People of the Dark

by Wright, T. M.

  "Sure," I said. "I understand," though I didn't, and she turned and left.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She came up from doing the laundry in the cellar the following evening and said, "Jack? The house is haunted!" The look on her face was an odd mixture of bemusement, frustration, and anger—as if she wanted to throw her hands into the air and say, Now, what are we going to do? "The house is haunted. And I don't like it."

  I said the predictable: "Erika, I've known you how long now—six, seven years?—and I had no idea you believed in ghosts."

  She cocked her head in confusion. "I thought everyone believed in ghosts. Don't you?"

  I shrugged. "I suppose I do."

  She looked annoyed. I added, my tone more serious, "Yes. I do. I believe in ghosts, Erika." I didn't stop to consider whether I was telling the truth or not. I didn't think I was. I was, at that point, trying to avoid a confrontation.

  Erika said, "But you don't believe that this house is haunted, right?"

  Again, I said the predictable: "Tell me why you think it's haunted and I can give you a rational answer."

  "Because," she started, her tone suddenly stiff; she pointed at the floor to indicate the cellar—"there are people talking down there."

  I nodded at the TV, which was on, volume low: "No. It was just the TV, Erika. I've heard the same sort of thing before. It sounds like there are people living in the walls, doesn't it?" I paused; she said nothing. I went on, "But there aren't any people in the walls. If there were, they wouldn't be talking, would they?"

  "No," she said, coolly.

  "You think my theory's full of holes, don't you?"

  "Yes," she said, still coolly. She nodded at the TV. "I can hardly hear that, and I'm in the same room with it, Jack. How in the hell am I going to hear it down in the cellar?"

  I shrugged again. "Weird acoustics, I don't know." She said nothing.

  "Okay, then—tell me what these spooks were talking about, Erika."

  "There was only one."

  "Oh?"

  "Yes. And I'm not sure what he was talking about. Something about the dark."

  "Oh? You didn't hear every word, Erika?"

  "No. Not every word. He mumbles."

  "Oh. He mumbles."

  "Stop that, damnit!"

  "Stop humoring you?"

  "Yes. The house is haunted, and when you care to talk about it further, I'll be in my music room." And she turned and left.

  I was curious, of course. I went into the cellar, said a few stupid things—"Hey, Mr. Spook, where are you? Come out, Mr. Spook"—then went to Erika's music room and told her I'd found nothing at all in the cellar.

  "Of course you didn't," she told me. "How are you going to find a ghost unless it wants to be found?"

  It was a good question. I had no answer for it, so the subject was dropped.

  A week later, Erika said to me over dinner, "I passed a place called Granada today, Jack."

  "Oh?" I said.

  She nodded, stuck a forkful of my homemade fettuccine Alfredo into her mouth, looked appreciative. "I took a different route home. You drive the same damned route every day, and it gets pretty boring." She pointed with her fork at her plate of fettuccine Alfredo. "This is good stuff, Jack. Really." She tossed her head so her dark hair fell in back of her shoulders.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "There were POSTED signs everywhere, but the place was deserted, so I drove through." She shook her head, scowled. "God, it was awfully grim. Remember Love Canal, near Buffalo, Jack?"

  "Yes," I said. "Entire little community all deserted and boarded up, right? Didn't it have something to do with a chemical dump?"

  She nodded. "This was the same kind of thing, I think. Several of the houses—and these were nice houses, Jack; I mean, these were $150,000 houses, at least—several of these houses had burned, but most of them looked like they'd simply been abandoned."

  "And no one was there, Erika?"

  She shook her head. "Not a soul. Lots of wildlife. I saw six or seven deer, a whole mess of squirrels, and Blue Jays, and I think I saw a raccoon, too. But no people." She popped another forkful of fettuccine into her mouth and chewed very deliberately.

  "Sounds . . . intriguing," I said.

  "It was, Jack. It really was. I mean—it was spooky, sure—"

  "Spooky?" I cut in, and nodded to my left to indicate the area where Jim Sandy had made his discovery. "Like that was spooky?"

