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By Root 2125 0

she seemed frankly bored by them, depending upon kindly Mrs. Dulne to take care of them and listen to their anxious, incessant chatter. Little Neale, a bright, articulate child who in the city had been charmingly outspoken, had become morbidly nervous in the country; he flinched and cringed at shadows, even his own; he was forever tugging at Mother’s arm in the way of a much younger child, pleading and whimpering. “It’s in here, it comes in here when we’re not looking and it hides and if you turn on the light it turns into a shadow, if you turn around it turns around with you so you never see it—” Neale rambled about someone, or something, he was convinced inhabited Cross Hill with us. Mother laughed irritably, saying, “I don’t have time for childish games. I can’t be ‘Mother’ twenty-four hours a day!” Little Ellen, a mirror-image of her brother, though slightly smaller, with wide, ingenuous brown eyes and a habit of sucking at her fingers, believed, too, that someone, or something, lived at Cross Hill with them, except it was invisible during the day. Rarely did Ellen sleep through the night; the poor child whimpered and thrashed in her bed, but Mother refused to allow her to sleep with a lamp burning for not only would it disturb Rosalind, with whom Ellen shared a room on the second floor, but there would be a risk in calling attention to ourselves in the dark—“You can see Cross Hill for miles. We’d be lighting a path to our very beds.”

One day, Ellen was whimpering, tears rolled down her flushed cheeks, and Mother, exasperated, knelt before her, gripped her thin shoulders tight and shook her gently—“Darling, please don’t cry! There aren’t tears enough for us all.”

Mother was made especially agitated by the Contracoeur Valley Weekly, which Father forbade us, and her, to read, but which Mrs. Dulne smuggled into Cross Hill at Mother’s request. Most of the newspaper was devoted to ordinary, domestic news; but the front page had been taken over in recent weeks by ever more disturbing headlines—

6-YEAR-OLD GIRL MISSING, MARSH SEARCHED—GIRL, 17, FOUND MUTILATED AND STRANGLED IN EMPTY GRANARY—CORPSE OF 19-YEAR-OLD MAN DISCOVERED IN ARSON FIRE. Local law enforcement officers were investigating these crimes, and others that may have been related; several suspects were in custody; fascinated and horrified, Mother read through the paper with unwavering concentration, telling us afterward in a faint, thrilled voice, “Now, you see why your father and I don’t want you children to go alone into town? Why you mustn’t leave Cross Hill at any time, except with us?”

As if our parents left Cross Hill often: never more than once or twice a week. A five-mile journey to Contracoeur! Where, if we were lucky, we might be allowed to accompany Mother, for instance, into the A & P to shop for food specials, or into the ill-smelling drugstore where we were regarded with rude, curious stares, or into Sears or Kmart. We Mathesons, who’d never set foot into such dreary places in our lives until now. Stephen scorned these meager outings, but Graeme and Rosalind, eager for a change of scene, usually went along. They were warned against wandering off—mingling with strangers—but of course they did, as soon as Mother’s attention was elsewhere. And they begged, and were grudgingly allowed, to spend some time in the small public library. There, while Graeme avidly browsed bookshelves in the science and mathematics sections, Rosalind, starving for companionship, shyly approached girls her age; daring to introduce herself; explaining that she and her family were new to the area, living at Cross Hill. The Contracoeur girls stared at her in amazement. One of them, with bold crimson lips, toughly attractive, said, “You live at Cross Hill? Nobody lives there.”

Midsummer. The warmly sulfurous air, blowing southward from Lake Noir, brought poor Mother migraine headaches of increasing severity.

Midsummer. A throbbing-shrieking of cicadas in the trees, as temperatures rose into the nineties, drew poor Mother’s nerves taut as wire.

And there were false sounds,