement, for he quickly scuffled to the ground and darted down the road in the same direction, this time with a diagonal curve toward the forest that ran parallel to the road, during which the three predatory rednecks coalesced and reconvened, setting out on foot to catch Mo for God-only-knew what.

The trees on either side of Mo became mere blurs, whereas Mo, who could not remember if he had his knapsack on his back, kept his eyes forward and did not dare look back to see if the degenerates were covering more ground than he. He (rightfully) assumed them not to be, for they had all appeared overweight and all seemed to have alcohol on their breath.

After a certain number of corners turned in his serpentine methodology of fleeing, there was something anew in his line of sight that caused him to halt for a moment.

It was a large and beauteous manor, the kind that shrugged off the very idea of modesty with its classical structure and its porch large enough to host a myriad of guests; but this was not what really piqued the interest of Mo Lincoln, for between the young man and the manor, there was a seemingly deep and clearly wide pond, one in which Mo could clear-as-day see his reflection.

In the moment he took everything in he, realizing he no longer had his knapsack (nor anything to lose), plunged into the pond and, reaching the bottom, remained silent for a long minute.

After several consecutive moments of nothingness, he, while struggling to keep his eyes open, swam to what he’d deemed to be the opposing side of the pond, and, prepared to take in a gasp of lively fresh air (air that he’d taken for granted this entire journey), he leapt once again to the surface.

Inspecting his surroundings, with continuing heavy breaths and a sense of loss for not only his knapsack and its contents, but a loss for his sense of purpose in this insipid digression, he climbed the shore of the pond, and, drenched in pond-scum and water, shifted toward the manor, as if he knew that there was anyone inside, let alone anyone who would help him.

Having had struggled to stand in the first place, the palpitations off his withdrawal-ridden heart now beginning to consume his heart (which already was pumped with adrenaline from all the preceding excitement), Mo fell to the ground, looking up at the manor’s uppermost window, basking in the ninety-degree sunlight.

Hearing a screen-door creak and hearing the sloppy clicks of concerned footsteps, Mo did not look away from the window. He saw a figure inside it, peering down at him. He could have sworn it to be a pale woman, one dressed in white. And, as everything went black, he, if he could have spoken, would have spoken about the voice that he was convinced was whispering in his ear; for it was nothing like the voices that usually resided in his head.

I thought myself to be Mary Harlowe.

I was thought by many to be Mary Harlowe; a young woman defined by a fair quietude, a quick wit, and a sharp beauty that caused more detractors than suitors.

I am uncertain if I’d be Mary Harlowe without such qualities; I ponder such things in this prison of mine.

But then I took it upon myself to reciprocate the advances of Bernard Saint, a boy two years my senior and the son of familial rivals.

And thus, I became, in the eyes of friends and townsfolk and even family, Mary Harlowe, the whore.

But my parents were wholeheartedly supportive; they wrapped me in arms of grace and held the ceremony in the backyard of the manor they kept outside of Crawford Creek.

And now one of the biggest questions I have concerns the masses- the friends, the townsfolk, even the distant family; were they judgmental in their scandalous labels, or simply trying to warn me?

The world was split into two transparent halves, each repetitive of the other, and, as they slowly became in sync with one another and joined into the singular vision of Mo Lincoln’s eyesight, he gradually understood himself to be on a living room couch, adjacent to a roaring fireplace and the age-old cliché of an older woman in a rocking chair, staring at him with sympathetic (albeit ever-suspicious) eyes.

“Can we help you?” she muttered.

Despite the question’s straightforwardness, she had asked too soon, to which her only response was a gargled and confused “Humh?”

“I said can we help you?”

“…Where am I?”

“Confined to the wooden bounds of Harlowe Manor. Now, I’m going to ask one more time, can we help you?”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Ted is in the other room. If we can’t help you, I must ask you to—”

“Ah lay off, sweetheart,” called the cracked voice of an elderly man (presumably Ted) from the neighboring kitchen: “I’m sure he’s just confused, he was out for a few hours.”

The gentleman, wearing an expression of hospice, walked into the room with water in one hand and tablets in the other, and, mixing the two, gave the drink to Mo.

