“What is it? I can’t take everything,” she said. “I have some bad allergies.”
“It’s only aspirin. That’s all I said I would bring you, Marlene. You’re so suspicious, always so suspicious. Why can’t you be trusting? Friends should be trusting.”
“Friends don’t have to chain each other up,” Stacey remonstrated. She couldn’t resist the comment, even as Irene’s eyes grew small.
“Every time I think we’re getting along just fine, you go and ruin it. I told you what Gerald said. He said that would continue to happen. Why must you prove him right? If you keep this up, he won’t let you stay here.”
“You mean,” Stacey said, unable to hide her hope, “he’ll send me away?”
“No,” Irene said. Her face changed expression dramatically, becoming hard and more mask-like. Her eyes darkened and she straightened her back, bringing her head back arrogantly. “No, he’ll take you away,” she said. “Here,” she said, thrusting the pills at her, “take these now.”
Gingerly, Stacey plucked the two pills from Irene’s palm as the other handed her the glass of water. Stacey put the pills into her mouth. There was the definite taste of aspirin and aspirins could only help her now, she thought. She swallowed them with the water chaser and tried to smile.
“Thank you.”
“That’s better. And you’ll feel much better in the morning, after you get a good night’s rest.” Irene guided Stacey back against the pillow and brought the blanket up over her shoulders. She tucked the covers in so tightly on both sides of the bed that the blanket felt more like a straightjacket. Then she turned off the lamp. “Good night, Marlene,” she said.
“Good night,” Stacey replied. She watched her move toward the doorway. When she reached for the door, Stacey called out. “Please, don’t close the door.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because…because I’m not sure I’ll be all right and I might need you later. If I do, I’ll call and I’m afraid you won’t hear me if you close the door.”
“Oh. Oh, of course. Don’t be nervous. I’ll be right down the hall.”
“Thank you,” Stacey said. Irene looked at her for a moment and then left the room, leaving the door open. Stacey lowered her head back to the pillow and breathed a sigh of relief. Step one of her plan was completed; she was really fighting back now. She had gone from terrible fear and panic, through trauma, to calm acceptance. Now she had gathered her resolve. If she had true grit, she thought, it would have to show itself soon.
Soon…that was the word she had to use in prayer. Soon she would work herself free. Soon she would slip away from this house. Soon she would find help and soon Tami would be rescued. It was what enabled her to remain calm knowing her five-year-old daughter was being tormented even more than she was in this house of madness.
Soon it would all end. Soon.
She prayed.
8
After checking on the man in the well, Gerald went back to the house. He decided that sometime in the morning he would start up the backhoe and bring a couple of buckets of earth to the well. That would cover the man’s body sufficiently, just as it had for Marlene and her daughter. Never once did he worry about anyone discovering them. Who came on his land anyway?
After he dropped enough dirt in, he would steer the backhoe to the east field and leave it next to the man’s car. Later, in the evening, he would dig the pit for the car. He felt confident that everything would work out fine. He still felt that he was in control of events, as long as they occurred in his house and on his land.
A mystical pall hung over the farm. He had always felt it was a world unto itself, a feeling he had inherited from his father. Whenever the two of them went hunting, his father would never venture beyond the borders of their land, no matter how enticing their quarry. It was as though stepping over the line would make him weak and vulnerable.
His father often complained about the sale of huge parcels of their land. According to his father, Gerald’s grandfather was foolish and nearsighted. He liquidated some of the land for funds with which to buy more livestock. This was true, but in doing so, their safe refuge shrank in size as the outsiders moved in nearer. “The sounds a neighbor makes should be damn well out of earshot,” he said.
Years later when Gerald was running things, he, too, had to sell some of the land. He couldn’t forestall trends, or bank on family loyalty; it was a matter of survival, but to his father it was betrayal. Gerald tried to explain the situation, but the old man turned to stone. That was the year the well had gone dry. Because they suffered a great drought, his crops had gone bad and they had needed the funds. Even though the drought ended and they had some pretty good rain in the years that followed, the well never made a significant comeback.
It was part of the old man’s curse, he thought, or the land’s way of punishing him. Of course, they weren’t dependent on that well anymore. It was just something special. “The nectar of our land,” his father called it. They had well water from a submergible pump implanted over two hundred and fifty feet down, cool, fresh, and delicious; but the water from the well that had been his great-grandfather’s main source of house water was gone.
Now the well was a tomb, accepting the dead playmates and the intruder. It had retained its status as something special.
He didn’t look in on the children when he reentered the house. Instead, he went directly to the living room and turned on the television set. It was a tube type, fifteen-inch black-and-white, almost twenty years old. Out here where they lived, there was no cable hookup. They still ran the set off the old antenna and received only two stations clearly enough to view. Neither he nor Irene watched much television, but they kept it going for Shirley. For Gerald it was simply a distraction.
More often than not, he would fall asleep in front of its glow, the music and the dialogue acting as a lullaby. Tonight was no exception. In fact, when he sank into the big easy chair, the large soft pillows accepting his body as though they were fitted to his form, he realized just how tired he was. He stared blankly at the wavy picture. For some reason tonight the images faded in and out and made him dizzy. He didn’t fight hard to keep his eyes open.
