Hoard
A one-way trip into the world of lost things
Since starting this blog, I’ve only really posted very short fiction. Now that Company of Ghosts is out in the wild, I’ve hit the two extremes, which is generally true to form for me. I feel most comfortable in the 100- and 1,000-word formats. Anything longer tends to be a novel.
This story is, I hope, a good example of the middle range, but it took a while to get here. I originally entered Hoard into a forum contest as a flash fiction, where it won its category but failed to win the overall prize. Instead of submitting it to magazines as a flash fiction, I decided to give it a little more room to breathe, but the story quickly ballooned into a 15,000 word novella.
After years of trimming and cutting, I’m finally pleased with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Hoard
Long Pacific highways turned my foot to lead, a fact Laurie reminded me of when she woke up twenty miles past the California border. She stretched, sat up, and checked the visor mirror against the onset of wrinkles, something she did more and more lately. Then she looked over at the speedometer, as if to confirm that yes, we were traveling at the speed she suspected. That was all it took to lift my foot off the accelerator and coast down to something reasonable.
This was a battle I’d lost early on, thanks mostly to her brother—dead at seventeen, in a high speed collision with a tractor trailer. I didn’t mind so much. For me it was just one of those things I looked forward to getting used to over the next forty or fifty years.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Maybe an hour out. We just left California.”
She checked the time. “You must have been flying.”
“Not so much,” I lied. “No traffic.”
If she caught the fib she didn’t call me on it. She clicked the radio on and fiddled with the dial, shuffling through two public stations, a hits station, a talk show. An hour later, we pulled into Port Orford.
The real estate agent had beaten us there, so I pulled in next to her Trans Am and cut the ignition. If the gravel didn’t announce us, the car doors did, and a few seconds later a woman in a blue pantsuit came out to meet us. I raised my hand and smiled, but Laurie took the lead.
“Hi there. Sorry we’re early. I’m Laurie, and this is Carl.”
In other words, Thanks for driving honey, but I’ll take it from here. I pocketed the keys and shook the agent’s hand when she extended it.
“Vivienne,” she said. “Happy to see you. How was the drive?”
“Beautiful,” Laurie said. “I love the ocean.”
The agent didn’t skip a beat. “Well, you’ll be close by,” she said, already working her first angle. “The nearest shore access is a twenty minute walk that way.” She pointed the way we’d come. “And there’s always hiking if you decide to do something inland. Are you big hikers?” she asked, with a tone that said she doubted it.
“Not really,” Laurie said. “But maybe someday.”
And on it went.
I sound cynical, but truth be told, it was a nice house. Three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a dining room with wide windows that looked out over the coast. There was a reading nook in the living room, a place for the TV, the sofa, and the chairs. It was unfurnished, which was fine. It meant that we could imagine our things there. I was just about to point out where Laurie could put her grandmother’s old dresser when Vivienne interrupted us.
“You’ll want to see the attic. There’s a bit of cleaning to do, which we can probably get the owner to pay for.”
If I wasn’t cynical before, I was now. The timing was just a little too convenient, her tone a little too breezy. She showed us the ladder access and pointed out the light switch from the safety of the hallway. Hantavirus, I remember thinking. That’s why she won’t come up here. Hantavirus and rats. Was hantavirus airborne, or did the rats have to bite you?
Laurie waited patiently on the stairs while I fumbled at the switch. I missed and brushed against a piece of exposed insulation, bristling at the contact. I found the plastic cover on the second try and switched it on. There was a brief flicker and the sound of a bulb popping, but the light came on a second later.
“How’s it look?” Laurie asked.
Junk didn’t begin to describe it. The word junk implies an accident, a slow accretion. Something that builds without anyone noticing until suddenly there’s too much of it.
The mess in the attic looked like a planned assault, as if all the mess and clutter of a dozen families had been designed to occupy the smallest space possible. I no longer wondered why the agent hadn’t followed us up the stairs. I barely had space to stand.
“Come up and see for yourself.”
“What is all this?” Laurie whispered, squeezing beside me on the landing.
From where I stood, I could see:
A box of porcelain roosters suspended in newspaper shavings; a row of Country Crock tubs packed twenty deep like Matryoshka dolls; a set of golf clubs held together by a bungee cord; a stack of record sleeves that brushed the ceiling; boxes; crates; an actual metal washboard; a cathode ray television with a spool of cable around the base like spilled intestines; a watercolor painting; a cavalry saber that looked old enough to have seen service in the Civil War.
