Faces in the Night

by Thomas Conuel

  He had tried very hard to recall if he had ever encountered the Durmans, but of course he hadn’t. The family name had died out with its horrific patriarch, Elijah Durman. And his widow had reverted to her previous name--Flanagan.

  It had been a strange time in the Swift River Valley. All homes not slated for preservation and removal were to be demolished. The people in those homes were, of course, supposed to have moved long before the wrecking crews arrived, but there had been a few families that had defied those orders. A few families and a few minor incidents. He hadn’t liked that part of the job and had asked for and been granted a transfer to the engineering division. Hard to remember everything. It was all so long ago.

  But now—the child’s face appearing high above him on the window—it stirred a vague memory. He struggled to place her image.

  An April morning—probably in 1938—and he was standing in a cluttered kitchen—near his elbow piles of unwashed dishes in a cast iron sink. He was bothered and nervous but trying not to show it. He was young, 18 or so, but already a supervisor, the local guy who knew how to get things done. Facing him in the kitchen was a family with a silent strange child; a family refusing to leave their home and still there when the wrecking crew had arrived that morning. There had been tears and pleas, and he had been called to intervene.

  “Please, this is my home,” a skinny old woman with long white hair said to him.

  “Where will we live,” a sallow-faced man in his 20s asked?

  And standing there in the kitchen of the soon to be destroyed farmhouse, a young girl of perhaps 10 or 12, saying nothing only smiling. She was, he realized, probably retarded or afflicted in some way.

  “This is the only home she has ever known,” the skinny old woman said pointing to the smiling, but silent child. “This will break her heart and she’ll never understand why we had to leave.”

  Lester Carlson had been reassuring. The state would help them find new and better homes. He knew that was true for some, but not for others. He never knew the endings to these stories. He simply moved the people out and away. “I can give you one more day to pack up and leave,” he said. “But by this time tomorrow, the bulldozers will be here.”

  He turned to leave and unexpectedly the child began to talk, pointing directly at Lester Carlson. “Someday the bad will try to come back here,” she said. “I’ve tried to keep him out but now I won’t be here. Someday he’ll be back here. Someday always comes.”

  “She never talks,” the skinny old woman said.

  “First words in months out of her,” the man in his 20s said.

  Lester Carlson said nothing. He stepped briskly out of the kitchen and into the bright sunshine of the morning, but now some 56 years later he remembered the face and words of the little girl.

  “I’ve tried to keep him out,” she said. “Someday he’ll be back here.”

  What did she mean by that?

  Hard to say. He hadn’t gone back, and the next day the bulldozer came and the local police dragged the family away from their home.

  He stretched in his seat at the library. Too much worrying—that was his problem. Whatever happened to him, he could accept. But he wasn’t going to worry about it anymore. He wasn’t going to spend his last years scared to death. Whatever he had done or failed to do was in the past. And he couldn’t change that.

  Something made him glance toward the stacks where the reference volumes were kept. It felt like an impulse at first, but then stronger and more incessant--like the feeling that gripped him outside his house days before and urged him to follow the hearse bearing the remains of the dead soldier.

  He looked across the long book-filled room with light slanting in from the skylight, bright and shadowy at the same time. He looked past a thin teenager reading Rolling Stone--Christ, ever think of just buying the frigging magazine--and past a decrepit old guy in plaid knee-length shorts and black socks who belched loudly as he gaped at a women’s underwear ad in Cosmopolitan. He looked past them into the reading alcove from where he had hours earlier retrieved these local history books. There, standing beside the long, high shelves stuffed with library volumes, was a startling sight. A man dressed as a Colonial personage--like one of those amateur actors who play Colonial and Revolutionary-era farmers, silversmiths, and soldiers at historic reenactments such as Williamsburg, and Sturbridge Village.

  Lester Carlson felt his gaze lock onto the man even as his brain puzzled over his appearance. There was something about the man that was familiar.

  Lester Carlson forced himself to look away from the alcove. He took a long deep breath, held it, and then slowly exhaled. A deep breathing technique that had served him well and calmed him for many decades.

  He looked again into the library’s reading alcove. The Revolutionary War era figure was still there. Tall and gaunt and somehow slightly strange and wrong--as if the edges of his body were gelatinous flesh with no bone structure. The figure turned and stared back at him--a thin wizened face with a long bony nose and stringy red hair. But there was something the matter with his look. And then it clicked into place for Lester Carlson. It was the same visage as the face at his window that night, only unblemished, without blood and broken teeth. For a moment Lester Carlson appreciated the rational part of all this--could it be an elaborate stage joke or a hallucination.

  He started to take another deep breath to free himself from the noxious vision when unexpectedly like a firecracker erupting into the sky the man’s face exploded outward and rushed free of the body and directly toward Lester Carlson as if on a high-tension wire spring. Lester Carlson cried out in an inarticulate gasp and threw his hands up to shield his face.

  The face hovered inches from him, and as before, it locked onto his gaze. He looked into the eye sockets. There, deep in the hollows of the eyes, a blue light began to slowly spin in a counter-clockwise motion. With a horrible sense of deja vu, Lester Carlson felt the face drawing him inward. He watched the blue light rotate within the skeletal eye sockets--spinning, spinning, spinning--toying with him.