  "No, Jack. Good spooky. Like going to a horror movie. It's at a distance, so it's not real. I could drive away from it. It's there"—she pointed quickly to her left, to the east—"I know it's there. But it's not here, is it?" She pointed stiffly at the kitchen floor.

  I grinned.

  "Is it?" she repeated.

  "I don't know," I said. "How do you know it didn't follow you home?"

  "Shithead!"

  "Just trying to scare the pants off you, that's all."

  She grinned a big, playful, inviting grin. "Maybe you did," she said.

  "Oh?" I said. "Can I find out?"

  "Sure," she answered. "Any time."

  "How about now?"

  "Yes," she said.

  So I did, and I had.

  "Sort of like what you imagine people wore to royal costume parties, huh?" she said at breakfast several mornings later.

  "What are you talking about, Erika?"

  "I'm talking about that 'part of a nose and forehead' you said were found here."

  "Oh." We were seated at the kitchen table, a glass top on a steel pedestal that we'd bought at a restaurant supply house several years before. There was a saucer with a couple of pieces of whole wheat toast on the table, a coffeepot, a pitcher of orange juice. I lifted the coffeepot. "More?"

  Erika nodded. I said as I poured, "That's pretty grim. You surprise me."

  "It was a joke," she said.

  I smiled, set the coffeepot down. "We won't do too much digging around here, okay?"

  "I was thinking of starting a garden, Jack." She took a quick sip of her coffee. "In that little flat open area near the privet hedge, in the spring. And if I find anything . . . tacky, I'll mark it with some string and save it for you."

  "Save it for me? What am I going to do with it?" This was a tense sort of humor we were sharing. "Start a collection?"

  She broke a piece of toast in half, studied it a moment, took a tiny bite of it. "Sure," she said. She took a larger bite. "You can start a collection, Jack. A body parts collection. And one day you can put a whole man together." She stuffed what remained of the toast into her mouth and said something unintelligible.

  "Huh?" I said.

  She swallowed, grinned. "We'll call you Doctor Frankenstein." She pronounced Frankenstein "Fronken-steen," the way Gene Wilder did. "Jack Fronk-ensteen and his whole man from the earth." Another grin, broader and stiffer. She shrugged. "Or maybe it's a woman, Jack. Did you ever think of that?"

  "No," I said.

  "I mean, an arm that looks like a rolled-up grocery bag doesn't necessarily have to be a man's arm. It could be a woman's; it could be a man's; it could be a child's."

  "Maybe," I said, and grinned.

  "What are you grinning about, Jack?"

  My grin broadened. I said in deep, sepulchral tones, "Out of the earth and into your bedroom, ha, ha, ha!"

  She said, eyes closed, and a little shiver running over her, "Let's drop it, okay?"

  "Sorry?" I said.

  "I said"—her huge brown eyes popped open and she stared hard at me—"let's drop it. That's not funny!"

  "Sorry," I said again, though in apology this time.

  Twenty years ago, in the park through which I walked home from school five nights a week, I called to Harry Simms, "Harry, it's me, it's Jack Harris. Come on out, Harry, what are you tryin' to prove, anyway?" I'd thought of running away a number of times, though mostly just for the hell of it, and I'd thought that the park would make a good starting point. So, if Harry had run away, as everyone though
t he had, he might still be there. And besides, I'd seen him; I'd heard him scream, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe!" as he swept past me, which I thought was a kind of a joke because it was the same thing he'd said earlier in the day, when he'd taken it hard in the gut during battle ball. He'd gone to his knees, hands pressed into his stomach, mouth wide, and he'd whispered, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe!" It scared the hell out of everyone, of course, but it turned out that he was only being melodramatic, that he really could breathe but that for some damned reason, he'd forgotten how.

  "Harry, goddamnit!" I called in the park three days after seeing him there. He wasn't what I'd have called a good close friend, but he'd been to my house a couple of times, and I'd been to his, and I figured that if he thought he had a good, close friend at school, it was me.

