Stephen whispered again, wiping his eyes, “I can’t believe this. It’s … wrong.”
Graeme, grown philosophical at Cross Hill, was the first to recover from the shock. He laughed, and thumped the dust-saturated seat of his African Eagle with a fist, and wiped cobwebs from the handlebars, saying, “It’s like time has passed. Years. This is what happens to material objects, in time.”
“In time?” Stephen asked. “But we’ve only been here for a few weeks.”
Rosalind ignored her contentious brothers. She’d felt the hurt of her bicycle’s deterioration as she might have felt her own. For this bicycle was hers … wasn’t it? She hadn’t ridden it much back home, hadn’t had time for it, and, at Cross Hill, had more or less forgotten about it; but now she felt the loss keenly, kneeling to extricate pieces of debris from the spokes, wiping away cobwebs and dust. Except for the corroded Peugeot logo at the front of the frame, she might not have recognized her bicycle at all. She said, uneasily, “Maybe it’s a test of some kind. If we don’t give in …”
Stephen laughed angrily. “I’m not giving in. I never will.”
If our parents had known we’d been searching for our bicycles with the idea of riding out from Cross Hill toward Lake Noir, or the town of Contracoeur, they would have forbidden us, of course; but neither knew. Unless Father was observing us from his third-floor quarters. (We were partly hidden by the carriage house, or so we believed. In fact, we weren’t altogether certain which windows on the third floor were Father’s; he might have had access to all, with a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of Cross Hill and its surrroundings.)
All of the bicycle tires were flat. Yet, surprisingly, they didn’t appear to be rotted or shredded. Stephen, in a determined mood, located the air pump, also badly rusted, but operable, and energetically pumped air into everyone’s tires; so quickly we tried our bicycles in Acacia Drive before the air leaked out again. We were laughing, excited. There was something crazed about our play. We were like children with crude, clumsy, homemade and possibly dangerous toys; toys that might explode in our faces. The twins shouted encouragement to each other, but their Schwinns were so coated in rust they were able to pedal them only a few yards before toppling over into the rutted lane. Lanky, long-limbed Graeme, who’d never been much of a bicyclist, as he’d never been at ease with his body, sat atop his bike and spun the pedals backward; tested the hand brakes (which seemed to work—or did they?); tried without success to straighten his handlebars that tilted comically to one side; and set off, grunting as he strained at the pedals, yet managing to move forward, barely. Rosalind had more success, despite the ravaged condition of her bike; though giggling with apprehension, like a drunken girl laboring to keep her balance as her bicycle wobbled, swayed, lurched and almost fell; yet moved forward. Stephen passed her, fiercely gripping the crooked handlebars of his bicycle; he too was swaying as if drunk, yet determined not to fall; just when you thought his bicycle was going to collapse, bringing him down ignominiously with it, somehow he kept it erect, and moving, by sheer strength. “I’m not going in,” Stephen cried, laughing. “Never!” We watched as our eldest brother made his way on his wreck of a bike with painstaking effort, the back of his T-shirt soaked in sweat, as if pedaling up a steep incline and not in fact descending a gradual incline, in the direction of the front gate, and the road. A flurry of Monarch butterflies, brilliantly orange and scripted in black, clustered about him like exclamation points.
Stephen was headed for the gate; we’d been forbidden to leave Cross Hill without permission.
The ornate wrought iron gate, of course, was open; permanently open; overgrown with brambles, ivy and moss.
“Hey!” Graeme called after his older brother and sister, who were pedaling away. He hoped to catch up with them but the rusted chain of his bike snapped suddenly, and he was sent sprawling into the grass. Behind him, the twins were whimpering. Ahead of him, Stephen and Rosalind were making their way, with effort, yet steadily forward, without a backward glance. Graeme, panting, his knee aching where he’d fallen, stared after them. He’d ceased smiling. The game was ended. Though the midsummer afternoon was flooded with light, almost blinding with light, he recalled suddenly that the thing-without-a-face had crossed Acacia Drive, in the moonlight, moving in the direction of the gate. Suddenly his knees were weak. There had been rumors of the mutilation-murder of a girl, or a young child, in Contracoeur; a rumor of other incidents, as far away as the village of Lake Noir, which Graeme had never seen; these rumors had been brought to Cross Hill by the Dulnes and never corroborated; Graeme recalled them now, and recalled too that sensation of terror he’d felt seeing the thing-without-a-face in the moonlight, the conviction This is real! Even if it can’t be, it is. He hadn’t seen the thing-without-a-face since that night fifteen days before but he’d had the sense that, somehow, the thing-without-a-face was aware of him; aware of all of them, the Mathesons; it was watching them, always. And now. Even now: in daylight. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, suddenly frightened, “Stephen! Rosalind! Come back!”
