21
APPEARANCES AND MESSAGES
June 20–21
Tommy thought about it until he couldn’t think anymore, until all the pictures inside his brain became confused and he wanted to take a leave of absence from his own mind. Maybe hang a GONE FISHING sign around his skull so that anybody who asked would know he wasn’t at home for a while. A real long while.
But it came back anyway and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t push it aside altogether, and what he saw was the way Lindy had clutched her stomach and fallen to the floor and how slicks of blood had formed around her and then there was the woman in the store hurrying around with napkins and the way Lindy had talked about wanting to go back to her room because she’d be okay there and then he’d helped carry her out to the back seat of the wagon where she’d lain with a strange look on her face—and suddenly this wasn’t Lindy, this wasn’t the girl who’d recently started to flirt with him and tease him, touch and embarrass him, this was another person altogether and one he didn’t know.
Jesus Christ. He’d heard about menstrual periods and he’d always felt sorry that women had to go through them—but he’d never expected to see anybody so doubled over in pain and babble so much about nothing in particular. And the blood, he hadn’t expected to see the blood … He ran his fingers through his hair and watched the sea from the kitchen window. From the upstairs part of the house, he could hear his mother and Rosie talking quietly—it was female stuff and he was excluded from it because that was in the nature of things, but just the same he wished he could go upstairs and see if Lindy was all right.
He pulled open the refrigerator and surveyed the items inside—bean sprouts and spinach and too many green things (all of which constituted his own idea of junk food)—and then he realized he wasn’t exactly hungry anyhow. In fact, there was this small knot of nausea in his stomach which he imagined he might kill if he sneaked a little of Rosie’s Jack Daniel’s. When he found the bottle he tipped it to his mouth and felt it singe the surface of his tongue, burn raw against the back of his throat: he stuck it away again. Disgusting stuff and who needed it anyhow except grownups who couldn’t handle their own problems without alcoholic help?
He sat down at the table and looked at the Ouija board, then he thought about going upstairs to his own room but that idea had about as much appeal as a trip to a dentist. He studied the board for a bit, then wondered about Lindy—about why she’d started to come on to him recently, stroking him, touching him, almost as if she was doing it for laughs. There was this utter mystery called Female Chemistry. Maybe it had something to do with that. Sometimes it seemed like girls turned into women overnight and they left you stranded in their wake and all you could do was gasp at the way they changed.
He sighed and went outside, watching the sun slip down over the ocean. He leaned against the porch rail and shut his eyes, sniffing the salt air. What he wanted was to take one of his fishing rods and go out on the water and sit there in a small boat and forget about this goddam house with its weirdness and its closet doors and its shadows. But even as he considered this, he realized he still couldn’t get Lindy out of his mind. He was trying to picture her lying upstairs in her bed—and his thoughts, sweet Christ, his thoughts were suddenly focused on her body and her long hair and the idea of her hands touching him. And he was thoroughly embarrassed by the whole notion.
He went down the steps to the sand. The tide was slow, distant, the sands flat and glistening. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and started to walk. He didn’t feel like going as far as the sea; he turned and looked back at the house and saw a couple of lights in the upstairs windows and a shadow pass against glass—his mother? Rosie? He wasn’t sure.
He shrugged and went around the side of the house.
The sun was almost gone, barely a fragment of dying light in the sky. Tommy squinted in the direction of the blacktop. As usual, it was empty; he wondered if the appearance of Clyde Mullery and his pickup truck had only been a kind of illusion. In fact, he even began to think that Cochrane Crossing itself was like a mirage. If he walked to the village right this moment, would it exist at all?
He moved through the grove of trees.
When he reached the edge of the road he started to think about Lindy again. He turned round, faced the house and looked at the light shining against her balcony door. And he remembered a movie where some guy had serenaded a girl on a balcony with his guitar. Somehow the thought made him feel clumsy, like his hands were too big or his fingers too thick.
He went back toward the trees.
Then he stopped once again.
There was a rustling among the leaves and branches. The sound of some night bird moving around. He looked this way and that but in the gathering darkness he couldn’t see anything.
Just the same, he had the distinct sensation that something was near him. Something that moved.
He stood very still. He thought: Lots of things move in the night. Birds. Rodents. Snakes. A whole bunch of things.
Then he raised his face and stared up at the empty balcony and the light from Lindy’s room.
Martha lit a cigarette and said, “I can’t remember my first period at all. I mean, I was prepared for it and I expected some big deal, but now I don’t even remember it.” And she paused, looking across the kitchen table at Rosie, who was pouring herself a shot of Jack Daniel’s. We’re both thinking the same thing, she thought. We’re thinking about the girl lying upstairs in her bedroom and how pale she looks and how much blood she’s lost. Martha twirled the cigarette round in her fingers. She looked away from Rosie and found herself staring at the doll on the window ledge and then, moving her eyes a little, at the Ouija board set out on the table. It was strange how, when one was faced with a natural upset, like the fact that Lindy was weak and had lost too much blood, all the supernatural intrigue, all the weird phenomena, seemed to fade into the background. It was still there—how could it not be?—but it was like sound-track music, something you were conscious of only in a limited way.
