The Other by Thomas Tryon.
Title: The Other.
Author: Thomas Tryon.
Genre: Literature, fiction, mental health, horror, psychology.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1971.
Summary: Holland and Niles Perry are identical thirteen-year-old twins. They are close, close enough, almost, to read each other's thoughts, but they couldn't be more different. Holland is bold and mischievous, a bad influence, while Niles is kind and eager to please, the sort of boy who makes parents proud. The Perrys live in the bucolic New England town their family settled centuries ago, and as it happens, the extended clan has gathered at its ancestral farm this summer to mourn the death of the twins' father in a most unfortunate accident. Mrs. Perry still hasn't recovered from the shock of her husband's gruesome end and stays sequestered in her room, leaving her sons to roam free. As the summer goes on, though, and Holland's pranks become increasingly sinister, Niles finds he can no longer make excuses for his brother's actions. A novel about a home-grown monster, the book is an eerie examination of the darkness that dwells within everyone.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥ The bogs have been drained, the meadows subdivided into tracts, and where we used to wade the brooks, streets are now laid out, with light poles, sidewalks, chain-link fences, and two-car garages. Of what was, nothing is left.
♥ I've told Miss DeGroot all kinds of stories about the apple cellar. She says it's a spooky place; she's right. Buried deep in the heart of the barn, with thick walls of New England traprock, and no electrical illumination, the room was a marvelously clandestine place. For six months of the year, October to March, the bushel baskets stood in rows, brimful with apples; onions dug our of the kitchen garden swagged from the rafters, and garlands of dried peppers, and along the shelves lay bunches of beets, parsnips, and turnips. But during the remaining months, its store of provender spent, the apple cellar served for other, more devious, employment. Shut away from the light, free from intrusion, you felt it was such a place as could be peopled by a boy's imagination with all the creatures of his fancy, with kings, courtiers, and criminals-whatever; stage, temple, prison, down there seeds were sown, to grow magically overnight, like mushrooms. A place whose walls could be made to recede into airy spaciousness, the ceiling and floor into a limitless void, wood and stone and mortar dissolved at will.
♥ Holland's voice, Niles noted, was stern and cold. Head tilted slightly downward, gray eyes flinty, gazing out from under gable-shaped brows, his expression was one not unknown to Niles: stark, flat, implacable; and holding the candle high, watching him climb the ladder to put a shoulder to the trapdoor, Niles felt a queer chill, like a slowly growing stain, spreading through all the walls and membranes of his stomach.
♥ Gradually a mosaic of glassy fragments formed his own image in the shallow depth. He watched it shimmer, draw together like the pieces of a puzzle, yet not quite, never quite, forming an undistorted reflection. He put his hand out, thoughtfully, abstractedly, as though to touch that other, similar boy who peered back at him with such a longing expression. Did he seem hopeful, perhaps? A little wistful? Who was it, that figure there? Friend or foe? What did he think? If he, Niles, spoke, would the other answer? He watched silently and shortly pulled away the bleached leaves caught in the bronze drain at the bottom, saw the water disappear, with it his image, saddened now by the parting, the face so familiar, though not because he often sought its reflection in a glass; so pleasant to see, though not because of any personal conceit; so cherished, though not for any sake of its own, but because in each small particular it was the exact and perfect twin of Holland's.
♥ "And you have tennis shoes of your own. Why do you persist in wearing the old ones of Holland?" Ach, she thought with amused dismay, how far apart were children and old ladies. How could she think to try to bridge the gap?
♥ "Is it really true that sunflowers follow the sun all day?" he asked. She had read this to him from a book.
"I think it is only superstition. But all Russians are superstitious, you know. See?" She took his cheeks between her hands and lifted his head upwards, turning his face to the sun.
"Sunflower!" he shouted, grinning proudly and squinting against the light. She let her eyes rest upon his face for a moment; ah, the freshness of his features, the flower-soft skin with the golden fuzz below the hairline. This was her podsolnechnik, her sunflower now; gone were all the sunflowers of Russia, but in their place grew this one, this prize flower of her heart.
♥ "What is it like?" she asked, a kind of expectation in her voice. "What does it feel like?"
"Airplanes. It feels like airplanes."
Ah, she thought, airplanes-rather perceptive.
It was something of that nature, though not a machine, a-what? Creature, he supposed. Carefully he examined the longness of it, the slenderness, the-airiness. Lighter than air, and as thin; segmented body, metallic wings veined with silver and gold, iridescent like fairy-tale wings, inaudibly humming, beating faster than eye can see. Head loosely jointed, turning every which way, exquisitely sighted eyes avid for prey. Delicate, ferocious little beast, swifter than a swallow, flushing insect game from the clover preserves, devouring, devouring, devouring...
