by John Langan
To say Rainer feels nervous is an understatement. It’s obvious that George is laboring under a heavy load, one or maybe two steps away from being crushed beneath it. Rainer can’t decide if the children will help the man shoulder his burden, or if they’ll be the extra weight necessary to break him. George keeps insisting that he has something wonderful for his children, which Rainer doesn’t like the sound of. Eventually, though, Rainer gives in to the man’s request and goes through to wake the children. As he tells Clara, he’s sure the kids will be happier knowing their father has returned, and he judges it better to give the fellow what he’s asking for than to deny him. If there’s any trouble—not that he can say what that trouble might be, but the thought crosses his mind—Rainer figures he’s only a house away. He’s right about the children. They’re happy and relieved to see their father’s returned, and rush to embrace him. For his part, George doesn’t seem any better. That grin modulates only slightly. But the children clutching his pants and shirt don’t appear to drive him any closer to the edge. Thanking Rainer profusely, his neighbor leaves, the children in tow.
Maybe five, maybe ten minutes after George’s departure, just enough time for Rainer to have climbed into bed, closed his eyes, and felt sleep waiting for him, the screaming starts. High-pitched and loud, there’s a lot of it. Rainer sits up; so does Clara. The screaming continues, hysterical, terrified. “That’s the children,” Clara says, meaning their neighbor’s, but Rainer’s already out of bed and heading for the door, cursing himself for a fool. He doesn’t bother stopping to put on his boots, but hauls open the front door and runs across to the neighbor’s house. All the while, the screaming keeps up. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Rainer’s muttering to himself. Other folks are at their front doors as Rainer lowers his shoulder and smashes into the neighbor’s. His blood is up. He’s ready for a fight. What he sees inside the house stops him in his tracks.
Directly in front of him, the children are gathered in a screaming knot around Maria, their faces full of tears and horror. To the other side of them stands their father, bent over slightly, his hands out to either side of him, as if he’s apologizing for something. He’s doing all he can to maintain that grin, though his face shakes with the effort. To his right, sitting on a chair, is his late wife.
When Rainer sees the woman there, his first thought is that George sought out her grave, dug it up, and carried the body back to the house. Then she raises her head and looks at him, and Rainer’s heart stops. He takes a step forward. Strange as it sounds, he actually moves closer to her. George is babbling on about miracle this and miracle that, but Rainer isn’t paying any attention to him. He’s studying the woman—Helen’s—eyes, which are different, somehow. Hard as it is to see in the light of the single lantern burning, Rainer is sure Helen’s eyes are gold, entirely gold, with tiny black pupils dotting their centers. He can’t remember what the woman’s eyes looked like before, but he’s sure it wasn’t this.
In the meantime, more folks have shown up at the front door. When they see what’s inside, some turn around and march straight back home. Others join the children in screaming. Still others start praying in whatever language they reserve for talking to God. One man, an Italian, Italo, who’s a stonemason with Rainer, runs into the house and hustles the children outside. When he’s seen them safely to his own house, a few streets over, he walks rapidly back to the house where Rainer is still gazing into Helen’s gold eyes. “Rainer,” he says, “what in the devil is this?”
The sound of his voice calls Rainer back from wherever the woman’s eyes have taken him. He shakes his head, then looks at Italo. His voice hoarse, he says, “This is bad business.”
Together the men turn to George, who’s jammed his hands in his pockets, for all the world like a little boy caught misbehaving. “How did this happen?” Rainer asks. George doesn’t answer him, just starts up again about what a miracle this is, how lucky they are to be here to see it, yes how lucky to see such a miracle. Italo crosses the floor to him, and slaps him. Rainer’s colleague is a small man, his bald crown making him appear older than he is, but George’s head swings with the force of the blow. His grin remains. Before he can pick up the thread of his babble, Italo slaps him again, and a third time. All the while, everyone’s doing their level best not to look at what’s sitting in the chair to George’s right. Helen had been pretty badly beaten-up by the mule-carts, most of the bones in her body broken, and she still looks, well, jagged, misshapen.
