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Where in the city Mother had had little time for us, now at Cross Hill, these interminable summer days, where the pale-glowering sun seemed to drag through the sky, and the minute hands of those clocks that functioned seemed sometimes to inch backward, she had too much time. Though Father rose at dawn to resume work on his case, Mother rose late; as late as possible, for she dreaded another day in exile; she bathed in a few grudging inches of rust-flecked lukewarm water in a stained antique tub; she made up her elaborate mask of a face, and tried to do something with her hair; drifted about the house like a ghost in her now rumpled, soiled city clothes, as if waiting for a friend to pick her up to drive her to lunch at the country club or the newest fashionable restaurant.
Is Mother drinking today? Poor Mother
. She grew suspicious, even jealous, of Rosalind, who was growing by swift degrees into a beautiful, physically capable and alert girl, with long wavy-curly red-blond hair bleached by the sun; she was forever interrogating Stephen and Graeme, convinced that they were sneaking away at every opportunity to Contracoeur, or beyond. She assigned chores to her elder children but rarely oversaw them. Where once she’d focused attention on the twins, dressing them with obsessive care as “the last of our babies,” now she seemed frankly bored by them, depending upon kindly Mrs. Dulne to take care of them and listen to their anxious, incessant chatter. Little Neale, a bright, articulate child who in the city had been charmingly outspoken, had become morbidly nervous in the country; he flinched and cringed at shadows, even his own; he was forever tugging at Mother’s arm in the way of a much younger child, pleading and whimpering. “It’s in here, it comes in here when we’re not looking and it hides and if you turn on the light it turns into a shadow, if you turn around it turns around with you so
you never see it
—” Neale rambled about someone, or something, he was convinced inhabited Cross Hill with us. Mother laughed irritably, saying, “I don’t have time for childish games. I can’t be ‘Mother’ twenty-four hours a day!” Little Ellen, a mirror-image of her brother, though slightly smaller, with wide, ingenuous brown eyes and a habit of sucking at her fingers, believed, too, that someone, or something, lived at Cross Hill with them, except it was invisible during the day. Rarely did Ellen sleep through the night; the poor child whimpered and thrashed in her bed, but Mother refused to allow her to sleep with a lamp burning for not only would it disturb Rosalind, with whom Ellen shared a room on the second floor, but there would be a risk in calling attention to ourselves in the dark—“You can see Cross Hill for miles. We’d be lighting a path to our very beds.”

One day, Ellen was whimpering, tears rolled down her flushed cheeks, and Mother, exasperated, knelt before her, gripped her thin shoulders tight and shook her gently—“Darling, please don’t cry! There aren’t tears enough for us all.”

Mother was made especially agitated by the
Contracoeur Valley Weekly
, which Father forbade us, and her, to read, but which Mrs. Dulne smuggled into Cross Hill at Mother’s request. Most of the newspaper was devoted to ordinary, domestic news; but the front page had been taken over in recent weeks by ever more disturbing headlines—

6
-YEAR-OLD GIRL MISSING, MARSH SEARCHED—GIRL,
17,
FOUND MUTILATED AND STRANGLED IN EMPTY GRANARY—CORPSE OF
19-
YEAR-OLD MAN DISCOVERED IN ARSON FIRE
. Local law enforcement officers were investigating these crimes, and others that may have been related; several suspects were in custody; fascinated and horrified, Mother read through the paper with unwavering concentration, telling us afterward in a faint, thrilled voice, “Now, you see why your father and I don’t want you children to go alone into town? Why you mustn’t leave Cross Hill at any time, except with us?”

As if our parents left Cross Hill often: never more than once or twice a week. A five-mile journey to Contracoeur! Where, if we were lucky, we might be allowed to accompany Mother, for instance, into the A & P to shop for food specials, or into the ill-smelling drugstore where we were regarded with rude, curious stares, or into Sears or Kmart. We Mathesons, who’d never set foot into such dreary places in our lives until now. Stephen scorned these meager outings, but Graeme and Rosalind, eager for a change of scene, usually went along. They were warned against wandering off—mingling with strangers—but of course they did, as soon as Mother’s attention was elsewhere. And they begged, and were grudgingly allowed, to spend some time in the small public library. There, while Graeme avidly browsed bookshelves in the science and mathematics sections, Rosalind, starving for companionship, shyly approached girls her age; daring to introduce herself; explaining that she and her family were new to the area, living at Cross Hill. The Contracoeur girls stared at her in amazement. One of them, with bold crimson lips, toughly attractive, said, “You live at Cross Hill? Nobody lives there.”

