Chapter Eight

I fainted. When I regained consciousness, the two right wheels of the car were in a ditch. Duff—the real Duff—was slapping my cheeks frantically.

“Are you all right, Mother?” he kept asking.

My ribs and my chin were sore. I wasn’t wearing the seat belt, and I had been slammed against the steering wheel. I didn’t remember Duff fastening his seat belt either, but he seemed unhurt.

“I think I’m okay.” I took a couple of deep breaths, despite the pain in my ribs.

“What happened? You just suddenly went off the road for no reason.”

I didn’t know what to say, or what to think. Had there been someone else there? Was I losing my mind?

“I thought maybe you had a heart attack like Dad. Maybe the road is slippery here.”

It was hard-­packed gravel on that side of the farm and perfectly dry. Could it have been a sudden change of light distorting his features? No light could have caused changes like those I had seen.

“I’ll have to say what you said. I don’t know why I did it.”

With Duff pushing, I managed to back the car a short distance to a place where I could get it back on the road.

“Only a scratched front fender,” he said, getting back in the car. “I’m still the champ.”

“Don’t try to be cute. It’s not at all funny.” My voice was quavering and my hands were trembling on the wheel as I drove the mile or so to the farm, glancing sideways every few seconds to make sure it was still Duff beside me.

Jack and Stephanie were waiting for us at the door. Jack was anxious, but Stephanie seemed really worried.

“Which one had the accident? The mother looks worse than the son,” Jack said.

“I wasn’t used to the car and I went off the road,” I said. “I don’t think we’re liable for damage to a rented car, are we? It’s about the only thing that’s happened today that we aren’t liable for.”

I called Franny’s school and asked that she be told to take the bus home. Then I took two of Jack’s Libriums and lay down on his bed. When Stephanie knocked at the door and asked if she should start preparations for dinner, I told her to go ahead. It was the last time I spoke with Stephanie.

I fell asleep and apparently slept for hours without having any of the nightmares I expected. When I awoke it was dark. I went out to the living room and found Jack sitting under the old fringed Art Deco floor lamp, writing on his yellow pad.

“Feel better?” he asked. He didn’t sound awfully concerned.

“Somewhat. Where’s everyone else?”

“Franny went to bed bewailing our lack of a television set. Duff went out.”

“Not in that rented car, for God’s sake, Jack!”

“No, no. I wouldn’t allow that. Some kids came by on motorcycles and picked him up.”

“And you let him go? You and your goddamn book!”

“Maggie, I saw no reason to keep him in the house on a warm September night. He said he didn’t have any homework.”

“Naturally, since he wasn’t in school today. Were they the same motorcyclists we saw that day we arrived—the ones in the supermarket parking lot?”

“I don’t remember seeing any motorcyclists that day.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jack! Where’s Stephanie? Did she go with them?”

“I don’t think so, but I haven’t seen her since dinner.” It was obvious he couldn’t wait to get back to his writing.

I wanted to ask Stephanie (hoping I could trust her not to repeat it) if what I had seen in the car could be related to what she had described as the evil in the house. Also, for some reason I felt I ought to warn her that I had talked to her mother and her grandmother about her. As it turned out, it was too late for any warning. Maybe it wouldn’t have done any good anyway.

Upstairs, the door to the bedroom I shared with Franny was closed and her portable radio was blaring rock music. I went into Duff’s room and turned on the light. The bed was made and his brush and comb and some paperback books were arranged neatly on the dresser. I had been expecting to find disorder, reflecting the changes in him, but this room looked the way his always did at home.

Then I went into the storeroom. Again, the piles of books and scrapbooks had been neatly arranged. On top of the nearest pile was Duff’s loose-­leaf notebook, containing a few filled pages in his handwriting. The first few lines were in his customary scrawl—I had helped him with enough homework to be able to decipher it—but, after that, the letters were larger and better formed.

Something else occurred to me later. Considering where the notebook had been left and the legibility of the writing, it was quite possibly intended that I read it.

