999

by Al Sarrantonio

  For not a minute of any hour of any day, nor even night, did we children of a disgraced and defeated man cease to feel the outrage of our predicament.

  Why? Why has this happened to us?

  Graeme made his way down the staircase that swayed slightly beneath even his modest weight of eighty-nine pounds. He imagined the pupils of his eyes enlarging in the dark, shrewd and luminous as an owl’s. The death-stillness of the hours beyond midnight. Moonlight slanting through the latticed windows on the eastern side of the house. In the near distance, the cry of night birds; a screech owl; loons on the lake; the murmurous wind. Graeme shivered—a faint chill wind seemed always to be blowing through the drafty house from the direction of Lake Noir, to the north. Why was I drawn to see what I had no wish to see? Why I, Graeme? For a moment disoriented by the size of the foyer, larger than it seemed by day, and the water-stained marble floor painfully cold against his bare feet; and the vastness of the room beyond the foyer, one of the public rooms, as they were called, only partly furnished and these random items of furniture shrouded in ghostly white sheets; a room with dust-saturated Oriental carpets; and everywhere the sour odors of mildew, rot, the dead, desiccated bodies of mice in the walls. The room’s ceiling was so unnaturally high it seemed to be obscured in shadow, from which shrouded chandeliers hung as if floating in the gloom; a room so large as to appear without walls; as if melting out into the shadows of the overgrown grounds. Graeme believed that this room was much smaller by day. Unless he’d wandered into an unfamiliar part of the house? For we were still virtual strangers to Cross Hill, living in only a few rooms of the great old house.

  It was then that Graeme saw a movement outside on the lawn.

  Certain at first that it was an animal. For Contracoeur was a wild region; everywhere there were deer, raccoons, foxes, even lynxes and black bears—that spring, we’d been told, black bears were sighted in the very city of Contracoeur. By its pronounced upright posture the figure outside on the lawn, moving slowly past the terrace windows, must have been a bear, Graeme thought; his heartbeat quickened. We’d been warned of bears at Cross Hill but had sighted none yet. So Graeme stood at one of the terrace windows watching with excitement the mysterious figure pass at a distance of approximately thirty feet. Beyond the terrace, of broken, crumbled flagstone, was a ragged grove of Chinese elms, storm-damaged from the previous winter, beyond the elms was a lane called Acacia Drive, which split in two to circle a fountain. The upright figure moved along this lane in the moonlight, in the direction of the lake, away from the house; its posture as ramrod-straight, stiff, too straight, Graeme decided, to be a bear. And its gait rhythmic and unhurried, not the shambling, loping gait of a bear.

  Graeme then did something not in his character: he quietly unlocked a terrace door and nudged it open and stepped outside breathless into the chill, fresh air; squatted behind the terrace railing to watch the departing figure. A trespasser at Cross Hill? So far from the city and from the nearest neighbor? A hunter? (But the figure carried no weapon that Graeme could discern.) This figure could not be the white-haired part-time groundskeeper who lived in town. Nor our father—hardly. Nor sixteen-year-old Stephen. The figure was taller and more solidly built than any of these; taller, Graeme had begun to think, with a sensation of dread, than any man he’d ever seen before.

  As Graeme stared from his inadequate hiding place behind the railing, the figure halted abruptly as if sensing his presence; seemed to be glancing in Graeme’s direction, head tilted, as if it were sniffing the air, in a vivid patch of moonlight revealing itself as—a being without a face.

  Not a man, a thing. A thing-without-a-face.

  Graeme jammed his knuckles against his mouth to keep from crying out in horror. His knees had gone weak; he had to resist the instinct to turn and run blindly away, which would have called the thing’s attention to him.

  The figure’s head was seemingly human in shape, though larger and more oblong, with a more pronounced jaw, than the average human head. Its hair appeared dark, coarse, unkempt. Its rigid, stiff-backed posture suggested that of a man with an exaggerated military manner. Yet, where a face should have been there was—nothing.

  A raw blank expanse of skin like flesh brutally fashioned with a trowel. A suggestion of shallow indentations where eyes should have been, and nostrils, and a mouth; possibly there were tiny orifices in these areas too small for Graeme to see. He dared not look; he’d sunk to the terrace to hide behind the wall like a terrified child.

  He was breathing quickly, shallowly. Thinking No! No! I didn’t see anything! I’m just a boy, don’t hurt me.

