by Abe Moss
“Oh God!!!”
She reached for him and he flinched away. In the dark, flesh folded down like a thick mask, he retreated toward the far corner of the room, batting a wet hand in her direction.
I can’t help him. I can’t look. I can’t. I need help.
She fled the room as Joanna had done. Joanna hadn’t gone far. She rested with her back against the wall in the hallway. Addie rushed past her into the foyer. She opened the front door with shaking hands, jogged through the yard on wobbly, fear-sick legs, up the front porch to the doctor’s. She didn’t pause. She threw the door open.
“Nuala?”
She stumbled through the entrance, through the dark and toward the stairs, bumped her shin against a table or chair in the shadows. Carefully, hand on the wall, she traced her way up each step toward the upstairs hall, where a dim light flowed along the hardwood from the room at its end. She took a deep breath and entered the room.
“I need—”
She panted, hand to her heart, her voice small and faint. The doctor stood on the other side of the room with his back to her. He faced his open wardrobe, and for a moment Addie couldn’t find her words.
“Dr. Lull, Lyle needs your help. It’s an emergency.”
The doctor startled at her voice. He shut the wardrobe and turned to her. The bag over his head slumped awkwardly to one side, as though it wasn’t tight around his neck.
“He’s hurt himself. He’s bleeding a lot. Please come.”
Without hesitation the doctor moved past her. She leaned in the doorway, watched him disappear down the stairs. Catching her breath, afraid to follow after him to witness Lyle’s handiwork, she went to the window instead and peered out, saw the doctor marching toward the guesthouse with haste and deliberation.
What’s going to happen now? Joanna and I will be alone?
She paced from the window back to the doorway, peered down the hall. Bud’s doorway was shut and dark. Turning back around, her attention was drawn to the wardrobe, where the doctor had been busying himself with something when she’d entered. What could he have in there, she wondered? Surely not clothes…
Footsteps entered the house below. They moved to the stairs and started up. Addie stood in the doorway, waited. The doctor came to the top of the stairs, a body in his arms. Nuala accompanied him—showing up from where, Addie didn’t know—lantern in hand. She hurried ahead of the doctor and opened the door to a second guest bedroom and the doctor carried Lyle inside. Afraid to look but helpless not to, Addie found herself at the bedroom’s entrance and she watched as the doctor and Nuala busied themselves over Lyle’s body on the bed.
“I’m going to fetch your bag and a bucket,” Nuala said to the doctor, and turned to leave the room. She spotted Addie watching as she made to leave. “You shouldn’t be here. Go back to the guesthouse with Joanna.”
“Is he going to be okay? Is it bad?”
“You must go. Come on.”
Addie glanced one last time into the bedroom. She couldn’t see Lyle’s face, for the doctor’s hulking form obscured it, but she could already see his blood on the sheets.
“Addie, come on,” Nuala said, waiting at the head of the stairs.
Addie followed her out of the house down to the water pump, where Nuala filled a bucket just as the doctor had done for her the night Addie attacked her.
“Is he going to die?” Addie asked. She didn’t know why she asked it, or why she thought he might, but a terrible, heavy feeling weighed upon her.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” was Nuala’s answer.
She finished pumping the water and started back toward the house with it, sloshing the water over the bucket’s rim as she went.
Please save him, she thought. A stitch of guilt tied itself around her belly when she thought the words. She didn’t care about him, she knew. He was nobody. Just another asshole. Another Carter. She only wished she hadn’t done it again.
A knack for pulling others over the edge—she hoped the doctor had a cure for that as well.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The next few days passed with little excitement. Addie asked about both Bud and Lyle any time she saw Nuala, to which she was given only vague answers. They were resting. They were healing. The doctor was taking care of them. The doctor would take care of everything.
The guesthouse was especially quiet with just herself and Joanna. Inside, the most common sound was that of Meatball’s nails clicking on the hardwood floor or Joanna’s snoring in the foyer in the middle of the afternoon.
“Why do you think he did it?” Joanna asked Addie once.
“He thinks he’s ugly.”
“So do lots of people, but… no, that can’t be right.”
Addie looked distractedly toward the kitchen window.
“He told me he jumped from a rooftop to kill himself, because he wanted to erase his face on the pavement. I think he found another way to accomplish that.”
✽✽✽
Taking a break in the fields, Addie spotted Nuala far off near the pond. When she was fifteen or so paces away, Nuala turned and smiled.
“You’re not here to badger me about them again, are you?”
“No.”
“All right, then.”
Addie stood next to Nuala on the shore of the pond, feet in the soft dirt. The sun was high and blinding in the sky but cool enough.
“What is it really?” Addie asked, staring into the water. “I asked before but you never really said.”
“What is what?”
“The pond. What’s wrong with it…”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Then say what you mean.”
Addie gave Nuala a hard sidelong glance. She sighed.
“What causes it to do what it does?”
