The Man in the Net (16 page)

“You took it? When?”

“On the phone. You called in the morning real early just around nine.”

“But I never called you.”

“John Hamilton in Stoneville. That was the name. John Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton said he wanted the cement to repair a dam in the creek for a kid’s swimming hole. I said he’d be better off with regular cement but he was set on the ready mix and he wanted it right away. It was nine and the truck was just going out for your neighborhood. It always goes out at nine on Tuesdays, so I had ’em load it right on there. And you—he said not to stop at the house because he wouldn’t be home but to just take it and dump it way past the house there by where the creek bends close to the road.”

He knew then, of course. It was as if the net had suddenly become visible and was sagging over him, black, inescapably intricate, deadly as a vast spider’s web. By the bend in the creek. Down the road behind the house toward the Fishers’—where he’d never gone since he returned from New York, where the search-party might have gone but hadn’t because Steve had got angry with the men and sent them home.

He had to say something. Dimly he was conscious of the necessity and of the potential danger for him at the other end of the phone, but there was nothing to say that could change what had happened.

“It wasn’t me,” he said. “If someone called you and used the name John Hamilton, it was somebody else. I never gave the order.”

He dropped the receiver. The phone didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered but the bend in the creek. He ran upstairs, put on the pants and shirt he had been wearing the day before and hurried out of the house up the road. The shadows of the sugar maples made feathery blue-grey patterns on the dirt road surface at his feet. The shadows, shifting, merging, growing now darker, now paler, seemed to him like shadows of the net. The point where the creek bent close to the road was less than a hundred yards away from the house. As he ran forward, the sound of the creek came, fresh, gurgling, cheerful. Then the brook itself came into view, looping down in a sharp curve to the roadside and twisting almost immediately back again into the meadow. The tall weeds by the side of the road were mashed down. He saw that even before he came up to them. The panic images blazed.

He reached the spot. There were the weeds, sprawled down where the cement sacks had been thrown from the truck. They lay broken and bent over, wilting in the hot sun. But the cement sacks weren’t there anymore.

Nothing was there.

It was several seconds before he noticed the track, but once he had seen it, it cried out for attention, biting deep into the damp grass by the bank of the creek. A single track. A wheelbarrow track. He left the road and moved through the battered weeds toward it. A thin white curling line paralleled it for a few feet and then stopped. He bent down but, even as he bent, he recognized it as cement— a trail of cement from a sack that had broken open.

That had broken open? That had been broken open! He knew that now. The cement trail was obvious just as the wheelbarrow track was obvious, because it had been deliberately arranged that way. This was part of it all, the climactic part of the nightmare of the typed note, the slashed pictures, the suitcase on the dump, the blue jeans …

He started to follow the wheelbarrow track across the overgrown meadow. Whenever it faded there was always something else to guide him, a broken cherry sapling, a patch of crushed golden-rod or the cement trail again. It was a track that a child could follow, and it progressed relentlessly away from the creek, always nearer and nearer to the house.

Suddenly, as he moved forward, the illusion came that he wasn’t alone any more but that other person, the Enemy, whose presence he had been dimly conscious of lurking in the center of the web, but who now seemed to spring forward and take possession of him. It was almost as if he himself had called the hardware store to order the cement (“Don’t stop at the house: I won’t be home”), and as if, at that very moment, he were pushing the wheelbarrow stacked with cement sacks, carefully indicating the track as he did so, breaking a sapling, mashing the weeds, letting the thin stream of cement ripple out from the split sack. The intensity of the illusion became such that he could actually feel the sensation of the wheelbarrow’s rubber handles, hot and sticky, in his palms.

Stop it, he told himself.

The back of the studio was looming ahead of him. He came down here so seldom that the barn, seen from behind, was grotesquely unfamiliar—like a building that had no part in his life. The windows at the back of the studio stared, flashing in the sunlight. Below them, its heavy wooden doors sagging on their hinges, was the old basement cow-barn.

