Nightshade

by John Saul

  Then they’d started coming to her door, talking to her like she was supposed to know who they were. She’d shut the door in their faces, and after a while, when she stopped answering the door at all, they stopped coming. But she knew they were still watching her, so she stopped going out of the house.

  She liked that much better, because she no longer had to worry about anything. And she wasn’t alone either, not really.

  She still had her memories, and after a while it wasn’t like they were memories at all. Sometimes, when she was fixing supper she’d make enough for two, and set out a place for Cynthia, too. She had a dim memory of Joan telling her that Cynthia wasn’t coming home, but Emily had known that wasn’t true — it was just another of the ways Joan was always trying to trick her. Besides, Joan had always been jealous of her sister, ever since she was a little girl. So Emily simply ignored what Joan said, certain that Cynthia had just gone away for a little while, and would be back any day now.

  So she stayed in her house, and after a while one day seemed just like another, and one week blended into the next, and the months and the seasons and the years all ran together.

  And Emily waited for Cynthia to come home.

  Today, though, something was different.

  Something didn’t quite feel right.

  But what was it?

  She peered dimly at the frying pan that was sizzling on the front burner, in which a quarter of an inch of oil was already bubbling. She tried to remember what she’d been intending to do with the skillet and the hot oil. Make breakfast?

  She wasn’t sure. In fact, she wasn’t really certain what time it was. But it was light out, and she was hungry, so it must be morning.

  Then, from the front of the house, she thought she heard a sound.

  Cynthia!

  She must finally have come home!

  The frying pan immediately forgotten, Emily pushed through the swinging door that led to the little dining room that was furnished only with a worn oak table so small that even if you crowded it, you couldn’t get more than six people around it. Not that anyone ever sat around it anymore, and it was certainly big enough for herself and Cynthia.

  Emily hurried through the dining room into the little foyer, and eagerly opened the door, certain Cynthia would be on the porch, ready to accept her mother’s hug.

  But the porch was empty except for the pile of newspapers that Emily never bothered to bring into the house anymore. Frowning, she looked out into the street, but all she saw was a man in a blue uniform, carrying a leather bag. As he raised his hand to wave at her, Emily quickly shut the door.

  Another one of Joan’s spies.

  Then she knew!

  Cynthia had her own key! She’d come in by herself and gone up to her room!

  * * *

  IN THE KITCHEN, the oil in the frying pan bubbled, then began turning black as curls of smoke rose from its surface.

  * * *

  EMILY STARTED TOWARD the stairs, but paused as she sensed something vaguely amiss. Something in the air? But even as her nostrils caught the first faint fumes drifting in from the kitchen, her old eyes fell on the threadbare brocade chair that stood just inside the archway leading into the parlor. Now how had that happened? Hadn’t it just come back from the upholsterers, covered with the bright, colorful material Cynthia had picked out the day before she’d gone on her trip? She’d have to speak to the upholsterer about the shoddy material they’d used!

  But that could wait. Cynthia finally coming home was far more important than any chair!

  The original reason she’d paused at the foot of the stairs having vanished from her mind as completely as if it had never been there at all, Emily hurried up the stairs and into the front bedroom. “Cynthia?” she called. “Oh, it’s so good to finally have you . . .”

  Emily’s voice faded into silence as she realized the room was empty.

  Her clouded eyes searched the room. “Cynthia?” she whispered. “Cynthia, when are you coming home?”

  * * *

  THE OIL IN the frying pan burst into flames just as the breeze outside caught one of the lace curtains that hung on each side of Emily Moore’s kitchen window. The breeze fanned the flames higher, the fire licking at the flimsy material as a beast might taste its prey before leaping to consume it. . . .

  * * *

  EMILY MOVED INTO the room on the second floor, her eyes falling on the photograph of her older daughter that hung on the wall exactly where she and Cynthia had placed it when they’d picked it up from the photographer the week after Cynthia’s eighteenth birthday.

  The beautiful gown Cynthia wore in the portrait still hung in Cynthia’s closet, along with all her other clothes.

  The book she’d forgotten to take with her on her trip still lay open, facedown on her nightstand.

  Everything was exactly as she had left it —

  How long ago?

  A week?

  A month?

  Surely no longer than that.

  And she’d be home any day now! Of that, Emily was absolutely certain.

  She moved slowly around the room, touching the objects on Cynthia’s vanity table, all the perfume and lipstick and eye shadow and mascara that Cynthia loved so much.

  Every one of them was in its place, waiting for Cynthia.

  She opened one of the drawers of Cynthia’s bureau, her trembling fingers caressing the soft cashmere of the sweater that lay within, her eyes oblivious to the depredations of the moths and the yellowing of the fraying fabric.

  She closed the drawer and let her eyes sweep over the room one last time.

  All was as it should be, exactly as Cynthia had left it.

  Emily left the room then and headed toward the sewing room, but as she passed the top of the stairs, an acrid odor filled her nostrils.

  Smoke?

  She frowned, trying to remember if she’d lit the fire that morning.

  She couldn’t remember.

  If fact, she wasn’t quite sure she’d even been downstairs that morning.

