People of the Dark Read Free

week later. He said that the job would take a full day.
     
    T he farmhouse Erika and I bought had been on the market for nearly two years, so we got it cheap. It's old but solid, and was completely renovated ten years ago. It has a new black tile roof, new aluminum siding (a light aquamarine that blends well with the evergreens, maples, and walnut trees around the house), and someone had once even made an attempt at landscaping, though what remained of that attempt when we got here was only a line of uncared-for privet hedges alongside the driveway and a wide circle of bricks just to the south of the house, with a fieldstone walkway leading from it.
    The house sits three hundred feet back from the road, at the crest of a small hill. Our "mountain"—all one hundred and fifty acres of it—looms behind the house. This is the Finger Lakes Region of New York, fifty miles or so from the Pennsylvania line, so what we call a mountain is actually no more than a steep hill littered with dead trees and eroding fast. The real estate agent told us, "The land is useless, of course," and we told him that that was okay, that we'd have privacy, at least.
    There are two other dwellings on our one hundred and fifty acres. One is just a stone foundation with some uprights remaining from the original frame. The other is a sad, three-room log cabin whose walls tilt and tar-paper roof sags precariously. It sits in a small clearing a thousand feet north of the house, also at the base of our mountain, so it's level with the house. It's just far enough from the house that hunters can sit in it unnoticed and wait for deer or opossums or raccoons to wander by. Erika and I discussed getting a permit to burn the place down, but it was an idea that never got beyond the talking stages.
     
    E rika and I are good together. We get a kick out of pretty much the same things; our sex life is usually exciting ("Our bodies fit together nicely," we say), and for six years we've been very happy. We have had our ups and downs, of course. Everyone does.
    She's left me several times. Not for other men. Other relationships never seemed to be a problem for us (she looks at other men, of course, and I at other women, and we often like what we see, but it's never threatened to go further than that for me, and I think for her, too). She's left me because of her ideas. She left me once, for instance, to go live with a cult that had cut off contact with society, much as the Shakers did, in Pennsylvania, but the group that Erika got involved with did it much more completely, with a great deal more gusto and cynicism. And that, I believe, is what finally drove her from them—that constant loud aura of superiority, the idea that because they were apart from society and were living according to their own rules and their own ideas, they were, of course, somehow above society.
    She was gone for two months, and although I knew where she was—she'd left me a letter—I realized it was something she'd have to work out for herself. And when she got back and we were talking about the whole thing, she told me, "We all come from the same mother, don't we, Jack? No one can deny that. They certainly can't deny that." I agreed, though the remark mystified me, then. It doesn't, now.
    And another time she left, for not quite as long, for a religious group that had developed what they called "A Live-in College for the Spiritually Enlightened" in the Berkshires, in New Hampshire. It wasn't a typical college, of course. It was a very large and pitifully ramshackle farmhouse that the group—which totaled about sixty men and women, ranging from sixteen to eighty years of age—had covered with a coat of light lavender paint. A large, rectangular sign over the front doors read, in lavender on a white background, GOD LOVES YOU—PASS IT ON. Below that, in simple black block letters, COLLEGE FOR THE SPIRITUALLY ENLIGHTENED. When Erika came back after that encounter, she was confused.
    "Who has to