“Now I do,” I tried to say.
“He’s my boy,” said Polar Bears. “My son. Now I’m going to teach you when to shut up.”
In the second before he hit me I saw his face irradiated with rage and I had time to wonder if Duane would have told me the final detail if he had not cut his hand. Then I couldn’t think about anything but the pain. Afterward he told Lokken to let me fall, and I toppled over onto the gravel. I could not breathe. I heard him say, “Lokken, get your fat ass out of here fast,” and I opened my eyes and saw his shoes. One of his toecaps lifted and came down on my face. I could hear Lokken running off. Polar Bears’ odor poured over me. The foot lifted from my face. His voice came straight into my ear. “You would have been a lot better off if you hadn’t never come here, Miles. And I think you better act like you know it.” I could hear him breathing hard. Wild Turkey mingled with the smell of gunpowder. “Miles, goddamn you, if you say one more word about those goddamned Coke bottles or goddamned doorknobs I’ll break you in half.” His breathing became ragged and harsh, and his belly strained out against his belt with the force of it. “And your cousin died twenty years ago, Miles. You say one more word about her and you’re through. Now remember this and remember it good. Whoever it was that was there when your cousin died saved your life by dragging you up onto the shelf. Maybe they wouldn’t repeat the favor. Maybe they’d just drop you back in the water.” Then he grunted, standing up, and was gone. I closed my eyes. I could hear tires spraying gravel.
When I opened my eyes again I touched my face. I felt slick blood. Then I sat up. I was alone. Duane’s Dream House was only a burning jumble of boards emitting a plume of dark smoke. Paul’s body was gone, and so was the heap of blankets. I was absolutely alone, lying on the white gravel beside a dying fire.
TEN
The final stage began.
When I reached home, I washed the blood from my face and went upstairs to bed and stayed there thirty-six hours. I was without friends—Paul was dead, Duane hated me, and Polar Bears had revealed himself as an enemy too complex to see clearly. I felt his touch burning me like a branding iron, and that touch was worse than his blows. My only protection was Rinn, a woman more than ninety years old. Yet if Polar Bears and Arden in general had absolved me of suspicion, why did I need protection? From Zack? I had done my worst there. I rolled under the damp sheets, groaning. I felt great dread.
I know that I waited, hearing nothing but the sound of my own voice saying to Polar Bears over the body of Paul Kant that there was another possibility, but it was too crazy, and knowing that it was there that my real dread originated…and lay rigid with tension. But nothing happened. There is no other possibility, I told myself. Gradually I calmed, eventually I went back to sleep.
I woke, aware of the smell of cold water inundating the room. “Alison,” I said.
A hand touched my shoulder. This happened. I rolled over and reached out and touched—I touched the body of a girl. A slight cold body, much colder than my hands. I was in that condition of only partial wakefulness when reality is at its most tenuous. I was conscious only of having been forgiven, and of her presence. My hands went, on their own impulse, to her face and felt what I could not see, the taut cheekbones bracketing that wild contradictory magical face, then her smooth hair. I felt her smile loosing itself under my palm, and there was no doubt that it was the smile of Alison Greening. A great general feeling of blessedness suffused my entire body. I touched her slim legs, embraced her lithe waist, cradled my head in the dip of flesh at the base of her neck. I have never felt such joy.
Actually, I have felt precisely that joy, and for the same reason: during the years of our marriage, I would at times come groggily half-awake and brush against Joan and think Alison, and embrace her, feeling in her longer taller body as we made love the lineaments of the dead girl I needed. At such moments, I experienced the same numb ecstasy, the same blessing; but on this night, the sensations were even more particularized, and as I embraced her shoulders and entered her, the small hands on my back and the slender body beneath mine were undoubtedly Alison’s. Everything else vanished, all the wretchedness of the past week. If we had been on a battlefield I would not have noticed the gunfire and exploding shells.