Now, as the treacherously clear track veered slightly to the left, directly toward the sagging doors, the tension in him was more than he could bear. Ignoring the track— why bother to follow it anymore?—he ran to the doors. A rusty old padlock hung on a hasp. He flicked it off, and grabbing one of the doors, tugged it open. To his eyes, accustomed to the brilliant sunshine, the interior was dark and shadowy as a crypt. For a moment he hesitated on the threshold, smelling the musty smell of disuse and decay. He saw the old ice-chest with Linda’s garden tools grouped around it and the plastic hose coiled under the faucet. Beyond them he could make out the wooden cow-stalls stretching down each of the side walls. Ancient hay was scattered over the beaten earth floor. Something gleaming caught his eye—something thrusting out from inside one of the stalls. The handle of a wheelbarrow?

He ran into the gloom. There it was, in the stall, his own beat-up, red, metal wheelbarrow. It was tilted over on its side and its interior was heavily coated with cement.

He looked at it, making an immense effort at control. He mustn’t feel anger or panic or anything for Linda. Nothing at all. He must be like a machine. Walking with deliberate slowness, he turned from the stall and into the next one and then the next one and then the next.

It was the last stall to the right. The floor wasn’t of caked dirt like the floors of the other stalls. It had been smoothly surfaced with cement, and stacked on the cement, taking up almost all the stall, was a high neat pile of logs. He didn’t have to try to remember how the stall had been before. One glance at the cement, in spite of the strewn shavings of bark, was enough to tell that it was brand new.

As he stood there gazing down, feeling as dead as the thing which, inevitably, lay there under the cement, he became conscious of a qualification of the silence—a rustling, a dry, furtive scurrying sound like the patter of tiny mice feet. He looked up at the window above the stacked logs. It was grimy and criss-crossed with grey, dirty spider webs, and there were dozens of yellow butterflies. Some were beating against the window pane. Some were caught in the webs, flapping one wing spasmodically. Others lay dead on the sill, wound around with grey silk or broken into scraps—a fragment of yellow wing, a black antenna, hard, stripped little body with jointed, hairy legs thrusting up in the air.

Nausea welled up in him.

He ran out of the barn and around it toward the house.

As he crossed the lawn, he heard the telephone—three rings … his ring.

THE SOUND of the telephone seemed to him as terrible as the thing he had left behind him in the cow-barn. The telephone was the outside world clamoring to get him; the thing in the barn was the ultimate, damning “proof” of his guilt. The two ends of the net were meeting at last. He ran on across the lawn and into the house by the kitchen door, not because he had any purpose in going into the house, simply because the house had now become less threatening than the barn.

He stood in the kitchen, his heart pounding. The telephone was still ringing its little persistent rings. It’ll stop, he told himself. It’ll have to stop. And then some vestige of self-preservation warned him: If you don’t answer, they may come; and if they come, they’ll go to the barn … Answer it. There’s less to lose by answering it.

He hurried out of the kitchen, his mind functioning imperfectly through the scar-tissue of shock, and picked up the phone.

“Hello.” His voice sounded quite strange to him. “Hello, hello.”

“John?” It was Vickie. He recognized her voice and it steadied the confusion of his thoughts. “John? Is it you?”

“Vickie.”

“Thank God. I’ve been ringing for over ten minutes. Quick. There’s practically no time. They’re coming to get you. Not the troopers. It’s Steve—and all of them. The whole village. I’m here at the store. I’ve seen them out of the window. I’ve seen the cars gathering. And they’ve driven off. They’ve been gone over five minutes. They’ll be there any moment … John, you can’t stay there. Not the way they are. Go to our house. That’s what you’ve got to do. Drive over right away. I’ll get back this minute. If you’re there with me, they’ll have to calm down. They —John, do you hear me?”

He was standing staring out through the thin nylon curtains of the hall window toward the road outside.

“Yes, Vickie, I hear you.”

“It’s the troopers. They called Steve. They’ve found blood and cement stains on the blue jeans, and some store in Pittsfield has reported that you bought sacks of cement. You buried her in the cellar, that’s what they’re saying. They’re coming to dig up the cellar. They’ve got picks and shovels and …”

He heard the cars then. Maybe he’d heard them even earlier as a faint wasp-like drone that had seemed to be a sound inside his own head. But now he heard them and there was no mistake. The drone was growing steadily louder. Not far away, he heard brakes screech. They were turning the bend in the road beyond the bridge.

