A Portrait in Time and Space

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.

A candle burning in a cabin window is an altogether benign thing to see, except for just one suddenly and absolutely deniable fact: this candle had never been there to begin with. It should be impossible for a candle to exist in this abandoned cabin. The cabin, the woods, and the abandonment: all of these things had been envisioned and realized intentionally, and had been brought to life without a thought ever being given to a candle, lit or unlit, in the window of this cabin. It had been painted, stroke by stroke, layer upon layer of oil color laid by hand, and never had there been a candle, not until about a week ago, when, as if it had been there the whole time, a candle burned in the window of “The Abandoned Cabin, 1968,” signed by artist Terry Ross (presumably circa 1968), before being printed on pre-stretched canvas en masse and distributed by Distinguished Wall Art, Inc., purchased by my father, and hung on my bedroom wall on my birthday. I did not feel any sort of profound affinity for the print, but in the absence of family photos full of smiling kin it seemed an apropos substitute to hang on my bedroom wall. And that is not to say that my family and I were not happy, we were, but there was just no photographic evidence to chronicle our happiness. No, our family preferred paintings and prints of paintings, as if we were curating our own lives via the visions and efforts of others, and even then through the visions and efforts printed in bulk and sold at a deep discount. We were not the “live, laugh, love” sort of wall art family, make no mistake, but we were the family with prints by Gaudi, Gauguin, Dali, et al, adorning the walls of our shared spaces, instead of records of our own earned memories.

I scratched at the surface to see if someone had painted the candle in, maybe as a joke, maybe as a visionary desecrator might make art beget art, but the surface appeared to have nothing more than the same ink-on-canvas texture that had come from the printer. I wondered very briefly if maybe I had just never noticed the candle, if maybe it had been there the whole time, but then I remembered being distinctly attracted to the idea behind the title of this print, and thinking to myself how nice it would be to find an abandoned cabin of my own, and I would not have thought that if I had seen a candle burning in the window. I would have more likely have thought to myself this cabin is not abandoned, Mr. Ross! Medication and age make it easy to doubt one’s own memory, to write off sensory input as being less-than-reliable, but I was sure that there had never been a candle in that window.

Medication and age, it seems, also makes it much more difficult to share stories of the strange with anyone. To the audience, if they know of you and of your prescriptions, stories of the strange are easily dismissed as the byproduct of mental illness, or as a side effect of little-understood psycho-pharmaceuticals.

Unfortunately, the phantom candle was not the strangest thing to happen since I brought home “The Abandoned Cabin, 1998,” but it was the only thing I tried to share with anyone else and was only the most recent, and least terrifying, phenomenon that I had experienced. Almost immediately after I hung it on my wall, little things started to happen. Things would disappear and reappear in places where I know I did not leave them, as easy as it was, and as tempted as I was, to dismiss my memory as less-than-reliable and bathed in medication. My porcelain dolls, dolls that I barely even moved when I dusted around them, would all turn their heads to watch me while my back was turned. Lights flickered, my door opened and closed on its own, and often, at night, I heard scratching coming from inside my walls. All of these things, I told myself, had alternative explanations, like rats, drafts, and my own imagination…even medication and age… but the candle was a permanent and observable change, and seeing as how my father had bought me the print and must have surely noticed that “The Abandoned Cabin, 1968” was, indeed, abandoned and without anyone home to light a candle, I decided to tell my parents about it. It went about as well as you would expect: “You’re imagining things, sweetie. You probably just didn’t notice it until now.” My own perception, as it turns out, my own senses, are just as easily dismissed as side effects by those who knew me as were the little-understood side effects of medication and a lively imagination. “Did you remember to take your medication, sweetie?” Of course I did. No, the candle was new, I was certain… and as of a few nights ago, so was the shadow man.

The scratching began almost as soon as I killed the lights and my head hit the pillow. It was light and intermittent at first, then grew in intensity and persistence. If I tried to cover my ears, the sound began to emanate from my headboard and travel straight through the feathers of my pillow. When I opened my eyes, I saw the eyes of all of my dolls staring back at me, dark glassy beads stuck in impossibly smooth and emotionless porcelain faces. I thought I needed more time for my eyes to adjust to the dark, there was something... off... in the air around me, but as I stared at everything and nothing it became clearer, darker, that there was an impossibly contained expanse of absolutely nothing standing… not-existing… at the foot of my bed. Silhouetted against the relative blackness of my darkened room was the outline of a still-darker figure, an emptiness, in the shape of a tall, thin man with a wide-brimmed hat. Although I could not see his eyes (there was nothing to see, perceiving the man was like staring into negative space) I could feel that he was looking at me, and I could feel the seething hatred he had for me. It was impossible to make out for sure, but he seemed woven out of darkness, like threads of nothingness were intertwined into a negative dimension.

