Something That Knows Your Name

by Laura Sanger Kelly

“This,” Maya said, opening the door to the professionally decorated bedroom, “Is the room my son refuses to sleep in.”

The other women in the party smiled politely. Except for Jamie. To her, the room moved, like an unseen river flowed silently through it. Time and place were mere eddies at the edge of deep, swirling invisible water.
Jamie kept quiet, allowing her friend the luxury of showing off her grand new home to new, upscale acquaintances.
The room, like the whole house, was brushed with an interior decorator’s magic.

“It’s a new house,” Maya told the entourage. “We finished building two months ago. There was nothing here before. But Harrison swears he heard something call his name out one night, and now he refuses to sleep in here.”

"Well, you did just remarry,” Irene noted, enjoying both envy and scandal. Maya’s new husband was a decade younger, and a million dollars richer. “I bet Harrison wanted to sleep with you and Barry.”

“For one night, claiming he was scared, but he seems happy in the guest room now.” Maya opened the door to another room, decorated with similar over elegant flourishes. Harrison’s baseball bat and mismanaged school bag looked out of place in the contrived opulence. Jamie peered into the room. It was still and regular, in the way
most places on Earth are.

“Of course, it helps having two guestrooms,” Maya beamed, opening another door, to a familiar scene of wallpapers, paint, and heavily fringed fabrics. The smells of electrical outlet fragrances battled in
the air. At the end of the tour, Maya led the ladies down the sweeping staircase into a large room. A bartender stood at an open bar, already preparing fashionable mimosas, margaritas, and cosmopolitans. Jamie grabbed a beer out of the cooler, feeling oddly underleveraged for the crowd.

She sat by herself on the patio, not really knowing couture and cotillions satisfactorily enough to engage in conversation about them.

“Knock, knock,” Maya said, slipping away from the party. She stepped gingerly on to the patio. “Someone once mentioned that you were sensitive.”

Jamie raised her eyebrows. Maya made it sound like it was a disease. Jamie hated people knowing that she knew things.

“Could you check Harrison’s room?” Maya asked quietly.

“I thought you didn’t believe him.”

“Just in case. You never know.” For an instant Maya was a worried Mom, not just a carefully poised caricature of what she thought she should be.

“For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t sleep in there, either. The place
has a creepy vibe.”

“That I don’t understand,” Maya said, “It’s a brand new house. It
wasn’t like this place was an Indian burial ground or an abandoned cemetery either. You know, they have to disclose stuff like that. But if they lied, you could sense that, right?”

Jamie’s ability to sense things was like enhanced sight,visualization beyond the normal range of vision. She could see odd curvatures in time and space, hinting at the invisible things they bore. It was akin to the difference between a seeing a very good photograph and seeing something in real life; no matter how good the three-dimensional quality of a photo, it was still just an image. Being there, with an object, it had undeniable depth, something the mind perceived as reality. Most people saw only the photograph. Jamie was transported to the place, seeing the figures of those not entirely bound by the laws of three dimensions, those who had somehow slipped between the fabrics of one dimension and another.

Maya coaxed Jamie up the stairs. “Harrison said he distinctly heard something call out his name. He seemed so sincere, and he doesn’t complain at all about sleeping in the guest room.” Maya opened the door to the sparkling new room, with its overbearing decoration. Jamie felt instantly queasy. Something very fixed met her gaze, deconstructing her. Light bent around it, refusing to touch its form. It crawled along the wall, and disappeared into a corner. Jamie hated moments like that, seeing things other people were blind to.

“Can you sense anything? Can you do anything about it?”

Jamie sighed. If someone did not believe, she was considered crazy. If someone did believe she had advanced perception, it usually went from asking for her observations to requesting an exorcism in one statement.

“I’ll look around.” Jamie offered.

Maya hugged her, in that quick posturing way socialites hug. Perfunctory in appearance, calculated in execution. “I have to get to my party. They’ll miss me.”

Jamie secretly wondered if she had only been invited by her old friend to attend to a troublesome paranormal defect in the environment: as a friendly, preternatural groundskeeper. She moved from Harrison’s room, with its localized malevolence, to the guest room he preferred. It was clean and fresh, with no hint of any disturbing presence. Jamie pursed her lips, then re-entered the queasy room. “Jamie,” a man whispered. She stepped back, startled. There was no one there, except the barely perceptible shape that quivered where light was revulsed. The presence had listened, she realized, learning her name. It must have learned Harrison’s the same way, overhearing his mother or stepfather call him.

Jamie methodically moved to examine the other guest room that adjoined Harrison’s. Intelligence that did not need to fear substance was a frightening prospect. A sickly sensation clung to a wall in the guest room. The wall the two rooms shared. There was a barrier, the presence defined strictly to a scrap of reality. Three-dimensions forming the boundaries on what wanted to be endless. “It’s a new house,” Jamie thought. Large, open, part of an
over-planned community. Brick, siding, and energy efficient glass, down the road from swimming pools, golf courses, and strip malls. She stood in the hallway, staring at the wall. Feeling dark prescience wiggle inside wooden beams. She started praying, inwardly, for guidance. For courage. The thing moved away from the words she mouthed. The house is not tainted, the ground is not tainted. Jamie reasoned. It occurred to her, as she considered where the evil had come from: There was tainted wood used in the construction. Used in beams that support the
common wall. Her mind allowed her eyes to see, to follow the images to the place. She opened her mind to see dark, thick forest, and feel oppressive swampy humidity.

A man in an old suit hovered in the air in front of her. His back was towards her, his attention on someone in front of him. He was flanked by a few other figures, of varying degrees of anger and pride. “We know your name, boy,” the man said coldly to someone Jamie could not see. “If the judge doesn’t believe in hanging you, that’s okay, because
we do.” Justice at the end of a rope. Jamie shook off the images, realizing that the man did this many times,
to many people, for many reasons. He relished being the final arbiter of vigilante jurisprudence.
He was the lynch master. Jamie realized, and this wood was cut from his hanging tree. Who knew where? Lumber was shipped around the country. Its history could lie anywhere.

“Your tree is chopped down,” Jamie said, focusing on her here and now. Rooting herself in a place where the laws of physics and man still held sway. “Go back to its stump. That’s where your justice lies.” The entity twisted, as she spoke. It turned as she spoke its terrible secret. There was a witness against him, and he had to flee, lest his own
justice catch up with him.

The thing wriggled out of the timber, slipping into nothingness. Scattering in the imagination of its own dark heart.
Jamie trembled, sensing footsteps on the stairway.

Maya came up, cosmopolitan surreal in her hand. “Everyone’s wondering where you are. You have to come down. Before anyone asks any questions.” She paused. “Is it gone?”

“Whatever was here is gone.”

Maya bounded back downstairs. “We’re watching Court TV, and the bartender is mixing up the best drinks.” she blushed. “I don’t know what juries are thinking nowdays. And those lawyers, getting people off on technicalities.”

Jamie shook her head, letting the last dust of the presence drip to the ground. The lynch master barred now from anything with form. “I can’t imagine why he thought he’d still fit in.” She thought bitterly.

The echo of her name said on his dead tongue still crawled around in her skull, as she rejoined the pretty party.
Oddly happy that hardly anyone there knew her name.