It was not a big house and in fact it was mostly a shack, one of those shanties you might see out along the county road. Tar-paper roof and it had a coal stove for heat in the winter. But Ben had fixed it up as nice as he could, and his wife had filled some old truck tires with creek dirt and planted them with morning glories and lily of the valley, which had bloomed. We weren’t scared, except maybe of what Ben might say when we woke him up. None of us took this too seriously—Curt left his.22 lying in the car.
But before we could knock, the door opened.
A man stepped out.
He wore a gray trench coat and a gray hat. He looked foreign. He had a funny smile, standing in the doorway of that darkened house.
Maybe you know who I mean.
And I suppose then we ought to have been scared or at least suspected something had happened. But the strange thing is we did not. He looked at each of us in turn, at me and Curt Bloedell and Charlie Dagostino —in that order—and he just smiled and said “Good night!” in a childish kind of way, and then he walked down to the road and was gone in the shadows while we watched. We didn’t ask who he was or what he was doing there. I swear I don’t know why. My guess would be that he put some kind of spell on us. I could not say this to Curt or Charlie and they never hinted at any such thing to me. But as soon as this man was out of sight we all shook our heads and began to have the feeling that something was terribly wrong. And we were scared then for the first time. Curt Bloedell kept muttering “Jesus, oh, Jesus,” and Charlie wanted to climb back in the Packard and run for home. But I said we had come to check on the Williamses and we should do that, and we were all thinking how strange it was that we could stand there talking out loud on the doorstep of the house and no one heard us, what was wrong? So I stepped inside and felt for a light switch because I knew the electric lines had been installed out here recently and so there would be light, at least. And I found the switch and I turned it on. Well, they were dead.
They were worse than dead, really, because parts of them were scattered around the shack and parts of them were just missing. There was some cheap luggage on the floor and some clothes, as if they might have been packing to leave when all this happened. And some of the baby toys were lying around. And so much blood.
I can’t describe it better than that. But it was terrible.
Remembering it is terrible.
I went outside and puked into one of the planters. Curt Bloedell ran to the Packard and got his.22 and started firing it into the air. I think he might have hurt himself if Charlie and I had not stopped him. He was sobbing like a child.
And I kept thinking, Those poor children!
We would have phoned for the police from that shack if there had been a phone, but Ben had never installed one. So we rode back to the parsonage (and it is a wonder no one was killed on that ride) and we told Reverend Dahlquist what had happened and he phoned the police for us.
We decided, in the time before the police came to talk to us, that we would not mention the children.
State custody would mean an orphanage or Christ knows what, and we thought it was better to deal with it inside the church—keep maybe a little closer eye on the kids that way. Plus Reverend Dahlquist and Charlie Dagostino’s wife had heard about Jeanne’s situation at home.
I suppose she told you about that, too? I see.
The police talked to us and they were suspicious at first, but of course there was no way me and Curt and Charlie could have done anything like that even with the.22, and there was no blood on us or anything. We told them about the man we had seen and how the house had looked. Reverend Dahlquist told how he had sent us out there because he was worried about Ben getting drunk and beating his wife. And the police, I think because they couldn’t figure out how or why any of this had happened, didn’t seem to want to follow it up. As far as they were concerned it was two vagabonds that had died in suspicious circumstances— no more to be said. And none of the three of us talked about it after that.
But even now—even now I have dreams about it sometimes.
Karen didn’t know what to say. It was too shocking, too horrible.
Willis said, “I don’t understand it. I don’t pretend to understand it. But I know what I felt the first time I saw Timmy doing that little trick of his. He was out in the backyard on Constantinople one summer night with fireflies all around him. You girls were inside and Jeanne was running a bath and I was out there watching the baby. He was chasing the fireflies. He would run across that lawn laughing and grabbing out. And then all of a sudden he reached out his little hand and drew a circle in the air. And the circle was full of that firefly light. And there were shapes in that light. Faces and bodies—things with wings. And it might have been anything but I thought—I was certain—it was Hell itself Timmy had opened up. And I could only think of that man in the gray hat and his eyes looking at me and Charlie and Curt Bloedell, and then of the blood and the parts of human beings in that shack.
“I took him—Timmy—and I beat him nearly senseless.”
Karen said nothing.
“It gave me no pleasure,” Willis said flatly. “I wanted him to be afraid of it. If that meant being afraid of me, then so be it. Whatever he had done, I knew where it led. It led back to that shack—those bodies.”
“But it didn’t work,” Karen said softly.
“Tim always fought me.” Willis rubbed his big callused hand across his face. “He hated me. You said as much.”
“And when we moved,” Karen said, “it was because of the Gray Man.”
“I might see him in the street. Or one of you kids might mention him. Or Jeanne might see him. And so we would run.”
“But he would always find us.”
“Eventually.”
Karen said, “You should have warned us before we left home.”
“I always thought—it seemed like Timmy he was after. And I believed sometimes that it was Timmy who would bring him. Timmy was not afraid of that man. I don’t know everything that went on… Timmy may have had some commerce with him.” He ground the stub of his cigarette against the sole of his shoe. “For years I believed that man was the devil.”
Karen understood that this was literally true, that her father had come out of an old tradition of hair-shirt fundamentalism, that he was quite capable of believing in a devil in an old gray hat. Considering what he had seen, maybe it wasn’t so crazy.
She said, “Do you believe that now?”
“I don’t know what to believe.”
She watched her father staring morosely out the window. The afternoon light had faded. The air rushing over the sill was icy cold. She said, watching him stare into the gathering dark, “You wanted us to be afraid.”
“Yes,” Willis said tonelessly.
“Because you were afraid.”
But he did not answer.
Chapter Fourteen
1
The day before they left, Jeanne Fauve took her daughter Laura aside and said in a whisper, “Where are you going from here?”
They stood in the parlor with the faded Persian rug and the relentless tick of the mantel clock. The air was still and dry; the furnace was humming. Upstairs, Michael and Karen were busy packing.
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “Up to Burleigh, maybe—see what we can find out.”