The dark fantastic (32 page)

Richard said quickly, "She went over to Jane's before breakfast."

His mother explained, "I sent her on an errand."

The rest of the family went back to their half-eaten breakfast.

Richard closed and locked the outer door of the bedroom and lowered all the windows.

"We'll settle this business," he said. "If a brick is thrown through that window now, it will have to smash the glass. And if it is sneaked out the door, it will have to go through the keyhole."

Judith shivered as with a chill. She went back upstairs in silence.

The others returned to their regular duties. The men went back to the work from which the breakfast bell had summoned them; the women, to their household tasks. Cousin Lutie Simms arrived to spend the day, but no one mentioned that Judith had seen another brick.

About an hour later they heard her scream.

Miss Ann and Cousin Lutie were in the kitchen with Millie. The black woman groaned, "Oh Lawdy, she's seein' things again!" Miss Ann hurried to the south room, Cousin Lutie at her heels.

They found Judith standing in the doorway. She still wore nothing but nightgown and wrapper; her long braids hung over her shoulders. She was staring at a spot on the floor.

"Judith, you shouldn't have got out of bed," said Miss Ann.

"I heard a whizzing sound—and then a thump." Judith's voice sank to a whisper as she looked at the closed window. "I knew what had happened—but I was afraid to come down —until it was too late."

"You didn't see a brick?" said Cousin Lutie in the tone of one who has been cheated.

Judith shook her head. "It was gone. But I heard the sound —a kind of whissht! like something rushing through the air."

Almost as she spoke Judith heard the sound she was trying to describe, then the familiar thud on the floor. She turned sharply—and saw a brick lying in the spot where the others had fallen.

There had been no crash of glass.

She pointed weakly to the brick. "There it is. Don't you see it?"

Cousin Lutie's face turned the color of cream. "I'm gettin' out."

Judith's cry was like the mew of a cat. She clung to her mother-in-law as she felt herself swooning. When she opened her eyes the brick was gone.

Miss Ann opened both windows and door That she might have air.

"Call Richard!" gasped Judith.

"He's already gone to the field."

"Ring the bell!"

"That will call all the men from their work." Miss Ann spoke practically to still the younger woman's rising hysteria.

"You think I'm going crazy."

"I think some noise outdoors sounds to you like falling bricks. And your imagination is doing the rest."

Judith seized on this eagerly, "Then now is the time to catch the person who is making that noise. Ring the bell!"

To quiet Judith, the bell was rung.

The ringing of the Timberley bell in the middle of the morning was a signal of such ominous import that not only did it bring the Tomlinson men to the house, but all the neighbors within hearing began gathering in expectation of fire, accident, or some other natural catastrophe. When it was learned that Tomlinson's wife had again reported bricks flying, the news spread like a prairie blaze. By noon half the countryside had assembled on the southeast lawn to watch for bricks.

"All I've got to say is, if Miss Judith seen bricks go through that window, then bricks have gone through it. A schoolteacher's too smart to be fooled," was the consensus of opinion, though one hardy individualist muttered, "If you ask me, the woman's gone daft," and at the chorus of protest added darkly, "There's others that think the same thing."

There was speculation as to the point from which the bricks were being thrown. No tree offered a vantage point from which that window could be bombarded. Yet all who claimed to hear bricks pass through the air (and it was remarkable how many people made this boast) insisted that they came from some point higher than the window, hurtling downward toward the house, lliose who claimed to have heard the whissbiug sound said it seemed to be above their heads. Henry Schook said, "If there was a windmill about fifty yards southeast, I'd say a feller on top if it might hit that window."

But there was no windmill southeast (as someone pointed out) nearer than Mr. Schook's own.

Another interesting circumstance was that people standing close to the house began claiming to hear the thud of falling bricks in the south room. Mitch Rucker—of Appomattox fame —had the temerity to venture so close to the window that he insisted he came very near being struck; in the head, this time, those who were bold enough to approach the open door reported that no bricks were to be seen inside the room, but this only gave rise to the fiction that the Tomlinsons were disposing of them as soon as they fell.

