Fortnight of Fear (15 page)

Archbold, Ohio

Archbold, Ohio, (population 3,318) is the only town in this book in which I have never spent any time (I stopped for twenty minutes for a cup of coffee and a Danish). Without being disparaging, I can think of no earthly reason why I should, and even one of the residents agreed with me. Because I have altered and fictionalized the setting, I have changed its name slightly to “Archman”. But I have visited Toledo and Defiance and seen the Independence Dam, and I was so taken by the scenery and the kindness of the people I met that I wanted to set a story somewhere in the vastness of northern Ohio – with that sense of being poised in the mid-West, somewhere between Cleveland and the setting sun.

I still have a postcard I bought in Archbold, showing some outstandingly nondescript buildings. Perhaps Archbold – except for those who live there and love it – is one of those places that should forever remain in one's imagination.

It was raining in cold dreary sheets that day I moved into 31 Caper Street; scurrying between the uplifted tailgate of my station wagon and the wedged-open front door, with a sodden copy of the
Archman Times
draped over my head.

And when at last it was all over, and I was sitting in my own brown dilapidated chair with rain-streaked boxes stacked around me, I closed my eyes against the raw glare of the single electric bulb and breathed relief.

But what sadness, too. Because Vicky was gone, and Jimmy Junior was gone, and here I was, alone in Archman, Ohio, on a rainy night, with wet shoes, and nothing to show for four years of marriage but old magazines and dog-eared Christmas cards and records I never wanted to listen to, never again.

I rummaged my way through four cardboard boxes until I found a half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey. There was nothing to drink it out of but a lime-encrusted flower-vase. I sat under the single bulb and drank myself a toast. To love, to life, to what-the-hell.

You threaten to walk out so many times. You rage and argue and all the time you never believe that one day you're going to do it. And then one day you do. And once you're standing on the wrong side of that door, that's it. Something irrevocable has happened, and you can never, ever go back.

My advice to all discontented husbands: don't argue, don't drink, don't walk through that door.

Now Vicky was working as a secretary in Toledo and Jimmy Junior was classified as the child of a single-parent family and I was preparing to start work as a geography-and-athletics teacher at Archman Junior High. Your whole life can turn itself upside-down that quickly – just because you walked out of that door.

I finished my drink, and lay back for a while, and then I decided I needed a walk, and maybe some supper, too. I left the apartment by the narrow front stairs and walked along Caper Street as far as Main.

It had stopped raining, but the streets were still wet. An occasional car swooshed past, its brake-lights bleeding into the glistening blacktop. I thrust my hands into my pockets and looked up at the rapidly-clearing sky, and felt that I was two thousand miles away from anybody I knew and loved.

On the corner of Willow and Main, there was a drugstore with steamy windows called Irv's Best. I pushed my way inside and it smelled of meatloaf and grape-flavored gum and
Elf Quest
comics. There was a rundown-looking guy behind the counter with a face like potatoes and a folded paper hat. “How about a Reuben sandwich and a lite beer?” I asked him.

He poured me the beer. “You want gas?” he said. “This'll give you gas. This, and a Reuben sandwich. You want a guaranteed recipe for gas?”

“I just want a sandwich and a beer, is that all right with you?”

He sniffed. “You headed east?” he asked me.

“I'm not headed anywhere.”

He frowned. He obviously didn't understand.

“I'm moving in. I've come to live here.”

“You've come to live in Archman? You out of your tree?”

“I'm teaching geography and athletics at the Junior High.”

“You
are
out of your tree.”

“I don't think so,” I told him, and by this time he was making me feel irritated. “I wanted to find someplace quiet, and Archman looks like it.”

“Well, you're right there. Archman is someplace quiet all right. Archman is so goddamned quiet they keep sending the sheriff across from Wauseon to see if we're still breathing.”

He sniffed more violently, and spent some time wiping the stainless-steel counter with a smeary rag. “There's a church, and a store, and a brickworks, and a library full of books that everybody's read, and that's it.”

