The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (10 page)

Trisha thought she was screaming, but when she thumped her head against the underside of the tree-trunk, showering bits of bark and moss down into her sweaty hair and waking herself up, she heard only a series of tiny, kittenish mewling sounds. They were all her locked throat would allow.

For a moment she was utterly disoriented, wondering why her bed felt so
hard,
wondering what she had thumped her head on . . . was it possible she had actually gotten
under
her bed? And her skin was crawling, literally
crawling
from the dream she had just escaped, oh God what a terrible nightmare.

She rapped her head again and stuff began to come back. She wasn't on her bed or even under it. She was in the woods, lost in the woods. She had been sleeping under a tree and her skin was still crawling. Not from fear but because—

“Get off, oh you bastards get off!” she cried in a high, frightened voice, and waved her hands rapidly back and forth in front of her eyes. Most of the minges and mosquitoes lifted from her skin and reformed their cloud. The crawling sensation stopped but the terrible itching remained. There were no wasps, but she had been bitten just the same. Bitten in her sleep by pretty much anything that happened by and stopped for a chomp. She itched everywhere. And she needed to pee.

Trisha crawled out from under the tree-trunk, gasping and wincing. She was stiff everywhere from her tumble down the rocky slope, especially in her neck and left shoulder, and both her left arm and left leg—the limbs she had been lying on—were asleep. Numb as pegs, her mother would have said. Grownups (at least the ones in her family) had a
saying for everything: numb as a peg, happy as a lark, lively as a cricket, deaf as a post, dark as the inside of a cow, dead as a—

No, she didn't want to think of that one, not now.

Trisha tried to get on her feet, couldn't, and made her way into the little crescent of clearing at a hobbling crawl. As she moved, some of the feeling started to come back into her arm and leg—those unpleasant tingling bursts of sensation. Needles and pins.

“Damn and blast,” she croaked—mostly just to hear the sound of her own voice. “It's dark as the inside of a cow out here.”

Except, as she stopped by the brook, Trisha realized that it most surely wasn't. The little clearing was filled with moonlight, cold and lucid, strong enough to cast a firm shadow beside her and put ash-bright sparkles on the water of her little stream. The object in the sky overhead was a slightly misshapen silver stone almost too bright to look at . . . but she looked anyway, her swollen, itchy face and upcast eyes solemn. Tonight's moon was so bright that it had embarrassed all but the brightest stars into invisibility, and something about it, or about looking at it from where she was, made her feel how alone she was. Her earlier belief that she would be saved just because Tom Gordon had gotten three outs in the top of the ninth was
gone—might as well knock on wood, toss salt back over your shoulder, or make the sign of the cross before you stepped into the batter's box, as Nomar Garciaparra always did. There were no cameras here, no instant replays, no cheering fans. The coldly beautiful face of the moon suggested to her that the Subaudible was more plausible after all, a God who didn't know He—or It—
was
a God, one with no interest in lost little girls, one with no real interest in anything, a knocked-out-loaded God Whose mind was like a circling cloud of bugs and Whose eye was the rapt and vacant moon.

Trisha bent over the stream to splash her throbbing face, saw her reflection, and moaned. The wasp-sting above her left cheekbone had swelled some more (perhaps she had scratched it or bumped it in her sleep), bursting through the mud she had smeared on it like a newly awakened volcano bursting through the old caked lava of its last eruption. It had mashed her eye out of shape, making it all crooked and freakish, the sort of eye that made you glance away if you saw it floating toward you—usually in the face of a mentally retarded person—on the street. The rest of her face was as bad or even worse: lumpy where she had been stung, merely swollen where mosquitoes in their hundreds had had at her while she was sleeping. The water by the bank where she crouched was relatively still, and in it she saw there was at least one mosquito
still on her. It clung to the corner of her right eye, too logy to even pull its proboscis from her flesh. Another of those grownup sayings occurred to her: too stuffed to jump.

