The Pines (15 page)

Her landmark towered over her—a dead cypress the locals called “Hanging Tree.”
They say she hung there till she was just a
skeleton.
The cypress loomed about the pines, one thick limb stretching over the road.
Till the bones just dropped off one by one.
By daylight, the rotted remnants of rope fibers could still be seen clinging to the bark. Athena always said it was probably just an old tire swing, but Pam believed, even cherished, the tale of the hanged witch.

A branch of the road, just a fading trace, lay behind the thick cypress. Saplings and tall weeds had begun to cover it.
Lonny’ll take care of things when he comes home.
But some inner part of her understood that Lonny would approve of the overgrown road, that he’d like the way to the trailer being hidden, impassable, because the state police would never find it now. She was fairly certain their trailer was stolen and hoped Athena never found out.
She gets so funny about that sort of
thing.
Sighing, she walked on.
Such a shame, Wallace dropping
dead like that. They was so happy.

A breeze stirred in the smaller trees.

Lonny’s been gone almost two years this time.
Leaving the road to town behind her, she wended between the little pines.
Lord, I
miss him.
Even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t really true. What she missed was what she’d never had.

Something rustled in the bushes.

“Dooley?” She stopped moving, stopped breathing. “Is there somebody?” She heard the dog bark somewhere far behind her. “Who is that?” Her voice trembled.

A match scratched and flared, and she flinched from the sudden light. “You scared me all to death!” she screeched, beginning to giggle.

Framed by tangled white-blond hair, a bloodless face floated in the dark. Marl Spencer stared stupidly, the flame glowing purple in his eyes. “Skeared ya?” The match twitched away.

Pam heard sucking. “You burn yourself, Marl?” Suddenly maternal, she moved toward him. Another match flared, and she paused, blinking.

Marl held the flame high with the other hand as he blew on his wet fingers. He had a crumpled paper sack under his arm, heavy shapes inside it.

“Is that my stuff?” she asked, not reaching for the bag. “Al Spencer shouldn’t be makin’ you deliver that so late at night,” her voice scolded. “An you can tell him I said so, too.”

“Gotta do it a’night,” the boy answered in a voice both shrill and husky.

“This-here purse is brand-new,” she told him proudly. “So I don’t have no money on me, but if you’ll walk me home I can…What’s that you sayin’, boy? Your pa said I can have credit, did he?” The match went out, and the paper sack rustled. She guessed he was holding it out to her. “I don’t want no credit. Now, you just come on to my place.” The bag rustled again. “It won’t take a minute, now. It’s just over here. Sides, I want to get you something for that burn.”

The boy mumbled.

“Oh, you got to put something on it right away! It’ll get all pus if you don’t. Now, you just come with me.” She started forward along the choked path. “You was on your way to the trailer anyways, right?” After a moment, she sensed his fleshy presence following.

The boy hung back when they reached the dark and littered clearing. The woman hurried past the black hulks of two automobiles, one on blocks, one on its side. “Well, here we are now.” She stamped up the metal steps of the trailer.

The door opened with a squeak, and lights came on inside. She stuck her head out the open door. The gleam revealed the clearing: a chicken-wire and plywood enclosure dominated the bare earth, and white petunias were bedded up against the trailer’s cinder-block foundations. Sagging from the roof, thick cable looped into the trees. “Ain’t you coming in?” The boy had his back to her. “What’s the matter? What do you keep looking over your shoulder for? You hear something? That’s right. You scared a dogs, ain’t you?” Still peering at him, she laughed. “Hell, the things people is scared of.” She liked the way the back of his head was shaped, she decided—he was growing up real nice. Of course everybody knew he was a retard, and he was still sort of pudgy. “Well, don’t just stand there then. Come on in the place.”

Reluctantly approaching the steps, he removed three large jars from the sack. Electric light gleamed yellow in the liquid as he handed them up to her. “Pop wants da jars back.”

She disappeared. “Can I git you some?” she called. “Oh, c’mon, have some. Maybe I’ll have a little. Not that I really drink or anything, you know. I just think it’s good to have some around. In case anybody should visit. You know, like a relative or something.”