He was silent and thoughtful for a while, and then he reached out his hand and said, “My name's Carl, by the way. Good to know you. Welcome to Archman.”

“What happened to Irv?”

“Irv who?”

“This place is called Irv's Best, isn't it?”

“Oh, that Irv. He died.”

I finished my sandwich and walked back to Caper Street. Carl was right. Archman was the quietest place I've ever been in,
ever
. You could stand in the middle of Main Street at midnight and you couldn't hear anything at all. It was just as if the whole town had been covered by a thick felt blanket. Claustrophobic memories of childhood, underneath a bedspread that was too heavy.

I climbed wearily up the stairs to my first-floor apartment, and closed the door behind me. I undressed, dropping my clothes on the floor. Then I took a shower. The plumbing shuddered so loud I imagined they could probably hear me all the way across town. I soaped myself and whistled a little.
The night they drove Old Dixie down … and all the people were singing
…

But then, so soft and indistinct that I thought I might have imagined it, I heard a noise in the apartment somewhere.

I listened, feeling that odd tingly feeling you get when your intellect is telling you to be reasonable but your instinct is more than just a little bit alarmed. I never particularly like taking a shower in an empty apartment anyway, it makes me feel
vulnerable
.

The next thing you know, Anthony Perkins is going to come slashing his way through the shower-curtain with a twelve-inch carving-knife.

I heard the noise again, and this time I shut off the faucet. I listened and listened, but all I could hear now was the soft gurgling of water going down the drain. I stepped out of the shower and picked up my towel. I opened the bathroom door.

There it was again. A soft, insistent, scratching noise. A rat, maybe; or a bird in the eaves. It seemed to be coming from the bedroom. I hesitated outside the door for a while, and then stepped in.

The bedroom was empty. There was a solid red-brick wall at one end, and the three other walls were painted white. I had set up the new divan with the brass headboard which I had bought three days ago at Sear's, but there was nothing else in the room at all. No cupboards for rats or cats to conceal themselves in. No nooks and crannies. Just a plain rectangular room, with a bed. A double bed, which one casualty from a recently-broken marriage was hoping from time to time to share with somebody else. God let there be some single women in Archman. Correction, God. Single women under the age of 60.

I listened a moment longer, but all I could hear was the muffled rattling of a distant freight-train. I finished drying myself, and then I climbed into bed and switched out the light. The ceiling was criss-crossed with squares of light from the street outside, on which the shadows of
raindrops trembled. I lay with my eyes open feeling more sad and lonely than I had ever been in my whole life. I thought of Vicky. I thought of Jimmy Junior. I let out one tight sob that was more of a cough and then I didn't allow myself any more.

Sleep took me by stealth. I snored once, and jolted, but then I was sleeping again. Two hours of the night passed me by, and then I heard that noise again. A soft, repetitive scritching, like claws against brick. I lay staring at the wall, tensed-up, not breathing, and then it came again.

I reached down and switched on the lamp, half-expecting to send a rat scurrying away into the shadows. But the bedroom was bare. I listened and listened and there it was.
Scritch, scritch, scritch
.

There was no doubt about it this time. It was coming from the other side of the wall. Perhaps somebody in the next building had a pet dog that was locked up for the night. Perhaps they were doing some late-night decorating, scraping off some old wallpaper. Whatever it was, it didn't have anything to do with me – except that if it kept on, I'd have to go next door and complain about it.

I turned off the light, dragged the comforter up around my ears, and made a determined effort to go to sleep. I had almost sunk back into the darkness when the scratching started up again. Angry now, and deeply fatigued, I picked up a heavy bronze ashtray and banged on the wall with it.

“Can you hear me? There's somebody living here now! I'm trying to get some sleep!”

Almost immediately, I received three sharp knocks on the wall in reply.

