Liminal house

The Brothers Pyk were not triplets, no, I don’t care what you say, how could they have been triplets when they were not born into this world on the same day, in the same year, and perhaps even decades set them apart? Their case file made this much evident, at least, to me.

I mention this only because, but for their hands, to which I will return in time, I promise, they appeared identical to the point of utter interchangeability.

They stood in the field fog. Stood in, or rather materialized out of. I say materialized because, as so often happens with me, I failed to notice their approach.

It was property taxes that brought us together. On such bureaucratic nonsense, the work days of lawyers, and I am a lawyer, are filled. “It’s not your fault, Attorney Harry,” the brother in the center, known to me, privately, within my head, as Two Hands, said. He said, “Liminal House is a house that cannot decide which side of the border it’s on.”

It was the official position, you see, of Harris County, the records of which were very official, that Liminal House of the Brothers Pyk lay squarely within the confines of Harris County. It taxed accordingly. Temixoch County did not agree and it taxed accordingly. But if a house exists, and Liminal House did exist, then surely it must exist at a given point, and if that point exists, then such a point, you would agree, must exist somewhere in relation to any given line.  

Ergo, vis a vis, res ipsa loquitur. I told you I was an attorney.

On Two Hands’ right stood another brother, this one missing his left hand and he had a lot to say. Like he said, for instance, “We were born and raised in Temixoch and we’ll die in Temixoch, right here in Liminal House,” and he said some other things to which I paid less attention. He stamped his foot, of which he was still blessed with two, thank goodness, I could not have handled many more missing appendages, and their concrete conical house towered over us. Loomed, I should say.

No roads, no fences, nothing but fog and a field and a concrete conical house so I put away my camera.

The third brother, mercifully silent until now, stood, somewhat predictably, on Two Hands’ left side, and lacked a right hand. When he began speaking, it seemed to me he advocated the view that Liminal House lay within Harris County, but I could not be certain, for soon thereafter my consciousness seemed to cloud at the edges.

I awoke within my clients’ Liminal House itself. O, I wouldn’t say I woke, exactly, that’s not the right word, not with the vision of the thread and the rest of the assorted eerinesses I saw, but how would you describe it better?

The yarn was red. I am sure of this to the extent I am sure about anything I saw inside of that house. The walls were at sixty degree angles and the yarn was red and I had a sense that I lay upon a sofa. The specifics run together here, exist beyond my meager powers of description, you see.

Naked, black, and sexless, Two Hands crouched before my reclining form. It was a shock. The red yarn now, the red yarn, yes, I’ve come to that. It must have come from beneath me, perhaps from an afghan beneath me, it must have been yarn.

Why do I bother myself with this when you are not going to believe me anyway? Two Hands tugged at the red yarn, which stretched from beneath me, probably, all the way across the conical room to a writing desk. At the writing desk, with their backs to me, mostly, sat Righty and Lefty. That’s what I’ll call them here, for the sake of convenience and also for client confidentiality.

Righty and Lefty Pyk, it is.

Utilizing the grand total of two hands they possessed between them, Righty and Lefty Pyk sewed, or darned, or maybe crocheted, I can’t tell you the difference, the red probable yarn into the crinkly flesh-colored pages of a leather-bound book. I told you you wouldn’t believe me. Their movements, in this vision, if that is what it was, a vision, stopped and started, stopped and started again, at regular intervals, seemed to be missing frames like an old stop action film for claymation. The light was so dim.

The great gash of the mouth of Two Hands, it spoke soundlessly, aimed, if I had to harbor a guess, towards someone across the room I could not see. A short person, perhaps, or a person similarly reclined, like me, or else sitting down. If it were a short person standing, it would have had to have been a very short person indeed, shorter than I’ve ever seen.

Two Hands cut the yarn.

Instantly, and though I say instantly, I really mean to say at the next moment of which I was aware of myself, I was standing up the room. I was apologizing, saying, “I am sorry for falling asleep, gentlemen. That was unprofessional of me. I hope to have your case wrapped up in January…”

(That fictional scoundrel, Katy Anders)
A picture on the wall was a portrait of that infamous scoundrel, Katy Anders, who does not exist, I know.

