999

by Al Sarrantonio

  Seeing, in that instant, that the figure confronting him wasn’t his brother Stephen but—the thing-without-a-face.

  Graeme stood paralyzed, transfixed. For it might have seemed to him that this was but a symptom of the insomnia of which he’d grown fatally proud: a nightmare figure standing before him which he’d imagined into being; a dream of his and not “real;” or, if “real,” as the atrocities reported in the weekly Contracoeur newspaper were real, in some way not related to him. He hadn’t time to cry out for help before the creature lunged at him, swiping with its hands as a maddened bear might swipe savagely and blindly; so much heavier and stronger than Graeme, Graeme was knocked to the ground as if he were a small child and not a thirteen-year-old boy.

  Except for the sounds of the nocturnal insects there was silence, for the creature did not speak, nor could Graeme scream, his breath choked off as the thing-without-a-face crouched over him where he’d fallen, raining blows upon his unprotected head, clawing and tearing at his face, tearing away the flesh of his face as Graeme fell, and fell, into the earth beneath the wild grasses of Cross Hill.

  9. The Traitorous Son

  For the second time that summer, in our exile in Contracoeur, the family woke to discover that our brother Graeme was missing. And again we called his name and searched for him; Rosalind led us immediately to the farther shore of Crescent Pond—which, by August, had shrunken so that it was scarcely more than a black, brackish puddle amid marsh grasses and desiccated bamboo. But of course there was no one there. Nor any footprints in the soft earth. Impatiently we called, “Graeme? Gra-eme!” for we’d come to resent Graeme’s childish, self-centered behavior, which upset us all. (With the exception of Mother, who came downstairs late in the morning, in her soiled silk dressing gown, to sit almost motionless in the breakfast room, too lethargic to prepare even tea, as Rosalind customarily did for her; her faded, watery gaze turned unperturbed in our direction.)

  At first, Father remained relatively calm, though annoyed that his work schedule had been disturbed; then, as it seemed that Graeme might be truly missing, he joined in our search, awkwardly, with a convalescent’s uncertain step, blinking in the harsh sunshine as he waded through the thigh-high grass brushing away gnats from his face. We heard his voice echoing everywhere—“Graeme! I command you to return! Son, this is your father speaking!” He was alternately furious and frightened; his fury didn’t surprise us, but his fear began to terrify us, for it was rare that our father betrayed so weak an emotion.

  Finally Stephen searched through the things on Graeme’s cluttered desk, where he discovered the cryptic message his brother had so conscientiously hand-printed:

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

  Where must I flee: not IRL. There is none

  Father was astonished by these words, as if he hadn’t known that his thirteen-year-old son was capable of such eloquence. In a puzzled voice he asked Stephen what “IRL” meant, and Stephen said, hesitantly, “I think it means ‘In Real Life,’ Father,” and Father said, “ ‘In Real Life’—but what does that mean?” and Stephen said, reluctantly, “ ‘IRL’ is a cyberspace term referring to—well, all that is, that isn’t cyberspace.” For a long tense moment Father contemplated this disturbing revelation; his pale, wounded mouth worked in silence. Then he said, “So Graeme has left us, then. He has run away. In repudiation of me. He has lost faith in me.”

  Stephen protested, “But Graeme might be—lost. Even if he ran away, he’s only a kid. He might need help; we’d better report him missing,” and Father said, with an air of dismissal, “Graeme is a traitorous son. He is no longer my son. I can never forgive him, and I forbid the rest of you to forgive him or get into contact with him. He has repudiated us all—the Mathesons. We must expel him from our hearts.”

  Before Stephen could prevent him, Father snatched the message from Stephen’s fingers and tore it briskly into shreds.

