Текст книги "Gypsies"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Chapter Eleven

1

The house was quiet that night, but Michael couldn’t sleep.

The dark third-floor windows were shrouded with snow. The snow, he thought, should have melted; it was early for this kind of weather. But the temperature had dropped and the snow had deepened, cold air sweeping down the valley where the Polger met the Monongahela, whipping through these old blacktop streets.

Michael had spent the day exploring the town, walking from the north side to the south and back. He had bought a couple of paperbacks at a sad-looking Kresge’s and stopped for warmth and a cup of coffee at the tiny McDonald’s on Riverside, but mostly he just walked. One long depressing afternoon hike, one side of the valley to the other. The town, he had estimated, was about as big as Turquoise Beach, but older and dirtier and poor in a different way. Michael understood that many of the people in Turquoise Beach had volunteered for poverty, lived that way so they could paint or write or make music. But poverty in Polger Valley was an unforeseen accident, a disaster as tangible as a train derailment.

He had climbed a hillside until he could see all the sooty length of the town and the broad winding of the Mon, the steel mill and the gray highway, clouds rolling like winter itself from the northwestern sky. Standing there in his heavy coat, Michael felt the power in himself—stronger, it seemed, than ever before. It was like a current rising out of the depths of the earth, the old coal veins buried there, carboniferous ruins—it was a river running through him. He understood that it did not come from him but that he was a vehicle for it; the power was something old, eternal, fundamental. There was no end to it; by definition it was limitless. The limiting factor was Michael himself.

He thought, I can go anywhere I can imagine. The places he had seen were real places—as Turquoise Beach was a real place—but accessible only if you could dream yourself there.

He thought about this, walking home. He endured Willis’s pointed stares that evening, thinking about it. He took his thoughts to bed with him.

He lay in the cloistered warmth of this ancient bed with the comforter pulled up to his chin and the wind sifting snow against the window.

He thought, What we dream, we are.

Some things would be closed to him forever. There were worlds he couldn’t reach, worlds beyond his grasp. He felt them out there in the storm of possibility, tenuous doors he could not quite open. It made him think of what Laura had said about Turquoise Beach: It’s the best I could find. She wanted paradise but couldn’t truly dream it… maybe didn’t really believe in it.

He figured Laura knew all this, understood that her ramshackle seaside Bohemia was also a testament to her own limitations.

But at least she had tried. Michael thought about his mother, who hadn’t, who pretended she didn’t have the power at all—and maybe that was true now, maybe she had lost it. Maybe it atrophied, like a muscle. She had spent her life living up to the pinched expectations of Willis Fauve, trying to lead a “normal” life that was, when you came down to it, as ephemeral as Laura’s paradise.

A better world, Michael thought.

Maybe there really was such a thing.

Maybe he could find it.

He felt sleep tugging at him. He felt, too, the maze of possibility, the twining corridors of time. He could walk that maze, he thought, pick a destination, feel for it, follow the tug of intuition… here and here and here.

He closed his eyes and dreamed a place he had never seen before.

He envisioned it from an immense height and all at once, a place where brightly colored cities stood amidst plains and wilderness, buffalo and redwood forests and busy towns where the rivers branched. He thought of names. They came into his mind unbidden, but with the feeling of real names, place names: Adirondack, Free New England, the Plains Nations.

He saw fragile aircraft swimming through a clean sky; the focus narrowed and he saw crowds thronging a city marketplace, caged birds chattering, acrobats in a public square, a man in feathers buying spices from a woman in Chinese robes.

And then he turned his head against the pillow, willed his eyes open, and saw only the dark outline of this attic room, the snow against the window.

The vision was gone.

Sleep, Michael thought longingly. Sleep now.

He lay in the dark and listened to Willis moving through the house, locking and checking the doors, maybe taking a last sedating drink before he climbed the stairs to his own long and dreamless sleep.

2

Laura shared the twin beds in the guest room with her sister, but tonight she couldn’t sleep.

She sat up, glanced at the motionless form of Karen, then pulled a robe over her nightgown and went to the child-sized desk in the corner of the room.

It had been their study desk, hers and Karen’s, years ago. How like Mama to keep it preserved up here. Laura switched on the lamp and blinked at the bright circle of light it made.

The desktop was bare.

She reached into the big bottom drawer and took out two bulky items. One was the shoe box containing her mother’s photographs. The other was an immense, leather-bound family Bible.

Buried truths here, Laura thought sleepily.

She examined the photographs first. There were maybe thirty or forty altogether. She shuffled and fanned them like cards, painstakingly arranged them into a rough chronological order.

One of the pictures was very old, a ghostly image of Grandma Lucille with a tiny girl-child—who must have been Mama—and two older boys, Uncle Duke and Uncle Charlie. Charlie had died in Korea all those years ago; Uncle Duke had vanished out of a bad marriage. Laura could not deduce, from the photo, anything extraordinary about these people. Just Lucille Cousins and her three children by the railing at Niagara Falls—the date on the back was 1932. A sunny day but windy: everybody’s hair was blowing around. Bland, sunny smiles. These people, Laura thought, were about as occult or supernatural as a shirt button. Maybe this was where Mama had derived her vision of perfect normalcy, from this smiling woman, her mother, the easy contentment in those eyes. Grandpa Cousins had died a handful of years after he took this photo; Grandma Lucille had gone on public relief. So here was this picture: the Eden from which Mama had been expelled.

