by Beth Trent-Ringler
The family arrived on January the 18th, in my opinion a rather inconvenient time to move, in the middle of a roaring snowstorm no less, but I understand we cannot always control these things. As it turned out they had very little with them, merely a few suitcases filled with clothing and other such necessities, and some inflatable mattresses for sleep. The rest of their furniture trickled in over the following weeks, each piece as mismatched to and well-worn as the previous, carried out of Thrift Save trucks by burly men.
The family consisted of a woman, Mary, and her three small children. It used to be quite strange and scandalous seeing children with no father, but so many families had been in and out of my home nothing much surprised me anymore. I even had a family with no mother once. Just a man and a young boy. It was clear, in that case especially, that the absence of the mother was a detriment to the boy. I felt some hope for the lad when his father brought a woman home one Friday evening, but those hopes were dashed over the following months as I saw him bring a different woman home practically every weekend, and none of the women seemed to have any interest in the child. It was no surprise to me when the little boy eventually turned into an angry teenager who was brought home by the police more often than not.
Not only did this newest family move in on one of the snowiest days of the year, but in the dead of night as well. This was something I had never seen in all my years and made me immediately suspicious. I am not as naïve as I once was. I know the things people get up to after dark, the range of vile and perverted occupations there are, and this middle of the night arrival did not immediately inspire my faith in the young mother.
The smallest child, I learned, was named Gracie. She looked to be about three, a suspicion that was confirmed when her 4th birthday was celebrated at the beginning of June. I had to admit she was a cute little girl. She had bright blue eyes and ringlets of curls that hung alongside her face. Her mother took great care to put little bows in her curls nearly every day that matched her blouse or her dress. Gracie had a laugh that threatened to light up even my dark demeanor.
The next in line was a little boy called Max. He must have been around eight and was fairly typical for a little boy, a mess of brown locks nearly always untidy atop his head, skinned knees and scuffed shoes. But when he smiled his brown eyes lit up like there was a candle burning just in front of them. And the freckles dusting his nose and cheeks added to this classic charm.
The largest child was a girl, aged twelve. She resembled her mother in physical appearance so closely I thought it uncanny. Not only in appearance were they similar, but in demeanor as well. The little girl, Abigail was her name, seemed to be precisely a miniature version of her mother. When the mother was away, Abigail would coddle Gracie and Max just as if she was embodied by her mother’s ghost. I had to admit that there was an impressive degree of love between the children. They shared a closeness that reminded me of my own childhood and my sister Frances, a common thread stitching them together so well that even I found it rather delightful to watch them all curled up together on the sofa watching their cartoons or letting their cooperative imaginations lead their games in the backyard.
I’d nearly immediately given up on my initial judgement of the mother, Mary, due to the strange circumstances of their arrival. It became clear in the first week of their living in my home that she was quite admirable for a woman. She had a hard edge to her, but a strange softness would seep out sometimes when no one was looking. When her children were all tucked into bed asleep, I would sometimes catch her sobbing into her own pillow, trying hard to muffle the sound as much as possible. She displayed a commendable sense of self-discipline that drove her out of bed and off to work early most mornings, but not before she had kissed each of her children on their cherub cheeks and assured them of her love. She did not remind me of my own mother who had been stern to such an extent that her love seemed often to have run cold, but I couldn’t help but to admire the way Mary balanced her motherly instincts with her hard work and obviously strong sense of responsibility. If I had ever had children of my own, I imagine that I would have wanted to be this type of mother.
As a rule, I do not involve myself in the affairs of others, even if they do reside in my home. To each his own and I would never presume to entwine myself into the affairs of strangers. I was certain that no amount of my developing fondness for the little ones or intrigue with their mother could threaten my long-held belief that a family’s business was its own. Until he showed up.
From the moment I set eyes on the man I knew I didn’t like him.
