“I imagine you’re pretty booked up for the holidays. New Year’s and all that.”
“I imagine I am,” she said.
He shook his head sorrowfully. “Just my luck. Just my luck.”
No, she thought, my luck.
He clapped his hands together and rubbed them vigorously. “Well, I expect I’ll see you at the Department meeting on Monday.”
“I expect you will.”
He hunched his shoulders as though against the cold, turned and surprised her by placing a soft kiss on her cheek. “In case there’s no chance later,” he told her. “Have a good Christmas, Mel.” And he was back inside before she could reply.
“Hell,” she muttered. He was two decades older than she and trying desperately not to reach fifty without sampling some of the so-called Youth Revolution. His problem was in his manner: he had no idea when to be aggressive and when to back off, when to espouse a current cause and when to debunk it. As such he always seemed to her to be like a small boy just climbing out of the cellar—eyes blinking in confusion, hands out to grab at something for support, trying to figure out what had changed . . . and why. And for that reason she could not dislike him, didn’t bother to scold him when he played at the rake. He was just so pitiably helpless she never had the heart to be angry.
The sound of shattering glass startled her, brought the cold back to her, and she had just reached for the doorknob when she saw him.
Standing just at the edge of the streetlamp’s far reach.
At first she thought he was waiting to cross the street (though there was no traffic), or waiting for a ride (but there was no car idling near him); then she realized he was watching the house, watching her. His hands were plunged deep into the pockets of a long black raincoat with double rows of brass buttons. The wide collar was pulled high in back, a broad-brimmed black hat slouched low over his face. She could not make out his features, but she knew instantly he was looking at her.
There was an impulse to take a step toward him, an impulse to call out; both were stifled, however, when the door was yanked away from her hand and Michael demanded to know if she intended to stay out there for the rest of the night. She looked at him, looked back to the streetlamp . . . and the man in the black raincoat was no longer there.
“Are you all right, Mel?”
She nodded. “Yes. Sure. Get me a drink, okay?” Once in the foyer she closed the door without looking back, shrugging without moving, though just before midnight she caught herself parting the dining-room curtains and staring out at the street.
On Monday the cold was still sharp, but a break in the clouds had brought a breath of warm sunshine. The opportunity was too fine to pass up, and Mel decided there was nothing for it but that she would have to walk out to the campus. It was something she did as often as the weather allowed. There was too much to miss when she drove, from the shadings of light beneath the trees along the way to the very taste and smell of the air she breathed. All of it was as wonderful a delight as being with her friends, moreso since she had come late (or so she thought) to the acceptance of her mortality. To permit an automobile, then, to rob her of a single leaf, a single singing bird, was tantamount to committing the most foul sort of suicide. Too much; there was much too much she dared not enjoy.
And too much of what she believed that had to be shared with others.
A little more than two miles separated the house on Quentin and the campus out on Chancellor Avenue. A part of that was the twice-larger-than-normal blocks she had to walk before reaching the broad road that stretched toward the valley. She took them briskly, hands in coat pockets, hair lightly protected by an emerald-green scarf. Several automobiles passed her, a few with drivers she knew; none of them, however, stopped. It had taken almost the entire semester, but finally she had been able to convince both her colleagues and the few students who commuted from the village that she actually preferred walking to riding. Now they merely honked a greeting, yelled a comment (most of the time carried off by the wind) or slowly shook their heads at the eccentricities of professors.
She loved it.
Just as she loved the falling away of the houses, the crowding of the woodland down to the shoulder. On her left, across the road, the tall iron fence surrounding the park gave way to stone walls and elaborate hedges that marked the estates reaching out into the valley. She had been in some of those homes on one or two occasions, the latest being a small dinner party given by Oliver Hawkstead, who was rumored ready to leave his entire fortune to the college. She had no illusions why she had been invited: brains and decoration, and the predictable leers from a dying old man. Now that she thought about it, she laughed; in a way it had probably been somewhat demeaning for a woman of her abilities; but on the other hand, she wasn’t about to let some vague principle stand in the way of improving her own lot as well as the campus’s.
A truck rumbled by, a station wagon, a van. She kept to the far side of the shoulder and turned slightly away to avoid the backwash of the passing vehicles.
And stopped.
The trees—mostly oak, elm, and birch—were sparse here, the ground covered with their leaves. About two hundred yards into the woods the first signs of an upward slope appeared, the lap of the hills that cut off the Station from the rest of Connecticut on three sides. The shrubs were bare, spindly, revealing greyed and decaying logs and half-fallen boles. In one such area a dark figure stood. Motionless. Partially screened by a stubbornly green laurel.
Mel had no doubt it was the same man in the same coat she had seen at the house Friday night; but while she had been merely curious then, now she was battling to be more annoyed than apprehensive.
A light breeze played with stray curls beneath her scarf and she swiped at them impatiently, blinked when her hand passed over her eyes and took a step back.
The figure was gone; in its place a lightning-blackened stump.
