Crawlspace Oracle

A few moments under the strange red lamps of the restaurant was all that was required to cause Rhiannon to wonder if she was dreaming. The long bus ride through the rainy afternoon certainly hadn’t helped matters, nor did the reason behind her trip: a reunion with a woman she’d considered, at best, an acquaintance in the office where she’d worked before Iain and marriage and the birth of the twins. It had been a long time since she’d ventured out on her own. She now regretted that her first outing was to this anaemic town that was notorious for being a haven for dismal weather and washed up entertainers.

For reasons Rhiannon could never unearth, these entertainers seemed to migrate to this colourless burg to collect their meagre pensions while waiting to die.

Today, Rhiannon had seen plenty of bleak weather, but only one example of the latter feature; when she’d deboarded at the bus depot she’d witnessed a scarecrow-like man on crutches attempting to juggle a trio of shining spheres. He’d watched Rhiannon hopefully as fluid (rain, perspiration, or tears, she could not tell) streamed down his cheeks. He’d made a pitiful sound as she’d walked by, clinging firmly to her purse. His whimper had been like a baleful note blown on an old wooden flute.

Rhiannon had no intention of ever coming to this town, or of seeking out Hyacinth again. The very thought of Hyacinth provided Rhiannon with pangs of guilt, pangs that worsened when her memory trawled up specific details, such as the lavish gift Hyacinth had given her for the baby shower. But seven years had passed since that time and there’d not been so much as a single call or Christmas card between them.

But once Rhiannon had arrived at the curious eatery and was able to see Hyacinth in the flesh, she wondered if they’d both been living on different calendars. If she were to use Hyacinth’s face as a gauge, it looked as though decades had passed since their last encounter, for Hyacinth appeared old and drawn and brittle.

Rhiannon wondered if this was partly due to the strange macrobiotic diet that Hyacinth had spent the first part of their evening explaining in detail. She’d ordered queer, tiny delicacies from the menu and had requested a small pot of boiling water and an empty mug, in which she steeped some pungent herbs that she’d bundled in a small piece of cheesecloth.

“I can’t thank you enough for inviting me to dinner!” Hyacinth said. “But I can’t allow you to pay the tab.”

“Please,” answered Rhiannon with a casual wave of her hand, “it’s my pleasure. I only wish we’d done this sooner.”

“Time is a startled bird flitting away from us, as my father used to say. Well, since you insist on buying dinner, if there is ever anything I can do to repay you, you may consider it done.”

Rhiannon grew cagey once she recognized this opportunity to state her true motivation for this reunion. The opportunity was too perfect, both in timing and tone. It thrilled and unnerved her at once.

“Funny you should say that…” she began, anxiously. The words were swirling about her head, just out of reach.

Hyacinth flared her sallow eyes with interest. “Oh?” she said.

“Yes. I was hoping to pick your brain about money.” Rhiannon flinched at her poor choice of words. Hyacinth’s expression darkened.

“No, no, not like that! I’m not asking for a loan or anything of that sort!” sputtered Rhiannon. “I’m just looking for some advice.”

“Oh.”

The cord of tension that Rhiannon had felt tightening between the two of them began to slacken, to her immense relief.

“You see, Iain’s had quite a good year at the agency: four quarterly bonuses on top of his annual salary increase. We’re looking to invest this extra money, put it toward something sound. It’s not a huge amount, but Iain’s pretty convinced we can make a respectable profit if we play our cards right.”

Hyacinth shaped her sapped expression into something vaguely happy. “First off, I am truly thrilled for you; all snug with a husband and those little darlings you made. I’m tickled to hear that you have money besides. But when it comes to investing, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know one market from another.”

“But those stories in the Gazette…”

“Those…” Hyacinth said dismissively, “…those articles were inflated.”

“They referred to you as Queen Midas,” Rhiannon said. She felt a peculiar pride when her comment caused her guest to visibly blush. “But you never gave those reporters the secret of your success, did you?”

“I’m only as good as my guide,” Hyacinth confessed.

