She wrenched at the wheel. The car veered against the wooded bank; in a spray of snow and shattered twigs it scraped and bucked to a stop. Colleen felt herself thrown forward against the seatbelt and just as abruptly thrown back.
In the sudden quiet, she glanced at her mother. Diane stared at the windshield wipers as they rubbed dry snow, slivers of tree bark and pine needles back and forth; she seemed dazed but unhurt. Colleen turned to peer ahead as someone stumbled up the bank and forced their way into the woods.
"He never even saw us."
She pressed the car horn several times, then pushed the door open and stepped into the stinging wind.
"Hey!" she yelled. "Come back!"
The wind struck her eyes, blinding her. At the edge of the road she called between the trees; it was like shouting down a well. Beneath the creaking boughs, she heard wood snap and footsteps crunch -- the clumsy passage of someone heading northward. She called again, repeatedly, until the noises faded and the snow sifting through pine needles made her think of dust in an empty house.
When she returned to the car, she found her mother peering through the window at the northern sky. There was no expression on her mother's face, only that intense, inexplicable stare.
Colleen watched her for a moment, then turned to face the road ahead, and suddenly found herself trembling. She imagined a call from beyond these hills, spreading out above the world like a silent burst of thunder; whatever it might be, she was deaf to it. Then again, that dream in the kitchen: perhaps that had been a tremor, an echo of the unheard voice.
If this were true, then how far would it spread?
She nodded to herself and gripped the wheel.
"I don't care what you have to say," she whispered, and pressed down on the gas pedal. "We're not going anywhere."
~
The blizzard died by morning, and after a day without daylight, the moon swelled and faded behind racing clouds. Colleen watched from the bedroom window while her mother slept beside her; she had slept throughout the day, linked to her daughter by a length of twine. When she struggled in her sleep with feeble movements, Colleen reached for the twine and held it tight, remembering her own dream of the day before.
With the wood stove in the kitchen just below them, the bedroom was warm. Their food would last for several weeks if they were careful. But afterward...?
Colleen had tried the telephone throughout the night, but it was dead. All she could know of the outside world would have to come from here, this seat by the window, and she spent hours watching moonlight flicker on snow.
Then the people passed by.
At first only one figure waded through the fields, but soon another staggered into view, and then it seemed as if the crowd would never stop flowing northward. From this far away it looked almost unreal, this long, slow march toward extinction.
Her mother moaned and shivered, locked within a dream. Colleen thought of her stumbling out to join that march, and held the twine with a firm grip. She could remember times when she had been afraid of coming home to find her mother dead; it seemed to her a terrible thing, to die alone. For the first time, she wondered if Diane had felt the same dread for her; when she awoke, Colleen would have to ask. Death was too final a truth to disregard until the last moment, and facing the reality of another's death after the fact would be an empty gesture, far too late: one that would deny everything she stood for.
Colleen bent at the window, lifted the sash and leaned out into the night. She took an aching breath of cold air, and shouted, "Over here!"
The dying struggled past her, heading northward.
"Not that way! Over here!"
Somewhere, the door had opened, and the call had spread from the burnt-out sky.
"Wake up! Fight it!"
And when the people were gone, who would remain?
"Listen to me!"
The animals would remain... the animals, and you.
*****
The Weight of Its Awareness
As the decades had gone by, Mikhail had come to doubt the reality of the tall blind houses near the canal. They began to seem like rippled images on dark water, like shadows in a twilit dream: he had been eighteen years old when he had first caught a glimpse of their gables and cupolas high above the concealing stone wall, and at eighteen his mind had been unreliable, haunted by a need for hills beyond the map.
Then one night, when he was fifty-five, he awoke and found himself huddled beneath twisted blankets, far away from dawn. He could hardly breathe: an oppressive weight seemed to bear down upon him, and trapped by his confusion, he felt as if the source of that weight were a pair of eyes, as if the mere act of being seen had crushed his ribcage and squeezed the blood from his heart.
After a moment of panic, the sense of being crushed began to fade. Mikhail sat up, waited for his breathing to grow steady, then tossed aside the covers and rose to his feet. He crossed the bedroom and stood before the window, where the darkness outside matched the darkness within. Tugging the bathrobe tightly around his chest, clenching at the fibrous carpet with his toes, he stared at the long array of lightless windows from the apartment buildings that surrounded his.
Nocturnal paralysis, he told himself. A nightmare.
Yet if he had been the victim of a dream, all he could remember was a glimpse of hard, pitiless eyes... and yes, the gables, the cupolas, the high stone wall.
So many decades had come and gone, so many compromises had worn away his confidence and freedom, since that day when he had wandered along the canal to that vague, far-off place. Since then, he had taken dull flat pathways recommended by businessmen, employers, customers. He had served the hopes and expectations of other people, but never his own. Now he thought of pathways never taken, or of pathways buried under time; he suddenly felt old and withered.
At that moment he resolved to settle once and for all the old mystery, to see if the tall blind houses near the canal had been real. At this point of his life, he very much needed for something to be real.
