Hide and Seek

a sudden childish vision of madness and cruelty. As we moved through

the last stands of trees, as the sky grew bigger overhead, I thought of

those things and wondered what I was doing here, like a vulture

visiting old corpses.

And I thought about Ben and Mary.

Of idiocy taken to its very extremity. And, in that extremity, made

evil.

We broke through to open clearing. Once it had been a pasture. All at

once the night sounds seemed to shift and alter around us. Steps were

softer. The sea was louder. We were in tall grass now. The crickets

screeched us a jib bering welcome.

"Wow," said Kim.

We stopped and looked straight up where she was looking. A huge pool

of stars, gouging light into the blue-black sky. The moon was so clear

you could see the gray areas against the white.

I've seen a thousand nights like this from a thousand fields, and they

never cease to calm me. This one calmed me now.

After a while I said, "Come on."

I've told you I have this habit of staring at the ground ahead of me

when I walk. I'd been doing that back on the road, but I wasn't now.

I was focused on that house. Not so nervous now but still focused.

Fascinated.

For a while it was nothing but a dark bulk rising off the flatlands,

beyond which was nothing you could see. I knew what was back there. A

short spit of land and then a cliff dropping down to the sea. I

recalled a porch back there and a kind of widow's walk on the second

floor.

And then as we got closer you could make out some of the details in

front. Gray-brown barn board covering the porch and the entire front

of the house, just as it had been in Ben and Mary's time. Three

windows on the second floor, shuttered. Two on the first floor, with

one of the shutters torn or blown away and an empty pane where the

glass should be. Off to the left, an outhouse. A newer wood there it

looked like pine to me. I thought how foul Ben and Mary's must have

been, and I guessed the old doctor had replaced it. I would have.