July 25, 1976. I have decided to keep this journal because I think it is important that what is happening be recorded. I want my parents and my sister to know how I feel now and how I felt in the past about them. I do love them, just as much now as I did at home, but I’m beginning to be afraid of them. I’m afraid they might try to prevent me from becoming what it is intended I become. What is that? I don’t know yet, but I have a feeling I will become a person of great power.

July 25, 1976. Evening. I got out of bed to write something, but now I don’t know what to write. I am very confused.

July 26. Early morning. I am Duffin Caine. I am Duffin Caine. I was born November 10, 1959. I am Duffin Caine.

July 26. After breakfast. I am not quite sure when the change began, but I think I began to feel different from the first moment I entered this house. I had a sense of belonging here, of having been here before. When I first came upstairs, the feeling was very strong. I seemed to remember all the rooms and even some of the furnishings. For instance, before I entered my room, I knew there would be a window directly opposite the door and that through the window I could see the front of the barn. I also expected to see a shelf in the corner with an oil lamp on it. The lamp would be sitting on a cracked blue plate. There was a shelf in the corner but no lamp or plate on it. However, today I discovered the very lamp and plate I had anticipated on the floor in the storeroom.

July 27. This is all mixed up. I meant to say something in the last note about Dad’s accident, but then I remembered what happened with Franny and I didn’t want to talk about that. However, now I feel I should say that I didn’t intend for any of it to happen. I, Duff Caine, I mean. Someone screamed upstairs, but it wasn’t Duff, I don’t think. I mean I could hear the screaming—could even see the man screaming and grinning as he screamed—and I know that screaming was what caused Dad to fall. Likewise, I could see someone—it wasn’t quite the man yet, but more like Duff—trying to undress Franny. But Duff didn’t want to do it. He really didn’t, Mother.

July 28. Sometimes he doesn’t like to come in the house. He calls to me to meet him outside. At first, I was afraid of him, but I’m not afraid anymore.

July 29. Now I don’t see him anymore. He comes and then he is Duff.

The last penciled entry ended a page. It was almost two months since the date of that entry. Had he given up keeping the journal—or had he been told to give it up by whoever was in control of him?

And was the man I had seen in the car the man Duff was referring to in his notes? Could he have been hiding in the back, crouched down behind the seats, ready to suddenly switch places with Duff? But how could it have been done without my seeing it—unless my attention had been diverted the way a magician does it, or unless I had been hypnotized? Hypnotized by whom? Duff? But if Duff had done it, perhaps there had been no other person. Maybe Duff had merely caused me to think he was someone else.

Ridiculous. My sixteen-­year-­old son a hypnotist? He had written that he was meeting the man outside the house, hadn’t he? Maybe it was that man, and not Mrs. Reddy, that I had seen with him the night after Jack’s accident.

I went back downstairs, put on my glasses and picked up my sewing basket. Jack was still scribbling on his yellow pad. I sat on the settee near him and began mending a torn blouse.

After a while, he got up, picked up his crutches and said he was going to bed. I said I thought I would wait for Duff and Stephanie to come in. I was trying to seem calm about it, but I didn’t feel that way. I was frightened and I grew more so as time went by and neither of them returned.

I kept listening for the sound of motorcycles on the road, but it never came. I repaired the first blouse and then another and then a number of torn shirts, socks and sweaters that had been collecting in my basket since before we left the East. The work wasn’t my best, but it kept my hands from trembling.

After a while I dozed off, but I was sure it was for just a few minutes. I did have a terrible dream, although I couldn’t remember the details of it later. My glasses had slipped off and I looked for them behind the settee, but there wasn’t enough light to search properly. Then I went out to the kitchen to check the time on Aunt Hannah’s old wall clock. It was three o’clock.

Where was Duff? Where was Stephanie? I went to her room next to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. Were she and Duff together somewhere?

