David Morrell: Black Evening

Perhaps he is still in the house, waiting for me.

To the hollow sickness in my stomach now comes fear, hot, pulsing, and I am frantic before I realize what I am doing, grabbing the spare cane that my mother always keeps by her bed, flicking on the light in her room, throwing open the closet door and striking in with the cane. Viciously, sounds coming from my throat, I flail the cane among faded dresses.

No one. Under the bed. No one. Behind the door. No one.

I search all the upstairs rooms that way, terrified, constantly checking behind me, clutching the cane and whacking into closets, under beds, behind doors with a force that would certainly crack a skull. No one.

"Meg! Sarah!"

No answer, not even an echo in this sound-absorbing house.

There is no attic, just an overhead entry to a crawl space under the eaves, and that has long been sealed. No sign of tampering. No one has gone up.

I rush down the stairs, seeing the trail of blood my mother has left on the carpet, imagining her pain as she crawled. I search the rooms downstairs with the same desperate thoroughness. In the front closet. Behind the sofa and chairs. Behind the drapes.

No one.

I lock the front door, lest he be outside in the storm waiting to come in behind me. I remember to draw every blind, close every drape, lest he be out there peering at me. The rain pelts insistently against the windows.

I cry out again and again for Meg and Sarah. The police. My mother. A doctor. I grab for the old phone on the wall by the front stairs, fearful to listen to it, afraid he has cut the line outside. But it is droning. Droning. I ring for the police, working the handle at the side around and around and around.

They are coming, they say. A doctor with them. Stay where I am, they say. But I cannot. Meg and Sarah. I must find them. I know they are not in the basement where the milk is dripping – all the basement is open to view. Except for my childhood things, we have cleared out all the boxes and barrels and shelves of jars the Saturday before.

But under the stairs. I have forgotten about under the stairs, and now I race down and stand dreading in the milk, but there are only cobwebs there, already reformed from Saturday when we cleared them. I look up at the side door I first came through, and as if I am seeing through a telescope, I focus on the handle. It seems to fidget. I have a panicked vision of the intruder bursting through, and I charge up to lock it, and the door to the barn.

And then I think: if Meg and Sarah are not in the house, they are likely in the barn. But I cannot bring myself to unlock the barn door and go through. He must be there as well. Not in the rain outside but in the shelter of the barn, and there are no lights to turn on there.

And why the milk? Did he do it, and where did he get it? And why? Or did Sarah do it before? No, the milk is too fresh. It has been thrown there too recently. By him. But why? And who is he? A tramp? An escapee from some prison? Or asylum? No, the nearest institution is far away, at least a hundred miles. From the town then. Or a nearby farm.

I know my questions are a delaying tactic, to keep me from entering the barn. But I must. I take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and unlock the door to the barn, forcing myself to go in quickly, cane ready, flashing my light. The stalls are still there, listing – and some of the equipment: churners, separators, dull and rusted, cobwebbed and dirty. The must of decaying wood and crumbled hay, the fresh wet smell of the rain gusting through cracks in the walls.

Flicking my light toward the corners, edging toward the stalls, hearing boards creak, I try to control my fright. I remember when I was a boy how the cattle waited in the stalls for my father to milk them, how the barn was once board-tight and solid, warm to be in, how there was no connecting door from the barn to the house because my father did not want my mother to smell the animals when she was cooking.

I scan my light along the walls, sweep it in arcs through the darkness before me as I draw nearer to the stalls, and in spite of myself, I recall that other autumn when the snow came early, four-foot drifts by morning and still storming thickly, how my father went out to the barn to do the milking and never returned for lunch, or supper. The phone lines were down, no way to get help, and my mother and I waited all night, unable to make our way through the storm, listening to the slowly dying wind. The next morning was clear and bright and blinding as we waded out, finding the cows in agony in their stalls from not having been milked and my father dead, frozen rock-solid in the snow in the middle of the next field where he must have wandered when he lost his bearings in the storm.

There was a fox nosing at him under the snow, and my father's face was so mutilated that he had to be sealed in his coffin before he could lie in state. Days after, the snow was melted, gone, the barnyard a sea of mud, and it was autumn again and my mother had the connecting door put in. My father should have tied a rope from the house to his waist to guide him back in case he lost his way. Certainly he knew enough. But then he was like that, always in a rush. When I was ten.

Thus I think as I aim my flashlight toward the shadowy stalls, terrified of what I may find in any one of them, Meg and Sarah, or him, thinking of how my mother and I searched for my father and how I now search for my wife and child, trying to think of how it was once warm and pleasant in here, chatting with my father, helping him to milk, the sweet smell of new hay and grain, the different sweet smell of fresh droppings, something I always liked although neither my father nor my mother could understand why. I know that if I do not think of these good times I will surely go insane, dreading what I might find. I pray to God that they have not been killed.

What can he have done to them? To rape a five-year-old girl. Split her. The hemorrhaging alone can have killed her.

Then, even in the barn, I hear my mother cry out for me. The relief I feel to leave and go to her unnerves me. I do want to find Meg and Sarah, to try to save them. Yet I am eager to leave the barn. I think my mother will tell me what has happened, tell me where to find them. That is how I justify my leaving as I wave the light in circles around me, guarding my back, retreating through the door and locking it.

Upstairs, my mother sits stiffly on her bed. I want to make her answer my questions, to shake her, to force her to help, but I know that will only frighten her more, push her mind down to where I can never reach it.

"Mother," I say to her softly, touching her gently. "What has happened?" My impatience can barely be contained. "Who did this? Where are Meg and Sarah?"

She smiles at me, reassured by the safety of my presence. Still she cannot answer.

"Mother. Please," I say. "I know how bad it must have been. But you must try to help. I must know where they are so I can find them."

She says, "Dolls."

It chills me. "What dolls, Mother? Did a man come here with dolls? What did he want? You mean he looked like a doll? Wearing a mask like one?"

Too many questions. All she can do is blink.

"Please, Mother. You must try your best to tell me. Where are Meg and Sarah?"

"Dolls," she says.

As I first had the foreboding of disaster at the sight of Sarah's unrumpled satin bedspread, now I begin to understand, rejecting it, fighting it.

"Yes, Mother, the dolls," I say, refusing to admit what I suspect. "Please, Mother. Where are Meg and Sarah?"

"You are a grown boy now. You must stop playing as a child. Your father. Without him you will have to be the man in the house. You must be brave."