Jane Baum was in bed by 10:30 that night, exhausted once again by her own fear. Lying there in her late aunt’s double bed, she obsessed on the mistake she had made in moving to this dreadful, empty place in the middle of nowhere. She had expected to feel nervous for a while, as any other city dweller might who moved to the country. But she hadn’t counted on being actually phobic
about it—of being possessed by a fear so strong that it seemed to inhabit every cell of her body until at night, every night, she felt she could die from it. She hadn’t known—how could she have known?—she would be one of those people who is terrified by the vastness of the prairie. She had visited the farm only a few times as a child, and from those visits she had remembered only warm and fuzzy things like caterpillars and chicks. She had only dimly remembered how antlike a human being feels on the prairie.
Her aunt’s house had been broken into twice during the period between her aunt’s death and her own occupancy. That fact cemented her fantasies in a foundation of terrifying reality. When Cissy said, “It’s your imagination,” Janie retorted, “But it happened twice before! Twice!” She wasn’t making it up! There were strange, brutal men—that’s how she imagined them, they were never caught by the police—who broke in and took whatever they wanted—cans in the cupboard, the radio in the kitchen. It could happen again, Janie thought obsessively as she lay in the bed; it could happen over and over. To me, to me, to me.
On the prairie, the darkness seemed absolute to her. There were millions of stars but no streetlights. Coyotes howled, or cattle bawled. Occasionally the big night-riding semis whirred by out front. Their tire and engine sounds seemed to come out of nowhere, build to an intolerable whine and then disappear in an uncanny way. She pictured the drivers as big, rough, intense men hopped up on amphetamines; she worried that one night she would hear truck tires turning into her gravel drive, that an engine would switch off, that a truck door would quietly open and then close, that careful footsteps would slur across her gravel.
Her fear had grown so huge, so bad, that she was even frightened of it. It was like a monstrous balloon that inflated every time she breathed. Every night the fear got worse. The balloon got bigger. It nearly filled the bedroom now.
The upstairs bedroom where she lay was hot because she had the windows pulled down and latched, and the curtains drawn.
She could have cooled it with a fan on the dressing table, but she was afraid the fan’s noise might cover the sound of whatever might break into the first floor and climb the stairs to attack her. She lay with a sheet and a blanket pulled up over her arms and shoulders, to just under her chin. She was sweating, as if her fear-frozen body were melting, but it felt warm and almost comfortable to her. She always wore pajamas and thin wool socks to bed because she felt safer when she was completely dressed. She especially felt more secure in pajama pants, which no dirty hand could shove up onto her belly as it could a nightgown.
Lying in bed like a quadriplegic, unmoving, eyes open, Janie reviewed her precautions. Every door was locked, every window was permanently shut and locked, so that she didn’t have to check them every night; all the curtains were drawn; the porch lights were off; and her car was locked in the barn so no trucker would think she was home.
Lately she had taken to sleeping with her aunt’s loaded pistol on the pillow beside her head.
Cissy crawled into bed just before midnight, tired from hours of accounting. She had been out to the barn to check on her giggling girls and the blind calf. She had talked to her husband when he called from Oklahoma City. Now she was thinking about how she would try to start easing Janie Baum out of their lives.
“I’m sorry, Janie, but I’m awfully busy today. I don’t think you ought to come over…”
Oh, but there would be that meek, martyred little voice, just like a baby mouse needing somebody to mother it. How would she deny that need? She was already feeling guilty about refusing Janie’s request to sleep over.
“Well, I will. I just will do it, that’s all. If I could say no to the FHA girls when they were selling fruitcakes, I can start saying no more often to Janie Baum. Anyway, she’s never going to get over her fears if I indulge them.”
Bob had said as much when she’d complained to him long-distance. “Cissy, you’re not helping her,” he’d said. “You’re just letting her get worse.” And then he’d said something new that had disturbed her. “Anyway, I don’t like the girls being around her so much. She’s getting too weird, Cissy.”
