After a while — she didn’t know how long exactly, ten minutes or so — the screams subsided, the pounding stopped, and a low, choked sobbing began.
Alice moved very quietly. Holding the doorknob tightly, she stretched her foot out toward the low chest filled with garden tools that stood in the hall and slowly slid it in front of the laundry-room door. It was reasonably heavy. She lowered herself onto the chest very quietly — somehow it seemed very important not to allow the girl to know what she was doing — and leaned against the door. The sobbing had grown quieter.
Alice was sure of one thing. Whatever motivated the child, Alice was terrified of letting her out of the room. She didn’t dare risk getting up to allow the weight of the chest alone to keep the door shut. So there was no way to get down the hall and out the door and over to a neighbor’s phone. The child might push her way out and hide somewhere in the house, those bright scissors, sharp as pain, glittering in her small cold hand. Alice knew she must sit on the chest, and control her nerves, and wait for David to come home.
It was two hours before she heard his car in the driveway. Her legs were stiff and her back, pressed against the door, ached. The child had grown completely silent. Alice strained to hear her, but there was no sound at all. Alice thought she must have fallen asleep. It seemed very cold. Perhaps the window in the laundry room was slightly open. There was a strong draft coming from under the door.
She heard David call a greeting from the front door. Afraid to waken the child, she remained silent. She saw David’s square, solid figure at the end of the hall. She held her fingers to her lips in a quieting gesture, and very carefully, slipping off her shoes, she crept on stocking feet toward him. Throwing her arms about his neck, her mouth against his ear, she whispered the story.
“Oh, my God,” he said, “what a terrible thing to go through. Alice, don’t be so frightened. You did just fine. Go upstairs. I’ll take care of it.” He gently pushed her toward the stairs and started down the hall toward the door with the chest in front of it.
A wave of terror overcame Alice, watching him. She felt a sudden, intense conviction that if he opened that door something terrible would happen, that things would never be the same again, that the child behind the door, now so strangely silent, had somehow become huge and monstrously powerful. She raced after him, grabbed his arm, and hissed her panic at him.
“Alice, Alice — it’s only a child. You said it was a child. Go upstairs and let me handle this.”
Alice watched him bend over and grasp the chest and slide it out of the way. She was shaking with fear, but unable to move from the spot. She thought of those little cold hands, the bright blades, of jagged bloody wounds in vulnerable flesh. “David, please don’t open the door! Please don’t let her out!” she begged, knowing that he would do it anyway — that she couldn’t stop him — that once he did, the dreadful unnameable thing would happen — that she was watching him in this hallway for the last time, before things changed forever.
When he reached for the doorknob, she covered her face with her hands so that she wouldn’t see. She heard the door creak open, a silence, then a child’s wild weeping, and David’s voice, steady and reassuring, saying, “It’s all right, darling, it’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t cry. I’ll call the doctor. He’ll come and help Mommy get better. Like he did the last time.”
Something to Declare
by David Williams
© 1988 by David Williams.
There was really no end to Percy’s calculated unkindnesses. They made Sybil very sad and dejected, and this prompted her to eat more, so that she became even fatter than before. But if she’d been disillusioned about the reason for her marriage, and left in no doubt about why it survived at all, her love for her husband still miraculously endured. If she was miserable in herself, in charity she was also deeply sorry for Percy, whose values she now realized had always been horribly distorted...
Percy Crickle had been married to Sybil for seventeen years before he determined to do away with her. The decision was triggered by her attitude over the winnings. It was the sheer ingratitude that stung Percy, coming on top of the massive disappointment she had caused him.
From the very beginning, Percy’s mother had insisted he was marrying beneath him — his late father had been an underpaid schoolmaster. Sybil’s father was a retail grocer whom Mrs. Crickle (Senior) invariably and pointedly referred to as a tradesman. She also described overweight Sybil as a pudding, and as graceless and untutored. She could not understand what a good-looking boy like Percy saw in the girl — or woman, rather, since Sybil was already pushing thirty-four at the time of the wedding.
But Percy had been taking the long view. He was then nearly thirty himself, and still living at home. Nor had he quite settled on a career, discounting several false starts as a professional trainee. His mother had put those down to experience — which was inaccurate or, at best, paradoxical. Meaningful work experience was to elude Percy throughout his adult life. He partially made up for the lack with a just sustaining sort of cunning. He figured that marriage to Sybil would be bearable, and better than that when she came into her inheritance.
For her part, God-fearing and trusting Sybil was genuinely in love with Percy. This was a sentiment quite separate from the incautious and transitory pleasure she felt about getting a husband well after the point where she considered marriage a serious prospect.
As for the inheritance, Sybil was a late and only child, with parents who were hard-working, appearing prosperous — and quite old. It had seemed to Percy to be only a matter of time before the fruits of their labors fell to their offspring. When that day arrived, he dreamed he would retire from his work — type unspecified — to devote himself to personal improvement of a vaguely academic nature.
In the years following the marriage, it was Sybil who brought in the larger part of their income. She had gone on working in her father’s shop, which was in a not very affluent part of Liverpool. Percy meantime elected to become a salesman, though with small success. But career setbacks never seriously perturbed him — after all, he was only marking time. There were no children of the marriage.
After sixteen years, Sybil’s father died suddenly. Then it was revealed that the grocery business had been on the brink of bankruptcy for some time. Sybil’s mother sold the shop, exchanging the modest sum it fetched for a life annuity. So it was doubly unfortunate that she also died soon after: the annuity died with her. That was the end of Sybil’s expectancy.
Since it was the prospect of the retail fortune that had kept Percy going, its failure to materialize upset him severely. The year that followed was the most depressing in his life. It burned in him, too, that Sybil continued to earn considerably more than he did. She had become chief checkout assistant in a supermarket.
But it was the sense of injustice that hurt Percy most — and he made no bones about that. He no longer bothered to conceal from Sybil that he had married her for her father’s money, now that it was clear her father had had no money.
It was no good Sybil reminding Percy that her father’s engagement present to her had been the house they still lived in. Percy had now taken to denouncing that very act of benevolence as a mere strategem, alleging bizarrely that if her scheming father had not provided a roof for her, Sybil would probably by now be living in a hostel for aging spinsters.