I carried the cup carefully toward the kitchen (forgetting to pour out its contents in the guest bathroom), again noticing the darkened carpet beneath my feet as I passed through the living room—the beige now bordering on a faint green, and shaggier (first reaction: the carpet is growing). Rosa was vacuuming, running the Hoover over one spot in particular. I gingerly walked closer, until I saw the footprints stamped in ash and thought, Why didn’t she clean those yesterday? When Rosa looked up she turned the vacuum off and waited for me to say something, but I was noticing that the furniture still had not been put back the way it was, and my hangover and confusion (because this room now seemed inescapably familiar to me) made saying anything superfluous.
Finally, Rosa gestured at the carpeting. “I think the party cause this, Mr. Ellis.”
I stared down at the ashy footprints embedded there. “How can the party cause the carpet to change its color?”
“I hear there was many people.” She paused. “Maybe they spill their drink?”
I slowly turned to face her. “What do you think we were serving them? Green dye?”
Rosa stared at me, humbled. A pause that seemed to last a decade ensued. I tried to offset the harshness of my tone by making a casual gesture. Without thinking I raised the Slurpee cup to my lips and then, just as casually, stopped myself.
“Miss Dennis—she outside” was all Rosa said, then looked away from me and turned the Hoover on again as I moved toward the kitchen.
On the table were the morning papers, and there was another headline about yet another missing boy, this one named Maer Cohen. I glanced at his photo quickly (twelve, nondescriptly Semitic) and noticed that he’d disappeared from Midland, which was only a fifteen-minute drive down the interstate from where we lived. My response was to turn the paper over. “Not today, can’t deal with that today,” I said aloud as I moved to the sink and discreetly poured out the contents of the Slurpee cup and rinsed it. And when I leaned against the counter, my hands picked up the vibrations of the whisper-quiet Miele dishwasher concealed behind the cherrywood panels. The vibration was soothing, but soon the sound of the leaf blower moving around the side of the house and into the backyard caused me to look up and out the wall of glass.
And then I remembered the headstone.
Craning my neck, I cautiously scanned the field.
I hesitated before accepting that it was no longer there.
And the epic darkness of last night flowed back to me.
But I walked outside onto the deck and it was a clear, beautiful day, still unseasonably warm, and everything seemed so less menacing in the light, almost as if the things I’d seen last night (and the fear I had felt) never existed. Victor lay in a heap in front of me, undisturbed by the roar of the leaf blower, and when I opened the kitchen door his tail started thudding expectantly against the deck but it stopped in midair when he realized who it was and then the tail lowered itself slowly until it curled between his hind legs. The dog flared its nostrils and let out a wet and heavy sigh. I searched my jeans for a Xanax and popped two and something briefly lifted off me, but then I saw the pool man (yes, this was definitely a Saturday) fishing what looked like a dead crow out of the Jacuzzi. (On Sunday night at the Allens’ I would find out that another crow had been nailed to the trunk of a large pine tree in front of the Larsons’ house and another crow had been “broken in half” and stuffed into the Moores’ mailbox; there was also one found mangled—“chewed on” is the phrase Mark Huntington will use—in the back of Nicholas Moore’s Grand Cherokee, and yet another crow was dangling from a massive spiderweb that spanned the two oaks in the O’Connors’ front yard.) As I moved closer toward the Jacuzzi, I noticed that what differentiated this particular crow from any I had ever seen was its abnormally long and pointed beak. The pool man and I stood there studying the bird, both of us speechless, until he asked, “Do you guys have a cat?” The smell of smoke was in the air, and the sun was still climbing the sky. Sarah had left her Terby lying by the pool, and in the morning light it resembled something black and dead.
I looked over at the field again to make sure that the headstone was gone.
I stared at the empty field and out to where the ground rose slightly just before the woods began and remembered how Jayne called the field a “meadow,” making it seem far more innocent than I now felt it was. The sound of the leaf blower kept getting closer, and I motioned to the gardener—a young white kid I’d never spoken to before. He turned the blower off and walked over, squinting in the harsh sunlight. I told the gardener there was something I wanted to show him and gestured toward the field. As we walked across the yard I asked if he had seen or heard anything strange lately. I noticed how deliberately I was walking while waiting for his answer, our feet crunching over the dead leaves.
“Strange?” he asked. “Well, Ms. Dennis was complaining that something was eating her plants and flowers. A couple of dead mice, a squirrel or two—pretty torn up. That’s about it.” The gardener shrugged. His tone suggested that none of this was unusual.
“It was probably our dog,” I said brusquely. “That thing on the deck. He has a cruel, prankish streak in him.”
The gardener didn’t know what to say after that. Just a pause in which he smiled but the smile faded when he saw I wasn’t joking.
“Well, dogs don’t usually eat the kind of flowers Ms. Dennis has.”
We were now on the periphery of the yard.
“You don’t know this dog,” I said. “You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
“Is that . . . right?” I heard the gardener murmur.
“I found something strange last night in the field.”
We stepped over a low concrete divider and were now standing where the headstone had been and someone had dug a hole (my most hopeful scenario). I pointed at the wide, black, wet patch I’d slipped in, and which now led from where the headstone had stood and stretched toward our yard, where it abruptly ended at the divider. The gardener laid down the leaf blower and, taking his cap off, wiped the sweat from his forehead. The black trail was glistening in the midmorning sun—there was a white veneer of crust overlaying it but the trail wasn’t entirely dry yet.
“What is it?” he asked, and I caught an expression usually associated with dead things.
“Well, that’s what I want to know.”
“It looks like, um, mud.”
“That’s not mud. It’s slime.”
“It’s what?”
“Slime. That’s slime.” I realized I had now said that word three times.
The gardener grimaced slightly. Kneeling down, he murmured a few noncommittal suggestions that I couldn’t hear. I looked back at the pool man, who was dumping the crow into a white plastic bucket. A warm wind was rippling the water in the pool, and high white clouds moved swiftly across the sky, blocking the sun and darkening the spot where we were standing. This field is a graveyard, I suddenly told myself. The ground beneath us was jammed with dead bodies, and one of them had escaped. That’s what caused the trail. That’s what dragged itself toward our house. The sound of kids playing somewhere in the neighborhood—their cries of surprise and disappointment associated with something living—momentarily comforted me, and the Xanax had increased my blood flow to the point that I could inhale and exhale without my chest aching.
“I slipped in that last night,” I finally said, and then added, before I could stop myself, “What made it?”
“What made it?” he asked. “Well, it is a slime trail of some kind.” The gardener paused. “I’d say a snail, a slug, or a whole hell of a lotta them made it but damn . . . this is really too big for a . . . slug.” He paused again. “Plus we haven’t had any snail problems here.”