Phantom

by Thomas Tessier

  Her smile was gone now, replaced by a look of anguish and rage. A face that had been beautiful but was now tom by elemental conflict. Again Ned pushed himself back, but the trees were a puzzle picture of hands and faces and bodies gathering around him, a phantom army that would not let him go. Steam bellowed up from the center of the pit, a scalding rush that engulfed the woman. The boiling mud roared at her feet. The leaves above, rippling from the force of the blast, made a noise like a crowd laughing obscenely. Ned couldn't turn away from the woman's eyes. They were burning with sorrow and loss, and they cut into the boy accusingly. It's my fault, he thought. I'm the one to blame for this, I'm doing it to her.

  The spring vented. A searing jet of steam shot fifteen feet into the air. Ned was spattered with gobs of hot mud and sulphurous water, but he hardly noticed it. The woman was turning bright red before his eyes, and then her skin began to peel away as her flesh sizzled and popped.

  —Child, why?

  Ned screamed.

  —Child, why are you doing this to me?

  Ned turned, tore his way through the ring of pipe-cleaner trees and ran.

  —Child, why are you leaving me again?

  Her words, a weeping in his brain, a cry of emotions so great and unexpected that it reduced the boy to raw confusion. He had no defenses left, no final pocket of sense or understanding to draw on. All he could do was run, full of shame and self-hatred. When he came to the way out he didn't stop to think, but instantly scrambled up the ramp of saplings, pulling himself like a frenzied monkey.

  Suddenly he was standing there, in darkness. Everything had changed. He had reached the top of the wall and it was a thin, luminous ribbon at his feet. The wall fell away a million miles below into endless space. All was blackness around him, utter night. The pale, glowing strip he stood on was his only foothold. He ran as fast as he could, never missing a step, following the line as it unrolled in front of him. Tears streamed down his face, tears for the woman he had left behind. She had burned and died, and he had done nothing. Nor had she died alone. More, so much more, had gone with her. A chance he would never have again. A secret, a truth he would never know. The feeling was beyond words for Ned. All he had left were useless tears and a vacuum within.

  The ribbon ran out and Ned was flying before he realized it. Then: whump! Stunned, blinking, .he rolled on his side and looked around. He was in the clearing. There was the terrace and the spa building. He was lying on soft field grass. The wall was just behind him. He had jumped out of the void and back into daylight.

  He cried bitterly.

  * * *

  21. Mother and Child

  Two days later Ned still didn't know what had happened to him at the spa. Had he really survived the final encounter he had sought, or was it merely a hallucination? Had he stood at the door to heaven, or hell? Was the woman in any way real, or was she just a fantasy? But the most important question was whether it was over at last, the haunting he believed he had been going through? Somehow it still felt unresolved, but he had no way of knowing whether there was anything even to resolve. How good it would be if he could write it all off as the fearsome antics of a boy's imagination, but Ned knew that you cannot willfully take shelter in ignorance or innocence.

  He was not apprehensive, but subdued. His body felt as if all strength and energy had been drained out of it. He had spent the two days sitting around the house listlessly. He couldn't get past one page of any book he looked at. He watched television, napped, said little to his parents. Mostly he brooded over the incidents at the spa. Some things continued to amaze him. He couldn't remember climbing up the saplings, for instance, and yet he must have done it. And then being able to run along the top of the wall—run—in a moment of crisis when it seemed as if he hap been transported to the black reaches of deepest space. His guardian angel was that part of the brain which had kept control and functioned automatically, delivering him from ... whatever.

  The second night, Ned went to bed after staring without interest at the television for a couple of hours. He put on his light pajamas and sat by the window. The sky was dark enough, and very clear. Ned pushed the screen up and brought his telescope to the open window. It was not an expensive or sophisticated instrument, like some in the Edmund Scientific catalogue, but it could bring him a reasonable glimpse of Saturn on a good night. He had seen planets, the moons of Jupiter and plenty of stars, but one of these days he would have to get a book that would enable him to properly identify other objects in the night sky. Like pulsars, or those baffling quasars. In a school magazine there had been an article about quasars; it said that astronomers didn't know exactly what they were—and that pleased Ned. There were some things grown-ups could see and study, but not explain.

