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«Vinia,» he said at last. «Do you think this is the beginning of something?»
«Oh, gosh, Jim, I don't know.»
«Do you think maybe we're in love?»
«Oh, I don't know that either!»
They passed down into the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to her street.
«Do you think we'll ever be married?»
«It's too early to tell, isn't it?» she said.
«I guess you're right.» He bit his lip. «Will we go walking again soon?»
'I don't know. I don't know. Let's wait and see, Jim.»
The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she shook his hand gravely.
«Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day,» she said.
«You're welcome,» he said.
They stood there.
Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, «Good night.»
He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.
In the middle of the night, a sound wakened her.
She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home, everything was locked and secure, but it hadn't been them. No, this was a special sound. And lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing warmth and moist bark and empty, tunneled tree, the rain outside but comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful darkness.
And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer-night room to touch it, was coming from her drowsy, half-smiling mouth.
Which made her sit bolt upright, and very quietly move downstairs, out through the door, onto the porch, and across the wet-grass lawn to the sidewalk, where the crazed hopscotch chalked itself way off into the future.
Her bare feet hit the first numbers, leaving moist prints up to 10 and 12, thumping, until she stopped at 16, staring down at 17, hesitating, swaying. Then she gritted her teeth, made fists, reared back, and . . .
Jumped right in the middle of the square 17.
She stood there for a long moment, eyes shut, seeing how it felt.
Then she ran upstairs and lay out on the bed and touched her mouth to see if a summer afternoon was breathing out of it, and listening for that drowsy hum, the golden sound, and it was there.
And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.
The Finnegan
That Woman on the Lawn
«Oh, gosh, Jim, I don't know.»
«Do you think maybe we're in love?»
«Oh, I don't know that either!»
They passed down into the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to her street.
«Do you think we'll ever be married?»
«It's too early to tell, isn't it?» she said.
«I guess you're right.» He bit his lip. «Will we go walking again soon?»
'I don't know. I don't know. Let's wait and see, Jim.»
The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she shook his hand gravely.
«Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day,» she said.
«You're welcome,» he said.
They stood there.
Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, «Good night.»
He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.
In the middle of the night, a sound wakened her.
She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home, everything was locked and secure, but it hadn't been them. No, this was a special sound. And lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing warmth and moist bark and empty, tunneled tree, the rain outside but comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful darkness.
And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer-night room to touch it, was coming from her drowsy, half-smiling mouth.
Which made her sit bolt upright, and very quietly move downstairs, out through the door, onto the porch, and across the wet-grass lawn to the sidewalk, where the crazed hopscotch chalked itself way off into the future.
Her bare feet hit the first numbers, leaving moist prints up to 10 and 12, thumping, until she stopped at 16, staring down at 17, hesitating, swaying. Then she gritted her teeth, made fists, reared back, and . . .
Jumped right in the middle of the square 17.
She stood there for a long moment, eyes shut, seeing how it felt.
Then she ran upstairs and lay out on the bed and touched her mouth to see if a summer afternoon was breathing out of it, and listening for that drowsy hum, the golden sound, and it was there.
And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.
The Finnegan
1996 year
To say that I have been haunted for the rest of my life by the affair Finnegan is to grossly understate the events leading up to that final melancholy. Only now, at threescore and ten, can I write these words for an astonished constabulary who may well run with picks and shovels to unearth my truths or bury my lies.
The facts are these:
Three children went astray and were missed. Their bodies were found in the midst of Chatham Forest and each bore no marks of criminal assassination, but all had suffered their lifeblood to be drained. Only their skin remained like that of some discolored vineyard grapes withered by sunlight and no rain.
From the withered detritus of these innocents rose fresh rumors of vampires or similar beasts with similar appetites. Such myths always pursue the facts to stun them in their tracks. It could only have been a tombyard beast, it was said, that fed on and destroyed three lives and ruined three dozen more.
The children were buried in the most holy ground. Soon after, Sir Robert Merriweather, pretender to the throne of Sherlock Holmes but modestly refusing the claim, moved through the ten dozen doors of his antique house to come forth to search for this terrible thief of life. With myself, I might add, to carry his brandy and bumbershoot and warn him of underbrush pitfalls in that dark and mysterious forest.
Sir Robert Merriweather, you say?
Just that. Plus the ten times ten plus twelve amazing doors in his shut-up house.
Were the doors used? Not one in nine. How had they appeared in Sir Robert's old manse? He had shipped them in, as a collector of doors, from Rio, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and mid-America. Once collected, he had stashed them, hinged, to be seen from both sides, on the walls of his upper and lower chambers. There he conducted tours of these odd portals for such antique fools as were ravished by the sight of the curiously overdone, the undersimplified, the rococo, or some First Empire cast aside by Napoleon's nephews or seized from Hermann Goering, who had in turn ransacked the Louvre. Others, pelted by Oklahoma dust storms, were jostled home in flatbeds cushioned by bright posters from carnivals buried in the windblown desolations of 1936 America. Name your least favorite door, it was his. Name the best quality, he owned it also, hidden and safe, true beauties behind oblivion's portals.
I had come to see his doors, not the deaths. At his behest, which was a command, I had bought my curiosity a steamship ticket and arrived to find Sir Robert involved not with ten dozen doors, but some great dark door. A mysterious portal, still un-found. And beneath? A tomb.
Sir Robert hurried the grand tour, opening and shutting panels rescued from Peking, long buried near Etna, or filched from Nantucket. But his heart, gone sick, was not in this, what should have been delightful, tour.
He described the spring rains that drenched the country to make things green, only to have people to walk out in that fine weather and one week find the body of a boy emptied of life through two incisions in his neck, and in the next weeks, the bodies of the two girls. People shouted for the police and sat drinking in pubs, their faces long and pale, while mothers locked their children home where fathers lectured on the dooms that lay in Chatham Forest.
«Will you come with me,» said Sir Robert at last, «on a very strange, sad picnic?»
«I will,» I said.
So we snapped ourselves in weather-proofs, lugged a hamper of sandwiches and red wine, and plunged into the forest on a drear Sunday.
There was time, as we moved down a hill into the dripping gloom of the trees, to recall what the papers had said about the vanished children's bloodless flesh, the police thrashing the forest ten dozen times, clueless, while the surrounding estates slammed their doors drum-tight at sunset.
«Rain. Damn. Rain!» Sir Robert's pale face stared up, his gray mustache quivering over his thin mouth. He was sick and brittle and old. «Our picnic will be ruined!»
«Picnic?» I said. «Will our killer join us for eats?»
«I pray to God he will,» Sir Robert said. «Yes, pray to God he will.»
We walked through a land that was now mists, now dim sunlight, now forest, now open glade, until we came into a silent part of the woods, a silence made of the way the trees grew wetly together and the way the green moss lay in swards and hillocks. Spring had not yet filled the empty trees. The sun was like an arctic disk, withdrawn, cold, and almost dead.
«This is the place,» said Sir Robert at last.
«Where the children were found?» I inquired.
«Their bodies empty as empty can be.»
I looked at the glade and thought of the children and the people who had stood over them with startled faces and the police who had come to whisper and touch and go away, lost.
«The murderer was never apprehended?»
«Not this clever fellow. How observant are you?» asked Sir Robert.
«What do you want observed?»
«There's the catch. The police slipped up. They were stupidly anthropomorphic about the whole bloody mess, seeking a killer with two arms, two legs, a suit of clothes, and a knife. So hypnotized with their human concept of the killer that they overlooked one obvious unbelievable fact about this place. So!»
He gave his cane a quick light tap on the earth.
Something happened. I stared at the ground. «Do that again,» I whispered.
«You saw it?»
«I thought I saw a small trapdoor open and shut. May I have your cane?»
He gave me the cane. I tapped the ground. It happened again.
«A spider!» I cried. «Gone! God, how quick!»
«Finnegan,» Sir Robert muttered.
«What?»
«You know the old saying: in again, out again, Finnegan. Here.»
With his penknife, Sir Robert dug in the soil to lift an entire clod of earth, breaking off bits to show me the tunnel. The spider, in panic, leaped out its small wafer door and fell to the ground.
Sir Robert handed me the tunnel. «Like gray velvet. Feel. A model builder, that small chap. A tiny shelter, camouflaged, and him alert. He could hear a fly walk. Then pounce out, seize, pop back, slam the lid!»
«I didn't know you loved Nature.»
«Loathe it. But this wee chap, there's much we share. Doors. Hinges. Wouldn't consider other arachnids. But my love of portals drew me to study this incredible carpenter.» Sir Robert worked the trap on its cobweb hinges. «What craftsmanship! And it all ties to the tragedies!»
«The murdered children?»
Sir Robert nodded. «Notice any special thing about this forest?»
«It's too quiet.»
«Quiet!» Sir Robert smiled weakly. «Vast quantities of silence. No familiar birds, beetles, crickets, toads. Not a rustle or stir. The police didn't notice. Why should they? But it was this absence of sound and motion in the glade that prompted my wild theory about the murders.»