Everything. Everything that had ever existed and been thrown away.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think…” Laurie started, but trailed off. She picked up a glass jar full of clock parts and unscrewed the lid. The little clock pieces spilled into her hand and she held them up to the light.
“Be careful,” I said. Of what, I didn’t know. Tetanus, maybe. The agent’s voice from downstairs interrupted the thought.
“If you look toward the north wall, you can actually see a bit of window. I’m told the room was originally planned as an office.”
“More like a storage shed,” Laurie whispered. She had her hands in the pocket of her coat. Behind her, daylight from the alleged window filtered through in long, narrow strips. No dust floated in those bars of light, I noticed, and I had a sudden, anxious feeling to be downstairs.
The agent gave us a tour of the backyard. There was a view of the ocean on clear days, she said, but with all the fog we’d have to take her word for it. A tool shed stood twenty feet off from the tree line, its door unlocked. I creaked it open and looked inside, but it was empty. I closed the door and finished walking around the yard.
On the drive back we booked a hotel room and ordered pizza for dinner. We watched TV and went to bed late. We talked about the house, the town, and the attic—the last in mostly scandalized tones. Before we fell asleep I remember thinking how odd it was that we’d whispered the whole time we were up there, like we were in a library, or a museum.
Maybe even a church.
***
We ended up picking something closer to home. A townhouse in the suburbs, still within easy reach of the city. Our neighbors were forty, with no kids and no plans to have any. I admired that, but Laurie couldn’t decide if it was empowering or just depressing. Once she figured it out, we’d have a decision of our own to make.
We unpacked all the boxes in a day, thanks to Laurie’s trick of putting something precious in each one and labeling none of them. Even after we finished unpacking, the place looked empty. Our last place only had three rooms, including the bathroom. Now we had twice the rooms to fill and not enough stuff to do the filling. The next afternoon, Laurie came home with a yoga mat and a set of cushions, which nailed the coffin lid shut on what to do with the extra bedroom. For my part, I snuck a mini fridge into my office without Laurie batting an eye, so I considered it a fair trade.
It was strange, the way our stuff settled into drawers beside each other. My father’s timepiece, Laurie’s mother’s jewelry box, my box of carved chess pieces, her tiny stuffed owls, our random assortment of furniture. They coexisted with minimal friction, despite their separate histories, which is as good a definition of a relationship as any. The days and weeks after we moved in were the happiest, I think, but not for any grand or romantic reason. Maybe because there was no grand or romantic reason.
We got jobs at the opposite ends of town. I’ve pretty much always worked for a run-down, three-office newspaper, and it happened that the Lincoln Bugle needed a sports columnist to cover the town’s Little League games until the end of fall. If I was still around and a full-time spot opened up, I’d have a shot at it, and until then I had a column every week to help pay the bills. Laurie landed a human resources job at a factory, where she traded in her literary ambitions for two solid paychecks a month, with benefits.
October came, and I started getting bigger projects from my editor. Nothing major, nothing that really challenged me, but I put in the work as if every story was my big shot, and I think he noticed. The culmination of all this effort was the Landsledder story.
“What’s a Landsledder?” Laurie asked over dinner. Porkchops, peas, and russet potatoes: our Friday night dish. “Some kind of construction company?”
“Off-road sports dealership,” I said. “ATVs, helmets, motorbikes, that kind of thing.” I cut off a healthy slice of pork chop and chewed it. “They’re moving into that row of houses on Jefferson. Bought the rights to the whole block.”
“Ugh. Good. Those houses look awful.” Laurie had complained about them before, and I’d agreed.
“Good enough for someone,” I said. “There’s a squatter living in one of them. She’s ignored a condemnation notice, an eviction notice, the works. It’s just a little old lady, but she’s too mean to reason with, and nobody wants to go in without a hazmat suit.”
Laurie’s fork paused briefly on the way to her mouth. “What kind of stuff does she have in there?”
At the time, I didn’t make anything of the question, or the pause that preceded it. “Not sure. Guess I’ll find out. Editor wants a rough draft of a story by tomorrow afternoon. I was going to drive by in the morning and see how close I could get, maybe snap a picture or two if she lets me inside.”
“Well, be careful,” Laurie said. Though of what, I couldn’t imagine. A crazy old lady with a rifle, maybe, or a shoe full of cockroach eggs to track home and leave in the carpet. But she didn’t say anything further, and the conversation moved to other subjects.
