Which is how, later the night of that same first day, Italo appears at the Schmidts’ door, calling on Rainer. When Rainer greets him and invites him in, Italo wastes no time in saying what he’s come to say: “This woman, your neighbor — the one who has left her grave — something must be done about her.” “What do you mean?” Rainer asks. “We have to kill her,” Italo says, “we have to put her back where she belongs.” While Rainer asks him what’s wrong, Clara sends Lottie, who’s still up reading, off to bed. She starts to complain, but the flash of her mother’s eyes tells her to do as she’s told. Once the door to her room is safely shut, Rainer repeats his question, “What’s wrong?” Italo summarizes the afternoon’s events, refusing only to repeat Helen’s message to Regina. “It doesn’t bear being spoken out loud,” he declares. He verifies, however, that what she whispered is true, a truth there’s no way she could have learned. “The woman,” he says, “is no longer human. You,” he points at Rainer, “have seen her eyes. What happened today leaves no room for doubt.” “What is she, then?” Clara asks. “I don’t know,” Italo says. “A devil? Something else? I work with stone. This is not my profession. I cannot say what she is, only what she is not. She is not human.”
He’s agitated. He’s come inside and accepted the glass of iced tea Clara sets on the kitchen table for him, but he sits perched on the edge of his chair as if ready to jump and flee the house at any moment, maybe to seek out the neighbor’s. He keeps running his hands through his hair, and rubbing them together when he isn’t. Lottie, who has opened her bedroom door ever-so-slightly during the last part of Italo’s conversation with her parents, thinks he looks as if the secret he’s keeping is eating him alive, chewing its way out from where he tried to cage it deep down inside himself. To Lottie’s surprise, her father appears to be agreeing with Italo. Although Rainer’s favorite quotation is that Shakespeare one, you know, about there being more things in heaven and earth, he is, as a rule, the family’s resident skeptic, champion of what he refers to as “clear thinking.” Now here he is, nodding to Italo’s wildest speculations, going along with the man’s assertions that the woman has to be done away with, that she’s no longer a creature of this earth. It’s not so much that Lottie herself disagrees with Italo’s assessment — she thinks there’s more truth than not to what he’s saying — so much as that she can’t believe her father isn’t arguing with his friend, offering rational alternatives to Italo’s wild speculations. The two men sit up like this until well after midnight, long after Clara goes off to bed, Italo swaying from side to side as fatigue overtakes him, Rainer with his hands clasped together, his gaze on the floor. When Italo has run down, Rainer sends him home with a promise that they’ll attend to what needs attending to. Rainer stands in the doorway watching his friend walk up the street, and Lottie, who’s kept awake at her spot at the bedroom door, opens it and walks into the kitchen. Without turning around, Rainer says, “How much did you hear, Lottie?” When Lottie protests that she’s just up for a glass of water, Rainer cuts her off. “You want to know how much of what Mr. Oliveri said is true,” he says, which is close enough to the actual question plaguing Lottie—“How much of it do you believe, Papa?”—for her to claim it as her own. Rainer faces her, and Lottie is shocked to see the look written on his features: fear, fear so intense it has him on the brink of tears, his lip trembling. “What is it, Papa?” Lottie asks, “What’s wrong?” But Rainer only shakes his head and says, “It’s time for bed.” So thrown is Lottie by that expression that she forgets to ask her father for the answer he promised, and hurries off to join her sisters in their bed.
IX
As I’ve said, it isn’t until the following evening that Clara reveals the identity of the man in the big house to Rainer, so setting in motion the final chain of events in this drama. In the meantime, things at the house next door continue their downward spiral. Helen’s husband, George, keeps more or less quiet all that first day. Folks hear him moaning from time to time, but that’s about it. At dawn the morning after Italo’s visit, George starts screaming and yelling to beat the band. Once again, Rainer runs over to see what the matter is. He finds the front door to the house wide open, George writhing on the floor like a man having a fit, and Helen nowhere to be found. Rainer rushes to the man and tries to grab him, to stop him thrashing around, but George throws him across the room like he’s a rag doll. Knocks the breath right out of him. While Rainer’s sitting rubbing the back of his head from where he struck it on the wall, a few more neighbors arrive, all of whom have the same idea as Rainer, and none of whom has any better luck restraining George. It’s as if the man’s in the grip of a great power: “like a river of lightning was pouring through him,” is how Rainer will put it to Clara. As Rainer pushes himself to his feet, he realizes that the man’s screams aren’t just noise. They’re words. Hard as it is to believe, the man convulsing on the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head, his mouth bloody from where he’s bitten his tongue, is speaking. Rainer can’t make out all the words, but he’s reasonably sure of a few, and they make the scene in front of him even stranger. The man shuddering in front of him is speaking a hodgepodge of languages: English, and what Rainer is pretty sure is Hungarian, and German, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as a few more that Rainer isn’t too sure of but thinks are Russian and Greek, plus a couple that Rainer’s never heard before, guttural barks and snarls that don’t resemble any tongue he knows or knows of. He’s skipping from language to language, George, but all his speech seems to be circling around the same two or three sentences.
When Lottie, who listens to this story alongside her mother, asks her father what the man was saying, Rainer will ignore her and try to proceed with his story, until Clara picks up her daughter’s question and echoes it, insisting. “It was something about water,” Rainer says, “something to do with black water.” The answer will satisfy Clara, but not Lottie, who knows, from the way her father looks up at the ceiling as he delivers it, that he’s not telling the whole truth. They’re observant, your children. There’s more to what the man was saying than her father’s letting on, and for reasons Lottie doesn’t yet know but that trail nervous shudders up her spine, her father doesn’t want to tell his family everything he’s learned.
Nor will Lottie be able to ask George what he was saying, because, about five minutes after Rainer’s arrival, in the middle of his stream of languages, George’s back arches, quivering, and he vomits a torrent of brackish water, a geyser that goes on and on and on, fountaining over his face, his clothes, the floor, the men standing closest to him, who leap back, cursing. More water pours from that man than you would think one body could hold, and Rainer’s sure he sees it running out George’s nose, ear, even from the corners of his eyes.