They’re gonna laugh, he thought. They were the other members of his hunting party—Bill Quirk, Jim Shoddy, John Rex and Jack Hope. Sure they’d laugh, they were probably laughing right now. “Don’t go wandering off unless you want to become a permanent resident,” Bill had told him. Jack had agreed, and Jim too, and John, who’d known Mike for a number of years, had laughed and said, “Let me tell ya—if anyone’s gonna get lost, it’ll be someone named ‘Raspberry,’ for Christ’s sake!” And then they’d all laughed.
Mike had to admit that this was a good joke. They knew this country, had hunted here a dozen times. And in a little while they’d come and get him and lead him back to the car, and there would be no mention at all of Bill’s suggestion that he—Mike—“go over the way”—to the north—“into those woods; I got an eight-pointer in there once.”
For sure they were laughing, now. Laughing and coming after him because no one leaves a buddy stranded like this, and a joke can go too far, can’t it!
If it had been a joke. If they really did know their way around these goddamned woods. If Bill really did bag an eight-point buck here once.
No. Too man ifs. It had been a joke. There were no ifs or maybes about it.
He slid open the bolt on his Winchester 30.06, slipped a cartridge in, closed the bolt, took the safety off. Just a precaution. After all, there were bobcats and foxes and coyotes around here, and maybe a black bear or two, and, sure, they’d probably be more fucking afraid of him than he would be of them, but maybe one would be rabid and not care, or maybe he’d disturb some kittens and their mother, or a vixen and her cubs. And it was always better to play it safe.
Like he should have done an hour ago (two hours ago?) when he’d started losing himself, and all because of some little bit of movement off in the distance, in these very woods. (Hell, it could have been anything—it didn’t necessarily have to be a deer just because it was a quick movement.) He should have called to the other guys, then. That’s what he should have done. Instead of running off half-cocked. He chuckled. Half-cocked. That was a hoot. He laughed loud and hard.
He stopped laughing abruptly and stood very still. Was he seeing right? For Jesus Hopping Christ, was he seeing right?
What in the name of God in heaven was a naked woman doing in these woods? And in November?
He thought of calling to her, but knew the distance was too great, that the brisk, fitful wind pushing through the trees would carry his voice away.
He aimed the Winchester at the naked woman, peered through the scope. For sure she was naked, and she was a goddamned beauty, real eye candy. Jesus, if a guy was going to get lost, this was one hell of a place to do it.
He grinned, blinked, saw that she had turned away from him. He lowered the gun slightly. Now that was nice!
He felt pressure in the small of his back, through his thick hunting jacket, and whirled. Nothing. He felt pressure at his thighs—a sharp, stinging pain on his right calf. He swung the rifle back, felt it connect with something soft. The pressure and the stinging pain stopped. He whirled again. “God, God! Bill, Jack—“
“God, God!” he heard. “Bill, Jack—“
He felt weight on his back. And in the next instant he felt the flesh on the left side of his neck being ripped away.
“Bill!” he cried. “Oh Jesus…Jesus!”
“Bill!” he heard. “Oh, Jesus…Jesus!”
LATE AFTERNOON
Rachel glanced out the front window for the fifth time in a half hour, hoping to see the car pull up. She sighed. How much longer could he be? All he’d had to do was pick up some damned groceries, and maybe do a few errands he hadn’t told her about. An hour, at most, for the groceries, another hour for the imagined errands, an hour to and from town. Three hours. If he left around seven, he should have been back by ten, or eleven (at the latest), and here it was four o’clock already. She stepped away from the window, folded her arms, tapped her foot against the rug. When the phone was put in, at last, he’d have no excuse—
It would be dark by six.
Her foot quieted.
Dark by six. Shit! She’d never experienced that here, before—darkness and solitude. That wasn’t something she looked forward to. She grimaced, turned again to the window. Nothing. It was true, after all, about the watched pot. It never boiled. And the car you waited for never arrived while you watched for it. If you kept on watching, you’d watch forever because the universe, the status quo, the empty place where the car should be, wouldn’t change. Only by divine, and therefore uncontrollable, intervention could it change. And that only happened if you looked away.
