Just After Sunset (30 page)

But there are places where the cloth gets ragged and reality is thin. The face beneath peeps through…but not the face of a corpse. It would almost be better if it was. Ackerman’s Field is one of those places, and no damn wonder whoever owns it put up a KEEP OUT sign.

The day was fading. The sun was a ball of red gas, flattened at the top and bottom, sitting above the western horizon. The river was a long, bloody snake in its reflected glow, eight or ten miles distant, but the sound of it carrying to me on the still evening air. Blue-gray woods rose behind it in a series of ridges to the far horizon. I couldn’t see a single house or road. Not a bird sang. It was as if I’d been tumbled back four hundred years in time. Or four million. The first white streamers of groundmist were rising out of the hay—which was high. Nobody had been in there to cut it, although that was a big field, and good graze. The mist came out of the darkening green like breath. As if the earth itself was alive.

I think I staggered a little. It wasn’t the beauty, although it was beautiful; it was how everything that lay before me seemed
thin,
almost to the point of hallucination. And then I saw those damned rocks rising out of the uncut hay.

There were seven, or so I thought—the tallest two about five feet high, the shortest only three or so, the rest in between. I remember walking down to the closest of them, but it’s like remembering a dream after it starts to decompose in the morning light—you know how they do that? Of course you do, dreams must be a big part of your workday. Only this was no dream. I could hear the hay whickering against my pants, could feel the khaki getting damp from the mist and starting to stick to my skin below the knees. Every now and then a bush—clumps of sumac were growing here and there—would pull my lens-bag back and then drop it again so it would thump harder than usual against my thigh.

I got to the nearest of the rocks and stopped. It was one of the five-footers. At first I thought there were faces carved in it—not human faces, either; the faces of beasts and monsters—but then I shifted my position a little and saw it was just a trick of the evening light, which thickens shadows and makes them look like…well, like anything. In fact, after I stood in my new position for awhile, I saw new faces. Some of these looked human, but they were just as horrible.
More
horrible, really, because human is always more horrible, don’t you think? Because we
know
human, we
understand
human. Or think we do. And these looked like they were either screaming or laughing. Maybe both at the same time.

I thought it was the quiet screwing with my imagination, and the isolation, and the
bigness
of it—how much of the world I could see laid out in front of me. And how time seemed to be holding its breath. As if everything would stay the way it was forever, with sunset not more than forty minutes away and the sun sitting red over the horizon and that faded clarity in the air. I thought it was those things that were making me see faces where there was nothing but coincidence. I think differently now, but now it’s too late.

I snapped some pictures. Five, I think. A bad number, although I didn’t know that yet. Then I stood back, wanting to get all seven of them in one picture, and when I framed the shot, I saw that there were really eight, standing in a kind of rough ring. You could tell—when you really looked, you could—that they were part of some underlying geological formation that had either poked out of the ground eons ago, or had maybe been exposed more recently by flooding (the field had a fairly steep downward slope, so I thought that was very possible), but they also looked
planned
, like stones in a Druid’s circle. There was no carving in them, though. Except for what the elements had done. I know, because I went back in daylight and made sure of it. Chips and folds in the stone. No more than that.

I took another four shots—which makes a total of nine, another bad number, although slightly better than five—and when I lowered the camera and looked again with my naked eye, I saw the faces, leering and grinning and grunting. Some human, some bestial. And I counted seven stones.

But when I looked into the viewfinder again, there were eight.

I started to feel dizzy and scared. I wanted to be out of there before full dark came—away from that field and back on Route 117, with loud rock and roll on the radio. But I couldn’t just leave. Something deep inside me—as deep as the instinct that keeps us drawing in breaths and letting them out—insisted on that. I felt that if I left, something terrible would happen, and perhaps not just to me. That sense of
thinness
swept over me again, as if the world was fragile at this particular place, and one person would be enough to cause an unimaginable cataclysm. If he weren’t very, very careful.

