“I’m only sorry it didn’t work out,” I said.
She started to cry softly to herself. I took her in my arms and held her there, rocking her back and forth as if she were an infant.
“Will we be lonely, again?” she asked.
“A little perhaps, at first.”
“We weren’t lonely while he was here, were we?”
“No,” I said wearily. “Not in the way we were. But in a different way.”
“In a different way?” she asked, peering up at me. “I don’t understand that.”
“Neither do I,” I said and laughed. And for a brief moment we were like that, holding each other and laughing softly together in the dark.
While I held her thus, the silence of the night was suddenly broken by the sound of the cellar door squealing open.
Alice suddenly clung to me.
“Yes,” I said, still patting her hand. “He’s on his way out again.”
Shortly after, we were asleep. I dreamed about my father, who’d been dead nearly fifty years. He appeared to me as a young man—in the full glow of health and vigor, a shock of splendid black hair atop his head, and the brown, gentle eyes I recall so well. We were sitting in a canoe far out on a lake, fishing and laughing, and eating sandwiches, the way we had so often, so many years ago. It was a sad, strange dream.
But the dream didn’t last very long, and I was awake an hour or so after I’d retired—awakened by the sound of a car rattling up the drive.
I lay there listening to it, imagining it was Birge or his man, come to check on the noises I’d reported. Then, as I lay there, it occurred to me that I heard another car, although I doubted my senses. Birge certainly wouldn’t have expended two patrol cars on me. I was quite astounded that he’d bothered even sending one.
Still I lay there, wondering if I oughtn’t to get up and look, and that’s when I heard what I thought was yet another car. And only then did I decide to get up.
Alice was already awake, sitting up in bed, staring at the window. “What is it?”
“Probably Birge,” I said, pretending to be casual.
Just as I said it we heard another car come rattling up the driveway. That was number four. It was then I got out of bed. “Wait here,” I said.
“Albert—”
“Wait. I’ll be right back.”
From the bedroom window I looked out into pitchy blackness. In the next moment I heard another car and then voices, muffled and somewhat muted by distance, come drifting round the corner of the house and up into the bedroom.
I turned and went back to Alice.
“What is it?” she asked.
“They’re back,” I said, and feeling myself grow icy, I started for the rifle.
“Don’t go down there.” She got up and tried to block me, but I grabbed the gun and pushed easily past her. “You stay here. Don’t move.”
“Albert!” she cried out after me, but I was already descending the stairs.
From the kitchen it was possible to see more. There were fewer trees, and the night from there wasn’t quite so impenetrable as it was around the back of the house. Here there were large gray spaces in the black, and as I stood by the kitchen door I could make out shapes huddled in the darkness.
There wasn’t too much I could see at first. However, there was no mistaking the face that the driveway was lined with cars, their headlights out, and people sitting in them. I guessed there were five or six cars, because they appeared to extend the entire length of the driveway.
The front car was nearly just outside the kitchen door, its low, humped silhouette appearing like a large bug dreaming. I could hear voices floating out of the open windows and see the orange tips of cigarettes inscribing glowing arcs within.
Suddenly the doors of the lead car opened and several people got out. Then I could hear doors opening a little further down the line and slamming, and then the crunch of footsteps on the gravel.
In a moment there were small clusters of figures all over the driveway and out near the garage—small huddled masses. I could hear talk and then laughter—ugly laughter, sniggering and muted—the sound of shabby little men grown bold on cheap wine and beer. Just the sound of it made the flesh on the front of my scalp -crawl. There were nearly two dozen out there.
I called Birge’s office again from the downstairs phone, keeping my voice low so as not to arouse Alice any more than she was already.
This time I reached Birge directly, feeling once again grateful at the sound of that unctuous, wheedling voice on the other side. Even as I was spewing the story out to him I realized it must have sounded wildly incoherent When he answered me, his voice had that irritatingly soothing quality as if he were talking to an hysterical child.
“You’ve got to come,” I kept saying over and over again.
“Now, just relax. I told you I’m sending a car right out there.”
“Never mind a car. You come. You come—”
“He’ll be out there very soon.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ain’t nothin’ to worry about, I told you. You’re just a little overwrought.”
“Don’t tell me I’m overwrought. I must’ve called you a half-dozen times. You never sent anyone out here. And I don’t believe you’re going to send anyone out here now.”
“Now you’re wrong there, Mr. Graves.”
I was “Mr. Graves” again.
“You’re wrong there,” he went on. If you could’ve heard the smirk in that voice it would’ve made you sick.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” I went on heatedly. “You sent these boys out here. And don’t tell me you didn’t.”
“Course I did,” he said, and started to laugh. “I swear I don’t know where you get your ideas, Albert. I been lookin’ out for you right along. If I hadn’t, you’d been dead long ago.” He laughed some more; then there was a click on the phone, and then silence.