“Your guide? So, you do have some sort of an advisor?”

“Some sort, yes.”

A fine balance was required for Rhiannon to probe her guest further without seeming rude.

“Do you have a card for this person?” she asked. “Some way I can reach them?”

Hyacinth stared past her dinner companion, toward the restaurant’s front window and through it. Rhiannon wondered what, if anything, the gaunt woman might have been looking for on those miserable streets.

Whatever she was scanning the soggy night for, Hyacinth suddenly appeared to have found. Her eyes brightened with fresh inspiration.

“I like you, Rhiannon. I always have. More than that, I trust you. And so, yes, I will show you. I will let you in.”

With that, Hyacinth rose and tugged her long coat from the pole by their booth.

“You mean now?” Rhiannon asked, flustered by her own lack of preparation. The world suddenly seemed to be spinning too quickly.

“Of course!” Hyacinth gushed. “Come along. My car is just around the corner.”

“I…it’s just that…I mean, surely their business will be closed by now.”

Hyacinth was already halfway to the door.

The car Rhiannon was led to was far humbler than what she’d envisioned a woman of Hyacinth’s standing would drive. She squeezed into the littered cab and endured the deafening rumble of an unmuffled engine. Her head was aching by the time Hyacinth chauffeured them off the main roads and down a maze of bleak-looking side streets.

When she noted the house before which Hyacinth stopped her car, Rhiannon was bewildered. Could the woman be playing some type of joke? She’d never known Hyacinth to have a sense of humour.

This confusion cooled into apprehension once Rhiannon closed the car door and watched her guide scaling the cement steps that connected the ugly lawn to a residence that was not much larger than a storage locker, and every bit as tasteless. It was a frame house, stunted and misshapen. It was as if an unskilled carver had whittled this stingy dwelling from a greater house, then tucked their shameful creation on a poorly lit backstreet in hopes of concealing it. The roof bowed where it should not, and the walls stood in a manner they could not, and the patina was the grey of curdled mushroom soup.

Hyacinth unlocked the narrow front door and held it open for her guest.

With that, as if on cue, Rhiannon’s surroundings conspired against her. A pair of men rounded the corner and began shambling in her direction (their voices deep, their laughter at some imperceptible joke scary), the lone streetlamp on the block began to flicker, the rain resumed falling.

She crossed the lawn and scaled the steep concrete steps as quickly as she could.

The realization that this entire adventure had been a grave mistake, which had been nagging faintly at the corners of Rhiannon’s attention from the moment she boarded the bus to come here, fully erupted the instant she crossed the threshold of Hyacinth’s house. What she was feeling was not the threat of immediate danger, but something vague, something dizzying in its menace. The nearest Rhiannon had ever felt to this sensation was déjà vu. She wondered if she had perhaps dreamed this reunion with Hyacinth years ago and was just now discovering that her dream had been an omen, a warning to avoid this detour on her life path. But it was too late now to heed.

“Just throw your coat anywhere,” Hyacinth said as she shut and bolted the door. “Would you like something? Water or tea?”

“No, thank you.” She kept her coat on.

Hyacinth moved down the little hallway and snapped on the kitchen light, revealing a countertop piled with unwashed dishes and rows of hanging cupboards with their doors open, flaunting their vacancy. Queen Midas was evidently nearer to Old Mother Hubbard.

Glancing discreetly through the archway to her right, Rhiannon saw a living room that was empty except for a folding lawn chair whose seat held a stack of rumpled magazines. The kitchen was as lacking in furniture and appliances as it was in foodstuffs. Rhiannon noted a small hotplate and a barstool stationed before the warped countertop. And that was all.

“I apologize for the state of the house. Don’t think I’m not aware of the fact that it has seen better days.”

“Oh…I…” stammered Rhiannon. “Are you in the process of flipping it?” she asked, her voice soaked in hope.

“No,” Hyacinth replied. “I’ve been living here for some time now.”

“What about your money?” Rhiannon immediately regretted her choice of words and scrambled to reframe her panicked interrogation. “What I mean is, surely you can afford to live a bit more comfortably than this.”