  Waking then sometime later, dazed, still anxious; a sick, sour taste of bile at the back of his mouth. He must have lost consciousness—must have fainted. So frightened he couldn’t breathe! And frightened still.

  Daring to lift his head—slowly. Cautiously. Wisps of cloud like filmy, darting thoughts were being blown across the moon. The grove of Chinese elms was still; the rutted, weedy lane called Acacia Drive was empty; no movement anywhere except the restless, perpetual stirring of grasses by the wind. All of nature was hushed as in the aftermath of a terrible vision.

  The thing-without-a-face had vanished into the night.

  2. Exile

  At Cross Hill where the perpetual teasing wind from Lake Noir blew southward through our lives.

  Where in exile and disgrace and in fear of his life our father had brought his family, his wife and five children, to live in his late grandfather’s ruin of a house; on ninety acres of neglected land in rural Contracoeur, in the lower eastern range of the Chautauqua Mountains.

  Mount Moriah, eleven miles directly due west. Mount Provenance, twenty miles to the south.

  Where millions of years ago gigantic ice glaciers pushed southward like living rapacious creatures from the northern polar cap to gouge the earth into nightmare shapes: peaks, precipices, drumlins, ridges, steep ravines and narrow valleys and floodplains. Where as late as Easter Sunday of mid-May snow might fall and as early as mid-August the night air might taste of autumn, imminent winter.

  At Cross Hill, built in 1909 by Moses Adams Matheson, a wealthy textile mill owner, positioned on the crest of a glacial incline three miles south of Lake Noir (so named because its water, though pure as spring water when examined—in a glass, for instance—irradiated, in mass, an inexplicably lightless effulgence, opaque as tar) and five miles east of Contracoeur (a small country town of about 8,500 inhabitants) on the banks of the Black River. Named Cross Hill because the house, neoclassic in spirit, had been idiosyncratically constructed in the shape of a truncated cross, of pink limestone and granite; looking now, after decades of neglect (for Moses Adams Matheson’s son and sole heir had never wished to live there) stark and derelict as an old ship floundering in a sea of unmowed grass, thistles and saplings.

  A hundred thousand dollars, minimum, would be required, Father gloomily estimated, to make Cross Hill “fit for human habitation;” almost as much to restore the grounds to their original beauty. (Which Father had seen only in photographs.) We didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars. We were “reduced to poverty—paupers.” We would have to live “like squatters” in a few rooms of Cross Hill, most of the enormous house shut up, the rooms vacant. And we would have to be grateful, Father warned us, for what we had—"Grandfather’s legacy to me. A place of sanctuary.”

  Temporary sanctuary, he meant. For of course Roderick Matheson meant to clear his name and return to the capital. In time.

  Seeing the ruin of Cross Hill that first afternoon in a pelting rainstorm, our station wagon’s wheels stuck and spinning in the grassy-muddy drive, Mother burst into tears, crying bitterly, “I’ll die here! How can you bring me here? I’ll never survive.” The younger children, Neale and Ellen, immediately burst into tears too. But Father quickly reached over to grasp Mother’s wrist, to comfort her; or to quiet her; we heard Mother draw in her breath sharply; Father said in a lowered, pleasant voice, “No, Veroni
ca. You will not die. None of us Mathesons will die. That will only please them—my enemies.”

  Enemies: some of them former associates of Father’s, even friends of his and Mother’s, who’d betrayed him for political reasons; had perjured themselves in a campaign to vilify and destroy his career; had had a part in issuing warrants for his arrest.

  Here are facts. We children knew little of them at the time, we had to piece them together afterward. For much was unknown to us. Much was forbidden knowledge.

  In April of that year, shortly after his forty-fourth birthday, Judge Roderick Matheson, our father, was arrested in his chambers at the State Court of Appeals.

  At the time of his much-publicized arrest the youngest of the eleven justices of the court and the one of whom the most brilliant future was predicted.

  Roderick Matheson was kept for twelve days in “interrogative detention” in a state facility within a mile of the State Court of Appeals. He was allowed to see only his attorneys and his distraught wife.

  Then, abruptly, he was released.

  And made to resign his judgeship. And made to surrender to the state most of his accumulated savings and investments. So the family was plunged into debt. Virtually overnight, into debt. So he and Mother were forced to sell their house in the most prestigious suburb of the capital; and their summer cottage on the Atlantic coast in Kennebunkport, Maine; and all but one of their several cars; and their yacht; and Mother’s several fur coats; and certain items of jewelry; and other expensive possessions. Why? we children asked, and Mother said bitterly, Because your father’s enemies are jealous of him, because they’re vicious men who’ve banded together to destroy him.

