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.
“My husband’s parents bought this property in a foreclosure sale in 1955. It was dilapidated. They revitalized the businesses, turned failure into success, and built additional houses as their children got married and the family grew. They lived in the hilltophouse until they died, both of them nine years ago. Bill and I lived up there four years—until everything changed. Five years now, we’ve lived down here.”
Without directly telling me that their controller and tormentor can be found in the highest of the seven houses, without mentioning a name or providing a description, without putting her request into words that might draw unwanted attention, she nevertheless conveys to me by her eyes and her expression what she hopes I might achieve. Maybe I, immune to the powers of the Presence, will be able to enter its lair undetected and kill it. I understand what she wants of me as clearly as if I could read minds.
If the Presence is alone and the Harmonys are many, and if it can control only one person at a time—as the story of Donny’s cut and Denise’s sewing up of his wound seems to indicate—then surely sometime in five years, they might have found a way to overwhelm their enemy. I don’t have enough information, however, to understand their long enslavement or to calculate the odds of my succeeding at the task she hopes that I will undertake.
The need to speak somewhat indirectly of these things and in a subdued manner complicates my information gathering. I ask, “Is it a man I’m looking for or something else?”
She turns from the window. “This line of talk is inadvisable.”
I
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.
“My husband’s parents bought this property in a foreclosure sale in 1955. It was dilapidated. They revitalized the businesses, turned failure into success, and built additional houses as their children got married and the family grew. They lived in the hilltophouse until they died, both of them nine years ago. Bill and I lived up there four years—until everything changed. Five years now, we’ve lived down here.”
Without directly telling me that their controller and tormentor can be found in the highest of the seven houses, without mentioning a name or providing a description, without putting her request into words that might draw unwanted attention, she nevertheless conveys to me by her eyes and her expression what she hopes I might achieve. Maybe I, immune to the powers of the Presence, will be able to enter its lair undetected and kill it. I understand what she wants of me as clearly as if I could read minds.
If the Presence is alone and the Harmonys are many, and if it can control only one person at a time—as the story of Donny’s cut and Denise’s sewing up of his wound seems to indicate—then surely sometime in five years, they might have found a way to overwhelm their enemy. I don’t have enough information, however, to understand their long enslavement or to calculate the odds of my succeeding at the task she hopes that I will undertake.
The need to speak somewhat indirectly of these things and in a subdued manner complicates my information gathering. I ask, “Is it a man I’m looking for or something else?”
She turns from the window. “This line of talk is inadvisable.”
I
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