The Collection

grandfather. He was crawling along the ground, looking up at me and smiling.' She shiv­ered. 'I tried to wake you up, but you were dead asleep. I kept shaking you and yelling, but you wouldn't budge. Then your grandfather grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down on the floor with him. I was screaming and kicking and fighting, but he had a hold on me, and he started pulling me out of the room. 'We're going to the bathhouse,' he told me. 'We're going to take a bath.'

'Then I woke up.'

'That's horrible,' I said.

'I know.' She laid her head against my chest, running her fingers through my curly chest hair.

We fell asleep in that position.

The day dawned early, just as I'd known it would. Sun­light was streaming through the window with full force by six o'clock. Sunrise always seemed to come earlier on the farm than in the city for some reason. That was one thing I remembered from my childhood.

Jan was still asleep when I awoke, and I crept out of bed softly so as not to disturb her.

My grandpa was already up, planted in his chair at the foot of the table, drinking a tin cup of black coffee. He looked up and smiled as I walked into the kitchen. 'Day's half over, city slicker. What took you so long?' His smile widened, the new ultrawhite dentures looking oddly out of place in his otherwise old face. 'Where's your wife? Still asleep?'

I nodded. 'I'm letting her sleep in. She had a pretty bad nightmare last night.'

'Yeah, your grandma used to have nightmares, too. Bad ones. Some nights, she'd even be afraid to go to sleep, and I'd have to stay up with her.' He shook his head, staring into his coffee cup. 'There were some pretty bad times there.'

I poured myself a cup of coffee from the old metal pot on the stove and sat down next to him. 'You ever have night­mares?'

'Me? I'm too boring to have nightmares.' He laughed. 'Hell, I don't think I even dream.'

We sat in silence after that, listening to the many morn­ing sounds of the farm. From far off, I heard the crowing of a rooster, endlessly repeating his obnoxious cry. Closer in, cowbells were ringing dully as four bovine animals moved slowly across the meadow to the watering pond. And of course, under it all, the ever-present hum of the flies.

'It's going to be a hot one today,' my grandpa said after a while. 'It feels humid already.'

'Yeah,' I agreed.

He added a dash of cream to his coffee, stirring it with the butt end of a fork. 'What are your plans for today?'

I shrugged. 'We don't have any, really. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look around a bit, then maybe go for a hike.'

'Not there?' He glanced up sharply.

'No. Of course not. We'd just walk around the farm here. I think the barn's about as far as we'd care to go.'

'Good.' He nodded, satisfied. 'For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets.'

Jan walked into the room then, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and I blew her a kiss across the table. She smiled and blew a kiss back. I turned again to my grandpa. 'You said that before. What is it? Part of a poem?'

'What?'

' 'It is a haunted place, strange with secrets.''

His face grew pale as I spoke the words, the color drain­ing from his cheeks, and I felt my own flesh starting to creep as I saw his fear. I was immediately sorry I'd mentioned it. But there was no way to retract the question.

He looked from me to Jan; his eyes narrowed into un­readable slits. He took a sip of coffee, and I saw that his hands were shaking badly. 'Wait here a minute,' he said, standing up. 'I'll be right back.' Holding on to his bad leg, he limped across the room and out into the hall. He returned a few minutes later with a piece of folded brown paper which he tossed at me.

I unfolded the paper and read:

For He lives here with flies in shadow and dark

And He is happy here, at home

For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets

I handed the paper back to my grandpa, puzzled. 'What is it?'

'I found it in your grandma's hand when she died. It's her handwriting, but I have no idea when she wrote it.' He folded the paper and placed it carefully in the upper-right pocket of his overalls. 'I don't think she ever wrote another poem in her life.'

'Then why did she write this?'

He stared into his coffee. 'I don't know.'

Jan sat down at the table, pulling her chair next to mine. 'How do you know she wrote it about the bathhouse?'

My grandpa looked up at her. It was a minute or so be­fore he answered, and when he did his voice was low, almost

a whisper. 'Because,' he said, 'that's where she died.'

***

We did indeed go into town, and we had some great ham­burgers at the lone diner: a dingy little hole-in- the-wall called Mac and Marg. After, we drove back to the farm and I gave Jan a guided tour of my childhood. I showed her the now-abandoned horse stalls where we used to lick the mas­sive blocks of salt with Big Red and Pony; I showed her the old windmill; I showed her the spot where we once built a clubhouse. I showed her everything.

We ended up at the barn.

'You really used to play here?' she asked, looking up at the decaying building. 'It looks so dangerous.'

I smiled. 'Well, it wasn't quite so bad off in those days. In fact, it was still being used.' I walked up to the huge open doorway and looked in. Light now entered the once-dark building through several holes in the roof. 'Hello!' I called, hoping for an echo. My voice died flatly, barely managing to scare two swallows who flew through one of the roof holes.

Jan walked up and stood beside me, looking in. 'You used to play upstairs, too?'

I nodded. 'We played everywhere. We knew every inch of this place.'

She shivered and turned around. 'I don't like it.'

I followed her back out into the sunlight. The day was hot, almost unbearably so, and though I was wearing a T-shirt, cutoffs, and a pair of sandals, I was still sweating.

Jan, ahead of me by a few paces, stopped at the edge of the tall grass and stared toward the hillside, silent, thinking. I crept up behind her and gave her a quick poke in the side. She jumped, and I laughed. 'Sorry,' I said. 'I just couldn't help it.'

She smiled thinly, and her gaze returned to the small cluster of buildings. 'It is scary, isn't it? Even in the day­time.'

She was right. The bathhouse and the small shacks sur­rounding it dominated the scenery, though they were by no means the most prominant figures in the landscape. It was as if the whole area, the scattered farmhouses, the fields and the hills, were somehow focused in on that point. No matter where one stood in the valley, his or her eyes would be drawn inexorably to the bathhouse. There was something strange about the makeshift hut, something a little off, some­thing entirely unrelated to my grandpa's story.

'Listen,' Jan said, grabbing my arm. 'Do you hear that?'

I listened. 'No, I don't hear—'

'Shhh!' She put up her hand to silence me.

I stood perfectly still, cocking my ear toward the bath­house, listening intently. Sure enough, a low buzzing was coming from that direction, growing louder or softer with the wafting of the hot breeze. 'I hear it,' I said.

'What do you think it is?'

'I don't know.'