More Than You Know (18 page)

on a rock; we didn’t see what it was, just a flurry of motion and a

scratching of claws on rock as it vanished among the foundation

blocks. I stepped up onto a square-cut chunk of granite so I could see

the water better.

“Careful.”

“I’m okay. It’s solid.”

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Conary put a hand out to steady me. Then he stepped up to join

me. We stood in happy silence looking at the blue of the bay. It was

lovely. The sky to the south was cloudless now, and the air around us

was still, except for a lazy summer hum of insects. On this side of the

house were more fruit trees, maybe pear. We happened to look at each

other at the same moment, so at peace and delighted that we glowed

with it, and Conary, very delicately, leaned toward me and kissed me.

He can’t have meant to do it. But once it happened, the power

of it, a mere brush of lips like a moth wing, stunned me so that for a

minute or two I couldn’t look at him. I turned and stood looking at

the sea, afraid that if I met his eyes I’d start to blither. The sea lay,

serene and green-black, with light glittering on the moving wrinkles

of its surface. Tall pines between me and the shore cast triangular

shadows, and I looked at them with a sense that the geometry of the

world had just been altered forever.

When I turned back to him, Conary, probably quite as overcome

with shyness as I was, was making a sextant with his hands, calculat-

ing the size of the house that had stood in this place. I looked into the

hole that had been the cellar and followed with my eyes the line of

granite that traced out the foundation.

I said, “What I can’t decide is, whether our couch will fit be-

tween the picture windows.”

“If it doesn’t,” said Conary, “we’ll cut the arms off.”

“Can I have a porch swing?”

“I promised you a porch swing.”

“So you did.”

I walked, arms outstretched for balance, away from him along

the foundation wall. I suddenly understood what people mean when

they say that their hearts sing.

The foundation blocks were jumbled one against another and

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looked unsteady, but I tested each one before shifting my weight onto

it. Conary, lithe and steady as a cat, came right along after me.

“Here,” I said. “I want the swing right here, so I can look out

to sea, or down into the garden.” And I looked down into where we’d

said the garden would have been, and there, standing patiently, watch-

ing us, was that unearthly black figure I’d seen in the schoolhouse

hall, with the gruesome burning eyes.

I made a noise, but it wasn’t a scream. I didn’t have that much

control of my faculties. How long had it been there? It was not thirty

feet away from us, and it was studying us, preying on us. I knew this,

yet I still could not clearly see its features. It was as if it were much

farther away from us than the tree it was standing under.

One thing was clear: Conary saw it too. I heard him make a

noise in his throat and he touched my arm. We couldn’t take our

eyes from that face, with its awful eyes that seemed to pin us

against some invisible wall. Conary took a step backward, and I

moved with him, terrified of slipping or falling into the hole, but

even more afraid of staying where I was. Without seeming to move,

the thing stayed with us.

We backed away, but it stayed the same distance from us, as if

it and we were linked together and all moving on another plane. This

was so awful that we stopped again. It held out its arms to us, and

then began to shudder . . . and then the noise began, the noise we’d

both heard before in the schoolhouse on the main. The weeping.

Now when it moved it drew nearer. I tried to back away and

found
I
could not move. I could not. It was walking toward us, but

not exactly on the ground. It was moving on a level with us as if the

ground it was walking came up to the top of the foundation wall, as

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indeed it may once have done. The weeping was terrible. It had an

awful angry timbre, and it wouldn’t stop that keening. It gave off a

smell, like the earthen floor of a root cellar.

It was only about ten feet from us now, and the sobs could

have been coming from our own throats. I’m not sure that they were

not. It was as if its grief here was so great that it made new rules.

It seemed to have gotten into
my
heart and chest, and I felt rooted

in horror to the rock where I stood. Sometimes in church when you

sing or pray, all the voices vibrate together and seem to come from

your own being . . .
Almighty and most merciful Father . . . We have

erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. . . . We have fol-

lowed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. . . . And

there is no health in us . . .

I was crying. It was close enough to reach its hand to me (or

someone it saw where I was standing). I could see its weird light eyes

with no pupils. It was repulsive, reaching out for us yet not really

seeing us, lost in a dream of its own desires.

Conary pushed me, freed me, and I jumped from the foundation

wall and ran. I could hear footsteps running behind me, but I couldn’t

stop crying and I couldn’t look back. I ran and ran and ran. Finally

Conary caught me, running and crying too, and when I heard his sobs

I had the thought that he was possessed, that the black thing was inside

him, using him to chase me, and, frightened all over again, I ran away

from him. At last, gasping with pain in my lungs, and balked by a

great wall of raspberry brambles, I stopped and stood, shaking and

panting. My legs were trembling. I was afraid to sit down for fear I’d

be too weak to get up again, so I just stood there with my knees locked,

trying to remember how to breathe and listening to unnatural silence.

Where was Conary? What had happened? At last I turned back the

way I had come. It was easy to track my course through the brush;

I’d broken a path the size of a bear’s.

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When I reached him, Conary was lying on his back in an odd

position, as if he had dropped and not moved again. His face was

streaked with tears and his pale eyes were staring, at the sky, at noth-

ing. It took me a moment to dare to touch him; I couldn’t see him

breathing, and his skin was an awful grayish color. I sat down beside

him and got up the nerve to reach out. He was warm, but his eyes

looked like dead marbles, flat as a doll’s. Now my fear changed again.

