Aaaiiieee (6 page)

“You live here in old Ed Phillips’s place?” I asked. Supposed to sound casual. My voice broke.

I
am
Ed Phillips, I thought he would say then. “Nope. Not if you paid me.”

“Don’t I know you? You look familiar,” I lied. The only face that reminded me of this man was the one I had on.

“Lived in town until 1960,” the man replied. “Then moved on to Shrewsbury. I used to be chief of police here…”

“
McGee?
Richard McGee?”

“That’s me. You know me?”

“Oh…no…not personally. I know of you.”

“You a townie?”

“Yes.”

“Your family must’ve known me. I’m seventy-seven now.” McGee looked at the Yellow House again and wagged his head, dumbfounded, as if he had aged from the thirty-seven of 1950 to the seventy-seven of 1990 all at once, just before I walked up to him. “Seventy-seven,” he repeated, his breath coming out in ghostly steam.

I was much less nervous now, much more intrigued. “You know a lot about this place. Ed Phillips’s place.”

“Nobody knows a lot about Ed Phillips’s place, son. Nobody
should,
I’d say.” His breath steam reached me now. I smelled alcohol in it.

“I’m pretty interested in the place, myself. You must be. You were staring at it a minute ago.”

“I come here about every Halloween night, boy. Just like everybody else does. Like the place ain’t here except on Halloween night. It is but it ain’t.”

“Very true. But why do you come…to look?”

“I look.” The old man was lost in his staring again. He appeared troubled. Uncertain. Afraid. “I best be moving on,” he mumbled to himself. “It’s cold…”

“A lot of funny stories.”

“What’s so funny? You wouldn’t think it was funny if you seen those cages in the cellar.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what about them.”

“You think he was up to no good?”

“Absolutely, boy. We don’t want to know what he was up to.”

“Yes we do. We both do…that’s why we’re here. But I thought you were the one who said that Phillips couldn’t have had anything to do with the disappearance of those two old guys. That’s what I always heard.”

“You heard right.” McGee was able to look at me again, away from the house. “I didn’t think it was him, at first.”

“But you did later?” No answer. “If you suspected him later then why didn’t you take him in for questioning?”

“Because by the time I believed it he was gone.”

“So is that why he ran off? He found out you were onto him?”

“He didn’t run off.” McGee started at a child’s scream of laughter down the street. He shuddered and tucked his head into his shoulders. “I been drinking and I’m old and tired. I gotta go home now and forget the past until next year if I’m still here. And I suppose I’ll come to look then, too. Almost every year, even when I lived in Shrewsbury…”

“You never told anyone that you changed your mind about his innocence?”

McGee squinted at me. “Who are you? Do I know you?”

“No. I was a little boy when you left town.”

“You want to know why I changed my mind? Do you? Well, you wouldn’t believe me. Drunken babblings, you’d say. And that’s just what they’d have said back then, if I told them what I saw.
You were drunk, chief,
they’d have said.
You were drunk on the job.
I had a problem with it, boy…I couldn’t tell them or they’d have said I was crazy. A crazy drunk. And maybe I was crazy. Maybe I didn’t even see  him…”

“See who?”

“Phillips. Ed Phillips. I saw him that night.”

“What night?”

“I never told them.”

“What night?”

“
You heard that story. About the baby? That baby somebody left on Doc Sullivan’s doorstep that night in October of ‘57?”

“
Heard
it? That’s…”

“The baby,” he interrupted, “was wrapped in men’s pajamas, left on the step with no note, bawling its head off. Little boy. Doc Sullivan thought he heard someone pounding on the door. When he came down, nobody was there but the baby—the person who left it musta ran off, he figured. But he coulda sworn he heard someone yelling, ‘Help me, help me’ in a strangled kind of voice when he heard that pounding. Just a trick to get him to come down and find the baby, he figured. So they put it in the papers but nobody ever identified the baby, and this couple came and adopted it, couple here in town. So that was the end of that…so they all think.”

“But…”

“Let me finish. I can tell you now—hell, what can they do, take away my badge? What do I care, I’m seventy-seven…”

“You saw Ed Phillips that night?”

