Nursery Tale (10 page)

He froze. Something inside him—some little-used, self-protective sixth sense—froze him. And it told him that something wasn't quite right here, that the child he was seeing—the young girl, he realized now, as she turned to face him—wasn't playing hooky from school, and wasn't the child of some neighbor back in town, and didn't belong to someone in that new housing development just a couple stones' throws away. He thought, fleetingly, that it was her huge, pale blue eyes that told him all this, and the blank, expressionless line of her mouth, and her naked, exquisite, and impossible beauty . . .

"Yes, sir!" she said. "Yes sir!" she repeated.

Manny Kent's mouth dropped open. He decided, on the instant, that only the devil himself could push his—Manny Kent's—whining scratchy voice up through that young girl's throat.

"Yes, sir!" she said again.

Manny brought the 30.30 up very slowly, mechanically, to a firing position. He aimed, his focus on the sight, not on his target, just as he'd been taught. And he realized that he hadn't loaded the rifle. He froze again.

The child had vanished.

Manny screamed—a high-pitched, shrill, animal-like scream that was repeated immediately, all around him.

Something touched him softly, here and there—on his legs, his buttocks, his groin, as if caterpillars were launching themselves at him from the leaves overhead.

Fifteen Years Earlier

P
aul Griffin moved south, off the path and into his fields.

He stopped again. He watched quietly, reverently, He owed them that much. His curses, his anger had no place here, in their midst. This was their cathedral.

And as he watched, and saw their faces turn occasionally, saw their eyes, expressionless, look in his direction, watched the firelight play on their smooth, dark skin, watched hands touch hands, and arms, and bellies—as if giving warmth and receiving it, as if re-experiencing and reveling in what they were—he knew that they were doing him a kindness, that he was privileged somehow. That few men, if any, had been allowed to see what he was seeing.

M
anny let go of the rifle. It dropped dully to the ground at his feet.

"Ba-na-na peels and mel-on rinds," he heard, and the Manny Kent deep inside him—the Manny Kent climbing out of the Chevy, running from the ghost of the colored man, scaling the Empire fence—laughed hysterically.

The small, soft hands at his throat cut the laughter off abruptly. He slumped to his knees.

"Ba-na-na peels and mel-on rinds," he heard again. "Yes, sir!"

J
anice McIntyre lowered herself very slowly into the seat at the breakfast nook.
Two
weeks, she thought, because that was how long it had taken her to force herself back here. Two weeks, and now this little private place to be alone, to think, was hers again. She had begun to exorcise the ghost.

She grinned self-critically. "Prepartum hallucinations," Miles had suggested, and she remembered laughing at him. "That's a new one on me, Miles." He'd shrugged, "Well, you never know, Janice." And that was true enough.

She glanced over at the clock on the stove: 4:45. Miles would be home in a half hour, and he'd expect something in the way of a supper—a TV dinner, some quick tuna casserole. She sighed. Miles was going to have to wait, because staying put here, at this damned haunted breakfast nook, had top priority this afternoon.

She sniffed the air tentatively, then quite conspicuously. She sighed again. Only the odor of Spic and Span, and a country autumn, and, beneath it all, the odor of her own nervous sweat. No woodsmoke. No burning hair (she grimaced).

"Have you hit your head recently?" the doctor had asked.

"No," she'd answered.

"Because unusual odors, without a physical cause, are one of the symptoms of concussion," he'd told her.

She thought now that she didn't
remember
hitting her head, anyway, at least not hard enough to cause a concussion. But then, that was often difficult to pin down, too, because—the doctor went on—even an apparently slight blow on the wrong part of the head can cause a lot of damage.

She realized that she was grasping at straws. Prepartum hallucinations, concussion, hunger pangs, for Christ's sake! She had experienced what she had experienced and she was keeping herself seated here, at the breakfast nook, because she had to overcome it, because she had to put it behind her once and for all, because if she didn't

Her peripheral vision told her that the woman was standing motionless in the kitchen doorway:

"No," Janice whispered. "No! Please! Go away!" She closed her eyes tightly. "Please go away, please, please go away!"