Once again, the night closed in and we were all alone. I went back upstairs. Alice was still sitting up in bed. She gaped at me. “Who were you talking to?”
“No one,” I said and took her by the hand. “I want you to get up now and put your bathrobe on.”
“Albert—”
“Please don’t argue with me. Just do as I say.”
The tone of my voice made her suddenly docile, and she got quickly to her feet and stood beside me shivering in the dark. I led her across the room to a closet and took out a bathrobe. I think it was mine.
“Put this on,” I said and helped her into it. Suddenly she appeared very tiny and helpless to me, like a small child, and in the next moment I was full of pity for her.
“Now, come with me,” I said and led her to the bathroom. When we reached there, I pushed her gently in. She was about to put on the light, but I stayed her hand.
“Keep the light out.”
Suddenly a pane of glass shattered somewhere down below us.
“Albert—”
“Now, lock the door and don’t come out until I tell you to.” I went to my bed and got the Smith-Wesson from under the pillow, then went back and handed it in to her. I could see her staring at it, the ugly metal barrel glowing in the dark.
“Take it!” I said, impatiently. She shrank backwards into the bathroom, away from it, and I had to follow her in. When I reached her, I took her palm and planted the pearl handle firmly in it. She was about to protest but in the next instant I slammed the door between us.
Another window pane shattered somewhere in the house. “Lock the door!” I shouted through the partition. I could hear her breathing on the other side. I stood there waiting to hear the bolt click, but I heard nothing.
“Lock it!” I shouted again. “Lock it!” Then the sound came—a small, high, metallic click. I turned and started for the rifle.
It was only a matter of moments before the whole house was under a hailstorm of rocks and flying debris. Large boulders struck the roof, then clattered and bumped their wa
y down the length of the gables, making a fearful racket as they went. From time to time, several boulders would land on the roof at one time, and the sound of them bumping and rolling down the eaves was amplified into booming claps that echoed horribly in the empty attic.
The rocks landing against the side of the house would strike the clapboards with a loud crack. When I first heard them, I thought they were rifle shots.
I ran from window to window trying to get a glimpse of my assailants. But each window was being systematically punched out. Glass was shattering all around me, and rocks ricocheted off the walls inside the house. After a while I just huddled in a corner with my rifle, wondering what to do next.
They’d ringed the house by this time, and the darkness was completely on their side. I could hear them outside thrashing all around the house, hooting and shrieking like Indians, and trampling through the bushes and the garden. It was horrible.
But curiously enough, after I’d bundled Alice up and taken her to the bathroom and locked her in, I ceased to be frightened. The fear just melted off me like an old reptile skin, and what was left in its place was a hate the depth of which I never knew existed in me.
I’ve often thought of that in past years, that sloughing off of fear. That’s not to say I haven’t feared things since. A fearful man is a fearful man. But that night, for as long as the horror lasted, I ceased to be frightened of it. I can’t say exactly why. Perhaps I was too numb to fear or to comprehend danger. But more and more I’m convinced it had something to do with my need to take care of Alice.
The torrential downpour of rocks increased at such a rate that at one point it sounded as if the house were in the crushing embrace of some huge, mindless creature who’d made a plaything of it. The walls and floors and joints creaked and shuddered. It was as if the poor place, somewhere down deep in its foundations, was groaning with pain.
Then suddenly, as if by some preordained signal, it was silent. The rocks stopped, the hooting ceased, the thrashing movement came to a halt, and once again the night flowed in upon me with all of its beautifully disarming sounds—the crickets and the cicada, the hoot owls and the frogs. It was a kind of mockery.
But even more disarming was the fact that I’d now lost track of them. Before, when they were howling and screeching like banshees, and rocks were flying off the house, I knew where they were and what they were up to. There was a curious comfort to be taken from that. Now, suddenly, I could see and hear nothing.
I went back upstairs to check on Alice. I heard her weeping behind the bathroom door. I went quickly to it and spoke to her with the door still closed between us. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” came her muffled voice. “Are you?”
“I’m fine. I’m going back downstairs to look around. You stay right where you are. Don’t move.”
With the rifle in my hands, I hurried quickly back downstairs, for the fear I had was that this silence indicated that they would now try to enter the house.
I was amazed at the speed and deliberation with which I moved. It seemed so purposeful. So much to the point. I appeared hardly the invalid I knew I was. Civilized man simply doesn’t know, or has forgotten, the amazing resources of his body—the vast reserves of endurance that can be called up even by a flabby, diseased body.
When I reached the lower floor, I found the place a shambles. Even in total darkness I could see how much destruction had been done, windows punched out, curtains torn down and hanging from the rods, bric-a-brac, lamps, crystal, smashed—all beautiful, irreplaceable things Alice and I had accumulated over a space of thirty years of marriage. And the floor, strewn with jagged shards of glass and rocks that had been tossed in from the outside, so that you had to tread your way very carefully.
