'No. It was a long time before that. He died the first time he went in there.'
Something in Randy's tone tels me he's referring not to the day we discovered Heather Langham but to the time when we were eight. When Ben learned of his father's accident that wasn't an accident and ran to the darkest place he knew.
'People can get over things,' I say. 'It just happens that Ben wasn't able to.'
'You think he's the only one?'
It seems that Randy may be about to cry. Or maybe it's me. Either way, they are sounds I realy don't want to hear. But just as I'm searching my memory for the distraction of a filthy joke, the one Randy likes about the midget pianist going into a bar, he slaps his hands against the window.
'The fuck?' he says.
'What is it?'
'Someone's there.'
Randy starts down the attic stairs.
'Randy! Wait!'
'Stay here. Watch the monitor. Trust me, I'm not planning on going inside.'
Then he's gone. I hobble to the window in time to see him cross the street and disappear into the shadows at the side of the house.
I have little choice but to do as I'm told and watch the screen. Five minutes—ten? twenty-five?—of studying the greenish empty celar.
And then something's happening. Or it has been happening since the motion sensor was triggered, and I am only noticing it now.
Breathing.
Long intakes and exhalations, wet clicks in the throat. Something alive yet invisible. The screen reveals nothing. Nothing except the outline of shadow that slides over the floor. A human shape elongated by the angle of available light, so that it appears gaunt and long-fingered.
The house moves.
A tremor that turns into an earthquake, the wals and floor and staircase pitching. It makes me look around Ben's room to see if I'm being tossed the same way. But the earthquake hasn't reached the fifty yards to the other side of Caledonia Street.
'Somebody's picked it up,' I say aloud, a statement I don't understand until I look at the screen again and see it bringing the ceiling beams into focus, the frayed wires veiled by cobweb lace.
A pause. Then the monitor is thrown to the floor.
The screen breaks into deafening static at impact. Just before it goes dead altogether, what could be the shattering fracture of the camera's casing, or feedback on the microphone—or a female scream.
Then I'm up. Fighting against my body's wish to find Ben's bed and lie face down, gripping the edges until morning. Past Betty McAuliffe's door and down the next flight, clinging to the handrail. Shouldering open the screen door to plow into the night.
I use my arms to keep balance, a breaststroke through air, until one hand freezes, a finger pointing at the house across the street. No, not the house. At the figure standing in the living- room window, indistinct but unmistakably there. Watching me just as I watch it.
[17]
I make it through the darkness of the mud room by feeling the air like a blind man. For the first several seconds there are no wals, no ceilings, no visible markings that might tel me where I am. Yet my memory of the space betrays me, and I slam headlong into the half-closed kitchen door, its hard edge cutting a fold of skin from my cheek.
'Fuck!'
The sound of my voice alows me to see, the widening aperture that turns the darkness into interior dusk.
I decide to check the living room first.
No, not 'decide,' not 'check'—I simply drift past the door down to the celar and find myself on the soiled rug, pretending I am being thorough when in fact I am merely afraid. I take the time to study the room, looking for signs of recent activity, but what I'm realy doing is listening. For a footfal, a creaking door, a breath. For the boy to tel me it was him.
On my return to the kitchen, I notice the odours I hadn't the first time through. The slow rot of wood exposed to moisture finding its way through the wals, the cardboard stuffiness of uncirculated space. Along with something sugary. It makes me think of the dousings of perfume old ladies apply before colecting in coffee shops or church basements. It brings on the same gag reflex I have fought at every funeral I have ever attended: my mother's, my father's, the coach's, Heather's, Ben's.
I stand over the sink and turn the taps, though nothing but a holow gurgle finds its way out. Through the window, the backyard looks limitless and wild in the dark, a habitat for prowling creatures. There is a sense that something is about to happen out there, the performance of violence. But when I turn away from the glass and lean my back against the counter, now looking into the house instead of out, I have the same sensation, only stronger.
On the kitchen wals, a similar scene to the one outside: the walpaper mural of a pond, a background of forest, a drinking deer. A picture of terrible expectation.
The hunter, when it comes, wil walk out of
