He sat up in bed and drank a glass of tepid water. Then he eased himself up, and found his old toweling wrap, the one that Ivan Lendl had given him after Wimbledon, six years ago, and limped downstairs.
He opened the kitchen door. The moon was out. Under its colorless light, the stones were back. All over the meadow, as many as before, even strewn across the garden this time, closer to the house.
Richard went to the sitting-room and opened up his half-bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured himself a glassful. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, and he looked like a ghost of himself, a badly-frightened ghost.
Sara, he thought. Help me.
But the night remained silent and sealed, and the stones lay scattered across the meadow and the garden as if they had been beached by a prehistoric tide.
He was tempted to call Ron Maccione straight away, but he waited until morning.
“Mr Maccione,” he said. “They’re back.”
“What? What’s back? What are you talking about?”
“The stones, they’re back. In fact, they’re worse.”
There was a very long silence. If anybody could convey over the telephone a sense of bitterness as sharp and as rural as bitten cow-parsley, then Ron Maccione managed to do it.
“So sue me,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard. Sue me. I wash my hands.”
Richard spent the entire morning wheeling stones out of the garden in a squeaking barrow and tipping them on to the edge of the meadow. Even though the day was cold and thundery, with flickers of lightning in the distance, he was sweating and puffing by eleven o’clock, and he stripped off his shirt. He felt like a character in a Grimm’s fairy-tale, Dick the Stone-Shifter. He was rumbling the wheelbarrow back across the garden for what he had promised himself would be the last load when he became aware that Greta Reuter was standing close to the house, watching him.
He set down the wheelbarrow, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He said nothing.
“I see the stones are back,” she remarked, approaching him along the diagonal paths, left and then right, left and then right.
He nodded, still short of breath.
“Quite a phenomenon,” she said, still smiling. “Have you found out what’s causing it? Or who?”
He wiped his chest with his shirt. “You want some coffee?”
“I brought you another pie,” she said. “Seeing how much you liked the last one. It’s blueberry this time. Sad, sad, blueberry.”
“Thank you, you needn’t have troubled yourself. I’m getting quite used to a diet of frozen pizzas and lima beans.”
She accompanied him back to the kitchen. “Tell me,” she said. “When you’re playing a game of tennis, and you do something to deliberately frighten or unsettle your opponent, what do you call that?”
Richard glanced at her sharply. “I don’t know. Psyching out, I guess.”
“That’s it,” she smiled. “Psyching out.”
It was only after she had left that he lifted the cloth covering the pie, and saw the pastry letters Fare Thee Well.
He was wakened by the sound of knocking. Dark, granite-hard knocking. He sat up in bed and switched on his bedside lamp. He sat listening. There was somebody in the house. Somebody, or something. He listened for two or three minutes, suppressing his breathing.
He heard the softest of crunching noises outside the door. He eased himself out of bed, and crossed the room. He had almost reached the door when it creaked sharply; and one of the upper hinges popped.
He hesitated, with his hand on the doorknob. The door creaked again – a deep, twisted creak, as if the very grain of the wood were being tortured. Behind the door he heard a heavy grating and grinding. It seemed as if the whole door-frame were being subjected to enormous pressure.
But from what?
The door cracked. Richard stepped back a little; but he was too late. The door suddenly burst its hinges, and collapsed on top of him, followed by an avalanche of rocks. He screamed in pain as both his ankles were broken, and the stainless steel pins which held his thighbones together exploded through his skin.
He was pinned to the floor, on his back, with the rock-heaped door pressing down on top of him.
“Aah! God! Help me!” he screamed. “God! Help me!”
But nobody answered, and the door grew heavier and heavier as one more rock after another scraped itself on to the top of the heap.
The rocks were alive. They were like huge, blind, slow-creeping turtles, with a heartless and unstoppable determination to crush the last ounce of life out of him.
He felt his ribs clutching him; then crackling one by one. He felt something burst inside him, and blood and bile gushed up into his mouth. He spat, coughed, choked.
“God!” he gargled, with lungs that were so tightly compressed that they could scarcely take in any air.
His head fell back and his eyes rolled up; and it was then that he saw her standing over him, Greta Reuter, in a long grayish dress, her blonde hair loosened, smiling, calm, with her hands held up in front of her as if she were praying.
“Help me,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, help me.”
Greta Reuter slowly shook her head. “William Palen didn’t help George Sturgeon, not for God’s sake, not for any sake. His wife Emily begged for his life, but William Palen hardened his heart.”
“Help me,” Richard repeated. “I can’t –”
Again Greta Reuter shook her head.
“William Palen piled on the last of the rocks that pressed George Sturgeon to death. And now you’re back in Preston, and you’re William Palen’s natural heir, so you must pay the price.”
She knelt down beside him, and touched his forehead with cool fingertips. “Missie Sturgeon lives within me. Missie Sturgeon has lived for generations within all the Sturgeon women until the time could come when she could take her revenge. That is the way with witches.”
All that Richard could do was gasp, as yet another massive rock grated its way to the top of the heap, and added enough weight to break his pelvis apart.
