BRICK HOUSE ON A WET STREET
by
Mike Minnis

    "So this is it?" Ippleston asked.  He sounded bored.  Ippleston always sounded bored.
    "Yep," Connor replied, examining the address scribbled on a PostIt note.  "2318.  Corner of Wyndham and Meade."
Ippleston brought the aging Ford pickup into a stretch of driveway broken by years of frost and thaw.  Connor squinted at the house’s address through the mist of spring rain; 231, in brass letters dark and pitted with age.  2318.  The last number was missing, which Connor thought odd – weren’t professors supposed to be fussy sorts, endlessly picking over details?  Even old, flaky ones with a Phd in –
    The sound of a door slamming shut disturbed Connor out of his thoughts.  Ippleston stood beside the truck, studying the house, thumbs hooked into his low-riding jeans.  His face was that of a fat silent movie comedian: half-sleepy, half-thoughtful, his hair a flattop brush neither red nor quite brown.
    "What was this guy’s gig again?" he asked.  "Professor of Antro…anner…"
    "Anthropology," Connor, the younger of the two, replied.  He got out of the truck.  Mist and dampness sank into his shirt, into his skin.  Drops of rain fell from leaves and branches, cold taps upon his shoulders, tiny slaps upon his baseball cap.
    "Hell’s that?"
    "Study of man," Connor said.  "Means he was into different cultures, that sort of thing.  I had him for a 101-type class for one of my social science requirements coupla years ago, before the partying and everything did me in.  He was really into Oriental stuff.  China.  Southeast Asia."
    "Huh…"
    "Guess his big thing was Tibet.  He was always taking trips there to do research.  He was there a lot before the Commies took it over.  Shit, he’d get started on that stuff, talkin about monks and shrines and mountains and plateaus…’I’ve been to the top of the world, ladies and gentlemen,’ he’d tell us, ‘and it is a strange, strange place.’  Then he’d smile and say, ‘Pop quiz.’"
    "Huh," Ippleston replied.  To him, Connor knew, Tibet and college were much the same: remote lands he had no intention of visiting anytime soon.
    Ippleston glanced about the overgrown yard, and whistled his disappointment softly.  "Seems like Professor Kung-fu shoulda stayed home more often and looked after things.  Get a load of this yard…"
    Connor nodded.  Wet grass came nearly to his jeans-clad knees.  It had gone to seed in places.  The flagstone path leading up to the front door was nearly lost as a result.  The bushes, once trim and angular, were now irregular and overgrown, thick blocks of vivid green, as was the hedge bordering the neighbors’ yard.  The house itself was half-obscured by creeping vines, scarlet sumac, and a few ill-looking fir trees of a shade between dead and dusty olive - weary soldiers at attention.  The sidewalk, like the driveway, was a tectonic slab of broken slabs and dark puddles littered with dead leaves, seeds, cottonwood spores and tiny spinners.  Worms crawled over the pavement; those that were dead lay white and still in the water.  Connor avoided them with meticulous disgust.
    Neglect had made the house unattractive.  It seemed to know this, hidden as it was behind vines and bushes.  It was a singular, uncompromising block of brick, square and solid.  Large windows gave little sense of light or openness.  Instead, they seemed old and rheumy and blind, the frames paint-peeling, the glass dusty as a dead eye.  The roof was sharp and steep.  Twin brick chimneys bookended the structure.  But otherwise, it was completely ordinary.
    Except, perhaps, for a round window set high in the wall above the front door.  It was so dark that it appeared that the glass was missing entirely.
    "See that window up there?"  Connor asked, grinning.  He folded his arms, tugged on his wisp of a goatee.
    "Yeah…what about it?"
    "Walk around a little.  Watch what happens."
    Ippleston, true to form, shrugged his shoulders and lumbered about the yard, cutting a swath through the grass like an elephant.  For a time he seemed puzzled, unimpressed, squinting at the black portal above the door.  This way and the way he wandered, grass whispering underfoot.
    "I’m getting soaked, Connor."
    "I know.  Just look.  You’ll see it in a minute."
 Then Ippleston came to an abrupt halt, squinted again at the window.
    "Huh!"
    "See it?"
    "Yeah."
    "What d’you think?"
    "Kind of a…hell, I don’t know.  Kind of a ripplin, flashin, starry kind of thing, you know?  Like one a them oil puddles you see in a parkin lot, only different.  Shit, that’s weird."
    Connor nodded, pleased.  Getting Ippleston to register interest, or even a different facial expression, was something of an achievement.  The fat man cocked his head like a puzzled dog.  He backed away, walked forward.  From where Connor stood, the window was innocuous, blank, an ugly curiosity indicative only of a lapse in taste and judgement.  But he knew if he moved, that at certain angles the glass would change.  He had seen it before, as a beleaguered undergrad on the professor’s doorstep, anxious to negotiate a midterm failure.  What had the man’s name been?   Goddard?  Greeves?  Something stuffy and stiff.
    Ippleston looked about him, and up at the sky.
    "Nope," Connor said, "it ain’t the sun or anything, specially on a day like this…it does that if it’s day or night or whatever."
    "Weird."
    "I think it’s neat as hell."
    "That one a them Tibet things you were talkin about?"
    "Don’t know.  I never asked."
    Connor went through his pantomime again, this way, that way staring and squinting at the window.  He looked as if he were dancing with an invisible, ungainly partner.
    "Come on," Connor said, "O’Reilly’ll get pissed if we take too long."  He went to the back of the truck, mentally ticking off their supplies: rubber gloves; brooms; Hefty garbage bags; Windex; paper towels; carpet cleaner-
    Ippleston snorted.  "Fuck O’Reilly.  He wants it cleaned that bad, tell’em to get his ass on down here."
    "Yeah…careful what you say about him, though.  That’s about the time he shows up to check up on you."
    "I know.  Keeps rainin like this, he’s bound to drop by.  And he’ll be pissed off that his golf game got scrubbed."
