Crawlspace
Page 22
I opened the box. The Iron Cross and the other trinkets he’d taken from the house were no longer there. In their place I found what appeared to be old talismans—bits of stone, chiseled and cut into the shape of amulets and scarabs, small dolls cut from small branches, leather thongs I from which hung bits of bone cut into different shapes, rather like charms cut into the shape of different animals, an owl, a deer, a beaver, and so forth. But no distributor. It all had a pathetic kind of childishness about it, like the hiding place of a small boy where marbles, skate keys, and rabbits’ feet are secreted. But there was something ghastly, too, about these toylike figures fashioned out : of the bones of innumerable devoured animals.
I stood there looking at it all, debating what I should do next, when suddenly I heard a small scratching sound behind me.
“This what you looking for?”
I whirled in the direction of the voice, causing the beam of my light to swing in wide arc around the crawl. At first I saw nothing and spun round again and again like one of those small shooting gallery targets that pivot stiffly around when you hit them.
It was the third time—just as my light splashed across the wall opposite the place where the chimney comes down into the crawl—that I saw him. Not him—of course—at least, not all at once. It was just the boot, at first—muddied and disembodied in the dark. Then my light traveled up the leg.
He was sitting there. But not really sitting. Just squatting on his haunches, leaning slightly rearward against the wall.
A strange, choking sound rose from my throat and clogged there. I stood there coughing and clearing it, like a man with a fishbone stuck in his gullet. In my fright I nearly dropped the light. Recovering instantly, I aimed the beam directly on his face and held it there as if I could pin him to the wall with’ it. And so we remained for an interminable second—frozen into immobility, in all that darkness, two figures in a frieze—not speaking, the two of us at two ends of a beam of light, regarding each other.
I can’t imagine what I looked like, but as for him, his face showed not the slightest trace of an expression—not surprise, not fear or anger, not even amusement of the malicious sort he might have indulged in at that moment—just that terrifying blankness I’d come to know so well.
“You lookin’ for this?” he said, holding up the distributor so that my light beam bounced off it and back into my eyes, blinding me momentarily. His voice was nearly as blank as his facial expression.
“Yes,” I said.
He looked at it, dully, as if it were something he barely recognized. “I took it this mornin’.”
“I know you did. You had no right to.”
Suddenly the distributor hit the earth beside his boot with a dull thud. He didn’t drop it or throw it. He merely let it slip to the earth from a limp, open hand.
I picked it up instantly, wheeled around, and started out. As I did, I nearly struck my head on one of the low joists just above me. In the process the light fell and I stooped for it. In that moment Richard rose and started toward me.
I’ll never be certain if he was coming for me or to retrieve the distributor, whether the movement was a gesture of threat or one of assistance. It was that ambiguous. I scrambled for the light and, reaching it first held the beam directly on him as if I could hold him back with that. He stopped dead in his tracks.
“I didn’t want you to go nowhere,” he said.
“You don’t have any right to stop me. And no right to touch my car. That’s not your property.”
I started to turn.
“I ain’t never leavin’!” he screamed at my back.
I hadn’t asked him to leave. I hadn’t even mentioned it. I didn’t have the stomach for it. But now that it was out, now that he’d given me the opening, I charged right in.
“Richard,” I started quite reasonably, trying to suppress the tremor in my voice, “I’ve been thinking. You said you wouldn’t mind working for yourself. What about a little business of your own? A store—or a little repair shop of some sort. Actually I think you’d be terrific in that. What if I set you up in something? Somewhere far away from here where people don’t know anything about—I’d be more than happy to advance the cash—”
I can’t begin to describe the look of contempt on his face. He knew full well that he was being bought off, given a sum of cash on the condition that he quickly and forever disappear. Suddenly it was all clear to me. Clear in a way that it hadn’t been since the very beginning.
“All right then,” I said in a voice that was now quiet and remarkably controlled. “I’m going to give you a week. By that time if you haven’t found a job and a new place to live, I’m going to ask you to leave. And if you don’t go, I’m going to have to have you put out.”
I watched his face for a moment, fascinated by it in the beam of my light. At first the only emotion it revealed with a minor fluttering at a corner of the mouth. Suddenly, something animated the rest of the features, as if some powerful creature chained beneath that mask of impassivity was thrashing around struggling to get out. Then, suddenly, it was loose and charging.
I lunged for the gray square of light just outside the entrance to the crawl. He came after me, and as he did I turned and struck him across the head with my light. The blow caught him high up near the temple. But it was a feckless little thing and hadn’t fazed him a bit.
He made a funny face—an expression I couldn’t quite associate with him. Rather like pity for a man who could strike such a pathetic little blow. Of course, he didn’t believe that I would hit him, and up until that moment I would never have believed it myself. But in that queasy instant of metal impacting on flesh and bone, a strange look came over his features. It went quite beyond pity or contempt. It was simply a face I’d never seen before.