Now the dragonfly wafted high into the air and Niles felt his own being lifting away from the earth, felt his corporeal self go soaring up over the meadow in company with the creature, compound eyes taking in, grasping, everything; to the west along the pastures running to meet the Avalon ridge across the river, and dimly in the distance, the Shadow Hills blanketed in haze. Away to the east, beyond the house, over billowy green treetops, down to a cluster of roofs and spires: the Center. At his own backdoor he saw into the kitchen garden, saw Winnie the hired girl taking in the laundry, saw the trolley car running the Shadow Hills route, up from Talcotts Ferry, up past Knobb Street and past Packard Lane, out through the city on the north, and on to Babylon to the west; Babylon, End of the Line. It lay all before him, like a miniature playtown, the houses diminished, the barn a toy, the people on the sidewalk only make-believe. Saw, down there on the ground, Ada, standing alone, a speck.
All this he described for her in precise detail. "That's what it feels like," he said, ardent and breathless from his flight.
She agreed; it must be all of that, surely. And between them they savored like forbidden fruit the secret of the game.
♥ "Another," he begged, tugging eagerly at her arm, but she only smiled and said, "That is enough for today"-which is also the way with grandmothers.
♥ So alike, yet so different. She remembered the way they reacted to "doing the game"; this almost mystic "transference" she had discovered as a girl and taught them. So different, Niles a child of the air, a joyous spirit, well disposed, warm, affectionate, his nature in his face; tender, merry, loving.
Holland? Something else again. She had always loved them equally, yet Holland was a child of the earth; still, guarded, bound within himself, fettered by secrets unshared. Craving love but not able to give it; so mysteriously withdrawn.
Holland's very birth-his body struggling, rending the womb, emerging dead. Slapped into angry life by the doctor. Twenty minutes later, when midnight had come and gone, Niles appearing with miraculous ease. Smoothest delivery I ever saw, Dr. Brainard had said, delicately removing the caul. Imagine, born with the caul.
"Twins? With different birthdays? How unusual." Indeed, for identical twins, very. Oh yes, there were the mixed signs, on cusp, as one says-they should have been more alike; nevertheless, the difference. Holland a Pisces, fish-slippery, now one thing, now another. Niles an Aries, a ram blithely butting at obstacles. Growing side by side, but somehow not together. Strange. Time and again Holland would retreat, Niles pursue, Holland withdraw again, reticent, taciturn, a snail in its shell.
It hadn't always been so. As twins should, they had been inseparable to begin with. Why, they had shared the same cradle, head to foot-that old wicker cradle, still in the storeroom-until they outgrew it, and then they slept in the same crib. You would have thought they were Siamese twins, so close they were; one being housed in two forms. What had happened? Whose fault? She could not tell. Always the same question, over and over...
Yes, for Holland she could weep.
"Why, Niles would give that boy the shirt off his back." I expect he would. It is his nature. Generous to as fault, that was Niles. Half the things given him had found their way into Holland's possession. Give each a tin soldier, Holland would end up with a pair; some cars, Holland would have a fleet. And a sorcerer when it came to money. Niles-born with the caul, naturally he was lucky with money-found a dollar bill tucked between the pages of Granddaddy's Bible, a piece of old-fashioned Civil War currency. Finders keepers, Vining had said; but turn around and Holland had the money, squirreled away behind the picture roll of the Chautauqua desk. Alexandra had found it later, dusting.
And Holland's nature?
..But there was more to it: stormy, fretful, surrendering himself to blind rages, torn by tantrums, this was Holland. Rash, sulky, proud by turns. "Holland," she would say to the scowling imp-face he put on, "you can catch a lot more flies with sugar than you can with vinegar. Holland, smile-you don't want your face to freeze that way." And in time the smile would come, reluctantly at first, then dazzlingly; afterward, an extravagance of affection. Dear Holland, she could weep.
♥ Russell Perry is in the parlor, in his coffin, open to view. It is from the parlor that the Perrys have always been buried. In the parlor they are christened, are betrothed, are married; dead, in the parlor they are laid out. It has always been so: the shades drawn, the casket on black-draped trestles looped with cords and tassels; sighing, whispery, shadowlike forms slipping in silently to mourn, to regret or-secretly, as some will-to savor, laying warm lips against cold unyielding flesh in last farewell. This is the Perrys' way.
