Campbell Wood

by Al Sarrantonio

  Seth shook his head. "His brother came and dragged him away." He hesitated for a moment, and then went on. "He said there was something weird about this place. He said there was something strange about Kaymie."

  Ellen and Mark looked at each other. "About Kaymie?" Mark asked. "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know," Seth said. They were weird."

  Kaymie came down the stairs and sat quietly at the table.

  "Look," Ellen said. "Daddy's made breakfast today."

  "Uh oh," said Seth, covering his mouth.

  Mark noticed that Kaymie had a funny look on her face. "Are you okay?" he asked.

  She hesitated before answering. "I'm okay." "You sure? You worried about starting school next week?"

  Kaymie thought of saying something about the noises in the closet, and her dream, but decided against it. "I'm all right, Dad."

  "Well," Mark said, wiping his mouth with a napkin and getting up. "I hate to eat and run but I've got things to do. You guys get to clean up the mess. I'll try to get home early so we can get a bunch of the junk stored away and set up the rooms better. But don't hesitate to start without me."

  "Phooey," said Seth, ducking under the table out of reach.

  Campbell Wood was a typical Hudson River community, and in a lot of ways was just like a turn-of-the-century postcard. There was a bit of timelessness here, with modern trappings. Route 22, which ran through the town, was flanked by two rows of single- and double-story shops—the kind of mom-and-pop establishments that had been all but wiped out by the suburban malls.

  Mark cruised slowly past a pharmacy, a small movie theater with a cheap double bill, a jeweler's with a white-haired old man sitting on a stool in the window, squinting over a watch with a magnifier screwed into his eye, an ice-cream parlor, a dry-goods store, a small grocer's, a Woolworth's. There was, of course, the inevitable McDonald's, but even that was tastefully decorated and fitted into the generally oak-trimmed decor of the street. Mark remembered vaguely his father taking him into that Woolworth's when he was three or four and buying him a set of jacks. I'll have to take Seth in there and see if the same magic works on him, he thought. He passed a few trees at the curb with bright green litter cans beneath them; he went through a single traffic light and by another small cluster of stores; then suddenly there were trees all around and the town was behind him. He climbed a small rise and there was the school where Kaymie would start today—a sprawling affair built in the days when school budgets had still been fat and when everyone had lots of kids.

  The trees closed in again.

  The woods were very thick here. A deep shade, relieved now and then by sharp slivers of sunlight breaking through the branches and late leaves overhead, settled over him. The colors were almost frighteningly beautiful—the leaves were thick with gold, red, and various shades of brown.

  They were falling all around him, and those still attached to the trees hung low over the roadway.

  Despite the beauty of the woods and of the day, Mark began to feel a growing sense of claustrophobia. Those trees were just too close. He leaned his head toward the half-open window, pulling in a few deep breaths. He felt as if that overhang of branches and foliage was pressing down on him. The trees now butted right up against the curb, their limbs pressing out and down toward him—

  The road abruptly drew out of the woods and widened into bright sunlight. Mark drew a deep breath of relief. Silly, he thought.

  The route twisted up and down and then up again, and there above him was the university complex, a low cluster of dull brick buildings huddled on a rise off the road.

  He pulled into the entrance, a wide, well-paved two-lane pathway rainbowed by a small arch with a bronze plaque on it. The library, he was told by a passing student, was off to the left, at the back of the campus, and after parking in the visitors' lot he made his way along a labyrinthine concrete walkway to the indicated building.

  When he asked inside about the science research collection he was told to his surprise that there was a separate collection in a different building. Retracing his steps to the other side of the campus, he eventually found himself in an impressively large structure labeled the Ferman Science Library.

  There was an oak desk just inside the foyer, with a small dark-haired girl behind it. Mark's steps echoed hollowly on the marble floor.

  "Excuse me," he said.

