We returned for dinner, amp; I stopped by my room to change clothes.
My door was wide open.
Nothing inside was damaged, everything was in its place as it should be – except the bed. The sheets were in ribbons right down to the mattress, amp; the pillow had been torn to shreds. Feathers were all over the floor.
There were even claw marks on the blanket.
At dinner the Poroths tried to persuade me to sleep downstairs in their living room; they said they'd lock all doors tonight so that not even a human burglar could get in. Sarr believes the thing is particularly inimical, for some reason, toward me.
It seemed so absurd at the time. I mean, nothing but a big fat grey cat…
But now, sitting out here, a few feathers still scattered on the floor around my bed, I wish I had taken them up on their offer. Wish I were back inside the house. I did give in to Sarr when he insisted I take his axe with me.
But what I'd rather have right now is simply a room without windows.
I don't think I want to go to sleep tonight. I'll just sit up all night on my new bedsheet, my back against the Poroths' extra pillow, leaning against the wall behind me, the axe beside me on the bed, this journal on my lap.
The thing is, I'm rather tired from all the walking I did today. Not used to that much exercise. Slacking off too much lately.
I'm pathetically aware of every sound. At least once every five minutes some snapping of a branch or rustling of leaves makes me jump. And who'd have believed that mice could make so much noise as they patter across my ceiling? They may be small, but they sound like veritable behemoths.
How did that line go from the funeral today? From the Book of Jeremiah?
Thou art my hope in the day of evil. At least that's what the man said.
July Twentieth
A dream of dragons. Woke up this morning with the journal amp; the axe cradled in my arms. What awakened me was the trouble I had breathing – nose all clogged, sneezing uncontrollably. Down the center of one of my screens, facing the woods, was a huge diagonal slash.. .
Book Eight: The Test
What we did was no harm at all, only a game.
Machen, The White People
July Twenty-first
The dawn was grey and overcast. The sun was lurking just behind the tops of the surrounding pines, yet there seemed no end to the night. It was like one of those short, chilly winter days when darkness extends far into the morning – the sort of day when all a man's instincts rebel at getting up, and when the thought of rising as early as five thirty seems scarcely to be borne. Yet five thirty was when the sun rose; and with it rose Ham and Nettie Stoudemire.
There was, beyond the darkness, another reason for Ham's reluctance to face the day: this year had been, for him, a year of troubles. If it wasn't a late frost that had stunted the roots of his young saplings, it was the fruit tree blight, or worms in the tomatoes, or tent caterpillars that nested in his maples just when he and Nettie had played host to the assembled Brethren.
And now, after splashing some cold water on his face and sipping a pre-breakfast mug of coffee with Nettie – who, as the local midwife, seemed better able to cope with getting up mornings – and after stumbling from his house into the semidarkness, now Ham discovered what appeared to be some new trouble over at the pigpen.
The animals were gathered in one corner, snorting and pawing at something on the ground. Only one thing will disturb a pig that way, and even as he hurried toward the pen Ham imagined exactly what, in fact, he found: a garden snake, thick and black and harmless, which had somehow wandered into the pigs' territory and had been stamped to death by their hooves.
Climbing nimbly over the fence, he gave the animals hard whacks on their sides. To them it was like a caress; they moved apart to let him pass. He took the dead, mashed body, still quivering from nervous contractions, and hurled it sidearm toward the woods, past the northern edges of the field.
A bad omen, he thought to himself, this early in the morning. A bad omen for the day.
Ten minutes later, as he strode out to the cornfield, a hoe upon his shoulder, he saw the next snake. It was small and slim and green, and was moving slowly down one of the planted rows. Such snakes were beneficial – they fed upon the rodents that fed upon the corn -and he let it go by, though not without a shadow of a frown. Watching as it passed timidly down the furrow, he turned to follow its course – and, turning, saw another snake, less small, less slim, and darker green.
Briefly he recalled something he'd heard at the worship last Sunday: a chance remark, prompted by the news of Hannah Kraft's death, about this season's having seen more reptiles in the woods than any time in recent memory…
Ignoring his growing uneasiness, he pushed between the waist-high stalks of corn into the next row. To his relief it was empty, empty except for the brown tilled earth and the green of the stalks and the yellow where the ears of corn peeped through And where the foot-long yellow corn snake slipped easily around a nearby stalk and glided up the row in search of food.
He turned and walked purposefully toward the house, keeping down the impulse to run. A garter snake was unwinding from the bushes that grew in front of the basement window. Wait – there were two more just behind it.
'Nettie,' he called. 'Nettie!'
The door opened and she stood upon the back steps, studying his face. 'Ham? What's the-' She looked past him. 'Oh, sweet Lord!'
He turned. For a moment it looked as if the cornfield was alive with snakes, each row a river of cold squirming bodies.
'Lord,' she said, 'tis like the plagues of Egypt!'
He looked down at his feet; the very ground on which he stood seemed to breed them. As he watched, three small dark heads appeared only a few yards away, three small heads with eyes of shiny black, heads that grew like ground vines and that, slipping from their holes, crept forth to wriggle upon the earth.
He pointed, wide-eyed, to where two more scaly bodies were emerging from the ground. 'Something down there is forcin' 'em up.'
In the shadow of the outhouse writhed a veritable Medusa's coil of them, strands of which were detaching themselves and moving toward the woods. How could the earth hold so many? It was as if they'd been planted like seeds a moon or two ago and had now begun to ripen.
Retreating to the back steps, he stood beside his wife and surveyed the things that crept across his land. 'What does it mean?' she kept asking – asking herself, or him, or God. 'What does it mean?'
Others were asking that same question. At Abram Sturtevant's a beloved old pony suddenly turned vicious and bit one of the children on the neck; Hildegarde Troet watched with horror that morning as a family of mice came dancing out of their holes beneath the kitchen and ran round and round the floor; Adam Verdock's cows had, for the past two days, been giving sour milk, and a hen in Werner Klapp's henhouse had just laid its third double- yoked egg. One of Shem Fenchel's dogs, the younger male, snapped at the female and had to be locked up. Shortly after noon Rachel Reid's canary sat stock still in its cage, its beak gaping wide, and uttered strange, piercing cries.
What was happening? Were they living under a curse? At first they asked individually, but as they learned, throughout that day, that others, too, were suffering the calamities, they grew more frightened and asked it of one another. What was happening? they asked. What did it mean?
A fourth day has dawned, a fine layer of dust has settled on his eyeballs, and still he has not moved. He does not hear the radio blaring salsa music in the street below, or the sound of children's voices in the playground down the block, or the urgently repeated ringing of the telephone. He is far away, far across the river. He has not broken contact.
He will see this thing through till the end. To do otherwise would be unthinkable.
He intends to be in on the kill.
Freirs counted his change and tried to get his story straight as he stood contemplating the pay phone that
