Chapter thirty-five

A wind had risen in the dark: a March wind blowing clouds across the moon. The moon was full. The clouds turned iridescent as they passed. Sometimes, in the seat beside me, Susannah pressed her face to the window and watched them. Sometimes she sat with her head pressed back against the seat. She hummed quietly to herself and sang. “Adeste Fideles.” The sound of it made me ache inside.

We sped along the highway, going past the town, toward the backlands on the other side. At either window, the moonlight was shining on the face of the fields. And the wind was moving there, rippling through the high grass or the corn.

Susannah watched them, the moon and the wind and the fields. Or she leaned back and sang softly in her sweet, clear voice. Before we left the office just after she had gotten off the phone with McGill, she was crying. Crying and smiling at once. I had held her a long time.

“I’m all right,” she kept telling me. “I’m all right.”

And so she seemed to be. She seemed to be just fine.

As for me, I kept silent. I did not want to go back to the house.

Now, as I had once before, I turned off the highway onto a smaller road, and then a smaller. The forest seemed to creep up on me this time, the trees seemed to shuttle to the edge of the road in the dark until they formed a long, long wall of looming silhouettes shouldering out the moon.

Susannah had her window rolled down though she had to huddle in her sweater. She took deep breaths of the green forest air.

The sparkling line of the moon on the water flashed out at us through the breaks in the trees: We had reached Jackson Lake. I kept an eye on it, following its edge toward the hill again.

I went past the driveway a few yards before I realized I had seen it. I brought the car to a stop.

Susannah stopped humming and looked at me.

“That was it,” I said.

She glanced over her shoulder as I backed up.

The driveway, overgrown as it was and littered with forest debris, looked threatening in the dark: the sort of dead end that swallows your footsteps, covers your traces, sucks you in. The clouds, I think, had covered up the moon. I guess that’s what it was.

As the car bounced over the growth and the ruin, as it pushed up the forest hill toward the inn, the headlights fought against the forest blackness all around us. We could see the broken branch or the tangled vine or the pit just in front of us, but everything else was obscure and shadowy, vague shapes sunken away in the wood.

We came around the bend and saw the inn. Gray and shrouded in branches. Yardley’s Chevy was parked outside. I pulled up next to it and killed the engine. Then I killed the lights.

The dark fluttered down over us like a blanket. We could hear the wind whirling around the car. We sat there, staring at the house in the dark.

At first it was just a presence, a tenebrous mask over the face of the forest. Then, as our eyes adjusted, it became a shape, a wedge of black louring against the racing clouds. The wind kept blowing, and the clouds ran by, and the moon reappeared. The house seemed almost to step out of itself and into the silver light. Its broken windows stared at us. Its weatherboard gleamed, dull gray. All the dead branches and grass and vines around it drew their shadows back and forth across the facade, shadows that melded with the ornate tracery of the porch overhang, shadows that answered, with their movement, the movement of the wind.

Susannah shivered. She glanced at me and laughed nervously.

“It’s so quiet,” she said softly. “It’s so dark. Where’s Ben?”

“I don’t know. He must be in there, nosing around.”

She turned her eyes to the second-story windows. The windows stared back at her.

“It’s so dark,” she said.

I popped open the glove compartment. The light went on in there. I took hold of the small plastic flashlight we’d brought along. I hesitated a moment, my hand hovering over the pistol I’d also brought. Susannah touched my arm. I looked at her, at her lips. I managed a smile. I left the pistol alone and slapped the glove compartment closed. I shoved open the door and slid out into the night.

The wind made motion everywhere. Motion and noise. The branches moved and whispered, and the leaves scuttled and scratched across the earth and lifted into the air and whirled around. The clouds moved, and the moonlight lived and died as they went by as if the moon were breathing in and out. I shut the car door and walked to the passenger side quickly. Susannah already had her door open. The car’s dome light gleamed yellow. She stepped out beside me. Her eyes remained fixed on the house. I shut the door. The dome light went out and, at the same moment, the moonlight was extinguished all around us. The house slipped back into the shadows.

I turned on the flashlight. A dull beam flickered and flitted about the trees, illuminating nothing.

I took Susannah’s arm. She stared at the house.

“It’s just a house,” I said. “Don’t think about it.”

I give great advice.

Following the beam, we moved together to the porch steps. I kept hold of Susannah’s arm at the elbow. We ascended side by side. When we stepped onto the porch, the wind dropped. And, as if the, wind had been keeping the dark at bay, the blackness closed in on us, even thicker than before. The flashlight’s sallow circle played over the front of the house. It picked out the front door and we shuffled toward it carefully. The door hung loose on its hinges. We could hear it shiver and creak against the jamb.

I pushed the door. It opened easily, and we passed into the house.

At once, the whisper of the wind grew to a roar as the air burst through the broken windows and skittered over the walls like poltergeist. For a second Susannah and I stood motionless, my fingers touching her arm. I felt my stomach churning as I passed the flashlight’s beam in front of me with a shaking hand. The beam waxed and waned, glowed and died amid the cobwebs and empty corners of a ruined foyer. It picked out the gilt frame of a mirror on the wall, all the glass shattered; a cupboard, covered with dust, stripped of drawers; the cabinet of a grandfather clock, its face ripped away.

