Crying Child (10 page)

When I came downstairs next morning, the fine weather had broken at last. The air outside was cool and yet sultry, and gray clouds hung low. It wasn’t the best possible weather for a hike, but I wanted to get out of the house before Ran or Mary appeared. I couldn’t face either of them.

I took the path to the graveyard, not because I particularly wanted to go there, but because it was the only path I knew. The road led to town—too far to walk, in the time at my disposal—and, in the other direction, to Will’s house. I wasn’t awfully anxious to see him either.

The cemetery could hardly have looked more dismal. In the oddly clear gray light the stillness
of the place held an air of expectancy. The hideous Gothic mausoleum was a unique creation; I had never seen anything quite so awful before.

It was an interesting structure, though. The workmanship was quite fine. The lancet windows were miniature replicas of medieval designs, but I couldn’t really consider them a happy thought. They had no glass, of course, only flat panels of stone behind the ornate tracery, but the suggestion of windows in that house of the dead was somehow unpleasant. I began to wonder about old Hezekiah; and then I began to notice other things. The door, for instance. Its heavy wooden panels were set deep in a carved arch which was adorned with sculptured figures, like the saints on a European cathedral. These were figures of Old Testament prophets and patriarchs. But there was a suggestion of something wrong, not so much in the figures themselves as in the details.

Jael, holding aloft the huge spike which she had driven into the head of Sisera—all right, that was perfectly in accord with the taste of the time. But surely the lady’s body was too visible through the folds of her robe, and too voluptuous for that of a Hebrew prophetess. The protuberances on the head of Moses were definitely horns; they came to sharp points. And there was a very peculiar face peering out over the shoulder of another bearded patriarch whose identity was uncertain.

Nor was the door itself lacking in suggestive details. Its ironbound panels were stained with decay, and the heavy padlock reminded me irresistibly of a horrible ghost story I had read as a child. “Count Magnus”—that was the name of it—the story of the traveler who finds the mausoleum with the three huge locks. Returning on successive days, he finds each day that another lock has mysteriously come open. On the third day he flees in terror; but behind him he hears the clang as the third and last lock falls open to the ground.

“Cut that out,” I said, addressing my inconvenient imagination. Then I was sorry I had spoken aloud. In the stillness the words came back at me from out of the trees.

Then, as I turned from the door, I saw her.

It was a woman, there was no doubt of that, even though a deep hood of the same black as her enveloping cloak shadowed her features. The cloak hung from shoulder to ground in unmoving folds; so still that the figure might have been a statue carved of dark granite.

My immediate reaction was fright, but not so much because of any quality of horror in the figure itself. The mood of the place, the suddenness of the apparition’s appearance, and its utter stillness would have struck even the boldest observer with a shock of surprise—and I’m not that bold.
But gradually, as my breath wheezed back into my lungs and the first panic passed I became aware of another, more insidious fear.

She wasn’t inside the cemetery. I was glad of that. She stood just outside the fence, leaning slightly forward toward it. I thought she was about to move, to lift pale hands toward the heavy iron spikes, when suddenly, off in the woods, a bird let loose a flood of liquid notes.

The sound broke some sort of spell; my aching eyes blinked. And when I opened them, she was gone.

Gone, disappeared, vanished. Not even the flutter of a black hem showed that anyone had been there. But I thought I heard a sound, a rustling among the fallen leaves to the right of the path by which I had entered the clearing—as if someone—or something—was making its way toward the gate.

I ran in the opposite direction. Panic made me stumble and trip over obstructions I should have been able to avoid. But the pain of bruised knees and a twisted ankle did not slow my flight. There was only one way I could go, since the path by which I had entered was barred to me—along the other part of the path, which led to Will’s house.

I came plunging out of the trees to see the house and the blue station wagon, just starting off down the track.

I ran straight out in front of it. When the car stopped—Will’s reflexes were excellent—its hood was so close to me that I was able to collapse onto it. Will didn’t even swear as he jumped out of the car and grabbed me; he could tell there was something wrong.

He kept shaking me and asking questions. Finally I managed to say,

“If you wouldn’t keep shaking me I could talk.”

His hands remained on my shoulders. I thought for a minute that he was going to pick me up and carry me; and the idea was so pleasant that I let myself lean on him. But by that time his professional eyes had inspected me and he had found no serious damage. He propped me up against the left fender of the car and stepped back.

“You’re not hurt,” he said flatly. “What’s the matter?”

“Someone in the woods,” I said, wheezing. “In the graveyard. A woman.”

“The same person you saw yesterday?”

“I guess so…. I don’t know.”

“What are you so scared of? Did she threaten you?”

“No, no. She just…” I stopped, seeing from his level stare that I was not making a good impression. “She was peculiar looking,” I finished lamely.

“How? Wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, or just plain ugly?”

“I didn’t—see her face.”

Will sighed loudly.

“I’m in a hurry, Jo. One of my patients is in labor. It’s her fourth, so she could have it any second, and she had a bad time with the third. Get in the car. I’ll take you home and on the way you can tell me all about your terrifying experience.”

He grabbed my arm, none too gently. I pulled back.

“If you’re in that much of a hurry, go ahead. I’ll walk.”

“And meet your scary lady again? It’s on my way; get in, I tell you.”

This time when he took my arm I didn’t resist. I had enough incipient bruises already. My offer had been sheer bravado. I wouldn’t have gone back into those woods for anything.

