Page 11 of Going Home in the Dark

“Dear God, a miracle.”

“Ernest, there’s no point speaking to God. You might as well have a conversation with a rock.”

“I know the feeling,” Ernie said, returning to the potatoes.

“I ask only that you keep your strange environmental views to yourself and cause me no further embarrassment in the community. By the way, it would behoove you to eat fewer potatoes and more lean protein.”

In spite of Britta, Ernie understood his passion and concern for nature and why he expressed it as an activist. However, he could not explain his obsession with novels about characters who suffered from amnesia or eradication of memories by brainwashing. He’d read hundreds of such stories with fascination. A professional book scout occasionally found a few of the hundreds of similar novels that were out of print, and Ernie at once pored through those also. He reread the better books three or four times. His collection of movies on the same subject had inspired repeated, sometimes obsessive viewing.

And so it was that on a Tuesday evening, before anyone knew that Ernie had fallen into a coma (because he had not yet fallen into a coma), he was in his study, sitting in the white-and-brown cowhide-upholstered armchair with polished bull-horn headrail. Two walls were brightened by James Bama paintings of cowboys and horses that had graced the covers of paperback books by famous Western novelists, and on the other two hung a variety of guitars beautified by exquisite inlays of exotic woods. This large study contained no desk, but a piano stood ready. Three more armchairs were draped with colorful Pendleton blankets that complemented the Navajo rug.

Sometimes Ernie wrote songs here, composing the lyrics first and then working out a melody on the Steinway. Most recentlyhe’d completed “They Don’t Have No Antidote for Love at Walgreens.” Currently, he was engrossed in a gunslinger novel about sheep men versus cattlemen in the 1800s. This edition contained the original text; Ernie refused to purchase revised editions that had been rendered into gibberish by aggressive “sensitivity readers” and published for semiliterate mobs with the hope they might read it instead of burn it either symbolically or literally.

Ernie found good Westerns to be highly entertaining, although characters with amnesia or suffering a fugue state were rare in the genre. The closest thing to a person like that in the present novel proved to be a schoolmarm who was by nature forgetful but accurate with a six-shooter.

After he read the final page and sighed with contentment and saw it was 6:10 in the evening, Ernie ambled into the kitchen with the reasonable expectation of heating a bowl of homemade vegetable soup and making a grilled cheese sandwich. After all, this was not the first occasion on which he’d undertaken to prepare dinner. With almost two decades of culinary accomplishments behind him, he had every reason to suppose he would again succeed at feeding himself.

But it was not to be.

The door between the hall and the kitchen featured a porthole-style window and swung freely on pivot hinges, like a door serving a restaurant kitchen. As was Ernie’s habit, he stepped briskly across the flush threshold, allowing the door to reverse its momentum and arc shut of its own accord. He took only two steps into the room before an unusual smell halted him no less abruptly than if he had walked into a glass wall.

Artists of many disciplines have a highly developed olfactory sense and respond dramatically even to subtle odors that mostpeople cannot detect or of which they take only transitory notice. Writers and songwriters and musicians are among the gifted in this regard, actors and dancers and painters not so much, least of all film directors and mimes and those who make origami animals. By far the artists most sensitive to smells are sculptors; no one knows why, though this matter is the subject of hundreds of scientific studies conducted at prestigious universities.

Although Ernie Hernishen was a talented songwriter rather than a sculptor, the subtle but unusual aroma in the kitchen impacted him on a profound level deeper than any psychological strata that Freud could have imagined even in his cups, where perhaps the great doctor spent much of his productive time. This smell was mysterious yet familiar, sweet even as it was savory, alternately aromatic and malodorous, simultaneously attractive and repellent. Ernie crossed the kitchen, following the scent, as helpless to resist as if the columella between his nostrils had been snared by a fishhook and the line were being reeled in. This is not to imply that the experience was painful, only that the odor was a summons that could not be resisted. If it had been painful, Ernie’s agony would be described here so vividly that the reader would cringe, shudder violently, and become nauseous.

Ernie found himself at the cellar door without being aware that he’d set out to reach it. An instant later he found himself at the foot of those stairs, in the windowless realm under the house. His obsessive reading of novels with a certain exotic plot element—which is not a reference to Westerns—had prepared him to recognize that “finding himself” at a place without any memory of how he had gotten there was an example of either micro amnesia or a brief fugue state.

