999

by Al Sarrantonio

  As if our parents left Cross Hill often: never more than once or twice a week. A five-mile journey to Contracoeur! Where, if we were lucky, we might be allowed to accompany Mother, for instance, into the A & P to shop for food specials, or into the ill-smelling drugstore where we were regarded with rude, curious stares, or into Sears or Kmart. We Mathesons, who’d never set foot into such dreary places in our lives until now. Stephen scorned these meager outings, but Graeme and Rosalind, eager for a change of scene, usually went along. They were warned against wandering off—mingling with strangers—but of course they did, as soon as Mother’s attention was elsewhere. And they begged, and were grudgingly allowed, to spend some time in the small public library. There, while Graeme avidly browsed bookshelves in the science and mathematics sections, Rosalind, starving for companionship, shyly approached girls her age; daring to introduce herself; explaining that she and her family were new to the area, living at Cross Hill. The Contracoeur girls stared at her in amazement. One of them, with bold crimson lips, toughly attractive, said, “You live at Cross Hill? Nobody lives there.”

  Midsummer. The warmly sulfurous air, blowing southward from Lake Noir, brought poor Mother migraine headaches of increasing severity.

  Midsummer. A throbbing-shrieking of cicadas in the trees, as temperatures rose into the nineties, drew poor Mother’s nerves taut as wire.

  And there were false sounds, as Mother came to call them—“cruel false sounds"—high-pitched vibrations, muffled voices and laughter in distant rooms at Cross Hill; a ringing telephone where there could be neither ringing nor a telephone. Veronica? Ver-on-ica? One parched afternoon in late July there came, bouncing along the rutted lane, an elegant silvery-green Mercedes that faded as it drew up the circular drive before the house; throwing poor Mother into a frenzy of excitement and panic, for she believed it must be her closest woman friend, from whom she hadn’t heard in months, coming to pick her up for a country club luncheon—“And I’m not dressed. I’m not bathed. And look at my hair!”

  Mother was so distraught, Mrs. Dulne had to catch her, and hold her in a comforting embrace.

  There was no Mercedes at the front of the house, nor had there been any Mercedes in the drive. Yet Graeme stubbornly insisted he’d seen it, too. He’d seen something, silvery-green, erratic in motion, shaped like a car, disappearing by quick degrees as it approached the house.

  Poor Mother. After the false alarm of her friend in the Mercedes, she was ill, exhausted, for several days. Then rising from her bed abruptly and filled with energy when Father informed her that important visitors were expected at Cross Hill in a week’s time to confer with him about re-presenting his case to the state attorney general. (He’d accumulated new data, new evidence, Father said. Proof that his key informers had perjured themselves in court. Proof that the original indictments brought against him, by a biased grand jury, had been fraudulent from the start.) Mother cried, “We can’t let them see these shameful rooms! We must do something.” Of course she would have wished to redecorate those downstairs rooms that were in use—but there wasn’t the money. Instead, her hair tied back gaily in a scarf, in loose-fitting cotton slacks and an old shirt of Stephen’s, Mother led a housecleaning team of Mrs. Dulne and the children through several rooms; concentrating, for practical purposes, on the glass-enclosed breakfast room overlooking Crescent Pond where Father intended to meet with his colleagues. None of us had seen Mother so girlish and enthusiastic in months—in years! Her eyes, though slightly bloodshot, shone. Her complexion, beneath the caked makeup, was fresh, glowing. Within two days, the filth-encrusted lattice windows of the breakfast room were scrubbed so that sunlight rayed through unimpeded; the parquet floor, long layered in grime, was partway cleaned and polished; the long antique cherrywood table was polished, and ten handsome chairs, not precisely matching, but in good condition, were set about it. The aged, rotted silk curtains were removed, and Mother and Mrs. Dulne, a skilled seamstress, cleverly refashioned newer curtains from another part of the house, a bright cheerful chintz, to hang in their place. When Father saw what Mother and the rest of us had accomplished, he stared in genuine surprise and gratitude. Tears welled in his eyes. “Veronica, how can I thank you? All of you—you’ve worked magic.” In boyish delight, he snatched up Mother’s hands to kiss them; hesitating only for an instant when he saw how white they were, how thin and puckered, like an elderly woman’s, from hours of scrubbing in detergent water.

  “Do you love me, then, Roderick?” Mother asked anxiously, in a way mortifying to her children to witness. “Am I a good wife to you, despite all?”