  That evening in the park it was sharply colder than it had been three nights earlier, although the air was dead still. I called to Harry Simms a number of times, and, of course, I got no answer. I heard only a high whining noise like the noise mosquitoes make. And that's what I thought it was, in fact, although the night was far too cold for mosquitoes.

  I didn't realize until just a few months ago that what I was hearing was my sometime-friend Harry Simms weeping as he melted slowly and purposefully into the earth.

  I think a lot of people had friends like Harry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was a while before we were able to take a walking tour of our property. Erika was spending long hours at her record store and I had my own work to do as well as lots of fix-up jobs around the house.

  Also, it rained too much. It rained every day for two weeks after Jim Sandy gave up on his trench digging—a soft, gray, constant drizzle that became a part of the background noise and ambiance of the house. God, it was depressing. When we were home together and that dismal rain was coming down, we moved about as if in slow motion, as if the air itself were thickening and we had to work very hard to walk in it. We played cards; we listened to music—Erika liked Rachmaninoff, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen—we made love three or four times a week (less than usual, but still noteworthy considering the depressing weather and our overwork) and took turns cooking. My specialties had everything to do with pasta. I'm a whiz at making pasta dishes. Pasta is heavy, hearty food, and I like the feeling of fullness it gives me. Erika's tastes are more eclectic, and artistic. She likes bean sprouts, falafel, goose liver pate (and, of course, my homemade fettuccine Alfredo), and she treats the preparation of food with great respect and love. She said once, "We have only what the soil gives us," and then grinned, as if embarrassed, because it was the kind of deeply philosophical remark which, from me, would have embarrassed her.

  But the rain stopped sometime early in January. The soil dried enough that we could walk on it without sinking to mid-calf, and we set off, up our mountain, with our wiry black tomcat, Orphan, following and talking to us constantly—a quick, high-pitched meow that sounded just like the word "now."

  I was thankful for the hiking boots I'd bought, because I'd grown to believe most of the stories the locals had told me, especially the stories about rattlesnakes.

  I'd been told many other things about life in the area—that there were bobcats and foxes, that the raccoons would tear our garbage up if we didn't hide it, that there were packs of feral dogs roaming about, and, of course, that crazy people lived high up on the mountain across the road from us. I'd come to the conclusion that it was best to believe most of what I heard. After a while I found that some of it was false and some of it was true, but by then it didn't make any difference.

  Erika and I walked north first, down a wide, grassy path that skirted the foot of our mountain for three-quarters of a mile. This path had once been a county road and had been unofficially named Goat's Head Road by the people in Cohocton, though no one could say exactly why. On the survey map of our property, it's simply called Old County Road Number 12/Abandoned. It continues well beyond our northern boundary, but when we got to the place where the surveyor had put up his wooden boundary markers, we turned east and started to climb our mountain.

  Erika said then, "Remember, Jack, if we find anything, it's yours."

  And I said, playing the ignorant, "I don't understand."

  "Body parts, Jack. If we find any hands or feet or legs or . . . or anything else, then you've got to deal with it. Okay?"

  "We won't find any body parts," I said.

  "Is that a promise?"

  I nodded earnestly. "You have my solemn promise, Erika. I have searched every available inch of our estate with my new, soon-to-be-patented Body Parts Detector, and I can assure you—"

  "Can it, Jack."

  I canned it.

  She was dressed very warmly in a blue ski jacket, a brown turtleneck sweater, jeans, her hiking boots, and brown leather gloves. I would have been sweating in an outfit like that—the temperature was well into the forties, and the air was damp from the recent rains. But Erika was always easily chilled. Most evenings that winter she spent an hour or so seated on the floor in front of the living room fireplace, her bare feet up close to the grating and a look of deep comfort and satisfaction on her face.

  "How long's this been going on, Jack?" she asked after a while. We were about a hundred feet up the mountain then, and trying hard to find an area where we wouldn't slide two feet down for every foot of progress up.

