Bottom of the Fourth

THEY WERE behind Dad's little house in Malden, just the two of them, sitting in lawn chairs that were a little too rusty, looking out over grass that was a little too long. The lawn-dwarves seemed to peer at her, smiling secret, unpleasant smiles from deep in their clumps of weeds. She was crying because Dad was being mean to her. He was never mean to her, he always hugged her and kissed the top of her head and called her sugar, but now he was, he was being mean, all because she didn't want to open the cellar bulkhead under the kitchen window and go down four steps and get him a can of beer from the case he kept down there where it was cool. She was so upset that her face must have broken out, because it was all itchy. Her arms, too.

"Baby bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting," he said, leaning toward her, and she could smell his breath. He didn't need another beer, he was drunk already, the air coming out of him smelled like yeast and dead mice. "Why do you want to be such a little chickenguts? You don't have a single drop of icewater in your veins."

Still crying, but determined to show him she did so have icewater in her veins - a little, anyway-she got out of the rusty lawn chair and went over to the even rustier bulkhead door. Oh, she just itched all over, and she didn't want to open that door because there was something awful on the other side - even the lawn-dwarves knew, you only had to look at their sly smiles to get that. She reached for the handle, though; she grasped it as behind her Dad jeered in that horrible stranger's voice to go on, go on, baby bunting, go on, sugar, go on, toots, go on and do it.

She pulled the door up and the stairs leading down to the cellar were gone. The stairwell itself was gone. Where it had been was a monstrous bulging wasps' nest. Hundreds of wasps were flying out of it through a black hole like the eye of a man who has died surprised, and no, it wasn't hundreds but thousands, plump ungainly poison factories flying straight at her. There was no time to get away, they would all sting her at once and she would die with them crawling on her skin, crawling into her eyes, crawling into her mouth, pumping her tongue full of poison on their way down her throat

Trisha thought she was screaming, but when she thumped her head against the underside of the tree-trunk, showering bits of bark and moss down into her sweaty hair and waking herself up, she heard only a series of tiny, kittenish mewling sounds. They were all her locked throat would allow.

For a moment she was utterly disoriented, wondering why her bed felt so hard, wondering what she had thumped her head on ... was it possible she had actually gotten under her bed? And her skin was crawling, literally crawling from the dream she had just escaped, oh God what a terrible nightmare.

She rapped her head again and stuff began to come back.

She wasn't on her bed or even under it. She was in the Woods, lost in the woods. She had been sleeping under a tree and her skin was still crawling. Not from fear but because

"Get off, oh you bastards get off!" she cried in a high, frightened voice, and waved her hands rapidly back and forth in front of her eyes. Most of the minges and mosquitoes lifted from her skin and re-formed their cloud. The crawling sensation stopped but the terrible itching remained. There were no wasps, but she had been bitten just the same. Bitten in her sleep by pretty much anything that happened by and stopped for a chomp. She itched everywhere. And she needed to pee.

Trisha crawled out from under the tree-trunk, gasping and wincing. She was stiff everywhere from her tumble down the rocky slope, especially in her neck and left shoulder, and both her left arm and left leg-the limbs she had been lying on-were asleep. Numb as pegs, her mother would have said. Grownups (at least the ones in her family) had a saying for everything: numb as a peg, happy as a lark, lively as a cricket, deaf as a post, dark as the inside of a cow, dead as a

No, she didn't want to think of that one, not now.

Trisha tried to get on her feet, couldn't, and made her way into the little crescent of clearing at a hobbling crawl. As she moved, some of the feeling started to come back into her arm and leg-those unpleasant tingling bursts of sensation. Needles and pins.

"Damn and blast," she croaked-mostly just to hear the sound of her own voice. "It's dark as the inside of a cow out here."

Except, as she stopped by the brook, Trisha realized that it most surely wasn't. The little clearing was filled with moonlight, cold and lucid, strong enough to cast a firm shadow beside her and put ash-bright sparkles on the water of her little stream. The object in the sky overhead was a slightly misshapen silver stone almost too bright to look at ... but she looked anyway, her swollen, itchy face and upcast eyes solemn. Tonight's moon was so bright that it had embarrassed all but the brightest stars into invisibility, and something about it, or about looking at it from where she was, made her feel how alone she was. Her earlier belief that she would be saved just because Tom Gordon had gotten three outs in the top of the ninth was gone-might as well knock on wood, toss salt back over your shoulder, or make the sign of the cross before you stepped into the batter's box, as Nomar Garciaparra always did. There were no cameras here, no instant replays, no cheering fans. The coldly beautiful face of the moon suggested to her that the Subaudible was more plausible after all, a God who didn't know He-or It - was a God, one with no interest in lost little girls, one with no real interest in anything, a knocked-out-loaded God Whose mind was like a circling cloud of bugs and Whose eye was the rapt and vacant moon.

