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PHILANNION
Toby’s mother died during the week. Nobody could tell you the exact day, since all of the days ran together like rain across the car windshield. On the way to her funeral Toby tried to remember her face, and could only remember the book on string theory that was in her lap when it happened.
His pants were ironed. Black pants, nice, neat with creases along the sides. He knew his mother would like to see him like this, knew his mother would call him a handsome little boy. She wouldn’t be mad that he forgot her face. She would be proud of him. Toby, Toby, her handsome boy, her mad scientist in a child’s skin.
His dad said nothing on the way to the funeral. He just looked out the window at all the cars around them and the rain slick and shiny on the street and storefronts, meditating on a world that would let his Chloe die in such a way. When Toby wasn’t looking he would chew on the fingers on his left hand, picking at the calluses with his teeth.
Open casket. Toby knew he would forget his mother’s face, forget her features. Instead of relying on photographs he turned to math, turned to the thing that had killed her. He memorized the vectors of her face, the equations that would create the lines around her mouth and the crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes.
His brain calculated ways of rendering her hair. Brown and curly, each wave a different function, each strand its own unique array of numbers and information. He pushed all of these equations into his mind, and found he could pull them out at will, and by remembering this he could remember her.
A plastic ball rolled up to Toby’s knee as he sat on the floor, trying to draw the equations of his mother’s face on graph paper. It came out at first like random geometrical shapes, perfect platonic forms. He looked over at the ball, and realized that it was wet and smelled like rain water.
He picked it up and saw his dad standing in the doorway of his bedroom, grinning at him. He had finally shaven off the rough stubble that lined his face and was dressed in a sweater and corduroy pants. “Hey, champ,” his face glittered wet with rain, “You remember this? Your mom gave it to you when you were six.”
Toby looked at it. All he could remember was its circumference. No other memories were attached to it. Just a little hand reaching out and measuring it with early eyes. “Yeah, I guess.”
His father walked up to him. His shiny dress shoes left a trail of water across the floor. “What you got there, huh? Drawing something?”
Toby wanted to pull it back, hide it, crumple it up into a little ball and shove it under the carpet. Instead he hesitatingly held it up. All those perfect forms, that platonic geometry that sketched the start of his mother’s face. His dad’s eyes looked at the page. A hollow glance, a haunted glance. A trigger of a memory.
“You drew this?”
Toby nodded.
“I’m thinking of us moving. Somewhere else. Too many ghosts here. Too many things that remind me. Of. Of, well, of her.”
Toby looked back at his drawing and felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. Rough grip, strong, fingers biting down into skin and shirt. “I want you to design the house.”
He did not know what to say. So Toby did not say anything. “I’ll take your silence as a yes.”
It started simple. The basis of the house—the math of his mother that he had memorized so long ago. Then he layered it with other things, mystical algorithms he found in books on numerology, astrological charts overlaid on top of the primitive arithmetic of her face and body, frozen in his mind at the moment he viewed them in her casket.
It took many painstaking hours. Toby did not sleep, did not go to school. For a week he worked, with barely any breaks to eat or to read on some new, interesting ideas that he could mold into the house. I am making a trap, he realized. A trap for my mother’s spirit.
When he was finished he nearly collapsed. He dreamt that night of voids between spaces, of emptiness at the heart of all things. He dreamt of entropy, of the universe slowly burning out. When he awoke he was covered in sweat and could smell molded plastic and burning rubber on his sheets.
When Toby’s dad first saw the finished house he felt afraid. The old man saw strange shadows moving through the bizarrely entangled corridors, saw doors appearing where there hadn’t been any doors before. He was more afraid of this house than anything before in his life.
But his son—his son’s eyes glittered with love. His son walked through every room, comparing it to the map he had laid out so carefully. It had been a long time since he had seen his son smile. He never realized that he had missed it until now.
It did not take them long to move. Amazing how little they had acquired over the years. Mostly some furniture, some odds and ends, scattered books on infinity and Carl Gauss. The new house was too big, too sprawling and mazelike to hold such little things. It felt empty.
His dad went out and bought a few new paintings, to try and brighten the place up. One that had appealed to both him and his son was a picture of a girl holding some flowers in a rain storm. Behind they could see the ruins of a castle, outlined in fog and mist. It was by a local artist. His dad hung this in the living room, accented by chaotic beams of wood jutting out in different angles.
A Closer Look at the Painting:
The girl has blonde hair, ratted and uncombed. In her hands is a bouquet of wild flowers. Random assortments picked from the landscape around her. She wears a blue dress that is clean and unpatched. Around her neck is an upside down triangle on a necklace.
