And there was a next time. Several next times. But he never came in. Just paused and waited outside the library door—breathing so we could hear him.
Hate isn’t an emotion that comes easily to me. But I tell you that now I commenced to hate him. Not merely because I feared him. I did fear him. Now much more than even at the very beginning. The unpredictability, the violence—it was all so terrifying. But quite beyond that normal fear, I began to have some deep and horrible loathing for him.
One day, shortly before that week was up, I nailed a heavy plank of wood against the library door, and once again I changed all the locks in the house—except the one on the cellar door.
Alice said, “Why? Why not that one, too?”
Yes—why not the cellar door with the bleached and runny letters GOD nearly all faded now about the lintel? Why not? Why not?
But I couldn’t say “Why not?” then. I could now. But why go into it?
Then Alice said to me around the fifth day of that week, “If you won’t put him out, call Birge. Birge’ll do it.”
“I know Birge will do it. He’d love to do it.”
“Then call him,” she persisted. “If you won’t, I will.” Her face had a nastiness I’d scarcely ever seen there before. There was something petty and vengeful about it. Imagine that! That from Alice. Alice, the gentle and mild; the friend of the poor and defenseless; the protector of lame birds and stray animals; Alice, who had made the Christmas feast and sung hymns in church beside a strange young man she thought of as her own son, attaching to his appearance proof of a divine will. Even succeeded in making me believe he was somehow my son, as well.
Now she was quite ready, eager in fact, to turn that son over to Birge. And, of course, she was right. If I had no stomach for the business, I could easily call Birge. Birge had stomach enough for everybody. Men like Birge exist for just such things—to carry out the will of the squeamish majority. People just like me—mouthing pieties, regurgitating all kinds of rosy, idealistic twaddle, and not for a moment wanting such things to come to pass.
So I left the garden door open. And I didn’t call Birge. I didn’t have to. He called me.
It was strange the way that call came. Almost as if he were thinking of us at the same moment we were thinking of him. Only he’d reached for the phone first, and all I recall, hearing that voice, was the enormous sense of relief I had—the way the appearance of an approaching ocean liner must affect a man stranded on a sinking raft.
“Albert,” came that low, familiar drawl, “I was passing by the other day and almost stopped in. But I didn’t. The place looks a little strange. How are you and the Mrs.?” His voice was oddly compassionate.
For a moment I almost believed he was serious and genuine. I had an urge to fall on my knees before him and weep with relief. But then the old voice came, wheedling and unctuous, confident of its great, persuasive powers. “You’re a good fellow, Albert. A gentleman. No one would question the decency of your motives. But I feel you’re into something way over your head. Some kind of trouble?”
“Trouble?”
“With that boy.”
“No trouble with the boy,” I blustered. “Only with the people who come around here bothering us.”
He paused, letting me hear something like the scratching of a pen on a pad coming from his side.
“I don’t like this boy,” he said.
“I’m sure of that.”
“I’ve got bad feelings about him. My feelings don’t often mislead me.”
“You wanted to hire him once. Make him a deputy.”
“I only wanted to help you out of an awkward spot. This boy’s a drifter. What we used to call a box-car rat.” He paused again, as if he were weighing the effect of his words. “What would you do,” he went on, “if a rat got into your house? You’d smoke him out, wouldn’t you? Or call for the exterminator?” he added with a small laugh. “Well, I’m the exterminator.”
That’s when the anger came over me, just as I imagined him thinking he had me right in ‘the palm of his hand, panting to be saved.
“Tell me, Albert. Has this boy threatened you? Are you afraid to say something? Because if you are, you don’t have to be. I’ll run him off. Just say the word. And you don’t have to worry about his coming back. Once I run ’em off, they don’t come back. I promise you that.”
When, at the end of it all, I said, to my own amazement, and sick to my stomach, “No,” and hung up the phone, there was Alice, standing there, where she’d undoubtedly stood for the greater part of that conversation. She had the look of one betrayed, full of bewilderment and hurt and growing rage.
