And scrawled on it in red letters was
ROBERT MARTIN ELLIS 1941–1992
The wind knocked me off-balance and I fell backwards.
The field was damp and spongy and as I tried to stand up I slipped on a large wet patch of dirt. But when I put a hand down to steady myself it wasn’t wetness I felt but something viscous and slimy that smelled dank and I kept trying to stand up because something was getting closer to me. The wind slammed the kitchen doors shut. Whatever was approaching me was hungry. It was pitiful. It was awesome. It needed something I didn’t want to give. I shouted out as I finally lifted myself up and lunged toward the house. Whatever was behind me kept shambling forward, its arms outstretched and grasping.
Once inside, I ran into the guest room and locked myself in it.
I waited desperately for Jayne and the kids to get home.
When they returned I made sure all the doors to the house were locked and that the various alarms were set. I pretended to be interested in Sarah’s candy. Jayne ignored me. Robby barely looked my way before climbing the stairs to his room.
Back in the guest room, drinking from the magnum of vodka, I kept thinking one thing, just two words.
He’s back.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1
9. outside
I woke up in the guest room to the sound of a leaf blower, and when I peered out the window (the gardener’s flatbed truck in the driveway a reminder that it was Saturday) I felt momentarily okay about things until I realized I was fully clothed (not a good sign) and had no recollection of how I fell asleep last night (ditto), which morphed into a spasm of anxiety. I immediately swung my legs off the bed, knocking over the bottle of vodka I had bought the previous night—but it was empty (another bad sign). Yet the Ketel One suggested that my fear was the result of a hangover and nothing else—I was safe, I was alive, I was okay. I had a mixed response, however, to the jumbo Slurpee cup I kept hidden under the bed and which now sat on the nightstand half-filled with urine, meaning I had been too intoxicated to make it to the guest bathroom a few feet away from the guest bed in the middle of the night but not so intoxicated that I was unable to direct the stream carefully into the cup and not onto the beige carpet, so it came down to: okay, peed into jumbo Slurpee cup and not on rug—plus or minus? I walked quickly to the guest room door and made sure I’d locked it before passing out. And the usual morning anxiety dissipated slightly when I realized I had in fact locked the door, which meant that Jayne wouldn’t have been able to check on me (passed out, reeking of vodka, a cup filled with my urine by the side of the bed). But the anxiety returned when I realized that she probably hadn’t even tried.
I carried the cup carefully toward the kitchen (forgetting to pour out its contents in the guest bathroom), again noticing the darkened carpet beneath my feet as I passed through the living room—the beige now bordering on a faint green, and shaggier (first reaction: the carpet is growing). Rosa was vacuuming, running the Hoover over one spot in particular. I gingerly walked closer, until I saw the footprints stamped in ash and thought, Why didn’t she clean those yesterday? When Rosa looked up she turned the vacuum off and waited for me to say something, but I was noticing that the furniture still had not been put back the way it was, and my hangover and confusion (because this room now seemed inescapably familiar to me) made saying anything superfluous.
Finally, Rosa gestured at the carpeting. “I think the party cause this, Mr. Ellis.”
I stared down at the ashy footprints embedded there. “How can the party cause the carpet to change its color?”
“I hear there was many people.” She paused. “Maybe they spill their drink?”
I slowly turned to face her. “What do you think we were serving them? Green dye?”
Rosa stared at me, humbled. A pause that seemed to last a decade ensued. I tried to offset the harshness of my tone by making a casual gesture. Without thinking I raised the Slurpee cup to my lips and then, just as casually, stopped myself.
“Miss Dennis—she outside” was all Rosa said, then looked away from me and turned the Hoover on again as I moved toward the kitchen.
On the table were the morning papers, and there was another headline about yet another missing boy, this one named Maer Cohen. I glanced at his photo quickly (twelve, nondescriptly Semitic) and noticed that he’d disappeared from Midland, which was only a fifteen-minute drive down the interstate from where we lived. My response was to turn the paper over. “Not today, can’t deal with that today,” I said aloud as I moved to the sink and discreetly poured out the contents of the Slurpee cup and rinsed it. And when I leaned against the counter, my hands picked up the vibrations of the whisper-quiet Miele dishwasher concealed behind the cherrywood panels. The vibration was soothing, but soon the sound of the leaf blower moving around the side of the house and into the backyard caused me to look up and out the wall of glass.
And then I remembered the headstone.
Craning my neck, I cautiously scanned the field.
I hesitated before accepting that it was no longer there.
And the epic darkness of last night flowed back to me.
