Knock Knock

by S. P. Miskowski

  "Everything here is hideous. Indoors and out."

  His voice took on the soothing tone she was learning to anticipate and loathe:

  "We can make yard sale money off anything you don't want to use while we're here, and entertain ourselves by meeting the neighbors at the same time. Then we ditch the last of the furniture and move back to Seattle. It's all good."

  "Hideous. If I have to live here six weeks, I'll kill the neighbors," Lydia warned with a crooked smile.

  "Well, aren't you nasty for a pregnant woman? We're going to be so popular here."

  "Buy a gun, an automatic rifle, and I'll shoot them," she said.

  "That's a great idea, honey," Greg told her. "So you take a little rest, there, and think about how to dispose of the bodies, and I'll bring in the suitcases. Then I'll get you some more water, and we'll talk funny again, okay?"

  "Mm," she said. "Me talk funny and kill people."

  As soon as he was out the door she hit the speed dial on her cell phone. She needed to hear a friend's voice, even if it was from far away. No answer, and then the voicemail picked up. She decided not to leave a message. Not today. She felt too pathetic and worn out. She nestled into the comfy, ugly chair and closed her eyes again.

  A ratcheting squeak told her Greg was taking their suitcases out of the car trunk. She knew he would check the bumper again for blood and scratches from the rabbit. He probably wanted to show her enough damage to justify his reaction on the road. He held onto things like that.

  The air was sweet and cool for the moment. All day the temperature had fluctuated but the humidity had remained insufferable. Lydia was tired. Her breasts were swollen and they ached. She knew her eyes were closed, but she couldn't tell if she was awake or dreaming. It sounded like someone was trimming hedges, or edging their yard, in the distance. The steady, thin buzzing was like a lullaby. This was how summer had sounded to her in the lazy suburbs where she grew up.

  She became aware of singing. A thin, high voice in a singsong rhythm, a rope-jumping song.

  Lydia opened her eyes in time to spy a child racing across the lawn. A cluster of blond hair above a smile flashed in a ray of sunlight and quickly folded back into the shadows. By the time Lydia sat forward in her chair, the kid was gone. For some reason a long forgotten family expression came to mind:

  "Lickety-split."

  She wasn't sure of its etymology. She made a mental note to look it up online. Then she sighed and closed her eyes again.

  A neighbor's child, she thought, playing alone in the woods. How sad and sweet.

  Marietta

  Marietta edged into the house and closed the front door as quietly as possible. She didn't want to disturb her daughter-in-law, who had one of her headaches today. Both women suffered from migraines, and took turns nursing one another back to health.

  The foyer led to a wide hallway. Double doors opened onto the living room with a floor-to-ceiling window at one end, exposed rafters, built-in cedar benches and shelves. An elk's head decorated the wall above the stone fireplace. Facing it at a right angle were two deer heads mounted on plaques.

  Everything about the house was overdone, the living room most of all. It was too big, calculated to make people think an outdoorsman made his rugged home here, when nothing could be further from the truth.

  Marietta lived here with her son Henry and his wife Alicia, but she never thought of it as home. She would never have made such a home for herself.

  Alicia and Henry had never hunted. Yet in addition to the mounted heads they collected elk and deer hooves under a set of small glass domes. An antique, sawed-off shotgun was on display over the living room door. They had purchased it at an estate sale and had it professionally cleaned and restored.

  To Alicia living in the country was an adventure. She collected baskets and filled them with dried flowers and leaves. She made potpourri. She sponsored bake sales to support Henry's church, and joined a quilting circle at the Longview women's club. She gravitated toward all things natural and down-home. Marietta's beekeeping was the only thing Alicia had refused to adopt, and only because she was highly allergic to bee sting.

  Alicia's family owned real estate on the west coast. They had a chain of hotels and a couple of theme parks. She might have lived anywhere, but Henry had staked his claim here in Skillute. So here they were, and they insisted that Marietta live with them.

  "Family ought to be together," said Alicia whenever the topic came up in conversation.