Her eyes are exaggerated. Alien. Full of sorrow. Her mouth is half perched into either a scream or a moan of ecstasy. Her hands are calloused, her fingers worn to the bone and bandaged.
Every blade of grass is painted in. Every peeking flower, each and every feather of the dead birds that litter the ground in the distance. The ruins are the front half of a castle, the architecture eaten away. On the ground are shapes made of wood. Some simple, some complex. Most are a part of this house.
The first time Toby’s dad saw the figure he thought that it was a trick of the light, a movement from the oddly shaped shadows. The second time he followed the form, tracking it throughout the house. He thought it was a burglar, or someone sneaking in.
But the form was familiar, female. When he caught a glimpse of her face, hidden coyly by overlapping shadowy triangles, he had nearly screamed and ran out of the house. It was her, his Chloe.
After that day he laid in wait for her ghost. He sat in the hallway, chewing on the tips of his fingers, sometimes breaking the skin as he sipped on his coffee. His vigil was nonstop, he feared sleep would somehow break the spell, somehow send her back into the land of mists and death.
Toby had not seen the ghost of his mother, and he feared that his magic had not worked. He listened to the whispers in the shadows, and wondered if there was any way he could’ve gotten it wrong.
He noticed his dad at night, chasing ghosts and ignoring anything else. He wanted to reach out, to comfort his dad. But in the late hours the world takes on a different light, everything changes and becomes darker. More sinister than ever before.
In those hours he laid in bed, listening to the shadows whisper and the sound of his dad’s footsteps running throughout the house, missing his mother and wondering what he could have done wrong in the designs.
His dad went missing. Toby knew that he was lost in the house, trapped within its changing rooms and mazeling landscape. He wanted to crawl through the moving doors and find him, but was afraid that he would get lost as well.
Instead he took the painting down from the wall and scurried back to his room, spending hours just staring at it. Hoping to see something inside the folds of the drawing that would change his world, change his life. Bring his mother back from death, bring his father back from the bones of the house.
While staring at the painting a wet ball came out from the hallway, bouncing into his room. He picked it up and stared out into the darkness, remembering the circumference of the ball and the vectors of his mother’s face trapped within the architecture.
He stood up, holding the ball in his hand. “Hello?”
No response. He looked down at the painting and saw that it was empty. A blank canvas. Startled he ran out into the hallway and smelled burning rubber and felt numb fingers running up and down his skin.
“Hello?” he called out.
From the shadows came a small girl with bandaged hands. “My name is Philannion. And I am your next door neighbor.”
Toby smiled. In his mind he overlaid the arithmetic of his mother onto her, and saw that they were in agreement. That the equations were equal on some base and primitive level. “Hello. My name is Toby.”
She nodded. “I know. What happened to your dad?”
Toby shrugged and walked with her into the living room. In the light she changed, her features moving. She looked both like the girl in the painting and his mother, yet like neither of them at the same time. She looked ageless and young. He could not pin her down.
“I think the house ate him.”
She laughed.“Aren’t you afraid the house will eat you too?”
Toby looked around and got a strange sensation from the ill cast shadows on the walls. A void. He remembered his dream, and felt the house moving. The walls grinding. He looked up and saw bits of the ceiling shifting, and wondered if the house was hungry.
“No,” he said, “I’m not afraid.”
The girl shrugged. “Maybe you should be.”
She walked up to him and stared into his eyes. He felt a stirring beneath the skin, and the motions of his first love crawling around in his chest. “I guess so,” he said, and leaned in and kissed her.
Above the house shook and random dust from grinding wood and concrete created a moving mist in the air.
An hour later and Philannion walked through the wreckage of the house. The abstract ceilings and floors lay like broken limbs, scattered dust hovered in the air. The house made no sound as it collapsed, released no noise at all.
She walked through the rubble and felt like she was on the moon. The walls half eaten, the architecture crumbled and empty. She heard Toby crying out for help, heard his father muttering and whispering in the shadows. She pulled up pieces of shattered roof and walls, opened doorways but could not find either one of them.
Paul Jessup has been published in many magazines, including Apex Digest, Fantasy Magazine, Farrago's Wainscot, Post Scripts, Electric Velocipede, Psuedopod, Flashing Swords, Nanobison, Journals of Experimental Fiction, Jacob's Ladder and the Harrow. He is also the recipient of the 2000 Kent State University Virginia Perryman Award. He currently edits with his wife the bi-annual magazine GrendelSong.
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