That’s when my OCD shit started. I went from stone to stone, touching each one, counting each one, and marking each in its place. I wanted to be gone—desperately wanted to be gone—but I did it and I didn’t skimp the job. Because I
had
to. I knew that the way I know I have to keep breathing if I want to stay alive. By the time I got back to where I’d started, I was trembling and wet with sweat as well as mist and dew. Because touching those stones…it wasn’t nice. It caused…ideas. And raised images. Ugly ones. One was of chopping up my ex-wife with an axe and laughing while she screamed and raised her bloody hands to ward off the blows.

But there were eight. Eight stones in Ackerman’s Field. A good number. A
safe
number. I knew that. And it no longer mattered if I looked at them through the camera’s viewfinder or with my naked eyes; after touching them, they were
fixed
. It was getting darker, the sun was halfway over the horizon (I must have spent twenty minutes or more going around that rough circle, which was maybe forty yards across), but I could see well enough—the air was weirdly clear. I still felt afraid—there was something wrong there, everything screamed it, the very silence of the birds screamed it—but I felt relieved, too. The wrong had been put at least partly right by touching the stones…and
looking
at them again. Getting their places in the field set into my mind. That was as important as the touching.

[
A pause to think.
]

No,
more
important. Because it’s how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond the world at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and drowning us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep. So I turned to go, and I was most of the way back to my car—I might even have been touching the doorhandle—when something turned me around again. And that was when I
saw
.

[
He is silent for a long time. I notice he is trembling. He has broken out in a sweat. It gleams on his forehead like dew.
]

There was something in the
middle
of the stones. In the middle of the circle they made, either by chance or design. It was black, like the sky in the east, and green like the hay. It was turning very slowly, but it never took its eyes off me. It
did
have eyes. Sick pink ones. I knew—my
rational
mind knew—that it was just light in the sky I was seeing, but at the same time I knew it was something more. That something was
using
that light. Something was using the sunset to see with, and what it was seeing was
me
.

[
He’s crying again. I don’t offer him the Kleenex, because I don’t want to break the spell. Although I’m not sure I could have offered them in any case, because he’s cast a spell over me, too. What he’s articulating is a delusion, and part of him knows it—“shadows that looked like faces,” etc.—but it’s very strong, and strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.
]

I must have kept backing up. I don’t remember doing it; I just remember thinking that I was looking at the head of some grotesque monster from the outer darkness. And thinking that where there was one, there would be more. Eight stones would keep them captive—barely—but if there were only seven, they’d come flooding through from the darkness on the other side of reality and overwhelm the world. For all I knew, I was looking at the least and smallest of them. For all I knew, that flattened snakehead with the pink eyes and what looked like great long quills growing out of its snout was only a
baby
.

It saw me looking.

The fucking thing
grinned
at me, and its teeth were heads. Living human heads.

Then I stepped on a dead branch. It snapped with a sound like a firecracker, and the paralysis broke. I don’t think it’s impossible that that thing floating inside the circle of stones was hypnotizing me, the way a snake is supposed to be able to do with a bird.

I turned and ran. My lens-bag kept smacking my leg, and each smack seemed to be saying
Wake up! Wake up! Get out! Get out!
I pulled open the door of my 4Runner, and I heard the little bell dinging, the one that means you left your key in the ignition. I thought of some old movie where William Powell and Myrna Loy are at the desk of a fancy hotel and Powell rings the bell for service. Funny what goes through your mind at moments like that, isn’t it? There’s a gate in our heads, too—that’s what I think. One that keeps the insanity in all of us from flooding our intellects. And at critical moments, it swings open and all kinds of weird shit comes flooding through.

I started the engine. I turned on the radio, turned it up loud, and rock music came roaring out of the speakers. It was The Who, I remember that. And I remember popping on the headlights. When I did, those stones seemed to
jump toward me
. I almost screamed. But there were eight, I counted them, and eight is safe.

[
There’s another long pause here. Almost a full minute.
]

The next thing I remember, I was back on Route 117. I don’t know how I got there, if I turned around or backed out. I don’t know how long it took me, but The Who song was over and I was listening to The Doors. God help me, it was “Break On Through to the Other Side.” I turned the radio off.

I don’t think I can tell you any more, Doc, not today. I’m exhausted.