So we lived that way for several days beyond the week’s time limit I’d set for Richard to vacate the crawl, not knowing what to do next, and barely suspecting even what I wanted to do. Until, that is, the smell came again.
It’s curious the way that started—first faint, barely perceptible, seeming to hover over a small corner of the kitchen. Then, suddenly, it was swift and everywhere, like a plague sweeping across a blighted land. Rising up from one story of the house to the next. That same harsh, fecal odor, like raw sewage. We opened the kitchen windows, and when it spread to other parts of the house, we opened more windows.
Alice cried now every day and prayed every night before going to sleep. Then she’d sit on the edge of the bed watching me check the rifle and the pistol. Now when I stuffed the pistol under the pillow I didn’t even bother to conceal it from her.
“He’s punishing me, isn’t he?” she said one night.
“Only you?” I said with bitter irony.
“Yes. He’s always liked you. It’s me he’s never been able to accept.”
“Oh, Alice.” I rolled over so that my back was to her.
“He’s punishing me,” she persisted.
“What for? What have you ever done to him but shown him kindness?”
“He’s never seen it as that,” she pleaded, and turning over with a pathetic whimper, she cried herself to sleep.
The next morning, shortly after she rose, she told me that she was going to call Birge.
“No,” I said emphatically. “You will not.”
“Why—Why, in the name of God? Will you tell me why?”
Her voice rose and I hushed her, for he was undoubtedly below in the crawl straining to hear everything we said. She started again. This time more softly: “Tell me why?”
It was an answer I felt I owed her, and so I set out to make my case. “In the first place, I will not put that boy into Birge’s hands, because he means to kill him—”
She started to protest, but I waved her to silence. “Don’t ask me how I know that or even dare to think it. But I know just as surely as I’m talking to you this moment that if I turn that boy over to Birge, it’d only be a matter of days until we’d hear that he was dead. Quite accidentally, mind you. Terrible tragedy, and all that, but the boy brought it on himself. That sort of thing.”
She stared at me a little queerly, half believing what I’d said.
“In the second place, if we turn the boy over to Birge, and it turns out I’m wrong—that Birge doesn’t kill him but merely chases him out of the county—where do you think that leaves us?”
“Leaves us,” she murmured, confused by thoughts moving too fast for her.
“Yes,” I said, a little cruelly. “Where do you s’pose that leaves us?”
She saw where the line of thought was going, but refused to pursue it. I pursued it for her.
“Suppose Birge runs him out of the county. Knowing Richard and what he is, how long do you think he’d stay out? And if he were to come back here some dark night—show up on your doorstep, or even better, get back into your cellar—how do you think things would go for us then, my dear? How much charity do you think he’d be prepared to show his old benefactors who’d crossed him? About as much as he showed Petrie when they crossed him.”
“You don’t think he’d—”
“Kil
l us?” I said almost charmingly. “I most certainly do.”
I had to laugh a little at the neatness of the dilemma I’d just posed. But Alice didn’t laugh. She just stared at me, a kind of sick, idiotic expression on her face. I was about to turn and leave, but she caught my arm. “Then let’s go ourselves.”
She whispered it at me with a kind of hissing desperation. “Yes. Why not? Why not just drive off ourselves?” Her eyes implored me. “At least for a while.”
“You won’t find a house here when you get back.”
“I’m willing to take the loss. At least then he’d be gone.”
There was a kind of bold, if not desperate, logic about it. And I must confess the idea was not totally unappealing. Perhaps it was an easy way out, but it seemed so drastic a step. Like burning down a house to get rid of a rat.
“He can’t keep it up much longer,” I said, finally. “Soon he’ll go himself. Of his own accord.”
“Of his own accord?” She said the words over again, as if she hadn’t quite under stood them the first time. “Is that what we’re waiting around here for?”
She didn’t wait for my answer. She gave a short, mocking little laugh. “Poor Albert.” She laughed again. “Poor. Poor. Sweet. Simple Albert.” Gales of laughter were suddenly pealing from her.