It was quiet upstairs. Apparently Irene had that situation under control; the children must be occupied with whatever activity Shirley had started. For the first time all day, he felt secure enough to permit himself to relax. He knew that if he did fall asleep, it would be only for a short period anyway. More and more these days, he slept in spurts and whenever he awoke, it was with a jolt.
Perhaps that was because his sleep was filled with ugly scenes, nightmarish images. What he found unusual, even somewhat frightening, was that he saw himself from another viewpoint in these scenes. Whether at his mother’s graveside or out in the night secretly reburying Arthur, he never visualized events from his own eyes; he was a witness to himself, as he stood at his mother’s grave staring into the cold earth, or watched himself scratch out a hole in the earth for Arthur.
It was as if all of these things happened to someone else, someone he once knew, but who was no longer here. He occupied this person’s body, but…he was not the person. Whatever happened to him?
At times now, Irene seemed like a stranger to him, too. He’d come upon her in these dreams and wonder, Who is this? What is her name? There was nothing familiar about her. The same was true for Shirley; she was someone else’s child. And then he’d look at himself in the mirror and he’d think, I’m a stranger, too. That’s not me; that’s not who I am.
The dreams had become maddening and brought on wrenching headaches. Irene would find him sitting there, his forefinger and thumb pressing so hard into his temples that they would leave bright coin-sized circles on his skin, and she would come to him and stroke his head gently, muttering, “Poor Gerald, poor Gerald.” Lately he couldn’t stand it. He would brush her aside and go outside.
The darkness always brought him welcome relief. The darker it was, the better it w
as. He got so he hated the stars and despised the moon. He liked the overcast nights because there weren’t any shadows. Nothing haunted him. Sometimes Irene would send Shirley out looking for him. She’d stand on the lawn and bellow like some dumb beast in pain. He got so he hated the sound of his own name when it came from Shirley’s lips.
That’s why he was so happy when she had a playmate. She was preoccupied and he wasn’t tormented by her presence. He would never say anything to Irene; he couldn’t even bring himself to say it to himself, but he had come to despise his own daughter. There was no hope in her, no promise for the future.
He thought there could have been such hope with Arthur. He could have taught him the good things; he could have taught him how to use the land well. He could have shown him the magic in the farm. Maybe together they would have built something out of the wasteland. Maybe…
Such thoughts were tormenting. It was better not to think them. When they surfaced, he forced himself to remember carrying the tiny coffin from the car into the night. He remembered how he fit his son into the earth and then closed it over him. It was more like he had planted him than buried him. After all, he was still a farmer, wasn’t he?
And he did have this dream—he hesitated to call it a nightmare—in which Arthur sprouted from the earth. First his fingers appeared, the tips showing like little stones, and then the top of his head pressed upward until his eyes cleared the ground. Arthur was coming back stronger and straighter and healthier. Gerald woke up when he started to water him with Shirley’s blood.
Now, in front of the television set, his eyes closed completely, but he wasn’t asleep long before he fell down the well, waking up with a start when he hit the bottom and confronted the pale white face of his father poking out of the damp earth. It was as if the well was the doorway of the dead, their only way to return from their graves. Why his father appeared in these tortured dreams he couldn’t fathom, since the old man had to be at peace, since he’d been buried lovingly, in a traditional if sparsely attended funeral, in the family’s mausoleum at Harwood Cemetery.
“Gerald.”
He spun around in his chair. For a moment he was totally disoriented. He wiped his face with his rough palms and shook his head.
“What? What is it?”
“Where are the children?”
“The children? In the basement. They’re in the basement.”
“No, they’re not, Gerald. I just came up from the basement. Didn’t you hear me shouting for them?”
“Well, maybe they went upstairs.”
“I was upstairs, Gerald. I came down to get them to put them to bed.”
He stared at her, struggling to find meaning in what she was saying.
“They’re not upstairs and they’re not down in the basement?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying, Gerald. Don’t you know where they are?”
“No. Shirley’s not playing that dumb hide-and-seek game, is she?”
“I don’t know, Gerald. I just came downstairs. I went down into the basement…”
“All right, all right. Dammit, I’ll break her neck. Shirley!”
“I’ve been calling, Gerald. They must have gone outside.”
“Outside?” Suddenly he realized she was right and he sprang up from his chair. “Why’d you let them do that?”
“I didn’t let them, Gerald. I was busy upstairs. Why didn’t you see to them? What were you doing?”
“I’ll break her neck,” he repeated and started out.
When Shirley and Tami scrambled up the stairs from the basement, they heard the television blaring in the living room. For a long moment, Shirley hesitated. She was drawn to watch television almost as much as she was driven to show Tami where Arthur was buried. What helped her make her decision was the realization that she hadn’t been to see Arthur for quite a while. It was also exciting for her to show someone else where Arthur was, so she turned toward the back door.
Tami had released Shirley’s skirt and didn’t immediately follow. Thinking about her mother, she looked longingly toward the stairway. She was about to bolt for it when Shirley turned and anticipated her action. She stepped back to her and seized Tami’s wrist.