  "You mean the body parts thing, Erika?" I'd found some solid ground. She was trying, with much difficulty, to pull herself further up the mountain from it by clinging to the thin branch of a dead oak tree. I planted both my hands firmly on her rear end and pushed. It took her by surprise. Her upper body lurched backward; her arms went wide, and with a small, high-pitched squeak of surprise, she began to fall. I caught her, held her a moment with my arms around her chest, and noticed that her breathing had become quick and shallow, as if she were in shock.

  I whispered to her, trying to sound playful, "Sorry about that, kiddo," but she made no response, so I continued, "Really. I'm sorry," and she shrugged out of my loose grip, turned halfway, and shook her head quickly.

  "No," she said. I heard tension in her voice. "No, it's all right. It's just that for a moment I felt like I was being . . . swallowed up."

  "Swallowed up. By what?"

  She made a visible effort to bring her breathing back to normal. "I don't know, Jack. By this mountain." She smiled sheepishly, embarrassed. "By nothing."

  We saw a man at the top of our mountain when we were halfway up. We yelled "Hello" to him, and Erika added, "Who are you?"—but he was a good distance from us, and we realized that he probably couldn't hear us. He was walking several feet back from the crest of the mountain, so we saw him only from the waist up, and I guessed that he was wearing jeans and a denim jacket, though from my vantage point it was hard to tell. Erika yelled to him again, "Who are you?" And added, "This is private property, you know!" I think he turned his head slightly when she said that.

  I believe that he smiled.

  "Yes," I yelled, "private property!"

  And he was gone.

  Erika turned to me. "That is our property up there, isn't it, Jack?"

  "I think it is," I answered. "I'll check the map."

  "Yes," she said. "Do that."

  It is true, of course, that our memories sustain us. They give the present a backdrop, scenery, substance; they tell us who we are and what we're becoming. They sing to us and caress us. And sometimes they make us sit for hours, quietly, unmoving, and unchanging. As if that will put time off, and the moments will not happen. I used to do that even then, at the house.

  I used to look at her and tell her how very beautiful she was. She liked that. She'd blush and say thank you, but that she wasn't, really, that it was all just an illusion. "You don't take compliments well," I'd tell her.

  "Just telling you what's real," she'd say.

  And I'd chuckle because I thought she was trying to be philosophical, cryptic, and humble. But I was wrong.
/>
  I went into Cohocton for some art supplies later that day to a shop called Ulla's Arts and Handicrafts. It was run by a pleasant, middle-aged Swedish woman and her husband, who was usually somewhere else when I visited. I'd been to the shop before, and when I walked in, Ulla looked up from behind the counter, said hello to me in Swedish, caught herself, said hello in English, thought a moment, and added, "Hello, Mr. Harris."

  "Jack," I said.

  "Hello, Jack." Her mouth had a constant, flat smile on it, not a vacuous kind of smile, but the kind that asked without words how she could help me. But it was also oddly defensive, as if she were trying to get the jump on bad news. "Are you settling in up there?"

  "We're trying," I said.

  "And have those people been to see you?"

  "What people, Ulla?"

  "The people who live across the road, Jack." Her smile flickered. "I don't know their names."

  "No," I said. "No one's been to see us."

  "They're crazy people, Jack." She put her forefinger to her temple. "They'll come and bother you. They bother everyone."

  I said nothing for a long moment. This wasn't the first I'd heard of the crazy people who lived across the road, of course, and I wasn't sure that Ulla, like the others who'd talked with me about them, wasn't having fun with me. It had become clear that the locals took an almost perverse pleasure in trying to scare newcomers, especially if they were city people and therefore unfamiliar with country life.

  "Are you joking with me?" I gave her a half smile that was designed to tell her that I wasn't totally without a sense of humor, that if she was joking it was okay.

  "Joking?" She shook her head. "No. I'm not joking. There are people living on the mountain across the road from you, and they are crazy."

  "How are they crazy, Ulla?"

  She lowered her head in thought. After a moment she looked up and said, "I don't know. I've heard about them. My customers tell me about them. They tell me they're like the people in that movie Deliverance. But I don't know how, exactly. I can't tell you." She turned her head slightly to one side. "Now, what can I do for you, today?"