Imp

by Andrew Neiderman

  As he lay there creating these pictures, he drew sleep over himself like a warm blanket. His body seemed to sink into a cool, numbing liquid. He whimpered a little, turned, and twisted himself into a more comfortable position, sniffed the air to be sure he was safe within his dark sanctuary, and closed his eyes even tighter. Soon his embrace of himself lessened, his body became limp, and he sank completely into his own inner world. The field mice that scurried around his box ignored him. The spiders in the corners of the walls and ceiling harvested their day’s catch, and the beams of the house creaked with the slight, almost imperceptible shifting of the structure. Then, all was quiet. The footsteps above him seemed to rise in the air, as Mary returned to her own darkness.

  All three of them slept; each with his private dreams, each anticipating a new day unlike any that had come before.

  SIX

  Faith was ambiguous about Bobby O’Neil. On the one hand, she hoped he had decided not to have anything to do with her. With that much less to worry about, her life would be simpler. Yet, as she walked through the corridors at school that morning, she couldn’t prevent the feelings of excitement that came with her expectations of his approaching her. He hadn’t been on the school bus, and she didn’t see him during home-room period, nor did she see him when she passed to her first period class. The thought occurred to her that something might have happened to him and that was why he never appeared on her fire escape landing as he had promised.

  In her mind, things didn’t just “happen” to people. If he had an accident or was very sick, it could be because his coming to her at night had been something evil and God had punished him, as Mary said God always would. And then there was the nagging fear in the back of her mind that Mary had discovered his visit, even though she hadn’t come right out and said so. Then using her powers of prayer, as she had done many times before, she had caused something to happen to Bobby O’Neil.

  The Fallsburg Central Schools bused its students in from seven hamlets, Centerville being one of the biggest. Since the year-round population of the entire township was only nine thousand, the school population rarely went above twelve hundred, K–12. In so small a school system, students were well aware of one another. Faith’s few speaking acquaintances were loners like herself. In all the years she had gone to school, she had never had a friend over to her house or been permitted to go to one of theirs. She never went to a school party nor got invited to a private one. Most of the students considered her a loser and had little or no contact with her. She sat alone at the tables in the cafeteria, even when there were others at the table, and rarely did anyone acknowledge her or she anyone, for that matter.

  On this particular day, however, she paid real attention to some of the conversations going on in the halls and in the classrooms, hoping to learn anything about Bobby O’Neil, if there was anything to learn. Apparently there wasn’t. No one mentioned his name and none of the boys that she knew were friendly with him looked concerned about anything. Finally concentrating on her work, she put it all out of her mind. During lunch, she sat at a corner table, eating very mechanically and looking lost in a daze. She didn’t even realize Bobby had come up beside her, until he took the seat next to hers. She turned in surprise and saw him smiling widely.

  “Hi.”

  For a moment she didn’t respond, but her face must have revealed some happiness, because his eyes brightened even more. She corrected herself immediately and turned back to her food. He slid his tray close to hers and began opening a milk container.

  “Sorry I wasn’t on your balcony last night,” he said.

  “It’s not a balcony. It’s a fire escape and I told you not to come.”

  “That wasn’t why I didn’t come.”

  She didn’t turn completely around, but she permitted herself to tilt her head just enough to catch the laughter in his eyes. She envied the lightness he expressed, the happy-go-lucky manner. What did it feel like not being dominated by heavy thoughts, by serious questions about life and morality and God? Her mother made her feel that other young people her age were loose because of their poor upbringing, but she couldn’t harden her heart against Bobby O’Neil, not with his face as soft as it was, not with his eyes as warm as his were, and not with a voice as sincere as his sounded.

  “Don’t you want to know why I didn’t come?”

  “Since I didn’t ask you to come, I don’t expect you have to tell me why you didn’t,” she said. She regretted how harsh she sounded. Fearful he might just pick up his tray and go, she added, “But I imagine your mother found out and told you not to.”

  He laughed. Some of the kids at a nearby table stopped talking and looked their way. Bobby nodded at them and most of them smiled. She didn’t like their “cat-ate-the-mouse” grins. They made her feel self-conscious. Was she being made a fool? The thought panicked her and she looked around the lunchroom quickly. It did seem like most of the students were looking her way. Was all this some kind of a joke, something Bobby O’Neil and a few of his friends cooked up for laughs?

  That had happened to her before—like the time Barry Weintraub asked her to the Junior Prom. Of course, she turned him down immediately, but some of the girls in her classes, girls who hardly ever spoke to her, approached her under the guise of trying to talk her into going. “He’s such a nice guy,” they said. “He really likes you,” they said. She didn’t argue with them, but he asked her again, this time in a very dramatically staged manner, after school, while the buses were loading. They had quite an audience.