Finally, George, his lips and nose bleeding from Italo’s blows, drops the talk of miracles and says something about a man. “What man?” Rainer asks him. “The man in the house,” George says, “the man in the big house.” Neither Rainer nor Italo has the faintest idea what George is talking about, but he goes on. “He understands,” George says, that bloody grin making him look like a nightmarish clown. “The man understands what it is to lose—what it is to lose. He listens. He understands. He doesn’t see why a man should suffer for what he didn’t mean to do in the first place. Things happened, that was all. He doesn’t ask for what you don’t have. Strength—to add your strength to his. He gives you his cup. Not compassionate—no, he’s not compassionate; he’s interested, interested, yes. He will help you if you will help him. Things happened. Why not? Your strength. All he asks is that you drink from his cup. His task is almost done. Why not? He will help you if you will help him.” He repeats those words a half-dozen more times, until Italo slaps him. “He’s a fisherman,” George says, and something about that statement strikes him as so funny he starts to giggle, then to chuckle, then to laugh, then to howl. It doesn’t matter how many more slaps Italo gives him, he won’t stop laughing. When he looks at his wife, still sitting calmly in the chair, his eyes start and he laughs even harder. Rainer and Italo exchange looks, and leave the cabin, shutting the door behind them. You can still hear the fellow laughing. All the camp hears it. “This is bad business,” Rainer says again, and Italo agrees, it is.
There’s a crowd gathered outside the house, composed of maybe a third of the men and not a few of the women in the camp. Every one of them has a dozen whispered questions for Rainer and Italo. Yes, they all speak in whispers. Most of their questions the men can’t answer. Nor, it seems, can anyone answer Rainer’s only question: Who is the man in the big house, the fisherman?
By now, the sun is on its way up, and, hard as it is to believe after a night like this one, soon it’ll be time to start work. No matter what happens, your job is always waiting for you, right? The crowd breaks up. A couple of men ask Rainer and Italo to let them know when they learn anything. Inside the house, George’s laughter has worn itself down to a low moaning. Thinking that he should check on George one last time, Rainer steps toward the door. Italo catches his arm. “Not until we know,” Italo says, “not until we know what’s sitting in that chair.”
“But the man,” Rainer says.
“He’s made his choice,” Italo says. “It’s none of ours.”
Rainer isn’t happy, but he doesn’t try to go in, either. He manages to convince Italo that they need to find out who the man in the big house, the fisherman, is; though I get the impression that Italo would’ve been happy to walk away from that house and never give it a second thought. What they’re going to do once they discover who’s behind the night’s events, Rainer doesn’t say, not to Italo and not to Clara when she asks him a short time later, when he’s done relating the night’s events to her. Lottie and her sisters listen to their father’s story with a combination of wonder and terror as they prepare for their various days. When he’s finished, Gretchen stops loading her schoolbag and asks Rainer if this is like in the Gospels, the time Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. At that question, Clara flies into a rage, grabbing Gretchen with one hand and beating her about the head with the other, shouting, “How dare you? How dare you listen to your father and me?” Lottie and Christina are shocked. They’ve never seen their mother like this before, ever. Rainer leaps up and c
atches Clara’s hand, and the look she gives him says that, were she stronger, she’d do for him, too. “Let’s go, girls,” Rainer says, and the sisters are out of that house one-two-three.
VIII
It’ll take Rainer two days to learn the identity of the man in the big house. As it so happens, it’s actually Clara who figures it out. Late on the second afternoon after Helen’s return from the grave, Clara hears a trio of women at the bakery discussing the Dort estate and the queer character who inhabits it. Right on the spot, she knows she’s found what they’re looking for. She sidles up to the women, asking if they’re talking about one of the houses up in the mountains. “No, no,” the first woman says, “the Dort estate’s right here.” In about ten minutes, they sketch out for Clara what it’s taken me much longer to tell you. When Rainer walks in the front door later that night, he’s greeted by Clara, who says, “I know what you’re looking for.”