  10. The Lost Brother

  In that way it happened that our brother Graeme disappeared from Cross Hill in the late summer of our exile at Cross Hill and was not reported missing; nor was any trace ever found of him in the old ruin of a house or on the grounds; though, without knowing what she did, Rosalind often found herself looking for him, or for someone—hearing a faint, reproachful voice calling Rosalind! Stephen! that, when she paused to listen more closely, faded into the incessant wind. Rosalind wandered through distant corridors and rooms in the old house, discovering parts of it she’d never seen before; ascending narrow, creaking staircases, poking into closets, peering into the dark, cobwebbed corners where household debris had accumulated like driftwood. Outdoors, she found herself drawn to the old, collapsing barns, the rotted grape and wisteria arbors with their look of bygone romance, the tall, rustling grasses of the park that extended for acres like an inland sea. Rosa-lind! Ste-phen! Help me! Yet Graeme’s features were beginning to fade in her memory, like a Polaroid photo exposed to overly bright sunshine. And in fact there seemed to be no photos or snapshots of Graeme in the household; it was discovered that most of the family memorabilia, kept in scrap-books once obsessively maintained by Mother, had been lost in the move from the city. So, if Father had agreed to report his missing son to the police, there would have been the embarrassment of having not a single picture of Graeme to give them.

  Anxiously, Rosalind examined herself in the murky, lead-spotted mirrors of Cross Hill. Through the long summer she’d grown an inch or more, her slender body was filling out, her legs long, beautifully shaped and subtly muscular; she’d become golden-tan, on the verge of her fifteenth birthday a striking, increasingly self-reliant girl—yet, in these antique mirrors, her reflection was wan, tremulous, fearful, like a reflection in rippling water. Was she, too, disappearing? Or was it, in fact, but the inadequacy of the mirrors? She’d noticed that Stephen, too, appeared vague and irresolute when glimpsed in certain mirrors, and the twins, Neale and Ellen, who hadn’t grown at all this summer but seemed, disturbingly, to have shrunk an inch or so, scarcely appeared at all except as wavering, watery images like poorly executed watercolors. Scrubbing the grime away from a mirror and polishing its glass did little good, for the lead backing was seeping through; as Mrs. Dulne had said, throwing up her hands in genial exasperation when once she and Rosalind were trying to restore a mirror, “Cross Hill is old.”

  One night, very late, Rosalind and Stephen were whispering together in the darkened corridor outside their bedrooms, and Rosalind dared to ask Stephen if he was starting to forget their brother—almost, Rosalind had forgotten Graeme’s name!—quite deliberately pronouncing it, “Graeme.” Stephen’s reply was an immediate, perhaps too immediate, “No.” Rosalind then asked if Stephen sometimes heard their names so faintly and teasingly in distance, like the wind, and Stephen shivered and acknowledged, yes, he sometimes heard “something—I’m not sure what.” “But it sounds like Graeme, doesn’t it?” Rosalind persisted, and Stephen said, as if this were something he’d been brooding over himself, “If he wants us to join him, how the hell can we? We don’t know where he is.” They talked for a while, in lowered voices, of where Graeme might have gone. Back home?—to the city? But what would he do there? Live with a friend? Not very likely. As for relatives, Mother and Father seemed to have few; Father’s parents were long dead, and Mother’s widowed mother, remarried and living in a condominium in Sarasota, Florida, had never expressed much interest in her grandchildren. Rosalind said, frowning, “But do you think Graeme could take care of himself, support himself?” and Stephen said, “We could all take care of ourselves, if we had to. We could get jobs, we could be independent. We could go to school but live alone—why not?” Rosalind said in a thrilled, tremulous voice, “We—could? I’d be afraid, I think,” and Stephen said impatiently, “Our great-grandfather Moses Matheson came to this country by himself when he was only twelve years old,” and Rosalind said, “Did Father tell you that?” and Stephen said, “No. I read it in a book in the library in t
own,” and Rosalind said, “But people were different then! I don’t think I would be that strong or brave,” and Stephen said, moving away, a forefinger to his lips, “Yes, you could.”

  II. “Immunity”

  Stephen whispered aloud, “I can’t believe it.”

  He was too upset to remain seated at the table in the Contracoeur Public Library and so heaved himself to his feet to continue to read stooped over the outspread newspapers, a pulse beating in his head, sweat running in rivulets like tears down his face. Even as he was thinking, sickened, I can’t believe it; I know it must be true.

  These ugly, damning headlines. In forbidden newspapers dating back to the previous winter. Front-page photographs of Judge Roderick Matheson and a half dozen other men. Arrested on charges of bribery, corruption, conspiracy to interfere with police investigations. These were Albany papers forbidden to us, the children of Roderick Matheson. These documents Stephen had at last sought out in the Contracoeur library, in willful defiance of his father’s command.

