I went outside. It was early in the morning. The kids were just filing over the front yard and into school. The sun was dodging the big clouds of November that surged over it and passed away again in the chilly wind. The wind also made the dying leaves fall and the fallen leaves whirl above the ground.
I stood for a moment and watched the traffic passing on the main road. I could sense the glares I was getting from the kids passing on every side of me. I had that nervous, excited feeling I get when I know I am in hostile territory.
And then the traffic disappeared from in front of me. In front of me there was nothing but the color blue. I stepped back. The blue was the blue of a school jacket. There was an orange G sewn on its breast. A very large young man was inside the jacket. Two other very large young men were in similar jackets behind him.
The large young man who had stepped in front of me was a trim broad-shouldered giant with a clean-cut handsome face, trim black hair, and a few pimples on his chin.
He said, “You’re that reporter.”
I nodded.
“I think what you wrote about Michelle Thayer stinks,” he said. “I’d like to bash your fucking head in.”
“The story was rewritten by my editor, Robert Cambridge,” I said. I gave him Cambridge’s home address.
“If you weren’t such an old fuck, I would bash your head in.”
“C-A-M-B-R-I-D-G-E,” I said.
“Go ahead,” said one of the large young men behind the large young man. “Go ahead, bash his fucking head in.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. It was beginning to become a leitmotif. What’s more, the students who had been moving toward the door had now stopped to watch. I could see them out of the corner of my eye. They were inching toward us. The expression on each of their faces was the same: an expression of grim approval. Justice, they figured, was about to be done.
As the kids began to gather, the large young man who had stepped in front of me began to gather courage. He hadn’t really meant to bash my head in when he started. But now—with all those grimly approving faces around—the idea was sounding better and better to him all the time.
“Listen—” I said.
But I wasn’t having much luck with that argument today. The large young man shot his right arm out. He hit me in the left shoulder with the heel of his palm. I let out a breath and took a step backward. The students all around us stirred with excitement and approval.
“Shut up,” the large young man told me.
This seemed to me to be getting out of hand. I tried a new argument.
“Lookit—”
“I said shut up.”
The large young man shot his arm out at my shoulder again. I knew he was going to do this: He did not strike me as endlessly creative. So when he shot his arm out at my collar again, I dropped back on my heel and pivoted down and away. His hand flew over my collar. He was off balance. He came forward a step. I straightened and put my hand on his collar gently. I put my hand on his collar, and my thumb on his throat. I did not press my thumb into his throat. I hardly touched it at all. I didn’t have to. I could see in the sudden, fearful widening of his eyes that he got the message.
He straightened up. I kept my hand on his collar. I took my thumb off his throat. I grinned.
“My friend,” I said between my teeth. He nodded, his eyes still wide. I went on, softly, so those around us would not hear. “My friend, I have lived quite a while,” I said, “and several people have tried to kill me. Some of them killed people for a living. But I am still here. Consider this.”
He did. I watched him consider it while we stood there together, he staring past me with his wide eyes, me with my hand on his collar, fatherly. He considered this, and I think the idea of bashing my face in began to lose its appeal.
His eyes refocused on me. “Why don’t … why don’t you just … why don’t you just, I mean, get out of here,” he said. “Okay?”
I took back my hand. I shrugged. “Sure,” I said.
He motioned with his head at the two large young men behind him. The three of them strode past me toward the school. One of them bumped into me as he passed.
I sighed. All around me I sensed an answering sigh. The students were breaking it up, moving away. They did not know whether to be sorry or relieved that it had come to nothing. I, for one, was relieved.
I’d parked the Artful Dodge on the street. I walked down the high school path toward it. I had reached the sidewalk before I felt someone grab my arm at the elbow. I was annoyed.
“Aw, come on, man,” I said, turning. “Get smart.”
But it was not the large young man. It was another young man: a thin, almost anemic creature, maybe sixteen, with wide, riveting brown eyes in a long, white face. He was dressed in a black shirt and black jeans. His black hair was cut to the nub. He kept his hand on my elbow. He kept his eyes on my eyes.
The minute I saw him something went through me, something chill and electric. It snaked quickly up my spine. It blossomed in my brow and vanished. It was something very much like fear.
“At the corner of Farm-to-Market and Bullethole Road …” he said.
His voice was nearly a whisper. It had no substance at all. I did not like the sound of his voice.
“Walk northeast into the woods, up the hill. There’s a root cellar there. At five o’clock.”
I stared at him. I didn’t answer. He studied me with wild eyes.
“All right?” he said. “All right?”
“Secret meetings are my life,” I said.
“Just be there, all right?”
“All right.”
“Because she was, you know.” He said it urgently. His eyes would not let me go. “She was.”
“Was what?” I said.
“Murdered.”
He finally released me.
“Oh,” I said.
And he turned and walked away.
19 At four-thirty I was there. The corner of Farm-to-Market and Bullethole Road was a desolate spot. It was the crossing of two lonesome roads: two roads that dipped and lifted through hills of trees and vanished into the horizons on every side. I parked the car, got out and stood beside it. I peered into the woods. Northeast, he’d said.