  But, poor Mother!—within days, all her labor was undone.

  Somehow, particles of dust, dirt, outright grime shifted back into the corners of the breakfast room. A sour odor prevailed of decaying matter. Wild birds, seduced by the cleaned windowpanes into imagining there were no glass barriers, flew into the windows, breaking their necks; in melancholy feather-heaps, they lay on the floor. Rain, blown through the broken windowpanes, had stained and warped the parquet; soaked and stained the chairs’ cushioned seats. Even the bright chintz curtains were frayed and grimy as if they’d been hanging there for years. Mother rushed about, tearing at her hair, crying, “But—what has happened? Who has done this? Who could be so cruel?” We children too were shocked and dismayed; ten-year-old Neale and Ellen huddled together in terror, convinced that the thing that dwelled in the house with us, invisible, that shifted out of sight when you whirled to see it, had committed this malicious damage. Rosalind was hurt and angry, for she’d worked damned hard; she’d been proud of her effort, helping Mother in good cause. Stephen was silent, thoughtful, gnawing at his lower lip as if he was making a decision. Graeme, his pinched, peevish face smirking in a pretense of satisfaction, said, “Mother, it’s the fate of the material universe—to run down, out. Did you think we were special?”

  Mother turned upon him and screamed, “I hate you! All of you!” But it was only Graeme she struck, cutting his cheek below his left eye with the sharp edge of her emerald ring.

  Mother then staggered and fell. Her eyes swooned back into her head. Her body struck the grimy floor softly, like a cloth bundle that has been tossed negligently down. We children seemed to know, staring at the stricken woman in horror, that Mother would never again be the person she’d been.

  7. Victims

  Locally, opinion was divided: the marauding killer was a black bear, crazed by having tasted human blood; or, the killer was a human being, himself crazed, simulating the behavior of an aberrant bear.

  There was another victim, in late July: an eleven-year-old girl discovered strangled and battered in a desolate wooded area near the village of Lake Noir. And, in early August, a seventeen-year-old boy killed by severe blows to the head, face torn partly away, found at the edge of a cemetery in Contracoeur. Shivering, Mother merely glanced at the newspaper with its lurid headlines—“It’s just the same thing over and over. Like the weather.” Nor did she show much surprise or interest when, one morning, the local sheriff and two deputies arrived to question us, informally; as, they explained, they were questioning everyone in the area. These men spent most of their time with Father, who impressed them with his intelligence and soft-spoken civility. They must have known something of Roderick Matheson’s professional difficulties, yet still they called him “Judge,” “Your Honor,” and “sir” respectfully; for the state capital was nearly three hundred miles away, and scandals and power struggles there were of little interest in Contracoeur.

  On his side, Father was gracious to the police. They had no search warrant, but he gave them permission to search the property outside the house. All of us, even Mother and the twins, who’d been anxiously fretting since the arrival of the police cars, watched from upstairs windows. With the air of one asking an unanswerable question, Mother said, “What do they expect to find? Those poor fools,” and Father said, with a trace of a smile, “Well, let them look. It’s in my interest to be a good c
itizen. And then they needn’t return, and trouble us ever again.”

  8. Second Sighting: The Thing-Without-a-Face

  What have I lost: my usemame, my password, my soul.

  Where must I flee: not IRL. There is none

  This would be Graeme’s farewell note, first typed out on his faulty computer, where the words jammed into solid blocks of gibberish, letters, numerals and computer hieroglyphics; then written out, in inch-high headline-letters, with such anger that the point of Graeme’s marker pen tore the surface of the paper.

  He’d ceased thinking of himself as Graeme Matheson. Both his names had become repugnant to him. “Graeme"-the name given, as a gift he’d had no choice but to receive. “Matheson"—the name inherited, as a fate he’d had no choice but to receive.

  The family believed he’d changed, become brooding, ever more silent and withdrawn, since Mother had slapped him in so public and humiliating a way; since his face, young, stricken, astonished, had bled; since the thin, jagged wound had coagulated into a zipper-like scratch that seemed, so strangely, so perversely, always fresh. (Did Graeme pick at it to assure its freshness? If so, he might have picked at it unconsciously, or in one of his meager, fitful bouts of sleep.) In fact, only Graeme knew that the cause went deeper.