  He wiped tears of angry, hurt shame from his eyes. He hoped no one was watching! Wondering at his naïveté, his stupidity, in having taken so long to seek the evidence when he’d half known, all these months, what it might be.

  Should I bring a knife, a weapon to protect myself?

  Somehow, Stephen never did. Thinking only of a knife when it was too late, when he was already gone from the house and pedaling his bicycle energetically away.

  Those languid summer nights he’d begun to slip away from the ruin of Cross Hill. Too restless to sleep or to lie in his rumpled bed listening to the shrill rhythmic cries of the nocturnal insects. Though in the deep humid heat of mid- and late August there was virtually no wind, yet Stephen heard the faint, whining, reproaching voice calling to him Ste-phen! Stephen!

  But when he held his breath, to listen intently, the voice was gone as if it had never been.

  At last slipping away from the ruin of Cross Hill. In secret!

  To ride, defiantly, his spare, lithe bicycle that now hurtled itself along the moonlit road with the hungry energy of a mongrel dog.

  The first night, Stephen rode perhaps two miles before, stricken with conscience and worry that Father would have discovered his absence, he turned back. He was fearful, too, of venturing farther in the dark, as clouds like shrapnel obscured the moon. For what of that thing his brother had seen, or had claimed to see—the thing-without-a-face? Stephen didn’t believe that such a creature existed but he well believed that a crazed black bear must be preying upon human beings, its appetite whetted by the taste of human blood.

  The second night, Stephen bicycled perhaps four miles before turning back. He was breathless, exhilarated. A weapon, a knife—I should have protection. How strange that, each time he ventured out on his nighttime journey, Stephen forgot to bring a knife, even a paring knife; only when he was actually on the road, in the stark loneliness of night, hurtling between somber, darkened, fragrant fields and meadows and wooded hills that quivered with unknown, invisible life, only then did he remember—I might be in danger; I should have protection.

  How he yearned never to come back to the ruin of Cross Hill! His heart beat in an ecstasy of flight. Yet he always returned, of course; he was a responsible boy; never would he have abandoned his sister, Rosalind, and the twins, Neale and Ellen; and he was reluctant, too, to abandon Father and Mother, despite everything. For he yearned to believe all that Father had vowed—Bear with me, children. I will be redeemed. I will redeem us all. It was true, wasn’t it? It had to be true!

  So each night in succession, Stephen returned home well before dawn; his head aching with exhaustion, and yet exhilaration; his shoulder, arm, and leg muscles pleasurably tingling. It was quite an experience now to ride his bicycle: no longer the sleek, elite Italian road bike that had been a costly birthday present to Stephen from his parents but this scarred, battered mongrel that fit so comfortably between his legs. Almost, it seemed to him alive. Eager to fly along the bumpy road into layers of shadow that parted to admit him as if welcoming him. Ste-phen! Oh, Stephen!

  And so returning, to hide his bicycle beneath a waterproof tarpaulin in dense cover beside the road. Congratulating himself on his cleverness. Congratulating himself, though he was sweaty and shivering with nerves, on his fearlessness. He kept his bicycle beside the road so that he could more readily slip from the house and run stooped over through the grassy park to push through an opening in the wrought iron fence, undetected; as he might have been detected had he pushed or ridden his bike along Acacia Drive.

  Stealth had come second nature to Stephen.

  He wondered—Was this Graeme’s way, too?

  He wondered—Am I following my brother’s path; will I be reunited with him?

  Stephen was never detected leaving Cross Hill at night. How strange then, how unexpected and bold, that he should find himself daring to slip away during the day.

  For by late summer, poor Mother was never vigilant about any of her children. Rosalind tended the twins, who clung to her like children of three or four, not nearly eleven. “Poor Neale!—poor Ellen!” Rosalind hugged them, and kissed them, and tried gently to extricate herself from their desperate, sticky embraces: “You have got to find games to play by yourself. Please!” Stephen, though he loved his baby brother and sister, had even less patience with them than Rosalind. If they followed him around when he was working outdoors, mowing the ever-lush, ever-fertile lawn, he tolerated them for a while; then sent them indoors, loudly clapping his hands. “Rosalind’s calling you!—go on.” His eye moving slyly to the house, to the blank glittering windows from which, weeks ago, Mother might have gazed to see what he was doing; or lifting to the mysterious third floor, where Father might even now be watching.