♥ Father leads him along the drive. Father wears a crewing sweater and smokes a pipe-Prince Albert. He is a giant of a man, stronger than Atlas, wiser than Solomon (richer than Croesus, alas no), more virtuous than Galahad, his eyes alight with humor, a tolerant smile on his mouth. Father, A Man Much Admired. He can do everything-well, practically. Anyway, Niles thinks so.
♥ "Hello, Mother." She was quite tall and he had to stretch to reach her mouth.
"Is it all over?" She dropped into the chintz-covered chair, while he, taking the dressing table stool, watched her wan face, easily detecting the strain. She was wearing her cologne, a fresh, flowery fragrance he liked, but one that failed to mask the other smell, though she kept her scented handkerchief close to her mouth.
Over. Yes, it was over. Russell was buried and Aunt Valeria was shut in her room, unable to stop crying. Niles was struck by the clarity with which he could identify his own reflection in the dark center of his mother's eye; how easily he recognized the pain there. Like the lens of a camera, stopped down to a single vivid image, this gleaming iris doggedly focused for him the picture of Russell Perry's round body tumbling out of the loft, down onto the cold steel jutting in the haymow.
♥ The shocked gloomy aftermath of death pressed a heavy hand upon the house. In the hallways the shades were pulled, the darkened staircase sprawled into a shadowy limbo. Lugubrious crying came from behind Aunt Valeria's door. Downstairs the bell rang; Niles, pausing on the top landing, glimpsed a face beyond the screen: Mrs. Rowe from next door. Ada would go to answer; she would be there to see to all the formalities. A man in black, a flower in his lapel, tiptoed across the hall carrying folding chairs to a second, similarly dressed man: Mr. Foley the undertaker, and an assistant; and there went the trestles, the funeral draperies. It was all so forlorn, so sad, so empty; such a feeling of finality to the events. A termination. The end. Born 1921-Died 1935. Poor Russell.
♥ Standing stock-still, Niles listened and watched, measuring the silence.
♥ "She's very unhappy." He wondered what might be done to cheer her up. Not much, he supposed, when people died, people cried a lot; but that's what death seemed to be, always crying, hurting, remembering...
♥ She put his hands from her, lightly and in no way reprovingly, and in another moment went to lift the window curtain. He came to stand beside her, looking down at the lawn, the pump, the well close by the grove of firs at the edge of the drive. The way she held the curtain aside, it was as though she exhibited for his perusal a landscape: sky, grass, river, trees, a cow or two. Her hooded eyes gazed out across the meadow, the river, and up along the fields on the farthest side, up to the Avalon ridge, beyond, even, across some vast untraveled space, and he could tell she had gone farther yet, even to that farthest point, that faraway place where no one might accompany her, beyond the ridge, beyond the Shadow Hills, to a place where she was alone, aloof, a solitary, pondering-what? witch, perhaps? no, something grander, a goddess, he thought-Minerva, all serene, imperturbable, benign, sprung full-blown from Jove's brow.
♥ "Ada?"
"Yes, dear?"
"Why did Brünhilde ride into the fire?"
"My, what made you think of what, the Wagner music? Why, in those days, that is what the women did. It was called immolation. They offered themselves on the pyre of the beloved."
"Yes, but why?"
"For love, I imagine. When one's love of the beloved is greater than one's love of life or of one's self, one sometimes prefers death. It is not so much an immolation of the body, I think, of one's physical being as-" she paused to select her words.
"What, then?"
"As an immolation of the heart."
♥ "Also, you must remember that your mother does not rest well. Often she walks the floor far into the morning. Sometimes she does not sleep at all; the light shows under the door until dawn. And this is very bad, because sleep is a most holy thing. It is while we sleep that we get our mind and our imagination filled up again." She shaped a bowl with her gnarled hands. "It is like a deep pool, this imagination, and during the day it gets used up, like water, and when we sleep at night the water we have used during the day gets replaced. And if it is not replaced, if there is none to drink of, we are thirsty. It is from sleep that God gives us our strength and our power and our peace, do you see."
"I wish I could help," he muttered, with a turn to the Victrola handle.
"We help one another by understanding one another: that is the only help there is. And the only hope as well."
♥ But you never could tell, with Ada. Her looks were often the strangest of all. Russians, being happy, the happiness oozed out of every pore. It was all around them, like the sun. Unhappiness was hidden, as though it didn't exist. Well, of course she was unhappy about Russell's getting killed on the pitchfork (no sense in hiding that).
