Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

The girl was evil, probably a serial killer. Something decisive needed to be done. For that she had to speak honestly, bluntly, with a friend who knew the girl as well as she did. Beverly called Marietta and invited her over for lunch that afternoon.

  "She has to be locked up for good. Her parents are afraid of her, that's why this has gone on for so long. If they had any respect for my state of mind, they would take my advice and find out what that little monster's been up to," Beverly told her friend.

  "I don't think it's about respecting you, Bev," Marietta told her. "They've got no choice. They think the girl belongs to them. They have to look after their child."

  It crossed Beverly's mind that Marietta was also talking about her feelings for Henry, the son she never wanted but loved despite his failures in school and at a long series of jobs before he announced his "calling" to be a preacher. Now he was the pastor of a church he had invented, a church hardly anyone attended. Marietta lived with Henry and his homely wife in a house that was much too big for them.

  "If she were my child," Beverly said. "She would've turned out in a different way, that's all."

  "Isn't that what people always say?" Marietta asked.

  Beverly turned away to clean her plate in the sink. When she came back to the table she cleared her throat.

  "What I'm thinking is that I'll contact social services for the county and have them interview Burt and Ethel. If the girl's as dangerous as I think she is, they'll take her away. It might do her some good to be in foster care, but I doubt it. I think she needs to be in the county hospital."

  "She wouldn't like foster parents that tried to make her do what they wanted," Marietta said. "Listen, you can't punish Burt and Ethel. They don't know what they're keeping in their house. It isn't what they think it is."

  This last was said with more gravity than usual. Beverly perked up.

  "You mean you agree with me, she's psychotic?" She asked.

  She was fond of this kind of talk, analyzing people to figure out what made them tick. She followed several TV shows that specialized in solving people's mental problems in front of a studio audience.

  Marietta looked at her for a while in silence. Then she folded the linen napkin in her hand and set it on top of her plate.

  "If I tell you what it is." She stopped.

  Beverly waited.

  "I've held my tongue. I always thought I could get close enough to solve the problem without hurting Ethel any more than she's been hurt already. If I tell you what I think it is," Marietta said. "Do you promise to go by what I say, and do what I ask? Because it might sound like a bad thing to do."

  This was even better than Beverly had expected. This was the kind of high drama and mystery she loved, on the rare occasions when Marietta allowed her into her private thoughts, and the world of her intuitions. Beverly nodded, thrilled to be making a pact of so much importance, and wondering what she was getting herself into.

  Winston

  Along this part of the road Doug fir had once grown in abundance. Now the grass was littered with tree stumps and snags. Just beyond the last house the broken asphalt gave way in stages to gravel and dirt. Further on there was some alder springing up in the gullies and Western hemlock scattered at the outskirts of the remaining forest, but even these grew as if it were an effort. They seemed stunted, unable to find the right spot in which to thrive.

  This was where the boy and his schoolmates were never supposed to go. Only the poorest families lived beyond the junction, where the road split. On one side right before the intersection was the big brick house that belonged to Pastor Colquitt and his wife. That was the good side. The other branch curved downhill to this place, the corner of nowhere.

  Old Man Jasper lived here, and he would chase kids away with his shotgun. Across the road from his place Connie Sara Sanders lived with her parents in a drafty old house with a good-sized garage that Burt Sanders kept trying to remodel into a workroom. You couldn't tell much by looking at the place from outside. The walls had sunk and settled with the years. The back of the garage and most of the patio were overgrown with moss. The outside walls needed paint. On this particular gray afternoon there was only one light shining inside, at the kitchen window.

  The boy was here because he had lied to his mother. And today's lie was a whopper: He said he was helping his classmates, two boys whose family his mother approved of, and would like to impress. He said they were building a kite for a competition in Long Beach. They were meeting at another friend's house, and he would walk there and back. He would have done worse than lie to his mother, to stay in favor with Connie Sara.

