“You can always come to see me,” Don said. “You never have to think twice about it. I mean that, Peter. I’ll never be anything but happy to see you. That’s a guarantee.”
“I was hoping you’d say something like that. Ricky’s leaving in a week or two, isn’t he?”
“Yes. I’m driving them to the airport next Friday. They’re both very excited about their trip. But if you want to see Ricky now, all I have to do is call him up. He’ll come.”
“No, please don’t,” the boy said. “It’s bad enough I’m bothering you …”
“For God’s sake, Peter,” Don said. “What’s the matter?”
“Well, it’s just that I’ve been having an awful time lately. That’s why I wanted to see you.”
“I’m glad you did. What’s wrong?”
“I keep seeing my mother,” Peter said. “I mean, I dream about her all the time. It’s like I’m back in Lewis’s house, and I’m seeing that Gregory Bate grab her again—and I keep dreaming about the way he looked on the floor of the Rialto. All those smashed-up pieces of him moving around. Refusing to die.” He was close to tears.
“Have you talked to your father about it?”
Peter nodded. “I tried. I wanted to tell him everything, but he won’t listen. Not really. He looks at me like I’m five years old and telling him some made-up nonsense. So I stopped before I really started.”
“You can’t blame him, Peter. Nobody who hadn’t been with us could believe it. If he can listen to part of it and not tell you you’re crazy, maybe that’s enough. Part of him was listening. Maybe part of him believes it. You know, I think there’s another problem too. I think you’re afraid that if you give up the horror and fear, that you’ll also be giving up your mother. Your mother loved you. And now she’s dead, and she died in a terrible way, but she put her love into you for seventeen or eighteen years, and there’s a lot of it left. The only thing you can do is carry on with it.”
Peter nodded.
Don said, “I once knew a girl who spent all day in a library and said she had a friend who protected her from vileness. I don’t know how her life turned out, but I do know that nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.”
“I know that’s true,” Peter said, “but it just seems so hard to do.”
“You’re doing it right now. Coming here and talking to me is part of getting to the other side. Going to Cornell will be another big part of it. You’ll have so much work to do that you won’t be able to brood about Milburn.”
“Can I see you again? After I’m in college?”
“You can come to see me anytime at all. And if I’m not in Milburn, I’ll write to let you know where I am.”
“Good,” Peter said.
But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.
He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser’s telephone number and said, “This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead.” The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, “Isn’t this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams.” The third time, an operator’s voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.
The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it—now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.
He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn’s only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and himself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes—so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.
How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.
If.
But perhaps children were quicker at seeing real difference than adults.
He knew he would have to make up his mind quickly: his account had shrunk to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But if he took the girl away and he was wrong, what was he: a maniac?
He started wearing the Bowie knife strapped to his side beneath his shirt when he went to the playground.
Even if he was right and the girl Ricky’s “lynx,” she could stick to her role—if he took her away, she could damage him irreparably by not revealing anything and waiting for the police to find them. But the nightwatcher wanted them dead: if he was right, he did not think she would let the police and the legal system punish him for her. She liked gaudier conclusions than that.
She seemed to take no notice of him, but the child began to appear in his dreams, sitting off to one side, observing him expressionlessly, and he imagined that even when she was sitting on a swing, seemingly absorbed, she peeked at him.
Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic’s desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.
Don closed out his account and took his remaining money away in cash; he could not sleep, even when he drank too much; he knew he was falling back into the patterns of his breakdown after David’s death. Each morning, he taped the big knife to his side before walking to the park.
If he did not act, he knew, one day he would not be able to leave his bed: his indecision would spin back into every atom of his life. It would paralyze him. This time he would not be able to write his way out of it.
One morning he motioned to another of the children, and the little boy shyly came up to him.
“What’s the name of that girl?” he asked, pointing.
The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said, “Angie.”
“Angie what?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why doesn’t anybody ever play with her?”
The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding that he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupping his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. “Because she’s awful.” He scampered away, and the girl swung back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, uncaring.
Angie. Sitting inside his sweaty clothes under a warm eleven o’clock sun, he froze.
That night, in the midst of some harried dream, Don fell out of bed and staggered to his feet, holding a head which felt as though it had fractured like a dropped plate. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin, and saw—imagined he saw—Sears James sitting at the dining-room table playing solitaire. The hallucination looked at him disgustedly, said, “It’s about time you straightened out, isn’t it?” and went back to its game.
He returned to the bedroom and began throwing clothes into a suitcase, taking the Bowie knife from the top of the dresser and rolling it up in a shirt.
At seven o’clock, unable to wait any longer, he drove to the park, went to his bench and waited.
The girl appeared, walking across the damp grass, at nine. She wore a shabby pink dress he had seen many times before, and she moved swiftly, wrapped as ever in her private isolation. They were alone for the first time since Don had thought of watching the playground. He coughed, and she looked directly at him.
And he thought he understood that all of these weeks, he sitting rooted to his bench and fearing for his sanity, she obliviously, concentratedly playing by herself, had been part of her game. Even the doubt (which still would not leave him) was part of the game. She had tired him, weakened him, tortured him as she had surely tortured John Jaffrey before persuading him to jump from the bridge into a freezing river. If he was right.
“You,” he said.
The girl sat on a swing and looked across the playground to him.
“You.”
“What do you want?”
“Come here.”
She stood up off the swing and began to march toward him. He couldn’t help it—he was afraid of her. The girl paused two feet in front of him and looked into his face with unreadable black eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Angie. Nobody ever talks to me.”
“Angie what?”
“Angie Messina.”
“Where do you live?”
“Here. In town.”
“Where?”
She pointed vaguely east—the direction of the Hollow.
“You live with your parents?”
“My parents are dead.”
“Then who do you live with?”
“Just people.”
“Have you ever heard of a woman named Florence de Peyser?”
She shook her head: and maybe it was true, maybe she had not.
He looked up toward the sun, sweating, unable to speak.
“What do you want?” the girl demanded to know.
“I want you to come with me.”
“Where?”
“For a ride.”
“Okay,” she said.
Trembling, he left the bench. As simple as that. As simple as that. No one saw them go.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Did you kidnap a friendless girl and drive without sleeping, hardly eating, stealing money when your own melted away … did you point a knife toward her bony chest?
What was the worst thing? Not the act, but the ideas about the act: the garish film unreeling through your head.