Following that, I knew it was all over. Whatever moments of friendship and trust, however brief and tenuous, we’d shared, were now at end. The cord was severed. There was something unmistakably final in the sound of that dull thud on the head, and even as we gazed at each other I could feel the walls growing up between us.
We stood looking at each other across a small space, both of a us a little breathless and crouching beneath the joists. He tried to speak, but only a hoarse, gurgling sound spilled from his throat. Then for the first time I looked into Richard Atlee’s eyes and saw pure hate.
He was only inches from me when he raised his arm as if to strike. The strength in those arms I knew to be formidable. I’d seen them chop wood and lift rocks. I knew what they could do. And as that arm went up, I’d already begun to recoil under the force of it.
But incredibly it went up, reached its high point, and never came down. It was as if something stayed the arm trembling above me as if he were Indian-wrestling some invisible other hand above us.
When I scrambled through the square and out into the cellar he shouted after me—crouched just inside the entrance—his face framed in black.
“I ain’t goin’. You hear? I ain’t never goin’. Never! You hear? Never!”
When I reached the foot of the stairs his voice was still roaring from the crawl, but somewhat muted now and muffled by distance, like sound filtering through plaster.
I looked up and saw Alice at the top of the stairs, a look of horror in her eyes. She’d heard the shouting and was starting down. I waved her back. Then, clattering up the stairs, I turned to look again at the black square, which appeared blacker at that moment than I could ever recall it.
His face was gone now, and suddenly there was no further sound from the crawl. It had stopped as if at a signal, and all I could hear was the terrible flutter of my heart, banging away at my ribs.
When we got back to the parlor Alice led me to a chair and I collapsed heavily into it.
Her face was white as raw mushrooms. “What in God’s name—”
“He was down there—”
“I heard voices. I couldn’t imagine what—”
“I asked him to go.”
“I gave him a week—”
“A week?” She was holding her flamed cheeks between the palms of her hands. “A week—?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
“You dare live with him for another week?”
“Yes,” I said. “We owe it to him. It’s all our fault. We misled him.”
She stood there speechless, still holding her cheeks.
“One more week,” I went on, panting like a winded dog. “Seven more days and then, job or no job—out.”
She studied my face for a moment, a small anxious smile flickering across her mouth. “You feel better now?” she said. “Now that it’s over?”
“Yes,” I said, a little surprised by her quick change of mood.
“But nothing’s done yet, Alice. This won’t be easy.”
Suddenly I remembered something. “Alice,” I said pointing to the closet right off the parlor, “go get me the guns now and all the ammunition.”
Somewhat later that day I had dizzy spells and I took to bed with pains in the chest. Alice wanted to call in Dr. Tucker, but I made light of those distinctly ominous symptoms and assured her I’d be up and on my feet again soon. In a short time the dizziness and pain subsided, and by supper time I felt well enough to take a cup of soup.
Of course, Richard Atlee didn’t appear at supper that night, but surprisingly, Alice set his usual place for him at table. I tell you—it amazed me. Even now over the space of time, I can still see that cold bare plate with the pieces of silver and the napkin set beside it, looking so vacant and forlorn, rather like the crib of a child who’s just died.
I made it all sound so melancholy. And mind you, it was. In one sense we were bereft. We couldn’t have been more bereft if he’d been our own child. I couldn’t bear to look at Alice. Nor she at me. No talk passed between us. The only sound was the sad tinkle of our spoons scraping along the bottoms of our bowls. We pretended that his setting wasn’t there, but I rather suspect that Alice, just like me, was waiting for him to come up from the crawl. We were both waiting to hear a footstep on the cellar stair—part of us wanting to hear something, and another part dreading to. Nothing came, however, and it was all—yes—so melancholy.
By the time we were ready to go to bed that night, we’d still heard nothing from Richard. We weren’t even certain whether he was in or out of the house.
Just before turning out the lights, I put the unloaded rifle in our bedroom closet with all the cartridges. I loaded the Smith-Wesson and placed it under my pillow. I did the latter in such a way that Alice might not see, but her quick, sharp eyes caught my fumbling movements, and she made a small whimpering sound and turned away.
Shortly after the lights went out, we had our answer about Richard’s whereabouts, for we heard the cellar door to the garden squeal open and footsteps climbing out from beneath the house into the night. It was, of course, Richard, and he was leaving—going out through his old point of egress, as he hadn’t done for many months.
“He’s going,” Alice said in one of those clipped, breathless whispers.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe for good.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Yes,” she said. And we both lay there quietly listening to his steps, neither hurried nor furtive, recede down to the bottom of the garden to the stone wall, the wall that he’d built to keep intruders out, and then beyond that to the woods, where, after a while, we heard it no more.
“Let’s hope,” we’d both said. But even as we lay there and said it, we knew it was a vain hope, and that the real crisis was only just beginning.
That night was a trying one. For sleeplessness and morbid thoughts it took the cake. I kept recalling the incidents of the day—Richard and myself in the crawl; the expression on his face when I asked him to leave; and that moment of sheer despicable pleasure when I snatched the distributor up and told him the car was not his property, that it was my property, implying as much that nothing in our house was his property, or indeed ever had been.
