by Ronald Malfi
There came a knocking on the other side of the door. Matthew froze, his skin suddenly blistered with gooseflesh. He waited for the silhouette of a head to appear on the other side of the sheer curtain. No one appeared. He waited. Outside, the wind picked back up, angry and unforgiving. The sound of the bare tree branches bullied by the wind was a haunted, creaking one, reminiscent of warped and loose floorboards. That knocking sound came again, slightly more muted this time. Again, Matthew expected the silhouette of a head to appear framed in the curtained panel of light. Again, no one appeared.
The door squealed on its hinges as he slowly opened it, though much of the noise was obscured by the rattling, locomotive sound of the whipping wind. Cold air blasted him and the flimsy T-shirt and boxer shorts he wore felt no more substantial than cobwebs. The banging sound, he realized, was the screen door banging against the frame. Beyond the screen, he could see the way the wind shook the bushes alongside the detached garage and, beyond, rattled the chain-link fence. Farther out, a sea of cornstalks undulated in the wind. Whirlwinds of dead leaves and scraps of trash danced across the yard.
It occurred to him that if he’d dropped Dwight’s money out here, it was long gone by now. In his mind’s eye—and not without a sense of utter despair—he imagined the dollar bills flitting like bats through the storm-laden night sky somewhere over the Cumberland Gap. Heck, for all he knew, they could be somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean by now…
Nonetheless, he pushed open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. The rickety boards complained loudly beneath his bare feet. The strong wind chilled his bones, and flecks of icy rain pattered against the side of his face. He hugged himself as he scanned the yard. There were scraps of paper stuck in some of the bushes beside the garage. Could they be Dwight’s money?
Matthew took a deep breath, steeling himself for the act…then quickly bounded down the porch steps. He hurried out across the yard, the wind icy cold and unrelenting without the confines of the house to serve as a buffer. Bits of flying grit stung his eyes. There was a motion sensor light above the garage doors; Matthew had completely forgotten about it until it clicked on, blinding and startling him. Like someone caught attempting to escape from a prison yard, he momentarily froze in the spotlight. He knew the light was visible from his own bedroom window, but Brandy’s and his mother’s bedrooms were at the opposite end of the house, facing the road. They wouldn’t be awakened by the light; he was safe for the time being.
Someone moved behind the tall hedgerow. Again, Matthew froze. The hedges stood just over four feet tall and ran the length of the yard to the side of the garage. Matthew blinked and tried to discern through the darkness the movement he had just seen a moment ago—a gliding, whitish blur passing just behind the bushes.
“Is someone there?” His voice was as weak as his knees. It frightened him to address the darkness aloud.
From the periphery of his vision, he caught another glimpse of someone—or something—moving behind the bushes, closer to the garage now. Had the motion sensor light not come on he might have been able to see more, but the gleaming halogen bulb caused inky pools of shadow to drip from the hedges and puddle around the side of the garage, blinding him if he looked too closely in its approximate direction. A twisting shape seemed to ebb and flow in the darkness just beyond the bushes, and he was reminded of the twisting shape he’d seen earlier that day when peering in the windows of the old plastics factory. He thought then of his nightmare, and of the flashing expulsions of light going off behind the grimy windows of the factory in his dream. And of Dwight’s voice, now eerily prophetic, saying, It sounds like someone moving back and forth on the gravel driveway. I look but there’s never anybody there.
As he watched, a figure stepped out from behind the hedgerow and paused, facing him, in the shaft of space between the hedgerow and the garage. The figure was a black blur, as indistinct as a distant memory, but Matthew had no question as to its authenticity. There was someone standing right there.
Matthew managed one hesitant step backward.
The figure took one step forward; one bare foot and a slender white shin appeared in the cone of light issuing from the motion sensor. A second foot joined it. As Matthew stared, the whitish legs and feet appeared to waver, and it was like looking at something from behind the distorting waves of rising heat. The legs weren’t bare at all. They were clad in grayish-blue denim, the feet encased in hard, black shoes.
