The house made its night sounds.
“Matthew?” Though growing weaker, the impression remained: the boy was here in the room, or had just been. She rose quickly, a twinge of pain in her leg as she felt about. Am I still dreaming? She groped her way along the bureau toward the deep opening of the doorway.
“Matthew?” She took a few blind steps into the hall—a mineshaft. She retreated, her right hand sliding along the must-furred bedroom wallpaper for the light switch. The dingy litter of her bedroom flared. Waiting for violet blotches to melt from her vision, she turned her back on the room, stared downward, her shadow spreading gigantically across the hall floor. The peeling green linoleum depicted leaves, impossibly huge and curling, now all but worn away.
Shuddering with a yawn, she snatched a frayed terrycloth robe from the bedroom floor, shook the dust balls free and wrapped it around her shoulders. The bedroom light almost penetrated to the end of the hallway, creating a faint haze. Again, she stood and listened. Nothing. She started down the hall. What if he’s not in his room? Feeling the steps above her with her hands, she limped heavily up the attic stairs.
The bedclothes rustled. In the charred darkness, a creak of cot springs fused with the hissing rhythm of his breath, and she heard him roll over, muttering wetly. The chain, when she reached for it, rattled against the bulb.
The boy didn’t flinch from the light. She bent over him. His sweat-slick body sprawled across the cot, and his hands stayed clenched into small fists, damp and sticky. Pamela has to bathe him. His T-shirt had balled up around his armpits, and the lump of stone was still clutched in one tight hand. She straightened, staring. He sweated, inert on the mattress.
The light rattled again.
She went back down toward the dull glow of her room. He really is asleep. She moved down the brightened hall. I’m tired. Doris said…working so hard. Switching off the overhead light, she thought of the boy. Dreamed it. She sat on the edge of her bed and pulled off her robe. Matthew is squeezing a stone. Through the window, a slight breeze carried faint sounds of the night. It felt cool on her still-damp body, and she lay down, partially covering herself with the rumpled sheet, thinking about her son who gripped a cold stone. No. Her mind grew heavy and hazy. That’s not the way it is. It’s not. Her eyes closed. not like that not
When he was sure the sliding footsteps had returned to her room, Matty opened his eyes and sat up.
For a while, he played with the stone, pretended it was a giant boulder that rolled end over end across the pillow landscape, but soon the sounds of barking reached him, and he listened, staring at the beams. And the wind brushed across the eaves, so close, and the barking swept through the pines with a rustling as of things long dead.
He looked around his dark attic, his kingdom: the old pieces of furniture, some covered, some trailing cobwebs in the dust, loomed all around the bed. On the far side of the room, the diamond panes of the window gleamed pale black. He listened again to the dogs in the woods, and to something else, something that called to him by name.
He hid the stone under his pillow.
Slowly, he brought his upper arm to his face and mouthed it, licked the hot, salty flesh. Then he bit down—hard, harder, small teeth sinking in. And at last it came. The taste…the wet meat. His mouth filled with drooling warmth, hot wetness at his crotch. He felt dizzy. Sweat trickled down his body while the dark room swayed around him, warmth spreading between his legs as he flooded the bed.
From the woods, from faraway, from far below, the howling of the dogs grew muted, and there drifted to his ears a thin yapping that held something of a human quality, leaving in his mind an echo like the cries of many voices. There was hysteria in those voices…and abject sadness. The boy sucked at his wound, and the dark room swayed about him.
PART TWO
MUNRO’S FURNACE
Scattered over widely separated huts…exists today a group of human beings as distinct…as to excite curiosity in the mind of any outsider brought into contact with them.
Elizabeth Kite, psychologist, 1913
“The Pineys”
They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding…. Their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity.
H. P. Lovecraft
Friday, July 31
The faint drone gradually swelled as a fly jerked through the room. One hand in a shallow depression, she lay on her side in the rutted center of the mattress—it seemed the furrow alongside her grew fainter with each solitary night. There had been a dream…drifting away now: her grandmother’s worn, warm face, a feeling of safety fading into a memory of the infant Matthew and the sweet breath of his warmth in her arms. Such a shame he never knew his grandmother, she reflected, easing her legs over the side of the bed. Great-grandmother, she corrected herself. My mother is his…
By the dimness that pried under the window shade, she read the alarm clock on the bureau. Damn. She got up too quickly and felt a sharp twinge in her knee as she hobbled across the room to raise the shade. I’m always up before this. Thin morning drizzle fell, and the casement framed a drab square on which water spots made swerving patterns. Always. She felt bloated with sleep, and her eyes burned as though she’d been crying. Am I about to begin spending my life in bed? Fighting the stupor, she rubbed at gritty eyes. Is that the next phase, girl?
She pulled on a robe and padded down the hall, then smoothed the sleep from her face with a washcloth at a sink stained blue and orange. Putrid noises emanated from the plumbing. The towel smelled of mildew, and the odor mingled strongly with that of soap. While the faucet pattered, and the runneled pane of the window rattled in a breeze, vines over the back of the house rustled like the wings of startled pigeons.
Leaning on the sink, she looked at her arms—browned from sun and wind—and remembered a time when they’d been pale and soft. Well, maybe never pale, exactly. She gazed at her dark eyes in the mirror, at the curve of her cheek. Stray curls hung about her face, catching the light, glowing softly. She grabbed an elastic band from the pile on the washstand.
The mirror held shadows. The bathroom walls curled, peeling like lizard skin, and in the corners lay hair and dust and flakes of plaster. The drain choked and growled.
Returning to her room, she began the exercises intended to strengthen her leg. Afterward, she rummaged through her clothes, looking for things lately worn only once.
In the hallway, a new spot leaked from a dark ring on the ceiling, and drops plunked rhythmically on the linoleum, slid off around the edges. She threw a towel on the puddle. Was Matthew awake yet? From the top of the stairs, the living room still looked mostly dark with streamers of watery light flowing through chinks in the boarded windows, giving the room an air of drowsy desolation. Dust floated. Muffled silence told her she was alone in the house. Only rain on the walls and her uneven tread on the stairs broke the quiet.