Click on the right arrow below and go to next page
Fiction from Web del SolA Knock At Midnight
Patrick Keppel
Continued . . .
"Oh, that's good, thank God," his mother breathed. "They'll get here and take care of it. I don't know why I don't have the number right there. For all those years Grandma always kept the number right by the--Stefan! Where are you going? Wait!" she shouted as Stefan glided silently on by, his gaze fixed on the door, which drew him on like a magnet. "Stay back here! Don't let him in! We can't let him in."
Stefan stopped and turned on her angrily. "I'm just going to talk to him," he said. "Tell him that help is on the way."
"Oh, good, good, that's ok--but don't go out there! Ah!-- I'll go wake your father," she added, her face suddenly brightening--at last she could be useful too!--and scuffled off through the kitchen to their bedroom at the back of the house.
Stefan watched her go; it was disturbing to see her so afraid, so exposed, as though shells were exploding all around her. Of course, he'd seen her like this before, often over nothing, like the very first time when Stefan was not quite five, when the Mauer family, returning home from an unusually pleasant night out, opened the front door and were greeted by a nervous rustling at the top of the darkened stairs. Although it soon became clear that the source of the noise was nothing more than a tiny squirrel, his mother reacted as though they had a dangerous criminal in their midst. Lest they be bitten (or witness what was to happen to the poor rodent), the children were hurriedly removed from the scene. As he was led away, however, Stefan turned and caught a glimpse of the intruder huddled in a quivering ball against the bars of the railing--peering at him, it seemed, with those bulging, lustrous black eyes. Stefan remembered feeling sympathetic, but frightened and indignant too. As they had no pets, it was easy to believe that his parents were right, that there was something devious about animals; they clearly did not belong in the house, yet they were constantly trying to sneak their way in. Only much later, in his twenties, did Stefan realize how absurd this was, and so found it at once amusing and annoying that whenever he went out, his mother felt compelled to warn him, in a low, conspiratorial voice (for the badgers and possums were surely listening in their secret lairs nearby), "Close the garage door, or else the animals will get inside."
And at these words, as though by accidental incantation, still another memory-curtain suddenly parted, another light flicked on, and Stefan began to see fragments of that dream he'd been having in the bath, blurry stills that slowly bled into the next until at last they blinked and rolled on like an old film: Hurrying from the Mauer house, trying to get back to his apartment. Has to cross the field, a winter wasteland of dirt and dead scrub. Takes a cautious step, but his foot sinks deep into the damp earth, and he pulls it back, repulsed. In the distance a storm is rising over the row of pines that mark the end of the property. The wind begins to gust, picking up clumps of soil and flinging them towards him, stinging his face. Turns back to the house, notices that a large window and the side door are wide open. These he closes--Who could have been so careless?--then returns to the field, which is calm now but blotched in places by all kinds of dark shapes, dense clouds that slowly mold themselves into strange lumpy animals--ostriches, buffalo, wildebeests, giraffes. They appear harmless enough, but . . . Why are they there? What do they want? They run off when they see him but never really go away, just lurk in the distance, waiting--for what? Whenever he turns away for a moment, they creep back even closer to the edge of the field than before, stand there like slabs of stone, the jagged crenelations of a ruined castle, the broken arc of some ancient calendar. Their huge black eyes stare off to one side or the other, but are watching him too, certainly they are watching him. Amusing in a way, but he can't bring himself to pass through their ranks, their silent picket line. Besides, the muddy field. So he turns and tries the field opposite, but the same thing happens--first the storm, the clumps of dirt against his face, and then the dusky clouds, the retreating, encroaching animals. . . .
Stefan shuddered, smiled--yes, that was a good one all right. He'd have to try to remember more of it later, write it down, piece it all together--surely it meant something. But now . . . Stefan hurried to the door, then stopped just short and slowly leaned in to the glass. The man outside seemed younger now than before, perhaps in his mid-twenties. He was leaning on the porch railing; one by one great drops of his blood fell off his face and splashed onto the grey-blue slats below. His head was still turned toward the light, his face twisted in silent agony, but his eyes were now sealed shut with clotted blood.
