Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Ahead he sees a young woman at the bridge railing, leaning her elbows on the railing as if she is very tired. Her long, tangled hair falls forward, hiding her face, which seems to him an aggrieved face, though he cannot see it clearly.

  It is this woman who has been sobbing—(is it?). L____ stops dead in his tracks at the sight of her.

  He will recall afterward he’d had no choice but to approach her to ask if anything was wrong.

  “Excuse me—? Hello?”

  The young woman doesn’t seem to have heard L____ Already she has turned distractedly away, she is walking away, a stricken creature, wounded, wincing with pain (he thinks); she does not want him to see her face.

  Is she crying? Is she ashamed that she is crying? He sees that she is wiping at her face with both hands as she hurries away.

  He thinks—But I have no choice!

  The woman is wraithlike, very thin. She seems scarcely to be walking or running but rather gliding. She wears a long, dark skirt of some flimsy material like muslin. She wears a shawl wrapped about her shoulders. He can’t see her face and so has no idea how old she is but her movements suggest that she is young, lithe. Her hair is a shimmer of hues—blond, ash blond, wheat, silver—that flies about her head as if galvanized by electricity.

  L____ doesn’t quicken his pace, he will not overtake the woman. If the woman needs help, if she needs protection, L____ will be close behind her, but he does not want to frighten her.

  He keeps a fixed distance between them: thirty feet perhaps. “I am here if you need me. I am always here. That is all.”

  L____ follows the woman across a street of badly broken pavement. He follows her into a vacant lot behind a block of brownstone row houses, which look as if they have been scorched by flame. Here there is underbrush, discarded and rotted lumber, broken glass sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. Broken clay pots—why so many? And empty bottles, gutted tin cans. L____ has become confused, for what is this fetid place? Where is the young woman leading him?

  “Hey. You.”

  Out of the rubble an angry man approaches L_____. He is fast and springy on the balls of his feet. He is belligerent and menacing as a pit bull.

  L____ is taken totally by surprise. Naively he glances over his shoulder to see if the angry man is addressing someone behind him but it is L____ at whom the angry man is staring with stark, protuberant eyes. It is L____ at whom he is speaking in disgust.

  “I said you! What d’you want?”—the flush-faced man, a decade younger than L_____, not taller than L____ but thicker bodied, obviously stronger, is bearing down upon L____ with a look of fury.

  L____ would turn away and flee. But L____ doesn’t want to retreat in the face of the other’s irrational anger for (he is thinking) that will violate his integrity; also, he dares not turn his back on such anger.

  The angry man spits at him: “You sick fuck! What the fuck d’you think you’re doing following her?!”

  Now it is clear. It is clearer. The man is in alliance with the unhappy young woman.

  L____ would explain that he meant no harm, he was only seeing if the woman needed help, he did not mean to upset her, he is sorry if he has been misunderstood; but the angry man isn’t interested in anything L____ has to say. He has stepped boldly close to L_____, and he continues cursing L_____. To his chagrin L____ sees that the young woman has taken a position behind the man, as if L____ presents such a threat to her that she has to hide behind the angry man; at the same time, the woman has become defiant herself, flushed with indignation. Her face is radiant not with tears but with intense emotion.

  This is certainly not Evangeline: L____ sees now.

  She is no one he has seen before. She has small, crushed-together features but she is not at all delicate-boned. Her hair has a coarse, metallic sheen. The shirt or blouse she wears has a low neckline, her bony upper chest is exposed, her pallid skin. In an incensed and infantile voice she tells the angry man that this is the person who has been following her, scaring her. “The son of a bitch is always following me. This is him!”

  Before L____ can protect himself, the angry man rushes at him and strikes him in the face. It is a powerful, stunning blow—L____ feels his left eye socket crack.

  He staggers backward. The angry man has wrenched the wine bottle out of L____’s hand, and threatens to strike him with it.

  “Hey! Don’t break this for Christ’s sake”—deftly the young woman detaches the wine bottle from her companion’s fingers.

