"Any questions?" she asked. "You know the way out there?"
"No questions. I think I can find it alright," he replied, then stopped. "Actually, I was wondering something. The name Webster's Gore, what does that mean?"
"When they drew up the town lines back in the colonial days, they accidentally left a space off and it became a part of no town. A gore means a place that no one claims. Kind of an in between place."
Jared nodded with a sardonic grin. Just where I belong right now, he thought, an in between place.
***
The road to the Gore took Jared through a beautiful countryside of rolling wooded hills and tidy farmsteads. The moving van was already there when Jared found the house. Myrna had sent him a few pictures and a hand drawn floor plan, so he knew what to expect when he arrived, yet he was somewhat disappointed. It was just an old farm house with a ramshackle attached barn, there was nothing gothic about it at all. It sat at the top of a slight incline, behind a tumbled stone wall and a wide yard of witch grass sprinkled with purple asters and goldenrod. And there was the tree. It was a massive oak, at least three times the height of the house. Its branches shaded half the yard and the entire width of the road.
The movers climbed down from the cab of their truck and opened its back gate. Jared stepped on to the porch and crossed to the front door. He fished the keys from his pocket, then hesitated before unlocking the door. He felt a twinge of fear, then felt embarrassed for it. Shaking his head and chuckling, he opened the door and stepped inside.
It was dark in the foyer. He could make out a set of stairs leading upward in front of him and the faintly lit outlines of doors to his left and right. He felt on the wall for a light switch, but could not find one. He stepped to the left, according to Myrna's drawing, the living room, and ran his hand along the wall inside the door. As he did so, he wondered if he had the nerve to stay in the house tonight if the lights did not come on. But his hand struck the switch, and Myrna had indeed, turned the power on. The room was illuminated from a dusty ceiling fixture.
The movers came in behind him and began to check out the layout of the house. Soon, the entire house was lit. They began hauling in furniture and dollies laden with crates and boxes. Jared felt like he was in the way, so he stepped outside.
The late afternoon sun was hovering in the western sky, barely clearing a long line of low hills. He stepped down off the porch and looked toward the tree. "She danced under that big oak," Abel had said. Jared walked, in hesitant steps, across the lawn and into the shadow of the oak's massive boughs.
He felt a chill, but attributed it to the shade and the approaching dusk. The grass was thin under the tree, and the ground was bare nearer the trunk, but littered with acorns. He looked up into the tree, thinking that it must be a fine home for squirrels but he saw none. He realized he heard no bird song either.
The bang of the screen door slamming startled him, and he turned to see the movers exiting the house. One of them approached him with a clipboard. He handed it to Jared and took a pen from his shirt pocket.
"All set, buddy," he said, "Just sign here and we'll be on our way."
Jared took the clipboard, signed the papers and handed it back.
"Nice old house, but it sure is isolated out here," the mover said.
"Well, I'm a writer, I'm hoping to get away from distractions."
The mover nodded and looked down at his manifest. "Oh, Jared Prince. Yeah, my wife has some of your books. She likes the spooky stuff." He looked around the yard. "Yeah, you could get some inspiration here. Well, good luck with the writing."
He signaled to his partner, and they climbed into the cab of the van. Jared watched them pull out of the driveway and for a moment, felt an urge to jump back in his car and follow them. "Don't be silly," he muttered aloud to himself, "There's nothing here to be afraid of."
***
The first thing he unpacked was his stereo system. He got it hooked up and filled the house with the sound of Bach concertos as he got to work setting up his new home. He found a box of linens and made his bed, then started on the kitchen. The nearest supermarket was in Farmington, almost an hour's drive away, but he had brought some staples and a few canned goods. He heated a can of soup and sat at the kitchen table and ate it. Sylvia would have a conniption, he thought, but he was on his own now and could eat what he wanted.
As he was finishing his soup, he glanced up at the window and realized that it was fully dark outside. Go look, he thought, then laughed at himself. He got up and rinsed his bowl in the sink. He looked out across the lawn. It was dark under the tree and he saw no sign of movement. Shaking his head, he went to the living room and found a box labeled "work". Food, shelter, and writing, he thought, my hierarchy of needs. He dug through the box and found his laptop. Flopping on the couch, he flipped it open. He connected to the hotspot on his cell phone and opened his browser. When he did not connect to the internet, he checked his phone and saw that he had only one bar.