  We were forbidden to ask further questions. We were forbidden to see newspapers or newsmagazines, watch TV or listen to the radio. Immediately at the time of Father’s arrest we were taken by Mother out of our private schools and forbidden to communicate with even our closest friends by telephone or E-mail. Mother insisted we remain in the house; Mother insisted upon knowing where we were every minute and became hysterical if one of us was missing, furious when we returned. Home, she shut herself away from us to talk on the phone for hours. (To Father? To Father’s attorneys? To attorneys of her own? For it seemed for a while that there was a possibility of separation, divorce.) Mother’s high shrill plaintive demanding incredulous quavering voice raised as we’d never heard it before. How can this be happening to me! I deserve better for God’s sake! I am innocent for God’s sake! And my children—what will their lives be, now?

  We were spoiled, indulged children. We didn’t know it at the time, not even Graeme knew it at the time; of course we were spoiled, indulged, the children of rich, powerful, socially ambitious parents. Even the ten-year-old twins Neale and Ellen with their sweet, innocent faces and astonished eyes. Our privileged lives of clothes and computers and private lessons (tennis, ballet, horseback riding), our pride in knowing we were the children of Judge Roderick Matheson of whom so much was said; our lives so like play-lives, and not real lives at all; changed suddenly and irrevocably as the lives of children glimpsed on TV who have suffered natural disasters like earthquakes, famine, war. And so Father himself looked, when he returned to us, the shock of blond-brown hair on his forehead now laced with silver, his cheeks gaunt, his eyes glassy and his once-handsome mouth like something mashed, like one, formerly a prince, who has survived, but only just barely, a natural disaster.

  We shrank from him, and from Mother. We were frightened of Mother’s changeable moods. For she might stare through us wide-eyed in fear and dismay, her once-beautiful hazel-green eyes swollen from weeping; or she might rush to embrace us, giving a little cry of pain—Oh, oh! Oh, what will we do? At such times Mother gave off a scent of sweet perfume commingled with perspiration; her breath smelled of—what? Wine, bourbon? Sometimes it was us, her children, whom she wished to comfort; at other times it seemed to be herself she wished to comfort; sometimes she was angry at Father, and sometimes at Father’s enemies; sometimes, for no reason we could comprehend, she was angry at us. Especially Rosalind, who at fourteen and a half, a lanky, long-limbed girl with frowning eyes, had a stubborn way of seeming to be thinking for herself, furrowing her brow and sucking at her lips, brooding silent in that space where even a mother can’t follow. So if Rosalind stiffened in Mother’s arms, nearly as tall as Mother now, Mother might lean back to sure into her face, gripping Rosalind’s shoulders with red-gleaming talon-sharp fingernails and pushing Rosalind from her—What’s wrong with you? Why are you looking at me like that? How dare you look at me, your mother—like that!

  Mother’s beautiful face like a mask. A porcelain-cosmetic mask. A mask that might shatter suddenly, like glass, if her blood beat too furiously in her veins.

  So Rosalind shrank from her and crept away to hide in a corner of Cross Hill. Thinking never never never would she grow up to be so beautiful and so angry a woman.

  But it was Father, so changed, who most frightened us. Where once Judge Roderick Matheson had been impeccably groomed, never allowing himself to be glimpsed in other than fresh-laundered clothes, his hair neatly combed, now he often wore rumpled clothes, ran his hands violently through his hair, shaved in such a way (we speculated) as to leave his skin pained, reddened; he was Father, still, and his face was Father’s much-photographed face, yet, it almost seemed, something older, rougher, ravaged sought to push its way through. His eyes, liquidy-brown, usually warm and ingratiating, had a dull glassy look; his mouth twisted as if he were arguing with himself.

  Father was a hurt, innocent man. A man betrayed, hounded and persecuted by his enemies and by the “ravenous, insatiable, unconscionable media"—the reason we hadn’t been allowed to read newspapers or watch TV. Father was an angry man and, sometimes, we had to admit, a dangerous man. For, like Mother, he swung between moods: now distressed, now furious; now optimistic, now enervated; now grieving for his family, now grieving for himself and his blighted career; now youthful, vigorous, now an aging, embittered man.

  In his speech-voice, at the dinner table, he might declaim, as if speaking to others, not just us, Dear wife, dear children! Bear with me! We will return one day soon to our rightful lives. I will redeem the name of Matheson, I will redeem us all—that is my vow. I will seal it with—my blood.