But I walked outside onto the deck and it was a clear, beautiful day, still unseasonably warm, and everything seemed so less menacing in the light, almost as if the things I’d seen last night (and the fear I had felt) never existed. Victor lay in a heap in front of me, undisturbed by the roar of the leaf blower, and when I opened the kitchen door his tail started thudding expectantly against the deck but it stopped in midair when he realized who it was and then the tail lowered itself slowly until it curled between his hind legs. The dog flared its nostrils and let out a wet and heavy sigh. I searched my jeans for a Xanax and popped two and something briefly lifted off me, but then I saw the pool man (yes, this was definitely a Saturday) fishing what looked like a dead crow out of the Jacuzzi. (On Sunday night at the Allens’ I would find out that another crow had been nailed to the trunk of a large pine tree in front of the Larsons’ house and another crow had been “broken in half” and stuffed into the Moores’ mailbox; there was also one found mangled—“chewed on” is the phrase Mark Huntington will use—in the back of Nicholas Moore’s Grand Cherokee, and yet another crow was dangling from a massive spiderweb that spanned the two oaks in the O’Connors’ front yard.) As I moved closer toward the Jacuzzi, I noticed that what differentiated this particular crow from any I had ever seen was its abnormally long and pointed beak. The pool man and I stood there studying the bird, both of us speechless, until he asked, “Do you guys have a cat?” The smell of smoke was in the air, and the sun was still climbing the sky. Sarah had left her Terby lying by the pool, and in the morning light it resembled something black and dead.
I looked over at the field again to make sure that the headstone was gone.
I stared at the empty field and out to where the ground rose slightly just before the woods began and remembered how Jayne called the field a “meadow,” making it seem far more innocent than I now felt it was. The sound of the leaf blower kept getting closer, and I motioned to the gardener—a young white kid I’d never spoken to before. He turned the blower off and walked over, squinting in the harsh sunlight. I told the gardener there was something I wanted to show him and gestured toward the field. As we walked across the yard I asked if he had seen or heard anything strange lately. I noticed how deliberately I was walking while waiting for his answer, our feet crunching over the dead leaves.
“Strange?” he asked. “Well, Ms. Dennis was complaining that something was eating her plants and flowers. A couple of dead mice, a squirrel or two—pretty torn up. That’s about it.” The gardener shrugged. His tone suggested that none of this was unusual.
“It was probably our dog,” I said brusquely. “That thing on the deck. He has a cruel, prankish streak in him.”
The gardener didn’t know what to say after that. Just a pause in which he smiled but the smile faded when he saw I wasn’t joking.
“Well
, dogs don’t usually eat the kind of flowers Ms. Dennis has.”
We were now on the periphery of the yard.
“You don’t know this dog,” I said. “You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
“Is that . . . right?” I heard the gardener murmur.
“I found something strange last night in the field.”
We stepped over a low concrete divider and were now standing where the headstone had been and someone had dug a hole (my most hopeful scenario). I pointed at the wide, black, wet patch I’d slipped in, and which now led from where the headstone had stood and stretched toward our yard, where it abruptly ended at the divider. The gardener laid down the leaf blower and, taking his cap off, wiped the sweat from his forehead. The black trail was glistening in the midmorning sun—there was a white veneer of crust overlaying it but the trail wasn’t entirely dry yet.
“What is it?” he asked, and I caught an expression usually associated with dead things.
“Well, that’s what I want to know.”
“It looks like, um, mud.”
“That’s not mud. It’s slime.”
“It’s what?”
“Slime. That’s slime.” I realized I had now said that word three times.
The gardener grimaced slightly. Kneeling down, he murmured a few noncommittal suggestions that I couldn’t hear. I looked back at the pool man, who was dumping the crow into a white plastic bucket. A warm wind was rippling the water in the pool, and high white clouds moved swiftly across the sky, blocking the sun and darkening the spot where we were standing. This field is a graveyard, I suddenly told myself. The ground beneath us was jammed with dead bodies, and one of them had escaped. That’s what caused the trail. That’s what dragged itself toward our house. The sound of kids playing somewhere in the neighborhood—their cries of surprise and disappointment associated with something living—momentarily comforted me, and the Xanax had increased my blood flow to the point that I could inhale and exhale without my chest aching.
“I slipped in that last night,” I finally said, and then added, before I could stop myself, “What made it?”
“What made it?” he asked. “Well, it is a slime trail of some kind.” The gardener paused. “I’d say a snail, a slug, or a whole hell of a lotta them made it but damn . . . this is really too big for a . . . slug.” He paused again. “Plus we haven’t had any snail problems here.”
I stood there, staring down at the gardener. “Too big for a slug, huh?” I sighed. “Well, that really sums it up nicely. This is encouraging.”
The gardener stood up, still staring at the trail, perplexed. “And it smells funny—”
“Can you just get rid of it?” I asked, cutting him off.
“This is really weird . . .” he muttered, but so are you his expression told me. “Maybe it’s that dog you’ve got such a problem with.” He shrugged lamely, aiming for levity.
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” I said. “He’s capable of anything. He’s got quite the attitude.”
We both turned and looked at Victor innocently lying on his side, oblivious. He slowly raised his head and, after a beat, yawned at us. It looked as if he were going to yawn a second time, but instead his head lolled forward and rested itself lazily on the deck, his tongue flopping out of his mouth.
“He’s, um . . . bipolar,” I told the gardener.
“Yeah, he looks like a problem . . . I guess,” the gardener murmured.
I didn’t say anything.