“She’s going to be okay, Rosie,” she said. “I mean …” Her voice trailed away.
Rosie threw her drink back and said nothing for a while. Then, drumming her fingers on the table, she leaned back in her chair. “Sure, she’s going to be okay. I just wish there was a fucking doctor around here, that’s all.”
Martha sighed and remembered how the woman at the grocery store, Darlene Richards, had said that the doctor only visited Cochrane Crossing twice a week—and that even then his visits were unreliable. They had tried to call the man, a certain Dr. Mannering, from the phone in the grocery, only to learn that he was out on an emergency in some godforsaken hamlet called Twynford and wouldn’t be back for hours.
“The loss of blood,” Rosie said, and her voice was a whisper. “I’ve never seen so much goddam blood.” She filled her shot glass again and downed the liquor quickly. Martha reached across the table and touched the back of her friend’s hand a moment.
“Christ, Martha …” Rosie pressed her fingertips against her eyelids and then stared into her empty glass. “This was intended to be an idyllic summer. You remember that far back? The four of us. This house. You were going to write and I was going to take pictures. Does any of that ring a bell for you, kid?”
Martha nodded. She needed to say something that might console Rosie, that might assuage her concerns for Lindy—but words, as they had done in the past, came out lacking the necessary quality of compassion. “Look, she’s not bleeding anymore. She’s sleeping, she’s fine …” Words. Little empty shells that just rattled together as uselessly as trinkets on a charm bracelet. She stared round the kitchen and she thought: It’s this place. This place. We’ve disturbed something here and whatever it is it’s made us unwelcome. It doesn’t want us here.
No. No, it isn’t like that at all.
Whatever, it needs us here.
It needs us here to torment us.
The house seemed smaller to her all at once, a confining presence, as if all around her it were dwindling. Shrinking. Slithering into the sands and taking all of them with it. She crushed her cigarette and lit another, thinking again of the child in the upstairs room. Thinking of what Lindy had said.
I’ll be fine if you don’t move me.
I’ll be okay just so long as you let me stay where I am.
And the tone of her voice—pleading, begging: she might have been saying, I can only get weaker if you take me away from this place. As if the beach house were the source of her strength. Dear Jesus.
The source of her strength.
She watched as Rosie’s hand touched the message indicator on the board. “Maybe this doctor will come soon,” Rosie said. She got up from the table and paced the room for a while in a restless way. Then, her shoulders sagging, she sat down once more and gazed at Martha.
“Tomorrow,” she said suddenly. “We’ll leave here tomorrow. If Lindy’s strong enough to travel …”
Martha looked at her friend for a while. She felt a conflict of emotions just then, a faint despair that Rosie’s spirit, her determination, had broken like this—and an upsurge of optimism at the prospect of getting out of this wretched house.
“Lindy says she doesn’t want to leave, Rosie.”
“Lindy doesn’t know her own mind. How can I agree to staying on here if she’s going to get sick? What happens if she starts to bleed again and this goddam doctor still doesn’t come? What do we do then?” Rosie raised her face and glanced up at the light bulb; she looked gaunt and weary, her skin stretched tautly over her skull. Martha had an urge just to reach out and hug her, as if the mere act of touching might soothe her concerns away. Then she was thinking again about the girl in the upstairs room and her mind was abruptly crowded with shadows, with all the shadowy movements of the house, the dark corners and the damp closets and the sense she had all at once that the place had a life of its own—a center, a core, a soul, call it what you like; and that this core was inhabited by something that had no right to any kind of life.
“We could get an early start,” she said.
“I’d like that.” Rosie nodded and took a pack of cigarettes from her breast pocket. Then she smiled weakly at Martha. “It’s funny. I think I could stand the idea of sharing this place with invisible tenants, I think I could have put up with apparitions and all the rest of it because deep down inside I still don’t believe in that shit, no matter what my senses might tell me—but when it comes right down to it, it’s the old maternal thing that makes you reach decisions. Screw the ghosts. Let them have this whole damn place to themselves. Let them have their fun all alone—I just need to know my daughter’s going to be okay. I need the confidence of knowing that there’s a hospital nearby and physicians that keep regular hours. Goddammit, I need civilization!”
