The Desert Upstairs

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

Worth noting: This story is part of the Micah Hogue cycle. Hogue is a character who surfaces once or twice a year for us, and his stories should be readable as standalones. But if you’re a chronological reader, start with the sort-of prequel E, then move to The Land Is a Black Mass, The Sermon Lacking That Old Thunder, and finally this one.

For all my sixteen years, upstairs in that house, on a certain door, my grandfather kept two padlocks. He alone entered the rooms beyond, and my grandmother said it had been that way since 1980. I never questioned it because I was in awe of Granpop. I figured the door was shut to me because in there was something I was unworthy to see. Something to do with God Himself. My grandfather was, of course, the pastor Micah Aaron Hogue—lit by a halo of Jesus fire, famed throughout Beaumont County and no doubt Heaven. But after he died late in 2021, I began to want a look behind that door.

And because of how he died.

“Gramma’ll want in,” said Gwen, my cousin, who was fifteen and the only other person in the family with any guts about the door. “Give her time. She’ll unlock it.”

Maybe. Our widowed grandmother had dropped into a fog. She would sit or even stand in one place for hours, silent as a doll. His death had done this. She and the whole family had witnessed his passing, as had three hundred others—because he died while delivering the Sunday sermon. And no way could anybody eradicate the memory of his corpse, on its feet in the middle of the church. Locked upright in that unnerving pose, terror frozen on its face. Nor could anyone ignore the strange tenor of the sermon he did not finish. After it, lifelong friends avoided our family.

But Gwen and I threw ourselves into after-school visits hoping to restore Gramma Hogue, and after six weeks, she began to notice her surroundings. Which is to say, the fog would thin enough for some household item to catch her sight, and she would pick it up, or lay a hand on it, and smile foggily.

“She’ll let us in soon,” Gwen said.

Another two weeks went by before Gramma spoke. The first thing she talked about was the afghan on the back of her couch.

“All these colors. Old Mrs. Buntley made this. So active in the church. Granpop joked it was a prophetic gift. The month after it, the worst blizzard in history, Blizzard of ’78.  Jim, your mother was toddling. Three? Three. Gwen, your dad was a peanut in a basket.”

Hand on the afghan, she turned serenely around the room, looking not at its present circumstance, but at my mother toddling toward the potbelly stove in 1978.

“Power went out. You never saw such snow. Drifted up above the rooftop, and the four of us just huddled under this afghan. Under this all day, parked before the stove. We were so young. Every time I touch it, I feel that day. How in love I was. And worried. I was always a little afraid.”

After that, she talked a little more each day, but only about whatever she was touching. Aggressively, Gwen handed her items, pointed things out.

“Where’d you get this silly mug, Gramma?”

“I bet there’s a story behind that orange stain on the carpet. I bet someone caught trouble!”

“So I discovered this bucket of tiny hotel soaps under the sink...”

Apart from objects, though, she still did not talk. At all. When I asked if she’d ever been to Nashville, her face remained empty. Two days later, Gwen pressed into her hand a tiny bar of soap from a Nashville hotel, and she told us all about a 1993 weekend there. So her life seemed to exist outside her, in things. But at least we’d found it still existed.

“What do you think of these locks on this door?” Gwen asked eventually.

That being the great mystery we burned to solve—and it got zero response, almost.

“I was so in love. Always a little afraid,” she said, vacant. “Stay out.”

• • •

Outside we got on our bikes to ride to our separate homes for dinner.

“Let’s just crowbar it open,” I said.

My cheeks felt a hint of a cold March drizzle. Gwen pulled up her hood.

“Maybe let’s forget it,” she said. “Whatever’s in there… it might hurt how Gramma remembers him.”

I said, “The way he died, no one remembers him right. What’s in there will fix that.”

“Sure—if your theory is right. Big if.”

