People of the Dark (13 page)

Erika appeared from the sub shop, a white sandwich bag in each hand. She stopped halfway down the steps and looked confusedly at me. "I think he should have marked these, Jack," she said. "I don't know which one's yours."

"The greasy one," I said.

Knebel
said, nodding at Erika, "So you get her home and safe quick's you can, okay?"

I sighed. "I'll do that,
Knebel
."

"I'd say that'd be the best thing tonight, Jack." He nodded in self-agreement, tugged on the German Shepherd's leash, and walked stiffly off, toward North Main Street.

T
all walnut and maple trees crowded both sides of the narrow road from Cohocton to the house, and on this night, the smell of wood smoke—from houses that used wood stoves—was heavy and unpleasant, in spots nearly like a fog. No one walked this road at night—not, I think, because it was dangerous but because the people who lived in the area drove if they had someplace to go.

That evening, when we were still a mile or so from home, Erika said, "I could stay here a long time, Jack." I heard something deeply meaningful in her voice, and something tense, too, as if she were afraid of what she was saying.

"Me, too," I said.

I felt her hand on mine on the steering wheel, and I glanced at it, surprised. When I looked up, I saw a deer running along the right-hand side of the road about fifty yards ahead of the car. I had already learned that the deer ran in groups, of three or four—if one got caught in the glare of headlights, the chances were very good that another, and another, and another would quickly follow. So I hit the brakes. "Hold on!" I said to Erika, and found suddenly that the car was facing the right side of the road, its high beams hard on the trees there. I cursed, let off the brakes; the car straightened. I pumped the brakes, brought the car to a halt, took a breath, studied the road ahead. The deer I'd braked for was a good hundred yards off now. As I watched, it angled sharply to the left, across the road, and was gone. Another deer appeared seconds later, then another.

Erika said, "I saw someone standing next to the road, Jack."

I glanced at her. "Oh?"

She nodded; she was looking straight ahead. "Yes, when the car skidded."

I glanced back through the rear window and saw the deep red glow of the brake lights on darkness, nothing else. I put the car in park, took my foot off the brake, saw the gray suggestion of sky, a black horizon. I noticed the smell of the wood smoke, too, and it got me thinking about house fires and carbon monoxide poisoning.

Erika said, "But he belongs here."

"Does he?"

She nodded again.

I asked, "He lives here, Erika?"

"Sure," she answered.

I put the car in drive, touched the accelerator; the car moved very slowly forward—the deer had spooked me and I was being extra cautious. I said, "How do you know all that, Erika?"

"Because I've seen him before."

I caught the suggestion of movement a hundred feet ahead, near the side of the road, and I slowed the car to a crawl.

"Where?" I asked.

"Near the house," she answered. "The other morning. When you were in the cellar."

I glanced quickly at her. "You're kidding." I glanced back. The thing at the side of the road appeared; it was a big raccoon. It ambled several feet into the road, got caught in the full glare of the headlights, loped back to the shoulder, and hesitated there, as if agitated by the presence of the car.

"No," Erika said. "It was the same man. He was wearing the same clothes."

The raccoon got up on its haunches, then down on all fours, and scooted across the road. I said to Erika, "You never told me you knew what the man was wearing. That's important stuff."

She shook her head. "No, it isn't, Jack. He belongs here."

I sighed. "Are you saying we've got goofy neighbors, Erika?"

"I thought you knew we had goofy neighbors, Jack." I heard wry amusement in her voice and realized that it signaled a clear change in her tone. "Everybody's got goofy neighbors," she declared. "I'm sure that
we're
someone's goofy neighbors."

"Uh-huh," I said, "sure we are," and I pushed the accelerator halfway to the floor. The car shot forward, giving me a little rush of excitement. "The hell with the damned deer," I muttered.

"And the hell with goofy neighbors!" Erika said aloud. "I'm hungry!"

S
he has a strange sense of humor. It's unpredictable, a little perverse, and she delights in the absurd. She has a
Kliban
poster in the music room. It shows a barrel-bodied, huge-headed pen-and-ink cat with a shit-eating grin on its mouth, and a scrawny mouse under its paw. "Love to eat them
mousies
," the cat's saying; "bite they little heads off."

When she got the poster, she explained simply—"That cat's honest." She grinned
lopsidely
. "I like honesty."

I
found myself back in Granada several days later. I'm uncertain what drew me there, because it was a strange and depressing place and it made me more than a little uncomfortable (the same way, I remembered, that I'd felt when I visited France five years earlier and didn't speak the language, like being blind and in a room whose dimensions are unknown).

It might have been Sarah
Talpey
who drew me back because the things she'd said, and the way she'd said them, had posed more questions than they'd answered. Or I simply could have been bored, alone at the house (it was a Monday, and Erika always put in at least twelve hours at her shop on Mondays).

Sarah was in Granada that day. It was a bright, warm morning, the first week in April, and when I got out of the car, a hornet buzzed me once, and again, then found the interior of the car and got stuck there. I cursed, closed the door, decided to deal with it later.

I was in front of the pastel blue house where I'd discovered Sarah. She was just coming out of it, dressed in gray overalls, a white shirt, and a blue ski jacket opened at the front. She was carrying something under her right arm. She smiled, waved, said, "Hello. Jack, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said loudly. "Hi."