“I’ll hose it down and . . . we’ll just hope it doesn’t come back.”
(But it will, I heard the woods whispering.)
That was the extent of the conversation. It wasn’t going to proceed anywhere else so I left the gardener and as I started walking back across the yard I could hear voices from the side of the house that faced the Allens’. I moved toward them.
When I came around the corner, Jayne was standing with our contractor, Omar (there had been lengthy discussions recently about adding a skylight in the foyer), and they both had the same stance: hands on hips, faces tilted upward toward the second floor. Jayne noticed me and actually smiled, which I took as an invitation to smile back and join them. Walking over I also looked up. Surrounding the large windows of the master bedroom, and above the French doors that framed the media room situated below it, were huge patches where the lily white paint was peeling off the side of the house, revealing a pink stucco underneath. Omar was holding an iced coffee from Starbucks, Persols pushed up on his forehead, totally confused. At first glance it looked as if the house was peeling randomly, as if someone had blindly scraped at the wall in a rushed and curving motion (could that have been what Robby heard in the middle of the night?), but the longer you stared at the swirling patches they began to seem patterned and deliberate, as if there was a message hidden in them, some code being spelled out. The wall was telling us (me) something. I know this wall, I thought to myself. I had seen it before. The wall was a page waiting to be read. At our feet were flakes of paint so finely ground that they resembled piles of flour.
“This shouldn’t be happening,” Omar said.
“Could it be kids? A Halloween prank?” I was asking. “Could it have happened the night of the party?” I paused and then, trying to gain favor with Jayne, added, “I bet Jay did it.”
“No,” Jayne said. “This started happening at the beginning of the summer and it’s just been accelerating.”
Omar touched the side of the house (I shuddered) and then brushed his palms off on his khakis. “Well, it looks like . . . claw marks,” he said.
“Is that some kind of tool?” I asked. “What’s a clawmark?”
“No—like something’s clawing at it.” And then Omar stopped. “But I don’t know how anybody—whatever it was—got up there.”
“Well, who lived here before?” I asked. “Maybe it’s just naturally peeling.” And then I reminded them of the heavy rains from late August and early September.
Jayne and Omar both glanced at me.
“What? I mean, why was this painted over?” I asked, shrugging. “That’s . . . a nice color.”
“The house is new, Bret,” Jayne sighed. “There was no other paint.”
“Plus that wasn’t the base color,” Omar added.
“Well, maybe the paint’s oxidizing, y’know, the enamel, um, underneath?”
Frowning, Omar grew quickly tired of me and pulled out a cell phone.
Jayne took one more look at the wall and then turned my way. She seemed inordinately cheerful this morning, and when she looked at my face she smiled again. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and I reached out to touch it—a gesture that only widened the smile.
“I don’t know why you’re smiling, baby. There’s a dead crow in our Jacuzzi.”
“It must’ve happened after you got out of it last night.”
“I didn’t take a Jacuzzi last night, babe.”
“Well, there was a wet pair of shorts on the railing by the deck.”
“Yeah, I saw them but they aren’t mine,” I said. “Maybe Jay stopped by.”
Jayne’s forehead creased. “Are you sure they’re not yours?”
“Yeah, I’m sure, and hey—did somebody from the decorating company come by this morning?”
“Yeah, they forgot a gravestone.” She paused briefly. “And a skeleton and a few bats.”
“That always happens on Saturdays, doesn’t it?” I grinned and then, trying to keep everything on a light note, I asked the following in a manner as casual as possible: “Did you know that someone wrote my father’s name on that headstone?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“When I came back last night—wait, you’re not mad at me because I got tired and had to skip out on trick-or-treating . . . are you?”
She sighed. “Look, it’s the first of the month. Let’s forget everything that’s been happening and let’s try to start over. How’s that? Let’s just start over. New beginnings.?
??
The hangover vanished. The fear was gone. This could all work out, I thought.
“I love your recovery time,” I said.
“Yeah, fast to get pissed, faster to forgive.”
“That’s what I love and admire about you.”
She flinched. “What—that I’m a total enabler?”
Behind her, Omar was on his cell, pacing and gesturing at the wall, which I couldn’t help looking up at again. How could something get up there? I wondered. What if it could fly? came back in response.
“What about the gravestone?” Jayne was asking. “Bret—hello?”
I made the effort and focused away from the wall and back on Jayne. “Yeah, when I came home last night I noticed it was left over from the party and when I went down to take a look at it I saw that somebody had written my dad’s name on it . . . and they also knew his birth date and, um, the year he died.”
Jayne’s expression darkened. “Well, it wasn’t there this morning.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I took the guys out there when they removed it.” She paused. “And there was nothing on it.”
“Do . . . you think it rained last night?” I cocked my head.
“Do . . . you think you had too much to drink last night?” She also cocked her head, mimicking me.
“I’m not drinking, Jayne—” I stopped myself.
We studied each other for a long time. She won. I settled. I rose up to it.
“Okay,” I said. “New beginnings.”
I placed my hands on her shoulders, which caused her to smile ruefully at me.