Will was definitely in a hurry; we went down the track much too fast for comfort, and when he took the curve along the cliff edge I closed my eyes.

“Speak up,” he said brusquely. “You’ve only got about five minutes.”

I was in no mood to speak up. I wanted to sit there like a sulky child, with my lower lip sticking out. I knew he wouldn’t believe me. He would just decide that Mary wasn’t the only hysterical neu
rotic in the family. But I wasn’t quite that childish; I told him what had happened. Naturally, the flat, reluctant statements failed to convey any of the atmosphere which had made the experience so terrifying—the only thing that had made it terrifying, for as I heard my own statement I realized how banal it sounded. When I had finished I looked at Will out of the corner of my eye. He was smiling. There was genuine amusement in that smile, but it wasn’t a nice kind of amusement. He was laughing at me.

“Annie Marks,” he said calmly.

“Who is Annie Marks?”

“Just a poor crazy old lady who likes to dress up in her grandmother’s clothes and wander around in the woods. I should have thought of her before. She lives with her daughter and son-in-law, a few miles down the road.”

“How many miles down the road?”

“This is a little out of her way,” he admitted. “But it must have been Annie. Who else could it have been? Her behavior is quite characteristic; you probably scared the poor thing half to death when she saw you lurking like a banshee at the door of the mausoleum.”

I felt like crawling down under the seat. Will was grinning broadly and humming quietly to himself. The scrap of music acted like a key, opening his thoughts to me, and I could see the scene
that was in his mind, the one he found so hilarious. It comes at the end of the first act ofThe Magic Flute, when that arrant coward Papagallo, sneaking around a corner, meets his enemy the Moor sneaking around the other side. They stare at one another in horror for a few seconds, croaking out disconnected gasps of musical terror; then, with a Mozartianly blended scream, they both flee in opposite directions. Poor old Annie and poor old Jo must have looked just the same….

We stopped in front of the house. Will jammed on the brakes with an excruciating jolt and leaned across me to throw the door open. His smile had disappeared, and the eyes he turned on me told me that he had forgotten the joke and was remembering another scene in which I had recently figured prominently.

“Better put some iodine on those scratches,” he said.

After the car had gone off in a cloud of dust I studied my scars. They were hurting now and they looked even worse. There wasn’t a square inch of skin on my calves that wasn’t scraped, bruised, or scratched. I was going to be a lovely sight in short skirts for days to come. My state of mind was a perfect complement to my legs; it too was bruised, scraped, and scratched.

“Oh, damn,” I said.

There was a chuckle from behind me—exactly
the sort of noise poor old weak-in-the-head Annie might have made. I whirled around. Mr. Willard—no, it was no use, I couldn’t even think of him that way, much less address him by that name—Jed stood there smiling at me.

“Sorry,” I said, in some confusion. I wasn’t sure how he would react to profanity from a young female. I had watched my language pretty carefully with Mrs. Willard, because I was sure how she would react.

He waved one hand. The other hand held the rake, which seemed to be supporting his leaning form, but I was beginning to know that his shiftless appearance was misleading.

“I’d say it was a pretty mild comment,” he said. “Considering…Don’t mind young Will. The Appleby girl’s in labor, and Will takes his job seriously.”

I didn’t ask how he knew the Appleby girl was in labor when Will himself had apparently discovered that fact only minutes before I ran into him. I was ready to believe that this smiling, vague-looking man and his stolid wife knew everything.

“Nasty scratches,” Jed went on, looking me over. “Better put something on ’em.”

“I will,” I said meekly.

“Yellow soap, too. Bertha has some. Good for poison ivy if you use it right away.”

I looked mournfully at my bare legs. I hadn’t thought about poison ivy.

“Something scare you?”

I looked up, startled at the accuracy of his guess, and met a pair of very knowing blue eyes. He had, as I have said, an affable face even when he wasn’t smiling—one of those faces that invite confidences. And as Mary always said, reticence was not precisely my chief character trait.

“I met Annie Marks,” I said, falling into step with him as he headed for the back of the house.

“She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“I know; I probably scared her. But not more than she scared me.”

He chuckled again.

“Pretty startling, at that, coming on someone sudden-like. Especially in the woods. They aren’t places for people.”

The words struck home, they fit so well with what I had been thinking. Forests were inhuman places. They were meant for birds and animals, but not for people—unless they were people who were still close to the original primitive origins of man. Quiet people, hunters and stalkers; people who could move as the beasts did, keeping the silence of the shut-in places.

We went into the tool shed and Jed hung the rake neatly on a hook among an assortment of gardening equipment.

“Nature is frightening,” I said, half to myself.

“It’s unpredictable. But that is why it’s so interesting.”

“You must find it interesting. You do a marvelous job; I don’t see how one man can keep this place in such beautiful condition.”

“I like the work. I tried accounting; even got me a CPA.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly at my expression of surprise; but he went on in the same even tone. “I couldn’t stand being cooped up. Or the monotony. Some people say that mathematics is exciting. It wasn’t to me. Ten digits, that’s all there are, and they always act the same way. Two and two always make four—’cept in some of the new mathematics, but bookkeepers don’t get into that. But when you work with living things you never know what’s going to happen. No two plants are exactly alike. One may die no matter how much care you give it. Another will fight to live through drought and disease and poor soil. Like people.”