“Fare thee well,” smiled Greta Reuter, drawing back her hair so that she could kiss his bloody lips.
Richard had never imagined that being slowly crushed could be so painful. He felt as if every nerve in his body were being stripped, like electrical cables. But he could no longer draw enough air into his lungs to cry out.
The very worst part was to feel like screaming but not to be able to. Sara, he thought, in agony. Sara.
Greta Reuter left the house like a gray shadow leaving the door open behind her. Outside, lightning danced epileptically on the horizon.
As she walked diagonally across the meadow, the stones that were strewn across it began to shift, and to knock against each other, and then to tumble.
By the time she reached the center of the meadow, with her blonde hair blowing across her face, hundreds of stones were clattering behind her, in her footsteps. The lightning flickered; her eyes shone white as milky marbles.
She had not yet reached the far side of the meadow, however, when a tall dark-haired figure materialized out of the darkness. A woman with dark eyes, and a face as composed as a porcelain mask.
“Where are you going, Missie Sturgeon?” the woman called, in a shrill, commanding voice. Greta Reuter stopped rigidly still, and her bride’s train of tumbling rocks clattered into silence.
“Who are you?” Greta Reuter demanded. “What do you want of me?”
“What have you done, Missie Sturgeon?” the woman cried. Her voice like saws; her voice like seagulls.
Greta Reuter took three stiff-legged steps forward. The rocks followed. “Sara Nugent,” she whispered.
“You’ve killed him!” Sara accused her. “You had no right to. You had no call to.”
Greta Reuter took another step forward, but Sara swung her arm and crackles of lightning skipped and popped from her fingertips, real witchery; and Greta Reuter
stood stiff and terrified, her hair rising and flying straight up above her, as the hair of all women flies up when they are about to be struck by lightning. Her face contorted, screaming a wide, silent scream.
“You had no right to,” Sara repeated, her voice soft and blurry with static electricity. “The sin dies with the sinner, you know that.”
Greta Reuter continued to scream. Then lightning struck her, directly on top of her head, and for one terrible instant her bones were visible through her skin. Then she fell backwards, in flames, convulsing and shuddering, with smoke pouring out of her wide-open mouth.
All around her, the stones cracked and split and exploded in every direction.
Sara stood over her for a long time, while the storm rumbled and gradually passed. Then she walked toward the house, where Richard at last would be waiting for her.
The Woman in the Wall
Archbold, Ohio
Archbold, Ohio, (population 3,318) is the only town in this book in which I have never spent any time (I stopped for twenty minutes for a cup of coffee and a Danish). Without being disparaging, I can think of no earthly reason why I should, and even one of the residents agreed with me. Because I have altered and fictionalized the setting, I have changed its name slightly to “Archman”. But I have visited Toledo and Defiance and seen the Independence Dam, and I was so taken by the scenery and the kindness of the people I met that I wanted to set a story somewhere in the vastness of northern Ohio – with that sense of being poised in the mid-West, somewhere between Cleveland and the setting sun.
I still have a postcard I bought in Archbold, showing some outstandingly nondescript buildings. Perhaps Archbold – except for those who live there and love it – is one of those places that should forever remain in one’s imagination.
THE WOMAN IN THE WALL
It was raining in cold dreary sheets that day I moved into 31 Caper Street; scurrying between the uplifted tailgate of my station wagon and the wedged-open front door, with a sodden copy of the Archman Times draped over my head.
And when at last it was all over, and I was sitting in my own brown dilapidated chair with rain-streaked boxes stacked around me, I closed my eyes against the raw glare of the single electric bulb and breathed relief.
But what sadness, too. Because Vicky was gone, and Jimmy Junior was gone, and here I was, alone in Archman, Ohio, on a rainy night, with wet shoes, and nothing to show for four years of marriage but old magazines and dog-eared Christmas cards and records I never wanted to listen to, never again.
I rummaged my way through four cardboard boxes until I found a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey. There was nothing to drink it out of but a lime-encrusted flower-vase. I sat under the single bulb and drank myself a toast. To love, to life, to what-the-hell.
You threaten to walk out so many times. You rage and argue and all the time you never believe that one day you’re going to do it. And then one day you do. And once you’re standing on the wrong side of that door, that’s it. Something irrevocable has happened, and you can never, ever go back.
My advice to all discontented husbands: don’t argue, don’t drink, don’t walk through that door.
Now Vicky was working as a secretary in Toledo and Jimmy Junior was classified as the child of a single-parent family and I was preparing to start work as a geography-and-athletics teacher at Archman Junior High. Your whole life can turn itself upside-down that quickly – just because you walked out of that door.
I finished my drink, and lay back for a while, and then I decided I needed a walk, and maybe some supper, too. I left the apartment by the narrow front stairs and walked along Caper Street as far as Main.
It had stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. An occasional car swooshed past, its brake-lights bleeding into the glistening blacktop. I thrust my hands into my pockets and looked up at the rapidly-clearing sky, and felt that I was two thousand miles away from anybody I knew and loved.