    Connor chuckled and murmured assent.  O’Reilly owned a number of older houses in this neighborhood, renting them out to just about anybody and everybody who could bleed green once a month: part-time faculty; old folks living off pensions and Social Security; moody art students majoring in indifference; extended Asian families; black families; young couples coming down hard from their wedding high; even a few weirdoes and headcases.  The professor had supposedly been one of the latter.  Not that O’Reilly had cared, of course.
    "Got the paint?" Connor asked, his arms loaded with cleaning paraphernalia.
    "Yep…antique white, right?"
    "Yeah."
    Connor unlocked the front door.  It swung back with a high, thin squeal, like a nail being pulled from wood, setting his teeth on edge.
    "WD-40 that sumbitch," Ippleston said thoughtfully.
    The first room was dark, narrow, and musty.   On the right wall was an imposing fireplace, built of fieldstones, and what looked to be a dining room or study.  Ghost shapes upon the walls spoke of missing pictures.  The carpet was matted, of a shade between ochre and beige.  Of furniture there was very little left – a cheap old couch coming apart at the seams, a rocking chair, and an empty bookcase.  There was a stairway against the far wall.
     Ippleston whistled softly again.  "Smells like a mushroom cellar in here.  Didn’t this guy ever open any windows?"
    "Shit, you think this is bad?  You shoulda been here when they first found the guy."
    Ippleston’s moon face furrowed.  "What’re you talkin about?"
    Connor set the cleaning tools down, relishing the moment and the attention.  "He croaked in here.  Last summer."
    "Oh, come on…"
"No.  Really.  It was last summer.  The guy just up and died.  Shit, he musta been about seventy, seventy-five years old or something.  Yeah, he croaked and it was, hell, maybe two, three weeks before somebody found him.  He was pretty damn ripe, from what I heard.  Place was crawlin with worms.  Maggots.  All sorts of nasty stuff."
    Ippleston shuddered involuntarily.  "Uhh…man, I can handle cleanin up after people, but not dead people.  O’Reilly sure as hell didn’t say anything about it.  Where’d they find him, anyway?"
    "Up in the attic."
    Ippleston rolled his eyes.  "Oh, of course…the attic."  He hummed a few ominous bars of music.
    "No.  Really, that’s where Kaperski said they found the guy.  I’m serious."
    "Uh-huh.  Mister "sick-day" Kaperski, right?"
    Ippleston laughed.  Connor shrugged, as if the matter really didn’t concern him.  They had a lot of work ahead of them, reluctant as he was to start.  The atmosphere of the house didn’t help, either.  It was cloying, still, humid.  He banged a window open.  Rain had begun in earnest outside, a rippling susurration not unlike white noise.  The windowsills were full of dead insects and dust and cobwebs.  O’Reilly was right: it would be a chore and a half.  He reflected dismally on the small amount of money he made per hour.
    "Well, where we gonna start?" Ippleston asked.
    Connor chewed on his lower lip.
    "I dunno.  It all looks pretty bad to me."
    "Huh.  O’Reilly said to start from the bottom, work your way up top.  Kitchen and bathroom are supposed to be the worst spots.  He also said that since Kaperski called in, to save the basement for him.  So I guess there is some justice…"
    "What about the attic?"
    "He said to leave it alone, that there ain’t anything up there but a bunch of old junk that that professor brought over from Tibet or wherever.  Said he ain’t too keen on one of us falling through the ceiling."
    Connor snorted derisively.  "Like he’d care.  Let’s do the kitchen first."
 

    With its walls painted a faded and unsightly yellow-green, the kitchen was full of unpleasant connotations in Connor’s mind: bile, poison, sickliness.  The counter tops were nicked and scarred and stained, the fixtures old and tarnished.  In the worn and dirty linoleum was repeated the same distasteful shades of the walls: pale yellow and gray-green.  The appliances were relics from an earlier period, given to leaking on humid days such as this one.  Plaster had sifted from ceiling to floor in spots, and crunched underfoot.
    Ippleston first swept, and then began to scrub the floor with a wire brush and soap.  In a matter of moments he was sweat-soaked.  Dark circles formed under his arms and on the small of his back.  Connor went to work on the countertops, which were a crosshatched pattern of knife cuts and abrasions.  He frankly wondered how the house had avoided condemnation by the health department.
     He had been on worse jobs, of course.  Once he and Ippleston had cleaned (‘refurbished’ was the word O’Reilly preferred) a duplex O’Reilly had stupidly rented out to a bunch of teenagers for the summer.  Fifteen trash bags full of garbage, some of it bordering on the indescribable: tattered porn magazines, pizza boxes from a different geological time period, dirty clothing, unpaid bills, fast food bags and containers, rotting scraps of this or that.  And the smell!  It had taken a week to get the odor of spoiled milk out of the place.
    They were nearly an hour into their work before Ippleston spoke again.
    "So Kaperski says they found this guy up in the attic, dead, huh?"
    "Yep.  That’s what he told me."
    "Natural causes?"
    "Well…yeah and no."
    "Yeah and no?  The hell you talkin about?"
    Connor scrubbed the countertop for a time before he would say anything.  "Now this is what Kaperski said.  Not me.  Kaperski said the guy – Greeves or Goddard or whatever his name is – was trampled flat."
    Ippleston’s sweaty face furrowed.  He swiped at his forehead and asked, "Trampled flat?"
    "Yep.  Not flat flat.  But flat enough.  Most of his bones were broken.  His skull was crushed.  They had it on the news a while back, as some sort of homicide, but they didn’t let any details out.  It got hushed up pretty quick.  And since the guy didn’t seem to have any friends or relatives, the case probably got dropped pretty quick.  Crap like that happens over this side of town, once in a while."
    "Yeah, but trampled flat?  Seems like a lotta work to get one guy dead."
    Connor leaned against the counter.  He fancied himself something of an expert on the stranger aspects of human behavior.      "Yeah.  But people do weird stuff like that.  It was probably a psycho or something.  They’re supposed to be real ritualistic, most of the time.  They kill people in distinct ways.  So you have the Son of Sam leaving clues for the cops…that Ed Gein guy out in Wisconsin making lampshades outta peoples’ skin.  The Zodiac Killer.  Weird stuff."