Trisha bent over the stream to splash her throbbing face, saw her reflection, and moaned. The wasp-sting above her left cheekbone had swelled some more (perhaps she had scratched it or bumped it in her sleep), bursting through the mud she had smeared on it like a newly awakened volcano bursting through the old caked lava of its last eruption. It had mashed her eye out of shape, making it all crooked and freakish, the sort of eye that made you glance away if you saw it floating toward you-usually in the face of a mentally retarded person - on the street. The rest of her face was as bad or even worse: lumpy where she had been stung,

merely swollen where mosquitoes in their hundreds had had at her while she was sleeping. The water by the bank where she crouched was relatively still, and in it she saw there was at least one mosquito still on her. It clung to the corner of her right eye, too logy to even pull its proboscis from her flesh. Another of those grownup sayings occurred to her: too stuffed to jump.

She struck at it and it burst, filling her eye with her own blood, making it sting. Trisha managed not to scream, but a wavery sound of revulsion - mmmmmmhh - escaped her tightly pressed lips. She looked unbelievingly at the blood on her fingers. That one mosquito could hold so much! No one would believe it!

She dipped her cupped hands into the water and washed her face. She didn't drink any, vaguely remembering someone saying that woods-water could make you sick, but the feel of it on her hot and lumpy skin was wonderful-like cold satin. She dipped up more, wetting her neck and soaking her arms to the elbow. Then she scooped up mud and began to apply it-not just on the bites this time but all over, from the round collar of her 36 GORDON shirt right up to the roots of her hair. As she did it she thought of an I Love Lucy episode she'd seen on Nick at Nite, Lucy and Ethel at the beauty parlor, both of them wearing these funky 1958 mudpacks, and Desi had come in and looked from one woman to the other and he had said, "Hey Loocy, jwich one are jew?" and the audience had howled. She probably looked like that, but Trisha didn't care. There was no audience out here, no laugh-track, either, and she couldn't stand to be bitten anymore. It would drive her crazy if she was.

She applied mud for five minutes, finishing with a couple of careful dabs to the eyelids, then bent over to look at her reflection. What she saw in the relatively still water by the bank was a minstrel-show mudgirl by moonlight. Her face was a pasty gray, like a face on a vase pulled out of some archeological dig. Above it her hair stood up in a filthy spout. Her eyes were white and wet and frightened. She didn't look funny, like Lucy and Ethel getting their beauty treatments. She looked dead. Dead and badly inbarned, or whatever they called it.

Speaking to the face in the water, Trisha intoned: "Then Little Black Sambo said, 'Please, tigers, do not take my fine new clothes.' "

But that wasn't funny, either. She smeared mud up her lumpy, itchy arms, then lowered her hands toward the water, meaning to wash them off. But that was stupid. The goshdamn old bugs would just bite her there.

The pins and needles had mostly worked out of her arm and leg; Trisha was able to squat and pee without failing over. She was also able to stand up and walk, although she grimaced with pain each time she moved her head more than a little to the right or left. She supposed she had a kind of whiplash injury, like the one Mrs. Chetwynd from up the block had gotten when some old man had rammed her car from behind as she waited for a traffic light to change. The old man hadn't been hurt a bit, but poor Mrs. Chetwynd had been in a neck brace for six weeks. Maybe they would put her in a neck brace when she got out of this. Maybe they would take her to a hospital in a helicopter with a red cross on the belly like in M *A * S * H and

Forget it, Trisha. It was the scary cold voice. No neck brace for you. No helicopter ride, either.

"Shut up," she muttered, but the voice wouldn't.

You won't even get inbarned because they're never going to find you. You'll die out here, just wander around in these woods until you die, and the animals will come and eat your rotting body and some day some hunter will come along and find your bones.

There was something so terribly plausible about this last-she had heard similar stories on the TV news not just once but several times, it seemed-that she began to cry again. She could actually see the hunter, a man in a bright red woolen jacket and an orange cap, a man who needed a shave. Looking for a place to lie up and wait for a deer or maybe just wanting to take a leak. He sees something white and thinks at first, just a stone, but as he gets closer he sees that the stone has eyesockets.

"Stop it," she whispered, walking back to the fallen tree and the wrinkled spread remains of the poncho under it (she hated the poncho now; she didn't know why, but it seemed to symbolize everything that had gone wrong). "Stop it, please."

The cold voice would not. The cold voice had one more thing to say. One more thing, at least.

Or maybe you won't just die, Maybe the thing out there will kill you and eat you.

Trisha stopped by the fallen tree-one hand reached out and grasped the dead jut of a small branch-and looked around nervously. From the moment of waking all she'd really been able to think about was how badly she itched. The mud had now soothed the worst of the itching and the residual throb of the wasp-stings, and she again realized where she was: in the woods alone and at night.

