From a writing project wherein I attempt to avoid any funny business
Before her father converted the old hotel into a dance hall, he raised Candace there. More accurately, you could say it was where he let her raise herself. As a child, she had loved the huge old hotel-come-honkytonk, or the “palace” as she called it. In those days, she spent most of her time holding court for an endless cast of imaginary characters until they were either replaced by, or became part of the dreams.
Around age ten, most girls force themselves to abandon the art of pretending. Candace, too, began to tell herself that such things were childish. She packed up her tea-set, and made every effort to be all grown up.
She succeeded to a large degree---filling her days with chores, sketching, reading, and a million other mature pursuits; however, her bizarre remodeling dreams only became more frequent. In the course of a few short years they added an entire actors guild worth of characters to her increasingly crowded imagination. In spite of a strong feeling that it was another childish pursuit best left behind, she loved the dreams more than anything in waking life. She loved to discuss them with her father. She began to draw surprisingly accurate, almost architectural draft quality sketches of the various rooms she saw in her dreams.
Barry was captivated by the drawings, and always listened attentively to narrations of the wild events of the dreams---all the while doing his best to conceal from her what he felt they might mean.
She once took the chance of sharing these dreams with Brittany, a friend from school. This had prompted her classmate to declare that Candace was, “the weirdest girl that ever lived.” Brittany went on to launch a social smear campaign based on the assertion. Candace had an acute awareness of her own quirkiness , and had taken the superlative “weirdest” as a personal compliment. She even looked up the word and learned that “weird” originally meant anything involving, or made by, witches---nice. Years later, Brittany would escape from a state mental institution, steal a revolver from her father's house, and use it to kill four random Wal-Mart shoppers while screaming, "I'm not crazy!" and turning the gun on herself, but that was years later, and probably had nothing to do with Candice or her drawings. It’s just one of those details that stands out in retrospect.
It was just after Candace's 14th birthday when worlds collided. She was taking her dad a cup of coffee from the kitchen up to his roost on the third floor. Feeling completely non-weird, she rounded the corner at the top of the third floor only to find another set of stairs between her and the top floor.
She stood there questioning herself---suspecting she might be dreaming---knowing she was not. Dust filtered through a shaft of sunlight; her dreams had a no-dust policy. She turned and looked over the railing of the switchback staircase---back down into what should have been the second floor, and it was---but? Her head swam and she half expected to see herself looking back up (or down) because, in the ordinary space of the house as she knew it, she would be looking down on the exact spot where she now stood.
As terror gripped her, she stood transfixed, alternately looking up to the top floor, then down to the second floor below her. It was dead-calm and she could hear her father rustling papers above her. She stood there so long that she began to think maybe she had always lived in a four story mansion, and she had somehow just never noticed this third floor part. She found that if she craned her neck over the railing she could get a glimpse of the red concrete pavement in the old carriage house that took up most of the first floor. Now, it was two full stories below where she stood.
It felt like hours. The floor she was standing on seemed to be laid out like the top floor, with two long halls and smaller passages leading to eight or ten rooms. She didn’t explore it because while she was looking down at the spot where her rational mind was telling her she should be, she thought she heard the rattling of dishes---and bits of a muffled conversation echoing up from the kitchen. One of the voices was her father’s, which was disturbing because, then, who was shuffling papers? The other voice was more disturbing because it was unfamiliar---exotic---maybe Russian.
She didn't really decide to ascend to the third (or fourth?) floor. She just lurched into action as soon as the fear and confusion that had paralyzed her wore off. The fear and confusion were still there. Her legs were just now responding to the internal commands that had been repeating in an infinite loop. She took the the steps of the final flight two at a time.
“Are you OK?” Barry asked her as she burst into the roost.
“What? Yeah-oh sure. I just got up from a nap and I must have just kept dreaming instead of waking up all the way.”
He looked over his reading glasses at the cup in her hands. “It happens. Is that for me?”