    "Shit, no wonder you don’t have a girlfriend," Ippleston said with a knowing smile.  "You talk about some warped things sometimes."
    "Heck, you think I talk about warped stuff?  You shoulda met this guy a couple times.  I mean, he was all right at the beginning of the semester, but he just started going downhill after that.  He quit showing up for class more and more often.  Gave his lecture notes to some grad student from East Europe who could barely speak English.  We had a midterm – which I blew, by the way – but no final.  Just about everybody got a Pass – not that it mattered, since half the class had dropped out by then, anyway.
    "I stopped by once to discuss my grade with him.  Fucker was almost never in his office, so here I am walking two, three miles over here from campus.  It’s fall out and pretty damn cold, too, ‘specially since some asshole on my dorm floor swiped my down jacket.  I have a pretty good idea of who it was, too.  Anyway, so here I am, walking to his house.  And it looks like hell.  Lawn’s about half-gone.  Dead leaves all over.  Bushes all overgrown."
    "Kinda like now."
    "Yeah.  And I’m thinking, Damn, this place looks haunted or something.  ‘Specially since it’s getting into October and overcast out.  So I knock on the door.  No answer.  So I knock again.  Nothing.  Now I’m getting pissed, because Goddard-whatshisface told me to meet him at home after class.  Finally, the guy answers the door.
    "Man, he gave me the creeps.  Funny thing was, up until that point, I’d never gotten a really a good look at the guy, I’d never seen him up close, cause he taught in a big lecture hall and I was always way up in the rows.
    "It was weird…but you didn’t like looking at him.  I mean, he wasn’t out-and-out scary or anything.  But he was creepy.  Real pale, even paler than some of them computer geeks who hang out at the lab all the time.  Kinda short.  Mostly bald, with this little smudgy mustache like an old movie star and these round glasses and kind of slitted, nasty eyes.  Shit, he looked kinda Tibetan himself.  No chin, either.  And he had this expression…like he was real wary of you, but better than you, too.  Like you were a bug he wasn’t sure would sting him or just fly away.  He looked like a war criminal, is what he looked like."
    "Huh."
    "And he was really hairy, too.  Black hair.  You could see it comin out of his collar and shirt cuffs.  Looked like he had a gorilla suit on, practically.
    "So he stares at me for this real long time, and I start getting uncomfortable.  Then he finally remembers me and says, ‘Oh, yes.  Connor, isn’t it?  Come in then, boy.   Have a seat.’"
    "What?  You mean Lurch didn’t answer the door or anything?"
Connor glared at Ippleston.  "Look, if you’re gonna keep givin me crap, I’m not gonna tell you what happened."
    "OK.  OK.  Don’t get steamed.  I’m just havin some fun.  Be glad O’Reilly isn’t here.  He’d kick our asses for talkin, probably."
    Ippleston resumed scrubbing the floor.
    "Probably…anyway, this Greeves guy sits me down in the living room – the one we were just in, with the fireplace – but that was back when the guy had all of his stuff from Tibet and Nepal.  I mean I’m talking stuff that was probably worth some money; little jade figurines; death masks; prayer beads hanging on the walls; candles; artwork.  The guy even had a little brass gong, for God’s sake.  I’m serious.  Everywhere you looked, there was something strange.  I mean, it was like an antique store, except none of it was nice or made you think of home.
    "He had a fire going, and the curtains were closed, so it was kind of stuffy in there.  And there was this Godawful cuckoo clock over the fireplace, some leafy ugly thing, and it’s tickin and makin me kind of sleepy.  But I was kind of scared, too.  So he sits down in a rocker across from me.  Folds his hands.  And he asks, ‘Well?’
    "And I go, ‘Well what?’"
    "And he goes, ‘You’re here to discuss your grade, correct?  I don’t get many visitors of their own free will.’"
    "And he smiles, like he’s in on some private joke, and says, ‘Oh, you students with you’re A’s and your B’s, your C’s and your D’s.  Letters of recommendation.  Humanities this, multicultural that.  Pass, Fail.  Sink, swim.  Pah.  There are things worth much more knowing.  Much more…"
    "So he asks me if I think it’s going to rain today.
    "I say that I don’t know.
    "He says, ‘rain brings out the worms ,’ and then he asks me if I want tea.
    "Without thinking, I say, Sure, I’ll have some tea.  So Goddard leaves the room, goes to the kitchen.  So I wait and I wait.  And he’s gone for a while.  So I get up and kinda wander around to see what this guy does in his spare time.  No TV.  No radio or anything.  No magazines.  Just all of this strange stuff, and some of it had to be really old, man.
    "He’s still gone, when I hear this noise from upstairs.  A big, long creak, like the whole house is settling, a couple of cracks, and then a thump, like somebody fell.  I mean it was loud. So I go to the stairs to see what’s up.  Then I think, ‘Not a good idea,’ so I head into the dining room to look for him.  The wind’s pickin up outside, and tree branches are swayin around and makin these shadows on the walls.  Dead leaves are flyin around and scrapin against the glass.   And the house is pretty dark, too."
    Connor rung his cloth out into a plastic bucket half-full of dirty water.  The memory of the visit made him uneasy, even now with Goddard-Greeves gone and the house empty.  Or was it the house itself that gnawed at his senses: the house that still hinted of secret things and cared not who would hear or see them?  There had been a murder here – did its pall still hang in the air like a suicide twisting slowly back and forth upon a rope?  After all, a great gnarled oak might lose its leaves, but it remained a tree.  And it was by no means dead.
    "Get scared?" Ippleston asked.
    "What?  You mean now?"
    "Well, no…I meant then."
    Connor laughed uneasily.  "Kind of both, really.  I didn’t like this house back then, and I don’t like it now."
    Ippleston agreed:  "Huh.  Yeah…O’Reilly rents out some real piles, sometimes.  He’s got a place out on Dyer, out near the woods, looks like a big ol haunted house.  I mean it’s missing shingles and needs paint and everything.  This place ain’t half as bad, far as he goes.  He buys some real wrecks.  Never asks questions or looks into the places.  He’s even worse about screenin the people who rent.  You’d swear he likes nutcases or something.  Long as you got the money, you got the place."