Two Hands again now, before me, fully dressed, he bade me goodbye, made complex cryptic hand signs across my chest and said, “May the Mad Conductor guide you and see you to the place where you belong.”

I fled the house. Forgive me, I fled it, and with a feeling as though I were leaving something of great personal importance behind, though I have never discovered just what.

The house vanished behind field fog before I’d driven fifty feet. Liminal House, I mean. But what was it I’d left behind?

Comments

  1. Anyone who makes a conical house is giving a middle finger to the cosmos, and as such the cosmos rewards him or them or her by focusing cosmic rays into the point of the cone. Cosmic rays bring all about cosmic entities like Cthulhu, you get cosmic cosplay whose conventions may conveniently cause consciousness collapse and confusion commensurate with catastrophic cranial calamities. Capisce?

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    1. I get the feeling you're grading this post with a C. Which is what i give it, too, but I'll be less cryptic about it.

      Delete
  2. According to the limited access to the internet I now labor under, the Pyks have aliases, and I would be careful around them if I were you. Pyruvate kinase and CG7070 were the two that kept recurring on the crappy little page the gods of AT&T are allowing me access to just now, and who knows what others lurk in all of the scholarly articles listed that I am currently forbidden from accessing?
    Since all (but one, which appears to be about auto parts) of the results seemed to concern cellular mechanics and gene expression, I might also be concerned with the snipping of the red yarn, and I would dredge up some stuff about the right and left if my own nahual hadn't been shot for years now...

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    1. I am hoping that net neutrality is going to be good for this blog, since obviously, I pay the internet providers big bucks for people to view it at top speeds. You'll only be able to view this page, Amazon, facebook, and the Walmart check-out page.

      They don't have a choice but to allow access to this page, because (obviously) this post clearly demonstrates that the writing is all done by the Illuminati.

      Delete
    2. I'll be back in the thick of it again as soon as John pays the internet bill, but as he's outside waiting for the cops to show up so he can tell them about his missing BMW, I don't think I'll bug him about it just yet...

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    3. Ugh, priorities. I hope they find the car. I know it's a long shot, but my aunt has had her car stolen multiple times, and it is always recovered in one piece.

      I don't know how long I'd be able to function without the internet...

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  3. "Naked, black, and sexless" Sounds like my kinda person. :D

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    1. I wish I could write real stuff about my clients sometimes. I have to cloak it all. But for 18 years, I've represented low income folks mostly in Houston's amazing LGBT community - one of the most interesting, creative, and non-average communities in the world, I'd say.

      _______________ alone would make you reroute your Arizona trips to Texas. (Did a google search and it turns out that what i just said would actually reveal the identity of a client. Redacted it. My God, what a life I lead sometimes...)

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    2. Sounds like a fascinating job.

      You know I can relate, when I started blogging my partner had a high profile job here in the UK working for a TV company and there was an issue and we had the press outside our home for a week. Our house was bugged etc. That's why as open as I am, I'm also pretty vague about certain aspects of my life too.

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    3. Yes, I've sort of caught glimpses of things about you here that I had not gathered from your own page. Of course, that's part of what is so great about reading people's blogs for a long time: It's like little puzzles, where you start to piece together who these other folks are.

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  4. Field fog conceals a great many things best left concealed. I ran into an alien invader once when bringing the cows in for milking...turned out to be a fence post. Still, he was very nice.

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    1. Actually, this post should have been about aliens instead of, well, whatever it was about.

      The whole thing might have just been a misunderstanding of something half-glimpsed in the fog.

      Delete
  5. Ah, to be young and fever-dream in the presence of professional acquaintances again. It's been a long time since I last let a nasty presence break my mind like that. Practice makes perfect I suppose. Don't let a single faltering crush your spirit, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

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    1. I can usually push through these things even if I'm sick or basically asleep. I've been doing this for so long, it's as though someone hits Play on a tape recorder and I hear my voice saying the right thing without thinking about it.