The sun had just dropped below the horizon. The light was fading on the naked trees. During the brief time I had been in the city, autumn had crossed the line. The trees that had been full of color were bare or in the rags of that color now. Their branches swayed in the wind of the gloaming. The woods seemed very dark and very bleak.
I started walking. There wasn’t much of a path. The woods rose up around me in a steep hill. I was out of breath quickly. I kept lifting my eyes from the humus beneath my shoes to the deepening forest dark around me. I couldn’t see the root cellar. I couldn’t see much of anything. The moon had not yet risen into the intermittent clouds.
I climbed some more. The dead leaves crunched beneath my feet. The sound of my breath overwhelmed them. I cursed the day I started smoking. The hill’s peak loomed above me: hulking trees silhouetted on the purple sky.
Then I was among those trees. I pushed the branches from my face. I crested the hill. There was the moon, low on the slope of the next hill over. A full moon. I saw the root cellar in its silver light. I saw the young man.
His face was chalk white in the new moonlight. His black clothes blended into the forest dark. I remembered the sight of Death by the stone wall outside of the Thayer house. And I felt that shiver once again.
The root cellar was just an old domed structure of stone, of one stone piled on another. He stood beside it, leaning against it with his elbow, like a man showing off his new house in a snapshot. I went down the hill toward him.
He didn’t move as I approached. He stood there. He stared. It was the same when I was face to face with him. It kind of unnerved me. I took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it. I hid behind the match flame. I shook out the match and blew smoke into the air. I hid behind the smo
ke.
“All right,” I said. “You’re sylvan and mysterious. I’m John Wells.”
Weird as he was, he smiled. He inclined his head. He spoke again in that eerie whisper. “Chris Thomas,” was all he said.
“Okay, Chris. Let’s have it.”
I saw his eyes glitter. He found the whole thing exciting. “She used to come here … to the cellar,” he said.
“Michelle Thayer.”
“Yes. She used to come here to be with me.”
I glanced from him to the little domed hut. “That’s where she went after school, you mean.”
He paused. He gave a single, abrupt nod. “Yes.”
“She was—”
“Well, sometimes.”
“Okay, she came here sometimes. She was your girlfriend.”
He laughed. I couldn’t see his face much anymore, just the white sheen of it in the moon. It seemed a floating haze above his black clothes. He laughed and said: “No. Not really. I mean … well … I loved her. But … not really.” He turned away from me. Even in the dark it was a bashful gesture. He stepped around the corner of the cellar, out of my sight. I followed him. He was gone. There was a low arched doorway into the cellar. I ducked under the lintel stone and went in.
Now I could not see him. Now, in fact, I couldn’t see anything. Nothing but the moon through the arch of the doorway and the standing, wavering trees outside. Nothing but the tip of my cigarette as it glowed on a breath before me.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re invisible now. Tell me.”
“We didn’t come here to … We came here to talk.”
“You weren’t lovers?”
I sensed his shudder in the dark. “I loved her, but she …”
I waited. “Loved someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Death.”
I followed the sound of his voice and grabbed him. He cried out. I took hold of his lapel and twisted him around into the moonlit doorway.
“Enough of this,” I said. “Let me see your face. Was it you? Out in the caves? Death in the woods. All that? Was it you?”
For a moment there was nothing but his heavy breathing. I released my hold on him. He sagged against the doorway. I tossed my cigarette to the ground and crushed it under my feet. He was the second kid I’d roughed up today. I was a very proud man.
I raised my face to him. “Was it you?” I said more gently.
“No. It was Death. She loved Death. That’s why she went to that place. That’s why she worked at that place all the time.”
“What place?”
“The hotline. Where the people called. She wanted to hear them talk about it.”
“A phone hotline.”
“Yes.”
“For what? For the suicidal?”
“Yes.”
“There is none in this area. I checked.”
“It was over the line.”
“The line?” I hadn’t thought of that. “In Connecticut?”
He nodded. “Brentford. She took a bus there. Once a week. That’s where she went. She never told anyone.”
“She told you.”
He straightened. “She told me everything,” he said proudly.
I sighed. I reached out and patted his shoulder with my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He spoke unsurely. “Something’s … wrong with you, isn’t it? You’re mad—pissed.…”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“Because she was murdered.”
“Maybe. If she was. Maybe that’s part of it.”
He hesitated. He considered, I think, whether to speak. Then he said: “The rest of them don’t understand. You understand, don’t you? About Death, about loving Death?”
I didn’t answer. “It’s almost dinnertime,” I said. “Let me drive you home.”
I saw him tremble in the darkness, like a deer. He shook his head. Then he turned around, and before I could reach for him again, he was loping away into the night.
20 I drove back to town. I stopped off in a convenience store and dialed Connecticut information. I got the number for the hotline and called. The line was busy. I had a cup of coffee and tried again. The line was still busy. I smoked a cigarette out in the parking lot. I tried again. Busy. I called information to see if the hotline’s address was listed. It was. It was in the Church of St. Andrew, on Briar Road. I climbed back into the Artful Dodge.
The road to Connecticut wound through the woods—like most of the roads around here, it seemed. The night mist was now curling out of the forests, curling up to the edges of the pavement, lying across the pavement in a thin sheet. It glowed in my headlights.
