People of the Dark (19 page)

"I'm going to have to ask you please to get off my property; I'm sorry—"

He grabbed my wrists, squeezed hard, pulled me closer angrily. "I
remember
this!" he repeated. He was incredibly strong. "I know that my mother is here!" And he let me go.

I stepped away from him, felt myself shaking. "Please," I managed.

"I am
human
!" he screeched. "My mother is here!"

I took a deep breath, tried to think of something to say, felt doubly frightened. At last I said, "I'm going to have to ask you to stay off my property. Otherwise I'll be forced to phone the police."

His wide, disarming smile reappeared. "I'm human," he whispered. Then he turned, walked quickly around Will's Mercedes, passed between it and the privet hedge—he let his fingers trace a crooked line in the beaded moisture on the Mercedes—then strolled down the long, muddy driveway and crossed the road.

I heard Will come up behind me. I turned my head.

"Jesus," Will said, "you can't
talk
to them, Jack. I've tried
talking
to them."

We watched as the man descended into the gully across the road, then appear moments later on the other side of it. He was moving very quickly now, at a fast and consummately graceful walk rather than a run.

"I've talked to that one before," Will went on. "I've
tried
to talk to him, anyway. All I could get from him was that his name is Seth and that he came here from Manhattan. I asked him where he's staying. He wouldn't tell me. I asked him what he was doing here—on your land—and he wouldn't tell me that, either. So I called Whipple about him, and Whipple came down and looked for him (at least he
said
he looked for him), but he couldn't find him."

I started for the house. Will fell in beside me. He cupped his hand on my left elbow. "Are you okay, Jack? You looked tired."

"Of course I'm tired." The rain was steady and soft now, the air frigid. "I'm cold, too, and I'm wet."

"I'll stay here with you for a few days, Jack."

"That's not necessary." I reached to open the screen door, saw that my hand was shaking.

Will reached quickly around me. "I'll get that," he said, and opened the door. I glanced at him; he was smiling foolishly. "You need me around here," he said. He pushed the kitchen door open.

I went inside.

"You really do need me around, Jack." He followed me to the dining room table. We sat. "Jack?" he said, and I heard something tense in his voice.

"Yes?"

He shook his head, grinned foolishly again, glanced out the window behind me. "I don't know how to say this." He looked earnestly at me. "I don't know how to say it without sounding . . . melodramatic, but I
feel
that Erika is here. I feel that she's here. In this house."

I
told him to get out. He apologized several times, and at length, added, "I'm probably just hitching myself to a wish-fulfillment fantasy, Jack." So I told him to hitch that fantasy to the back of his Mercedes and leave. He finally did, which left me alone at the house and a bit of an invalid because I had the use of only one arm. I was exhausted; I was tense, frustrated, angry—all at the same time.

I went into the living room, sat in the wing-backed chair and listened to the rain pelting the picture window. I tried hard to think about Erika because I supposed that I should think about her, that it was my duty to think about her. But I couldn't. I'd been thinking about her and talking about her for a week, and I had to turn my attention to something else.

My arm itched—the one in the cast—and I remembered that I could have gotten a long, plastic scratching device to insert under the cast. I tried to ignore the itch.

I remembered that the gutter on the east side of the house still needed fixing. The rain falling two stories from it was forming a deep trough at the edge of the foundation; I got a mental picture of myself getting the ladder out of the garage, carting it back to the house—with my good arm—setting the ladder up against the house, and doing the work. I thought I could even do it in the dark, with the aid of the spotlight, despite the rain.

I thought about Will, too. I thought that I had been telling myself for years that I knew him only too well, and could predict him. I had always realized the intensity of his feeling for Erika, but had been telling myself that because he was such a pragmatic, reasonable, and rational person, he'd never let anyone know about it, especially me. I grinned at that, there in my wing-backed chair. I whispered to myself, "Who, for God's sake, can you know too well?"

Which took me back to Erika, if only for a moment. She unsettled me now. I knew that if she walked into the house and said, "Hi, Jack, I'm back," I wouldn't know what to say to her, that I'd stand for a while looking dumbly at her. And at last I'd say something like, "Hi. What in the hell are you doing here?"

Tiny pellets of sleet got involved with the rain hitting the window. I imagined that it sounded like fingernails, which made me nervous, so I told myself that it sounded more like flies hitting the window, and that reminded me of the flies I'd seen all over the ceiling of the house in Granada. "Asshole," I whispered.

The floor of the front porch was uneven, so whenever someone tried to use the metal storm door leading to this porch, it took lots of effort. On particularly wet days, I'd found the door wouldn't open more than a few inches.

I heard someone fighting with that door as I sat in my wing-backed chair. I heard the harsh scraping sound that the bottom of the door made on the warped porch floor; I felt the house shake very slightly as the door was pushed once, then again.

I got out of the chair, turned around, went into the library, then to the front door, the door that opened onto the porch.

I stood behind the closed front door for several seconds, listened, heard the same scraping noises, felt the house shake a little, heard someone shuffling about. I nearly said, "Who's there?" But I stayed quiet. I listened for another minute, and another. I went back to my chair, closed my eyes.

I said aloud, though not loud enough that whoever was on the porch would have heard me, "Who's there? Please. Who's there?" But there was no one on the porch, then. The noises had stopped.

