happen.
But nothing happened.
"Hey!"
I felt as if this was Hallowe'en night and I was a child in a graveyard, timidly searching for ghosts that I didn't believe in but which I fully expected to find.
I stepped into the doorway and hesitated and then took one more step into the room.
Violence had been done here. A rocking chair was on its side, one arm smashed. The vanity bench lay in the corner by the dresser, splintered as if someone had taken an axe to it. The dresser mirror had been shattered; and shards of silvered glass were all over the floor. The bureau was on its side, drawers spilling from it and clothes foaming from the drawers.
I found the skeleton on the far side of the canopied bed. It was a human skeleton, sprawled gracelessly on the floor. It leered up at me. It held not even an ounce of flesh. Small, fine-boned, it was obviously a woman's skeleton. The remains of
Molly Johnson.
----
12.
The Johnson farm was as real as pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for Connie, Toby, and me. The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips. I walked through the house, barn, and stable like a man moving, dazzled and amazed, through the jagged landscape of a demented, paranoid nightmare which was as solid and as undeniable as Fifth Avenue.
We were going to die.
All of us: Connie, Toby, me.
There was no escape.
I knew it. I felt it.
But I told myself that the future could be shaped by one's own thinking, and that I must abandon negative thinking and embrace all that was positive.
Nevertheless, struggling with a Peale imitation, I continued to sense a rapidly approaching disaster of truly terrifying proportions.
When I found nothing more of interest in the farmhouse (no new skeletons), I went downstairs and outside, across the porch, into the whirling snow. Without benefit of snowshoes, I went to the barn, bulling my way through knee-deep snow and walking around the more formidable drifts.
The winter world was a kaleidoscope of death: rotate the lens for countless disturbing images:
- the storm sky: waxy, mottled gray-black, as still as if it had been painted on a fine-gram canvas: the skin of a corpse;
- the wind: cold, crisp, enervating: the breath of the long-dead multitudes;
- the forest: deep, Stygian, mysterious: home of Goethe's terror, Der
Erlkonig;
- the unbiquitous snow: milk-pure, bride-white, hymeneal: the death shrouds, the smooth satin lining of a new casket, age-bleached bones
The barn doors slid open on well oiled runners.
I entered with the wickedly sharp butcher's knife held out in front of me, although I sensed that the weapon was now quite worthless. The enemy had come, had taken all that was wanted, and had gone away from this place a long, while ago. The barn no longer contained any danger that could be dispatched with a well honed knife.
I stepped out of the cold winter wind into motionless air that was even more chilling.
The barn was a mausoleum that contained the skeletons of sixteen fully grown milk cows. Fifteen of them were lying in railed milking bays, their heads toward the outside barn walls, fleshless haunches poking out into the hay-strewn central aisle down which I walked. They seemed to have died and been stripped of their flesh in an instant, much too swiftly for them to have become sufficiently agitated to snap their restraining ropes which were still intact, looped around skeletal necks.
The sixteenth set of bones was piled in the center of the aisle, the head having
But nothing happened.
"Hey!"
I felt as if this was Hallowe'en night and I was a child in a graveyard, timidly searching for ghosts that I didn't believe in but which I fully expected to find.
I stepped into the doorway and hesitated and then took one more step into the room.
Violence had been done here. A rocking chair was on its side, one arm smashed. The vanity bench lay in the corner by the dresser, splintered as if someone had taken an axe to it. The dresser mirror had been shattered; and shards of silvered glass were all over the floor. The bureau was on its side, drawers spilling from it and clothes foaming from the drawers.
I found the skeleton on the far side of the canopied bed. It was a human skeleton, sprawled gracelessly on the floor. It leered up at me. It held not even an ounce of flesh. Small, fine-boned, it was obviously a woman's skeleton. The remains of
Molly Johnson.
----
12.
The Johnson farm was as real as pain, and at the same time it was also a clairvoyant vision, a psychic-flash premonition of our own fate: a warning that there was no possible future but this one for Connie, Toby, and me. The gigantic face of Death lay beneath me, the obscene mouth opened wide; and I balanced precariously-in the style of bespectacled Harold Lloyd, but grimly, grimly-on the dark and rotting lips. I walked through the house, barn, and stable like a man moving, dazzled and amazed, through the jagged landscape of a demented, paranoid nightmare which was as solid and as undeniable as Fifth Avenue.
We were going to die.
All of us: Connie, Toby, me.
There was no escape.
I knew it. I felt it.
But I told myself that the future could be shaped by one's own thinking, and that I must abandon negative thinking and embrace all that was positive.
Nevertheless, struggling with a Peale imitation, I continued to sense a rapidly approaching disaster of truly terrifying proportions.
When I found nothing more of interest in the farmhouse (no new skeletons), I went downstairs and outside, across the porch, into the whirling snow. Without benefit of snowshoes, I went to the barn, bulling my way through knee-deep snow and walking around the more formidable drifts.
The winter world was a kaleidoscope of death: rotate the lens for countless disturbing images:
- the storm sky: waxy, mottled gray-black, as still as if it had been painted on a fine-gram canvas: the skin of a corpse;
- the wind: cold, crisp, enervating: the breath of the long-dead multitudes;
- the forest: deep, Stygian, mysterious: home of Goethe's terror, Der
Erlkonig;
- the unbiquitous snow: milk-pure, bride-white, hymeneal: the death shrouds, the smooth satin lining of a new casket, age-bleached bones
The barn doors slid open on well oiled runners.
I entered with the wickedly sharp butcher's knife held out in front of me, although I sensed that the weapon was now quite worthless. The enemy had come, had taken all that was wanted, and had gone away from this place a long, while ago. The barn no longer contained any danger that could be dispatched with a well honed knife.
I stepped out of the cold winter wind into motionless air that was even more chilling.
The barn was a mausoleum that contained the skeletons of sixteen fully grown milk cows. Fifteen of them were lying in railed milking bays, their heads toward the outside barn walls, fleshless haunches poking out into the hay-strewn central aisle down which I walked. They seemed to have died and been stripped of their flesh in an instant, much too swiftly for them to have become sufficiently agitated to snap their restraining ropes which were still intact, looped around skeletal necks.
The sixteenth set of bones was piled in the center of the aisle, the head having
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