She struck at it and it burst, filling her eye with her own blood, making it sting. Trisha managed not to scream, but a wavery sound of revulsion—
mmmmmmhh
—escaped her tightly pressed lips. She looked unbelievingly at the blood on her fingers. That one mosquito could hold so much! No one would believe it!

She dipped her cupped hands into the water and washed her face. She didn't drink any, vaguely remembering someone saying that woods-water could make you sick, but the feel of it on her hot and lumpy skin was wonderful—like cold satin. She dipped up more, wetting her neck and soaking her arms to the elbow. Then she scooped up mud and began to apply it—not just on the bites this time but all over, from the round collar of her 36
GORDON
shirt right up to the roots of her hair. As she did it she thought of an
I Love Lucy
episode she'd seen on Nick at Nite, Lucy and Ethel at the beauty parlor, both of them wearing these funky 1958 mudpacks, and Desi had come in and looked from one woman to the other and he had said, “Hey Loocy, jwich one are jew?” and the audience had howled. She probably looked like that, but Trisha didn't care. There was no audience out here,
no laugh-track, either, and she couldn't stand to be bitten anymore. It would drive her crazy if she was.

She applied mud for five minutes, finishing with a couple of careful dabs to the eyelids, then bent over to look at her reflection. What she saw in the relatively still water by the bank was a minstrel-show mudgirl by moonlight. Her face was a pasty gray, like a face on a vase pulled out of some archeological dig. Above it her hair stood up in a filthy spout. Her eyes were white and wet and frightened. She didn't look funny, like Lucy and Ethel getting their beauty treatments. She looked dead. Dead and badly inbarned, or whatever they called it.

Speaking to the face in the water, Trisha intoned: “
Then
Little Black Sambo said, ‘Please, tigers, do not take my fine new clothes.' ”

But that wasn't funny, either. She smeared mud up her lumpy, itchy arms, then lowered her hands toward the water, meaning to wash them off. But that was stupid. The goshdamn old bugs would just bite her there.

The pins and needles had mostly worked out of her arm and leg; Trisha was able to squat and pee without falling over. She was also able to stand up and walk, although she grimaced with pain each time she moved her head more than a little to the right or left. She supposed she had a kind of
whiplash injury, like the one Mrs. Chetwynd from up the block had gotten when some old man had rammed her car from behind as she waited for a traffic light to change. The old man hadn't been hurt a bit, but poor Mrs. Chetwynd had been in a neck brace for six weeks. Maybe they would put
her
in a neck brace when she got out of this. Maybe they would take her to a hospital in a helicopter with a red cross on the belly like in
M*A*S*H,
and—

Forget it, Trisha.
It was the scary cold voice.
No neck brace for you. No helicopter ride, either.

“Shut up,” she muttered, but the voice wouldn't.

You won't even get inbarned because they're never going to find you. You'll die out here, just wander around in these woods until you die, and the animals will come and eat your rotting body and some day some hunter will come along and find your bones.

There was something so terribly plausible about this last—she had heard similar stories on the TV news not just once but several times, it seemed—that she began to cry again. She could actually see the hunter, a man in a bright red woolen jacket and an orange cap, a man who needed a shave. Looking for a place to lie up and wait for a deer or maybe just wanting to take a leak. He sees something white and thinks at first,
Just a stone,
but as he gets closer he sees that the stone has eyesockets.

“Stop it,” she whispered, walking back to the fallen tree and the wrinkled spread remains of the
poncho under it (she hated the poncho now; she didn't know why, but it seemed to symbolize everything that had gone wrong). “Stop it, please.”

The cold voice would not. The cold voice had one more thing to say. One more thing, at least.

Or maybe you won't just die. Maybe the thing out there will kill you and eat you.

Trisha stopped by the fallen tree—one hand reached out and grasped the dead jut of a small branch—and looked around nervously. From the moment of waking all she'd really been able to think about was how badly she itched. The mud had now soothed the worst of the itching and the residual throb of the wasp-stings, and she again realized where she was: in the woods alone and at night.

