by Peter Straub
“I see you!” the man shouted.
I didn’t bother to turn around: the vanishing of the figure into the woods made me run even harder, even more clumsily, forgetting the technique I had learned in the police parking lot. The ground was hard and dry, covered with a light stubble, and I pounded along, keeping in view the place where the figure had last been. Beside me, the corn was higher than my head, a solid dark mass beyond the first rows.
The boundary of the first row of fields, from the highway to the farm just beyond Duane’s, is formed by a small creek, and it was this that gave me my first difficulty. The plowed and farmed land ended about eight feet on either side of the creek; when I reached the end of the corn planting, I looked to my left and saw an area of beaten-down tall grass and flattened weeds where apparently Duane customarily drove the tractor through to the upper fields. When I ran there and began to approach the creek, I saw that the ground had been churned by the tractor so that the whole area was a muddy swamp. There the creek was four or five feet wider than anywhere else, spilling out into the depression the tractor had made. I walked back along the bank; birds and frogs announced themselves, joining the cricket noises that had surrounded me since I had left the road. My boots were encased in soft mud.
I pushed tall fibrous weeds apart with my arms and saw a narrowing of the creek. Two hairy grassy bulges of earth made an interrupted bridge over the water; the bulges, about a yard and a half apart, were supported by the root systems of two of the cottonwood trees which grew all along the creek’s length. I circled one of the trees and edged out on the root-hump and jumped across, banging my forehead and nose into the trunk of the tree on the opposite side. Crows took off in noisy alarm. Still clutching the tree with both arms, I looked back over the cornfield and saw the VW parked on the valley road before the Sunderson house up on its hill. Light came beaming out from both house and car—I had forgotten to turn off the engine. Worse, I had left the key in the ignition. Mrs. Sunderson and Red were standing at one of the windows, cupping their hands to their eyes and staring out.
I jumped down from the humped tangle of roots and, after struggling through another area of thick weeds, began to jog up through the next field. I could see the place where I thought the figure had slipped into the woods, and pushed myself up over a rise where alfalfa gave way to corn again. In a few minutes I was at the beginning of the trees.
They seemed sparser, less a thick homogeneous mass than they had appeared from the road. Moonlight made it possible for me to see where I was going once I had begun to run through the widely spaced trees. My feet encountered the edges of large rocks and the yielding softness of mold and beds of pine needles. As I ran deeper into the trees the impression of sparseness quickly diminished: the ghostly pines and birches slipped behind me, and I was moving between oaks and elms, veterans with rivered barks which blocked out nearly all the light. I came to a jog and then stopped, hearing an excited rustle of movement off to my left.
I turned my head in time to see a deer bounding for cover, lifting its haunches like a woman leaving a diving board.
Alison. I plunged blindly off to the right, hindered by my heavy boots. She had appeared to me, she had signaled. Somewhere, she was waiting for me. Somewhere deep in the darkness.
—
A long time later and after I entered a circle of trees, I admitted that I was lost. Not finally lost, because the slope of the forest’s floor told me which way the fields and the road were, but lost enough not to know if I had been circling. More disturbingly, after I had fallen and rolled against a lichen-covered boulder, I had become unsure of lateral direction. The woods were too dark for me to see farmhouse lights in the distance—in fact, distance did not seem to exist at all, except as an infinity of big close dark trees. I had edged my way into one clearing, perhaps half a mile back; but it may have been up, not back, and was at least some distance up, for I had come down the slope before going right again. All in all I thought I had been looking for nearly an hour, and the trees about me seemed familiar, as if I had been at this same spot before. It was only the little clearing, blackened at its center with the cold ashes of a fire, which proved I had gone anywhere at all, and not turned and turned in the same place before the same trees until I was lost and dizzy.
Because, really, it did look familiar—the giant bulge of a trunk before me had been before me earlier, I had looked up at an identical thick curve of branch, I had knelt on an identical shattered log. I shouted my cousin’s name.
At that moment I had an essentially literary experience, brewed up out of Jack London and Hawthorne and Cooper and Disney cartoons and Shakespeare and the brothers Grimm, of panic which quickly passed into fear. The panic was at being lost, but the fear which rushed in after it was simply of the woods themselves, of giant alien nature. I mean that the trees seemed inhabited by threatening life. Malevolence surrounded me. Not just nature’s famous Darwinian indifference, but active actual hostility. It was the most primitive apprehension of evil I had ever known. I was a fragile human life on the verge of being crushed by immense forces, by forces of huge and impersonal evil. Alison was a part of this; she had drawn me in. I knew that if I did not move, I would be snatched by awful twigged hands, I would be shredded against stones and branches, my mouth and eyes filled with moss. I would die as the two girls had died. Lichen would pack my mouth. How foolish we had been to assume that mere human beings had killed the girls!
From this frozen encounter with spirit it was terror that finally released me, and I ran blindly, plungingly, in any direction I could find—in far greater fear than I had run from the hooligans in Arden. Low branches caught my stomach and brought me crashing down, rocks skittered under my slippery feet, twigs clutched at my trousers. Low leaves rustled at my eyes. I was just running, glad for running, and my heart whooped and my lungs caught at breath.
