Chapter Four
Nightmare
She had been sitting there perhaps two minutes at the most, when a faint scream of acute fright reached her from a distance. It was thin and piping, and must have been thin even at its source. She jarred to her feet. That had sounded like the voice of a child, not a grown-up. It repeated itself, and two others joined in with it, as frightened as the first, if less shrilly acute. She started to run, as fast as the trackless nature of the ground would allow, toward the direction from which she believed the commotion was coming.
She could hear water splashing, and then without any further warning she came crashing out onto the margin of a sizable and completely screened-off woodland pool. It was shaped like a figure eight.
At the waist, where it narrowed, there was an irregular bridge of flat-surfaced stones, although the distances between them were unmanageable except by sprinting. There was a considerable difference in height between the two sections, and the water coursed into the lower one in a placid, silken waterfall stretching the entire width of the basin. This lower oval was one of the most remarkable things she had ever seen. It was shallow, the water was only about knee-high in it, and it was surfaced with dazzling creamy-white sand. There was something clean and delightful-looking about it.
Two small boys in swimming-trunks, one of them Johnny Gaines, were arched over two of the stepping-stones, frantically tugging at a third who hung suspended between them, legs scissoring wildly across the surface of the sleek sand below. “Keep moving them!” she heard Johnny shriek just as she got there. “Don’t let ’em stay still!”
She couldn’t understand the reason for their obvious terror. The water below him certainly wasn’t deep enough to drown anybody—
“Help us, lady!” the other youngster sobbed. “Help us get him back up over the edge here!”
She kicked off the impediment of her high-arched shoes, picked her way out to them along the stones, displaced the nearest one’s grip with her own on the floundering object of rescue. He wouldn’t come up for a minute, even under the added pull of her adult strength, and she couldn’t make out what was holding him, there was nothing visible but a broil of sand-smoking water around his legs. She hauled backwards from him with every ounce of strength she had in her body, and suddenly he floundered free over the lip of the low spillway.
The three of them immediately retreated to the safety of the bank, and she followed. “What got you so frightened?” she asked.
“Don’t you know what that is?” Johnny said, still whimpering. “A quicksand! Once that gets you—”
There could be no mistaking the genuineness of their fright. His two companions had scuttled off for home without further ado, finishing their dressing on the hoof as they went.
“Look, I’ll show you.” He picked up a fist-sized rock, shied it in. What happened sent a slight chill down her spine. The stone lay there for a moment, motionless and perfectly visible through the crystalline film of water. Then there was a slight concentric swirl of the sand immediately around it, a dimple appeared on its surface, evened out again, and suddenly the stone wasn’t there any more. The sand lay as smooth and satiny as ever, clean and delightful-looking. The delayed timing was what was so horrible about it.
“We’d better go,” she said, taking a step backward from it.
“The upper pool’s all right, it’s only got gravel at the bottom,” Johnny was explaining, wiping off his hair with a handful of leaves.
She didn’t hear him. She was examining the branch of a bush growing beside the bank that had swung back into place again in her wake. It formed an acute angle such as is never found in nature. It was badly fractured halfway out along its length. She reached for a second frond, a third, fingered them. Their spines were all broken in that same way.
Her face paled a little. She moved around the entire perimeter of the bush, handling its shoots, careful to overstep the treacherous cup under her. Then she examined the neighboring bushes in the same way. The fractures were all on the landward side, away from the pool. The tendrils that overhung the water itself, that anyone in difficulties in the sand could have been expected to grasp at and cling to, were all perfectly undamaged, arching gracefully just the way they had grown.
She came away with a puzzled look on her face. But only that, no increased pallor.
At the edge of the woods, just before they came out into the open again, the youngster beside her coaxed plaintively: “Miss Prince, don’t gimme ’way about going swimming in there, will you?”
“Won’t they notice your hair’s damp?”
“Sure, but I can say I went swimming in the mill-pond, down by the O’Brien place. I’m allowed to go there.”
“Oh, it’s just that... that place we just came from they don’t want you to go near?”
He nodded.
That could have been because of the quicksand — possibly. Then again it could have been for other reasons as well. “Have they always told you to keep away from there?” she hazarded.
It paid off. “No’m, only lately,” he said guilelessly.
Only lately. She decided she was going to pay another visit to that cannibal sand-bed. With a long pole, perhaps.
The evening meal began in deceptive calmness. Although the two Masons continued to watch her in sullen silence, there already seemed to be less of overt suspicion and more of just casual curiosity in their underbrow glances. A casual remark from Johnny suddenly brought on a crisis when she was least expecting it. The youngster didn’t realize the dynamite in his remark. “Did I pass, in that composition I handed in?” he asked all at once. And then, before she could stop him in time, he blurted out: “You know, the one about the dream I had, where I came down and—”
Without raising eyes from the table she could sense the tightening-up of tension around her. It was as noticeable as though an electric current was streaking around the room. Ed Mason forgot to go ahead eating, he just sat looking down at his plate. Then his father stopped too, and looked at his own plate. There was a soft slur of shoe-leather inching along the floor from somewhere under the table.
Mrs. Mason said in a stifled voice, “Sh-h, Johnny.”
There was only one answer she could make. “I haven’t got around to reading it yet.” Something made her add: “It’s up there on the table in my room right now.”
Mason resumed eating. Then his son followed suit.
She had given them all the rope they needed. Let them go ahead and hang themselves now. If the composition disappeared, as she was almost certain it was going to, that would be as good as an admission in itself that—
She purposely lingered below, helping Mrs. Mason as she had the night before. Then when she came out of the kitchen again and made ready to go up to her room, they were both sprawled out sluggishly in the adjoining room. Whether one of them had made a quick trip up the stairs and down again, she had no way of knowing — until she got up there herself.
Mason’s eyes followed her in a strangely steadfast way as she started up the stairs. Just what the look signified she couldn’t quite make out. It made her uneasy, although it wasn’t directly threatening in itself. It had some other quality that she couldn’t figure, a sort of shrewd complacency. Just before she reached the turn and passed from sight he called out: “Have a good night’s sleep, Miss.” She saw a mocking flicker of the eyes pass between him and Ed.
She didn’t answer. The hand with which she was steadying the lamp-chimney she was taking up with her, shook a little as she let herself into her room and closed the door. She moved a chair before it as a sort of frail barricade. Then she hurried to the table and sifted through the homework papers stacked on it.