Short Story: “The Maniac’s Warning”

Even with the bonfire roaring the light does not penetrate more than one or two of the curtain-layers of trees. Graduation, seven girls celebrating, no boys. Someone’s old Outback wagon, someone else’s older sibling’s F150, domestic beer, bro country blasting, whooping laughter, skinny dipping, water and trees and fire and piney sand. Near the fire, Jane and Allison; further away, Bryhanna and Astrid; in the water, Nella and Nevaeh. Libby. She is neither particularly close nor particularly far. She has in her left hand a can of Budweiser and, in her right, her dead phone on which tonight’s pictures have been by and large vouchsafed. Libby is lank-haired and leggy and lugubrious and she looks up at the sky in which some nightbird flies ambivalently through the points of the pointed firs. She has been dared to kiss Astrid, and to swim with Nella and Nevaeh, and to scream at the firs and pines and thin New England soil (such as it is) until her throat physically can no longer. All of these dares she has turned down for that Libby refuses to exist in order that others might find her interesting. It has been months since any other of these seven girls has trusted Libby with the aux, although they do trust her to watch drinks and intimidate scumbags and parentals. Libby almost took one of the dares, that was, to swim in the cold water of the strange-smelling woodland river. Yet when she waded in, above her knees but below the hem of the shorts that she had not yet conceded to shucking off, it was cold indeed, so cold for this late in the spring, even for this part of the country, that it was hard for her to understand how Nella and Nevaeh could bear it. So she got out and tried to think no more of it, particularly since the goosebumps that rose on her arms and legs could just as well be blamed or credited to the odd yelping sounds that came from that thing flying to and fro in the treetops. The Skohaquontic flowed home to the sea, but it was not Libby’s lot, she thought, to flow there with it. And in that clearing and around that fire and from a boombox dug up from a parent’s garage and perched on the hood of the old station wagon flowed that rough music. Dirt road, small town, lite beer, as here. A flattening of the world maybe, but one too obvious to get upset about even if any of them, even Libby herself really, had been paying the song anywhere near enough attention to notice. “Live a little, Elizabeth!”—and it was not one, not any, of her friends who was the one who was saying this to her. They never called her by her full first name. Libby resented as always the implication that what she was living through, in a Courtney Love sort of way, somehow was not life. First of all her caution and discretion was what allowed her friends to be brazen and daring and outrageous, and they never seemed to be particularly grateful to her for that. Secondly she did not fear or think she was above skinny dipping or drinking or testing the borders of the fire or the woods or any of the other things that her friends like to dare her to do. She just was not that interested. Most of it did not seem fun to her. Some did, which was why she had considered the skinny-dipping, but only in the same way that it was fun to listen and to watch for that clamoring bird up there, the bird that she could swear she had heard in unsettled dreams now and then in recent years. She felt a strong desire, which she succumbed to after a few more moments in the diffident midmost of the party, to ask “Who are you?” If the bird was some kind of owl then it might think that she was an owl too, to word it like that, and thus might answer her. So at least was her magical hope that she thought in the same way that she thought the church her aunt and uncle sometimes made her go to might be right. And yet it did answer, or at least it cooed or jabbered at her again, not quite hooting, not really. She asked “Who are you?” again. When she did someone stepped out of the nearmost curtain of trees. It or they or she looked like a middle-aged woman, but it was hard to make out the details of her features in this light, or at least Libby thought it was because of the light. Some feeling that was enormous, but difficult to explain or to identify, smote Libby’s heart as she looked for the first time at so ambiguously shadowed a face, neither beautiful nor unbeautiful, female but not feminine or maybe the other way around, with long dark hair that might have been treeshadow and a high noble nose that might have been a beak. The body too below the face and head looked partly human and partly natural, which was to say not that humans were unnatural, were un-creatures, but that that part of this woman’s particular body contrived to be one but not the other. Libby did not think that it was attraction or allure, exactly, that she was feeling. It hit her more deeply than that, and had, more than, to her, attraction did, an irreducible element of very deep fear. This nightbird or nightwoman approached her as a herald and harbinger of danger, and, worse, of a danger that promised something to her, along the lines of what her friends seemed to mean when they ran their mouths about living. It was a kind of delectable fear that made her want to move closer and to learn more, like the time she and her cousins, much younger and callow then, had tried to make napalm with a grab-bag of agricultural chemicals in her aunt and uncle’s garden shed. They had not come up with napalm but they had come up with something noxious, all right, which fact had to Libby been interesting itself. So too, maybe, with her, the she that was in front of Libby now. Not attractive, and not a dare, and yet something “else.” She wished she could, without doing too much violence to herself, step forward and ask to know what that was, that feeling of some thrilling peril that was wafting towards off of this being-from-the-trees. She abhorred herself for being in place as she was, stock-still but feeling somehow that she was unlikely to endure for very much longer. It did not quite make her want to die per se, but it came close. She shuddered. The person or being before her seemed to notice her shudder, and, perversely, to enjoy it, or maybe that was Libby being preyed on again, played tricks on again, by her own mind’s eye. The person raised a hand and pointed at something, at it was almost as if she was pointing with something, like a cigarette or a teacher’s pointing stick, even though her hand was empty. Libby realized fully that what she was feeling was entirely and simply and plainly fear, but of an odd kind with a curious frailty to it—and in realizing this she could neither move nor do anything about it any more than could a fawn. She thought that she was being adjured about something best avoided, and so she