"What"s the matter sonny?"
"Begging your pardon, but you got collards dribbling all over your chin."
Grandpa put down his fork. "So they is. I thank you kindly."
And before he rightly knowed what he was doing, Grandpa wiped his mouth on the napkin.
When he finished he looked down at it. He looked once and he looked twice. Then he just set the napkin down gentle-like, stood up from the table, and headed straight for the stairs.
"Goodbye all," he said.
We heard him go clumping up the steps and down the hall into his room and we heard the mattress sag when he laid down on his bed.
Then everything was quiet.
After a while Pa pushed his chair back and went upstairs.
n.o.body said a word until he come down again.
"Well?" Ma looked at him.
"Ain"t nothing more to worry about," Pa said. "He"s laid down his burden at last. Gone to glory, amen."
"Praise be!" Ma said. Then she looked at me and crooked a finger at the napkin. "Best get rid of that."
I went *round and picked it up. Sister Susie give me a funny look.
"Ain"t n.o.body fixing to tell me what happened?" she asked.
I didn"t answera"just toted the napkin out and dropped it deep down in the crick. Weren"t no sense telling anybody the how of it, but the Conjure Lady had the right notion after all.
She knowed Grandpa"d get his proofa"just as soon as he wiped his mouth.
Ain"t nothing like a black napkin to show up a little ol"
maggot.
INSIDE THE CLOSET.
by Michael McDowell.
(Based on a Teleplay by Michael McDowell).
She"d been told the house was Victorian and about two minutes from the campus. It was, however, at least a mile and a half from the campus, down a steep hill, across a picturesque iron bridge crossing and ugly trickle of water that was called the Alewife Brook, and finally up an even steeper hill. Further more, the house wasn"t Victorian at all, but Edwardian. Built around 1914, Gail guessed. Because her undergraduate thesis had been on the domestic architecture of Philadelphia, she was confident she wasn"t more than a year or two off.
It was three stories high, but its wide windows and its horizontal planking, its lazy porches and its doubled doors made it look as if it had been squashed down from a house that was much more pleasantly vertical. It was surrounded by evergreen treesa"the kind that grew slowly, grew tall, and provided the house not so much shade as black shadow all year round. The lot was large, fenced, with a p.r.i.c.kly hawthorn hedge outside the fence. The house faced differently from its neighbors, fronting a dead-end lane of empty wooded lots.
Gail wondered at her good fortune.
The porch light was encased in an iron lantern Gail was certain was original to the house. She admired the stained gla.s.s that bordered the front door on either side. More richly secular colors than you"d find in a church, and new soldering showed her they"d been carefully reinforced. There was a bell, but Gail used the knocker insteada"bra.s.s, in the form of a horned goat"s head.
The man who opened the door was tall, middle-aged, dour.
"I called," said Gail "Dr. Fenner?"
"Miss Aynsley," he replied, confirming she"d gotten the address right.
"Gail," she said.
He politely stepped aside, allowing Gail into the hallway.
She went in cautiously and glanced around without moving her head. She didn"t want to appear too curious.
The woodwork was original, mahogany or perhaps even the more exotic gumwood. The wallpaper was an elegant wide-weave canvas, painted cream, the lighting fixtures tarnished bra.s.s with low-wattage bulbs. It was exactly the sort of low-keyed elegance Gail adored.
Or would have adored had it not been for the hangings on the walls: mounted heads of small animals. Small angry animals. Tiny screaming primates. Small snarling rodents.
The long-haired gaping faces of unhappy mammals she couldn"t give a name to.
"I"m told I have the last available s.p.a.ce in town," said Dr. Fenner.
The books Gail was carrying slipped out of her arms.
Embarra.s.sed, she knelt on the dark carpeta"a faded, frayed, and exquisitely valuable Circa.s.sian runner.
"I should"ve started looking earlier. The term begins next week. I"m a graduate student in fine arts."
"I"m dean of the veterinary school," he replied, in frigid amiableness. "There"s a reason the room hasn"t been rented yet." Gail stood, her books and tablets gathered together.
Since she"s started her studies in architecture, the history of design, and the development of domestic architecture, she"d always wanted to appened that she was desperate for a place to live. She wondered what she could say to persuade Dr. Fenner to accept her as a tenant.
"I"m a strict landlord," said Dr. Fenner after a moment, when she had said nothing. "I do most of my work here at homea"I write and teach and administratea"and I have to have quiet. So no stereos, no television, no boyfriends trooping through at all hours of the night."
"All I"ve got is my slide projector," returned Gail hesitantly, "and I promise not to run it late."
Fenner softened. "No boyfriends?"
"It"s me and my books." Gail smiled.
"Bookcases I have," said Fenner. "Third floor. All to yourself."
Fenner led her up a thickly carpeted dark staircase, down a long unlighted corridor past wide dark doors with bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, around an unexpected turn, to a small triangular landing.