Martha was silent for some time; she’d been too worried about Lindy to think about her own son but now she was conscious of his absence. He’d mentioned something earlier about going for a walk—how long ago had that been? She had no real idea of time now, as if it had become suspended: a whole little world without clocks. She wandered to the window, stared out into the dark, then returned to the table and looked down at the Ouija board. Tommy, she thought: he’s out there walking the beach. Maybe he found something intriguing along the sands—a crab, a chunk of driftwood, a stranded sea creature.
Rosie said, “We could drive up to DC and spend a couple of days sightseeing. We could do the whole tourist thing. Check into a nice safe motel. Clean sheets. Bubble baths. We could sit up late and watch TV and gorge ourselves on Kentucky Fried Rat. Doesn’t that sound appealing?”
“It sounds wonderful,” Martha said. And it did—well-lit streets and illuminated monuments and automobiles and pollution: the idea of poisoning your own lungs on the air you breathed had never quite seemed so attractive to her.
“I’ve never actually seen the White House,” Rosie said, working herself back into a mood that was one of counterfeit cheerfulness. “How can I genuinely call myself an American and say that I’ve never seen the great beating heart of the Republic, huh?”
Martha smiled. “And I’ve never seen the Capitol.”
Rosie shook her head in mock solemnity. “What are we? Communists or something?”
“Card-carrying members.”
“It’s a terrible admission.”
“Dreadful.”
“It’s the kind of realization that makes me want to smoke a joint, Martha.”
Rosie reached for her purse, opening it, rummaging inside. It was a forced kind of banter, Martha knew, but it was better than nothing, better than the gloom, the weight of this house. Rosie took a plastic bag out and opened it. She spilled some grass and a pack of rolling papers onto the table and began to pick seeds out with her fingertips.
Martha watched: Rosie did this nimbly, swiftly, with all the expertise of long practice.
The discarded seeds rolled across the surface of the Ouija board.
And then Martha knew—
She knew something was about to happen, she could feel it coming in at her from a long way back—a dark sense of presentiment, of premonition. She wanted to rise and get out of the kitchen, but before she could move, the plastic indicator in the center of the board shivered, shifted slightly, rolling toward one corner of the board, then back once again to the dead center.
She stared across the table at Rosie.
And then back down at the indicator, which was moving again, pausing over one letter before sliding on to the next.
PLEASE
And again: PLEASE.
Rosie tried to smile: “What’s this? A little politeness tonight?” But her flippancy didn’t work—it was a dead thing, a bad effort.
Then the indicator was rolling quickly, moving in zigzag patterns all over the board.
PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE ME HERE
Martha clutched the edge of the table. This room had changed, the atmosphere in this kitchen had altered—as if it were suddenly inhabited by an invisible being whose pain and loneliness were palpable things.
DO NOT LEAVE ME HERE WITH ROSCOE
“Anna?” Rosie asked suddenly. “Is this Anna?”
YES
“Where are you?”
I AM WITH ROSCOE
“Why are you with him? Tell us why.”
PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE ME WITH HIM HE HURTS ME
Martha shut her eyes a second. She had a picture of a small child trapped in a black labyrinth, a lonely voice crying in a locked room. He hurts me.
“Why are you with him, Anna?” Rosie asked again.
Nothing. The plastic gadget had come to a halt in the center of the board.
“Why, Anna?”
Nothing. Rosie leaned back in her chair and looked at Martha.
Silence.
Martha felt an odd sadness, a sense of sorrow that had no particular focus: how the hell were you supposed to feel something about a disembodied voice? Something you couldn’t touch and see, couldn’t help in any way?
Rosie, her fingers trembling, picked up the pack of rolling papers and removed one. “Well? What do you make of—”
Before she could finish her question, the board had come to life again. And this time it was different, its vibrations altered, the movement of the indicator slower, more deliberate.
MISERABLE
A pause. Martha thought: We don’t even need to touch the goddam thing. We don’t need to lay our hands on it. It moves and it speaks anyhow. And she tried to imagine spectral fingers hovering over the table.
CUNTS
“Roscoe,” Rosie said in a whisper. “Our old friend Roscoe. Charming as ever.”
THE CHILDREN
There was a long pause. Martha leaned over the board, tense, expectant, all the nerves in her body burning: The children, what about the children? What was he going to say about the children—
The indicator didn’t move.
“Roscoe?” Rosie said. And there was a certain determination in her voice, almost as if she were challenging Roscoe to respond. “Roscoe, we’re waiting.”
We’re waiting, Martha thought.
Like it was a telephone connection to The Beyond.
Nothing more than waiting for some operator—trapped in purgatory—to plug in the right wires. And she wanted suddenly to laugh, wanted to toss this idiot board aside, but she couldn’t laugh and she couldn’t move because the board and its plastic triangle had become the claustrophobic center of the universe.
THE CHILDREN
“What about the children, Roscoe?” Rosie asked. Her challenge was stronger now, her voice more firm.