***
I pulled into the lot on Jefferson street at 8:30 in the morning. I hadn’t slept well. Laurie had gotten up three times in the middle of the night, once to use the computer for an hour and a half. I’d have liked to sleep in, but I’m a big believer in appearances, and there’s nothing like showing up at the office half an hour early when you’ve got a deadline to meet.
I flipped down the mirror to give myself a look before I went in. Tired looking, on the verge of needing a shave. But then, where I was going, I’d probably be the cleanest looking thing in any given room. I pulled my press ID from my glovebox and hung the lanyard around my neck on my way to the door.
The house looked like it had been built in the 1950’s, and the woman who answered the door might have been the same age. She didn’t live there, legally speaking, but I pretended she did. I asked if I could come in for a chat, just to get her side of the story for the local papers, that kind of thing. Everyone has a story they want to tell, and being the guy who listens opens more doors than you might think. She gave me a flinty look, but the laminated ID settled her doubts.
“Wipe your feet before you come in,” she said.
I did so.
It was hard to identify which rooms I was walking through. Nothing marked one pile of trash as different from any other. Two of the rooms had refrigerators, neither of which looked operational. A single-window room that might have been a dining room had two ovens stacked on top of each other, the interiors filled with junk. The floor was no help either. Hardwood throughout the whole house, when it was even visible. Everywhere I stepped seemed to creak or stick to my shoes or both, and most of the time I walked on trash.
The lady of the house introduced herself as Stella. She led me into a room full of paperback books which she seemed to be using as furniture. The room stank of rotting food. No matter where I looked, cockroaches danced in and out of sight. Stella offered me a seat on one pile of books, but I politely declined.
“Suit yourself.”
She eased herself onto a sofa made of romance novels, clearing the rat pellets from the linen covering with her bare hands. It struck me how impossible it would be to get comfortable in this house. My shoulders were tight from hunching in away from the mess.
“It’s a lovely house,” I said, searching for an in.
“Bullshit,” she laughed. “It’s a wreck and everyone knows it. But it’s mine, and so is most everything in it.”
“I noticed some of your things as I walked through,” I said. “Lots of interesting pieces. What’s the story there?”
Her eyes squinted, and her mouth twisted down into a frown. “How do you mean?”
I went for the honest approach. “Frankly,” I said, “it’s a goddamn mess.”
Stella smiled and I knew I’d struck gold. “True.”
“So why keep it?”
She shrugged, went silent. I decided to change course.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Thirty years.”
I did the mental arithmetic, pictured the younger woman walking through the hallways. “With your family?”
“With my husband, yes.”
The clipped tone answered my next question, so I skipped ahead. “And he left you the house?”
“Yes. He left me the house, and I filled it with junk.”
“To fill the space, perhaps?”
She grinned, but it had a kind of meanness to it. Her teeth looked filthy, disorganized. “You writing an article or a love story?”
“Fair enough,” I said. I decided to cut to the heart of it. “What do you think you’ll do when they make you leave?”
Her grin fell to shambles, and her expression went sad and distant. “Nothing, I expect.” Her gaze settled on the remnants of an ottoman, moldering in the corner. “Nothing for a while, and then I guess I’ll die.”
“Not much different than the rest of us,” I offered. It was a weak effort, and we both knew it, but it was all I had.
I stuck around long enough to fill out the rest of the story, collecting dates and details, things like that. On my way out the door, Stella pressed something into my hand: a slim golden watch with silver plating on the back. I tried to refuse it, but she closed the door in my face. After a while I understood. This was something that could escape, maybe find a home while the rest got sent to the dump. I felt burdened, cynical. Why should I find a home for someone else’s junk? But then I remembered Stella’s broken expression, and, feeling guilty, shoved the watch into my pocket.
***
“You know, I think this might actually be worth something.”
Laurie held the gold watch up to the light. I’d handed it to her as soon as I brought it home, partly to share it with her, partly to give the watch a story before she found it in a desk drawer and started wondering why her husband was bringing home a gold watch she’d never seen before.
More on that:
Laurie and I weren’t each other’s first relationships. I knew enough about her past to know that she’d been down that road with other men. It started with little hints, things she ignored, excuses that got the benefit of the doubt. Birthday gifts for her boyfriend from “friends” she’d never met. A hundred little reasons to call herself stupid after it all came crashing down.
The worst of these broke up with her by leaving in the night with half her valuables, including an engagement ring that had belonged to her grandmother. She still cried when she told that story. I knew she trusted me, but trust is a fickle thing. You earn it by the drop, lose it by the bucket.
