Voices in the Night

by Steven Millhauser

  Tears

  In the shadow of her rock she looks up and sees him. His arms hang like broken branches. His eyes are dead, his lips a bitter wound. His wild hair, his beard. From the depths of dream he has come to her, the lost one. He looks like a dying tree. She is standing before him, the stranger. She tries to remember the tower, the braided hair. Now her hair is ragged and full of thistles. The children have sucked at the breasts where he has sucked. Tears scratch at her eyes like thorns. They drop onto the stones of his eyes. In the wilderness, water is rushing between rocks, blossoms are bursting from thorns. Slowly the Prince opens his eyes.

  Homecoming

  Banners fly from the corner towers. Streamers hang from every window. As the Prince enters the main courtyard with his bride-to-be and their two children, voices of welcome fill the air. The Prince sees the faces of dear friends, lovers, companions of the hunt, but he is curiously unmoved. He wonders whether it’s because, as they cross the courtyard, he can think only of her. It’s as if he fears that at any moment he might lose her again in the dark. But as he moves among the courtiers and ladies, who part before the steps that lead to the Great Hall, he understands that his estrangement will not be temporary. Between him and the faces that welcome him lies the darkness. His wounds are healed, his beard is short and cut to fashion, his cloak is trimmed with ermine, but he is no longer of their world. He turns to look at Rapunzel. He tries to remember the girl in the tower, the hair coming down like a shower of fire, his feet against stone—it’s all a story in a book. The woman beside him is marked with a fierce beauty of suffering that makes the court faces seem childlike. As they approach the high steps, he touches her arm. The day has tired him a little. He looks forward to the end of the long celebration, when he and she can be quiet for a time.

  In the Tower

  In the thorn-tower, where Rapunzel lies sleeping, the sorceress sits brushing the hair in her lap. Rapunzel has been tired lately; it is good for her to sleep. A ray of sunlight slants through the space in the thorn-crossed window. It strikes the back of a wooden chair, runs across the stone floor, climbs the bedside, lies across the coverlet. When she is done brushing the hair until it shines, the sorceress will braid it slowly and carefully, feeling the weight of it in her lap. From time to time she looks up at her darling, who sleeps peacefully, safe from harm. Suddenly the sorceress stiffens with alertness. She lays aside the hair, goes to the window, and looks out between branches of thorns. It was only a crow, landing on a pine branch. She returns to the chair and continues brushing. Later she will get up and smooth the coverlet, plump the pillow. When Rapunzel wakes, the sorceress will prepare an herbal drink. She will feel her daughter’s forehead, she will ask if there is any soreness in her throat. But for now she will let her sleep. There’s no hurry. They have all the time in the world.

  Rapunzel

  Walking beside the Prince along the courtyard, toward the steps leading to the Great Hall, Rapunzel is aware of the glitter of many jewels. The costumes are richly colored and catch the sun. On a gallery above the courtyard, men bearing shields look down. Voices cry out in welcome. She tries to recall her childish fear of these faces, but it is like trying to recall the pictures in an old book. Long ago she lived in a tower, in the middle of a great forest. The sorceress, the high window, her hair falling toward the bottom of the tower, all of it is fading away. In the sunlit courtyard she sees flashes of bright hair, high-arched eyebrows, earlobes with rings. She will study them, she will learn what she needs to learn. The Prince no longer doubts her, as he did in the time before the wilderness. Night after night he came to her in the tower. She can feel his eyes on her face. She turns, sees that he is tired. Soon he can rest. She understands that he is done with trials and challenges, with perilous adventures. She understands one more thing: she is stronger than the Prince. It is good. She will laugh again, she will grow out her hair, she will play. But for the moment, as they approach the steps, she will walk beside her Prince among the courtiers and the ladies, inviting their attention, meeting their glances, looking calmly at them as they observe their Princess.