He lingered on the stoop. “Uh…”

Something banged within, then glasses clicked. “Marl? What are we? Like cousins sort of?”

Backing away from the trailer, he folded the paper bag and stuck it in his pants as the woman’s voice faded behind him.

“I bet everybody in town thinks I’m real snotty, like I think I’m better than them or something, right? Marl? Marl?”

He’d already crossed the clearing.

Suddenly, she stood, tapping her foot in the doorway. “You don’t got no more deliveries to make to night, do you? Well then, come on in here and let me see that finger.”

Through the trees, there came distant, lonely barking. He froze. Slowly, he walked back toward the trailer. One foot on the stairs, he turned to the woods—the barking sounded again. He entered.

The night breathed through the empty clearing. Trees whispered. A slight breeze pressed through, muttering and sighing, and the pines moved, barely swaying. Moths danced in the arc of pale light from the doorway through which the woman’s voice drifted. “That’s a boy. Come on in here. You know, my sister-in-law was telling me just tonight about this bunch a wild dogs that’s running around. Now, hold it out while I put some of this on it—won’t hurt. Yeah, that’s right. They’re still out there somewheres, so you got to be careful going home, you know, and me all alone cause a Lonny’s still being away. Don’t move. Still away. It gets real lonely out here. Course ’Thena and me is real good friends. Hold still now. They talk about me in town? They tell jokes about me? Hold still. That’s it. Don’t that feel good? Don’t it? You’re really growing, really getting big now, ain’t you? Such nice big hands. You know, Marl, you ain’t like them other pineys in town. You’re more like me and ’Thena. Yeah, you got…fine qualities. I never believed none a them stories about you starting fires. Does that feel good? Come on. Yeah now. That’s it. Does it feel good now?”

Disturbed by the light, crickets chirruped erratically. In the coops, the chickens stirred and complained.

“Don’t move away now. This is nice, boy. Just let me…feels so…No!”

The boy burst out of the doorway, leaped the three steps and hit the clearing a good yard away. Tripping in the darkness, he picked himself up running.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

He glanced back once.

“Boy, you’re really weird!” She stood framed in the doorway. “Where you going? I won’t tell nobody. You coming back?” As he tore along the darkly tangled trail, her voice followed. “You gonna tell? Weird! What’s the matter with you?”

Reaching the road, he raced toward town, her words festering in his brain. Something clicked in his face, and his hand came away wet. He sucked in his breath. The barking seemed closer now, and he ran, his temples pounding. A pulse throbbed in his neck, and he panted, stumbling in the sand. Thoughts of wild dogs pursued him, raging in his mind: hounds smelling his blood. Howling surrounded him. He fled through the night in panic, blackness dripping onto his shirt.

The woods were not silent.

She’d lain awake, clenched and sweating, but sleep had finally rolled over her in thick, smoky waves. Athena’s mouth made tiny whistlings like a child’s as she breathed in the damp, moldy smell of the mattress. The liquid sigh of the pines seemed slower, more somber to night, only sometimes peaking with a rush. Crickets called weakly, and her breathing droned. The house itself creaked. Some deep recess of her sleeping mind still listened, as gradually the wooden groans grew rhythmic. Soon she could hear the slapping of waves on the outside walls. Rising. Receding. Darkness seemed to lap around her, and the mattress floated. On her spinning bed, she tensed, squirming as the nightmare began.

Dark…drowning…black choking…and suddenly eyes. At first many. Burning red. Malignant. Then only two.

Something hungry, watching from the dark.

Starting, she came fully awake and sat up, her body wet with perspiration. She kicked a tangled sheet and some clothes away from her legs, felt a wave of coolness. With one hand, she forced herself back down, felt the pounding in her chest.

Through the open window drifted the distant howling of the town’s dogs.

Well, that’s a new twist.
Eyes wide-open, she lay, seeing nothing.
Not just the dark this time, but something in it.
Beads of sweat rolled down her face, and she inhaled deeply.
After all these years, why should it change?
The scanner’s tiny red light winked from the dresser.
There’s my red eyes.
The recognition brought no comfort—why should something so familiar, so positive, seem threatening? Her heart still hammered against the heel of her hand, and the sense of menace failed to dissipate.