♥ "I told you, she chased me home." This time his chuckle was a little more than wry, a little less than savage. "But just wait."
"Wait for what?"
"Wait till Old Lady Rowe gets it." And Niles noted how, as Holland made the remark, the flushed exuberance of his face evened out, leaving him with a placid, introspective expression, his narrowed eyes thoughtfully examining some private phantom. Niles considered his profile against the dark sky: Holland, he thought; Holland. He needed him-they needed each other. That was the thing. He was-what?-dependent on him. Without Holland, he felt some unidentifiable part of him had been lost.
♥ Though it was the habit of the servants to be early stirring, Ada Katerina was earlier yet, throwing off the covers of her white iron bed, kneeling on the floor, praying before her icon, then dressing and going abroad to walk solitary along the path between the fields of wild sunflowers, fields spread so wide and far and deep that they seemed unending, stretching away from the path in gentle undulations as far as the eye could see, bobbing and swaying like a sea of gold, on which Ada Katerina had thought a ship might sail away, sail away forever over those waves of flowers, as high as a man's head.
There on the path she felt all the world was yellow, and tranquil. So enormous she could not even begin to imagine how enormous it was. To be alone in that sunflower world was to be at peace, and this was something that belonged to her alone. "Always I would go by myself, for I did not want to talk or chatter like those other magpie girls. And me barefooted-yes, always Ada with her bare feet no matter what mamuschka would say, this being in a time when my toes had not corns and bare feet was always such delight for me. I am thinking on these fine mornings how homesick I should be if ever I had to leave my sunflowers, and how contented I was in my heart. And I could see things. That is, one kind of thing in another kind of thing, things that were not really there at all. And I could find faces and figures in almost anything, in everything: in the clouds and in the trees and in the water. On the ceiling, even."
Oh, yes, they had a face too, on their ceiling.
"And then, afterward, came the game."
Oooooh, the game.
Stroking her hair with a brush as she leaned back against the pillows of her white iron bed, modestly, "Oh, well, the game is not so hard, you know. Not so special." (Or so she made out, though they knew better.) "A little pretend game is all. There is a trick to it, do you see? Just-well, thinking, that was all. Pick something and look at it. Pretty soon you are looking and looking and looking and looking at it. And you are thinking about that one thing, you are thinking so hard, and sometimes you squeeze up your eyes and you remember the picture of the thing behind your eyelids, and the sun is making all colored dots behind there, and then you open your eyes and you can see what that thing is really like. What it really is. Looking into it, you pass through it."
It's a trick, isn't it?
"Yas, I think so, but if a trick, it is a Russian one." As if that explained it all.
But how? How?
"Well, Russians, if you can see it, feel more than do most people. Deep down. Russians, I suspect, have a sixth or seventh sense that God didn't give to most other people. They have a lot more of what do you call it-" Thinking a moment. "Insight. Yas. That is the word. Insight. They are mystical folk, Russians, and," she added jokingly, "the drunker they get, the more mystical they get. Worse than the Irish, the Russians."
But they could do it too.
"But of course, you are half Russian. What should you expect?"
♥ And how strange, Madame thinks, that Ada had known about the mad dog lurking in the thicket; how could she have known? But, Beware when mad dogs lurk, for lurking they shall bite, was all Ada could reply to her queries, remembering always to add, And biting, shall bite again.
♥ But there were always sunflowers, her beloved podsolnechniki, that Ada would plant to remind her of the fields of St. Petersburg and of the Ada Katerina who had been and who was now Ada Vedrenya, sunflowers in her dooryard, along the fence, beside the garage. And when she came to Pequot Landing she put seeds into the earth behind the carriage-house, where they grew tall and these flowers were favorites of all the others, each with its own sun-face to greet her in the summer morning. As the Sunflower turns on her god, when he sets, The same look which she turned when he rose. These lines she had found in a book and copied them out, and the thought seemed to please her. But with the passing of the years the flowers reminded her less of the old country and more of her grandsons, with their twin fringes of bright yellow, like the rays of the flowers, and truly, to her, it seemed their shining faces sent forth rays. And it was only sometimes, like this evening, with the Tchaikovsky music on the radio, that she permitted herself to be reminded of white embroidered dresses and ribbons and the soft evenings in the summer house on the big dacha in St. Petersburg.