THE CHILDREN
Pause.
Then:
STAY
Martha raised her face and looked at Rosie, who was getting up from her chair and moving round the kitchen—
“What do you mean they stay? What the hell do you mean by that?”
But the board was silent and secretive, its alphabet a furtive arrangement of meaningless letters, and Rosie’s questions, echoing through the kitchen in a thin muffled way, went unanswered.
The sounds of the women’s voices, drifting up to her room from the kitchen, seemed to belong to some other world, some other dimension of experience. She lay flat on her back and stared upward at the ceiling and thought about the strange weakness she felt and the numbness that existed at the backs of her legs: she might have been floating in warm water or drugged by one of those sleeping pills her mother used and which, from time to time, she had pilfered. Turning her head a little to the side so that she faced the balcony door, she realized how glad she was that the women had left her alone—their fussing around and the way they’d been whispering about her made her uneasy; and their presence inside her room had been like trespassing on her privacy.
They’d been talking about leaving. About leaving the beach house and going back to good old Syracuse. Maybe that was the thing that troubled her most. She pushed herself upright and gazed across the room at the oval mirror. Her reflection was pale and her hair looked dry and ragged. She ran one hand through the strands and sighed: Why did they want to leave here anyhow? Didn’t they feel the vibrations of this place? Didn’t they understand that there was warmth concealed at the heart of this house? Warmth and pleasure? Exquisite pleasure?
She hugged herself, closing her eyes: you feel more secure in this room now than you’ve ever felt anywhere else. You feel safe. And what you thought of at first as fear has become something quite different.
It has become an invitation to stay.
You misunderstood before.
But not now. Now that you don’t feel scared.
She lay back down, her hands beneath the bedsheets. And she stroked her hips and stomach with her fingertips in lazy, circling motions. She imagined the man moving along the balcony toward her room. The sound of his footsteps on the boards. His hand lightly touching the rail. She imagined him turning the handle of her door and stepping inside, the curtain blown back by the breeze and the glass shimmering in moonlight, and then he was crossing the floor toward the bed and just sitting there, gazing at her for a long time without moving, just sitting, just watching—
She sat upright again, listening. Then she rose and, pushing the bedsheets aside, moved toward the balcony door. When she opened it, she leaned for a moment against the frame. Weak, she thought. Still weak. She felt the night breeze stir in her hair and blow against her bare legs.
She reached for the handrail and pressed her body against it as she looked down toward the trees.
Somebody was moving below. Moving slowly through the grove.
Tommy. She recognized him as he approached the house. He paused, looking upward at her. The breeze flapped against her once more, blowing her robe open, but she made no move to cover herself. She stared down at the boy.
Then her attention was drawn elsewhere. She turned her face and looked the length of the balcony.
They were watching her.
The man and the little girl.
The child had one hand held out, palm curled in a gesture of invitation. Lindy stared at the small face, which was impassive and pretty and pale. Then she looked at the man, vaguely afraid but fascinated just the same, unable to prevent herself from gazing at him and knowing, with dead certainty, that if he were to hold out his hand she wouldn’t hesitate to go toward him—and suddenly she was trembling, her legs weak, her heartbeat fast.
He was smiling.
Even as he seemed to look straight through her as if she were no more than a sheet of clear glass, he was smiling. She was conscious only of the darkness in his eyes and the way the smile appeared to be little more than an empty expression, something that was chilly and condescending and taunting.
She turned her face away.
Tommy was still standing motionless below. Watching.
She looked back at Roscoe and the child.
The girl had lowered her hand now. With the same impassive look on her face, she reached out and placed her fingers between the man’s legs and when she turned to stare back at Lindy she was holding his penis in her hand.
Lindy took a couple of steps forward and realized she’d never seen a man erect in her whole life. She wanted to touch him herself, wanted to wrap her hand around him, stroke him, push him inside her own body. He was large and swollen and she knew he would hurt her but she didn’t care. She understood only that she needed the man, she needed him to fill her; and she was conscious all at once of how her own blood was singing inside her head and her pulses dancing and her terrible desire.
She took a few more steps forward until she was only yards away from the man and the child.
When she stopped again.
Because it changed.
It changed completely, as if some demented conjuror, some malicious sleight-of-hand artist, had drawn a cloth of black silk across the whole scene and she was left gazing at an empty balcony, an empty night, a starless dark filled with poignant absences; and Roscoe and the child had slipped through this same silk into a place of invisibility. She gripped the handrail and looked down at Tommy, who hadn’t moved, who was still staring upward.
Lindy watched him for a long time, conscious of the breeze playing over the surface of her skin, conscious of the sinking sense of disappointment she felt—before she turned and went back inside her bedroom, closing the balcony door.