It was the nightmare again, with nothing in it real except Vickie’s voice.

He said, not feeling anything, “Thanks, Vickie. I’ll be over.”

“Quick.”

“Yes. Quick.”

He dropped the receiver. Down the road a horn blared. Instantly other horns took it up until there was a wailing like an air-raid siren. For a moment panic had him completely in its grip, paralyzing him from action. He just stood, turning his head meaninglessly as if to shake off the scream of the automobile horns. He couldn’t get to his car. He knew it. He saw himself running to the garage, pushing up the door, trying to back out …. No, there was no time for the car. Then there wasn’t anything to do. He just had to stand there. Wasn’t that what the dream intended of him?

Through the window, he caught a glimpse of the first automobile gleaming beyond the shield of underbrush at the roadside. The sight of it jolted him out of the destroying lethargy. Not the road. Not the car. But the woods. Run through the woods and down through the woods to Vickie. That was it.

These were hardly reflections, merely vague instinctive reactions. Get to the Careys’. There seemed then to be no other goal but that. What came later didn’t matter.

He ran back through the hall, through the kitchen and out through the kitchen door on to the lawn. As he zigzagged through the apple trees toward the overgrown slope behind them which fell to the woods, he heard a yell from the road behind him. Then, and then only dimly, he realized that by running across the lawn he had exposed himself, not to the first cars, but to the rear cars in the cavalcade way down the road where the bank flattened out and there were no bushes or trees to block the view. The yell was followed by other yells. Some of the horns stopped. He heard a car door slamming shut and then another.

He didn’t look back. To have seen the men—little dark dots streaming down through the meadow behind him— would have brought the panic again, would make real the dream he dreaded so much, the dream of the hunters and the hunted.

But this was the dream. He knew that, and once again the dream quality distorted everything around him. The sunlight seemed yellower than real sunlight. The details of the leaves, the weeds, the butterflies, as he dashed through the choked meadow, were frighteningly vivid as if they were things he had never seen before and now was seeing from eyes ten times more powerful than human eyes.

Behind him, someone bayed like a hound dog. Or was that just his imagination—part of the dream of human pursuers on all fours galloping after him?

The grove of pines which guarded the threshold of the woods gleamed ahead of him. He reached them and plunged among them, the needles slashing against his cheeks like gentle whips. He came through them and in front of him the creek prattled over its rocky bed. He jumped across it from stepping-stone to stepping-stone. He was in the woods now. All around him was the anonymous world of great trunks, underbrush, fallen trees and filtering sunlight. He was immensely conscious of the screening pine trees behind him. He was out of sight at least. The sensation of invisibility was like a balm, descending on him, making it almost possible to think and feel again like a human being. Don’t lose your head. You know these woods. You know exactly how to curve around to the left and eventually down to the lake and Vickie. You’re way ahead of them. You can travel as fast as they.

Then he heard shouts from the meadow just behind him, beyond the screen of pines. Was that, too, his imagination? They couldn’t be as close as that—not the men from the far slope. Then, with a flutter of panic, he understood. The men in the first cars, near the house, had seen the others streaming down the slope and had realized that he’d been sighted. They’d plunged down directly from the house.

His lead had been cut in half.

Ahead through the trees, beyond a sprawling patch of blackberry vines, he recognized a huge beech trunk. His mind blindly obeying his nerve-ends, he thought: Make for the beech. It was the wrong direction, off toward the Jones’ house, but beyond it the terrain dropped sharply downward into a little gulley thick with hemlocks. There, beyond the beech, would be cover.

He ran forward, skirting the blackberries. With a deafening clap of wings, a partridge shot upward almost from under his feet. He reached the beech tree and, as he slithered down the slope beyond, he heard the shouts behind him, suddenly, shockingly nearer. Had they heard the flushed partridge? And what if they had a dog with them? A memory came of the sharp-nosed white mutt with the fluffy brown tail. If they had a dog! He came to the bottom of the slope and started running again, twisting to left and right, his heart thumping, his breath coming in spasmodic gasps. He could see the hemlocks ahead, a dark solid screen flanking a long outcropping of rock. He dashed toward them and then, just before he ducked into the shelter of their feathery branches, he heard a voice from behind and what seemed like miles above him, yelling: