Fortnight of Fear (14 page)

Two skulls, or two stones.

Ron Maccione said, “Are you trying to kid me, or what?”

Richard was standing in the hallway, his Dad U R The Greatest coffee-mug steaming on top of the kitchen stool
beside him. It was a few minutes after seven o'clock the sun had been up for less than twenty minutes.

“No kidding, Mr Maccione. The whole field is full of them.”

“Well, that's pretty damned hard to believe, Mr Palen. We shifted over one hundred fifty-eight tonnes of stone and rock off of that field. We graded that soil fine as baby-powder.”

“You want to come over and check it out for yourself?”

“Sure I'll come over and check it out for myself. But I'm pretty damned tied up today. What do you say Monday?”

“Mr Maccione I'm going to cancel your check. You promised me no stones, remember?”

“I cleared the stones, Mr Palen, so help me. When I left that field, there wasn't a single stone worth calling a stone.”

Richard sipped coffee, and burned his mouth. “You said they could come back. Some kind of physics. The cereal-box syndrome.”

“Well, sure, but that's only if they're
there
, Mr Palen, under the soil surface. We cleared them, Mr Palen. We cleared them good.”

Richard picked up the telephone and stepped sideways in the hallway so that he could see through the sitting-room window to the gardens at the back, and beyond, to the meadow. The early-morning light was bony and uncompromising. Even though the meadow was screened by trees, the stones that were strewn across it were obvious, even from here. Hundreds of them, scattered right across the finely-graded soil from one side of the meadow to the other.

“Shit,” said Ron Maccione. “
Piove sul bagnato
.”

While he was waiting for Ron Maccione to arrive, Richard
walked out across the meadow, picking his way between the stones with complete bewilderment. I mean, how the
hell
–?

Even allowing for natural geological sifting – the so-called “cereal-box” effect in which smaller particles sift and trickle downwards between larger particles, like the powdery crushed-up bits in a box of Cap'n Crunchberries – all these hundreds of rocks couldn't have risen out of the ground overnight. And yet nobody could have trucked them all back again – there were no footprints on the soil, no tiretracks.

Richard began to feel peculiarly alarmed; as if the reappearance of the stones were more than a scientific phenomenon. As if it were a threat, or a warning.

Some of the rocks were huge, four or five feet across, and must have weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. Others were not much than pebbles. He picked up one of the smaller stones and hurled it high toward the far side of the meadow.

As he stepped back to watch it fall, a tissue-soft voice said, close behind him, “You're up early, Mr Palen.”

Richard turned around. Greta Reuter was standing close by, her face pale, her eyes the same crushed-sugar color as the morning light. She wore a thick maroon dress and a maroon woollen shawl.

She looked around the meadow. “I thought you were going to clear it,” she said. “You can't play much tennis on this, can you? Stones trip; stones hurt the feet; stones betray.”

There was something about her expression that was almost amused. Richard said, “Stones seem to have the ability to come up overnight, too. This field was cleared yesterday. Not a stone in sight.”

Greta Reuter said nothing, but continued to smile.

Richard finished the last of his coffee. “You wouldn't know anything about this, would you? I mean, there isn't
anybody local who doesn't like the idea of a tennis-club, is there?”

Greta Reuter turned her face away. “People are very reserved hereabouts. Very jealous about their privacy.”

“Jealous enough to sabotage my tennis-courts?” Richard retorted. He hesitated, and then he said, “I'm only asking. I used to be a tennis champion. I've come across jealousy before.”

“I suppose it
could
be sabotage,” said Greta Reuter. “But if it was, who would have done it, and more important, how was it done?”

“Witchcraft?” Richard suggested. “This is prime country for witches.”

Greta Reuter stared at him mischievously for a moment, then threw back her head and let out a loud, mannish laugh.

Baffled, enraged, Ron Maccione brought two of his bulldozers back to the meadow, and spent the better part of a day and a half clearing the stones back to the perimeter.

