Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense Read online

  Of course, I would see Mrs. S____ in church for she always attended the ten o’clock service in the company of an older stout bald-headed man who (I supposed) was her husband or (maybe) her father.

  I did not want to see the hateful woman and yet, I could not stop myself from searching for her, just to determine where she was, and look away from her, and not look back. Until at the end of the service when the congregation rose, and all sang hymns together, except for me, for with my cracked voice like gravel I could not sing, and did not want to sing, but this was a time when it was natural to glance around, and so I might see Mrs. S____ on the other side of the aisle, a row or two closer to the front of the church than our row, five or six seats in, holding a hymnal in her hand at which she never glanced, and singing with the others, or pretending to sing.

  Holding my breath, that Mrs. S____ might glance back at me. Biting her lower lip in a smile as her eyes greedily sought me out.

  How-ard has his secrets, eh? For shame.

  The sign of the beast on his face for all to see.

  My hatred for Mrs. S____ was such, I had never asked any questions about her, for I did not want to know anything about her, I did not want to think of her at all. Yet there was a kind of satisfaction in establishing that the woman was in church, as I was, twenty feet away.

  After the hymn, there was another time for glancing about the church, a time to see who was behind you, or on the far side of your pew, and then too I could look openly at Mrs. S____, and it would not have seemed strange, and my mother would not have nudged me—Howard! Don’t stare.

  Sometimes yes, Mrs. S____ did see me. Or seemed to see me. Though so quickly I looked away, or shut my eyes, it was not possible to be certain.

  The small bright eyes like a snake’s eyes moving upon me, in secret. Unmistakably the woman’s thoughts rushed through me like an electrical current—I know what you do when you are alone, How-ard! What thoughts you have of me. What a bad boy, what a disgusting boy, and the sign of the beast in your face to identify you—everyone knows.

  Irritably my mother gripped my arm and gave me a nudge asking what on earth was wrong. For I’d seemed to be paralyzed, unable to move.

  My knees were weak, and my back teeth were heated from grinding my jaws. Sullenly I mumbled to my mother that I was OK but that it was too hot for me in the church, I could not breathe.

  Later, outside the church, I overheard my parents speaking worriedly with Reverend Boxall and a vague reply of the minister’s—A phase he is going through. Boys do. He will get over it. God sets us these tests, as parents.

  It happened that I would follow Mrs. S____ when I saw her.

  By accident when I saw her. I did not seek the woman out.

  In town, on the street. In a parking lot. In a store.

  She did not see me, I think. Most of the time.

  Yet: moving her hips as if she knew that someone was watching, but did not want to let on.

  Happened that Mrs. S____ shopped at the drugstore, at the grocery store, at the Target store. By accident sighting her, standing at the edge of the lot behind a Dumpster. And soon then, I knew to identify her car which was a dull-silver compact Nissan.

  Exciting to me, to see Mrs. S____ park her car, climb out with a flash of her legs, walk across a parking lot in her bright clothes. Her hair was shiny-black, her mouth very red. In warm weather her arms were bare to the shoulders. Like a scene in a movie it was, when you know that something is going to happen to the person in the scene but you do not know exactly what it will be, and when.

  I know you are watching me, How-ard!

  We know what it means—the sign of the beast.

  Rode my bike to the church, Sunday morning before nine o’clock. Dragged the bike behind a storage shed in the churchyard and slid down into the ravine, to hide.

  For an hour then, squatting on the creek bank and throwing stones into the shallow, slow-moving water.

  In the classroom at the rear of the church, Mrs. S____ was teaching Sunday school. I had not dared to peer in a window but I knew. It was exciting to me, to think of how I could come into the classroom slamming the door open—the looks in the faces! If it was a movie, there would be a gun, and the gun would fire.

  How-ard! How-ard, no!

  After a while I climbed up out of the ravine, and returned to the rear of the church. By this time churchgoers were starting to arrive, parking their cars. They would enter the church, and take their places in the pews. Like ants they seemed to me, taking their place in a hive. I would not be one of them that morning.

