Reasons Unknown - A Short Story

The boy was but nine when he happened upon that cliff face.  Whatever it was that brought him there he could not say.  A voice in his dreams and when he awakened he found that he was bare foot, and nearly sinking an inch into the snow. It was indeed the middle of January and he was dressed simply in his pajamas, which were a pair of soft cotton pants with the design of some heroic hero whose face littered his comic book collection.  His top was of the same design, indeed a matching set his mother had just gotten him for Christmas not a month earlier.   It was peculiar and dangerous that he was dressed as he was and in the location that he was.  Not only was the freezing air biting at his exposed skin, but his toes were quickly numbing.  Not only was he on the edge of a terrifying cliff but it was a location he had never been before.  

When he turned about to inspect his waking surroundings there was a towering lighthouse.   Icicle’s like cavernous stalactites dangled from its upper railing.    Some nearly touched the ground.  It was littered and pelted by the falling snow which seemed to be falling sideways due to the strength of the winds.  The side that wasn’t hit and stood exposed to the air was made up of thick white bricks.  Some were chipped, and most were whole.   He hugged his arms tightly around him as if to confine the warmth inside of his bones, but in truth it did not help, and his only survival instinct led him to the base of that lighthouse.  He wandered about it in a circle for there was no reason to feel that he needed to escape the pain because he did not feel anything.  Surely his feet were frostbitten by now he figured.  Surely they were black and dying.   He felt as though the second he stepped inside that lighthouse, if it was even warm, that he would lose each toe.  That each one would stick to the cemented ground and rip apart from his body.   So he wandered around at a decent pace, but not a hurried one.   It took many minutes, and he in truth felt light headed, that he could pass out at any moment, but eventually the door was in sight and it was opened.

To his astonishment his toes were only a pink red.   They were not frozen to death.  In fact they soon began to regain their feeling in a matter of seconds.  Despite the fact that the door had been left open the lighthouse itself was heated, as though someone were still in care of it.   He wasn’t sure how that would be so, because inside it was littered with cob webs as if no one had been inside it in ages.  His cheeks, limbs and appendages felt fuzzy as the life returned to them, and he let loose his hug and let his arms dangle at his sides.

“Hello.”  He ventured a cautious greeting.  His eyes cast about searching for anyone who might hear him.   Above him an infinite staircase extended skyward until it arrived what he assumed must have been heaven.   “Hello.”  He said again.   He stepped about the center cylinder that the stairs wrapped around and there was nothing, but he did see a flattened surface above where the stairs stopped and then continued.   One last time he looked around this bottom floor to see what it was he could see.    Only old crates, and old tools, long ago rusted sat on the floor.  When he was satisfied it was only these old remnants he found a foot on the first step, then another foot on the next, and he alternated as he ascended into heaven.

At that platform he found a bed.   More to the point he found a dusty old mattress.   He moved toward it, and the boy laid a hand on its surface and the springs squeaked under the pressure, and the bed bounced momentarily before coming to a dead stillness.   A stillness like the rest of that place.   Beside the bed there was an old wooden end table.   On this end table which was long ago water logged rested a picture frame but no picture.  This he found the most eerie, and the most peculiar.   His nine year old hands lifted up the frame, and he was careful.  His hold was delicate as though the thing would disintegrate into dust if he pinched too hard.   It was turned over in his hands, over and over its blacked old surfaces collection upon its dust impressions of his fingerprints.   This frame he sat back down and he looked more on that platform.

A simple looking barrel sat on its side, resting against the continuing staircases railing.   A torn and ripped tarp sat randomly on the floor.   On the walls of that area were more empty picture frames, and it was as though no one had been inside in a good long while.  This he knew to be truth, but the heated spaces seemed absolutely trivial.  The boys mind could not figure to the upkeep of such a place that was obviously internally in a state of decay.  That was all that was left to see here, so he found a hand on the railing of the stairwell and he continued to move to the higher floor, for he could see another flattened surface just above.  As he went, and just for curiosities sake, he uttered another halfhearted, “Hello.”  And listened as silence responded.

The next floor was a study of sorts.  Or an office.   There was a single barred window sitting just over a terribly large writing desk.  It too suffocated below dust.   As he approached there was something he noticed.  A large pair of hand prints perfectly placed were on the writing desks surface.  Atop this desk was a layer of dust so thick that it was as though it were a lair of soft snowfall.  His hands he placed into the hand prints, and they indeed were nearly triple his size, as though they belonged to a giant.   His mind thought of such fantastical things as giants, and he wondered if that was who was here.   Someone who needed the warmth, but the sheer mythological nature of his height made him want to remain hidden enough but not suffering from the cold.

Removing his hands from that place he took the index finger of his right hand, and moved it to a point amongst the dust.   He traced a line and then another, and then lifted his finger to start some more lines, and just for fun he wrote, “I Was Here.”  He smirked at the words and very nearly turned to leave to continue his exploration, and then as if the dust were move away by nothing words began to take shape all by themselves.    When it was finished he felt his heart begin to race, he felt his hands trembling, and his eyes searched over the words that read, “I Am Here.”  Instead of turning to run, his nervousness gave way to a more general curiosity.   Then he wrote, “Hello.”  To which the dust moved about to read, “Hello Devrin.”  The boy took a step back for this was his name, and how could anyone have known of his name, especially this apparition that rested inside of a long dormant lighthouse.

