Bethany's Sin

II

June

THREE

IN THE DARKNESS, 1980

In the darkness he listened to the distant, hollow sound of a dog barking, and, his brain still misted with the need for sleep, he wondered why that noise made his flesh crawl.

Is it because, he thought, that dog has to be barking at someone? Or something? A presence that prowls the midnight streets of Bethany's Sin like an avenging juggernaut? He turned his head slightly to look at the digital clock on his night table. Twenty minutes after three. The longest hours of the night yet to come, the quietest, the hours when nightmares tremble on the edge of reality.

He waited, not willing to return himself to that dark place of sleep, because fear gnawed at him now and there seemed to be a growth of thick tension in his stomach, like a knot of twisted muscle and intestine.

Because he knew when they came for him, they would come in the night.

Abruptly, as if the earth had swallowed it up, the dog stopped barking. The man lay still beneath pale blue sheets, stripes of moonlight like bands of softly glowing neon splayed across the bed through the open curtains. Clear skies for the next few days, the weather report had said; good weather for the first weekend of June, but showers probable by Tuesday. He saw the silhouette of a tree in the moonlight, a thing with many heads, a Hydra swaying and hissing and waiting just outside his window. With the next breath of breeze he could almost hear the thing whisper: Come outside, Paul, where the stars and the moon are bright, where the night is thick, where no one will see while I rip you to pieces.

Dear God, he thought suddenly. They're coming for me.

No. No, stop it! There's nothing out there but darkness and trees and barking dogs and the familiar streets of the village. Why didn't I leave today? he asked himself. Why didn't I get in my car and drive to Johnstown, get a room at the Holiday Inn, read, watch television, feel safe? Because, he heard the stricter voice of reason within him say, you cannot be certain. Your home is here. Your work is here.

Your responsibilities. When he'd gone to Dr. Mabry last week for his physical - he'd put it off as long as he could, but since Elaine's death three years ago he'd been lethargic and had experienced stomach pains - he had felt compelled to open up, to spill some of these things that had taken root inside him and now grew wild and tangled.

The doctor had listened quietly, nodding in all the right places, eyes attentive and concerned.

I've heard clicks on my telephone, he'd told Dr. Mabry. As if someone is monitoring my conversations. I've heard them several times, but only very faintly. And then there are the prowlers...

Prowlers? Dr. Mabry had raised an eyebrow.

Not every night, but I know when they're there. I have insomnia sometimes, so I've been awake to hear the noises.

Have you ever seen anyone lurking around your house at night?

No. But I've seen shadows, things that move in the corner of my eye when I stand at the window looking out. And there's a dog that barks down at the end of McClain Terrace; I know it sounds funny to you that a dog should bother me, but it's like...an early warning. That the dog has seen or sensed something...terrible.

Well, the doctor had said, why don't I prescribe some pills for you that will help you sleep? Maybe you're over working at the bank, and not getting enough exercise; that could be causing your insomnia. You already know what the problem is with your ulcers.

Have you thought about taking up golf again?

Too many things had built up within him, too many noises and skeletal shadows in the darkness. The raindrops of suspicion and unease had become pools, streams, rivers, oceans surging behind a weakening dam. The pressure was about to blow him wide open. Of course he'd gone to Wysinger, but the man was little or no help.

Sure, Wysinger had told him, I'll bring the patrol car down McClain Terrace a couple of times a day if you think that'll help. My number's in the phone book, too, and you can reach me at night if anything happens. How about that?

Please, he'd told the man. Whatever you can do.

But he knew Wysinger wouldn't find them. No, no. They were too smart, too cunning to be caught.

And now a word burned in his brain: paranoid, paranoid, paranoid, like a child's strange rhyme, a jump rope singsong. You let little things bother you too much, Paul, Elaine had always told him, even when they were living in Philadelphia. Learn to relax. Learn to take things as they come.

Yes. And now they're coming for me.

Suddenly he craved light. Snapping on the night-table lamp, he squinted until he could see. My eyes are going fast, he thought, feeling a new pincer of panic. They were myopic and weak from years of reading fine print on loan applications. He took his thick-lensed glasses from the night table, put them on, threw aside the sheets, and stood on the floor. He crossed the room and looked out the window to where the rectangle of yellow light from his own bedroom lay on the green lawn. Craning his neck, he looked right and left along McClain Terrace. Dark, empty, silent as the grave.

Darkest before the dawn, he thought, glancing back to the digital clock. Returning his gaze to the window, he thought he saw the glimmer of a light in a house far up the street, but instead of being comforted by that light, he felt a new seed of fear burst into raw bloom. But it wasn't a light after all, he realized in another moment; it was the shimmering white reflection of the moon on window glass. Everyone was sleeping.

Except him. And whatever had disturbed the dog at the end of the street.

