Odd Interlude

Ardys’s fists unclench, and she lowers her head. She has about her an air of exhaustion, as if analyzing her words before speaking them, with an ear for those that might summon the Presence that she fears, has drained both her physical and mental reserves.

Less than an hour of darkness remains, yet the night seems to be rising, submerging the hills, lifting the houses out of anchorage to set them adrift. This perception is nothing more than a reflection of my state of mind; a change in my conception of reality, of what’s possible or not, is what has actually for a moment unmoored me.

If I understand Ardys, then the Presence that entered my dream and tried to explore the archives of my memory is more than a reader. It is in their case a controller of great power and greater cruelty, a tyrannical puppeteer. Beginning five years earlier, it has made of Harmony Corner not precisely a prison and not in scope an empire, but a pocket universe akin to a primitive island on which a god carved of stone demands absolute obedience, with the difference that this false deity is capable of brutally enforcing its commands. It entered rebellious Donny and forced him to mutilate himself, and thereafter it entered Denise and, using her hands, made sure that Donny’s face would always testify to the dire consequence of disobedience.

Earlier, when Sweet Donny became Angry Donny, the Presence must have entered him and taken control. I had suddenly been talking not to the mechanic’s second and less appealing personality, but instead to another individual entirely, the puppetmaster.

The service station had no television, and Donny was wide awake when he was abruptly possessed. My understanding of how the Presence travels and how it takes up tenancy in another’s mind is incomplete. Watching the boob tube might not be an invitation to this particular damnation, after all—though it’s still not a wise idea to spend a lot of time watching reality-TV shows about celebrity families living in the wild with gorillas.

I realize, too, that by “my own private door” Ardys means the door to her mind. For a moment, she thought that she felt it opening.

They live in unceasing expectation of being invaded, controlled. How they have held fast to their sanity for five years is beyond my comprehension.

Although I assume Ardys has said as much as she dares to say, she raises her head and continues, speaking softly and in a voice that might seem weary if I didn’t know the effort required of her to make it sound so. “My sister-in-law, Laura, is a Harmony, but her married name is Jorgenson. She and Steve, her husband, have three children. The middle one was a boy named Maxwell. We called him Maxy.”

I am sobered by her determination to maintain a voice without dramatic emphasis and, presumably, also to repress internally the emotions that these revelations should inflame. Her effort suggests that on some level the Presence is always aware of the general mood of each of the subjects in its little kingdom. Perhaps it’s alerted to a possibility of disobedience when one of them becomes a bit too agitated emotionally, in much the way that our nation’s security forces employ computers to monitor millions of phone calls, not listening to every exchange but scanning for certain combinations of words that might identify a conversation between two terrorists.

“Maxy was always exceptional-looking. A pretty baby, then a beautiful toddler. More handsome year by year. He was six when things changed. He was eight when we learned there is a degree of beauty that, if exceeded, inspires envy and requires the removal of the one whose appearance causes offense.”

Her ability to speak of child murder with such bland words and in such a dispassionate tone indicates that in the three years since the killing of Maxy, she has developed and refined techniques of self-possession that I could never match. She is eerily composed, all excited feeling subdued, for this is what she must do to survive—and now to save her daughter.

She says, “There’s a short story by Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lottery,’ which concerns a ritual stoning. Everyone in the town must participate so that something outrageous and morally repugnant may seem normal, essential to public order, and a moment of community bonding. Those who participate in that lottery do so voluntarily. When someone too beautiful had to be removed from the Corner, everyone participated, one after the other, including Maxy himself, but none voluntarily.”

The horrific scene she suggests with such restraint chills me as much as anything ever has.

I am inexpressibly grateful that I am invulnerable to the power of this mysterious Presence. But then I pray that I am indeed not vulnerable, because perhaps on second try the puppetmaster will find a way to open my own private door.

Speaking now in a whisper, Ardys says, “Here, mere stones are considered uninspired. More imagination is employed. And unlike in the Jackson story, the sacrifice is not performed efficiently but with an intention to prolong the event as you might want to see a good ball game go into several extra innings to increase the drama and the ultimate satisfaction.”

My palms are damp. I blot them on my jeans before picking up the pistol from my lap.

“In three years, there has not been another whose appearance has caused such offense,” Ardys informs me. “Until recently. Members of our family have begun expressing envy of my daughter’s growing beauty, both to her and to me. Of course I mean this envy has been expressed by another for whom they are forced to speak.”

I have a hundred questions, but before I can pose one, Ardys gets up from the chair and asks that I come with her.

She opens the front door and leads me inside.

For a moment, I look back warily at the shadowed porch and the deeper gloom beyond. When I close the door, I turn the deadbolt, for it seems that the night itself might rise like a rough beast and slouch across the threshold in our wake.

I follow her along the hallway to the immaculate kitchen.

In my experience, everything in Harmony Corner is spotless. Hard work must be essential to relieve their minds from continuous morbid consideration of their desperate situation. Focusing intently on what they can control—like the cleanliness of their homes and enterprises—must be one of the few ways they can keep aglow the embers of hope.

In the kitchen light, I discover that Ardys Harmony is lovely. Perhaps in her late thirties, she has a complexion as clear as light, and her eyes are the color of crème de menthe, darker green than I would have thought any eyes could be. Her otherwise perfect skin is marked by crow’s-feet, but those tiny wrinkles seem to me to be evidence not of aging but instead of the courage and the steel willpower with which she faces each day in the Corner, as even now her eyes are squinted and her mouth tightly set with determination.

She draws me to the sink, above which is a window that frames a view of the larger house on the hill behind this one. As earlier, lamplight brightens some of the second-floor windows in that imposing residence.

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