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“What way?”
“In that tone of voice. As if you pitied me.”
“I do pity you, Albert,” she said, her eyes all wet, and red in the face from laughing. “I pity us. You and I for what we are.”
“And what are we?” I shouted.
“Ssh,” she whispered and winking, pointed with her finger to the kitchen floor.
“What are we?” I shouted again.
“The meek of the earth,” she whispered and then she was gone.
The following morning the stench was unbearable. We opened all the windows wide and got out of the house as early as we could. We stayed out all morning and came back at noon only to get a bit of food and carry it back outside to eat it. In the afternoon we went walking in the woods. I don’t know how long we stayed out there. It was already September and the days were beginning to grow cool and shorter.
We argued back and forth. It’s useless to recount the nasty scenes and the bitchy sentiments of that afternoon, but at the end of our walk in the woods, we had come to a decision. We would go ourselves. Not permanently, to be sure. Just a short trip of an indefinite length, without any fixed destination, so as to make it very difficult for us to be followed. Perhaps we would be gone two months, maybe three—at the end of which time, he would surely be gone, and we would move back in. Assuming, that is, that we still had a house to move into.
That night was the first night of the phone calls. They were ugly things. We’ve all had them from time to time—the phone ringing later than it should, and nothing but heavy breathing on the other end. We had one of those the first night; two or three the second. Then nearly a dozen the night after.
Then the calls began to come earlier—usually just about the time we’d finish supper—and then continued right up until about bedtime. They were always the same thing—no words and a lot of heavy breathing.
At first we tried to pay no attention, but after the calls continued for several nights, it began to grow unbearable. At first I thought it was the bunch that had come out to the house that night several weeks back. It occurred to me that by these calls they were watching our movements, staking us out, as it were, for yet another nocturnal assault.
But after that I began to think that it was Richard Atlee (at this point we never knew if he was in the house or not), and for some unaccountable reason I found this second possibility more plausible than the first. It suddenly occurred to me that what he was doing was trying to make us believe that the calls, by their frequency and number, were the work of the same vile bunch that had visited us before. By doing this he meant to frighten us, to drive us out, leaving him behind as the heir apparent to all our possessions. Right then and there I decided, come hell or high water, I would not leave the house, with all our possessions and everything we’d accumulated over the years, to Richard Atlee. Not to him and not to any pack of roving vandals whose only purpose was to loot and mutilate.
One night we thought we heard someone prowling around outside in the dark, near the house. It might have simply been imagination or a case of badly frayed nerves. By that time we were pretty rattled. Also the phone calls that night had grown so frequent and jarring that, much against my better instincts, I called Birge’s office.
The phone was answered by a deputy or some assistant. I told this person who I was and asked to speak with Birge. He promptly informed me that Birge was out and very politely asked if he could be of any assistance. I explained our situation—told him about the calls and the noises about the house. I started to tell him about our prowlers of several weeks earlier, but “Of course,” he said, he’d heard all about it already. I asked him when Birge was expected back, and he said not that night, and even as he was saying it I heard Birge’s soft, mocking laughter in the background.
The deputy assured me that he would send a patrol car out to the house immediately, and with a sinking heart I hung up the phone.
Alice did a curious thing that night. Just prior to going to bed, she went into Richard’s room, which had remained shut for several weeks. She put on the lights, poked her head in the door, and gazed quickly around. She stood there a moment, then crossed quickly to the bed, sat down and fingered the edge of the blanket thoughtfully. Then she rose, flicked off the lights, and closed the door of the room behind her. It all must have taken no more than a minute or two, but it left a very strong impression—almost as if she were certain, poor woman, that if she’d only open the door and look, she’d find the sweet, lambish infant she’d lost somewhere, curled safely in its bed.
After that we locked all the doors, turned out the lights, and went upstairs to get ready for bed.
I undressed swiftly and got into pajamas. All the while that we were undressing the phone kept ringing, but now we didn’t even bother answering it. In the next moment, Alice slipped despairingly into bed.
