The town has its secrets, and keeps them well. The people don't know them all. They know old Albie Crane's wife ran off with a traveling man from New York City--or they think they know it. But Albie cracked her skull open after the traveling man had left her cold and then he tied a block on her feet and tumbled her down the old well and twenty years later Albie died peacefully in his bed of a heart attack, just as his son Joe will die later in this story, and perhaps someday a kid will stumble on the old well where it is hidden by choked blackberry creepers and pull back the whitened, weather-smoothed boards and see that crumbling skeleton staring blankly up from the bottom of that rock-lined pit, the sweet traveling man's necklace still dangling, green and mossy, over her rib cage.
They know that Hubie Marsten killed his wife, but they don't know what he made her do first, or how it was with them in that sun-sticky kitchen in the moments before he blew her head in, with the smell of honeysuckle hanging in the hot air like the gagging sweetness of an uncovered charnel pit. They don't know that she begged him to do it.
Some of the older women in town--Mabel Werts, Glynis Mayberry, Audrey Hersey--remember that Larry McLeod found some charred papers in the upstairs fireplace, but none of them know that the papers were the accumulation of twelve years' correspondence between Hubert Marsten and an amusingly antique Austrian nobleman named Breichen, or that the correspondence of these two had commenced through the offices of a rather peculiar Boston book merchant who died an extremely nasty death in 1933, or that Hubie had burned each and every letter before hanging himself, feeding them to the fire one at a time, watching the flames blacken and char the thick, cream-colored paper and obliterate the elegant, spider-thin calligraphy. They don't know he was smiling as he did it, the way Larry Crockett now smiles over the fabulous land-title papers that reside in the safe-deposit box of his Portland bank.
They know that Coretta Simons, old Jumpin' Simons's widow, is dying slowly and horribly of intestinal cancer, but they don't know that there is better than thirty thousand dollars cash tucked away behind the dowdy sitting room wallpaper, the results of an insurance policy she collected but never invested and now, in her last extremity, has forgotten entirely.
They know that a fire burned up half of the town in that smoke-hazed September of 1951, but they don't know that it was set, and they don't know that the boy who set it graduated valedictorian of his class in 1953 and went on to make a hundred thousand dollars on Wall Street, and even if they had known, they would not have known the compulsion that drove him to it or the way it ate at his mind for the next twenty years of his life, until a brain embolism hustled him into his grave at the age of forty-six.
They don't know that the Reverend John Groggins has sometimes awakened in the midnight hour with horrible dreams still vivid beneath his bald pate--dreams in which he preaches to the Little Misses' Thursday Night Bible Class naked and slick, and they ready for him; or that Floyd Tibbits wandered around for all of that Friday in a sickly daze, feeling the sun lie hatefully against his strangely pallid skin, remembering going to Ann Norton only cloudily, not remembering his attack on Ben Mears at all, but remembering the cool gratitude with which he greeted the setting of the sun, the gratitude and the anticipation of something great and good; or that Hal Griffen has six hot books hidden in the back of his closet which he masturbates over at every opportunity; or that George Middler has a suitcase full of silk slips and bras and panties and stockings and that he sometimes pulls down the shades of his apartment over the hardware store and locks the door with both the bolt and the chain and then stands in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom until his breath comes in short stitches and then he falls to his knees and masturbates; or that Carl Foreman tried to scream and was unable when Mike Ryerson began to tremble coldly on the metal worktable in the room beneath the mortuary and the scream was as sightless and soundless as glass in his throat when Mike opened his eyes and sat up; or that ten-month-old Randy McDougall did not even struggle when Danny Glick slipped through his bedroom window and plucked the baby from his crib and sank his teeth into a neck still bruised from a mother's blows.
These are the town's secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face.
The town cares for devil's work no more than it cares for God's or man's. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.
TWO
Sandy McDougall knew something was wrong when she woke up, but couldn't tell what. The other side of the bed was empty; it was Roy's day off, and he had gone fishing with some friends. Would be back around noon. Nothing was burning and she didn't hurt anywhere. So what could be wrong?
The sun. The sun was wrong.
It was high up on the wallpaper, dancing through the shadows cast by the maple outside the window. But Randy always woke her before the sun got up high enough to throw the maple's shadow on the wall--
Her startled eyes jumped to the clock on the dresser. It was ten minutes after nine.
Trepidation rose in her throat.
"Randy?" she called, her dressing gown billowing out behind her as she flew down the narrow hall of the trailer. "Randy, honey?"
The baby's bedroom was bathed in submerged light from the one small window above the crib...open. But she had closed it when she went to bed. She always closed it.
The crib was empty.
"Randy?" she whispered.
And saw him.
The small body, still clad in wash-faded Dr Dentons, had been flung into the corner like a piece of garbage. One leg stuck up grotesquely, like an inverted exclamation point.
"Randy!"
She fell on her knees by the body, her face marked with the harsh lines of shock. She cradled the child. The body was cool to the touch.
"Randy, honey-baby, wake up, Randy, Randy, wake up--"
The bruises were gone. All gone. They had faded overnight, leaving the small face and form flawless. His color was good. For the only time since his coming she found him beautiful, and she screamed at the sight of the beauty--a horrible, desolate sound.