It was reaching a peak. She knew it. This sense of dread—the nameless premonition that kept her paralyzed and waiting—grew each day more intense.

Reflexively, her hand reached across the bed, finding only the old depression beside her in the mattress.
There’s someone in this room.
Abruptly, she sensed it. Every cell of her body recognized a presence, as though the dream continued. “Matthew?” Again, she sat up in bed, her pillow sliding softly off the edge.

The house made its night sounds.

“Matthew?” Though growing weaker, the impression remained: the boy was here in the room, or had just been. She rose quickly, a twinge of pain in her leg as she felt about.
Am I still dreaming?
She groped her way along the bureau toward the deep opening of the doorway.

“Matthew?” She took a few blind steps into the hall—a mineshaft. She retreated, her right hand sliding along the must-furred bedroom wallpaper for the light switch. The dingy litter of her bedroom flared. Waiting for violet blotches to melt from her vision, she turned her back on the room, stared downward, her shadow spreading gigantically across the hall floor. The peeling green linoleum depicted leaves, impossibly huge and curling, now all but worn away.

Shuddering with a yawn, she snatched a frayed terrycloth robe from the bedroom floor, shook the dust balls free and wrapped it around her shoulders. The bedroom light almost penetrated to the end of the hallway, creating a faint haze. Again, she stood and listened.
Nothing.
She started down the hall.
What if he’s not in his room?
Feeling the steps above her with her hands, she limped heavily up the attic stairs.

The bedclothes rustled. In the charred darkness, a creak of cot springs fused with the hissing rhythm of his breath, and she heard him roll over, muttering wetly. The chain, when she reached for it, rattled against the bulb.

The boy didn’t flinch from the light. She bent over him. His sweat-slick body sprawled across the cot, and his hands stayed clenched into small fists, damp and sticky.
Pamela has to bathe him.
His T-shirt had balled up around his armpits, and the lump of stone was still clutched in one tight hand. She straightened, staring. He sweated, inert on the mattress.

The light rattled again.

She went back down toward the dull glow of her room.
He really is asleep.
She moved down the brightened hall.
I’m tired. Doris said…working so hard.
Switching off the overhead light, she thought of the boy.
Dreamed it.
She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled off her robe.
Matthew is squeezing a stone.
Through the window, a slight breeze carried faint sounds of the night. It felt cool on her still-damp body, and she lay down, partially covering herself with the rumpled sheet, thinking about her son who gripped a cold stone.
No.
Her mind grew heavy and hazy.
That’s not the way it is. It’s not.
Her eyes closed.
not like that not

When he was sure the sliding footsteps had returned to her room, Matty opened his eyes and sat up.

For a while, he played with the stone, pretended it was a giant boulder that rolled end over end across the pillow landscape, but soon the sounds of barking reached him, and he listened, staring at the beams. And the wind brushed across the eaves, so close, and the barking swept through the pines with a rustling as of things long dead.

He looked around his dark attic, his kingdom: the old pieces of furniture, some covered, some trailing cobwebs in the dust, loomed all around the bed. On the far side of the room, the diamond panes of the window gleamed pale black. He listened again to the dogs in the woods, and to something else, something that called to him by name.

He hid the stone under his pillow.

Slowly, he brought his upper arm to his face and mouthed it, licked the hot, salty flesh. Then he bit down—hard, harder, small teeth sinking in. And at last it came. The taste…the wet meat. His mouth filled with drooling warmth, hot wetness at his crotch. He felt dizzy. Sweat trickled down his body while the dark room swayed around him, warmth spreading between his legs as he flooded the bed.

From the woods, from faraway, from far below, the howling of the dogs grew muted, and there drifted to his ears a thin yapping that held something of a human quality, leaving in his mind an echo like the cries of many voices. There was hysteria in those voices…and abject sadness. The boy sucked at his wound, and the dark room swayed about him.

PART TWO
MUNRO’S FURNACE