much. In times of stress they come flying back at you like ghosts of
squalling children.
We started off down the road, me in the lead, the two girls together
behind me and Steve bringing up the rear.
The road was rough and pitted, strewn with rocks and studded with
holes, more weathered than I'd thought it would be. If somebody
twisted an ankle, it was going to be a very short evening. So I went
slowly. For the first couple of yards all you could hear was the four
of us scraping along. Then the road got a little better and our
walking that much quieter.
It was eerie. Walking in front of everybody, I had the feeling of
great aloneness- we four in the empty night. And even we seemed
insubstantial. Just sounds of motion like the sea and the raspings of
insects. Kim stumbled and cursed and Casey laughed, but aside from
that nobody spoke a word. We were made of shoe leather and silence out
there, and that was all.
The road got bad again. But the trees broke apart overhead, so you
could see a little better. There was a dead branch ahead, and I kicked
it out of our way. It made a rustling, crackling sound in the bushes,
like a fire burning. Pebbles rolled along with it. On the dry road
they were hollow-sounding. The air was heavy with the scent of
evergreen.
Off to the left something moved in the brush. I stopped. The
footsteps behind me stopped too. A moment later I saw cattails waving
a few feet further on. We'd startled something. A raccoon, maybe.
Something roughly that size.
'What was that?' You could hear the thrill in Kim's voice.
'Coon. Possum. Grizzly maybe. It's hard to tell.'
There was a moment's pause and then she laughed and called me a
bastard.
'Could be a rattlesnake. They grow 'em big around here. So watch your
step.'
'Could be one of those cockroaches,' said Steven. 'The big ones. The
kind that carry off babies.'
'We had them back in Boston,' said Kim.
Then they were giggling back there for a while. There was a little
tussle going on. I turned around and saw him tickling her. She
started squealing. I looked at Casey.
'I don't think we've scared 'em yet. Do you?'
'Just wait.'
We turned a bend in the road and then just ahead you could see where
the trees stopped and the clearing began, the long grass, weeds and
brambles. Framed in the last arch of birch trees you could see the
Crouch house, a single black mass against the starry sky.
I'd never approached the house this way at night before. So it was
sort of shocking. If ever a house looked haunted, it was the Crouch
place. Suddenly all the stories we'd told about it as kids came back
to me all at once, and looking at it, you had to wonder if there wasn't
a grain of truth in them, as though maybe we'd all had some instinct
about the place, some knowledge in the blood and marrow.
How do you credit the creature under the bed? The monster in the
closet?
you oo uui you oon l.
It was black, solid black, and because there was nothing but the sea
behind it, it seemed to drop right off into nowhere. Like the end of
something.
The house at the end of the world.
It was bad enough remembering the real things, the things I knew to be
true about the place. The dogs. Starved and eaten. The smell of
animal waste and bodies bloated with heat and death. The stacks and
stacks of newspapers- in a house where nobody could read. The smeared,
discolored walls inside.
But there was all the other stuff too. Ideas I'd grown up with,
shuddered over, laughed at, scared myself with over and over again.
The vampires and the evil and the dead. All that came back too, like
a sudden childish vision of madness and cruelty. As we moved through
the last stands of trees, as the sky grew bigger overhead, I thought of
those things and wondered what I was doing here, like a vulture
visiting old corpses.
And I thought about Ben and Mary.
Of idiocy taken to its very extremity. And, in that extremity, made
evil.
We broke through to open clearing. Once it had been a pasture. All at
once the night sounds seemed to shift and alter around us. Steps were
softer. The sea was louder. We were in tall grass now. The crickets
screeched us a jib bering welcome.
'Wow,' said Kim.
We stopped and looked straight up where she was looking. A huge pool
of stars, gouging light into the blue-black sky. The moon was so clear
you could see the gray areas against the white.
I've seen a thousand nights like this from a thousand fields, and they
never cease to calm me. This one calmed me now.
After a while I said, 'Come on.'
I've told you I have this habit of staring at the ground ahead of me
when I walk. I'd been doing that back on the road, but I wasn't now.
I was focused on that house. Not so nervous now but still focused.
Fascinated.
For a while it was nothing but a dark bulk rising off the flatlands,
beyond which was nothing you could see. I knew what was back there. A
short spit of land and then a cliff dropping down to the sea. I
recalled a porch back there and a kind of widow's walk on the second
floor.
And then as we got closer you could make out some of the details in
front. Gray-brown barn board covering the porch and the entire front
of the house, just as it had been in Ben and Mary's time. Three
