Jeffrey Thomas [Thomas - Thought Forms

THOUGHT FORMS

Stories by Jeffrey Thomas

ISBN: 978-1-937128-91-3

This eBook edition published 2011 by Dark Regions Press as part of Dark Regions Digital .

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Dark Regions Press

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Jeffrey Thomas 2011

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With thanks to Bobbi Sinha Morey, who enabled this story to see the light of day, by typesetting a manuscript once called Tulpaswritten by hand between 3/3/84 (Friday, 2:24 AM) - 11/28/87 (Saturday, 6:06 AM).

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do now know whether a man or a woman

But who is that on the other side of you?

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Chapter

Hed had a bad dream.

He sat on the back door stoop. He wished he had a cigarette to draw on thoughtfully in consideration of his dream, but he didnt smoke. Movies and books, and generations of human behavior perhaps now instinctual, made such props and posings seem mandatory. It was a little chilly as April night closed in, but his dark blue windbreaker was sufficienttoday it had almost been hot. He was eager for spring, and summer beyond that. His favorite time of the year, spring, when life came back. But it was still chilly enough for cigarette smoke to be a warm comfort in his internal hearthexcept he didnt smoke.

The pulley on the metal line that stretched across his yard hissed, his dogs chain clipped to it. She pranced delicately through a minefield of her own waste; apparently like a spider, able to negotiate its web without getting stuck. She circled in her instinctual dog ritual, beating down tall grass that wasnt there, before posing to dump her load. Or wasnt that why dogs turned in a circle before they curled up to sleep, to beat down grass that wasnt there in an instinctive routine? He contemplated this partially, idly, while still contemplating his dream, at least able to draw on the crisp night air in thoughtful consideration.

He had lain down for a nap at five, fully dressed but for shoes. He hated himself for taking napsbesides screwing up his sleep patterns and thus being bad for his body, he recognized his naps as being chunks of escapist narcolepsy. His bedroom was always closed off and smother-ingly warm in the cold months, an irresistible womb. He would eagerly anticipate coming home from work and drawing all night, starting a new oil painting, making a prop for a video movieand he would come home and stall, make coffee, pace his livingroom, play Atari. Snack, watch TV.

Meekly he would finally crack that door, trying to fool himself into still believing he would create. But there lay the bed, a sea of bed, and he walked to it like Virginia Woolf. The narcotic effect was so extreme that sometimes he bounced into his bedroom fully energized for creating, and the sight of the bed sapped him with shocking contrast. He seldom resisted its gravitational pull. He would lie down still feebly lying to himselfjust an hour, then Ill get up and draw. Sometimes this was true. But too often it was three, four hours. He would get up, make coffee, pace, play Atari, snack, watch TV. Back to bed. His empty bed proved more alluring than an empty canvas.

This had been a particularly unpleasant nap.

He squinted at it in his mind as if at a painting he had done while in a fugue state. He felt deeply unsettled, to his very spirit, as if some rough punks had mocked him in the street and he had done nothing but bring the humiliation and stifled fury home with him to poison every moment of his night. One of those things that his subconscious morbidly, masochistically clung to and wouldnt let go.

Actually, though, the dream wasnt difficult for him to analyze, as it was largely based on fact.

He had been a boy again. Four. That had been 1961. Happy Days , he thought. The year his parents were murdered.

His dream didnt fill the gaps in his memory of the incidentor if it had, his waking mind had been cheated. What he remembered of the dream was basically just what he remembered of the night. He was sleeping in this very house, in the bedroom he slept in now. A scream awoke him from his four-year-olds dreams (in his dream he had dreamed he was dreaming). He got out of the bed, ran in his slippers to the kitchen, saw his father crash against the kitchen table, groping at the chairs for balance, blood snaking down his face bright in the bright kitchen light, and then his fathers eyes met his and he screamed again as someone out of view apparently seized his father by the ankles and yanked his feet out from under him, dragged him and a tipped chair to the floor with a terrible crash. His father wailed (to him?) for help as he was dragged out of sight behind the stove, himself in turn dragging the fallen kitchen chair after him. Ahigher-pitched banshee shriek now. Four-year-old Ray turned and ran for his mothers bedroomnot crying, just terribly confused. Like it was a dream.

His mother was there. Coweringin a corner, close to the floor. She had lost a lot of blood, so much of it splashed across her that its source was hard to determine. Her hair ends dribbled. She rasped and shrank from her son feebly. But then she realized who it was. And with one gesture she showed her son the most concern and compassion she had ever showed him in his short life, and ever wouldshe shakily pointed across the room to a window. Ray looked to it. Just a screen kept the night out.

Summer bugs clung to the mesh. His mother was urging him to escape, so as to survive, knowing she and her husband would not.

Ray looked back to her and her arm fell. She stared at him, mouth open wide, maybe dead alreadyor maybe she lived long enough to watch her son fumble open the screen and scamper out into the bushes below the window.

He hid in the bushes for a few minutes, afraid to make a noise, afraid to run. He decided to peek up over the edge of the window, perhaps for more instructions from his mother, seeing as how she was in such a concerned mood. What he saw of his mother was her on her back, arms flung out slack, and someone apparently dragging her out of the room by the ankleswhoever it was out of view. Now his mother was gone, too, having left a smudged wet path across the floorboards after her.

Ray turned and ran through the fern bushes, off toward the woods.

Now the dream had become more of what you expected from a dreamabsurd and dissonant, more fictional. When he emerged from the other end of the woods it was day, and he was older, probably nine. His cousin Paul was there, probably seven. They played Frisbee on a shady country back road with no cars to endanger them, while across the road was a farmhouse with a goat tied to a gnarled ancient apple tree, nibbling grass amongst the green fallen fruit, much of it rotting. An old couple, blatantly New England in character, sat in rocking chairs on a porch watching them. They didnt speak, just rocked in the gentle breeze. Paul spun the Frisbee high; Ray looked up at it from below, the sun making it translucent, and it looked like a flying saucer. It became a flying saucer in a way, because it flew away high over the woods in the direction of Rays house and didnt come back. Ray was amazed at Pauls talent and laughed, Great throw!

Go get it, Paul said.

Ray looked back into the woods doubtfully, his laughter gone. He knew where the flying saucer had landed.

Thats where he woke upcontemplating the way back into the woods.