Fanshawe paused to identify the direction from which it had arrived: just off from the break in the grasses, where a lone tree stood entwined by leafy vines.
Then two more words, even fainter: “…love you…”
Before Fanshawe had stuck his head fully out from the tree, he saw with a jolt that he was not alone. Just below the immediate rise of the hill lay a lower elevation surrounded by flanks of unkempt bushes, while two t-shirts draped over a bush left a clue: HARVARD and YALE. The joggers, Fanshawe remembered. Indeed, the two women were lying together in the lower clearing, sunbathing on towels, and after a moment of peering, Fanshawe recalled their headbands and well-toned bodies. Both women were topless, yet they’d also rolled up the edges of their running shorts as much as the fabric would permit. Fanshawe stared without breathing.
Their age could not be determined, though he suspected they were well out of the groves of higher learning. One, Harvard, lay flat on her back, eyes closed, with a tiny grin touching her face, while Yale lay on her side, on one elbow, to gaze down in apparent adoration. “I love you,” came another drift-like whisper, and Harvard replied, “I know,” and grinned with more obviousness. They kissed daintily, then Yale ran a hand up her companion’s belly and across her breasts in a single, fluid motion. Harvard’s nipples erected, at once, to dark pink plugs of sensitive flesh. Then Yale assumed her friend’s supine pose. There they both lay now like a passionate secret, smiling, basking in brilliant sun, their hands joined.
It was only when they both lay still that Fanshawe’s emotions began to simmer. He gulped, his mouth going dry. His gaze rolled over their enticing bodies like drool. His eyes would not close.
No, no, no, words scarcely his own pleaded. I can’t be doing this, I MUST NOT DO THIS… His groin fidgeted, he snatched a breath through his teeth as he continued to stare.
No…
His hand moved against the command of his conscience, and slithered across his crotch, but just as he would prepare to masturbate—outright, oblivious—he gnawed his own tongue and dragged his eyes off the fleshy spectacle like nails being dragged out of a plank. It was all he could do not to moan aloud in anguish spliced with self-disgust.
Pervert, scumbag, peeper…
Moments later he’d forced himself well back from the tree. Tears lay in the grooves of his narrowed eyes. He stepped back and back and back until he nudged the large wooden sign; and then he leaned there for a several minutes, regaining his breath and his senses.
This isn’t supposed to be happening…
What if somebody else had walked up and seen him? Or one of the women themselves? What could he say? What excuse could he give?
Nothing. Because his intent would’ve been obvious to anyone, anyone in the world.
He leaned against the sign for some time. He felt jittery, like someone who’d lived on nothing but coffee for a day. Was his heart beating irregularly? Soon he was slumping in place. His mind felt dark, hollow, and blank, but in time he realized he was looking at something with some focus, something he hadn’t noticed when he’d first come up onto the hill. It sat by itself, just before the wall of grasses, at the clearing’s edge.
A barrel.
It was a large one, four feet high and three wide, encircled by two rusting iron bands. Riled by termites and creviced by water-damage, the grayed slats suggested that the barrel was very old, but a closer glance showed him that a heavy coat of some water-resistant resin covered the entire vessel, no doubt a more recent application. A lone antique barrel sitting on this history-laden hill struck Fanshawe as odd, yet he next made an odder observation.
The barrel had a single ten-inch-diameter hole in its side.
He looked perplexed at it. What the hell’s an old barrel doing up here? Perhaps it was an original-era rain barrel, preserved for its value as a relic. But if so? What’s with the hole? A hole in the side of a barrel kind of defeats its purpose.
He shrugged and turned to leave. The temptation raged: to steal a departing glance at the near-naked joggers, but after a wince, he resisted and strode back toward the path that would lead him out. Before he could fully leave the hill’s perimeter, however…
A shock riveted him, and he spun back around.
He’d heard a sound that couldn’t be denied. A crisp, guttural growl, unmistakably that of a large dog.
Wild dog… Fanshawe’s hand came to his heart. His eyes darted for a branch or stone, something that might serve as a weapon, but when his eyes pored back over the clearing he saw that there was no dog to be seen.
— | — | —
CHAPTER THREE
(I)
The sun was just beginning to wester when Fanshawe made it back to town. Recession be damned, he thought. If anything, more tourists were apparent now, more cars in various lots, more strollers enjoying the town’s quaint shops and atmosphere. As a financial maven, he was pleased to see that people had vacation money to spend. It also pleased him that some resolve seemed to be filtering back into his conscience: he’d resisted the impulse the pass the Travelodge and its alluring windows and sunbathers, and instead had taken a more circuitous route via a street farther off, mostly residential. He walked casually now, more at peace with himself. He spotted several empty beer kegs stacked behind the tavern; they made him think of the unlikely barrel on Witches Hill. I’ll have to ask Abbie about that, he ventured. Later, he came around the back of the Wraxall Inn. Not once did he look up at the windows of the upper floors. Back in New York, when his sickness had been at full spate, the city’s endless trove of windows had caused him to brim with something like feverish delight. At night he’d walk the posh Upper West Side, to duck into tactical alleyways and raise his mini-binoculars at the gem-like glass frames that too-often presented the merchandise that his warped mind shopped for. His office, with the door locked, served as a veritable voyeur’s outpost on the countless nights he’d tell his wife he’d be working late, and for this he possessed a high-powered pair of Nikon field glasses and even a compact telescope, both fitted with digital cameras. Worse, he’d gone on to purchase a mini-van with custom one-way window-inserts; at night he’d park in strategic lots and manipulate a small Zeiss-brand spotter scope at the windows of the best condominiums.
Whacked in the head, he thought. And for years, his poor wife had never known, and never known either that whenever they made love, Fanshawe’s mind was stuffed, steamy, and delirious with the images of other women he’d viewed so discretely and pervertedly. The inconceivableness of his addiction struck even Fanshawe himself: a man of extraordinary financial success enslaved by this lowly and risky crime. At least Dr. Tilton understood—all too well—and he was encouraged to know that she’d treated others suffering from his own diagnosis of chronic scoptophilia. “For sure, Mr. Fanshawe, yours is a disorder that is rather commonplace in a general realm but oh so uncanny in particular regards to you.” “Pardon me?” he’d asked, prickled by her insinuation. “You are most certainly an unrepresentative peeper”—and at this, Fanshawe winced—”in that your bounteous wealth retails little mollification at all.” “I don’t even know what that means,” he snapped. “For $1000 per hour, could you please speak English?” And then she’d smiled in that tiny, barely discernible way of hers, a way that made him feel even lower. “A man of your vast financial solvency could certainly enjoy the pleasures of the most beautiful call girls and strippers available, but you’ll have none of that, hmm? Instead, you skulk around alleys, or hide in your van to slake your dismal and pathetic need from a distance.” He’d wanted to walk out then and there, until he admitted that she was quite right, and that this observation proved her clinical competence. The highest-class strip clubs and the most preeminently attractive call girls did nothing for him. “It’s no good, is it, Mr. Fanshawe, unless the lecherous images with which you quench your craving are stolen, from victims, not whores, from unknowing targets, not willing and morally oblivious pole-dancers? You must steal from them, Mr. Fanshawe, you must look at them in your unrestrained lust without their permission, otherwise the satisfaction is useless, no better than a heroin addict injecting tap water.” Fanshawe stared right back at her, insulted, humiliated, but realizing that his hatred for her was just camouflage for his hatred of himself. He croaked his reply: “You’re absolutely right…”