I slammed my eyes shut and held my pillow tighter against my ears until the scratching subsided and the hate left the atmosphere. I’m not sure for how much longer I stayed awake, or for how long I slept, just that soon it was morning and the sunlight brought a welcome warmth to my room. All of my dolls were staring straight ahead, the walls were silent, and I was alone. Everything seemed normal, as it should be.

I checked to see if the candle still burned. It did.

The rest of that day passed by uneventfully. At least, no event occurred that bears mentioning at this point, but when the extraordinary becomes reality, what is mentionable really becomes a relative issue. My dolls were alive, the walls literally itched, and vast emptiness could be contained in the shape of a ghostly and menacing figure at the foot of my bed… these things were mentionable. Brushing my hair was not. My morning breath was not. Getting dressed was not. I think I had breakfast. I likely walked my dog. I might have read a book for a little while. I cannot really be sure.

I wish I could remember the myriad details of the days that followed. The meals with my family, time spent petting my dog, the cliche moments during which I smelled the roses that grew by the front door… all of the little things that we do as mortals that we may take for granted up until the moment we are immortalized by the sort of obligatory memorialization that comes from our absence, our death, all of those things that contribute to what others eventually consider to be our legacy, those are the things that I wish I had filled the shadow man days with. In retrospect I know now how fickle my interests were, how readily I took my family and my friends, and my pets, my freedom, and my senses for granted… the smell of canvas does not change. Seeing the whole spectrum of visible light at each sunrise and each sunset…hearing not only music, but thunderstorms and the sound of rain on our metal roof and all of the scratches in the walls, and smelling everything from the sweaty paw pads of my dogs to the fresh herbs growing in our neighbor’s raised beds were all of the things that passed by my sensory organs and my brain under-appreciated before, but were now incomparably precious.

The second time the shadow man visited me was again preceded by scratches in the wall, my door creaking open and then closed again, porcelain eyeballs staring straight into my tightly shut eyelids, air saturated by hatred and menace… all of these things filled my senses up until the moment I caved and I opened my eyes and stared into the abyss at the foot of my bed.

He, it, was there. Not standing, not floating, not existing at all, just emptying the reality around him like a vacuum through threads of nothingness, and beneath or above or between those threads were those vacuous eyes, those hateful pits of loathing staring straight into my own. I wanted to shut my eyes and bury my face in my pillow, but I knew that he, it, did not need to see into my open eyes to look straight into my soul. I could close my eyes, sure, but whatever it was going to do would be done in summary fashion with or with out my own eyes in attendance. It, nothingness, was no juvenile spook who could be defeated by taught bed covers and ignorance. I shut my eyes anyway.

What I felt was nearly incomprehensible. I floated above my bed and I melted into my mattress at once. My covers became my skin, my body was laid bare and my nose burned as if turpentine was being poured directly into my nostrils and I felt as if I were breathing through saturated cheesecloth. My lungs achingly stretched apart as I gasped for air and got none. I read once that drowning is supposed to be a peaceful way to go, but I felt as if I were drowning and it was far from a blissful and pleasant experience. My lungs burned, my throat burned, behind my eyes felt as if it there were swelling pockets of boiling fluid about to burst forth from my face.

I opened my eyes again and, as if through a thin wet film, found myself standing, not transfixed and paralyzed so much as gelled and ensconced, as if painted into a collage of mixed media, in the middle of our living room. The film fell from my eyes as the burning in my lungs subsided, and I saw my parents, both of whom were sitting at opposite ends of our living room couch with an open book in their laps. My parents were, are, avid readers, consummate purveyors of the written word. I wanted to speak, to scream, to wildly gesticulate and to rage against my stasis, but could only watch as they each turned a page… and then I continued watching as they slowly continued turning a page… turning a page that seemed to be fighting against air that had turned fluid. I could think, reason and watch in real time, but they moved as if mired in resin. Unblinking, unmoving, they simply sat motionless as their pages were stuck in mid-turn. Time passed for me, but they seemed frozen in a moment. I wondered if they, too, were raging against paralysis.