For a long moment Stefan did not speak, did not even move, but instead just continued to gaze through the window as though he were standing before a painting in a museum. Finally Stefan's lips parted, but words evaporated in his uncertain breath, condensed in a faint cloud on the glass between. "H-Help Is On The Way," he pronounced at last, his voice buzzing against the glass like a trapped fly. "Help Is On The Way. It Will Be All Right."
At this, the young man began to lean back ever so slowly--clicked on, it seemed, animated by his audience, like a funhouse robot or a streetmime. His red mouth widened, as though he were about to laugh. "I-I'm s-scared," he moaned. "I'm s-so s-scared!"
Stefan paused, took a step back. For a moment he wondered whether this might be some kind of trick after all. There seemed to be something suspiciously rehearsed in the young man's words, an underlying "purpose" one might detect in the pitch of a con-man determined above all to be let inside the door. In light of this, the blood seemed an even more impossible red, like the fake splattering they used in the theatre. And besides, there had in fact been a story circulating about a murder that had been committed not too far from there. . . .
But then all at once Stefan frowned in self-reproach. What utter nonsense! He'd just told the man Help Was On The Way. If he were a criminal, he'd have fled at once. Stefan went back to the window. Slowly the young man began to sink down, down, until at last he was sitting on the porch in a smear of blood. He was scared--obviously! He probably just wanted someone to hold his hand, his bloody hand.
"Is he still there?" Stefan's mother whispered as she reappeared in the hallway with his father, who surged past her looking large and angry, his bleary eyes trained intently on the front door. He seemed ready to punish someone, anyone, and Stefan instinctively stepped aside. His father glanced through the window, then quickly turned away. "Was there an accident?" he said, heading off toward the living room to look down the road.
Stefan's mother made an answer as though he'd expected one--they didn't know what was happening; they just heard a knock, and there he was!--then gazed off toward the living room, anxiously awaiting some new information, or else an order, some useful act she could perform. When her husband didn't respond, she turned to Stefan. They stood there motionless, an oppressive silence between.
"What's keeping them?!" Stefan growled through his teeth, though it really hadn't been all that long. Wringing his hands, he retreated into the kitchen. His mother trailed after him.
"You did the right thing, Stefan," his mother said. "They'll come and take care of it. I don't know what I'd have done if I'd been alone."
Stefan glared at her for an instant, then slowly let his eyes fall to the red swirls marbling the tiles below. Suddenly he felt queasy, light-headed, oddly wounded by that plainly horrible fact--yes, in that case the young man surely would have died. But as clear and awful as this fact seemed, it was really no more than a thin veil covering another that was far more appalling; when all at once the veil dropped, vanished like a scrim, Stefan went pale with terror: Was he not dying even now? Stefan's head jerked up and back. He spun around on his heels and as in a dream, ghostlike, glided rapidly toward the door.
"Stefan! Stay back! Don't open it!"
"I'm not!" Stefan said automatically and pulled up just shy of the door, as though if he would but touch the knob he would be instantly electrocuted. He peered out at the young man--a boy actually, perhaps no more than sixteen. "It's ok, it's ok," Stefan said through the glass in a softer tone than before. "They'll be here soon . . . Hang in there. You'll be all right."
This time the boy didn't answer, but just sat there on the porch in his steamy red smears, sobbing and shivering in pain and despair.
Just then the police drove up. "They're here," Stefan announced with great relief.
"Oh, good!" his mother sang and rushed toward the living room. "Peter, the police are here, you better--"
"He didn't make the turn," Stefan's father broke in, then added somewhat angrily under his breath, "They always have to go so fast." He steamed right past them both to the kitchen and went out through the side door.
"Oh! You better go outside too, Stefan," his mother said. She was gesturing to him wildly with her hands as she did when she was trying to get everyone properly arranged for a photograph or for dinner--something like a stage manager who was utterly convinced the play could not happen without her, yet whom the actors tacitly ignored. "They'll probably want you for something, to make a statement, or something."