  Clutching the banister, she started down the steep flight.

  The odor grew stronger as she came to the foot of the stairs, but when she peered into the parlor, the fireplace was dark.

  But she was certain she smelled smoke!

  The kitchen?

  Why would there be smoke in the kitchen? She’d just come downstairs, hadn’t she?

  She moved toward the kitchen, pushed open the door that separated it from the dining room. She saw it: flames boiling up from a skillet someone had left on the stove. More flames consuming the curtains around the window and charring the wood of the cupboards.

  Hurrying across to the stove, Emily picked up the frying pan and started toward the sink, but the skillet slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. The burning oil quickly spread across the linoleum, and an instant later the floor was covered with a sheet of fire.

  Emily stared at the flames in frozen horror for a moment, then turned and fled from the kitchen. “Cynthia!” she called out. “The house is on fire! Hurry!”

  Moving as quickly as her old legs would carry her, Emily made her way to the front door, pulled it opened, and lurched out onto the front porch.

  From the other side of the fence that separated her yard from the one next door, an elderly man — whom Emily was certain she’d never seen before — looked at her worriedly.

  “Emily?” asked Ralph Gunderson, who had lived next door to Emily for nearly thirty years. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Fire,” Emily managed to say, looking back at her house. “Someone set my house on fire!”

  As Ralph Gunderson’s gaze followed Emily’s the first tongues of flame flicked out the kitchen window. Feeding voraciously on the wind, the fire began climbing the dried wooden siding of Emily’s old frame house.

  * * *

  MATT MOORE CROUCHED at the scrimmage line, his eyes looking straight through the boy opposite him, knowing his refusal even
to acknowledge his opponent’s presence was already undermining Eric Holmes’s confidence. It was a trick he’d been using on Eric since they’d first started playing football in fourth grade, and even eight years later Eric hadn’t figured out exactly what it was that made Matt’s movements so hard to predict. Matt’s body tensed as he listened to the quarterback call the signal to the center, and the second the ball was snapped, he sprang into action, feinting to the left then reversing to the right so quickly and smoothly that Eric, already rattled by Matt’s patented blank stare, had thrown himself off balance and was unable to throw a block that might knock Matt off stride. Matt streaked downfield toward the goal line, faked right and went left, then spun around as he crossed into the end zone and reached up, his hands closing on the ball, which seemed to have been placed there by some kind of magic.

  Except there was no magic involved.

  Rather, it was nothing more than Pete Arneson playing his role with the same precision that Matt had performed his own maneuvers. Though neither Pete nor Matt had so much as glanced at each other during the play, the quarterback had trusted Matt to be at the right position at the right moment.

  A moment, both of them knew, that was absolutely predetermined by the silent counting they had perfected over the years they’d been playing together. They’d started counting together in seventh grade, practicing out loud until they found the fastest pace they could both comfortably maintain. Then they began working in silence. Whenever they were together — hiking, or going to a movie, or just hanging out — sooner or later one of them would say “Go!” and both of them would begin silently counting in their heads. After a few seconds one of them would say “Stop!” and they’d compare where they were. By the time they got to high school, the two were never more than a couple of digits off at the stop signal, and the system had given them an edge. They’d simply decide where Matt would be when they hit a certain number, and Pete would throw the ball to that spot, no matter where Matt was when he cocked his throwing arm. By last summer their coordination was so good that the coach had put Matt in the starting lineup despite the fact that his lithe frame carried at least thirty pounds less than any of his teammates.

  “I don’t get it,” Eric Holmes groused to Matt afterward.“He wasn’t even looking at you! Everyone thought he was going to pass to Brett Haynes. And you weren’t paying any attention at all — you didn’t even look until you turned around to grab the ball!”

  “Never count us out,” Matt said, cryptically repeating the only phrase he and Pete ever used when anyone asked how they managed to communicate without looking at each other. So far, no one had figured it out, not even their coach.

  Eric’s eyes rolled as he heard the answer for the billionth time, but he knew better than to try to worm the secret out of either one of his friends. Even though Pete told him practically everything else, he’d always ducked the question of how he knew exactly when to throw the ball. As for Matt, there’d always been things Matt wouldn’t talk about — secrets Matt kept from him and Pete.

  Eric eventually decided there wasn’t any secret to Pete and Matt’s precision at all — that they probably didn’t know how they did it themselves. Besides, all that mattered was that if they kept it up, there was no way anyone was going to beat Granite Falls on the football field this year. As Matt joined his team’s huddle, half a dozen boys gathered around Eric. “Well?” someone asked.

  Eric shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Maybe we should just always take Matt out,” Mark Ryerson suggested, flexing his huge tackle’s body to let Eric know he was prepared to do exactly what he’d suggested. “There’s always been something weird about that guy.”

  Eric eyed Ryerson balefully. “You break one of his legs and there goes our shot at the championship.”

  “I didn’t mean really hurt him,” Mark said quickly. “I meant like — just keep him covered, you know?”