But they were out of earshot, and recklessly moving away.
Once through the opened gate and onto the country road, Stephen felt remarkably lighter, freer; as if gravity had miraculously lessened; that curious sensation you feel when stepping into water, as it begins to buoy you up. His battered bicycle continued to sway, lurch, shudder beneath him, his seat was unnaturally low, as if for a much shorter boy, there was a staccato click! click! click! as if his chain was preparing to snap, yet Stephen persisted; he managed to get the bicycle into a higher gear; by degrees, his speed increased. And Rosalind, trying to keep up with him, experienced much the same sensation of a sudden airiness, lightness, elation, as soon as she found herself out on the road, which was a narrow blacktop road hardly two full lanes. A fragrant wind cooled her heated face and dried the tears of hurt and frustration in her eyes. “See? What did I tell you!” Stephen called to her, grinning. His wonderful sunny smile that lit up her heart. His smile that was like their father’s, except its boyishness was sincere, genuine; not lined with irony. They laughed together like careless children. There they were: free! Children of a former justice of the State Court of Appeals, and yet—free!
They were giddy with daring. They knew they might be punished. Yet not thinking of that—their father, punishment—not thinking of anything but the balmy summer air, the exquisite splotched sunlight shining through foliage at the side of the road; in this region of steep and undulating hills that was scarcely known to them, surrounded by dense, shadowy pine forests alternating with open meadows in which wildflowers shimmered with color—the pale blue of hepatica and chicory, the vivid yellow of miniature sunflowers. Close beside the road were shallow, rocky, fast-running brooks; in the near distance, the ever-present, brooding Chautauqua Mountains, covered in pines and misty at their peaks. Rosalind’s heart beat with a strange illicit joy. Her flushed, pretty face shone with excitement, her fingers were covered in bright rust from the corroded handlebars. Breathless from the hilly terrain, she called, “Stephen, wait for me!”
They were traveling in the direction of Contracoeur—weren’t they? Or was it in the direction of Lake Noir, deeper into the country? They must have bicycled two miles, three miles—yet nothing looked familiar. No houses, no farms, no familiar landmarks. And, oddly, there was no traffic on the road. Rosalind would have called these observations out to Stephen but he was too far ahead, and unconsciously pulling away; the entire back of his shirt was damp with sweat, his sinewy, muscular legs worked powerfully at pedaling. Rosalind felt a stab of apprehension; not fear, exactly, but apprehension; thinking without knowing she’d been thinking of it, of the hideous thing-without-a-face that had appeared in her dream of the other week, and which Graeme had claimed to have seen. Was such a thing possible? On such a summer day, in such surroundings, Rosalind found it difficult to believe.
But, yes: you know it’s so.
Another half-mile and t
here came, returning in her direction, Stephen, concerned that his rear tire was leaking air; so, reluctantly, he and Rosalind pedaled back to Cross Hill, approximately three miles, though it seemed much longer, for the road now ascended almost steadily, and its cracked blacktop surface, apparently unrepaired for years, made their teeth rattle in their heads. By the time the corroded, partly collapsed wrought iron fence that bordered Cross Hill came into view, overgrown with jungle-like vegetation, the sky had gradually darkened with heavy, porous clouds blown by a warm, sulfurous wind from the direction of Lake Noir. Was something wrong? Rosalind tasted alarm, apprehension. Seeing, glimpsed through drooping foliage, the stately old limestone house on its hill, cross-shaped, a somber pink-gray; a storybook dwelling it seemed, surely inhabited by very special people, though whether the house was beautiful, or frankly ugly, Rosalind, panting, dazed with exhaustion, could not have said. What did we children know of the history of Cross Hill, what had we been told of our father’s grandfather?—only that the man, deceased for decades, had had a name with a Biblical resonance: Moses Adams Matheson. He’d made a fortune, it was said, as a textile manufacturer in Winterthurn City, forty miles to the south, and had reared to the Chautauqua foothills of Contracoeur. Yet there were no portraits of him at Cross Hill; there were no family portraits at all, and little hanging on the walls except faded silk wallpaper hanging in strips; most of the rooms in the shuttered wings were empty not only of furnishings but of even the memory, the suggestion, of furnishings. As if history itself had been banished, erased. As if history itself was too painful to be retained.
