Nathaniel

by John Saul

  The dog whined happily and licked Michael's face. "But we've only been up an hour," Janet pointed out. "Your grandfather's been up since dawn. Shadow could have been over there."

  "But why would he go to Grandpa's? He doesn't even like Grandpa!"

  Janet sighed, and got to her feet. "Well, we don't really know what happened, do we? So why don't we go over there and find out?" Suddenly Michael stiffened. "No!"

  "Michael!"

  "I don't want to go over there. Grandpa's going to try to blame everything on Shadow, and it's not fair."

  Suddenly Janet's own thoughts from the night before came back to her. Don't argue with him. "All right," she agreed. "You can stay here. But I want you to stay in the house, and rest. You still limp, even if it's just a little."

  "Can't I even go out to the backyard and play with Shadow? I could just throw sticks for him."

  Janet was already at the front door. "Okay, but that's as far as you go. The yard. Understood?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'll be back as soon as I can." And then she was gone, and Michael and Shadow were alone in the house.

  "Did you get him, Shadow?" Michael said softly when the sound of the old truck had faded away. "Did you really get him?" The dog whimpered, and pressed closer. "Good boy," Michael whispered. "Next time, maybe you can make him die."

  The scene at the Halls' was eerily familiar: there was Anna, her wheelchair pushed close to the sofa in the parlor, and there was Ione Simpson, doing her best to fill the gap left by Dr. Potter's death, bending over the supine figure on the sofa. But this time, it was Amos Hall, not Michael, on the sofa. Janet paused at the doorway for a moment, but Anna motioned her into the room.

  "He's all right," she assured the younger woman. "Nothing's broken, and Ione doesn't think there're any internal injuries. Mostly, he got the wind knocked out of him, and his dignity's taken a beating." Suddenly she frowned. "Where's Michael?"

  "I left him at home," Janet replied hastily. "I didn't know what was happening here, and I was afraid he'd just add to the confusion."

  "It's his dog, I want," Amos suddenly growled. He struggled a moment, then sat up, fury in his eyes. "That mutt attacked me, and I want it destroyed."

  "Now, Amos," Anna began, but her husband cut her off.

  "You saw him, Anna. You saw him sneaking around the barn. And then he went for me."

  "Oh, Amos, I'm so sorry," Janet said. "What happened? Why did he attack you?"

  "How the hell do I know why?" Amos snorted. Briefly, he told them what had happened. When he was done, Janet sighed.

  "We'll just have to get rid of the dog then, I suppose."

  "Get rid of him?" Ione asked. "What do you mean?"

  Amos glared at her. "She means have it destroyed. Don't you understand English anymore?" Ione's lips tightened but she said nothing.

  Janet leaned forward. "Amos, I didn't mean that—"

  "Well, you should have. The dog's dangerous. I told you that when it first came around, but you didn't believe me. Well, do you believe me now?"

  "I--."

  But this time it was Ione Simpson who didn't let Amos finish. "Are you sure the dog attacked you, Amos?"

  Amos's angry eyes shifted back to the nurse again. "What the hell do you mean, am I sure?"

  "We've had a lot of dog bites over the years," Ione replied, keeping her voice calm in the face of Amos's wrath. "Most of them were just nips, but a few of them were good hard bites. And a few years back, a dog about the size of a collie did attack someone around here."

  "And?" Amos asked.

  Ione shrugged. "At least those people had a break in their skin for their trouble. And remember Joe Cotter? Both his arms were torn up, and he was lucky he survived."

  For a long moment, Amos was silent, glowering malevolently at Ione. When he finally spoke, his voice was dangerously low. "Are you accusing me of lying?" Ione shook her head tiredly, knowing arguing with Amos Hall was useless. "I'm only suggesting you might think it was a lot worse than it was. I mean, where are the bites?"

  "Goddamn it, it didn't bite me," Amos roared. "It backed me up to the edge of the loft, then jumped at me and pushed me off."

  "Amos, calm down," Anna cut in. "No one's accusing you of anything, and I'm sure you think Shadow attacked you. But couldn't you be wrong? Just once in your life, couldn't you be wrong about something?"