He toyed with the amazing structure in his hands.
«What would you say if you could imagine a spider large enough, in a hideout big enough, so that a running child might hear a vacuumed sound, be seized, and vanish with a soft thud below. How say you?» Sir Robert stared at the trees. «Poppycock and bilge? Yet, why not? Evolution, selection, growth, mutations, and-pfft!»
Again he tapped with his cane. A trapdoor flew open, shut.
«Finnegan,» he said.
The sky darkened.
«Rain!» Casting a cold gray eye at the clouds, he stretched his frail hand to touch the showers. «Damn! Arachnids hate rain. And so will our huge dark Finnegan.»
«Finnegan!» I cried irritably.
«I believe in him, yes.»
«A spider larger than a child?!»
«Twice as large.»
The cold wind blew a mizzle of rain over us. «Lord, I hate to leave. Quick, before we go. Here.»
Sir Robert raked away the old leaves with his cane, revealing two globular gray-brown objects.
«What are they?» I bent. «Old cannonballs?»
«No.» He cracked the grayish globes. «Soil, through and through.»
I touched the crumbled bits.
«Our Finnegan excavates,» said Sir Robert. «To make his tunnel. With his large rakelike chelicerae he dislodges soil, works it into a ball, carries it in his jaws, and drops it beyond his hole.»
Sir Robert displayed half a dozen pellets on his trembling palm. «Normal balls evicted from a tiny trapdoor tunnel. Toy-size.» He knocked his cane on the huge globes at our feet. «Explain those!»
I laughed. «The children must've made them with mud!»
«Nonsense!» cried Sir Robert irritably, glaring about at trees and earth. «By God, somewhere, our dark beast lurks beneath his velvet lid. We might be standing on it. Christ, don't stare! His door has beveled rims. Some architect, this Finnegan. A genius at camouflage.»
Sir Robert raved on and on, describing the dark earth, the arachnid, its fiddling legs, its hungry mouth, as the wind roared and the trees shook.
Suddenly, Sir Robert flung up his cane.
«No!» he cried.
I had no time to turn. My flesh froze, my heart stopped.
Something snatched my spine.
I thought I heard a huge bottle uncorked, a lid sprung. Then this monstrous thing crawled down my back.
«Here!» cried Sir Robert. «Now!»
He struck with his cane. I fell, dead weight. He thrust the thing from my spine. He lifted it.
The wind had cracked the dead tree branch and knocked it onto my back.
Weakly, I tried to rise, shivering. «Silly,» I said a dozen times. «Silly. Damn awful silly!»
«Silly, no. Brandy, yes!» said Sir Robert. «Brandy?»
The sky was very black now. The rain swarmed over us.
Door after door after door, and at last into Sir Robert's country house study. A warm, rich room, where a fire smoldered on a drafty hearth. We devoured our sandwiches, waiting for the rain to cease. Sir Robert estimated that it would stop by eight o'clock, when, by moonlight, we might return, ever so reluctantly, to Chatham Forest. I remembered the fallen branch, its spidering touch, and drank both wine and brandy.
«The silence in the forest,» said Sir Robert, finishing his meal. «What murderer could achieve such a silence?»
«An insanely clever man with a series of baited, poisoned traps, with liberal quantities of insecticide, might kill off every bird, every rabbit, every insect,» I said.
«Why should he do that?»
«To convince us that there is a large spider nearby. To perfect his act.»
«We are the only ones who have noticed this silence; the police did not. Why should a murderer go to all that trouble for nothing?»
«Why is a murderer? you might well ask.»
«I am not convinced.» Sir Robert topped his food with wine. «This creature, with a voracious mouth, has cleansed the forest. With nothing left, he seized the children. The silence, the murders, the prevalence of trapdoor spiders, the large earth balls, it all fits.»
Sir Robert's fingers crawled about the desktop, quite like a washed, manicured spider in itself. He made a cup of his frail hands, held them up.
«At the bottom of a spider's burrow is a dustbin into which drop insect remnants on which the spider has dined. Imagine the dustbin of our Grand Finnegan!»
I imagined. I visioned a Great Legged thing fastened to its dark lid under the forest and a child running, singing in the half-light. A brisk insucked whisk of air, the song cut short, then nothing but an empty glade and the echo of a softly dropped lid, and beneath the dark earth the spider, fiddling, cabling, spinning the stunned child in its silently orchestrating legs.
What would the dustbin of such an incredible spider resemble? What the remnants of many banquets? I shuddered.
«Rain's letting up.» Sir Robert nodded his approval. «Back to the forest. I've mapped the damned place for weeks. All the bodies were found in one half-open glade. That's where the assassin, if it was a man, arrives! Or where the unnatural silk-spinning, earth-tunneling architect of special doors abides his tomb.»
«Must I hear all this?» I protested.
«Listen more.» Sir Robert downed the last of his burgundy. «The poor children's prolapsed corpses were found at thirteen-day intervals. Which means that every two weeks our loathsome eight-legged hide-and-seeker must feed. Tonight is the fourteenth night after the last child was found, nothing but skin. Tonight our hidden friend must hunger afresh. So! Within the hour, I shall introduce you to Finnegan the great and horrible!»
«All of which,» I said, «makes me want to drink.»
«Here I go.» Sir Robert stepped through one of his Louis the Fourteenth portals. «To find the last and final and most awful door in all my life. You will follow.»
Damn, yes! I followed.
The sun had set, the rain was gone, and the clouds cleared off to show a cold and troubled moon. We moved in our own silence and the silence of the exhausted paths and glades while Sir Robert handed me a small silver pistol.
«Not that that would help. Killing an outsize arachnid is sticky. Hard to know where to fire the first shot. If you miss, there'll be no time for a second. Damned things, large or small, move in the instant!»
«Thanks.» I took the weapon. «I need a drink.»
«Done.» Sir Robert handed me a silver brandy flask. «Drink as needed.»
I drank. «What about you?»
«I have my own special flask.» Sir Robert lifted it. «For the right time.»
«Why wait?»
«I must surprise the beast and mustn't be drunk at the encounter. Four seconds before the thing grabs me, I will imbibe of this dear Napoleon stuff, spiced with a rude surprise.
«Surprise?»
«Ah, wait. You'll see. So will this dark thief of life. Now, dear sir, here we part company. I this way, you yonder. Do you mind?»
«Mind when I'm scared gutless? What's that?»
«Here. If I should vanish.» He handed me a sealed letter. «Read it aloud to the constabulary. It will help them locate me and Finnegan, lost and found.»
«Please, no details. I feel like a damned fool following you while Finnegan, if he exists, is underfoot snug and warm, saying, 'Ah, those idiots above running about, freezing. I think I'll let them freeze.' «
«One hopes not. Get away now. If we walk together, he won't jump up. Alone, he'll peer out the merest crack, glom the scene with a huge bright eye, flip down again, ssst, and one of us gone to darkness.»
«Not me, please. Not me.»
We walked on about sixty feet apart and beginning to lose one another in the half moonlight.
«Are you there?» called Sir Robert from half the world away in leafy dark.
«I wish I weren't,» I yelled back.
«Onward!» cried Sir Robert. «Don't lose sight of me. Move closer. We're near on the site. I can intuit, I almost feel-«
As a final cloud shifted, moonlight glowed brilliantly to show Sir Robert waving his arms about like antennae, eyes half shut, gasping with expectation.
«Closer, closer,» I heard him exhale. «Near on. Be still. Perhaps . .
He froze in place. There' was something in his aspect that made me want to leap, race, and yank him off the turf he had chosen.
«Sir Robert, oh, God!» I cried. «Run!»
He froze. One hand and arm orchestrated the air, feeling, probing, while his other hand delved, brought forth his silver-coated flask of brandy. He held it high in the moonlight, a toast to doom. Then, afflicted with need, he took one, two, three, my God, four incredible swigs!
Arms out, balancing the wind, tilting his head back, laughing like a boy, he swigged the last of his mysterious drink.
«All right, Finnegan, below and beneath!» he cried. «Come get me!»
He stomped his foot.
Cried out victorious.
And vanished.
It was all over in a second.
A flicker, a blur, a dark bush had grown up from the earth with a whisper, a suction, and the thud of a body dropped and a door shut.
The glade was empty.
«Sir Robert. Quick!»
But there was no one to quicken.
Not thinking that I might be snatched and vanished, I lurched to the spot where Sir Robert had drunk his wild toast.
I stood staring down at earth and leaves with not a sound save my heart beating while the leaves blew away to reveal only pebbles, dry grass, and earth.
I must have lifted my head and bayed to the moon like a dog, then fell to my knees, fearless, to dig for lids, for tunneled tombs where a voiceless tangle of legs wove themselves, binding and mummifying a thing that had been my friend. This is his final door, I thought insanely, crying the name of my friend.