As Stephen and Rosalind at last passed through the opened gate of Cross Hill, the first raindrops struck, like hot lead, sizzling and stinging. And what an uphill climb it was: the hill of Cross Hill had never been so steep. And the badly rutted Acacia Drive, leading through the grassy ruin of a park, so arduous to navigate. By the time Stephen and Rosalind arrived at the house, they were breathless and drenched in sweat; there was little that would have seemed attractive about them, for their bodies reeked of perspiration; Rosalind’s thin cotton shirt and shorts clung to her slender body, her hard, small breasts, in a way repulsive to her. And there, to their dismay, were both Father and Mother awaiting them in the weedy flagstone square in front of the front entrance; the other children were nowhere in sight, as if banished. Father wore a rumpled off-white linen jacket and sporty trousers; clearly he was angry, yet making an effort to control his anger; some of his old, ironic charm had returned, as if he were addressing the court or speaking on television. His eyes were flat and lusterless but he managed to smile with seeming ease; Mother, just slightly behind him, in pale green silk slacks and a matching kimonolike silk tunic, made no effort to smile at all, for her heavily made-up face was swollen with hurt and anger; her eyes were puffy from crying; for she, who was Mother, had surely been blamed for the bad behavior of her two eldest children. Sternly Father said, “Stephen, Rosalind—how dare you disobey me? You’ve been gone, without permission, without even informing your mother and me you’d left Cross Hill, for almost eight hours! Such behavior is unconscionable.” Eight hours! Stephen and Rosalind exchanged a stricken glance. They protested, “But we haven’t been gone more than an hour! We were only just testing our bicycles …” Yet it seemed clear that they’d been gone for more, much more, than a single hour. The sky, massed with ugly clouds, had darkened almost to twilight; the temperature had plummeted at least twenty degrees; the harsh, stinging rain began to fall harder, smelling of night. Like a guilty child Rosalind burst into tears—“Father, I’m sorry! So sorry.” Father said, incensed, “ ‘Sorry’! After we’ve been worried sick about you! You will both go to your rooms now, at once. I’ll speak with you privately.” Shamefaced, Rosalind hurried into the house; but Stephen remained behind, defiant, saying stubbornly that they hadn’t been gone eight hours, he was certain they hadn’t been gone eight hours, and anyway they had a right to ride their bicycles—“You can’t keep us prisoners, Father, in this place, just because you’re one.”
There was a moment’s silence. The only sound was the harsh, hissing sound of rain against the flagstones.
Quickly, yet with dignity, Father took a step forward, and before Mother could clutch at his arm, he struck Stephen a blow with his opened hand on the side of Stephen’s glowing, sweaty young face.
6. Poor Mother
Poor Mother—“Veronica Matheson.” That melodic name once so frequently uttered, and now so rarely. For to us, of course, our mother was “Mother” and to the Dulnes she was “Mrs. Matheson” or, more often, “ma’am;” of all of the family, only Father had the prerogative of calling her by her lovely given name; yet when he addressed her, at dinner for instance, it was usually in a tone of mild, martyred reproach.
Veronica, what on earth is this food? It tastes of—earth.
Veronica, why do the children persist in coming to the dinner table looking like vagabonds? And smelling as if they haven’t bathed in days?
Veronica, why is the air so—heavy in this room? So humid? Or is it our heavy, humid hearts?
Mother sat at Mother’s place facing Father at the head of the table smiling her beautiful dazzling smile. Perhaps she heard, perhaps not.
