Odd Interlude (Complete) Read online

  Soon I arrive at the end of the woods, beyond which the grassy land descends in pale, gentle waves toward the shore, perhaps three hundred yards distant. Incoming from the west, dark waves of a more transitory nature ceaselessly disassemble themselves on the sand. The declining moon silvers the knee-high grass, the beach, and the foam into which the breaking waves dissolve.

  I am overlooking a cove. On the highlands to the north are the lights of the service station and the diner. A black ribbon, perhaps a lane of pavement, unspools from behind the diner, through the moon-frosted grass, diagonally over the descending series of slopes and along the vales, to a cluster of buildings just above the beach, near the southern end of the cove.

  They appear to be seven houses, one larger than the other six, but all of generous size. In two of the structures, a few windows glow with lamplight, but five houses are dark.

  If the extended Harmony family, including sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, staff the enterprises just off the coast highway, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they will live nearby. This must be their private little enclave of homes, a picturesque and privileged place to live, though somewhat remote.

  Although this is a mild January, snakes are most likely not as active in these meadows as they will be in warmer seasons, and especially not in the coolness of the night. I particularly dislike snakes. I was once locked overnight in a serpentarium where many specimens had been released from their glass viewing enclosures. If they had offered me apples from the tree of knowledge, I might have hoped to cope with that, but they wanted only to inject me with their venom, denying me the chance to undo the world’s disastrous history.

  I wade down through the sloping meadows, grass to my knees, until I come, unbitten by lurking serpents and unscathed by plummeting drones, to the blacktop lane, which I follow toward the houses.

  They are charming Victorian homes graced with generous porches and decorative millwork—some call it gingerbread—exuberantly applied. In the moonlight, they all appear to be in the Gothic Revival style: asymmetrical, irregular massings with steeply pitched roofs that include dormer windows, other windows surmounted by Gothic arches, and elaborately trimmed gables.

  Six houses stand side by side on big lots, and the seventh—which is also the largest—presides over the others from a hilltop, thirty feet above them and a hundred feet behind. Lights are on in a second-floor room of the dominant residence, and also in several rooms on the ground floor in the last of the six front-row dwellings.

  At first I feel pulled toward that last house on the lane. As I reach it, however, I find myself continuing past the end of the pavement and down a slope, along a rutted dirt track on which broken seashells crunch and rattle underfoot.

  The beach is shallow, bordered by a ten-foot bank overgrown with brush, perhaps wild Olearia. About three feet high, the waves crest late, collapsing abruptly with a low rumble, as if slumbering dragons are grumbling in their sleep.

  Thirty feet to the north, movement catches my eye. Alert to my arrival, someone drops to a crouch on the sand.

  Reaching under my sweatshirt, I draw the pistol from the small of my back.

  I raise my voice to outspeak the sea. “Who’s there?”

  The figure springs up and sprints to the overgrown embankment. It’s slight, about four and a half feet tall, a child, most likely a girl. A flag of long pale hair flutters briefly in the moonlight, and then she disappears against the dark backdrop of brush.

  Intuition tells me that if she is not the one I have set out to find, she is nevertheless key to discovering the truth of things in Harmony Corner.

  I angle toward the embankment as I hurry north. Earlier, the purling waves must have reached within a foot of the brush, because now that high tide has passed, the narrow strip between the surf line and the enshrouded slope is still damp and firmly compacted.

  After I have gone perhaps a hundred feet without catching sight of my quarry, I realize that I have passed her by. I turn back and make my way south, studying the dark hillside for some path by which she might have ascended through the vegetation.

  Instead of a trail, I discover the dark mouth of a culvert that I hadn’t noticed in my rush to pursue the girl. It’s immense, perhaps six feet in diameter, set in the embankment and overhung in part by vines.

  Backlit as I am by the westering moon, I assume that she can see me. “I don’t mean you any harm,” I assure her.

  When she doesn’t answer, I push through the straggled vines and take two steps into the enormous concrete drainpipe. I now must be a somewhat less defined silhouette to her, but she remains invisible to me. She might be within arm’s reach or a hundred feet away.

  I hold my breath and listen for her breathing, but the rumbling pulse of the sea becomes an encircling susurration in the pipe, sliding around and around the curved walls. I can’t hear anything as subtle as a child’s respiration—or her stealthy footsteps if she is approaching me through the blind-black tunnel.

  Considering that she is a young girl and that I am a grown man unknown to her, she will surely retreat farther into the pipe as I advance, rather than attempt to bowl me off my feet and escape—unless she is feral or dangerously psychotic, or both.

  Years of violent encounters and supernatural experiences have ripened the fruits on the tree of my imagination past the point of wholesomeness. A few steps farther into the pipe, I am halted by a mental image of a blond girl: eyes glittering feverishly, lips peeled in a snarl, perfect matched-pearl teeth, between several of which are stuck shreds of bloody meat, the flesh of something she has eaten raw. She’s got a huge two-tined fork in one hand and a wicked carving knife in the other, eager to slice my abdomen as if it were a turkey.