♥ She nodded without speaking and he carefully removed her work from her lap to put it in the basket. After he had kissed her, and the screen door clacked at his back as he carried the basket and Torrie's doll-lamp inside, she remained a little longer in her chair, rocking gently, and feeling the warm night grow cold around her, while terror stole across her mind, so quietly, so stealthily, so imperceptibly that, absently fingering her swollen knuckles, she was taken quite unawares.
♥ When it was over, he yawned, removed the earphones, and went to open a window to the south. Along the drive, the fir trees, green-black against the sky, appeared a pantheon of bearded gods-Wotan, Fafnir, Thor-their arms stretching, stirring and stretching toward him in the wind. Gold, gold was what they craved-Nibelung gold; Peregrine gold.
♥ "Damned hermaphrodite. That's what they are-a hermaphrodite. Half-man, half-woman."
"That's what a marriage is."
♥ "Wipe your feet!" Her familiar chant ended in a rising inflection warning of dire consequences.
"I did," Niles hastened to assure her, the screen door clattering behind him as he stepped over a basketful of root beer bottles and left a trail of grass cutting across the linoleum to the sink. At her ironing board, Winnie shook a woeful head. For how many years had she tried to train Perry kids not to track up her floor? Fall, leaves; winter, snow; spring, mud; summer, half the lawn, natcherly.
♥ "Hot," he heard Holland murmur. Niles opened his eyes. Against the sky his twin's face looked saturnine, satanic almost, as he shot Niles one of his oblique looks and then, with a lazy half-smile of contentment, closed his own eyes.
There's that secret smile again. What was it, this thing that amused Holland so, this past week or more? What is it? Say. Tell me. No, you won't-you never do, have, will. It wasn't fair. They had come from the same cell, had lived nine months curled around one another. They should have already learned each other's secrets. And he had given his up, all of them. Is that the way it was supposed to be with twins? The Gemini, Castor and Pollux? I already told you all my secrets-all of them. But you keep yours, you hide them. Miserly, sly, secretive Holland, angry half the time, indifferent the rest; twins are supposed to be together, aren't they? Aren't they?
He felt overcome; the old, sad feeling, that longing for-what? He could not tell. Fugitive tremors ran through his body, along his limbs, vague yearnings assailed him; again the Shadow Hills came to mind. He tried to picture them. Nothing. His brain groped; what was it? Something he had forgotten? Never learned? Was it a taste, a smell, a place? Babylon-end of the line?
What was at the end of the line?
♥ She wobbled to the counter and put her nose in her pocketbook, looking for money, while Miss Josceline-Marie silently remarked how the roots of her customer's hair betrayed the sincerity of its color.
♥ Blinded by his tears, he peered vacantly at the sides of the gravestones, where dying flowers sat in chipped green containers. The noontime air was torpid, the scent of bloom sour, nearby a faucet dripped on stone, somewhere in the branches a locust chirred. Overhead the summer sky was bright blue, the perfect, translucent blue of a Dutch china plate, glazed with an awful clarity, stunning to the eye, but brittle like the shell of an egg; if he stared too long at it, it would crack, shatter to bits, a deadly blue hail falling about him.
"Now, child," she told him, "you shall say it."
"What? Say what?" he demanded, bewildered, shaking his head in wonder at the very thought of whatever strange thing she was willing him to say.
"Say the truth, child," she said, her voice patient and tender and sad. "Say the truth. Out loud, so we shall both hear it, the two of us together."
..Across the blue shell of sky, curved like a bowl, a network of fine lines appeared, like the roadways on a map, the veins in a leaf. He studied it; alas, too long. The lines multiplied, one upon another; the shell cracked, splintered into a million jagged fragments; they showered around him, sharp, painfully sharp and tinkling like blue rain. The grass felt prickly as he threw himself down, knocking aside the withered flowers-daisies and coreopsis and sunflowers that Ada had used to decorate the grave-dug only in March of this year-his trembling fingers spreading over the cold stone with the panicky touch of the newly blind, groping their way Braille-like across the freshly carved lettering that formed the terrible inscription:
HOLLAND WILLIAM PERRY
Born March 1922 Died March 1935
..Now that was an event, wasn't it?
Poor Holland.
You can see how it is. Very simple, really. Holland is dead. Dead as a doornail, to repeat Miss Josceline-Marie's unfortunate smile, used an hour ago in Niles's hearing. It's true. Make no mistake about it. Do not be further deluded. Holland is gone. Trying to hang Ada's cat in the well, he killed himself also. Such are the ironies of life. Killed himself in the well by the cloverpatch, back in March, on his birthday. This is why the mother stays in the room and drinks, because she cannot face the loss, and this is why, bereft, forlorn, all alone, unwilling that Holland should be dead, Niles has re-created his twin, has conjured him up, so to speak, has resurrected him.