  The boy had red hair. His name was Winston, but his mother often embarrassed him by calling him Winnie. She also embarrassed him by showing her friends the glass jar in which she saved the golden red curls from his first haircut.

  "A woman would kill to have hair like this," she cooed, clutching the jar with one hand and touching its surface gently with the other. Her lady friends always nodded and agreed: They would kill to have those long, loose, silken curls that caught the light in the living room and made the boy wince with discomfort.

  Winston crossed his arms over his chest. He made an effort at not looking scared, but the smirk uncurled from his lips when he said:

  "I don't believe the part about the witch."

  "Are you calling me a liar?" Connie Sara asked.

  Winston considered the seriousness of this charge, and said:

  "No, but I'm saying you might be wrong. You might think she's a witch, and she might not be. Sometimes it's hard to tell."

  They sat in the brittle fluorescent light of the Sanders' kitchen, drawing pictures with crayons and butcher paper. The sound of Connie Sara's father Burt snoring out a great guffaw in the bedroom down the hall startled Winston. Her mother was at the grocery store. Connie Sara leaned close and whispered:

  "What a baby you are. No wonder your mama calls you Winnie. I don't care if you believe it. There's a witch living in the woods, and she's got somebody in a dungeon that she beats and pokes at with a stick. At midnight, if you go walking by the place I'm talking about, you can hear a poor little girl calling for her mama. But you don't care. Nobody cares."

  Winston kept his arms crossed, and stared straight into Connie Sara's sky-blue eyes. He was afraid of what she had said, but more afraid of what she might say about him to the boys he knew at school. They made fun of him because he'd been held back a year. They said he was slow, but the truth was that his mother thought he needed an extra year to mature. The boys didn't care about the reason. They loved any excuse to taunt him. Especially Troy, who thought Winston was a crybaby and sometimes followed him home, pitching rocks at the back of his legs.

  "Hey, Winnie!" Troy would call out when there were no grownups in sight. "What's that on the back of your pants? Hey, Winnie the Poop!"

  Winston was afraid of the boys' bathroom, because there was no door on the last stall. That's where Troy and three other boys had ganged up on him, teasing him with vague threats until he burst into tears. Once Troy was satisfied with his victim's panic and tears, he had left Winston alone in the stall. But the next day, afraid to use the toilet, Winston held it until he was about to explode. In fact, he did explode, just enough to make a small mess in his underpants. He was standing on the playground near Shelly Miller, who kept sniffing the air and shrieking:

  "What's that smell? Holy macaroni! Can you smell that?"

  Pretty soon everyone knew where the smell came from, and Winston had a nickname. He wondered every day: Would people know about this, even if he moved to another town? When he was a man, would it still be like this? Did grownups call each other names? Were they allowed to do that?

  Luckily, this had happened a couple of months after Connie Sara left school. She and Winston had been in the same class for half a year. Then her parents took her out for home schooling. The teacher said she played too rough with the smaller kids. Somebody got hurt on the playground, and nobody wanted to t
alk about it, but they all said it wasn't the first time, and they all blamed Burt and Ethel Sanders.

  Winston knew better than to show his friend a sign of weakness. The more he brushed off her smart remarks, the more she sought him out. She was the only person his age who ever did that, the only one who invited him to her house on the weekend and asked him to join a club. She was also the only person he had ever known who lived on a road that was named after her.

  Together they had built a fort out of plywood against a maple, but the first storm of the season tore it down. Even without the fort, they had sworn an oath of loyalty, and they'd eaten a handful of dried crimson berries from a devil's club plant, which made Winston gag. Eating the berries was part of the oath, so he did his best. His mother hated devil's club, its spindly thorns catching any clothes or skin that came near it. Whenever she found it in the yard she would dig it up and throw it in the trash. He thought of this while trying to choke down the berries.

  Winston and Connie Sara were blood scouts, now. So here he was, killing a cloudy Saturday afternoon, against his mother's orders.

