never mean to her, he always hugged her and kissed the top of her head and called her sugar, but now he was, he was being mean, all because she didn't want to open the cellar bulkhead under the kitchen window and go down four steps and get him a can of beer from the case he kept down there where it was cool. She was so upset that her face must have broken out, because it was all itchy. Her arms, too.
'Baby bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting,' he said, leaning toward her, and she could smell his breath. He didn't need another beer, he was drunk already, the air coming out of him smelled like yeast and dead mice. 'Why do you want to be such a little chickenguts? You don't have a single drop of icewater in your veins.'
Still crying, but determined to show him she did so have icewater in her veins - a little, anyway-she got out of the rusty lawn chair and went over to the even rustier bulkhead door. Oh, she just itched all over, and she didn't want to open that door because there was something awful on the other side - even the lawn-dwarves knew, you only had to look at their sly smiles to get that. She reached for the handle, though; she grasped it as behind her Dad jeered in that horrible stranger's voice to go on, go on, baby bunting, go on, sugar, go on, toots, go on and do it.
She pulled the door up and the stairs leading down to the cellar were gone. The stairwell itself was gone. Where it had been was a monstrous bulging wasps' nest. Hundreds of wasps were flying out of it through a black hole like the eye of a man who has died surprised, and no, it wasn't hundreds but thousands, plump ungainly poison factories flying straight at her. There was no time to get away, they would all sting her at once and she would die with them crawling on her skin, crawling into her eyes, crawling into her mouth, pumping her tongue full of poison on their way down her throat
Trisha thought she was screaming, but when she thumped her head against the underside of the tree-trunk, showering bits of bark and moss down into her sweaty hair and waking herself up, she heard only a series of tiny, kittenish mewling sounds. They were all her locked throat would allow.
For a moment she was utterly disoriented, wondering why her bed felt so hard, wondering what she had thumped her head on ... was it possible she had actually gotten under her bed? And her skin was crawling, literally crawling from the dream she had just escaped, oh God what a terrible nightmare.
She rapped her head again and stuff began to come back.
She wasn't on her bed or even under it. She was in the Woods, lost in the woods. She had been sleeping under a tree and her skin was still crawling. Not from fear but because
'Get off, oh you bastards get off!' she cried in a high, frightened voice, and waved her hands rapidly back and forth in front of her eyes. Most of the minges and mosquitoes lifted from her skin and re-formed their cloud. The crawling sensation stopped but the terrible itching remained. There were no wasps, but she had been bitten just the same. Bitten in her sleep by pretty much anything that happened by and stopped for a chomp. She itched everywhere. And she needed to pee.
Trisha crawled out from under the tree-trunk, gasping and wincing. She was stiff everywhere from her tumble down the rocky slope, especially in her neck and left shoulder, and both her left arm and left leg-the limbs she had been lying on-were asleep. Numb as pegs, her mother would have said. Grownups (at least the ones in her family) had a saying for everything: numb as a peg, happy as a lark, lively as a cricket, deaf as a post, dark as the inside of a cow, dead as a
No, she didn't want to think of that one, not now.
Trisha tried to get on her feet, couldn't, and made her way into the little crescent of clearing at a hobbling crawl. As she moved, some of the feeling started to come back into her arm and leg-those unpleasant tingling bursts of sensation. Needles and pins.
'Damn and blast,' she croaked-mostly just to hear the sound of her own voice. 'It's dark as the inside of a cow out here.'
Except, as she stopped by the brook, Trisha realized that it most surely wasn't. The little clearing was filled with moonlight, cold and lucid, strong enough to cast a firm shadow beside her and put ash-bright sparkles on the water of her little stream. The object in the sky overhead was a slightly misshapen silver stone almost too bright to look at ... but she looked anyway, her swollen, itchy face and upcast eyes solemn. Tonight's moon was so bright that it had embarrassed all but the brightest stars into invisibility, and something about it, or about looking at it from where she was, made her feel how alone she was. Her earlier belief that she would be saved just because Tom Gordon had gotten three outs in the top of the ninth was gone-might as well knock on wood, toss salt back over your shoulder, or make the sign of the cross before you stepped into the batter's box, as Nomar Garciaparra always did. There were no cameras here, no instant replays, no cheering fans. The coldly beautiful face of the moon suggested to her that the Subaudible was more plausible after all, a God who didn't know He-or It - was a God, one with no interest in lost little girls, one with no real interest in anything, a knocked-out-loaded God Whose mind was like a circling cloud of bugs and Whose eye was the rapt and vacant moon.
Trisha bent over the stream to splash her throbbing face, saw her reflection, and moaned. The wasp-sting above her left cheekbone had swelled some more (perhaps she had scratched it or bumped it in her sleep), bursting through the mud she had smeared on it like a newly awakened volcano bursting through the old caked lava of its last eruption. It had mashed her eye out of shape, making it all crooked and freakish, the sort of eye that made you glance away if you saw it floating toward you-usually in the face of a mentally retarded person - on the street. The rest of her face was as bad or even worse: lumpy where she had been stung,
merely swollen where mosquitoes in their hundreds had had at her while she was sleeping. The water by the bank where she crouched was relatively still, and in it she saw there was at least one mosquito still on her. It clung to the corner of her right eye, too logy to even pull its proboscis from her flesh. Another of those grownup sayings occurred to her: too stuffed to jump.
She struck at it and it burst, filling her eye with her own blood, making it sting. Trisha managed not to scream, but a wavery sound of revulsion - mmmmmmhh - escaped her tightly pressed lips. She looked unbelievingly at the blood on her fingers. That one mosquito could hold so much! No one would believe it!
She dipped her cupped hands into the water and washed her face. She didn't drink any, vaguely remembering someone saying that woods-water could make you sick, but the feel of it on her hot and lumpy skin was wonderful- like cold satin. She dipped up more, wetting her neck and soaking her arms to the elbow. Then she scooped up mud and began to apply it-not just on the bites this time but all over, from the round collar of her 36 GORDON shirt right up to the roots of her hair. As she did it she thought of an I Love Lucy episode she'd seen on Nick at Nite, Lucy and Ethel at the beauty parlor, both of them wearing these funky 1958 mudpacks, and Desi had come in and looked from one woman to the other and he had said, 'Hey Loocy, jwich one are jew?' and the audience had howled. She probably looked like that, but Trisha didn't care. There was no audience out here, no laugh-track, either, and she couldn't stand to be bitten anymore. It would drive her crazy if she was.
She applied mud for five minutes, finishing with a couple of careful dabs to the eyelids, then bent over to look at her reflection. What she saw in the relatively still water by the bank was a minstrel-show mudgirl by moonlight. Her face was a pasty gray, like a face on a vase pulled out of some archeological dig. Above it her hair stood up in a