  This is not a psychic vision, merely a boogeygirl sparked into existence by the rubbing together of my frayed nerves. As ridiculous as this fear might be, it nevertheless reminds me that I would be foolish, pistol or not, to proceed farther in such absolute darkness.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you.”

  She abides in silence.

  Reason having dismissed my imagined psychopathic child, I speak to the real one. “I know something is very wrong in Harmony Corner.”

  The revelation of my knowledge fails to charm the girl into conversation.

  “I’ve come to help.”

  The claim of noble intent I’ve just made embarrasses me, because it seems boastful, as if I believe that the people of Harmony Corner have been waiting for none but me and, now that I am here, can rest assured that I will set right all wrongs and bring justice to the unjust.

  My sixth sense is peculiar but humble. I am no superhero. In fact, I screw up sometimes, and people die when I want desperately to save them. Indeed, my primary strange talent, the ability to see the spirits of the lingering dead, has not come into play here, and I am left with only uncannily sharp intuition, psychic magnetism, a ghost dog that keeps wandering off somewhere, and an appreciation for the role that absurdity plays in our lives. If Superman lost his ability to fly, his strength, his X-ray vision, his imperviousness to blades and bullets, and was left only with his costume and his confidence, he would be of more help to the Harmony family than I am likely to be.

  “I’m leaving now,” I inform the darkness, my voice echoing hollowly along the curves of concrete. “I hope you’re not afraid of me. I’m not afraid of you. I only want to be your friend.”

  I am beginning to wonder if I might be alone. Perhaps the figure I’d seen had found a way through the brush and up the embankment, in which case the timid girl to whom I now spoke was as imaginary as the homicidal one with the carving knife.

  As I have learned before, it is possible to feel as foolish when alone as when one’s lapse in judgment or behavior is witnessed by an astonished crowd.

  To avoid feeling even sillier, I decide not to exit the pipe backward, but instead to turn and walk out with no concern about who might be at my back. With the first step, my imagination conjur
es a knife arcing through the darkness, and by my third step, I expect the point of the weapon to stab past my left shoulder blade and into my heart.

  I exit the drainpipe without being wounded, turn left on the beach, and walk away with the increasing conviction that, whatever kind of movie I’m in, it’s not a slasher film. When I reach the rutted track littered with broken shells, I look back, but the girl—if it had been a girl—is nowhere to be seen.

  Returning to the blacktop lane and the last of the seven houses, where lamplight brightens a couple of ground-floor rooms, I decide to reconnoiter window-to-window. As I climb the front steps with catlike stealth and mouselike caution, a woman says, “What do you want?”

  Pistol still in hand, I hold it down at my side, counting on the gloom to conceal it. At the top of the steps, I see what seem to be four wicker chairs with cushions, all in a row on the porch. The woman sits in the third of them, barely revealed by the glow that emanates from the curtained window behind her. I smell the coffee then, and I can see her just well enough to discern that she holds a mug in both hands.

  “I want to help,” I tell her.

  “Help what?”

  “All of you.”

  “What makes you think we need help?”

  “Donny’s scarred face. Holly’s amputated fingers.”

  She drinks her coffee.

  “And a thing that almost happened to me as I drank a beer and watched TV.”

  Still she does not reply.

  The rhythmic rumble of the surf is hushed from here.

  Finally she says, “We’ve been warned about you.”

  “Warned by whom?”

  Instead of answering, she says, “We’ve been warned to avoid you … and we think we know why.”

  In the west, the moon is as round as the face of a pocket watch, and in this exceptionally clear sky, it seems to have a fob of stars.

  The dawn is still more than an hour from the eastern horizon. I don’t know why, but I think that getting one of them to speak frankly will be easier in the dark.

  She says, “I’ll be punished if I tell you anything. Punished severely.”

  Had she already decided not to speak with me, she would have no need to suggest that she will pay dearly for doing so. She simply would tell me to go away.

  She needs a reason to take the risk, and I think that I know what might motivate her. “Is that your daughter I saw on the beach?”

  The woman’s eyes glisten faintly with ambient light.

  I take the first seat, leaving an empty chair between us, and hold the pistol in my lap.

  With less dismay than I ought to feel, I seek to manipulate her. “Is your daughter scarred yet? Does she still have all her fingers? Has she been punished severely?”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Do what, ma’am?”

  “Push me so hard.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you?” she asks. “Who do you work for?”

  “I’m an agent, ma’am, but I can’t say of what.”

  That is true enough. I could tell her what I’m not an agent of: the FBI, the CIA, the BATF.… The office that I hold comes without a badge or a paycheck, and although it seems to me that my gift makes me the agent of some higher power, I can’t prove it and dare not say as much for fear of being thought delusional.

  Strangely emotionless considering her words, she says, “Jolie, my daughter, is twelve. She’s smart and strong and good. And she’s going to be killed.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because she’s too beautiful to live.”

  FIVE

  The woman’s name is Ardys, the wife of William Harmony, whose parents created Harmony Corner.