No one went so far as to claim, actually, to have seen a brick. But from time to time rumors circulated that Judith Tomlin-son had seen another one. These little flurries of excitement came with maddening irregularity. There might be an interval of quiet. People would decide that nothing was happening and they might as well go home, when a woman's thin scream within the house would cause the mass hysteria without to mount wildly. People would again fancy they heard the whistle. And no doubt they did, for half the crowd were now making the sound with their lips. It went on like that all day. Very little work was done in Timberley district that long bright spring day.

The excitement reached the crossroads store, and storekeeper and customers decamped and hurried off to the big white house on the knoll. The drummer, Jenkins, happened to be in the store at the time. He carried the news to Woodridge. By midafternoon half the idle citizenry of the town (and some not so idle) had joined the crowd about the house at Timberley. A covered wagon bearing the slogan California OR Bust turned in from the toll road on the mistaken assumption that the buggies, horses, and people milling around denoted a camping site for overland travelers.

It was remartable how calmly the Tomlinson family seemed to take the annoyance of having half the countryside camped on their lawn. The work within the house went on as though this were a normal day. Some busybody coming up to the well for a drink called to Miss Ann in the dining room and asked what she did with the bricks that fell inside the house. Her retort was quoted far and wide.

"No bricks have fallen in the house. If they had, I'd have used them to disperse this crowd."

Both the Tomlinson daughters and their husbands came over in answer to the bell summons. They remained to help their mother, for Millie was too demoralized and Cousin Lutie too excited to be of any use. Judith, soon after her husband's arrival, retired to her room. There were sharp words between Richard and his wife over the ringing of the bell.

"Why didn't you send one of the children for me, Judith? Then we wouldn't have had the whole neighborhood swarm-ing over here."

"I'm glad they've come. Now maybe we'll catch the person who's torturing me."

"No one's doing anything to you. Mother said the last time you saw a brick the window was closed. Why wasn't the glass pane smashed by the brick you heard pass through it?"

"I don't know. I'm not an expert in sleight of hand."

"So that's why you rang the bell. So that people would be here to see Thorne as she comes from Jane's. I believe you'd do anything, Judith, to incriminate Thorne. I believe these fits of hysteria have been staged for that purpose, just as Abigail's were. You're getting more like Abigail every day."

"Don't say that!" cried Judith, and clutched her throat.

"Then why do you hate Thorne, who's never done you an injury?"

"You can ask that, after what you told me yesterday?"

"She's not to blame. The fault—if there is a fault—is mine. She's innocent, Judith. She doesn't deserve to be hounded for something she had nothing to do with. She's good. You don't know how good she is."

Judith said meaningly, "Perhaps I do."

Suddenly he was enlightened. "It was you we heard in the passage last night. You were supposed to be in bed and you were listening. Have you no shame, Judith?"

"Under the circumstances, I had a right to listen. It is you, Richard, who should feel shame. Offering to run away with that little baggage. Don't think I couldn't see through her sly pretense of virtue. Of course she put you off. She knew I was hearing what she said."

"She didn't know. Neither of us guessed you'd stoop to eavesdropping."

"A wife must stoop to scotch the snake that has crawled into her bed."

"JUDITH!"

She could feel the impact of his shocked anger. But she had said the thing that had been beating in her brain since the night he left her room.

"You didn't think I knew, did you, Richard? How clever of you to pick a quarrel with me so you could move downstairs to the room she would have us believe is haunted. The room no one ever enters any more. You've been quite safe there, the two of you, haven't you, Richard?"

So great was his horror at this charge that he did not even think to deny that he had been sleeping in the isolated chamber.

"Judith! Do you know what you're saying, or are you really losing your mind?"

"You may as well admit the truth, Richard. I shall find means to prove it."

He tried to control himself. He tried to remember that this woman was his wife, whom he had vowed to cherish and protect. For otherwise he surely would have struck her in his rage.

