“You sure?” Mickelsson asked. His voice was accidentally stern. “I noticed them myself.”
The old man lifted his chin, his eyes narrowed, on guard. “Ain’t seen nobody in a week,” he said. “Mebby that car that sets and watches us.”
“More like a month,” the old woman shouted from her place behind the door.
Mickelsson frowned. “Maybe just somebody turning around in your driveway,” he said. “What kind of car is it?”
“Kids, mebby,” the old man said, and nodded. “I don’t go out and mess with ’em.”
Now Jessica stood up, her movements too smooth and restrained, as if she thought herself in danger. “Well,” she said, “it certainly was nice of you to invite us in. If there’s ever anything we can do for you—that is, anything Peter …”
“We get a lot of kids up here,” the old man said. He spoke quickly and peevishly, lest they not let him say it. He too got up, bending far forward, pushing down hard on the sides of the chairseat with his arms. “Give ’em half a chance, they’ll burn you out.”
“Really?” Mickelsson asked. Now he too was standing.
“Yup. They got a gang. Burn people’s houses and barns down for money. Whole thing was in the Seskehenna paper.”
“And you think—” Jessica began.
He was leading them back through the kitchen now, making his way between garbage bags. “That’s right,” he said. “But tell the truth, they don’t scare me. We’re pretty well protected.” He turned, head bowed, to smile back at them. “See this?” he said. He reached up to seize a rope near the kitchen door—a dark, frayed rope that went up into a hole in the ceiling above. “Give this rope a good jerk,” he said—he suggested a pull without carrying it out, then pointed through the grimy kitchen window—“and out there in the dog-house the door on the side there pulls open, and out they tumble.”
Jessica leaned down by the window, pressing her hands against her knees, to look. “Are they dangerous?” she asked. Even bent over she was taller than old Sprague.
“Wal,” the old man said, smiling, “there’s worse dogs and better dogs, but I’ll tell you this: they’re hungry.”
Mickelsson said, “You really think there’s somebody that wants your house burned down?”
“Sure I do!” Though he continued to smile, his cheek twitched. He reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, and his knobby fingers came out with just one, as if he had them in there loose. “There’s Dudak and Pearson—they’d like to get my land if they could grab it off cheap. And there’s the doc.” He raised his eyes to meet Mickelsson’s, then smiled, pretending the look was not a challenge. “She’s a killer—that’s right. Believe me, I know! And she knows I can prove it in a court of law. We been goin at it a long time now, her ’n’ me.” He hesitated, studying Mickelsson, still smiling. “She stole that house, ya know. Stole it right from under my shoes.”
“My place?” Mickelsson asked.
“That’s it.”
Jessica asked, “What happened?”
The old man held a match to his cigarette and sucked in, then coughed. When he was able to talk again, he said, “It’s a long story, but the long and short of it is, there was some taxes on the place and she paid ’em and took it, just like that.”
“You couldn’t afford—” Jessica began.
“She was quicker, that’s all,” the old man snapped. “Got there to the courthouse before I ever knowed what was doin.” Again a coughing fit came over him, ragged smoke-clouds spewing from his lungs with each cough.
“Hmm,” Jessica said. She had her hand extended toward him, getting ready to say good-bye, but now she changed her mind.
“Don’t matter. Comin to the end of it,” the old man said. “She’s got a hex on ’er.”
“She’s got—” Mickelsson began, drawing back a little.
“Never mind who put it,” the old man said, then laughed, eyes crazily merry. “People just never do learn, do they?” He seized the doorknob, turned it, and opened the door for them. “Glad you folks come up,” he said, bobbing his head at Jessica, then at Mickelsson. “Now don’t be strangers!”
Across from the porch, the bony hounds were leaping at the fence again, snapping and barking as if in rage and despair. Powdery dust clouded at their feet, obscuring the head on the floor.
“Shet ap!” the old man yelled, and flapped his arms at them, to no avail. To Jessica he said, “Say hello to the ghosts for me, missus.”