She didn’t know right away. In fact it seemed like the cup had just sort of appeared in her hands. But, yeah---it must be for him because it was inky black, and she always took hers with sugar and much more milk than coffee. Before she said anything, she took a sip and found that it was cold, almost icy. “Yes, but...” she said. “It’s cold. I- I got distracted and... I’ll warm it up.” She turned to leave.
“Candice wait, what’s going on? Really, maybe you should just sit down. I’ll go for the coffee.”
She started to object, but caught a glimpse of herself in the window. She had gone paper white. “Yeah, OK. Probably best,” she said as she sat down on the strange taxidermy Longhorn sofa Barry kept in his office.
Barry took the cup of cold coffee from her and left. She listened to his footfalls as they descended what seemed to be entirely too many steps. Fear welled up again as she waited. When he came back, she made a conscious effort to count his steps. She counted twenty six, which was about right---twelve for each switchback, plus a couple for turning around on the landing.
He set her "blond latte" on the end-table before he put the cup of hot black on his desk. He asked her again about what was troubling her.
“You know those dreams I tell you about where there are extra rooms in the house that I’ve never seen before? You know, the drawings and all? Well I was bringing your coffee and---and well, I thought I was suddenly on a whole other floor between here and the kitchen, only I was wide awake, and when I got here your coffee was cold and...” she trailed off.
“And what?” Barry asked.
“Well, it was just so real that I’m afraid to go back down. This sounds stupid, but it’s like one of my remodeling dreams leaked out into the real world and… and I’m really not sure how many floors there are. I mean, it was just so real. I got creeped out, and I guess I’m still a little confused. And I feel... just weird I guess---not to mention that every time I think of the word ‘weird,’ it creeps me out even more because---Did you know that ‘weird’ originally meant something made by witches?"
“Right,” he said. “Like the three ‘w-e-y-a-r-d-’ weird witches from Macbeth---ill wyndes that doth blow no man good---but sorry, I’m just fanning the flames of creepy aren’t I? So, how can I help?” he asked her.
She realized this must be why he always pronounced it, “we-yard,” but from a man with a couch made out of a real cow in his office, it had never seemed odd. Half joking, she said, “You could start by telling me how many floors there were when you came back up.”
Not joking at all, he replied “Candace dear, there were four on the way down, but only the normal three on this trip up. There are always at least three---and this one is always at the top---carriage house is always on the ground floor---but sometimes the mudroom next to it is a porte-cochère. The truth is Candice, things change around here.“
She wanted to think he was just messing with her, but when Barry prefaced anything with "Candace dear," she knew she could take it as gospel---it was the God's honest truth from a man in whom there was no guile. Her head swam again. She stared into her cup, trying to be angry with her father for not taking her seriously, but actually being much more so because she knew he had. She knew he was finally letting her in on the unvarnished truth, or at least as much of it as he thought she could handle.
It seemed that recently he had been naturally less protective in the way parents are as their children mature; but there was nothing natural about this, and truth told, this weirdness (weyardness?) was so severely lacking in anything like objective reality, she felt a nice coat of shellac might have been in order.
This wasn’t mortgage payments or menstrual cramps. This was something more like Lovecraft’s “dead dreamer” and that “non-linear geometry” she had read about in one of the other books from the “off-limits” collection. At the same time, it was a truth she had guessed at all along.
She kept staring into the cup for what seemed like hours. Barry finished whatever trivial bookkeeping task he had been doing, and left the room without a word. Maybe he had said something, but it didn’t register. Candace kept staring into her cup. She never took a sip. When the rest of the room went dark, the almost white circle of beige milk seemed to be the only light in the room.
When she finally reached for it, there was another disturbing shift in her perception. She realized she was no longer sitting on the sofa, but was in her father’s office chair facing the window; no longer looking into a cup of anything, but reaching out her hand toward a brilliant and impossibly full moon.