  “If that’s what you meant, why didn’t you say it? Just make sure that’s all you do,” Eric replied. Though he was playing opposite Matt and Pete today, Pete was still his best friend. And even if he didn’t care that much about Matt, there was still no way he would let Mark Ryerson mess up their shot at the school’s first winning season in more years than Eric could remember. He saw a flicker of anger in Ryerson’s eyes, but before the other boy lost control of his temper, their attention was diverted by the wailing of a siren, which was quickly coming closer.

  As the boys huddled around Matt Moore and Pete Arneson turned toward the blaring sound, a fire truck — immediately followed by a second one — came around the corner off Manchester Road onto Prospect Street, raced by the practice field, then braked hard and turned onto Burlington Avenue.

  No more than a house or two from the corner, a curl of smoke was rising up into the afternoon sky. The sirens died away, and for a second an almost eerie silence fell over the football field. Then a girl’s voice called out.

  “Matt? Matt!”

  The boys on the field watched as Kelly Conroe — dressed in her gym clothes for song-leading practice — ran across the field from the gym. “It’s your grandmother’s house!” Kelly gasped as she came up to Matt. “We could see it from where we were practicing!”

  For a moment Matt didn’t seem to comprehend what Kelly was saying, but then, as the smoke from Burlington Avenue billowed up, he came to life. Grabbing Kelly’s hand, he started running, Pete Arneson and Eric Holmes right behind him.

  * * *

  “LET GO OF me!” emily moore demanded, struggling to pull her arm free from the fireman’s grip. “It’s my house! Don’t you understand? It’s mine!”

  “I know it’s yours, Mrs. Moore,” Sean McCallum replied. He cast an eye around the quickly gathering crowd in search of the old woman’s daughter. “But I can’t let go of you unless you promise you won’t try to go in!”

  Emily’s eyes flashed dangerously. “I can go in if I want to! It’s my house!”

  “No, you can’t, Mrs. Moore,” McCallum said doggedly. “Not until the fire’s out and we know it’s safe.”

  “I have to go in,” the old woman insisted. “I have to — ”

  Before she could finish, Matt Moore appeared, panting and sweating from his dash from the practice field. “Gram? Gram, what happened? Are you okay?”

  “Mrs. Moore is your grandmother?” Sean McCallum asked. When Matt nodded, he eased Emily toward the teenager, finally releasing his grip on her arm. “She’s trying to go into the house. Make sure she doesn’t.”

  Before Matt could reply, the fireman was gone, disappearing around the corner of the house toward the kitchen.

  “What happened, Gram?” Matt asked again.

  Emily’s eyes were still fixed on the house, and when she took an unsteady step toward it, Matt reached out to steady her. She recoiled from his touch and turned her angry gaze on him.

  “Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Don’t — ” Her words died on her lips, and her eyes seemed to lose some of their anger. “I know you,” she finally said. “You’re — You’re — ”

  “Matt,” he prompted, dropping his voice so no one would hear him having to remind her who he was.

  “Joan’s brat!” Emily hissed the two words, and now it was Matt who recoiled.

  “I’m your grandson, Gram,” he said. Just as Sean McCallum had done a few moments ago, Matt scanned the crowd in search of help in dealing with the old woman. “You know me, Gram,” he went on. “It’s Matt! You’ve known me all my life!”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Emily suddenly demanded, her eyes narrowing to suspicious slits as she peered into Matt’s face.

  “M-Me?” Matt stammered.

  Emily took a halting step forward, jabbing at his chest with her bony forefinger. “You did it! Don’t lie to me! It was you!”

  Matt could see Pete Arneson and Eric Holmes standing behind his grandmother. Both of them were grinning, and while Pete grotesquely rolled his eyes, Eric mockingly twirle
d a finger around his ear.

  “If you two jerks don’t want to help, why don’t you just go away?” Kelly Conroe said to them as she moved close to Matt and his grandmother. “You might be a little confused, too, if it was your house that was burning.” As their grins faded, she turned to Emily Moore. “It’s going to be all right, Mrs. Moore,” she said, gently taking Emily’s hand in her own. “We’re going to take care of you.”

  The old woman peered into Kelly’s soft blue eyes. “Cynthia?” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  “It’s Kelly,” Matt replied. “You know her, Gram — Kelly Conroe.”

  But Emily didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes remained fixed on Kelly, and now she was holding both of the girl’s hands, her fingers digging deep into Kelly’s flesh. Her lips worked for a moment, then she found the words. “She did it, didn’t she?”

  “D-Did what?”

  Emily’s rheumy eyes shifted to the burning house. “She did it,” she muttered so softly that Kelly and Matt couldn’t be certain she was speaking to them. “It was her. I know it was her.”

  Seeing his mother and stepfather coming across the lawn, Matt breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  “Mother?” Joan Hapgood cried, her voice reflecting the relief she felt as she spotted Emily. “Mother, what happened? Are you all right?”

  The sound of her daughter’s voice brought Emily out of the reverie into which she’d fallen, and she wheeled around to face Joan. “Now look what you’ve done!” she said.

  Dear God, Joan silently begged, knowing from years of experience what was coming. Please don’t let her do this. Not right here. Not right now. But even as she offered the silent prayer, she knew there was no hope of it being answered, for Emily was already shaking an accusing finger in her face.