Stop it! he told himself. You're wrong! Am I losing my mind, going crazy in middle age? Paranoid, paranoid, paranoid: that was a word used for nuts, wasn't it? He went out into the hallway, turning on the overhead light, walking barefoot to the staircase and descending. Then through the downstairs den, pausing to snap on the color television. Of course there was nothing on the screen but a blizzard of multicolored snowflakes, but somehow the noise of it reassured him just as when he'd been a child left alone in his parents'

house, watched over by the flickering black-and-white guardian. He walked into the kitchen.

Bathed in the stark white light of the refrigerator, he rummaged through leftovers. That was the only part of living alone that still gave him trouble: cooking, making use of what was at hand. The refrigerator was full of little Tupperware bowls holding leftovers, cans of beer, a pitcher of two-day-old iced tea, a blue platter with slices of roast beef wrapped in aluminum foil. He smeared mustard on two pieces of bread for a roast beef sandwich. He'd taken one bite of the sandwich when the lights flickered.

Fading to brown, as if the darkness outside were finally and inevitably slithering in through door and window chinks. He was staring at the lightbulb in the open refrigerator when the house went black and the refrigerator's motor wound down like a long human moan. And then he stood in darkness, surrounded by a silence like the aftermath of a gunshot, or the spaces between ticks of the clock.

Christ! he thought, stunned for a second, his heart giving a violent kick in his chest. He heard something plop onto the kitchen floor, and the noise startled him until he realized that he'd dropped the sandwich. What now? he wondered, waiting without moving, hoping the lights would flicker on again. The damn fuses had been overloaded. Or maybe it was a power blackout; he thought he'd read an article in the paper that said Pennsylvania Power was going to be doing some work on the lines this week and next. He turned, groped in a drawer, and found a flashlight, but the batteries were weak and cast only a dim brownish beam. Strange, he thought, how familiar objects look foreign in the half-light; in the den the furniture seemed to crawl, to twist into hideous shapes awaiting his passage. If there was a bad fuse, or the fuses had blown, he'd have to take care of it before the food in the refrigerator went bad; when he reached the door under the staircase that led down into the basement, he paused.

Shouldn't he call the power company to check first? He put a hand on the doorknob and felt its coldness travel through his veins all the way to the heart. Call the power company. No, they'll think you're stupid! They'll think you're paranoid, and if you keep this up, sooner or later the people at the bank are going to be talking about you in whispers.

He turned the knob, pierced musty-smelling darkness with the flashlight, and began to descend the series of wooden steps. It was cooler down here, and quiet as a tomb. The stone floor of the basement was cold against his bare feet. He came down here infrequently, using the basement as a storeroom for things from his past: old trunks filled with ill-fitting clothes, a chair with a broken arm, a cracked ceramic-base lamp, a few pasteboard boxes that held some of Elaine's old clothes, musty books and Life and National Geographic magazines. he'd paneled two walls in pine; the other two were bare brick, and there were circular concrete columns as supports for a ceiling crisscrossed by pipes and copper tubing. On the far side was a door with four glass panes, and on either side of it, windows looked out onto a small backyard. The dark mass of the furnace stood silent; metal reflected the light into his eyes. He swung the flashlight beam around toward the fusebox, mounted on a wall just beyond the staircase; the light brushed past the doorway of a utility room filled with paint cans and dirty tarpaulins. He glimpsed a naked lightbulb, dangling from its cord like a severed head.

The fusebox was stubborn; rusted hinges squealed. On both sides of the flashlight beam, the darkness had begun to creep in, like slow waves of a black ocean. He wrenched at the box, shaking off a cold hand that seemed to be poised over the back of his neck.

The fusebox came open. He fumbled with the light, shone it inside.

And it was then that he saw the fuses had been ripped away.

He sensed rather than heard the movement behind him, and as he whirled around to see his arm coming up defensively with the flashlight, he heard something shrieking at him from the darkness, from the doorway of the utility room. He had a split-second glimpse of something glowing a hard electric blue, turning over and over as it cleaved the air, but he had no time to step back, nor to breathe, nor to scream.

For in the next instant a shimmering, neon blue, double-bladed ax struck him directly between the eyes. Shattered from the inhuman force of the blow, his eyeglasses parted over the bridge of the nose and fell away on each side of the head, while the ax blade tore through flesh and bone and brain. His body was slammed against the wall, the head snapping back so fast there was a sharp crack! as the neck broke. Blood streaming through the nostrils and the widened, horror - struck eye sockets, the corpse sagged down onto the floor like a mass of gore-splattered rags. It twitched spasmodically, the death dance of the muscles and nerves, and through the severed tongue, teeth clicked like bones thrown by ancient oracles.

And then the corpse lay still, in pooling red, the flflashlight still gripped in a slowly whitening hand. But before dawn the batteries would be drained as well.

And through the basement, making glass rattle in the windows, echoing through the house and off along McClain Terrace, rose the savage shriek of a blood-hungry, victorious eagle.

When the last echoes had faded minutes later, a dog began to bark somewhere, frenziedly, like Cerberus at the gates of Hades.