23

The knock resounded, an echoing imperative. Each blow made me wince. It seemed unending, the knock persisting, so heavy the floorboards quaked.

This was not an ordinary reverberation in the air. This was another event that was both real and not real, within time and beyond it.

When I opened the door I would be taking a further step in agreeing to something I did not understand. I looked back at my father and his expression was strained, his smile forced. A good man, he had often said, stands up to what he fears. I saw now, though, that much of my father’s sure-handedness, and much of his insouciance, had been an act. My love for a dangerous sport, risking riptides, may have been the desire to prove myself equal to a man who was by no means equal to himself.

He must have read my thoughts, or sensed them like high-amp voltage through his own considerations. “You’ve always been slow to make up your mind,” he said.

I tried lying to myself. It was only a knock, and certainly, I reasoned, it may be someone innocent, a neighbor in need of help. The knock came again, and my instincts made me want to cringe, hide. “I won’t. If I don’t answer it, nothing bad can happen.” I felt reduced to childishness, and reduced to a boy’s diction, and a boy’s stubbornness.

He did not speak for a moment. “There’s no sense putting it off forever.”

I nearly asked him what he himself had done, what he had bartered and what he had gained, in dealing with such an army. “I won’t talk to them.”

He could not keep the slightly patronizing tone from his voice. “You’re being foolish.”

I began to argue, but he put his fingers to his lips. I turned back to the door, certain that my father’s love for me was strong enough to keep me from harm. The pounding continued, the barrier shivering with each blow.

“I will never open the door,” I said, in a whisper.

There was a breath behind me, at my nape, and I turned to see my father sweating, his hand taking my shoulder in a grip that was not strong so much as urgent, a bony pinch, the clench of a desperate man.

I saw that if I did not release the latch and let the barrier swing wide, he would suffer. He was suffering now, with a look in his eye like the pain I had seen in Blake’s. He could not say it. He could not beg. He was proud. If much of his courage during life had been an act, it had been a good one, a noble act, even, a reliance on manners and good humor.

“We have to accommodate our visitors,” he said, “since they are so insistent, and since we have no real choice.”

“A contract coerced,” I said, quoting one of my old teachers, “is no contract.”

“Remember this,” he said. “I love you.”

The words took all the light, all the dark, all sensation from my body.

I turned. I strode across the hardwood floor to the door, and the walk stretched, each step falling shorter than the one before it. I would never reach the door. I would never stop my father’s pain and cut short this pounding, each blow staggering the house, now, shuddering the walls. Nails squealed in the joists and the foundations groaned.

In the midst of my eagerness to spare my father, in the midst of my hatred for the fist hammering the door, I had begun to change. The doubt was beginning to return. I was aware that it was all for my benefit, this theater. I felt myself imprisoned in an opera, a stage so exaggerated none of it could be believed for a moment. Only my love for my father was real, and it was with that love that I approached the door.

The door handle was cold, beads of condensation greasing it, water drooling to the floor as my grip closed around the brass. The metal grew even colder. My thumb found the latch tongue, and depressed it. Too cold, I thought, feeling my flesh stick to the handle, the handle growing colder with each heartbeat, until my skin was joined to the metal. The cold sang into the bones of my arms, into the muscles of my shoulder.

I wrestled with the door and began to drag it open, and yet the door had taken on the weight of something massive, swiveling on corroded hinges. Except that I knew the door was not more massive, and I knew the brass of the handle was not cold. It was my own weakness that made them so, and I was frail because I was afraid.

The door was open, and I stepped back.

I turned, beckoning to my father, and he was gone.

The knowledge made me stumble, and I caught myself against the wall. I called out, and yet my cry was a whisper. I called again, knowing the futility of it.

There was no need to search for my father, no need to cry after him. He had vanished into a void inside me, in my own psyche, the same wound that had produced him in the first place.

Doubt now replaced the joy, diluting even the fear. I had been deceived. This had not been my father. My tears, my love, had been wasted on a hallucination. All of this was a sham. But would a specter, a demon garbed in my father’s appearance, have expressed his love so fervently?

The silence was perfect.

The door was open, and there was nothing there. The staging had gone awry, and a character had missed his cue. I made a sound, half yelp, half growl. You see, I wanted to declaim to an audience, to a colisseum of assembled souls. You see—none of this is real. This is pageantry, this is the dazzle and the thunder of illusion.

As I stood before the black rectangle of the open doorway I felt something like disappointment. Because I had anticipated the sight of a divine being, a god, if only an evil, fallen god. And here was silence. I laughed. I mocked myself, shaking my head.

And I had been convinced, I told myself ruefully, that they would be able to hurt me, to torture that trick of light and reason that I had believed was my father. The legions I faced were frightening but swordless, empowering only the imagination. This was a little more than a new caliber of nightmare. I had survived such dreams.

The house was silent. The floor was solid under my steps as I reached the door, and swung it silently shut.

But it would not shut entirely.

Someone was out there.

Coming in.