I screamed, or at least I tried, at the top of my lungs, but lungs filled with resin can only expand and contract at the speed of resin. A chest that was painted into the living room can only breathe and heave as allowed by the medium upon which it is painted. And sound can only move at the speed of sound… but when sound becomes a slave to the shadow, subservient to oil colors and canvas, sound does not travel very far, if at all, from painted lips.

After what seemed like hours I awoke to a room bathed in warm sunrise hues of orange and amber, and was mildly soothed to find all of my dolls facing forward, my door still and un-swinging, lights unblinking, walls un-scratching… and all of the space around me occupied by something, anything, even if just air. It was nice to see that there were no rips or tears, or men made of absence, emptying my room of simply being.

Breakfast was a non event. I wanted to share with my parents what I had seen, I wanted to just test the water of belief and my own sanity, but I could hear myself trying to vocalize what I had seen and I, myself, found it incomprehensible and, for lack of a better term, crazy. Had I remembered to take my medications? Of course I did. My parents asked me how I slept. I told them “fine.” They asked me about my dreams. I told them I could not remember them. In retrospect, I should have said something, but this was our normal everyday conversation and it never seemed appropriate to actually discuss dreams, however fantastic. In retrospect, discussing anything would have been better than the choice to pioneer my way through this experience solo. In stark contrast to the moments that felt like days during which I stood immobile in the living room watching my parents frozen like in a cold family photo, sitting at opposite ends of our familiar couch, shadows cast against each other by their respective side table lamps, the sort of cold family photo we didn't hang on our walls I wish we did, the rest of that day passed by in an instant. It was as if I were tethered or anchored in place and time and space were free to flow right past me.

I resisted sleep. I resisted my bed, I resisted the routine that saw me to my bedroom every night no later than 9 pm. I resisted the menacing gaze of my porcelain dolls, even more menacing after the sun set and stole the warm orange and yellow hues from their faces and left them cold and pale. I resisted. I felt the tether-anchor at the base of my skull not only pull me upstairs to my room, but it seemed to act as a spigot for my will and my energy. I dreamily washed my face, brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas… I went through my bedtime routine. I was on autopilot. I barely even noticed as the dolls shifted their gazes to watch me traverse the room from my dresser to the bathroom, back again, and then onward to my bed where I switched off my bedside table lamp, threw back my covers, and climbed in. I watched myself do all of this while practically in a trance so this is how the dolls see me. I watched myself as if from outside my body, floating at the end of an ethereal tether.

As soon as the covers were raised to my chin I was back in my body, looking out from behind my own eyes at the ceiling. I did not have to wait long at all for the feeling of dread to return… I heard faint scratching in the walls almost immediately. I looked to my dolls, and they were all looking right back at me. Damn it I had meant to leave a light on tonight, but as a matter of habit, or by virtue of my tether, the room was immersed in the darkness that only a moonless night can bring. I saw brilliantly empty sockets staring back at me from every doll’s face, and the scratching grew louder. And then I noticed something I had failed to notice the night before: the darkness, the impossibly contained vastness of nothing starting flowing, or oozing, or emanating… leaking? No, it started consuming the spaces inside my room from the window of “The Abandoned Cabin, 1968.” It started as a negative trickle, then grew into the familiar shapelessness of a tall man in a wide-brimmed hat. From deep inside this cloud of nothing escaped a hiss, a hiss that turned into a very low and guttural rumble from which words started to form… come… it moved closer to me, straight up from the bottom of my bed…inside… I watched, paralyzed, as my feet, then my legs, simply vanished into the nothingness… me… and then it was at my chest and I could not breathe. I was sure that if I could breathe and inhale, and if the nothingness had breath, it would smell like death. It was at my face, my eyes, and then I was nothing, too.

The experience of becoming nothing is difficult to describe, but for me it was like being filtered through a sieve. It all happened in a moment that was nearly instantaneous; I felt me, my flesh and my muscle, grow taut and then apart, and then I came together again before I had time even to panic or to scream where would my scream have even gone? I tried to move, and I felt that I could, but my limbs articulated as if my joints had become cloth-like, like my muscles and sinew were more like bedsheets than meat. There was a strange friction deep in my body when I moved, like my muscles were just twisted ropes that were furling and unfurling as I moved. It was so, so dark. I could see nothing at first, but then, in the distance, I could make out a soft glow. I walked wrapped and unwrapped toward it.

