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FIFTY-NINE

‘Try it now, ma’am,’ the truckdriver said. He was looking into the engine cavity of Rachel’s rented car.

She turned the key. The Chevette’s engine roared into life. The truckdriver slammed the hood down and came around to her window, wiping his hands on a big blue handkerchief. He had a pleasant, ruddy face. A Dysart’s Truck-Stop cap was tilted back on his head.

‘Thank you so much,’ Rachel said, on the verge of tears. ‘I just didn’t know what I was going to do.’ ‘Aw, a kid could have fixed that,’ the trucker said. ‘But it was funny. Never seen something like that go wrong on such a new car, anyway.’ ‘Why? What was it?’

‘One of your battery cables come right off. Wasn’t nobody frigging with it, was there?’ ‘No,’ Rachel said, and she thought again of that feeling she’d had, that feeling of running into the rubber band of the world’s biggest slingshot.

‘Must have jogged her loose just ridin’ along, I guess. But you won’t have no more trouble with your cables, anyway. I tightened her up real good.’ ‘Could I give you some money?’ Rachel asked timidly.

The trucker roared laughter. ‘Not me, lady,’ he said. ‘Us guys are the knights of the road, remember?’ She smiled. ‘Well … thank you.’

‘More’n welcome.’ He gave her a good grin, incongruously full of sunshine at this hour of the morning.

Rachel smiled back and drove carefully across the parking lot to the feeder road. She glanced both ways for traffic, and five minutes later was back on the turnpike again, headed north. The coffee had helped more than she would have believed. She felt totally awake now, not the slightest bit dozy, her eyes as big as doorknobs. That feather of unease touched her again, that absurd feeling that she was being manipulated. The battery cable coming off the terminal post like that … So she could be held up just long enough for …

She laughed nervously. Long enough for what?

For something irrevocable to happen.

That was stupid. Ridiculous. But Rachel began to push the little car along faster nonetheless.

At five o’clock, as Jud was trying to ward off a scalpel stolen from the black bag of his good friend Dr Louis Creed, and as her daughter was awakening bolt-upright in bed, screaming in the grip of a nightmare which she could mercifully not remember, Rachel left the turnpike, drove the Hammond Street Cutoff close to the cemetery where a spade was now the only thing buried in her son’s coffin, and crossed the Bangor-Brewer Bridge. By quarter past five, she was on Route 15 and headed for Ludlow.

She had decided to go directly to Jud’s, and she would make good on at least that much of her promise. The Civic was not in their driveway, anyway, and although she supposed it might be in the garage, their house had a sleeping, unoccupied look. No intuition suggested to her that Louis might be home.

Rachel parked behind Jud’s pickup and got out of the Chevette, looking around carefully. The grass was heavy with dew, sparkling in this clear, new light. Somewhere a bird sang and then was silent. On the few occasions since her pre-teenage years when she had been awake and alone at dawn without some responsibility to fulfil as the reason, she had a lonely but somehow uplifted feeling – a paradoxical sense of newness and continuity. This morning she felt nothing so clean and good. There was only a dragging sense of unease which she could not entirely charge off to the terrible twenty-four hours just gone by and her recent bereavement.

She mounted the porch steps and went in through the screen door, meaning to use the old-fashioned bell on the front door. She had been charmed by that bell the first time she and Louis came over together; you twisted it clockwise and it uttered a loud but musical cry that was anachronistic but delightful.

She reached for it now, then glanced down at the porch floor and frowned. There were muddy tracks on the mat. Looking around, she saw that they led from the screen door to this one. Very small tracks. A child’s tracks, by the look of them. But she had been driving all night, and there had been no rain. There hadn’t even been a ground mist.

She looked at the tracks for a long time – too long, really – and discovered she had to force her hand back to the turn-bell. She grasped it … and then her hand fell away again.

I’m anticipating, that’s all. Anticipating the sound of that bell in this stillness. He’s probably gone to sleep after all and it will startle him awake … But that wasn’t what she was afraid of. She had been nervous, scared in some deep and diffuse way ever since she had found it so hard to stay awake, but this sharp fear was something new, something which had solely to do with those small tracks. Tracks that were the size— Her mind tried to block this thought, but it was too tired, too slow.

—of Gage’s feet.

Oh stop it, can’t you stop it?

She reached out and twisted the bell.

