2002-02-06 - 2:13 a.m.

For the past week or so, I've been telling everyone whom I hadn't already told about the book "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski. I've already read the book once, and am on my second reading. But after my walk home tonight, I feel I have to put a disclaimer on my recommendation. Yes, it's a truly great, very well-written book. But I'm warning you. It may have a serious affect on you. And it may not be one you'll like.

Tonight, when I got out of work, it was a quarter till Wednesday. 11:45 PM, and I'd just gotten out of work, kept for hours longer than necessary by a network problem that no one could seem to fix. Finally, when the network technician got there, and I was able to leave, I'd just shaved off another 100 pages or so from the book and put two Post-It notes on the inside for things I wanted to look into with more depth later on.

As I strolled down the parking lot—both of my bikes have flat tires, and since one's a road bike and one's a mountain bike, I can't simply transplant one good tire from one to the other, they won't fit—a song came into my head. Logically, it was "Hey Pretty" by Poe, featuring Mark Z. Danielewski, reciting a passage from "House of Leaves." I went through the song once before I made it to Route 1, where my story gets rather frightening.

Route One is not a place I like to be on at any time of the day. Whether noon, with its high volume of traffic, or midnight with its poor lighting, this is not a place for pedestrians to feel safe, and tonight was no exception. Halfway between the Fox Ridge Office Park and the turn onto School Street where I get to feel the relief of not being on one of the more major highways in the area, I heard a car coming behind me. I moved closer to the guardrail, not technically in the road, but still close enough that I didn't feel totally comfortable there, and watched as I walked and the car approached. Suddenly, I got a vision in my head. Something told me the car was just a bit too far to the right, and I imagined that it was going to hit me. Not only hit me, but crush me between the fender and the guardrail, severing me in two. And I thought to myself, as it happened in my head, that I wasn't being cut in two by a Geo Metro and a guardrail, but by a network problem.

Of course, I was not cut in two by a Geo Metro, or a guardrail, or even by a network problem. If I had been, I wouldn't be here writing this. The car drove right past me, as they tend to do, and I continued walking, the song still playing in my head. But, as they often do, the lyrics, or the passage, or whatever, got blurry after the second chorus. I think this happens because it's different on the CD than it is on the mp3 version I have on my computer. Either way, just as I reached the turn onto School Street, the wonderful jukebox in my brain, garbling the song, decided instead to switch over to "Smooth Criminal" by Michael Jackson.

I walked for a bit, singing along to the words Jackson was spewing forth in my head, and, in the natural progression of the song, got to the part where the lyrics are simply replaced by a guitar thing and him saying "OW!" in that high-pitched way that he does. And so, of course, I did the same. But one of the times I did it, I was met by another sound. Almost like an echo, but it came too fast, and, well… didn't sound like the sound I'd just made.

It almost sounded like a mouse. But it was far too loud to be a mouse. More like a giant field mouse, stretched to unnatural proportions by some evil force, but somehow retaining its tiny larynx, so its high-pitched squeak manages to reach across fields and pierce eardrums. Or perhaps like some other rodent of some kind, or maybe a lagomorph, having its life extinguished by some previously unseen predator, giving its voice a power otherwise unknown to a creature its size, but only for that last instant of its life.

What spooked me the most about the sound, however, was that it seemed to defy definition by contradicting itself. While sounding like some loud, angry (or terrified?) creature, it had a mild, tinny, distorted echo that sounded more like it had been created by something electronic. And worse, the mere fact that it had a bit of an echo contradicted my other perceptions, because while the mild reverberation seemed to come from the trees across the lacrosse field on my right, the sound itself seemed to originate deep within my ear canal.

Whatever the sound was, it seemed like it was a bad thing. And so I quickened my pace. I glanced left and right, and slowly, though I didn't notice it until the gray ground beneath my feet was finally interrupted by those two yellow lines, I drifted toward the center of the road, suspiciously eyeing the trees that before seemed to have been reaching out for me. At the center of the road I felt safer, like I was as far away as possible from both sides of the road, and thus as far away as possible from anything that would be hiding on either side, waiting to strike. Though I knew, logically, that in the center of the road, I was just more likely to end up getting hit by a car. And besides, whatever was stalking me, had been stalking that creature before lunging out, killing it, and causing it to unleash that terrible, unnatural sound, wouldn't be thwarted by a few extra feet of cold asphalt.

But still I walked, barely ever stepping away from the yellow lines. I kept watching around me, and listening. Many times on my walk I would hear something nearby, and calm down to realize that it was just the sound of a dry leaf skittering across the ground in the wind. Until I realized it's January, and while there is plenty of wind, I can't see a leaf on the ground anywhere, and especially not one moving anywhere near where that sound came from.