I walked and I walked, or so I thought I walked; I could not see my legs, and as I mentioned the feeling of walking was alien and strange to me. I may have simply floated and floated or so I thought I floated for what felt like hours. I tried to wake up, but felt acutely awake and aware already, so awake that I expected to wake up into another dream, the kind of dream in which you go through the mundane tasks of getting up and getting ready only to find that you are still in bed, simply imagining being awake. I felt cold. So cold. I’m not sure how I knew, but I knew that the soft glow would be warm and so I continued walk-floating through the pitch blackness.

“Hello.”

Just as surely as the space had been empty a moment ago, there was now someone else there. A beat passed, and again came a clear “Hello?” I looked around everywhere, but there was only a warm glow on the horizon and nothingness in every other direction.

“Hello?” I said back.

“Over here,” he said. It was the voice of a young boy, and it sounded like it came from everywhere.

“Over where?” I asked.

I felt a tug on my right arm my right bedsheet and turned to see, ever so faintly, the featureless white face of a child. I could not make out eyes, or a nose, or a mouth, but I heard him say “right here.”

“It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen anyone here,” he said. The sound again came from everywhere and nowhere, everywhere but his lack of a mouth. “It’s definitely been years, but I don’t know how many.” I simply stared, looking for anything to stare into but that creepy white face-shaped space. “This place is abandoned except for me.”

“Who are you?”

“I can’t remember my name. What is yours?” He spoke in a monotone, so nonchalant for such a young boy, especially one that hadn't seen anyone in years.

“Erin,” I answered.

“Hi Erin. You can call me Erin, too.”

With each word he spoke the space around him grew a little clearer and just a little less empty. I could make out bare walls behind him, a bare floor underneath his feet, all of which was seemingly made from an incredibly grainy sort of textured grey wood.

He stood still and upright, hardly moving. I felt the urge to reach out and touch him, to feel if he was as textile as I felt, but I also felt that familiar sense of dread. I knew to touch him was finite, to touch him was to reach into the loathsome eyes of the shadow man and pull nothing back. Subtly, he began to move. It seemed uncomfortable and robotic at first, as if his joints were rusted machinery, and I could have sworn I heard a sound like breaking the spine of a brand new paperback, or of canvas groaning as it dried and stretched on a wooden frame.

He shrugged a shoulder, then the other. “What year is it?” He asked. “Is it still 1968?”

“No,” I answered before thinking it better to stay quiet. “It’s 2022.”

He paused for a second, just a moment, before continuing. “I was 14 years-old in 1968.” He slowly raised both arms toward me. “Hug me,” he said, more a statement of fact than a request. “Please give me a hug. I miss my parents.”

My heart both broke and froze at once. Frozen in time, frozen in a dreamlike moment in a dark abandoned cabin as the world continued spinning, as time marched on, as parents grew old and moved on and forgot they had ever hung a silly print on your wall for your fourteenth birthday, or, conversely, as time marched on for you while your family was stuck watching a single page slowly turn, turn as if through solid space, and all of that time spent without so much as a hug.

I wanted to resist, I wanted to turn around and walk back out of this dream, but I felt my arms rise to meet his own. He stepped closer, and closer, and I thought I could make out hints of facial features stretching through the white face-shape as we drew closer still. We stood now, chest-to-chest and face-to-face, and our arms slowly closed behind each other. I could see then, so suddenly, my own face take shape where his blank space was before. He whispered something into my ear… “come inside me.”

My face, my joints, my muscles my skin: everything flew in reverse back through the sieve through which I had passed earlier and I felt myself come together again as a still life, a barely two-dimensional depiction of a tiny girl whose only depth ran as deep as ink runs into canvas. He pulled away from our embrace wearing my own skin, my own muscle and joints and my face… and as he turned to walk away he whispered “I hope the hat man gets bored of you soon.”

“Wait,” I tried to say, but the words could not form past the oil filling my not-mouth.

My not-eyes struggled to see through what felt like a wet film again, although this time it did not fall away. I saw, out through the canvas window of an empty cabin, my blurry, grainy room. Staring back at me was… me. It was hard to tell exactly what more was said; the silence was absolute and grew even more so as I turned more and more into an afterthought that may or may not have ever been intended by artist Terry Ross in 1968. I could see less, hear nothing, and feel only the cold. I think he, she? I?... mouthed the word “sorry” before pursing my lips and blowing toward me. The candle fluttered and died, and then all was darkness.

All was darkness, that is, except for the nothingness that now stands forever behind me.