  "No," Amos snapped. "I know what happened, and I want that dog destroyed. He's dangerous. Sooner or later he'll attack someone else." His attention turned back to Janet. "How would you feel if he attacked Michael?"

  Janet stared at the old man, aghast. "Michael?" she replied. "Why on earth would he attack Michael? He adores him. It's almost as if the two of them can communicate with each other."

  Amos's eyes darkened. "Well, if something happens to Michael, it won't be my fault."

  Suddenly Janet found herself angry with the old man. "Amos, stop it," she said. "Nothing's going to happen to Michael, and if it does, it won't be because of Shadow. Right now, that dog is Michael's closest friend, and unless you can come up with something more than talk to back up your claims that he attacked you, I'm not getting rid of him. Ione's right—if he'd attacked you, it seems to me you'd at least have some scratches. I think you simply stumbled off that loft yourself, and you don't want to admit it. And frankly, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to put the blame on Shadow." She rose to her feet and left the front room, followed immediately by Anna, who stopped her just as she was leaving the house.

  "Janet? Wait a minute."

  Her anger already spent, Janet turned back to face her mother-in-law. "Oh, Anna, I'm sorry—I just don't know what got into me."

  "No," Anna said softly, shaking her head. "Don't apologize. It wasn't your fault—none of it. I'm sure you were right about what happened. But Amos has always been that way—he can't stand to be contradicted, or criticized, or made to feel he's wrong. He'll get over it. Just give him a little time."

  Janet nodded. "Of course." She smiled sadly at Anna. "Is that what happened with Mark? Did he suggest that Amos was wrong about something?"

  Anna hesitated a moment, then nodded. "I suppose you could say that." Her eyes met Janet's, and Janet could almost feel the sadness in them. "Don't you do it, too," she pleaded. "Don't turn away from him—from us. I know he's not always easy, but he loves you, and he loves Michael. I know he does."

  Janet reached out and touched the older woman's cheek.

  "I know," she said softly. "And it will be all right. I won't hold anything against him, and neither will Michael."

  Anna stayed by the door until Janet was gone, then slowly wheeled herself back to the living room, where Ione Simpson was giving Amos a shot. Anna sat silently in her chair, her eyes fixed on her husband.

  But in her mind, she had gone back twenty years, back to the house where Janet lived now, the house Mark had fled from.

  She has to know, Anna thought. Sometime, Janet has to know what happened that night, and why Mark left. And I will have to tell her. But even as she entertained the thought, Anna was not at all sure she could ever tell the truth about that night and what had gone before. Even after all these years, it was still too painful to think about.

  She came back to the present, and focused once more on her husband. Silently, she wondered what had really happened in the barn that morning, wondered if Shadow had, indeed, attacked Amos. Or had it been another accident, like Mark's. Like Michael's.

  With a shudder, Anna recalled her husband's words on the day Michael's foot had been hurt. The trouble would go on, she realized. The trouble that had started twenty years ago, then erupted again when Mark finally came home.

  And suddenly she knew, with dreadful certainty, that the trouble wouldn't end until Amos was dead. Amos, or Michael. Her husband, or her grandson.

  Slowly, Anna turned and wheeled herself out of the room.

  "Get it, Shadow! Go get it, boy!" The stick had arced through the air, landing with a thud
in the dust near the entrance to the cyclone cellar. Shadow took a few steps away from Michael, then turned back to look uncertainly at his master. "That's right, Shadow," Michael told him. "Fetch. Fetch the stick." The big dog hesitated, then as if finally understanding what was expected of him, trotted off toward the little dugout. But before he got to the stick, he veered off to the right, and a moment later began snuffling around the edges of the closed door. At last he looked back at Michael and barked loudly.