    "Yeah…"
    "Nutcases, huh?"
    The voice was irritated, sharp, authoritative; the sound of it made Connor’s stomach drop.  O’Reilly had ‘dropped’ in, like he did occasionally to check up on his workers.   Sonofabitch!
O’Reilly stood in the kitchen doorway, palms on the doorjambs, leaning.  Deeply tanned skin stood in blinding contrast against white shorts and a yellow sports shirt.  Despite the rainy gloom of the day he sported mirrored sunglasses and a red driving cap, and despite the humid heat he wore a beard the color of a badger’s pelt, a panoply of gray, white, black and sandy blond.  Connor could tell the man was very irritated; his golf game had been rained out, and he had time to play only on the weekends.
    O’Reilly sauntered into the kitchen.  Ippleston watched him steadily.
    "This is as far as you two’ve got?  The kitchen?"
    "We had a hard time finding the place, Dan," Ippleston said, lying.
    O’Reilly opened and closed cupboards as if looking for something; irritation clung to him like cigarette smoke.
    "Hard time?  How?  3218, corner of Wyndham and Meade, near all of them streets named after Civil War generals.  Look for the brick house with the weird round window.  Hell, I figured the college boy would remember that if you didn’t, Ippleston."
    "One of the numbers was missing, Mister O’Reilly," Connor said with mock sincerity.
    O’Reilly heaved a great, end-of-the-world sigh.  "Fine.  Whatever.  Christ, first my game gets rained out before I play even three holes, I just about get rear-ended on my way over here, I get here and I find you two in the kitchen gossiping about me and my renters like a couple of old biddies.  Kind of annoying, don’t you think?"
    Neither Ippleston nor Connor replied.  O’Reilly leaned against the kitchen counter and stared out the grimy window at the adjacent house.  Rain fell in a translucent gray curtain outside.
    "This is about the one time a week I can get away from this business…and here I am right in the middle of it.  Not only that, but Kaperski needs to sleep off a hangover, so I’m short a man."
    He shook his head.
    "I’m completely behind on getting these units presentable," he said.  "Well, I got some things to take care of here.  Phone calls, that sort of thing."
    Connor rolled his eyes.  Units.  There he goes again, trying to sound like a real businessman…and now we’re stuck with him for the rest of the day.
    O’Reilly drummed his fingers restlessly.  Then he struck the countertop with the flat of his palm, a hard smack that made        Connor and even imperturbable Ippleston flinch.  Connor disliked him more than usual in that moment.
    "And, dammit, open some of these windows so the smell gets aired out of this place!"
    And, as if to drive the point home, O’Reilly began to furiously wrestle with the kitchen window, which proved intractable despite blows and shaking and curses.  He became angrier and angrier.
    "Come on," Ippleston said, "let’s get the other windows.  Be careful, Dan.  Floor’s kinda wet in here."
    "Yeah, uh-huh, whatever."  Smack, thump, smack.  "Dammit, you sonofabitch piece-of-shit window!"
    Ippleston and Connor opened the large dining room window.  Then they opened the three windows in the living room.  The house cooled somewhat, but the musty moldiness hardly abated.  The windowsills were full of dust and old cobwebs.  Overgrown bushes prevented a clear view of the neighboring house; spiderwebs glittered within their branches like gossamer necklaces threaded with raindrops.
    "Upstairs windows, too, Dan?" Ippleston called.
An inaudible reply.
    "WHAT?"
    "YEAH!"  A curse and a heavy thud, which was followed by more cursing, followed his answer.
    "Told him about that floor," Ippleston said.  "Fuckin’ Dan O’Reilly…"
    The stairs were of wood, worn and stained.  The stairwell was high, and narrow to the point of claustrophobia.  Connor looked up toward the angled ceiling and became nearly dizzy.  He and Ippleston turned a corner, and they were upstairs, in a foyer of some sort, with O’Reilly comfortably behind them.
    "Damn, that guy gets on my nerves," Ippleston said.
    Four doors stood before them; two directly before, and two off to either side.  The foyer, lacking windows, was very dark, and thick with still, dusty air.  Connor flipped a lightswitch.  The single ceiling bulb threw a diffuse, poisoned glow over the foyer, and made the two men seem pale and drowned.
    "Bathroom, bedroom, bedroom, storage," Connor said, ticking off each door in turn, left to right.  "Storage room’s the one that leads up to the attic."
    "Huh.  Hey, by the way, what happened with you and that professor?  You were talkin about him when Dan the Man barged in and started goin off on everything."
    "Let’s go into a room first so O’Reilly doesn’t hear us."
    They entered the first bedroom.  It was completely empty.  The floor, like the staircase, was of wood, and squealed underfoot; plaster dust lay in tiny sporadic drifts upon it.  The wallpaper was coming off the wall in long strips.  Connor thought of shed snakeskin and shuddered.  Thin light fell into the room through the windows, left stilted angles on the floor.  The houses across the street were lost in a haze of rain.
    "Damn…look at the ceiling," Ippleston said.
    The ceiling was crumbling.  Tiny cracks spiderwebbed its surface like the dried mud of a dead riverbed.  Several much larger cracks ran the length of the room.
    "O’Reilly’s gonna flip when he sees this," Connor said.
    "Huh."
    Connor paced the dimensions of the room.  Dust whispered and crunched under his boots.
    "So this is where Professor Kung-fu kicked back after a long day of pop quizzes, huh?" Ippleston asked.
    "I guess," Connor replied, forcing the three windows up.  "He was a character, all right.  I mean, I get into the kitchen.  He’s there making tea.  Acting as if I’m not even around.  He’s got a kettle on the stove.  Doesn’t say a word.
    "So I go, ‘Hey, I heard something fall upstairs.’
    "And he says, ‘Hmm?  Oh.  That.  Don’t worry about it.  It’s just the house.’, but I swear he looks worried.  He doesn’t even look at me.
    " I go, ‘Shouldn’t you go see if something’s broken?’
