Her son followed her up the stairs, which were pale wood, curved like an instrument. The light cascaded icily from the glass dome over their heads. The door was darker glass, and a tidy woman scanned their tickets at a desk in front of it. The door was very heavy. She could not see through it. She laid her hand on his shoulder, warning him silently to stay beside her. He tensed but didn’t pull away. She was buoyed by this small victory.

The space they entered was full of clocks. They ranged in size from pocket watches to a huge grandfather clock at the far end of the gallery beside an archway that led to the next room. The room was fairly empty, and the few people were silent, looking up. Staccato ticking filled the air, the clocks out of sync with one another. She could feel him straining like a dog tugging a leash, she was not sure at what. Something he had noticed that he wanted to go toward without her.

Her husband had told her he did not think the exhibit would be appropriate for a child, but she did not know if this was true, and their son was not an appropriate child. She wanted to go to an art gallery. She wanted to be someone who could go to a special exhibit at an art gallery with her child and have it be pleasant and interesting and not too meaningful. It was cold outside; they would go for hot chocolate afterwards to the café she’d seen across the street. At dinner later she would coax him into describing what he had seen. He would be relaxed, even-tempered, and his father would be surprised. She would be proved right. Much of her happiness, she admitted, lay in being proved right. She resented her husband’s prissy use of appropriate and her son exhausted her; she would take happiness where it was offered.

The clocks were chimeras. Minute and hour hands were made of vertebrae or were miniature models of human arm-bones, skeleton fingers pointing. Some of the numbers were formed of dried flowers, glass eyes, some were tiny twisted figures with sad faces. One clock face was set into a halved stuffed head; she couldn’t tell in the low light what kind of animal it was. A wolf? Forelegs jutted from the sides of the clock, the paws replaced by hands, sewn on with waxed red twine. She checked behind the clock for a tail, but there wasn’t one. The bared teeth and yellow glass eyes discomforted her and she looked around for evidence she was not alone in this. The young man beside her seemed placid and undisturbed.

A cuckoo clock burst open to her left and instead of the bird there was a little withered man lying on a brass bedstead. He was wearing a top hat, not a nightcap, and pointed ears stuck out from under it. He sat up jerkily, then lay back down as the bed was indrawn through the door.

The exhibit was from the personal collection of a film director. She’d read a profile in a magazine. He lived in a house on the side of a mountain, accessible only by one private road, the house built in the 1930s by a producer of B-movies as a place where he could hold parties for younger and younger men, one of whom drowned in his swimming pool.

The director lived there alone. She had only seen one of his films, an early one from before his move to America. She remembered entrails that turned into mouths. Her tolerance for body horror had diminished after her son was born. He was an emergency C-section, lifted out flinching from the lights, a scrunched frog with impassive eyes. The doctors could not stop her bleeding and so they removed her uterus. Her son would probably have been an only child anyway. But it would have been nice to choose.

One of the clocks struck behind her head. A small clear chime. Her son froze until the sound died away.

She was jealous of the director, who did not prevaricate, who loved what he loved, was intimate with his most inappropriate nightmares. She was not even familiar with her nightmares; she barely remembered them but woke with a sense of nauseous unease, a bitter taste in her mouth that felt more significant than the taste of waking. Lay in bed in the early morning just before the alarm went off, looking at the woolly grey light outside, her husband asleep beside her, her son awake, even from her top-floor bedroom she knew he was awake below, staring at the ceiling with his familiar expression of beatific and focused indifference, as if the only things he actually saw were inside him.

He shook her hand off, went into the next room, and she followed.

The few people in the room were younger than her, she could not tell how young, she found it hard to tell anymore; enough to make her feel frazzled and sallow and middle aged. He was the only child present. Her husband was right, or at least everyone else would think so.

A man carved out of wood stood in the centre of the room, enclosed by a velvet rope. Antlers sprouted from his head, and he was spangled with dead butterflies with blue and green wings. Lesser figures lined the walls. These must be models from later films, nothing she remembered. His monsters. Her son stood in front of the carved man and she hoped he could become someone like the director, his self-absorption generative. Her son had a book of drawings that he hid from her. She went through them when he was at school, and was afraid. He was indisputably talented, more than most nine year olds, but she knew that was beside the point, given what was inside his head. She slid the book back into the hiding place under his mattress.

Above the man’s head, a banner, looped black lettering across it: The Erlking will do you grievous harm.

When she met her husband they were both close to forty. He was divorced from a woman who’d moved back to America; she had just left a man who had not wanted children though that was not the reason she left, or not the main reason. Her pregnancy was nearly immediate and unplanned, a lucky thing she should be shrewd about, a gift it would be ungracious to refuse. They would have a child. They married just before their son was born.

Her husband was a history professor, his work focusing on union movements in the first half of the twentieth century, and he had the nostalgic handsomeness of a sepia portrait. She imagined he was loved by many of his students, probably discreetly mocked by the more sophisticated ones in reaction to his subtle neediness, his tetchiness when contradicted. He took himself very seriously, and she made mistakes, made the wrong jokes, not understanding this. She assumed it was the students, that it must warp you to be around people who, while ostensibly adult, were just beginning their lives, powerfully grandiose and powerfully fragile at the same time, too antagonistic and too adoring. He could not help being self-serious. There was nothing wrong with him. She quit her administrative job on which she’d supported herself since her art degree, along with occasional badly paid work illustrating children’s books.

Her husband was surprised by his son, affronted by the disruptions to his time and attention. He thought himself a reasonable man betrayed in his reasonable expectations. She didn’t ask him what he’d imagined, what he thought it meant, to have a child. She didn’t show him the secret drawings. Her own drawings, while pleasing, were tentative, correct. She would offend no one. She minded this, a little. Caught sight of her own reflection, her zippered boots and looped scarves and flyaway dry hair, her worried face, and thought she had failed to cultivate her monsters.