  Years ago they had stopped urging Marietta to sell the little bungalow where she had raised Henry. They accepted her reluctance to sell as a sentimental eccentricity. Anyway the land around the old place was strangled by blackberry bushes and weeds that ruined any appeal it might have to a buyer. It would take an awful lot of work to restore the land.

  Marietta was as nice as she could be to Alicia. In truth, she felt sorry for her daughter-in-law. The woman was twelve years older than Henry. She was tall, broad-hipped, and a little awkward, as if she were still getting used to her body, like a girl who sprouted several inches over one summer. She smiled a lot and laughed eagerly. The way she recounted her life to Marietta, she had been a lonely child, shuffled between boarding schools and divorced parents, acquiring and discarding fashions and hairstyles in a constant effort at fitting in. Here in Skillute she had put down roots with a vengeance: building a large brick house on three acres of land, and eventually buying and decorating the double-wide unit that served as Henry's church.

  The light waned and Marietta sat in her favorite spot, tucked into the cedar window seat surrounded by embroidered cushions. She sipped tea and watched the complicated shifting of shadows across the meadow that separated the Colquitt house from its nearest neighbor.

  The view in this direction took in wildflowers, tall summer grass, and devil's club skirting the forest. It included vine maple, orange honeysuckle, and wild blackberries. From the other side of the house she could see the Sanders and Jasper homes. Both views excluded Henry's chapel, which was just as well.

  Marietta didn't like to gaze on the church her son had built next door to his home. The glossy trailer and the Astroturf made it stick out in a neighborhood that was mostly residential and rural. A ground level, brightly lit marquee told the world that Henry and his savior were open for business, like tire salesmen. People were afraid to stop by, Marietta thought, because it looked like the Lord Himself was on duty at a gas station twenty-four hours a day. She wondered when Henry would get the idea to hand out coupons for discount salvation. He had tried just about everything else to bring in recruits. Everything failed.

  Marietta didn't share the faith of her two loved ones. She didn't believe in a God who listened, let alone protected or cared, but she went along with as many of Henry and Alicia's activities as she could stomach: Christmas and Easter service, and a few baptisms each year. She attended these as she had attended Connie Sara's memorial: Quietly, politely, without closing her eyes or bowing her head during the prayers.

  Once Alicia had enlisted her in a prayer circle. She tried to beg off, but the woman wouldn't take no for an answer. They were meant to pray for Alicia's fertility following a discouraging report from her doctor in Portland. Marietta was relieved when Alicia's next examination proved she wasn't capable of conceiving. For a short time there was talk of finding a surrogate but neither Henry nor Alicia had enough enthusiasm to carry out a search. Marietta kept her mouth shut and soon the subject died altogether.

  Henry's holiday sermons brought in the poorest of their neighbors, young couples with no money and no inclination to join a real church. When the collection plate came around they didn't feel saved, only humiliated. Broke and mostly uneducated, they hauled sickly infants to Henry's church, the Chapel of Christ's Mercy, for a perfunctory blessing. As often as not these babies would die from the complications of simple things like colds and flu, or because they suffocated in their blankets in the middle of the night, and Henry would deliver the funeral
service.

  Ethel had been a recipient of Henry's kindness because her husband Burt was so often out of work and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. Their daughter wasn't sickly, had never been sick a day in her life. It was unnatural, people said, how quickly the girl had grown and how strong she had become, roughhousing in the meadows and the woods, pulling pranks on the few children whose parents allowed them to play with her.

  Now the girl was gone, and no one talked about the terrible way she had died. In fact, they never spoke her name. They didn't pull down the road signs with her name on them. No one would touch the signs, or even look at them.

  Ethel had left town right after the memorial and the burial. No one had heard from her since. Burt had stayed on in their house for a while, but loneliness and grief caused him to drink more than usual. Pretty soon he was sleeping outdoors. Then he started camping out full-time. Maybe it was easier for him than living alone in the house he had once shared with his family.

