With Milking, Michael Cisco has written a very creepy story. The creepiness builds and builds, from the first page to the last, bringing to mind the films of Alfred Hitchcock. However, here Cisco’s creepiness relies on indirection and understatement. To show exactly what I mean, I’ll move through the story step by step, noting a number of instances—from ominous and chilling to menacing to sinister—leading up to the dramatic conclusion.
The story opens with the main character, a boy named Lucas, walking downstairs past the parlor and kitchen to a small room at the back of the house to drink his morning glass of milk. Once he swallows all of the milk, his father “would settle his blessing hand carefully on the head of his son and smile, his brow contracted.” From the start, we sense that Lucas’s drinking milk has, in an odd way, taken on ritual significance.
Lucas lets his mother know he’s taking Smokey, the family dog, down to the ocean beach. She tells him to stay within sight of the house. On the deserted sandy shore, Lucas looks back and can see his mother watching from her upstairs bedroom window and his father from the kitchen below. He knows he must stay visible; the one time he wandered farther down the beach, both parents became alarmed and distraught. Cisco presents Lucas as a boy of about nine or ten—just old enough to take the dog to the beach yet still confined within the anxious surveillance of his parents, a tension that becomes central to the story’s creeping unease.
When Lucas returns to the house, his Aunt Inger and mother are sitting in the parlor talking. Aunt Inger greets him warmly, and Lucas is encouraged to speak of his observations down by the ocean. She says enthusiastically, “He has the eye of an artist. We should get him a painting set!” But when his mother gives her a particular look, she adds quickly, “When the time is right.” This brief exchange alerts us that something is definitely off. Lucas is a sensitive boy with a vivid imagination—so why would his parents not encourage him to express and develop his creativity?
Lucas knows his parents do not want to spoil him. Cisco’s language has a precision that heightens the weirdness that follows. Lucas has the idea that “his parents mysteriously combined their reluctance to spoil him with the disappearance, one by one, of various things belonging to the family—the piano, the old gilt mirror that used to hang over the mantelpiece, and the porcelain figurines that had been kept with great care on the shelf high on the wall. He had started to believe that, as children grow, their house becomes more empty.” We can easily imagine Lucas’s confusion. Why didn’t his parents explain any of this to him? They must have known such disappearances would strike anyone as strange.
Aunt Inger and his mother resume their conversation. Lucas retreats to his room. “The enemy emerged from beneath his bed in sinister, deviously moving ranks, but the vigilant defenders did not fail to notice and repel them.” Cisco captures the power of Lucas’s imagination—the way a child’s mind, especially around the age of nine or ten, can transform the ordinary into something vast and malevolent.
Lucas is beckoned downstairs to the parlor to play with his cousins, who have now arrived. The adults are in the kitchen, but Lucas knows there is one iron rule he must obey: never enter the kitchen until his parents are finished in there. When they finally emerge, they are nervous, flushed pink, and self-conscious. Lucas wonders at their strangeness. As readers, we also wonder what is being kept secret.
Then the eeriness escalates. The kitchen door stands open, and Lucas notices something unusual about the room: the door in the corner—what his parents call the closet door—is ajar. He has always been told that this door was both useless and impossible to open. Had his parents been hiding something from him? And what is that odd smell?
Lucas does something daring: since no one is looking, he slips into the closet. The smell is stronger inside. He sees that it isn’t a closet at all but a small, bare room with a plain wooden table beneath a skylight. The stench is everywhere, thick and inescapable. Then Lucas realizes—it’s the smell of the room itself.
That evening, after all the guests have departed, Lucas lies in bed, unable to get the secret closet room out of his mind. He imagines that plain wooden table beginning to walk on its stiff legs, its feet against the floor like tiny hooves. His imagination swells, growing more vivid, until he hears a squeal of wood from downstairs. Lucas comes fully awake and listens in the dark. Again, he hears the sound! He wants to know what is happening— “if only so that he could stop thinking about it and get back to sleep.”
Lucas gets up and cautiously walks down the stairs. There’s that smell again, a smell “of some special bad thing.” And they are all there, as if they have never left the house. Reaching the bottom of the steps and peering secretly into the closet room, Lucas sees a tall, clean, empty glass being passed from hand to hand. He doesn’t have the vocabulary for it, but what he witnesses bears a forbidding resemblance to an occult ceremony.
Lucas runs out of the house and down to the beach. Cisco’s laser-sharp language captures the boy’s panic: “Tomorrow morning exploded with terror. He would stand as ever in front of a tall gemmed glass of white milk, with the eyes of his father and the weight of everything in life thundering down on top of him without a sound.”
What Lucas does at the story’s conclusion once again reminds readers of Alfred Hitchcock.
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