*****
Rachel put her hand against the wall to steady herself on the stairway. “Paul?” she whispered. “Is that you?”
Silence.
“Paul, if you’re down there, please answer me.”
The closed door at the bottom of the stairway rattled a little on its hinges.
“Paul, please!”
A voice from the other side of the door said, “Paul?”
She stopped moving down the stairs. The voice, she realized, had been her voice—made slightly hollow, a bit off-key, by the closed door. “Paul?” it repeated, and added, “Is that you?”
The long sliver of dull light along the bottom of the door was cut at the left and right by shadow.
“Paul?” Rachel pleaded aloud, “don’t play games with me!” But Paul didn’t play such games, did he? He couldn’t play such games. He was too somber, too humorless.
“Paul?” she said and, on tiptoes, descended the last few steps and put her ear to the door, her hand lightly on the cold doorknob. “Paul, please answer me,” she said. She tightened her grip on the knob. Turned it. Hesitated. “Paul?” she said.
“Paul, don’t. Please answer me, Paul.”
An echo, she told herself. Only an echo.
“Don’t,” repeated the voice on the other side of the door. “Please answer me, Paul.” And added, “Paul?”
Rachel pushed on the door. It didn’t respond. “Oh, my God!” she whispered, and pushed harder, though in vain. “Oh, please,” she wept, relaxing her grip on the knob and lowering herself to a knees-up, head forward sitting position on the stairs, “whoever you are, please, please go away!”
“Please go. Oh my God!” said the voice at the other side of the door.
*****
It couldn’t be rain, Paul realized, and yet, of course, it had to be rain. Some changes happened quickly here—the weather especially. It was a very light rain; it sounded like mice running about on the roof. And, as well, sunlight still illuminated Lumas’s bed, Lumas’s shirt and pants—what was left of them. And what was left of them, Paul thought, was—along with the small, grimy cabin—probably all that was left of Lumas, the man. Paul sighed. Perhaps Lumas had been able to drag himself off, into the forest. He was very strong; perhaps he’d been able to defend himself, had driven the animal away and then, in panic, had fled the cabin. It was possible. Another sigh. Lumas was simply not the type to panic. And the evidence of his shredded, barely bloodstained clothes was damning evidence indeed.
Paul went quickly to the bed, hesitated a moment, scooped up the shredded shirt and pants, turned and started for the door. He stopped, his gaze on the shotgun standing up in the southeast corner of the room. Lumas, he remembered, had once shown him the weapon, had, in fact, waxed enthusiastic about it. “I don’t use it,” he’d said. “Never needed to. Probably never would. But it sure is one hell of a fine gun, don’t you think?” Paul only smiled and nodded. Now, darkly aware that what had happened to Lumas could easily happen to him, and cursing himself for not having had the sense to have brought his own rifle, he took the shotgun from its place against the wall, studied it briefly, dispassionately—as if it had become some necessary but uninteresting extension of his arm—and made for the door.
He stopped once more. The rain was letting up, he realized.
*****
The sliver of light along the bottom of the door had suddenly become whole again.
“Paul?” Rachel said. Dimly, she was aware of how useless it was to call to him. It wasn’t Paul at the other side of the door. He was still at Lumas’s cabin, or had begun the grim process of burying him. Even so, the possibility for communication existed. It always existed.
“Paul?” she repeated.
From somewhere in the living room, but not from in front of the door, she heard Paul’s voice. “I love you, darling,” it said.
Then her own voice, but not her voice: “Oh, Paul,” it said. “Oh, Paul!”
She screamed—it was shrill, abrupt, piercing. She pressed her hands firmly to her ears and heard, through her hands, the scream repeated.
“My God, Paul,” she wept, “we have to leave this place.” And for one beautiful, impossible moment she was back in her small and stifling Manhattan apartment, and she could hear her neighbors through the walls; they were a middle-age couple and they always argued. She could make out none of the words but she knew it was a horrible argument. They hated one another, loved one another, were inseparable.