The woman rolled her eyes and threw up her hands in frustrated resentment. It was then that infantile wails began to carry their way down the spiral staircase to Mo’s left and, after another scoff and a sour look, the woman got up and went upstairs to tend to it.

The man sat down where the woman once was with an inquiring smile: “What’s your name, son?”

“Mo.”

“That ain’t no kind of name. What’s your real name?”

“My name is Moses; people call me Mo.”

“Well I’ll call you what your mama named you, if that’s alright.”

At the mentioning of Mo’s mother, Mo felt a chill run down his spine and, sipping his carbonated water as the old man spoke, he almost spat some out.

“Everything alright?” Ted asked.

“I’d… I’d just prefer if you called me Mo.”

“Well let’s get acquainted first. First, I’d like to apologize for my woman’s behavior. Claire hadn’t taken too kindly to strangers these past couple of years.”

Trying not to sound bored, Mo replied “That right?”

“’Fraid not.”

“I see.”

The baby atop the stairs, as if to fill the void of discomforting silence, wailed yet again.

Mo raised his glass in indication of the upper level: “That your kid, sir?”

The man’s smile became melancholic: “No, no… That’s our grandson.”

“Ah.”

“You were quite a mess when we found you, son.”

“I was running from… these guys…”

“Well what did these ‘guys’ want, exactly?”

A shrug, “Damned if I was gonna find out.”

Ted chuckled: “Well… I was just telling the missus that, should you seem like a normal fella, we ought to let you shower and sleep in our daughter’s old room. Should that appease you.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Do I seem like a ‘normal fella’?”

“I don’t know…” a beat, “Would such circumstances appease you?”

“I’m afraid that they would, sir.”

A beat, one marked by the lingering question of the Harlowe’s lenience to allow Mo to spend the night.

“Well, son,” the elder Harlowe began, “Let me ask you something and, please, for our sake, don’t read too much into this, alright?”

“Um, alright.”

“Are you from Crawford Creek?”

Another beat, one timed by the seconds of the grandfather clock and laced with confusion over the bizarre (yet benign) question.

“Um,” Mo answered, “No?”

“Yeah,” Ted raising an eyebrow, “You lying to me?”

“…No?”

Ted looked very analytically at the young man before nodding and then quietly assuring him: “Sure, what the hell? Room’s upstairs down the hall from the nursery. Bathroom’s across the room.”

In the mirrors I see a new reflection, and in the fireplace’s shadows there is a new figure, ebbing and waning with the flames.

Upon seeing the mere semblance of a new person, I shut my eyes, where I’m met with the walls of ebony of my eyelids, ones that hold true even in this hell.

For even now I find myself wretched with fear, and even though none of it is for myself nor my life, it is fear nevertheless.

I listen; for screaming, distress, signs of struggle or a fight, anything of that nature.

But there is nothing.

I open my eyes once more, and see the new face for what it is—drenched in pondwater and sweat and terror that very well mirrored my own.

But I can tell—he does not know true horror.

And I can sense it—true horror is coming.

As Mo laid in the bed that the elders had made for him, he stared at the ceiling, hypnotized by the fan and pondering all the expressions his mother may bear when she lays eyes on him after all this time. He noted that nobody in the house wore masks at any time, and, although he found solace in their hospitality, he was very concerned for their safety, for they had taken in an unmasked stranger amidst a global crisis. He decided, however, to instead of worrying about them to be filled with gratitude for their warmth and homeliness.

With this he shut his eyes and tried to do the age-old trick of counting backwards from a random number to lull himself to sleep.

Fate would intervene, however, when he felt a twitch in his veins, forecasting a night of heavy withdrawal symptoms.

Upon realizing what was coming, his heart would become numb and his skin would begin to radically itch up and down his arms; a cold sweat formulated atop his forehead.

And with that, time became an absurdist construct to the young man as he retched and sputtered in his suffering; before long he’d have no understanding as to whether or not he was truly awake. Like a small child he thrust himself underneath the covers amidst a wave of chills that assaulted him without warning. Frigidity becoming entwined with a sense of hopeless despair, he relished the thought of death, and wished to be discovered by the Harlowe’s in the forthcoming morn.

But as sure as every day fades into night, the cold subsided; it was when he poked his head out from the covers against the bedpost, however, that he became truly horrified.