“I have before. I hope to again. But the money’s gone.”

Rhiannon wished that the woman’s tone wasn’t so cheerful.

“I’m confused. I thought you had this excellent advisor, that the advice he’d been giving you was sound.”

“Oh, it is. It’s very sound indeed. The fault lies with me, not my advisor.”

“How so? Did you not take their advice?”

“For a long time, I did. As my father did before me and his father before him. But it’s all about correctly interpreting the message. That’s the key. I’ve not been interpreting the messages properly, obviously. Or maybe it’s that the nature of the messages has changed.”

“I don’t follow.”

Hyacinth stood leaning against the cluttered counter, studying her guest, scrutinizing her.

Rhiannon looked away and loudly cleared her throat. “Um…did you happen to have that advisor’s phone number?”

Hyacinth shook her head. “No need.”

She crossed the tiny kitchen and pulled down the gingham towels that hung from a mounted rack. The removal of the towels revealed a door of whitewashed wood.

Hyacinth pulled this back from its jamb, unto a black void, or so it seemed to Rhiannon, whose legs were losing their strength. Fear had rendered her helpless. She stood mutely, watching as her host clawed at the debris on top of the stained refrigerator until she found a large black flashlight.

Though she appeared to merely be testing the batteries, Hyacinth had the light upturned so that its beam shone against her chin, a sight that stirred in Rhiannon frightening memories of ghost stories around bonfires during those awful weeks when she’d been left to fend for herself at summer camp. She recalled how immersive those tales had been for her, the horrible impact they’d had, tainting the strange world around her as something seething with hidden peril.

Standing here now, in this dingy kitchen, Rhiannon came to appreciate how true those impressions had been.

Without a word, Hyacinth turned the flashlight to the open door and began her noisy descent of the basement steps.

Recognizing this opportunity, Rhiannon turned to charge for the front door, but a chanced view through the living room window crushed her plan of escape.

The straggling figures she’d seen moving down the unfamiliar street when she’d arrived were now loitering by Hyacinth’s rusted car. Or were these the same figures? No, for where there had been but a pair, there was now a group. Forlorn-looking women now stood alongside the imposing men. They looked to be huddling under the sputtering streetlamp like moths.

Rhiannon reached into her purse for her phone to call a cab, or perhaps call Iain. She stole another look. The figures were ordering themselves. They were lining up single-file along the sidewalk.

“Everything is ready,” announced Hyacinth.

The sound of her voice made Rhiannon squeal. She spun and looked into a flash-lit grin.

“You look frightened.”

“I am!”

“But there’s no reason to be. I’m coming with you, it’s fine.”

Hyacinth began down the basement stairs first, which made Rhiannon feel just secure enough to move to the doorway and look down at those ruddy steps; anything to keep her focus off the strange congregation outside.

The basement was no longer a wall of blackness. In addition to the gleaming finger from Hyacinth’s torch, it now hosted an intriguing sheet of prismatic light; something festive, carnivalesque.

It was to this cloistered aurora that Rhiannon moved, one hesitant stair at a time, until eventually she found herself standing amidst the cluttered cellar.

The room was reminiscent of an army bunker, with its stifling confines and its drab cinderblock walls. It also looked as though it hadn’t been properly cleaned since the analogue age.

Hyacinth was standing in wait between two towers of stacked plastic bins, an unnerving smile staining her face. She turned and wriggled herself down the tiny row, then crouched down, her shadow now stretching amongst those flickering trails of multicoloured light.

Rhiannon manoeuvred through the maze of detritus to find her hostess squatting before a tiny hatch door that was set into the wall just above floor-level.

“Come see,” cooed Hyacinth. Politeness (and, if she was being honest, the curiosity of the unknown) moved Rhiannon toward the open doorway, but as soon as she was able to see the room and what it contained, this curiosity instantly twisted into fear.