Outside, a wailing ambulance was on its way to somebody’s misfortune.
It was early June. Paul Griffin had, the previous evening, asked her to marry him: “I want you to be my wife, Rachel. Will you be my wife?” he’d said, and it was obvious that he felt foolish asking her that way.
“I’d like that,” she’d answered, smiling gratefully, despite herself.
And now, listening to the drone of her middle-age neighbors, she laughed.
The moment ended.
She became aware of a presence at the top of the stairs. She turned her head, looked. It was the boy.
“What…what…” she stammered.
The boy laughed—that mature, infectious laugh so terribly unlike the laugh of a child, so terribly unlike what the laugh of a child could possibly be.
And Rachel laugh again—coldly, hysterically—and heard that whatever was at the other side of the door was laughing with her.
Chapter Fifteen
Paul knew it and tried hard to cope with it. But coping was impossible. It’s possible, he thought, to cope only with what is familiar and recognizable. Coping with something that didn’t show itself, that remained hellishly anonymous, isn’t possible. You don’t cope with ghosts, you experience them.
He knew there was no wolf. The last wolf had been killed nearly a century ago, as he’d told Rachel. Wolves left tracks. He had seen none. Wolves howled from time to time, but the only sounds here were the sounds one expected—sounds that were at least vaguely identifiable. Wolves, as well, had their own way of killing, and though it was terribly effective, it was also messy. Messier than had been evidenced by the poor, ravaged animals he’d found.
There was no wolf. There was something else.
Suddenly, he remembered his final conversation with Lumas—more a monologue than a conversation, really, and one Lumas clearly felt had to be delivered before death claimed him. A kind of bizarre last will and testament.
“The land…” he’d stammered. “The land…” he’d repeated, obviously reaching deep within himself for the correct words. “The land, Paul…the land creates.”
Everything he’d said had revolved around that statement. But none of what he’d said had been any less vague. Obviously, Paul thought, he had been employing his own opaque brand of subtlety. His reference to Rachel’s “gifts” had been especially opaque. If she possessed any gift, it was the questionable gift of an acute sensitivity couple, damnedly, with a remarkable imagination. Evidence the voices she claimed to have heard from behind the closed door two weeks earlier, and the occasional and barely audible laughter she claimed to hear on random evenings. Laughter that seemed to originate, she said, from somewhere within the forest, laughter Paul hadn’t heard, though his hearing, he’d reminded her, was excellent.
And so his deception, or half-truth, that the was going out each day in search of “the wolf.” A deception for her sake. She could picture a wolf; she could mentally hold onto it. As he could. But the ghosts that actually inhabited the land were something else entirely. No, he thought, they were—as far as his knowledge of them was concerned—even less substantial than ghost. They were a vacuum. Something impossible for him to hold onto. And if Rachel tried to deal with it, it would tear her apart from the inside.
And so his deception, for Rachel’s sake—wonderful, sensitive, vulnerable Rachel—would continue until he’d found whatever he was looking for. Or until it found him.
These thoughts preoccupied him for more than half the dist
ance down the path to the forest. He stopped short, the rifle came to rest at a horizontal position in his hand. He glanced critically at it. He’d had little experience with rifles. He knew only that their primary function was to kill, and that made them obscene. He knew also that obscenity was necessary, on occasion. What had been done to Lumas, for instance, was an obscenity. Not the instinctive actions of an animal satisfying its hunger. An obscenity. It required the obscenity of a rifle bullet to answer it.
He glanced behind, up the path that led to the house, certain his preoccupation with Rachel and Lumas had caused him to overlook something. But the path was empty—the brightly sunlit trees and bushes to either side were curiously motionless.
He closed his eyes briefly, as if that temporary loss of sight would make his other senses more acute. He heard nothing. Felt nothing. Only stillness.