It seemed I drove for a long time. Anything can be a long time on those roads. They twist and turn, but they never change. The trees and the darkness haunt them. You can go for miles without seeing a light—even a stoplight—even a house set back in the woods. If you think you’re lost, if you think you might run out of gas, if your car breaks down, you feel like you’re a hundred miles away from anywhere. But if you stand very still in the night and listen, you will hear the whisper of other cars on other roads nearby, twisting and turning through the woods that never change.
I saw a small sign welcoming me across the border. That was the only difference between one state and another.
Brentford is a fairly large little city. Maybe fifty thousand souls. I never got to the center of it, though. I was in the outskirts, among large houses on even larger tracts of land, when I found the Brentford R.C. Church of St. Andrew.
It was an old, crumbling structure set on top of a rocky hill. It looked deserted. Its boards, once white, were brown. They sagged. Its steeple was chipped, so you could see the rafters. There were no lights inside, just the moon’s strange glow on the rose window above the front door. The church squatted above me as I came up its winding drive.
There were no other cars parked at the top. I was sure I was in the wrong place. After I had stepped into the chill night, after the car door had thudded shut behind me, the silence seemed to creep out of the dark to surround the place like the Indians in an old cowboy film. I walked over a path of pebbled gravel to the decrepit church. I went up the stairs and stood before two large, brass-studded wooden doors. I touched the wood. The door swung in, creaking loudly. I nearly laughed at the horror-movie sound effect. Nearly. I stepped inside. The door creaked and swung back in.
The air was filled with a musty smell of candles and decay. I was in the dark. Almost the dark. On the walls at either side of me, peaked, stained-glass windows glowed with the moon. I could make out the ghostly blue shadow of St. Andrew, his head flung back, his mouth jacked wide in agony, his hands and feet nailed to his X-shaped cross. I could make out the somber kings—red and white and yellow—bringing gifts to Bethlehem. I could make out the raging scarlet angel blowing the last trump. I thought I saw the eyes of the devil burning silver with the moon.
I called out: “Hello.”
No one answered. I shuffled forward a little. A little more. I listened. I thought I heard faint voices in the empty room. I never have liked churches. They give me the willies.
My eyes were adjusting now to the dark. I could make out the shapes of the pews. There weren’t many. Most of the places where they had been seemed stripped bare. In another moment I saw the altar. I saw the crucified Christ gleaming faintly on the wall above it. Some sort of complex wooden altarpiece seemed to be hanging atilt next to it. It seemed to have fallen into disrepair.
I scanned the room slowly. I saw a movement to the left of the altar. Curtains, I thought, stirring in the night air. Behind them I caught a glimpse of an even deeper darkness. I shuffled forward down the aisle.
The voices in the emptiness around me grew louder. Low, murmuring voices. I reached the curtain and pulled it back. I walked into the darkness behind.
There was a hallway. I couldn’t see much of it. I came forward with my hand against a wall. My fingers touched a m
etal door. I stood and listened. The voices were coming from behind it.
I opened the door. Black, it was utterly black in there. Then I made out stairs, rickety stairs leading downward. I hate churches. I always have.
I went down the stairs. The murmuring voices got louder. My feet touched down on stone. I was in the cellar of the place. I was disoriented by the completeness of the dark.
I called out: “Hello!”
The light flashed out at me. It hit me like the edge of a sword. I was blinded. I put my hand up before my eyes.
“Yes?”
It was a woman’s voice. I saw her silhouette in the doorway that had just opened in front of me. For a long moment the blinding light kept me from seeing anything else. Squinting, my hand still raised as a shield, I came forward.
“Yuh—yes …” She stammered this time, uncertain, and something about her voice made me pause. It was familiar to me. It seemed to have spoken out of the memories of the night before. Now, standing there, surprised and still, I heard her slight intake of breath: a startled sound, a sound of recognition.
I came forward. I saw the room behind her. A desk. Figures in there, hunched over the phones. Then she stepped back from me, unsteadily. She nearly staggered back and, as she did, the light came down across her face.
I stopped in my tracks. I lowered my hand.
“I know you,” I said.
She answered quietly, but her face was pale: “Yes, John.”
“Chandler Burke,” I said.
And she answered: “Yes.”
21 She was wearing a simple, tan skirt and a prim, high-collared blouse of white lace. She wasn’t a beautiful woman. She never had been. Her face was too pale, and her pale eyes were saggy and sad. Her hair was a lackluster brown. It framed her cheeks shapelessly. There was now, too, a spinsterly tightness to her thin, white lips, a nervous shifting of her eyes, quick, stealthy gestures of her slender hands that I’d never seen before. Her figure, though, remained nearly as it was: full and soft. It seemed it would be warm to the touch.
I’d known her only briefly, and that almost eighteen years ago.
She’d worked in White Plains then. She was a social worker, a counselor at a clinic for substance abusers. I’d worked with her when I did a story on heroin addiction. She’d given me a guided tour of the city’s shooting galleries and hit joints. I remember her soft, nervous, girlish voice describing the horrors there.