The Pines

by Robert Dunbar

  It was reaching a peak. She knew it. This sense of dread—the nameless premonition that kept her paralyzed and waiting—grew each day more intense.

  Reflexively, her hand reached across the bed, finding only the old depression beside her in the mattress. There’s someone in this room. Abruptly, she sensed it. Every cell of her body recognized a presence, as though the dream continued. “Matthew?” Again, she sat up in bed, her pillow sliding softly off the edge.

  The house made its night sounds.

  “Matthew?” Though growing weaker, the impression remained: the boy was here in the room, or had just been. She rose quickly, a twinge of pain in her leg as she felt about. Am I still dreaming? She groped her way along the bureau toward the deep opening of the doorway.

  “Matthew?” She took a few blind steps into the hall—a mineshaft. She retreated, her right hand sliding along the must-furred bedroom wallpaper for the light switch. The dingy litter of her bedroom flared. Waiting for violet blotches to melt from her vision, she turned her back on the room, stared downward, her shadow spreading gigantically across the hall floor. The peeling green linoleum depicted leaves, impossibly huge and curling, now all but worn away.

  Shuddering with a yawn, she snatched a frayed terrycloth robe from the bedroom floor, shook the dust balls free and wrapped it around her shoulders. The bedroom light almost penetrated to the end of the hallway, creating a faint haze. Again, she stood and listened. Nothing. She started down the hall. What if he’s not in his room? Feeling the steps above her with her hands, she limped heavily up the attic stairs.

  The bedclothes rustled. In the charred darkness, a creak of cot springs fused with the hissing rhythm of his breath, and she heard him roll over, muttering wetly. The chain, when she reached for it, rattled against the bulb.

  The boy didn’t flinch from the light. She bent over him. His sweat-slick body sprawled across the cot, and his hands stayed clenched into small fists, damp and sticky. Pamela has to bathe him. His T-shirt had balled up around his armpits, and the lump of stone was still clutched in one tight hand. She straightened, staring. He sweated, inert on the mattress.

  The light rattled again.

  She went back down toward the dull glow of her room. He really is asleep. She moved down the brightened hall. I’m tired. Doris said…working so hard. Switching off the overhead light, she thought of the boy. Dreamed it. She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled off her robe. Matthew is squeezing a stone. Through the window, a slight breeze carried faint sounds of the night. It felt cool on her still-damp body, and she lay down, partially covering herself with the rumpled sheet, thinking about her son who gripped a cold stone. No. Her mind grew heavy and hazy. That’s not the way it is. It’s not. Her eyes closed. not like that not

  When he was sure the sliding footsteps had returned to her room, Matty opened his eyes and sat up.

  For a while, he played with the stone, pretended it was a giant boulder that rolled end over end across the pillow landscape, but soon the sounds of barking reached him, and he listened, staring at the beams. And the wind brushed across the eaves, so close, and the barking swept through the pines with a rustling as of things long dead.

  He looked around his dark attic, his kingdom: the old pieces of furniture, some covered, some trailing cobwebs in the dust, loomed all around the bed. On the far side of the room, the diamond panes of the window gleamed pale black. He listened again to the dogs in the woods, and to something else, something that called to him by name.

  He hid the stone under his pillow.

  Slowly, he brought his upper arm to his face and mouthed it, licked the hot, salty flesh. Then he bit down—hard, harder, small teeth sinking in. And at last it came. The taste…the wet meat. His mouth filled with drooling warmth, hot wetness at his crotch. He felt dizzy. Sweat trickled down his body while the dark room swayed around him, warmth spreading between his legs as he flooded the bed.

  From the woods, from faraway, from far below, the howling of the dogs grew muted, and there drifted to his ears a thin yapping that held something of a human quality, leaving in his mind an echo like the cries of many voices. There was hysteria in those voices…and abject sadness. The boy sucked at his wound, and the dark room swayed about him.

  PART TWO

  MUNRO’S FURNACE

  Scattered over widely separated huts…exists today a group of human beings as distinct…as to excite curiosity in the mind of any outsider brought into contact with them.