  The girl looked up, and a shock went through Mark. She was not exactly pretty, but had a strangely magnetic look to her face. There was an electrical intensity about her. Her hair was black as ink and cut severely short. Her face was fair-complexioned and slim-featured, which made her large, dark eyes stand out even more. Her eyes fixed intensely on Mark for a moment, and then suddenly she smiled.

  "Is there something specific you're looking for?" Her voice was medium-pitched, with a husky edge to it, but extremely businesslike.

  "A little of everything," Mark responded, trying hard not to sound embarrassed.

  She tapped a pencil on her knuckles. "Well, we have a subsection in every general area as well as some specifics like microbiology and astronomy. We also have a periodical room and an audiovisual library with a projection theater." She stood the pencil on its end and looked up at him again.

  "That's great," said Mark. "Is it okay for me to use all this stuff?"

  "Sure. It's pretty dead around here now. The science school's shut down for reorganization."

  "Any chance you could show me the astronomy collection?"

  She got up. "No problem." She was slim, even shorter than Mark had guessed. She couldn't have been more than five feet even. She looked to be in her early twenties and wore the kind of clothes Mark had worn in his college days—blue jeans, sneakers, a blue flannel shirt.

  My God, Mark thought, suddenly realizing that he was aroused.

  He walked with the librarian down a short hallway and into a cluttered but well-lit room, all the while keeping his briefcase over his front. He felt like a complete idiot.

  "Most of our astronomy texts are along that back wall," said the girl, sweeping her hand over a shelf of books. "If you need anything specific you don't see, it might possibly be in the physics library. The periodicals are on the second floor. There's a study table at the back; if that isn't big enough you can use one of the oversize ones on the first floor." She abruptly turned and held out her hand, startling Mark into nearly dropping his briefcase. "My name is Fay. Anything I can do, just ask." She smiled, a brief, electric smile.

  When she left, Mark stood mystified, trying to figure out why the girl had had that effect on him. I'll be damned, he thought. This kind of thing had happened to him a couple of times before, though never this intensely. He couldn't help looking at it analytically—maybe there was even an article for one of the science magazines in it. For some reason, it seemed, certain people, when placed together, produced an actual physical response—at least in one of the partners.

  Lust at first sight, he thought, and laughed.

  Before long he was totally absorbed in work, and when he glanced at his watch absentmindedly and then looked back at it again it finally registered on him that it was three o'clock. Almost five hours had gone by. He'd completely finished a first draft for an article on new advances in black hole research; his basic research was done and all he needed to do was polish up the prose and get it off in the mail to New York.

  At the front desk he returned, a little self-consciously, Fay's pleasant wave. As he backed through the front door he turned around, banging into something solid. He nearly fell forward, just catching his balance, and looked up to see the man he'd walked into doing the same thing.

  They exchanged apologies, and Mark helped gather the papers that had fallen. He saw that the other was more of a boy than a man. He had the look of a preoccupied student about him—thin almost to the point of ascetic with longish, unruly hair and a pair of rimless glasses. He looked as though parts of clothing—sweater, button-down shirt, oversize pants, overco
at—had been fastened to him with spots of glue, and not always in the right places.

  "My fault, really," the boy said to Mark. "I'm giving a final exam tomorrow and it occurred to me at lunch that I hadn't made it up yet." He pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose.

  "You teach?" said Mark, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice.

  The other smiled and held out a thin hand. "Tom Nolan. Associate professor, sociology department." He peered through his glasses at Mark. "You?"

  "I'm a freelance writer."

  "You're not on the staff?" Nolan replied. "I just assumed you were. You see, I still don't know anybody here outside the guy in the office next to mine—and that's only because I borrow his coffeepot." He scratched his head. "I can't remember his name half the time. They tell me I spend too much time studying the locals and not enough studying the curriculum. Oh well . . ." He began to move off, but Mark took him gently by the arm, stopping him.

  "You know a lot about Campbell Wood?"

  "About as much as anyone. Interesting bunch—but I've got to run." He pulled away from Mark and disappeared into the library.