~
He left his apartment at sunrise on that cool, clear day in autumn, and walked all morning on the low embankment beside the canal. At the edge of town the concrete sidewalk gradually crumbled and became a path of dusty clay, and he followed this route beyond the sagging warehouses, beyond the rusted lines of long-abandoned railways, beyond the weed-choked vacant lots and the long-neglected fields, to meadows where clumps of twisted hawthorn and stands of spreading sumac eventually gave way to a dense forest of pine.
At every gust of wind from the pale blue sky, the pines reached out with brushing needles to block his way, and shivers rippled across the stillness of the black water. But he pulled himself back into the warmth of memory; and very soon, he was eighteen years old again.
~
At eighteen, Mikhail had wandered compulsively, and one spring day he had followed the canal in search of something he could barely define to himself, something driven by the needs of a younger man: not a hillside out of fantasy with broken columns and jeweled idols, not a girl out of daydreams with a sudden, shy smile, but something less tangible: perhaps a reason to live, perhaps hope in a future.
He had followed this dirt pathway until it reached a narrow creek that intersected the canal at a right angle. On the near side of the creek, the clutching pines had given way to a thick, writhing stand of cedars; on the far side loomed a wall of grey stone that formed a high barrier along the creek.
Where the pathway came to an end, black steps glinting with mica led down to a lawn that bordered the creek like a green alley. Mikhail descended the steps to the neatly-cut grass, and walked between shaken cedars on one side and high wall on the other, until wall and forest angled outward to form a small, enclosed park.
Here the creek expanded into a shallow pool, an oval of tourquoise-blue cement. Iridescent squares of indigo, purple, and magenta formed an abstract mosaic that uncoiled on the floor like a jewelled serpent, and led the eye down a narrowing
channel, where the water disappeared into the darkness of a grilled opening in a wall that brought the park to its end.
He stood for a long time in the warm sunlight and the cold silence. No bird, no insect broke the quiet, and the cedars were now as motionless as any group of trees in a photograph. Beyond the canal itself, there seemed to be no exit: the cedars behind him formed a thick hedge, the outlet beside him was barred like an art nouveau cage, the stone wall before him stretched far above his reach. And up there, just beyond a crowning barricade of intensely white marble, rose a line of houses.
Their high projecting gables, lean mansard roofs like squeezed rectangular bells lined with green copper, dark red-shingled cupolas, bristling rows of black iron spikes on blade-sharp ridges, all suggested the Victorian style known as Queen Anne, all suggested concealed dwellers with a taste for chaotic design.
And the dwellers were truly concealed, for at no point on that long array of upper storeys did he notice any windows. There were settings built for windows -- dormers curved and rectangular, gabled and eyebrowed; ornamental wooden panels bordered with black or jade green shutters; blind arcades of polychromatic tiles that formed glittering unicorns and bright, leaping goats; curved, boxlike or canted structures that bulged from high walls like assertive bay windows -- but no glass, no panes through which any dweller could see or be seen.
Compelled by that strangeness, Mikhail tried to gain a better view, but the stone wall seemed impossible to climb without a rope, and the cedars blocked the other way. Instead, he returned to the canal, hoping to find another entrance. But the wall formed a right angle where it met the water, and lined the canal as far as he could see.
With no more pathway to follow, with no obvious way to reach the tall blind houses, the only place left to go had been the route back home.
~
Since then, the years had passed, devoured by work and by all the disappointments born of compromise. The houses had come to seem like a fantasy, like a dream half-recalled.
But now, decades later, here he was on the dusty pathway... and there was the intersecting creek.
Sunlight burned on the slow water. He blocked the glare with a raised hand and saw the grey stone wall on the far side, and just ahead, the black stairway starred with mica, exactly as he had remembered.
He descended to the well-cut lawn, and found himself at the entrance to the shadowed alley between high stone wall and thick mass of cedars. After a few paces, both fell away; the passage widened, and there, up ahead, was the concealed park.
But now the park was different.
It was no longer empty: the lawn was crowded with tightly-grouped sculptures and statues. Some were formed of wrought iron, green or black; others of marble, salmon pink or white; and a few had been daubed with bold reds that gleamed in the angled sunlight of late afternoon.
For a moment he stood in surprise; then he stepped forward and turned to face the nearest group of statues. He peered at this tableau for what seemed a long frozen time, and felt a growing chill that had nothing to do with autumn.
Before him stood a man of white marble. Life-sized and life-like in all its details, it clutched at the air with hands on which every tendon stood out in ridges of extreme pain. Every tendon stood out on its neck as it reared backwards and screamed in silence at the sky. Its body was contorted with agony, surrounded and pressed in from all sides by three distorted creatures of black wrought iron: diseased unicorns the size of Clydesdales, emaciated, skeletal at many points, yet with slabs of muscle that bulged in brutal exertion as they crushed the man between their shoulders and chests, muscles that clenched like tree roots on their straining necks as they reached down with black teeth to tear at the screaming face.