  "Aw, come on, Shadow, we're supposed to be playing fetch," Michael complained. He began trudging once more toward the piece of wood which had so far entirely failed to capture the dog's attention. When he had the stick in hand, Michael called to Shadow again. "Come on, boy. Look what I've got!" But Shadow ignored him, his nose still pressed against the crack between the doors of the storm cellar. Frowning slightly, Michael dropped the stick and started toward the dog, and as he drew close to the big animal, he began to feel a slow throb begin in his temples. "What is it?" he asked.

  As if in answer, Shadow whined eagerly, and pawed at the door.

  "Is something in there?" Michael struggled with the door for a moment and finally succeeded in getting it halfway open. Shadow immediately disappeared into the gloom of the little room, but Michael hesitated, searching the darkness for some hint of what had attracted the dog.

  And then he heard the voice.

  "Michael."

  "N-Nathaniel? Are—are you in here?"

  "Go inside," the voice instructed him. "Go inside, and close the door."

  As if in a trance, Michael obeyed the voice, moving carefully down the steep steps, lowering the door closed behind him. Slowly, his eyes began adjusting to the darkness. Enough light seeped through the cracks in the weathered doors to let him see Shadow crouching attentively in the corner, his ears up, his tail twitching with eagerness.

  "Nathaniel? Are you in here?"

  "I am in you, Michael. I am in you, and you are in me. Do you understand?"

  In the semidarkness of the subterranean room, Michael slid his arms around Shadow's neck, pulling the dog close. "N-no."

  "We are part of each other," Nathaniel's voice said. "I am part of your father, and I am part of you."

  "My father?" Michael breathed. "Is—is that why Grandpa killed him?"

  "He found out. He found out, so he killed your father."

  Michael's eyes darted around, searching for the familiar face of Nathaniel, but there was nothing in the room, nothing but the coolness and gloom. "What did Dad find out?" he whispered.

  "The children. He found out about the children. I told him, and showed him, and he believed. But he was afraid."

  "He wasn't!" Michael protested. "My dad wasn't afraid of anything!"

  "He was afraid to act, Michael," the strange voice replied. "He was afraid to punish them, even after he saw what they did."

  "Y-you mean he wouldn't fight?" Michael's voice quavered as he asked the question, for slowly he was beginning to understand what was going to be asked of him.

  "He wouldn't make them die, Michael." Nathaniel's voice took on a strangely compelling quality, and even though Michael was sure he ought to resist the voice, he knew he wouldn't. "Will you, Michael? When the time comes, will you be with me and help me make them die?"

  "I—I don't—"

  "You do know, Michael," Nathaniel's voice insisted. "You know what you must do. You told us so."

  "Told you? Told you what?"

  There was a long silence, and then, from inside his head, Michael heard his own words—the words he'd spoken to Shadow that very morning—repeated to him in the voice of Nathaniel: "Next time, maybe you can make him die."

  Deep down inside, far down in the depths of his subconscious, Michael understood what was expected of him.

  He was to avenge his father's death.

  He was to kill his grandfather.

  His head pounding with the throbbing pain, Michael tried to drive the voice of Nathaniel out of his mind. His arms dropped away from Shadow, and he hurled himself toward the cellar door, scrambling up the steep steps, bursting out into the morning sunlight. But even then, Nathaniel's face lingered inside him.

  "You will, Michael. When the time comes, you will help me. You will make them die, Michael. You will…"

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Ryan Shields was working on his bicycle, adjusting the seat and the handlebars, when he heard the back door slam. He looked up, then watched curiously as his mother brought a bundle of clothes down the back steps and made her way across the yard to the graveled area where the incinerator stood. "Whatcha doing?"

  "Cleaning out the attic," Laura told him. "It's gotten too full, and your father wants me to burn some things."

  "Want me to help?" Ryan asked, eagerly abandoning the bike in favor of the prospect of a bonfire. But Laura shook her head.

  "I can do it." Carefully, she set the bundle on the gravel, stared at it a moment, then returned to the house. A few minutes later she appeared once again, struggling to maneuver a crib through the back door. Immediately, Ryan recognized the crib.