  Ned found the Pleiades. Distance was such a tricky business. To look at this star group you would think they were all bunched closely together. But Ned knew they were actually separated by hundreds of millions of miles, vast gulfs of space. The sizes and distances involved were almost more than the mind could comprehend.

  And what if this whole universe were nothing but a speck on a microscope slide, being examined by a boy in another universe, the same being true of his universe, and so on, and on .... Talk about giants! Hello, up there. Was there any way a phantom could fit into this scheme of things? Ned had to admit that it seemed silly. But, who knows—maybe one of those boys in another universe had a similar problem. Size and distance would mean nothing, when it came to that. Hope he's doing better than I am, Ned thought.

  He heard someone in the hall. As he turned to look around, his mother's face appeared in the doorway.

  "Ned?"

  "Hi, Mom."

  Linda came into the room.

  "Can't sleep?"

  "In a few minutes. There's a good sky tonight."

  "Are all the stars where they're supposed to be?"

  Ned smiled. "I think so."

  Linda sat down on his bed and leaned back against the wall.

  "Come on over here with me for a minute," she said.

  Ned pulled the telescope in and lowered the window screen.

  He started to get up onto the bed.

  "Oh—want me to turn the light on?"

  "Don't bother. Just get close to me."

  Ned sat next to his mother. It was a very bright night, and they looked like ghostly figures in the dark. Linda put her arm around the boy and hugged him, resting her head on his. Ned snuggled closer, luxuriating in her warmth, the clean smell of her and the feeling of love she always gave him.

  "Are you okay, Ned?"

  "Sure."

  "Anything bothering you?"

  "No .... "

  "Anything at all, you just tell me about it."

  "Uh-huh."

  "The reason I mention it is, you've been in a funny mood lately. Know what I mean?"

  "Well ... " Ned let the word fade away and gave a small shrug.

  "It seems that way to me," Linda went on. "Just a little."

  "Mom?"

  "Yes?"

  "How old do you think you'll be when you die?"

  "I don't know, hon. Nobody knows that about themselves. Why? Is that what's bothering you?"

  Another shrug. "I don't know."

  "Well, if it is, don't waste your time thinking about it. The important thing is to live a good, happy life, with as much love as possible. That's all. That's everything."

  "But, Mom ... "

  "Hmmmn?"

  "I don't want to lose you."

  "Oh, Ned." He sounded so sad and helpless, Linda suddenly felt herself about to cry. "You're not going to lose me, honey. No, you're not. Please don't worry about that." She gave him another long hug, then brushed his hair back off his forehead and kissed him several times. "No, no, no," she whispered.

  "But, Mommy—" Now that Ned had started, he couldn't stop. His voice trembled. "I'll be gone and I won't ever see you again."

  "No, no, no." Softly, soothingly, but firm.

  "But
I will, I'll be gone and—"

  "No, Ned. Where?"

  "I don't know .... They'll take me somewhere way far away."

  "Who?"

  " ... Somebody ... "

  "No, that's not—"

  "Yes." Surprisingly insistent. "I know, Mommy, I know."

  Linda found her son's eyes in the dark and she could see the fear running loose in them.

  "Ned, is it those two old men? Are they—"

  "No, they're my friends."

  "Well, have you seen somebody else? Has someone followed you home or threatened you, or anything like that?"

  After a long pause, a tiny voice: "No .... "

  "Okay. Now you listen to me, sweetheart. You don't have to be afraid. Nobody's going to take you away from Daddy and me."

  "Yes, they will."

  Once more Linda was surprised at how certain Ned sounded.

