Page 49 of Nightwatching

Go back, go back, there’s blood on the track!

You’ve sucked in snow and ice and it cut and bloodied your insides, that’s all.

Her lungs opened like butterfly wings, red and soft, organblood spattering the snow with a steam and freeze.

Bloody eye, bloody hands, bloody feet. Don’t you make a tasty treat.

Delicious.

She recognized, dimly, that her brain wasn’t working quite right. That her eye wasn’t, either. That her slippers were gone. Was she frozen? She looked down. No, her legs were still moving. She swiped at her eye, saw through the clotted lashes the black open end of the trail, so close all of a sudden, so all at once!

She threw herself out of the trees, floundering in the snowdriftsthat deepened where the path stopped. She tried to scream, and blood came out. She coughed it into the snow. She was swimming, swimming through the snow.

The houses were dark. Sleeping giants, barely visible now through the thickening blizzard, unprotected here with the way they’d clear-cut the trees, planted small, shapeable things.

Where is he? He’s nearly on top of you, he must be, you can feel him. Don’t look!

The coat was heavy, so horribly heavy, catching all the snow. She pulled it up again, forced herself forward, legs wallowing dark against that whiteness. Her exposed thighs screamed with it.

With one eye open but foggy at the edges and the other swollen to blindness, she flailed toward the dark outline of the nearest house.

Time was broken. Space didn’t look right; it kept rolling and shifting and the house had run away.

A floodlight.

“Help!” she mouthed, silent.

It was like her nightmares. She saw the linoleum floor of her dorm room. She tried to scream and no sound came.

Shame on you! Call for help, do it!

Out came air and metal, the taste of tinfoil between teeth.

A door, there! There’s a door, get to the door.

The coat was difficult to hold, kept slipping and binding her legs, the lining slick and soggy.

Through her unhurt eye, she saw she was at a door, its brass knocker shaped like a pineapple.

She reached out. It was hard to use the knocker. So heavy. She saw a white box with a button, held it down, pumped it. Heard a distant chime.

A light nearby. She leaned her forehead against one of the long,thin windows that flanked the door. Vague somethings swam behind the glass. Then a face peered through, white and pale, eyes growing big.

She saw her reflection in the glass, dark, bloody, unrecognizable.

The face disappeared, then peeked through the window again.

She pressed the doorbell.

When the door opened, when her hand fell away from that little white box, she saw she’d left it smeared with blood.

“Hullo,” she heard herself say. “I’m your neighbor. Can you help me, please?”

17

She’d been only nine, but she clearly recalled that her mother’s killer was balding. The sight of the back of his head as he sat facing the judge stuck deep in her memory. There was a little quiver of his cheek visible if he turned even slightly. He had a big belly, flat butt, arms that looked especially scrawny given the size of his middle. What hair he had was getting a little gray. He looked to her like a white blob. The middle-aged man she saw everywhere. The policeman, the lawyer, the doctor, the accountant, the politician.

She hated him. Stared daggers at his doughy body. The man who had obliterated her mother, erased that beautiful voice, the milk of her skin, the fingers that braided hair, the consistently sour breath, the too-loud voice—he’d wiped all that from the face of the earth. He’d annihilated now and forever all the mother’s love she would have gotten, and had left all the love she still had bottled up with nowhere to go.

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