  I had not given any thought to it, that my parents would wonder where I was, and if I was hiding from them in order to stay away from church.

  Crouched behind a gravestone. Watched the rear door.

  Children were leaving, Sunday school was over. Through the scope of a rifle they could be viewed, and picked off one by one without any more knowledge of what was happening to them than the knowledge of a grazing deer that is shot with its head lowered to the grass.

  Last of all was Mrs. S____ who was lighting a cigarette as a man might do, shaking out the match. (Smoking was not allowed on the church property! I knew this.) It was surprising to me, and exciting, that Mrs. S____ was smoking in secret, and that I had not known this before.

  Very quickly the woman smoked holding the cigarette to her mouth as she inhaled, exhaled smoke in little puffs. She was wearing a bright-green dress and around her waist a black patent leather belt cinched tight. On her feet straw-colored high-heeled shoes with no backs. As she smoked the cigarette staring at the ground at her feet it did not seem to me that Mrs. S____ looked so confident as usual but rather subdued, frowning.

  Then for some reason Mrs. S____ glanced over to where I was crouched behind the gravestone. Somehow it happened, she saw me, and a flash seemed to come into her eyes such as you see in an animal’s eyes, reflecting headlights.

  “Why, How-ard Heike! Is that you?”

  The voice was not so mocking, but rather surprised-sounding, almost happy.

  “How-ard? Hel-lo.”

  Mrs. S____ was staring in my direction, where I was cringing down behind the gravestone. I could not understand how she had seen me clearly enough to identify me.

  Shamed by being so recognized, I crawled on hands and knees to the edge of the graveyard. Then scrambled to my feet to run, run.

  “How-ard? Where are you going? I see you.”

  Laughing after me, until I could not hear her any longer.

  Following this, I was determined to stop thinking of Mrs. S____. For she had seen me, and would be prepared for me now. And still she might complain to my parents or to Reverend Boxall or even to the police and I would not be able to explain myself, why I was following Mrs. S____ when it was a great relief to me that I no longer had to attend Sunday school. Just to think of that was to feel a rush of happiness.

  Now, I did not attend church services either. My parents had not tried to argue with me though (I knew) they had been talking about me in their room, my father’s voice raised and my mother’s voice quieter, pleading.

  Clamped my hands over my ears. Laughed, what the hell did I care about them.

  Somehow it happened, I learned where Mrs. S____ lived: in a weatherworn clapboard house on Cottage Street across from a vacant lot littered with trash. Also scrub trees grew on the lot, I could easily hide behind.

  The plan came to me: I would ride my bike into town, hide it behind bushes. I would see if Mrs. S____’s Nissan was parked in the driveway of the clapboard house and if it was not, I would dare to walk to the house to ring the doorbell believing that no one would be home but that I could peer into the house through the ground-floor windows and maybe, if no one was watching I could go to the rear of the house, and look in the windows there.

  I would try the door to the house, at the rear. If it was not locked, I could open it …

  A wave of dizziness came over me, at the thought of what came next.

&n
bsp; And so at the S____ house where the Nissan was not in the driveway I did not think that anyone would be home. It was rare that my father was home in our house during the day, but rather at work at the lumberyard and this was true for my relatives’ houses where all the men worked. And even on a Saturday, a man would probably not be in his house for much of the day.

  It did not occur to me that Mr. S____ (if that was who the bald-headed man was) might be home and that he would not only open the door but see me through the window as I approached the front door.

  So, I rang the doorbell—which was the first time in my life that I had ever rung a doorbell!—and almost at once, the door was flung open, and a bald-headed man stood in the doorway, not smiling. “Yes? What do you want?”

  I was a husky boy, five foot six or seven. My hair had been shaved close to my skull for the summer. I was wearing soiled bib overalls with no shirt or T-shirt beneath. (Some days, I worked at Heike Lumber. But not every day, and not full days.) The bald-headed man who’d opened the door was only an inch or two taller than me and might have felt some worry of me, why a stranger like me was on his doorstep.