What was this? Was he suspended somewhere, no longer alive but not

yet dead? Had time stopped? I felt I stopped breathing myself, spend-

ing all my strength trying to turn time back, to will whatever had

happened to him to unhappen.

I wish I believe I rescued him, but whatever had gripped him

was not something I could touch. Suddenly, though, explosively, he

took a long shuddering breath, and then more, with his eyes now on

mine, as if he could stay in life that way and force the horror to get

out of his lungs by squeezing it out with sheer will. His face began

to return to a human color. As I watched his eyes take on more and

more the expressions I knew, it seemed his return was gradual, as if

his spirit had been shattered and dispersed and he had to recall it from

some miasma around him. Then he lay still, and then, at last, he closed

his eyes. I touched his face and said his name. I could still hardly

believe it hadn’t killed him. I thought that parasitic black sack of fury

and decay had lodged itself in his lungs and shaken him apart with

his eyes staring open. He suddenly sat up and put his arms around

me, and I began to cry my own tears.

Conary held me and let me feel him breathe and believe in his

warmth, and he didn’t try to stop me. Finally he stroked my back and

whispered, “It’s all right now, it’s all right now,” and I felt myself

calm down, like a skittish horse being gentled.

Somewhere in the woods near us we heard something moving.

Something large and mercifully ordinary, like a deer. It brought us

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both to our feet. In another moment we saw that the sun was low in

the sky and would soon sink below the line of the trees. We could

feel the coolness chilling our skin and knew it would deepen with

darkness. Where had the day gone?

Connie took my hand and said, “Let’s go home.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“No. But let’s try to head northwest, up the ridge of the island.

We may find the meadow, or we may catch a break in the trees so we

can see the shore of the main. I’ll be able to tell better where we are

from that.”

I nodded; I was sure he could lead us to safety.

We saw nothing that we’d seen on the walk south. It was easy

going, though Conary had hurt his foot and was limping. We came

once to an open field filled waist-high with some bushes or stunted

trees with copper leaves. It proved impassable, so we made our way

around the rim of this strange rust-colored basin. It forced us off our

course, and when we reached the other side, a thicket of alders forced

us still farther off the ridge than we wanted to go. We went on in that

fashion, zigzagging in an attempt to head for the point we wanted,

like a boat tacking into the wind. I said, “It’s a beat,” and Conary

smiled for the first time in what felt like hours.

Near the ridge of the island, the brush and woods that had been

fighting us suddenly opened out to a wide heath. It lay silver and

peaceful, like a naked body under summer sky. We had found one of

the blueberry barrens. Most of the berries were still green, but here

and there a cluster of deep blue glowed among the tiny polished green

leaves, and we gathered as many as we could without stopping; we

were beginning to be hungry and thirsty.

At the highest point on the barren, Conary stopped and pointed.

We could see the south shore of the Neck. Conary said, “That’s Al-

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len’s Nub.” It was over a mile away, across the south reach, and it

looked like flat black shoreline to me, but I could tell from Connie’s

expression that we were no longer lost.

It took perhaps another half hour to reach March Cove. I wanted

to ask him a hundred questions about what had happened to us. It was

already beginning to seem like a waking nightmare of some sort, ex-

cept that the ache in my throat was as real as if I’d been screaming

at the top of my lungs for hours. I almost started to speak then, when

we knew we were at last on our way home, but the fear was too fresh,

my sense of normalcy too tentative, and it must have been the same

for him. We both carried ourselves carefully through the pinewoods,

concentrating on our footing like people battered and fragile and

frightened of falling.

By the time we reached the cove,
Frolic
was floating quietly in

deep water. The anchor was holding, but the painter Connie had led

up to the beach was lost somewhere underwater; we had no way to

bring the boat to us. In the hours since we’d beached the boat on sand

some twenty feet below what was now the water’s edge, the cove had

become a different place. There was no sand flat. Our clam hod was

eight feet underwater. The wind had died completely, and the bay was

like a mirror, its unrippled surface streaked with blue and pink and

violet shadows.

I must have showed a momentary loss of heart, because Conary,

watching my face, put his arms around me. We held each other for a

moment. What thoughts we’d had of reaching somewhere warm and

bright, with hot food and a welcome before nightfall, were gone.

Connie said, “I could swim out and tow the boat in to shore . . .”

“Don’t. It’s too cold.”

“I don’t mind that. But there’s not much point. We can’t sail

without wind.”

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“Are there oars?”

“One paddle. And no light, until the moon rises. We’re a couple

miles from the harbor.”

For a moment I had an unpleasant vision of Edith beginning to

really steam about now. Conary must have had similar thoughts, be-

cause he added, “They’ll probably start looking for us soon. For you,

anyway. And even if they don’t, the wind may come up after moon-

rise.”

Just then the sun reached the treetops on the mainland and shot

a streak of gold across the still water. It was going to be one of those

heart-stopping sunsets. Conary stared at it for a moment, then leaned

down and chose a small flat stone and sent it skipping across the glassy

stillness, a gesture very much like whistling in the dark. I chose my

own and sent it whisking toward the sunset. It sank a good ten feet

farther out than Connie’s.