She became aware of recorded sound: running water over stones, and the effect of the recording and the man with antlers and the butterflies and the other figures grouped around him reminded her of the dioramas in museums she’d visited as a child. She’d liked those. Her son had moved past the antlered man to a peephole in the wall. He pressed his face to it, his cheek mashed against the copper circle it was set in.

The Erlking will do you grievous harm.

She remembered the Erlking from a survey course on German Romanticism and the Brothers Grimm that she’d taken at the art college. They’d read a poem by Goethe: the father and child riding at night, the boy beckoned by something fearful and seductive, a shape in the trees which the father does not see. The Erlking whispers to the child. The father insists there is nothing there. Mist on the willows. They reach home, the father holding his son to his chest. He reins in his horse to find the child is dead in his arms. The Erlking has called for him.

She stepped closer to the carved man. She could not tell if the butterflies were specimens or models, and saw that the figure was also twined with vines, all along the legs, eliding explicit nakedness. A greenish beam of light shone down over the man’s antlered head, like sun in a forest, and the fake leaves reached for the fake sunlight.

Before meeting her husband she’d lived in a studio apartment near a bank, outside of which stood a white plastic cube advertising mortgage services. She’d been horrified when vines had grown up inside the box, pressing themselves against the plastic, trying to find the sun. She could see only shadows, the leaves grasping and choking each other. It made her sick. At first she thought her sickness was pity or guilt, as if the box was a reminder of the violence of civilization, but she came to believe that her sickness was from a different reminder, a memento mori. The vines were biding their time, full of life force that did not care about her or how sorry she was. Her pity was useless. The vines would win. Perhaps the director thought this, wandering by himself at night through the rooms of his fantastical lonely house. He knew something he would not say aloud, something he would put into the carved face, the vision of hundreds of butterflies, something so brutally obvious it was trite but triteness was not a consolation.

She stepped up to the peephole. Her son watched her.

She drew back, incredulous, though to be fair there was a warning, she saw now, in small apologetic print below the hole. She forced herself to look again, wondering if her shock had been too hasty, if she was mistaken. The light was so dim. No, she wasn’t mistaken, though she didn’t think a printed warning was sufficient. The director was a fraud, a disgusting child, taken seriously because he was a man, able to barter a mixture of prudery and lasciviousness into some kind of authority. She made herself keep looking. Spread legs, severed limbs and torn breasts, the face of the horned god, seen now without his covering of butterflies.

She reached for her son but he wasn’t there.

She walked around the room, back toward the clocks, feeling in front of her optimistically as if his thin shoulder could materialize suddenly under her hand, then through a smaller door to what she thought was the gift shop. She found instead a narrow empty corridor, one of those inexplicable corridors carpeted in grey, windowless and barely lit. The corridor turned sharply into another gallery, and she thought this must still be part of the exhibit, or there would be a sign telling her she was leaving.

It made sense that he had gone this way. He liked small spaces, hidden spaces. Cupboards, the dusty warmth underneath his bed, where once he had found a dead mouse, the fur shrunken around the bones, dried and scentless from the effects of the poison she’d put down. He’d sealed the mouse in a jar on his desk, the sad grimace and filmed-over eyes facing his right hand while he sat drawing his hybrid faces.

She wanted someone to notice her distress and ask her what was wrong, but there was no reason anyone would. She knew that was one of her chief follies, thinking someone would ask her what was wrong, as if that was something people did, something she herself did, noticing the faces of strangers. If anyone had asked her, she would not have known what to answer. Her child moving out of her line of sight was not a reason to feel this surge, not panic yet but the flicker of it, growing nearer. She breathed. She was breathing. All she had to do was keep breathing. She told herself he was not far. He could not be far. There was nowhere he could go so quickly where he would come to harm or cause harm, she never knew which one she was afraid of. She would look for a minute down this corridor and then go back toward the clocks, where she remembered a security guard, an older man with lank hair, very tall, leaning against the archway.

Green and blue light flickered faintly ahead in the further gallery. She heard voices, and imagined her son’s voice, and hurried, pausing as she entered the darkened space.

The source of the green and blue light was six large screens, almost as tall as the walls, which were staged in a hexagon shape with narrow gaps between them. Something was being projected onto the screens, and she stood uncertainly, assuming she was meant to slip between the gaps, afraid of what she might be shown, thinking of the peephole and the mangled flesh. Her hands tingled. Then she pictured him there already, her son, standing in the emptiness of the gallery, the cinematic light and whatever images it formed washing over his wedge of a face, drenching his body. She ran through the nearest gap, calling his name.

No one was there. The screens were innocuous, projections showing green grass rising up into hills, grey sky, the landscape sliced by the blackness between the screens. A man and a woman walked slowly across the grass. The man played a guitar, the woman kept time with a tambourine. They vanished briefly when they reached the edge of one screen before appearing in the next, as if they were real and had to cross that dark space.

Death is elsewhere, they sang, death is elsewhere, just that over and over, moving in a circle around her, and she stood transfixed and patient while they sang this one phrase, appearing and disappearing in the gaps and appearing again, and she knew she should go and find someone to ask for help but she didn’t, she stayed in the centre of the circle and watched them and listened, death is elsewhere, death is elsewhere, the man’s voice almost a drone, the woman’s winding above to make a harmony, and at each disappearance she stared hard at the dark gaps and expected to see, before the figures reappeared on the next screen, the face of her son looking back, loved and familiar, except for the antlers rising up from his hair, the butterflies moving now, their wings opening.

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Image: Julia Iredale, Forest Lord, 2017, digital illustration.