‘plate! I won’t –‘
‘Shut up, Vern,’ Chris said, and beneath his usual authoritative toughness I could hear
the hollow boom of awe. I wondered if his arms and back and belly were as stiff with
gooseflesh as my own were, and if the hair on the nape of his neck was trying to stand up
in hackles, as mine was.
Vern’s voice dropped to a whisper as he continued to expand the reforms he planned to
institute if God would only let him live through this night.
‘It’s a bird, isn’t it?’ I asked Chris.
‘No. At least, I don’t think so. I think it’s a wildcat My dad says they scream Moody
murder when they’re getting ready to mate. Sounds like a woman, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. My voice hitched in the middle of the word and two ice-cubes broke off
in the gap.
‘But no woman could scream that loud,’ Chris said … and then added helplessly: ‘Could
she, Gordie?’
‘It’s his ghost,’ Teddy whispered again. His eyeglasses reflected the moonlight in weak,
somehow dreamy smears. I’m gonna go look for it’
I don’t think he was serious, but we took no chances. When he started to get up, Chris
and I hauled him back down. Perhaps we were too rough with him, but our muscles had
been turned to cables with fear.
‘Let me up, fuckheads!’ Teddy hissed, struggling. ‘If I say I wanna go look for it, then
I’m gonna go look for it! I wanna see it! I wanna see the ghost! I wanna see it -‘
The wild, sobbing cry rose into the night again, cutting the air like a knife with a
crystal blade, freezing us with our hands on Teddy – if he’d been a flag, we would have
looked like that picture of the Marines claiming Iwo Jima. The scream climbed with a
crazy ease through octave after octave, finally reaching a glassy, freezing edge. It hung there for a moment and then whirled back down again, disappearing into an impossible
bass register that buzzed like a monstrous honeybee. This was followed by a burst of what
sounded like mad laughter … and then there was silence again.
‘Jesus H Baldheaded Christ,’ Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of going into the
woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four of us huddled up together
and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only one. If we had been tenting in Vern’s
field – where our folks thought we were – we probably would have run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood
freeze. Running deeper into Harlow and closer to die corpse of Ray Brower was equally
unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a ha’ant out there in the woods – what my dad
called a Goosalum – and it wanted us, it would probably get us.
Chris proposed we keep a guard and everyone was agreeable to that We flipped for
watches and Vern got the first one. I got the last Vern sat up cross-legged by the husk of
the campfire while the rest of us lay down again. We huddled together like sheep.
I was positive that sleep would be impossible, but I did sleep — a light, uneasy sleep
that skimmed through unconsciousness like a sub with its periscope up. My half-sleeping
dreams were populated with wild cries that might have been real or might have only been
products of my imagination. I saw – or thought I saw – something white and shapeless
steal through the trees like a grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet.
At last I slipped into something I knew was a dream. Chris and I were swimming at
White’s Beach, a gravel-pit in Brunswick that had been turned into a miniature lake when
the gravel-diggers struck water. It was where Teddy had seen the kid hit his head and
almost drown.
In my dream we were out over our heads, stroking lazily along, with a hot July sun
blazing down. From behind us, on the float, came cries and shouts and yells of laughter as
kids climbed and dived or climbed and were pushed. I could hear the empty kerosene
drums that held the float up clanging and booming together – a sound not unlike that of
churchbeils, which are so solemn and emptily profound. On the sand-and-gravel beach,
oiled bodies lay face down on blankets, little kids with buckets squatted on the verge of
the water or sat happily flipping muck into their hair with plastic shovels, and teenagers
clustered in grinning groups, watching the young girls promenade endlessly back and
forth in pairs and trios, never alone, the secret places of their bodies wrapped in Jantzen
tank suits. People walked up the hot sand on the balls of their feet, wincing, to the
snackbar. They came back with chips, Devil Dogs, Red Ball Popsicles.
Mrs Cote drifted past us on an inflatable rubber raft. She was lying on her back,
dressed in her typical September-to-June school uniform: a grey two-piece suit with a
thick sweater instead of a blouse under the jacket, a flower pinned over one almost
nonexistent breast, thick support hose the colour of Canada Mints on her legs. Her black
old lady’s high-heeled shoes were trailing in the water, making small Vs. Her hair was
blue-rinsed, like my mother’s, and done up in those tight, medicinal-smelling clockspring
curls. Her glasses flashed brutally in the sun.
‘Watch your steps, boys,’ she said. ‘Watch your steps or I’ll hit you hard enough to
strike you blind. I can do that; I have been given that power by the school board. Now, Mr
Chambers, “Mending Wall”, if you please. By rote.’
‘I tried to give the money back,’ Chris said. ‘Old lady Simons said okay, but she took it!
Do you hear me? She took it! Now what are you going to do about it? Are you going to
whack her blind?’
‘ “Mending Wall,” Mr Chambers, if you please. By rote.’ Chris threw me a despairing glance, as if to say Didn’t I tell you it would be this way?, and then began to tread water.
He began.’ “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that sends the frozen groundswell
under it -“‘ And then his head went under, his reciting mouth filling with water. He
popped back up, crying: ‘Help me, Gordie! Help me!’ Then he was dragged under again.
Looking into the clear water I could see two bloated, naked corpses holding his ankles.
One was Vern and the other was Teddy, and their open eyes were as blank and pupilless as the eyes of Greek statues. Their small pre-pubescent penises floated limply up from
their distended bellies like albino strands of kelp. Chris’s head broke water again. He held
one hand up limply to me and voiced a screaming, womanish cry that rose and rose,
ululating in the hot sunny summer air. I looked wildly towards the beach but nobody had
heard. The lifeguard, his bronzed, athletic body lolling attractively on the seat at the top
of his whitewashed cruciform wooden tower, just went on smiling down at a girl in a red
bathing suit. Chris’s scream turned into a bubbling waterchoked gurgle as the corpses
pulled him under again. And as they dragged him down to black water I could see his
rippling, distorted eyes turned up to me in pleading agony; I could see his white starfish
hands held helplessly up to the sun-burnished roof of the water. But instead of diving
down and trying to save him, I stroked madly for the shore, or at least to a place where the
water would not be over my head. Before I could get there – before I could even get close
-1 felt a soft, rotted, implacable hand wrap itself around my calf and begin to pull. A
scream built up in my chest … but before I could utter it, the dream washed away into a
grainy facsimile of reality. It was Teddy with his hand on my leg. He was shaking me
awake. It was my watch.
Still half in the dreams, almost talking in my sleep, I asked him thickly: ‘You alive,
Teddy?’
‘No. I’m dead and you’re a black nigger,’ he said crossly. It dispelled the last of the
dream. I sat up by the campfire and Teddy lay down.
20
The others slept heavily through the rest of the night I was in and out, dozing, waking,
dozing again. The night was far from silent; I heard the triumphant screech-squawk of a
pouncing owl, the tiny cry of some small animal perhaps about to be eaten, a larger
something blundering wildly through the undergrowth. Under all of this, a steady tone,
were the crickets. There were no more screams. I dozed and woke, woke and dozed, and I