Then suddenly the skirmish line was moving again, looking like a fiery bracelet spread out across the dark line of woods, and the hoarse bark of the dogs echoed far out across the chill, clear, moon-filled night.
We waited until shortly past midnight. That’s when we heard the first shots booming up out of the bog. There were four of them in rapid order. Then four more. Then it was silent.
A short time later we climbed the stairs and went to bed. We didn’t speak. We just lay there in the dark, the moon streaming through the casements, a naked branch scratching along beneath the eaves, and listening to each other breathe.
I tried to think of him as he’d looked that day, that wraith-like figure swaddled in mist. But I couldn’t reconstruct his face—not a feature of it—not even those icy blue eyes staring determinedly westward.
At a certain point I heard Alice sob. It was brief and over in a moment. She turned and stifled the rest of it into her pillow. Then there was nothing but the trembling of the mattress beneath her.
I don’t know how many hours were spent that way, and though we never spoke or touched each other, we were curiously together that night—more together than we’d been in a long time. Together with our guilt and cur self-disgust, with our hate for each other, and with our pity.
What came next is hard to say. Alice has her version. I have mine. We both agree that it started with the sound of footsteps. You could hear them coming at a run from the direction of the woods and churning heavily up through the garden in the back. Then they were outside the door, and the next thing we heard was the well-known jiggle of the key and click of the bolts in the cellar door, the hinges squealing open, and then the dull thud of the door closing.
Alice was sitting bolt upright in bed, the whites of her eyes glowing in the dark. I recall lying there, wanting to say, “He’d dead. He’s dead. Don’t worry. He’s dead,” but finding no voice with which to say it. Instead, a sour little puff of air rose from my throat, and I just lay there panting and winded on the pillow.
Then, next, the footsteps pounding up the cellar stairs, and the impact of a body crashing against the library door, still locked with a board nailed across it.
It’s curious the way the mind, in such dire moments, calculates almost coolly the chances of survival. I remember lying quite still and thinking about the library door and the lock and the bar of heavy wood I’d nailed across it. How long could it last? I wondered.
Then I heard the noises—loud, shattering cracks, one following the other—heavy and rhythmic, like strokes of fate, and Alice moaning softly beside me. Then the sound of wood seaming and splitting open, being gouged out and hacked aside as if by some single-minded, ungovernable machine. Then, finally, the hinges screaming as they were ripped out of the timber, and the wrecked door smashing down on the floor of the library, like the crack of doom.
Something got me up then—up by the scruff of the neck and out across the floor to the closet. To this day, I don’t know what it was. Given my state of mind, my physical condition, and the abuse it had already taken in the course of that day, I don’t know what tiny residue of will—what small hard nut of self-preservation there still remained to have gotten me up and across the room—but I moved through the darkness as if I were floating.
I was standing over by the closet clutching the smooth, cold stock of the thing and I recall thinking, “My God, what am I doing with this thing now?” Alice had shrunk back against the headboard of the bed, still under her sheets, digging deep down into the bed like a small burrowing creature, as if she were digging a hole, encapsulating herself in a warm, dark cocoon. The moon fell directly across her sheet-swaddled form, and a small moan rose from somewhere far down within it.
Downstairs, the heavy footfall of Richard Atlee could be heard clattering swiftly across the parlor toward the stairs. Then I could hear him breathing as he started up the step taking them two at a time.
It seemed a lifetime before he reached the top of the landing. While waiting for Richard to reach that point, I recall thinking of my father, curiously enough and seeing him quite distinctly at several stages of his life.
Richard appeared to pause at the top of the landing for a moment, as if he were gathering all his strength for the final push.
Then it came with a heavy thud. It was the bottom of his boot against the door. The door burst open, slammed hard up against the wall, and started to bounce back. But he stopped it with his fist.
At first I saw nothing. Nothing at all. Then Alice screamed. I saw an immense black shadow pass like an eclipse across a shaft of moonlight between the window and me, and move on toward the bed, where it finally came to a halt just at the place where Alice’s sheeted figure cowered against the headboard.
I watched with a peculiar fascination the arm rise high above her and pause. It was like the gesture of a priest in benediction. At the very top of that arm, something glinted and flashed in’ the moonlight. It glowed eerily for the briefest moment and in the next instant started down.
Then there was the thunder and the jagged blue-white flash of the gun as it leapt out of the end of the barrel reaching like a fiery finger across the room.
Then I was moving—dropping down somewhere, with two walls of blackness converging on either side of me. I was being swept swiftly backwards through a long dark tunnel while a bead of light ahead of me grew smaller and more distant. That’s all I recall.
I was rushed to the hospital, where the admitting physician pronounced me dead on arrival. Another doctor verified his findings. They took me to the hospital morgue, where I was laid out on a slab in preparation for the morticians who were to come early in the morning.
I’m told I lay there for nearly four hours—no heart beat, no pulse, no blood pressure, and that the night man—a kind of night watchman who checks the morgue several times a night—discovered that I was alive.