As far as I could determine, no one had yet entered the house, although the kitchen door, which had sustained an awful beating, now hung on its hinges, like a loose tooth just waiting to be plucked out. Inside the kitchen, midway between the table and the door, lay an enormous boulder that had undoubtedly been tossed against the door by several of them, with the purpose of stoving it in. The device, while barbarous, had worked admirable.
It was to this door that I went, still holding the rifle, a little coyly, like a man holding a dead rat by the tail. The safety catch was still on and the weapon, pointed downwards, dangled clumsily in my hands.
When I reached the door, I swung the rifle barrel against the few jagged spikes of glass still remaining in the door frame. They flew out and landed on the brick step outside with a high, almost musical sound. Then, peering out through the empty frame I saw something that turned my bones to jelly.
At different points in a rough perimeter of sixty yards or so, I could see fiery pinwheels twirling in the dark, all around the house. Undoubtedly, they were rags, soaked with gasoline and then ignited. There were nearly ten I counted, twirling around out there. It was almost pretty, I thought, those orange-yellow circles spinning against the black night, disembodied and scorching the night air, like some fantastic fireworks. The pleasant smell of them came acrid and pungent to my nose, faintly reminiscent of burning punk on Halloween.
Suddenly there was a long, blood-curdling shriek, and one of the pinwheels with an unseen person at the end of it started to streak toward the house, moving in a line directly toward me, where I stood in the open doorway.
I don’t know what I thought. I don’t suppose you ever do in moments like that. The mind goes a total blank, and you see the thing—this ball of whirling fire streaking toward you like a meteor—with someone at the other end of it shrieking out there in the darkness.
In the next instant I jerked the rifle clumsily up with the intention of shooting high over the runner’s head, hoping that the sound of a rifle report would be enough to turn him off. I hoisted the barrel skywards and squeezed the trigger. The only sound that followed was a sickening click. I’d forgotten to release the safety.
Some twenty paces off and to the right, a face illumined by a torch light suddenly burst out of the darkness. It was the face of a young boy. Not an unpleasant face. The kind of face you see at high school football games or at a dance. And to my horror, I suddenly realized that I recognized the face. It was the young boy who for the past several years had been waiting on me at the tobacconist’s shop in town. His parents often sat next to us in church, and I had frequently chatted amiably with the boy himself.
But now those boyish features were twisted into an ugly snarl. He stopped dead in his tracks about ten paces from where I stood and shouted an obscenity. Then he raised the flaming torch.
I watched the orange wheel above the boy’s head grow larger and begin to whirl faster and faster. I gazed at it in a rapt detachment—like a spectator at an accident—wondering almost impassively when he would let it fly from his hand. I had forgotten the gun or abandoned the notion of even using it—one or the other.
In the next moment he screamed and once again started streaking toward me, the flaming rag spinning madly above his head. He seemed to grow larger and larger until he no longer seemed like a boy, like a living creature, but rather like a thing—a piece of machinery gone haywire—a runaway locomotive that nobody could stop.
Then he was so close I could hear him breathing. For a moment our eyes locked and we contemplated each other in a shower of sparks.
Just then a mass of black shuttled across my line of vision. That’s all I saw at first—a black blur between the boy and me. The figure twirling the firebrand tumbled heavily on the earth a few feet from where I stood. It was as if he’d been lifted bodily off both feet and flung down; the torch fell harmlessly aside. The two figures rolled over it, sending out a great upward shower of sparks, and then rolled past into the shadows. There was a scramble and then some grunting, and then a dull sickening thud.
I knew it all before I got there. I didn’t need the little bit of light still flickering in the trampled torch to tell me what had happened.
When I scrambled
down the steps and stood there, the unfired rifle still dangling at my side, what I saw was like a little vignette you come upon in stained glass in some old church: some grisly Old Testament tale of pride or lust or murder—Cain and Abel. I suppose, or Absalom and David—telling an ancient parable of violence.
That’s the way Richard Atlee looked at that moment, panting there like a winded animal and crouching over the limp carcass of the boy. In his fist, the heavy boulder with which he’d bludgeoned him was still swinging from the momentum in his arm.
Richard stared up at me. I could see his face clearly in the orange shadows of other burning rags. They were still all around us, ringing us, but now they’d moved closer and their pinwheels were strangely still. At a certain point they all halted, not twenty feet off, and silently watched the little scene being played before the kitchen door. There was no sound other than the hissing of the burning rags and the sound of crackling sparks flying upwards.
I stooped over the boy, trying to see what had been done to him. At first he seemed to be sleeping, strangely childlike, his hands folded across his chest in an attitude of beatific repose. Then when I knelt down I could see that the front of his skull was caved in. A large flap of flesh had been gouged out by Richard’s rock and hung loosely from the front of the boy’s head. From beneath that, small bubbles of grayish matter were seeping out at the edges. The eyes were still open, but the pupils had rolled upwards, only their bottoms still showing from beneath the upper lid, like thin, black crescents.
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