I followed the beam with my eyes awhile, and then my eyes wandered. I stared at nothing. I was finding it hard all of a sudden to catch my breath. The place smelled old and sour. The air was thick with dust. I felt dizzy, sick, closed-in, as if the house were tightening around me, trying to work its way inside me. Then, for an instant, my whole body was racked by a violent shudder. I felt like that house, that old inn, my father’s inn, and I were locked in combat. It pulled at something in me and, against my will, that something rose up to meet it. Something like a wave rose up, crashed out of me, filled the darkness all around. It was a shapeless something, but it was filled with a million shapes, a million faces. They swirled around me on the currents of air, each of them babbling with its own voice, all of them babbling with one voice. Some of them would come clear for a second. A bleeding face, a pleading eye, a dying hand would rise up before me with sudden violence. I could not place any of them, but I knew them all.

Susannah made a small noise beside me. I clutched her elbow.

“It’s all right,” I said—I croaked.

“It’s dreadful,” she whispered.

“You’re right. It’s awful. Jesus.”

“Where’s Ben, where’s Ben?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we go? Can we just go?”

In fact, I had completely forgotten why we’d come.

“Uh …” I said.

Just then a noise rose out of the wind. A human voice that mingled with its howl. Soft, but keening and terrible.

Susannah gasped. “Oh, what’s that?”

“Jesus.”

“Is it Ben? It must be Ben.”

I shouted. “Ben!”

My shout fell away into the sound of the wind. The noise had ceased but the silence still seemed to shimmer with it.

“It was coming from upstairs,” said Susannah.

“Where? Where are the stairs?”

“I don’t know.”

“They should be right in front of us,” I said.

I swung the flash this way and that, too violently to really get a view of anything. I fought to steady my arm. Then the beam settled on a newel post, lowered to a stairway. Susannah took my hand. Our fingers twisted together. We edged forward to the first step.

The noise began again.

“Yardley!” I shouted.

“Ben?” Susannah called.

We went up together.

It was a long climb. What made it long was the dark. Not the dark around us. The flashlight cut through that a little. It was the dark waiting for us up there beyond the stairs. The light made no dent at all in that. In that endless darkness, the shapes and faces were swirling still. Now, too, there were sounds, wrenching sounds, mingling with the mingled voices: sudden gunshots, sudden cries, sudden groans that seemed torn from a wild desperation. And then that noise again, the real one, a sustained note of anguish, coming from upstairs, coming from the darkness waiting for us up there. The darkness grew closer and closer as we ascended. Tighter and tighter all around me. It was a long, long climb.

We came onto the landing.

“Ben?” I said.

There was no answer.

I passed the flash around. I saw the vague shapes of the upstairs corridor. A two-legged table, stretched on its side. Jagged holes gaping from the wall plaster with thick webs shivering over them. Floorboards twisting through the threads of what had been a carpet. And doorways. Doorways, here and there, illuminated ever so faintly by the window light from inside the rooms beyond them.

The human voice we’d heard was gone. The wind had died down. But the demons all around me, their cries, their faces, the sounds of their lives and deaths, they kept on.

This was where I’d stood. Right here, this landing.

“Michael?”

“What? What?”

“Are you all right?” she asked me.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I hate this place.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

We moved to our left slowly. We moved to the doorway from which the sound had come. It was my doorway, the doorway to my bedroom. To the left of it was the room where my parents had slept: I moved with Susannah toward my bedroom door. She was about to go through when I hesitated at the threshold, held her back.

I had lain awake in there, afraid of monsters.

I took a breath. We stepped into the room.

There was nothing. Nothing but blackness. The flashlight cut into it only weakly, casting a faint glow over clusters of debris. I saw boards lying in a pile in one corner. In another I saw a clot of bedclothes that had decayed almost to humus. And then, against the wall to my left, the light picked out a grimy mattress, torn open in the middle for the rats to nest in. I stared at it, hurting for it, for the big old bed it had been and the warmth of the big old bed and the cool sheets under me and the kiss good-night sweetheart good-night good-night. The stink of rat dung drifted to me. I moved the flash away.

I found a window on the far wall. It was opened on the night. The pane was broken and my beam traced the jagged shape of the remaining glass. Just beyond it, I could see the faint shimmer of the moon behind the passing clouds. Then the wind rose. It rushed through the window. We heard again that soft, almost human sigh of pain. I felt Susannah relax beside me.

She said: “It was just …”

The clouds rushed by. Moonlight pierced the window like a spear. The torn, bloody face of Ben Yardley stared up at us from the floor. And the chaos of voices gibbering in my brain tightened like a fist into a single sound: Susannah screaming.

Her hands were at her mouth. “Oh, God, God, God!”

I took a step forward. I knelt down beside the body. The mutilated flesh that had been Ben’s features shone black and silver.

“Dead,” I rasped. “Like all of them.” I hardly knew what I was saying.

Susannah began to whimper.

The moonlight dimmed again.

Ben Yardley reached up and grabbed me.

I cried out. His hand curled around my shirt front. He pulled me down to him. That tangle of blood and matter that was his face seemed to open as if to devour me. His breath was hot and rancid. It stank of the grave.

“… out,” he whispered—gasped. “… out … the scarred … the scarred man … the scarred …”

His hand fell away. Then I heard him die.

It was just a little noise, lost in all the other noise around me, within me. It was just a little breath, so small it rattled in his throat. But it was a white-hot breath with all the life of him in it, and somehow, amid everything, I heard it go.

I turned away from Ben’s body and I stood.

Susannah was fighting for control. I saw her hug herself and shiver.

I went to her, put my arms around her. She pressed against my chest, trembling. I could feel her tears through my shirt.

“Ssh, my love, my love,” I whispered. “Hush, my love, my love.”

Slowly, she raised her face to me.

She said: “He’s here, isn’t he?”

I saw the tears gleaming on her cheeks in the last dim moonlight.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. He’s here.”

And now we could hear him, coming up the stairs.