On the corner of Willow and Main, there was a drugstore with steamy windows called Irv’s Best. I pushed my way inside and it smelled of meatloaf and grape-flavored gum and Elf Quest comics. There was a rundown-looking guy behind the counter with a face like potatoes and a folded paper hat. “How about a Reuben sandwich and a lite beer?” I asked him.
He poured me the beer. “You want gas?” he said. “This’ll give you gas. This, and a Reuben sandwich. You want a guaranteed recipe for gas?”
“I just want a sandwich and a beer, is that all right with you?”
He sniffed. “You headed east?” he asked me.
“I’m not headed anywhere.”
He frowned. He obviously didn’t understand.
“I’m moving in. I’ve come to live here.”
“You’ve come to live in Archman? You out of your tree?”
“I’m teaching geography and athletics at the Junior High.”
“You are out of your tree.”
“I don’t think so,” I told him, and by this time he was making me feel irritated. “I wanted to find someplace quiet, and Archman looks like it.”
“Well, you’re right there. Archman is someplace quiet all right. Archman is so goddamned quiet they keep sending the sheriff across from Wauseon to see if we’re still breathing.”
He sniffed more violently, and spent some time wiping the stainless-steel counter with a smeary rag. “There’s a church, and a store, and a brickworks, and a library full of books that everybody’s read, and that’s it.”
He was silent and thoughtful for a while, and then he reached out his hand and said, “My name’s Carl, by the way. Good to know you. Welcome to Archman.”
“What happened to Irv?”
“Irv who?”
“This place is called Irv’s Best, isn’t it?”
“Oh, that Irv. He died.”
I finished my sandwich and walked back to Caper Street. Carl was right. Archman was the quietest place I’ve ever been in, ever. You could stand in the middle of Main Street at midnight and you couldn’t hear anything at all. It was just as if the whole town had been covered by a thick felt blanket. Claustrophobic memories of childhood, underneath a bedspread that was too heavy.
I climbed wearily up the stairs to my first-floor apartment, and closed the door behind me. I undressed, dropping my clothes on the floor. Then I took a shower. The plumbing shuddered so loud I imagined they could probably hear me all the way across town. I soaped myself and whistled a little. The night they drove Old Dixie down … and all the people were singing …
But then, so soft and indistinct that I thought I might have imagined it, I heard a noise in the apartment somewhere.
I listened, feeling that odd tingly feeling you get when your intellect is telling you to be reasonable but your instinct is more than just a little bit alarmed. I never particularly like taking a shower in an empty apartment anyway, it makes me feel vulnerable.
The next thing you know, Anthony Perkins is going to come slashing his way through the shower-curtain with a twelve-inch carving-knife.
I heard the noise again, and this time I shut off the faucet. I listened and listened, but all I could hear now was the soft gurgling of water going down the drain. I stepped out of the shower and picked up my towel. I opened the bathroom door.
There it was again. A soft, insistent, scratching noise. A rat, maybe; or a bird in the eaves. It seemed to be coming from the bedroom. I hesitated outside the door for a while, and then stepped in.
The bedroom was empty. There was a solid red-brick wall at one end, and the three other walls were painted white. I had set up the new divan with the brass headboard which I had bought three days ago at Sear’s, but there was nothing else in the room at all. No cupboards for rats or cats to conceal themselves in. No nooks and crannies. Just a plain rectangular room, with a bed. A double bed, which one casualty from a recently-broken marriage was hoping from time to time to share with somebody else. God let there be some single women in Archman. Correction, God. Single women under th
e age of 60.
I listened a moment longer, but all I could hear was the muffled rattling of a distant freight-train. I finished drying myself, and then I climbed into bed and switched out the light. The ceiling was criss-crossed with squares of light from the street outside, on which the shadows of raindrops trembled. I lay with my eyes open feeling more sad and lonely than I had ever been in my whole life. I thought of Vicky. I thought of Jimmy Junior. I let out one tight sob that was more of a cough and then I didn’t allow myself any more.
Sleep took me by stealth. I snored once, and jolted, but then I was sleeping again. Two hours of the night passed me by, and then I heard that noise again. A soft, repetitive scritching, like claws against brick. I lay staring at the wall, tensed-up, not breathing, and then it came again.
I reached down and switched on the lamp, half-expecting to send a rat scurrying away into the shadows. But the bedroom was bare. I listened and listened and there it was. Scritch, scritch, scritch.
There was no doubt about it this time. It was coming from the other side of the wall. Perhaps somebody in the next building had a pet dog that was locked up for the night. Perhaps they were doing some late-night decorating, scraping off some old wallpaper. Whatever it was, it didn’t have anything to do with me – except that if it kept on, I’d have to go next door and complain about it.
I turned off the light, dragged the comforter up around my ears, and made a determined effort to go to sleep. I had almost sunk back into the darkness when the scratching started up again. Angry now, and deeply fatigued, I picked up a heavy bronze ashtray and banged on the wall with it.
Fortnight of Fear Page 11