I found only his pipe, cane, and empty brandy flask, flung down when he had escaped night, life, everything.
Swaying up, I fired the pistol six times here into the unanswering earth, a dumb thing gone stupid as I finished and staggered over his instant graveyard, his locked-in tomb, listening for muffled screams, shrieks, cries, but heard none. I ran in circles, with no ammunition save my weeping shouts. I would have stayed all night, but a downpour of leaves, a great spidering flourish of broken branches, fell to panic and suffer my heart. I fled, still calling his name to a silence lidded by clouds that hid the moon.
At his estate, I beat on the door, wailing, yanking, until I recalled: it opened inward, it was unlocked.
Alone in the library, with only liquor to help me live, I read the letter that Sir Robert had left behind:
My dear Douglas:
I am old and have seen much but am not mad. Finnegan exists. My chemist had provided me with a sure poison that I will mix in my brandy for our walk. I will drink all. Finnegan, not knowing me as a poisoned morsel will give me a swift invite. Now you see me, now you don't. I will then be the weapon of his death, minutes after my own. I do not think there is another outsize nightmare like him on earth. Once gone, that's the end.
Being old, I am immensely curious. I fear not death, for my physicians tell me that f no accidents kill me, cancer will.
I thought of giving a poisoned rabbit to our nightmare assassin. But then I'd never know where he was or if he really existed. Finnegan would die unseen in his monstrous closet, and I never the wiser. This way, for one victorious moment, I will know. Fear for me. Envy me. Pray for me. Sorry to abandon you without farewells. Dear friend, carry on.
I folded the letter and wept.
No more was ever heard of him.
Some say Sir Robert killed himself, an actor in his own melodrama, and that one day we shall unearth his brooding, lost, and Gothic body and that it was he who killed the children and that his preoccupation with doors and hinges, and more doors, led him, crazed, to study this one species of spider, and wildly plan and build the most amazing door in history, an insane burrow into which he popped to die, before my eyes, thus hoping to perpetuate the incredible Finnegan.
But I have found no burrow. I do not believe a man could construct such a pit, even given Sir Robert's overwhelming passion for doors.
I can only ask, would a man murder, draw his victims' blood, build an earthen vault? For what motive? Create the finest secret exit in all time? Madness. And what of those large grayish balls of earth supposedly tossed forth from the spider's lair?
Somewhere, Finnegan and Sir Robert lie clasped in a velvet-lined unmarked crypt, deep under. Whether one is the paranoiac alter ego of the other, I cannot say. But the murders have ceased, the rabbits once more rush in Chatham Forest, and its bushes teem with butterflies and birds. It is another spring, and the children run again through a loud glade, no longer silent.
Finnegan and Sir Robert, requiescat in peace.
To say that I have been haunted for the rest of my life by the affair Finnegan is to grossly understate the events leading up to that final melancholy. Only now, at threescore and ten, can I write these words for an astonished constabulary who may well run with picks and shovels to unearth my truths or bury my lies.
The facts are these:
Three children went astray and were missed. Their bodies were found in the midst of Chatham Forest and each bore no marks of criminal assassination, but all had suffered their lifeblood to be drained. Only their skin remained like that of some discolored vineyard grapes withered by sunlight and no rain.
From the withered detritus of these innocents rose fresh rumors of vampires or similar beasts with similar appetites. Such myths always pursue the facts to stun them in their tracks. It could only have been a tombyard beast, it was said, that fed on and destroyed three lives and ruined three dozen more.
The children were buried in the most holy ground. Soon after, Sir Robert Merriweather, pretender to the throne of Sherlock Holmes but modestly refusing the claim, moved through the ten dozen doors of his antique house to come forth to search for this terrible thief of life. With myself, I might add, to carry his brandy and bumbershoot and warn him of underbrush pitfalls in that dark and mysterious forest.
Sir Robert Merriweather, you say?
Just that. Plus the ten times ten plus twelve amazing doors in his shut-up house.
Were the doors used? Not one in nine. How had they appeared in Sir Robert's old manse? He had shipped them in, as a collector of doors, from Rio, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and mid-America. Once collected, he had stashed them, hinged, to be seen from both sides, on the walls of his upper and lower chambers. There he conducted tours of these odd portals for such antique fools as were ravished by the sight of the curiously overdone, the undersimplified, the rococo, or some First Empire cast aside by Napoleon's nephews or seized from Hermann Goering, who had in turn ransacked the Louvre. Others, pelted by Oklahoma dust storms, were jostled home in flatbeds cushioned by bright posters from carnivals buried in the windblown desolations of 1936 America. Name your least favorite door, it was his. Name the best quality, he owned it also, hidden and safe, true beauties behind oblivion's portals.
I had come to see his doors, not the deaths. At his behest, which was a command, I had bought my curiosity a steamship ticket and arrived to find Sir Robert involved not with ten dozen doors, but some great dark door. A mysterious portal, still un-found. And beneath? A tomb.
Sir Robert hurried the grand tour, opening and shutting panels rescued from Peking, long buried near Etna, or filched from Nantucket. But his heart, gone sick, was not in this, what should have been delightful, tour.
He described the spring rains that drenched the country to make things green, only to have people to walk out in that fine weather and one week find the body of a boy emptied of life through two incisions in his neck, and in the next weeks, the bodies of the two girls. People shouted for the police and sat drinking in pubs, their faces long and pale, while mothers locked their children home where fathers lectured on the dooms that lay in Chatham Forest.
«Will you come with me,» said Sir Robert at last, «on a very strange, sad picnic?»
«I will,» I said.
So we snapped ourselves in weather-proofs, lugged a hamper of sandwiches and red wine, and plunged into the forest on a drear Sunday.
There was time, as we moved down a hill into the dripping gloom of the trees, to recall what the papers had said about the vanished children's bloodless flesh, the police thrashing the forest ten dozen times, clueless, while the surrounding estates slammed their doors drum-tight at sunset.
«Rain. Damn. Rain!» Sir Robert's pale face stared up, his gray mustache quivering over his thin mouth. He was sick and brittle and old. «Our picnic will be ruined!»
«Picnic?» I said. «Will our killer join us for eats?»
«I pray to God he will,» Sir Robert said. «Yes, pray to God he will.»
We walked through a land that was now mists, now dim sunlight, now forest, now open glade, until we came into a silent part of the woods, a silence made of the way the trees grew wetly together and the way the green moss lay in swards and hillocks. Spring had not yet filled the empty trees. The sun was like an arctic disk, withdrawn, cold, and almost dead.
«This is the place,» said Sir Robert at last.
«Where the children were found?» I inquired.
«Their bodies empty as empty can be.»
I looked at the glade and thought of the children and the people who had stood over them with startled faces and the police who had come to whisper and touch and go away, lost.
«The murderer was never apprehended?»
«Not this clever fellow. How observant are you?» asked Sir Robert.
«What do you want observed?»
«There's the catch. The police slipped up. They were stupidly anthropomorphic about the whole bloody mess, seeking a killer with two arms, two legs, a suit of clothes, and a knife. So hypnotized with their human concept of the killer that they overlooked one obvious unbelievable fact about this place. So!»
He gave his cane a quick light tap on the earth.
Something happened. I stared at the ground. «Do that again,» I whispered.
«You saw it?»
«I thought I saw a small trapdoor open and shut. May I have your cane?»
He gave me the cane. I tapped the ground. It happened again.
«A spider!» I cried. «Gone! God, how quick!»
«Finnegan,» Sir Robert muttered.
«What?»
«You know the old saying: in again, out again, Finnegan. Here.»
With his penknife, Sir Robert dug in the soil to lift an entire clod of earth, breaking off bits to show me the tunnel. The spider, in panic, leaped out its small wafer door and fell to the ground.
Sir Robert handed me the tunnel. «Like gray velvet. Feel. A model builder, that small chap. A tiny shelter, camouflaged, and him alert. He could hear a fly walk. Then pounce out, seize, pop back, slam the lid!»
«I didn't know you loved Nature.»
«Loathe it. But this wee chap, there's much we share. Doors. Hinges. Wouldn't consider other arachnids. But my love of portals drew me to study this incredible carpenter.» Sir Robert worked the trap on its cobweb hinges. «What craftsmanship! And it all ties to the tragedies!»
«The murdered children?»
Sir Robert nodded. «Notice any special thing about this forest?»
«It's too quiet.»
«Quiet!» Sir Robert smiled weakly. «Vast quantities of silence. No familiar birds, beetles, crickets, toads. Not a rustle or stir. The police didn't notice. Why should they? But it was this absence of sound and motion in the glade that prompted my wild theory about the murders.»
He toyed with the amazing structure in his hands.
«What would you say if you could imagine a spider large enough, in a hideout big enough, so that a running child might hear a vacuumed sound, be seized, and vanish with a soft thud below. How say you?» Sir Robert stared at the trees. «Poppycock and bilge? Yet, why not? Evolution, selection, growth, mutations, and-pfft!»