Even farther, I hear a growl coming from over the horizon. Slowly it transitions into its true form, the sound of a single engine plane, and again I calm down. Until the sound stops. Not landing, not gradually flying off somewhere, but just stopped. And now, while I think back on it, I think of a hundred different reasons why the acoustics of that area would result in my suddenly not being able to hear the plane, but at that time, all I knew was that meant it wasn't really a plane, but rather something else that my mind, desperate to protect itself, had allowed me to believe was a plane.

Still farther I walked, up the Central St. hill, and glanced behind me. In the distance, on the tree line, I saw Orion. His left foot balanced on the tips of the trees, he was tilted to his left (my right), almost like he was looking past the tree line to something I couldn't see, but he, with the advantage of being projected on the heavens, could. Maybe he was planning to shoot it, as he aimed his bow down on it. But I knew he would have no effect. Maybe, centuries ago, as the mighty hunter, he would have been able to protect me from what was coming to get me. But not now. And at that moment, what scared me was something Sam said to me on the phone. Something she said to make me come to my senses, but that really scared me when I was on that hill. "It's just a constellation." Of course she's right. But then, that's kind of the problem. Because while that thing, the thing that was coming for me, became more real to me, his arrows, his bow, his entire material being was nothing more than an outline in my imagination. "Just a guy made of dots and lines." So while he might be able to see it, he would be powerless to kill it. Just as I would when it finally reached me.

Still closer to home, but still not close enough to feel comfortable—though I found out I wouldn't feel comfortable again until I was in my room, using up my last phone card minutes talking to someone with whom I'd previously never spoken—I started noticing dark houses, windows completely without light. Until I would glance back at them and notice one illuminated window or room that I'd somehow missed the first time. Somehow I knew that light had been on the whole time, but I just hadn't seen it.

Finally, as the hill began to level out and I was nearly home, the wind got stronger, to the point that my face stung with cold. To my right, another growl. But this time, a more familiar one. Just steam coming from a vent in the side of a house, where it does that almost every time I walk by. After I walked about 200 more feet, though, something made me look back down the street. Under a streetlight, I watched as a swirl of...something, twisted up through the air, and beyond the light until I couldn't see it any more. It was like a swirl of dust from the road caught in a gust of wind. Or a snow drift. But all of the dust on the roads had been washed or blown away by the recent weather, and the snow was all frozen over with ice.

That's when I saw something that matched it almost perfectly.

My own breath.

I watched as my own breath, as soon as it was released from my mouth, made the same kind of spiraling rise through the air. Only my breath wasn't a good 150 feet away, and wasn't in a big enough cloud to stretch from the ground to the top of a street light.

I quickened my pace. But I couldn't help but keep looking back.

And I saw it again.

This time, barely 100 feet away, another large swirl of something (dust? snow? water vapor? breath?) rose from the ground. Like an enormous, yet invisible beast, breathing out its hot breath, so it can curl on the ground and rise up through the air where it was once standing. "Once standing" because by now it would have been moving, like a rippling mass of pure muscle and bone, ripping through the air toward me, leaving nothing in its wake but a cloud of its breath to warn me.

Again I quickened my pace, glancing over my shoulder the whole time. I tried to tell myself, "There's nothing there. Stop looking, there's nothing there. And if there's anything that cheesy scary movies with cop-out endings have taught us it's that the big scary ghost thing can't hurt us if we simply don't believe it exists."

I tried telling myself that, but it had no effect on me. Still I kept looking over my shoulder as I power-walked toward my house. Almost like, even though this thing was obviously invisible, it would wait until I stopped looking for it to strike. Like the moment I stopped trying to find it, a giant clawed paw, or powerful, razor-teeth-laden jaws would tear through my spine, sternum, and all of the readily accessible organs there, paralyze me, possibly kill me instantly, possibly not, but either way, rip through my like a paper doll before I had any chance to react. I had to keep looking, just to make sure it really didn't exist. Because if I didn't check, it would exist, and I would be dead.

Finally I stepped through the door to my house. Shaking and tired, I still felt much better than I did outside it. I turned on AIM and ICQ, looking for people to talk to. I found Sam, and though we'd never talked before on the phone, despite a very good online friendship of over a year, I finally called her up, on her suggestion, and we talked about it. I felt much better when I was done, and faced more readily the simple fact that this book has just been screwing with my brain, and now that I've faced it, and written about it, I think I'm finally able to sleep.

I just hope whatever that thing is doesn't come for me there. Because there, where I go when I sleep, I don't have the solace of good friends who are just a phone call away.