And it struck him that the stillness was not the ordinary stillness of mid-afternoon—that there was no busy undertone of foraging honeybees, birds involved in mating and food-gathering, small animals slipping through the underbrush. Sounds he had grown so accustomed to they had become a part of silence. The stillness he sensed was complete, as if all that existed around him were only some vast, circular and wonderfully executed painting of what had once existed, an exhibit: This has passed. This is history. Turn the page.
He thought of cupping his hands to his mouth and shouting, “Hello, hello!” but felt, strangely, that it would be an oafish thing to do, a cowardly thing to do. He couldn’t admit that it would also be proof of the sudden strong fear that had settled over him. That, if the land and all that existed on it had gone into a sleep, his shouts would awaken it. And awaken the ghosts. Give them notice of his presence and apprehension.
*****
From the doorway, Rachel quietly watched the boy for a long moment. His back was to her, his face pressed hard against the boarded-up window. She could dimly see the contours of his tensed muscles beneath the green corduroy suit. Amazingly, the first time she’d dressed him in it, several days ago, he’d made no attempt to get out of it.
“Care to tell me,” she said, realizing and relishing her facetiousness, “what it is you see out there?” She paused. The boy gave no indication that he knew she was in the room. “Is it freedom?” she continued. “Is it freedom you see?” She found that her tone had become vaguely pitying. “We all lose our freedom,” she went on. “We have to. I lost mine to Paul. He lost his to this house. And you lost yours to us. That’s the way it has to be. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.”
The boy did not move.
Rachel took a few steps into the room. “It’s the sunlight you want, isn’t it?” she said. “And I’ll admit that we’re being terribly unfair—keeping you cooped up in this dreary room. But it’s the prerogative of parents to be unfair, isn’t it?” She took another step toward him. Still he gave no hint that he knew she was in the room. “It’s for your own good. I want you to know that. If we were to let you outside, as if you were a normal child, you might go back. And we don’t want that.”
She heard the sound of cloth being torn, seams giving way. The sounds stopped abruptly.
She stepped forward and studied the boy more closely. “What are you doing?” she whispered. He was in precisely the same position he’d been in when she’d entered the room. “Don’t do that,” she ordered, unsure of what it was she didn’t want him to do. “What are you doing?” she repeated, because she heard again the sound of cloth being ripped, seams giving way.
Then, impossibly, the boy’s flesh—from his waist to under his right arm—appeared beneath the torn corduroy suit.
Rachel gasped. “What are you doing?” she screamed.
She ran to him, bent over and spun him around viciously. He faced her eye to eye, expressionlessly, for a second, then closed his eyes, as if in meditation, and tensed his muscles powerfully.
The left hand seam burst.
Before realizing what she was doing, Rachel’s open hand swept hard across his face.
The seams on the legs of the corduroy suit burst simultaneously.
“My God!” Rachel whispered, and raised her hand to strike him again. But hesitated. For the first time, she saw, an emotion was clear on his face. An emotion that, like his laughter, was a contradiction, an abomination. And, she realized in the next moment—as the shreds of the corduroy suit fell to the floor around him—that she was the source and the target of his emotion.
*****
This is how the deaf must experience the world, Paul told himself. The thought was inaccurate, he knew. The world of the deaf was the same world he normally inhabited, and that world was filled with motion. This world was not.
The thought—off-handed, desperate, inaccurate—had been designed to give him comfort, to make him an observer, not a participant, he realized.
“Bullshit!” he whispered. He was both observer and participant here. But of what?
Was this only some sacred pause in the progress of things?
“Hello!” he shouted. He shuddered. The word had been absorbed by the land in much the way it would have been absorbed by a small and cluttered room. As if the vastness around him were only an illusion.
Then the word came back to him from the forest—a quarter miles distant—and he smiled, relieved.
“Hello,” he shouted again.
“Hello,” he heard a second later.
His smiled broadened. Far to his right, a hawk circled expectantly. Ahead, near the forest, a woodchuck waddled across the path. From a shallow weed-choked ditch behind him, he heard a flurry of activity; a moment later, a pheasant, several of its feathers trailing to earth behind it, took flight.
