999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [37]
So Graeme waited for Stephen, crouched in the tall grass. On all sides, the night was harshly sibilant with nocturnal insects. Some sang in rhythm, others in isolated, piercing, saw-like cries. Graeme’s insomnia, he believed, was particularly triggered by moonlight. That moon! A pitiless eye teasing, winking, glowering at him so far below. Yet it’s a talent, never to sleep. Never to be taken by surprise. Graeme was convinced he’d remained awake but suddenly then he was jolted into consciousness by a sound of footsteps, a vibration of the earth; he sat up, dazed, for a moment confused, and saw then Stephen passing close by, or a figure he took to be Stephen’s—noting how tall, how mature Stephen had become; everyone had noticed how muscular Stephen had grown this summer, working outdoors with Mr. Dulne at mowing and tending the enormous lawn, which invariably grew back more lushly within a few days, shoulder-high grasses and brilliantly colored wildflowers in a riot of fecundity. Graeme stammered, “Stephen?—it’s me.” It came to him in a rush that his brother might reject him: he, Graeme, had been sulky and sullen for much of the summer, turning from Stephen’s frequent overtures of friendship. Graeme said, “Stephen? Wait. Can I come with you? Please—” It seemed strange to him that Stephen, knowing now who he was, had not spoken. Strange that he’d halted so suddenly, approximately ten feet from Graeme, arms raised at his sides, his posture tense, vigilant; his face, shrouded in shadow, showing no animation. “Stephen—?” Graeme blundered forward, unthinking.
Seeing, in that instant, that the figure confronting him wasn’t his brother Stephen but—the thing-without-a-face.
Graeme stood paralyzed, transfixed. For it might have seemed to him that this was but a symptom of the insomnia of which he’d grown fatally proud: a nightmare figure standing before him which he’d imagined into being; a dream of his and not “real;” or, if “real,” as the atrocities reported in the weekly Contracoeur newspaper were real, in some way not related to him. He hadn’t time to cry out for help before the creature lunged at him, swiping with its hands as a maddened bear might swipe savagely and blindly; so much heavier and stronger than Graeme, Graeme was knocked to the ground as if he were a small child and not a thirteen-year-old boy.
Except for the sounds of the nocturnal insects there was silence, for the creature did not speak, nor could Graeme scream, his breath choked off as the thing-without-a-face crouched over him where he’d fallen, raining blows upon his unprotected head, clawing and tearing at his face, tearing away the flesh of his face as Graeme fell, and fell, into the earth beneath the wild grasses of Cross Hill.
9. The Traitorous Son
For the second time that summer, in our exile in Contracoeur, the family woke to discover that our brother Graeme was missing. And again we called his name and searched for him; Rosalind led us immediately to the farther shore of Crescent Pond—which, by August, had shrunken so that it was scarcely more than a black, brackish puddle amid marsh grasses and desiccated bamboo. But of course there was no one there. Nor any footprints in the soft earth. Impatiently we called, “Graeme? Gra-eme!” for we’d come to resent Graeme’s childish, self-centered behavior, which upset us all. (With the exception of Mother, who came downstairs late in the morning, in