    "And he says, ‘Should we, my boy?’  And he laughs and says, ‘Curious one, aren’t you?  But that’s good.  A diminishing commodity these days, curiosity.  People are content merely to be told what to think, to feel, to do.  Where are the great minds anymore?  Where are the dreamers? Where are the truthseekers? Where is the man willing to journey to the outer reaches of human perception and experience?’
    "I made a joke, then.  I said, ‘I think he’s growing dope in our dorm room closet.’
    "So he sighs and tells me to go ahead and make foolish jokes if I wish.  ‘Why should I not, if everything is a foolish joke in the end.  Humanity.  Existence.  The universe.  One and all, jokes.  Mischief created by cruel gods.’  And he lights up a cigarette and goes back to ignoring me.
    "I go, Don’t you mean, ‘a cruel God’?
    "And he looks right through me and blows smoke and says, ‘No.  I meant ‘cruel gods.’   Not one, but many.  Cruel, violent, indiscriminate gods.  The Tibetan monks told me of them…that which they dared whispered, at least.’  He said to even speak of them is dangerous and a violation of our own world.  Our own reality."
    "Then he goes, ‘Ever hear of the Tchos-Tchos, my boy?’
    "It was kind of a funny name, and I laugh and go, ‘Who?’
    "He said that they were a people who lived on the plateau of ‘Tsang’ in Tibet, and that they weren’t a laughing matter.  ‘Very nasty little folk,’ he tells me.  ‘Hardly one of them bigger than a nine-year old child.  Bald as eggs.  Were they Eurasian?  Negroid?  Caucasian?  I couldn’t tell. The Tibetans were terrified of them.  All I knew is that they were full of spite and malice.  And knowledge.  So I approached them.  Alone and unarmed.’"
    Ippleston shook his head and whistled softly. "Think the guy should’ve put in for a vacation or something."
    They entered the second bedroom, which was empty but for the wood frame and spring mattress of an old bed, a stack of yellowed newspapers tied with rotting twine, plaster dust and a few empty beer bottles – the spoor of exploring adolescents, no doubt.  Three more windows were opened.  Connor hardly noticed a difference in the atmosphere.
    "You’d think there’d be rats or mice or something in this house, " Ippleston said.  "But there ain’t anything in here.  That place out on Dyer had woodchucks.  Damn, did it ever stink."
    "You don’t believe me much, do you?" Connor asked.
    "Huh?  No.  I mean, yeah, I believe you, but I think that other guy was goin to Tibet for more than just monk-stuff."
    "What you mean?"
    "Poppies.  Opium.  Bet you ten to one he was a fuckin hash smoker and you caught him during a bad trip."
    "Might’ve been.  I didn’t smell anything strange, though.  Hell, that guy probably didn’t even need drugs to trip.  He just went on and on about these Tchos-Tchos for a while, talkin about their rituals and stuff and how they claimed to know about a place called Leng.’
    "I was getting a little exasperated with this guy’s tangents, so I asked him if  this Leng was anything like Shangri-La.’
    "And he laughs and shakes his head, and he goes, ‘Oh, no.  Oh, no, not quite.  Leng isn’t Shangri-La.  Leng isn’t paradise.  Not even remotely.’
    "Then he gets real serious, kind of leans in and says, ‘I’ve been interested in Leng for a very long time, my boy.  I wanted to see it for myself, to prove that it existed – at least, some of the time.’  He tells me about all these books debating whether this Leng is here or there or if it exists in the real world or in ‘a Jungian collective unconscious’.  And I’m here thinkin, Jesus Christ, how’d this one get past the Board?
    "And he gets even more intense.  He talks about livin with these Tchos-Tchos, on and off, for several years, until the Chinese army came through in’49.  Can you imagine that, man?  Livin with these little sawed-off aborigines?  I guess they taught him a thing or two, from what he said."
    "Like what?" Ippleston asked, heading for the bathroom.  The irritated strains of O’Reilly’s voice came from below, indistinct and harried.  Another satisifed customer, no doubt, Connor thought.   Ippleston wrestled with the tiny bathroom window, which was lodged in its frame.  Connor leaned against the bathroom doorframe.
    "Oh…all sorts of stuff.  I mean, you might be right about the guy being a hash smoker, because some of the stuff he told me was way out there.  We’re talkin shock theatre, man."
    "Seriously?"
    "Seriously.  Before I know it, he’s off on another tangent.  He’s pacing around the kitchen, goin on and on about these Tchos-Tchos, and how in ’49 they knew China was going to invade Tibet, and how thought their god or goddess or whatever was going to strike the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army dead – ‘crush them underfoot’ – were his exact words.  ‘Burn them, break them, destroy them utterly.’  That sort of thing.  The Tchos-Tchos weren’t afraid of the PLA’s soldiers, even though the Tibetans were loading everything they had on their yaks and getting the hell out of there."
    "Huh."
    They walked back downstairs.  O’Reilly was in some sort of dispute on the phone.  "Listen…look…will you listen, please?"
    "Were they talkin about Buddha when they meant ‘god’?  Those Tcho-Tcho guys?"
    "No.  I thought that was what Greeves-whatshisface meant at first, because I told him that Buddha was supposed to be for peace, right?
    "And the guy just laughs at me.  Says, ‘peace’ and shakes his head.  ‘Nothing of the sort.  No peace comes out of Leng…and as for Buddha, the Tchos-Tchos neither know nor care for an impotent idol.  The one they spoke of was the Three-Faced Goat.  The ‘Magna Mater.’"
    "The what?"
    "The Great Mother."
    "’Magna Mater’…that Tibetan or Tcho-Tcho?"
    O’Reilly rounded the corner from the kitchen and nearly ran into them.  His sunglasses were off now, folded into the neck of his sports shirt, and he was sweating profusely.  His eyes were the color of slate.  He would have been a good-looking man but for his pinched expression of continual exasperation.  In his hands he clutched a pencil and a small notepad.
    "That took long enough," he said.
    "Some of the windows were stuck, Mr. O’Reilly," Ippleston lied, again.
    "Yeah.  Whatever."  He sighed and rubbed his eyes, pressing them gently with his fingertips.  He began to pace about the dining room, talking more to himself than Ippleston or Connor.