Appalled, Mikhail turned away, and noticed that the pool was also different. The iridescent mosaic was gone, replaced by a sculpted representation of an undersea floor. In the clear, shallow water, a thick mass of weeds like dark green spears tipped with red lined the bottom of the pool, and partially entangled, partially concealed, lay the supine body of a dead man. Only the arched torso could be seen; that, and the lower part of the head, with its gaping mouth. The pale stone of the corpse had a vaguely greenish hue, a sickly green that looked too convincingly realistic -- as realistic as the long jade form of a sea serpent, coiled in a choking circle around the corpse, and lurking in the weeds for another victim. From its head extended a long, backwards-leaning spike or spine, poisonously red and obviously deadly; its one visible eye peered up through the water with calm reptilian patience -- directly, it seemed, at Mikhail.
The water trembled with sudden ripples: the wind seemed sharper, now, and much more cold.
He turned away, and nearly stumbled into the next tableau. Lean goatish figures of pale stone, tall as human beings and equally bipedal, with insane eyes rolled upwards in each socket, with yellow teeth gaping and shallow jaws red with slick paint, they crouched, lunged at each other with lowered horns or cloven hooves, fought with each other to grab a torn, flayed bundle that one of the creatures hugged to itself possessively with snarling greed: the mutilated body of a human child.
Mikhail hunched himself against the sight and turned away, but every space to right or left confronted him with some new atrocity in stone. And so he peered up instead at the crazed high rooftops of the partially concealed houses; he looked up and saw that every house had windows: from every gable and dormer, black panes glinted like the eyes of a waiting spider.
And then the wind faltered, and gave way to a throbbing silence.
In one angular bay window high above, a casement swung open.
From the darkness within, a head pivotted and squeezed itself into the daylight. Impossibly huge, lean and hairless, it revealed a pair of hard eyes that narrowed at the sight of him, and then glared down with a solar intensity.
Without sound, without words, in a shattering voice that went right to the skull, it spoke to him:
I know you.
I know exactly what you fear.
~
At the ragged limits of the pine forest, Mikhail stopped running, clutched at his ribcage and struggled to breathe. Then he trudged between the wild meadows and the dark canal until he no longer felt the need to gasp for air, until his mind began to function again and the sumacs and hawthorns, the pale autumn grass, the slanting daylight began to seem real.
Yet reality was tainted by the impossible memory of that face, by the spreading cancer of that image in his mind. Trees and grass, dark water and pale blue sky, none of it seemed to matter any more.
"How do I get this out of my head?" he thought, but no matter how far he travelled that day, no matter how dazzling the low sun, how sharp the cold air, he could never shake off the sense of crushing weight within his mind.
~
That night he dreamt of something in a high narrow house. It knew him. It had watched him from the darkness at the moment of his birth, it would watch him from the darkness at the moment of his death.
It knew exactly what he feared.
In the dream, it erupted from the window, spread itself across the sky below the moon, and cast its midnight shadow on the land. It rushed onward like a storm, seeking one particular mind; and then, from the distance of the night, it sensed him: a small thing, a trembling reed before the weight of its awareness.
It lunged at his window, directly at his window.
Mikhail shook himself awake and found himself huddled beneath twisted blankets, far away from dawn. He looked up at his bedroom window, where the darkness outside matched the darkness within.
Clutching at the blankets, he stared into the blackness until the window burst open.
*****
The Vast Impatience Of The Night
In the season of dead weather between the last dry leaf and the first hard frost, on a clear day of cold skies, Janet Richardson found herself enacting the same old rituals in a farmhouse parlour full of widows.
She had been there since morning,
after the ambulance had taken Ryan Lindstrom. His wife Rita still remained upstairs, in a closed-off bedroom, and the widows helped as much as they could while their neighbour mourned in drawn-curtain darkness.
Downstairs, with a mug of cold coffee in one hand, a pencil stub in the other, Janet copied telephone numbers from a well-thumbed notepad.
She held up a scrap of paper, and called out, "There's a daughter in Ottawa. Can somebody phone her?"
Mrs. Beacon in the corner nodded yes.
Other widows called out requests of their own: "Can somebody get the horses in before dark? Do the horses get oats, or hay? Has anyone heard from that sister in Montreal? Can somebody stay the night? -- I have to get home, my daughters need supper."
Then Janet glanced up at the pale blue sky beyond the white lace curtains, and realized that she, too, would have to leave.
In the front hallway, she met Annie Seidel coming in from the barn.
"It's freezing out there," said Annie; her fogged-up glasses and red face offered proof. "It's more like winter than fall. Will you be warm enough?"
"I'll be dressed for winter. You have to be, this time of year, when you ride a bike."
Annie wiped her nose and smiled. "Yes, from my kitchen window, I've seen you going past in the evenings. You looked like the ski patrol on wheels. I remember telling Bry--"
She caught herself, gazed up at Janet with apologetic frankness; but Janet replied with a gentle smile and a reassuring touch on the arm.
"It's all right," she said. Then she glanced toward the darkened stairwell just beyond the hallway. "But it's going to be hard on Rita. She'll need a lot of time."
Annie nodded, with a distant look on her face. "You know..." she said, "You know, I always thought I'd miss Piter at night. But no. It's in the morning, at breakfast. It's when I pick up the coffee pot."
With a rueful smile, she turned her eyes to Janet. "I used to fill the pot all the way, but now I never do. There's only me. I'm the only one left."