I fell many times. The last time, I peered up through creepers and nettles and saw that the malevolence had gone; the god had departed; human light was darting into the vegetation, the light which represents our conquering of unreason, and I brought my body complaining up into a squatting position to see from where the light was coming. I could feel Alison’s letter in my pocket. My personality began to reassemble. Artificial light is a poem to reasonableness, the lightbulb casts out demons, it speaks in rhymed couplets, and my body began to shake with relief, as if I had stumbled into the formal gardens of Versailles.
Even my normal cast of mind returned to me, and I regretted my momentary betrayal of belief. It was betrayal of Alison and betrayal of spirit. I had been spooked, and spooked by literature at that.
As this specific Teagardenish guilt whispered through me, I finally saw where I was and knew the house from which light fell. Yet my body still trembled with relief when I made it stand and walk through the domesticated oaks.
She appeared on the porch. The sleeves of a man’s tweed jacket hung below the tips of her fingers. She was still wearing the high rubber boots. “Who is that out there? Miles? Is that you?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I got lost.”
“Are you alone?”
“You’re always asking me that.”
“But I heard two of you.”
I just stared at her.
“Come on in, Miles, and I’ll pour you some coffee.”
When I came up on the porch she scrutinized me with her good eye. “Why, Miles, you’re in a terrible condition! You’re all over dirt. And you’ve torn your clothes.” She looked down. “And you’ll have to take off those boots before you can come into my kitchen.”
Gently I removed the mud-laden boots. I was aware of numerous small aches and sores on my face and hands, and I had somewhere banged my leg in the same place I had when I had accompanied the chair down the stairs of the root cellar.
“Why, you’re limping, Miles! What were you doing out there at night?”
I lowered myself into a chair and she placed a cup before me. “Auntie Rinn, are you s
ure you heard someone else in the woods? Someone besides me?”
“It was probably one of the chickens. They do get out and make an awful ruckus.” She was sitting poised on a chair across the old wooden table from me, her long white hair falling to the shoulders of the gray tweed jacket. Steam from the cups rose wispily between us. “Let me take care of your face.”
“Please don’t bother,” I said, but she had already bounced up and was at the sink, dampening a cloth. Then she took a covered pot from a shelf and returned. The cloth was cool and soothing against my cheekbones.
“I don’t like saying this to you, Miles, but I think you should leave the valley. You were troubled when you first came here, and you are more troubled now. If you will insist on staying, I want you to leave Jessie’s house and come to stay here.”
“I can’t.”
She dipped her fingers in the pot and dabbed a thick green mixture on my cuts. It made my entire face throb. A woodsy fragrance snagged in my nostrils. “This is just an herbal mixture for your cuts, Miles. What were you doing out there?”
“Looking for someone.”
“Looking for something in the woods at night?”
“Ah, yes, someone broke most of the glass on my car and I thought I saw them running up this way.”
“Why were you trembling?”
“I’m not used to running.” Her fingers were still rubbing the green mixture into my face.
“I can protect you, Miles.”
“I don’t need protection.”
“Then why were you so frightened?”
“It was just the woods. The darkness.”
“Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.” She looked at me fiercely. “But it is never right to lie to me, Miles. You were not looking for a vandal. Were you?”
I was conscious of the trees bending over the house, of the darkness outside her circle of light.
She said, “You must pack your things and leave. Come here or go back to New York. Go to your father in Florida.”
“I can’t.” That thick smell hung over my face.
“You will be destroyed. You must at least come here to stay with me.”
“Auntie Rinn,” I said. My entire body had begun to shake again. “Some people think I have been killing those girls—that was the reason they attacked my car. What could you do against them?”
“They will never come here. They will never come up my path.” I remembered how she had terrified me when I was a child, with that look on her face, sentences like that in her mouth. “They are only town people. They have nothing to do with the valley.”
The little kitchen seemed intolerably hot, and I saw that the woodstove was burning, alive like a fireplace with snapping flames.
I said, “I want to tell you the truth. I felt something monstrous out there. Something purely hostile, and that’s why I was frightened. I guess it was evil I felt. But it all came out of books. Some toughs chased me through Arden, and then Polar Bears shook me up, as he would say. I know the literature about all this. I know all about Puritans in the wilderness, and it caught up with me. I’ve been repressed and I’m not myself.”
“What are you waiting for, Miles?” she asked, and I knew that I could prevaricate no longer.
“I’m waiting for Alison,” I said. “Alison Greening. I thought it was her I saw from the road, and I ran up into the woods to find her. I’ve seen her three times.”
“Miles—” she began, her face wild and angry.
“I’m not working on my dissertation anymore, I don’t care about that, I’ve been feeling more and more that all of that is death to the spirit, and I’ve been getting signs that Alison will come soon.”
“Miles—”
“Here’s one of them,” I said and took the crumpled envelope out of my pocket. “Hovre thinks I sent it to myself, but she sent it, didn’t she? That’s why the writing is like mine.”