  Elizabeth Kite, psychologist, 1913

  “The Pineys”

  They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding…. Their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Friday, July 31

  The faint drone gradually swelled as a fly jerked through the room. One hand in a shallow depression, she lay on her side in the rutted center of the mattress—it seemed the furrow alongside her grew fainter with each solitary night. There had been a dream…drifting away now: her grandmother’s worn, warm face, a feeling of safety fading into a memory of the infant Matthew and the sweet breath of his warmth in her arms. Such a shame he never knew his grandmother, she reflected, easing her legs over the side of the bed. Great-grandmother, she corrected herself. My mother is his…

  By the dimness that pried under the window shade, she read the alarm clock on the bureau. Damn. She got up too quickly and felt a sharp twinge in her knee as she hobbled across the room to raise the shade. I’m always up before this. Thin morning drizzle fell, and the casement framed a drab square on which water spots made swerving patterns. Always. She felt bloated with sleep, and her eyes burned as though she’d been crying. Am I about to begin spending my life in bed? Fighting the stupor, she rubbed at gritty eyes. Is that the next phase, girl?

  She pulled on a robe and padded down the hall, then smoothed the sleep from her face with a washcloth at a sink stained blue and orange. Putrid noises emanated from the plumbing. The towel smelled of mildew, and the odor mingled strongly with that of soap. While the faucet pattered, and the runneled pane of the window rattled in a breeze, vines over the back of the house rustled like the wings of startled pigeons.

  Leaning on the sink, she looked at her arms—browned from sun and wind—and remembered a time when they’d been pale and soft. Well, maybe never pale, exactly. She gazed at her dark eyes in the mirror, at the curve of her cheek. Stray curls hung about her face, catching the light, glowing softly. She grabbed an elastic band from the pile on the washstand.

  The mirror held shadows. The bathroom walls curled, peeling like lizard skin, and in the corners lay hair and dust and flakes of plaster. The drain choked and growled.

  Returning to her room, she began the exercises intended to strengthen her leg. Afterward, she rummaged through her clothes, looking for things lately worn only once.

  In the hallway, a new spot leaked from a dark ring on the ceiling, and drops plunked rhythmically on the linoleum, slid off around the edges. She threw a towel on the puddle. Was Matthew awake yet? From the top of the stairs, the living room still looked mostly dark with streamers of watery light flowing through chinks in the boarded windows, giving the room an air of drowsy desolation. Dust floated. Muffled silence told her she was alone in the house. Only rain on the walls and her uneven tread on the stairs broke the quiet.

  A glow soaked through the parlor curtains, brightness mottling the floorboards. She pulled a curtain aside, and the drizzle twisted the soft light, sent it spinning in slow torrents along the glass. Outside, a single strand of vine had found its way across the pane, leafy course erratic as that of any caterpillar.

  She rummaged around the kitchen. Coffee wasn’t made, and as usual there was nothing much to eat. Where the hell was Pam? Where was Matthew? The mug held concentric black rings, and congealing bacon grease filled the iron skillet. The previous
night’s dishes covered the table, and the floor needed to be swept. She glanced out the back door at a fine mist blowing. Coffee, she remembered groggily, then searched for matches to light the burner.

  Door banging, the shed slouched in gusts of damp wind. Within, boy and dog played in determined silence.

  The interior was thick with the woody smell of wet leaves. While the dog frisked about the dirt floor, the boy clambered over stacks of soggy cardboard boxes. Gray spiders dropped off the boxes, their fat bodies making audible plops as they fell on newspapers in the loamy shadows.

  Waiting for the coffee to brew, she stood in the doorway and stared at gray-veined trees. “Oh hell.” Laundry sagged heavily from the clothesline, making her recall her grandmother’s house, festooned with washing. It’s just a sort of rural ghetto, after all. Even the setting for my life doesn’t seem to change much…just the same situations over and over. Again, she struggled with the sense of being held here, frozen in place, waiting for something to happen. As though I’ll never be free to move on until…

  Winds that wetly snapped the sheets carried to her the smells of the rotting pine forest. Beneath the ashen sky, Dooley barked at the flapping linen, and Matthew ran around the shed. About to call out, she hesitated and sadly watched him play. He hasn’t even got sense enough to come in out of…

  While they scampered around each other and wrestled for sticks, the boy talked to the dog, constant and low, his voice a hum, sometimes a chatter, part of the wind that brought it to her. And a name reached her from across the yard, clearly, twice.