[
And he looks it.
]

[Next Session]

I thought the effect the place had had on me would dissipate on the drive home—just a bad moment out in the woods, right?—and surely by the time I was in my own living room, with the lights and TV on, I’d be okay again. But I wasn’t. If anything, that feeling of dislocation—of having touched some other universe that was inimical to ours—seemed to be stronger. The conviction remained that I’d seen a face—worse, the suggestion of some huge reptilian body—in that circle of stones. I felt…
infected
. Infected by the thoughts in my own head. I felt
dangerous
, too—as if I could summon that thing just by thinking about it too much. And it wouldn’t be alone. That whole other cosmos would come spilling through, like vomit through the bottom of a wet paper bag.

I went around and locked all the doors. Then I was sure that I’d forgotten a couple, so I went around and checked them all again. This time I counted: front door, back door, pantry door, bulkhead door, garage overhead door, back garage door. That was six, and it came to me that six was a good number. Like eight is a good number. They’re friendly numbers. Warm. Not cold, like five or…you know, seven. I relaxed a little, but I still went around one last time. Still six. “Six is a fix,” I remember saying. After that I thought I’d be able to sleep, but I couldn’t. Not even with an Ambien. I kept seeing the setting sun on the Androscoggin, turning it into a red snake. The mist coming out of the hay like tongues. And the thing in the stones. That most of all.

I got up and counted all the books in my bedroom bookcase. There were ninety-three. That’s a bad number, and not just because it’s odd. Divide ninety-three by three and you come out with thirty-one: thirteen backwards. So I got a book from the little bookcase in the hall. But ninety-four is only a little better, because nine and four add up to thirteen. There are thirteens everywhere in this world of ours, Doc. You don’t know. Anyway, I added six more books to the bedroom case. I had to cram, but I got them in. A hundred is okay. Fine, in fact.

I was heading back to bed, then started wondering about the hall bookcase. If I’d, you know, robbed Peter to pay Paul. So I counted those, and that was all right: fifty-six. The numbers add to eleven, which is odd but not the
worst
odd, and fifty-six divides to twenty-eight—a good number. After that I could sleep. I think I had bad dreams, but I don’t remember them.

Days went by, and my mind kept going back to Ackerman’s Field. It was like a shadow had fallen over my life. I was counting lots of things by then, and touching things—to make sure I understood their places in the world, the real world,
my
world—and I’d started to place things, too. Always even numbers of things, and usually in a circle or on a diagonal line. Because circles and diagonals keep things out.

Usually, that is. And never permanently. One small accident and fourteen becomes thirteen, or eight becomes seven.

In early September, my younger daughter visited and commented on how tired I looked. She wanted to know if I was overworking. She also noticed that all the living-room knickknacks—stuff her mom hadn’t taken after the divorce—had been placed in what she called “crop circles.” She said, “You’re getting a little wiggy in your old age, aren’t you, Dad?” And that was when I decided I had to go back to Ackerman’s Field, this time in full daylight. I thought if I saw it in daylight, saw just a few meaningless rocks standing around in an uncut hayfield, I’d realize how foolish the whole thing was, and my obsessions would blow away like a dandelion puff in a strong breeze. I wanted that. Because counting, touching, and placing—those things are a lot of work. A lot of responsibility.

On my way, I stopped at the place where I got my pictures developed and saw the ones I’d taken that evening in Ackerman’s Field hadn’t come out. They were just gray squares, as if they’d been fogged by some strong radiation. That gave me pause, but it didn’t stop me. I borrowed a digital camera from one of the guys at the photo shop—that’s the one I fried—and drove out to Motton again, and fast. You want to hear something stupid? I felt like a man with a bad case of poison ivy going to the drugstore for a bottle of Calamine Lotion. Because that was what it was like—an itch. Counting and touching and placing could scratch it, but scratching affords only temporary relief at best. It’s more likely to spread whatever’s causing the itch. What I wanted was a cure. Going back to Ackerman’s Field wasn’t it, but I didn’t know that, did I? Like the man said, we learn by doing. And we learn even more by trying and failing.