“I don't know what happened, don't even ask me,” he said. “I'm taking the full responsibility, okay? I guaranteed you a clear field, no stones,
di riffe o di raffe
. But I don't know what the hell happened.” That night, Richard heard knocking noises in his sleep: heavy, hollow, knocking noises, skulls knocking together. He woke up sweating, trembling, terrified – but conscious that he hadn't been dreaming of Sara. This dream was something new; something cold; something abrasive; something to do with Preston, and the stones in the meadow; and the crushed-sugar eyes of Greta Reuter.

He sat up in bed and drank a glass of tepid water. Then he eased himself up, and found his old toweling wrap, the one that Ivan Lendl had given him after Wimbledon, six years ago, and limped downstairs.

He opened the kitchen door. The moon was out. Under its colorless light, the stones were back. All over the meadow, as many as before, even strewn across the garden this time, closer to the house.

Richard went to the sitting-room and opened up his half-bottle of Jack Daniel's and poured himself a glassful. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, and he looked like a ghost of himself, a badly-frightened ghost.

Sara
, he thought.
Help me
.

But the night remained silent and sealed, and the stones lay scattered across the meadow and the garden as if they had been beached by a prehistoric tide.

He was tempted to call Ron Maccione straight away, but he waited until morning.

“Mr Maccione,” he said. “They're back.”

“What? What's back? What are you talking about?”

“The stones, they're back. In fact, they're worse.”

There was a very long silence. If anybody could convey over the telephone a sense of bitterness as sharp and as rural as bitten cow-parsley, then Ron Maccione managed to do it.

“So sue me,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard. Sue me. I wash my hands.”

Richard spent the entire morning wheeling stones out of the garden in a squeaking barrow and tipping them on to the edge of the meadow. Even though the day was cold and thundery, with flickers of lightning in the distance, he was sweating and puffing by eleven o'clock, and he stripped off his shirt. He felt like a character in a Grimm's fairy-tale, Dick the Stone-Shifter. He was rumbling the wheelbarrow back across the garden for what he had promised himself would be the last load when he became aware that Greta Reuter was standing close to the house, watching him.

He set down the wheelbarrow, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He said nothing.

“I see the stones are back,” she remarked, approaching him along the diagonal paths, left and then right, left and then right.

He nodded, still short of breath.

“Quite a phenomenon,” she said, still smiling. “Have you found out what's causing it? Or
who
?”

He wiped his chest with his shirt. “You want some coffee?”

“I brought you another pie,” she said. “Seeing how much you liked the last one. It's blueberry this time. Sad, sad, blueberry.”

“Thank you, you needn't have troubled yourself. I'm getting quite used to a diet of frozen pizzas and lima beans.”

She accompanied him back to the kitchen. “Tell me,” she said. “When you're playing a game of tennis, and you do something to deliberately frighten or unsettle your opponent, what do you call that?”

Richard glanced at her sharply. “I don't know. Psyching out, I guess.”

“That's it,” she smiled. “Psyching out.”

It was only after she had left that he lifted the cloth covering the pie, and saw the pastry letters
Fare Thee Well
.

He was wakened by the sound of knocking. Dark, granite-hard knocking. He sat up in bed and switched on his bedside lamp. He sat listening. There was somebody in the house. Somebody, or something. He listened for two or three minutes, suppressing his breathing.

He heard the softest of crunching noises outside the door. He eased himself out of bed, and crossed the room. He had almost reached the door when it creaked sharply; and one of the upper hinges popped.

He hesitated, with his hand on the doorknob. The door
creaked again – a deep, twisted creak, as if the very grain of the wood were being tortured. Behind the door he heard a heavy grating and grinding. It seemed as if the whole door-frame were being subjected to enormous pressure.

But from what?

The door cracked. Richard stepped back a little; but he was too late. The door suddenly burst its hinges, and collapsed on top of him, followed by an avalanche of rocks. He screamed in pain as both his ankles were broken, and the stainless steel pins which held his thighbones together exploded through his skin.

He was pinned to the floor, on his back, with the rock-heaped door pressing down on top of him.