She was going to speak again, and I held up my hand. “You see, you never liked her, nobody ever liked her, but we were always alike. We were almost the same person. I’ve never loved any other woman.”
“She was your snare. She was a trap waiting for you to enter it.”
“Then she still is, but I don’t believe it.”
“Miles—”
“Auntie Rinn, in 1955 we made a vow that we would meet here in the valley, and we set a date. It’s in only a few weeks from now. She is going to come, and I am going to meet her.”
“Miles,” she said, “your cousin is dead. She died twenty years ago, and you killed her.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
SIX
“Miles,” she said, “your cousin died in 1955 while the two of you were swimming in the old Pohlson quarry. She was drowned.”
“No. She drowned,” I said. “Active verb. I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have killed her. She meant more to me than my own life. I would rather have died myself. It was the end of my life anyhow.”
“You may have killed her by accident—you may not have known what you were doing. I am only an old farm woman, but I know you. I love you. You have always been troubled. Your cousin was also a troubled person, but her troubles were not innocent, as yours were. She chose the rocky path, she desired confusion and evil, and you never committed that sin.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. She was, I don’t know, more complicated than I was, but that was part of her beauty. For me, anyhow. No one else understood her. And I did not kill her, accidentally or any other way.”
“Only you two were there.”
“That’s not certain.”
“Did you see anyone else that night?”
“I don’t know. I might have. I thought I did, several times. I got knocked out in the water.”
“By Alison’s struggles. She nearly took you with her.”
“I wish she had. I haven’t had a life since.”
“Not a whole life. Not a satisfied life. Because of her.”
“Stop it,” I shouted. The heat of the kitchen was building up around me, seeming to increase with every word. The stuff on my face was beginning to burn. My shout had frightened her; she seemed paler and smaller, inside all those wrinkles and the man’s baggy jacket. She slowly sipped at her coffee, and I felt a great sad inevitable remorse. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shouted. If you love me it must be the way you’d love some wounded bird. I’m in a terrible state, Auntie Rinn.”
“I know,” she said calmly. “That’s why I have to protect you. That’s why you have to leave the valley. It’s too late now for anything else.”
“Because Alison is coming back, you mean. Because she is.”
“If she is, then there is nothing to do. It is too late for anything. She has hooks in you too deep for me to remove them.”
“Thank God for that. She means freedom to me. She means life.”
“No. She means death. She means what you felt out there tonight.”
“That was nerves.”
“That was Alison. She wants to claim you.”
“She claimed me years ago.”
“Miles, you are submitting to forces you don’t understand. I don’t understand them either, but I respect them. And I fear them. Have you thought about what happens after she returns?”
“What happens doesn’t matter. She will be in this world again. She knows I didn’t kill her.”
“Perhaps that doesn’t matter. Or perhaps it matters less than you think it does. Tell me about that night, Miles.”
I let my head drop forward, so that my chin nearly touched my chest. “What good would that do?”
“Then I will tell you. This is what Arden people remember about you, Miles. They remember that you were suspected of murder. You already had a bad reputation—you were known as a thief, a disturbed, disordered boy with no control over his feelings. Your cousin was—I don’t know what the word is. A sexual tease. She was corrupt. She shocked the valley people. She was calculating and she had power
—I recognized when she was only a child that she was a destructive person. She hated life. She hated everything but herself.”
“Never,” I said.
“And the two of you went to the quarry to swim, no doubt after Alison had deceived your mothers. She was ensnaring you even more deeply. Miles, there can exist between two people a kind of deep connection, a kind of voice between them, a calling, and if the dominant person is corrupted, the connection is unhealthy and corrupt.”
“Skip the rigamarole,” I said. “Get on with what you want to say.” I wanted to leave her overheated kitchen; I wanted to immure myself in the old Updahl farmhouse.
“I will.” Her face was hard as winter. “Someone driving past on the Arden road heard screams coming from the quarry and called the police. When old Walter Hovre got there he found you unconscious on the rock ledge. Your face was bleeding. Alison was dead. He could just see her body, caught on a rock projection down in the water. Both of you were naked. She had been…she had been abused.” Her complexion began to redden. “The inference was there to be made. It was obvious.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think she seduced you and died accidentally. That she died by your hand, but that it was not murder.” Now her blushing was pronounced: it was a ghastly effect, as if she had rubbed rouge into her cheeks. “I have never known physical love, Miles, but I imagine that it is a turbulent business.” She raised her chin and looked straight at me. “That is what everybody thought. You were not to be charged—in fact, many women in Arden thought that your cousin had gotten just what she deserved. The coroner, who was Walter Hovre in those days, said that it was accidental death. He was a kindly man, and he’d had his troubles with his own son. He did not want to ruin your life. It helped that you were an Updahl. People hereabouts have always looked up to your family.”
“Just tell me this,” I said. “When everybody was silently condemning me while hypocritically setting me free, didn’t anyone wonder who had made that phone call?”