"At least there's a moon," she said, standing by the tree and looking nervously around her little crescent of clearing. It looked even smaller now, as if the trees and underbrush had crept in closer while she was sleeping. Crept in slyly.

The moonlight wasn't as good a thing as she'd thought, either. It was bright In the clearing, true, but it was a deceptive brightness that made everything look simultaneously too real and not real at all. Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.

Something twitted in the woods, seemed to choke, twitted again, and was silent.

An owl hooted, far off.

Closer to, a branch snapped.

What was that? Trisha thought, turning toward the snapping sound. Her heartbeat began to ramp up from a walk to a jog to a run. In another few seconds it would be sprinting and then she might be sprinting as well, panicked all over again and running like a deer in front of a forest fire.

"Nothing, it was nothing," she said. Her voice was low and rapid ... very much her mother's voice, although she did not know this. Nor did she know that in a motel room thirty miles from where Trisha stood by the fallen tree, her mother had sat up out of a troubled sleep, still half dreaming with her eyes open, sure that something awful had happened to her lost daughter, or was about to happen.

It's the thing you hear, Trisha, said the cold voice. Its tone was sad on top, unspeakably gleeful underneath. It's coming for you. It's got your scent.

"There is no thing," Trisha said in a desperate, whispery voice that broke into complete silence each time it wavered upward. "Come on, give me a break, there is no thing."

The unreliable moonlight had changed the shapes of the trees, had turned them into bone faces with black eyes. The sound of two branches rubbing together became the clotted croon of a monster. Trisha turned in a clumsy circle, trying to look everywhere at once, her eyes rolling in her muddy face.

It's a special thing, Trisha - the thing that waits for the lost ones. It lets them wander until they're good and scared - because fear makes them taste better, it sweetens the flesh - and then it comes for them, You'll see it. It'll come out of the trees any minute now. A matter of seconds, really. And when you see its face you'll go insane. If there was anyone to hear you, they'd think you were screaming. But you'll be laughing, won't you? Because that's what insane people do when their lives are ending, they laugh . . . and they laugh ... and they laugh.

"Stop it, there is no thing, there is no thing in the woods, you stop it!"

She whispered this very fast, and the hand holding the nub of dead branch clutched it tighter and tighter until it broke with a loud report like a starter's gun. The sound made her jump and utter a little scream, but it also steadied her. She knew what it was, after all -just a branch, and one she had broken. She could still break branches, she still had that much control over the world. Sounds were just sounds. Shadows were just shadows. She could be afraid, she could listen to that stupid traitor of a voice if she wanted to, but there was no

(thing special thing)

in the woods. There was wildlife, and there was undoubtedly a spot of the old kill-or-be-killed going on out there at this very second, but there was no crea-

There is,

And there was.

Now, stopping all of her thoughts and holding her breath without realizing it, Trisha knew with a simple cold certainty that there was. There was something, Inside her there were at that moment no voices, only a part of her she didn't understand, a special set of eclipsed nerves that perhaps slept in the world of houses and phones and electric lights and came fully alive only out here in the woods. That part didn't see and couldn't think, but it could feel. Now it felt something in the woods.

"Hello?" she called toward the moonlight-and-bone faces of the trees. "Hello, is someone there?"

In the Castle View motel room Quilla had asked him to share with her, Larry McFarland sat in his pajamas on the edge of one of the twin beds with his arm around his exwife's shoulders. Although she wore only the thinnest of cotton nightgowns and he was pretty sure she had nothing on beneath it, and further although he had not had a sexual relationship with anything but his own left hand in well over a year, he felt no lust (no Immediate lust, anyway). She was trembling all over. It felt to him as though every muscle in her back were turned inside-out.

"It's nothing," he said. 'Just a dream. A nightmare you woke up with and turned into this feeling."

"No," Quilla said, shaking her head so violently that her hair whipped lightly against his cheek. "She's in danger, I feel it. Terrible danger." And she began to cry.

Trisha did not cry, not then. At that moment she was too scared to cry. Something watching her. Something.

"Hello?" she tried again. No response ... but it was there and it was on the move now, just beyond the trees at the back of the clearing, moving from left to right. And as her eyes shifted, following nothing but moonlight and a feeling, she heard a branch crack where she was looking. There was a soft exhalation ... or was there? Was that perhaps only a stir of wind?

You know better, the cold voice whispered, and of course she did.

"Don't hurt me," Trisha said, and now the tears came. "Whatever you are, please don't hurt me. I won't try to hurt you, please don't hurt me. I ... I'm just a kid."

The strength ran out of her legs and Trisha did not so much fall down as told up. Still crying and shivering all over with terror, she but-rowed back under the fallen tree like the small and defenseless animal that she had become. She continued begging not to be hurt almost without realizing it. She grabbed her pack and pulled it in front of her face like a shield. Big shuddery spasms wracked her body, and when another branch cracked, closer, she screamed. It wasn't in the clearing, not yet, but almost. Almost.