Another step forward and the figure’s face emerged from the darkness. Matthew could see his father’s face, stubble along his cheeks and neck, the crooked part in the man’s prematurely graying hair. Still in his postal uniform, his shirt partway unbuttoned just as he used to wear it on those days after work when he went immediately to the garage to tinker around without changing his clothes first.
It took a moment for his father’s eyes to focus on him.
The motion sensor light clicked off.
Matthew Crawly was aware of a rush of wind, a strong embrace of arms…and then a piercing sensation at the small of his back. For a moment, he thought he could smell his father’s aftershave lotion mingled with the familiar scent of his perspiration. But that quickly was replaced by a sharp, medicinal smell that stung Matthew’s nose and caused his eyes to water. When he opened his mouth to scream, no sound came out. It was like trying to scream underwater.
His last conscious thought was of Captain Nemo’s submarine coasting soundlessly through the tar-colored waters of a frozen sea, silvery fish flitting by like mirrors of dancing light.
Chapter Two
1
Maggie Quedentock was still shaking when she climbed back into her husband’s Pontiac. With one shaking hand, she keyed the ignition and pulled out onto the darkened strip of pavement that was Full Hill Road. The radio was on, John Fogerty straining the speakers, singing about something that had fallen out of the sky. Maggie quickly turned it off. Though they’d owned the car for several years, it now felt completely alien to her: the seat was uncomfortable and too close to the steering wheel, the dashboard controls were in all the wrong places, and when she went to hit the high beams she accidentally flicked on the windshield wipers.
Am I really going to lose my shit right now? After all this?
Once she got far enough down Full Hill Road that the lights of the houses behind her had blinked out of existence, she pulled along the shoulder beneath a lamppost and slid the gearshift to Park. She clicked on the Pontiac’s interior light but didn’t look at her reflection in the rearview mirror right away. Instead, she sat in the uncomfortable driver’s seat and faced forward, staring blankly at the curve of roadway and the dense black trees that loomed up on either side. Already her mind was replaying snapshot scenes from the night’s escapades, accusatory in all their vividness. She couldn’t blink them away. Finally, she confronted the creature in the rearview mirror.
Muddy eyes, blotchy complexion, hair askew, she was instantly reminded of those self-deprecating little moments back in high school, so many years ago now, when she had surrendered countless times to boyfriends’ lustful desires. They used to paw at her mercilessly in the backseats of their parents’ cars. She was forty-five years old now and married, with high school a distant, if not smeary and indistinct, memory, and the blotchy skin and wild nest of hair suddenly struck her as vulgar. A deep, personal resentment briefly rumbled around inside her chest, thick as a blood clot.
She had never had an affair before—had never even considered cheating on Evan—and now, less than an hour after the deed had been done, she wondered what the hell she was doing. Was it possible she had been a completely different person just a couple of hours ago, sitting at Crossroads and nursing a Heineken at the bar?
From her purse, which she’d tossed haphazardly onto the passenger seat in an effort to leave Tom Schuler’s house as quickly as possible, she produced a small black makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her lap then fumbled with the zipper until the contents spilled into he
r lap and onto the floor.
“Fuck.”
Get it under control, lady. You’re vibrating like a guitar string.
She leaned forward, the side of her face resting against the steering wheel, and scrounged around in the footwell. When her fingers brushed along the thin, square packets of moist towelettes, she snatched them up and hastily peeled one open, her eyes volleying furtively between her unsteady fingers and the blotchy mask of her face in the rearview mirror. She was attractive and she kept in good shape, exercising several times a week and watching what she ate, yet the visage staring back at her was horrific.
She exhaled nervously then began wiping the streaks of mascara that had leaked from her eyes to the tops of her cheeks. The smell of ammonia burned her nostrils.