He first arrived on one sweltering evening in late July. The children had been playing with water in the backyard, spraying each other with the garden hose and making mud pies with what resulted from their watery play. Their mother was not yet home from work and Abigail, as usual, was doing a fine job of looking after the others. I observed as she sprayed off Gracie’s and Max’s feet, and then her own, before they all tramped into the kitchen. Then I saw him. He was barely visible behind the broad beech tree that skirted the gap in the fence between my house and the neighbors to the rear. I couldn’t really make out his features except to note that he was a man of average build with brown hair and eyes. He was just standing there, nearly invisible in the branches of the tree, watching the children. Once they were all inside and had closed the kitchen door behind them, he moved across the yard swiftly and ducked beneath the kitchen window. I could see him more fully now and noted that he was wearing a white button up shirt, the top three buttons undone, with navy blue slacks. His face was conventionally handsome, but his eyes seemed void of any warmth that would make him pleasant looking. He gripped the windowsill and peered ever so stealthily through the glass. The children were just being children at the moment, finding snacks, bickering, Abigail playing the mediator between the two little ones, and he just stared. His dark eyes maintained their unsettling glassy gaze. I was relieved when the children moved on into the living room and when, a few moments later, their mother arrived home.
I looked to where he had been, but he was gone. I could not see any sign of him in the backyard and I supposed he must have crept off the way he had come. The entire ordeal gave me a sense of unease and I found myself keeping a closer eye on the children when Mary was away and wary for his reappearance.
I didn’t see him again for several weeks. On this occasion he appeared as suddenly as before. The children were tucked in and Mary sat alone on the sofa reading, a rare glass of wine in her upraised hand. I saw the shadow of him slinking across the front yard and then he moved into the light of the front porch. I watched as he made his way over to the window and peered in. He stared at her through the opaque curtains while she read, that same dead look in his terribly dark eyes but Mary did not notice, lost as she was in her book, senses likely dimmed from the wine. Once again, he disappeared as quietly as he had arrived, with Mary none the wiser.
This happened four more times over the course of several weeks. Each time he seemed to me a bit more brazen, a bit less concerned with being caught. But he never was. Mary and her children were so very caught up in their lives with each other they did not notice his uncanny presence.
It was the 18th of October that my reticence to become involved in the affairs of others was put to the test in a most violent manner.
Mary had come home from work a bit earlier than usual and surprised the children with two bags filled with an agglomeration of twinkling orange lights, plastic skeletons, gauzy webs, and little plastic spiders. They’d squealed delightedly and set to work right away transforming the house into the very image of a haunted mansion. Max and Abigail strung the webs all across the porch railing while Mary searched for an extension cord and little Gracie flung the plastic spiders into the webs where they clung haphazardly. Once satisfied that their particular placement of creepy skulls and twinkling lights had made the porch as spooky as they dare, the four of them had retired to the kitchen where Mary began to prepare mugs of hot chocolate and the children planned what they would dress up as for Halloween. It was such a delightful scene that it kept the whole of my focus, so I did not see him slinking across the front yard. I only became aware of his presence when the front door squeaked, barely audible, on its hinges.
Mary hadn’t heard the door over the chattering cadence of her children’s voices excitedly planning for the upcoming holiday. He was upon them before anything could be done. The man lunged across the kitchen like a hurricane, swift and destructive. He had Mary, gripping her neck and her arm, pinned against the wall in an instant. The children’s panicked screams competed with Mary’s strangled demands for them to run. Little Max ran around the table and kicked at the man’s legs, his face streaming with tears and his screams cracking sobs. Abigail had swooped up Gracie immediately and stood, holding her tightly, in the middle of the room not knowing whether to run or to help her poor mother.
The man seemed entirely unaware of, or completely unconcerned with the commotion of destruction surrounding him. Max’s kicks must have felt as useless as the pestering of flies on a summer day. He was wholly focused on Mary, his face inches from hers which was turning an alarming shade of purple due to the pressure he was applying to her throat. I couldn’t make out what he was saying over the distressed sounds of the children, but he was yelling in her face, spittle flying into her eyes and mouth which was wide open and gasping for air.
