store, and magazines littered the floor, the couch, the coffee table.
The magazines were what you might expect. Photos of nude women were featured between articles about extreme sports, fast cars, and pathetic seduction techniques, all surrounded by ads for virility herbs and for devices guaranteed to increase the size of the average man’s favorite body part, by which I do not mean his brain.
My favorite body part is my heart because it is the only thing I have to give Stormy Llewellyn. Furthermore, the beat of it, when I wake each morning, is my first best evidence that I have not, during the night, joined the community of the stubbornly lingering dead.
The paperbacks surprised me. They were romance novels. Judging by the cover illustrations, these were of the more chaste variety, in which bosoms seldom heaved and bodices were not often lustily ripped open. They were stories less concerned with sex than with love, and they were a peculiar counterpoint to the magazines full of women fondling their breasts, spreading their legs, and licking their lips lasciviously.
When I picked up one of the books and thumbed through it, the riffling pages made no noise.
By this point, I seemed to be able to hear no sounds except those that had an internal origin: the thud of my heart, the rush of blood in my ears.
I should have fled right then. The eerie muffling effect of the malign atmosphere in the house ought to have alarmed me.
Because my days are characterized as much by strange experiences as by the aroma of meat smoke and the sizzle of fat on the griddle, I don’t alarm easily. Furthermore, I admit to a tendency, sometimes regrettable, to surrender always to my curiosity.
Riffling the soundless pages of the romance novel, I thought that perhaps Fungus Man did not live here alone. These books might have been the preferred reading material of his companion.
This possibility turned out not to be supported by the evidence in his bedroom. The closet contained only his clothes. The unmade bed, the scatter of yesterday’s underwear and socks, and a half-eaten raisin Danish on a paper plate, on the nightstand, argued against the civilizing presence of a woman.
An air conditioner, mounted in the window, wasn’t running. No breeze blew from its vents.
The faint foul smell first detected in the kitchen grew stronger here, reminiscent of the malodor of a shorting electrical cord, but not quite that, with a hint of ammonia and a trace of coal dust and a whiff of nutmeg, but not quite any of those things, either.
The short hallway that served the bedroom also led to the bath. The mirror needed to be cleaned. On the counter, the toothpaste tube had not been capped. A small wastebasket overflowed with used Kleenex and other trash.
Across the hall from Fungus Man’s bedroom stood another door. I assumed it led either to a closet or to a second bedroom.
At that threshold, the air grew so chilled that I could see my breath, a pale plume.
Icy against my palm, the doorknob turned. Beyond lay a vortex of silence that sucked the last sound out of my ears, leaving me for the moment deaf even to the labor of my heart.
The black room waited.
DURING MY TWENTY YEARS, I HAVE BEEN in many dark places, some lacking light and others devoid of hope. In my experience, none had been darker than that strange room in the home of Fungus Man.
Either this chamber had no windows or all the windows had been boarded over and caulked against every prying blade of sunshine. No lamps glowed. In this profound gloom, had there been a digital clock with an LED readout, the faint radiance of its numerals would have seemed like a blazing beacon.
At the threshold, I squinted into such absolute blackness that I seemed to be peering not into a room at all but into dead space in a far region of the universe where the ancient stars were burnt-out cinders. The bone-brittling cold, deeper here than elsewhere in the house, and the oppressive silence argued as well that this was some bleak way station in the interstellar vacuum.
More peculiar than anything else: The hallway light failed to penetrate even a fraction of an inch into the realm beyond the door. The demarcation of light and utter lightlessness was as sharp as a painted line at the inner edge of the threshold, up the jamb, and across the header. The perfect gloom did not merely resist the intrusion of light but foiled it entirely.
This seemed to be a wall of blackest obsidian, though obsidian that lacked polish and glimmer.
I am not fearless. Toss me in a cage with a hungry tiger, and if I should escape, I will need a bath and clean pants as surely as will the next guy.
My unique path through life has led me, however, to fear known threats but seldom the unknown, while most people fear both.
Fire scares me, yes, and earthquakes, and venomous snakes. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.
To me, however, the most daunting mysteries of existence—death and what lies beyond—have no fright factor because I deal with the dead each day. Besides, I have faith that where I am ultimately going is not to mere oblivion.
In spooky movies, do you rail at the beleaguered characters to get the hell out of the haunted house, to get smart and leave? They poke into rooms with a history of bloody murder, into attics hung with cobwebs and shadows, into cellars acrawl with cockroaches and cacodemons, and when they are chopped-stabbed-gutted-beheaded-burned with the flamboyance necessary to satisfy Hollywood’s most psychotic directors, we gasp and shudder, and then we say, “Idiot,” for by their stupidity they have earned their fate.
I’m not stupid, but I am one of those who will never flee the haunted place. The special gift of paranormal sight, with which I was born, impels me to explore, and I can no more resist the demands of my talent than a musical prodigy can resist the magnetic pull of a piano; I am no more deterred by the mortal risks than is a fighter pilot eager to take flight into war-torn skies.
This is part of the reason why Stormy occasionally wonders if my gift might be instead a curse.
On the brink of unblemished blackness, I raised my right hand as if I were taking an oath—and pressed my palm to the apparent barrier before me. Although this darkness could fend off light, it offered no resistance whatsoever to the pressure that I applied. My hand disappeared into the tarry gloom.
By “disappeared,” I mean that I could perceive not even the vaguest impression of my wiggling fingers beyond the surface of this wall of blackness. My wrist ended as abruptly as that of an amputee.
I must admit that my heart raced, though I felt no pain, and that I exhaled with relief—and without sound—when I withdrew my hand and saw that all my digits were intact. I felt as though I had survived an illusion performed by those self-proclaimed bad boys of magic, Penn and Teller.
When I stepped across the threshold, however, holding fast to the door casing with one hand, I entered not an illusion but a real place that seemed more unreal than any dream. The blackness ahead remained uncannily pure; the cold was unrelenting; and the silence cloyed as effectively as congealed blood in the ears of a head-shot dead man.
Although from the far side of the doorway I had been unable to discern one scintilla of this room, I could look out from within it and see the hallway in normal light, unobstructed. This view shed no more illumination into the room than would have a painting of a sunny landscape.
I half expected to find that Fungus Man had returned and that he was staring at the only part of me now visible from out there: my hooked fingers desperately clutching the casing. Fortunately, I was still alone.
Having discovered that I could see the exit to the hall and therefore could find my way out, I let go of the doorway. I eased entirely into this lightless chamber and, turning away from the sight of the hall, became at once as blind as I was deaf.
Without