She handed the watch back to me.
“She’d crammed the place with junk from floor to ceiling,” I said. “Statistically speaking, at least something in the mess had to be valuable, right?”
Laurie frowned and went into the bedroom without answering me. I heard the drawer of her nightstand open and close. When she came back out, she held something in her hand: a strange little cog about half the radius of her palm, like a piece of a clock. Something had been inscribed on the side, but it was too rusted and worn to read.
“I found it at the house in Oregon. Do you know what it is?”
“Not a clue,” I said, picking it up and turning it over.
“It’s an analog computer,” she said. “Or a part of one. They used them as calendars in Ancient Greece.” She gestured to the markings around the rim. “These are star signs. I can only read some of them, though.”
“You read Ancient Greek?”
She grinned. “Benefit of a classical education.”
In other words, twenty thousand dollars of student loan debt for a double major in Classics and Comparative Literature.
“So what was it doing in Oregon?”
“No idea,” she admitted. “We never found out who lived there. Maybe it’s like you said. With that much junk, some of it has to be valuable, right?”
***
We visited Laurie’s family for Thanksgiving that year. They lived in southern Idaho, but we wanted to spare the car, so we flew in a few days early and made plans for them to drive us to the airport. Our flight wasn’t until the Monday after, but I’d had enough family time for the weekend, so Laurie suggested we take a walk through the woods behind the house to stretch our legs and get some privacy.
The woods had that tangy scent of old, soft forest: fir and cedar, ponderosa pine. The cold gnawed, but didn’t bite, and we crunched through the forest arm in arm, bellies full of leftovers. Laurie caught sight of a mountain bluebird in its nest and made us walk around. We came on a deer trail a short distance after, which led us past the creek, up a hill, and into the backyard of a house.
The house was old, and clearly abandoned: a two story Georgian colonial with a roof that sagged and slumped. Grass and garbage had overtaken the yard, and bottles crunched beneath our feet as we walked toward the door. If anyone had lived there since the sixties, I’d have been surprised. The calendar we found in the kitchen had fallen from its place in the window, and we could see where someone had scrawled a birthday in pen: July 25th, 1957.
It’s a cliche, but sometimes things really do happen in threes. Like starting your car in the freezing cold, or sitting across from someone on a third date and realizing you might have found someone special. That ramshackle, junk-filled house in the Idaho woods was our third, and this time we knew what to look for.
Actually, that wasn’t it at all. We didn’t know what we were looking for. We just knew that somewhere in the mess, there was something worth finding.
In a pile of clothes in the upstairs bedroom, we found a hunk of fossilized amber the size of a fist. In the kitchen, a Baekje incense burner sat huddled among a year and a half of unopened letters. Laurie found the head of a clay statue from the Qin dynasty in the yard, buried six thousand miles from the necropolis it was built to guard.
Not that we knew any of this at the time. Laurie’s history background helped us with most of it later on. We were guided by instinct, by some unseen magnetism that we shouldn’t have trusted but couldn’t resist.
When we finished, we carried our spoils back to the house and stashed them in Laurie’s old room. Her parents gave us a knowing look, as if they’d guessed what we’d been up to in the woods. I still wasn’t quite sure myself. We’d cracked some code, some undiscovered law of the universe that put valuable old things in ruined old houses the same way time and pressure turned coal into diamonds.
In true American fashion, we decided to make some money off it.
***
A rental car wasn’t bad for local work, but the fees got out of hand unless you turned it back in where you’d gotten it. Most weekends we would drive the car to an open house a few cities over and check into a hotel room on Friday night. We picked the oldest houses, the most run down, the ones you couldn’t even call fixer-uppers. Realtors gave us skeptical looks. Doors creaked deliciously as they opened. Yes, we were very interested in seeing the attic.
When we weren’t checking out houses, we picked a road and drove. There’s nowhere in America where you can’t find something abandoned. Once, we came across a squatter that chased us out with a crowbar. Another time, a policeman turned us out, but took simple curiosity as an excuse when he was sure we didn’t have any drugs on us. Outside of that, we had the ruins to ourselves.
You couldn’t sell most of what we found. Pawn shops won’t take the salt-crusted engine panel of a Lockheed Electra, and a historian wouldn’t believe the story. Ancient burial crowns were only valuable once you’d popped the jewels out. Some of it we couldn’t even identify, even though we knew it had to be something. It all had a look we’d come to recognize, a weight beyond its actual weight.