“I have no idea. It’s always just done it.”
“You really don’t know?”
Nuala shook her head. “Maybe the doctor does. I’ve never asked.”
They stood another minute, Addie filling to the brim with questions.
“How did you come to know him?”
Nuala didn’t say anything for a while, and Addie didn’t push. They were alone there by the pond, only Addie’s ears to listen, and she sensed Nuala was willing to talk. She only needed to let her.
“I was alone when he found me. I don’t remember anything before it. I was only very young.”
“Found you where?”
“Just…” She searched for the proper words, and Addie couldn’t remember ever seeing her struggle to find them. Instead she settled on gesturing wildly with her hands in the direction of the horizon. “… out there.”
“He just found you alone in the woods?”
“In a nest, from what I understand. Like a bird.”
“Wait, really?”
“So he says.”
Addie considered the possibility of finding such a creature out in the wilderness and couldn’t buy it, not in any wilderness she knew. This train of thought brought her to her next question.
“Where are we really?”
“Hmmm?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot over these past several weeks and my mind won’t let me get very far because it just doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t any normal part of the world, is it?”
They met each other’s eyes and held their gazes briefly before Nuala broke into another grin and turned her attention back to the scenery spread out before them, like a daydreamer.
“Is it?”
She couldn’t tell if Nuala bit her tongue to tease her or if she didn’t know.
“Enough has happened and we’re still here. A little truth isn’t going to change anything.”
“The truth always changes something.”
In an instant Addie felt more irritable than she could handle and she turned to walk away, to separate her nagging questions from Nuala, a source of information proving to be both bottomless and emp
ty.
“What if I told you I didn’t know?”
Addie stopped. “I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Well that’s the truth if you really care to hear it.”
“Then why do you pretend to have the answer? Why not tell us you don’t know anything from the very beginning?”
“Because… I’m ashamed of not knowing.”
The tone of her voice was unlike anything Addie had heard from her before. Whereas she normally spoke with such authority, a kind of detachment through her superiority over the others, like a teacher to students or a mother to children, she now sounded considerably less guarded. Addie came closer again. Nuala stared ahead, down into the water, hands held gently behind her back.
“I’ve been helping the doctor for so long and yet… I still don’t know him very well myself. He’s a mystery even to me. How am I supposed to tell you anything about him?”
“Haven’t you ever asked him? Don’t you talk to him?”
“I think that must be where I get it from. The sidestepping—the vague answers I give you. The doctor does it just as well, if not better.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that he won’t share anything?”
“I’m not in any position to feel entitled to his knowledge. I’m grateful just to be here, helping him with his work.”
They stood quietly for a while. Addie’s legs baked in the sunlight. She watched as a wispy, winged insect landed on the water’s surface. She wondered what it might see.
“Have you ever gotten in the water?”
Nuala eyed her curiously.
“No. I wouldn’t see the point.”
“Don’t you want to try, just to see?”
Nuala laughed. “Not much has happened in my life.”
Addie shrugged. The more questions she asked, the less need she felt to ask any others. Maybe that was the point.
“I think I’ll head back now.”
“Before you go,” Nuala said. “I wanted to ask you…”
“What?”
“About Lyle.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know why he might have done it?”
Addie shook her head. “Mystery to me.”
“I just thought, because you two seemed to be getting on…”
“Just crazy like the rest of us, I guess.”
“I’d like to help him, but I’m not sure how.”
“Well… that’s the doctor’s job, isn’t it? Let him worry about Lyle.”
Nuala gave a curt smile and nodded.
Finally Addie left her.
✽✽✽
Up late again—becoming the norm—Addie sat in the foyer with a book in her lap, though she didn’t read it. She tried time and time again but nothing could hold her attention.
Is it really possible to be so wrong about someone…
It was late enough that her eyes grew sore and droopy. She blinked, sleep closing in. If not for a sudden knock on the front door she might have dozed within seconds. She sat up straight. The book she held slipped to the ground.
They knocked again.
She got up and went to the door, and in a sleepy stupor she attempted to peer outside through a peephole which didn’t exist. At last she opened it. Looming tall and dark on the porch, the doctor waited stiff as a scarecrow. The burlap bag on his head even earned such a comparison.
“Oh,” she said. Her grogginess lifted in an instant. She rubbed her eyes. She drew them slowly up and down the doctor’s form, and from his sleeve the doctor produced from a folded sheet of paper. “For me?”
She unfolded it and read the type:
There’s something I’d like to show you. Let’s go for a walk.
Addie left the paper behind on the counter by the door. When she stepped outside and closed the door behind her, the doctor stood facing the field to the left where the road winded down into the trees. Addie stood behind him.
“Lead the way, I guess.”