I went upstairs and opened his door. He was in bed asleep, or pretending to be. I stood by his bed and watched him for a long time. Just as I was about to turn away, I saw his lips move, although his eyes remained closed.

He said very distinctly, not in Duff’s voice but rather the voice of the man in the car, “People in this house are going to die.”

“Who, Duff?” I whispered.

“Maybe John . . . maybe others.”

“When, Duff?”

He didn’t say any more. I put my hand on his forehead and he stirred a bit, but he still didn’t open his eyes.

“Duff, why did you say that?”

There was still no answer. I waited a minute or two longer and then went to my bedroom. I guess I was sobbing because Franny awakened.

“Mother, is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, I’m just overly tired, that’s all.” I undressed and got into bed with her. “Did you hear Duff come in tonight?”

“Yes, a long time ago,” she said.

“How long?”

“Hours. He was walking funny, sort of dragging his leg, you know? He was putting both feet on each step as he came up. I thought of getting up and asking him if something was wrong, but he’s been acting so weird lately I thought I’d better leave him alone.”

“How did you know it was Duff and not someone else?”

“Who else could it have been? You or Stephanie wouldn’t have made such a racket, and Dad doesn’t come upstairs. Also the person went into Duff’s room, so it had to be Duff.”

After a while I said, “Franny, there’s a key to the door of this room, isn’t there?”

“Yes, it’s on the dresser.”

“All right, from now on, the last one of us to come to bed will lock the door.”

She sat up. “But why, Mama?”

“There are prowlers in this area. Someone told me today.”

“But if we just lock our outside doors—”

“We’ll do that too, but in addition I think it’s a good idea to lock the bedroom door.”

“Daddy too, and Stephanie?”

“We can suggest that they do it.”

“And what about Duff? You’ll have a hard time convincing him to lock his door.”

“We can tell him we’re doing it. Maybe that will cause him to follow suit.”

There was silence for a moment and then Franny asked, “Mama, should I get out of bed and and lock the door now?”

“No, we’ll let it go for tonight.”

He’s asleep now, I thought, and likely to stay that way until daylight. But who was it asleep in that bed? Was it Duff speaking like the man or—a really wild thought—the man looking like Duff?

I stayed awake until daylight and then (moments later, it seemed) the alarm went off. While Franny was getting ready for school, I went to Duff’s door and knocked. He answered in his normal voice, saying that he was getting up and would be down for breakfast shortly.

But he didn’t join us for breakfast. Stephanie didn’t either, which was strange because she was usually up and around before any of the rest of us. Her bedroom door was still closed, however, so I assumed she had come in after three o’clock when I checked the room.

After a few minutes of waiting for Duff, I went upstairs to look for him. He wasn’t in his room and he wasn’t in the storeroom either. I assumed he had gone downstairs and out the front door, without any of us seeing him from the dining room. It was unpardonable behavior to leave the house without saying anything to us, but, to tell the truth, I wasn’t anxious to confront him that morning anyway.

Franny finished her breakfast and went out to the road to wait for the school bus. Jack was reading a magazine in lieu of the morning newspaper that usually arrived in the mail about noon. After another short while I went to Stephanie’s door again, knocked and, receiving no answer, opened the door. She wasn’t in her room and her bed seemingly hadn’t been slept in.

“Stephanie isn’t in her room,” I told Jack.

He didn’t look up from his magazine. “She’s probably left us. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Don’t make it sound like a vendetta. And I don’t think she’d leave us without saying good-­bye—or taking any of her things.”

I had seen a couple of her dresses in the closet when I looked in from the doorway. I went back now and inspected the room. As far as I could tell, she had taken nothing with her other than the nurse’s uniform she had been wearing.

“Maybe she went home for the night,” Jack suggested.

It didn’t seem likely to me, considering her feeling about her mother and grandmother, but I decided to call them anyway.

Mrs. Reddy answered. “No, Stephanie isn’t here,” she said. Then there was silence. She didn’t ask why I was calling or why Stephanie wasn’t at our house.