  A time existed, she says, when life here was as ideal as it can be anywhere. They enjoyed the grace of a close-knit family and the blessing of a sustaining enterprise in which they labored together, without conflict, perhaps much as pioneer families of another era worked a plot of land, producing together what they needed to survive and producing, at the same time, a history of accomplishment and shared experience that bound them together in the best of ways.

  From the start of the Corner, the family’s children have been homeschooled, and both children and adults have preferred to spend most of their leisure time fishing in this cove, sunning on this beach, walking in these meadowy hills. There were field trips for the school-age kids, of course, and vacations beyond the boundaries of their property—until five years previously. Then Harmony Corner became for them a prison.

  She recounts that much in a calm voice so quiet that, at times, I lean sideways in my chair to be sure of hearing every word. She allows herself none of the grief in advance of loss that you might expect if she really believes that young Jolie, as punishment for her beauty, will be killed. Neither does a note of fear enter her voice, and I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.

  Literally a prison, she says. No one any longer vacations off these grounds. No day trips are taken. Long-time friendships with people outside the family have been terminated, often with a rudeness and pretended anger that will ensure that the former friends make no attempt to patch things up. Only one of them at a time may leave the property, and then only to conduct banking or a limited number of other tasks. They no longer go shopping for anything; what they need must be ordered by phone and delivered.

  Although her manner and her tone remain matter-of-fact, her voice is haunting, because she is a haunted woman. The revelation toward which she is leading me has bound her spirit but not yet broken it. I sense in her a despondency that is an incapacity for the current exercise of hope, a despondency that arises when resistance to some adversity has long proved futile. But she does not seem to have fallen all the way into the settled hopelessness of despair.

  I’m surprised, therefore, when she stops speaking. When I press her to continue, she remains silent, staring solemnly at the dark sea as if it calls to her to drown herself in its cold waters.

  Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried. If we are good at waiting, we discover that what we wanted of the future, in our impatience, is no longer what we want, that waiting has brought wisdom. I have become good at waiting, as I wait to see what action or sacrifice is wanted of me, wait to discover where I must go next, and wait for the day when the fortune-teller’s promise will be fulfilled. Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting.

  After a few minutes, Ardys says, “For a moment, I thought I felt it opening.”

  “What?”

  “The door. My own private door. How do I tell you more when I’m afraid that mentioning his name or describing him might bring him to me before I can explain our plight?”

  When she falls silent again, I recall this: “They say you should never speak the devil’s name because next thing you know, you’ll hear his footsteps on the stairs.”

  “At least there are ways of dealing with the devil,” she says, implying that there may be no way to deal with her nameless enemy.

  As I wait for her to continue and as she waits to find a route to her truth that will be safe, the darkness beyond the porch railing seems vast, seems to be washing in around us as the black sea washes to the nearby shore. Night itself is the sea of all seas, reaching to the farthest end of the universe, the moon and every planet and every star afloat in it. Here in this waiting moment, I almost feel that this house and the other six houses, the distant diner and service station—the lights of which seem like ship lights—are being lifted and turned in the night, in danger of coming loose of their moorings.

  Having found a way to approach her truth indirectly, without mentioning the devil’s name, Ardys says, “You’ve met Donny
. You saw his scar. He transgressed, and that was his punishment. He thought that if he was sufficiently deceitful and quick enough, he would win our freedom with a knife. Instead, he turned it upon himself and slashed his own face.”

  I thought I must have misunderstood. “He did that to himself?”

  She holds up a hand as if to say Wait. She sets aside her coffee mug. She lays her arms on the arms of the chair, but there is nothing relaxed about her posture. “If I am too specific … if I explain why he would do such a thing to himself, then I will say what I must not say, the thing that will be heard and that will summon to us what must not be summoned.”

  My mention of the devil seems more apt by the moment, for there is in what she just said something that reminds me of the cadences of Scripture.

  “Donny might have died if his death had been wanted, but what was wanted was his suffering. Though he was bleeding profusely and in terrible pain, he remained calm. Though his speech was impeded by his cut lips, he told us to tie him down to a kitchen table and to put a folded cloth in his mouth to stifle the screams that would shortly come and to ensure that he would not bite his tongue.”

  She continues speaking in a quiet voice from which all drama and most inflection are edited, and it is this self-control, which takes such a great effort of will, that lends credence to her incredible story. Her hands have closed into tightly clenched fists.

  “His wife, Denise, who is screaming and near collapse, seems suddenly to collect herself—just as Donny at last begins to scream. She tells us what she will need to staunch the bleeding, sterilize the wound as best she can, and sew it up. You see, she must share in Donny’s punishment by being the instrument that ensures his permanent disfigurement, which a first-rate surgeon might have minimized. There will be nerve damage and numbness. And every time she looks at him for the rest of their lives, she will in part blame herself for not being able to resist … to resist being used in this fashion. We know that if we fail to assist her, any one of us might be the next to slash his own face. We assist. She closes the wound.”