Free People of the Dark by T.M. Wright Page A

interesting place, don't you think? Granada, I mean."
    "Sure," I said, obviously unconvinced. "I suppose it is."
    "You don't think so?" This seemed to surprise her. She stared silently at me a moment, then went back to her sleeping bag, rolled and tied it, and started to put her boots on. She said, as she laced one of them, "I've been coming here for several years, Jack." She thought a moment, looked quizzically at me. "I have permission, I mean, if you're someone who should be concerned about that."
    I shook my head. "No. My wife told me about this place. She came by a couple of days ago."
    "Yes," Sarah said. "I saw her car." She slipped the other boot on, began to lace it. "No one else comes here anymore. They used to, in the first couple of years, but no more. The novelty has worn off, I think."
    "Oh?" I said.
    She straightened, stuck her hands into the pockets of her overalls. "Uh-huh. And it suits me fine, Jack. I'd just as soon not be tripping over the tourists—that sounds crass, I know—"
    "Sarah," I cut in, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
    She looked at me. "Really?"
    "Really."
    She smiled. "Then you're something of a virgin, aren't you?" Her smile flattened. "It's pretty grim stuff, Jack, real National Enquirer I-ate-my-grandmother kind of stuff, and it's more than just a little depressing. I mean—people were not only murdered here—" She stopped, picked up her sleeping bag, and walked toward me. "Come on, Jack. I'll show you around the place. There's not much to see anymore but there's lots to tell—more, I think, than you'll probably want to hear."
    "It sounds intriguing," I said, and followed her outside.
     
    I think that people are beginning to drift back, now, to the village, to Cohocton. Occasionally, when I'm in the living room listening to music or waiting quietly for Erika, I see a furniture-laden pickup truck pass by, going toward the village, or a car loaded with people and belongings. I'm not sure what I think of this. I think it's sad, on the one hand, that a village should stand idle and empty. Villages are meant to be lived in, after all. But of course, Cohocton has never lacked for inhabitants.
    And so I assume, when I see that people are coming back, that a season is done. And I assume that another has begun. I have no real way of knowing. It's a romantic notion, I think. Living with Erika has filled me with romantic notions.
    That life continues, for instance. That there is a kind of vast reservoir of life beneath our feet and that everything living rises up from it, in one way or another—the mechanics of the thing aren't very important, only the fact that it happens—and then goes back after a while to the place where it started.
    Toss a pail of water into the ocean. It doesn't go anywhere, of course, but out of that pail.
     
    E rika used to have nightmares. She tells me they were nightmares from her childhood, and when she first started having them I told her I was surprised, that I thought, from the photographs and from what she'd told me, that her childhood had been pretty good. I asked her if her nightmares had to do with her parents' deaths and she said no, she didn't think so. She said they had to do with hunger, and with eating, with becoming engorged. That was the word she used. "I become engorged, Jack. And I drift. I drift away from . . . things. From events. From existence. And for a while I'm very happy."
    "It sounds like limbo," I said.
    She shook her head. "No. No, I think something happens, there. I think I grow there; I think I grew there," she corrected, apparently because she realized she'd been talking about dreams of her childhood.
    "Then it's Freudian," I suggested. "It has to do with puberty, with growing up, and becoming a sexual being." I leered at her.
    She chuckled softly, quickly. "It depends a lot on what I'm eating, doesn't it?"
    I nodded. "Yes, it does."
    Occasionally, she still has nightmares. She had one a couple of nights after I found her