And in the moment that I told him he would have to leave, that was the moment that I felt the most exquisite sense of relief, as if a painful boil had been finally lanced and the heat of infection and the poisonous fluids were all boiling off.
I dropped off into fitful sleep and when I did, I dreamed of him. I saw him towering, giantlike, above me, his face swollen and horrible, the saint’s eyes red and blazing like ingots, his arm cocked above his head to strike, like some remorseless, retributive angel. When I woke I was in a cold sweat with dizziness and the chest pains of the day returning.
I have never paid much attention to my mortality, being content in the past to trust to God on that score. I suppose that in some naive and childish way I believed I was going to live forever and that death is an accident that only happens to someone else. But of course we all think that way.
On this night I lay in bed listening to the beat of my heart, which had been slamming away at the mattress beneath me. Suddenly it appeared to flutter and then stop. I could hear it no longer. Silence such as I’d never heard or ever believed was possible on tins earth of birds and insects and machines—that was the silence that swarmed in upon me. And in that moment I believed I’d died or that I had reached the moment directly preceding death—the transitional moment where a person stands on the threshold of two worlds, not quite in either.
It was a moment of sheer panic. My instinct was to cry out and leap up, to somehow claw my way back into the world of the living. But I was petrified of moving, for fear that the slightest motion on my part would drive me over the precipice.
I can’t recall how long it was I lay that way—eyes open, staring into the darkness of the room, feeling a creeping iciness at my fingertips and toes, and wondering how long the body lives after the heart ceases to beat. “So this is the way it is,” I thought. “It will be like this.”
I must’ve laid there like that for hours, too petrified to move, until I realized that Alice was sitting up ‘in bed beside me.
“Did you hear that?”
I’ll never forget the sound of her voice, shattering the awful silence, and the sudden rush of affection I felt for her.
“Did you hear it, Albert?” she said it again, just like that, a kind of whisper it was.
I sat up feeling the reassuring rush of blood flowing back into me. “Hear what?”
“Outside. Just now.”
I listened for a moment. “I don’t hear anything.” Then, suddenly, just as I’d said that, the garden door squealed open again, and then closed softly.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Alice said.
I looked at the luminous dials on the clock. It said three.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s Richard. He’s come back.”
Chapter Fifteen
That week, the one meant to be his last week, he came back again and again. He went out each night at a set time and returned at a set time, just as he’d done months before, when he’d been living in the crawl. Now he’d gone back to that dark, murky place once more.
In the morning when we rose and went down to breakfast, no longer did we find the table set in the breakfast nook, with the vase of freshly picked flowers, and the kitchen warm and full of the comforting smell of biscuits and perking coffee.
We’d eat our breakfast in silence and go out to work in the garden in silence. The garden, too, was a mess, for no longer did Richard go out there each day to look to the picking and weeding and pruning. Everything was tangled and overgrown, and in some curious way Alice and I had forgotten how to cope.
From meal to meal we waited for him to return, waiting for the sound of the footsteps on the stair. But it never came. Instead, we’d hear him coming and going in darkness, like the sounds of faceless transients you hear at night in shabby little hotels moving along the corridors outside your door.
Though
he was nowhere to be seen, he was never out of my mind. In the daytime I imagined him squatting on his haunches against a wall in the half shadows of the crawl, just as I’d found him the day I’d gone down to retrieve the distributor. It would be just as he had sat with me in the cave a few months before, stolid and squatting, something a little atavistic about it, as if he had sat the way men sat eons before in the icy ‘twilight of Pre-Cambrian caves.
I imagined now that he had gone back to those grisly little feasts of his—the small wild birds and the field rodents, tearing the fur and feathers from them and eating them raw. I wondered if he thought back wistfully of Alice Graves’s table, of the pink and white bone china and the savory scents, and of friends and easy chatter about a warm, lighted table.
One night early in that week we sat at supper, not eating, not seeing each other, just waiting for time and the week to pass. Steam rising from bowls of soup curled listlessly up between us. Suddenly, a pair of heavy steps thudded on the bottom cellar stair—like the sound of stones dropping. Alice’s gaze locked in mine as we listened to the steps, unhurried and relentless, mount the stair, then pause at the top just outside the library door.
I recall watching my hand reach for a fork, my grip closing down hard on the handle, and the five sharp tines gleaming in the gasolier. I could hear him breathing in the moist, mouldy, cellar darkness just beyond the library door, imagining his hand reaching for the knob and then the door swinging open. My fist closed tighter on the fork handle and, my eyes still locked in Alice’s, I half rose expecting him to suddenly appear before me. But the door never opened. Instead, the steps started back down, still unhurried and relentless, like a tide receding.
There was something calculating and nasty about it. As if he wanted us to hear him—wanted to tease and taunt us. Give us a fright and turn away sniggering. As much as to say, “Not this time. Maybe next time.”