I never met the man. Several months later I tried to find him and thank him, but by that time he was gone. He was, they tell me, a simple uneducated soul, a Central American—part-Indian, part-Spanish—who could barely speak a word of English. He had tried to live in this part of the world because he had heard of the great opportunities. But he found none and he went home.
When he was making his routine check of the morgue, I was lying there on a slab. He said that when he saw me, it seemed to him that he could hear breath—faint and feeble, but nevertheless breath. He pressed a small glass under my lips, as he’d been told by an old Indian cacique that this was the only sure test of death. When he’d done this, instantly he saw small beads of mist clouding the glass, and then he ran and fetched the night doctor.
I lay in a coma between life and death for five days. I have no recollection of any of it. Except that during that time I had a dream, or at least it seemed a dream, only more so. Perhaps “experience” is a better word, since what I saw was more vivid than any dream—more actual. Perhaps it wasn’t a dream at all.
With my first recollection of consciousness I discovered that I was still in my body but that my body and I were now separate. I know that sounds confusing, but I beg you to bear with me.
Because of this separation within me I was able, for the first time, to look at myself—look at my own body. I could see all the wonders of my anatomy, tissue for tissue, and I could see my own soul carefully interwoven into that dead body.
I assumed I was dead. I was completely calm and at peace. “I’ve died,” I said, “as men term death, and yet I’m as much myself as ever. I’m about to get out of my body.”
I watched the whole process by which my soul separated itself from my body. By some power not my own, the soul was rocked, to and fro, sideways, like a cradle is rocked. That gentle rocking motion was the method by which the soul was gradually disconnected from the tissues of the body. After a short time, the lateral motion ceased, and along the soles of my feet, beginning at the toes, passing rapidly to the heels, I felt and heard the snapping of innumerable small cords.
When this had finished I began to feel myself retreating from some point within myself. I was moving upwards, as if I were on an elevator, moving from the feet toward the head. Like the way a rubber band shortens after tension is taken off it. I remember reaching my hips, and saying to myself, “Now there’s no life below the hips.”
I have no memory of passing through the stomach and the chest, but I recall perfectly when my whole self appeared to have been funneled into the head and was contained there. Then I thought 4o myself, “I’m all up in my head now, and soon I’ll be free.”
I moved all around the brain as if I were hollow. I compressed it and its membranes gently toward the center and peeped out between the sutures of my skull until I could see myself emerging, being oozed out like the flattened edges of a bag of membranes. I recall how I appeared to myself, something like a jellyfish in color, texture, and form. As I emerged, I saw two ladies sitting at my head, two men at my feet; another man, a shadowy figure, stood in the corner of the room. I stood up before them and then I realized that they couldn’t see me because I was no longer mortal, I was something else.
When I was fully out of the head, I floated up and down and laterally like a soap bubble attached to the bowl of a pipe until I finally broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor where I slowly rose and expanded into the full stature of a man.
I seemed to be translucent—of a bluish cast. I moved toward the door past the men and the women grouped around the bed. I turned and faced them. As I did so, my left arm grazed the elbow of one of the men. To my amazement my arm passed right through his without any resistance. He gave no sign of having felt the slightest contact. He just stood there gazing at the bed I’d just left. Then, when I looked in the direction in which he was gazing, I saw my own dead body. It was lying just as I’d left it, flat on my back, my feet close together, and my hands clasped across my breast. I was a little shocked at the paleness of my face. I hadn’t looked in a mirror for some time and hadn’t realized how ghastly pale and sickly looking I was.
Now I could see clearly the people sitting and standing around the body and noticed again the two women. One was Alice. She was kneeling by my left side. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying a good deal. Another was the nurse, a Mrs. Plesdish. Dr. Tucker was there and another doctor whom I didn’t recognize, but he was the one with whom my arm collided. I was now standing beside the figure in the shadows and it was my nephew, Wiley Crane.
I tried to get their attention with the object of comforting them—to tell them there was no reason for grief. I ran back and forth from one to the other trying to shake or jostle them. But I made no impression on them. Then the situation struck me as uproarious and I laughed aloud. They must have heard that, I thought, but no one lifted their eyes from my body. They can’t see me, I thought. They’re looking at me but they can’t see me. They keep looking at that body. That’s not me. This is me, and I’m as much alive as ever.
Then I was walking out an open door and descending some steps, walking down a corridor, down some more steps and into the street. I stopped and looked around me. It was the Main Street of the town, but I’d never seen anything like it before. I could see the grayness of the pavements and the redness of the soil in such a light and intensity that I thought it would blind me. I could see millions—billions of ants and worms alive and dwelling in it; I saw the dazzling greens of trees and grasses, the most brilliant blue sky I’d ever seen, and the fantastic washes the rain had made.
Then I discovered to my delight that I’d become taller than I was in life. I was just the height I’d always wanted to be. “How well I feel,” I thought. “Only a few moments ago I was sick and miserable. Then came that change called death which I’d always dreaded. It’s past now, and here I am, still a man, alive and thinking, thinking as clearly as ever, and how well I feel! I’ll never be sick again. I don’t have to die any more.”