Fifteen years of marriage and this is what I do. Again, she unleashed a shaky breath, this time certain she could smell Tom Schuler on her. Her mouth was full of him. His perspiration was commingled with hers, too, clinging guiltily to her body like an illness. Moreover, she could still feel him inside her—a tender, vacant sensation nestled between her thighs that, even now, simultaneously nauseated and excited her. Fifteen years of marriage.
She and Evan had dated on and off throughout high school, and even for a while after graduation. They’d fumbled through their fair shares of other relationships—Evan had even gotten engaged to a woman from Delaware, though it had never culminated in marriage—before reconnecting. At that point she had been thirty, and although she did not feel the motherly desire to have children, she knew that a woman in her forties had a better chance of being killed by terrorists than getting married. Or so she’d heard. Whatever the case, forty had only been a scant decade away at that point, and the notion that she might be doomed to spend her life unmarried and alone terrified her.
She confessed her desire to Evan on more than just a few occasions, but Evan Quedentock, high school football star and the life of the party (as long as the party was in a bar with his lifelong friends), was not the type of man to be easily persuaded. They lived together, took care of each other. What more did she want? Marriage, she’d informed him. Commitment. To this, Evan would always chuckle and ask what more commitment there was than a man forking over his paycheck every two weeks. It was then that she realized this approach wasn’t going to get her anywhere with him.
Like a sailor tacking for new wind, she decided on a different approach: she lied and told him she was pregnant. You really want to be responsible for bringing a bastard kid into the world? That did the trick. They went down to the courthouse the following week and got hitched. It seemed Evan Quedentock could be caught after all; she just had to put the right bait in the right trap.
A week or so after they got married, she had summoned some tears by spraying perfume in her face. She thought she’d done an admirable job telling him she had lost the baby. At the news, Evan had seemed both relieved and a bit disappointed (the latter emotion a surprising revelation to Maggie since she knew Evan, much like her, had no great desire to have children). He had comforted her in his clumsy, brutish way, and that had been the end of it. Fifteen years later, they were still married.
Fifteen years…
Tom was one of Evan’s friends and had been over to the house countless times. The flirtatiousness between them had always been of the innocuous variety, or so Maggie had thought. She had flirted with men in the past but never adulterously. So how had the situation with Tom gotten so goddamn out of hand? Tom had been over at the house one night, drinking too much with Evan. Under the pretense of using the bathroom, he’d followed her into the house while Evan remained on the back porch. Yet he hadn’t used the bathroom; he’d followed her into the kitchen, his shirt partially unbuttoned, and leaned against the refrigerator while they talked in quick, glib, declarative sentences. It wasn’t that he was drop-dead gorgeous or even roguishly handsome—Tom Schuler was a bit too skinny and his face was patchy with old acne scars—but that did not seem to matter to Maggie. For whatever reason, she felt a flutter of uneasiness while he talked to her, his eyes drinking her in. And she found that she liked this uneasiness.
Tom had left their house that evening with Maggie’s cell phone number, along with some indistinct promise in his eyes. Later that evening, she had lain awake in bed, staring at the misaligned panels of moonlight playing across the ceiling as Evan snored like an old hunting dog beside her. She wondered what Evan would think if he knew she’d given Tom Schuler her cell phone number. Moreover—and this was the forbidden part, yet at the same time, the part that elicited some childlike glee within her—she wondered what Evan would do if she were to have an affair with Tom Schuler and he found out.
That childlike glee was gone now. Sitting behind the wheel of her husband’s car, cleaning up the smeared streamers of makeup from her face, she felt as obvious as a beacon of light on a darkened coast. Terror enveloped her when she realized that there would be no way to hide the smell of sex from her husband once she got home. Would he leave her? Would he hit her? On both counts, she thought maybe he would.
Tonight’s rendezvous at Crossroads was the culmination of a monthlong game of cat and mouse. Tom had pursued her with regularity, calling her whenever he knew Evan was at work, trying to convince her to meet him for a drink. A few times she promised she would but later backed out, sending him vague texts that suggested conflicting schedules and last-minute chores. If Tom was ever dissuaded by her continual misdirection, he never let on.