Again he tapped with his cane. A trapdoor flew open, shut.
«Finnegan,» he said.
The sky darkened.
«Rain!» Casting a cold gray eye at the clouds, he stretched his frail hand to touch the showers. «Damn! Arachnids hate rain. And so will our huge dark Finnegan.»
«Finnegan!» I cried irritably.
«I believe in him, yes.»
«A spider larger than a child?!»
«Twice as large.»
The cold wind blew a mizzle of rain over us. «Lord, I hate to leave. Quick, before we go. Here.»
Sir Robert raked away the old leaves with his cane, revealing two globular gray-brown objects.
«What are they?» I bent. «Old cannonballs?»
«No.» He cracked the grayish globes. «Soil, through and through.»
I touched the crumbled bits.
«Our Finnegan excavates,» said Sir Robert. «To make his tunnel. With his large rakelike chelicerae he dislodges soil, works it into a ball, carries it in his jaws, and drops it beyond his hole.»
Sir Robert displayed half a dozen pellets on his trembling palm. «Normal balls evicted from a tiny trapdoor tunnel. Toy-size.» He knocked his cane on the huge globes at our feet. «Explain those!»
I laughed. «The children must've made them with mud!»
«Nonsense!» cried Sir Robert irritably, glaring about at trees and earth. «By God, somewhere, our dark beast lurks beneath his velvet lid. We might be standing on it. Christ, don't stare! His door has beveled rims. Some architect, this Finnegan. A genius at camouflage.»
Sir Robert raved on and on, describing the dark earth, the arachnid, its fiddling legs, its hungry mouth, as the wind roared and the trees shook.
Suddenly, Sir Robert flung up his cane.
«No!» he cried.
I had no time to turn. My flesh froze, my heart stopped.
Something snatched my spine.
I thought I heard a huge bottle uncorked, a lid sprung. Then this monstrous thing crawled down my back.
«Here!» cried Sir Robert. «Now!»
He struck with his cane. I fell, dead weight. He thrust the thing from my spine. He lifted it.
The wind had cracked the dead tree branch and knocked it onto my back.
Weakly, I tried to rise, shivering. «Silly,» I said a dozen times. «Silly. Damn awful silly!»
«Silly, no. Brandy, yes!» said Sir Robert. «Brandy?»
The sky was very black now. The rain swarmed over us.
Door after door after door, and at last into Sir Robert's country house study. A warm, rich room, where a fire smoldered on a drafty hearth. We devoured our sandwiches, waiting for the rain to cease. Sir Robert estimated that it would stop by eight o'clock, when, by moonlight, we might return, ever so reluctantly, to Chatham Forest. I remembered the fallen branch, its spidering touch, and drank both wine and brandy.
«The silence in the forest,» said Sir Robert, finishing his meal. «What murderer could achieve such a silence?»
«An insanely clever man with a series of baited, poisoned traps, with liberal quantities of insecticide, might kill off every bird, every rabbit, every insect,» I said.
«Why should he do that?»
«To convince us that there is a large spider nearby. To perfect his act.»
«We are the only ones who have noticed this silence; the police did not. Why should a murderer go to all that trouble for nothing?»
«Why is a murderer? you might well ask.»
«I am not convinced.» Sir Robert topped his food with wine. «This creature, with a voracious mouth, has cleansed the forest. With nothing left, he seized the children. The silence, the murders, the prevalence of trapdoor spiders, the large earth balls, it all fits.»
Sir Robert's fingers crawled about the desktop, quite like a washed, manicured spider in itself. He made a cup of his frail hands, held them up.
«At the bottom of a spider's burrow is a dustbin into which drop insect remnants on which the spider has dined. Imagine the dustbin of our Grand Finnegan!»
I imagined. I visioned a Great Legged thing fastened to its dark lid under the forest and a child running, singing in the half-light. A brisk insucked whisk of air, the song cut short, then nothing but an empty glade and the echo of a softly dropped lid, and beneath the dark earth the spider, fiddling, cabling, spinning the stunned child in its silently orchestrating legs.
What would the dustbin of such an incredible spider resemble? What the remnants of many banquets? I shuddered.
«Rain's letting up.» Sir Robert nodded his approval. «Back to the forest. I've mapped the damned place for weeks. All the bodies were found in one half-open glade. That's where the assassin, if it was a man, arrives! Or where the unnatural silk-spinning, earth-tunneling architect of special doors abides his tomb.»
«Must I hear all this?» I protested.
«Listen more.» Sir Robert downed the last of his burgundy. «The poor children's prolapsed corpses were found at thirteen-day intervals. Which means that every two weeks our loathsome eight-legged hide-and-seeker must feed. Tonight is the fourteenth night after the last child was found, nothing but skin. Tonight our hidden friend must hunger afresh. So! Within the hour, I shall introduce you to Finnegan the great and horrible!»
«All of which,» I said, «makes me want to drink.»
«Here I go.» Sir Robert stepped through one of his Louis the Fourteenth portals. «To find the last and final and most awful door in all my life. You will follow.»
Damn, yes! I followed.
The sun had set, the rain was gone, and the clouds cleared off to show a cold and troubled moon. We moved in our own silence and the silence of the exhausted paths and glades while Sir Robert handed me a small silver pistol.
«Not that that would help. Killing an outsize arachnid is sticky. Hard to know where to fire the first shot. If you miss, there'll be no time for a second. Damned things, large or small, move in the instant!»
«Thanks.» I took the weapon. «I need a drink.»
«Done.» Sir Robert handed me a silver brandy flask. «Drink as needed.»
I drank. «What about you?»
«I have my own special flask.» Sir Robert lifted it. «For the right time.»
«Why wait?»
«I must surprise the beast and mustn't be drunk at the encounter. Four seconds before the thing grabs me, I will imbibe of this dear Napoleon stuff, spiced with a rude surprise.
«Surprise?»
«Ah, wait. You'll see. So will this dark thief of life. Now, dear sir, here we part company. I this way, you yonder. Do you mind?»
«Mind when I'm scared gutless? What's that?»
«Here. If I should vanish.» He handed me a sealed letter. «Read it aloud to the constabulary. It will help them locate me and Finnegan, lost and found.»
«Please, no details. I feel like a damned fool following you while Finnegan, if he exists, is underfoot snug and warm, saying, 'Ah, those idiots above running about, freezing. I think I'll let them freeze.' «
«One hopes not. Get away now. If we walk together, he won't jump up. Alone, he'll peer out the merest crack, glom the scene with a huge bright eye, flip down again, ssst, and one of us gone to darkness.»
«Not me, please. Not me.»
We walked on about sixty feet apart and beginning to lose one another in the half moonlight.
«Are you there?» called Sir Robert from half the world away in leafy dark.
«I wish I weren't,» I yelled back.
«Onward!» cried Sir Robert. «Don't lose sight of me. Move closer. We're near on the site. I can intuit, I almost feel-«
As a final cloud shifted, moonlight glowed brilliantly to show Sir Robert waving his arms about like antennae, eyes half shut, gasping with expectation.
«Closer, closer,» I heard him exhale. «Near on. Be still. Perhaps . .
He froze in place. There' was something in his aspect that made me want to leap, race, and yank him off the turf he had chosen.
«Sir Robert, oh, God!» I cried. «Run!»
He froze. One hand and arm orchestrated the air, feeling, probing, while his other hand delved, brought forth his silver-coated flask of brandy. He held it high in the moonlight, a toast to doom. Then, afflicted with need, he took one, two, three, my God, four incredible swigs!
Arms out, balancing the wind, tilting his head back, laughing like a boy, he swigged the last of his mysterious drink.
«All right, Finnegan, below and beneath!» he cried. «Come get me!»
He stomped his foot.
Cried out victorious.
And vanished.
It was all over in a second.
A flicker, a blur, a dark bush had grown up from the earth with a whisper, a suction, and the thud of a body dropped and a door shut.
The glade was empty.
«Sir Robert. Quick!»
But there was no one to quicken.
Not thinking that I might be snatched and vanished, I lurched to the spot where Sir Robert had drunk his wild toast.
I stood staring down at earth and leaves with not a sound save my heart beating while the leaves blew away to reveal only pebbles, dry grass, and earth.
I must have lifted my head and bayed to the moon like a dog, then fell to my knees, fearless, to dig for lids, for tunneled tombs where a voiceless tangle of legs wove themselves, binding and mummifying a thing that had been my friend. This is his final door, I thought insanely, crying the name of my friend.
I found only his pipe, cane, and empty brandy flask, flung down when he had escaped night, life, everything.
