Off Season - Jack Ketchum [91]
I had no word for it then. Now I think it’s thrall. That quality you see in a cat’s eyes when it stares at you. An intelligence you can only partly understand but which drives you to try to anyway, a need to comprehend the thing.
Then summer arrived, and with my father at work I was left alone with her all day. I spent as much time outdoors as possible avoiding her. I’d roam the woods with Betty and her pups, Hester and Lily—we’d decided to keep them after the male died. They were good-sized dogs by then. We’d wade through streams, chase after squirrels or rabbits, find possum tracks and bird’s nests and box turtles. I’d wait till just before dinnertime, when my father was due, to come back home. What Elizabeth did alone at the house all day I didn’t know and didn’t care to know. For a while I’d check my room but she never touched my things or went near my father’s models. We’d come home and most of the time she’d be sitting in the shade rocking back and forth on the porch swing, knitting like an old lady.
She knitted nothing but squares of swirling forestcolors, earth and autumn leaves and summer blues and greens. My father thought they were pretty. To me they made no sense at all.
I thought she was crazy.
But that was no big deal.
It was only nights that she actually scared me.
I woke once to find her leaning over me, no more than two feet away, staring. I swear I could feel her breath on my cheek. I pushed her away hard and she smiled and went back to bed. Another night I found her standing naked by the window, looking out towards the barn. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her naked, she wasn’t modest at all about dressing and bathing but something about it being dark and her at the window bothered me and I watched her for a long time.
She was thin as a whip, not an ounce of fat on her unless you counted her small breasts or her buttocks. Her eyes kept flickering in the moonlight, darting back and forth as though looking for something. Finally she turned and I closed my eyes, pretending, while she slipped on her pyjamas and crawled back into bed. Only then did I allow myself to try to fall asleep.
Then one night toward the end of summer I woke from a dream in which I was a sailor jumping off a ship onto an old rotted deck high above the sea. The dock gave way beneath my feet and plunged me down to the rocks and the swirling sea below and I woke just as I was going to hit the water. Her bed was empty. It was nearly dawn. I got up and went to the window and out there everything was silent. I walked into the living room but she wasn’t there, just the dogs curled up snoring on the rug. The door to my father’s room was open. I walked over and looked inside.
My father was asleep. She sat at the foot of the bed watching him, her long dark hair flowing down her naked back, both her hands in front of her between her parted legs while her hips moved slowly, rythmically, back and forth, her hands and shoulders moving down and up. I watched her, not knowing what she was doing but knowing it was wrong somehow, the nakedness, the touching. I saw the beads of sweat along her brow and hairline and the sheen across her shoulders. She tossed her hair.
Then her head snapped to the side and suddenly she was staring right at me.
Her lips pulled back in a snarl and I ran for the bedroom. I jumped up on the bed and pulled my father’s long-finished and reassuringly solid-feeling model of the Monitor off the shelf behind me and held it like a club—the same way I’d held the flimsy Spanish galleon months before, afraid of the Creature in the Closet. I stood there listening to my heart pound, waiting, until finally she appeared in the doorway.
She laughed, high and girlish, mocking me, glancing at the Monitor and then back at me, moving slowly into the room, keeping her own bed between us while she pulled on