She looked away, stood quietly for a full minute, looked back. Nothing.
“Dammit to hell!” she whispered. She crossed the room to the back window, ran her finger up and down the curtain—“Oh, c’mon, Paul,” she said.
And she heard a car pull up. Seconds later, she heard a car door close.
She ran to the front door, threw it open.
It wasn’t Paul’s car.
And the man walking down the lawn wasn’t Paul.
The man waved. “Hello,” he called. “Could I talk to you?”
Rachel looked confusedly at him. She said nothing.
The man mounted the porch steps heavily, opened the porch door, hesitated. “Could I talk to you, please, Ma’am? It’s kind of important.” He gave her a big, broad, false smile.
“Is it about Paul?” Rachel said. “Has something…”
“Paul?” the man cut in.
“My husband. Paul. He’s later.”
“Oh,” the man said, and stepped onto the porch, held the door open for a second, then closed it slowly. “No.” He paused. “May I come in?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” She spoke in a monotone. “Paul doesn’t like me to let strangers into the house.”
The man smiled again, quickly, as if to say he understood. “Well, okay,” he said. “My name’s Bill Quirk.” He waited for Rachel to acknowledge him, to introduce herself. She said nothing. “Yes,” he went on. “Quirk. Odd name, I know. I, uh, wanted to ask if maybe you’ve seen a hunter around here. Big guy. He’s wearing a dark blue hunting jacket.”
Rachel said nothing. Quirk conti0nued, “The last time we saw him—“
“We?”
“Me and my friends.” He nodded to indicate the car. Rachel looked, saw that there were three other men in the car, that all of them were looking at her.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. I see.”
“Sure,” Quirk said. “We were hunting, and Mike—that’s his name, Mike Raspberry, another stupid name—and Mike…got lost.” He grinned, embarrassed. “The last time we saw him he was going into the back of the woods behind your house.”
“Did you look there?” Rachel asked.
“Yes, we did.”
“And you didn’t find him?”
“Would I be here if… I’m sorry, no. We didn’t find him. We looked, but we didn’t find him, Mrs. Uh, Mrs.…”
“I haven’t seen him, Mr. Quirk. I’ve been inside all day.”
“You’re sure?”
“That I’ve been inside all day? Yes, I’m sure. Now, you’ll have to excuse me.” She began to close the door. The man stepped forward quickly, held it open. “Would you, uh, tell your husband, when he returns, that there’s a hunter missing and we’d really appreciate his help. He can call me at—“
“We don’t have a phone, Mr. Quirk. And besides, your friend should not have been hunting on our land. If something happened to him…” She stopped.
“Yes?”
“Nothing. I’ll tell Paul what you said. Now if you’ll please excuse me.”
The man let go of the door. Rachel closed it softly and watched as Quirk moved up the lawn to the car, got in, glanced skeptically at her, then drove away.
Paul arrived a half hour later.
“Insulation,” he explained, and pushed a huge roll of fiberglass through the doorway and into the kitchen. “We ca
n use it on the upstairs floor. There are four more rolls in the car.”
“I’ll get my coat,” Rachel said, “and help you bring it in.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“You’re late, Paul.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry. I had some car trouble, then I had to search all over hell and gone for this stuff, and then I went to the phone company offices and waited around there for a couple of hours. I didn’t get much accomplished, I’m afraid. I wanted to see if they could get the phone in before the end of the month, but they can’t. Don’t ask me why—something about schedules and contracts and union stuff.”
“We had visitors, Paul.”
A pause.
“Visitors?”
“Some hunters. They wanted to know if they could use our land. I told them no. That’s what I thought you’d say. Is it what you’d say?”
“It sure as hell is. Thanks.”