  L____ would retreat but the angry man won’t allow him. L____ dares not turn his back for fear he will be murdered. He tries to defend his bleeding face as a child might, with his elbows, uplifted arms, bending at the waist, cowering, but the angry man continues to pursue him, not so hurriedly now, almost randomly striking him with sharp blows, his chest, his shoulder, his left temple. L____ can barely see, both his eyes have been struck, his vision blotched by pinpoint hemorrhages.

  “No—please—don’t”—L____ tries to protest but his mouth has been wounded. His teeth are loose and bleeding. His lower lip has been savagely slashed. He would stagger away in desperation—he would crawl away—but the angry man refuses to let him. The wrath of this stranger seems to be building, like that of a vengeful god. The more he punishes his victim, the more furious he is with his victim. L____’s very blood on his hands, splattering his clothing, is a goad to him, a provocation.

  A forlorn thought comes to L_____, belatedly—Your mistake was leaving Mura House today, on foot.

  L____ is knocked to the ground by the angry man’s pounding fists. It is a mistake too to fall to the ground for now the angry man is even angrier, and is kicking L_____. Grunting, cursing, kicking at L____—the angry man is a flame that cannot be quenched, that must burn itself out. Kicking the fallen L____ in the ribs, without mercy. L____ feels the bones which protect his heart and lungs cracking. He is writhing in pain, he is pierced with pain as with a steel blade. The tangle-haired woman is taunting him, she is not trying to save him from the angry man but has become his assailant too, bent upon vengeance. L____ wants to ask—Why?

  And now it is worse, it is unbearable, L____ is being kicked in the stomach, in the terrible wound in his lower belly that has not yet healed, in the stoma that bleeds so easily, a mere touch can start it bleeding and the terror is of bleeding to death. L____ can’t draw breath to explain, he is unable to speak, the angry man will not let him speak and the angry young woman will show him no mercy.

  They have confused L____ with someone else—is that it? He wants to protest, to plead with them it is the wrong man they are punishing. But in his agony he can’t draw breath to speak.

  L____ hears the angry man grunting as he kicks his final blows, each blow is a final blow, a death’s blow. His grunting is a righteous sound. Such punishment is work. Such punishment is justice. Between L____’s legs pain escalates so powerfully it can’t be contained but explodes from him like a geyser.

  And then suddenly he is alone, his assailants have departed. It is very quiet except for L____’s gasping breaths.

  One of them has taken his wallet, torn it from inside his blood-soaked trousers.

  L____ is alone, flat on the ground, and the tin-colored sky close overhead like something that is shutting. The pain continues to build. Behind his blinded eyes the flame grows in intensity until there is nothing but the hot, blinding, searing flame that envelops him, and is him.

  No ID? Who is this? Jesus!—looks like somebody was real mad at the poor bastard.

  3.

  Hello!

  Her eyes lift to his. He can’t see her face clearly. But he can see that she is smiling at him, shyly. He believes that she is smiling at him. They are in a secluded place that smells of the lake. Rotted algae, carcasses of fish mummified in the summer sun. He sees a fleeting shadow on the ground, the shadow of a large bird, a predator, or rather a scavenger, with wide, dark, comically awkward wings. He does not know if this is a turkey vulture. He knows that the
re are turkey vultures in Cattaraugus County. The bird is too large to be a crow or a raven. It is too large to be a blackbird. It is not flying but rather walking, with ungainly steps. It is walking toward him. Its eyes are bronze, unwinking. Its beak looks sharp and it is long enough to reach his heart.

  The silvery-haired woman is close by. This is Evangeline, he is certain: but perhaps she does not want to be called by that name, by L_____. Perhaps that is a secret name, not to be uttered.