Before the bed stood a woman in white, not dissimilar to the one he’d seen in the window hours ago; she stood, stately and upright, in what appeared to be a wedding gown and holding a candlestick with several lit candles. They glowed in the pitch-black and illuminated her porcelain face, the flames casting mingling shadows behind her.

She was young, and bore a fascinating face that radiated statements of quietude. Her very presence had an aurora that Mo could only conclude was serene and pleasantly sublime, and from this he felt an eerie calm, and knew somehow that the woman knew no harm.

In a state of shock at the apparition (or marvel?) before him, he remained silent, eyes wide like a child being soothed from a tantrum.

So awestruck by her beauty, the holes in the woman’s chest, and the streaks of blood that accompanied them, never quite registered.

The door to the room creaked open, and Ted walked inside, and flicked on the light-switch, with a look of concern.

“I fell asleep in my chair downstairs,” he said, “I heard you fidgeting around,” a chuckle, “this house is older than I am. Something troubling you?”

Averting his gaze, understanding that Ted could not see what he saw, Mo spoke in a ghostly whisper, asking what he knew not to be his concern: “Why isn’t your grandson with his mother?”

After a sigh, as if he had to explain himself, Ted recollected: “Well, that’s kind of why Claire is so frustrated, and why I asked you that stupid question earlier.”

And after another beat of silence between the two men, he’d recollect further.

Before my days had reached their finality, in the final months, I could sense that something was coming. Like a dog yelping before a chaotic storm, I’d just sit there in silence, while Mom wanted me to help decorate for the ceremony.

The calm before the storm.

Bernard began by trying to comfort me, but then he went quiet too. And it was his silence that seemed to confirm my worrying, my suspicions.

Bernard Saint began as a sweet boy, even at times to a fault. But with sweetness in a boy comes the opportunists, and the father’s iron fists; with iron fists comes pain; with pain comes trauma; with trauma comes paranoia. And it was Bernard’s paranoia that ate the poor boy alive. Alongside the madness that followed.

My melancholy truly began when I asked him a simple, singular question about our future. I asked him where he wanted to live.

He simply said he didn’t know. To which I inquired further. Conversation turned to debate, and debate turned to bickering, which turned the two of us sleeping apart for the first night in a long time.

I laid silently on my side, alone in our bed, and realized (and then consistently denied) that he was not convinced he would live that long.

And the feeling, the calm before the storm… it’s happening again.

“And in a web of disarray, the boy’s mind leapt to the conclusion that our family conspired against his, and that, as the bastard son of a lousy father, he’d earn his place amongst the Saint clan by slaughtering the family that had supposedly betrayed him.

“So, on the day which he was to be wed, he arrived and promptly shot our little girl in the chest. I remember the blood and the pieces of her that lay on their son, our grandson. It was a work of pure horror.

“That was two years ago.” Ted finished

Mo quietly muttered, “I’m so sorry,” as if it could help in any way.

Ted sighed, as if once again retiring to his fate, “That’s why we aren’t regarded so highly in Crawford Creek, just down the road. It’s why we moved out here.”

Mo, in a moment of boldness (possibly a side effect of his symptoms), blurted the question: “Is it why Mrs. Harlowe is so wary of strangers?”

Ted looked up: “Mostly,” he said, “But it sure as shit didn’t help when he read of his release from mental health custody just two days back.”

Mo, feeling regret in his miniscule question, decided to ask another: “What’s his name? Your grandson?”

“That may be the most agonizing part; we’ve been so brokenhearted, looking day after day at the product of our daughter and that destructive young man, we haven’t had the nerve to name him in the past eighteen months.”

And it was in this moment of seething that Mo witnessed in Ted that he, upon some epiphanic finding in his psyche, decided to inquire one more thing, after what he deemed to be an appropriate stretch of silence: “Do you have a phone I could borrow?”

Consciousness may very well be older than time, than life, than the world we know of.

For at this very moment, I feel my consciousness rattling inside me; I am forever confined within these walls, and am convinced that the whole universe around it is shaking, and that there is no escape.

I hear no crying nor agony, but I know it’s all coming.

Perhaps it’s a kindness; I shall no longer be alone.

But it’s also damnation; for all of is my fault.

