“Danger!” I yelled, and began to sprint toward her.
Wind knocked me down as casually as a breeze flips a playing card.
“Miles?” she said. “My father didn’t—”
Before she could say come home, I saw another woman, a smaller woman, appear momentarily on the path behind her. My heart froze. The shadowy second girl stood with her hands on her hips, looking at both of us. She vanished in the next instant. Alison Updahl must have felt some particle of the other’s force, and she twisted her upper body to look behind her. I saw the terror begin in her — it was as though life and will had suddenly drained from her. She had seen something, but I did not know what. I got up from the dust and stones of the path. “Take off,” I shouted to her.
But it was too late. She was too terrified by whatever it was she had seen, and she could not move. “Alison!” I shouted, and it was not the living girl I addressed. “Leave her alone!”
There was a whirring, typhoon-like noise of rushing, rattling wind. I turned in its direction, and was aware of Alison Updahl, stunned like a bird before a snake, turning slowly too. In the long grass before the road, wind was making a pattern: carving circles in flattened grass. Leaves and twigs began to fly together. Out on the road, stones and chunks of tarry asphalt lifted and flew toward the circling pattern.
I called to Alison Updahl, “Come toward me.” She jerked herself forward, stumbled. The air was filled with small flying bits of wood, with tumbling leaves.
Through the leaf storm I ran toward her. She had fallen on the path, and a shower of small branches and stones came cascading down upon her. I grasped her hand and pulled her upright.
“I saw something,” she muttered.
“I saw it too. We have to run.”
The whirling pattern exploded. Most of the twigs and leaves filling the air were blasted soundlessly away, and spun lifelessly down to earth all over the area between the two houses. Only a tall skeletal superstructure, a vague outline of brown and green, remained towering; then it too blew away. A few stones rattled around us. The noise of screeching air, as if we were in a hurricane, stayed with us. Again the grass was printing itself into wide circles.
Her mouth opened, but she could not speak.
I took her hand more firmly and started to run. As we came hurrying down the path. Dave Lokken pulled into the drive in Polar Bears’ car. He still looked like a man climbing out of a three-day drunk. He looked at the girl and me, running as hard as we could in his direction. “Hey,” he said. “We gotta get those bodies…”
The circling pattern on the grass moved in his direction. Then I saw the figure of the girl, still shadowy, that I had seen on the path appeal beside his car. Immediately, both windshields shattered. Lokken screamed and covered his face with his arms. A force I could not imagine pulled him from the carseat and through the open window at his side. He rolled across the gravel of the drive. His nose was pouring blood.
I tried to take Alison Updahl toward the side field, seeing that it was useless to try to hide in the house. We had gone three paces, me tugging, she stumbling, when our hands were torn apart and a wind that stank of the grave and rotting meat buffeted me aside and knocked me against the tree where my grandfather used to hang his scythe. Something started to move across the grass toward Alison Updahl.
It was as though the rind of the world had broken away, just sheared away, houses, trees, dogs, people, jobs, sunlight, all of it, and only the most primitive and the darkest life was left, what remains when everything comprehensible and usual, the rind, has peeled off and what emerges is like what you see when you flip over a long flat rock in the woods. Lokken, lying down in thick vines behind me, his nose still gouting blood, saw what I saw and screamed a second time. I knew that he was covering his eyes.
Alison got to the porch and rushed inside. Whatever it was that followed her vanished like a smudge on a pane of glass.
A spout of material — grass, leaves, pebbles — lifted from the lawn and shattered against the side of the house.
There was one gascan left in the garage. I saw it in my mind and felt the way the grip would fit my hand, and without knowing what I would do with it or how it would help, I made myself run into the garage and lift it. It was full, as I knew it would be. By itself, the weight of the heavy liquid seemed to draw me outside again, as if it were pulling me down a slope.
I went toward the house. You have already done this once, I told myself, you did it last night: but I knew that beside the quarry I had been ready to die and now I was not. I glanced back at Lokken; he was half crouching in the weeds into which she had rolled him, making noises in his throat. Blood covered his uniform shirt. No sound came from the house. I had a sudden mental vision of poor Duane, poor Polar Bears, pinned like fruit to the trees, their skin black and white, and obligation to the past — a feeling like love — moved me forward.
The smell was like water from graves, and it blanketed the porch. The gascan weighed heavily in my hand. I went through into the living room. Everything looked different. It was all there, nothing had been moved, but the room I had prepared for Alison Greening was now darker, meaner, shabbier; water stains blotted the walls. The smell was thicker inside than on the porch. Alison Updahl was cowering on a chair, her legs drawn up before her chest as if she would kick anything that came too close. I do not think that she saw me. Her face was a tight white shield. What she had seen when she had twisted around on the path was what Lokken and I had witnessed moving toward the house. “I’m not going to let her get you,” I said. “I’m going to get you out.” It was just noise.
I heard the windows breaking all over the house. The girl before me twitched: her eyes were all whites. “Stand up,” I said. She put down her legs and tried to lever herself out of the chair. I turned away, satisfied that she could move and began to splash gasoline around the room. If we have to go this way, I thought, it will be better than — I saw the bodies pinned to the trees. I doused the furniture and splashed the gasoline on the back wall.
She was there, I knew; I could sense her in the house. It was that awareness of a hostile force I had had on the first night in the woods. Alison Updahl was up on her feet, her arms out in front of her like a blind woman’s. The floor of the room was filmed with dirt; I saw a triangle of moss sprouting in a corner of the ceiling.
Then I saw a shadow against the gasoline-spattered wall. Small, formless, but essentially manlike. I dropped the empty gascan and it rang on the floor. Outside, a branch thwacked against the white boards. “Miles,” Alison Updahl said very softly.
“I’m here.” Useless words of comfort.
Leaves pushed against the broken kitchen window and forced it in. I heard them boiling in the corrupt air .
The shadow against the wall grew darker. I caught the girl’s outstretched arm and pulled her toward me. Her eyes were fluttering, but I could see their pupils. “That smell…” She was on the edge of hysteria, I could hear it slice in her voice. She moved her head and saw the darkening shadow on the wall. The earth on the floor was stirring, moving in dervish circles.