    "Just got off the phone with the Chinese people over on Stuyvesant.  They say they got rats in their basement.  But then the guy can’t pay the garbage bill, so apparently he can’t put two and two together and see what’s going on.  I could barely understand the fucker.  So he says, ‘He call County Health Department", and I said, ‘Fine, hope you like voice mail.’
    "Then I get a hold of Kaperski…and the numbnuts bohunk says he won’t set foot in this house, let alone work in it, because of what happened here a year ago.  And I say, ‘Jesus H., Joe, it wasn’t as if you found the body or something!’  Nope.  He says he was here to cut the lawn once, and that he that he didn’t like the window out front…said it made him feel as if he were being ‘watched’.  He also said he thought he heard something bumping around in the attic.  Nope, he wasn’t waiting in line to come back here.  So I told him, Good, because the next line you’ll be in is at the unemployment office.  Bastard.
    "Then, to top it all off, I try to get hold of some of this guy’s relations, next-of-kin, whatever.  Just my luck, he has practically no friends and most of his family’s dead.  Whoever’s left doesn’t even want to talk about this guy, let alone come and get his stuff…so I’m stuck with God-knows-how-much Chinese junk-"
    "Tibetan," Connor corrected.  "They’re Tibetan antiques, Mr. O’Reilly."
    O’Reilly eyed him coldly for a moment.  "Yeah, whatever – so I’m left with God-knows-how-much Chinese junk in the attic, most of it probably worthless, on top of having to fire Kaperski…on top of that idiot out on Stuyvesant…and on top of my fucking game getting rained out!"
     "Don’t have to shout, Dan," Ippleston said.
    O’Reilly glared at him.  "Yeah, well if I don’t shout sometimes, things don’t get done, Ippleston."
Again, the out-of-patience sigh.
    "Well, I’m heading up to the attic to get a look at some of this stuff, never mind what Kaperski says.  Hell, maybe some of it’ll be worth something to somebody.  The University, maybe.  Either that, or it will be junk and we’ll have to haul it out of here before I can get this unit ready."
    Unit, Connor thought disgustedly.
    "Want us to help?" Connor asked – not that he really wanted to help O’Reilly, but it was wise to stay on the man’s good side.
    "No, I…well, wait a minute.  Yeah, you can help me, Connor.  At least we can get this guy’s collection sorted out.  Not that I think we’ll turn up any priceless Ming vases or anything.
    "Ippleston – start in on the kitchen."
    "Will do," Ippleston replied, with little real enthusiasm.
    Sudden inspiration struck O’Reilly.  He even permitted himself a tight smile, making him look like an avaricious badger.
    "Hell, you’re the college kid," he said to Connor.  "Maybe you can even identify some of the stuff.  Sort out the gold from the dirt, right?"
    "I’ll try," Connor said, smiling wanly.

    Sorting the gold from the dirt was easier said than done, as Connor was soon to realize. The attic was a cobwebby arched vault, equal parts warehouse, refuse bin, and graveyard for inanimate objects no longer wanted or needed, and many of these covered in moldering sheets.  Both Connor and O’Reilly were forced to pick their way through, carefully.  The air stank faintly of long-gone mothballs and dust and mid-summer wetness.  Dead insects dangled from the ceiling.
    On all sides, hoarded junk: reams of old bills and invoices; stacks of magazines from an earlier era (VICTOR OF THE BISMARCK SEA, proclaimed Life in 1943); unmarked bottles of old medicine; picture frames; a coat rack; an old-fashioned straight-backed chair missing one leg; sealed and taped cardboard boxes; a rusty bicycle; galoshes; an antique Victrola radio; all odds and ends and seemingly little of any worth.  A single bare bulb was barely enough to illuminate the darkness.
The only interesting object was a sealed urn of unadorned ceramic, standing waist high.
    O’Reilly, seemingly at a loss, stood with hands on hips and sighed:  "Well…"
    The attic was very humid; a few louvers provided no fresh air.  Rain drummed on the roof in a low, steady, atonal rumble.  The only comfort was the size of the attic, which allowed the two men to stand most of the time.
    "Look at all this junk," O’Reilly said in disbelief.  "Good God.  It’s gonna take two days just to go through it all."
    "Probably."
    "See anything interesting?" O’Reilly asked.  He removed his cap to wipe sweat away.
    "Just junk," Connor replied.  "Except for that urn.  He probably boxed the valuable stuff away."
    "Yeah.  Good thinking.  Let’s open some of this stuff up.  Don’t touch the urn, though.  Probably got some dead uncle’s ashes in it."
Good thinking.  I guess that’s why you’re the boss…
    The boxes were moldy, crumbling easily.  The packing tape pulled away like old skin.  Inside they found crumpled yellow newspaper, and rather more interesting paraphernalia.
    O’Reilly opened a box full of old incense sticks, which still smelled faintly of cinnamon and earth. "Goddamned hippie crap," he muttered.
     Connor came upon several tiny jade figurines, the workmanship of which ranged from the crude to the exquisite. Buddha in his various guises, he could guess some to be, but two were very strange: a three-faced goat upon a pedestal, and another, formless and yet somehow even more ominous.  It seemed as if the artist, or carver, or whatever, had tried to give shape to a whirling vortex of half-matter, something equal parts serpent and demon and boiling chaos.
    He held the figurine up to the light.  It glittered and flashed, and he thought of knives, for some reason, or claws and teeth – things wickedly sharp, things able to cut the very air and leave it bleeding.  Words returned to him, the words of the strange myopic little professor, whose cuffs and collar bristled with black goatish hair:
 
    The Tchos-Tchos knew the Peoples’ Liberation Army was coming - they could hear their artillery echoing like thunder among the peaks.  I knew what became of Nationalists and bandits who fell into the hands of Mao’s soldiers…and I expected no better for the Tchos-Tchos.