She came quickly down the battered walkway, extended her free hand; I took it. "I'm Sarah," she said. "Remember?"

"I remember."

She let go of my hand, noticed that I was looking at the thing she was carrying under her arm. She said, "I found this today," and held it out for me to see. It was a tattered brown suede jacket. She turned her head slightly, nodded, "In that house, in the attic. Under the insulation."

It was a child's jacket, that was obvious, and it was torn in several places. Around the collar it looked as if it might have been chewed.

Sarah went on, "It's a marvelous find, Jack. It belonged to one of the children who lived here—a boy named Robin." She held up the jacket's right sleeve. The name Robin had been sewn there in red thread. "Robin Graham," she went on, and tucked the jacket back under her arm. "He was eleven years old. A twin, I think. I'll have to check that. And he turned up missing one day." A flat, sad grin appeared on her lips. "He was never found. Lots and lots of people looked for him, and for quite a long time, too. Then his brother turned up missing, too, and
he
was never found, and things got pretty frantic. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, I'm afraid."

"Oh?" I said.

She nodded. "Uh-huh." She lifted her head, closed her eyes briefly, opened them, and smiled. "God, what a day, Jack!" She took my elbow. "C'mon, walk with me."

I
spent several hours with her in Granada that morning. We did a lot of walking, more than I'd done in some time (my legs ached the next day from it), and she went into detail about Granada, why she was there, what had happened twenty years ago. And when she was done and was walking me to my car, I told her that she had scared the hell out of me.

"Good," she said.

"I don't believe a word of it, Sarah, but I enjoy a good story well told."

She smiled thinly, opened my car door. "So do I, Jack," she said, leaned over and looked into my car. "I'll get that hornet out for you. I think you're probably a little squeamish about that sort of thing."

"Thanks," I said. "I am."

O
nce, on a business trip to New York City, I had to spend an hour or so at Grand Central Station. I found that all the stories I'd heard about it were true. It's crowded, it's noisy, it's smelly, most of the people are rude, the cops surly. And it does not lack for crazies. There are probably a hundred or more crazies there at any given time. Usually, they're benign and predictable—people who carry on long and unintelligible conversations with themselves, people who wander aimlessly from place to place, people who accuse passersby of all kinds of immorality. But on this particular business trip I ran into a very rare type of crazy, the Imaginative and Articulate Crazy. He was a man in his late forties who called himself "The Late Dr. Bernie Swan." He was dressed very stylishly, looked as if he had money, and for a full hour and a half he told me, in wonderful detail, about the giant spiders that lived in Manhattan's subway system. He explained that they were "a heavily mutated species of arachnid and they subsist almost entirely on a diet of subway freeloaders." I found myself vastly entertained, and when he was finished I said that he should try writing novels or short stories. He shook his head slowly and seriously—he was a distinguished-looking man with a well-groomed black mustache, nicely coiffed hair, intelligent gray eyes—and said, "No, I'm afraid not. Those sorts of people deal in fiction, you see," then stood and strode off, to the Forty-Second Street exit, his gait quick and purposeful, as if he had places to go and people to see.

When I drove home after spending the morning with Sarah
Talpey
, I thought about him and his "heavily mutated arachnids," and I wondered if Sarah, too, got a big kick out of the stories she told, and if she believed them, as well. I remember hoping she did because I had grown to like her and I didn't want to believe she was bringing herself unhappiness.

"T
he earth produced us all," she told me. "I believe that, Jack. Do you believe that?"

"Sure," I said, though I had little idea what she was talking about.

"The earth and air and sunlight produced us all," she said. We were walking several hundred feet north of Granada on a narrow path. It was a deer path, she explained; as she talked she kept her hands folded behind her, Robin Graham's brown suede jacket tucked under her arm. She held her head down, wore a little frown. She was a very attractive woman, and I couldn't help looking at her often as she spoke, though she rarely looked at me. I got the idea that she was delivering a monologue. She went on, "The earth and air and sunlight produce all kinds of things, Jack."

"Uh-huh," I said.

She turned her head and gave me a quick, embarrassed grin. "That wasn't awfully profound, was it?"

I said nothing.

She turned back. "It's at the heart of all this, though."

"All this?"

She gestured obliquely with her free arm. "Yes. Granada."

"It is?" I heard the incredulity in my voice.

"Yes—Jack, do you want to know what really happened here? Twenty years ago." She didn't give me a chance to answer; she hurried on, as if in a sudden frenzy, "The earth
reared
up, Jack, and caught those people with their pants down. The
earth
swept them away. The earth produced its own"—she swung her arm wide—"and swept them away.
Swept
them away. Robin Graham, my brother—
all
of them." She paused. Then she whispered, "They were swept away."

"By arms of loving grace," I said.

She looked momentarily confused. "Maybe," she said. "I don't know. Maybe."

"And I don't know what we're talking about, Sarah."

"Arms of loving grace. That's important, Jack."

"Is it?"

She nodded once, earnestly, but said nothing. I asked, "Why is it?"

"Because we all come from the earth, Jack. And we all go back to it. So you see, there's no real difference between us and them."