“How do you know me?”

“Why would I not?”

“Do I know you?”

“You do not.”

He found his finger writing and the dust parting to respond to his inquiries.  But he found that he was running out of space to write properly on the desks surface, but just to the other side was a wall that was layered in even more dust.   He thought perhaps this would work just as well.   His feet led him there and he ran his finger against the wall.   “Can you still see this?” 

“Of course I can.”

“Did you bring me here?”  He asked, for it was indeed the only question he had wanted to ask the most.  His heart seemed to stop.  His thoughts seemed to freeze.   The anticipation bubbled upon inside of him; his anxiousness was evident upon his expression.  His eyes were wide in waiting.

“I called out to my son, hoping he would listen.  But you are fine as well.  You his offspring, but he does not hear me.  You do hear me.   It is well that you do.   Will you do me a favor?  Will you – “Then just like that they arrived at the edge of the wall and the words did not continue.  There was no more space he figured for this ghost to write.  The nine year old boy was distraught, anguished that he could not see what it was this strange figure wanted him to do.  This figure who claimed to be his father’s father.  This ghost who said that he was his grandfather.   When he moved about that platform he could not find another surface to write, but then he had an idea.  He had one last spot of hope on his mind.

With a flash of speed he didn’t know he was capable above he returned to the stairwell and descended the way he had come. The bedroom had an end table with dust that he could write on, though its surface was small he couldn’t imagine the ghost would need more space than it housed.   In his bare feet and all their slick nature did not mesh well with the surface of the steps and he found himself slipping with still more than half a way to go.  It was as though time was suspended that his body soared for a finite infinity until he crashed hard into the platforms surface.  On his head he felt the blood pool about as the crack seeped forth.   It was just over his left eye and his nose as well.   The pain was excruciating but his goal had been more important.  Somehow he found his footing even though the blood from his head wound seeped into his eye.  

Upon the writing desk he wrote, “I’m back.”

In smaller letters as though it knew the space was once again limited, the invisible grandfather wrote, “My favor, there is a trinket in this lighthouse.  Will you bring it to my son?”  The boy nodded that he would, forgetting that that was not how the ghost responded.   In the remaining space that was available he wrote as small as he could, “I will.  Where is it?”  Then there was no more space.

His eye stung from the blood.  And he felt dizzy, his equilibrium off balance due to the blood loss.  He stumbled back a moment and looked around, but there was no other place the ghost wrote.  Even upon that spring mattress no more words appeared.  He felt beside himself with confusion, with worry and with pain.  He was furious at himself for falling, for hurting himself, for now it was throwing off his pursuit.   Where once his mind had a singular goal, now it had double.  He wanted to feel better, to return home and fix his head, but he also wanted to remain and see the quest out.

When he turned himself toward the stairs that moved onward, in that pool of his blood there was drawn an arrow pointing toward the stairs.   He smiled, and then stumbled as he walked on.  His ascent was difficult and cumbersome but he found his way up and up to the office platform.   There was nowhere here that he could see any sort of trinket, so he moved on half-blinded by the blood in his eye, and half-blinded by the lack of blood inside of him.  He kept moving nonetheless.  Up and up he climbed, his legs moving him till he came to a door that when opened sent a rush of freezing air against his face.  The snow pelted him and his superhero pajamas.

The nine year old named Devrin collapsed here however.  Exasperated by his ordeal.  His mind a cloud of ambition and foggy bewilderment.   The cold air had made it harder to breathe, had made it harder to move.   Soon he would be joining the ghost of his grandfather.  The man who had called on him to complete this action though he was only a boy and he could not.   The cement surface was cold on his chin and he tried to move to get more comfortable.   His ear resting and freezing instead and his eyes felt heavy.  They fluttered a bit, trying desperately to stay open but then he saw it.   A horseshoe.   It was plastic and obviously a child’s toy.   This must have been the thing the old man had been speaking of.   He tried to reach his hand out, and his arm extended just barely, and as if out of strength he just barely mustered he gripped it tightly in his nine year old fist.  That was when he blacked out.

The boy awoke in his bed.  Tucked tightly into his pajamas.   He lay there a moment, as if assuming it was some kind of hallucination but then he frantically sat up and looked about him.   He was indeed back in his real room.   The entire thing had to have been a dream he figured.  He sighed relieved, but there was a hint of disappointment in his heart.   For he had never known his grandfather.  The old man had died long before Devrin was old enough to have known him.  From the sound of the stories his father had told him, the man had been quite young indeed when the old man threw himself from the top of the lighthouse.  About Devrin’s age he reckoned.  He thought about the stories he was told as he laid his head onto his pillow. 

There was something rough underneath the feathered thing, and he moved the pillow aside and saw there upon the bed, that same blue plastic horseshoe.   He brought his fingers to his forehead, and he felt the place the scar had been, and it was still there, but there was no blood crusted upon his head.  No red stains upon the pillow or the bed.   Though he knew his father would be asleep, he lifted up the horseshoe, threw the blankets off of himself and rushed out of the room and down the halls.   There was indeed some reason for this all.

The man was irritable and groggy as he rubbed his eyes and turned on the bedside light in response to the boy’s excited cries, but on sight of the horse shoe he was anything but irritable.  His eyes looked up at the boy and down at the trinket.   “I had one of those when I was a boy.”  The man said as his eyes were filled with uncontrollable tears.