“Listen!” I yelled. “All I want you to do is to shut up! Do you hear me? No more knocking! Just let me get some sleep!”

There was silence. I stayed where I was, kneeling up in bed, half-expecting to hear another knock, but none came.

After a while, I allowed myself to wriggle back under the covers and re-arrange my nest.

An hour passed. I dozed and dreamed. I heard whispering and laughter. Sometimes I was asleep and sometimes I was awake. I thought I could see someone sitting hunched in a hood in the opposite corner of the room, and it turned out to be nothing more than a shadow. Then, later, I woke up sweating and although the room was silent I knew that somebody had been speaking to me. I lay bunched up in my covers, listening, holding my breath, my brain feeling as cold as an empty linoleum corridor.

Somebody said, “
Help me
.”

I lifted my head a fraction.

“
Help me
,” the voice repeated. A woman's voice, but very faint.

I sat up in bed, listening so intently that my eardrums sang.

“
Please help me call somebody, please
”.

I pressed my ear against the brick walls.

“
Help me,
” she repeated, and this time there was no doubt that she was next door, whispering to me through the wall.

“What's wrong?” I called back. “Can you hear me? What's wrong?”

“–
lp me
,” she said.

“Listen!” I shouted. “Are you locked in? What's wrong? Has somebody locked you in? What's happening in there?”

“–
me, for God's sake, hel
–”

I sat up straight. I didn't know what the hell to do. A strange woman on the opposite side of my bedroom wall was begging me for help, but she wouldn't tell me what was wrong. Either that, or she couldn't hear me. But if she were whispering, and I could hear
her
, then she must be able to hear me yelling.

I climbed out of bed. I went through to the living-room,
found the phone and picked it up, intent on calling the police. But then I thought I'd better make one last check. I'd called the police once before, when Vicky and I had been arguing, and that experience had been sufficient to make me feel highly prudent about summoning the law. I went back to the bedroom and knocked on the bricks with my ashtray.

“Are you okay?” I called. “Are you hurt, or anything like that? Do you need an ambulance?”

“
He's coming
,” she whispered. “
Please hurry, he's coming!
” Then she screamed, and her scream was so piercing that I shouted out, too, and dragged my pants off the back of the chair, and hop-stumbled into them, and grabbed at my shirt, and wrenched open my door and ran down the stairs to the street not even stopping to think that I was scared.

Outside it was cold and windy, with a fine flying drizzle in the air. I banged at the door of the house next door, Number 29. “Let me in!” I shouted. “Let me in! You touch that woman and I'll call the cops!”

I banged and yelled and yelled and banged, and two or three lights went on, in bedrooms across the street. I tried to wrestle the front door open with my shoulder, but even though it was old and rotten and the gray-green paint was flaking, it wouldn't budge.

I stepped panting into the street and peered up at the second-story windows. They were dark and blank. They looked almost as if they had been boarded up from the inside. I wondered if I ought to shout out again, or find an axe and try to smash the door down, but neighbors were watching me now, hostile and inquisitive, and I decided against it. If anything serious was going on next door at Number 29, I'd better call the police, and leave it to them to break in.

I ran back upstairs, and hammered at the bedroom wall. “It's all right! Hold on! I'm calling the police!”

There was no reply. My God, I thought, he's killed her. He's killed her and I couldn't stop him. I picked up the telephone with shaking hands and dialed the local police station. It was almost a minute before they answered.

The patrol car parked on the curb outside with its red-and-blue lights flashing and now the whole neighborhood was awake. A thin gray-haired police officer with a Boy Scout hat was standing on the sidewalk waiting for me when I opened the door. “You the fellow who made the complaint about twenty-nine?”

“That's right. I heard a woman calling for help. Then a scream. She said something about a man coming to get her. I tried to break into the house but I couldn't.”

The police-officer tirelessly chewed gum and stared at me with interest. “You tried to break in but you couldn't?”

I nodded. “The door was locked, I couldn't budge it.”