My theory related to the fact that Granpop Hogue was a favored servant of God. I’d seen that truth as early as my first Sundays in his church as a little kid, saw it right up to the morning he died. And in the Bible, God spoke directly to His chief servants. So I’d told Gwen years ago what that meant, in my book: God spoke to Granpop. Had probably instructed him to seal that door. Because something miraculous went on behind it. Much as He directed Noah to build the Ark, God had bent Granpop to the building of some Ark in there.

Gwen said, “Jim, think. No preacher ever padlocked a door to hide evidence he was good. Maybe we should stay out.”

This made me angry. This attack. “Tsh,” I said.

But tsh was all, because I worried she was right, and that night I felt like I was tangled in barbed wire. If only he’d died praising God.

That last sermon… declaring God a failure… calling Jesus a failure because he preached in desert, where no seed grows...

But that was why we needed to get in there. To breathe life back into our reverence of Granpop Hogue.

He died before he finished the speech. One more minute, he would have made it clear he was praising The Lord…

The desert is a test, surely he’d been about to say. Jesus is—undefeated!

I needed proof that Granpop was righteous. That God was God. I needed it, or doubt would corrode my faith, and ruin me for life.

That night as I prayed, I pictured Granpop young. Carefree, sinful. We’d all heard the story: Walking a desert road, struck unexpectedly by holy understanding. He’d dropped to his knees. A modern Saul of Tarsus.

So he’d raced home to become our preacher.

Now let me open that door, let the light behind it strike me!

I thought about the suitcase he’d lugged in there four years ago. Full of sand—that was my theory.

Sand from the spot where he fell when saved.

I could go in there and stand on that consecrated ground. Everyone could. And then everyone—me, Gramma, every doubting parishioner—would be restored.

 • • •

 We picked the first Friday in April to break in. We just said we wanted to sleep over Gramma’s like we used to as kids. Our parents didn’t blink. They joined us for dinner—Gramma could converse then, in short bursts—and after they left, we three played Jenga at the kitchen table.

“Sometimes I feel like he’s still here,” Gramma said. “Right around the corner. Reading a book by the stove.”

I understood. He was as much a part of her house as that overstuffed reading chair he’d used every night. It felt more likely than not that he’d finish a chapter and appear in the doorway, as he had so many times.

When she went to sleep, presumably with hearing aids removed, we got out the bolt cutters.

The locks did not snip easy. I had to rest between tries. When it finally worked, misgivings took over, so I pretended to need another rest. Maybe I wanted Gwen to say one last time “Let’s not,” as if now I might listen. We’d brought replacement padlocks to cover our tracks. We could affix those without opening the door and walk away.

Even though behind that door we will behold a sign?

And never again waver in service of The Lord?

Never again.

And we’ll restore Granpop’s good image.

In there awaited a glowing chapel.

I could feel it.

On its floor a box of sanctified sand.

Maybe a bush, too, dug up and brought back in that suitcase. The air would smell fragrant, as if the bush had burned, though its branches would be unblackened; in there behind this door God had spoken from a fire that did not consume its fuel, as He had spoken to Moses.

Gwen did try to stop me, in those last seconds.

“It’s going to be something bad in there,” she said. “Real bad.”

“Nah,” I said right away. “It’s glorious.”

I pushed the door.

She reached in and flicked the light switch.

• • •

“All this time…” Gwen said.

It was a single room, as big as the two-car garage below, and what it held—was the last thing I’d have guessed.

She started to laugh. “All this time, he had a hobby.”

A landscape spread before us. Uniformly beige, but varied in topography. Barren plain, tumbled rocky hills. Dunes. All desert—and through it all, in long straightaways and occasional turns, lay railroad track. Granpop Hogue had built the largest trainset I’d ever seen. All atop plywood mounted on legs made of two-by-fours, stretching wall to wall. The only part of the room not desert was a corner work desk piled with paints, glues, jars of knives.

“Let’s run it,” Gwen said.

We found a control box of levers and lights. We managed to get an engine running, a diesel not larger than a thumb. With a whir it began to tow a two-foot procession of boxcars across a sandy plain. It approached where I stood, and a little horn wailed as it rolled away, into a curve.