  He wasn't even sure why his mother didn't like the Sanders family. She made little remarks to her friends: Burt and Ethel were too old to have a child, the house they lived in was a rat-trap, but nothing that explained why he was forbidden to see Connie Sara after she stopped coming to school. He wasn't small or weak like the kid who got hurt at school. He could fend for himself against a girl, especially one who was a year younger than he was.

  "You do believe me, don't you?"

  "I don't know," he said. He needed more time to think it over. "Where exactly does this witch live, anyhow?"

  "Nowhere," said Connie Sara. "Nowhere that most people can see. Her house is painted like the woods, so it's invisible. That's how come nobody else knows about it."

  A rumble of thunder rolled across the darkening valley. On this gravel and dirt road leading to where Connie Sara lived, the useless pastures were overrun with blackberries in the summer. In front of the Sanders' house, year-round, a disassembled tractor lay rusting on the grass. From the side, its parts looked like a pre-historic bird fossil.

  "How can she have a dungeon, if there's no house?"

  Winston was pleased with this question. He crossed his arms again.

  "I didn't say 'no house.' I said it's invisible. It's disguised. The dungeon is buried down in the ground," she told him. "And the little girl is real. You can hear her crying late at night."

  "Well," he pondered. He swallowed and thought it over again. "Who do you think it might be, the little girl? Who does this witch keep in the dungeon?"

  Connie Sara got up and closed the kitchen door. The sound of her father's snoring faded away. With the door shut, a tiny shift in the air pressure flattened their voices. Connie Sara sat down, leaned in with her hands clasped together on the tabletop, and said:

  "She's got little Tracy down there in the dungeon."

  Winston felt a cold rush at the name. Tracy Carson had been gone almost a year, lost walking home from school. She'd gotten into a fight with another girl. Nobody remembered how it started. Tracy wandered off and nobody ever found her. The sheriff and his deputies and Tracy's mother had finally given up combing the woods and the nearby junkyard, posting pictures of the missing first grader.

  "My mom said she got kidnapped by her dad, over the customs." Winston knew this was the wrong word, but couldn't remember the right one.

  "Well. Maybe she doesn't know what she's talking about. Was your mom right about toadstools?" Connie Sara asked.

  Winston's mother had warned him off eating things he found in the woods. When she discovered a few truffles in the pocket of his jeans, she force-fed him a large, store-bought mushroom coated in castor oil, until he threw up. Then one day Connie Sara teased and dared him into splitting a toadstool with her. He'd found, to his amazement, that his mother was dead wrong. He didn't get sick at all.

  "Was your mom right about the creek?"

  Everybody knew the putrid creek that dribbled down from the Kelso lumber mill was polluted. To make sure Winston stayed away from it, his mother told him it was radioactive and anyone who played in it would lose the parts of his body that touched the water. Connie Sara had shown him that his mother was an outright liar, the day they stripped down to their underpants and shirts and went wading in the sludge. It took three baths to kill the awful stench of his legs and feet, but Winston had learned another lesson that day.

  And it wasn't the last. She had always been right. In school she had predicted which kids would get sick before it happened:

  "That one's weak, and her mama treats her like a baby."

  Sure enough, the child she pointed out would go home sick before the end of the week. In every way, Connie Sara had proven that she knew more about the world than Winston's parents did. She had made his mother's fears and coddling seem silly.

  "Aim for the body, the broad part," Connie Sara had whispered. "A little bit lower."

  Winston had taken aim. He felt the polished pine handle of the slingshot clenched in his fist. He heard the rough twang of rubber that sent the rock shooting through the air. The robin never made a sound.

  They ran to the spot and gazed down into the wet leaves where the robin had fallen. Its feathers were damp, and its chest was crushed in. While Winston watched, the robin gave a shiver, a spasm that lasted a second, and that was it. Yet the two children went on watching until they were sure nothing else would happen.