“Shh,” she said before Tami had a chance to howl. “Come on,” she whispered. Still holding on to her, Shirley continued through the house to the back door. There, she looked back once to be sure no one had heard them, and then she opened the door and the two of them stepped out into the night.
To Tami the evening darkness never looked so black, nor did the shadows look so threatening. As long as she was with Shirley, it was natural for her to anticipate even more terrible things to happen out here. The farm structures, the machinery, and the nearby trees loomed about them, silhouetted like the creatures in her worst nightmares.
In the daytime she wouldn’t have any trouble recognizing a backhoe or a tractor. She had been on job sites with her father before and she had seen construction machinery. But tonight they looked monstrous. The moment she set her eyes on them, she could swear she saw them move threateningly toward her.
The cry of an owl to her right made her gasp. She was so frightened she even squeezed Shirley’s hand, but when she looked at Shirley, she was surprised at how nonchalant the other was. She didn’t wince at the nocturnal creature’s hoot; she didn’t seem in any way intimidated by the shadows and the shapes.
“This way,” she said and dragged Tami off to the left. Although there wasn’t any discernible path, Shirley moved quickly, leading Tami out behind the vegetable garden, around the wire fence, and down a small hill toward the west cornfield. It wasn’t that steep a hill, but because she was so small, Tami lost sight of the house behind her rather quickly.
The house was no haven of safety for Tami; far from it, considering the kinds of things that had happened to her and to her mother inside, but that was where her mother was kept so she went into a small panic when it was no longer visible.
“I want my mommy,” she said loudly. She pulled back suddenly, bringing Shirley’s forced march to a halt. “I wanna go back.”
“Come on, Sooey-face.”
“No. I wanna go back.”
“I said come on,” Shirley repeated. She tugged hard on Tami’s wrist and Tami fell forward on her stomach. She started to cry and made no effort to scramble to her feet. Shirley began tugging harder on her arm, dragging her over the grass. Small rocks cut into her chest and legs and she screamed. Shirley stopped. “It’s not far,” she said, attempting a reasonable tone.
“I wanna go back to my mommy.”
“Oh, what a baby.”
“I wanna go back.”
“Arthur’s not going to like this, and when Arthur gets mad,” Shirley said, imitating Irene, “he comes into the house and crawls right into your dreams.”
Tami lowered her sobbing and looked around. The shadows were thicker and darker out here. The trees loomed higher and closer. Something rustled in the forest to their right and a strange animal cry tore the air directly ahead of them. She didn’t recognize it as the cry of a raccoon, but thought it resembled the cry of a small baby.
“That’s Arthur,” Shirley whispered. “He knows we’re coming. He knows we’re close. Get up. Quick!”
Tami pushed herself into a sitting position. They heard the cry again.
“Quick,” Shirley repeated in a loud whisper.
Tami’s tiny heart was beating so hard the vibration shook her spine. She stood up and brushed the pebbles from her clothing, her eyes wide, her lips pressed tightly together to form a grim line.
“That’s better,” Shirley said. “Come on.” She took Tami’s wrist again and dragged her through the field at a run. With the darkness and strange surroundings all around her now, Tami was afraid to do anything but follow.
After a short distance, they came to a small clearing. When they reached the rim of it, Shirley hesitated. The raccoon’s cry drifted off to their right and away. Tami was grateful for the silen
ce, but by now she was afraid to make a sound; she was almost afraid to breathe.
Shirley moved them forward again, but now she moved with distinct caution. Because she was obviously a bit frightened herself, Tami’s terror intensified. Where were they going? Who was Arthur? Why was he out here in the darkness?
With a sudden move Shirley brought them to a stop. She said nothing as she stared ahead into the darkness. Tami peered into the night. What was there? She quieted her panic enough to focus on what looked to be a small tree growing in the middle of the clearing.
“That’s where Arthur sleeps,” Shirley said. “That’s his tree.”
Tami said nothing. She wiped her eyes with her free hand and waited. Then Shirley moved them closer.
“I’ve got to shake the tree,” she said. “That’s how Arthur knows I want to see him.”
Tami didn’t cry, but as Shirley reached out slowly toward the young tree, a thin, humming sound began at the base of her throat. She sounded like a frightened and angry cat. Shirley didn’t notice; she was concentrating too hard on the tree. When her fingers clasped around the narrow trunk, her body stiffened. Tami felt Shirley’s hand grow cold. It was as though she was clasping the hand of a statue. They waited; the silence that had fallen around them was deafening.
Shirley shook the tree gently and then pulled her hand back quickly. Tami looked about, anticipating the arrival of some horrible monster, perhaps a creature like the ones she had seen in that comic book Jamie Jo Grossman always carried with him. But nothing happened. The night remained quiet and still.
“He’s not here,” Shirley concluded. “He’s gone somewhere. He travels through the ground like a worm.”
“Let’s go back,” Tami said. “I want my—”
“I know; I know. You want your mommy. We’ll come back tomorrow night. Maybe he’ll be here then.”
The Maddening Page 14