“Cool,” I said.

Narrow inlets jigsawed through the layout. These made the land resemble a puzzle of enormous pieces not quite clicked together—but the inlets provided closer access.  I moved down one to follow the train, and crouched as I went. To see at eye level this world he’d built.

To walk alongside the track.

The room was painted to create sky. Deep blue ceiling, fading into pale blue down the walls. Tawny yellow at the horizon, where wind-whipped sand hazed the air. I could feel the air of this scene. Hot, metallic. It dried my lips. Caught as grit in my teeth.

Gwen said something, but I was sinking into details. I stopped to watch the train pass as if I stood outside the gas station across from the burger shack. A fatigued metal sign shaped like a big burger stood high atop a steel pole. The shack was boarded up, the boards were cracked. It was a dark interior behind the cracks. Vandals had spray-painted a tangle of red letters between the restroom doors.

OUT OF THE WORLD’S ASSHOLE

THEY WALK WHERE THEY WILL

One restroom door stood ajar. A urinal exposed. Grimy tile floor. How had he painted the grime—why had a pastor painted that graffiti—

How is it so detailed?

Two kids, the only sign of life, kicked a soccer ball outside a Spanish-style church. They looked lonely. Skinny. I wanted to go ask what happened here. The church had partly burnt down. Through its gaping windows I saw a black altar.

Granpop built this.

God did not tell him to.

I walked out of town, along the rails. The train had shrunk ahead in the distance. Crossing a road I felt the breeze of a passing car—no, no, of course; the car was plastic. It did not move. The road was plaster. Stains from rubber and oil had been painted on. Right at my feet the faded red splash where weeks ago some poor animal got waffled—painted on. The road curved away, I walked straight. To the edge of a plain of sand. What no model needed, just flat sand. Five or six feet of nothing, dotted by low dry bushes. Miles of nothing.

The bushes…

The nearest one included an odd angle of branch. As big as my thigh, wedged in there. I crouched, and saw this was not part of the bush. A foreign object, caught in the branches—

It was a twig. A real twig. Clipped from a real bush. Placed in to the scale-model bush maybe with tweezers.

Curious, I walked to the next bush—and found a scrap of brown leaf wedged in that one.

A human skull gleamed on the ground.

“Jim,” said Gwen. “Jim.”

Kicked in the head by her voice. Knocked out of where I wanted to stare.

I stood.

All the little replicas of scrub, each holding a tiny piece of real plant—

“What the heck is this?” she said.

I went to her side and, as she half-crouched, I assessed from above, now, as if I were a hawk, let’s stay out of it, let’s not—this was better, up here. As if I were God. Like Granpop. He had been God here. And he had built a kind of—

A henge.

Pagan stones. That’s what Gwen had found.

Tall and thin rough pillars in a circle.

Through the circle’s center, bisecting it, lay train track.

I walked around the table toward the spot where the track lead away from the henge to a dead end. West of the circle, among ruins.

Old West ruins. A jumble of dusty boards, piles of brick. Rusted iron machinery. Once some sort of factory. Wind whispered across my ears. What would be manufactured out here? I looked down the track toward the henge, and decided I’d find the answer that way. So I started walking. Now the pillars loomed close, and the top of each revealed itself—there were faces, up there. Faces, and I squinted against the sun to see them. Animal faces, chiseled into the rock. Indian art. Scowling down beaks, snouts, all unhappy. All stares fixed on the ground at the center of the circle they formed. Where the track ran.

Above, large eyes loomed out of the blue. Gwen’s eyes. And under them out of the shimmering heat now there emerged staggering toward me alongside the track a man. He did not show any sign that he saw the eyes behind him, and began to wave wildly to me. In his gait I saw he needed water; could no longer believe everything he was seeing. Maybe he did see the eyes. His royal blue suit jacket flapped as he swung. He almost fell—

His stumble made me notice, finally, a detail that had been bothering me every minute down here. It was so subtle. It had not intruded into my full awareness—

That suitcase.

