The Wheel Of Misfortune
Written by Kenneth Gerleve
Installation by Linda Scholly & Kenneth Gerleve
It began when a tiny sputtering stream of water rained down on Kevin O’Donnell’s forkful of au gratin potatoes as he lifted them towards his mouth. He paused, examining his fork, and then he looked across the dining room table at his wife, Tori who had also witnessed the offending water spout. She squinted at him in disbelief. They both raised their eyes upward, and noticed the light fixture above them was filled to cresting with water. Above that, on the ceiling, a dull ochre flower bloomed across the ceiling.
The 1980s split-level house on St. Andrew’s Road had seemed perfect to the O’Donnells. For years, they had lived in the city, moving from one drafty apartment to another. Ultimately, they realized the city life was just too loud and hectic for them. They wanted more space, dark skies at night, and quiet. So they scrimped and saved until they had enough for a downpayment.
The house was big, but otherwise unremarkable, nestled in a quiet subdivision. A month later it was theirs. The sellers were a recently divorced young couple with kids who had only lived there for two years. They had purchased it from the estate of the original owner, an elderly man named Jack Smith, who seemed to have disappeared and was presumed dead. That was the extent of detail on the provenance of their new home, but the O’Donnells didn’t really care anyway. They could stand on their deck at night and see stars above, and the only sounds they heard were crickets chirping and frogs bleating. They were content.
Kevin pushed his chair back from the table, stood up, and walked to the garage while Tori placed her large but already empty wine glass under the dribbling chandelier. This wasn’t the first problem they had encountered in their new home.
For the first few weeks, the O’Donnells busied themselves with cleaning, renovations, and redecorating. Everything seemed dirtier than it had been when they first toured the house. Every handle, every light switch, had been coated in a sticky residue which they attributed to the two children of the previous owners. They painted over egregious wall colors until every wall was an unremarkable shade of gray. They ripped up the worn carpets and replaced them with new flooring. They bought sleek and modern furniture for every room. Every night they went to bed exhausted. Slowly, they were making this house into their home.
Kevin returned from the garage with an eight foot ladder and headed for the attic hatch at the top of the stairs. He set up the ladder, lumbered up the steps, and poked his head up into the dark, expansive attic. He was met with a blast of hot, stagnant air. He pulled himself through the hatch and up onto the rafters. As his eyes adjusted, he spotted a hole in the roof and a damp patch of fiberglass insulation below it.
For a moment, Kevin was distracted by a view into the yard from the slatted vent at the apex of the gabled roof. Below, Tori was chatting away with the neighbor as she hung her laundry on the line that ran parallel to the property line. He couldn’t hear anything over the loud and relentless drone of cicadas. “I’m up here in the attic roasting, and Tori’s out there gabbing her head off with the lady next door,” he grumbled to himself.
Every once in a while, Kevin or Tori would catch a glimpse from a window of one of their neighbors in their yards, staring up at the O’Donnell’s house. But whenever Kevin was mowing the lawn or Tori was planting geraniums in the window-boxes, the neighbors never acknowledged their presence. The O’Donnells would admit that they had not made any attempts at neighborly interaction either. In fact, they preferred a level of anonymity.
The problem diagnosed, he turned to head back to the hatch, and that is when he noticed a pile of boxes, old furniture, and assorted odds and ends stored in the corner opposite. Someone had nailed planks of wood over the rafters to create a floor in this section of the attic, and a bare bulb hovered over the dusty trove. His first instinct was to escalate his grouching at the fact that the former owners had left their crap behind, but as he carefully made his way toward the boxes, the flopped corner of a rolled up canvas tarp caught his eye. Painted inside a white circle on its surface, he could read the word ALIVE in bold capital letters.
“Kevin,” Tori’s voice called from the hatch, “What’s going on up there?”
“There’s some damage to the roof,” Kevin replied. “I don’t know if it’s new, or if the inspector missed it in their report. Anyway, we’ll have to get someone out to fix it before it rains again.”
“Well I’m not surprised,” she sighed. “Hey, I just spoke to our neighbor Gina and she said that the couple we bought the house from was nice, but seemed to run into so many problems — like they were cursed. Kept complaining about a ticking sound whose source they could never find. And the old man, Jack, who used to live here… well they said he was a real cheapskate and very unpleasant to deal with. Thankfully, he mostly kept to himself.”
“Oh?” Kevin replied. Happy to have an excuse to leave behind the mysterious heap of junk, and the heat of the attic, Kevin made his way to the hatch and climbed down. As he pulled the hatch closed, he took one last look at the hoard of oddities in the corner and resolved he would investigate them soon.
The following morning, Kevin spent hours pouring over everything in the attic, sorting and arranging the items into piles, creating a landscape of ephemera. A story began to emerge. He unrolled old lithographic posters featuring a tuxedoed young man, surrounded by fire-eyed pumpkins and little red devils, that shouted miraculous claims. Kevin hung the carnival banners from the rafters so he could see them. They were illustrated in a less skillful way than the older posters. The colors were worn and slightly faded but the images still seemed bold, the same tuxedoed man, the pumpkin, the Devil.
See the Man Who Cheated the Devil.
Ancient Secrets & Mysteries Await.
Take a Spin on the Wheel of Fortune.
Ask a Question and Learn Your Fate!
Dusty clothes pulled from beaten up trunks draped over random worn bits of furniture — a costume of moth-eaten red wool with gold trim and embroidered words, a top hat, a cape, yellowed white kid gloves. Sequins and rhinestones. Sweat stains and dust. Stage props, including a large crystal ball, knives and swords, and a large wheel of fortune which appeared to comprehensively list various manners of death; Drowned, Stabbed, Choked, Burned, A Fall, Crushed, Shot, Sickness, Old Age, Poisoned, etc.
A scrapbook contained crumbling headlines torn from newspapers. Old photos. Handbills, tickets. A cast of characters leaned against train cars. Carnival rides and sideshow performers. The younger man appeared in many of the photos, gesturing next to the wheel of fortune, but to Kevin, the man behind the smile remained as elusive as the hoard of items in the attic was tangible.
“These were not the personal effects of the young couple or their children,” Kevin said that night as they ate dinner al fresco on the deck.“They belonged to the old guy, Jack Smith, a.k.a. Jack Avarice, a.k.a. Jacques Lanterne, who it turns out, had been a stage magician of some renown. At the height of his career, he was known simply as “Lanterne.”
“Did Jack have a wife? Kids?” Tori asked him. “Why did he quit show business? What did he do after?”
“I don’t know,” Kevin replied. Tori’s question made him realize he had only scratched the surface of this mystery.
In the weeks that followed, Kevin attempted to glean any information he could from the neighbors (who noticed the sudden change in their neighbor’s neighborliness,) but ended up with nothing. Kevin searched Google, the library, and the town clerk's office. All dead ends. Jack Smith’s former life was hidden in these rafters long ago, and his neighbors were completely unaware of it.
How does someone live such a rich and interesting life only to end up invisible and forgotten? The corner of the attic was full and yet it was full of artifice. “Why are you so stingy with the details, Jack? What happened to the Lantern?” Kevin said under his breath. As he pondered, he heard a whirring, ticking sound. The wheel of fortune was idly turning as if caught by an errant breeze. Tick. Tick. Tick. It slowed, hesitated, then stopped.