And, abruptly, all the nearly subliminal noises of the land returned.
In the same instant, Paul’s face went blank. He brought his rifle to a ready position--diagonally across his chest, right hand on its stock, left hand on its barrel.
You there! he wanted to yell. But the words went unuttered.
Fear stopped them.
And confusion.
And knowledge.
“The land, Paul…The land…creates. The earth creates.”
He understood, now, what Lumas meant.
Chapter Sixteen
Rachel thought the boy had died in his sleep, during the night, at any rate, while she and Paul slept.
She wanted to step into the room. IT seemed so ludicrous that she couldn’t she had, after all, been with him most of the night. But now, less than a minute after summoning Paul—“It’s the boy. I don’t know—there’s something wrong. I don’t think he’s breathing.”—she could only wait in the doorway, arms at her sides, body erect, face blank in anticipation.
Is he dead, Paul? she wanted to ask, to have the final word said. Paul was taking so long, and this death was so grotesquely obvious. So without question.
Paul took his finger from the boy’s jugular but did not straighten: he had his left knee on the floor, was resting his right arm on the other knee. “He’s gone, Rachel.”
“He’s dead?” she managed, as if asking if he were asleep, or whether he’d eaten his dinner or if he was feeling better after a minor illness.
“Yes. He’s dead.”
“How do you think he died, Paul?” How do you change a tire, clip a cat’s nails, use an axe?
Paul stood very slowly, his gaze on the boy all the while. “He’s dead, Rachel—that’s all I can say. If you want to know how, you’ll have to ask someone more qualified.” He aid it matter-of-factly, as if commenting on a not-quite-up-to-par meal: it gave his words a grim, cold finality.
“Was it me, Paul?”
He looked confusedly at her. “You?”
“Was it this room?” she said, face still blank, body still erect. “Did we kill him by putting him in here?”
Paul turned back to the boy. “He died.” Again matter-of-factly. “He’s dead. That’s all I can say, and any speculation as to how he died is going to be self-
defeating.”
‘Jesus, Paul!”
“It’s true, and you should realize it.”
She said nothing.
Moments later—when he turned away from the boy—she was gone. He listened heard her go down the stairs, hesitate, then cross through the living room and kitchen, where she hesitated again, then he heard first the back door then the screen door being opened. Both doors shut seconds later.
Some things—weddings, for instance, and bad lovemaking—Rachel mused, are permanently fixed in the memory, and they’re unalterable. All the pathetic futile attempts made to stop a death are unalterable, too. A person might wish, afterward, that those attempts had been more in earnest, had put the death off a few hours or a few days. But the result would be exactly the same, wouldn’t it?
She descended the back steps slowly, almost instinctively with caution. My God, it was a gorgeous day, brisk and clear and it had a good clean smell to it—the smell of autumn.
Permanently fixed: covering that exquisite brown body with several blankets (warmth always put death off), even though she knew that, within minutes, he’d throw them to the floor. Smearing first-aid cream over those ugly dark splotches on his arms and legs. Forcing bouillon and mushroom soup and mashed peas into his mouth (hunger was a friend to death). Staying in that awful room with him for hours and hours, as if death couldn’t happen unless she looked away. But it had, although the exact moment had escaped her notice. She might, she knew, have been watching him a long, long time…
Permanently fixed—all that she should have done to save him. She could have taken him into town, for Christ’s sake, where there would have been better help him, although not as much caring. And, during the first stages of his illness, letting him out of the house and into the healing sunlight. But she hadn’t done those things and never would—not even in memory. Instead, she had done the things which had killed him.
Goddammit! Did Paul listen, really listen, to some of the stuff that came spilling from his mouth? “He’s dead, that’s all I can say, Rachel. And any speculation as to how he died, or why, is going to be self-defeating.” Oh, that was very nice, very rational. And inhuman. You could expect some killing machine to feel nothing for what it did, but as for the person who operated that machine…
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