Mrs. God by Peter Straub

with thick green vines and broad dark leaves. Halfway down the side of the house, the trellis parted around a low wooden door. At its far end he emerged again into bright sunlight and saw the land falling away before him in three broad terraces to the long dark pond. This was bordered at either end by the stands of gnarled, leaning trees from which the woman in green had emerged. A steep metal staircase, painted black, ran down the slope of the terraces.
    He moved toward the staircase. Far away, on the other side of the long pond and a little forest, a wide field striped by a mower sloped upward to a row of straight feathery trees that served as the border of another, higher field. White sheep like dots of wool stood so motionless they looked painted. At the top of the far field the blades of a windmill shaped like a beehive turned slowly in a drifting breeze.
    An unchanging paradise would have such fields, such ponds and trees, even the unmoving sheep and the drowsy windmill. It came to him that he was wholly happy for the first time since boyhood.
    The black paint on the iron railing was flaky and pitted with rust. The entire structure clanged when Standish moved onto the first step. He grasped the gritty railing and looked back at the house.
    From the rear the building had the massivity of a prison. The rough stone facing of the ground floor gave way to undistinguished brick. The windows at the back of the house were uniformly smaller than those at the front. Here and there blackened timbers, relics of some earlier Esswood, were visible within the brickwork. Only the library windows were not curtained.
    Standish began to move down the iron staircase.
    White iron lawn chairs and a sturdy iron table had been set out on the first terrace. The second was a smooth green swatch of lawn, oddly blank, like an empty stage.
    When he reached the bottom of the stairs his palm was stained orange from the rust. Behind him the staircase chimed and vibrated against the bolts.
    Over the tops of the trees Standish could see the feathery trees and the field topped by the windmill. A thick, buttery odor hung in the air—an almost sexual smell of grass, water, and sunlight. It occurred to Standish that this was a perfect moment: he had been inhabiting a perfect moment since he had come out from under the trellis. He walked across a track of crushed red gravel and bent to immerse his hand in the pond. The water met his flesh with a cold live shock that refreshed his entire body. Had they swum here, Isobel and Theodore Corn and the others? He swirled his hand gently in the water, watching the rust deposit drift away like a cloud of orange blood.
    Shaking his right hand, he stood up and turned toward the house. From the pond it looked less ugly, more like the prosperous merchant-landowner’s house it had been before Edith had turned it into a sort of art colony.
    An enormous butterfly with deep, almost translucent purple wings like fragments of a stained-glass window bobbled in the heavy air over the pond, and Standish’s breath caught in his chest as he watched it zigzag upward with aimless grace. Its angle to the light altered, and the thick wings became a dusty noncolor. Then Standish half-saw, half-sensed a movement in the house, and he looked up the terraces and saw a figure standing in the library window. A smudge of face above a blur of green hovered behind the glass. His viscera went cold. The woman was shouting at him: a black hole that must have been her mouth opened and closed like a valve. He had a sense of anger leaping like a flame. The pale blobs of her fists flattened against the glass. With a rush of panic, he remembered driving north on the motorway and seeing the child shut up in the red brick house: it was as if she had pursued him here, still demanding release.
    Standish put his hand on his chest and breathed hard for a moment, then began to move around the pond toward the house. The woman stepped back from the