But I didn’t get into bed. I went to the closet and took out the rifle along with several boxes of cartridges. Alice watched me with an expression of tired resignation on her face. She knew now I would never leave the house until the situation was resolved one way or another.
“What are you going to do with that?” she asked, looking blankly at the gun.
“Don’t worry.”
I flicked out the lights, then walked to the window and opened it as softly as I could. Next I drew up a chair and placed the rifle with the safety catch on across my lap.
There was no moon, but there were innumerable stars such as there are in early autumn. Outside the window I could see nothing but an inky curtain of blackness. I sat there listening to the night sounds, letting them flow in upon me—the cicadas, and the late peepers, an owl hooting in the branches of the witch hazel, and a chorus of bullfrogs intoning down along the bog. It was the sort of night that ought to bring peace and deep, healing rest to any man. Only a year ago, I could’ve felt that such a night was a sure sign of God and His infinite benevolence. Now the very lushness of that night, heavy with the scent of pine and twice-bloomed sweet pea, only seemed like evidence of some universal treachery. The night cast a protective shawl over the furtive movements of the intruder. The night was the friend of the thief and the murderer.
Alice called me softly from the bed. “Albert.”
“Go to bed.”
“Albert.”
“Go to bed now. I just want to sit here a while and see if I can see anything.”
“Do you think they’ll send someone out to help us?”
“Didn’t you just hear Birge’s man say they were sending someone out? Go to bed. I’ll be along soon.”
I wasn’t very convincing, nor did I try to be. By this t
ime, she knew as well as I did just precisely what could be expected of Birge and his deputies.
“No, they won’t,” she said softly. “They won’t send anyone at all.”
The phone rang again—a jarring rattle beside the bed. We listened to it ring insistently for nearly a quarter of an hour; then suddenly and ominously it stopped altogether.
Once again I peered out into the darkness and thought about all the hours that lay between us and dawn—like a weary, shipwrecked man swimming doggedly along, thinking of all the dark, cold water between himself and shore.
“Albert.”
“Go to bed, dear. I’ll take the phone off the hook.”
“No—Come here.”
“I will. In a few minutes. Go to bed now.”
“Albert. Please.”
Sighing, I leaned the rifle against the window sash, stood up, and made my way across to her in the dark.
When I reached her she thrust her hand out from beneath the blanket and snatched mine. So suddenly old and withered that hand felt to me in the dark.
“Now, now, now.” I patted her hand reassuringly.
She looked up at me through the darkness. “We never really wanted him, did we, dear?”
“Not quite so deeply as he wanted us.”
“We led him on, didn’t we?”
“Yes. I think that too, now.”
“It wasn’t really his fault—any of it.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” I said, still patting her hand. “And all the good work he’s done for us,” she went on. “The stone fence and the painting, and the electrical wiring, and all the other little attentions. The suppers and the laundry.”
“He was trying so hard to please.”
I could sense her studying me in the dark. “It is,” she went on, “a kind of love. Isn’t it?” She had to hesitate and swallow before she could bring herself to say the word.
“You mean all this clawing and clinging? The refusal to go?”
“Yes,” she said. “Even the smell. That, too.”
“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling sorry for her. Sorry that she had not had more love in her life. And sorry that she had not had an opportunity to give more love, for surely no one had a greater capacity to give love than Alice. And my fault, I suppose, had always been a kind of unresponsiveness to that. While loving her in my fashion, I’d always kept her somewhat at a distance. And wasn’t it sad, I thought, that now, at this late period in her life, when this boy, this lonely and graspingly possessive creature hungering for affection, comes along to her, isn’t it sad that he should turn out to be like Richard Atlee—a creature who could not take or give love with any moderation or balance? Only with insane excesses? And just as sad for Richard Atlee. Just as sad for him, given his ungovernable hunger to be loved, that he had to stumble into a household where demonstrations of affection, when on those rare occasions they occurred, could only be described, at best, as restrained.
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