  He had fainted that first time when the face appeared at his window. But dammit all, he wasn’t going to do it again in the middle of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. Lester Carlson managed to exhale and then draw a fresh deep breath. With great deliberation he closed his eyes and shut out the vision before him. As he blinked his eyes open again, the face receded swirling through the air and back into the body of the Revolutionary War figure in the library alcove. And then the body vanished from the alcove.

  Lester Carlson held his hands in front of his face for several more seconds and then folded them quietly on the table in front of him. He took several deep breaths in rapid succession. The old man in the plaid shorts stared at Lester Carlson as if he were watching a man recovering from a spastic fit. The kid reading Rolling Stone looked up for a moment with a bored and annoyed expression. Lester Carlson gave a weak smile. “I’ve not been well. I started to faint,” he said.

  “Ya look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the old man in plaid shorts snorted. The kid reading Rolling Stones snickered and looked at Lester Carlson with feigned indifference.

  “I thought you were having a heart attack, man,” the kid said.

  Lester Carlson looked at them both for a long moment, and then asked the question he already knew the answer to.

  “There was a man over there in the alcove, dressed up like a person from the Revolutionary War. Did you see him?”

  Both the old man and the kid stared at him. “There was nobody there, man,” the kid said folding his Rolling Stones and using it as a pointer. He gestured with the magazine toward the alcove. “You outa your mind, man. There’s been nobody over there for the last 15 minutes.”

  Lester Carlson looked over at the stacks. There was nobody there. The Revolutionary War figure was gone. All was quiet here in the Jones Library. He took another deep breath and let the tingling sensation of fear drain from his body. He walked over to the shelf and r
eplaced the Quabbin books.

  He stood for a long moment in the alcove wanting badly to tell somebody about his encounter with the face. He turned to go and noticed Katherine, Blake’s wife. She was across the room heading for the same section of books where he now stood. She held a slip of paper in her hand peering at it nearsightedly as she moved toward the local history section.

  * * *

  PART X: Time Past--Time Present

  Chapter 44

  Lester Carlson peered down from the Quabbin observation tower. From high above, the reservoir looked like a watercolor painting limned with gentle blues and grays and circled with swirls of green. From this perspective, 500 feet above the floor of the Swift River Valley, the reservoir appeared flat and serene before blending into the horizon. From this height there were no waves slapping across its rocky shoreline; no gusting winds blowing across the high limestone ledges in the northwest corner of the Quabbin woods; no shifting streaks of dusky yellow sunlight playing across deep shadows in an overgrown cellar hole, and no tall old maples sighing with the wind on the edge of an abandoned Town Common.

  Lester Carlson moved back from the grassy walk that encircled the Quabbin lookout tower and stood gazing up at the tower. It was a gray stone building, three stories high and perched on the highest hill in the Quabbin Reservation. It was not an original Quabbin building; rather it had been constructed during the last phases of the project that produced the reservoir under which lay the four towns.

  He had helped plan this observation tower. The thinking had been to turn the eastern edge of the reservoir into a public area with parking, picnic tables, hiking trails, administration buildings, and this observation tower, and leave the rest of the 186 square miles untouched—a wilderness in the middle of populous Massachusetts.

  That original concept had worked well. Today, a fine early spring day in the middle of the week with sun and light breezes, the public area, while not crowded, was being used. Several couples were walking in and out of the tower, peering through binoculars down into the reservoir. Several small groups sat munching on sandwiches at the picnic tables scattered about on the grassy area nearby. Far below in the Quabbin woods eagles, hawks, deer, coyotes, bobcats, wild turkeys and even loons were going about their daily business undisturbed.

  Quabbin had been one project that turned out better than expected. In the 1920s, when the state engineers had first come to the valley with their plans for discontinuing the towns of Enfield, Dana, Prescott, and Greenwich in order to build a reservoir for Boston, the area residents had been too stunned to resist and had accepted the decision to destroy their towns to create a reservoir. There was nothing else they could do. Lester Carlson smiled to himself at a comparison. Three decades after he had finished work on Quabbin Reservoir, which would be around 1968, the world was a vastly different place and protest was flourishing.

  He was in the State Department by then, and of course backed the war effort, though the streets in every major city in the United States had been aflame with anti-war protest. It became a kind of standard greeting to him everywhere he went—students shouting obscenities, mothers-against-the-war marching, and greasy-looking radicals burning America flags.

  He had tried to imagine a project like Quabbin being built in the 1960s. No way. In the silent 1930s it had been almost too easy to buy up and displace the people who had lived in the four Quabbin towns. Nobody thought of defying their government. Protest had come a long way since then.

  “Hi. I brought us some wine.” Lester Carlson turned to see Katherine, Blake’s wife. She had walked up beside him while he was staring out over the reservoir.

  “Good idea,” he said peering at the bottle Katherine carried in her tote bag. “Thanks for meeting me here.”

  “You seemed upset this morning at the library,” she said.

  Lester Carlson paused before replying. “I was. Something happened right before you arrived. I wanted to tell somebody about it.”