Its sound was even louder than she remembered, but not so musical – it was a harsh, choked scream in the stillness. Rachel jumped back, uttering a nervous little laugh that had absolutely no humor in it at all. She waited for Jud’s footsteps, but his footsteps did not come. There was silence, and silence, and she was beginning to debate in her own mind whether or not she could bring herself to twist that iron butterfly shape again, when a sound did come from behind the door, a sound she would not have expected in her wildest surmises.

Waow! … Waow! … Waow!

‘Church?’ she asked, startled and puzzled. She bent forward but it was of course impossible to see in; the door’s large glass panel had been covered with a neat white curtain. Norma’s work. ‘Church, is that you?’ Waow!

Rachel tried the door. It was unlocked. Church was there, sitting in the hallway with his tail coiled neatly around his feet. The cat’s fur was streaked with something dark. Mud, Rachel thought, and then saw that the beads of liquid caught in Church’s whiskers were red.

He raised one paw and began to lick it, his eyes never leaving her face.

‘Jud?’ she called out, really alarmed now. She stepped just inside the door.

The house gave back no answer; only silence.

Rachel tried to think, but all at once images of her sister Zelda had begun to creep into her mind, blurring thought. How her hands had twisted. How she used to slam her head against the wall sometimes when she was angry – the paper had been all torn there, the plaster beneath torn and broken. This was no time to think of Zelda, not when Jud might be hurt. Suppose he had fallen down? He was an old man.

Think about that, not about the dreams you had as a kid, dreams of opening the closet and having Zelda spring out at you with her blackened, grinning face, dreams of being in the bathtub and seeing Zelda’s eyes peering out of the drain, dreams of Zelda lurking in the basement behind the furnace, dreams— Church opened his mouth, exposing his sharp teeth and cried: Waow! again.

Louis was right, we never should have had him fixed, he’s never seemed right since then. But Louis said it would take away all of his aggressive instincts. He was wrong about that, anyway; Church still hunts. He— Waow! Church cried again, then turned and darted up the stairs.

‘Jud?’ she called again. ‘Are you up there?’

Waow! Church cried from the top of the stairs, as if to confirm the fact, and then he disappeared down the hall.

How did he get in, anyway? Did Jud let him in? Why?

Rachel shifted from one foot to the other, wondering what to do next. The worst of it was that all of this seemed … seemed somehow managed, as if something wanted her to be here, and— And then there was a groan from upstairs, low and filled with pain – Jud’s voice, surely Jud’s voice. He had fallen in the bathroom or maybe tripped, broken a leg or sprained his hip, maybe, the bones of the old were so brittle, and what in the name of God are you thinking of, girl, standing down here and shifting back and forth like you had to go to the bathroom, that was blood on Church, blood, Jud’s hurt and you’re just standing here! What’s wrong with you?

‘Jud!’ The groan came again and she ran up the stairs.

She had never been up here before, and because the hall’s only window faced west, toward the river, it was still very dark. The hallway ran straight and wide beside the stairwell and toward the back of the house, the cherrywood rail gleaming with a mellow elegance. There was a picture of the Acropolis on the wall and (it’s Zelda all these years she’s been after you and now it’s her time open the right door and she’ll be there with her humped and twisted back smelling of piss and death it’s Zelda it’s her time and finally she caught up with you) the groan came again, low, from behind the second door on the right.

Rachel began to walk toward that door, her heels clacking on the boards. It seemed to her that she was going through some sort of warp – not a time-warp or a space-warp, but a size-warp. She was getting smaller. The picture of the Acropolis was floating higher and higher, and that cut-glass doorknob would soon be at eye-level. Her hand stretched out for it … and before she could even touch it, the door was snatched open.

Zelda stood there.

She was hunched and twisted, her body so cruelly deformed that she had actually become a dwarf, little more than two feet high; and for some reason Zelda was wearing the suit they had buried Gage in. But it was Zelda, all right, her eyes alight with an insane glee, her face a raddled purple; it was Zelda screaming, ‘I finally came back for you, Rachel, I’m going to twist your back like mine and you’ll never get out of bed again never get out of bed again NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN—’ Church was perched on one of her shoulders and Zelda’s face swam and changed, and Rachel saw with spiraling, sickening horror that it really wasn’t Zelda at all, how could she have made such a stupid mistake? It was Gage. His face was not black but dirty, smeared with blood. And it was swollen, as if he had been terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.

She cried his name and held her arms out. He ran to her and climbed into them, and all the time one hand remained behind his back, as if with a bunch of posies picked in someone’s back meadow.

‘I brought you something, Mommy!’ he screamed. ‘I brought you something, Mommy! I brought you something, I brought you something!’