  She is not so close that he can reach out to touch her, to clutch at her hand as he wants to do. For if he could clutch her hand, if she would grip his hand firmly, she might pull him up onto his feet—badly, he wants to be raised to his feet, he is in despair of what has happened to him, and it will be the first step in making things right, in returning to his normal life, if the young woman will help him to his feet, if she will offer him her hand. She is not so close that he can see her face clearly, or her eyes. He senses that her eyes are veiled. But he sees that she is there. She has not abandoned him.

  Gently she says to the fallen man—O love. Give me your hand.

  Night-Gaunts

  1. The Sighting

  In a high, small, octagonal window of the (vacant) house he sees the face he is not prepared to see.

  Stops dead in his tracks. Climbing steep cobbled Charity Hill where (once) the Cornish family had lived. He had lived.

  It is gaunt, narrow, grave as a face carved in granite. Very pale, impassive. The eyes are sunken yet alive and alert—gleeful.

  A face not quite pressed against the glass, which would have distorted the features. Hovering just behind the windowpane and so almost out of sight so you must look closely to determine—yes. A face.

  The Cornish House, as it is called, at 33 Charity Street, Providence, Rhode Island. A graceless foursquare mansion of sandstone, brick and iron (originally built 1828), in a lot of approximately two acres behind a twelve-foot wrought-iron gate and wrought-iron fence.

  So then, if Cornish House is vacant, as he has reason to believe it has been vacant for years, that cannot be a face in the octagonal window on the third floor. More likely what appears so uncannily to be a face is a reflection in the glass, possibly the moon, for there is a quarter-moon on this gusty March evening, paper-thin and elusive behind a bank of gauzy stratus clouds.

  And then he hears—Son? Come to me.

  He is eleven years old. Or, he is seventeen. Or—he is much older, an adult. His father has been dead for many years.

  You know, son—I have been waiting.

  It had seemed like the start of his life. His new life.

  That day, or rather that hour. When his father’s death was revealed to him.

  He’d been alone. So abruptly they’d been called away, summoned to the hospital, his Scots nanny had accompanied his mother who was distraught with emotion.

  In the lower hall of the house on Charity Street he’d heard the women’s urgent voices. Wanting to stop up his ears for the words of adults had often been terrifying to him when overheard by chance.

  Chance means you cannot control. Cannot even anticipate.

  Chance means a leakage of the universe, that might trickle into your brain.

  And so the two women were gone, and had forgotten him. In the excitement and dread of their departure for the hospital neither had given any thought to him.

  This, he realized with a sensation of hurt, alarm and grim satisfaction spreading like the quick damp warmth of wetting the bed which was a very bad thing to do and which since his fifth birthday he was resolved never to do, not ever not again.

  Since he’d come into consciousness as a very young child the greatest dread had been that his father would be displeased with him. Already in the cradle he’d seemed to know. An affable sort of mockery—Is that my son?—that?

  You could see (the son could see) that the father had once been a handsome man, a fit man, now thick-bodied, with shadowed jowls, suspicious eyes, yet still the old boyish grin, laughter intended to mask cruelty and impatience beneath.

  If the Scots nanny complained to his mother of the child wetting the bed and his mother complained to his father it was not (he knew) to punish him (for his mother loved him very much, with a desperate smothering love) but rather to express reproach to the father who in those years had often been gone from the household, away in his own mysterious life.

  Our son has become anxious, Horace. He rarely sleeps through the night.

  Please try to be gentler with him, to seem to love him even if you do not.

  (Had the child heard these astonishing words? How possibly could he have heard, when the words were uttered in the master bedroom in the mother’s faint tremulous pleading voice scarcely audible to the father?)

  But all that was over. The pleading. The hurt.

  No wetting the bed any longer, since his father had been “hospitalized.”

  No need to cringe in apprehension that Father would stare at him with a mocking smile and screw up his face as if smelling a bad smell. Jesus! Get him away from me.

  Even after he’d been bathed by the nanny, and certainly did not smell.

  However, he had ceased to think of his father. No need to think of his father. So long his father had been gone away—(as his mother told him with her tight-stitched smile)—in a place where he is resting, and getting well again.

