Phantom (26 page)

"Seems to me the house sat empty for a
while," Cloudy said. "I can't swear, but I got a vague recollection
it was some time after the father was gone before somebody else
moved in."

"Yeah," Peeler agreed. "I think you're right
about that, but the main thing about the Farleys is that it was
just one of them things that happens now and again. Tragedy
strikes, a family drifts away, finally the last one pulls up stakes
and that's the last you see. They settle down elsewhere and start
over again, that's the way it is, but because folks don't hear
about that they only remember the unhappy part."

It didn't escape Ned that
Peeler and Cloudy had seemed wary of this subject at first, but
then had teamed up to sketch it out as a very ordinary,
down-to-earth matter. They were making a great effort to convince
Ned that the Farley story was in no way remarkable or unusual, that
it was "just one of those things." But they were wasting their time
with that; Ned knew he was on to something. In some way, the
Farleys
had
to be a
part of what he had been experiencing. Tragic deaths. A son and his
mother. Ned's parents, and Peeler and Cloudy too, probably. would
explain it away as a coincidence of local history and a young boy's
imagination. But Ned couldn't. He had been through too much. He
wondered about the Farleys all the way back home.

"What'd you go and tell him all that for?"
Cloudy asked, after Ned had left.

"I dunno," Peeler admitted. "I wasn't gonna
say nothin' at all, and then it just kinda eased out." He rubbed
the side of his jaw, and then looked up. "You did a pretty good job
of beatin' your chops too."

"Once you got goin' I had to help out."

"Yeah. sure."

"Keep it from gettin' outta hand."

"Outta hand—how?"

"He's just a boy, Peeler. That sort of story
could get him all scared now, afraid to sleep in his own bed. That
ain't right, it just ain't right."

"He was scared already. Didn't you see
that?"

"I know, I know." Cloudy looked miserable.
"But all we go and do is make it worse for him. Probably got him
scared stiff now."

"Maybe," Peeler said. "Maybe that's a good
thing, too."

Cloudy said sternly, "Ain't nothin' never
happened to nobody in that house all these years, and that's the
gospel truth and you know it."

"Ain't never been a boy child livin' there
since the Farleys," Peeler said. "Till now."

* * *

23. On The Street
Where You Live

"He was scared," Linda stated flatly.
"Really scared. It took the longest time before he was asleep
enough so that I could leave the room. He wouldn't let go."

She scraped the plates clean of chicken
bones and unfinished food. Michael sat at the table, sipping the
last of the white wine and listening patiently. They had eaten
dinner a little while ago. The skies had cleared late in the
afternoon and Ned was out in the backyard stalking night crawlers,
figuring that the day's rain would bring them out early. He was
eager to go fishing with Peeler the next day and night crawlers
were easier to put on a hook than red wrigglers. The kitchen radio
played an instrumental medley of show tunes.

"
I
was scared too," Linda went on. "I
didn't know what to do or what to say to him. He was quite beside
himself, almost hysterical. And then he just burst into
tears."

"It's happened before," Michael said
quietly.

"Before, yes, but—"

"He's been like that when he's had
nightmares."

"But he wasn't sleeping, Michael. I told you
that. He was wide awake, sitting at the window with his telescope
when I went in. Then we sat and talked for a few minutes and-it all
came out. It was like something he'd been holding back, keeping
inside of himself, and it finally broke loose."

Michael was nodding his head rapidly, as if
prompting Linda to finish. "Okay, I know," he said. "It wasn't a
nightmare. All I said was that it was like a nightmare. Like the
last time."

Linda emptied the garbage into a large green
plastic bag under the sink and then she put the platter into the
dishwasher.

"He's convinced someone is going to take him
away from us. He is absolutely terrified of it."

"Yes, and we've been through that before,
too. When he had the sunstroke he said something like that."

"It's not just an idle thought he dreamed,
Michael."

"What is it, then?"

"It means something."

"Ha!" Michael exclaimed, unable to restrain
himself. ''I'm not laughing, honey," he added quickly, "but do you
really believe that stuff?"

Linda's face clouded with uncertainty. "A
week, two weeks ago, I would have said no. But now ... I'm not so
sure. I don't know what to think. I feel so stupid and
helpless."

Michael watched his wife nearly drop the
carton of milk as she went to put it in the refrigerator. Her
expression was a worried, distracted frown and her movements,
wiping the tabletop, were jerky and nervous. He thought she looked
like an actress laboring to achieve a certain effect but not
completely succeeding. She was being too dramatic about it, letting
it get to her this way. It was impossible for Michael to accept all
that his wife was telling him. The real problem was how to calm her
down and make her see sense.

"That's a mistake," he said. "You can't keep
blaming yourself—and for what? If something is bothering Ned, we'll
deal with it one way or another. But I don't want it to get out of
hand with you."

"Out of hand?" Linda's voice wavered upward.
"Michael, he's my son. What do you want me to do—act as if nothing
has happened?"

"No," he answered loudly. Then he softened
his tone. "It's· just that I have to worry about you, too, as well
as Ned, and the last thing I want to see happen is for you to work
yourself into such a state of anxiety and nerves that you ... well,
bring on another bad asthma attack. You know that tension and
stress are big contributing factors."

"I used to be afraid of that," Linda said.
"But now I'm afraid for Ned. He's the most important thing right
now."

Was it just a good try at bravado, or was
she serious? Michael couldn't tell, but it was hard to believe that
his wife could pull off such an about-face as far as asthma was
concerned. For the. last five years she had feared nothing in the
world more than a repeat of that terribly severe attack.

"It doesn't matter how you feel about it,"
Michael argued reasonably. "The fact is, you're still susceptible
to it. You're in the high-risk bracket, and to me it looks like
you're pushing yourself closer and closer to the edge. Now tell me
something: How are you going to help Ned if you get to the point
where your own health breaks down and you wind up in bed for a few
weeks, or maybe even the hospital? How will that help Ned, or any
of us?"