Full of holy sand.

Under my feet, each grain of sand was the size of my fist. I had been stepping mindfully, so as not to wrench an ankle.

The man’s stumbling made me understand.

It’s the wrong size.

The model was so careful in every other detail. But the sand. It should have been smaller grains. N-scale. The size used to make ultrafine sandpaper. Instead—

This is all real, I understood in a terrible flash.

The burger shack. The henge. These are places he knew.

Places he reproduced exactly.

This sand is from the real places.

To make not just a model but…

The man pushed sweaty white hair off his forehead as if that would help him see me better, make sure I was not a mirage.

He built the real thing.

The heat had obscured the face of the man, but now that he was closer—

He was yelling and had no voice, but in the center of my head I knew he was calling Help! Jimmy! Are you real? Jimmy?

It was Granpop Hogue.

I should not have come down here. I should have hovered above with Gwen. Maybe he was a tiny plastic figure to her.

He ran now, waving both arms deliriously. Save me, Jimmy! he shouted in my head.

And can I? Save him?

Maybe I could. Lift him out. Back into the full-sized world.

I extended a hand. Yes! he called. Grinning. Jimmy, good boy! Oh, I’m so glad! Bring me back! A loud happy sob sprang from him. Help me!

It was a twisted ankle on the chunky ground that spilled him. The twist spun up the length of his body. His waving arms windmilled. Frail old man, plunging. Unable to save himself from hard impact. And when he hit, he—

Blew apart.

Like a figure made of sand, swept off in a wind. Gone.

“Gwen?” I whispered.

Then he was back. As if the wind pushed him back together. Up and running to me.

The train horn sounded. Miles distant, but it carried over the barren land. He ran mouth open, and it seemed the forlorn wail came from his lungs.

Get out of here, I thought. Leave him.

Thunder rolled across the clear sky. As he reached for my outstretched hand.

Don’t let him touch. Don’t—

The thunder was Gwen’s voice.

Jim! Granpop was saying. I know your name!

His hand about to grab mine—and I saw how he was made. I saw an insubstantial but indestructible shape, and in a slosh outward from it came its despair, with an undertow dragging me to it. I don’t know how I dropped my hand in time. I did not want to touch the dead. Then came his dismay—as I backed away, as I rose, betraying him, forsaking him; and from above I saw that the shadows in motion all around him were not cast by clouds in motion, as I had thought down there, but were instead the shadows of large figures that stood invisible to me, the shadows of vast monsters creeping over that sand without leaving prints in it; though in my glimpse I could not divine whether these beings aimed to tighten their grasp on him—or hurl him toward my touch. Whether they reached to stop his escape from eternal torment—or to assist it. To speed him upward with me, into the larger world, where he would be delivered as an abomination.

“JIM!”

Gwen’s voice.

I was standing with her.

The layout was a toy again. Plastic. Balsa. Paint.

Except him, staggering in a circle, reeling under sky gone blank. Where had I gone? He was no taller than a fingernail. But unmistakably he wore the royal blue suit he’d died in; unmistakably I was seeing Granpop’s soul.

Gwen looked horrified.

I said, “Let’s burn it.”

I thought she would argue.

She went straight to the work desk. To the glue, turpentine, isopropyl labeled Danger: Flammable.

An hour later, the firefighters continued to struggle.

Between us on the front yard, Gramma stood wrapped in her afghan. I had never seen her face so completely blank. Nothing lit it but the fire. All progress since December, gone.

“Gramma?” Gwen said. “The important thing is, we’re safe.”

A section of roof collapsed and up leapt sparks. 

“Praz Eejes,” Gramma said.

So it seemed she invoked some primitive name, some forgotten false god. Only after a minute of shudders at that did I decide she meant “Praise Jesus.”

I prayed silently to Jesus. But not for forgiveness. I prayed the fire would obliterate every particle of her home. And after a while, I also took away her afghan, and threw that in.

The end