Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992)
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“I don’t know what to think.”
“Led’, I thought, if I imitate that noise for him— ”
“No!” She had brought some mending and was about
to sit down with it, but froze as if threatened by attack. “ I
couldn’t stand it, Harp. And— it might bring them.”
“Them?” Harp chuckled uneasily. “I don’t guess I
could do it that good he’d come for it.”
“Don’t do it, Harp!”
“All right, hon.” Her eyes were closed, her head
drooping back. “Don’t git nerved up so.”
I started wondering whether a man still seeming sane
could dream up such a horror for the unconscious
purpose of tormenting a woman too young for him, a
woman he could never imagine he owned. If he told her a
fox bark wasn’t right for a fox, she’d believe him. I said,
“We shouldn’t talk about it if it upsets her.”
He glanced at me like a man floating up from underwater. Leda said in a small, aching voice: “I wish to God we could move to Boston.”
The granite face closed in defensiveness. “Led’, we
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been over all that. Nothing is going to drive me off of my
land. I got no time for the city at my age. What the Jesus
would I do? Night watchman? Sweep out somebody’s
back room, b’Jesus Christ? Savings’d be gone in no time.
We been all over it. We ain’t moving nowhere.”
“I could find work.” For Harp, of course, that was the
worst thing she could have said. She probably knew it
from his stricken silence. She said clumsily, “I forgot
something upstairs.” She snatched up her mending and
she was gone.
We talked no more of it the rest of the day. I followed
through the milking and other chores, lending a hand
where I could, and we made everything as secure as we
could against storm and other enemies. The longtoothed furry thing was the spectral guest at diriner, but
.we cut him, on Leda’s account, or so we pretended.
Supper would have been awkward anyway. They weren’t
in the habit of putting up guests, and Leda was a rather
deadly cook because she cared nothing about it. A
Darkfield girl, I suppose she had the usual twentieth-
century mishmash of television dreams until some impulse or maybe false signs of pregnancy tricked her into marrying a man out of the nineteenth. We had venison
treated like beef and overdone vegetables. I don’t like
venison even when it’s treated right.
At six Harp turned on his battery radio and sat
stone-faced through the day’s bad news and the weather
forecast— “a blizzard which may prove the worst in
forty-two years. Since three pm , eighteen inches have
fallen at Bangor, twenty-one at Boston. Precipitation is
not expected to end until tomorrow. Winds will increase
during the night with gusts up to seventy miles per
hour.” Harp shut it off, with finality. On other evenings I
had spent there he let Leda play it after supper only kind
of soft, so there had been a continuous muted bleat and
blatter all evening. Tonight Harp meant to listen for
other sounds. Leda washed the dishes, said an early good
night, and fled upstairs.
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Harp didn’t talk, except as politeness obliged him to
answer some blah of mine. We sat and listened to the
snow and the lunatic wind. An hour of it was enough for
me; I said I was beat and wanted to turn in early. Harp
saw me to my bed in the parlor and placed a new chunk
of rock maple in the pot-bellied stove. He produced a
difficult granite smile, maybe using up his allowance for
the week, and pulled out a bottle from a cabinet that had
stood for many years below a parlor print— George
Washington, I think, concluding a treaty with some
offbeat sufferer from hepatitis who may have been General Cornwallis if the latter had two left feet. The bottle contained a brand of rye that Harp sincerely believed to
be drinkable, having charred his gullet forty-odd years
trying to prove it. While my throat healed, Harp said,
“ Shouldn’t’ve bothered you with all this crap, Ben. Hope
it ain’t going to spoil your sleep.” He got me his spare
flashlight, then let me be, and closed the door.
I heard him drop back into his kitchen armchair.
Under too many covers, lamp out, I heard the cruel
whisper of the snow. The stove muttered, a friend,
making me a cocoon of living heat in a waste of outer
cold. Later I heard Leda at the head of the stairs, her
voice timid, tired, and sweet with invitation: “You
cornin’ up to bed, Harp?” The stairs creaked under him.
Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired
pain that is brief release from trouble.
I remembered something Adelaide Simmons had told
me about this house, where 1 had not gone upstairs since
Harp and I were boys. Adelaide, one of the very few
women in Darkfield who never spoke unkindly of Leda,
said that the tiny west room across from Harp and
Leda’s bedroom was fixed up for a nursery, and Harp
wouldn’t allow anything in there but baby furniture. Had
been so since they were married seven years before.
Another hour dragged on, in my exasperations of
sleeplessness.
Then I heard Longtooth.