A car blared a warning and she spun around, a hand to her mouth, the other half-raised to flag it down. It was well past her, however, and she gnawed lightly at her lower lip. This wasn’t like her, making mysterious men out of dead trees; it wasn’t like her at all. And it was obvious that, though she hadn’t thought of the stranger since the night of the party, he had made some sort of impression on her. One she knew she would much rather do without.
She walked more quickly, and the sun disappeared beneath the grey blanket overhead. The temperature dropped. The woodland thickened. By the time she reached the entrance to the campus the first, tentative snowflakes had begun to hide in the tall grass and melt blackly on her shoulders.
Was it a friend, she wondered as she hurried on to the meeting, someone who thinks this makes a pretty fair gag? Or someone she didn’t know, someone who needed to know where she lived, where she worked, how she managed to get from one place to another. It was, all of it, ridiculous in the extreme, but she could not dislodge the images once they had wormed their way in. The man beneath the streetlamp, the man in the woods . . . he followed her into the lab where Litten had already begun to explain the procedure for exams, sat just behind her and addled her thinking to the point where twice she had to ask the chairman to repeat the simplest of instructions. He frowned at her, as did the others, but none of them said anything until, just before noon, the meeting adjourned for lunch in the cafeteria. Afterward, there was to be a general faculty meeting, the last before the holidays, but Mel was already devising excuses to skip it if she could.
At the door, however, Litten caught her arm and eased her back inside. “Mel, you all right?”
Her smile was weak. “Sure.”
“You weren’t here today.” The little man was concerned, his left hand fussing with an ascot at his collar. “You didn’t have any trouble getting here, did you?”
“No,” she said. “I walked, as usual.”
“Someone try to pick you up?” He laughed, then. “You know what I mean. Not for a ride.”
She shook her head. Shrugged. “It�
��s nothing, Sam. I just thought . . . I thought there was someone in the trees, watching me, that’s all. It turned out to be a dead stump, but it’s like a tune you don’t know the title of and you can’t get it out of your head, you know what I mean?”
“I know, believe me. Though I really can’t be persuaded that the music these days has any tune.” He took her elbow and they walked down the corridor, falling in with other, just-ended meetings. “But why should that bother you so much?”
“How should I know? Just one of those things, I guess.”
“Just one of those wonderful things,” he sang, dreadfully off key.
“Terrible,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “That’s really god-awful.”
“You biology people are damned snobs,” he told her.
“Maybe, but you chemistry fools can’t sing worth a damn.”
He pouted, scuffed a foot, and she broke into a laugh that she knew was too long and too loud, leaning into him for a moment as if he were Michael and resting her cheek briefly against his arm. “I’m okay,” she insisted. “It’s the end of term, if you know what I mean. I’d probably get hysterical over anything at all.”
“You really want me to believe that?”
She laughed again. “Boss, you can believe any damn thing you want to.”
And the moment she heard herself say it, she regretted it. Litten was too anxious to be more than just a friend, and the look in his eyes told her he had taken the comment as a delicate, but definite, invitation to dance. And she wasn’t thinking clearly enough to say anything to discourage him. As it was, then, he commandeered chairs and a table for them in the cafeteria, made sure they were sitting together to listen to the dean of faculty give his annual praise-and-caution speech in the auditorium afterward. Paul and Tammy sat on her right, appropriately solemn, sub-vocally sarcastic, keeping a small circle of colleagues in red-faced silent giggles until the meeting was done and they exploded like fools.
Litten scowled, and Mel told him not to be such an old fart. “Good lord, Sam, don’t you remember what it was like not to be a part of an enemy?”
“Is that what you think of me, the enemy?”
She stood and made her way out to the aisle. “No, not at all. It just seems to me there are times—like all the time, Sam—when you take this job, and life, too seriously. Things are beautiful, Sam. And there’s fun to be had. I don’t mean party-type fun, but just . . . well, enjoyment of things.” She glanced at him a little sadly. “Sometimes I think you don’t see that at all.”
In the large crescent lobby—reds and golds and a swirled marble floor—she rose on her toes to search over the heads of the milling crowd, hoping the Prescotts had not deserted her, leaving her to Sam. Paul she could see near the blind-faced ticket windows on the far side; Tammy, she guessed, had gone to the ladies’ room. When Paul finally spotted her he lifted an inquiring eyebrow, and she nodded. He grinned. Winked. And Sam bulled his way to her side and touched her waist.
“Your problem, Melissa,” he said as if they had not stopped talking, “is that you don’t take enough seriously.”
“Is this my chairman talking, or my friend?”
He put a hand to his ascot and untied it absently. “Both, I suppose.”
She looked hard at him then, slightly puzzled. He had never spoken to her this way before—sober tones veiling possible threats—and she wasn’t sure she knew how to handle it. However, neither was she about to permit him to ruin the good mood that had returned with her baiting him. The day was too nice, and the vacation too near. Instead, she told him she would be in tomorrow for just an hour or two to hand in her examinations for copying, then she would be gone for the holidays. W:ith the student body already scattered and her work caught up, she didn’t think he would mind. The disappointment that crumpled his face was almost heartbreaking, and she felt herself about ready to do something stupid when Paul suddenly loomed over them and reminded her of a nonexistent date she had with him and his wife.