Really, it isn’t a moment too soon. In that same two days, things in the house next door have plummeted from bad to worse. Italo’s wife, you may recall, is looking after Helen and George’s children. About noon of that first day, Helen—or what was Helen—decides she wants those children back. How she knows where Italo has taken them, I can’t say, but know she does. She stands from her chair, leaves her husband where he’s still lying moaning on the floor, and sets out for Italo’s place. Those who see her making her way over to Italo’s say she doesn’t walk right. She moves the way you’d expect a person trying to use a pair of shattered legs and a broken spine would. And if that isn’t strange enough, the footprints she leaves are wet, as if she’s newly out of her bath and not bothered toweling off. She lurches her way to Italo’s, folks stopping when they see her and hurrying away in the opposite direction. She ignores them. When she reaches her destination, she stands in front of it, swaying from side to side, before stumbling forward and knocking on the door.
You have to give Italo’s wife, Regina, a lot of credit, because, although she sees Helen shuffling up the street toward her house, she hauls open the front door and stands there with her hands on her hips, facing this woman with the gold eyes. Regina’s an inch or two taller than her husband, whom she probably outweighs by a good twenty or thirty pounds, too. She isn’t stupid. She’s already sent the children, her own and Helen’s, into the back bedroom and told them not to open the door for love or money. (She’d kept them all home from school that day: Helen’s children because of the shock of the night before; her children to keep them company. Her views on education were flexible, you might say.) Regina doesn’t say a word to Helen. Later, she tells Italo and Rainer she was too afraid to speak. Why she opened the door in the first place, Regina wasn’t sure, but I think I know. Have you ever been so scared of something you move toward it, try to touch it, that kind of thing? It’s strange, isn’t it? I don’t know what the name for that reaction is, but I’m pretty sure it’s what drove Regina to confront this woman knocking on her door. Helen, the dead woman, the woman who was dead and isn’t any longer, is standing there on her ruined legs, looks at Regina, then looks at the room she’s guarding. She says, “The children.”
The sound of her voice is something awful. It’s hard, raspy, as if it hasn’t been used in a while, which I guess it hasn’t. It’s kind of liquidy, too, as if Helen’s speaking from underwater. There’s something else, a quality to the woman’s voice Regina will have a hard time putting her finger on when she relates Helen’s visit to her husband and his friend. She has an accent, Regina will say at last, but who doesn’t have an accent in this place? It’s not the accent the woman had when she was alive, no, not like what any of them has, moving from one tongue to another. This accent is what you’d imagine if an animal learned how to speak, something that wasn’t trying to master your particular language, but the idea of language itself. It’s not the way you’d think a dog or cat would speak, either. It’s the voice you’d give a lizard, or an eel. Although she’s the first to hear Helen speak—aside from George, presumably—she’s far from the last, and the consensus is that her description hits the nail right on the head. When she hears Helen, the hairs on the back of Regina’s neck stand straight up, and she has all she can do to keep where she is and shake her head no.
According to Regina, Helen doesn’t so much look at her as through her. Apparently she sees her shake her head, however, because she repeats her request, those same two words, “The children.” Regina repeats her answer, too, shaking her head so hard she’s afraid it might fly off.
It isn’t until Helen states her demand a third time, stepping closer to the door as she does, that Regina finally finds her voice. “They’re not yours anymore,” she says. “Go away.”
The woman doesn’t. Instead, she takes another, lurching step forward. Regina backs away, grabbing for the door with one hand. “Go away,” she says, “go back where you belong. Get back in the ground.”
When Helen makes to cross the threshold into the house, Regina swings the door shut. Not quite fast enough—before it’s shut, Helen thrusts her arm inside and starts grabbing at Regina, who, panicking, throws herself against the door, pushing with all her strength against the woman on the other side. The arm catches at her hair, her ear, and Regina slaps it away. Helen’s skin is stone cold, Regina will report, and damp. She pushes, and Helen pushes back, and the woman’s strength is terrible. If not for the fact that her body is full of broken bones, Helen would have the door open and those children in no time. Regina can hear the sound of the woman’s bones grinding against each other as she heaves herself against the door. Despite Regina’s best efforts—which I gather were nothing to sneeze at; she was a strong woman—Helen is slowly gaining on her, inching the door open. Sweat pouring down her forehead, Regina calls on God and the saints for help and, when none of them inclines to answer, lets loose every curse she knows in English and Italian on the woman. None of it makes any difference. If she’s thought to exorcise Helen by calling on the Almighty, it appears the woman isn’t afraid of him; if she’s thought to shock her by cursing, it appears Helen has heard worse. She continues pushing the door open, and Regina knows it isn’t going to be long until the muscles in her arms and legs, already trembling with the fight, give out. She screams her frustration, slapping away that cold, grasping hand, and that scream is what does the trick. It summons the children, her own and Helen’s, who pour out of the back room in a tide. Without stopping to figure out what’s what, they rush to the door and pile against it. Their strength isn’t much, but it’s enough. Now Regina is gaining, heaving the door shut. Helen flaps her arm at them, and the children, shrieking, scratch and claw it, one of them breaking her cold skin. Black blood—literally black blood—splatters the floor. The arm jerks back. The door slams shut. Regina’s oldest throws the bolt.