  For in the Contracoeur Public Library he’d discovered, in a section tided “Contracoeur Valley History,” several aged, leather-bound books whose covers hadn’t been opened in decades, and out of curiosity he’d read of the renowned Moses Adams Matheson, the “textile manufacturer—wilderness conservationist” who’d constructed Cross Hill, one of the “distinguished architectural landmarks of the region;” he’d been intrigued to learn that his great-grandfather had crossed the Atlantic Ocean steerage class from Liverpool, England, unaccompanied by any adult, at the age of twelve, in 1873; that he’d been an apprentice to a shipbuilder in Marblehead, Massachusetts, but soon left for upstate New York, where, in Winterthurn City, he built the first of several Matheson textile mills on the Winterhurn River; within a decade, he’d become a wealthy man; by the turn of the century a multimillionaire, in the era in which such aggressive capitalists as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Edward Harriman and Andrew Carnegie made their enormous fortunes through monopolies and trusts; and through the systematic exploitation of unorganized, largely immigrant labor. Moses Adams Matheson was never so rich as these men, nor so notorious; yet, Graeme gathered from his rapid skimming of these texts, his great-grandfather had cruelly exploited his workers; women, young girls, even children had been employed in his mills for as little as $2.50 a week; many of his workers were younger than twelve, and girls as young as six and seven worked thirteen hours a day. Aloud Graeme whispered, “Thirteen hours!” He had never worked at any prolonged task until the folly of the breakfast room, under Mother’s guidance; at that, he hadn’t worked longer than two hours at a time, and his effort had hardly been uniformly concentrated. He could not imagine working for—thirteen hours! As a young child in clamorous, stifling-hot or freezing conditions.

  Graeme read with horror of the “South Winterthurn conflagration of February 8, 1911"—one of the Matheson textile mills had burnt to the ground, killing more than thirty persons including young children; investigation revealed that the mill hadn’t been properly equipped with adequate fire exits, and in fact, unaccountably, most of the doors had been locked. He found himself staring at a sepia photograph of a smoldering skeleton of a building; firemen and others stood about, and on the snowy ground were corpses in rows, shrouded in canvas, so many! and some so small! A number of the fire victims had been so badly burnt, their faces so charred, absolute identification was impossible. Bodies without faces.

  Blindly, Graeme shoved the book back onto the shelf. He’d had enough of family history. How right he’d been to feel a sick sort of shame to be a Matheson and to live at the ruin of Cross Hill; erected, as he was only now discovering, upon the bones of such innocent victims.

  He decided not to tell Rosalind or Stephen. Not just yet. The revelation was too ugly, too humiliating. Graeme treasured his own adolescent cynicism but would not have wished his more energetic, more attractive sister and brother to share it. Someone has to protect the innocent from knowing too much.

  He wondered if Mother knew about Moses Adams Matheson. Probably not. Surely not.

  And Father? Surely yes.

  To be fated, to be accursed—isn’t that also to be special?

  Since that June night, early in our summer of exile, when he’d seen the creature he called the thing-without-a-face, Graeme had rarely slept more than an hour or two at a time at night; often he didn’t undress and lie down in his bed at all, for it had become to him a place of torment and misery. And so sleep overcame him during the day, in paralytic attacks; helpless to stay awake, he sank into a deep, catatonic sleep, like an infant; spells from which, blinking and gasping for breath, he’d wake with a violent pounding of his heart. (He might find himself on the filthy floor of one of the shut-up rooms at Cross Hill, or in the spear-like grass of the lawn, unable to recall how he’d gotten where he was. Sometimes one of us was stooped over him, crying, “Graeme, wake up! Graeme, please wake up!”) As Graeme’s insomnia worsened, his perverse pride in it increased. He could not trust the night for sleep; he could not trust the day. How he wished he could go on-line, to boast to his invisible friends in cyberspace that he, unlike the rest of them, no longer slept. He reveled in the fact that Mother, sunk in upon herself, indifferent now to her children, hadn’t the slightest awareness of his morbid condition; nor did Father seem to be concerned, except to address him ironically at the dinner table when his head nodded or he failed to reply to a question directed at him. ("Son, I’m speaking to you. Where is your mind?” Father would ask; and Graeme would labor to bring back his mind, his consciousness, as a boy might tug timidly at a favorite kite blown high into the sky by an unpredictable wind with the power to tear it to shreds at any moment. My mind! My mind! Father, here it is!)

  Yet to be isolated, accursed—that was to know himself special.

