Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (6 page)

“Nobody,” I said.

“I heard that question before, you know,” she said. “Ain't the first time I been asked. Somebody else asked me, once.”

I sat in my chair, stiff as a ham.

“Your father's brother asked me that once. But we won't talk about him, will we?”

I shook my head.

Next Saturday I waited until it was dark and everyone was in bed. The night air was warm, but I was sweating more than the warm could cause as I rode my bike down the dirt road, lamp beam swinging back and forth. The sky was crawling with stars, all of them looking at me. The Milky Way seemed to touch down just beyond the road, like I might ride straight up it if I went far enough.

I knocked on the heavy door. There were no lights in the windows and it was late for old folks to be up, but I knew these two didn't behave like normal people. And I knew that just because the house looked empty from the outside didn't mean it was empty within. The wind rose up and beat against the door, making me shiver. Then it opened. It was dark for a moment, and the breath went out of me. Two pairs of eyes stared from the black. They seemed a lot taller this time. “Come in, boy,” Jack whispered.

Fireflies lit up the tree in the living room. The brambles and wildflowers glowed like weeds on a sea floor. The carpet crawled, but not to my feet. I was shivering in earnest now, and my teeth chattered .

I only saw their shadows as they sat on the bench in front of me. “Sit,” Meg said. “Listen close. You've taken the fire, and it glows bright. You're only a boy, but you're just like a pregnant woman now. For the rest of your life you'll be cursed with the worst affliction known to humans. Your skin will twitch at night. Your eyes will see things in the dark. Beasts will come to you and beg to be ridden. You'll never know one truth from another. You might starve, because few will want to encourage you. And if you do make good in this world, you might lose the gift and search forever after, in vain. Some will say the gift isn't special. Beware them. Some will say it is special, and beware them, too. And some—”

There was a scratching at the door. I thought it was an animal for a moment. Then it cleared its throat. It was my great aunt.

“Some will say you're damned. Perhaps they're right. But you're also enthused. Carry it lightly and responsibly.”

“Listen in there. This is Sybil Danser. You know me. Open up.”

“Now stand by the stairs, in the dark where she can't see,” Jack said. I did as I was told. One of them—I couldn't tell which—opened the door, and the lights went out in the tree, the carpet stilled, and the brambles were snuffed. Auntie Danser stood in the doorway, outlined by star glow, carrying her knitting bag. “Boy?” she asked. I held my breath.

“And you others, too.”

The wind in the house seemed to answer. “I'm not too late,” she said. “Damn you, in truth, damn you to hell! You come to our towns, and you plague us with thoughts no decent person wants to think. Not just fairy stories, but telling the way people live and why they shouldn't live that way! Your very breath is tainted! Hear me?” She walked slowly into the empty living room, feet clonking on the wooden floor. “You make them write about us and make others laugh at us. Question the way we think. Condemn our deepest prides. Pull out our mistakes and amplify them beyond all truth. What right do you have to take young children and twist their minds?”

The wind sang through the cracks in the walls. I tried to see if Jack or Meg was there, but only shadows remained.

“I know where you come from, don't forget that! Out of the ground! Out of the bones of old wicked Indians! Shamans and pagan dances and worshiping dirt and filth! I heard about you from the old squaws on the reservation. Frost and Spring, they called you, signs of the turning year. Well, now you got a different name! Death and demons, I call you, hear me?”

She seemed to jump at a sound, but I couldn't hear it. “Don't you argue with me!” she shrieked. She took her glasses off and held out both hands. “Think I'm a weak old woman, do you? You don't know how deep I run in these communities! I'm the one who had them books taken off the shelves. Remember me? Oh, you hated it--not being able to fill young minds with your pestilence. Took them off high school shelves and out of lists—burned them for junk! Remember? That was me. I'm not dead yet! Boy, where are you?”

“Enchant her,” I whispered to the air. “Magic her. Make her go away. Let me live here with you.”

“Is that you, boy? Come with your aunt, now. Come with, come away!”

“Go with her,” the wind told me. “Send your children this way, years from now. But go with her.”