Midsummer. The warmly sulfurous air, blowing southward from Lake Noir, brought poor Mother migraine headaches of increasing severity.

Midsummer. A throbbing-shrieking of cicadas in the trees, as temperatures rose into the nineties, drew poor Mother’s nerves taut as wire.

And there were false sounds, as Mother came to call them—“cruel false sounds"—high-pitched vibrations, muffled voices and laughter in distant rooms at Cross Hill; a ringing telephone where there could be neither ringing nor a telephone.
Veronica? Ver-on-ica?
One parched afternoon in late July there came, bouncing along the rutted lane, an elegant silvery-green Mercedes that faded as it drew up the circular drive before the house; throwing poor Mother into a frenzy of excitement and panic, for she believed it must be her closest woman friend, from whom she hadn’t heard in months, coming to pick her up for a country club luncheon—“And I’m not dressed. I’m not bathed. And look at my hair!”

Mother was so distraught, Mrs. Dulne had to catch her, and hold her in a comforting embrace.

There was no Mercedes at the front of the house, nor had there been any Mercedes in the drive. Yet Graeme stubbornly insisted he’d seen it, too. He’d seen something, silvery-green, erratic in motion, shaped like a car, disappearing by quick degrees as it approached the house.

Poor Mother. After the false alarm of her friend in the Mercedes, she was ill, exhausted, for several days. Then rising from her bed abruptly and filled with energy when Father informed her that important visitors were expected at Cross Hill in a week’s time to confer with him about re-presenting his case to the state attorney general. (He’d accumulated new data, new evidence, Father said. Proof that his key informers had perjured themselves in court. Proof that the original indictments brought against him, by a biased grand jury, had been fraudulent from the start.) Mother cried, “We can’t let them see these shameful rooms! We must do something.” Of course she would have wished to redecorate those downstairs rooms that were in use—but there wasn’t the money. Instead, her hair tied back gaily in a scarf, in loose-fitting cotton slacks and an old shirt of Stephen’s, Mother led a housecleaning team of Mrs. Dulne and the children through several rooms; concentrating, for practical purposes, on the glass-enclosed breakfast room overlooking Crescent Pond where Father intended to meet with his colleagues. None of us had seen Mother so girlish and enthusiastic in months—in years! Her eyes, though slightly bloodshot, shone. Her complexion, beneath the caked makeup, was fresh, glowing. Within two days, the filth-encrusted lattice windows of the breakfast room were scrubbed so that sunlight rayed through unimpeded; the parquet floor, long layered in grime, was partway cleaned and polished; the long antique cherrywood table was polished, and ten handsome chairs, not precisely matching, but in good condition, were set about it. The aged, rotted silk curtains were removed, and Mother and Mrs. Dulne, a skilled seamstress, cleverly refashioned newer curtains from another part of the house, a bright cheerful chintz, to hang in their place. When Father saw what Mother and the rest of us had accomplished, he stared in genuine surprise and gratitude. Tears welled in his eyes. “Veronica, how can I thank you? All of you—you’ve worked magic.” In boyish delight, he snatched up Mother’s hands to kiss them; hesitating only for an instant when he saw how white they were, how thin and puckered, like an elderly woman’s, from hours of scrubbing in detergent water.

“Do you love me, then, Roderick?” Mother asked anxiously, in a way mortifying to her children to witness. “Am I a good wife to you, despite all?”

But, poor Mother!—within days, all her labor was undone.

Somehow, particles of dust, dirt, outright grime shifted back into the corners of the breakfast room. A sour odor prevailed of decaying matter. Wild birds, seduced by the cleaned windowpanes into imagining there were no glass barriers, flew into the windows, breaking their necks; in melancholy feather-heaps, they lay on the floor. Rain, blown through the broken windowpanes, had stained and warped the parquet; soaked and stained the chairs’ cushioned seats. Even the bright chintz curtains were frayed and grimy as if they’d been hanging there for years. Mother rushed about, tearing at her hair, crying, “But—what has happened? Who has done this?
Who could be so cruel?”
We children too were shocked and dismayed; ten-year-old Neale and Ellen huddled together in terror, convinced that the thing that dwelled in the house with us, invisible, that shifted out of sight when you whirled to see it, had committed this malicious damage. Rosalind was hurt and angry, for she’d worked damned hard; she’d been proud of her effort, helping Mother in good cause. Stephen was silent, thoughtful, gnawing at his lower lip as if he was making a decision. Graeme, his pinched, peevish face smirking in a pretense of satisfaction, said, “Mother, it’s the fate of the material universe—to run down, out. Did you think we were special?”

