'I don't know, honey,' she said. 'I'm feeling awful tired.' Yawning, she laid aside the brush.
'Well, if you'd rather not, I can- What's that?'
She turned to look at him, her eyes wide. 'What?'
'There. Inside your mouth.' He pointed, half conscious that his hand was trembling. 'I saw it in the mirror, when you yawned. There was something there.'
'Nonsense!' She tossed her head and turned away. 'It's just the light.'
'Don't try to fool me, woman! I know what I saw!' He crossed the room in two steps, grabbed her by the shoulders, and whirled her around to face him. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. 'Now open your mouth!'
She shook her head, glaring at him. Her jaw clamped shut.
'Deborah, open your mouth! If something's the matter, I want to know about it.'
'Get your hands off me,' she hissed through clenched teeth.
'Open your mouth or I'll pull it open myself.'
She tried to yank her shoulders away; he held on, dragging her toward the lamp, amazed at how strong she was as she struggled in his arms. Her hands reached clawlike for his face; nails like a cat's raked his cheek. He pulled back, grabbing at her wrists. She spat as he forced her backward, away from him, toward the light. Suddenly she yielded and went limp; caught off balance, he stumbled forward, falling against her and knocking over the table on which the lantern stood. It crashed to the floor and rolled under the bed, still burning. With a yell he released her and lunged for the lantern, fingers groping blindly beneath the bed while she stood above him, not moving, in the darkness. Reaching out, he touched something hard, and screamed as the glass burned his fingers. Ignoring the pain, he grasped the lantern and drew it forth from beneath the bed. It was still flickering; he set it down and checked beneath the bed. It had not caught fire.
'Fool!' Deborah hissed. She was looking down at him, her hands curled into fists. He had never seen her so angry. 'You could set this place aflame.'
Panting, he picked up the lantern by the handle and got to his feet. 'All right,' he said. 'Let's see.'
He brought the lantern close to her face. She hesitated a moment, then opened her mouth wide. He peered into it in the glowing light.
'See?' she said at last. 'Was I lying?'
'No.' He hung his head. There had been nothing there. 'No, you weren't lying. I'm just seeing visions, that's all.' Sighing, he righted the overturned table, set down the lantern, and turning his face to the corner, knelt to say his prayers. She was right; he was a fool. Yet earlier he could have sworn he'd seen something there, small, black, and convoluted, on the back of her tongue.
Hours later he lay staring at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. He felt her there beside him, felt her weight on the mattress, heard the regular, slow rhythm of her breathing, and wondered what he lay with in the bed.
Outside, in the moonlight, where trees whispered urgently, the wind had begun to sound to him like the rise and fall of breathing, sometimes even coinciding eerily with the breathing beside him; but the breathing outside was of something huge and monstrous, something so big that, with each breath, the trees shook.
Finally, when the sky had grown purple before the next dawn, he was able to drift into sleep. And perhaps it was already the beginning of a dream, but the last thing he recalled, as he turned in sleep toward her, was his wife's face lying on the pillow next to him, her eyes as wide as the moon.
July Twenty-ninth
From the Hunterdon County Home News, Friday, July 29:
VOLCANOES IN HUNTERDON COUNTY??? by News Science Writer Mike Aldano
The Mexican volcano Paricutin, it's said, appeared one morning in a farmer's cornfield. Now New Jerseyans may have a similar surprise in their own back yard: a 40-foot hill in the woods outside Gilead in the heart of Hunterdon County – a hill that, townspeople believe, wasn't there a few days before.
'It just grew up during the night,' said Galen Trudel, whose son Raymond, 12, claims credit for discovering the formation yesterday. 'You could hear the sound for miles, like a roaring. We had our pigpen blown down and we still haven't recovered all the animals.'
The little farming community of Gilead (pop. 187) has already had its share of disasters this week. Sunday it was rocked by a minor earth tremor that measured 4.9 on the Richter scale. Wednesday night it suffered an even greater shock, 6.1 on the scale, causing an estimated $50,000 in damage. (A spokesman for the Governor's office says that to date no claims have been filed with the state.)