Even so, we cleaned up. Laurie quit her job, and I dropped down to part time for mine just to keep the insurance. We took long vacations, funded by the sale of whatever we’d managed to fence that month. We even donated some of it, and there was a luscious feeling of charity whenever some local paper described us as “mysterious benefactors.”
It all lasted about a year.
We’d taken a summer trip to New Hampshire, anxious to try our luck on the east coast. There was history there, a long tapestry of settlers, all of them displaced or misplaced, hoarding what they could, abandoning the rest. We booked a room in a bed and breakfast in a small town outside of Manchester, thinking we could drive down to Boston or maybe up to Portland for a day trip.
I walked downstairs to get a map of the town while Laurie unpacked. When I came back, she was sitting on the bed. She held something in her hand. It caught the light from the window, refracted it against the far wall.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I found it in the nightstand,” she said. She held it up to show me. It was an old engagement ring with a tarnished white gold band and a small, round cut diamond in the setting.
“I saw a lost and found box downstairs,” I said. I reached out to take it, but she snatched her hand away, shaking her head back and forth.
“It’s hers,” she said. “My grandmother’s. It even has her initials.”
But how? I wondered.
Motion caught the corner of my eye: a pillar of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Did it tilt toward Laurie just now, or did I imagine that? I suddenly felt nervous, alone in a vast space. I remembered the attic in the first house, the way it felt like walking into a church. Laurie looked down at her grandmother’s ring like it was a miracle, but I saw it for what it was.
The bait at the end of the hook.
“Laurie,” I whispered. “Laurie, you have to put it back.”
“What? No. No, Carl. I finally found it, I’m not putting it back.”
I tried to reason with her. Argued. Yelled. It ended with her walking out of the room and slamming the door behind her. I wasn’t sure whether I should follow her, and anyway I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I fell into a chair, exhausted, and listened to her footsteps as she stormed off.
But not downstairs, toward the lobby.
Upstairs, toward the attic.
***
The police were more efficient than I thought they’d be. In twelve minutes a patrol car pulled into the parking lot and two officers came up to investigate the room. Laurie hadn’t packed anything, hadn’t taken our rental anywhere. No signs of struggle or forced entry. No one in the place had seen her leave.
I stayed in New Hampshire for about a month before I gave up hope. The townsfolk knew my story, but I wore out their sympathy in the first week. The last straw came when I broke into someone’s house to rifle through their attic. Nobody pressed any charges, but the police chief threw me in lockup and bought me a bus ticket out of town. I didn’t know where our rental car was anymore, but my credit card still worked, and it was good enough to buy a plane ticket back home, where I locked my doors, unplugged my phone, and spent a good long week doing some real investigative work.
I combed through a few dozen forums on the occult with no luck. Even if they weren’t all crackpots, none of their stories were similar to mine, and the few posts I made got no replies.
Mythology came next, which is where I got my first real breakthrough. The trick is to go back three or four thousand years. Once you go deeper than Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, things start to get blurry. There are figures there whose names have been forgotten, whose temples haven’t seen the sun since the Bronze Age.
And why wouldn’t it be one of them? All those lost gods, forgotten except for time-worn carvings on obelisk fragments buried in the dirt, their followers little more than trace fragments of the human genome. Why not become a caretaker of lost things like themselves? With makeshift temples where they grant little miracles, like turning coal into diamonds.
And we, in our extravagant stupidity, had stolen from one of them.
***
I don’t have much hope. If what I believe is true, then I’m at odds with something that measures time in millennia. I know Laurie is out there somewhere, hidden with all the other lost things, but I have no way to reach her and no trail to follow.
Last fall, I bought a house off the Oregon coast. An old one, with a long driveway, settled right up to the edge of the cliffs. At night, just after sunset, I walk down to the beach and throw a scrap of paper into the ocean, where it curls up, sinks, and is swept away.
Love letters, mostly—lost at sea. I hope she’s getting them.
Author’s Note
I forget the prompt that inspired a story about hoarders, but the more I worked on it, the more it became a metaphor for my childhood fear of drowning.
I used to be terrified of water where you couldn’t see past the surface. My brother almost drowned when I was young, and I had this recurring nightmare of his head slipping beneath the waves. I would know he was in the lake somewhere, but I also knew that I’d never be able to find him.
There are veils, I think, that are as thin as the surface layer of water. But once you cross them, you’re gone forever.
This was beautiful and mysterious. Thoroughly enjoyed it. The ring was very eerie.