“No, no,” he muttered. “Really stupid!”
But still, some quiet motion within the closeted space caused both, at almost the same instant, to hold their hands out on the air, curious, like people testing invisible waters. The air seemed to move one way and then another, now warm, now cold, with a pulsation of light and a sudden turning toward dark. All this they thought but could not say.
There was weather here, now a quick touch of summer and then a winter cold, which could not be, of course, but there it was. Passing along their fingertips, but unseen by their eyes, a stream of shadows and sun ran as invisible as time itself, clear as crystal, but clouded by a shifting dark. Both felt if they thrust their hands deep, they might be drawn in to drown in a mighty storm of seasons within an incredibly small space. All this, too, they thought or almost felt but could not say.
They seized their frozen but sunburned hands back, to stare down and hold them against the panic in their breasts.
“Damn,” whispered Robert Webb. “Oh, damn!”
He backed off and went to open the front door again and look at the snowing night where the footprints had almost vanished.
“No,” he said. “No, no.”
Just then the yellow flash of headlights on the road braked in front of the house.
“Lotte!” cried Martha Webb. “It must be! Lotte!”
The car lights went out. They ran to meet the running woman half up the front yard.
“Lotte!”
The woman, wild-eyed, hair windblown, threw herself at them.
“Martha, Bob! God, I thought I’d never find you! Lost! I’m being followed, let’s get inside. Oh, I didn’t mean to get you up in the middle of the night, it’s good to see you! Jesus! Hide the car! Here are the keys!”
Robert Webb ran to drive the car behind the house. When he came back around he saw that the heavy snowfall was already covering the tracks.
Then the three of them were inside the house, talking, holding onto each other. Robert Webb kept glancing at the front door.
“I can’t thank you,” cried Lotte, huddled in a chair. “You’re at risk! I won’t stay long, a few hours until it’s safe. Then . . .”
“Stay as long as you want.”
“No. They’ll follow! In the cities, the fires, the murders, everyone starving, I stole gas. Do you have more? Enough to get me to Phil Merdith’s in Greenborough? I—”
“Lotte,” said Robert Webb.
“Yes?” Lotte stopped, breathless.
“Did you see anyone on your way up here? A woman? Running on the road?”
“What? I drove so fast! A woman? Yes! I almost hit her. Then she was gone! Why?”
“Well . . .”
“She’s not dangerous?”
“No, no.”
“It is all right, my being here?”
“Yes, fine, fine. Sit back. We’ll fix some coffee—”
“Wait! I’ll check!” And before they could stop her, Lotte ran to the front door, opened it a crack, and peered out. They stood with her and saw distant headlights flourished over a low hill and gone into a valley. “They’re coming,” whispered Lotte. “They might search here. God, where can I hide?”
Martha and Robert glanced at each other.
No, no, thought Robert Webb. God, no! Preposterous, unimaginable, fantastic, so damned coincidental the mind raves at it, crows, hoots, guffaws! No, none of this! Get off, circumstance! Get away with your goings and comings on not neat, or too neat, schedules.
Come back, Lotte, in ten years, five years, maybe a year, a month, a week, and ask to hide. Even tomorrow show up! But don’t come with coincidence in each hand like idiot children and ask, only half an hour after one terror, one miracle, to test our disbelief! I’m not, after all, Charles Dickens, to blink and let this pass.
“What’s wrong?” said Lotte.
“I—” said Robert.
“No place to hide me?”
“Yes,” he said. “We’ve a place.”
“Well?”
“Here.” He turned slowly away, stunned.
They walked down the hall to the half-open paneling.
“This?” Lotte said. “Secret? Did you—?”
“No, it’s been here since the house was built long ago.”
Lotte touched and moved the door on its hinges. “Does it work? Will they know where to look and find it?”
“No. It’s beautifully made. Shut, you can’t tell it’s there.”
Outside in the winter night, cars rushed, their beams flashing up the road, across the house windows.
Lotte peered into the Witch Door as one peers down a deep, lonely well.
A filtering of dust moved about her. The small rocking chair trembled.
Moving in silently, Lotte touched the half-burned candle.
“Why, it’s still warm!”
Martha and Robert said nothing. They held to the Witch Door, smelling the odor of warm tallow.
Lotte stood rigidly in the little space, bowing her head beneath the beamed ceiling.
A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, “Shut the door.”
They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.
They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.
The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte’s car fast vanishing, and at last gone.
“Thank God,” whispered Martha.
The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped, waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away into the snow and the hills.
Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.
“We were lucky,” said Robert Webb.
“But she’s not.”
“She?”
“That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They’ll find her. Somebody’ll find her.”
“Christ, that’s right.”
“And she has no ID, no proof of herself. And she doesn’t know what’s happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!”
“Yes, yes.”
“God help her.”
They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. “You can’t escape,” she said. “No matter what you do, no one can escape.”
They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and touched it.
“Lotte,” they called.
The Witch Door did not tremble or move.
“Lotte, you can come out now.”
There was no answer; not a breath or a whisper.
Robert tapped the door. “Hey in there.”
“Lotte!”
He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated.
“Lotte!”
“Open it!”
“I’m trying, damn it!”
“Lotte, we’ll get you out, wait! Everything’s all right!”
He beat with both fists, cursing. Then he said, “Watch out!” took a step back, raised his leg, kicked once, twice, three times; vicious kicks at the paneling that crunched holes and crumbled wood into kindling. He reached in and yanked the entire paneling free. “Lotte!”
They leaned together into the small place under the stairs.
The candle flickered on the small table. The Bible was gone. The small rocking chair moved quietly back and forth, in little arcs, and then stood still.
“Lotte!”
They stared at the empty room. The candle flickered.
“Lotte,” they said.
“You don’t believe . . .”
“I don’t know. Old houses are old . . . old . . .”
“You think Lotte . . . she . . . ?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Then she’s safe at least, safe! Thank God!”
“Safe? Where’s she gone? You really think that? A woman in new clothes, red lipstick, high heels, short skirt, perfume, plucked brows, diamond rings, silk stockings, safe? Safe!” he said, staring deep into the open frame of the Witch Door.
“Yes, safe. Why not?”
He drew a deep breath.
“A woman of that description, lost in a town called Salem in the year 1680?”
He reached over and shut the Witch Door.
They sat waiting by it for the rest of the long, cold night.
The End
