People of the Dark (9 page)

I grinned again, nervously this time, because I could hear a strange kind of tension in her voice. "Sure, Erika," I said. "If that's what you'd like." And I buried the mole in our backyard, close to where what we liberally referred to as "our lawn" blended with the weeds and thickets that were the beginning of the woods.

S
everal days later I set out on a solo trip into Cohocton for dessert fixings. Erika wanted sundaes; she liked hot fudge on
H
ä
agen-Dazs
vanilla, with chopped nuts and real whipped cream; I liked everything but the chopped nuts. On the way I happened upon the jogger I'd seen earlier in the year. He was sitting on the edge of the road—his head down, his knees up, as if he'd gotten dizzy and was trying to correct it—in front of an open field that had a weathered FOR SALE sign in it, several acres of vineyards to the north, a trailer that looked abandoned to the south. I stopped next to him and rolled the passenger window down. "Hi. You okay?"

His hair was dark, straight and nearly to his shoulders, his skin almost as dark, as if from a very good tan, and his body, in blue running shorts and a sleeveless white T-shirt, was well-muscled and lean. He shook his head a little, though he didn't look up.

"You're not okay?" I thought he had misunderstood my question.

He whispered hoarsely, "I'll be okay. Thanks."

I didn't believe him. He sounded awful, as if on the verge of passing out. "Are you cold?" The temperature was hovering, I guessed, at around fifty.

He nodded, though he still didn't look up. "Yes. I am now. Not when I run. I'm not cold when I run."

I put the car's flashers on, and went to the jogger, got down on my haunches, held my hand out. "My name's Jack Harris."

He looked up briefly, glanced at my hand, looked down again. "Hi, Mr. Harris. Thanks, but I'll be okay." His face was spectacularly average. It could have jumped off a
Popular Mechanics
ad for power saws. The eyes were brown, like Erika's, but not so large and appealing; the nose was straight, the mouth full, the cheeks a little hollow. There were probably ten million faces like it; if you took the crowd of male faces at a football game or a boxing match or a topless bar and mixed them together and made one face out of them, you'd get this jogger's face.

I said, "Sure, you'll be okay? Maybe I can give you a lift somewhere."

He shook his head. A little chuckle came from him.

"Did I say something funny?" I asked.

He said, his voice a bit steadier now, "Did you ever have a dream that you were running . . ." He paused, cleared his throat, went on, "Where you were running from . . . something. Anything. It doesn't matter what. You were running. And after a while, after a short while, you realized that you weren't getting far?" Another pause; he looked quizzically up at me.

I said, "Sure. Everyone's had a dream like that."

He nodded, lowered his head again. "And the reason you weren't getting far, Mr. Harris, was that your feet were glued to the earth?"

I nodded. "Yes," I said, "but not since I was a kid." I realized that it sounded like a kind of value judgment, so I said again, "Everyone's had that kind of dream, I think, at one time or another."

"I have it all the time."

"Uh-huh," I said for lack of anything better to say. I get embarrassed, a little tongue-tied when strangers begin opening up their private lives to me. It happens a lot. It happened with Erika, in fact, when we first met. I added, "I'm sorry, it must be . . . difficult."

He nodded, his head still lowered. "It is. I even have it when I'm jogging. It was pretty bad just now. Christ, it really threw me for a loop."

"I'm sure it must have."

"It's as if the earth . . . it's as if the goddamned
road
is reaching up for me. Jesus, that sounds awfully strange, doesn't it, that sounds awfully, awfully
cuckoo
—"

"Not at all, not at all, Mister—uh . . ." I was coaxing him.

"I mean, it really drags me down, it
really
drags me down, Mr. Harris, you can't imagine—"

He went on talking, babbling, really, for a good five minutes. At one point he said, "It's probably like being sucked back into the womb, don't you think?"—and shivered visibly at the idea, as if he had a chill. I listened, nodded occasionally, said "Uh-huh" when I thought I should, and after a while he seemed to wind down. He took a deep breath, looked up, extended his hand, and smiled. "Thank you, thank you very much, Mr. Harris, you've been a great help." He stood and jogged off, south, past the trailer which I'd assumed was abandoned. As he passed it, a tall, stocky older woman dressed in a tattered blue and white dress, white socks, what looked like ankle-high sneakers, and a gray scarf thrown over her shoulders came out of the trailer and watched him. Even from a distance—and the trailer was a good one hundred fifty feet away—some emotions are easy to spot, and perhaps it wasn't so much that I could read the woman's face at that distance as that I could read the stiff set of her body, but I knew that she was watching the jogger with undisguised hatred.

T
hese are the things I remember fondly about Erika: I remember that she liked to make love with her socks on because her feet got cold. I remember that she quickly learned the names of most of the birds that came to feed at our feeding stations just west of the house. She got a kick out of being able to name them, as if their names, or her ability to remember them, or both, involved the use of a whole different language.

I remember that she did not like the dark. It was not a matter of being
afraid
of it so much as simply being uncomfortable with it. The only time we ever talked about it, she said she wasn't sure why it made her uncomfortable, and then she thought a moment and added, "I think that I
feel
too much in it, Jack. I feel that it's going to solidify," which mystified me.

She quite often mystifies me, which is something, of course, that people often do to other people. Sometimes it's a game; sometimes it's a pose; sometimes it's real. With Erika, it's real. She often mystifies herself, I think.

