Hide and Seek (11 page)

Dead of poison and measles and gunshot wounds and hard birthing. The restless dead. You can hear them in the rustling leaves, see them in the leaning slabs of stone.

"A virgin. Look."

I walked to where she was.

The stone was down, fallen heavily against the smaller one beside it.

Casey was bending low, a match about to burn her fingertips. I blew it out and lit another.

We read the inscription. Here lyes the remains of Elizabeth Cotton, Daughter of the Reverend Samuel Cotton late of Sandwich

Mass. who died a Virgin October 12,1797, aged 36. Who hath not ever sinned. It was the oldest stone we'd seen there.

"Poor lady. Maybe she should have met up with Bill Trumbell over there."

The match went out and she lit a third one. An angel was carved over the inscription, almost weathered away. The stone was rough, pitted by wind and rain. You could see the slight indentation where the stone had uprooted itself, just as hallow dip in the soil by now. I stood up.

"Let's go."

"Wait."

The match flickered away again. I'd been working so hard to read that for a moment everything went black. Then my eyes adjusted to the moonlight.

The pullover blouse lay beside her. She was naked to the waist, her breasts and belly and shoulders naked, and she was reaching for

"Come on. Right on top of Elizabeth Cotton, virgin."

"It's silly."

"You think uY?"

I watched her lean back and slip the jeans down off her thighs, the thin panties folding away with them, graceful as a snake shedding its skin. She tossed them away and lay back against the cool earth, reached over her head and took one side of the headstone of Elizabeth Cotton in each hand. In the moonlight her tanned flesh looked unnaturally pale. She smiled at me and moved against the stunted grass.

"Come on. I want you in me."

Justa whisper. Like a razor sliding through paper. Itseemedto force the blood through my veins and trigger a heavy pounding in my chest. I wanted her. With all I'd seen of her tonight, I wanted her worse than ever. I felt like a man in a life jacket who finally accepts

the water's numbing cold. This was hers. Pure Casey. Undiluted. In the Middle Ages, they'd have burned her at the stake.

I took off my clothes and stood there a moment, naked, looking down at her, watching myself rise. Amazed a little.

Then I went into her.

I went in hard, tickled by perversity. The smell of damp musty earth suddenly strong around us. I pumped at her until her cool skin grew warm again and then moved her violently on top of me, exchanging places with her-the ground, the old crumbled bones beneath my arched back and thighs.

She reached down. Her fingers clawed the damp soil. She took up a handful and ground it against my chest. I felt a sudden all-enveloping chill. She leaned over me and grasped the headstone in both hands again and I rose up high to meet her.

I looked up into a face that was already trembling on the near side of orgasm, past the blind-seeming eyes, and glimpsed myself as though reflected in some dream image as clouds drifted by the moon. I saw us as though from above, locked together, clashed in need. The headstone behind me. I saw huge dead hands reach up out of the churning earth and pull us down.

As she screamed, I felt those hands on me. Broken stalagmite fingers.

On my shoulders. On my neck. Lightly clutching.

Cold and sweating, I came too. And screamed along with her. While the hands receded. Tendrils of smoky mist, climbing back into the soil.

"My god!"

I heard my own nervous "You too, huh?" "You were moving at me right up out of the ground. I was fucking a dead man!"

I felt her shudder. Her body sparkled with beads of sweat. "God!

Kiss me. Kiss me easy."

It was very soft and warm. For a moment I felt the strangeness clear a tiny space for us, like stepping into a dense fog and watching it swirl away around your feet. I felt her cool breasts brush my chest,

laughter.

smelled the rich natural perfume of her damp hair. She was Casey, just Casey. Slightly nuts but that was all.

I still lay inside her.

Like the dead, it would take only a little imagination to get me to rise again.

I broke the kiss and gently lifted her away.

"No more?"

"I think we've educated old Liz Cotton."

I stood up and pulled on my clothes. She sat still a moment fingering a blade of grass, the picture of healthy life amid all those twisted shapes of tombstones. Suddenly I heard the crickets and the frogs again. They'd been there all along, but I was elsewhere.

She got dressed. The last thing she put on was her pullover blouse.

She tugged it on over her head and then thought of something. While it was still around her neck she kissed the palm of her hand and pressed it to the headstone of Elizabeth Cotton.

We walked back through the cemetery to the church. Neither of us spoke. I glanced at the padlock on the door and shook my head.

"You know why I was so mad before? Back at your house. You know why I hit you?"

"The windows. The broken windows. I don't blame you."

"No. Just partly that."

"What else?"

I pointed to the padlock.

"Look at that. It's ridiculous. A Yale lock wouldn't keep out a determined ten-year-old."

"So?"

"So I know. Remember I told you there was one other brush with the law?"

"Yes?"

The blue eyes glittered at me.

"Breaking and entering. I was fourteen years old. It was no big thing. A lot of scare tactics at the police station, that was all. And bad times with my mom and dad for a while."

"A lock like this?"

"God, no! You wouldn't want a lock lit than ashed. That's what I mean. No, this was a house over on Maple. Properly closed for the winter. I went through a window on the ground floor. Wandered around awhile. Somebody saw my flashlight through the living-room window."

"But why? What were you doing? Stealing?"

"Good thing I wasn't, or I wouldn't have gotten off with just a warning. No matter how many cops my dad knew. No, that was the weird part. I didn't go there to steal.