  ELSEWHERE

  That summer a restlessness came over our town. You could feel it on Main Street, you could feel it at the beach. In the early mornings we’d step from our front doors and head for the paper wrapped in its rubber band at the end of the walk—and in that warm, inviting air we’d stop suddenly, as if in confusion. At work we stared out of windows. At home we sat down, stood up, walked into other rooms. We planned long weekend excursions that never materialized, flung ourselves into complex diets that we forgot the next day, spoke eagerly of changing our habits, our jobs, our lives. Husbands in baseball caps and cargo shorts, pushing power mowers and dreaming of distant mountains, drifted absentmindedly across driveways into neighboring yards, where they looked around in surprise. On the green lawns of summer, you could see the wives in gardening gloves and wide-brimmed hats, kneeling on cushions beside rows of marigolds and azaleas. As they raised their three-pronged weeders, they would sometimes pause for a moment and glance into the next yard. They would look up at the familiar windows at the back of a neighbor’s house, at the roof shingles trembling with sunlight, over the top of the roof into the startling blue sky, which seemed to be calling them to come away, come away.

  Even the young people of our town seemed infected by unease. Home from school, teenagers in T-shirts and ripped jeans threw themselves down on the family couch with an arm over their eyes. Seconds later they sprang up as if in the grip of a violent passion, then fell back with a shuddering yawn. On burning Saturday afternoons at the public beach, you could see the children crouching down on the hard wet sand at the water’s edge. There they began building fanatically detailed castles, with turrets and castellations and arrow slits for crossbows, pausing only to look up as a yellow helicopter flew high above the water. When they looked back down, they had lost interest forever.

  In the hot nights we’d sit on our screened back porches, lit by dim lanterns, and listen to the crickets growing louder and louder, as if they were always coming closer, and behind them or through them we could hear a deeper sound, like a distant waterfall: the steady roll of trucks on the thruway, rushing away in opposite directions.

  What was it that we wanted? We were doing all right, on the whole, we were happy enough, as things go. Oh, we had our worries, we woke in the dark with thoughts of money and death, but our neighborhoods were safe, no one died of hunger in our town, we counted our blessings and knew we’d been spared the worst. We’d looked forward to summer the way we always did—season of vacations, season of departures from the usual flow of things—but this time there was something left over, as if we’d stretched out our arms wider than the world. Had we expected too much of summer? That blue sky, that yellow sun…Never a blue sun! Nowhere a green sky! Sometimes we had the sense that we were waiting for something, a hint, a sign—waiting for a direction in which we could pour our terrible energy.

  The first incident occurred toward the middle of June, at about 10:30 at night, in the home of Amy Banks, a sixteen-year-old high-school junior. Her parents, Dr. Richard Banks, a well-known orthodontist with a flourishing practice on East Broad Street, and Melinda Banks, a social worker at the new community center, were upstairs in their bedroom. Amy had been sitting in the family room, watching TV with the sound off and talking to a girlfriend on her cherry-red cell phone. She said good night, snapped the cell shut, and reached for the remote. At that moment she became aware of a motion in the dark corner of the room between the TV and the window. From the window a pair of light curtains hung down past the sill. Amy thought at first that a breeze might have stirred a curtain, even though the room was warm and the window was closed. As she began to get up from the couch, where she’d been sitting back against two pillows with her legs tucked under her, she was again aware of a motion in the corner, which this time, she said, was a “stirring,” though not of the curtains. She saw nothing distinct, nothing at a
ll.

  Now a fear seized her. At the same time she was uncertain what she’d seen and told herself not to cry out and wake her father, who went to bed early. The stirring continued, without a sound. Just as Amy was about to run from the room, everything returned to normal: the corner was still, the TV cord lay against the baseboard, a woman on the screen sat in her car and silently pounded the heels of both hands against the steering wheel, the light from the kitchen reached across the arm of the reading chair and touched the edge of the lamp table. Amy stood up. She took two deep breaths and walked over to the corner. There she examined the floor, the baseboard, and the back of the TV. She pulled aside both curtains. She raised and lowered the window shade, felt the wall, looked all around. She turned off the TV and went up to bed.