The parting was swift, Litten close to surly, and ten minutes later they were in the Prescotts’ station wagon and heading back into the village. The snow had thickened somewhat, had nearly covered the dead brown ground, and the gentle silence that came with it eased her, made her smile.
The windshield wipers thumped rhythmically.
The heater, though set low, made all of them drowsily quiet. “Sam looks to be getting awfully pushy,” Paul said at last.
“I’m used to it,” Mel told him.
“You never needed rescuing before.”
She explained quickly what had disturbed her, left her nearly vulnerable to Sam’s advances, then pointed suddenly across Tammy toward the other side of the road. “There,” she said. “You can see it back in there.”
Tammy nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. Yeah, I can see what you mean. Doesn’t look so bad now, though, With all the snow on it, I mean.”
“You should have seen it before. My god, when I thought that guy was really following me I almost had a heart attack.”
“No clue as to who he is?” Paul said without taking his eyes from the road.
“Nope.”
“Well,” Tammy said, shifting just enough so that Mel had to slide closer to the door, “if you ask me—and I’m not saying you are—I think the two of you are making an awful lot out of nothing. Mel sees some guy by the house on Friday and he spooks her, right? So she walks to school and thinks a tree stump is the same man, right? And poor dear Sam’s got so much hots for her that she’s ready to climb the walls because he’s also her boss and she doesn’t know what to do about it. Right? Seems simple to me. You’re cracking up, kid.” She grinned. “Think about it.” And laughed.
Mel didn’t object to the crack, nor to the odd way Tammy looked at her while she hugged briefly her husband’s ann. Probably, she decided, Tammy was right. And the man in the raincoat was probably one of her students, trying to figure a way to either spook her (and somehow affect the finals) or make a not very subtle pass.
Or maybe she hadn’t seen the guy at all. It was dark and she had been drinking and . . . hell, who the hell cares?
At Centre Street the Prescotts led her out so she could do some idle shopping before returning home. The sun was already down, the air tinged a faint shade of lilac, and she kept her hands deep in her pockets as she walked through the village’s only business district. Grinning. Sometimes humming. Losing herself at last in the freshly minted holiday spirit brought on by the new snow that laced the bare trees at the curbing, brightened the strings of lights in shopwindows, softened the pedestrians’ footsteps on the somewhat slippery pavement. Quiet carols chimed from a speaker above the National Bank’s entrance. Children, bundled and red-cheeked, shoe-skied on the sidewalk. She breathed deeply, still grinning, greeted several people she knew with hugs and solid kisses.
Lovely, she thought as a flake nestled on an eyelash. Oxrun in winter is nothing less than heaven.
And when, by accident, she found herself standing next to the library, looking across the street at the pine-greens-bedecked post office, there was only the slightest twinge of melancholy at being the last of her family. Only the slightest. Because life, her life, was still filled with joy.
She laughed aloud, turned around and headed back down the street without any urge to hurry. Lingering. Listening. Once ducking away from a kid-thrown snowball. Every so often an automobile with chains on its tires chattered past, the sound reminding her of sleighs and harness bells. She stuck out her tongue to taste a snowflake, stared for what seemed like hours at jewelry in display windows and eventually returned home with nothing in her arms and not the least bit disappointed.
She showered quickly and changed into slacks and a sweater, then considered calling Sam, thinking that somehow she ought to apologize for her abrupt departure with Paul, and for something else that she didn’t quite understand. But the line was busy, and the decision vanished, and she buried herself in her study to finish cutting the
stencils for her classes’ exams.
It took her almost three hours, with no more break than it took to make herself a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Not eating, she told herself, was good for the figure.
When she was finished, she stood with both hands massaging the small of her back and realized that the house was dark. Her first thought was for the tree lights, and she stumbled into the living room and switched them on. Smiled softly at the reflections in the decorations, in the bow window, and hummed tunelessly to herself as she reached out to palm away condensation on one of the panes.
And the man in black was standing under the streetlamp.
She stood in the still-dark room, telephone to hand, peering around the bulk of the tree.
“I know, Michael, I know,” she whispered, as though the figure might overhear her. “But he isn’t doing anything. He’s just standing there, looking at the house. At least I think he’s looking at the house. I can’t really tell. I can’t see his face.”
“Just call the police, Melissa. I’ll be over in five minutes.”
“But what if he leaves before they get here?”
A sigh of scarce tolerance. “Melissa, it doesn’t matter if he’s still there or not. You give them a description and let them do the rest.”
“Oh, great. There’s a man out there in a black hat and a black raincoat and I can’t see his face or his hands or his feet. What am I supposed to tell the cops?”
“That.”
She exhaled loudly. “Michael, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“And you aren’t making any sense tying up the phone when you could be calling the police.”
“Michael—”
“Do it, Melissa. I’m on my way.”
She replaced the receiver with an exasperated sigh and set the unit on the floor. One strand of tree lights winked at her. A small red bulb swayed. With one hand extended to guard against table corners she made her way across the room into the foyer, pressed herself to the front door and looked through the single rectangular pane set vertically into the wood at eye level.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror) Page 17