  I could not think of any answer to his question. I was not a good liar. I began to stammer, and felt blood rush into my head.

  Again the bald-headed man asked me what I wanted, who I was, and I managed to tell him that I was Mrs. S____’s student at Sunday school, and she had told me that she would leave a “special Bible” for me, to pick up that day.

  Special Bible! Where this notion came from, I had no idea. My face was hot with blood and my eyes were moist with tears for my words were a terrible effort for me, like dragging a heavy plank with my bare fingers.

  Yet, the bald-headed man had seemed to believe this. At the mention of a special Bible his features softened and were not so harsh and so he even smiled, or stretched his lips in a kind of smile, such as you might make at someone who was annoying to you but harmless, and perhaps pitiful, like a retarded child or a crippled person.

  Telling me he hadn’t heard of any special Bible. His wife was not home. She had not left anything and had not said anything to him about it.

  OK, I told him. Already I was turning away, eager to be gone.

  In the doorway the bald-headed man looked after me. I did not look back but felt his eyes on my back.

  Then calling after me, “Excuse me? What’s your name?”

  But I was far away enough not to hear, or anyway I did not seem to hear, waving my hand without turning back to him, and walking fast away.

  He will tell her. She will know who I was. Who I am.

  Waited a while before doubling back, to get my bicycle in the vacant lot. By that time the sky was darkening and a wind had come up. It was late August, there had not been any rain in weeks. Crouching in the underbrush waiting to know what to do next for I was not (yet) ready to go home and the thought came to me how easy it would be to drop a match behind the S____ house. At night when she was asleep, when no one would see. Grasses were dry as straw and the leaves on all the trees were dry and brittle.

  Except I did not have a match. I had come away from home with no matches. And now the wind was coming up, and the sky was massed with dark thunderclouds, it would be the end of the drought—I had waited too long, and now it was too late.

  For some time then, after school began I did not see Mrs. S_____. I did not linger by the drugstore, the grocery store, the Target store where I might see the woman. I did not return to Cottage Street for fear that the S____s had reported me to the police and would be waiting for me to return and would call the police again and have me arrested.

  Then, after school one afternoon when the days were starting to get dark by five P.M. I was cutting through the parking lot at the 7-Eleven, and there was Mrs. S____ coming out of the store carrying plastic bags, and I stopped and stared at her with (I guess) a funny look, and Mrs. S____ laughed and said, “Hello, How-ard.” There was a trace of mockery in her voice but I was bigger now, not cowering at my desk like a baby, and I felt the fear in the woman, the way she was gripping the plastic bags against her chest as if to protect herself, saying with a nervous laugh, “I hope you aren’t following me, Howard. Are you following me?”—like it could be a joke too, if it was taken that way.

  Shrugged my shoulders and laughed like yes, it was a joke. And Mrs. S____ said, “It’s just that I seem to see you often …” and her voice trailed off and I said, “I c’n take those for you, ma’am,” like a grown man might say though I had never done anything like this in my life and could not have imagined doing it until that moment. And so I went to where Mrs. S___ was standing very still like a rabbit will freeze when you approach it, if there is no way out for the rabbit.

  From Mrs. S____’s arms I took the packages (which did not weigh much but were clumsy to carry) and walked with her to her car (knowing which car it was, the dull-silver Nissan, but pretending that Mrs. S___ had to lead me to it) and put the packages in the trunk of the car and all this while Mrs. S___ was moving kind of stiff and her face was not the mocking face of Sunday school but the face of a woman of some age younger than my mother, but not much younger, that was looking strained, tense. Still her mouth was a bright crimson and around her neck she wore a white and red polka dot scarf.

  “Thank you, Howard. That’s very kind of you”—her voice was not steady.

  Saw her eye move to the birthmark on my cheek, that had been itching and so I’d scratched it, and probably it was reddened, or even bleeding, but if Mrs. S___ was about to make some comment on the sign of the beast she thought better of it, just murmured Bye! and got into her car and drove away.