I felt a kind of tingly warmth and knew it was time to get home. I snuck out the back way and came around to the front of the house. There was no car. She'd followed me on foot all the way from the farm. I wanted to leave her there in the old house, shouting at the dead rafters, but instead I called her name and waited.

She came out crying. She knew.

“You poor sinning boy,” she said, pulling me to her lilac bosom.

Richie by the Sea

The storm had spent its energy the night before. A wild, scattering squall had toppled the Thompson's shed and the last spurt of high water had dropped dark drift across the rocks and sand. In the last light of day the debris was beginning to stink and attract flies and gulls. There were knots of seaweed, floats made of glass and cork, odd bits of boat wood, foam plastic shards and a whale. The whale was about forty feet long. It had died during the night after its impact on the ragged rocks of the cove. It looked like a giant garden slug, draped across the still pool of water with head and tail hanging over.

Thomas Harker felt a tinge of sympathy for the whale, but his house was less than a quarter-mile south and with the wind in his direction the smell would soon be bothersome.

The sheriff's jeep roared over the bluff road between the cove and the university grounds. Thomas waved and the sheriff waved back. There would be a lot of cleaning-up to do.

Thomas backed away from the cliff edge and returned to the path through the trees. He'd left his drafting table an hour ago to stretch his muscles and the walk had taken longer than he expected; Karen would be home by now, waiting for him, tired from the start of the new school year.

The cabin was on a broad piece of property barely thirty yards from the tideline, with nothing but grass and sand and an old picket fence between it and the water. They had worried during the storm, but there had been no flooding. The beach elevated seven feet to their property and they'd come through remarkably well.

Thomas knocked sand from his shoes and hung them on two nails next to the back door. In the service porch he removed his socks and dangled them outside, then draped them on the washer. He had soaked his shoes and socks and feet during an incautious run near the beach. Wriggling his toes, he stepped into the kitchen and sniffed. Karen had popped homemade chicken pies into the oven. Walks along the beach made him ravenous, especially after long days at the board.

He looked out the front window. Karen was at the gate, hair blowing in the evening breeze and knit sweater puffing out across her pink and white blouse. She turned, saw Thomas in the window and waved, saying something he couldn't hear.

He shrugged expressively and went to open the door. He saw something small on the porch and jumped in surprise. Richie stood on the step, smiling up at him, eyes the color of the sunlit sea, black hair unruly.

“Did I scare you, Mr. Harker?” the boy asked.

“Not much. What are you doing here this late? You should be home for dinner.”

Karen kicked her shoes off on the porch. “Richie! When did you get here?”

“Just now. I was walking up the sand hills and wanted to say hello.” Richie pointed north of the house with his long, unchildlike fingers. “Hello.” He looked at Karen with a broad grin, head tilted.

“No dinner at home tonight?” Karen asked, totally vulnerable. “Maybe you can stay here.” Thomas winced and raised his hand.

“Can't,” Richie said. “Everything's just late tonight. I've got to be home soon. Hey, did you see the whale?”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Sheriff is going to have a fun time moving it.”

“Next tide'll probably take it out,” Richie said. He looked between them, still smiling broadly. Thomas guessed his age at nine or ten but he already knew how to handle people.

“Tide won't be that high now,” Thomas said.

“I've seen big things wash back before. Think he'll leave it overnight?”

“Probably. It won't start stinking until tomorrow.”

Karen wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“Thanks for the invitation anyway, Mrs. Harker.” Richie put his hands in his shorts' pockets and walked through the picket fence, turning just beyond the gate. “You got any more old clothes I can have?”

“Not now,” Thomas said. “You've taken all our castoffs already.”

“I need more for the rag drive,” Richie said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Where does he live?” Thomas asked after closing the door.

“I don't think he wants us to know. Probably in town. Don't you like him?”

“Of course I like him. He's only a kid.”

“You don't seem to want him around.” Karen looked at him accusingly.

“Not all the time. He's not ours, his folks should take care of him.”