  What was it? Not paranoia, not in one so young. Then she remembered something from her own childhood. How old had she been at the time—five? Anyhow, it was the first time someone explained the word kidnapping to her. For weeks after that Linda had lived in sheer terror, convinced that at any moment she was going to be snatched and murdered and buried in a swamp and never found again. Finally she had gotten over it, but she still recalled the fear. Vividly. Ned was nearly ten, but ten was still very much a child. He could get a notion into his head and it could grow out of all proportion.

  "My poor baby." It had to be something like that, some irrational childhood fear. Linda rocked him in her arms. "Do you think Daddy or I would ever let anybody take you away from us? Of course not."

  "But what if you couldn't stop them?"

  "That'll never happen, Ned. Never, never, never."

  "Mommy, I love you." .

  "I love you."

  "And Daddy."

  "And Daddy loves you. We both love you so much."

  "I don't want it to happen to me."

  "Nothing bad is going to happen to you, Ned. Only good things. And no one is ever, ever going to take you away from us.”

  "Oh, Mommy ... "

  "We love you too much, and nothing can beat that."

  "Will you stay here with me in the dark, Mommy?"

  "Of course, I will."

  "Really all night?"

  "Sure."

  "Because, well, I really want you to stay and hold me."

  Little-boy talk. Regression? He sounded more like an Oedipal five or six. This thing tonight, Linda thought, it's set him back. But at least he's brought it out and told me about it. With lots of love and a bit of luck it'll be over with in a day or two. Please.

  "I'll stay here as long as you want, Ned."

  "Mommy, Mommy ... "

  His whole body shook, and then Linda could feel his hot tears soaking through her blouse. For a few minutes she couldn't keep from crying along with him. She hugged and rocked him some more. She sang gently to him and hummed any soft tune that came into her head. Ned cried himself to sleep in her arms, but whenever she tried to move, his fingers grabbed her tightly. At some point Michael looked into the room, but Linda waved him away, afraid that Ned would wake up.

  Later, much later, she managed to slip out of Ned's room. Her arms and legs were stiff, and her breathing was a little irritated. She took two puffs of Becotide from the inhaler. Michael was asleep.

  After a while, so was she.

  * * *

  22. The Farley Place (2)

  "Lady of Spain I adore you. Pull down your pants I'll explore you .... "

  As Ned entered the baithouse, Cloudy was singing to himself. He was perched on a stool at the small zinc table that served as a workbench in the back comer of the shed, where he was fiddling with a dozen or more flashlights. Peeler sat in his armchair, thumbing through an old catalogue of fishing and trapping gear. Both men glanced up at the boy.

  "I told you he didn't run off to join the Navy," Cloudy said.

  Peeler grunted.

  It was a drizzly morning, fit for doing nothing, and Ned had been sure he'd find either or both of his friends at the baithouse. He shook the moisture off his baseball cap and made his way past the tables of tanks and wooden boxes.

  "Where did you get all the flashlights?"

  Cloudy nodded toward Peeler. "That old fool had these lyin' around for years, and there ain't a one of 'em works. Now I brung one good set of batteries so we can see what's what." He pushed the switch to try the flashlight in his hand. Nothing happened. "Okay, now, this one here needs a new bulb, see?"

  Ned nodded.

  "So far, every dang one I tried needs a new bulb." Cloudy took the batteries out and put the flashlight with a group of four others to one side. He resumed humming the same schoolyard song as he took up the next flashlight.

  Ned moved away a few feet, to a tray of baby crayfish. He teased them with his finger, sending them scurrying through the water.

  "So watcha been doin'?" Peeler asked after a few moments.

  "Oh ... nothing much."

  "Another one needs a new bulb," Cloudy announced. "You sure need a lot of new bulbs."

  Peeler harumphed. "You gotta check the connection," he said. "It don't matter if you got good bulbs and batteries if they don't make the connection.'"

  "I know, I know."

  "Some of them things been kicked around so much they don't connect no more. That's what needs fixin'."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "Don't need but one anyhow," Peeler added in a mutter.

  Ned waited until he was sure this exchange was over before speaking. "Something did happen to me a few days ago," he said. "I thought I was in real trouble for a while there."