Finally, when he proposed they have a few drinks at Crossroads while Evan was on the late shift—strictly platonic, he had assured her—she had agreed. Of course, she did not put any stock in his promise of chastity, and while she was uncertain what her intentions were up until she was taking her clothes off in the downstairs hallway of his house, she had showered, shaved, groomed with meticulous dedication, and spritzed herself with expensive perfume. She had selected her tightest pair of jeans and a loose-fitting blouse that revealed her tanned and freckled cleavage. Just one drink, she’d promised herself, knowing damn well she was a liar before she ever got in the car and drove out to Crossroads on Melville Street.
Maggie reapplied her makeup then ran a brush through her hair. She spied a bottle of perfume on the floor beneath the accelerator, which she scooped up and administered liberally to her neck, hair, shoulders, and breasts. When she finished, she dug her cell phone out of her purse and deleted the call log. To her knowledge, Evan had never snooped through her phone, but she wasn’t about to leave it up to chance.
After she replaced all her fallen cosmetics back in her purse, fixed her hair, and sat behind the wheel staring blankly off into the darkness for some undisclosed amount of time, a warm serenity seemed to overtake her. After a few more minutes, she felt calm enough to drive. Her plan was to get back to the house, take a shower, and crawl into bed before Evan got home from the night shift. With any luck, she could pull it off as though the affair had never happened.
She dropped the gearshift to Drive, readjusted the rearview mirror, then pulled slowly back out onto Full Hill Road. She drove slowly, the car’s headlights cleaving through the muddy darkness. She hated this stretch of Full Hill Road—hated, as a matter of fact, all the wooded roadways that snaked out of downtown and wound up into the rocky foothills of the mountains. Maggie Quedentock did not like to feel like she was alone.
Pressing the accelerator closer to the floor, the Pontiac advanced to a rough gallop, the black woods on either side of the road a smudgy blur. More calmly now, Maggie switched the radio back on and surfed through the stations until she found an old Beach Boys number. It soothed her. When she glanced up at her reflection again in the rearview mirror, she was pleasantly surprised to find a timorous smile on her face.
Something darted out into the road. Maggie saw it only peripherally—the slight, colorless approximation of a person—before she struck it with the car. Simultaneously slamming on the brakes and spinning the steering wheel, the car shuddered then fi
shtailed. The acrid stench of burning rubber filled her nose.
The car finally came to a stop in the middle of the road. Having achieved a complete 180-degree spin, the vehicle’s headlights now illuminated the road in the direction that she had come. The reek of scorched rubber was hot and suffocating. Shaking, Maggie looked over one shoulder and peered out the dark rectangle of the Pontiac’s rear window. Aside from the few feet of asphalt illuminated in the blood-red glow of the brake lights, the world beyond was pitch-black. For all Maggie knew, she could have been staring off into space.
My God, I felt the fucking impact. If I live to be one hundred, I will never forget what that felt like…what it sounded like…
She fumbled with her seat belt and managed to get it undone. Her heart strumming like a banjo, she opened the car door and staggered dazedly out onto the roadway. She braced herself for the horror of what must surely lay several feet or yards down the road, though she was too terrified to move away from the pool of warm light that issued out of the open car door.
“Hello?” Her voice held the paper-thin quality of an AM radio broadcast.
Something moved in the center of the roadway. Maggie’s body went cold. As her eyes adjusted to the lightlessness, she could see the crumbled form of a small human body, a pair of bare legs folded up into a fetal position. The figure was whitish-blue beneath the glow of the moon, though the tapered swell of its thighs radiated with the sickly red light of the Pontiac’s taillights.
As she watched, the figure’s legs parted. She heard—or thought she heard—a wet, guttural clicking coming from the shape. Even now, with its undeniably human form, Maggie was struggling to convince herself that what she had hit had been a deer or a dog or any such careless, brainless animal that had wandered stupidly out onto the road in the middle of the night…