“Ah,” I said. “Just because Gary was killed just around the time I came back, huh? I must have learned some foul, dark sins while tramping across foreign soil.”
“I know it’s coincidence, Kit—”
“Well, of course it is, dammit!”
“—but they don’t know it. Marve called me today and asked me how you were feeling.”
That hurt, more than if she had accused me directly. “What’s his damned problem, huh? Can’t he call me? He has to go through you, is that it? Hasn’t got the damned guts to face—”
“I said you were a little tired is all. I said there was nothing seriously wrong with you.” The “is there,” however, was as clear as if she had said it.
I bridled, immediately paid the check and took Catherine home. In silence. In anger. Wondering what the hell I had done that would make my own town turn against me like that. But all it took, obviously, was one frightened mother, one angry father...
I ran to the playground, ducked into the woods and climbed the fence back by the mats. When I was over, I had to sit on one of the swings to calm my lungs, to wipe the perspiration from my face and palms. And when I was sure I could stand without my legs trembling, I went to the slide and walked slowly around it, touching it, pressing against it, standing at its foot and sighting along its length to the top, and to the mats not three feet from the end. They met in the comer, black slabs against the night, and I blinked slowly when I imagined I saw a hazed shimmering, a distortion of vision not quite circular. I rubbed a knuckle into my eyes and knelt on the ground in front of it. Reached out my hand.
And it vanished.
Into cold/warmth, a feeling of winter/summer, sunlight and clouds.
I yanked my hand back, scrubbed it against my side and ran. Clambered over the gates. And ran.
Again I had had too much to drink. I know it.
But I can’t help thinking:
About coming up undetected on a child in a room, listening to him talk seemingly to himself. There might be a doll, or a shadow on the wall, or a favorite stuffed animal toy truck, tin soldier. There would be a scowl when he was interrupted.
About watching a child chasing himself in the yard, shrieking with delight—and that instant frown when an adult I comes by.
About children sitting on the ground, solemnly and intently staring at a tuft of grass, an anthill, a sliver of bark.
Kid stuff.
But my hand vanished.
Suppose, then, there’s a world—no, not a world, the world, where reality lies uncovered, to which children unaffected yet by us and our deceptions can escape. To remember, to know what it’s like and return with resentment for what they are becoming.
Suppose, just suppose, they really get angry. With a kid named Gary, or Eliot, or Chuck. Suppose they invite Gary, Eliot, Chuck to visit their world. Suppose they drop them down the slide and watch them vanish, rush in after them and haul out their bodies.
Why bodies?
Because despite their youth, Gary and the rest are already blinded; and the light they are exposed to frightened them to death.
We like you, Mr. Craig.
I don’t believe this for a minute, of course. Not a word. - Not a thought.
We really like you, Mr. Craig.
But I don’t think I’m going to look out my window any more.
Would you please visit us sometime? Sometime soon?
That way I won’t see Darlene at the gate, the others beside her. Miffy with a bouquet of flowers in her hand; Stevie sucking his thumb; Tim with his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. I’m their friend, I know, but what they don’t know is that friendships can hurt more than emnity can.
And if I don’t see them, maybe I won’t hear them. Maybe I won’t hear Darlene when she calls me out to play.
Needle Song
In a living room, pieces of sparse and battered furniture had been formed into a square so that, in her darkness, the old woman could find them, avoid them without the tap of her probing white-tipped cane. There were neither rugs on the floors nor pictures on the walls, and only a single shapeless lamp. No matter the day or the weather, she always wore the same dress, an oddly shapeless garment whose colors had seemed dead for centuries. Her hair was decades long, braided and coiled into a silver basket around the top of her head; and her face and arms and thin, strong legs were shadowed with ancient wrinkles.
But, as she sat at her piano, her hands glided out from long, laced sleeves, and they were beautiful.
Eric sat quietly on the family room floor, his short legs pulled up tight in awkward Indian fashion, his back resting stiffly against the dark-oak paneling that covered the walls to the ceiling. His hands, as pinkly puffed as the rest of him, were folded in his lap, and for a moment he smiled, thinking of how his teacher would approve. Caren lay on the overstuffed couch, her white blond hair sifting down over her face. One hand dangled almost to the floor, and when, in her sleep, she whimpered once, it jerked up to her cheek, touched, and fell again. He was tempted to wake her but didn’t want to move, didn’t want to whisper. The slightest sound might spoil the battle, might make him miss the music, and then it would be too late.
He stared instead at the walls and the pictures there of his father’s favorite game birds. Then he tried to count the floor’s black-and-white tiles; but his eyes blurred and he had to shake his head to clear his vision. A fly, perhaps the last of the year, darted across the room, swerved toward him, and made him duck. Automatically, his hands unclenched, remembered, and settled again. His knees ached where he had scraped them the day before. Caren sighed.
Through the two windows above the couch he could see the brown-edged leaves of a ribbon of flowers his mother had planted along the front of the house. They had been green once, like all the others in the neighborhood; watered, dusted with aerosol sprays, and caressed with eyes that loved and appreciated them. By stretching very slightly he could see beyond the single row of faded bricks that separated the garden from the lawn. The grass was hidden, but he knew it was dying anyway, a perfect camouflage for the leaves that sailed from the elms and willows.