  But Father was increasingly remote, locked away from us. He rarely appeared downstairs before early evening, and sometimes not even then. No words of chastisement had been heard from him since his outburst of rage at Graeme’s traitorous behavior. No words of anger or disgust uttered at Stephen, though sometimes, at the dinner table, he commented sarcastically upon Stephen’s “uncouth, disheveled” appearance or pointedly asked, “Son, when did you bathe last? Can you recall?”

  And so, Stephen began slipping away from Cross Hill during the day. Repairing a barn roof, for instance, he jumped down, ran stooped over toward the road, grinning to himself like a wild, willful child. And there was his bicycle he loved, lying waiting for him beneath the tarpaulin; always, it seemed to Stephen a miracle that the bicycle was there, hidden; he jumped on it, and struck off in the direction of Contracoeur. It seemed the most natural, the most inevitable thing in the world, as if a powerful force were drawing him to that small, ordinary city on the banks of the Black River; a former mill town, no longer economically prospering; yet not so depressed as other, similar towns in the Chautauqua Mountain region, for there was a thriving lumber business. Where once he’d scorned Contracoeur as a hick town, not worthy of a second glance, now he strolled happily about the streets, paved and unpaved; he smiled at strangers and was touched that they should smile at him in return. He was a handsome, tanned, amiable boy with sun-bleached wavy brown hair that grew past his collar, and a frank, direct, warmly brown gaze; yet too lacking in vanity to have a clear sense of how he might appear to others. For when he’d come to Contracoeur with our mother on her strained shopping expeditions, people had stared openly at Stephen; now, alone, he felt their eyes move upon him with pointed curiosity, yet not, so far as he could judge, hostility. One afternoon, seeing boys of high school age playing softball, Stephen was drawn to watch; within an hour he was invited to join the game; before long, he became acquainted with a dozen or more Contracoeur boys and girls. Hesitantly he introduced himself as “Steve” at first; only when asked where he lived did he say, “That old stone house about five miles out in the country—Cross Hill.” How peculiar the name tasted in his mouth, like tarnish.

  Stephen’s new friends glanced at one ano
ther and at him. A red-haired boy said, smirking, “Cross Hill?—hell, man, no one lives there.” Another boy poked this one in the ribs and said, in a quick undertone, “It’s lived in now, man. Must be.”

  Stephen was smiling and did not allow his smile to fade. He asked, “Who lived at Cross Hill before?”

  The second boy said, “Before what?”

  “Well—five years ago? Ten years ago?”

  Frowning, the young people shook their heads. Cross Hill had “always” been empty, they said. For as long as anyone could remember.

  On other days, in Contracoeur, Stephen asked for work. Hourly labor hauling furniture, unloading trucks at the Buffalo-Chautauqua railroad yard, sawing and helping to stack planks at McKearny’s Lumber. Over the summer he’d grown to a height of almost six feet; his arm and shoulder muscles were filled out and solid; he was unfailingly good-natured, uncomplaining— anywhere that wasn’t Cross Hill, and manual labor in isolation, seemed a cheerful, convivial place to him. His Contracoeur employers liked him very much. He seemed to know (for Stephen was as perceptive as any Matheson) that all of Contracoeur was speaking of him; speculating about him; assessing him. Knowing more about me than I know about myself? One day in late August Fred McKearny invited Stephen to stay for supper, and soon Stephen found himself befriended by the entire McKearny family, including the golden labrador Rufus, who, while Stephen sat at the dining room table with the McKearnys, rested his head on Stephen’s knees. There was Mrs. McKearny, who seemed as fond of Stephen as if she’d known him all of his life, and there was eighteen-year-old Rich, and there was sixteen-year-old Marlena, and there were several younger children; Stephen was giddy with happiness, for he’d forgotten what it was like to sit at a table, relaxed, and eat delicious food, and talk, and laugh as if it was the most natural thing in the world. This is real life, Stephen thought.