In March, for instance, she began to seek out the dark. First the night-light that she always kept burning in the bedroom got unplugged. Then the curtains, which I'd lately gotten into the habit of leaving open in order to let in what light there might be (except when I insisted that the heating bills would be lower if we closed them), got closed permanently, and the translucent shades behind them got replaced with opaque. And yet she still was uncomfortable.

I came up to the bedroom after working late and found her in a rocking chair, in the dark. I went over to her, put my hands on her shoulders, found that she was trembling. "Erika," I asked, "why are you trembling?"

"I don't know," she answered, her voice low, as if she didn't want to talk.

"Are you cold?"

"Yes. A little." She was whispering now. "I'm a little cold." She was dressed warmly enough, and the night wasn't particularly cold.

"Can I get you a blanket?"

She shook her head. "It wouldn't help. It's the dark."

"I don't understand." I was still leaning over her, my hands on her shoulders, which seemed to help because she stopped trembling. "What do you mean, 'It's the dark'? I'll turn the light on—"

"No," she cut in. "No. It's okay. It's nothing. The dark makes me cold, that's all." She put her hands on my forearms. She repeated, at a whisper, "The dark makes me cold."

I
went to Granada the following morning. I had decided to take the day off because I'd worked a good twelve days straight, trying to meet the deadline on the Earth's-Way account that I realized, at last, wouldn't get met anyway. Erika had given me directions: "Down Route 64 to Clement Road," she said. "That's about two miles from East Cohocton."

"Yes," I said. "I know where it is."

"Good. You go about five miles down Clement Road, Jack. Maybe six miles. You'll see a sign that says 'Granada, Next Right.' When you go right, you've got another mile or so to go down this lousy dirt road—" She paused, continued, "God, I don't know why I went down it at all, Jack. I guess I was lucky I didn't break an axle. Some of those potholes are real killers—you'll find out."

I did find out. I had to keep my three-year-old Toyota well below twenty down that road to Granada.

The remains of a gate led into the place. It stood ten feet tall, and one side—which bore the letters GRAN—was lying in the road that led directly into Granada. The other side had the letters ADA on it.

From the gate, Granada looked much like a thousand similar bedroom communities. The houses were familiar pastel greens and pastel blues and pastel pinks. They were larger than most such houses, though not ostentatious, and were arranged in a nearly complete ring around a circular park that was all but totally overgrown by weeds and thickets crowding into the roadway.

I expected to see children playing, men pruning hedges, heads turning as a new and strange car entered the little community. But Granada was empty, and it had clearly been empty for more than a few years. It had the unmistakable patina of abandonment and de-cay about it. It smelled of the earth—which was shouldering back—not even faintly of car exhausts and driveway sealer and chemical fertilizer. And there were no noises of children or pets or stereos. Only the quick
putta-putta
of my Toyota, the high keening sound of the snow tires on the rutted blacktop. Nothing more. The place had a tense stillness to it, like a drawing done in hard, quick strokes with pen and ink.

I stopped the car in front of a big pastel blue house because its front door was standing open. I got out of the car, stared at the house a moment, expecting momentarily that a curtain would be drawn back slightly—there still were curtains in some of the windows—and that half a face would appear and disappear. But that didn't happen. If it had, it would have scared the hell out of me.

I saw an FBI warning poster nailed to the left of the front door, a pile of feces halfway up the concrete walkway to the house, an empty plastic Pepsi
bottle
in the yard to my left, and near it, a small black wheel, like a lawnmower wheel. The grass was matted, wet, and very short.

Along the edge of the walkway, there was a strip of mud six inches wide. I saw footprints in this mud.

I went to the front door of the house, stuck my head in, and said "Hello" several times. There was no answer. I could see the foyer, a part of the living room, an open dining area. Most of the furniture in these rooms had been removed, except for a pine kitchen chair lying on its side just ahead of me, in the foyer. The blue striped wallpaper was peeling from the top and the hardwood floors were wavy—here and there some of the boards stuck an inch or so above the level of the others. The ceiling, which had been done in swirls of a thick beige paint, was home for dozens and dozens of flies. Some wandered about, but most were still; and as I watched them, I became aware that I could smell them, faintly.

I went into the foyer, stopped, said "Hello" again. At the other side of the living room, directly opposite me, a huge picture window, intact, overlooked fields and woods behind the house.

I didn't think that anyone was living in the house. I thought it was possible that transients camped out in all the houses in Granada. "Is anyone here?" I said, and because I heard nothing except the low humming of the flies, I made my way into the living room.

A woman was asleep there. She was in a dark blue sleeping bag, her head on a green knapsack. She had short, dark blonde hair, and high cheekbones.

I said "I'm sorry," though she was still asleep, and started to back out of the room.

Her eyes fluttered open. She saw me, looked momentarily stunned, a little embarrassed. Then, as she sat up, a smile appeared on her thin, red lips. "I'm Sarah," she said, shrugged out of the sleeping bag, and stood. She was tall—almost six feet, I guessed—and gracefully thin. She was wearing a pair of gray overalls, a long-sleeved white cotton shirt with a turtleneck collar, and thick white socks; I saw a pair of Sorrel boots near the sleeping bag. She came over to me, her hand extended.

I took her hand. "Hi," I said. "I'm Jack Harris."

"Hello, Jack." She looked to be in her early forties, and surprisingly, considering the circumstances, had a distinct air of refinement about her. "You surprised me."

"Yes. I'm sorry." I glanced about, and grinned questioningly. "You don't live here, do you?"

She waved the question away. "No, Jack. Of course not. No, I live in Brighton." Thirty miles east of Rochester. "I come here from time to time. It's an interesting place, don't you think? Granada, I mean."