  Not thinking of Father, and not counting the days since Father had been carried from the house. (One hundred nineteen.)

  Not recalling the last time he had seen Father living. Not recalling the strangulated cry Father had flung at him, managing with much effort to lift his head from the stretcher upon which he was strapped, being borne away by husky white-clad strangers, that had sounded like Son! Don’t let them take me! Help me!

  Too young, he had not heard. Hadn’t been anywhere near.

  Had not seen the frenzied eyes. Ravaged jaundiced gaunt face and saliva-glittering lips out of which the desperate cry escaped.

  On his father’s right cheek, a small coin-sized birthmark of the hue of dried blood, with a suggestion of miniature fingers, or tendrils. An opened hand? But very small.

  Almost you might miss it if you didn’t know it was there.

  A dozen times a day, the child touched his right cheek. Peered at his reflection in the mirror with relief, there was no birthmark on his cheek.

  It was strange, the child seemed to recall a time when the birthmark on his father’s cheek had seemed of little consequence, scarcely noticeable, like a freckle. But then, in the year or so preceding the hospitalization, the birthmark had seemed to grow, to become inflamed-looking. Often, the father had scratched at it, unconsciously. Often, the father’s breath was fierce as a combustible gas, terrible to smell.

  A clattering of bottles, “empties.” (The word “empties” fascinated the child, as commonplace words often did, that suggested obscure and surreptitious meanings.)

  Cut-glass tumblers containing a fraction of an inch of amber liquid. These were scattered in the downstairs rooms, sometimes even on the carpeted steps leading to the second floor. Once, the child discovered a near-empty tumbler on a windowsill in what had once been his grandfather’s library, clumsily hidden behind a drape. Daringly the child lifted the tumbler to inhale the fumes, and would have swallowed the amber liquid except his throat shut tight, in sudden fear of being poisoned.

  For the whiskey was a poison, he seemed to know. No one had needed to warn him.

  He’d come to associate the sharp-smelling liquid with alterations of mood in his father but he could not invariably predict his father’s mood—affable, irritable; quick to laugh, quick to sneer. A brisk hug, a brusque shove. Uplifted voice—What the hell, are you afraid of me? Of your own God damned father, afraid?

  I’ll teach you to be afraid! Little freak.

  Painful to realize that his father was provoked to cruelty by the very sight of him, the spindly limbs, puny body, sallow skin and doggish-damp eyes, a way of cringing that
suggested curvature of the spine—and so it was wisest for the child to avoid the father as much as he could, like any kicked dog; though like any kicked dog eager to be summoned by the master to have his hair tousled, shoulder fondly cuffed, if the mood shifted sufficiently.

  Then there was likely to be Father stumbling up the stairs, muttering and laughing to himself, to fall across the immense canopied bed of the master bedroom, at any hour of the day.

  Quickly then, Mother would shut the door to the master bedroom, from the outside.

  Mother, too, had learned to stay out of the father’s way at crucial times. Warning the child—Try not to provoke your father, he has much on his mind.

  So young at the time of his father’s hospitalization yet already the child had learned essential stratagems of survival. The creature that can best camouflage itself amid its surroundings, and does not call attention to itself, is the one that will elude the predator, while other, more naive and trusting creatures become prey.

  His mother held him, and comforted him, but chided him as well—You see, dear, your father works very hard, he is distracted by many worries.

  One day the child would learn to his surprise that his father had scarcely worked at all in those years. Once he’d been a traveling salesman (orthopedics, medical supplies) but no longer. Often he’d been away from the house on Charity Street, possibly traveling, or staying somewhere else in Providence, in the Grand Whittier Hotel, for instance, where he met with his poker-playing (male) companions and other companions (female) about which the mother knew very little but more than she wished to know. Having married a rich Providence banker’s spinster-daughter who would adore him to the day of his death, and who would be the principal heiress of his estate, why should Horace Love work?