“I was sittin’ in my cruiser down the reservoir with a bottle. Heat on. Relaxing. I had too much, I admit it…I had a problem then…”

“But you saw him? After he’d supposedly disappeared already?”

“He came out of the woods, right in front of me. Damn near had a coronary. He looked at me. We just stared at each other a minute. I should’ve gotten out, I should’ve…I didn’t. I sat there. I couldn’t get out. Then he just stumbled off in the dark and I lost sight of him. I didn’t go after him. I didn’t call it in.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid, boy. I was plain paralyzed afraid. It was his face. His hair all sticking out, his eyes…sticking out. Like a crazy man. And he was twitching all over, and jerking, like he was having a fit the whole time. Scariest damn thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t really explain it now thirty-three years later. And I never told a soul.”

“And that same night the baby was left on the doctor’s doorstep?”

“The same night. The next day I found out about that. I saw the baby, and the pajamas it was wrapped in. And I almost had me another coronary but I still kept my trap shut.”

“What was the matter?”

“When I saw Ed come out of the woods he was wearing those same pajamas. Red and white stripes. Same damn pajamas so help me Jesus.”

 “Oh my God.”

“Yep.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God…”

*     *     *

I can’t tell you now the feeling that spread through me.

I stammered a good-night to the old man. He walked down the street one way, I went back the way I’d come, both of us away from the Yellow House.

My mind was swimming. It was almost a panic. I wanted to run home to my parents but I knew I had to keep calm. That’s when I decided to begin an orderly investigation, a sane and rational examination of facts. I decided to write all this down. Calm. Rational…

I haven’t told Pammy any of this yet. I haven’t confronted my foster parents either, though I doubt they know much anyway.

It was they who had adopted me after Dr. Sullivan found me on his doorstep that October night in 1957. The Mystery Baby, the papers called me then…another town celebrity, another funny story.

Edwin Phillips kidnapped me, I’ve told myself. Or fathered me. Then he left me on Dr. Sullivan’s step, first wrapping me in the pajamas he wore. And then he’d fled. Fled…naked? Fled where?

He kidnapped me, or fathered me, I’ve got to stay calm. He must be my father. That’s where I got my red hair. It isn’t wild and uncombed; it’s short and neat. It isn’t the same…

But I do have this bad habit. I’m lazy, that’s all.

I don’t like to shave.

Fallen

“Angel of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater, you gull that grows out of my back in the dreams I prefer.”

—Anne Sexton

He made his escape under the cover of rain, I realized later. And before he invaded my apartment, he first practiced his escape by invading my dreams.

The dreams were of soaring; above great forests, pastures, ancient villages and modem cities…above landscapes totally alien, as lovely as strange-colored seas or as hideous as bloody canyons torn in the flesh of a living planet. I saw through his eyes, experienced the freedom and the ecstasy of flight.

But in one recurring dream, while he rested between flights in some secret place, the men in black robes appeared, and cursed him, made signs to bind him, converged upon him with daggers and chains and incantations. I would start awake, as if I were the one stabbed and bound, their evil faces still floating before my eyes in a dispersing vaporous residue.

I attributed these dreams of flight and freedom to some deep subconscious yearning. As a young girl I had been struck by a car while riding my bike, my legs so crushed I was lucky to regain the ability to walk. On cold damp days I had to use a cane, even at my still youthful age, and the scars on my legs were so pronounced that I never wore shorts or a bathing suit. In fact, I was even ashamed to let a lover see them, and preferred the safety of darkness for lovemaking. Not that this was a frequent concern. My scars prevented me from even letting lovers approach me. They never had a chance to be repulsed; I was repulsed for them.

On that night of rain, I heard a crash from the parlor of the third floor flat I masochistically rented, and I sat up in bed to listen. I heard my cat Virgil hiss and spit, then scamper into another room. Afraid now, I slid stealthily from bed, pulled on sweat pants and a T-shirt and advanced shakily toward the murky parlor, picking up a flashlight from atop my bureau as I went—as much for a weapon as for light—though I didn’t yet thumb it on.