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The noise came from the west side, beyond the snow-
hidden vegetable garden. When it snatched me from the
edge of sleep, I tried to think it was a fox barking, the
ringing, metallic shriek the little red beast can belch
dragonlike from his throat. But wide awake, I knew it
had been much deeper, chestier. Homed owl?— no. A
sound that belonged to ancient times when men relied
on chipped stone weapons and had full reason to fear the
dark.
The cracks in the stove gave me firelight for groping
back into my clothes. The wind had not calmed at all. I
stumbled to the west window, buttoning up, and found it
a white blank. Snow had drifted above the lower sash.
On tiptoe I could just see over it. A light appeared, dimly
illuminating the snowfield beyond. That would be coming from a lamp in the Ryders’ bedroom, shining through the nursery room and so out, weak and diffused,
into the blizzard chaos.
Yaaarrhh!
Now it had drawn horribly near. From the north
windows of the parlor I saw black nothing. Harp
squeaked down to my door.
“ ’Wake, Ben?”
“Yes. Come look at the west window.”
He had left no night-light burning in the kitchen, and
only a scant glow came down to the landing from the
bedroom. He murmured behind me, “Ayah, snow’s up
some. Must be over three foot on the level by now.”
Yaaarrhh!
The voice had shouted on the south side, the blinder
side of the house, overlooked only by one kitchen
window and a small one in the pantry where the hand
pump stood. The view from the pantry window was
>
mostly blocked by a great maple that overtopped the
house. I heard the wind shrilling across the tree’s winter
bones.
“Ben, you want to git your boots on? Up to you— can’t
ask it. I might have to go out.” Harp spoke in an under
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tone as if the beast might understand him through the
tight walls.
“Of course.” I got into my knee boots and caught
up my parka as I followed him into the kitchen. A
.30-caliber rifle and his heavy shotgun hung on deerhom
over the door to the woodshed. He found them in the
dark.
What courage I possessed that night came from being
shamed into action, from fearing to show a poor face to
an old friend in trouble. I went through the Normandy
invasion. I have camped out alone, when I was younger
and healthier,' and slept nicely. But that noise of
Longtooth stole courage. It ached along the channel of
the spine.
I had the spare flashlight, but knew Harp didn’t want
me to use it here. I could make out the furniture, and
Harp reaching for the gun rack. He already had on his
boots, fur cap, and mackinaw. “You take this’n,” he said,
and put the ten gauge in my hands. “Both barrels loaded.
Ain’t my way to do that, ain’t right, but since this thing
started— ”
Yaaarrhh!
“Where’s he got to now?” Harp was by the south
window. “Round this side?”
“I thought so. . . . Where’s Droopy?”
Harp chuckled thinly. “Poor little shit! She come
upstairs at the first sound of him and went under the bed.
I told Led’ to stay upstairs. She’d want a light down here.
Wouldn’t make sense.”
Then, apparently from the east side of the hen loft and
high, booming off some resonating surface: Yaaarrhh!
“He can’t! Jesus, that’s twelve foot off the ground!”
But Harp plunged out into the shed, and I followed.
“Keep your light on the floor, Ben.” He ran up the
narrow stairway. “Don’t shine it on the birds, they’ll act
up.”
So far the chickens, stupid and virtually blind in the
dark, were making only a peevish tut-tutting of alarm.
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But something was clinging to the outside of the barricaded east window, snarling, chattering teeth, pounding on the two-by-fours. With a fist?— it sounded like nothing else. Harp snapped, “Get your light on the window!”
And he fired through the glass.
We heard no outcry. Any noise outside was covered by
the storm and the squawks of the hens scandalized by the
shot. The glass was dirty from their continual disturbance of the litter; I couldn’t see through it. The bullet had drilled the pane without shattering it, and passed
between the two-by-fours, but the beast could have
dropped before he fired. “I got to go out there. You stay,
Ben.” Back in the kitchen he exchanged rifle for shotgun.
“Might not have no chance to aim. You remember this
piece, don’t y’?— eight in the clip.”
“I remember it.”
“Good. Keep your ears open.” Harp ran out through
the door that gave on a small paved area by the woodshed. To get around under the east loft window he would have to push through the snow behind the bam, since he
had blocked all the rear openings. He could have circled
the house instead, but only by bucking the west wind and
fighting deeper drifts. I saw his big shadow melt out of
sight.
Leda’s voice quavered down to me: “He—get it?”
“Don’t know. He’s gone to see. Sit tight. . . .”
I heard that infernal bark once again before Harp
returned, and again it sounded high off the ground; it
must have come from the big maple. And then moments
later— I was still trying to pierce the dark, watching for
Harp— a vast smash of broken glass and wood, and the
violent bang of the door upstairs. One small wheezing
shriek cut short, and one scream such as no human being
should ever hear. I can still hear it.