"Janice?"

Janice's breathing halted momentarily. She turned her head. Trudy Wentis smiled quizzically at her.

"Janice, I'm sorry, but I've been ringing your doorbell for the past fifteen minutes. I thought something might be wrong, so I came in. Your door was unlocked. Are you all right?"

"Oh my God, Trudy, you have no idea—"

Trudy Wentis crossed the room quickly and sat across from Janice at the breakfast nook. She felt sure she was intruding, and equally sure that Janice needed to talk to someone. (Theirs was a friendship which had been kindled a week earlier, when Miles left for a two-day business trip and asked Trudy if she could "sort of keep an eye on my wife, if you don't mind." And then he'd added that Janice was "pregnant and nervous. She doesn't like to be alone.")

"Janice, would you like to talk about it?" Trudy said now.

"There's nothing to talk about."

"Okay." Soothingly.

"Unless you want to talk about ghosts. Do you want to talk about ghosts, Trudy?"

"Any ghost in particular?"

A slight, sad smile appeared on Janice's face. "My own, if I keep this up—high blood pressure, ulcers . . ."

I
n the still, cold November air, a scream settled over Granada from the small stand of woods a half mile off. Timmy Meade, just getting off his school bus, heard it—a
hawk
, he decided, because he felt sure that "country living" was turning him into a junior naturalist.

Lorraine Graham, making her sons' beds, windows open to the country air, heard it and dismissed it immediately because it could only be what it appeared to be—the scream of someone in deep torment—and that, of course, was impossible here, in Granada.

At the McIntyre house, the two women seated at the breakfast nook, absorbed in their conversation, heard nothing at all.

November 2

N
orm Gellis couldn't sleep. It was, he felt sure, because of all the coffee Marge had pushed at him after dinner—"Oh, have some more, Norm; stay and talk with us. Mother doesn't visit that often, you know." He had very grudgingly assented, and now he thought he was paying the price.

He listened to Marge snoring softly in her bed. "Damn you!" he whispered, and was on the verge of damning her mother, too (she had left shortly after supper), when a slight, barely audible tinkling noise drifted up to him from somewhere on the first floor. He pushed himself up on his elbows: "Marge?" he whispered anxiously. "I think somebody's in the house, Marge." There was a hint of excitement in his voice. "Wake up, Marge!" he said aloud. He listened. Marge continued snoring. "Bitch!"

He sat up, paused, heard the tinkling noise again; he smiled. "I'm going downstairs, Marge." She continued snoring. "I'm going to get the .38 and go downstairs." The tempo and pitch of her snoring altered. "It's okay, Marge—go back to sleep." He stood and moved quickly and quietly into the bathroom, the smile stuck on his face all the while. He opened a cupboard beneath the sink, got down on one knee, felt inside the cupboard on a small ledge inside a narrow panel above the cupboard door. He heard the quick, brittle noise of glass breaking somewhere on the first floor. "Shit!" he murmured, still smiling. He got the .38 from its hiding place, went back to the bedroom. Miraculously, Marge was still asleep. He went to the top of the stairs, wondered if he should turn on the overhead light in the living room with the switch up here, in the hallway. He quickly decided, no, the element of surprise was very important now.

Putting his weight on the extreme right-hand side of the steps, close to the wall—where the wood was least likely to creak—he started down. "Shit!" he whispered, spontaneously, gleefully.

T
he ringing of the telephone woke Clyde Watkins almost immediately. In the two decades that he'd served as Penn Yann's Volunteer Fire Chief he had taught himself to sleep, as he put it, "with one ear and one eye open." He snatched the receiver up. "Yes?"

"Clyde, it's me, Sarah."

He rolled his eyes. "Christ, Sarah, have you got any idea what time it is?"

"Three thirty, Clyde. That's why I called." She hesitated. "Manny's been gone since yesterday afternoon, Clyde, and I'm worried about him."