“I will,” she said, forcing a smile. She stood looking out at the dogs.
“Don’t you folks fool with ’em,” the old woman’s voice called from somewhere nearby. “You leave them alone, the spirits’ll leave you alone!”
“We’ll be careful,” Mickelsson called. “So long!” He waved, in case the old woman was somewhere where she could see him.
“Take care, now,” the old man said, and reached as if toward a cap. “I’ll be seein ya.” He winked. “Someday ye’ll look up in the sky and there I’ll be.” He flapped his arms like a bird.
Jessica smiled. “All right,” she said.
They crossed to the Jeep, neither of them glancing at the head thrown to the dogs. When the motor caught, Mickelsson waved one last time, then backed out. At the road he stopped, shifted into low, ready to start back down the mountain, but Jessica said, “Look, Pete! Look at the snow in the woods! It’s full of paw-prints!”
He saw that it was true. “He must’ve freed them for a while,” he said. “Presumably sometime after last night’s snowfall.”
“Or sicked them on someone,” Jessica said.
“Like for instance the doc,” Mickelsson said, slowly nodding.
In his mind’s eye he saw the black dogs bounding along like deer beside the doctor’s car. He saw Pearson’s ram jerk his head up suddenly as the dogs came flying through the fenced-in yard, bellowing, and saw the ram take off, heading in blind terror for wherever the dogs were not.
“Yes,” Mickelsson said, and nodded. “That must be what happened.”
They sat side by side on the couch in his livingroom, staring into the crackling, sputtering fire in the open-doored stove, Jessica with her shoes off, one foot tucked up under her, the back of her head resting lightly on Mickelsson’s arm. Her face was solemn, like that of a child listening to the stories of a grandfather. When he moved his hand on her shoulder or arm, she did not stop him. His groin ached dully, and every now and then a light shiver passed over him. Her left arm lay along his right upper leg. He concentrated on willing her to move her hand to his crotch. No luck.
Except for the fireplace and the nightlight in the kitchen, the whole house was dark. Outside, it was snowing a little. Jessica’s sherry glass sat untouched on the glass coffeetable, Mickelsson’ abandoned martini beside it. How she’d gotten him on the subject of the ghosts Mickelsson couldn’t remember.
“So what was it like?” she asked. “He just came into the bedroom and looked at you?” Though her tone was impatient, she was serious, interested.
“As I said, I’m not really sure he was there at all. Anyway, he didn’t look at me.” Mickelsson touched his forehead with two fingers. The scent of her hair and the nearness of her mouth impaired his capacity for thought. He said carefully, “He said something to someone—not to me, I think; someone he expected would be there—and then he looked embarrassed, as if he realized he’d made a mistake, and he went out.”
“You don’t even remember what he said?”
“Something like ‘Are you there?’ or, ?ou in there?’“
“So then what? He turned around and saw you?”
He smiled at her bullying. “I don’t think he ever saw me,” he said. “I’m not at all sure I saw him either, you know. The mind’s a queer business. People see things that aren’t there all the time—crazy people, people on drugs, people who are asleep and don’t know it, people who’ve been hypnotized. … When you think about it, it’s a wonder anyone’s certain of anything.”
r /> “Maybe so, but really,” Jessica protested, “you can tell at some level when what you’re looking at isn’t really there.”
“I couldn’t—not this time—though common sense makes me assume it wasn’t. I don’t know.” He stared hard into the fire, reliving the memory for her benefit—the bearded old man shuffling in on him, staring with near-sighted, red-webbed eyes at the hatrack across the room. “I remember wondering at the time if maybe I was dreaming,” he said. He glanced at her. “Or crazy.”
“What did you decide?”
“I couldn’t tell. I think what I pretty much decided was—” He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to make out whether or not he believed what he was about to say, not that it mattered, then finished: “It wasn’t craziness. Something real, possibly not a ghost. It could be, I think, that I was tuning in on something from the past.”
“Spooky,” Jessica said, and sat forward in order to look into his face.
“Spookier than a ghost?”