  The girl was to blame for it. The thing that took her form was to blame. Connie Sara was what Burt and Ethel called her, what they had named her at birth, but Marietta knew she had other names. The girl had lived here, in some form, for longer than Marietta had been alive. The terrible thing, buried for years, woke up the day Marietta and her friends took their oath in the woods. From that day it wanted to be alive again. It had forgotten what it once was. Now it only wanted to live, and it would kill anyone who stood in its way. This thing didn't pass on with Connie Sara. That much was clear from the way Beverly had died.

  The coroner decided the cause of Beverly's death was a heart attack. Maybe it was. Nobody questioned it, because Rex and Beverly had never made a secret of their rich diet. Rex had gone the same way. It made sense, so everyone believed it.

  The thing that didn't make sense was why Beverly had spent the last minutes of her life piling chairs and cushions and end tables against the grate of her fireplace. People who didn't know Beverly laughed when they heard that, but Marietta knew it was something her friend would never do in her right mind. She was too house-proud to risk damaging her nice things unless she was fighting for her life. She wasn't easily frightened, either. She had stayed on in the house Rex built for her, alone, for years after he died. She never complained about being afraid there. The only complaint she had was against the girl, Connie Sara.

  Marietta felt a rush of guilt each time she remembered the plan she had made with Beverly. She didn't regret what they had done. She was only sorry because it was clear to her now that they had failed. They didn't kill the thing that had come back as Connie Sara. It was still here, waiting, working a new strategy in the dark.

  She had heard that a couple was coming to claim Beverly's house. She had had her suspicions. Now she had gotten a brief look at them, and her worries were confirmed.

  They were city people, so she hoped they wouldn't stay long. Maybe they only wanted to sell the house.

  When she'd seen the woman, and the woman's condition, she understood that Beverly's death wasn't simply revenge. It was part of a plan.

  Lydia

  That weekend, sweating in a bright blue sundress and fighting an urge to belch after a late breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup, Lydia sat in a canvas chair on the lawn and watched her only customer pick gingerly through a box of picture frames. It was impossible to guess the exact age of the woman with raven hair and violet eyes. She seemed fragile. She also seemed familiar, but everyone looked slightly familiar at the moment.

  These had been a busy few days, with a trip to her interim doctor, then to buy hardware, a long trek to a home supply store and then a grocery store in Longview. Then came the Welcome Wagon: tiny spinster sisters who drove a wood-paneled station wagon and wore matching sweater sets despite the humidity. Later there was a brief but memorable appearance by a real Avon lady, a brisk, handsome woman named Odelia Farrow who left fragrance samples and a lilac business card despite Lydia's assertion that she and her husband were only visiting and would be gone in a month.

  On separate occasions the pastors of two local churches stopped by to say hello and leave pamphlets that looked like vacation brochures. One of these was named Henry Colquitt, and he made an impression without inspiring Lydia to sample his sermons.

  Lean, almost freakishly tall, stooped at the shoulders, with dark, straight hair and eyeglasses, and dressed not in a traditional suit but in jeans and a white shirt with button-down collar, Pastor Colquitt explained that he had no bias against any religion or lifestyle and welcomed everyone to his church. Lydia couldn't get over his resemblance to a young Stephen King. She kept thinking he was about to jump at her and say, "Boo!"

  The funniest part was that the church in Pastor Colquitt's brochure looked like nothing but a trailer surrounded by fake grass. It reminded her of the idyllic, mundane pictures that gave Lydia and her childhood friends the creeps when they were sent to vacation bible school. The churches portrayed were impossibly pretty and tidy, and inexplicably frightening. Nothing that placid could be real. The emerald grass and yellow sun must be a distraction from something wicked, just outside of the frame.

  It had taken Lydia and Greg a few hours to clean and dust and move all this junk onto the lawn. Then Greg had loaded up the kitchen set Lydia hated more than anything else in the house and headed off to the nearest dump. Since then no one had made an offer on any of the spare furniture or knick-knacks. Several times people in cars and trucks had slowed down then cruised on past the front yard where Lydia sat sweating and smiling.