“At least there's a moon,” she said, standing by the tree and looking nervously around her little crescent of clearing. It looked even smaller now, as if the trees and underbrush had crept in closer while she was sleeping. Crept in
slyly.

The moonlight wasn't as good a thing as she'd thought, either. It was bright in the clearing, true, but it was a deceptive brightness that made everything look simultaneously too real and not real at all. Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.

Something twitted in the woods, seemed to choke, twitted again, and was silent.

An owl hooted, far off.

Closer to, a branch snapped.

What was that?
Trisha thought, turning toward the snapping sound. Her heartbeat began to ramp up from a walk to a jog to a run. In another few seconds it would be sprinting and then
she
might be sprinting as well, panicked all over again and running like a deer in front of a forest fire.

“Nothing, it was nothing,” she said. Her voice was low and rapid . . . very much her mother's voice, although she did not know this. Nor did she know that in a motel room thirty miles from where Trisha stood by the fallen tree, her mother had sat up out of a troubled sleep, still half-dreaming with her eyes open, sure that something awful had happened to her lost daughter, or was about to happen.

It's the thing you hear, Trisha,
said the cold voice. Its tone was sad on top, unspeakably gleeful underneath.
It's coming for you. It's got your scent.

“There is no
thing,
” Trisha said in a desperate, whispery voice that broke into complete silence each time it wavered upward. “Come on, give me a break, there is no
thing.
”

The unreliable moonlight had changed the shapes of the trees, had turned them into bone faces with black eyes. The sound of two branches rubbing together became the clotted croon of a monster. Trisha turned in a clumsy circle, trying to
look everywhere at once, her eyes rolling in her muddy face.

It's a
special
thing, Trisha—the thing that waits for the lost ones. It lets them wander until they're good and scared—because fear makes them taste better, it sweetens the flesh—and then it comes for them. You'll see it. It'll come out of the trees any minute now. A matter of seconds, really. And when you see its face you'll go insane. If there was anyone to hear you, they'd think you were screaming. But you'll be laughing, won't you? Because that's what insane people do when their lives are ending, they laugh . . . and they laugh . . . and they laugh.

“Stop it, there is no thing, there is no thing in the woods, you stop it!”

She whispered this very fast, and the hand holding the nub of dead branch clutched it tighter and tighter until it broke with a loud report like a starter's gun. The sound made her jump and utter a little scream, but it also steadied her. She knew what it was, after all—just a branch, and one
she
had broken. She could still break branches, she still had that much control over the world. Sounds were just sounds. Shadows were just shadows. She could be afraid, she could listen to that stupid traitor of a voice if she wanted to, but there was no

(thing special thing)

in the woods. There was
wildlife,
and there was undoubtedly a spot of the old kill-or-be-killed
going on out there at this very second, but there was no crea—

There is.

And there was.

Now, stopping all of her thoughts and holding her breath without realizing it, Trisha knew with a simple cold certainty that there was. There was
something.
Inside her there were at that moment no voices, only a part of her she didn't understand, a special set of eclipsed nerves that perhaps slept in the world of houses and phones and electric lights and came fully alive only out here in the woods. That part didn't see and couldn't think, but it could feel. Now it felt something in the woods.

“Hello?” she called toward the moonlight-and-bone faces of the trees. “Hello, is someone there?”

In the Castle View motel room Quilla had asked him to share with her, Larry McFarland sat in his pajamas on the edge of one of the twin beds with his arm around his ex-wife's shoulders. Although she wore only the thinnest of cotton nightgowns and he was pretty sure she had nothing on beneath it, and
further
although he had not had a sexual relationship with anything but his own left hand in well over a year, he felt no lust (no
immediate
lust, anyway). She was trembling all over. It felt to him as though every muscle in her back were turned inside-out.