Something in the scene struck some chord in me. The injustice of it, the pure evil on display, it made something in my amorphous chest begin to feel solid. I knew I’d grown rather fond of the children, but I think I always did, at least a little bit, come to enjoy the children of the various families who had, over the years, found their home in my house. It was hard not to enjoy children, at least superficially, for they always seemed to have a way of making dark days brighter. I think it was the laugh of a wee babe that had first woken me from my self-pitying slumber some eight decades earlier. It was hard to recall the specifics, but I do remember that lilting laugh echoing up into the attic where I lie in my self-imposed repose.
But the generally delightful nature of children alone could not explain what was overtaking me, for the solid feeling was spreading out from where my chest would have been. It spread into my limbs, my hairs, my teeth. I could feel it bourn by rage taking me over and my eyes, now seeming solid and tangible, could see Mary clearly across the kitchen, clutching futilely at the strong hands gripping her throat and her eyes met mine. Momentary shock was quickly displaced by relief in her eyes, tears spilling from the corners. Against my better judgement I knew what must be done.
I moved more swiftly than had been possible in my life, with more strength than I had ever possessed, and heard rather than felt a high terrible scream issuing from my throat, a shriek that overpowered the mingled sobbing and screaming of the children, the vile yelling of the man. How strange it was to move in a temporal way once more, and I would have liked to pause and enjoy the sensation of it. I could smell the hot chocolate and wondered, for a split second, if I would have been able to taste it as well. It had been so long since I had smelled, tasted, touched… but I knew that this temporary solidity had been granted for a specific purpose.
His grip on her limpened as I grabbed his shoulder, forcing him to turn and face me. I must have looked a fright considering how his expression changed upon viewing my countenance. His dark eyes were no longer flat and emotionless, they were alight with dread, as if every nightmare he had ever had was brought to life before him. In that moment he drew for me a distressing resemblance to young Max, the same brown hair and eyes. I had to strike down a flame of pity that bore itself up in me seeing him so childlike and afraid. I looked away and in so doing my eyes lit again on Mary. It was the panic in her eyes, panic not because of my appearance, but because of the presence and violence of the man that tore me from my thoughts and assigned me once again to my purpose.
I threw him to the floor with an ease that surprised me. In life I had not had great strength at all, especially in my later years as my body began to fade. How powerful it felt to fling this monster of a man to the ground with the ease of flicking a crumb from a tablecloth. He scrambled backwards, trying to come to his feet, but his fate was as inevitable as my own. I tangled my, by now very solid, fingers in his hair and pulled him behind me. Out of the kitchen I bore him, away from the shocked faces of Mary and the children. Up the stairs we went, him flailing and trying to grip every obstacle he could along the way, to no avail. Across the second floor landing I took him and threw open the door to the attic. It had been long since I had been up there, but I marched resolutely, slamming the door behind me with a deafening sound.
I quieted his screams fairly quickly. I don’t know how I knew to do it, or how to do it, nor how I was able to set aside more than a lifetime of civility in order to perform such a reprehensible act, but it was as if this temporary solidity granted me both the knowledge of what must be done and the strength to do it. It was a mere twist of the neck, a cracking sound, and then absolute silence.
The terrible task completed, I stared down at his limp form. His head hung at an unnatural angle and drop of blood had pooled in the corner of his mouth. I was empty of emotion now, my former rage having been quite extinguished, and slowly I became aware of the solidness fading away. My mind was as jumbled as it was the night I had died; the confusion of spirit detaching from physical form. I lay down on the attic floor, I could actually feel the dusty boards beneath my hands, my head. I lay and felt something like a heartbeat, pulsing away the seconds. Though I did not breathe, I could feel the cadence of something like breath moving in and out of me in a constant wave. Gradually what was physical became once again ethereal.
I do not know how long I lay in the attic. Time does not move the same, does not hold the same meaning when you are nothing more than vapors. I think it was a laugh that woke me again. Not the laugh of a baby, dimwitted and light, but the hearty, knowing laugh of an adult. It echoed up through the house and I rose, bleary-eyed if a spirit can be such a thing, and wandered down. I wandered down to see who was living in my house now.
Beth Trent-Ringler lives with her husband and three young children in northern Colorado where she studies at Colorado State University. This is her first publication.