She thought of her daughters—of fearless Tess and dear little Mandy—and of how safe and nice it was for children in the country…
“Besides,” Bob had said, “she’s got to do more of her own chores. We need Tess and Mandy to help out around our place more; we can’t be having them always running off to mow her grass and plant her flowers and feed her cows and water her horse and get her eggs, just because she’s scared to stick her silly hand under a damned hen…”
Counting the chores put Cissy to sleep.
“Tess!” Mandy hissed desperately. “Wait!” The older girl slowed, to give Mandy time to catch up to her, and then to touch Tess for reassurance. They paused for a moment to catch their breath and to crouch in the shadow of Jane Baum’s porch. Tess carried three rolls of toilet paper in a makeshift pouch she’d formed in the belly of her black sweatshirt. (“We gotta wear black, remember!”) and Mandy was similarly equipped. Tess decided that now was the right moment to drop her bomb.
“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered.
Mandy was struck cold to her heart by that familiar and dreaded phrase. She moaned quietly. “What?”
“It might rain.”
“I told you!”
“So I think we better do it inside.”
“Inside?”
“Shh! It’ll scare her to death, it’ll be great! Nobody else’ll ever have the guts to do anything as neat as this! We’ll do the kitchen, and if we have time, maybe the dining room.”
“Ohhh, noooo.”
“She thinks she’s got all the doors and windows locked, but she doesn’t!” Tess giggled. She had it all figured out that when Jane Baum came downstairs in the morning, she’d take one look, scream, faint, and then, when she woke up, call everybody in town. The fact that Jane might also call the sheriff had occurred to her, but since Tess didn’t have any faith in the ability of adults to figure out anything important, she wasn’t worried about getting caught. “When I took in her eggs, I unlocked the down-stairs bathroom window Come on! This’ll be great!”
The ribbon of darkness ahead of Mel Brown was no longer straight. It was now bunched into long, steep hills. He hadn’t expected hills. Nobody had told him there was any part of Kansas that wasn’t flat. So he wasn’t making as good time, and the couldn’t run full-bore. But then, he wasn’t in a hurry, except for the hell of it. And this was more interesting, more dangerous, and he liked the thrill of that. He started edging closer to the centerline every time he roared up a hill, playing a game of highway roulette in which he was the winner as long as what-ever coming from the other direction had its headlights on.
When that got boring, he turned his own headlights off.
Now he roared past cars and trucks like a dark demon.
Mel laughed every time, thinking how surprised they must be, and how frightened. They’d think, Crazy fool, I could have hit him…
He supposed he wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe going back to prison, and he didn’t think they’d send him down on a speeding ticket. Besides, if Kansas was like most states, it was long on roads and short on highway patrolmen…
Roaring downhill was even more fun, because of the way his stomach dropped out. He felt like a kid, yelling “Fuuuuck,” all the way down the other side. What a goddamned roller coaster of a state this was turning out to be.
The rain still looked miles away.
Mel felt as if he could ride all night. Except that his eyes were gritty, the first sign that he’d better st
art looking for a likely place to spend the night. He wasn’t one to sleep under the stars, not if he could find a ceiling.
Tess directed her sister to stack the rolls of toilet paper underneath the bathroom window on the first floor of Jane Baum’s house. The six rolls, all white, stacked three in a row, two high, gave Tess the little bit of height and leverage she needed to push up the glass with her palms. She stuck her fingers under the bottom edge and laboriously attempted to raise the window. It was stiff in its coats of paint.
“Damn!” she exclaimed, and let her arms slump. Beneath her feet, the toilet paper was getting squashed.
She tried again, and this time she showed her strength from lifting calves and tossing hay. With a crack of paint and a thump of wood on wood, the window slid all the way up.
“Shhh!” Mandy held her fists in front of her face and knocked her knuckles against each other in excitement and agitation. Her ears picked up the sound of a roaring engine on the highway, and she was immediately sure it was the sheriff, coming to arrest her and Tess. She tugged frantically at the calf of her sister’s right leg.