As her body warmed, the strangeness began. It was not that her body changed—it was not as crude as that—but that it seemed at times during the night double-exposed, shifting imperceptibly in shape so that in one half of a second it was that body I had seen flashing in the water and in the other half it was fuller, so that a leg drawn up against my flank seemed to increase in weight, to press with greater urgency. The breasts against my chest were small, then heavy, then small; the waist, slim, then sturdy; but it is more accurate to say that both were present at once and when I was aware of this double-exposure I dully imagined it as a flickering between the two halves of a second.
Once, for only a moment that was submerged deep into an onrushing succession of longer moments—a moment like the smaller fraction concealed within a fraction—my hands seemed to touch something besides flesh.
Hours later I opened my eyes and saw young skin beneath me, a curve of flesh which resolved itself into a shoulder. Hands were kneading my back, a round knee lifted between my legs. The bed was a bath of odors. Sexual perfume, that raw, pungent odor, talcum powder, young skin, newly washed hair. And the smell of blood. I jerked my head up and saw that the girl beneath me, even now sliding her hand to excite me once again, was Alison Updahl.
I scrambled off. “You.”
“Mnnn.” She crept forward into me. Her eyes were flat and pale as ever, but her face was soft.
“How long have you been here?”
She laughed. “I wanted to surprise you. But last night you didn’t even act surprised. Just starved. You really make a girl feel welcome.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since about one last night. Your face is all cut up where Mr. Hovre hit you. You know that dumb deputy he has, Dave Lokken? He’s been telling everybody. About two days ago. About how Mr. Hovre hit you. How it was Paul Kant all along. So I thought I’d help you celebrate. Even though you tried to make him think it was Zack. But that was just stupid.”
“I want you to leave.”
“Oh, it’s okay. I mean, he won’t know anything about it. It’s Thursday morning, and on Thursday mornings he always goes over to the Co-op. He doesn’t even know I’m out of the house.”
I looked at her carefully. She seemed to be entirely comfortable, unaware of any oddity.
“You were here all night?”
“Huh? Sure I was.”
“You didn’t feel anything strange?”
“Only you.” She giggled, and put an arm around my neck. “You’re pretty strange. You shouldn’t have said that about Zack to Mr. Hovre. Zack really likes you. He even read some of those books you gave him, like he told you. He usually only reads books about crime, you know, murder and stuff. Did you say it because of out at the quarry? What we did? We were just fooling around. You were cute then. Even after, when you were mad, you were looking at me—you know. ’Course I didn’t have any clothes on. Like now.”
She grimaced, apparently having scratched herself on something in the bed, and brushed off her hip with her hand; the gesture uncovered all of her compact upper body, and I felt an involuntary flame of sexual interest—the Woodsman was right. I had been starved. I still felt as though I had not made love in months. I reached over and cupped one of her breasts. The smell of blood began to pour outward again. My only excuse is that we were in bed together, and that she was being deliberately seductive. It was an experience entirely different from that of the night before. Her body was altogether foreign to me, our rhythms did not match, and I kept being thrown out of stride by sudden charges and spasms from her. Eventually I rolled over and let her direct things, as she evidently wished to do. It was an awkward performance, I suppose unhelped by my doubts about my own sanity. I had been so certain
that my partner had been my cousin; when I tried to recall the “double-exposure” sensation, it seemed very vague. But one thing was certain—Alison Updahl was a sexual stranger to me, less melodic with her body.
When it was over, she sat up in the bed. “Well. Your heart wasn’t in that one.”
“Alison,” I said, having to ask it, “did Zack do those things—the killings? Because Paul Kant didn’t, in spite of what Polar Bears thinks.”
Her tenderness had vanished before I had finished speaking. She swiveled her legs over the side of the bed, making it impossible for me to see her face. I thought that her shoulders were trembling. “Zack only talks about stuff, he never does it.” She lifted her head. “Hey, what do you have in this bed anyhow, I was scratching myself on it all morning.” She stood up, turned to face me, and threw back the sheet. On the bottom sheet lay a scattering of thin brown twigs—about enough to cover the palm of a hand. “Time you changed your sheets,” she said, in control of herself again. “They’re starting to sprout.”