I wish I knew what I was doing, he thought as he lowered his gaze to Caren again. I never killed anyone before. But I guess it’s got to be done or she’ll kill us all first. I know it. I know she will.
Visions of his parents, of Caren’s, of all the others, lying in the street like so much discarded trash.
Visions of television shows, of movies, of twisted evil women burning at the stake and laughing, having their heads cut off and their mouths stuffed with garlic, fading to corpse-gray dust at the first touch of daylight.
Visions, and it was all supposed to be make-believe, and the witch, vampire, werewolf wounds just makeup that washed off with soap.
A strong gust of wind drummed twigs against the windows, and Caren moaned softly in her sleep. As she rolled over onto her back, Eric wondered if he should have talked to some of the others. But he knew most of them would have been too frightened to do anything but call for their mothers. In fact, Caren was the only one who believed all that he said and was the only one who was willing to join in the fight.
Maybe, he thought, we’re both a little nuts. Even in the stories, vampires only drink blood.
But his father, he recalled, had been complaining about things called deterioration, depreciation and plummeting values just before he had been hospitalized; and perhaps if Eric understood it more he might be convinced that this was what was killing the street, and all the other streets in all the other towns. He frowned, scratched at his chin and rhythmically, lightly, thumped his head back against the wall. Maybe. And maybe his father was so involved in just being an adult that he couldn’t see what was real anymore. That’s what Caren had said after her spaniel puppy had been killed by a driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop to say he was sorry.
Murder.
The word popped into his mind unbidden.
“Eric,” Caren had said
that afternoon, “we can’t just break into the house and kill her. How can you kill her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we can find a gun somewhere, knock her out and, I don’t know, cut off her head or something.”
“You’re being silly.”
“Kids kill people all the time. I see it on the news at night”
“Big kids,” she said, pulling nervously at her hair. “We’ll have to think of something else."
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but we’ll think of something.”
He shifted to ease the discomfort creeping up his back, then rubbed his palms against his thighs. The sun went down unwatched, and the windows went briefly black before reflecting the single light from the floor lamp near the steps. He stretched his legs straight out ahead of him, and his heels squeaked on the tiles. Caren jumped, swung her legs to the floor, and sat up.
“It’s okay,” he said, grateful for the chance to get to his feet "Nothing’s happened yet. Do you want to sleep some more?”
“No,” and her voice was younger, smaller than the size of her years. “Do you think she’ll do it tonight? It hasn’t been regular for a long time.”
Eric shrugged, stretched up to his toes so he could see the house across the street “Her light is still on.”
“It always is. Even in the day.”
“You want something to drink? I think Mom left some pop in the kitchen for us.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to leave here, not yet Maybe we should call Jackie and see if she can come over, too.”
“She’s always crying, Caren. She can’t help. Besides, she’s too young to understand. We have to do it alone.” He placed his hands on his hips, a gesture his father used to indicate finality. “Do you think you can remember enough good things?”
Caren nodded, rubbing at her eyes, then began swinging her legs. The room seemed large with shadows in the corners, but neither of them made a move to turn on the lights embedded in the white ceiling. Instead, they stared at the backless clock on the far wall and willed the hands to sweep to nine.
Caren marked the seconds by tapping a nail against her palm.
Eric wondered why no one else knew.
The fingers that rested on the piano keys were like ten wings of five sleeping hummingbirds, and they were slender and long. They hesitated, as if undecided about waking up and what to do when they did. The ivory was yellowed in blotches and stains, but the velvet-coated hammers were young and deep blue. The old woman breathed deeply to draw in what she felt, assimilated it and translated it to the language of the wings that fluttered now, darted and glided, a polka and waltz; and from the depths of the piano the music came back.
Hawthorne Street was a community unto itself, and no one who lived there would have had it any other way. Along its entire length, all families were neighbors and all children friends. The seasons were shared with garden-hose batons, snow-blower basso; pets roamed freely, and every yard but one had a hole in its hedge for the passing of gossip. Tree houses sprouted, sidewalks were chalked, but the unofficial leader was Eric because his home faced the unlucky Number 136. Of all the houses on the street, only this one could not keep a family; three in less than two years, not because it was haunted, but because the people were not able to penetrate the tightly meshed lives of everyone else.
Then, Eric remembered, came last September, and the smallest moving van he had ever seen pulled into the ragged blacktop driveway and unloaded one odd-angled piano a disturbingly deep black, one polished cedar hope chest that took three men to carry, one graying wicker chair slightly unstrung and a bench of burnished copper. He and Caren had loitered on the curb waiting for signs of children or pets but there was nothing else in the van and after one of the men had relocked the front door, it pulled away and did not return.