"Randy! Wake up! Randy? Randy? Randy?"
She got up with him and ran back down the hall, the dressing gown slipping off one shoulder. The high chair still stood in the kitchen, the tray encrusted with Randy's supper of the night before. She slipped Randy into the chair, which stood in a patch of morning sunlight. Randy's head lolled against his chest and he slid sideways with a slow and terrible finality until he was lodged in the angle between the tray and one of the chair's high arms.
"Randy?" she said, smiling. Her eyes bulged from their sockets like flawed blue marbles. She patted his cheeks. "Wake up now, Randy. Breakfast, Randy. Is oo hungwy? Please--oh Jesus, please--"
She whirled away from him and pulled open one of the cabinets over the stove and pawed through it, spilling a box of Rice Chex, a can of Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, a bottle of Wesson oil. The Wesson oil bottle shattered, spraying heavy liquid across the stove and floor. She found a small jar of Gerber's chocolate custard and grabbed one of the plastic Dairy Queen spoons out of the dish drainer.
"Look, Randy. Your favorite. Wake up and see the nice custard. Chocka, Randy. Chocka, chocka." Rage and terror swept her darkly. "Wake up!" she screamed at him, her spittle beading the translucent skin of his brow and cheeks. "Wake up wake up for the love of God you little shit WAKE UP!"
She pulled the cover off the jar and spooned out some of the chocolate-flavored custard. Her hand, which knew the truth already, was shaking so badly that most of it spilled. She pushed what was left between the small slack lips, and more fell off onto the tray, making horrid plopping sounds. The spoon clashed against his teeth.
"Randy," she pleaded. "Stop fooling your momma."
Her other hand stretched out, and she pulled his mouth open with a hooked finger and pushed the rest of the custard into his mouth.
"There," said Sandy McDougall. A smile, indescribable in its cracked hope, touched her
lips. She settled back in her kitchen chair, relaxing muscle by muscle. Now it would be all right. Now he would know she still loved him and he would stop this cruel trickery.
"Good?" she murmured. "Chocka good, Wandy? Will oo make a smile for Mommy? Be Mommy's good boy and give her a smile."
She reached out with trembling fingers and pushed up the corners of Randy's mouth.
The chocolate fell out onto the tray--plop.
She began to scream.
THREE
Tony Glick woke up on Saturday morning when his wife, Marjorie, fell down in the living room.
"Margie?" he called, swinging his feet out onto the floor. "Marge?"
And after a long, long pause, she answered, "I'm okay, Tony."
He sat on the edge of the bed, looking blankly down at his feet. He was bare-chested and wearing striped pajama bottoms with the drawstring dangling between his legs. The hair on his head stood up in a crow's nest. It was thick black hair, and both of his sons had inherited it. People thought he was Jewish, but that dago hair should have been a giveaway, he often thought. His grandfather's name had been Gliccucchi. When someone had told him it was easier to get along in America if you had an American name, something short and snappy, Gramps had had it legally changed to Glick, unaware that he was trading the reality of one minority for the appearance of another. Tony Glick's body was wide and dark and heavily corded with muscle. His face bore the dazed expression of a man who has been punched out leaving a bar.
He had taken a leave of absence from his job, and during the past work week he had slept a lot. It went away when you slept. There were no dreams in his sleep. He turned in at seven-thirty and got up at ten the next morning and took a nap in the afternoon from two to three. The time he had gone through between the scene he had made at Danny's funeral and this sunny Saturday morning almost a week later seemed hazy and not real at all. People kept bringing food. Casseroles, preserves, cakes, pies. Margie said she didn't know what they were going to do with it. Neither of them was hungry. On Wednesday night he had tried to make love to his wife and they had both begun to cry.
Margie didn't look good at all. Her own method of coping had been to clean the house from top to bottom, and she had cleaned with a maniacal zeal that precluded all other thought. The days resounded with the clash of cleaning buckets and the whirr of the vacuum cleaner, and the air was always redolent with the sharp smells of ammonia and Lysol. She had taken all the clothes and toys, packed neatly into cartons, to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill store. When he had come out of the bedroom on Thursday morning, all those cartons had been lined up by the front door, each neatly labeled. He had never seen anything so horrible in his life as those mute cartons. She had dragged all the rugs out into the backyard, had hung them over the clothesline, and had beaten the dust out of them unmercifully. And even in Tony's bleary state of consciousness, he had noticed how pale she had seemed since last Tuesday or Wednesday; even her lips seemed to have lost their natural color. Brown shadows had insinuated themselves beneath her eyes.
These thoughts passed through his mind in less time than it takes to tell them, and he was on the verge of tumbling back into bed when she fell down again and this time did not answer his call.
He got up and padded down to the living room and saw her lying on the floor, breathing shallowly and staring with dazed eyes at the ceiling. She had been changing the living room furniture around, and everything was pulled out of position, giving the room an odd disjointed look.