Now comes Helen’s turn to scream, and scream she does. Bad as her voice is, her scream is a thousand times worse. Like a devil burning in hell, is how Regina will describe it. Years later, I understand, each of the children will still be waking from nightmares of it. Regina braces herself against the door, ready for Helen to make another try at it. She doesn’t. While the echoes of her scream are ringing in everyone’s ears, she leans close to the door and whispers to Regina through it. Whatever she says is more than two words, yet the children either can’t hear or can’t understand her. They see the blood drain from Regina’s face. They see her squeeze her eyes closed and suck in her breath a little, as if she’s felt a pain. But they don’t know the reason for any of it. Helen waits around for a moment after delivering her message, as if she’s listening to its effect on Regina. The children hear her on the other side of the door, breathing heavily from her efforts. Maria, Helen’s oldest, will tell Lottie’s sister Gretchen that the breathing sounded like her grandfather’s in the months before his death, hoarse and harsh, and something else, wet, like the way you breathe when you’re congested. Slowly, Helen retreats from the door, shuffling back to what was her house and husband.
; Regina tells no one except Italo about Helen’s message to her. When he returns from work later that day, she sends the kids out to play—she’s kept them inside and close around her since Helen’s appearance, and even when she tells them to go outside, she insists they not go far—and she and her husband have a long talk about the day’s events. One of the children—Italo and Regina’s son Giovanni—hangs close to the house to try to spy on his mom and dad’s conversation. Only natural, I suppose, given that Regina hasn’t explained any of what happened earlier, just given abundant hugs to him, his brothers and sister, and the other children, and told them all to pray the rosary. The next day, Giovanni will tell Christina, the youngest of the Schmidt girls, about what he overheard. At first, he says, his dad was furious, ready to storm right over to the dead woman’s house and put her back in the ground. He was on his way to do that very thing when his mom told him that the woman had whispered something to him. Her voice dropped as she told his dad what it was, and Giovanni couldn’t hear. Whatever her words, they stopped his dad in his tracks. “What?” he says and Regina answers, “You heard me.” “Impossible,” he says. “Not,” says she. There was a lot of back-and-forth. The boy reports that Italo kept asking Regina, Was she sure? and, How could this woman know such a thing? his voice becoming more uncertain and quavery with each repetition. In return, Regina’s voice gained strength as she said again and again that she didn’t know how this woman could know, though the damned and devils in hell were supposed to know all manner of secrets, weren’t they? But that yes, so far as she could tell right then and there, the woman was correct. In fact, it explained a number of things. By the conversation’s end, Italo was in tears, sobbing, “What are we going to do?” over and over; Regina saying she didn’t know, but that they still had a little bit of time. Understandably, young Giovanni was upset at listening to all this. When he took up his position to eavesdrop, he hadn’t bargained on listening in on his dad sobbing. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and ran inside to join his parents, weeping himself. For which consideration he received a clout upside the head from Regina for spying, and a teary embrace from Italo. He watched Regina tell Italo he must consult his German friend about this matter. He was an educated man, the German—more importantly, he struck Regina as owning a measure of wisdom, and wisdom was always a precious commodity, especially at a time like this. She thought the German stood a better chance than most of them of knowing what to do about this woman who should be lying in the ground but was up and walking around. Because dealt with she had to be. There was no arguing the matter. Still wiping the tears from his eyes, Italo agreed. He would talk to his friend.
