VACANCY & ARIEL

She paced back and forth, making a humming noise. I had no reason to believe I would survive the encounter, but I was not as frightened as I might have expected and thus was able to appreciate the sight of this lovely woman half-cloaked in black hair, the statuesque lines of her body visible through the thin material of her dress, gliding with an oddly smooth gait over the moon-dappled forest floor. Not even the funky clothes detracted from her air of otherworldliness. I had the notion she had forgotten about me and was lost in some mental labyrinth, trying to come to terms with a terrible frustration—I recalled hiding in the brush, watching a wolf drink from a stream in the Alaskan wilderness, watching a drunken old woman on the fringes of Carnival in Bahia, lifting her arms to the moon as if pleading for one last grand frivolity, and other glimpses of the kind, those sudden, small observances that hold in our minds and seem to sustain the rest of life, as if life were a tapestry; mostly dark and dingy, and they were the bright pins it was stretched between. It was like that watching the Willowy Woman, sitting dazed beneath the water oak that night, lost in the witchy West Virginia woods.

I heard a moan from the shadows on the opposite side of the trunk: Henley. The woman broke off her pacing and turned toward the sound; then, apparently not caring that Henley was alive, she came over to me, dropped to a knee, and leaned close, her face inches away. She said something. A name, I thought, for she tapped her chest before she spoke. “Ahhh-ell,” she said, and waited for a response; but I was incapable of speech, not—as I’ve said—afraid, but transfixed, overpowered by the intensity that streamed from her like rippling heat. She repeated the word, breathing it harshly, a windy growl, and when again I failed to respond, she whirled up to her feet and strode away, her hands clasped behind her neck. Her fingers, I saw, were disproportionate in length to the rest of her hand, less affected by the transformation. Each finger had an extra joint.

Henley groaned a second time and when the woman did not react, I crawled over to where he lay, crumpled in a slant of moonlight, his Mountaineer cap lying on the ground by his hand. I asked if he was all right. His eyelids fluttered and he said, “Hell no!” His breath caught; he winced. “My left leg…I think it’s broke.”

Using the hunting knife strapped to his belt, I ripped his trouser leg. His knee was swollen, but not discolored. “Might be a sprain,” I said.

“It’s a bad ’un if it is,” he said.

He winced again, clamped his hands to his ears, and at the same instant I felt a vibration inside my skull and heard a thin keening, as from an electronic whistle. The pain that followed pitched me onto my side. Through slitted eyes I saw the woman standing about fifteen feet away, her mouth wide open, neck corded, gazing into the forest. From off in the dark there came an agonized squealing; a second or two later a wild boar, a bristly little black tank, trotted into view, shaking its head wildly. It made a staggering charge toward the woman, then toppled over onto its side, its legs trembling, and soon lay still. The keening stopped, the woman stepped to the boar, squatted and began wrenching at one of the hind legs. It took her a great deal of effort, but finally she managed to rip off the entire haunch. She shouldered the remainder of the boar, picked up the bloody haunch in her right hand. She walked over to where I was sitting and dropped the fresh meat on the ground in front of me. Sadness came into her face. She put her hand, fingers spread, on her chest and, nailing me with those huge dark eyes, said again, “Ahhh-ell.”

I was certain now that she was telling me her name, but I was too frightened to answer.

She stood looking at me another ten, fifteen seconds. It was if she had turned up her intensity—I could have sworn I felt the specific values of her feelings. Sadness. Frustration. But these were merely elements of a more intricate emotion I could not put a name to. I wanted to say something to bind her there, but I remained afraid of her strength, her killing voice. She leaped up onto the trunk of the water oak, clung one-handed, then scooted out of sight among the leaves. I heard the crown thrashing and thought I heard a rustling thereafter in an adjoining tree.

“She’s gone from here,” said Henley, sitting up. He’d donned his Mountaineers cap and looked more together than he had. I asked what reason he had for believing she was gone and he said, “Just a feelin’ I got. She gonna be findin’ herself a new home.”

I’d received no such impression, though it was possible it had been buried in among all the other impressions I had received.

“Gone suits me fine,” Henley said. “I seen her twice’t now and twice’t is all I need.”