  No doubt about it: Greg had gotten off easy this time, hauling away a fake colonial dining set Lydia said no one except the wife of Satan would buy. She expected a great takeout dinner for doing the yard sale solo.

  "Those are a dollar each," Lydia said gently.

  The dark-haired woman stopped, fingers poised like spider legs over the box of ornate frames. She gazed at Lydia with a fierceness that made her uncomfortable. Then she nodded. At last Lydia recognized her from Misty Mart on the day she and Greg arrived in Skillute.

  The loud twang of a country radio station cut the air. Lydia flinched. The source of the music, a red and white pickup truck with tiny American flags attached to its hood, pulled up at the edge of Lydia's yard and stopped. The passenger door popped open and Kristy Court slid out, landing on both feet at once with a loud crunch of sparkling white and tangerine tennis shoes in gravel. She walked toward Lydia with an exaggerated femininity, not quite swinging her hips, a less than subtle imitation of womanhood. The effect was further distorted by the braces on her teeth and the broad chewing motion she made, working a piece of gum to the brink of extinction.

  Chewing her cud, Lydia thought.

  "Hey again!" Kristy called out to Lydia, who managed to force a smile at the girl.

  "Hi," she said.

  The raven-haired woman didn't look up until Kristy called out in her direction:

  "Oh, hey, Miz Colquitt! Hey there!"

  The name caught Lydia's attention at once. Briefly she entertained the notion that the woman was married to Pastor Colquitt, but the raven hair was a dead giveaway. She had to be his mother.

  Now the woman raised her head and turned, her face softened slightly by a good-natured grin. It took Lydia by surprise, and she wondered if she had misjudged the woman, assuming she was hostile when she was merely half-witted.

  "Kristy," said the woman. "How tall you look nowadays, and how pretty!"

  "Thank you, ma'am," Kristy replied.

  A short honk from the truck indicated that the driver, a burly middle-aged man Lydia assumed to be Mr. Court, was losing interest in the scenery.

  "D'oh! I got to go," Kristy said to Lydia. "I'm late for my shift at the store."

  "You see anything you like?" Lydia asked and blushed.

  She knew they would never unload all of this ugly junk. Greg would have to drag the chairs and the end tables from the lawn back into the house when he came home. And she would have to camp out in a house wher
e she pretended not to see the hideous decor right in front of her. The thought made her sleepy.

  "Oh," said Kristy. "I don't think we need anything today. We just wanted to pull over and say welcome to the neighborhood and stop by Misty Mart any time! We've got baby supplies for sale, my mom said to tell you, and we're open most holidays except for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter."

  Lydia was acutely aware of the two strange women, the raven-haired nut and the frizzy country teen, staring at her. She wondered if they found her weird, too: dripping sweat, her belly beginning to swell and throwing off her center of gravity, a pair of smart, square sunglasses shielding her eyes. Mothering her yard sale like a crazy lady.

  "Okay," she told Kristy. "Thanks for stopping by."

  Pastures beyond the woods, bovine hips in all of those pastures. All the girls say: "Moo."

  She had to stop. She was driving herself crazy. She had spent the previous afternoon trying to get friends in Seattle to answer email, while trying not to seem pathetic.

  They were busy, all of her friends, and she was only waiting, now: Waiting for the baby, waiting for the house to sell, waiting for Greg to find work, and waiting for life to become good again. When was that going to happen? Or was it over? Was her real life done, finished? Would she spend the rest of her days cleaning up after someone else?

  As the truck took off, grinding gravel under its tires, Lydia turned her attention back to the dark-haired woman. She had moved along to a small table covered in knick-knacks, little objects Lydia had found in the drawers and cupboards.

  "How much do you want for this?" Marietta asked.

  She held up a red ceramic bowl.

  "Oh," said Lydia. "I don't know. Fifty cents?"

  Marietta fetched two quarters from her purse and handed them to her. Then Lydia surprised herself by saying:

  "Would you like to come inside for an iced coffee?"