  6

  Annie Burns hated her kids. Loved them, of course, but also hated them when they drove her crazy like this.

  She glanced up from her dishes again, out through the kitchen window to the backyard. "Jonathan!"

  Jonathan was pulling his running act again. He would push little Bobby to get him mad, then run around in a tight circle, just fast enough to keep his brother out of reach. Not only that, but, while running, he'd turn his face around to jeer at Bobby for not being able to get him. It was a cruel game, and the worst part about it was that her kids weren't really bad. They actually loved each other. But they'd get into these moods . . . Annie Burns was no philosopher, but she knew why people were so rotten to one another—because they couldn't help it. Being rotten was basically fun.

  "Bobby, don't pull his hair!"

  The end of the game arrived when Jonathan would finally let the younger boy catch him; then he would fall to the ground and laugh at Bobby's ineffectual blows. Sometimes things got out of hand as the furious Bobby did everything he could to hurt his bully brother—bite, kick, pull hair. "Bobby!"

  She didn't even bother to look up from the dish bin, the thing was so perfectly choreographed. She could just yell at one or the other of them periodically without having to take in the action.

  She finished drying the last glass, twist-rung out the dishrag, and put it on its rack under the counter. Now for the floor, and then dinner. Anybody who thought modern marriage was a great thing was out of his mind. She cursed the whole business, feeling tired enough to prove her right to curse it. She was supposed to take care of these little monsters during the day and then go out when Carl got home to earn part-time pay to buy the food she had to cook herself. And her husband expected her to be Superwoman in bed, too!

  Sensing a change in the outside activities, she paused with her sweeping and went to the window. She groaned. Now the two were playing with the huge swing Carl had rigged up for them one Sunday from the huge oak by the back fence.

  "You're pushing him too hard, Jonathan not so high!" She turned away. Damn! She'd forgotten a couple of breakfast dishes that were hiding under the afternoon paper.

  A piercing scream from the backyard hit her ears, and a bolt of ice went through her. That was no play scream. She knew the difference between a play screech and this terror-filled sound. She held her breath and ran to the window.

  The time between her hearing that scream (Bobby?) and her reaching the window was almost nonexistent, for she was just in time to see that the swing had broken at its highest arc and Bobby was flying off, screaming a high, tearing shriek as he twisted in the severed ropes. Annie's heart dropped into a huge, bottomless cavern. The thing happened as if in slow motion. Bobby was still in a sitting position but Annie could see that the seat of the swing was broken. She wanted to reach out as if what she was seeing were a frame of movie film and stop it, wind it backward and make that swing whole again. But she could not. There was a kid-size wooden log cabin that Carl had bought and put up, on another bright Sunday, which stood across the yard, and Bobby hit it with a sickening dull sound.

  The world stopped at that instant. Crazy with shock and fright, Annie stumbled from the kitchen out through the screen door (damn Carl! she thought irrationally—he hadn't even bothered to take down the screen door yet) to where Jonathan was standing pale and shaking over his brother. Bobby was still as death, the little angles of his body in not-quite-right positions, the rope from the swing coiled haphazardly around him. Annie bent down to feel his pulse, which didn't seem to be there, and then, suddenly, her eyes darted upward. The branch that had held the ropes of the swing, she now saw, was severed cleanly off.

  Annie Burns lost her mind then. "What did we do?” she screamed at the trees above her. "We didn't do anything—we didn't go near them! Why?" She held the body of her son to her breast, her eyes fixed wildly on the foliage above. "Why?"

  Behind her, Jonathan's voice, soft as a ghost's, said, "He went over there this morning. Just to look. He played with the little kid. I dragged him home. We thought no one would know."

  Annie Burns screamed.

  High above, in the dense and hidden tops of the highest tree, a branch cracked and fell, long and slow, to land silently at Annie Burns’ feet.

  7

  Ellen couldn't believe a month had gone by in their house.

