This time the thought-Monster! Boogeymonster!-rose from the lower levels of her mind to the more brightly lit stage of her consciousness. She denied it again, but she could feel her terror returning, just the same. The creature on the far side of the room might be a man, but even if it was, she was becoming more and more sure that there was something very wrong with its face. If only she could see it better!
You wouldn’t want to, a whispery, ominous UFO voice advised her.
But I have to talk to it-have to establish contact, Jessie thought, and immediately responded to herself in a nervous, scolding voice that felt like Ruth and Goody mixed together: Don’t think of it asan it, Jessie-think of it as a he. Think of it as a man, someone who’smaybe been lost in the woods, someone who’s as scared as you are.
Good advice, perhaps, but Jessie found she couldn’t think of the figure in the corner as a he, any more than she was able to think of the stray as a he. Nor did she think the creature in the shadows was either lost or frightened. What she felt coming from the corner were long, slow waves of malevolence.
That’s stupid! Talk to it, Jessie! Talk to him!
She tried to clear her throat and discovered there was nothing to clear-it was as dry as a desert and as smooth as a soapstone. Now she could feel her heart pounding in her chest, its beat very light, very fast, very irregular.
The wind gusted. The shadows blew white-and-black patterns across the walls and the ceiling, making her feel like a woman trapped inside a kaleidoscope for the colorblind. For just a moment she thought she saw a nose-thin and long and white-below those black, motionless eyes.
“Who-”
At first she could manage only that one tiny whisper which couldn’t have been heard on the far side of the bed, let alone across the room. She stopped, licked her lips, and tried again. She was aware that her hands were clamped into painfully tight balls, and she forced her fingers to loosen.
“Who are you?” Still a whisper, but a little better than before.
The figure didn’t answer, only stood there with its narrow white hands dangling by its knees, and Jessie thought: Its knees? Knees? Not possible, Jess-when a person’s hands are hanging at his sides, theystop at the upper thighs.
Ruth responded, her voice so hushed and fearful Jessie almost didn’t recognize it. A normal person’s hands stop at the upper thighs,isn’t that what you mean? But do you think a normal person would creepinto someone’s house in the middle of the night, then just stand in thecorner, watching, when he finds the lady of the manor chained to the bed? Just stand there and nothing more?
Then it did move one leg… or perhaps it was only the distracting motion of the shadows again, this time picked up by the lower quadrant of her vision. The combination of shadows and moonlight and wind lent a terrible ambiguity to this entire episode, and again Jessie found herself doubting the visitor’s reality. The possibility that she was still sleeping occurred to her, that her dream of Will’s birthday party had simply veered off in some strange new direction… but she didn’t really believe it. She was awake, all right.
Whether or not the leg actually did move (or even if there was a leg), Jessie’s gaze was momentarily drawn downward. She thought she saw some black object sitting on the floor between the creature’s feet. It was impossible to tell what it might be because the bureau’s shadow rendered that the darkest part of the room, but her mind suddenly returned to that afternoon, when she had been trying to persuade Gerald that she really meant what she was saying. The only sounds had been the wind, the banging door, the barking dog, the loon, and…
The thing sitting on the floor between her visitor’s feet was a chainsaw.
Jessie was instantly sure of this. Her visitor had been using it earlier, but not to cut firewood. It was people he had been cutting up, and the dog had run because it had smelled the approach of this madman, who had come up the lake path swinging his blood-spattered Stihl saw in one gloved hand-
Stop it! Goody shouted angrily. Stop this foolishness right thisminute and get a grip on yourself!
But she discovered she couldn’t stop it, because this was no dream and also because she had become increasingly sure that the figure standing in the corner, as silent as Frankenstein’s monster before the lightning-bolts, was real. But even if it was, it hadn’t spent the afternoon turning people into pork-chops with a chainsaw. Of course not-that was nothing but a movie-inspired variation of the simple, gruesome summer-camp tales that seemed so funny when you were gathered around the fire,-roasting marshmallows with the rest of the girls, and so awful later on, when you lay shivering in your sleeping-bag, believing that each snapping twig signalled the approach of the Lakeview Man, that legendary brain-blasted survivor of the Korean War.
The thing standing in the corner wasn’t the Lakeview Man, and it wasn’t a chainsaw murderer, either. There was something on the floor (at least she was pretty sure there was), and Jessie supposed it could be a chainsaw, but it could also be a suitcase… a backpack… a salesman’s sample case…
Or my imagination.
Yes. Even though she was looking right at it, whatever it was, she knew she couldn’t rule out the possibility of imagination. Yet in some perverse way this only reinforced the idea that the creature itself was real, and it was becoming harder and harder to dismiss the feeling of malevolence which came crawling out of the tangle of black shadows and powdery moonlight like a constant low snarl.
It hates me, she thought. Whatever it is, it hates me. It must. Whyelse would it just stand there and not help me?
She looked back up at that half-seen face, at the eyes which seemed to glitter with such feverish avidity in their round black sockets, and she began to weep.
“Please, is someone there?” Her voice was humble, choked with tears. “If there is, won’t you please help me? Do you see these handcuffs? The keys are right there beside you, on top of the bureau…”
Nothing. No movement. No response. It only stood there-if it was there at all, that was-looking out at her from behind its feral mask of shadows.
“If you didn’t want me to tell anyone I saw you, I wouldn’t,” she tried again. Her voice wavered, blurred, swooped and slid. “I sure wouldn’t! And I’d be so… so grateful…”
It watched her.
Only that and nothing more.
Jessie felt the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. “You’re scaring me, you know,” she said. “Won’t you say something? Can’t you talk? If you’re really there, can’t you please talk to me?”
A thin, terrible hysteria seized her then and flew away with some valuable, irreplaceable part of her caught firmly in its scrawny talons. She wept and pleaded with the fearful figure standing motionless in the corner of the bedroom; she remained conscious throughout but sometimes wavered into that curious blank place reserved for those whose terror has become so great it approaches rapture. She would hear herself asking the figure in a hoarse, weepy voice to please let her out of the handcuffs, to please oh please oh please let her out of the handcuffs, and then she would drop back into that weird blank spot. She knew her mouth was still moving because she could feel it. She could also hear the sounds that were coming out of it, but while she was in the blank place, these sounds were not words but only loose blabbering torrents of sound. She could also hear the wind blowing and the dog barking, aware but not knowing, hearing but not understanding, losing everything in her horror of the half-seen shape, the awful visitor, the uninvited guest. She could not cease her contemplation of its narrow, misshapen head, its white cheeks, its slumped shoulders… but more and more it was the creature’s hands to which her eyes were drawn: those dangling, long-fingered hands that ended much farther down on the legs than normal hands had any right to do. Some unknown length of time would pass in this blank fashion (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the bureau reported; no help there) and then she would come back a little, would start thinking thoughts instead of experiencing only an endless rush of incoherent images, would start hearing her lips speaking words instead of just babbling sounds. But she had moved on while she was in that blank space; her words now had nothing to do with the handcuffs or the keys on the bureau. What she heard instead was the thin, screamy whisper of a woman reduced to begging for an answer… any answer.