A week passed, and suddenly Caren had pounded on the front door, dragged Eric into the street. In Number 136, in the dirt-streaked picture window, were wine-red curtains. A light glowed behind them, and no one ever saw it go off. Four days more to a Saturday waiting for autumn, and an old, very old woman, appeared on the front lawn. She sat like a weathered totem in the wicker chair, her head covered by a sunhat whose brim dropped to her shoulders. She did nothing but sit. Watch. And sit until dark. Repeated every day until November’s cold drove her inside.
One by one, or in reassuring groups, the children passed by, waving, and receiving no response. Eric had been the only one with nerve enough to call her a greeting, but only a breeze moved.
“I think she’s blind,” he said to Caren on the way to school just before the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Deaf, too,” she said, grinning, receiving a grin in return.
And though they pestered their parents daily, they could get no satisfactory answers about the odd woman’s origins, her designs, why she never invited anyone in for tea, or cookies and pop.
She became, simply, the Old Lady, and a superstition instantly born prevented any of the younger children from passing her house on her side of the street.
And then, one cold and snow-ready night, when Hawthorne Street stayed home and huddled, richly, front of fieldstone fireplaces and gleaming Franklin stoves, the music began. Precisely at nine o’clock, the November chill was warmed by glittering sparks that sifted through windows and doors and startled the people who heard.
Hey, a circus, Eric thought, running to the living room to look up and down the street.
Hey, Mom, Caren had called, there’s one of those guys with the monkey and the thing that you turn.
There was a lullaby, a love song, memories of dance bands, carnivals and boardwalk calliopes on a hot August night
For thirty minutes to the second before it stopped, and the notes fell like powdered snow to vanish into the ground.
“Eric?”
He spun around, blinking, then glaring at Caren’s silent laugh.
“What’s the matter, did I scare you?”
“Not me,” he said. “You kind of just snuck up on me, that’s all. What’s the matter? You need something, or something?”
“I was thinking about the time she came,” and she shivered an aggravated chill, making him laugh. “Remember the time we tried to sneak a look through the back window, and Jackie started sneezing because of her hay fever, and we didn’t stop running until we must have got all the way to the park?”
“I wasn’t scared then, either.”
“I didn’t say you were, silly.”
“Then why’d you have to say all that? Don’t we have enough troubles?”
“I was just trying to remember, Eric, that’s all.”
“Okay, I’m sorry, but you’d better save it. I think I can feel it coming.”
Remember, he thought in disgust. Just like a girl to waste time remembering when we got things to do more important. And what good would it do asking for things to be the way they were anyway?
Throughout that winter, it seemed as if what rainbows there were had all spilled into a vast shimmering pot called Hawthorne Street, and all on the heels of the music.
Caren’s brother was accepted into a European university with full scholarship honors; Eric discovered he had a natural talent for musical instruments, and horns in particular, and his teacher told him in all honesty that he would someday be famous: Jackie Potter’s family won a state lottery and planned a trip across the country during Easter vacation; and there seemed nothing at all wrong in standing by the front window and listening to the piano drawing them closer, stirring their emotions while it accompanied snow onto the lawns, ice onto puddles, and guided the wind to cradle dead leaves softly into the gutters. The snowmen were bigger, the snow forts more elaborate and Eric’s father came home twice with promotions and once with a car big enough to hold thousands.
Eric scrubbed his cheeks dryly. It was no good remembering things like that because it wasn’t that way anymore, and it was all because of a vampire witch who sucked them dry with her music.
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It was April when the weekly concerts stopped, and while most of the people worried for awhile, no one thought to visit the old woman to see if there was anything wrong. It was as if the children’s superstition had been universally accepted, and when Eric suggested they try again to sneak a look into the Old Lady’s house, Caren became angry and told him to leave the poor thing alone.
In May, a fire destroyed the oldest house on the street; Caren’s brother was arrested for possession of drugs and assault with a deadly weapon; and Eric’s grandfather died in the guest room, in his sleep. New grass was planted, was washed away during three consecutive storms that knocked out power for three days, flooded every waterproof cellar and uprooted a maple that was reputed to have been planted by the town’s original settlers.
Caren’s puppy was killed.
Eric’s father was forced out of work and into a hospital bed by a series of massive heart attacks.
The elms rotted from the inside, and the willows crawled with worms that soon stopped their weeping.
The music came again, at odd hours for nearly a week, stopped just as abruptly, and what grass was left began dying in the middle of a shower.
All the houses needed painting, gardens weeding and red brick shaded to brown.
Something had been taken away, something was missing, but few people cared, fewer still knew.
“Hey, listen, if you’re going to sleep, I’m going home.”
Eric grinned stupidly. He was sitting against the wall again, and his head felt stuffed with cotton like a baby’s toy.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be thinking yet.”
“Okay, I’m sorry again,” he said, crossing the room to sit with her on the couch. “I just can’t help it.”
“I know what you mean. Do you . . . do you think we can fight her?"
He looked at her carefully before nodding,
“What if we’re wrong?”
“We’re not, I told you.”
“Then let’s get going.”
The music. It came at them through the dead leaves and grass and age-bent trees. The melody varied, wavered, changed.
Tales from the Nightside Page 12