"You are mad, Judith. Mad with jealousy, just as Abigail was. Only you are more jealous. Because you are smart. I shouldn't care to have your brains, Judith. Anyone capable of harboring such foul suspicions of an innocent girl would be capable of planning something equally monstrous."

"what do you mean?" Judith's face was suddenly ashen. There was no comeliness left in her at all. He wondered how he ever could have desired her.

He said softly, "Have you really seen bricks, Judith?"

"Don't try' to change the subject! Say what you mean, Richard. Don't stand there accusing me of unspeakable things."

"I'm not accusing you, Judith."

"You are, I can see it in your eyes. And it's false, do you hear? Lies! Lies! All lies! You can prove nothing against me.

He said quietly, "Go back to your bed, Judith. You and I have talked long enough."

Richard went out into the yard where his neighbors were fast gathering. He stood gazing toward the southeast, as was everyone else. But it was not the unseen thrower of bricks for whom he was looking. He was watching for Thorne.

She did not return to the house until midafternoon. Jane had asked her to mind the baby till she came back, and it was well after the noonday meal before Jane was free to leave Timberley and return to her own house.

"I wouldn't go home through the fields," she said as Thorne set forth. Kindhearted Jane had noted her brother's anxiety and guessed its source. So she advised Thorne to go round by the turnpike and the lane through the grove so that she would not be seen eoming from the southeast.

The covered wagon was camped in a little clearing in the grove. The family from Pennsylvania were making their supper. They had got permission, they explained when Thorne stopped to speak to them, from the people at the house. Camping privileges were never refused at Timberley.

Thorne laughed at the banner California or Bust. The wayfarers were an amusing family, curiously unlike the country jakes they appeared to be. There was something gay and dashing about them all, from father and mother down to the youngest child. A debonair, happy-go-lucky bohemian-ism that touched a nostalgic chord. When Thorne inquired what they expected to raise in California, the father—a dapper, youngish fellow in spite of blue jeans and graying hair—winked at his wife and said, "Vegetables," and the whole family laughed as though he had cracked some sort of joke.

Suddenly Thorne cried, ''You're show people!"

"How'd you guess?"

''I used to be with a show myself."

After that they were no longer strangers.

"The best show I've seen in many a day is going on right now up at that house yonder," said the man. "They tell me some fellow with an aim like a knife thrower is hurling bricks through a window no bigger'n that"—he spread his hands to indicate—"and they say he's so far off he can't even be seen, that fellow's wasting his talent on a farm, lie ought to join up with us. Out in California performers get gold nuggets big as walnuts tossed on the stage when their act makes a hit. And anything goes, even second-rate stuff. That brick thrower would panic 'em."

"Did you see any bricks go through the widndow?" asked Thorne.

"No. There's such a crowd you can't see anything. But I got close to a fellow that claimed he heard one go over his head. Said it might' near hit him. But they tell me nobody's been struck yet."

"And no one has seen the brick thrower?" Thorne repeated.

"No, little lady, seems they haven't. I stuck around awhile, trying to find out. Then I got hungry and came back to the wagon. If you know who's doing it, I wish you'd tell him to get in touch with me. I believe I could make him a proposition that'd interest him."

Thorne said, "No one's doing it. There aren't any bricks."

When she had gone the mother of the migrant troupe said to her husband, "She was a pretty little thing, wasn't she?"

The man said with a knowing look, "I didn't tell all I heard up there. Brick throwin' ain't the only funny business, according to the talk."

"What kind of talk?"

"Witches, ghosts, goblins, all sorts of queeraess. And ugly tales about a half-grown girl who used to make flowers bloom in mid-air and pull rabbits out of hats."

The woman's mouth dropped open. "Do you suppose "

"She said she had been with a show."

"Poor child!" The kindly woman sighed and shook her head. "She'd better get back with show people, then, before these crazy farmers burn her for a witch."

The man said wistfully, "I sure could use her in the act."

Judith sat by the window in her room, her knitting in her hands. She saw Thorne enter the house and went to the top of the stairs and called to her.