  Face flushed with wine, eyes prankishly narrowed, Father might take up his fork and, before Mother could prevent him, stab it into the back of his hand as if stabbing a small hairless creature that had unaccountably crawled up beside his plate.

  We flinched, but dared not cry out. What was required from us was a murmur—Yes, yes Father. For crying at such times generally displeased Father for its suggestion that, though we were children quickly murmured Yes, yes Father we did not truly believe our own words.

  “It’s like he died after all, isn’t it? In jail. His eyes …”

  It was after one of Father’s strange elated outbursts at the dinner table that Stephen uttered this remark in a drawling voice unlike his normal voice; Stephen whose life had been, until Father’s arrest, soccer, football, basketball, sports video games and the intense, rapidly shifting friendships of boy and girl classmates at his school; Stephen, handsome as Roderick Matheson had been as a boy, with his father’s broad face and sharply defined cheekbones.

  Graeme shrugged and walked away.

  Rosalind said something quick and hurtful to Stephen, called him an ignorant asshole, and walked away.

  Lying then awake and miserable most of the night. Pressing her damp face into her pillow. Thinking Can eyes die? A man’s eyes—die? And the rest of the man continue to live? Through the interminable wind-haunted night like each night in this terrible place she hated, so lonely, so far from her friends and the life of Rosalind Matheson she’d loved; waking fitfully to see, as if he were crouched over her bed, the glassy, red-veined eyes of our father glaring at her out of the dark.

  Dear God help him to prove his innocence. To clear his good name. Help him to restore
himself to all that he has lost. Make us happy again, make us ourselves again, return us to our true home and make the name Matheson a name again of pride.

  3. By Crescent Pond

  A sunny, wind-blustery morning! One of the grimy-paned windows in the breakfast room was cracked like a cobweb, and scattered tree limbs and debris lay on the terrace rustling like living, wounded things. “Where’s Graeme?” we asked one another.

  “Where’s Graeme?” Mother asked with vexed, worried eyes.

  For Graeme had not joined us at breakfast. He’d been awake before us, and dressed, and gone. So little Neale had said, wistfully.

  Yet Graeme was somewhere in the house. Stubborn in resistance when we called: “Gra-eme! Where are you?”

  Since our move to Cross Hill, his old life left behind, Graeme had been plunged into an angry melancholy. His expensive computer equipment could not function in this ruin of a house: there was inadequate wiring. Our parents’ large bedroom at the far front of the second floor, off-limits to us children, was said to contain a lamp with a sixty-watt bulb; and Father’s private office on the third floor contained a telephone, a fax, and one or two low-wattage lamps; though the lights frequently wavered and went out, and Father tried to use them sparingly. (Yet often Father worked through the night. He was involved in preparing extensive legal documents refuting the charges and innuendos made against him, to be presented one day to the state attorney’s office; he was also on the phone frequently with the single attorney still in his hire.) But Graeme’s new-model computer, plugged into one of the crude Cross Hill sockets, displayed a splotched gray screen with virtually no definition. Most of his programs and video games could not be operated. The Cross Hill cyberspace resembled a void; a vacuum; an emptiness like that of the atom, which is said to contain almost nothing; slow-drifting particles like motes in the corner of your eye. It was increasingly difficult to believe, Graeme thought, that such a phenomenon as “cyberspace” existed—anywhere. He’d resumed his E-mail, in defiance of Mother’s warning, but the messages he received from his several friends back in the city were strange, scrambled. One morning Stephen came upon Graeme in his room hunched over his computer keyboard, swiftly typing commands that led again and again, and again, as in a nightmare of comic cruelty, to ERROR! SERVER CANNOT BE LOCATED on a shimmering, fading screen. Stephen was shocked by the sorrow in his brother’s face. “Hey. Why don’t you let that stuff rest for a while? There’s other things we can do. Like bicycling. Into town …” But Graeme didn’t hear. He hunched his thin shoulders farther over the keyboard, rapidly typing out another complex set of commands. The luminous hieroglyphics on the screen floated slowly upward as if channeled from a very great distance through space and time. In the pale clotted light of the overcast June morning, Graeme’s adolescent skin had a peevish green cast, like tarnished metal; his eyes glistened with bitter bemusement. In disgust he said to Stephen, “Look.” Stephen looked: it was Graeme’s E-mail he was scanning, but each of the messages had something wrong with it, as if awkwardly translated from a foreign language, or in code: