"Dad!" he gasped, pushing his mother out of the way and stepping into the entry. His father was still alive, but when Tom knelt next to him he knew that he would not be alive for long. His face was pierced in a dozen places, and although the wounds were small, as if the skin had elastically closed back up after what had stabbed it had been removed, the amount of blood that had flowed from the neck wounds was frightening. The entry carpet was saturated.
His father's eyes had mercifully, Tom thought, been spared, and they looked at him now, blinking out of pools of blood from the wounds in his face. "Brrr . . ." his father said, his whole body trembling with pain and shock.
"I'll get an ambulance, Dad," Tom babbled, patting the man on the shoulder. "We'll get a doctor right away . . ." He stood up and began to move toward the phone in the kitchen, and saw, for the first time since he had come upstairs, his mother's face.
The look on it froze him in place. Her eyes were wide and staring, and the front of her yellow blouse was bright with her husband's blood. She still held the carving in her right hand, and blood slowly dripped from its beak onto the floor.
Tom had been so alarmed by his father's condition that he had taken scarcely a moment to consider its source. Now, though he could scarcely admit it to himself, he knew. As he and his father had both feared, his mother had gone mad. He could not leave her here alone for another second with his father. This time she might finish what she had begun.
"Mother," he said, hating the way his voice shook, "give it to me."
She stood there, staring straight ahead, her eyes not seeing him. He reached down and grasped the carving, but she would not relinquish her hold. She said nothing, made no shake of her head or other indication of her tenacity. She only held on with a grip of iron that Tom could not loosen, even when he tried to bend back her fingers one at a time.
At last he took her by the arm and began to guide her into the kitchen. He was rigid with the tension of fear, ready for anything, for her to lift the carving and try to drive it into his own face. He prayed she wouldn't. He didn't want to hurt her.
But before he could get her out of the entry and into the short hall that led to the kitchen, a cry came from his father. "Nuuuh!"
Tom stopped and looked down at the man, whose face was a mottled map of red and white. "Burrr . . . burrrd," he said, blood bubbling from his lips. He coughed, and Tom saw with horror a spot on his father's cheek open just wide enough to release a bubble of pink froth that popped instantly, coating the already blood-wet cheek with a new, glistening residue. "Uh . . . luhn . . ."
"Bird?" Tom repeated. "Alone?"
"Yuuuh . . ." Ed breathed out, forcing his head into a painful nod.
Tom tried to understand. "It was . . . the bird? The bird alone?"
"Yuh . . ." He could not have said yes. What was left of his mouth was incapable of making sibilants. Suddenly Ed took in a short, quick breath, stiffened, and died. His life left him on his final exhalation, an endless, rattling moan that grew deeper and deeper in tone until Tom's hearing could no longer sense it.
"Dad?" Tom said, knowing that there would be no answer.
"Dad?"
Ignoring his mother, he fell on hands and knees next to his father, feeling for a pulse that would not be there. When he finally looked back up, his mother had not changed position.
"Mom?" he said, straightening and putting an arm around her. "Mom, what happened? What was it? Who did this?" Had she done it? Had his father simply said what he had to try and protect her, knowing that she was mad and was therefore not responsible? Though he hated to imagine it, it was the only answer that made any sense. The pain and ferocity of the attack had probably maddened his father as well, for him to say that it was the bird that had done it, the bird alone, as if a carved bird were capable of murder.
The thought of the bird reminded him that it was still in his mother's hand. And while one side of his mind, itself maddened by what he had just seen, by the loss of his father and his son to death and his mother to insanity, told him that it didn't matter, let her have the bird, his rational side struggled against the grief, against the overwhelming urge to lie down and weep and let the woman, now a stranger, kill him too if that was what she wanted. No, he told himself, he would not do that. He would, as always, weep later.
"Mother," he said sharply.
There was no response. He held her right wrist and shook her left shoulder, but still she did not react. Finally he slapped her lightly on the face. Her head jerked back, and she blinked rapidly. The surprise was great enough to make her loosen her grip, and he wrenched away the carving, only to see her fist tighten again, her face once more become catatonic.
He led her into the living room, got her seated on the sofa, and, still holding the carving, went into the kitchen to call the ambulance. He set it down so that he could dial the phone, but when a voice answered at the emergency number, he was unable to speak, for he had noticed that the carved woodpecker was not the same as it had been before.
The blood had discolored the paint, but there was more to it than that. The wings had been only partially spread, as though the bird were about to take off. But the carving in the table before him was that of a bird whose wings were fully spread and pushed back, as if in the very act of flying, of driving itself through the air.
Or against an obstacle.
"Hello? . . . hello? . . . This is 911 . . ." The voice sounded thin and far away, and Tom didn't know how many times he heard it before he finally spoke.
He gave his name and address, and told, very briefly, what had occurred. He asked for an ambulance, and also asked that the Chalmers police be called as well.