Swaying up, I fired the pistol six times here into the unanswering earth, a dumb thing gone stupid as I finished and staggered over his instant graveyard, his locked-in tomb, listening for muffled screams, shrieks, cries, but heard none. I ran in circles, with no ammunition save my weeping shouts. I would have stayed all night, but a downpour of leaves, a great spidering flourish of broken branches, fell to panic and suffer my heart. I fled, still calling his name to a silence lidded by clouds that hid the moon.
At his estate, I beat on the door, wailing, yanking, until I recalled: it opened inward, it was unlocked.
Alone in the library, with only liquor to help me live, I read the letter that Sir Robert had left behind:
My dear Douglas:
I am old and have seen much but am not mad. Finnegan exists. My chemist had provided me with a sure poison that I will mix in my brandy for our walk. I will drink all. Finnegan, not knowing me as a poisoned morsel will give me a swift invite. Now you see me, now you don't. I will then be the weapon of his death, minutes after my own. I do not think there is another outsize nightmare like him on earth. Once gone, that's the end.
Being old, I am immensely curious. I fear not death, for my physicians tell me that f no accidents kill me, cancer will.
I thought of giving a poisoned rabbit to our nightmare assassin. But then I'd never know where he was or if he really existed. Finnegan would die unseen in his monstrous closet, and I never the wiser. This way, for one victorious moment, I will know. Fear for me. Envy me. Pray for me. Sorry to abandon you without farewells. Dear friend, carry on.
I folded the letter and wept.
No more was ever heard of him.
Some say Sir Robert killed himself, an actor in his own melodrama, and that one day we shall unearth his brooding, lost, and Gothic body and that it was he who killed the children and that his preoccupation with doors and hinges, and more doors, led him, crazed, to study this one species of spider, and wildly plan and build the most amazing door in history, an insane burrow into which he popped to die, before my eyes, thus hoping to perpetuate the incredible Finnegan.
But I have found no burrow. I do not believe a man could construct such a pit, even given Sir Robert's overwhelming passion for doors.
I can only ask, would a man murder, draw his victims' blood, build an earthen vault? For what motive? Create the finest secret exit in all time? Madness. And what of those large grayish balls of earth supposedly tossed forth from the spider's lair?
Somewhere, Finnegan and Sir Robert lie clasped in a velvet-lined unmarked crypt, deep under. Whether one is the paranoiac alter ego of the other, I cannot say. But the murders have ceased, the rabbits once more rush in Chatham Forest, and its bushes teem with butterflies and birds. It is another spring, and the children run again through a loud glade, no longer silent.
Finnegan and Sir Robert, requiescat in peace.
That Woman on the Lawn
1996 year
Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It went on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that on the late-summer wind.
He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound. Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?
He sat up and the weeping stopped.
At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.
The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there was no more sadness and only the footprints there.
He stepped back from the window, suddenly chilled, and went down to heat and drink a cup of chocolate.
He did not think of the weeping again until dusk the next day, and even then thought that it must be some woman from a house nearby, unhappy with life, perhaps locked out and in need of a place to let her sadness go.
Yet . . .?
As the twilight deepened, coming home he found himself hurrying from the bus, at a steady pace which astonished him. Why, why all this?
Idiot, he thought. A woman unseen weeps under your window, and here at sunset the next day, you almost run.
Yes, he thought, but her voice!
Was it beautiful, then?
No. Only familiar.
Where had he heard such a voice before, wordless in crying?
Who could he ask, living in an empty house from which his parents had vanished long ago?
He turned in at his front lawn and stood still, his eyes shadowed.
What had he expected? That whoever she was would be waiting here? Was he that lonely that a single voice long after midnight roused all his senses?
No. Simply put: he must know who the crying woman was.
And he was certain she would return tonight as he slept.
He went to bed at eleven, and awoke at three, panicked that he had missed a miracle. Lightning had destroyed a nearby town or an earthquake had shaken half the world to dust, and he had slept through it!
Fool! he thought, and slung back the covers and moved to the window, to see that indeed he had overslept.
For there on the lawn were the delicate footprints.
And he hadn't even heard the weeping!
He would have gone out to kneel in the grass, but at that moment a police car motored slowly by, looking at nothing and the night.
How could he run to prowl, to probe, to touch the grass if that car came by again? What doing? Picking clover blossoms? Weeding dandelions? What, what?
His bones cracked with indecision. He would go down, he would not.
Already the memory of that terrible weeping faded the more he tried to make it clear. If he missed her one more night, the memory itself might be gone.
Behind him, in his room, the alarm clock rang. Damn! he thought. What time did I set it for? He shut off the alarm and sat on his bed, rocking gently, waiting, eyes shut, listening.
The wind shifted. The tree just outside the window whispered and stirred.
He opened his eyes and leaned forward. From far off, coming near, and now down below, the quiet sound of a woman weeping.
She had come back to his lawn and was not forever lost. Be very quiet, he thought.
And the sounds she made came up on the wind through the blowing curtains into his room.
Careful now. Careful but quick.
He moved to the window and looked down.
In the middle of the lawn she stood and wept, her hair long and dark on her shoulders, her face bright with tears.
And there was something in the way her hands trembled at her sides, the way her hair moved quietly in the wind, that shook him so that he almost fell.
He knew her and yet did not. He had seen her before, but had never seen.
Turn your head, he thought.
Almost as if hearing this, the young woman sank to her knees to half kneel on the grass, letting the wind comb her hair, head down and weeping so steadily and bitterly that he wanted to cry out: Oh, no! It kills my heart!
And as if she had heard, quite suddenly her head lifted, her weeping grew less as she looked up at the moon, so that he saw her face.
And it was indeed a face seen somewhere once, but where?
A tear fell. She blinked.
It was like the blinking of a camera and a picture taken.
«God save me!» he whispered. «No!»
He whirled and stumbled toward the closet to seize down an avalanche of boxes and albums. In the dark he scrabbled, then pulled on the closet light, tossed aside six albums until finally, dragging another forth and riffling pages, he gave a cry, stopped, and held a photo close, then turned and moved blindly to the window.
There he stared down at the lawn and then at the photograph, very old, very yellowed with age.
Yes, yes, the same! The image struck his eyes and then his heart. His whole body shook, made an immense pulsation, as he leaned at the album, leaned on the window frame, and almost shouted:
You! How dare you come back! How dare you be young! How dare you be what? A girl untouched, wandering late on my lawn!? You were never that young! Never! Damn, oh, damn your warm blood, damn your wild soul!
But this he did not shout or say.
For something in his eyes, like a beacon, must have flashed.
The crying of the young woman on the lawn stopped.
She looked up.
At which instant the album fell from his fingers, through the burst-wide screen, and down like a dark bird fluttering to strike the earth.
The young man gave a muted cry, whirled, and ran. «No, no!» he cried aloud. «I didn't mean-come back!» He was down the stairs and out on the porch in a matter of seconds. The door slammed behind him like a gunshot. The explosion nailed him to the rail, half down to the lawn, where there was nothing to be seen but footprints. Either way, up the street lay empty sidewalks and shadows under trees. A radio played off in an upstairs window in a house behind trees. A car passed, murmuring, at a far intersection.
«Wait,» he whispered. «Come back. I shouldn't have said-«
He stopped. He had said nothing, but only thought it. But his outrage, his jealousy?
She had felt that. She had somehow heard. And now. ..?
She'll never come back, he thought. Oh God!
He sat on the porch steps for a while, quietly biting his knuckle.
At three in the morning, in bed, he thought he heard a sigh and soft footsteps in grass, and waited. The photo album lay closed on the floor. Even though it lay shut, he could see and know her face. And it was utterly impossible, utterly insane.
His last thought before sleep was: ghost.
The strangest ghost that ever walked.
The ghost of someone dead.
The ghost of someone who died very old.
But somehow come back not as her old self.
But a ghost that was somehow young.
Weren't ghosts always, when they returned, the same age as when they died?
No.
Not this one anyway.
«Why . ..?» he whispered.
And dream took over the whisper.
One night passed and then another and another, and there was nothing on the lawn but the light of a moon that changed its face from outright stare to half grimace.
He waited.
The first night a more than ordinarily casual cat crossed the yard at two a.m.
The second night a dog trotted by, wearing his tongue half out of his mouth like a loosely tied red cravat, smiling at trees.
The third night a spider spent from twelve-twenty-five until four a.m. building a baroque clockface on the air between lawn and trees, which a bird broke in passing at dawn.
He slept most of Sunday and awoke with a fever that was not an illness at dusk.
Late in the twilight of the fifth day, the color of the sky somehow promised her return, as did the way the wind leaned against the trees and the look of the moon when it finally rose to set the scene.
«All right,» he said, half aloud. «Now.» But at midnight, nothing.
«Come on,» he whispered.
One o'clock, nothing.
You must, he thought.
No, you will.
He slept for ten minutes and woke suddenly at two-ten, knowing that when he went to the window-
She would be there.
She was.
At first, he didn't see her, and groaned, and then, in the shadow of the great oak far out on the edge of the lawn, he saw something move, and one foot came out, and she took a step and stood very still.