“She went out and didn’t come back last night,” I finally said. “We’re concerned about her.”

“Oh, you mustn’t worry,” Mrs. Reddy said breezily. “She’ll turn up. You don’t really need her anymore anyway, do you? I’ll get you someone else if you do. There’s a very well qualified girl in Cainesville who trained at the hospital with Stephanie.”

“I guess we can get along without anyone now. Where do you think Stephanie has gone?”

“She probably got on a bus and went to Cleveland. She has friends there. Or maybe she went to Columbus.”

“But she didn’t take her bag or any extra clothes, as far as I can tell.”

“That wouldn’t matter. Probably she just decided to go on the spur of the moment. She does those things.”

“Without even telling us?”

“Ashamed to tell you, very likely she was. And she ought to be. I’ll give her a good talking to when I see her.” She promised to call us if she heard from Stephanie.

“What should we do now?” I asked Jack.

“Nothing.”

“Should we call the police?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s up to her parents.”

“But they don’t seem to be concerned about her.”

“Then why should we be?”

I went back to Stephanie’s room and had another look around. In a dresser drawer I found her purse with forty or fifty dollars in it, her driver’s license and a couple of Ashland department store credit cards. She surely wouldn’t have gone on a trip without taking those things.

Shouldn’t I call the Cainesville police or the sheriff’s office, despite what Jack had said? Then something else occurred to me. A member of our family was already in trouble with the police. Wouldn’t their first impulse be to question Duff about Stephanie’s disappearance?

My first impulse was the same, I don’t deny that. I wondered if Duff was involved as soon as I realized Stephanie was missing. He had assaulted her once. Could he have done something worse to her this time?

I went back to Jack. “Do you realize Duff isn’t here either?”

“So he’s gone to school.”

“He didn’t come down for breakfast, did he? And he didn’t take the bus. I saw Franny get on the bus alone. And the Hertz car is in the yard.”

“Maybe one of his friends picked him up.”

I walked away in disgust, still more worried about Stephanie than Duff, although I kept telling myself she hadn’t been gone all that long. She could’ve gone to a motel with the married boyfriend she had told me about. She wouldn’t have needed her purse or any extra clothes to do that.

Somewhat relieved by that thought, I went out to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. I should explain now that the Caine kitchen is an extraordinarily large one, typical, I suppose, of nineteenth century farmhouses, with plenty of work and storage room. It’s a gloomy place, even with the electric lights on, and it’s particularly gloomy in the morning, since there is just one small window overlooking the yard.

I mention these things to indicate that it wouldn’t be difficult for a person to remain unobserved in the room, even if he wasn’t intending to hide. Thus it happened that I was standing by the electric stove for a good five minutes, waiting for the water to boil for my instant coffee, before I became aware of someone else in the room.

The first time I turned to look, I didn’t see anyone, but I still had the feeling that someone was watching me. I turned again and saw him.

He was tilted back in one of the old wooden kitchen chairs, his feet on the open door of the wood stove. He was the man I had seen in the car, and he was grinning at me as before.

This time I noticed that he was wearing clothes like Duff’s, a sweatshirt and jeans, but the shirt was too small for his bulging shoulders, and the jeans were open at the top, revealing an expanse of hairy belly.

I couldn’t scream. “Who are you?” was all I could manage.

“You know who I am.” It was that same guttural voice. “I am Duffin Caine.”

I shook my head. “You’re not my son.”

“I am Duffin Caine.” He lowered his feet and stood up. He was taller than he had seemed sitting, and even broader in the chest. He came limping toward me and then I managed to scream.

I ran out of the kitchen and through the dining room. Jack was still in the front room, struggling to his feet and trying to get his crutches under his arms. I yelled something about a man in the kitchen.

“What man?” He swung past me into the dining room.

“Don’t go out there, Jack!”

I expected to hear shouts, blows, the sound of Jack falling, but there was nothing. In a moment Jack reappeared.

“There’s no one in the kitchen but Duff,” he said.