  Graeme had ceased to believe that our father might be “redeemed"—that “justice” would be executed. He’d ceased to have faith that we would ever be returned to our old lives in the city; he’d ceased to believe that our “old lives” had ever existed, in fact. As cyberspace, in which he’d spent so many hours of his young life, exists everywhere, but also nowhere. And nowhere must predominate. The final law of nature.

  Now that Mother had been broken by Cross Hill, now that Father had more obsessively retreated to his quarters at the top of the house (forbidden, as the master bedroom was forbidden, for us children to approach), there came to be a prevailing mood of confusion in the household; like that aftermath of shock, yet a silent, undefined shock, following the passage of a powerful jet plane overhead. It was August; a time of intense, sweltering heat; a time of tremulous, quavering heat; and frequent thunderstorms, and lightning; a time of frequent electric failures, when the inadequate wiring at Cross Hill broke down completely and darkness might be protracted for hours. One day we realized that Mr. and Mrs. Dulne had ceased to come to the house; we seemed to know that the couple hadn’t been paid in weeks and had given up hoping to be compensated for their work. Mother explained in a blank, indifferent voice, as if she were commenting upon the weather, “They will receive payment. Father will write them a check. In time.” But when? we asked. (We were ashamed that this kindly older couple, who’d been so gracious to us, might be cheated.) But Mother merely smiled and shrugged. Since the “betrayal” of the breakfast room, as she’d come to call it, she’d withdrawn from emotion. Not Mother now, Graeme thought bitterly. Then who?

  Ironically, Father’s important visitors hadn’t shown up that morning. He’d waited through the day for them, and it was one of our longest August days. He’d waited calmly at first, in a newly pressed blue-pinstripe seersucker suit, white shirt and tie, glancing through documents neatly arranged in stacks on the cher
rywood table; then with growing agitation he’d waited at the front entrance of Cross Hill, beneath its mossy, discolored neoclassic portico; as the hours passed, and the whitely steaming sun moved lethargically through the sky, he grew calm again, with a look of ironic resignation; staring across the grassy acreage in the direction of the front gate like one who hears distant music inaudible to others and, at last, inaudible to the listener himself.

  It was a mid-August night, gauzily moonlit, when Graeme decided to follow his brother Stephen; to lie in wait for Stephen outdoors in the marshy grass at the foot of the drive. He seemed to know that Stephen was slipping away from Cross Hill by night, in secret, on his bicycle; disobeying Father’s admonition that no one of us should ever again, on our bicycles or on foot, leave the property without his permission. It thrilled Graeme that his brother was so willfully disobeying our father, yet he was envious too. Where is he going? Who are his friends? It isn’t fair! Stephen kept his bicycle hidden in one of the barns, surreptitiously oiling it, sanding away the ever-accumulating rust, making repairs; the Italian road bike, though lightweight and graceful in design, was surprisingly sturdy. The chain on Graeme’s bike had never been repaired so it couldn’t be ridden, but Graeme was thinking he might ride Rosalind’s bike; he and Stephen could ride together to—Contracoeur?

  So Graeme waited for Stephen, crouched in the tall grass. On all sides, the night was harshly sibilant with nocturnal insects. Some sang in rhythm, others in isolated, piercing, saw-like cries. Graeme’s insomnia, he believed, was particularly triggered by moonlight. That moon! A pitiless eye teasing, winking, glowering at him so far below. Yet it’s a talent, never to sleep. Never to be taken by surprise. Graeme was convinced he’d remained awake but suddenly then he was jolted into consciousness by a sound of footsteps, a vibration of the earth; he sat up, dazed, for a moment confused, and saw then Stephen passing close by, or a figure he took to be Stephen’s—noting how tall, how mature Stephen had become; everyone had noticed how muscular Stephen had grown this summer, working outdoors with Mr. Dulne at mowing and tending the enormous lawn, which invariably grew back more lushly within a few days, shoulder-high grasses and brilliantly colored wildflowers in a riot of fecundity. Graeme stammered, “Stephen?—it’s me.” It came to him in a rush that his brother might reject him: he, Graeme, had been sulky and sullen for much of the summer, turning from Stephen’s frequent overtures of friendship. Graeme said, “Stephen? Wait. Can I come with you? Please—” It seemed strange to him that Stephen, knowing now who he was, had not spoken. Strange that he’d halted so suddenly, approximately ten feet from Graeme, arms raised at his sides, his posture tense, vigilant; his face, shrouded in shadow, showing no animation. “Stephen—?” Graeme blundered forward, unthinking.