Tess jerked her leg out of Mandy’s grasp and disappeared through the open window.
The crack of the window and the thunder of the approaching motorcycle confused themselves in Jane’s sleeping consciousness, so that when she awoke from dreams full of anxiety—her eyes flying open, the rest of her body frozen—she imagined in a confused, hallucinatory kind of way that somebody was both coming to get her and already there in the house.
Jane then did as she had trained herself to do. She had practiced over and over every night, so that her actions would be instinctive. She turned her face to the pistol on the other pillow and placed her thumb on the trigger.
Her fear—of rape, of torture, of kidnapping, of agony, of death—was a balloon, and she floated horribly in the center of it. There were thumps and other sounds downstairs, and they joined her in the balloon. There was an engine roaring, and then suddenly it was silent, and a slurring of wheels in her gravel drive, and these sounds joined her in her balloon. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she popped the balloon by shooting herself in the forehead.
In the driveway, Mel Brown heard the gun go off.
He slung his leg back onto his motorcycle and roared back out onto the highway. So the place had looked empty. So he’d been wrong. So he’d find someplace else. But holy shit. Get the fuck outta here.
Inside the house, in the bathroom, Tess also heard the shot and, being a ranch child, recognized it instantly for what it was, although she wasn’t exactly sure where it had come from. Cussing and sobbing, she clambered over the sink and back out the window, falling onto her head and shoulders on the rolls of toilet paper.
“It’s the sheriff!” Mandy was hysterical. “He’s shooting at us!”
Tess grabbed her little sister by a wrist and pulled her away from the house. They were both crying and stumbling. They ran in the drainage ditch all the way home and flung themselves into the barn.
Mandy ran to lie beside the little blind bull calf. She lay her head on Flopper’s side. When he didn’t respond, she jerked to her feet. She glared at her sister.
“He’s dead!”
“Shut up!”
Cissy Johnson had awakened, too, although she hadn’t known why. Something, some noise, had stirred her. And now she sat up in bed, breathing hard, frightened for no good reason she could fathom. If Bob had been home, she’d have sent him out
to the barn to check on the girls. But why? The girls were all right, they must be, this was just the result of a bad dream. But she didn’t remember having any such dream.
Cissy got out of bed and ran to the window.
No, it wasn’t a storm, the rain hadn’t come.
A motorcycle!
That’s what she’d heard, that’s what had awakened her!
Quickly, with nervous fingers, Cissy put on a robe and tennis shoes. Darn you, Janie Baum, she thought, your fears are contagious, that’s what they are. The thought popped into her head: If you don’t have fears, they can’t come true.
Cissy raced out to the barn.
The Young Shall See Visions, and the Old Dream Dreams
KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH
There has long been a substantial crossover between writers of science fiction and writers of crime and suspense fiction, but most of the early names that come readily to mind (Poul Anderson, Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, Isaac Asimov) are male, simply because in its earlier years, few women wrote sci-fi. Now, of course, there are many women in that field, and a number of them—Kate Wilhelm, for example—have also contributed to mystery fiction.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (b. 1960) was born in Oneonta, New York, attended the University of Wisconsin and Clarion Writers Workshop, and now lives in Oregon. A freelance journalist and editor and a radio news director earlier in her career, she edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the venerable journal founded by Boucher at mid-century, from 1991 to 1997. With her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, she founded Pulphouse Publishing (1987-92).
While Rusch is better known as a science fiction than a mystery writer, having won the prestigious John W. Campbell Award for new writers in 1991, she has a solid record of achievement in both genres. Among her sci-fi works are Star Trek (in collaboration with her husband) and Star Wars novels. The’ cross-genre Afterimage (1992), written with Kevin J. Anderson, is a fantasy serial-killer novel. Her mystery novel Hitler’s Angel (1998) was a critical success, and in 1999, she scored a rare hat trick, winning Reader’s Choice Awards from three different peri
odicals: Science Fiction Age, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and (with the World War II-era mystery “Details”) Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine.