Stefan drifted past her and out the side door. He joined his father under the pear tree about ten feet from the porch and watched silently through the pulsing strobe of red lights as the two policemen bustled about the injured boy. Gently they laid him flat on the slats, then one pressed a cloth to his head, while the other began at once to clear the porch of its decorations, in one motion grabbing the copper milk can by its crown and the electric candle by its neck and setting them down over the side railing. As swiftly he seized the bench, but struggled when what was resting on it--a large, densely woven wreath knotted at the top by a huge red bow that read Mauer's Farm in gold script--began to roll out from the side. He glanced toward Stefan and his father, and at last the latter stepped forward in a rush, received the bench and wreath as they were lowered from above, and set them gently on the grass beneath the pear tree.
"Stefan! Get your coat on!"
Stefan looked behind him at his mother standing alone in the doorway, stared at her uncertainly for an instant, as though through dim glass or a fog. She seemed somehow distant, miles away, and very old and frail besides, someone's grandmother shivering in her worn red bathrobe. Stefan glanced down at his black t-shirt, his bare arms bathed in flashes of red light. "I'm not cold," he said curiously, as though at a loss to explain the phenomenon.
Just then a fire truck drove up noisily and was directed by the police down the road to the scene of the accident. Stefan's father watched them pass, set down the milk can and candle with the other things, then turned and strode rapidly toward the house. "I'm going to call the Kopps," he announced. "They might see all the lights and start to worry."
"Good idea!" Stefan's mother exclaimed and followed him into the house.
Stefan turned back to the porch. The policeman with the cloth was kneeling closer to the boy, who was moaning faintly, trying to speak. "I-It's all my f-fault," he finally managed to sob. "I was . . . going too fast, I--"
All at once he stopped, perhaps even passed out. Stefan shut his eyes, abashed to be gazing upon the boy's desperation --his futile hope that if he but told the truth, took all the blame, then somehow everything that was happening now would stop, and all would return to the way it was before, except that this time he would be more careful, always and forever more careful, in every way imaginable. This plea, this innocent attempt to invoke magical powers long disbelieved, made the boy seem even younger than sixteen, a mere child of twelve, or eleven, ten, nine . . .
"Better not touch those," Stefan's father murmured in his son's ear.
Stefan turned around abruptly, then followed his father's gaze down toward a pair of bloodstained tissues lying at the foot of the milk can like orchids. "You never know what kind of . . . diseases," his father went on in the same low voice, then handed Stefan a wool overcoat. Stefan took it as though it were some tool he didn't know how to use.
"Put it on!" his mother called from the doorway, cupping her hand around her mouth. "You just had your bath. Your pores are open."
Stefan stared at the coat until at last he recognized it as the Christmas gift his parents had given him only yesterday, then slowly put it on. Suddenly in its warmth he felt very cold, or else felt only then how cold he really had been. It was probably nearly freezing out, and he'd been standing there in just a t-shirt. All at once he felt ridiculous, useless, and so headed back inside.
"Yes, come inside, it's cold out there," Stefan's mother said. She followed him anxiously into the kitchen and then into the hallway. Finally he stopped a good distance from the front door, and so she stopped. "Your father called the Kopps so they wouldn't worry," she said, then made a face and rolled her eyes. "I'll call the Wands first thing tomorrow. It won't take them long to hear about it--you know how people talk! It'll be all over town that we had some trouble here. Who knows what everyone will think! . . ."
Stefan stared through her words, peered hard at the very surface of his mother's face, tracing the course of every one of its deep lines and curves, until all at once he saw only how different that face would look were someone to whisper in her ear right then that the boy lying near death on her front porch was one of hers. He'd seen that woman before, for one terrifying instant, that time his brother Thomas almost drowned in the motel pool. Though they were around ten, neither of them had ever learned to swim, since of course it was a terribly dangerous thing to do, even more so than riding a bicycle. Still, when he saw his brother, his other half, flailing away in the deep end, Stefan instinctively began to drift toward him out of the shallow. "Stefan! STAY BACK!" his mother had growled as she clawed through the water, her eyes knifing the distance between her and her drowning son with a horrifying ferocity, her teeth bared. It seemed to take forever, but at last she reached him and dragged him by the neck to safety, to life. . . .
"He's just a kid . . ." Stefan said suddenly, then trailed off.