The illumination guttered from a lanky strand of Christmas lights, which had been wound about the beams that served as the thick bones of the house itself. Insulation bulged between the wooden beams; pink as lung tissue, fluffy as candy floss. The floor of the crawlspace was but a single board that stretched from the doorway to the far end of the hatch like a ship’s fatal plank.

And it was there, upon that long runner of unsanded pine, that Rhiannon saw the body. It was as large as life and its presence among the festive bulbs was confusing, uncanny, terrible, and yet, irrefutably, shockingly, just…there.

The figure was slumped at the back of the room. Its head was swollen, and its eyes were shimmering, bulbous things. The mouth was gaping but expressionless. It was dressed in a dingy leotard that lent its body the lumpy, colourless appearance of bagged flour.

Hyacinth pulled herself through the crawlspace opening and proceeded to slither across the long plank, toward the crumpled form.

“My grandfather built him,” she explained. “He helped my family flourish during the Great Depression. We’ve looked to him ever since.” Hyacinth fussed with the figure while she talked, adjusting its posture like a fretting mother would with her child, pushing the cobwebs from its head using the heel of her longish hand. “I’d be lying if I told you that we’ve always benefited from his words, but really, it’s a matter of interpretation. That’s the art of it. Are you familiar with Sortes Sanctorum? It’s divining one’s fortune through a seemingly random flip of the Bible page. Great-grandfather was a believer and he taught my grandfather. But grandfather took it beyond the gospels. He felt that the great pattern was everywhere, in all things at all times. So he devised this.”

Rhiannon watched as Hyacinth reached around to the back of the figure’s plaster head. Its mouth began to glow with faint amber light, which revealed the too-wide grin of the dummy to be a fabric-covered speaker, the kind that might bring one feelings of nostalgia if one had memories of wartime gatherings around a cathedral radio to listen to melodramatic plays. Rhiannon had no such memories and therefore the mouth was horrible.

Static gushed from the dummy’s speaker/mouth. Underneath this incessant whir Rhiannon could hear faint strains of music and distant voices all struggling to be heard, to emerge from the static like fish breaking the surface of deep water.

The great lidless eyes began to spin. They were twin plastic discs, each bearing a spiral pattern. They glowed as they spun around and around and again. Was Hyacinth attempting to hypnotize her?

No, this effigy was a radio receiver, its dial-eyes prowled the bandwidths in search of transmissions.

Hyacinth nestled close to the thing and whispered something into where its ear should be.

Rhiannon had already begun backing away from the colourful crawlspace, but when she heard the doll speak as if in response to Hyacinth’s question, Rhiannon turned and ran.

On hands and knees she scaled the wooden steps, dragging herself toward the landing.

Her hands had managed to slap down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor when Rhiannon felt something grip her ankles. She screamed and tried to kick, but Hyacinth was unnaturally strong for so slight a person. She scrabbled upon Rhiannon’s prostrate form, looped her wiry arms around Rhiannon’s waist and heaved her clean off the stairs.

“Shhh,” she cooed, “shhh…shhh. It’s fate, darling. It’s not about you or me.”

Swiftly and inexorably, Rhiannon was being pulled back toward the hatch in the wall.

“All we ask is that you listen, just listen.”

Rhiannon was thrust through the square aperture. The wooden lane was filthy and rough. The blinking lights made her nauseous. And the sight of the horrible mannequin reduced her backbone to putty.

Closer to it now, closer than she would have ever wanted to be to such a thing, Rhiannon could see that the effigy’s body was nothing more than a hollow frame of chicken wire wrapped in a cheap white leotard. The pattern of the wire mesh was pushed firmly into the fabric, creating the illusion of reticulated flesh. And yet the gardener’s gloves that capped the hands betrayed the thing’s true nature: it was nothing but a pathetic scarecrow, without so much as a post to perch upon.

But scarecrows with their heads of straw and sackcloth cannot speak as this thing spoke. Its voice was as ugly as its shell. The spiral eyes spun around and again, pulling in random fragments from countless broadcasts. Hyacinth’s advisor was a child of Babel.