  “Chabwok.”

  A name—she felt certain now. He was playing with Chabwok. Listening, she marveled at how much more verbal he was when alone. The rest of what he said eluded her, vague as the words of a song being played in a passing car. Again, Pamela had been right. I’m his mother, and I know nothing. Despite herself, she listened as the louder parts drifted to her with the rain that had become little more than haze, so fine she scarcely felt it.

  If I went back to the city, it might be the best thing all around. She could leave him with Pam. She’d take good care of him, even if she’s not exactly the most reliable person in the world. She shut her eyes against a dizzying sorrow that surprised her, and for a second, she tried to imagine Matthew in some apartment with her, walled in by cement. He’d die. He’d die if she took him away from here.

  “Muther-fucken…muther-fucken…”

  What?

  “Fucken loony…shit-fuck, man.”

  They played harder now, the dog beginning to bark with excitement, the boy yelling and running. He hadn’t seen her yet. Where could he have learned those words? Pamela would never use them around him. Frowning slightly, she stared at the boy’s back…as he began a clever mockery of her limp.

  The dog barked steadily now, a new sharpness to the sound, and from the shadowed kitchen, she watched them, stricken. They ran in and out of the shed, the dog snapping at air, teeth meeting in a click audible even at this distance. The boy twisted with strange movements, lifting his feet exaggeratedly high, as though something blocked the doorway. Bewildered, she moved onto the fading, whitewashed porch and watched him repeat the pantomime, over and over, in and out. A steady spattering noise drowned his rapid words. The leaky spout from the roof had gouged a pool along the wall, and water still dribbled to the deep puddle. Basement will be flooded again. She looked away.

  There came a yell. Suddenly the boy seemed to have been jerked back, away from the shed. Tearing through the yard, he began to race in narrowing circles, panicked confusion on his face as he made breathless clawing motions at the air.

  “Matthew!”

  Dooley barked furiously, then slunk away, back hunched. Ugly animal sound in his throat, the boy gyrated wildly. Words mingled.

  “Matthew? Matthew, stop it!”

  Head thrown back, the boy ran and shouted, drunk with his own wildness. “Bite ’em an Chabwokchabwok get Ah! Ah! ’em an chab chab…!” His eyes reeled at the watery gray of the sky, all confusion in his face replaced by madness. Rain-laden wind soughed through the trees.

  “Matthew.” She stepped down the rotted boards of the porch stairs, and a long, pointed splinter broke off. He’s calling…calling to…his playmate. She strode toward the boy, her eyes raking the pines as she tried to fight down the growing conviction that someone or something was present, lurking just out of sight. Behind her, somebody coughed.

  “Did I scare ya?” She whipped around, and the man grinned at her. “Sure is spooky, ain’t he?”

  She faced a living death’s head, a macabre caricature of her handsome husband. Unable to speak, she stared at the man in the dark gray work clothes. They age so quickly, these people. The thought ran inanely through her mind, almost provoking a giggle. Lonny’s face was a Technicolor marvel—red nose, bloodshot eyes, hollowed cheeks mottled with purple where small veins had broken under the sallow skin. Yet the resemblance to Wallace lay in every taunting feature.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Wa’ da ya mean? I come to see my sister-in-law an’ nephew. Ain’t a man allowed ta come see family when he wants ta?” Dirt had tangled in the dark hair that swayed as he nodded. “My only nephew. My only brother’s son. Sometimes I feel like that boy’s my own.”

  She turned away, watched Matthew run silently around the shed. The drizzle had trickled to nothing, and sunlight began to bleed through the overcast.

  “I used ta play in this yard. Me an’ Wallace.”

  A tremor deep inside, she kept her back to him. Wisps of remembered conversations drifted, memories of how close he’d been to Wallace—a closeness inexplicable to her. Wallace had been such a good man, while Lonny…

  Their mother had been a teacher, and the two boys had gotten more education than most locals, for all the good it had done Lonny. After their parents’ accident, Wallace and his brother had lived like ghosts in their ruined house, by their ruined town. Sometimes they’d drifted. She knew there’d been farm jobs, even a government work project down South. But always they’d been drawn back here.