She shook her head. “It’s all pretty spooky, if you ask me.” She considered, then settled back against his arm, snuggling in. With the thumb and first finger of her right hand she caught the wing of her collar, pulling it up almost to the tip of her chin, then letting it fall back. She glanced at him. “Don’t pick,” she said, and lightly slapped at his hand. Unconsciously he’d been playing with her sleeve. Her eyebrows lowered and her expression became comically studious, eyes glittering and darkening as the firelight and shadows moved. “You could be right,” she said at last. “I read a book, the autobiography of one of those psychics who work with the police. He talked about what he feels and sees as he works, and it’s a little like what you describe. It’s as if he’s in two different rooms at once, two different times—you know what I mean?” She checked his eyes, though why he should fail to understand her plain English was unclear to him. “He sees the people standing around him—the police, for instance—and he sees something else just as clearly, the way when you’re driving down the road and imagining something, you see the road, but you also see the thing you’re imagining.” Again Jessica leaned forward to see him better. “Did you feel anything funny? In your body, I mean? Did you feel old, for instance?”
Mickelsson shook his head. “Not that I remember.”
“Maybe it’s different with different people,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t remember?”
He thought of Dr. Rifkin. “I’ve tried. I can’t.”
As if disappointed in him but grudgingly forgiving, she lay her head back on his arm again. “I wish you’d pay closer attention to things,” she said. Then she turned, rolled her eyes toward his, and smiled, as if afraid if she pushed too hard he might get balky and be of no use to her. “But it is interesting.” She rounded her eyes still more. Then abruptly sober: “If only I could make out what it means!”
“It has to mean something?”
“God knows it doesn’t have to,” she said, “but maybe it does. Why is it these ghosts that people get glimpses of? Is it possible they’re trying to warn us about something? I know that sounds dumb—I don’t mean it, exactly. I think. But why is it this particular house that’s so alive? Or maybe it’s you—something about you, or people like you. …”
“Tell you a different theory,” Mickelsson said. “It all started as a haunted-house story by a bunch of kids, and when I heard the story, being more or less ‘suggestible,’ having a history of delusions of this kind—”
She declined the gambit, clenching her fist on her knee. “But I don’t think it is ‘nothing.’ There’s something about the house that feels … I mean, it’s a nice house, it’s beautiful. But there’s this strange“—she frowned, then slid her eyes at him—”there’s this smell, Peter.”
“Probably the spring in the basement,” he said. “It rots the wood.”
“Are you crazy? It smells like cake.”
He shrugged, apologetic. The uncivil forthrightness no doubt had its advantages, but it was wearing.
Jessica looked at him, then patted his arm as if conscious that she’d slightly hurt his feelings. “You have noticed it, haven’t you?” she asked.
He’d had, he knew now—one after another—strange sensations he’d dismissed at the time: fantasies of indistinct voices, smells, an occasional sense of people near him, observing, nodding. … Suppose it were not just flickering dream-work but something more active. Suppose they had, whatever it might mean, some kind of stake in him.
He felt her hair brushing lightly against his wrist, tickling it, and when he breathed in deeply he again smelled her perfume. Lilacs? He was stirred, as one always is, he thought; but at the same time he was hurled deeper into the pit of himself. He imagined himself making love to her, huffing and blowing away in the bed upstairs, both of them mmming and groaning with delight, Jessica generously faking by the ancient Rules of Order for sexual politicians. He remembered for no reason what old man Sprague had said: Sometimes people get taken over. … Some kinda feelin that’s in the woods. That was what was happening to him, the reason he was beginning to see ghosts.
He shuddered severely enough that Jessica noticed. She turned to him and, like someone reaching out to touch a nervous stallion, put her hand on his chest. “Are you cold or what?” she asked.
Down in the valley the train was rumbling through the darkness with its freight of lost childhood.
Abruptly, to free himself from the sweetness of her touch, he leaned forward, reaching for his pipe on the coffeetable. He got a match lit and held it over the bowl.