“They obviously don't care much.”

“He's well-fed,” Thomas said. “He looks healthy and he gets along fine.”

They sat down to dinner. Wisps of Karen's hair still took the shape of the wind. She didn't comb it until after the table was cleared and Thomas was doing the dishes. His eyes traced endless circuit diagrams in the suds. “Hey,” he shouted to the back bathroom. “I've been working too much.”

“I know,” Karen answered. “So have I. Isn't it terrible?”

“Let's get to bed early,” he said. She walked into the kitchen wrapped in a terry-cloth bathrobe, pulling a snarl out of her hair. “Must get your sleep,” she said.

He aimed a snapped towel at her retreating end but missed. Then he leaned over the sink, rubbed his eyes and looked at the suds again. No circuits, only a portrait of Richie. He removed the last plate and rinsed it.

The next morning Thomas awoke to the sound of hammering coming from down the beach. He sat up in bed to receive Karen's breezy kiss as she left for the University, then hunkered down again and rolled over to snooze a little longer. His eyes flew open a few minutes later and he cursed. The racket was too much. He rolled out of the warmth and padded into the bathroom, wincing at the cold tiles. He turned the shower on to warm, brought his mug out to shave and examined his face in the cracked mirror. The mirror had been broken six months ago when he'd slipped and jammed his hand against it after a full night poring over the circuit diagrams in his office. Karen had been furious with him and he hadn't worked that hard since. But there was a deadline from Peripheral Data on his freelance designs and he had to meet it if he wanted to keep up his reputation.

In a few more months, he might land an exclusive contract from Key Business Corporation, and then he'd be designing what he wanted to design—big computers, mighty beasts. Outstanding money.

The hammering continued and after dressing he looked out the bedroom window to see Thompson rebuilding his shed. The shed had gone unused for months after Thompson had lost his boat at the Del Mar trials, near San Diego. Still, Thompson was sawing and hammering and reconstructing the slope-roofed structure, possible planning on another boat. Thomas didn't think much about it. He was already at work and he hadn't even reached the desk in his office. There was a whole series of TTL chips he could move to solve the interference he was sure would crop up in the design as he had it now.

By nine o'clock he was deeply absorbed. He had his drafting pencils and templates and mechanic's square spread across the paper in complete confusion. He wasn't interrupted until ten.

He answered the door only half-aware that somebody had knocked. Sheriff Varmanian stood on the porch, sweating. The sun was out and the sky clearing for a hot, humid day.

“Hi, Tom.”

“Al,” Thomas said, nodding. “Something up?”

“I'm interrupting? Sorry—”

“Yeah, my computers won't be able to take over your job if you keep me here much longer. How's the whale?”

“That's the least of my troubles right now.” Varmanian's frizzy hair and round wire-rimmed glasses made him look more like an anarchist than a sheriff. “The whale was taken out with the night tide. We didn't even have to bury it.” He pronounced “bury” like it was “burry” and studiously maintained a midwestern twang.

“Something else, then. Come inside and cool off?”

“Thanks. We've lost another kid—the Cooper's four-year-old, Kile. He disappeared last night around seven and no one's seen him since. Anybody see him here?”

“No. Only Richie was here. Listen, I didn't hear any tide big enough to sweep the whale out again. We'd need another storm to do that. Maybe something freak happened and the boy was caught in it...a freak tide?”

“There isn't any funnel in Placer Cove to cause that. Just a normal rise and the whale was buoyed up by gases, that's my guess. Cooper kid must have gotten lost on the bluff road and come down to one of the houses to ask for help—that's what the last people who saw him think. So we're checking the beach homes. Thompson didn't see anything either. I'll keep heading north and look at the flats and tide pools again, but I'd say we have another disappearance. Don't quote me, though.”

“That's four?”

“Five. Five in the last six months.”

“Pretty bad, Al, for a town like this.”

“Don't I know it. Coopers are all upset, already planning funeral arrangements. Funerals when there aren't any bodies. But the Goldbergs had one for their son two months ago, so I guess precedent has been set.”