He held his breath, quieted his heart, told himself to turn, walk, and take each step down with precision, numbering them, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, moving in darkness with no rush, six, five, four, and at last one. He opened the front screen door with only a whisper, and was on the porch without frightening what might be out beyond waiting for him.
Quietly, he moved down the porch steps to the edge of the lawn, like one who stands on the rim of a pond. Out in the center of that pond, the young woman stood, trapped like someone on thin ice that might at any moment break and drop her through.
She did not see him. And then …
She did a thing that was a signal. Tonight her hair was fixed in a knot at the back of her head. She lifted her white arms in a gesture and with one touch of her fingers, a touch of snow, loosened her hair.
It fell in a dark banner, to blow and repattern itself across her shoulders, which trembled with their shadows.
The wind stirred her hair in the night and moved it about her face and on her uplifted hands.
The shadows laid down by the moon under every tree leaned as if called by the motion.
The entire world shifted in its sleep.
The wind blew as the young woman waited.
But no footsteps sounded along the white sidewalks. No front doors opened far down the street. No windows were raised. No motion caused front porches to creak and shift.
He took another step out onto the small meadow of night.
«Who are you-?» she gasped, and stepped back. «No, no,» he said softly. «It's all right.» Another trembling had taken over her body. Where before it had been some hope, some anticipation, now it was fear. One hand stopped her hair from blowing; the other half shielded her face.
''I'll stand right here,'' he said. ''Believe me.'' She waited a long while, staring at him until her shoulders
relaxed and the lines around her mouth vanished. Her whole body sensed the truth of his words.
«I don't understand,» she said.
«I don't either.» «What are you doing here?»
«I don't know.» «What am I doing here?»
«You came to meet someone,» he said.
«Did I?»
The town clock struck three in the morning far away. She listened to it, her face shadowed by the sound.
«But it's so late. People don't walk around late on front lawns!»
«They do if they must,» he said.
«But why?»
«Maybe we can find out, if we talk.»
«About what, what?!»
«About why you're here. If we talk long enough, we may know. I know why I'm here, of course. I heard you crying.»
«Oh, I'm so ashamed.»
«Don't be. Why are people ashamed of tears? I cry often. Then I start laughing. But the crying must come first. Go ahead.»
«What a strange man you are.»
Her hand fell away from her hair. Her other hand moved away so her face was illuminated by a small and growing curiosity.
«I thought I was the only one who knew about crying,» she said.
«Everyone thinks that. It's one of those little secrets we keep from each other. Show me a serious man and I'll show you a man who has never wept. Show me a madman and I'll show you a man who dried his tears a long time ago. Go ahead.»
«I think I'm done,» she said.
«Any time, start over.»
She burst out a tiny laugh. «Oh, you are strange. Who are you?»
«We'll come to that.»
She peered across the lawn at his hands, his face, his mouth, and then at his eyes.
«Oh, I know you. But from where?!»
«That would spoil it. You wouldn't believe, anyway.»
«I would!»
Now it was his turn to laugh quietly. «You're very young.»
«No, nineteen! Ancient!»
«Girls, by the time they go from twelve to nineteen, are full of years, yes. I don't know; but it must be so. Now, please, why are you out here in the middle of the night?»
«I-« She shut her eyes to think in on it. «I'm waiting.»
«Yes?»
«And I'm sad.»
«It's the waiting that makes you sad, yes?»
«I think, no, yes, no.»
«And you don't quite know what you're waiting for?»
«Oh, I wish I could be sure. All of me's waiting. I don't know, all of me. I don't understand. I'm impossible!»
«No, you're everyone that ever grew up too fast and wanted too much. I think girls, women, like you have slipped out at night since time began. If it wasn't here in Green Town, it was in Cairo or Alexandria or Rome or Paris in summer, anywhere there was a private place and late hours and no one to see, so they just rose up and out, as if someone had called their name-«
«I was called, yes! That's it! Someone did call my name! It's true. How did you know? Was it you!»
«No. But someone we both know. You'll know his name when you go back to bed tonight, wherever that is.»
«Why, in that house, behind you,» she said. «That's my house. I was born in it.»
«Well»-he laughed-«so was I.»
«You? How can that be? Are you sure?»
«Yes. Anyway, you heard someone calling. You had to come out-«
«I did. Many nights now. But, always, no one's here. They must be there, or why would I hear them?»
«One day there'll be someone to fit the voice.»
«Oh, don't joke with me!»
«I'm not. Believe. There will be. That's what all those other women heard in other years and places, middle of summer, dead of winter, go out and risk cold, stand warm in snow banks, and listen and look for strange footprints on the midnight snow, and only an old dog trotting by, all smiles. Damn, damn.»
«Oh, yes, damn, damn.» And her smile showed for a moment, even as the moon came out of the clouds and went away. «Isn't it silly?»
«No. Men do the same. They take long walks when they're sixteen, seventeen. They don't stand on lawns, waiting, no. But, my God, how they walk! Miles and miles from midnight until dawn and come home exhausted and explode and die in bed.»
«What a shame that those who stand and wait and those who walk all night can't-«
«Meet?»
«Yes; don't you think it's a shame?»
«They do, finally.»
«Oh, no, I shall never meet anyone. I'm old and ugly and terrible and I don't know how many nights I've heard that voice making me come here and there's nothing and I just want to die.»
«Oh, lovely young girl,» he said gently. «Don't die. The cavalry is on its way. You will be saved.»
There was such certainty in his voice that it made her glance up again, for she had been looking at her hands and her own soul in her hands.
«You know, don't you?» she asked.
«Yes.»
«You truly know? You tell the truth?»
«Swear to God, swear by all that's living.»
«Tell me more!»
«There's little more to tell.»
«Tell me!»
«Everything will be all right with you. Some night soon, or some day, someone will call and they'll really be there when you come to find. The game will be over.»
«Hide-and-seek, you mean? But it's gone on too long!»
«It's almost over, Marie.»
«You know my name!»
He stopped, confused. He had not meant to speak it.
«How did you know, who are you?» she demanded.
«When you get back to sleep tonight, you'll know. If we say too much, you'll disappear, or I'll disappear. I'm not quite sure which of us is real or which is a ghost.»
«Not me! Oh, surely not me. I can feel myself. I'm here. Why, look!» And she showed him the remainder of her tears brushed from her eyelids and held on her palms.
«Oh, that's real, all right. Well, then, dear young woman, I must be the visitor. I come to tell you it will all go right. Do you believe in special ghosts?»
«Are you special?»
«One of us is. Or maybe both. The ghost of young love or the ghost of the unborn.»
«Is that what I am, you are?»
«Paradoxes aren't easy to explain.»
«Then, depending on how you look at it, you're impossible, and so am I.»
«If it makes it easier, just think I'm not really here. Do you believe in ghosts?»
«I think I do.»
«It comes to me to imagine, then, that there are special ghosts in the world. Not ghosts of dead people. But ghosts of want and need, or I guess you might say desire.»
«I don't understand.»
«Well, have you ever lain in bed late afternoons, late nights and dreamed something so much, awake, you felt your soul jump out of your body as if something had yanked a long, pure white sheet straight out the window? You want something so much, your soul leaps out and follows, my God, fast?»
«Why . . . yes. Yes!»
«Boys do that, men do that. When I was twelve I read Burroughs' Mars novels. John Carter used to stand under the stars, hold up his arms to Mars, and ask to be taken.
And Mars grabbed his soul, yanked him like an aching tooth across space, and landed him in dead Martian seas. That's boys, that's men.»
«And girls, women?»
«They dream, yes. And their ghosts come out of their bodies. Living ghosts. Living wants. Living needs.»
«And go to stand on lawns in the middle of winter nights?»
«That's about it.»
«Am I a ghost, then?»
«Yes, the ghost of wanting so much it kills but doesn't kill you, shakes and almost breaks you.»
«And you?»
«I must be the answer-ghost.»
«The answer-ghost. What a funny name!»
«Yes. But you've asked and I know the answer.»
«Tell me!»
«All right, the answer is this, young girl, young woman. The time of waiting is almost over. Your time of despair will soon be through. Very soon, now, a voice will call and when you come out, both of you, your ghost of want and your body with it, there will be a man to go with the voice that calls.»
«Oh, please don't tell me that if it isn't true!» Her voice trembled. Tears flashed again in her eyes. She half raised her arms again in defense.
«I wouldn't dream to hurt you. I only came to tell.» The town clock struck again in the deep morning. «It's late,» she said.
«Very late. Get along, now.» «Is that all you're going to say?» «You don't need to know any more.» The last echoes of the great clock faded.
«How strange,» she murmured. «The ghost of a question, the ghost of an answer.»
«What better ghosts can there be?»
«None that I ever heard of. We're twins.»
«Far nearer than you think.»
She took a step, looked down, and gasped with delight. «Look, oh, look. I can move!»
