Symmetry's Shadow Chapter 1

"Santa's workshop, Doofus!"
"No really, Paul!"
"A jail for Doofuses, Doofus!
"Paul!"
Paul said nothing this time and slapped Randy in the back of the head and stalked off toward the kitchen door.
"Doofus, don't try to hide out here while I have to move all that stuff inside myself," he called as he pulled the screen door open. Randy turned away from him and looked back at the fence as he heard the door slam shut. All he wanted to know was what was out there; what was out beyond the fence. This was his first time in the back yard of the new house. Randy started walking toward the fence and as he did so he had a vague sense of feeling different, different than he had felt in about a week. That sense of sour hopelessness was not sitting in his stomach now as he reached the edge of the yard and put his fingers through the metal links in the fence above his head and leaned his whole body forward. The other side had weeds that grew as high as the top of his head and streched out across a field up to a line of trees. What was out there, he wondered, that recquired a fence? Is the fence here to keep people like me on this side or to keep something on the other side?
The last week of Randy's life had been the strangest and saddest experience he had ever been through. It was Saturday - almost the end of August. One Saturday ago the Gardeners were still living in Lehigh Furnace Pennsylvania. All of his belongings were still in the bedroom that he had lived in for his entire eleven years of life, all of his friends still lived within walking distance or at least biking distance and he had never set foot outside of the state of Pennsylvania.
Now he was standing behind a strange new house in the strange city of Caladagia, New York and Randy was about two hundred miles away from his friends. Up until this week, whenever Randy did something new, different, fun, or scary; anything he thought was worth talking about, his first impulse was to tell his friends. Now he was going through the biggest thing in his life, moving to another town, and he had no one to talk to. Darren, Paul, Andy, Tom, he had to keep reminding himself that they were far away. While they could still see each other he was very much isolated.
Randy turned to the right and walked along the fence dragging his fingers across the links. As he took in his new surroundings, he couldn't help but imagine how he would describe everything he was seeing to the gang back in Lehigh Furnace. He pictured himself in his old backyard surrounded by the crew that he had done so much with over the years. They would all be listening intently as Randy mesmerized them with the details of his odyssey deep into the state of New York all the way to the strange city of Caladagia.
He reached the edge of the yard where it met the neighbor's property. At least it was where he thought the neighbor's property began. There were a few poplar trees in a ragged line that seemed to demarcate the border between yards. He pivoted on one foot and faced the other neighbor's yard. Nothing seemed remarkable about either of them. His mother said something about one of them having a kid his age but Randy was not at all interested in making new friends. Besides, judging from the backyards he didn't think that there were any kids living in either house. He saw no bike or clubhouse; no toys at all.
Leaning his right shoulder into the fence, Randy gazed back into the field beyond and thought about his new life in this new city. It still didn't seem quite real. He had known that the move was coming all summer but when it finally happened it seemed to happen a lot faster than he thought it would. The four hour drive in the car had had a dream-like quality. Or maybe nightmare would be a better word. The back seat was crammed with things that wouldn't fit in the trunk, which itself was stuffed with things that couldn't go in the moving truck for whatever reason. This made it feel even more cramped and uncomfortable than any previous trip in the car had ever been for Randy. And on top of every thing else, it was the hottest day of the summer.
When they had left at about one o'clock that afternoon, Darren, Tom and Andy had all been gathered to see Randy off. They were all wearing their cut-off jeans and were equipped with inner-tubes and knapsacks full of candy and chips and canteens full of cool-aid. They were ready for an expedition through the woods to Rattle Creek for some swimming and tubing. It was something that Randy must have done with them about a hundred times over the summer and about a hundred times the summer before that. Now he was standing with his face pressed against this fence and the air was noticably cooler. It was hard to believe that it was only about five-thirty of the same day. It was almost impossible to believe but those guys were probably still at the creek. It was as if Randy and his family hadn't just driven out of Lehigh Furnace Pennsylvania, it was as if they had driven out of summer.
As the latest and most powerful feeling of unreality of the day swept through his head and his stomach, Randy's breath hitched and his view of the field through the fence blurred. He realized he was starting to cry. He also realized he saw something moving way out in the field. He wasn't sure but it looked like...
"Raaandeee!"
"Dooofuuus!"
What timing. His mother and his brother were both calling him. It sounded like they were both in the driveway out front. Randy quickly rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and wiped his nose on his arm and started around to the front of the house.


"RAN-dee!"
"DOO-fus!"
The calls were more urgent this time. He was only back here for about five minutes. What catastrophe had struck in that time that required his assistance? As he came aound the front of the house he tried to cover his miserey with a neutral facial expression.
His mother was standing out at the curb looking down the street first in one direction and then in the other. He knew she was looking for the moving truck.