  The next night, shortly after ten o’clock, something stirred in the first-floor bedroom of Barbara Scirillo, a high school senior who lived three blocks away from Amy Banks and shared a French class with her. Barbara screamed. Her father, James Scirillo, a physics teacher and a member of the school board, called the police. No trace of an intruder was found. Barbara said she’d been changing into her pajamas and watching the computer screen when she felt something or someone move in the room. She saw nothing, no one. She could provide no further details.

  Our local paper, the Daily Echo, reported the Scirillo incident on the second page, where Amy Banks’s father came across it over breakfast. He put down his coffee cup, shook the paper into shape, and read the piece aloud to his wife and daughter. When Amy then described her own weird adventure, Dr. Banks called the police. The Echo gave a full account the next day.

  Now we were all on the alert for an intruder, possibly a peeping Tom, though we reminded ourselves that the details were sketchy, the observers impressionable. No doubt the incidents would soon have been forgotten, if it hadn’t been for a sudden rash of “sightings,” as they came to be called. The victims—or sighters—were mostly junior-high and high-school girls, who reported suspicious movements at night in the corners of living rooms, bedrooms, and darkened hallways. But they weren’t the only ones who saw things. A woman in her late thirties reported a stirring in her garage at dusk, several young mothers reported incidents of apparent intrusion, and John Czuzak, a retired policeman, claimed that one night when he entered his kitchen from the TV room he saw something move near the refrigerator, though he couldn’t say what it was that moved or even what the motion was like, other than “a kind of ripple.”

  As the incidents spread across our town, creeping into the bedrooms of corporate lawyers and third-grade teachers and drill-press operators who worked at the machine shop out on Cortland Avenue, people began to propose theories to account for what was happening. Of these the Peeping Tom and the Prankster Theories were the most widely believed. The police warned us to lock our doors and windows at night and report any sign of unusual behavior in our neighborhoods. Some of us wondered whether there might be a physical explanation—maybe the ripples were effects of light produced by passing cars, or the results of air condensing because of a sudden temperature change.

  These early guesses quickly gave way to more elaborate conjectures. The incidents, some said, were signs of a collective delusion bred by the boredom of summer—the sightings passed from girl to girl like an infection and then to anyone with a hungry imagination. We were trying to decide whether it pleased us or bothered us to think of the sightings as imaginary when a bolder theory appeared. The article was printed in the Opinions section of the Daily Echo and signed “A Friend of Truth.” In it the writer argued that the mysterious incidents were nothing less than manifestations of the invisible world—eruptions of the immaterial into our realm of matter. This argument, which many of us found irritating or laughable, was taken up, debated, condemned, and embellished, until in a late version it served as the founding principle of a group that called itself the New Believers. Members proposed that the visible world contains rents or fissures through which the invisible world shows itself. The “manifestations” were said to indicate those places of rupture.

  Many of us who resisted these explanations found them more troubling than the incidents they sought to illuminate, for in their extremity, in their eagerness to embrace an unseen world, they seemed to us a sign of the very discontent that burned its way across our summer.

  As ideas multiplied and arguments grew more heated, the manifestations themselves grew less frequent. Soon small groups began to form, composed of people intent on observing and even encouraging the incidents. Three or four friends would gather at a set time, at dusk or late at night, in a living room or bedroom. They would turn off the lights, except for a four-watt night-light set in the baseboard. For hours they would talk among themselves as if they were casually gathered there, an easygoing group of friends with nothing much to do on a summer evening, all the while watching closely for signs of stirring in darkened corners. The new burst of sightings that emerged from these exercises caused a brief excitement, but the evidence they offered was always in question, since it was difficult not to feel an element of contrivance and self-deception at the heart of those meetings. By the end of June, the few reports of manifestations no longer attracted serious attention.