  "How's that?" Peeler looked at the boy over the top of the catalogue.

  "Oh, I was just out walking. Near the old railroad tracks, you know." Ned kept his eyes on the crayfish as he spoke. He wouldn't come right out and say he was in the spa again, but he didn't think he would have to tell a blatant lie either. "And suddenly these bees came up, a whole mess of them. Boy, did they chase me. I never ran so hard in my life."

  'They'll do that," Peeler said. His eyes dropped back to the catalogue page.

  "Was they yellow jackets?" Cloudy asked.

  "I didn't stick around to find out."

  "You musta come on a hive of 'em, to stir 'em all up like that," Peeler said. "Did it myself once."

  "It was scary."

  "They can hurt you, yes, they can," Cloudy said. "I used to know a fella—Peeler, you remember old Billy LeBeau?—he'd get sick real bad from bees."

  "Yeah," Peeler replied.

  "Just one or two bee stings and his face'd get all swole up like a big pink marshmallow, and he'd have trouble breathin' and all."

  "Really? That bad?"

  "Oh, yeah, sure. They had to give him oxygen once, and he had to carry a little jar of pills around with him all the time, in case he got stung."

  "Billy didn't have to see a bee," Peeler said. "If he just heard a buzzin' around him, he'd drop his load and head for the hills. Hey, whatever become of Billy, anyhow?"

  Cloudy considered for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't know. He's gone somewhere. Ain't seen nor heard of him in years now. Maybe he's out in the desert, or up with the Eskimos. Any place where there ain't no bees."

  "I think we have a nest in our house," Ned said. "I've heard them buzzing around."

  But the subject of bees was apparently finished, for this brought no response from the two old men. Peeler scanned the pages of the catalogue as if looking for something he had lost, and Cloudy was humming again as he worked on another flashlight.

  "When are you going fishing again?" Ned asked.

  Peeler shrugged. "Tomorrow, maybe. If it's not too wet out. I got red wigglers to spare, so we could go over to Baxley Mill Pond and get us a bunch of sunfish, if nothin' else."

  "You gotta catch so many of them," Cloudy protested. "And then they're a pain in the butt to clean."

  "They ain't so bad," Peeler said. "We
can all pitch in. Ned'll cut up a few punkinseeds, won't you?"

  "Sure."

  "See? I think it's a good idea. I been feelin' so bone-lazy this past week, that's about as much work as I can stir myself to do."

  "And you wouldn't do that if you couldn't get the boy to do most of the work for you, ain't that right, Mr. Tadpole?"

  Ned laughed. "I don't mind. I like to go fishing."

  "Okay, okay." Cloudy gave up. "I'll watch the shop, you guys bring home the food." Then, to himself: "Dinky little sunfish ... "

  Peeler threw the catalogue over his shoulder, stretched and gave a mighty yawn. He slumped back in the armchair, his eyes a little watery. "Darned if I ain't like a watch that's all wound down," he said. "Must be the weather."

  "Yeah, and we been havin' this dam weather for thirty years now," Cloudy remarked, with a sly wink at Ned.

  "Peeler."

  "Hmmmn?"

  Ned sat on a wooden crate near the old man. "Tell me about my house," he requested.

  "Your house?"

  “Yes."

  "What about it?"

  "Well—everybody calls it the Farley place, don't they?"

  "Sure do."

  "How come?"

  "Folks name of Farley used to live in it, a long time ago.

  They built the place."

  "But why do people still call it that, if it was so long ago?"

  "Ah, that don't mean nothin'. Somethin' gets a name, it sticks, that's all."

  "What happened?"

  "What d'ya mean?"

  "Something happened at the house—to the Farleys—didn't it?"

  Peeler smiled, but Ned noticed that the old man was chewing his lower lip. Cloudy had turned around on his stool, a flashlight. lying neglected in his hand.

  "You're guessin' now, Nedly."

  "But it did, didn't it?"

  "Why? What makes you think so?"