Then I lost consciousness again. When I awoke I found myself on the bottom of a narrow roadway that was inclined upward at an angle of about forty-five degrees. I looked up and saw sky and clouds above me. I looked down and saw the tops of green trees. I seemed to be facing directly north. I was very high up, and yet I had no fear of falling. In life I’d always been terrified of heights. I kept climbing upward, and though the road was steep I felt absolutely no fatigue. My feet seemed fight and my step was bouyant as the step of childhood.
As I walked I thought again of my illness, and the last sickly years of my life, and now I rejoiced in my perfect health and strength. I kept climbing and surveying the scenery. It was glorious. I’d never felt such perfect peace. To the east, mountains as far as the eye could see. The forest below me extended to the mountains, reaching up their sides and on up to their craggy-summits. Beneath me lay a forest and a valley through which ran a beautiful river full of shoals and rippling eddies and white spray. It reminded me of the Saco River, where I swam when I was a boy.
Still I saw no one. I thought surely someone from the other world would be here to meet me. But oddly enough, there wasn’t one person whom I wanted to see. Then I started to think of such things as heaven and hell and divine retribution, in which I’d never really believed, and suddenly I was frightened.
Then something happened which is very hard to describe. At different points about me in space I was aware of the expressed thought: “Fear not. You are safe.” I heard no voice. I saw no person, yet I was perfectly aware that at different points, at varying distances from me, someone was thinking that thought for my benefit. How I was made aware of it, I can’t say, but from that moment I ceased to fear anything.
Suddenly I saw up ahead of me three huge rocks blocking the road. I knew I couldn’t get past them, and as I stood there wondering what to do, the same extraordinary thought came filtering down on me: “This is the road to the eternal world.” There was no voice and no person visible, just the thought filling everything up around me. “Yonder rocks are the boundary between the two worlds and the two lives. Once you pass these rocks, you can no more return into the body.”
Suddenly I was filled with an overwhelming conviction that Richard Atlee was standing just on the other side of the rocks. I could see no sign of him, and I don’t know where the notion came from, but there was such a strong, unmistakable aura of him all about the place. And then, most curious of all, for the merest moment, on the center rock and graven just beneath the pinnacle of it, I thought I saw the word GOD written in scarlet letters, just as it had once been smeared above my cellar door. But it was gone the next instant.
I tried to peer past the rocks. The atmosphere was green. Everything seemed cool and quiet and unspeakably beautiful. I made ready to cross. By that time I was determined to get past those rocks. But just as I tried to go forward a voiceless thought came to me again. “You can’t cross here,” it said. The world beyond those rocks seemed more beautiful than ever. I started to go toward the rock, but I found myself struggling. “Richard,” I cried, “please let me in. I want to be with you. Richard—Please, Richard—Richard—Richard—” I felt the power to move or think leaving me. My hands dropped powerless to my side; my shoulders and head dropped forward; the cloud touched my face, and I recall no more.
Suddenly my eyes were open and I was looking at my hands and once again I could feel my body. Then I was looking into the kind, drab features of Mrs. Plesdish, and the first thing I said was, “Where’s Richard? Is he all right?”
“You’re fine,” she said. “You’re going to be all right.”
I recall my heart sinking when she said it, and all I could say was, “Must I die again?”
I lived for several weeks in the intensive care unit of the hospital. I was kept in an oxygen tent in a perpetual gray twilight of semi-consciousness. Unfamiliar figures drifted back and forth like fish in water just beyond the plastic sheets of the tent. From time to time I would see Alice—distant, yet unmistakable—seated in a rocking chair beside my bed. I recall her knitting and ro
cking gently back and forth in the chair. Whenever I stirred, her head would bob up quickly.
I was kept under heavy sedation. The doctors claimed that it was a miracle that I was still alive, considering the amount of heart damage I’d sustained from previous seizures coupled with the kind of massive cardiac arrest I suffered this time.
All the while I lay in the tent, I kept thinking of Richard. I had no way of knowing if he was alive or dead, if my bullet had hit or missed. I kept hoping that I’d missed and that he was alive in prison somewhere, awaiting sentence. For if that were the case, I planned, lying there in the oxygen tent, to hire lawyers and seek an immediate appeal. If that was the case I’d consider myself lucky, I told myself. But down deep, I knew that wasn’t the case.
All the while I was in the hospital, I never actually learned what Richard’s fate had been that night. In one respect I was too weak to ask and—in another—not well enough to be told. But then Alice and I had reached an agreement. We had reached it by mutual and tacit consent and neither of us sought to violate it.
I knew that at a given moment which she would deem both appropriate and safe, I would be told everything, and against that time we would keep our lips sealed.
The day I left the hospital was a gray, dismal time in early November. Small flurries of snow swirled meanly around, then disappeared while the sun lay flat against the sky like a great, white disk.
As we stepped out of the hospital doors, a car drew up at the entrance. I thought it had come to drive us home but when we got in I saw our suitcases strapped on a luggage rack in the back, and I knew we were leaving there forever.
Once in the car and out on the road with the meadows and the low hills sliding past us and small hard flakes of snow whispering on the windshield, Alice told me that she had sold the house. The news neither surprised nor displeased me. I felt a twinge of sadness and then a long sweet breath of relief.
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