I think I lost some seconds in shock. Then 1 was
groping up the narrow stairway, clumsy with the rifle and
flashlight. Wind roared at the opening of the kitchen
door, and Harp was crowding past me, thrusting me
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245
aside. But I was close behind him when he flung the
bedroom door open. The blast from the broken window
that had slammed the door had also blown out the lamp.
But our flashlights said at once that Leda was not there.
Nothing was, nothing living.
Droopy lay in a mess of glass splinters and broken
window sash, dead from a crushed neck— something
had stamped on her. The bedspread had been pulled
almost to the window— maybe Leda’s hand had
clenched on it. I saw blood on some of the glass fragments, and on the splintered sash, a patch of reddish fur.
Harp ran back downstairs. I lingered a few seconds.
The arrow of fear was deep in me, but at the moment it
made me numb. My light touched up an ugly photograph
on the wall, Harp’s mother at fifty or so, petrified and
acid-faced before the camera, a puritan deity with shallow, haunted eyes. I remembered her.
Harp had kicked over the traces when his father died,
and quit going to church. Mrs. Ryder “disowned" him.
The farm was his; she left him with it and went to live
with a widowed sister in Lohman, and died soon,
unreconciled. Harp lived on as a bachelor, crank, recluse, until his strange marriage in his fifties. Now here was Ma still watchful, pucker-faced, unforgiving. In my
dullness of shock I thought: Oh, they probably always
made love with the lights out.
But now Leda wasn’t there.
I hurried after Harp, who had left the kitchen door to
bang in the wind. I got out there with rifle and flashlight,
and over across the road I saw his torch. No other light,
just his small gleam and mine.
I knew as soon as I had forced myself beyond the
comer of the house and into the fantastic embrace of the
storm that I could never make it. The west wind ground
needles into my face. The snow was up beyond the
middle of my thighs. With weak lungs and maybe an
imperfect heart I could do nothing out here except die
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Edgar Pangbom
quickly to no purpose. In a moment Harp would be
starting down the slope of the woods. His trail was
already disappearing under my beam. I drove myself a
little farther, and an instant’s lull in the storm allowed
me to shout: “Harp! I can’t follow!”
He heard. He cupped his mouth and yelled back:
“Don’t try! Git back to the house! Telephone!” I waved
to acknowledge the message and struggled back.
I only just made it. Inside the kitchen doorway I fell
flat, gun and flashlight clattering off somewhere, and
there I stayed until 1 won back enough breath to keep
myself living. My face and hands were ice blocks, then
fires. While I worked at the task of getting air into my
body, one thought continued, an inner necessity: There
must be a rational cause. I do not abandon the rational
cause. At length I hauled myself up and stumbled to the
telephone. The line was dead.
I found the flashlight and reeled upstairs with it. I
stepped past poor Droopy’s body and over the broken
glass to look through the window space. I could see that
snow had been pushed off the shed roof near the bedroom window; the house sheltered that area from the full drive of the west wind, so some evidence remained. I
guessed that whatever came must have jumped to the
house roof from the maple, then down to the shed roof
and then hurled itself through the closed window without regard for it as an obstacle. Losing a little blood and a little fur.
I glanced around and could not find that fur now.
Wind must have pushed it out of sight. I forced the door
shut. Downstairs, I lit the table lamps in kitchen and
parlor. Harp might need those beacons— if he came
back. I refreshed the fires, and gave myself a dose of
Harp’s horrible whiskey. It was nearly one in the morning. If he never came back?
It might be days before they could plow out the road.
When the storm let up I could use Harp’s snowshoes,
maybe . . .
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Harp came back at 1:20, bent and staggering. He let
me support him to the armchair. When he could speak
he said, “No trail. No trail.” He took the bottle from my
hands and pulled on it. “Christ Jesus! What can I do?
Ben . . . ? I got to go to the village, get help. If they got
any help to give.”
“ Do you have an extra pair of snowshoes?”
He stared toward me, battling confusion. “Hah? No, I
ain’t. Better you stay anyhow. I’ll bring yours from your
house if you want, if I can git there.” He drank again and
slammed in the cork with the heel of his hand. “I’ll leave
you the ten gauge.”
He got his snowshoes from a closet. I persuaded him to
wait for coffee. Haste could accomplish nothing now; we
could not say to each other that we knew Leda was dead.
When he was ready to go, I stepped outside with him
into the mad wind. “Anything you want me to do before
you get back?” He tried to think about it.
“ I guess not, Ben . . . God, ain’t I lived right? No, that