“Don’t pull away, Pete,” she said, as if she were now the injured one. She leaned forward too, moving her left arm around behind him and pressing her right hand flat on his chest, over his heart, where the pain was. She drew back a little, away from the pipe-smoke, and blew at it.
Against his will, he savored the calm spreading out from her hand. So it had once been with Ellen. Age-old story. He said, “I was thinking about what old Sprague said, the feeling that’s in the woods. I know what he means.” He scowled, bold sign of sincerity, though he had no intention of saying what was in his mind. No more cowpastures apparelled in celestial light. That was why he hated it when her judgments of people were clinical, unwilling to consider anything not physically there: because she was right. “Why are you massaging my chest?” he thought of saying. “What’s it to you? Except that maybe someday your chest may ache. Good long-range investment.” His chest ached more, and the magical healing power of her hand—so it seemed—became all the more annoying. Christ, what wouldn’t he give for Jessica to be in love with him! But he’d learned what Jessica, of the tribe of Freud, had no doubt always secretly known. No love, just fuck. He decided to put the pipe down; he could survive for at least a few minutes without it. What difference? He said, “It’s not like entropy—not like simple loss of energy, simple giving up. It feels more like something alive, like those dogs, or rattlesnakes.” He looked at her forehead. The side of her breast was touching the side of his. They were inching up on the time of decision. Someone must make the first move. Was the game already started?
“I’m dull company, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Cheap move, but piss on it.
She put her finger to his lips, leaning close. Her eyes were distant and thoughtful. She placed her mouth where he had no real choice but to kiss it.
Mickelsson lay beside her, trying to think, trying to come alive. Not that his body was asleep, non-functional. His body was a massive contradiction, his erection immense and violent, the rest of him—his fingertips and lips, even his large, cold feet—so timid, so constrainedly gentle, as if robbed of life-force by the ache in his heart, they were almost non-material. The smoothness of her skin, the fullness of her breasts—pale underneath, glorious with tan and color toward the shoulders—her perfect nipples, the dark, soft bush between her legs, all took his breath away: beauty beyond his wildest dreams. Yet his heart was drowning in wretchedness. “Pete, it’s all right,??
? she crooned, as if knowing his mind. She was lying on her side, her breasts touching his arm and chest. His sense of doom hovered over him like a foreign presence, worn out, icy with indifference. Yet here was this body of his in a state of jubilee! He hardly dared to touch her breasts, though he touched them, first with his fingers, then with his lips and tongue, hungrily. Women hate to be touched. Women are lunar. She kissed the top of his head, then his eyes, nose, cheeks—sweetly, tentatively, as though she knew the slightest error would make him draw away again, feeling foolish and fat. Oh, she was good—A-plus, five stars—no question! Or could it be that she was still unsure, afraid of him, holding back out of timidity? He moved his hand from the softness of her belly to her crotch and to his astonishment found it wet, more than ready for him. Rarely in his life—either in his married life or in his occasional affairs, even with Donnie Matthews—had he encountered such seeming evidence that he was desired. His mind, with all its doubts and considerations, switched off for a moment, his penis stealing his brain’s blood—ah, Nature! ah, Devil!—and his heart, like an animal beaten and shouted to activity, began to labor, sending reverberations through his body. He eased himself up over her and touched the lips of her vagina with the tip of his painfully throbbing cock. His heart hammered crazily now; he realized again that he could die. She raised her head from the pillow and, as if doing some magic charm, kissed him four times, quickly. Then he eased himself into her. They both gasped and almost laughed, and her arms came around him, clinging, as he clung to her. Her legs locked around him like jaws. Soon a motion he could not control came over him—over her as well—a terrible mechanical power he’d never in all his years been taken by, a mighty and yet effortless rocking that made him feel shaman-like, as if the curtain of illusion had parted and they’d fallen to the beginning of things. Her face shone, her smile wide. When at last the explosion came, he felt light, as if turned from heavy flesh into thin, shining air. Now he did at last laugh, and pressed his cheek against hers.