A familiar tale by now, told and retold to us, and to Mrs. Dulne, who only shook her head and made sympathetic tsking sounds, how back in the city, as soon as rumors of Judge Roderick Matheson’s imminent fall from grace circulated, Mother’s telephone ceased to ring. One morning, suddenly—the house was silent. Where once the stylish Veronica Matheson had been dazed by her own popularity, on everyone’s guest list, in a fierce round of luncheons, charity functions, museum openings and receptions and formal black-tie dinners, now she, like Judge Matheson, was abruptly dropped, erased. “As if I were in quarantine with some loathsome disease,” Mother said bitterly. “All of us Mathesons, even you children—‘guilty until proven innocent.’ “ Her delicate, carefully made-up face began to resemble a smeared watercolor; her eyes, hazel-brown, once so brightly vivacious, were now veined with red from countless bouts of weeping; her breath, breathed accidentally into her children’s faces, was sour-smelling as the interior of the old refrigerator in the kitchen. Is Mother drinking? we whispered. Is Mother drunk? We loved Mother but we hated Mother. We were afraid of Mother. Rosalind said, “I never knew her before, did you?” and Graeme shuddered, and shook his head; and Stephen, who tried to make the best of things even as (we suspected) he was plotting his escape, said, “Mother’s just going through a phase. Like a butterfly.” Graeme said, smirking, “A butterfly in reverse.”
Where in the city Mother had had little time for us, now at Cross Hill, these interminable summer days, where the pale-glowering sun seemed to drag through the sky, and the minute hands of those clocks that functioned seemed sometimes to inch backward, she had too much time. Though Father rose at dawn to resume work on his case, Mother rose late; as late as possible, for she dreaded another day in exile; she bathed in a few grudging inches of rust-flecked lukewarm water in a stained antique tub; she made up her elaborate mask of a face, and tried to do something with her hair; drifted about the house like a ghost in her now rumpled, soiled city clothes, as if waiting for a friend to pick her up to drive her to lunch at the country club or the newest fashionable restaurant. Is Mother drinking today? Poor Mother. She grew suspicious, even jealous, of Rosalind, who was growing by swift degrees into a beautiful, physically capable and alert girl, with long wavy-curly red-blond hair bleached by the sun; she was forever interrogating Stephen and Graeme, convinced that they were sneaking away at every opportunity to Contracoeur, or beyond. She assigned chores to her elder children but rarely oversaw them. Where once she’d focused attention on the twins, dressing them with obsessive care as “the last of our babies,” now she seemed frankly bored by them, depending upon kindly Mrs. Dulne to take care of them and listen to their anxious, incessant chatter. Little Neale, a bright, articulate child who in the city had been charmingly o
utspoken, had become morbidly nervous in the country; he flinched and cringed at shadows, even his own; he was forever tugging at Mother’s arm in the way of a much younger child, pleading and whimpering. “It’s in here, it comes in here when we’re not looking and it hides and if you turn on the light it turns into a shadow, if you turn around it turns around with you so you never see it—” Neale rambled about someone, or something, he was convinced inhabited Cross Hill with us. Mother laughed irritably, saying, “I don’t have time for childish games. I can’t be ‘Mother’ twenty-four hours a day!” Little Ellen, a mirror-image of her brother, though slightly smaller, with wide, ingenuous brown eyes and a habit of sucking at her fingers, believed, too, that someone, or something, lived at Cross Hill with them, except it was invisible during the day. Rarely did Ellen sleep through the night; the poor child whimpered and thrashed in her bed, but Mother refused to allow her to sleep with a lamp burning for not only would it disturb Rosalind, with whom Ellen shared a room on the second floor, but there would be a risk in calling attention to ourselves in the dark—“You can see Cross Hill for miles. We’d be lighting a path to our very beds.”
One day, Ellen was whimpering, tears rolled down her flushed cheeks, and Mother, exasperated, knelt before her, gripped her thin shoulders tight and shook her gently—“Darling, please don’t cry! There aren’t tears enough for us all.”
Mother was made especially agitated by the Contracoeur Valley Weekly, which Father forbade us, and her, to read, but which Mrs. Dulne smuggled into Cross Hill at Mother’s request. Most of the newspaper was devoted to ordinary, domestic news; but the front page had been taken over in recent weeks by ever more disturbing headlines—
6-YEAR-OLD GIRL MISSING, MARSH SEARCHED—GIRL, 17, FOUND MUTILATED AND STRANGLED IN EMPTY GRANARY—CORPSE OF 19-YEAR-OLD MAN DISCOVERED IN ARSON FIRE. Local law enforcement officers were investigating these crimes, and others that may have been related; several suspects were in custody; fascinated and horrified, Mother read through the paper with unwavering concentration, telling us afterward in a faint, thrilled voice, “Now, you see why your father and I don’t want you children to go alone into town? Why you mustn’t leave Cross Hill at any time, except with us?”
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