I
listened to the rain and the sleet hitting the window. I wept. Because I realized how very, very much I wanted Erika back, how much I wanted our routines back, even the occasional boredom, even cleaning up after the cats, and especially sleeping together—curling up naked, my stomach to her back, my thighs against hers, my arm over her. She was the only woman I had ever actually been able to sleep with that way, and I missed it.

I did not believe for a moment that some crazy had gotten hold of her. I believed that she was too smart for that, too wary. And too alive. She was one of those people who looked and acted as if she would always be alive—the kind of person that death could never touch. If it tried to touch her, she'd simply slip away, grinning.

I thought that the people around the house were crazy. But I thought they were probably benevolent crazies. Back-to-the-
landers
. Maybe they slept in quickly built lean-tos, or on the ground in sleeping bags, or even in the trees. People did much stranger things than that. The Cohocton Tree-Sitting Festival was stranger. The middle-aged men who annually dove into the ocean, in February—they called themselves the Polar Bears, I think—were crazier than that. They just didn't carry it out for quite as long as these people had. They weren't as
committed
to their craziness.

In my wing-backed chair, I smiled through my weeping as I peeked at these thoughts, and eventually I said to myself, "Oh, hell, Jack, she'll come home. She always has. Just give her some time."

And I believed it.

T
he dusk that evening was pigeon-gray, flat, and very quick—it brought the night down with a thud, and the night pulled me out of that chair and led me around the house.
Lock the doors
, it said.
Turn the lights on, turn all the lights on!
it said. So I did. I was beyond the point of feeling embarrassed for my fears. They were rational, after all. Benevolent or otherwise, there were people around the house, in Cohocton, in Dansville, who did strange things, who had probably vandalized the house and who probably had something to do with Erika's disappearance.

At 7:30, Sarah
Talpey
came to the house.

She looked tired. She was dressed in tan pants, a denim jacket, a white cotton turtleneck shirt, hiking boots. But she looked very tired, at the point of exhaustion, in fact, and I told her so.

"Thanks," she said, grinning, sat down at the kitchen table, and asked if I could make some coffee. I put some water on to boil, sat down across from her at the table. She took a pack of Camel Lights out of her coat pocket.

I said, "I didn't know you smoked, Sarah."

"I used to," she said. "I gave it up ten years ago. I need it again, I'm afraid." She glanced about. "Do you have an ashtray, Jack?"

I got up. In the cupboard under the sink I found an aluminum foil dish that had once had a Swanson chicken pot pie in it; Erika saved everything. I took the dish back to Sarah and sat down again. I said, "Erika's missing. Did you know that?"

She shook her head. "No. How long?"

"A week. A little more than a week."

"Have you notified anyone?"

"Yes. The police. They said to sit tight."

"Oh. She's done this before, then?"

I nodded. "Once or twice."

She lit a cigarette, took a very long drag of it, coughed once, took another, shorter drag. She coughed again, more severely. "I've forgotten how awful it feels," she said. "I never thought I'd take it up again."

The water started boiling. I stood, hesitated. "I'm glad you're here," I said.

"I had to come here, Jack." She tapped some ashes into the foil dish. "I had to warn you."

I turned off the stove, took the teakettle to the counter. "Oh?" The thoughts I'd once had about her—that she was not unlike Dr. Bernie Swan and his "heavily mutated arachnids"—came back. "Want some cream in your coffee, Sarah?"

"No. Black."

"Sure." Those thoughts stayed, I realized, because I knew it was altogether possible that she was, herself, one of the crazies wandering about.

I brought the coffee back to the table. "Warn me about what, Sarah?"

"About these . . . people, of course." She raised the cup to her lips and blew on the coffee to cool it. Some of it splattered onto the glass table top; a drop hit her cigarette in the foil dish and caused a slight hissing noise. "I came to warn you about these people. I came to tell you that they might hurt you."

"I know they've got toys in their attic—"

"I don't like that phrase, Jack," she cut in.

"Sorry." I took a nervous sip of my coffee, burned my tongue, took another nervous sip, burned my tongue again.

She shook her head quickly, butted out the half-smoked Camel Light, and fished in the pack for another. "It's a personal problem; that's all. I didn't mean to snap at you."

I smiled. "Don't worry about it." I took another, slower sip of coffee and let it slide under my tongue. It tasted awful. "So tell me who these people are, Sarah."

"They're not
people
. I can tell you that. They're not people." She lit another cigarette, butted it out immediately, got another from the pack, lit it, smiled. "I mean that quite literally, Jack." She took a quick puff of the cigarette, butted it out. "I'm trying to quit," she said, as if as an aside.

"You should," I told her.

"I will. Right now." And she crumpled the pack into a wad the size of a Ping-Pong ball. "Wastebasket?" she said; I nodded backwards. She leaned to her right, and tossed the crumpled cigarette pack expertly so it landed in a grocery bag I'd set up in a corner of the kitchen. "I played basketball once," she said, and grinned.

"Good for you," I said.

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"About playing basketball?"

"Please don't be an idiot, Jack. It doesn't suit you."

"Thanks," I said. "No, I don't believe you."

She took a long swig of the coffee and set the cup down hard on the table. "I know they look like people—"