"He's probably sleepin' off a drunk somewhere, Sarah."

"I don't think so, Clyde. I called The Playground and Itzy's and Bagnano's, too. He ain't been in none of 'em all night. Nobody's seen him, Clyde."

"We got a liquor store in town, Sarah—"

"I called there too, Clyde. And like I said, no one's seen him. And I'm real worried, Clyde. I was hopin' you'd have some idea where he might be. I thought he might be with you, as a matter of fact."

Clyde sat up reluctantly. He shivered: Damn, it was cold! "He ain't with me, Sarah."

"Can you go lookin' for him, Clyde?" she pleaded. "Can you do that for me?"

"I was just about to, Sarah."

"Thank you, Clyde. I knew you'd help."

"Don't I always, Sarah?"

"You want me to come with you, Clyde? Where you think yer gonna look? You'd tell me if he's got a girlfriend, wouldn'tcha, Clyde? You'd tell me that . . ."

"He ain't got no girlfriend, Sarah. Who in hell'd want him?!"

"That ain't nice, Clyde." But she knew the question was a good one. "I'm puttin' my coat on right this minute, Clyde. I'll be waitin' for ya."

"Okay, Sarah." He sighed. "I'll be over directly." He hung up, shivered again.
Unseasonably cold, tonight
, he remembered the TV weatherman saying.
Into the teens in some of the valley areas . . . By early morning the temperature should be on the rise again
. He stood and put his jeans and flannel shirt on over thermal underwear. It was early morning, now, wasn't it?! he asked himself. And still it was colder than a witch's tit!

He got his heavy winter coat out of the closet and put it on. He had no idea where he'd look first for his brother-in-law. If Manny hadn't been in any of the bars, and he wasn't at home, well then, where else could he be? He was a real predictable son of a bitch, Clyde thought, and that fact told him that something was very, very wrong.

L
orraine Graham pushed her twins' bedroom door open quickly, so as to catch them by surprise. "You boys had better—" she began, and fell silent. Robin and Robert Graham were sleeping quietly in their separate beds. Lorraine's brow furrowed; she closed their door gently. She felt certain she'd heard them talking and giggling (Christ, but why did they
giggle
, for God's sake?). She pulled her short, terrycloth robe tight around her. The next time she went into Penn Yann, she decided, she'd have to check the prices on good, winter-type robes. This thing she was wearing was obviously meant more for seduction than warmth. She started for her bedroom, her steps made uneven and uncertain by the interruption of sleep.

She heard the sound of her boys giggling again.

She hurried back to their room, threw the door open.

Robin lifted his head a little from the pillow. "Mom? What's the matter?"

She stared incredulously at him. "What do you mean, 'What's the matter?' You know damned well what the matter is."

Robin pulled his blanket up around his neck. "No, I don't, Mom," he stammered. "Could I have another blanket, Mom?"

Robert woke. "What's goin' on? Is it time for school?" He started to get out of bed, Lorraine shook her head; "No, Robert—you've got a couple hours' sleep left." She paused—her sudden anger had quickly given way to confusion. "You boys have been asleep all this time?"

"Yes, Mom," Robin answered.

Robert said nothing. He was asleep again.

"Oh," Lorraine said. And she left the room.

T
he smell of Norm Gellis's nervous perspiration roughly approximated the smell of vegetable soup. It was a smell that permeated the air around him now, and made his nose wrinkle. He had his finger on the downstairs light switch and was toying with several ideas. The first told him it was probably best to give his trespasser fair warning—something like,
Freeze, or you're a dead man!
Or maybe,
I got a .38 here, and I hate to tell ya what size hole it'll put in your belly!
Because, said the small voice of his intellect, the abrupt turning on of the light might panic the trespasser, and if the trespasser had a gun, too . . . Which was why he much preferred the second idea. Surprise. Sudden and sure! And anyway, said the same, small voice, why give the trespasser fair warning?