  Their house. When she got up in the morning she no longer felt that strange feeling that one gets on first awakening in a hotel room or any alien bed. All that came now was the instant recognition that here she was, in the place where she belonged.

  She knew she had given up things to live here. Many of them she bore silently for Mark's sake. She would be perfectly content in a one-room studio apartment in New York City—as long as the ballet was in season and the museums stayed open and Gristede's was in business. Laundromats didn't bother her. She loved walking out at ten o'clock on Saturday night to buy the Sunday papers at the corner. She loved kosher delis and all-night pizzerias. She didn't even mind the city transit system, that Byzantine network of lunatics, self-appointed prophets, junkies, and creeps. She'd known she was giving that all up for a quiet town in the woods, a town that closed at seven every night and where you couldn't get pizza by the slice. If she needed a tampon at eleven o'clock at night she didn't just run to the corner; she waited until ten the next morning when McArthur's Drugstore opened. She had to drive to get anywhere. The supermarket with good prices was almost fifteen minutes away, across town. But for some unaccountable reason, none of this bothered her. She'd fallen in love with the house—its odd-shaped rooms, the master bedroom too small for all their Queen Anne furniture, the hedges that would need trimming every week in the summer, the tons of leaves that needed collecting now. The kitchen was nearly as big as their old apartment, with a gas stove that went out sometimes and a huge oak table big enough for ten. She loved the smell of burning leaves in November.

  All of this surprised her. She had gritted her teeth and smiled when Mark suggested they move. She had resigned herself to at best getting used to it, for his and especially the kids' sake. It was, after all, a better and healthier life in a lot of ways.

  And here she was, loving it more than any of them.

  Well, most of it, anyway. Something bothered Ellen, tugged at the corner of her mind where she didn't like to look. Campbell Wood was a strange place. While she loved the house, the town itself she had not warmed to. Nor it to her. The people here all had an odd, almost inbred look about them —not only physically, though they all were, for the most part, short. Mark and Kaymie, she now saw, had much the same look about them, though Seth, it was obvious, would be tall like her when he grew up. The inbreeding of the people of Campbell Wood was more of a spiritual, or mental, thing. They weren't very nice, or even polite. Ellen always had the feeling she was an outsider, some
one who didn't belong. People even seemed to go out of their way to avoid her.

  Now that she thought about it, something was bothering her about Mark, too. The kids seemed happy enough, though they hadn't really made any friends yet, but Mark was too wrapped up in his work all of a sudden, too single-minded when she knew him to be someone who never took anything too seriously. That facet of his personality was what had attracted him to her.

  Maybe I'm too paranoid? she thought, and then her reverie was broken by Seth.

  "Mommy, I hear noises in the cellar."

  She put down her iron and looked at him. "Noises?" The kid was always hearing or seeing something. Anything to get her away from her work. She wished he hadn't had a half-day at school today.

  Seth was defiant. "Someone is knocking down there."

  Ellen sighed. "Oh, all right."

  She paused at the cellar door. There was a sound down there—like two pieces of wood being whacked together. She knew the damn house creaked all the time, but this was something different.

  There was a loud bang, and Ellen jumped. "You stay here," she said to Seth, pointing him into a kitchen chair.

  Ellen eased the cellar door open a crack, tilting her head to listen. Cool air brushed her from below.

  "Mommy—"

  "Stay here," she said, sternly.

  She opened the door farther and reached in, turning on the light at the top of the stair. There was a thump as she did so and no light went on. Iciness gripped her until she realized she had hit the red oil-burner switch by mistake.

  Jerk, she thought.

  She snapped the burner off and hit the light switch, throwing a patch of dull yellow on the steps at the bottom.

  She placed a foot on the top stair. Suddenly something touched her leg from below and she held her breath. She turned, seeing Seth, his hands in his overall pockets, staring sullenly at her from where she'd left him. Gritting her teeth, she lowered her eyes, breathing a sigh of relief at the sight of one of the cats.