“
Aah! God! Help me!
” he screamed. “
God! Help me!
”

But nobody answered, and the door grew heavier and heavier as one more rock after another scraped itself on to the top of the heap.

The rocks were alive. They were like huge, blind, slow-creeping turtles, with a heartless and unstoppable determination to crush the last ounce of life out of him.

He felt his ribs clutching him; then crackling one by one. He felt something burst inside him, and blood and bile gushed up into his mouth. He spat, coughed, choked.

“
God!
” he gargled, with lungs that were so tightly compressed that they could scarcely take in any air.

His head fell back and his eyes rolled up; and it was then that he saw her standing over him, Greta Reuter, in a long grayish dress, her blonde hair loosened, smiling, calm, with her hands held up in front of her as if she were praying.

“Help me,” he whispered. “For God's sake, help me.”

Greta Reuter slowly shook her head. “William Palen didn't help George Sturgeon, not for God's sake, not for any sake. His wife Emily begged for his life, but William Palen hardened his heart.”

“Help me,” Richard repeated. “I can't –”

Again Greta Reuter shook her head.

“William Palen piled on the last of the rocks that pressed George Sturgeon to death. And now you're back in Preston, and you're William Palen's natural heir, so you must pay the price.”

She knelt down beside him, and touched his forehead with cool fingertips. “Missie Sturgeon lives within me. Missie Sturgeon has lived for generations within all the Sturgeon women until the time could come when she could take her revenge. That is the way with witches.”

All that Richard could do was gasp, as yet another massive rock grated its way to the top of the heap, and added enough weight to break his pelvis apart.

“Fare thee well,” smiled Greta Reuter, drawing back her hair so that she could kiss his bloody lips.

Richard had never imagined that being slowly crushed could be so painful. He felt as if every nerve in his body were being stripped, like electrical cables. But he could no longer draw enough air into his lungs to cry out.

The very worst part was to feel like screaming but not to be able to.
Sara
, he thought, in agony.
Sara
.

Greta Reuter left the house like a gray shadow leaving the door open behind her. Outside, lightning danced epileptically on the horizon.

As she walked diagonally across the meadow, the stones that were strewn across it began to shift, and to knock against each other, and then to tumble.

By the time she reached the center of the meadow, with her blonde hair blowing across her face, hundreds of stones were clattering behind her, in her footsteps. The lightning flickered; her eyes shone white as milky marbles.

She had not yet reached the far side of the meadow, however, when a tall dark-haired figure materialized out
of the darkness. A woman with dark eyes, and a face as composed as a porcelain mask.

“Where are you going, Missie Sturgeon?” the woman called, in a shrill, commanding voice. Greta Reuter stopped rigidly still, and her bride's train of tumbling rocks clattered into silence.

“Who are you?” Greta Reuter demanded. “What do you want of me?”

“What have you done, Missie Sturgeon?” the woman cried. Her voice like saws; her voice like seagulls.

Greta Reuter took three stiff-legged steps forward. The rocks followed. “Sara Nugent,” she whispered.

“You've killed him!” Sara accused her. “You had no right to. You had no call to.”

Greta Reuter took another step forward, but Sara swung her arm and crackles of lightning skipped and popped from her fingertips, real witchery; and Greta Reuter stood stiff and terrified, her hair rising and flying straight up above her, as the hair of all women flies up when they are about to be struck by lightning. Her face contorted, screaming a wide, silent scream.

“You had no right to,” Sara repeated, her voice soft and blurry with static electricity. “The sin dies with the sinner, you know that.”

Greta Reuter continued to scream. Then lightning struck her, directly on top of her head, and for one terrible instant her bones were visible through her skin. Then she fell backwards, in flames, convulsing and shuddering, with smoke pouring out of her wide-open mouth.

All around her, the stones cracked and split and exploded in every direction.

Sara stood over her for a long time, while the storm rumbled and gradually passed. Then she walked toward the house, where Richard at last would be waiting for her.