“But the pilot lights—”
“No reason they should be going out.”
He’d said this with a sullen certainty, as if implying that some unmentionable action of hers was responsible for the trouble with the pilot lights, and that was patently absurd Air currents in the kitchen, she told herself, or perhaps an intermittent blockage in the stove’s gas line, or something related to the damp in the kitchen. She didn’t really understand these things, but couldn’t it be that some sort of inert gas rose up from the damp brick floor, hovering in the air long enough to smother the flame of the pilot lights? Maybe such a hypothesis didn’t make hard scientific sense, but wasn’t it possible all the same?
In a house where ghosts walked, where healthy babies died abruptly in their sleep, wasn’t almost anything possible?
She lit a cigarette and sipped her coffee. A couple of nights ago, when all three pilot lights had gone out, she’d asked David about the possibility of having the pilots shut off altogether and lighting the burners with a match. She thought it might be safer that way. The idea of gas escaping silently and invisibly from an extinguished pilot light frightened her.
He had insisted it was nothing to worry about. “There’s not that much gas involved,” he explained. “Just a trickle, just enough to nourish the tiniest possible flame. If it goes out it’s an inconvenience but it’s not a danger. The small amount of gas that escapes gets dispersed right away. It can’t build up enough to cause an explosion, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“But I can smell it. I walk into the room and I can smell it.”
“It’s not even the gas you smell. Natural gas is odorless. The manufacturers are required to add a chemical to it, and that’s what you smell.”
It seemed academic to her whether she smelled the gas or a substance that had been added to the gas. If the gas were such a harmless compound, why would the law require the addition of this chemical? Gas was dangerous. It burned, it exploded, it asphyxiated people.
She drew on her cigarette, blew out a thin column of smoke. She remembered a news story from a few years ago. A town somewhere in the north, Pennsylvania or New Jersey, she couldn’t remember exactly where. They had had trouble with underground gas lines freezing and thawing during the winter. Several homes had exploded, with more than a few deaths resulting.
One incident had made an indelible impression. A woman evacuated her house just minutes before it exploded. She lost all her possessions but escaped with her life. After her house blew up, she took shelter with a neighbor a couple of blocks away. Whereupon the neighbor’s house exploded, killing the woman.
Roberta had thought at the time that the story was enough to make a fatalist out of anyone. If you were destined to die in a gas explosion, one house was as good as the next. God would get you wherever you ran.
It was easy enough to believe that when your involvement was limited to a few lines in the newspaper and a few minutes on the seven o’clock news. But how well did the belief hold up when the smell of gas was present in your own kitchen?
She got up, checked the pilot lights. All three were in good order.
Outside, a stout middle-aged woman in tight corduroy slacks was walking a small terrier. The dog was not on a leash. He raced on ahead of the woman, sniffed at the base of a tree, scampered back behind the woman, barked at a squirrel, then raced to keep up with the woman, who strode on at a steady pace, looking neither left nor right and paying no evident attention to the dog whatsoever.
Roberta watched them until they disappeared from view. Maybe she should get a dog, she thought. But she didn’t want a dog. She’d had the one thing she wanted and it had been taken from her, and its place could not be taken by some yapping little terrier.
She reached for her cigarettes, put them down, then gave up and lit one. She’d been living on coffee and cigarettes ever since Caleb’s death. She didn’t know how much weight she’d lost but she could tell from the fit of her clothes that she was losing flesh.
Upstairs, Ariel sounded a few tentative notes on her tin flute. Roberta winced. There was no escaping the child’s music, she thought. It didn’t help to close doors. The notes slithered through walls and floorboards, penetrating to every corner of the huge old house. And she wouldn’t play a proper song, something with a discernible tune to it. Instead she insisted on making up her own horrible dirges, inventing as she went along.
An image: Ariel as the Pied Piper. Slippers on her feet with turned-up toes. A peaked cap perched on her head. The tin flute at her lips. And an endless parade of rats and assorted vermin following her as she played.
Pied Piper, Act Two: Ariel with her flute, a devilish smile on her lips. Followed now not by rats but by all the town’s children, the innocent children, and all of them looked like Caleb, and—
Roberta sat up straight, gave her head a violent shake to dislodge the images forming within it.
What was the matter with her? Instead of becoming increasingly able to accept Caleb’s death, she remained appalled at the injustice of it. Her mind, evidently requiring someone to focus blame upon, seemed to have settled on Ariel. It didn’t make sense, and she knew it didn’t make sense, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it. There was no way to deal with the thoughts that came to mind. She couldn’t seem to talk to anyone about them. She couldn’t talk to Ariel at all, about anything, and she couldn’t even admit her thoughts to David, and who else was there?
Gintzler? Several times she’d been on the point of calling the psychiatrist, but each time she’d resisted, feeling that she already knew what he would tell her. He’d interpret the woman who’d appeared in her bedroom as something she’d conjured up out of guilt or anxiety, and no doubt he’d come up with some interesting symbolic explanation for the apparition, but his scientific bias was such that he’d never for a moment allow the possibility that the house was somehow haunted, that the woman was a manifestation of some force present within its walls, that she’d either signaled Caleb’s imminent death or actually caused it, taking him away to another plane of existence.
Gintzler would raise an eloquent eyebrow if she even dared to suggest the possibility that the apparition was real. He’d shame her out of it, and she was enough of a people-pleaser to go along with him, pretending that her thoughts were no more than an indication of the instability of her mind. And could she be sure that wasn’t the case?
She couldn’t be sure of anything.
She crushed out her cigarette. Ariel’s flute had gone silent again, she noticed. At least if you heard the flute you knew where the child was. She’d turned into such a sneak lately, slipping around the house like a ghost herself. When she or David climbed the stairs, a board or two invariably groaned underfoot. Similarly, neither of them could walk the length of the second-floor hallway without setting the floorboards to creak. But Ariel padded silently through the house as if her feet never touched the ground. You never heard her in the hallway or on the stairs. She weighed considerably less than they did, certainly, but Roberta was convinced there was more to it than that.
It was spooky.
She’d been more and more aware of this since Caleb’s death. She’d be in one room, any room, and suddenly she’d have the feeling that the child was nearby, watching her, spying on her. She would turn around, suddenly or stealthily, and never managed to catch Ariel in the act. The child seemed to be always hovering just out of sight, like a little speck dancing on the periphery of one’s vision.