I looked with a dry throat at the small things beside me on the rumpled sheet. She turned away.
“Alison,” I said, “answer something for me.”
“I don’t want to talk about those things.”
“No. Listen. Did you and Zack request a song on the radio about two weeks ago? From A and Z, for all the lost ones?”
“Yes. But I said I can’t talk about that—please, Miles.”
—
Of course Alison had no notion of what those fingerlike twigs meant to me, and when I got hurriedly out of bed she at first ignored me as she dressed. “Not exactly chatty, are you? Except for stupid questions,” she said, yanking a T-shirt over her head. “Not exactly big on small talk, hey Miles?” She squirmed into her jeans. “You just like to ruin things. Well, you don’t have to worry. I won’t invade your privacy anymore.” Then, when I did not protest, she looked at me more closely. “Hey Miles, what is going on? You looked just as spooked as you did that first day you came back.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “I have the same reason. For your own good, you’d better leave.”
“For my own good? Jesus, are you ever a case.”
“No doubt,” I said, and she stamped her feet into clogs and clattered down the stairs without saying good-bye.
Other explanations—there had to be other explanations. I had picked up the twigs on my clothing as I had walked into the woods, or simply while walking around the farm. Or they had adhered to my clothing when Polar Bears had permitted Dave Lokken to let me fall. I stood up and brushed them from the sheets. Eventually I straightened the bed, dressed, went into my office and took a pencil and some sheets of paper downstairs to try to work at the kitchen table. Tuta Sunderson showed up not long after, and I asked her to change the sheets.
“Heard you was over at Andy’s the other morning,” she announced, hands on hips. “Lot went on there, I guess.”
“Um,” I said.
“You’ll be grateful for some of it, I guess.”
“Nothing like a good beating.”
“Red says that Paul Kant should have been run off a long time ago.”
“That sounds like good old Red.”
“I think he killed himself. That boy Paul was always a weak one.”
“Yes, that’s one of your favorite theories, isn’t it?”
PORTION OF STATEMENT BY TUTA SUNDERSON:
July 18
The way I saw it, I wasn’t going to rush into thinking something just because everyone else did. There wasn’t any proof, was there? I think Paul Kant just snapped—he was too weak to take the pressure, and he broke. He never even confessed, did he? No. And you still hadn’t found that other girl yet. I keep an open mind.
Anyhow, I was goin’ to keep on watching Miles. In case he decided to run or something. So I went over on Wednesday morning just like always, and I’ll tell you what I was thinking about—that torn-up picture of Duane’s girl I found. That just sat in my mind, bothering me. I mean, what goes through a man’s mind when he tears up a picture of a girl? You think about that.
So, like I said, I saw the girl leave his house that morning just when I was walking up the road. I says to myself, you’ve been where you shouldn’t be, little girl, and I stayed out there on the road a little bit so he wouldn’t know I saw, and when he sent me up to change his sheets I knew just what they’d been up to. You can lie all you want to, and some do, but you can’t fool the person who washes your sheets.
I made up my mind I’d talk to Red. I knew sure as shooting that he’d get real mad, but I wanted him to decide if we should tell Duane. He’s the man now.
—
Half a dozen times that day I nearly left, got into the car and took off for someplace—it did not matter where. But I still did not have my car and I still thought there might be other explanations than the one which had leaked into my consciousness on the night when I had looked through the window of my room and seen that slight figure blasting cold jealous energy at me from the edge of the woods. That was when the conscious fear had started.
And it remained, refusing to be salved by theories. It followed me downstairs and upstairs, it was with me while I bolted my food, and when I sat and wrote, it stood behind me, sending its chill straight through my clothing.
She is your snare, Aunt Rinn had said. All of my life had demonstrated the truth of that statement.
Which put me where I had started, with the overwhelming memory of the terror I had felt, that night in the woods. I tried to reconstruct those moments. Later, I had explained it to myself as a fantasy cooked up out of literature, but at the time—that was important, at the time I had sensed nothing literary but instead the pure and overwhelming terror of evil. Evil is what we call the force we can discover when we send our minds as far as they can go: when the mind crumbles before something bigger, harder than itself, unknowable and hostile. Had I not courted that evil, by willing my cousin back into life? She did not promise comfort, I knew, thinking again of the figure at the edge of the fields; she did not promise anything I could comprehend.