Witness this astonishing reverence, this passion for a corpse; the boy is in thrall to a cadaver, obsessed by a ghoulish inamorato; not a ghost, not a vision, but a living breathing thing of flesh and blood: Holland, he himself. Such are the properties of the game. Be a tree, be a flower, be a bird-be Holland. With this-creature-he acts out his little pageants of blissful agony, the happy, subtle tyrannies, loving his twin, yet supplanting him, idolizing him, yet tearing him from his place; it is not enough to be Holland's twin, he must become Holland himself. Peregrine for Perry. He who wears the ring...
You can see how it is. It is summer. School's out. Niles solitary. Remember, I pointed out that he has no friends, or, having them, does not seek their company. Did you ever hear of a schoolboy without companions? Seldom, I think. But there is Niles, finding faces-as Ada has taught him-faces in the clouds, one face, his face, the face of him-the other. In clouds or in the oil pump or on the ceiling, it's all the same. He is there-the other. In the cracked and yellow plaster with the ripply brown watermark. You will understand. I do the same thing here, lying on this bed, with my watermark on my ceiling. See? The two eyes, the nose, the mouth that curls slightly at the corners?
..In any case, there is Niles, whiling away the summer, playing Ada's game-on dead Holland. And how else does he pass his time? Remember Russell Perry? And Mrs. Rowe, who lived next door? Well, no matter. Whose fault is it, you ask, these tragic circumstances, the bizarre transference of the boy to his dead twin. No one's, you may say. It just happened. I would disagree. As far as I'm concerned, the fault is Ada's.
I have been thinking about her a lot. I do not like her. Oh, I suppose she is worthwhile enough, taken all in all. Though not without sentiment, she is not guilty of sentimentality, that most lugubrious of pitfalls. An interesting enough type, she is, I suppose, a kind of peasant-aristocrat; and the Russian mind is sometimes strange. She has a certain humor in her thinking, in her dealings with the boy. She is not self-indulgent. She has restraint. She does her work, keeps her house, tends her flowers (ah, the sunflowers!), accepts her tragedies, tries to keep the family together. There is marrow yet in those poor old bones; they do not break easily. She is seemingly unconquerable, yet-and she does not know this-she has been conquered. The old woman has indulged the child too far, indulged him in his mad fancy; and madness, surely, it is; where else was it they took the other grandmother, Isobel Perry, if not to the asylum? And Ada knew there was insanity in the family. You will see in time how bitterly she comes to regret this (nodding and smiling, all compassion, watching Niles looking into the water in the pump pool-and for what?), this failing to take into account the all-too-obvious fact, and in time the realization will break her heart, knowing that it was she who first planted the seeds of the tragedy. And while you may suffer with her, the foolish woman, I shall not. The poor benighted creature, all the time unwitting, not in the least mindful of the lengths to which it has gone... the macabre lengths...
Well, not entirely unwitting. If Niles is afraid Holland may go away, she is afraid he has come back...
♥ Niles let the door slam, pausing a moment to survey the sky. Ada always insisted a mackerel sky meant rain, an old New England notion she'd picked up. The sky was clear, but it was going to rain. Niles was certain. The sun was getting ready to set, and high above the fields of Avalon across the river hung the thinnest slice of moon, the quintessential new moon: it looked like Ada's pin, a perfect crescent, visible up there in the early evening sky, only it was silver instead of gold. The sun and the moon appearing together-a rare sight. Making it both day and night, both a beginning and an ending, at one and the same time. Church bells tolled in the distance. Aloft on the cupola the weathervane was pointing due north, the gilded peregrine casting his amber eye and signaling brightly in the waning sunlight some cryptic message for all to see. An omen of some sort. But who was there to read it?
♥ Outside, the wind continued to roll up around the house; inside, an uncommon number of noises: curtains flapped like annoyed white hands at the windows, somewhere crystal tinkled, a pane of glass vibrated, beams snapped behind the plaster. The closet door rattled as though some presence inside wished to escape. Tock-tick, said the grandfather clock, tock-tick.
It was as if the house itself were breathing, exerting some effort of its own, struggling to maintain a curious lifelike equilibrium, as a spoon balances on the rim of a glass. Suspense had magnetized the air.