“Other than that, the day’s been pretty dull.” She grinned.
“Dull?”
She got her coat off the coat tree, shrugged into it. “Dull,” she repeated. “Dead dull boring monotonous. Until, that is, about three, and I began worrying about you.” She paused. “Bastard!” she concluded playfully.
“Dull dead boring monotonous, huh? Sorry to hear it.”
“I’m not, Paul. It was heaven.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
November 15
The shotgun felt heavy, alien, obscene in Paul’s hand. It had no place here (what had Rachel called it?)—in heaven.
He inhaled deeply, caught the musty odor of the forest a hundred yards ahead, the smell of earth around him. A lazy snowfall the night before had vanished shortly after sunrise, moistening the earth, warming it.
Winter, Paul realized, would soon be upon him.
He stared at the twin barrels of the shotgun as he walked. What had he hoped to do with the thing? Kill the approaching winter with it?
What did he have to fear from the winter that the house and the fireplace and his newly installed insulation and the portable electric heater wouldn’t take care of? Civilized men are only slowed down by winters, not killed by them. If, that is, they’re both civilized and careful (which was, after all, the key to survival under any circumstances).
But if that were true, and if he believed it—as he surely did—why was there that awful fluttering in the pit of his stomach, that second’s flow of adrenaline whenever the reality of the coming winter struck him? As it had with the smell of the earth—moist and stinging and cool, the smell of mid-November. The smell of the land in transition.
The November sky, as blue as it was today, caused the fluttering and the flow of adrenaline, too. Because it was a tight, frigid blue—the summer sky was fluid and warm.
He gripped the gun tightly in his left hand. The metal was cold, dispassionate. Dead metal. The gun was death incarnate. Death was its only purpose.
So why had he brought it here? Into heaven.
He stepped cautiously across the narrow stream that bordered this side of the forest. Stopped.
He had come here to kill. He knew it at once and hated it and could do nothing about it. He had come here to kill. Before the winter could.
He was an on errand of mercy. He was one of God’s perverse angels dispatched to ensure heaven a peaceful winter sleep.
He was the sandman.
A short distance to his left a pheasant suddenly took flight—a dozen sheets flapping crazily in a brisk wind. Paul froze, the adrenaline coursing through him, giving him strength momentarily, then sapping it. He snapped his head to the left, watched the pheasant settle to earth fifty yards away. He turned his body to face it, raised the shotgun, aimed.
Sandman!
He touched one of the triggers, felt it give a little.
Sandman!
He squeezed harder, saw the pheasant crouch low, trying to camouflage itself. It was a hen, dull brown, and the short grasses surrounding it were nearly the same color.
Sandman!
The pheasant shot into the air again.
Paul pulled the trigger tight. The hammer clicked. Paul smiled, relieved. The chamber was empty.
He turned and took the shallow slope in long, slow strides. He found his way to the clearing easily.
*****
Rachel had never tasted rabbit and the thought of it made her queasy Rabbits were almost like cats—so soft and warm and frisky. Some people made pets of rabbits.
But Paul had told her he was going to bring one home, if it happened to “pose” for him, offered itself. And since, as he had also told her, they might not be able to depend on the grocery store in town for their meat when winter was fully upon them, she had agreed, in order to steel herself to the task, to cook the rabbit, or at least attempt it.
She rolled over onto her shoulder, folded the pillow so her neck and head were horizontal. And hour’s nap was all she needed. And then she’d do some cleaning, take a bath, do a little reading. But just an hour’s nap, first. To shake the cobwebs away. To catch up on all the sleep she’d missed in the last couple of weeks.
They were both partly to blame for that, she knew. Their need for one another, their hunger, had not just increased, it had doubled, and redoubled, had become all-but an obsession. And she knew also that there were times—even when they were locked together and their ecstasy was all-consuming—that she was at a distance, watching, grimacing, thinking how distasteful, how wasteful of time, how deadening all of it was, that she was put on the earth for more than merely this.