  “An we always had dogs too. ’Thena? I gotta talk to you.”

  Almost before he spoke, she recognized the pleading sorrow in his voice and felt herself draw away.

  Seeing the way her face hardened, he twitched, then pointed at the boy. “Poor li’l half-wit.” Suddenly, he leered. “An’ you hate him for it, don’t ya? ’Cause he ain’t perfick. An’ you s’posed to be his mother.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Who was it wanted to have ’im put away?” His eyes seemed to tighten as he watched the boy. “Huh? Answer me that. You ain’t no kinda mother.”

  “Do you want money? Is it that again?”

  “Ah, ’Thena. You used ta like me once. What do we gotta fight for? We’re family.” He leaned into her face, his breath reeking of booze.

  The condition of his teeth shocked her, and she grimaced with disgust.

  “Ya think you care ’bout him? You don’t care for shit!”

  “When did you get out?” She tried to look bored. “Does Pamela even know? Have you been home yet, or just to Spencer’s?”

  “What’s ’at s’posed ta mean? You think I’m drunk or something? I’m sick. Shit. You runnin’ round in that fuckin’ ambulance. Makes me laugh. You don’t even care ’bout your own kid,” he’d begun to shout. “You just provin’ how s’perior you are wi’ all them hurt people. That’s disgustin’ if you ask me. Fuckin’ nigger wonder woman gonna save the day, huh? You just a cripple, ’at’s what you are. ’At’s all you are!” He pointed. “It’s your fault he’s like ’at! My brother’s kid!”

  Though she tried not to flinch, her lips went thin.

  “That’s right, ’Thena,” he gloated. “Don’t lose control. Gotta stay s’perior. Matty! Matty, c’mere. Your uncle’s here, boy—c’mon over here.”

  As she looked at the boy, all her germinating suspicions to the contrary melted away. Rooted to th
e spot, he stood with his fingers in his mouth, staring as though about to flee. While the boy drooled, Lonny began ranting at her again, and she felt enraged, wanting to laugh and scream with shame…and sorrow.

  Matt didn’t run away.

  His concentration excluded the adults. He brought the inchworm that crawled on his hand closer to his face and watched the pale green movement. The insect bowed its body, feeling blindly in the air before making contact with his flesh—the barest tickling sensation. Gently, the boy crouched and held his finger to the ground, watched the tiny life crawl away.

  “Why don’t ya go back to the city then? If ya hate us here so much? Shit. Go on—go live in slum housing. Go ask your black aunt ta take you back! You’d die before ya did that, wouldn’t ya? Does your wonderful family even know ya got a retard kid?” Suddenly, his voice slurred even more. “Never should’ve stopped the chains. You’ll find out. They used to know how to treat ’em.” He kept rubbing at the back of his gray neck. “Look at ’im. Oh Jesus, look at ’im. You ever know ’bout my father’s brother? No, Wally wouldn’t tell that, would he? I’m so damn tired of hearin’ how wonderful ole Wally was. Don’t look like he’s doin’ you much good now though, do it?” He sneered. “That boy. He’s a real member of this family, he is. It’s gonna take ’im.” Shouting again, he moved closer to her, his hands spasmodically clenching into fists.

  She braced herself. The subject of his rant might switch from moment to moment, but the momentum built steadily.

  “You’re the one with the crazy mother. Don’t even know who the hell yer father was. You didn’t think Wally told me that, did ya? Coulda been any animal retard.”

  She wanted to retort with something about his own children, dead or deformed, but couldn’t. For Pam’s sake. Couldn’t. Moving away from him, she trod on one of the scattered iron flagstones, splashes of rust red on the sodden earth. Once—how long ago?—Wallace had hauled topsoil from well beyond the barrens, dumped it here so she might have a garden, but the rain had leached it away, until now only heroic clusters of crabgrass grew in the darker earth around the flagstones. The erratic trail of a slug glistened wetly on starved weeds.