  It was now that we began to hear of new groups, hidden gatherings. These shadowy associations rejected the belief in manifestations as literal intrusions of another realm, while arguing that they were clues or shadow-events intended to call into question the claims of the visible world. One such group, the Silents, was composed of older teenagers and young adults. The Silents met secretly and followed strict dietary rules that limited them to grains and juices. What brought them to our attention was the rumor that they practiced something called Ultrasex. From our bedroom windows at night we would sometimes see them, young people in flowing gowns, moving through the streets toward secluded places. In basement playrooms, in church graveyards, in small clearings in the north woods, they would hold their meetings, after which they would lie down in pairs and strive for a consummation that had nothing to do with the body. Love, desire, lust itself, according to the Silents, were strictly immaterial events. Touching, hugging, kissing, stroking, rubbing, to say nothing of sexual intercourse, were all forms of failure—descents into the realm of matter. Members of the group were encouraged to lie as close as possible beside a partner, who was often partially naked, and, while rigorously abstaining from the act of touch, give way to sensations of desire of such ferocious intensity that the body seemed to dissolve in flames. It was said that this discipline, far from punishing the flesh, made use of the material body to create sustained heights of spiritual ecstasy, in comparison to which the most violent orgasm was the twitch of an eyelid.

  Those of us who deplored such practices understood they could not last, while at the same time we acknowledged that the turn away from the body was only another sign that the old satisfactions could no longer be taken for granted.

  It was about this time that we became aware of something else, as we lay awake at night with closed eyes and unquiet minds. At first it was only a faint noise, a scratching sound in the dark. Soon you could almost hear them: breaking into the cement with their picks, digging down with their shovels and spades. From the outset we called them the tunnelers. In houses scattered throughout our town, in ranch-house developments and older neighborhoods, they were said to be at work, the same family men who in other summers had gone bowling or settled down with a beer and a bowl of chips in front of the TV. Sometimes after dinner, sometimes late at night when their wives and children were asleep, they would go down to their cellars and continue digging. And though the tunnelers themselves never spoke of their work, so that we had to rely on rumors and thirdhand reports, we believed in the tunnels, we understood them immediately. In that relentless digging, that digging to nowhere, we saw a desire to burst the bonds of the house, to set forth, from the familiar place, into the unknown. Sometimes a tunneler would raise his pick over his shoulder, swing it against t
he beckoning dirt, and feel a sudden loosening. A moment later he’d break through to another tunnel, where a neighbor was hard at work. Then the intruder would lean on the handle of his pick, wipe his forehead with the back of a sleeve, and exchange a few awkward words, before retreating and changing direction.

  In our beds at night, listening to the call of crickets and the rush of trucks on the thruway, we could hear that other, more elusive sound, which might have been the sound of many shovels striking against earth and stone—and we had the sense that down there, all across town, beneath our bedrooms and kitchens and neatly mown backyards, far down beneath the roots of pine trees and the haunts of garden worms, a web of passageways was being woven, an intricate system of crisscrossing hollows, so that our yards and houses sat upon a thin crust of earth that at any moment might burst open with a roar.

  Sometimes at night I would wake up and think: I’ve got to get away, I’ve got to go somewhere, right now, soon, first thing tomorrow. Then an excitement would ripple through me, as if I were already packing my bags, already dropping my shoes into the airport basket. In the long hours of the night my excitement would gradually lessen, until by morning I no longer remembered what it was, exactly, that I’d made up my mind to do.

  As if in response to the tunnelers, the roof-dwellers appeared. We all knew how it started. One morning David Lindquist, a retired handyman who lived in a two-story carriage house set back on a dead-end road, climbed onto his roof. There he built a simple shelter against the chimney and refused to come down. His wife delivered food through a trapdoor in the attic ceiling. Lindquist had contrived a system of pipes that connected to the plumbing, and he’d brought up a hose to flush down waste. He refused to talk to reporters, but his wife told them that her husband really liked it up there; he’d always been drawn to heights. What struck us wasn’t so much Lindquist’s eccentricity as his austerity. It was said that he lived on a diet of bread, water, and fruit, sat for long hours gazing out at the surrounding trees, and trained himself to sleep in the angle where two roof slopes met.