  “A face? You said something about a face. Maybe a hallucination?”

  “Well—something like that. But why were you in the local history section of the library?” Lester Carlson asked.

  “Blake, my husband. I’m trying to help him. He feels he’s got to wait here until they find the remains of his old friend, the soldier from Vietnam they never buried.”

  “So you’re out studying local history trying to figure out what?

  “I’ll tell you something,” Katherine replied. “I tend to have good instincts. I think there is some crazy connection between Blake getting hit on Memorial Day, that day when you found him, and his friend’s body going missing.”

  Lester Carlson tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “So why visit the library? I mean I’m glad you did, but why?”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I really don’t know. I had a kind of dream this morning. You talk about seeing a face. In this dream I saw a little girl’s face.” Katherine stopped talking and removed the wine bottle from her tote bag.

  “I work with this woman back in Ohio. Judy, she’s the producer of this radio talk show I do. Sex chat stuff. Don’t laugh, please. It’s a living.”

  “No, no, not at all,” Lester Carlson said. “I bet you’re a great radio personality.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Katherine said, “but Judy, my producer has this beautiful daughter who is autistic and can’t talk at all. She’s maybe 10 or so and she has the most angelic face. Well this morning, I woke from this dream seeing a little girl’s face, not Judy’s daughter, but a face just like her face—angelic—big blue eyes and an expression that looks way off into the distance.”

  “But why go to the local library?” Lester Carlson asked.

  “That’s what I can’t figure out. Sure I want to help Blake, but I don’t know how poking about in the local history section will do that. It just seemed that after I saw that little girl’s face, I should go read some local history and see if I could find her somewhere back there in the past. Weird, isn’t it.” She paused and looked out over the great reservoir.

  “But how about you?” she said. “You were the one looking upset this morning.”

  “Funny,” Lester Carlson said. “Really kind of a coincidence I saw a little girl’s face this morning at the library also—high up on the skylight windows. And then I saw a rather horrible face.”

  * * *

  Chapter 45

  Lester Carlson bent forward to examine the bottle of wine Katherine held in her hand.

  “A cabernet from the Napa Valley,” Katherine said. “They have some very drinkable wines.”

  He looked up and smiled. He was old but he wasn’t that old. He still appreciated women. Some things never change. The old urges for one thing. They died down with age, but they sure as hell didn’t go away, like a fire in the fireplace with two logs instead of four. Katherine was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans that hugged her legs and backside and a bright green sweatshirt that set off her blue eyes and blonde hair. She smiled back at Lester Carlson.

  She was certainly a pretty woman, Lester Carlson thought, but there was something else about her that attracted him. It was a quality difficult to define that he had encountered on occasion in other women over the years. For want of a better word, he called it sex appeal. But it was not the type of sex appeal that many men seemed to be referring to when they used the term—the sex appeal of a super model; haughty and superficial; strutting her wares like some sort of wax automaton, or smirking with large puffy lips from the cover of a glossy magazine. That was what most men he knew seemed to think of as sex appeal. They used the term sex appeal and almost always followed it with descriptions of how hot and appealing the woman was. It was sex appeal of a crude leering type. And it wasn’t what he found memorable at all about a woman.

  Katherine, standing here by his side dressed in blue jeans and sweatshirt, had a very powerful appeal. He wanted badly to know everything about her—what was she wearing under her jeans, how lo
ng did she brush her hair in the morning, did she undress slowly piece by piece when she came to bed at night or hurriedly in swift underwear-shedding motions, did she like a bath or a shower, how did she like to kiss?

  There were so many small intimacies that he would like to know about a woman like Katherine. She had a certain sureness and comfort about her that the sex goddess lacked. And she wasn’t spectacular looking. Katherine was pretty but not a great beauty. Her hair and her eyes were distinctive, but her face was a bit too round and her mouth a tad thin to call her a true beauty. But she had it—whatever is really was that men loved in women, she had it.

  “Strange,” Lester Carlson said. “We both see a little girl’s face this morning, but then I get to see this really terrible face at the library. This Revolutionary War character. What’s going on here?” He laughed with a nonchalance he didn’t feel, and could tell that Katherine didn’t feel either.

  Moments before, when he told her of the Revolutionary War character with the exploding face, she had looked at him with deep concern, not treating the story as a joke at all.

  “Somehow,” she said, “and I can’t tell you how, I think Blake’s Vietnam buddy and his missing coffin link up here. But I don’t know why I feel that.”

  “Why?” Lester Carlson shifted his glance to Katherine’s hands, calmly beginning to work a small corkscrew into the top of the wine bottle. “Why does your husband still worry about what happened to his buddy in Vietnam? It was so long ago, and he couldn’t have done a thing.”

  “He’s feels he let his friend down that day in Vietnam. That he’s partially responsible for his friend getting killed. And that now he is supposed to stay and make things right by retrieving his body.” Katherine pulled slowly on the corkscrew. The cork slid from the bottle with a small pop. She took ceramic cups from her bag and carefully poured them half full with the purple wine. She handed a cup to Lester Carlson and looked up at him.