      I probably got thrown off this time because I wasn't expecting the uncanny, maybe evil, activities.

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  6. Nice to see Katy again. She's my favourite fictional lesbian.

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    1. It's harder to work my old characters in now that I've revealed they were all fictional.

      I have a few ideas of how to do it. We'll see...

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    2. Hey, if I can write crapola using the voice and perspective of a dead cat, you can easily manage to work a fictional lesbian or two into your stories.

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    3. Yeah, Harry, believe in yourself!

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    4. It was so much easier to tell the truth when I was a fictional character.

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    5. Listen to her HRH! She is great!

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  7. Nicely done. That was pretty creepy and strange.

    Lee
    Tossing It Out

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    1. Thanks! I had a lot of trouble with it, and it didn't QUITE click the way I wanted it to, but I like to try new things and work outside of my comfort zone!

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  8. "I fled it, and with a feeling as though I were leaving something of great personal importance behind, though I have never discovered just what."

    Don't know if I ever mentioned it to you, but my wife is a tax attorney and works for the state of South Carolina. She's having a similar moment, along with her coworkers, trying to figure how the tax bill going through Congress right now.

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    1. I would think so, yeah. Which means she probably understands it about as well as most of the people voting on it, right?

      That happens down here with Texas legislation once in a while. Something gets passed, everybody freaks out, and then there are a bunch of emergency CLE classes put together to try and make sense out of what just happened.

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    1. It's far too early in the morning to be this meta.

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    2. I'm not going to defend myself to her. If Nasreen wants to deal with her nonsense, on the other hand, that's up to her.

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    3. Katy, can I come and be YOUR cat? My lesbian is boring.

      Delete
  10. Fog, missing hands - great ingredients for a horror story. Now working a taxing district dispute into a horror story now that takes skill. My property taxes are getting scary however.

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    1. It doesn't work quite as well as some of my other recent uncanny pieces, but at least I finished it. Maybe I can use my day job to create a new genre: Bureaucratic horror.

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  11. All that red thread and the fact there are three makes me think of the old myths of The Weirds or The Spinners who are said to weave the fates of all people.

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    1. I hope so because I need some fate-weaving for the upcoming year. This year sort of sucked.

      Now I need to go read up on these Spinners to see the implications of what I wrote in this post...

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    2. It's the Germanic version of The Three Fates from the Greco Roman. Worth looking up if you can spend a little time with it.

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  12. Sorry I'm late. Facebook usually shows me whenever you post a link to your blog, but nope, it skipped this post completely because I didn't like your last status update. Facebook: "Well, it's over, he hates Harry now, better stop showing him his posts."

    "Ergo, vis a vis, res ipsa loquitur. I told you I was an attorney."

    I would have also accepted wizard. Isn't that a Harry Potter spell?

    Having read this, I still don't entirely know what's going on, but that's okay. Only you could make property taxes this horrific and simultaneously interesting to read about.

    Genuinely, that's a compliment.

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    1. I read this week that facebook is going to start targeting posts that say things like "KLike this post if you love your grandmother." Maybe they're not ignoring my posts because I've been thinking about doing that. Because ou really should like my fb posts if you love your grandmother.

      This blog post doesn't quite do it for me because instead of being a ficiton piece that demonstrates a real fear or love of mine, it seems to be weird for weird's sake, to an extent. But I'd been reading too much Thomas Ligotti.

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  13. Hi Harry! Interesting read! I have to admit, I read it a couple of times and then read your comment section, because I wasn't sure what was going on? But, I liked it!

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    1. Thanks, Stacy. I was trying to bring together some of my scattered blog mythology - Temixoch, the Conductor, Katy, etc. I'm just glad I finished it and it kind of holds together...

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  14. I'm glad it's a story, because that would be one damned baffling dream to weave.

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    1. Oh, I'd hate this as a dream. I only accept it when I can inflict it on you people...

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  15. I know you told us what Righty and Lefty looked like, but them moment you called them that I started seeing them as roundish and wrinkly.

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    1. Haha... This is why we can't have nice things.

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