"When they got there-the cops, I mean-I'd just been sitting in the living room, in this big old easy chair, wondering what the people were like. And smoking a cigarette. I'd almost forgotten that. I guess I did steal something. The cigarette. From a tired old pack on the kitchen table."

We walked to the car and I thought about it. I hadn't thought about it for years And I'm not sure I'd ever asked myself exactly what the point had been.

"I don't know why. It was exciting. I liked it. Hiked invading their privacy. I looked through all the drawers upstairs, but they were mostly empty. There were some clothes in the closet. I looked through them. I didn't know the people at all, but being in the house gave me the feeling that I did. I liked that. That's why I was sitting in that chair. Just thinking about them. I could almost hear their voices.

"I have this fantasy. I'm in the city, Portland maybe. Whatever. And I see this girl on the street. She's very attractive, so I follow her.

I follow her for days, get to know everything she does and everywhere she goes. But she never sees me. I get to know her completely without her ever knowing me. And then when I think I've got her completely down cold, I go away and never come back. Like leaving a lover. She never even knows I was there."

v oy g u r I s m.

"Sure. I get to be with her, know her, even care about her a little, but I never have to do anything . I'm completely .. . aloof. At the same time I'm completely committed to her, obsessive even. It's all I do for days. You see?"

"I think so"

fora while, k get it out of my mind. The whole experience was so clear to me, as though it had only happened days ago. And it was strange, because I could remember want/ngto get caught in there. That was why the flashlight was on. I'd had it trained right on the window, for no good reason at all except that I must have known somebody would see it and wonder. I'd wanted somebody to know. I think I was even aware of it at the time, without understanding why I'd want to risk that, why I felt that way.

I thought I knew now what the fantasy was about. It was a kind of declaration to myself as to where things stood with me. The reserve.

The need for emotional safety. Yet as early as six years ago, I'd broken into a stranger's house and thrown a flashlight beam on the living room window. Even that far back I must have known what my little reserve was worth.

We were quiet going back to Dead River. I didn't take her home. Even at four in the morning it would be quite a scene there. A rock through a neighbor's window would be nearly impossible to forgive. And Casey wouldn't want forgiveness anyway.

We went to my apartment instead.

We climbed the stairs yawning. And Casey turned back to me and murmured, "Sounds like fun."

"What does?"

I knew what she meant. It made me cold inside. But I went through the motions anyway.

"Breaking and entering."

I said nothing. I opened the door for her. She stepped inside and faced me. The smile was sleepy but the eyes were filled with broken light. I didn't even bother to argue the point. I knew where it would lead us. It was where we'd been going, anyway, all along.

"I want to do it."

The tendrils of fog had followed us from the graveyard. They slid around my throat again like soft wet claws, caressing me, turning my spit to acid.

"And I know just the place for it too. The perfect place."

"You do?"

She looked at me. For the first time, her smile mocked me a little.

"Don't you?"

"Look, it has to be the Crouch place."

"Why?"

"Because it does."

The hamburgers at Harmon's were lousy. The refrigerated, prepackaged kind you stick in a microwave. But we ate them. Casey looked terrific in a tiny blue halter and cream-colored shorts. The makeup was subtle and carefully done. To me it was obvious there was seduction going on.

"Because the Crouch place is isolated, dummy. I have no intention of getting caught like our cat burglar over here." She nodded at me and Kim smiled.

"Nobody's going to come by. Nobody's going to see us go in or come out again, and nobody's going to pay any unexpected calls. It's perfect."

"She's right," said Steve. "It's the safest place around. But I dunno, Case. Where's the big thrill?"

"It'll be worth it. You'll see."

"Got something planned?" Kim wiped at a crumb of burger bun at the corner of her mouth.

"I might."

"So tell us."

"And make it good, please," said Steve. "Because I really don't see this so far. I mean, what's the big deal about walking into an empty house at night, looking around and leaving? It's kids' stuff. It

would make more sense to do it someplace in town. If we can't get caught, Where's the risk? What's the point?"

"There's no risk. But I can still make it fun. It's kids' stuff, all right. But use your imaginations. You'll see."

"See what?"

"Will you tell us for chrissake?"

"Come on, Case," I said. "Let's have it. Skip the buildup."

She looked at me and grinned. I wasn't a conspirator, but I felt like one. Whatever her idea was we hadn't discussed it. She knew damn well I wasn't happy with the thing. I'd go along. She didn't have to sell me like she did the other two. But I wasn't happy.

She was, though.

She'd found a way to shoo the boredom again.

"Hide and seek," she said.

Kim's mouth made a big scowly streak across her face. "What?"

Steve looked at her the way an adult will look at an annoying child. I just sat there, thinking about it.

"Hide and seek. Just the way we used to play it when we were kids. But we play it in the Crouch place."

You could feel it dawning on them. It was a dumb idea, all right, but it had possibilities, ambiguities. Personally I'd rather have been in Sheboygan.

"I get it. The place is supposed to be haunted or something, right?"

Steve's index finger darted at her like the tongue of a snake.

"Right. So we play with that a little, see? No flashlights allowed.

A strange house. At night. Alone. A place we don't know and have never been in before."

Kimberley nodded. "The vague possibility of a cop coming along."

"Very vague," I told her. I hoped I was right.

"But still there," said Casey.

"And us with the lights off, trying to find one another in the dark in an old, weird house." Kim's voice was excited now, the concept in full bloom.

Steve snapped his fingers.

"I like it. I really do. You're right-it's kids' stuff, but it's good."

"A whole lot better than The Love Bug."