empty space that when you went over there you couldn’t even find the
people who’d gone ahead of you.
That scared him most of all. Not just losing Julie to the Place, but
not being able to find her when he went over there himself.
He was already afraid of the night. All that big empty place off the
world. So if just the night itself was so scary, Bad Place would be
lots worse. It was sure to be bigger to the night, and daylight never
came in the Bad Place.
Outside, the sky got darker.
Wind blew the palms.
Rain ran down the glass.
The Bad Thing was far away.
But it would come closer. Soon.
CANDY WAs having one of those days when he could not accept that his
mother was dead. Every time he crossed a threshold or turned a corner,
he expected to see her. He thought he heard her rocking in the parlor,
humming softly to herself as she knitted a new afghan, but when he went
in there to look, the rocking chair was filmed with dust and draped with
a shawl of cobwebs. Once, he hurried into the kitchen, expecting to
find her in a brightly flowered house dress overlaid with a
ruffle-trimmed white apron, dropping neat spoonsful of cookie batter on
baking sheets or perhaps mixing a cake, but, of course, she was not
there. In a moment of acute emotional turmoil, Candy raced upstairs,
certain that he would find his mother in bed, but when he burst into her
room, he remembered that it was his room now, and that she was gone.
Eventually, to jar himself out of that strange and troubling mood, he
went into the backyard and stood by her lonely grave in the northeast
corner of the large property. He had buried her there, seven years ago,
under a solemn winter sky similar to the one that currently hid the sun,
with a hawk circling above just as one circled now. He had dug her
grave, wrapped her in sheets scented with Channel No. 5, and lowered her
into the ground secretly, because interment on private property, was not
designated as a grave site, was against the law. If he had allowed her
to be buried elsewhere, he would have had to go live there with her, for
he could not have endured being separated from her mortal remains for
any great length of time.
Candy dropped to his knees.
Over the years the original mound of earth had settled, until her grave
was marked by a shallow concavity. The grass was sparser there, the
blades coarse, wiry, different from the rest of the lawn, though he did
not know why; even in the months following her burial, the grass above
her had not flourished No headstone memorialized her passing; although
the back yard was sheltered by the high hedge, he could not risk
calling] attention to her illegal resting place.
Staring at the ground before him, Candy wondered if a stone would help
him accept her death. If every day he could see her name and the date
of her death deeply cut into a sliver of marble, that sight should
slowly but permanently engrave his loss upon his heart, sparing him days
like this, when he was disturbed by a queer forgetfulness and by a hope
that could never be fulfilled.
He stretched out on the grave, his head turned to one side with an ear
against the earth, as if he half expected to hear her speaking to him
from her subterranean bed. Pressing his back hard into the unyielding
ground, he longed to feel the vitality that she had once radiated, the
singular energy that had flowed from her like heat from the open door of
a furnace, but he was nothing. Though his mother had been a special
woman, Candy knew it was absurd to expect her corpse, after seven years
radiate even a ghost of the love that she had lavished upon when she was
alive; nevertheless, he was grievously disappointed when not even the
faintest aura shimmered up through the dirt from her sacred bones.
Hot tears burned in his eyes, and he tried to hold them back But a faint