"Fuck me," he muttered. He closed the laptop and sat quietly, thinking. Maybe that was for the best, he thought, the slow connection would tempt him to fewer distractions. Now, if only he had something to write about.
****
It was raining in the morning, a slow steady drizzle that continued all day. Jared had slept well. He spent a couple of hours setting up and filling his bookshelves, then made the drive to Farmington to eat lunch and buy groceries. When he returned home, he took his laptop into the kitchen and scrolled through his slush file of story ideas. He opened one, titled Tooth and Claw, and began to read. After a few minutes, he closed it. Werewolf stories had been his bread and butter once, but he couldn't muster any interest for it. He got up and went to the front door. The rain had picked up and he could hear it hitting the leaves of the oak. He saw nothing in the dark beneath it, but still, it was a place to start. He returned to the kitchen and began to write. He spent an hour on a detailed description of the house. It was much more than he needed, but when he knew what direction he wanted to take the story, he'd trim out the extraneous details.
The words were coming to him tentatively, in fits and starts, but at least they were coming. When he started to feel hungry, he did not want to stop, so he threw together a sandwich for his supper, and kept going.
Myrna had told him that the house had been built in the late seventeen hundreds. He tried to remember what he knew about that period. All that came to mind was George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps the dancing woman was the widow of a soldier who had been killed in the Revolution. Was there fighting in this part of the country? He thought that Webster had a small library, perhaps they had some books on local history. They might even have something that would give him information about the house and who the dancing woman might have been.
He tried again to access the internet, and grew sleepy watching his home page try to load. He gave up and went to bed.
He awoke in a pool of moonlight. He rolled over on his side, his back to the window and tried to go back to sleep. Moonlight, he thought, as he began to drowse. Moonlight is special, but why? He sat up suddenly as the full thought formed. She danced in the moonlight.
He threw back his covers, and rushed to peer out of his second story window. From this angle the tree's canopy blocked most of the yard from view. But as the wind blew the leaves, he thought he saw a flash of something white beneath them. He leaned closer to the glass and stared. There was something there, something that was gleaming with the moon's reflection. Something that was moving.
Grabbing his bathrobe, he hurried down the stairs, pulling it on as he went. He threw open the front door and stepped out on to the porch.
He detected motion before any image became clear. As he stared, he realized he was looking at a pair of delicate feet, toes aimed toward the ground like a ballerina on pointe. He remembered Abel saying that it was the fact that she floating above the ground that scared him into running. Jared did not run, he was mesmerized as the feet flexed and slowly rotated in a circle. His eyes moved up, taking in a pair of slender calves, bone white in the moonlight. Above the knees, the legs were hidden in the darkness of the tree.
Jared imagined himself stepping off the porch and going closer to her. That was something else Abel had said, that he was torn between fleeing from her and being drawn to her. But Jared found that he could not move.
She bent her knees, raising her heels and then slowly dropping them again. She made one more slow spin, and then, like a sputtering candle, seemed to just flicker out.
Jared stood on the porch for several minutes, hoping that she would appear again. But when a cloud hid the moon and the darkness under the tree spread to encompass the rest of the yard, he turned and went inside.
He sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the laptop screen, struggling to find words to preserve his impressions. For years, he had imagined the supernatural, and he had made a good fortune conveying his imaginings to others. But now, personally faced with the otherworldly at last, he could not articulate how he felt. He imagined that this was how religious people felt when they spoke of epiphanies.
Just write it down as it happened, he thought, like a journalist writing a news story. He began typing, reciting the details of how he had awoken and what he had seen when he stepped out the door. Trying to go deeper into the meaning of his experience could wait until after he'd had more time for reflection.
He eyes were bleary. He shut the laptop and went back upstairs. We crawled back into bed. The sky outside his window had grown brighter. She will be gone now, he thought, at least for tonight, and he gave himself over to sleep.
****
It was nearly noon when he woke. He dressed and drove into Webster. It was a drab town, dominated by the crumbling hulk of an abandoned tannery. In addition to the Subway and the Dollar General, it had a small grocery store and a couple of diners. The one sign of past prosperity was the ornate Carnegie library that loomed over the town square.