Time seemed to halt for Rhiannon as she faced the thing and planned her escape. The angled beams forced her to crawl like a slug. She tried to push herself back toward the hatch.

She felt the draft and heard the slam of the hatch door as Hyacinth sealed her in. There was the recognizable clunk of a lock being fastened, followed by the roar of heavy things being dragged, both of which rendered the crawlspace door immovable.

She kicked at it, hammered at it until the heels of her hands began to swell. All the while the cheery lights continued to flash, and the endless babble of Hyacinth’s advisor mounted.

Rhiannon’s joyous moment of inspiration that came when she thought of using her cellphone to call 911 turned black and came crashing down around her when she realized that her purse had slipped off her shoulder during her struggle on the stairs.

Her screams shredded her throat but roused not so much as a sound from beyond the door.

Some time later, the Christmas lights went out and the only the illumination that remained was the mannequin’s endlessly spinning eyes and the amber glow of its fabric mouth.

 

*

 

Three days and three nights passed before Hyacinth finally deemed to unlatch the crawlspace door. But by then Rhiannon had shed all conceptions of time and lost every ounce of will, strength, resistance. Like Lazarus, she slinked, broken but alive, out of the open hatch door, a living creature from a stifling crypt. Some Logos, some obscure alchemy of sound and isolation, had altered her world. It was powerful enough to transform Rhiannon’s tomb to womb, potent enough to spore her back among the living, her head brimming with messages. She felt as though her skull was on the verge of cracking, erupting like a volcano, so gigantic was this fresh knowledge.

Hyacinth had been keeping vigil. Her tiny form was propped upon a scuffed wooden stool and she held a burning white taper in her hands. The melted wax ran down in rivulets, splattering upon the already waxy skin of Hyacinth’s unsteady hands. Rhiannon looked at her face, so ghastly in the candlelight.

She looked past Rhiannon. The sight of the effigy lying broken and silent inside the crawlspace did not faze her. She returned her gaze to Rhiannon.

“Yes?” she whispered. “Yes, please…speak.”

Speaking just might relieve some of the unbearable pressure in her head. Rhiannon opened her mouth, but for what purpose? Was she going to scream? To beg for pity?

She heard a voice resounding in her skull, could feel words shaking over her palate, but the statements she was making bore no resemblance to the ones she was trying to make. Many of the words were from languages of which Rhiannon had no knowledge. Some of the sounds were not even words but were instead almost musical: the blurt of a trumpet, the pluck of a cello string.

Hyacinth’s face became a mask of delight. She puffed out the candle and sat it smoking upon a stack of old books. She advanced to Rhiannon, wrapped a switch-thin arm around her back and guided her toward the basement steps.

The climb was almost impossible for Rhiannon, whose ankles buckled with each footfall. By the time they reached the kitchen she had lost all feeling in her legs.

She was frightened to discover that the main floor of the house was not appreciably brighter than the crawlspace, for the windows had been sheathed in tarpaper and every lamp she passed had its lightbulb purposely smashed.

With care, Hyacinth guided her form, which grew weaker with each tick of the clock, into the living room and sat her in the folding chair Rhiannon had spotted on the way in.

“This is only temporary,” Hyacinth purred, her tone maternal and assuring. “We’ll get you a chair befitting a woman of your stature as soon as we’re able to understand your message. Can you hear what I’ve been saying to you? No, no, don’t try to speak. Just blink your eyes once for yes and twice for no. That’s it. Good. And can you understand what I’ve been saying to you? Very good. Do you know what it is that has happened to you? No. Well, that’s to be expected, my dear. Don’t let it alarm you. It will take time.”

Hyacinth moved around to the front of the chair, hunched slightly to level her eyes with Rhiannon’s.

“There are some people outside, some really lovely people. They’ve been waiting a long time to see you. May I send them in?”

Rhiannon’s arms felt like concrete. Unable to lift them, she closed her eyes to press away the tears that were welling up and blurring her vision. Hyacinth took this to be an affirmative answer and squealed with delight before rushing to the front door.