After he hung up the phone he looked at the bird for a long time. When he picked it up, he did so gingerly, as if expecting it to come to life in his hands. It was the bird he had carved all right, the one Bill Singer had painted. But he hadn't carved it in flight. He knew he hadn't. Damn it, he was practically in shock, and felt nearly as insane as his mother truly was, but the one thing he knew, the one thing he was sure of, was his work. And this was his work, but it was not what he had carved.
The bird. Alone.
What if it had, Tom wondered. What if it had come to life and attacked his father, and his mother had grabbed it, grabbed it and held on to it and broken its magic. . . .
Magic?
Jesus, he was going crazy, wasn't he? No matter what had happened, no matter if the bird had grown horns and whistled fucking Dixie, there had to be a logical, rational explanation, there had to be.
And if the only rational explanation was that his mother had attacked his father, that his father lied to clear her, and that Tom, because of shock, was hallucinating a memory that made his carving something other than it really was—well then, that was what had happened.
It was what had to have happened.
He made himself look away from the bird, thinking that he would remember it differently when this was all over, and then made himself go into the living room and join his mother.
She sat on the sofa where he had placed her and had apparently not moved since. Her eyes were wide and staring, and her right fist was clenched without being closed, as though something invisible was held within. "Mom?" he whispered to her, and then said louder, "Mother?" But she did not answer.
As he waited for someone to come, he felt disoriented, strangely apart from what had happened. It was all too absurd, losing so much in so short a time—his wife, his son, his parents—and he thought wildly, Another funeral, I cannot go to another funeral, and almost, but not quite, found himself laughing and wondered if he had not lost himself as well.
It was not until the ambulance came, with Bret Walters trailing after, that Tom Brewer even entertained the idea that someone other than his mother might have been responsible for his father's death. It was the first thing that Bret thought of, and Tom felt ashamed that he had not thought of it himself.
"It had to be somebody else," Bret said to him a
s they watched the ambulance take away his mother. The body of his father would have to remain until the state police came.
"Maybe I should buy one," Tom said softly.
"What? Buy what?" Bret said.
"An ambulance," Tom answered, turning to Bret with an edgy smile. "They keep coming."
Bret looked away for a moment, as if he hadn't wanted to hear the comment. "It had to be somebody else," he said again. "Your mother isn't all that strong. Your father could've fought her off. Besides, why would she do it? It doesn't make sense any way you look at it."
"Nothing does," Tom said, then added, "My father said the bird did it. That doesn't make any sense either. Unless he was trying to protect her."
The state police contingent arrived a few minutes later and Tom overheard one of the officers grimly tell Bret that this was getting to be a nasty habit. He took Tom back into the kitchen and questioned him, while the other policeman, the medical examiner, and a photographer busied themselves in the entry over Ed's body. The interrogating officer was polite, and apologized for the abruptness of the questioning, but explained that the sooner witnesses were questioned, the more likely they were to remember details.
But there were no details for Tom to remember—only the noises from upstairs and the sight of his mother standing over his father's body, the bloody carving in her hand. The officer went over the same ground several times, but Tom was able to tell him nothing new. Yes, it was possible that someone else could have been in the house, yes, it was possible, anything was possible. Especially, Tom added with no humor in his voice, in Dreamthorp.
When Tom and the officer came out of the kitchen, Tom saw that his father had been taken to the ambulance, which was not leaving, and that a police line had been placed across his front walk. On the other side of it were a number of neighbors, among them Charlie Lewis and Laura. When he saw the look of concern on her face, he tried to smile bravely at her, but his face cracked, and the tears started to come.
If the . . . fetter must be worn, let it be worn as lightly as possible. It should never be permitted to canker the limbs.
—Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
"I remember reading about Teddy Roosevelt—how he lost both his wife and his mother on the same day. And I thought, Jesus, it would take somebody like Teddy Roosevelt to cope with something like that. You know, somebody with tremendous endurance?"
Tom Brewer stood up from where he was sitting next to Laura Stark on the swing on his front porch and stepped to the railing, which he placed his hands upon, and gazed into the darkness like a sea captain, Laura thought. Like the Flying Dutchman, alone for eternity.
"But then I realized," Tom went on, "that it's just something you have to do. Accept loss. It's there and you live with it, with all the memories and everything else that goes with it, because what else can you do except die? Anyone can deal with anything if they want to. If they have to." He turned toward her with a tight smile. "Does that sound at all reasonable? Logical?"
She nodded. "Yes. It does."
"Does it sound cold?"
"I don't think so," she answered honestly. "It's a matter of perspective, I suppose. You have to . . . put up barriers to pain. People who can't . . ." Laura paused.
"Go crazy. Like my mother. Or kill themselves, maybe." He sighed. "Adaptation is a blessing. But it makes me feel guiltier than hell."
"There's nothing to feel guilty for."
"I'm afraid there is. It all hinges on Josh's death. Which wouldn't have happened if I'd just been more . . . something, I don't know . . . more aware, more loving. If I had, he might still be alive, my mother might still be . . . sane, and my dad would be alive too."