Was it in the trees? Moving through the interlaced branches of the trees? Something with wings, like a bat?

She peered out between the top of the pack and the curve of the sheltering tree. She saw only tangled branches against the moon-bright sky. There was no creature among them at least not that her eyes could pick out-but now the woods had fallen completely silent. No birds called, no bugs hummed in the grass.

It was very close, whatever it was, and it was deciding. Either it would come and tear her apart, or it would move on. It wasn't a joke and it wasn't a dream. It was death and madness standing or crouching or perhaps perching just beyond the edge of the clearing. It was deciding whether to take her now ... or to let her ripen a little while longer.

Trisha lay clutching the pack and holding her breath. After an eternity, another branch cracked, this one a little further off. Whatever it was, it was moving away.

Trisha closed her eyes. Tears slipped out from beneath her mudcaked lids and ran down her equally muddy cheeks. The corners of her mouth quivered up and down. She wished briefly that she was dead-better to be dead than have to endure such fear, better to be dead than to be lost.

Further off, another branch cracked. Leaves shook in a brief windless gust, and that was further off still. It was going, but it knew she was here now, in its woods. It would be back. Meanwhile, the night stretched out ahead of her like a thousand miles of empty road.

I'll never get to sleep. Never.

Her mother told her to pretend something when Trisha couldn't sleep. Imagine something nice. That's the best thing you can do when the sandman's late, Trisha,

Imagine that she was saved? No, that would only make her feel worse ... like imagining a big glass of water when you were thirsty.

She was thirsty, she realized ... dry as a bone. She guessed that was what got left over when the worst of your fear departed-that thirst. She turned her pack around with some effort and worked the buckles loose. It would have been easier if she'd been sitting up, but there was no way in the world she was coming out from under this tree again tonight, no way in the universe.

Unless it comes back, the cold voice said. Unless it comes back and drags you out.

She grabbed her bottle of water, had several big gulps, recapped it, restowed it. With that done, she looked longingly at the zippered pocket with her Walkman inside. She badly wanted to take it out and listen for a little while, but she should save the batteries.

Trisha rebuckled the pack's flap before she could weaken, then wrapped her arms around it again. Now that she wasn't thirsty anymore, what should she imagine? And she knew, just like that. She imagined Tom Gordon was in the clearing with her, that he was standing right over there by the stream. Tom Gordon in his home uniform; it was so white it almost glowed in the moonlight. Not really guarding her because he was Just pretend ... but sort of guarding her. Why not? It was her make-believe, after all.

What was that in the woods? she asked him.

Don't know, Tom replied. He sounded indifferent. Of course he could afford to sound indifferent, couldn't he? The real Tom Gordon was two hundred miles away in Boston, and by now probably asleep behind a locked door.

"How do you do it?" she asked, sleepy again now, so sleepy she wasn't aware that she was speaking out loud. "What's the secret?"

Secret of what?

"Of closing," Trisha said, her eyes closing.

She thought he would say believing in God - didn't he point to the sky every time he was successful, after all? - or believing in himself, or maybe trying your best (that was the motto of Trisha's soccer coach: "Try your best, forget the rest"), but Number 36 said none of those things as he stood by the little stream.

You have to try to get ahead of the first hitter, was what he said. You have to challenge him with that first pitch, throw a strike he can't hit, He comes to the plate thinking, I'm better than this guy. You have to take that idea away from him, and it's best not to wait. It's best to do it right away. Establishing that it's you who's better, that's the secret of closing.

"What do you . . ." like to throw on the first pitch was the rest of the question she meant to ask, but before she could get all of it out, she was asleep. In Castle View her parents were also asleep, this time in the same narrow bed following a bout of sudden, satisfying, and totally unplanned sex. If You had ever told me was Quilla's last waking thought. I never in a million years would have was Larry's.

Of the entire family, it was Pete McFarland who slept the most uneasily in the small hours of that late spring morning; he was in the room adjoining his parents', groaning and pulling the bedclothes into a tangle as he turned restlessly from side to side. In his dreams he and his mother were arguing, walking down the trail and arguing, and at some point he turned around in disgust (or perhaps so she wouldn't have the satisfaction of seeing that he had begun to cry a little), and Trisha was gone. At this point his dream stuttered; it caught in his mind like a bone in a throat. He twisted back and forth in his bed, trying to dislodge it. The latening moon peered in at him, making the sweat on his forehead and temples gleam.

He turned and she was gone. Turned and she was gone. Turned and she was gone. There was only the empty path.

"No," Pete muttered in his sleep, shaking his head from side to side, trying to unstick the dream, to cough it loose before it choked him. He could not. He turned and she was gone. Behind him there was only the empty path.

It was as if he had never had a sister at all.