    And so I went to speak to the high priest of the Tchos-Tchos, who lived alone in a crude temple of stone and mortar, in a prehistoric burial ground ancient when the pyramids were young.  The air was cold and thin.  The wind whined and moaned in the cracks and gullies and I thought of voices chanting, half in adulation and half in fear, and I was reminded of what is written in the ‘Necrotaxia’, and of the horrors Sophianes dares whisper.
    The Tchos-Tchos, fearsome as they were, almost never came here.
    Did you notice the window over the door?  Good.  It is older even than the burial ground I mentioned.  Much older.  That very window was set high in the temple arch, above the entrance, toward the east.  That window I brought back with me from the Plateau of Tsang…among other things.  It was very precious to the Tchos-Tchos.  It is very precious to me, too.
    The high priest, who had no name, sat upon a stone block.  It made no sign as to whether It knew I was there or not.  So at last I said, ‘The Peoples’ Liberation Army is coming.  They are sweeping all before them.’
    But the high priest of the Tchos-Tchos, who wore black silk robes and a faceless black silk mask, was not disturbed by the course of events.  Mongols, Tibetans, Pamirs, Chinese – all had come to conquer, all had come to dust.  Only Leng was eternal.  Only Leng and its gods, who lived in the air, and whose servants could be heard piping mindlessly amidst the Himalayan peaks, would see the end of time.
    And I asked, ‘Is not Leng in peril, nonetheless?  Modern man has neither use nor love for your gods.’
    And the High Priest did not speak, but I heard him all the same, ‘No.  Leng is not in peril.  Leng is peril.  Those whom you fear will come to naught, for Leng is where Leng wishes to be, and neither It nor the Old Ones have any use or love for your ‘modern man.’’
    This I thought arrogant.  ‘Your contempt is your comfort for now,’ I said.  ‘But modern man will someday tear your mask away.’
    And the High priest replied, ‘My contempt is your undoing…’
    So I grabbed a fistful of the mask, and tore.
    Beneath the mask…was what I first took to be a human face.  But this was not so.  The face was moving.  Twitching.  Squirming, really…it was a writhing mass of worms and maggots, in a mockery of man, and it…it looked up, stared at me…but it had no eyes…and then it began to sway drunkenly, to dissolve, to crumble almost immediately.  It slumped into a shapeless pile of silk, convulsing and rising and falling…while the worms and maggots spilled across the floor like slime.  And I clutched that mask and screamed…
    A shimmering mellow metallic note jerked Connor out of his unpleasant reverie.  He gasped and nearly dropped the jade figurine.
    O’Reilly had found the brass gong.  It was a small, ugly curiosity, ornately carved.
    "The hell did you do that for?" Connor asked.
O’Reilly shrugged.  "Just wanted to see if it still worked.  What’s the matter, you getting nervous up here?"
    "…No."
    "I don’t know about you, college boy.  But I bet some of this Chinese – I mean, Tibetan antiques – are worth some cold hard cash."
    "…Maybe."
    "Hell, I might even be able to pawn some of it off over at the university, right?  Bet some of them old geezers would pay a mint to get their mitts on this stuff…the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?"
    "What?"
    "You been up here acting like a scared kid in a haunted house or something.  I expect that kind of crap out of Kaperski.  You’re not scared, are you?"
    "…No.  It’s just that I don’t like goin’ through a dead guy’s stuff, is all.  It’s creepy."
    "Yeah, well, his relatives had the chance to come here and get it.  They didn’t, so now it’s mine."
    "Kind of like the guy who lived here," Connor said.
    "What’re you talking about?" O’Reilly was immediately flinty and suspicious.
    "Well…I met him once, and he told me that all of this stuff here was his now.  The only problem was he didn’t really want it.  But he didn’t have a choice.  It was his whether he wanted it or not.  He said that he should have been more careful in his dealing with other…people."
    "Kind of like me, right?" O’Reilly said with a derisive grin.
    Connor nodded, wished O’Reilly to be quiet, and opened another box.  Photographs.  Once black-and-white, they had now faded to washed-out grays and sepias.  Pictures of mountain peaks, sharp and sheer and streaked with snow; pictures of rough camps of tents and Tibetan yak-hide yurts, enclosed by low crude stone walls; pictures of what appeared to be an expedition, winding its way over the lunar lichen-strewn landscape of Tibet.  Shaggy leather-faced Tibetan guides and porters led heavily loaded llamas.  Then, the professor, much younger, but still myopic and unsmiling, atop a llama.  And then, beside a large sealed urn, the round black window, amid a clutter of camp and archaeological equipment, looking very much like a piece of the void itself.
    "Could use some more light in here," O’Reilly said.  "Hey, isn’t that weird window over here or something?  Thought it might be."
    Sounds of fumbling, of heavy objects being rudely pushed aside.  The coat rack fell over and O’Reilly swore.
    Connor barely noticed the racket.  What he did hear, however, in his mind, was the dry melodious voice of his instructor and the whine of an October wind: And so we set forth from Tsang, under a dark sky.  Behind us, the temple lay in ruins.  Behind us lay Leng, and I should hope no one ever looks upon it again.
    Six days out, the Chinese – soldiers in fur hats and padded jackets, carrying submachineguns - captured us.  They were bandits, really, looking for easy loot.  They took the llamas, and then killed the Tibetan porters.  Greedy, they then seized upon the temple artifacts I had brought forth from Tsang – the black window and the sealed urn.  A terrible mistake.
     I came to Lhasa alone, with the artifacts, half out of my mind.  Of that, I remember little, though it is said that I spoke of worms…and maggots…and of a high priest without a face…and bellowed the praises of a goat with three faces.  But not only did my words bring horror.  I was crawling with worms and maggots myself.  And they were slowly eating my llama alive.
    And that is how I brought the high priest of the Tchos-Tchos out of Tsang.
    And my reward, he had said with an ironic smile, this.  This.  A tiny brick house on a tiny plot of land, where all the contrivances of this feeble world badger me.  Don’t think I don’t know when I’ve been cheated.
    Someday I’ll smash that window to pieces.  It’s strong, but I will.  Not tomorrow.  Or the next day.  But someday.  It isn’t right.  It shouldn’t be here.
    I think you should go now.
    "There," O’Reilly said.