Later, when she reflected on it, she ascribed those feelings to a latent Puritanism instilled in her by her stolid, no-nonsense mother.
Rachel closed her eyes.
The sex—yes, that was part of it. But the dreams were a large part, too.
They weren’t dreams she wanted to remember, and, because she always awoke quickly, sometimes in a sweat, after having them, she remembered little. Only a man with jet-black hair and a day’s growth of beard, and anguish splashed all over him and—the thing that caused her to wake, to run, to retreat—her own strange, warm feelings upon seeing that face, that anguish, as if it, the poor man’s anguish, were inexplicably related to her own pleasure.
But she was exhausted now. Perhaps that would ensure a deep and dreamless sleep. She hoped so. She thought briefly of taking off her jeans and shirt and decided it would make no difference. She was long past having to make herself comfortable in order to sleep.
Were the doors locked? she wondered. And the windows?
But her consciousness dimmed and she saw, in her mind’s eye, that the house was wonderfully open, as it should be, to any of the creatures of the land that might want to come into it. Then sleep overtook her.
*****
Paul had been waiting an hour, the shotgun propped up beside him against the tree trunk where he was sitting, when he heard a soft crackling noise in the underbrush behind him. His body tensed, but he didn’t move. They obviously wanted to take him by surprise. Let them believe they were; it would ease their caution, make them bolder.
Without moving his head, he glanced at the shotgun. He could reach it, stand, turn and fire in less than two seconds. Very quick. But quick enough?
How quick had Lumas been?
The soft cracking noise repeated itself. It was closer, Paul thought—closer and more to the right. But it wasn’t time yet. He would wait. Let them come to him.
He chanced a slow glance upward, into the trees that surrounded the clearing. He focused on a huge brown nest in the upper branches of an oak at the other side of the clearing, and heard a soft padding sound, like a large cat walking across a stiff rug.
They were close.
He let his gaze fall, his head lowered, he stared a moment at the ground between his feet, saw a small cream-colored bone there. The bone glistened warmly. Seductively.
“Shit!” he whispered.
He grabbed the shotgun, stood, turned, aimed, fired.
Two
seconds.
And for Paul, an eternity existed in them. Around them. Like a wheel.
His hand on the cold metal was his hand on his mother’s dead face; it was, “Good-bye, Mother.” And it was his father’s tears. And the other death; that small, wrinkled, white thing at his mother’s breasts. That grotesquerie. It was a black silhouette where his father lay, the night alone when the dark face touched him, reached out to him, rejoiced in him, in his sadness.
The wheel receded. Went back to its point of rest, the place it had existed for twenty-one years—his years in New York, where he had learned what civilization was and what his part in it should be.
The point of rest. Just below his consciousness, where he could not recognize it or call it up at will. Or remember that it had shown itself again, for the fourth time since he had come back to the house.
He became aware of a dull ache in his shoulders and realized he had not held the gun properly, that its hard recoil had driven the stock into his shoulder.
He set the gun down, moved forward a few feet and bent over. He lifted the mangled raccoon by the scruff of its neck. Its hindquarters were nonexistent, its eyes were open. Paul thought he saw fear and pleading in them. Blood and salvia had welled up in its mouth.
Paul heard himself whisper, “I’m sorry,” and flicked the dead raccoon into the underbrush, turned, picked up the shotgun, started for home.
*****
He got down on one knee beside the bed, reached out, ran his hand gently over Rachel’s back, her waist, her buttocks.
She was never beautiful and inviting than when she was naked and asleep.
She moaned softly.
“Rachel,” he whispered.
Silence.
He coaxed her left leg toward him. She moaned again.
“Rachel,” he repeated.
He put his hand between her thighs, touched her with the tip of a finger, pushed her right leg away, probed with all his fingers. She was open, ready.
She moaned again.
He stood, hurriedly took of his pants, straddled her, inserted himself.
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