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?