“The Young Shall See Visions and the Old Dream Dreams” first appeared in EQMM’s stablemate, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
Nell rubs a hand on her knickers and grips the bat tightly. Her topknot is coming loose. She can see strands of hair hanging in front of the wire frames of her glasses. “What’s the matter, four-eyes? You nervous?” She concentrates on the ball Pete holds in his right hand instead of the boys scattered across the dusty back lot. Any minute now, he’ll pitch, and if she thinks about the ball instead of the names, she’ll hit it. “You hold that bat like a girl,” T.J. says from first base. Nell keeps staring at the ball. She can see the stitches running along its face, the dirty surface disappearing into Pete’s fist. “That’s because I am a girl,” she says. It doesn’t matter if T.J. hears her. All that matters is that she spoke. “Pitch already!” Chucky yells from the grassy sideline. Pete spits and Nell grimaces. She hates it when he spits. With a sharp snap of the wrist, he releases the ball. It curves toward her. She jumps out of its way and swings at the same time. The ball hits the skinny part of the bat, close to her fingers, and bounces forward. “Ruuun!” Chucky screams. She drops the bat and takes off, the air caught in her throat. She’s not good at running; someone always tags her before she gets to base. But the sweater-wrapped rock that is first base is getting closer and still she can’t hear anyone running behind her. She leaps the last few inches and lands in the middle of the rock, leaving a large footprint in the wool. A few seconds later, the ball slams into T.J.’s palm.
“You didn’t have to move,” T.J. says. “The ball was gonna hit you anyway.”
“Pete always does that so that I can’t swing.” Nell tugs on her ripped, high-buttoned blouse. “He knows I hit better than any of you guys, so he cheats. And besides, the last time he did that I was bruised for a week. Papa wasn’t gonna let me play anymore.”
T.J. shrugs, his attention already on the next batter. “Nell?” She looks up. Edmund is standing behind third base. His three-
piece suit is dusty and he looks tired. “Jeez,” she says under her
breath.
“What?” T.J. asks.
“Nothing,” she says. “I gotta go.”
“Why? The game’s
not over.”
“I know.” She pushes a strand of hair out of her face. “But I gotta go anyway.”
She walks across the field in front of the pitcher’s mound. Pete spits and barely misses her shoe. She stops and slowly looks up at him in a conscious imitation of her father’s most frightening look.
“Whatcha think you’re doing?” he asks.
“Leaving.” Her glasses have slid to the edge of her nose, but she doesn’t push them back. Touching them would remind him that she can’t see very well.
“Can’t. You’re on first.”
“Chucky can take my place.”
“Can’t neither. He’s gotta bat soon.”
She glances at Chucky. He’s too far away to hear anything. “I can’t do anything about it, Pete. I gotta go.”
Pete tugs his cap over his eyes and squints at her. “Then you can’t play with us no more. It was dumb to let a girl play in the first place.”
“It is not dumb! And you’ve gone home in the middle of a game before.” She hates Pete. Someday she’ll show him that a girl can be just as good as a boy, even at baseball.
“Nell.” Edmund sounds weary. “Let’s go.”
“He’s not your pa,” Pete says. “How come you gotta go with him?”
“He’s my sister’s boyfriend.” She pushes her glasses up with her knuckle and trudges the rest of the way across the yard. When she reaches Edmund, he takes her arm and they start walking.
“Why do you play with them?” he asks softly. “Baseball isn’t a game for young ladies.”
He always asks her that, and once he yelled at her for wearing the knickers that Karl had given her. “I don’t like playing dollies with Louisa.”
“I don’t suppose I’d like that much either,” he says. When they get far enough away from the field, he stops and turns her to him. There are deep shadows under his eyes and his face looks pinched. “I’m not going to take you all the way home. I just came because I promised I would.”
“You’re not gonna see Bess?”
He shakes his head, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out the slender ring that cost him three months’ wages. The diamond glitters in the sunlight. “Karl’s back,” he says.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 33