    Connor was stirred from his memories, and looked up from the photographs.
    O’Reilly had pushed aside several years of accumulated junk and artifacts and cobwebs to reveal the black window, set in the wall in a circular frame, facing east as it had done for countless millennia.  It seemed inert now.  Lifeless.  A dusty cataract, like the glazed eye of a dead rotting fish…or was there a sullen gleam deep within its surface?  Connor thought of a snake plying sinuously through black water…
    "Jesus, what an ugly piece of shit," O’Reilly said.  He was unaccustomed to exertion and sweating profusely.  He pushed against it.  For some reason this made Connor very nervous.
    "Bastard’s wedged in there good and tight, too.  Can’t open it."
    "Hey, Dan…maybe we should just leave it alone."
    "What?  Why?  It’s fucking ugly and I want it out of here with the rest of this garbage.  I mean look at it!  It looks like an oil slick or something.  Who’s gonna want that thing on the front of their house?"
    He wiped sweat from his forehead and cast about the attic for something – what, Connor didn’t know.
    "Here – Connor – gimme that coat rack."
    "Why?  What’re you gonna do with it?"
    O’Reilly glared.  "Hang up my fucking hat," he said at last.  "What the hell do you think I’m gonna do?"
    "Hey – wait.  Dan – it might be worth some money."
    "Yeah, right.  Bout as much as a velvet Elvis painting, is my guess.  Now gimme the coat rack."
Connor made no move.
    "Connor…the coat rack.  I’m not going to ask you again."
    With a dreamy sense of dread, Connor handed the coat rack to O’Reilly.  It was long and awkward to begin with; in such confined surroundings, it was nearly impossible to maneuver it properly.  O’Reilly tried and succeeded in knocking a stack of boxes to the floor.
    "Bitch!" he snarled.
    He brought the coat rack around again.  It struck something large in the darkness.   Whatever it was fell heavily.  O’Reilly stopped to see what it was he had hit, and whistled softly in relief.
    "What?" Connor asked.
    " Just about put a hole through one that urn over here," O’Reilly said, and chuckled at his own wit.
    "What?  Dan…be careful."
     "Jesus, will you relax, Connor?  I’m sure all this stuff is insured."
    And with that, O’Reilly brought the coat rack back like a lance, and struck the black window as hard as he could.
It didn’t give an inch. "…dammit…"
    O’Reilly struck the window again, harder this time.  The sound was like that of a fist on a great iron door – a hollow boom reverberated through the attic – frightening and unaccountable.  The window itself had commenced to shimmer and pulsate with fantastic, amorphous oily colors – poisonous yellows, electric blues, vermilion, emerald, mauve, deep violet.  Connor, without thinking, had begun to edge back toward the attic trapdoor.  O’Reilly seemed to notice neither the window’s changes, or Connor.  He brought the coat rack back, paused, gathered himself, struck a third time –
    And it went through, but there was no shattering of glass.  The coat rack pierced the blackness, but what should have been glass flapped and pulled and tore like a wet membrane.  Shreds of the unearthly matter then scattered soundlessly through the attic like mad formless bats, and Connor shrunk in his skin at the thought of such things touching him.
    A stink filled the room; rotting fish and raw clay.  Empty eyes and yellow bones.  Violet electricity crackled about the window frame, full of purposeful malevolence.
    Somewhere a seal broke.  There was the scrape of ceramic, and then something shattered.
    "Jesus…," O’Reilly muttered, the coat rack clutched in his white-knuckled hands.
    Tatters of the alien matter still clung to the window frame.  There was no wind to cause the tarry stickiness to flap and twist in the manner it did, and, with a cold shock, Connor was certain it was alive.  There was no explanation for the way in which it suddenly surged forward, twining around the coat rack like black snakes, to engulf O’Reilly’s arms.  Blind white eyes erupted over its surface like boils, rolling madly.  O’Reilly’s mouth twisted and worked soundlessly.  He was helpless, held fast.  But it was not the thing that held him that finally tore the screams from him.  It was something else, pouring through the portal like slime; a cloudy mass that began to fill the attic, boiling, seething like sulfuric acid.  Jade figurines, brass gong, boxes, clay urn – all were soon lost from view.  The thing smelled of bile and open wounds, a thick stink that made Connor choke helplessly.
The mass began to take form, but it was impermanent, like an eddy of filthy water in which things emerged and were lost again; bear-trap mouths full of teeth and running with venom or saliva; black shaggy growths that might be hair or tentacles; the glitter of scales or hide; membranes; and, somehow worst of all, twisted black animal legs, terminating in hooves.  Some were huge, others grotesquely dainty, but all kicked spasmodically in a dreadful fury, and none moved in a way that was sane or good to see.
    A black hoof struck O’Reilly, breaking the man’s neck with a sickening crunch.  A reticulated mouth darted in to snap the lolling head off.
    Connor screamed.  He was sure someone would hear him.  Ippleston would hear him, and he would come to open the attic to banish these dark, draggling things.  Good old imperturbable Ippleston.  He would have no time for such monsters.  He would have no patience with the Three-faced Goat.  College, Tibet, crazed professors become prophets of maggots and worms – nonsense.  And Ippleston was downstairs, in the kitchen…
    A hand came down upon his shoulder, swift and firm.  At least, in shape it was a hand, but it roiled and convulsed with the frenzy of tiny white jelly-like maggots, twisted and undulated with the sliding of other, larger worms – worms brown, worms, worms the color of bruised flesh.  Worms began to fall away from it, to rain down Connor’s shirt, and he began to gibber helplessly.
    The hand slid to the back of Connor’s neck, wet and horrid and alive, and he could not scream, he could not scream.
Though boneless, the high priest’s grip was like that of a lamprey.  Though blind, the black hooded thing, master of the Tchos-Tchos, slowly turned Connor about, slowly, so that soon they both faced the terrible East, and the roiling blasphemous mass that was the Three-Faced Goat.

END

All Things Dark and Dangerous is Copyright ©  2000 Corey Whitworth
"Brick House on a Wet Street"  Copyright © 1997  Micheal Minnis