Only the darkest light filtered into the parlor, but still I hesitated to turn on the flashlight, let alone a lamp. Was anyone in here? If so, was I as invisible to them as they were to me? I strained my hearing, but only ended up listening to the rain, or was that the surf of my own blood in my ears? At last, unable to stand the thought of being studied from the shadows, I pointed the light at the door to my apartment and switched it on.

He crouched there, close to the floor, his curly dark hair plastered to his head, his eyes wide and frantic. Naked—and his flesh glaringly pale in the harsh light, which was unkind to the wounds in him, the hooks in his bruised flesh.

I screamed, and before I could turn to run or even move the light I saw him fling himself at me. In so doing, wings spread wide from his shoulders, and they were broad and black and it was as though a great wave were falling upon me.

When I awoke, I was back in bed, and the being knelt beside me, gripping my hand in both of his. I couldn’t see him well, and I cried out again, jerked my hand free, fumbled for the bedside lamp. When it came on he shielded his eyes. His wings lifted a bit but did not unfold again.

“Oh my God,” I remember saying, sitting up, hugging myself, “who are you? Who are you?”

He looked up at me, his eyes pained and beseeching. I had time now to better take in the severity and profusion of his wounds. Though his body was as beautiful as that of a Greek sculpture, it was cruelly pierced with barbs and hooks, some still attached to chains which he had wound around his arms or waist. His white skin showed scars that were whiter still, and raised symbolic designs that had been branded onto him. His wings were particularly mutilated, their joints and where they joined his shoulders bearing awful scars, and pinned with black metal clasps to hinder or prevent movement, these also hung with weights. The sleek black feathers of his wings held an oil-slick’s iridescence, and still dripped rain drops to the hardwood floor.

Cautiously I crept out of bed, and only his eyes followed me. Moving around him, I was able to see his wings more clearly, to prove to myself that indeed they grew out of his shoulders, that the scars were not an indication of some bizarre surgery.

“My God,” I said again, but softly this time; and again I said, but in awe, “who are you? Who are you?”

I knew only one thing about him. That he had visited me in my dreams so as to prepare me for this night.

I went to the parlor, put on one light. He had broken the chain on the door. I locked it with the bolt instead. Turning, I saw that he had timidly followed me into the room, and was reaching out to pet Virgil, who gave a warning growl and flicked his tail but reluctantly allowed his head to be stroked. The being looked to me, and smiled.

The bells of the old monastery at the end of my block tolled midnight as they did every night. I was not religious, had no idea if this were a common practice for such a place or what significance it held. But the sound terrified the creature. Before I could protest he came to me, and held my right hand in both of his hands. His grip was strong, painful, but it wasn’t meant to restrain me, I knew. It was an expression of fear.

I did not go to my classes the next day. How could I leave him here alone? In the morning my landlady Mrs. Hanson, who lived on the first floor of the old tenement house, phoned to ask if I had had another of my awful nightmares last night. I told her I had, but that everything was all right now.

I made coffee, and the seraph sat at the kitchen table watching me, smiling whenever I met his eyes like a stray dog appealing for some kindness. His hair and wings had dried at last. I considered offering him some sweat-pants to wear to cover his nudity, but the thought of so exotic a being in so prosaic a garment seemed beneath his dignity.

His wounds troubled me more than his nakedness, and at last I could stand it no longer. I set down my coffee, dug under the kitchen sink for the tool box my father had assembled for me, though only he ever used them when he came to make a repair for me or for Mrs. Hanson. I found a small set of bolt cutters in there Dad had used to trim the branches that had been scratching at my bedroom window at night (though now I wondered if it had been the seraph, reaching for me in dreams). Gingerly, I approached him at the table.

Rather than assume a defensive attitude, he bowed his head, submissive, inviting me to shear away his painful tethers.

I started with a thin chain holding a weight to the clasp in one wing. I grunted as I forced the handles together, and the weight thumped into a nest of bath towels I had set underneath to dull its fall. Encouraged, I moved on to the other weights.

Now I examined the barbs in him more closely and realized that they were wed with his flesh so intimately that I didn’t dare try to snip them, so the best I could do was cut the chains or remnants of chains depending from them. In order to do this, I couldn’t help but touch him, and the first time my hand brushed his skin we both flinched, but he did not protest, and I went on to finish my work.