Placing the phone to his ear, Mo’s heart picked up a pace not dissimilar to that of his withdrawal. He hoped for nothing shy of a womanly (albeit possibly decrepit) voice on the other end of the line. With each ring he became more concerned, scared that it’d go to a voicemail that he did not recognize. The seconds ached by and, shortly after the fourth ring, a voice rang through.

“Hello?”

His heart sank, as he realized it was not only a man’s voice, but a familiar one: “Hello, Dad.”

“…Son. The hell do you want?”

“I was just wondering how—”

“How what? How your mom’s doing?” He coughed.

“Yeah.”

“Your too goddamned late you little shit. The virus got her. She’s gone.”

“…Oh.”

“That all you have to say for yourself? You’re as selfish as you always were. We tried to call you and you changed your goddamned number?”

“I had to—”

“No, fuck you; you were a mistake, and you still are.”

“I’m not trying to—”

“Don’t call here again.”

Dial tone filled his ears as he felt a familiar heat penetrate his eyes. The feeling was defined by a nearly apocalyptic unpleasantness. He felt as though a personal eruption was upon him, when another one emerged underneath the floorboards.

It emerged in the form of a screaming Claire.

The scream shook the house, and, nearly collapsing Mo’s eardrums, bore the name “Bernard.”

Mo, up until this point, had never seen a man of Ted’s age lunge and dart so fast past him toward the spiral staircase; but he saw it on this night, as he would see many other firsts in his life.

Following only a half-second after of shock, Mo leapt down the final stairs to see a ragged young man (with an appearance that quietly resembled his own) piercing a knife into the old man, whereas his wife laid on the floor with a burst neck, blood pooling onto the hardwood floors.

With a natural stoicism that only few men could lay claim to, Ted fell to his knees, and, gripping the blade so hard that blood leaked from his fingers, tried to pull the knife away from his chest; this attempt was fruitless, however, and the blade continued to soar toward the old man’s heart.

Mo’s line of sight and fixations were compromised, however, when he saw in the window the reflections of the three of them; for there was a fourth counterpart, a figure behind him. He once again saw the woman in white, making eye contact with him through the reflection.

As they stared at each other for this epiphanic half-second, Mo felt a courage that had been unbeknownst to him before this moment, and, as if granting permission, the woman seemed to nod at him.

What happened next was what Mo could only later describe as an out-of-body experience. He sprinted toward the two men connected by steel, and leapt on the younger one.

Mo, sitting atop the other young vagrant, proceeded to tightly wind his fingers around him and, feeling Bernard’s pulse coursing through his hands, felt it slowly come to a crawl, and upon the pulse becoming snaillike, pondering what to do next, looked up past Bernard to see the lower half of a bridal gown.

He looked up and saw her once more, whereas she once again silently nodded; and with that, Mo released his hands. Bernard’s head fell to the ground, having succumbed to the blackness of his suffocation, dead.

Mo walked over to Ted, who seemed to conjure a look of peace across his face, despite his bleeding out.

The two men would exchange no words between one another as the light burnt out of Bernard’s eyes; the pair would simply grant one another looks of understanding, for even in silence Ted seemed to know what greater purpose Mo seemed to have been assigned, and what he was to do next.

I gasp, as if I still need to breathe.

It is not of shock, but of relief.

For, looking at what this stranger has done, I feel a newfound contention overtake me.

I look across my body, where a certain brightness overtakes every inch of my being.

For now I am at peace, and, in my ascension, I see clear as day who’s waiting for me.

Mo, having had taken the Harlowe’s station-wagon, peered into the rearview mirror to see the shining and sleepy-eyed face of the two-year-old, who smiled warmly.

Upon deciding to drive straight through Crawford Creek, across the way to new ground of Southern expeditions, Mo also pondered and questioned what he saw in the Harlowe manor, wondering if his last gaze in the mirror with the child in his arms, truly did for a split-second bear more peaceful versions of the Harlowe family, or if his visions were products of a hallucinogenic withdrawal.

And in the same moment, he concluded that the child would be known as Ted.

Upon the end of my mother, few predicted my life’s actual longevity, as few predicted the turnarounds of products of psychological illness and abuse.

Lo and behold.

And it was upon hearing this story on my father’s deathbed, that I resigned myself to return to Crawford Creek for its second Reconstruction.

-Theodore Lincoln.