Undoubtedly handsome in its day, the rambling Victorian house had been remodeled into Gothic by time, weather, and neglect.
The resident was a repulsive toad. He had the sweet voice of a young prince, but he looked like a source of warts and worse.
At first sight of the Toad, Preston almost returned to his SUV. He almost drove away without a question.
He found it difficult to believe that this odious bumpkin’s fantastic story of alien healing would be convincing. The man was at best a bad joke, and more likely he was the mentally disordered consequence of generations of white-trash incest.
Yet…
During the past five years, among the hundreds of people to whom Preston had patiently listened recount their tales of UFO sightings and alien abductions, occasionally the least likely specimens proved to be the most convincing.
He reminded himself that pigs were used to hunt for truffles. Even a toad in bib overalls might once in a while know a truth worth learning.
Invited inside, Preston accepted. The threshold proved to lie between ordinary Idaho and a kingdom of the surreal.
In the entry hall, he found himself among a tribe of Indians. Some smiled, some struck noble poses, but most looked as inscrutable as any dreamy-faced Buddha or Easter Island stone head. All appeared peaceable.
Decades ago, when the country had been more innocent, these life-size, hand-carved, intricately hand- painted statues had stood at the entrances to cigar stores. Many held faux boxes of cigars as if offering a smoke.
Most were chiefs crowned by elaborate feathered headdresses, which were also carved out of wood and were hand-painted like the rest of their costumes. A few ordinary braves attended the chiefs, wearing headbands featuring one or two wooden feathers.
Of those not holding cigar boxes, some stood with a hand raised perpetually in a sign of peace. One of the smiling chiefs made the okay sign with thumb and forefinger.
Two — a chief, a brave — gripped raised tomahawks. They weren’t threatening in demeanor, but they looked sterner than the others: early advocates of aggressive tobacco marketing.
Two chiefs held peace pipes.
The hall was perhaps forty feet long. Cigar-store Indians lined both sides. At least two dozen of them.
A majority stood with their backs to the walls, facing one another across the narrow walk space. Only four figures stood out of alignment, angled to monitor the front door, as if they were guardians of the Teelroy homestead.
More Indians loomed on alternating risers of the ascending stairs, against the wall opposite the railing. All faced the lower floor, as though descending to join the powwow.
“Pa collected Indians.” The Toad didn’t often trim his mustache. This fringe drooped over his lips and almost entirely concealed them. When he spoke, his lilting voice penetrated this concealing hair, with the mystery of a spirit at a seance speaking through the veiled face of a medium. Because he barely moved his hair-draped lips when he spoke, you could almost believe that he himself wasn’t speaking at all, but was an organic radio receiving a broadcast signal from another entity. “They’re worth a bunch, these Indians, but I can’t sell ‘em. They’re the most thing I’ve got left of my daddy.”
Preston supposed that the statues might indeed have value as folk art. But they were of no interest to him.
A lot of art, folk art in particular, celebrated life. Preston did not.
“Come on in the livin’ room,” said his flushed and bristling host. “We’ll talk this out.”
With all the grace of a tottering hog, the Toad moved toward an archway to the left.
The arch, once generous, had been reduced to a narrow opening by magazines tied with string in bundles of ten and twenty, and then stacked in tight, mutually supportive columns.
The Toad appeared to be too gross to fit through that pinched entry.
Surprisingly, he slipped between the columns of compressed paper without a hitch or hesitation. During years of daily passage, the human greaseball had probably lubricated the encroaching magazines with his natural body oils.
The living room was no longer truly a room. The space had been transformed into a maze of narrow passageways.
“Ma saved magazines,” explained the Toad. “So do I.”
Seven- and eight-foot stacks of magazines and newspapers formed the partitions of the maze. Some were bundled with twine. Others were stored in cardboard boxes on which, in block letters, had been hand-printed the names of publications.
Wedged between flanking buttresses of magazines and cartons, tall wooden bookshelves stood packed with paperbacks. Issues of National Geographic. Yellowing piles of pulp magazines from the 1920s and ’30s.
Cramped niches in these eccentric palisades harbored small pieces of furniture. A needlepoint chair had been squeezed between columns of magazines; more ragged-edged pulps were stacked on its threadbare cushion. Here, a small end table with a lamp. And here, a hat tree with eight hooks upon which hung a collection of at least twice that many moth-eaten fedoras.
More life-size wooden Indians were incorporated into the walls, wedged between the junk. Two were female. Indian princesses. Both fetching. One stared at some far horizon, solemn and mystical. The other looked bewildered.
No daylight penetrated horn the windows to the center of the labyrinth. Veils of shadow hung everywhere, and a deeper gloom was held off only by the central ceiling fixture and occasional niche lamps with stained and tasseled shades.
Overall, the acidic odor of browning newsprint and yellowing paperbacks dominated. In pockets: the pungent stink of mouse urine. Underneath: a whiff of mildew, traces of powdered insecticide — and the subtle perfume of decomposing flesh, possibly a rodent that had died long ago and that was now but a scrap of leather and gray fur wrapped around papery bones.
Preston disliked the filth but found the ambience appealing. Life wasn’t lived here: This was a house of death.
The incorporation of cigar-store Indians into the walls of the maze lent a quality of the Catacombs to the house, as though these figures were mummified corpses.
Following the Toad through the twists and turns of this three-dimensional webwork, Preston expected to find Ma Toad and Pa Toad, though dead, sitting in junk-flanked niches of their own. Funeral clothes hanging loose and largely empty on their dry skeletal frames. Eyes and lips sewn shut with mortuary thread. Ears shriveled into gristly knots. Mottled skin shrink-wrapped to their skulls. Nostrils trailing spiders’ silk like plumes of cold breath.
When the Toad ultimately led him to a small clearing in the maze, where they could sit and talk, Preston was disappointed not to find any family cadavers lovingly preserved.
This parlor at the hub of the labyrinth barely measured large enough to accommodate him and the Toad at once. An armchair, flanked by a floorlamp and a small table, faced a television. To the side stood an ancient brocade-upholstered sofa with a tassel-fringed skirt.
The Toad sat in the armchair.
Preston squeezed past him and settled on the end of the sofa farthest from his host. Had he sat any closer, they would have been brought together in an intolerably intimate tete-a-tete.
They were surrounded by maze walls constructed of magazines, newspapers, books, old 78-rpm phonograph records stored in plastic milk crates, stacks of used coffee cans that might contain anything from nuts and bolts 10 several human fingers, boxy floor-model radios from the 1930s balanced atop one another, and an array of other items too numerous to catalog, all interlocked, held together by weight and mold and inertia, braced by strategically placed planks and wedges.
The Toad, like his loon-mad ma and pa before him, was a world-class obsessive. Packrat royalty.
Ensconced in his armchair, the Toad said, “So what’s your deal?”
“As I explained on the phone earlier, I’ve come to hear about your close encounter.”