As he stood in the darkness, unable to move, paralyzed by some power he couldn’t name, Ernie realized he should be afraid. Yet he was not afraid. He was patient, overcome by a sense that he had a purpose to fulfill and that, when he’d done what was wanted of him, he would experience a satisfaction unlike anything he had known heretofore. It was as though the alluring scent that had drawn him into the cellar was also conveying to him a tranquilizing fragrance to ensure his docility until whatever had been planned for him began to occur.

The cellar lights came on.

This was the primary mechanical room for the house. Furnace. Water softener. Electrical panels. Featuring LED fixtures between the ceiling joists, the space was better illuminated than the realm under the serial killer’s house inThe Silence of the Lambs, though there were still shadows befitting a cellar, contributing to the kind of atmosphere that lovers of slasher films find stimulating.

In the grip of a power unknown, Ernie ceased to be able to move his body, but he remained capable of turning his head left and right to the usual extent, which allowed him substantially more than a 180-degree field of vision. If he was able to see three-quarters of the room, which is likely but not verifiable to the extent that detail-obsessed readers of a persnickety nature might prefer, then the person who turned on the lights must have been in a ninety-degree arc immediately behind him.

Although Ernie’s fear response remained suppressed, he was quite capable of imagining that the person looming over him was armed with a shotgun or a scythe. Or behind him might even be an orangutan trained to commit murder, as in the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe. Yet because of the tranquilizing effect thatbespelled him, even those grievous suspicions couldn’t excite terror in Ernie.

He could hear no slightest movement.

He could smell no cologne or body odor or exhalation of garlic breath, only the strange scent that had him in its thrall.

No voice—either sinister or welcoming—spoke of his fate or about anything else, for that matter.

Suddenly, released from paralysis, he moved toward one of three steel doors as it swung open to receive him.

The man who built this place, Dwight Fry, fancied himself a survivalist. The cellar was larger than the footprint of the house above it. The rooms that extended under the surrounding yard had concrete walls. The thick steel doors hung on concealed barrel hinges. Fry stocked those three big chambers with enough food to last him and his young wife, Bambi, for thirty years. Tragically, just before their move-in date, Bambi informed her husband that she intended to divorce him in order to marry the entrepreneur who had sold them several tons of freeze-dried vacuum-packed food. Already on edge because the Armageddon that he had foreseen was less than a month away, Dwight wentoverthe edge and tried to kill his wife with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. The weapon proved more unwieldy than he anticipated, which gave his bride time to retrieve the Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special from her purse and place a perfect triangle of .38-caliber rounds in his chest and abdomen. Bambi claimed self-defense and was not prosecuted. Ernie Hernishen bought the house, Armageddon supplies and all.

Disposing of several tons of freeze-dried food was a daunting task that Ernie chose not to undertake or oversee. He left it in the three rooms where Dwight stashed it. Having no skill withfirearms and no desire to learn, he figured that if the end of the world came to pass, the contents of those chambers would be his gift to the post-Armageddon mutants and barbarians in return for their kindly not eating him.

Now, in the thrall of the mesmerizing odor, as lights came on in the food vault ahead of him, he began singing one of the songs that he’d written—“She Stole My Heart and My Visa Card.” In spite of the title, it was an upbeat number. He thought he sounded happy as he sang, and he wondered how long that would last.

When he stepped into the well-stocked room, he stopped singing and stared at what awaited him. The walls were lined with fully laden metal shelves to a height of eight feet. In the center of the space, a table-high island of low drawers with a butcher-block top allowed a spacious walkaround. Lying face up on this four-foot-wide ten-foot-long formation was his doppelgänger, in the very same clothes that he wore. This Other Ernie appeared to be sleeping.

Just as the One and True Ernie began to be concerned, his twin on the butcher block faded away as if it had been a mirage. Ernie realized that the phantom figure had been a placeholder intended to show him what position he was expected to take.

He clambered onto the table and stretched out on his back and gazed at a ventilation grille in the mottled-gray concrete ceiling.

A voice issued from the grille. It was rather like that of Darth Vader from theStar Warsmovies. “Listen to me, boy. Great is my frustration. Greater still is my anger. Greatest of all is my determination. I will probe your brain for answers.” The unseen speakerlaughed merrily. In a pleasant voice, he said, “Just joking. There will be a little coma, but you’ll be okay. I’m pretty sure.”

---