Whatever was wrong with her had advanced during the night, and her appearance was bad enough to cut through his daze like a sharp knife. She was still in her robe and it had split up to mid-thigh. Her legs were the color of marble; all the tan she had picked up that summer on their vacation had faded out of them. Her hands moved like ghosts. Her mouth gaped, as if her lungs could not get enough air, and he noticed the odd prominence of her teeth but thought nothing of it. It could have been the light.
"Margie? Honey?"
She tried to answer, couldn't, and real fear shot through him. He moved to call the doctor.
He was turning to the phone when she said, "No...no." The word was repeated between a harsh gasp for air. She had struggled up to a sitting position, and the whole sun-silent house was filled with her rasping struggle for breath.
"Pull me...help me...the sun is so hot..."
He went to her and picked her up, shocked by the lightness of his burden. She seemed to weigh no more than a bundle of sticks.
"...sofa..."
He laid her on it, with her back propped against the armrest. She was out of the patch of sun that fell in a square through the front window and onto the rug, and her breath seemed to come a little easier. She closed her eyes for a moment, and again he was impressed by the smooth whiteness of her teeth in contrast to her lips. He felt an urge to kiss her.
"Let me call the doctor," he said.
"No. I'm better. The sun was...burning me. Made me feel faint. Better now." A little color had come back into her cheeks.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. I'm okay."
"You've been working too hard, honey."
"Yes," she said passively. Her eyes were listless.
He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it. "We've got to snap out of this, Margie. We've got to. You look..." He paused, not wanting to hurt her.
"I look awful," she said. "I know. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before I went to bed last night, and I hardly seemed to be there. For a minute I..." A smile touched her lips. "I thought I could see the tub behind me. Like there was only a little of myself left and it was...oh, so pale..."
"I want Dr Reardon to look at you."
But she seemed not to hear. "I've had the most lovely dream the last three or four nights, Tony. So real. Danny comes to me in the dream. He says, 'Mommy, Mommy, I'm so glad to be home!' And he says...says..."
"What does he say?" he asked her gently.
"He says...that he's my baby again. My own son, at my breast again. And I give him to suck and...and then a feeling of sweetness with an undertone of bitterness, so much like it was before he was weaned but after he was beginning to get teeth and he would nip--oh, this must sound awful. Like one of those psychiatrist things."
"No," he said. "No."
He knelt beside her and she put her arms around his neck and wept weakly. Her arms were cold. "No doctor, Tony, please. I'll rest today."
"All right," he said. Giving in to her made him feel uneasy.
"It's such a lovely dream, Tony," she said, speaking against his throat. The movement of her lips, the muffled hardness of her teeth beneath them, was amazingly sensual. He was getting an erection. "I wish I could have it again tonight."
"Maybe you will," he said, stroking her hair. "Maybe you will at that."
FOUR
"My God, don't you look good," Ben said.
Against the hospital world of solid whites and anemic greens, Susan Norton looked very good indeed. She was wearing a bright yellow blouse with black vertical stripes and a short blue denim skirt.
"You, too," she said, and crossed the room to him.
He kissed her deeply, and his hand slid to the warm curve of her hip and rubbed.
"Hey," she said, breaking the kiss. "They kick you out for that."
"Not me."
"No, me."
They looked at each other.
"I love you, Ben."
"I love you, too."
"If I could jump in with you right now--"
"Just a second, let me pull back the spread."
"How would I explain it to those little candy-stripers?"
"Tell them you're giving me the bedpan."
She shook her head, smiling, and pulled up a chair. "A lot has happened in town, Ben."
He sobered. "Like what?"
She hesitated. "I hardly know how to tell you, or what I believe myself. I'm mixed up, to say the least."
"Well, spill it and let me sor
t it out."
"What's your condition, Ben?"
"Mending. Not serious. Matt's doctor, a guy named Cody--"
"No. Your mind. How much of this Count Dracula stuff do you believe?"
"Oh. That. Matt told you everything?"
"Matt's here in the hospital. One floor up in Intensive Care."
"What?" He was up on his elbows. "What's the matter with him?"
"Heart attack."
"Heart attack!"
"Dr Cody says his condition is stable. He's listed as serious, but that's mandatory for the first forty-eight hours. I was there when it happened."
"Tell me everything you remember, Susan."
The pleasure had gone out of his face. It was watchful, intent, fine-drawn. Lost in the white room and the white sheets and the white hospital johnny, he again struck her as a man drawn to a taut, perhaps fraying edge.
"You didn't answer my question, Ben."
"About how I took Matt's story?"
"Yes."
"Let me answer you by saying what you think. You think the Marsten House has buggered my brain to the point where I'm seeing bats in my own belfry, to coin a phrase. Is that a fair estimate?"
"Yes, I suppose that's it. But I never thought about it in such...such harsh terms."
"I know that, Susan. Let me trace the progression of my thoughts for you, if I can. It may do me some good to sort them out. I can tell from your own face that something has knocked you back a couple of steps. Is that right?"
"Yes...but I don't believe, can't--"
"Stop a minute. That word can't blocks up everything. That's where I was stuck. That absolute, goddamned imperative word. Can't. I didn't believe Matt, Susan, because such things can't be true. But I couldn't find a hole in his story any way I looked at it. The most obvious conclusion was that he had jumped the tracks somewhere, right?"