The first pair to make the hesitant entry into the living room were the men Rhiannon had seen laughing on the street the night of her arrival, the men who’d loitered in the pooled light of the streetlamp, the men who’d scared her. They held hands as they approached her. They asked about the nature of their father’s illness.

Rhiannon’s cry for help translated into a staccato message, something in Spanish or perhaps Portuguese.

The men sighed and shed tears and blessed her for this message. Before they exited, they handed a small and crumpled envelope to Hyacinth, who was already greeting the next visitant.

Iain was the sixth or seventh to approach. The sight of him brought Rhiannon a relief that bordered on bliss. She tried in vain to rise. Crying out his name yielded only static. She felt trapped in a nightmare, the kind where she would try to scream but found she had no voice, and all the while the danger—calmly and with notable relish—would close in upon her, mangling her body with a weapon or forcing something thick and fibrous deep inside her mouth, her cleft.

But dear Iain did no such thing. His assault was something far more insidious.

He wrapped his arms around her momentarily, kissed her oily brow.

In her ear he whispered, “Will we be successful?”

Rhiannon’s reply was instant, confusing, and delivered wholly without her consent.

Never had her mate appeared so pleased.

This would be the only memory of his face that Rhiannon would have to cling to over the next three years, the first of which was spent solely in that horrid folding chair, meeting with an endless procession of guests.

Hyacinth kept the tarpaper on her windows and succoured her new doll with her choicest teas and macrobiotic delicacies. She cleaned her bucket twice daily without complaint and washed her with a loofah sponge soaked in tepid rosewater.

Iain made good on his promise to Hyacinth. He procured for them a handsome and firm stone cottage in the city’s historic district. Gardeners and contractors were hired to see that the house and its humble grounds were kept in good repair. The windows were two-way smoked glass, which assured privacy while not depriving the occupants a view of the elegant street.

Rhiannon was given a chair befitting her at last; a throne-like apparatus of sand-coloured plush and a white lacquered Hepplewhite frame. She was stationed in the bedroom at the top of the stairs (the master bedroom went to Hyacinth). A second chair, comfortable looking but not as regal, was placed before Rhiannon so that her visitants would feel more at ease during consultations.

A year or so later, Iain finally made his return. Though he still managed the books for this little soothsaying enterprise, this was the first time he’d made a pilgrimage to its source.

Rhiannon’s recollection of him was faint, dulled by exhaustion and trauma and time. The young woman who clung to him was wholly unfamiliar to her. The twins who cowered behind Iain had grown immensely during her absence.

“Hello, Rhiannon,” Iain said weakly. Then he turned to the young girl at his side. “Sit,” he bade her. “Ask.” He then instructed the twins to go outside and play.

The young woman was reluctant to obey, and once she found herself facing the glassy-eyed hag with her tea-stained teeth, her marionette-like body, her frumpy floral gown, her black-soled feet with their thick yellow toenails, her voice refused to come. Rhiannon knew the feeling well. Seeing the girl in this familiar helpless state, that of nightmare, that of her very existence since the night in the crawlspace, made Rhiannon pity the girl. She did her best to show empathy through her unfailingly vacant gaze.

“Can you tell us,” the girl began pausing to clear her throat, “will our baby be a healthy one?”

The power inside Rhiannon, over which she had no agency, shared its prophecy.

Iain smiled. His young lover began to cry. He helped her to her feet, and they escaped the room together, like some awkward three-legged hybrid joined at the hip.

Twenty-three weeks after their consultation in the stone cottage, the last of which were filled with punishing nausea, the word was made flesh.

Wriggling, its tiny limbs twitching as though being prodded with an electrical charge, the child’s first mewling cry was distorted from the mucous that sealed its mouth like fine stretched fabric. Iain swaddled its body, still greasy with the fluids of the womb, and carefully lifted it from the bed. The cord was still connecting the baby to its host. Iain could feel the lump growing in his throat, could feel himself tearing up, yet he still managed a smile. For and from this child, great things had been predicted.