The second quake may also have had an additional result: the strange new hill in the woods three miles north of town.
The cone-shaped dirt-and-basalt structure has drawn geologists from all over the state – and some worried comments from townspeople. 'I don't want my children going near it,' says Hannelore Reid, a housewife and mother of six. 'Everybody knows the swamp around there is unsafe.'
Bert Steegler, manager of the Gilead Town Co-operative, is more blunt. 'The woods around there are haunted,' he maintains. 'They always were.'
BUBBLE IN THE EARTH?
Authorities, however, paint a less romantic picture. Describing the formation as the result of 'an immense bubble of methane' – commonly known as 'swamp gas' – Dr James Lewalski of Princeton University's department of geology, contacted by phone, noted that north central New Jersey lies over a recognized geological fault area, the so-called Ramapo Fault, and dismissed the mound as 'a perfectly explainable natural phenomenon,' although he admitted that few such mounds are created with such rapidity and suddenness…
There were other reports, too, that day, in the local press. The tombstone of one Rachel van Meer, who'd died in 1912, had been toppled by the quake and had rolled down the hill to the road, where John and Willy Baber, young men of the town, had hit it the next morning in their pickup truck. The nine-foot-tall granite monument to the Troet family had cracked in two, and a number of graves had been so shaken that at least three wooden coffins were actually left jutting above the ground. 'Tis like the Day of Judgment,' remarked Jacob van Meer, whose house adjoined the cemetery.
A man in nearby Annandale had commented that it was 'lucky that the quake hit Gilead,' as it was the only town around without a steeple. A Lebanon man had added, 'It's a good thing those people don't have electricity.' A state legislator for the district had suggested, in a meeting at the local schoolhouse, that the town apply for federal disaster aid and had almost been run out on a rail.
And according to another item, a representative of the U.S. Geological Survey, after visiting the site, had concluded: 'Recent reports of unusual animal behavior in Gilead and the surrounding area may be attributable to preliminary earth tremors leading to this week's disturbances.'
But the people of Gilead didn't see it that way.
To Abram Sturtevant, whose German shepherd had gone wild and had had to be shot; to Klaus and Wilma Buckhalter, whose cow had miscarried; to Adam Verdock, checking the splint on his cow's rear leg, broken when, Wednesday, it had clambered out of its collapsed stall; to Hershel Reimer, repairing the stable door that his horse had kicked down; to Galen Trudel and his son, still searching through the swamp for their missing hogs; to Werner Klapp, burying thirty-seven chickens that had been pecked to death by their fellows on the night of the quake; to old Bethuel Reid, who refused to go outside now without a rake in his hands for fear of serpents; to all of them, the earthquake itself and the animals' unusual behavior were merely two symptoms of the same fundamental disturbance. The one was not the cause of the other; rather, both were portents, signals from above, warnings of divine displeasure. But what, they asked, was He displeased about?
Sunlight amp; grasshoppers: the woods are quiet now. Slept long into the morning, then walked up to the house, scratching groggily. Sounds of Sarr's axe echoing from across the stream. Kitchen deserted; splashed some cold water on my face in the bathroom, gazing longingly at the tub amp; thinking of Deborah's pale lovely body, almost mine for the asking. Over a solitary lunch – mostly store-bought cookies – thumbed through today's Home News. There's some kind of volcanic thing out there in the woods. Must visit.
Felt fat from lunch, amp; angry at the breakdown of my discipline. Ambled down to the stream. Deborah was kneeling in front of it, day-dreaming, amp; I was embarrassed because I'd come upon her talking to herself. I asked her if Sarr had shown any suspicion about yesterday. 'No,' she assured me, 'not even a hint.' She didn't dwell on the subject amp; went back to the house without mentioning it again. I suspect she feels guilty about the whole thing.