  "You're going to burn that?" he asked. "But that's—"

  "I know what it is," Laura said, and there was something in her voice that made Ryan fall silent. "I know what all of this stuff is, and I don't want to talk about it, Ryan." She glared at him for a second. Then: "Don't you have anything to do? Do you have to hang around here all the time? Why don't you go out and see Michael?"

  Abashed, Ryan scuffed at the ground for a moment.

  "Well?" Laura demanded with a severity that startled her son. "You haven't seen Michael for a long time. Did you two have a fight?"

  "Not exactly—"

  "Then go," Laura told him.

  "But Dad told me not to go anywhere," Ryan protested. "He told me to stay around here in case you needed anything."

  "Well, I don't need anything," Laura declared. "And I'm getting tired of having you underfoot all the time." Then, as she saw her son's chin begin to quiver, she suddenly relented. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry. It's just that I'm upset right now, and I have to do something I really don't want to do. It'll be easier if I'm by myself. Do you understand?"

  Even though he didn't understand at all, Ryan nodded his head. "But if you don't want to burn that stuff, how come you're going to?"

  "Because your father says I have to. I've put it off as long as I can, and I have to do it by myself. All right?"

  Reluctantly, Ryan got to his feet. "Okay. Maybe I'll go out and see what Eric's doing. Maybe we can go fishing."

  "Why don't you go see Michael? Are you mad at him?" she asked again.

  Ryan hesitated, and dug at the ground with the toe of his sneaker. "He's always got his dog with him," he finally said.

  "Shadow? Don't you like him?"

  "He doesn't like me. He only likes Michael, and whenever anyone else is around, he starts growling. He scares me."

  "He's just being protective—he wouldn't hurt you. Now run on along."

  When Ryan was gone, she finished bringing Becky's things down from the attic.

  She went over them once more—the clothes Becky had never worn, the crib Becky had never used, the mobiles Laura had never been able to hang over Becky's bassinet, and the toys she had never been able to see Becky touch for the first time. Finally there was nothing left except the album, the album which should have eventually filled with pictures of Becky's first years.

  The captions were all there: "Her first meal."

  "Sunning in the backyard."

  "First step—wobbly, but she did it!"

  She turned the pages slowly, as if studying for the last time the pictures that weren't there—had never been there.

  She'd nearly lost herself over Becky. She could remember some of it so well, and yet so much of it was a blank.

  She could recall the days of waking up and listening for the cries of the baby, only to remember that there would be no cries, for there was no baby. Other days—the worst da
ys—she'd known from the moment she awoke that Becky had died, and those days had been desolate ones.

  The best days had been the days—sometimes two or three of them in a row—when she truly believed that Becky was still there in the house, sleeping, perhaps, and would soon wake up and call for her. It was during one of those times that she'd ordered the Raggedy Ann doll, a gift for Becky to make up for her own neglect.

  No one had known she'd done it until the doll arrived, and when Buck had asked her about it, she'd blurted out the truth without thinking. "It's for Becky—I've left her alone so much."

  That's when they'd sent her away for a while—not very long, really, only a few weeks. And when she'd come back, she'd been all right. Except that every now and then, she still crept up to the attic to go through Becky's things, to pretend, if only for a few minutes, that Becky was all right, that Becky had survived the birth, that Ryan—despite all the love she felt for him—was not her only child.

  But she knew Buck was right, she knew she had to get rid of the last of Becky's things and put the child out of her mind, finally and forever. If she didn't, she would destroy herself.

  She placed the empty album on top of the heap, then doused the whole thing with kerosene. Finally she stood back and tossed a match onto the pyre. A moment later all that was left of her memories of her daughter began to go up in flames.

  For a long time Laura watched the blaze, standing perfectly still, her attention focused totally on the conflagration. When the touch on her shoulder came, she jerked spasmodically, then whirled around to see Janet standing behind her.

  "I'm sorry," Janet said. "Are you all right? I spoke to you, but you didn't answer me."

  "I—I—" Laura floundered, then fell silent and turned back to gaze once more at the fire which was fast diminishing to nothing more than a bed of glowing coals. "I was just burning some trash," she whispered at last, her eyes filling with the tears she had been doing her best to control.