I still could not admit to myself what I had begun to imagine. That night, the night which changed everything, began calmly enough, in the manner of most of my evenings. I had halfheartedly munched an assortment of things in the kitchen—nuts, a couple of limp carrots, some cheese—and then wandered outside onto the lawn. The night was warm and full of the scents of hay and mown grass, and I could hear crickets chirruping and invisible birds lifting off the walnut trees. I rubbed my face and went down to the road. I could not see the woods, but I knew they were there. From the center of the warm night, an icicle of cold reached out to touch my face. Now that the inhabitants of Arden and the valley had decided that I was innocent of the girls’ deaths, I felt more watched, more under observation, than ever before.
I thought of the twigs in my bed, and went back up the drive.
I pulled my chair up to the desk. Mechanically, I began to resume writing. After some minutes I became aware of an intensification of the atmosphere: the air in the room seemed charged, crowded with unseen activity. The overhead light appeared to waver, darkening my shadow on the page before me. I blinked and sat up straight. I could smell cold water all about me.
A palm of cold wind struck the pencil from my hand, an elbow of wind cut into my body.
The light darkened as my shadow had, and I was immediately aware of Alison’s presence fighting to enter me. My face and hands were icy. I tipped backward in my chair, windmilling my arms. She was coming in through nose and eyes and mouth; I screamed with terror. A stack of paper shot up into the air and fragmented. I felt my mind become elastic, skidding, stretching out of my control. She was within my mind, within my body: beneath my animal terror, I felt her hatred and jealousy. My feet kicked out at the desk, and the door racketed away from the trestles. The typewriter thudded to the ground. My head struck the wooden floor. When my right arm found a stack of books, they geys
ered up into the air. I felt her hatred on all my senses: the darkness, the burning cold of my mouth and fingertips, the flooding smell of water, a rushing noise, the taste of fire in my mouth. It was punishment for the last sad copulation, that spiritless animal joining. She was boiling within me, and my arms thrashed and my back arched and slammed against the wood. I sent papers flying toward the window, toward the lightbulb. My body was sent rolling across the floor. Saliva, mucus, tears slid across my face. For an instant I was above my body, seeing it thrashing and writhing across the littered floor, watching my slimed face contort and my arms hurling books and papers, and then I was back in the boiling, thrashing mess, suffering like an animal in a fit. Her fingers seemed slipped into mine, her light, violent bones overlay mine.
My ears were pressed forward, fluid filled my nose, my chest burst.
—
When my eyes opened it was over. I heard myself panting, not screaming. I had not sensed her leaving, but she had left. I was looking at a quiet edge of the moon through the window above the toppled desk.
Then my stomach violently unlocked itself, and I barely made it downstairs in time. A bitter brown colloidal juice shot upward into my mouth. At that moment I was seated on the toilet, feeling watery liquid expel itself from the other end of my body with an equal force, and I turned my head toward the sink, my eyes closed and a sickly perspiration blossoming on my face.
When I came limply out of the bathroom into the kitchen I had to support myself by leaning against the sink as I drank glass after glass of cold water. Cold water. The smell pervaded the house.
She wanted me dead. She wanted me with her. On that night which seemed a century ago, Rinn had warned me. She means death.
And the other things—the girls’ deaths? I looked that dread in the face, fully, for the first time. I sat in the room I had labored to prepare for her and numbly tried to accept what I had refused to think about before: the other possibility I had mentioned to Polar Bears. I had awakened Alison’s spirit, that terrible force I had felt in the woods, and I knew now that spirit was rancid with jealousy of life. On the twenty-first she would appear—and would have anyhow, I now saw, even if I had not worked at reconstructing the old interior of the farmhouse—but as the date drew nearer, she was growing in strength. She could take life. That, she had been able to do from the day I had begun to draw near the valley.