"Where could that moving truck be?" she asked. Paul was leaning in the trunk of the car, a dark blue Lincoln Mercurey Cougar. He came out with a stack of bedding and pillows. It was the perfect load for Paul; it looked like a lot but it actually weighed very little. Paul was a tall athletic sixteen year old with straight blond hair. He had been on the junior varsity track team back at Lehigh Furnace High School and was considered to be very fast. His father, who had himself run track, had done a lot to encourage him to "maximize his potential" on the track. Paul didn't seem to care about it as much as his dad but went along with his father's enthusiasm as the path of least resistance. Randy had a hard time seeing what the attraction of the sport was. The way he saw it, between school, Church, homework and his chores, Randy already spent more than enough time on boring, structured activities. What was the point of giving up even more time trying to do the wishes of adults by following a bunch of arbitrary rules for hours at a time? Unlike his brother, Randy was much more interested in hiking and exploring. At times like these, he was his own boss. No adults were there to tell him what he had to pay attention to or how long he had to sit still. Besides, Randy suspected that Paul was just in sports to meet girls.
As he approached the car, Paul moved in the opposite direction toward the house carrying the pillows and blankets. He pretended he couldn't see his younger brother and elbowed him in the ribs as he walked by.
"Woops, sorry Doofus, didn't see you there." Randy let it go. He wasn't in the mood to argue or talk or to interact with his family in any way. He reached into the trunk and pulled out a suitcase that felt like it had been filled with bowling balls and cement. As he started walking to the house with that giant ungainly load banging into his legs, Randy's mother turned away from her moving - truck watch and faced him.
"Well? What do you think of the house?" she asked as if the answer was obviouse. The house is wonderful, was what she wanted to hear. Randy didn't want to give her the satisfaction but at the same time he didn't want to start a debate.
"The house is wonderful mom." His enthusiasm was forced but his mother was too caught up in the excitement of moving to notice. She just smiled and turned back to the street leaving Randy to deal with the heaviest suitcase in the world. No wonder vthis thing was still in the trunk. As he struggled up the front porch stairs, his mother called to him again.
"Would you ask your father to come out here for a minute? Unless he's in the middle of checking the fuse boxx... Just ask him..." The rest was lost as Randy finally made it in the front door. He set the suitcase down in the entryway next to the front stairs and looked around for any sign of his father. It seemed strange to think of the stairs next to him as the front stairs. There was another narrower staircase to the second floor in the back of the house. He had never been in a house with two sets of stairs before. In fact, he had never been in a house this old before.
All of the houses that he had been in in Lehigh Furnace had been made in the fifties at the earliest and all of them seemed to look more or less the same. Their old house had been a one-story ranch house with a big rec-room in the basement. This house was a two-story Colonial. The rooms were smaller than what he was used to but there seemed to be a lot more of them in this house than in his old house.
This was only the second time Randy had been in the house and the first time was when they had first arrived when he dashed all the way through to get a look at the back yard. If he remembered right, the door to the basement was in the kitchen. He cut through the dinning room and arrived in the kitchen where he saw two doors to his left. After opening one and seeing that it led to the back stairs, he went through the other and into the dusty darkness.


“Dad?” he called, thinking that the basement wasn’t at all like the rec-room that they used to have. It wasn’t even like a basement but more like a cave. The stairs whined and groaned all the way down the two short flights until his sneakers touched down on the dirt floor. The basic layout became clear as his eyes adjusted to the daylight that squeezed through the narrow, cob web covered ground level windows. There was a pile of something or somethings under some sort of a tarp in the corner and a ramp that led through an opening in the wall and up to a pair of horizontal doors that must have opened up into the back yard. Why hadn’t he noticed them when he was outside? Whe did a house need doors like that? He couldn’t recall anyone ever saying, “Boy a couple of weird doors that led directly from the outside to the basement sure would come in handy!” For some reason he pictured his old reading teacher, Mr. Gruber saying this and chuckled to himself.
He saw some light coming from behind a wooden wall that divided the basement and headed for it through a doorway. His father was standing there with a small flashlight sticking out of his mouth shinning on what Randy believed was the fuse box.
“I ight ave oo all omm omm,” he said looking baffled and disappointed at the same time.
“What?”
Randy’s father took the flashlight out of his mouth and shined it at Randy.
“I said, I might have to call someone. I don’t think the problem is even in here, I think the electric company shut off the power. The realtor said they weren’t going to but they did.” His father said this as though he were imparting some profound fatherly wisdom. Son, sometimes realtors say thing’s that aren’t true. Randy’s father, David to others his own age, sighed, shook his head and closed the door of the fuse box. Randy could tell by the lack of forced involved in closing the fuse box door that his father was already out of his long-trip-in-the-car bad mood and was developing a moving-sucks attitude. He had seen the long-trip-in-the-car-bad-mood before today and it usually entailed long periods of silence interrupted by bursts of misdirected anger. It looked like his new moving-sucks attitude would have more of a theme of simmering disgust.
“Uh, Dad...Mom wants you to come outside as soon as you can.”
“Yeah, yeah,” David said as he led his son back to the stairs. Before they reached them, David’s flashlight swept over the canvas-covered heap that Randy had spotted earlier. David focused the flashlight on it and stared for a few moments. Randy wondered why his father did things like this. Instead of lifting the tarp up to see what was under it, he just stood there trying to guess.