"E-Z listening from E-Z
Radio," a syrupy voice announced. "Coming up next, the One Thousand
and One Strings and their interpretation of 'On The Street Where
You Live' from
My Fair
Lady
, followed by ... "

"I understand," Linda said. "I know what
you're saying, and you're right."

"Okay, now we're getting somewhere."

"No, we are not," Linda went
on hastily. "We're not getting anywhere by talking about my health
at a time when we should be doing something about Ned. His problem
is real, it's very, very real, at least to him. And it's going on
right now, it's not something that might or might not happen, like
an asthma attack. It's here. Now. Do
you
understand?"

Michael tapped the tabletop with one finger.
"All right, Linda, I'll ask around tomorrow and get the name of a
good child psychiatrist, and we'll take Ned in to see him. Or her."
He said it with an air of resignation, thinking that this
unpalatable alternative might force his wife to back off. The
change on her face suggested the tactic was working.

"Wait a minute. No," Linda said. "I didn't
mean that."

"Why not?" Michael followed up promptly.
"He's been to the doctor, and he got a clean bill of health. So if
there's a problem, it must be a mental problem, and he should see a
shrink. Right?" Michael had lowered his voice and looked out the
kitchen window. He was relieved to see that Ned was safely out of
earshot in the backyard. Christ, the boy'd really have a problem if
he heard his parents talking about him like this, Michael thought.
He had to put a stop to this nonsense, once and for all.

"No," Linda repeated. "I don't like that
idea."

How could she possibly admit that her son,
not yet ten years old, might need a psychiatrist? No way.

"What then?"

"You don't think there's any chance he could
be right?" she asked hesitantly. It was too much to expect that
Michael would agree, but she could think of nothing else.

"About somebody taking him away?"

Linda nodded, staring at the table.

"Honey, we've been through all that before,"
Michael said. "If I thought there was any chance, any chance at all
that Ned was right, I'd have to hire armed bodyguards to follow him
around from the time he got up in the morning until the time he
went to bed at night and put padlocks on his bedroom door and bars
on the window. Is that what you want me to do? Because if it is,
we'll have to start thinking of ways to come up with all that
money, and—"

He let it go. Linda's
shoulders sagged, and he could tell she was giving up on that
angle. Michael took another sip of wine and smiled to himself.
Nothing like a little
reductio ad
absurdum
to shake out a
situation.

"Michael ... Help us .... "

Her voice was striving to sound disconsolate
and little-girl-lost. Again Michael had the sensation that she was
purposefully dramatizing. How much longer could he indulge it
without leaving the way open for real trouble? To move to Lynnhaven
was proving more difficult for Linda than he had expected. Much
more difficult, it seemed, than for Ned even. Maybe the boy was
bothered by something, but it would pass. Let a plant grow, and
ninety-nine times out of a hundred it'll grow. The conditions are
right. If Linda refused to take Ned to see a counselor or a
specialist of some sort (and Michael really didn't want that
either), then there was nothing more to be said. It was time to be
firm.

"All kids have fears,
Linda," he said. "Big, vivid, bone-freezing fears. They see things
in the dark, and then they think they begin to see them during the
day too.
Things that aren't really
there
. But what you're doing is taking
Ned's natural childhood fears and blowing them up into your own,
and then Ned gets them back from you, worse than they were before.
The two of you are feeding each other's fears, in bigger and bigger
doses. Can't you see what's happening? It's a vicious circle, round
and round, back and forth between the two of you. Something
terrible is being created out of nothing. Linda, you can't let
yourself get into Ned's fantasies and perpetuate them by acting as
if you believe them too. It's got to stop."

Linda reached for the wine bottle, found it
was empty. She grabbed the sherry decanter and poured herself a
large measure.

"I mean it, honey," Michael continued.
"Fact: our son is perfectly healthy. Fact: our son is not, repeat
not, being shadowed by kidnappers or a child molester or a ghoul or
anything else. Fact: you ... "

Linda kept her back to him as he rattled on.
He's right, her mind said, but that was no help. She hated it when
Michael got off on one of his fact-this and fact-that routines. The
annoying thing was that he even had her doing it sometimes. Take
all your facts and stick them under your pillow, she wanted to tell
her husband. Maybe the tooth fairy can make use of them. I can't.
What did it always come down to in the end? Talk, talk and more
talk. That's all.

Linda couldn't even hear him now, although
he was only a few feet away, talking to her. She couldn't hear, and
that was worrying. Were they beginning to drift away from each
other? It had always seemed that they were deeply attuned to one
another, locked on the same wavelength, body and soul. But you have
to wonder if that can last forever. How many marriages do? If they
were so far apart on something so vital as their only son ... Had
they run the course to its end?

Something he had said still
rankled—what was it? Talking about if Ned was right, that someone
was going to take him ... Michael had said that he would "have to
hire armed bodyguards" to protect the boy. Not what you would
expect, the automatic
I would
hire, but the grudging
I
would have to hire
. Bodyguards were out of
the question, of course, but Linda felt her husband had betrayed
himself, as well as her and Ned, in that choice of
words.

"Ned worries about whatever it is he worries
about," Michael was saying. "You worry about Ned and I worry about
you. It's ridiculous."

Once, up until a short time ago, Linda might
have responded to that with a smile and said, "Cheer up, dear. I
know for a fact that your mother still worries about you," or some
remark like that. Now she couldn't manage it. She felt alone, and
bitter that they should be put in this position at a time when they
should have everything going for them.

She hammered the start button on the
dishwasher with a white-knuckled fist.

* * *

24. Stony Point