The bag rustled as he looked over his shoulder and nodded. Together they trekked into the field. Addie listened to the doctor’s boots clomp through the grass on the hard dirt and felt a pang of resentment. Maybe someday they’d be permitted shoes of their own…
Once more she observed the starless sky overhead and for a moment wished she could ask the doctor about it. With no mouth to speak, however, there would be no use. How convenient for him, she thought.
“Where exactly are we going?”
The doctor pointed toward the trees, still a ways off across the field. There was nothing more. They continued on. With twenty feet or so left between them and the tree line they stopped. Addie turned her attention to the doctor, to the inexpressive bag over his head, for a reason or at the very least a clue. But the bag offered nothing. He only stood. She stood beside him, trusting something would come of it.
They faced the trees for a couple minutes. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, waited patiently. Her belly buzzed with expectation. The doctor, on the other hand, didn’t fidget at all. It was something Addie noticed a great deal now. She thought she might have noticed it all along, though she could never pinpoint it before. As impersonal as he seemed—masked and cloaked under his heavy, shapeless clothes—there was something else which especially caused discomfort and that was his way of moving. He didn’t make any false moves. He never faltered or flinched or trembled. Everything he did was with precision, like a finely-tuned machine. He lacked body language.
“Is this what you brought me to see?”
She joined him in watching the trees. They were thick and tightly grown. The moonlight reached beneath their full branches only in small doses, so that no shadow could be well-distinguished from the ones around it.
At least, not until one of the shadows began to move. Through the dark pillars something weaved closer, side to side around each trunk, swayed and hunched beneath branches, rustled through the bristly undergrowth. There was a head and shoulders, and arms held out for balance as it twisted its way from the woods. Altogether featureless, there was something undeniably familiar about it. Maybe it was the way its shoulders bobbed, or the pace of its step. Maybe it was nothing. Or maybe it was just a gut feeling, an inexplicable knowing. When Addie began to recognize it, her breath caught in her throat. She swallowed it down. She had to stop herself from reaching for the doctor.
I don’t want it to be this… No, it can’t…
The dark form continued making its way toward them through the trees, and for a long while it seemed to move through them without ever getting closer, like an image in a loop. But the longer they watched, the bigger it grew, and Addie had no doubt of its progress. It was coming for them.
“What is it?” she asked. She knew the doctor couldn’t answer. Her thoughts spiraled. She had a clear enough idea, she thought. No, more than that. “I… I don’t want to see this.”
In and out, behind and across, the figure (it looked to be a man in the shadows) followed its path toward them until it came nearly to the woods’ edge. It stopped. It stood perfectly still like the surrounding forest. Addie squinted to see it clearer. In the oval of its head were two wet, shiny dots staring out. She tried to release her held breath and it escaped in a cool, shuddery gasp.
“What is this?” She meant to pull her eyes away, to speak to the doctor directly, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She feared the man in the trees might come for her if she looked away.
Not just any man in the trees… not just any man…
“Why are we here? Who is he…”
I know who it is.
There was a pressure against Addie’s back and she saw the doctor had put his hand there. With his other hand he directed her toward the trees.
“No. I can’t.”
The doctor remained as he was, arm held out, waiting.
“I don’t feel comfortable about it. Please.”
The hand on her back gave a slight nudge, and she took a step forward. His extended arm straightened further, emph
asizing his wish. She took another step forward. The tree line started only fifteen feet or less away. The man, waiting behind its dark curtain, stood only a few feet farther. The hand on her back fell away and she took one more step. Then she paused.
What is this helping? What am I meant to see?
“Addie?”
The voice carried itself to her from the trees like sand in the wind—her ears ached with it. She studied the silhouette, met its watchful eyes, realized the familiar manner of its posture, the slope of its shoulders. Had the voice come from it or the forest itself?
“Is that you, baby?”
The figure took a step toward them. Addie took a step back. The man came to stand at the very edge of the trees, and suddenly it seemed that his shadow on the grass bled outward, stretched toward them like an oil spill, until it reached Addie’s feet. She took another step back.
“Is it really you?”
He took a final step from the trees, the moonlight seized him, Addie gave a cry, and she bolted directly into the doctor’s waiting arms.
“Please!” she bawled. “Let me go!”
The doctor had hold of her arms and she wrestled against him.
“How could you do this?” she breathed into his musty overcoat. “Let me go! I don’t want this!”
“Addie. Let me see you. Let me look at your face.”
She froze in the doctor’s arms, eyes wide, and the voice carried itself to her louder and louder from behind. She listened, dowsed in trickling fear, and swore she heard his footsteps drawing closer and closer through the dry grass.
“Let GO of me!”
She ripped herself from the doctor’s embrace. Once free, she half-turned to the approaching footsteps and her body tensed like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring, and she did just that. She darted beside the doctor and fled past, through the field toward the guesthouse. She dared not to look back as she went, just ran. She saw her own shadow before her, arms punching the air, a wild flourish of hair flipping side to side.
It wasn’t real.
It can’t be real.
Just run.
Chapter Twenty-Five