“Randy, have you seen your mother?”
“Outside Dad, she wants to see you>“
David abruptly took the flashlight off the canvas mound and pointed it at the stairs.
“OK, c’mon, let’s go - we’ve got work to do and if we aren’t going to have any electricity tonight then we should try to get as much done as we can while its still daylight.” Randy walked into the cone of light cast by his father and started up the stairs. He wondered if his father understood that his son had been somehow able to maneuver through the basement without the help of his flashlight. It sometimes seemed as though David sometimes had trouble believing that things and people continued to exist after they left his field of vision. His whole universe was defined by the area illuminated by his flashlight.


Once upstairs and in the light, David pocketed the flashlight and took the lead. As they approached the front door, a flat banging came from the upstairs. David stopped and looked upward. Randy knew he was reviewing the membership roster of the family and then by accounting for everyone he could use the process of elimination to determine who was responsible for the racket.
“Paul!” he shouted.
“Dad!” came the exasperated reply from the spot where the pounding was coming from.
“What are you doing?” David’s simmering disgust was focusing into anger. Paul didn’t know it but he was joining the lying realtor and the electric company on David’s list. He did make some sort of response to his father that was unintelligible because he didn’t stop pounding while he was speaking. David held his position for a moment longer and then waved his hand in disgust toward the upstairs and went out the front door with Randy right behind him. Now David was a little angrier and Paul was out of range. Therefore he would be going after targets of opportunity.
“Randy, is the car empty? The moving truck should be here soon.” Randy wasn’t sure what the one had to do with the other but jogged over to the car any way. He lifted a bag of shoes out of the trunk as he heard his dad talking to his mom out at the curb about the dual crises of the missing moving truck and the missing electricity that were afflicting the Gardener family.
He went back in the house and up the front stairs passing the open door to his brother’s room. In all there were four bedrooms upstairs and Paul had quickly claimed the largest one after the master bedroom. Randy glanced in and saw the source of the noise that had vexed his father. Paul was pounding a board against a window that apparently wouldn’t open. This could only end in ringing success.
He carried the bag of shoes down to the bedroom at the end of the hall. His mother had said that this room had been servant’s quarters. Paul had said that it was a room for people who were too smelly to live in the front of the house. The room was small but Randy didn’t mind. He thought he would get more privacy here. He set the bag of shoes down and walked up to the window on the back wall. It was a double window that opened inward and was held shut by a latch. Outside he could see the backyard, the fence and the field beyond it from a better angle.
The field stretched far in either direction. To the left, he couldn’t see where it ended, but to the right he could see where it reached a very large gray house. It had many sides and porches and windows that bulged outward. The top of the sprawling building had a cupola that could easily hold several people. It was one of the strangest looking houses that Randy had ever seen in real life. He thought it was almost a castle for all of its complicated layout. Maybe if it was made of stone instead of wood.
The sun was glaring off the windows so he couldn’t make out anything inside. The house sat inside the fence line about halfway between the trees and the fence itself. Whoever lived there must own everything inside of the fence. Whenever he finally got the chance to get away from the family and all of the activity of moving he knew he was going to have to explore in that field. Having no idea how the people in the house would feel about that, Randy knew he would have to keep an eye on that house. He couldn’t see any cars outside but it looked like there was a very large garage on the far side. There was also a backyard area that was defined by a vicious looking wrought iron fence - this only intrigued Randy more. Inside the yard area - it looked very large, about two and a half times the size of the yard that his family had now - there were a few smaller buildings of the same gray color as the main house. They must be guest houses or tool sheds he surmised.
As Randy noticed that the banging from Paul’s room had stopped, he allowed his eyes to sweep the field and the trees beyond. As he did so, he thought about what he had seen earlier when he was in the back yard. It had been very strange and he wished he had been able to get a better look but all he had really gotten was a glimpse. Now there didn’t appear to be anything unusual going on in the field or in the trees. There was no movement other than when the occasional breeze would hurry through the field and bend the weeds and the leaves slightly in the direction of the big gray house.
Randy opened the window and pulled himself up so his stomach was resting on the sill and his head was sticking out. It was too bad that his binoculars were still packed away, if he had them he might be able to get a better look at the forest.
Another breeze picked up, one strong enough to be called a gust and it bent the weeds enough for a moment for Randy to be able to catch a glimpse of something. Up until this moment, he hadn’t really been sure he had seen something among the weeds but now this confirmed it.
Earlier, when he was in the back yard, he thought he saw someone - a man, a bearded man - lunge out of the trees and disappear down into the weeds. His clothing had looked dark and filthy. The pounding from Paul’s room started up again as Randy realized that the man was still lying down in the weeds, his head was tilted up and he was looking in the direction of Randy’s house. Then just as Randy heard the sound of breaking glass from Paul’s room, the man turned his head slightly and made eye contact with Randy.