  After she got onto the bus, a group of kids went into a chant: “Faith said no; she won’t go. Faith said no; she won’t go.” For a while that afternoon, the whole bus load of students was chanting it, raising their voices even louder when the bus approached Centerville. She closed her ears to them the way Mary had taught her. While they chanted, she quietly recited the Lord’s Prayer. Willie Rosen obviously thought the whole thing was funny, because he didn’t turn around and get the kids to stop. He heard her reciting though. She remembered the look on his face—this quizzical and then almost frightened expression when he realized what she was saying.

  After a while, like most everything else the kids did or said in relation to her, it passed. She wasn’t enough to hold their attention for long periods.

  “No,” Bobby said, snapping her out of her memory, “that wasn’t it.” His expression changed, the smile quickly fading. When he looked down and poked at his food, she had real interest.

  “Something happened?”

  “To my little brother. You know Billy. He’s always getting himself into something.”

  “What happened?”

  “He messed with a raccoon and got his arm badly scratched up. We had to take him to the hospital and by the time we got back, it was pretty late.”

  “Oh. A raccoon?”

  “Yeah. My father thinks it was my dog’s fault. He thinks Captain led Billy to it. I’m supposed to keep him tied up all the time now.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m sorry. I’ve seen raccoons, but I’ve never thought about them scratching me.”

  “Me neither. I asked Mr. Hoffman about it and he thought it was very unusual. He said that coon must have really been trapped.”

  “Well what does Billy say about it?”

  “Forget about what he says,” Bobby said. “He’s got some imagination. My mother doesn’t want to take him to the movies anymore. Whatever he sees on the screen, he thinks he sees in our backyard. And yours, too,” he added.

  “Oh.”

  “He’s probably covering up for doing something wrong anyway. My father doesn’t like our dog and he’s always after Billy about him. You don’t have a pet, do you?”

  “No,” she said. She said it so quickly that he looked at her askance.

  “Your mother doesn’t like animals?”

  “It’s not that. We don’t have the time for such things.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said, but she didn’t t
hink he did. They were both quiet for a while. Danny Rosenbloom and Carole Shatsky stopped at the table to say hello to him. They talked about a math test they were having tomorrow and then Carole looked at Faith as though she had just noticed she was there.

  “How’s it going?” she asked. For a few seconds, Faith was unable to respond. She had always admired Carole Shatsky from afar, envious of her chic and her popularity with other girls. She seemed more mature than the rest of them, and although she was never very friendly with Faith, she was never blatantly unfriendly either.

  “OK,” Faith finally replied. Carole smiled warmly and then she and Danny moved on. The whole encounter, as short as it was and as insignificant as it would appear to anyone else, left her with a warm feeling. Because of that, she wasn’t as adamantly negative as she thought she should have been when Bobby talked about their meeting again at night.

  “You can’t come up again,” she said. “My mother … my mother is suspicious, I think.”

  “She heard me there the other night?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then how could she … I mean, why would she be suspicious?”

  “You don’t know my mother,” Faith said and thought she had said enough. She started to put her things together to get up and go.

  “You could come down then.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be at your house waiting. What time does your mother usually go to sleep?” She simply stared at him. “From the way you were talking the other night, I gathered she goes to bed relatively early. Right?”

  “Right after her programs.”

  “You mean that religious stuff I heard?”

  “Yes,” she said sharply, her eyes smaller.

  “So I’ll be at your house by nine. You come down the fire escape and we’ll go to the lake or pond or whatever you want to call it.”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Sure you can. It’ll be easy.”

  “No,” she repeated, now feeling frightened. She got up,

  “If you don’t come down, I’ll come up.”

  “You better not.”

  He took her hand, literally holding her to the table. She was too embarrassed to pull away, but the feel of his hand firmly around hers brought her an unexpected pleasurable sensation—it started as a chill, but quickly turned into a warm flush. She looked about to see if any of the other students were watching, but now everyone else seemed totally involved in their own conversations.

  “Try it just once,” he said. “We’ll have fun. You’ll see.”

  “No,” she said shaking her head weakly. “I couldn’t.”

  “You can.”

  She slipped her hand free and started away.

  “I’ll whistle,” he called, but she didn’t look back at him until she was at the door. He was eating quickly and reading his math textbook, acting as though nothing much had just happened. For her it was like the opening of another world. She trembled from both fear and excitement, squeezing her books closely against her body for security.

  All through the remainder of the day, she thought of nothing else but the way he had grasped her hand and the proposal he had made. She found herself seriously considering it. Did she dare? Mary would go to sleep early as usual, right after her programs. Faith would say goodnight to her and then … she would dress quickly and quietly and sneak out of the window. She imagined that every squeak of the fire escape would make her heart beat like crazy.

  And what if she got down safely and undetected? Would she go off with him alone in the darkness? Would she get into his rowboat and look up at the stars? Would she let him take her hand again? Would she want him to touch her in places she was afraid to touch herself? Nothing seemed more frightening and all at once more exciting. The debate raged on within her.