  At the rear of the house. At that time of dark when lights are not yet on. Trying the door, discovering that the door is open, and this is a sign—it is meant to be, you can enter.

  And in the house, like a dream that is not clear at the edges but sharp and clear where you are looking, a room that was the kitchen, a room with a Formica-topped table looking like the very table in my mother’s kitchen; and through a doorway, a shadowy space that was the living room, and a TV on a table and headlights from outside the window reflecting in the TV screen. And there is a stairway—there is a railing to be gripped.

  It is an old house, needs repainting and roofing, and the stairs are creaking, needing new stairs, planks. Because I am heavy, the steps give beneath my weight, and I am afraid to breathe, the woman in the bedroom upstairs will hear me and begin to scream before even she sees me before even she sees the sign of the beast knowing it is meant for her.

  2.

  Final year of school for me, when I’d drop out without graduating.

  In vocational arts my grades were B+. In other subjects, mostly D’s.

  But I did not need a high school diploma for already I was working at Heike Lumber and would soon work full-time.

  In the locker room after gym class the guys were talking about a woman in our town who’d been found dead in her house, that was only a few blocks from our school. One of the guys had an older brother who was a cop so he’d heard before anybody else, before the newspaper or TV, about how a woman who lived on Cottage Street had been found dead in some kind of storage space where her body had been crammed, and the body was badly decomposed, and nobody had missed the woman though she hadn’t been seen in weeks. And none of her relatives even had missed her. She’d had a husband but he had died and there were no children.

  How her body was found, somebody had smelled it. Next-door neighbor had actually smelled it.

  Looked pretty much like she’d been murdered …

  The guys did not know the woman’s name but at once I thought, this had to be Mrs. S_____.

  In recent years all I knew of Mrs. S___ was that she no longer taught Sunday school at the church. She’d had some disagreement with Reverend Boxall or with some parents of her students, my mother had said, and had been dismissed.

  She’d been acting strange, people said. Saying things to children they repeated t
o their parents that did not sound like a Christian speaking.

  Then later that day I would learn from TV news that yes it was Mrs. S___ who had been found dead. The county coroner did not yet know how she had died. Her body had appeared “battered” and “wasted”—her face had been “unrecognizable.” A relative called to make the identification had fainted from shock. The coroner had not yet determined if the woman’s body had been carried after death into the storage space which was crammed with junk, or if the woman had crawled there of her own volition, to die.

  Woman’s body. It was shocking to me, to hear Mrs. S___ spoken of in this way.

  As you might speak of some object, or thing—laundry, gravel, garbage. Woman’s body.

  The wild thought came to me—Did I do that? Did I kill her? My fists, my feet? (For I wore heavy work boots when I worked at the lumberyard. Once the woman had fallen it would take only minutes to kick, kick, kick her until she ceased struggling.)

  My mouth went dry, with thinking of this. A wave of dizziness passed over my brain.

  But then, I chided myself—No. I did not do such a thing! I did not.

  I had wanted to enter the clapboard house on Cottage Street but I had not done it. I had wanted to surprise the woman in that house, in a (shadowy) room in that house, in a way in which she could not have known who I was while at the same time guessing who I was which was a dream of mine that came to me when I was half-awake in my bed in sweaty rumpled sheets. How-ard! Is it you?

  But it had never happened. I was sure.

  In my face my mother saw something for I was standing very still staring at the TV though on the screen now was a noisy advertisement. Asked me if Mrs. S___ had ever said strange things when I had gone to Sunday school and I told her sharply that I did not remember.

  That evening I did not have any appetite for supper. I went upstairs to my room and fell onto my bed without undressing or even removing my work boots for it was important to be vigilant, if the police came for me. What I would hear (I imagined) was a pounding at the door and my father going to open the door, then raised voices, and a sound of excitement, and footsteps on the stairs leading to my room …