"Bath and kitchenette," said Fenner, thumbing through the old iron keys on the old iron ring. "But basically illegal."
"Illegal?" Gail echoed as he found the key and shoved it in the lock.
The key turned easily.
"I"m not zoned for tenants," he replied as he pushed open the door. "No exterior staircase, no fire escape."
"I don"t smoke, either." said Gail.
"Twenty-five off the rent." He turned on the light, stepped inside, making room for Gail. "It was my daughter"s room."
The same dark wooda"she still couldn"t tell if it was mahogany or gumwood. Plaster walls painted a long-faded ocher.
A long bank of square windows with faded white curtains. An unadorned ceiling that slanted here and there beneath the sharply pitched roof of the house. Simply and predictable furnished with a straight chair and a round tea table on a hooked rug. A narrow painted iron bed with a chenille spread. A standing cedar wardrobe. Behind a green baize curtain were a tiny stove and refrigerator with shelving above. A small bathroom with white porcelain fixtures and yellowed tile.
And in the wall next to the bathroom, one more door.
Obviously the door of a closeta"but perhaps not quite obviously, for the door was not quite four feet high.
It was smaller than any door she"d seen elsewhere in the house, but with the same panels, the same hinges, the same bra.s.s k.n.o.b, the same keyhole. So it had been built that way.
"Is that the closet?" Gail asked.
"It was the closet," he replied coldly. "But it"s locked now and I"ve lost the key."
She tried the k.n.o.b. The door was locked.
"That"s why the standing wardrobe is in here. If you don"t have enough room for your things, you can put them in one of the closets downstairs.
So if you"rea""
"But why is this door so small?" she asked, interrupting him.
Fenner didn"t answer the question. He ashed another in return: "Do you want the room?"
"Yes," she replied, startled. "Yes, of course I do."
In the first-floor entryway, Fenner stood still and silent, listening.
Nothing was to be heard.
Nothing from outside.
Nothing from any of the rooms that opened off of the entryway: a living room he hadn"t set foot into in ten years; his study, where he spent a third of his life; the kitchen he never cooked in, where the cabinets were padlocked..
Silence from upstairs. His bedroom. A bath. Three more bedrooms filled with boxes and bottles and jars and bones and pelts and skulls and the severed hands of rare primates in which wire had been played through the fingers so the withered, dead fingers might still splay or fist.
Nothing from the third floor, where Miss Aynsley slept.
Or where Miss Aynsley, if she was not yet asleep, crept about softly on her bare feet.
Fenner locked the front door and turned off the lights.
He gave a swift, hard kick to a box of belongings Mis Aynsley had left beneath the hall table and hoped he had broken something inside. Then he went upstairs.
Gail went softly on her bare feet, folding and putting away the last of her clothes,. She arranged things in the medicine chest in the bathroom, placing a folded towel in the sink just in case she fumbled one of the gla.s.s bottles. Because hid=she had a fear of electrical shortages, she placed her hair dryer, her electric curlers, her iron, her cup warmer, her contact lens cleaner, and her slide projector in the st.u.r.diest of her cardboard cartons and shoved it beneath the bed, well away from any electrical outlet.
Gail"s fear of the dark, however, was greater than her fear of being burned in her sleep, so she allowed herself the luxury of a night-light. She plugged it into an outlet near the foot of the bed, then carefully pinned the corner of the chenille away from its glowing shade.
She brushed her hair, untied the ribbon at the neck of her nightgown, and climbed into bed.
Gail shortly fell asleep and some time after that dreamed she slept beneath a chenille spread in an iron bed in a room with ocher walls and a closet door that was only four feet high.
Dreamed that something crouched on the other side of that diminutive door and turned the bra.s.s k.n.o.b this way and that, slowly and quietly, so that she, sleeping and dreaming in the bed, would not hear and awaken.
Gail awakened and sat up in the bed so quickly, the iron joints and the iron springs of the iron bed sc.r.a.ped and rocked and creaked.
The k.n.o.b of the closet door gleamed faintly in the pink illumination of the night-light.
It was not turning at all.
But Gail still thought there was something behind that closet door.
Because she could hear its nails scrabbling against the wood.
Then the scrabbling stopped.
Because whatever was inside the closet knew she was awake.
Fenner was b.u.t.toning his coat. Gail waited at the landing a moment, watching him, hoping that he"d notice her before she had to speak. But if he noticed her, he did not acknowledge her presence.
"Dr. Fenner," she called at last.
The way he looked up, the way he wrapped the scarf around his neck, convinced her he had known she was there.
"Yes, what is it?"
"You forgot to give me keys."
He took them from a basket on the hall table and tossed them up to her.
"They"re labeled," he said. "I have to get to my office."
He started for the door.
"Dr. Fenner . . ." she said in a tone of voice meant to detain him.
"Yes?" he replied in a voice meant to express his impatience at being detained.