Mother turned upon him and screamed, “I hate you! All of you!” But it was only Graeme she struck, cutting his cheek below his left eye with the sharp edge of her emerald ring.

Mother then staggered and fell. Her eyes swooned back into her head. Her body struck the grimy floor softly, like a cloth bundle that has been tossed negligently down. We children seemed to know, staring at the stricken woman in horror, that Mother would never again be the person she’d been.

7. Victims

Locally, opinion was divided: the marauding killer was a black bear, crazed by having tasted human blood; or, the killer was a human being, himself crazed, simulating the behavior of an aberrant bear.

There was another victim, in late July: an eleven-year-old girl discovered strangled and battered in a desolate wooded area near the village of Lake Noir. And, in early August, a seventeen-year-old boy killed by severe blows to the head, face torn partly away, found at the edge of a cemetery in Contracoeur. Shivering, Mother merely glanced at the newspaper with its lurid headlines—“It’s just the same thing over and over. Like the weather.” Nor did she show much surprise or interest when, one morning, the local sheriff and two deputies arrived to question us, informally; as, they explained, they were questioning everyone in the area. These men spent most of their time with Father, who impressed them with his intelligence and soft-spoken civility. They must have known something of Roderick Matheson’s professional difficulties, yet still they called him “Judge,” “Your Honor,” and “sir” respectfully; for the state capital was nearly three hundred miles away, and scandals and power struggles there were of little interest in Contracoeur.

On his side, Father was gracious to the police. They had no search warrant, but he gave them permission to search the property outside the house. All of us, even Mother and the twins, who’d been anxiously fretting since the arrival of the police cars, watched from upstairs windows. With the air of one asking an unanswerable question, Mother said, “What do they expect to find? Those poor fools,” and Father said, with a trace of a smile, “Well, let them look. It’s in my interest to be a good citizen. And then they needn’t return, and trouble us ever again.”

8. Second Sighting: The Thing-Without-a-Face

What have I lost: my usemame, my password, my soul
.

Where must I flee: not IRL. There is none

This would be Graeme’s farewell note, first typed out on his faulty computer, where the words jammed into solid blocks of gibberish, letters, numerals and computer hieroglyphics; then written out, in inch-high headline-letters, with such anger that the point of Graeme’s marker pen tore the surface of the paper.

He’d ceased thinking of himself as Graeme Matheson. Both his names had become repugnant to him. “Graeme"-the name
given
, as a gift he’d had no choice but to receive. “Matheson"—the name
inherited
, as a fate he’d had no choice but to receive.

The family believed he’d changed, become brooding, ever more silent and withdrawn, since Mother had slapped him in so public and humiliating a way; since his face, young, stricken, astonished, had bled; since the thin, jagged wound had coagulated into a zipper-like scratch that seemed, so strangely, so perversely, always fresh. (Did Graeme pick at it to assure its freshness? If so, he might have picked at it unconsciously, or in one of his meager, fitful bouts of sleep.) In fact, only Graeme knew that the cause went deeper.

For in the Contracoeur Public Library he’d discovered, in a section tided “Contracoeur Valley History,” several aged, leather-bound books whose covers hadn’t been opened in decades, and out of curiosity he’d read of the renowned Moses Adams Matheson, the “textile manufacturer—wilderness conservationist” who’d constructed Cross Hill, one of the “distinguished architectural landmarks of the region;” he’d been intrigued to learn that his great-grandfather had crossed the Atlantic Ocean steerage class from Liverpool, England, unaccompanied by any adult, at the age of twelve, in 1873; that he’d been an apprentice to a shipbuilder in Marblehead, Massachusetts, but soon left for upstate New York, where, in Winterthurn City, he built the first of several Matheson textile mills on the Winterhurn River; within a decade, he’d become a wealthy man; by the turn of the century a multimillionaire, in the era in which such aggressive capitalists as J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Edward Harriman and Andrew Carnegie made their enormous fortunes through monopolies and trusts; and through the systematic exploitation of unorganized, largely immigrant labor. Moses Adams Matheson was never so rich as these men, nor so notorious; yet, Graeme gathered from his rapid skimming of these texts, his great-grandfather had cruelly exploited his workers; women, young girls, even children had been employed in his mills for as little as $2.50 a week; many of his workers were younger than twelve, and girls as young as six and seven worked thirteen hours a day. Aloud Graeme whispered, “Thirteen hours!” He had never worked at any prolonged task until the folly of the breakfast room, under Mother’s guidance; at that, he hadn’t worked longer than two hours at a time, and his effort had hardly been uniformly concentrated. He could not imagine working for—thirteen hours! As a young child in clamorous, stifling-hot or freezing conditions.