appeared from the west side of the yard. Not just tall but large, with long strides through the mud and standing water, walking away at an angle, toward his truck. His hair in back was crudely cropped, maybe grey-blond. He wore dirty brass-coloured overalls, a plaid shirt, muddied work boots. His hands were huge, they hung oddly, with the thumbs slightly turned in, barely swinging as he walked. As he approached the truck she stepped farther back into the room and crouched out of the direct windowlight. He went around to the tailgate and was partly obscured by the cab but she sawhe was rolling his sleeves and she said to herself, oh well, oh well, he’s not going away. From the truck bed he hauled out a heavy coil of rope and ducked his head and one arm through it and wore the rope across his shoulder and chest. He came around the side and reached again into the bed and lifted out a chainsaw. Then he started back the way he’d come, to the west side of the house, and now she saw his face. He was younger than she would have thought from Denise’s story, though Denise had said nothing about age, maybe late thirties or forty, but the skin around his eyes was lined deeply, as if he’d been staring into the sun his whole life.
For a full minute she didn’t move. Then she went across the hall to the back bedroom, where the Dahls stored their things behind a plastic sheet tacked to the ceiling. She lifted the draping and edged into the narrow aisle between stacks of boxes and along to the north-facing window. He stood at the edge of the ravine, facing the house. The chainsaw nodded from his chest where he’d latched it onto his gaping bib. He had looped the rope around a tree and tied it into a makeshift harness at his waist. He paid out the rope from a coil on his arm and it drew across the maple trunk as he lowered himself over the edge and dropped away.
She was conscious of the drama of it all. There he was, or had been. She’d seen him drop over the edge and thought that if he was harmless then it wouldn’t matter that she show herself and so she should stay out of sight in case he was not harmless. But if he was not harmless then she wasn’t safe even inside the house—he might already have suspected she was inside, and even if she locked the doors now, he had a chainsaw, after all.What he was doing in the ravine was either in aid of her or a misdirection to draw her out or to occupy him in work, loud work that she could hear from wherever he assumed she might have walked to, and so to lure her back to the house, predisposed to be thankful to the helpful neighbour and so to put his benevolence out in front of his appearance, or in case she’d heard of him by name, an arrangement he would have learned to seek out over the course of his life. From the ravine the saw coughed and then shot high and fierce, and the sound seemed to compress the light and the time in it. If he was the man Denise had described, if she believed Denise, then she should run while he was in the ravine in all that noise. But she didn’t believe Denise, or rather she believed only bodily, adrenally, not in her brain. The mistake would be to trust the flight instinct. Even if Shoad was dangerous she should show herself and evince strength and fearlessness, and act in ways he wouldn’t predict to keep him out of reach of his own triggers.
She was about to choose. The brain itself contained a means of foreknowledge—changes in the retrosplenial cortex predicted certain kinds of human errors by about thirty seconds. She thought, I need a live image of my default mode region. She thought, I need a knife.
In the laundry room she found a fishing knife in a sheath in the basket of tools sitting beside the clothes dryer. The note read, “for gardening, set inside for winter D” It was the only tool with a note attached. The blade was curved, flat silver, maybe six inches long, pointed at the tip. It was clean. She squeezed the grip and it did not
For a full minute she didn’t move. Then she went across the hall to the back bedroom, where the Dahls stored their things behind a plastic sheet tacked to the ceiling. She lifted the draping and edged into the narrow aisle between stacks of boxes and along to the north-facing window. He stood at the edge of the ravine, facing the house. The chainsaw nodded from his chest where he’d latched it onto his gaping bib. He had looped the rope around a tree and tied it into a makeshift harness at his waist. He paid out the rope from a coil on his arm and it drew across the maple trunk as he lowered himself over the edge and dropped away.
She was conscious of the drama of it all. There he was, or had been. She’d seen him drop over the edge and thought that if he was harmless then it wouldn’t matter that she show herself and so she should stay out of sight in case he was not harmless. But if he was not harmless then she wasn’t safe even inside the house—he might already have suspected she was inside, and even if she locked the doors now, he had a chainsaw, after all.What he was doing in the ravine was either in aid of her or a misdirection to draw her out or to occupy him in work, loud work that she could hear from wherever he assumed she might have walked to, and so to lure her back to the house, predisposed to be thankful to the helpful neighbour and so to put his benevolence out in front of his appearance, or in case she’d heard of him by name, an arrangement he would have learned to seek out over the course of his life. From the ravine the saw coughed and then shot high and fierce, and the sound seemed to compress the light and the time in it. If he was the man Denise had described, if she believed Denise, then she should run while he was in the ravine in all that noise. But she didn’t believe Denise, or rather she believed only bodily, adrenally, not in her brain. The mistake would be to trust the flight instinct. Even if Shoad was dangerous she should show herself and evince strength and fearlessness, and act in ways he wouldn’t predict to keep him out of reach of his own triggers.
She was about to choose. The brain itself contained a means of foreknowledge—changes in the retrosplenial cortex predicted certain kinds of human errors by about thirty seconds. She thought, I need a live image of my default mode region. She thought, I need a knife.
In the laundry room she found a fishing knife in a sheath in the basket of tools sitting beside the clothes dryer. The note read, “for gardening, set inside for winter D” It was the only tool with a note attached. The blade was curved, flat silver, maybe six inches long, pointed at the tip. It was clean. She squeezed the grip and it did not
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