♥ And since then all the days had been beautiful, beautiful and sorrowful and infinitely changed. Now Torrie remained hidden in her room and, close to her side, Rider, alternating between hope and despair. Now Uncle George was drinking more; he and Aunt Valeria could be heard behind their door, talking stridently. Now people came and went, tramping up and down stairs, questioning, recording, photographing, disturbing the already-disturbed household. People waking up hollering from nightmares. Now Winnie went from one room to another, trying to care for all, trying to smile, to be brave, to have faith, to keep the news from Alexandra...
But Mother knew, somehow.
Somehow she had learned-or sensed-the truth.
Poor Mother; it was terrible. They could scarcely keep her in her wheelchair: day and night she could be heard rolling angrily around her room in an agony of frustration, banging into things, knocking them over. She smashed her vanity mirror, then broke her tortoise-shell comb, then took scissors to her embroidered slippers. And then, two nights ago, when Niles had lain down-unfortunately on Holland's bed-listening to the crystal set, staring at the face in the ceiling, he had not heard the door open or the creak of the wheels, because of the earphones. When he looked up he saw his mother's face leaning above him. Oh, that face! Dead white, eyes ringed with black, the scarlet mouth opening, closing-it chilled him to think of it. Poor deluded Mother; how could he make her understand that he was Niles. For Holland he accepted the furious rain of blows on his face, the silent curses heaped upon him. A natural enough error: she had taken him for his twin lying in his own bed. And now she was gone, put away from harm, and the house was more sorrowful than ever.
♥ She could not go on.
He stood without moving, waiting for her to finish her sentence, eyes wide in astonishment. He had never seen her cry before, not ever in his life, and he knew somehow that these were wondrously important moments passing here in the cornfield. She had turned away so that he should not see her tears. She stood looking along the rows of cornshocks, but instead of this she saw before her a plain, a field of sunflowers, not wilted merely, but dead, trampled, the flowerfaces gray and withered, not lifted to the sun, but bent down toward the earth, all laid to waste.
And suddenly she felt very cold.
"-only I did not know how far it had gone," she finished, as though talking to herself, forcing her voice and body into control. "It was only because I loved you."
Still he returned her look. "Do you love me now?"
"Of course I love you."
"I am your beloved?" he asked with a child's innocence, the smile of an angel; and she had to answer it.
♥ "I said, why can't it go on, go on being the same?"
"Oh, my dear. Niles, you must listen to me. Carefully. Will you?"
"Yes."
"Things cannot ever be the same again. Not for any of us. Not any more. We sometimes reach a point in our lives where we can't ever go back again, we have to go on from there. All that was before is past now. It went too far. Everything has gone too far. It must stop, do you see? Now-it-must-stop."
"No more game?"
"No. No more game."
♥ And he knew what she was thinking.
"Where are we going?" he asked as she took his hand-this atrocious chikld, whom even now she loved-and crossed the furrows, back to the cemetery lawn.
Where? Where indeed. Her hand to her heart as she walked, she let her mind guide her along to the logical conclusion. Well, they would go home. They would pass through the iron gates and leave the graveyard. They would go home and have supper in the kitchen, then join the selectmen for Granddaddy's Toast and then... and then... her mind faltered. Where would he go then?
What would be his punishment, she wondered, turning the alternatives over in her mind. What did they do to a child for such crimes? What child could commit such crimes? Where would they take him? To that barren place, that place of brick and iron bars, to be held there, like some dangerous animal?
"You're going to send me away," he said quietly, watching the toes of his shoes as he walked along beside her.
"Away?" she repeated, shocked that he had read her thoughts. "Why, where should you go, douschka?" With an abysmal attempt at a joke.
But he refused to answer, withdrawing then and refusing to speak of it any more, and she could tell that he knew, knew what she had been thinking, that his mind was picturing, as hers had, the dismal building of brick, red and grimy like Rose Rock, with iron bars and heavy screens, where Grandmother Perry had gone. That place, that domicile. No. No, that was not to be thought of. She would never consider such a thing, never such an end for her beloved.
♥ A baby... the baby...
Pale and spent, she stopped in the roadway, faced him, and asked the question once more. "Niles, where is the baby?"
"The baby?"
"Yes. The baby of Torrie."
"Torrie's baby?" His face was reddening again. "I don't know."
"But you must, child. You must!"
"No! I don't!"
"Then who does?" she demanded.
His answer came, not so much as an answer, but as a scream.
"Holland knows! Ask Holland!"
Fast upon his scream she seemed to hear a voice, quite clearly and distinctly, warning:> Beware of mad dogs lurking for lurking, they shall bite! And biting, shall bite again!