«Yes.»
«What was it you said, boys walk all night, miles and miles?»
«Yes.»
«I could go back in, but I can't sleep now. I must walk, too.»
«Do that,» he said gently.
«But where shall I go?»
«Why,» he said, and he suddenly knew. He knew where to send her and was suddenly angry with himself for knowing, angry with her for asking. A burst of jealousy welled in him. He wanted to race down the street to a certain house where a certain young man lived in another year and break the window, burn the roof. And yet, oh, yet, if he did that!?
«Yes?» she said, for he had kept her waiting.
Now, he thought, you must tell her. There's no escape.
For if you don't tell her, angry fool, you yourself will never be born.
A wild laugh burst from his mouth, a laugh that accepted the entire night and time and all his crazed thinking.
«So you want to know where to go?» he said at last.
«Oh, yes!»
He nodded his head. «Up to that corner, four blocks to the right, one block to the left.»
She repeated it quickly. «And the final number?!»
«Eleven Green Park.»
«Oh, thank you, thank you!» She ran a few steps, then stopped, bewildered. Her hands were helpless at her throat. Her mouth trembled. «Silly. I hate to leave.»
«Why?»
«Why, because . . . I'm afraid I'll never see you again!»
Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It went on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that on the late-summer wind.
He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound. Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?
He sat up and the weeping stopped.
At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.
The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there was no more sadness and only the footprints there.
He stepped back from the window, suddenly chilled, and went down to heat and drink a cup of chocolate.
He did not think of the weeping again until dusk the next day, and even then thought that it must be some woman from a house nearby, unhappy with life, perhaps locked out and in need of a place to let her sadness go.
Yet . . .?
As the twilight deepened, coming home he found himself hurrying from the bus, at a steady pace which astonished him. Why, why all this?
Idiot, he thought. A woman unseen weeps under your window, and here at sunset the next day, you almost run.
Yes, he thought, but her voice!
Was it beautiful, then?
No. Only familiar.
Where had he heard such a voice before, wordless in crying?
Who could he ask, living in an empty house from which his parents had vanished long ago?
He turned in at his front lawn and stood still, his eyes shadowed.
What had he expected? That whoever she was would be waiting here? Was he that lonely that a single voice long after midnight roused all his senses?
No. Simply put: he must know who the crying woman was.
And he was certain she would return tonight as he slept.
He went to bed at eleven, and awoke at three, panicked that he had missed a miracle. Lightning had destroyed a nearby town or an earthquake had shaken half the world to dust, and he had slept through it!
Fool! he thought, and slung back the covers and moved to the window, to see that indeed he had overslept.
For there on the lawn were the delicate footprints.
And he hadn't even heard the weeping!
He would have gone out to kneel in the grass, but at that moment a police car motored slowly by, looking at nothing and the night.
How could he run to prowl, to probe, to touch the grass if that car came by again? What doing? Picking clover blossoms? Weeding dandelions? What, what?
His bones cracked with indecision. He would go down, he would not.
Already the memory of that terrible weeping faded the more he tried to make it clear. If he missed her one more night, the memory itself might be gone.
Behind him, in his room, the alarm clock rang. Damn! he thought. What time did I set it for? He shut off the alarm and sat on his bed, rocking gently, waiting, eyes shut, listening.
The wind shifted. The tree just outside the window whispered and stirred.
He opened his eyes and leaned forward. From far off, coming near, and now down below, the quiet sound of a woman weeping.
She had come back to his lawn and was not forever lost. Be very quiet, he thought.
And the sounds she made came up on the wind through the blowing curtains into his room.
Careful now. Careful but quick.
He moved to the window and looked down.
In the middle of the lawn she stood and wept, her hair long and dark on her shoulders, her face bright with tears.
And there was something in the way her hands trembled at her sides, the way her hair moved quietly in the wind, that shook him so that he almost fell.
He knew her and yet did not. He had seen her before, but had never seen.
Turn your head, he thought.
Almost as if hearing this, the young woman sank to her knees to half kneel on the grass, letting the wind comb her hair, head down and weeping so steadily and bitterly that he wanted to cry out: Oh, no! It kills my heart!
And as if she had heard, quite suddenly her head lifted, her weeping grew less as she looked up at the moon, so that he saw her face.
And it was indeed a face seen somewhere once, but where?
A tear fell. She blinked.
It was like the blinking of a camera and a picture taken.
«God save me!» he whispered. «No!»
He whirled and stumbled toward the closet to seize down an avalanche of boxes and albums. In the dark he scrabbled, then pulled on the closet light, tossed aside six albums until finally, dragging another forth and riffling pages, he gave a cry, stopped, and held a photo close, then turned and moved blindly to the window.
There he stared down at the lawn and then at the photograph, very old, very yellowed with age.
Yes, yes, the same! The image struck his eyes and then his heart. His whole body shook, made an immense pulsation, as he leaned at the album, leaned on the window frame, and almost shouted:
You! How dare you come back! How dare you be young! How dare you be what? A girl untouched, wandering late on my lawn!? You were never that young! Never! Damn, oh, damn your warm blood, damn your wild soul!
But this he did not shout or say.
For something in his eyes, like a beacon, must have flashed.
The crying of the young woman on the lawn stopped.
She looked up.
At which instant the album fell from his fingers, through the burst-wide screen, and down like a dark bird fluttering to strike the earth.
The young man gave a muted cry, whirled, and ran. «No, no!» he cried aloud. «I didn't mean-come back!» He was down the stairs and out on the porch in a matter of seconds. The door slammed behind him like a gunshot. The explosion nailed him to the rail, half down to the lawn, where there was nothing to be seen but footprints. Either way, up the street lay empty sidewalks and shadows under trees. A radio played off in an upstairs window in a house behind trees. A car passed, murmuring, at a far intersection.
«Wait,» he whispered. «Come back. I shouldn't have said-«
He stopped. He had said nothing, but only thought it. But his outrage, his jealousy?
She had felt that. She had somehow heard. And now. ..?
She'll never come back, he thought. Oh God!
He sat on the porch steps for a while, quietly biting his knuckle.
At three in the morning, in bed, he thought he heard a sigh and soft footsteps in grass, and waited. The photo album lay closed on the floor. Even though it lay shut, he could see and know her face. And it was utterly impossible, utterly insane.
His last thought before sleep was: ghost.
The strangest ghost that ever walked.
The ghost of someone dead.
The ghost of someone who died very old.
But somehow come back not as her old self.
But a ghost that was somehow young.
Weren't ghosts always, when they returned, the same age as when they died?
No.
Not this one anyway.
«Why . ..?» he whispered.
And dream took over the whisper.
One night passed and then another and another, and there was nothing on the lawn but the light of a moon that changed its face from outright stare to half grimace.
He waited.
The first night a more than ordinarily casual cat crossed the yard at two a.m.
The second night a dog trotted by, wearing his tongue half out of his mouth like a loosely tied red cravat, smiling at trees.
The third night a spider spent from twelve-twenty-five until four a.m. building a baroque clockface on the air between lawn and trees, which a bird broke in passing at dawn.
He slept most of Sunday and awoke with a fever that was not an illness at dusk.
Late in the twilight of the fifth day, the color of the sky somehow promised her return, as did the way the wind leaned against the trees and the look of the moon when it finally rose to set the scene.
«All right,» he said, half aloud. «Now.» But at midnight, nothing.
«Come on,» he whispered.
One o'clock, nothing.
You must, he thought.
No, you will.
He slept for ten minutes and woke suddenly at two-ten, knowing that when he went to the window-
She would be there.
She was.
At first, he didn't see her, and groaned, and then, in the shadow of the great oak far out on the edge of the lawn, he saw something move, and one foot came out, and she took a step and stood very still.
He held his breath, quieted his heart, told himself to turn, walk, and take each step down with precision, numbering them, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, moving in darkness with no rush, six, five, four, and at last one. He opened the front screen door with only a whisper, and was on the porch without frightening what might be out beyond waiting for him.
Quietly, he moved down the porch steps to the edge of the lawn, like one who stands on the rim of a pond. Out in the center of that pond, the young woman stood, trapped like someone on thin ice that might at any moment break and drop her through.
She did not see him. And then …
She did a thing that was a signal. Tonight her hair was fixed in a knot at the back of her head. She lifted her white arms in a gesture and with one touch of her fingers, a touch of snow, loosened her hair.
It fell in a dark banner, to blow and repattern itself across her shoulders, which trembled with their shadows.
The wind stirred her hair in the night and moved it about her face and on her uplifted hands.
The shadows laid down by the moon under every tree leaned as if called by the motion.
The entire world shifted in its sleep.
The wind blew as the young woman waited.
But no footsteps sounded along the white sidewalks. No front doors opened far down the street. No windows were raised. No motion caused front porches to creak and shift.
He took another step out onto the small meadow of night.