  "You see, now?" Connie Sara said.

  Winston nodded.

  "Winnie," his mother must have said a thousand times. "God loves all creatures, but they can't all go to heaven with us. Only birds go to heaven."

  At this point she often paused in her embroidery to admire the tall cage full of hopping, chirping finches in the corner of the living room. Winston, when he was a toddler, had loved this story. He would watch his mother's rapt expression as she described the afterlife of birds:

  "Every one will be part of the celestial choir, Winnie. Can you imagine: Millions of birds, in all colors of the earth, singing in harmony? They fly straight up into God's hand, the moment they die. You can actually see the fluttering of their wings in the sky when that happens. They leave their bodies and become pure spirit!"

  Now, at last, Winston knew why his father made a face every time he heard this tale about the birds. It was a lie. If not, then it was the stupidest thing anyone had ever said. And why would she tell such a lie to her only son? What else was she telling him that would prove to be wrong and make him look like a loser?

  "It all comes down to one thing, Winnie," the girl said. "Do you want to be a hero and a blood scout in the Devil's Club, or just a crybaby?"

  "I'm not a crybaby," he said. And he recalled the times Troy had followed him to the very edge of his front yard:

  "Whiney Winnie the Poop! Yeah, get your fat butt into that house, or I'll kick it in!"

  Connie Sara came up with the plan, but Winston agreed every step of the way. She told him the only method for sneaking up on a witch, and avoiding the same fate as little Tracy, was to travel by night when they wouldn't be expected. This seemed reasonable enough. And since Winston had snuck out of his house on two other occasions to go exploring in the woods after dark, he was sure he could handle the unexpected. On one of those nights he was startled by an owl, and almost wet his pants. But he had gotten home all right. He had slept deeply and, for once, dreamed of nothing he could remember. It was a wonderful feeling.

  They agreed that they would each bring their own flashlight, and meet at the giant fir tree where the meadow and the forest met the dirt trail leading from Connie Sara's backdoor. This meant that Winston would have to travel twice the distance Connie Sara had to cover, but this fact appealed to him.

  "I've hiked seven and a half miles down and back up a canyon with my dad, last summer," he told her.

  "That's pretty good," she said. She tucked a strand of her hair behind one
ear and Winston felt a surge of pride.

  "That's right," he said, to confirm it.

  "Well, then," she said. "This ought to be easy for you. I found the place by accident the first time. Going back there on purpose is going to be hard. I just hope I don't get too scared and run off."

  "You won't run off," he assured her. "And we won't get lost. You can count on me. I never get lost."

  On the designated night, Winston dropped to the ground outside his bedroom window. His sneakers wobbled when he landed, but he righted himself without making a sound. He crept in the shadows, whisking weeds and wildflowers that grew along the side of the house. Everyone in his family was sleeping. He might have walked out the front door without attracting any attention, but slipping out through the window was much more exciting.

  He carried a pillowcase slung over one shoulder. Inside were a flashlight and a rope. He was proud of this second item, which Connie Sara had neglected to mention. If they were going to form a rescue team, they would need a rope to lift young Tracy from her underground prison cell. That much was clear to him, if not to Connie Sara. But then, he had seen more action adventure movies than she had, so he knew these things.

  Once they had completed their quest and returned the missing child to her grateful, weeping mother they would appear on TV, at least on the news, and maybe on their own show. Winston figured: if this kind of thing, young girls being kidnapped and tortured by witches, could happen here in Skillute, then there must be places all over the world where heroes were needed. He (and maybe Connie Sara) could travel to those places, and save other kids, all expenses paid by television fans and parents. This required the kind of courage and know-how that Troy would never have. After a while he would ask Winston if they could be buddies, and that would be okay as long as Troy was his sidekick and did what Winston said.

  He was picturing himself aboard a huge private plane, sipping grape soda and eating popcorn, when Connie Sara reached out from behind a fir tree and grabbed him by his shirt.