Howell thought he wouldn’t hear anything, but it was the loudest noise he had ever heard. He let go of the shotgun, fell over the back of the sofa, and sprawled on the floor. The noise, incredibly, still in his ears. The windows and french doors rattled violently.

Thunder, unbelievable thunder, and he was still alive. Why hadn’t the shotgun gone off?

He struggled to his feet and started around the sofa to find the shotgun; then he stopped. It had gone very quiet. It was pitch dark, but he knew absolutely. There was someone else in the room.

He stood perfectly still, held his breath, and listened. He could hear breathing, and it wasn’t his. He let out the breath as slowly as possible. He opened his mouth and breathed in again. “I know there’s somebody…”

His words turned into an involuntary shout as a blinding-white flash of lightning lit the room for a tiny moment, fixing everything in it in his mind’s eye before winking silently out, leaving him cringing, blinded. He saw it all against the insides of his tightly closed eyelids, the room, the rug, the furniture, and-standing with back not quite turned to him-a child of eleven or twelve, a farm child, in overalls and a blue work shirt, pigtails, a girl, standing at the window, nearly in front of him, eight or ten feet away, ignoring him, gazing out over the lake.

Howell opened his eyes to blind blackness, then jammed them shut again as a roaring explosion of thunder that made the earlier one seem mild assaulted the cabin, violently rattling the windows and the french doors, making him think the glass would go. As he opened his eyes again, another, steadier roar filled the cabin, and, as suddenly as the lightning, the lights came on, causing him to jump and cry out. The child was gone. One of the French doors was open and banging, and water was coming through it. Howell ran to close it, and was soaked by the intensity of the downpour of rain. He put his hands to the glass and looked out over the lake, or where the lake should have been. All he could see was a solid wall of rain, coming down vertically, no wind, the heaviest rain he could remember.

No child should be out in that, he thought, and he started to open the door and look for her, but the density of the rain frightened him, and he hesitated. He backed away from the doors and stood in the middle of the room, wondering whether any roof could take it. For two or three long minutes the rain came down, the sound of it riveting him to the spot. Then it seemed to slacken, and half a minute later, it was no more than an ordinary thundershower.

Howell opened the door and stepped onto the deck, unmindful now of a rain that seemed gentle compared to what had just passed. Brief flashes of lightning illuminated the deck, the lake, and the woods around it. He could not see the girl, and he hoped she was all right. He felt ashamed that he had not gone after her.

He went back into the cabin, took a towel from the still-unpacked linen box and rubbed his face and hair. He cautiously looked into the bedroom and kitchen to be sure he was alone. Every light in the cabin was on, lights he was sure were not burning when he had fallen asleep on the sofa. He picked up the bottle of bourbon and drank directly from it. His heart was still thumping against his chest, and he was breathing so rapidly that he nearly choked on the whiskey. He sat down heavily on the sofa and waited for the warmth of the bourbon. Gradually, his vital signs regained some sort of normality, but he still felt stunned, unable to cope with the image of the child, unwilling to wonder whether he had truly seen her there.

Then he remembered what he had been about before the thunder had interrupted him. He got up and walked around the sofa. The shotgun was gone; so was the box of shells. Had the child taken them? Had she been watching the whole thing, wanting to stop him? He was embarrassed to think that someone had seen him in those circumstances. But why hadn’t the shotgun fired? He remembered, he was certain, the triggers giving way under the weight of his feet on the pencil. The pencil lay at his feet, broken in two. But he was sure the triggers had moved.

Somehow, he didn’t feel cheated; he didn’t want the shotgun back. Something had saved him from that one, mad moment, and he was glad. He walked back around the sofa, got a blanket and a pillow from the linen box, and went about the cabin, turning off lights. He went into the bedroom, stripped off his wet clothes, and threw himself onto the bed, exhausted. In his last moment of wakefulness, he reflected that, a few minutes before, he had hit bottom, and he had bounced.

4

Howell’s response to the hammering was panic; he didn’t know where he was, and when he remembered, he wasn’t sure what had happened during the night. The events seemed curiously remote, and he would have thought he had been dreaming, if he had not remembered everything so clearly. Finally, his muddled brain focused on the front door as the source of the noise, and, cursing, he struggled into a bathrobe and got going, shivering in the damp chill of the uninsulated cabin. It was still raining. He yanked open the door.

A young man stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, rain dripping from his slicker and from his hair. It seemed immediately obvious to Howell that he was probably retarded. His eyes were not coordinated, and he seemed to be looking out across the lake as he spoke to Howell.

“You want some wood?”

The fellow was oddly handsome, Howell thought. His features were regular, chiseled, almost patrician; he had excellent teeth. Only the eyes and a slackness of the jaw made him seem other than normal.

“You want some wood?” he asked again, smiling a little this time, revealing the beautiful teeth. “Mama said you needed some wood.”

Howell looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a battered pickup truck with tarpaulin covering its bed. He finally got the picture; the fellow was selling firewood. Benny Pope had said he couldn’t come until Sunday, and it was only Tuesday. “Yeah, sure,” Howell managed to say, finally. “Just put it right there.” He pointed to the shed next to the stairs.

“Yessir,” the fellow said. He ran to the truck, pulled back the tarp, revealing a random pile of split logs, and began bringing four or five at a time to the shed. It occurred to Howell that he hadn’t asked a price, and he wondered if he would get bitten, but what the hell, he’d burned all the wood he had the night before. When the truck was empty and the shed full, the man tossed a burlap bag of kindling into the shed, waved, and started for the truck again.

“How much do I owe you?” Howell shouted at him.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he yelled back. He got into the truck on the passenger side, and Howell realized that someone else was driving.

Howell was too surprised to shout his thanks until the truck had turned around and was headed up the hill toward the crossroads. A woman was driving, but the truck window was too misted over to get a good look at her. He dashed down to the shed in the rain, grabbed the gunny sack of kindling, and a couple of logs and, stepping gingerly in his bare feet, ran back up the stairs. He had a fire going and was half way through his first cup of coffee before he remembered what the fellow had said. “Mama said you needed some wood.” Who the hell were the young man, the woman driving him, and, above all, Mama? And how did she know he needed wood? Some friend of Denham White’s, he supposed, who had seen the empty woodshed and was being neighborly. That was all right with him, Howell thought, basking in the glow of the fire. He’d have to call Denham and ask him who the people were so he could thank them. Then, as he warmed his hands, a thought struck him. A few minutes before, when he’d been waked by the fellow at the door, he’d felt terminally hung over; certainly he’d had enough to drink the night before. Now, oddly, he felt perfectly well – no headache, no fuzziness.