Kate Wilhelm - The Price Of Silence

“It’s the shadow,” Maria said. “It moves out when it’s ready. I’ll put this on your bed in case you want it later.” Maria had on a heavy robe, but her feet were bare.

“I can’t understand why you don’t get cold when this happens,” Ruth Ann said in the kitchen a few minutes later, seated at the table sipping the tea she had insisted on making herself the way she liked it, black and strong, and in a big mug. Maria had a cup, half tea, half milk, the way she liked it.

“I get cold, but not like you do,” Maria said. “And Thomas Bird, he hardly notices it.”

“Strange,” Ruth Ann murmured. “I was thinking earlier how many things are strange. People think that when you get old you suddenly get smarter, or at least wiser, and I doubt that. You just have more memories.”

“Isn’t that what wiser means? More things to compare and weigh with?”

“You won’t get smarter,” Ruth Ann said. “You’re already too smart for your own good.”

“What other strange things were on your mind?” Maria asked.

Ruth Ann drew her robe tighter. She was very cold, but the tea was helping, and she knew the cold spell would not last very long. It never did. “Earlier,” she said, “when Todd was here we were looking at that picture of my mother and father, and I began to realize one of the reasons I like Todd and Barney so much. They remind me of my parents. Isn’t that strange?”

“Not how they look.”

“No. No. They don’t look at all like them. How they act, how playful they are together, trusting and honest. Things like that. Their attitude, I suppose.” She held her mug of tea, the heat felt good on her hands. “My parents were like that,” she said softly. “Laughing, playing, teasing a little. I think funerals make you think of such things.” Then more briskly she said, “Maria, it’s two-thirty. Go to bed. I’ll be awake a bit, but you should go on to bed.”

Even this was strange, Ruth Ann thought when Maria agreed that she was tired. People probably thought of them as mistress and servant, but she knew that they were simply two old friends who could share a cup of tea and chat easily at two o’clock in the morning.

Back in her sitting room, Ruth Ann stood before the portrait of her parents. She wished that they had smiled for the photographer. She had never seen her father looking that stern, he certainly had never directed such a look at her. Now she felt as if his eyes were looking through her. That’s how they posed them in those days, she thought, but he was looking at her, demanding, commanding….

“Tomorrow, Dad. I’ll start tomorrow.” She had saved the newspaper, and her mother had saved the other papers. It was time to see what was in them.

Todd snuggled close to Barney, comforted by his deep breathing, by the warmth of his body next to hers, but she couldn’t go to sleep. Usually they both fell asleep almost instantly, the way children do, the way she had done most of her life, but she was wakeful that night. She had been crying in her sleep, she thought, disturbed by the idea that a dream could have induced real tears, even sobbing, and then vanished from memory leaving no trace.

She knew that hers had been a fairly easy life compared to most people she knew, especially compared to Barney. Nothing terribly traumatic had ever happened to her; she had loving parents, loving brothers even if they had teased her unmercifully, three living grandparents. The last time she had cried like that, she recalled, had been when the family dog, Dash, had died, and they all had cried over him. She had been eight.

She never had minded the cold before. Growing up in Colorado, she had skied and ice skated, enjoyed winter sports most of her life—but the cold air that had invaded the house was not like any cold she had ever known. Barney had felt cold, too, although nothing like the chill she had experienced twice now, or the feeling of loneliness and desolation that came with it…. It had started in the hotel that night. If she had not stayed in the hotel, maybe it would not have found her, targeted her. She tried to banish the thought, but it persisted. The cold had targeted her.

Not just her, she told herself. Others felt it, too, an inversion setting in and then dissipating—in what, the wind? That made no sense at all. No door had been open that night, and no wind had been blowing back in August the first time. She knew this kind of thinking drove Barney wild. It was exactly what he was struggling to denounce in his dissertation: superstition, fear of the inexplicable, feeling targeted by the unknown.

There is always an explanation, he would say, even if we don’t know what it is yet. She closed her eyes tight. If he had felt it the way she had, he wouldn’t be so certain of that.

She remembered Jan’s vehemence when she said there was something rotten about Brindle, how she hated it. “She’s right,” Todd heard her own voice in her head. “There’s something rotten here, something wrong, something evil.”

Mornings in the Schuster house were always hectic after Mame Schuster left for work. Jodie scurried around making sure the boys were up and getting dressed, making sure they didn’t settle in front of the television, that they ate breakfast. She tried on one shirt after another, not satisfied with the results, and finally pulled on a sweatshirt that she would wear all day no matter how hot it became. She had never worried about her body until this semester, her first in high school, when all her friends were getting real figures. She was saving money to buy a padded bra, but she had decided not to tell her mother. Saturday she would go to the mall with her best friend Kelly and buy it.

She yelled at her little brothers to get moving or they would be late, and for Bobby for heaven’s sake to tie his shoes. His socks were not matched, but he liked it that way. Half the kids in his second-grade class would have mismatched socks. They thought it was cool.

“And put your dishes in the dishwasher!” she called on her way to the bathroom to give her hair a final brushing. She was putting her algebra book and spiral binder in her backpack when the boys left. They would ride their bikes down to the field across Brindle Creek where the school bus would come. They liked to get there early to fool around with the other kids. She checked the table, wiped up a little milk. Bobby always managed to spill a little.

She was worried about one of the algebra problems, certain her answer was wrong, but it was the best she could do. Algebra was hard for her. She closed her backpack, grateful that this year she had one with wheels. It was time for her to leave.

They always used the back door, as she did that morning. She stepped out, maneuvered her backpack over the sill, reached past it to shut the door, and someone grabbed her from behind, an arm hard around her chest, something cold pressed on her face. She tried to kick, but she was being held too tight, and she couldn’t breathe. Her struggles weakened, then stopped.

She moaned and twisted her head, trying to escape a bright light that hurt her eyes. Her head ached and her tongue was thick and dry. After a moment she opened her eyes and, shielding them with her arm, she sat up. She was on a bed. A wave of nausea rose. She thought she would vomit and closed her eyes again, but it passed. After a moment she cautiously opened her eyes just a little, squinting in the bright light.

It wasn’t a real bed. Just a mattress on the floor. And her clothes were gone. She was wearing a dress of some sort, pink and soft, and nothing else. No underwear, no shoes or socks.

Memory rushed in and with it a tidal wave of fear.

“Who’s here?” she said faintly. “Where is this place? Where are you?”