«Who are you-?» she gasped, and stepped back. «No, no,» he said softly. «It's all right.» Another trembling had taken over her body. Where before it had been some hope, some anticipation, now it was fear. One hand stopped her hair from blowing; the other half shielded her face.
''I'll stand right here,'' he said. ''Believe me.'' She waited a long while, staring at him until her shoulders
relaxed and the lines around her mouth vanished. Her whole body sensed the truth of his words.
«I don't understand,» she said.
«I don't either.» «What are you doing here?»
«I don't know.» «What am I doing here?»
«You came to meet someone,» he said.
«Did I?»
The town clock struck three in the morning far away. She listened to it, her face shadowed by the sound.
«But it's so late. People don't walk around late on front lawns!»
«They do if they must,» he said.
«But why?»
«Maybe we can find out, if we talk.»
«About what, what?!»
«About why you're here. If we talk long enough, we may know. I know why I'm here, of course. I heard you crying.»
«Oh, I'm so ashamed.»
«Don't be. Why are people ashamed of tears? I cry often. Then I start laughing. But the crying must come first. Go ahead.»
«What a strange man you are.»
Her hand fell away from her hair. Her other hand moved away so her face was illuminated by a small and growing curiosity.
«I thought I was the only one who knew about crying,» she said.
«Everyone thinks that. It's one of those little secrets we keep from each other. Show me a serious man and I'll show you a man who has never wept. Show me a madman and I'll show you a man who dried his tears a long time ago. Go ahead.»
«I think I'm done,» she said.
«Any time, start over.»
She burst out a tiny laugh. «Oh, you are strange. Who are you?»
«We'll come to that.»
She peered across the lawn at his hands, his face, his mouth, and then at his eyes.
«Oh, I know you. But from where?!»
«That would spoil it. You wouldn't believe, anyway.»
«I would!»
Now it was his turn to laugh quietly. «You're very young.»
«No, nineteen! Ancient!»
«Girls, by the time they go from twelve to nineteen, are full of years, yes. I don't know; but it must be so. Now, please, why are you out here in the middle of the night?»
«I-« She shut her eyes to think in on it. «I'm waiting.»
«Yes?»
«And I'm sad.»
«It's the waiting that makes you sad, yes?»
«I think, no, yes, no.»
«And you don't quite know what you're waiting for?»
«Oh, I wish I could be sure. All of me's waiting. I don't know, all of me. I don't understand. I'm impossible!»
«No, you're everyone that ever grew up too fast and wanted too much. I think girls, women, like you have slipped out at night since time began. If it wasn't here in Green Town, it was in Cairo or Alexandria or Rome or Paris in summer, anywhere there was a private place and late hours and no one to see, so they just rose up and out, as if someone had called their name-«
«I was called, yes! That's it! Someone did call my name! It's true. How did you know? Was it you!»
«No. But someone we both know. You'll know his name when you go back to bed tonight, wherever that is.»
«Why, in that house, behind you,» she said. «That's my house. I was born in it.»
«Well»-he laughed-«so was I.»
«You? How can that be? Are you sure?»
«Yes. Anyway, you heard someone calling. You had to come out-«
«I did. Many nights now. But, always, no one's here. They must be there, or why would I hear them?»
«One day there'll be someone to fit the voice.»
«Oh, don't joke with me!»
«I'm not. Believe. There will be. That's what all those other women heard in other years and places, middle of summer, dead of winter, go out and risk cold, stand warm in snow banks, and listen and look for strange footprints on the midnight snow, and only an old dog trotting by, all smiles. Damn, damn.»
«Oh, yes, damn, damn.» And her smile showed for a moment, even as the moon came out of the clouds and went away. «Isn't it silly?»
«No. Men do the same. They take long walks when they're sixteen, seventeen. They don't stand on lawns, waiting, no. But, my God, how they walk! Miles and miles from midnight until dawn and come home exhausted and explode and die in bed.»
«What a shame that those who stand and wait and those who walk all night can't-«
«Meet?»
«Yes; don't you think it's a shame?»
«They do, finally.»
«Oh, no, I shall never meet anyone. I'm old and ugly and terrible and I don't know how many nights I've heard that voice making me come here and there's nothing and I just want to die.»
«Oh, lovely young girl,» he said gently. «Don't die. The cavalry is on its way. You will be saved.»
There was such certainty in his voice that it made her glance up again, for she had been looking at her hands and her own soul in her hands.
«You know, don't you?» she asked.
«Yes.»
«You truly know? You tell the truth?»
«Swear to God, swear by all that's living.»
«Tell me more!»
«There's little more to tell.»
«Tell me!»
«Everything will be all right with you. Some night soon, or some day, someone will call and they'll really be there when you come to find. The game will be over.»
«Hide-and-seek, you mean? But it's gone on too long!»
«It's almost over, Marie.»
«You know my name!»
He stopped, confused. He had not meant to speak it.
«How did you know, who are you?» she demanded.
«When you get back to sleep tonight, you'll know. If we say too much, you'll disappear, or I'll disappear. I'm not quite sure which of us is real or which is a ghost.»
«Not me! Oh, surely not me. I can feel myself. I'm here. Why, look!» And she showed him the remainder of her tears brushed from her eyelids and held on her palms.
«Oh, that's real, all right. Well, then, dear young woman, I must be the visitor. I come to tell you it will all go right. Do you believe in special ghosts?»
«Are you special?»
«One of us is. Or maybe both. The ghost of young love or the ghost of the unborn.»
«Is that what I am, you are?»
«Paradoxes aren't easy to explain.»
«Then, depending on how you look at it, you're impossible, and so am I.»
«If it makes it easier, just think I'm not really here. Do you believe in ghosts?»
«I think I do.»
«It comes to me to imagine, then, that there are special ghosts in the world. Not ghosts of dead people. But ghosts of want and need, or I guess you might say desire.»
«I don't understand.»
«Well, have you ever lain in bed late afternoons, late nights and dreamed something so much, awake, you felt your soul jump out of your body as if something had yanked a long, pure white sheet straight out the window? You want something so much, your soul leaps out and follows, my God, fast?»
«Why . . . yes. Yes!»
«Boys do that, men do that. When I was twelve I read Burroughs' Mars novels. John Carter used to stand under the stars, hold up his arms to Mars, and ask to be taken.
And Mars grabbed his soul, yanked him like an aching tooth across space, and landed him in dead Martian seas. That's boys, that's men.»
«And girls, women?»
«They dream, yes. And their ghosts come out of their bodies. Living ghosts. Living wants. Living needs.»
«And go to stand on lawns in the middle of winter nights?»
«That's about it.»
«Am I a ghost, then?»
«Yes, the ghost of wanting so much it kills but doesn't kill you, shakes and almost breaks you.»
«And you?»
«I must be the answer-ghost.»
«The answer-ghost. What a funny name!»
«Yes. But you've asked and I know the answer.»
«Tell me!»
«All right, the answer is this, young girl, young woman. The time of waiting is almost over. Your time of despair will soon be through. Very soon, now, a voice will call and when you come out, both of you, your ghost of want and your body with it, there will be a man to go with the voice that calls.»
«Oh, please don't tell me that if it isn't true!» Her voice trembled. Tears flashed again in her eyes. She half raised her arms again in defense.
«I wouldn't dream to hurt you. I only came to tell.» The town clock struck again in the deep morning. «It's late,» she said.
«Very late. Get along, now.» «Is that all you're going to say?» «You don't need to know any more.» The last echoes of the great clock faded.
«How strange,» she murmured. «The ghost of a question, the ghost of an answer.»
«What better ghosts can there be?»
«None that I ever heard of. We're twins.»
«Far nearer than you think.»
She took a step, looked down, and gasped with delight. «Look, oh, look. I can move!»
«Yes.»
«What was it you said, boys walk all night, miles and miles?»
«Yes.»
«I could go back in, but I can't sleep now. I must walk, too.»
«Do that,» he said gently.
«But where shall I go?»
«Why,» he said, and he suddenly knew. He knew where to send her and was suddenly angry with himself for knowing, angry with her for asking. A burst of jealousy welled in him. He wanted to race down the street to a certain house where a certain young man lived in another year and break the window, burn the roof. And yet, oh, yet, if he did that!?
«Yes?» she said, for he had kept her waiting.
Now, he thought, you must tell her. There's no escape.
For if you don't tell her, angry fool, you yourself will never be born.
A wild laugh burst from his mouth, a laugh that accepted the entire night and time and all his crazed thinking.
«So you want to know where to go?» he said at last.
«Oh, yes!»
He nodded his head. «Up to that corner, four blocks to the right, one block to the left.»
She repeated it quickly. «And the final number?!»
«Eleven Green Park.»
«Oh, thank you, thank you!» She ran a few steps, then stopped, bewildered. Her hands were helpless at her throat. Her mouth trembled. «Silly. I hate to leave.»
«Why?»
«Why, because . . . I'm afraid I'll never see you again!»