And now, no sooner did her hand strike the child's face than it flew to her open mouth. "Oh," she murmured, more stricken by her act than by any words of his. She stepped back, staring in horror at her palm. It was some moments before she could compose herself, and, her limp more pronounced, force her trembling limbs to carry her along the roadway. It was no good, she could tell. He would never give it up, this incredible, this most monstrous delusion, these remains he was obsessed with. It would be with him for as long as he lived. She could see that now. And this outburst she had just witnessed, so unlike him, but so like... the Other... it was almost as though...
She gave a shuddery gasp at the thought, and preceding him along the sidewalk by the church, unable to look at him, she was unaware of how slowly the red mark on his white cheek disappeared, unaware too of his expression as he followed, staring with flat opaque eyes from under gable-shaped brows at her stiffened back.
♥ ..George leaned over, placed the glass under the spigot of the keg, and with an unsteady hand turned the tap.
Like blood from an open vein the wine began spurting into the glass, then slowed, flowed again for a moment, gurgled, dribbled away to nothing. Puzzled, George twisted the tap, set down the glass, and tiled the keg to it. Again, the slight trickle into the half-filled glass.
"Can't be empty," he mumbled, tapping the keg and rocking it on the silver footed tray. He listened, then looked over at Leno with a mystified shrug. "Damn thing's s'pose-a be full, right, Leno? 'Less someone's been at the wine, huh?" His tobacco-stained fingers had fumbled the knot loose; he pulled the canvas aside and by the light of a raised candle peered inside. Quickly he fumbled for his napkin, which he clapped over his mouth and, while Niles and Mr. Angelini kept their places, the others drew closer, Mr. Fenstermacher and Dr. Brainard, Mr. Foley, Ada as well, and together they stared. Mr. Fenstermacher was the first to break away, making awful retching sounds in his throat, Ada moaned aloud, and Torrie, rising, tottered forward, her arms flung wide, her screams beginning and Rider only half catching her as she crumpled, the doll-lamp rolling away to the baseboard, the bulb shattering.
"What is it?" Mr. Pennyfeather was demanding. "What is it?" He alone, seated behind smoked glasses at the foot of the table, was unable to see what the others plainly saw, what Niles, his eyes now on the wavering candlelight image of his twin, did not care to see-the little face that floated in the dark red wine, so like the baby in the bottle, hair waving, the eyes staring up at the ceiling, the mouth parted in a silent scream.
♥ He stared at the red walls, and in the dancing light saw, gathering out of nothingness, shapes hideously alluring, gigantically filling the room, saw, overhead, serpents, anaconda-long, never warm, half-sloughed skins like glittering chain mail, coiling undulant soft spotted wreaths around the beams, salmon tongues slicking, into mortise and tenon. And Peregrine, Peregrine himself, amber-eyed Falcon Peregrine, come crying, cawing, swooping, brazen bird, audaciously rustling those pinions that were the measure of the boy's madness. He beat at the bird, striking it away, flailing, ducking, writhing, trying to cover eyes, ears, to smother, shunt out sight and sound.
Remember.
He heard the word, and as it hung in the air, it broke apart into a chain of echoes-remember-remember-remember-remember-
♥ It's true: of just such minor happenstances does our life consist. Ironic, isn't it?
♥ Let me say I was not sorry to leave the house on Valley Hill Road. I found it, after a while, too large, too noiseless, too-dead. It seemed to be growing, enlarging and expanding, the whole house, and I felt its emptiness oppressive, as though conspiring against me, and I realized how much of my time was spent looking for someone, someone in the house, listening, waiting, seeking around corners, up a stairway, along a corridor, behind a door. But no. There was nothing. I was alone. Truly; though there were others in the house, I was alone. And lonely, let me admit it. I think it was then that I began to miss him, felt the lack of him, began to seek him out, to look for him, all through the house, the barn, the fields, down by the river. But he was gone, of course, he truly was dead then, he who I had been, the Other; and I became aware then how really alone I was. Sometimes I would think I saw him, a fleeting glimpse only, a flash, just for a brief moment, standing there, there in the darkened corner of a closet, or there, winding the grandfather clock as he used to, or there, in the storeroom, wearing the pink shirt and playing the old Victrola. But it wasn't really him. Winnie saw to keeping the clock wound, for who else could be bothered? The Victrola stood covered with dust in the storeroom-that silent room-and no corner of any closet harbored the Other. He was gone; I could not conjure him up, as he had me. He was gone, and, sadly, I missed him. I was alone then, in the house, and I have been alone ever since.