  When school ended, he was waiting out in the parking lot. He had his father’s pickup truck, which explained why he wasn’t on the bus in the morning. She pretended she didn’t see him, but he called out to her and gestured. Some of the other girls looked at her enviously. She considered the bus, Willie Rosen sitting there, grinning out at her, the other kids filing on. Her heart beat so quickly she thought she was going to faint, and her hands were so weak they could barely grip her books. She hesitated. Bobby stood there smiling, his hands on his hips. With some of his wavy light brown hair lying across his forehead, and with his broad, thick shoulders pulled back, he reminded her of her father—strong and alive with masculine energy, exciting and dangerous, like Prometheus, unafraid of flaunting in the face of the gods. Taking what seemed to her like the biggest steps of her life, she started in his direction.

  Without another word, as if he were afraid that speaking would frighten her off like a doe, he opened the truck door for her. She got in quickly and he hurried around to his side.

  “You’ve got to let me out where the bus would,” she said before he started the engine, “so my mother doesn’t know.”

  “Sure. I’m not going to get you into trouble.” He smiled. Too arrogantly, she thought, but she wanted so much to believe him.

  All the way home he talked about Brown’s Pond and the rowboat and what it was like to be out there at night “when the stars make you bend your head back until your neck hurts.”

  “You feel like you could fall off the earth,” he said. She thought he talked like a little boy, but he did make obvious things, things she had always taken for granted, seem like special things. In fact, he talked all the way home, never once pausing to let her say anything. She was grateful for that. As long as he talked, she didn’t think about being in the truck on an afternoon when Mary was waiting at the house. She didn’t think about the dangers.

  He deliberately rode right behind the bus, so they would arrive at the same time the bus did. She got out at her usual spot, which was far enough from the house so Mary couldn’t see. She was just going to say thanks and close the door, but, when she turned around and saw him sitting there looking so admiringly at her, she paused. The silence was exciting. She was sexually stimulated by it, and it brought heat into her cheeks and wetness to her lips.

  “See,” he said. “I told you I wouldn’t get you into trouble. You can trust me.”

  Mary’s words began to haunt her: “They know you’re weak and vulnerable; they know you’re lonely and afraid. You yearn for their affections, for their softness, for their strength. They talk away your resistance and you open yourself to their lustings …?

  No, she screamed back at her thoughts, no, it’s not true.

  “I’ll whistle,” he said. She closed the door and started away. He leaned out the side window. “I’ll whistle. Will you come? Will you?”

  She spun around and stared at him, her eyes small, her lungs frozen. The whole world seemed to stop, every sound dying. It was as though she were suddenly deaf. She could only feel her own heartbeat, her own blood pulsating through her veins.

  “Maybe,” she whispered. “Yes.” she added quickly, loud enough for him to hear, and then she turned and ran as hard as she could to the house, as if it would give her the sanctuary she needed, sanctuary from herself.

  This time he waited until it was darker, and this time he didn’t stop for anything. He saw little animals scurry away; he heard interesting and curious sounds. He smelled odors that attracted him and touched leaves and soft things he wanted to explore; but each time he fought off the temptation, for tonight he would not make the same mistake. His mind was set on one thing and one thing only—the little girl with the beautiful hair and the happy sounds.

  When he reached Cy Baum’s house, he waited in the bushes at approximately the same place from where he had first seen the little girl. There was no one outside and no indication that anyone was coming outside. This disappointment, on top of what had happened the night before, was more than he could tolerate. He was determined to see her again.

  Cautiously, he emerged from the protection of the bushes, and taking care to remain within th
e shadows, he made his way across the lawn, crawling with his palms down, his feet arched so that his knees stayed inches above the ground. The calves of his legs had grown hard and round from this movement, as had the deltoid muscles in his shoulders. It gave him a knobby-like appearance, but he had yet to see a clear and full reflection of himself. He slowed as he drew closer to the house. The windows on this side were lit and occasionally he saw a shadow move across them. He heard the familiar sounds of a radio and decided to move to the windows that were closer to it.

  At the house, he crouched beside the cement wall. There were no rocks here, nothing to pull out, no way to create a hole so he could enter. All of the windows were much too high for him to reach and look through. It was all so frustrating, so he decided to continue around the house.

  There was a small porch in the rear. He paused by the railings and studied some of the things that were on it—empty bottles placed in a soda case, two folding chairs, a neatly rolled garden hose, and a small tricycle. The little bike interested him. He slid through the bars in the wooden grate and cautiously approached the tricycle. Then he explored all of it with his fingers, tracing the frame back from the handlebars to the rear wheels, running his palm over the soft, vinyl seat, gripping the chrome bars, and pressing down on the pedals. When he did that, the front wheel turned and he was frightened by the bike’s forward motion.

  He retreated a few feet to think about it. What could it be? Was it alive? Was it another kind of small animal? He leaned forward and touched one of the rear wheels. Nothing happened until he pushed on it. The bike moved forward again, only this time it continued its motion until it crashed into the soda case filled with empty bottles. Their rattling sent him scurrying off the porch and around to the other side of the house, where he waited anxiously in the shadows. He remained crouched on all fours, ready to rush into the bushes again. He listened, but no one appeared.