"It still might have been someone else. You know what the police said. About the murder."
"Yeah, I know. Physical evidence. They don't think my mother did it, but they're not sure. Nobody's sure of anything. Dad wasn't either. The bird . . ." He trailed off, shaking his head.
Laura looked away from him out into the darkness into which he was gazing, with no more hope of finding the truth there than he had. They had spoken of these things before in the week they had spent together since the funeral, a small and uneasy affair in which Ed Brewer was placed beneath the earth near his grandson and daughter-in-law. Those who attended were numb with a surfeit of violence. Frances, the widow and partially suspected killer, did not attend. She was herself in attendance in a state mental facility until Tom was able to go through the task of finding her a private one.
The head of the art department at Harris Valley College suggested that another professor should take over Tom's classes for the rest of the summer, and Tom had acquiesced. When he asked Laura if she thought he had made the right decision, she told him he had, though in truth she thought it would have been better for him to continue teaching after a hiatus of a week or two. A long period of mourning could only lead to introspection and brooding.
For that reason she decided to spend as much time with Tom as possible, to be a sounding board, to be his friend, to let him know that there were people who cared. Charlie Lewis spent much of the day with Tom when Laura was at work in Lancaster. She talked to Charlie privately about him, and they decided together that he would be all right, though his disposition was, not unreasonably, morbid at present. But that would change, they thought, with time. Charlie continued to entertain him during the day with jazz and beer, Laura at night with talk, dinner, and movies on her VCR.
On the single night they had slept together, they had done so chastely, and even now had not yet become lovers, although they held hands and he put his arm around her when they sat together on her sofa or on his porch swing. They kissed good night too, warm, loving kisses with only the teasing promise of true lovemaking. Although Laura wanted him as a lover, she felt, strangely, that to take him into her bed now would be to take advantage of his grief, and so far he had made no overtures to her. His mind, she thought, was too full of other things, dark things that would have to be put down before love could become real.
When she asked Tom what else he did during the day besides visit Charlie and listen to jazz, he told her that he was carving. When she asked to see what he was working on, he became reticent and told her that he wasn't ready to have anyone see it.
"The Kurtzes left today," he said suddenly, and she looked up in surprise.
"The Kurtzes?"
"Down on Hawthorne. I saw the moving van when I went to the post office. I asked Mrs. Purviance, and she said they were moving."
"Did they sell their cottage?"
"Mrs. Purviance said no, they didn't want to sell. But they wanted to get out because they were afraid for their little girl. I guess they're figuring on coming back when . . . if the person gets caught who . . . did everything."
"That's too bad," Laura said, thinking that the Kurtzes were not the first to go, nor would they be the last. In the past few weeks, and particularly since Sam Hershey's gruesome death, families had been leaving Dreamthorp on a regular basis. Most of them were summer people who simply breathed more easily away from what they now considered to be the murderous air of the town, but there were a few year-rounders like the Kurtzes who had packed their bags to stay with nearby relatives until the reign of terror ended.
And a reign of terror was how more than one national news magazine had described the string of events that this hot, dry summer had brought to the village. The media had swarmed in the day after Ed Brewer's death with their cameras and tape recorders and notepads, only to find the residents united in silence. Few people had any comment to make, and those they did make were noncommittal and scarcely newsworthy. The newest in the line of murders was dutifully reported all the same, duly noted, and consequently forgotten by all those except the suffering residents of Dreamthorp, who awoke every morning wondering if one of their neighbors had died cruelly in the night. More than one became convinced upon awakening that they had heard the sound of sirens pierce through the thick stockade of trees and the thick
er blanket of sleep, though the night had been quiet.
All the nights were quiet. A week went by after Ed Brewer's death, a week without incident. Another quiet week followed, and by the first weekend in August, people had begun to think that perhaps the siege had ended, that perhaps the monster who had killed so horribly had died or melted or moved on to some other unfortunate town. People were beginning to smile on the narrow little streets again, to putter about their cottages with a renewed lightness of heart.
August
There they stand, in sun and shower, the broad-armed witnesses of perished centuries; and sore must his need be who commands a woodland massacre.
—Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as our fears whisper.
—Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
The first Monday in August, Tom and Laura went to the Hall of Culture to hear the Dreamthorp Playhouse company present a reading of A Streetcar Named Desire. That particular day was not, they both agreed before the actors seated themselves on their stools in front of their individual lecterns, the ideal vehicle for a dramatic reading, since there was so much physical action revolving around the character of Stanley Kowalski. The resultant reading did nothing to change their opinion, and by mutual gestures, squeezes of the hands, and smiles, they tacitly determined not to return for the second act once the rising lights freed them from their folding-chair bondage.
However, before the close of the first act, there was an interruption in the form of a scream that made everyone, including the actors, pause for a moment and look up like rabbits getting the scent of a fox. In that second, fear permeated the large room like a living thing, and Tom thought he could smell it, chill and metallic, like cold meat in a freezer, and the look on all the faces spoke the same thought:
The monster's back.
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