The power, Laura thought, the specialness, must have come from somewhere else.

She had never met any of Daddy’s family except Grandma Fauve, another widow. Laura remembered Grandma Fauve as a huge woman, obsessed with a mail-order fundamentalist cult she had discovered through radio broadcasts out of WWVA in Wheeling. She embroidered samplers with queer, threatening passages from the Book of Revelation; her bookcases spilled out pamphlets with titles like Warning from the Sky and Living in the Last Days. Laura, as a child, had looked very hard at her grandmother, peered deep into those dark unblinking eyes… scary eyes, in their own way; but she had never seen the power there, none of the recognition she had longed for.

Daddy didn’t have it. Mama didn’t have it. She thought, Then we are flukes. Mutants. Monsters.

But the power was an inherited power… Michael had demonstrated that.

She leafed through the other photos quickly. The image of Tim caught her eye, Tim growing up in these old pictures like the frames of a silent movie. He looked less intimidating than she remembered. She remembered how Tim used to bully his sisters, even though he was the youngest—something in his voice, his bearing; or just his stubborn willingness to do what they wouldn’t, to break not just one rule but every rule. But in the photographs he was just a child. His round face looked not threatening but threatened: a frightened child.

There were fewer pictures of Tim as a teenager, but in these she could detect at least something of his brooding sullenness. He wore a leather jacket that not even Willis’s threats had been able to pry off him. Laura smiled and thought, A fuck jacket. He regarded the camera with his chin lifted and his lips set in a grim line. His eyes were narrow, fixed.

Laura looked at her lost brother and thought, How much do you know?

The power was immensely strong in him. He had gone on experimenting even after Willis began to beat him—but privately, warily. Laura remembered how Tim would go off back into the hills or down some lonely road somewhere. She suspected that he practiced his awesome talent there, but she never asked. She was not as prim as her older sister, but Laura had always been a little bit afraid of her power, of the things she might see or conjure. Karen believed what Willis told her; Laura did not, but was cautious; Tim—

Tim, she thought, hated all of us.

She closed away the photographs and hid the shoe box once more.

She opened the Bible. It was a very old family Bible with lined pages in the back marked births and marriages and deaths. The Bible had belonged to Grandma Lucille and the pages were filled with her writing, looping fountain-pen letters, and then Mama’s looser ballpoint script.

Laura bent over the brittle pages with their curious odor of dust and papyrus. Births from the turn of the century. She found Mama here next to Duke and Charlie. She found her cousin Mary Ellen, Duke’s girl by a woman named Barbara before Duke ran off. There were mysterious branches of the family, people she had never met, names she couldn’t recall.

She looked for her own name, for Karen’s and Tim’s.

But the names weren’t there.

Karen’s marriage was recorded—To Gavin White, Toronto, Canada, 1970—but not her birth. None of them appeared in the birth register.

Laura felt suddenly light-headed, breathless. Felt fragile—as if she might float out the window and into the sky. We were not born, she thought, so how can we exist? She thought of the fairy tales she used to read out of her big illustrated Golden Book. We are changelings, she thought. The goblins left us. She remembered those goblins from the pictures. Gnarled and huge-headed, with sharp noses and sinister bright eyes. The goblins left us, she thought, and now the goblins want us back.

She shuddered and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She closed the Bible and put it back in the bottom drawer with the shoe box of photographs on top. She was about to close the drawer when she spotted something at the back, a cluster of faintly familiar shapes, dust-shrouded and gray.

She pulled the drawer open as far as its runners would allow and reached inside.

Three things. She brought them up into the circle of the light.

A paperweight, clouded and opaque.

A tiny, pathetically simple baby doll.

And a cheap pink plastic hand mirror.

I remember, she thought excitedly. I remember!

She thumbed a layer of dust from the surface of the mirror and regarded herself. The old glass was bent and pitted. How she had loved this old thing. The fairest in the land. Who had said that? Another fairytale memory, she thought, a Golden Book memory. She repeated it to herself, aloud but faintly: the fairest in the land.

Ahh… but I’m not.

Her own eyes regarded her sadly from the shrouded depths of the mirror.

Truth was, she had grown old in that quiet California town. She had grown old almost without noticing: mysteriously, effortlessly. I was beautiful once, she thought. I was beautiful and I was young and damn if I wasn’t going to change the world, or anyway find a better one. She had been caught up in that hot, brief burst of Berkeley idealism—all the things people meant when they talked longingly about the sixties. And it had burned like a fire in her and she would follow it out beyond the walls of the world and it would never, ever fail her.

But now I’m old, she thought, and I have spent twenty years watching the waves roll in and out. Twenty years of rose-hip tea and poetry and winter fog; twenty years of Emmett’s facile, occasional love.

Twenty years of stoned equilibrium, she thought, and all this coming home won’t make me young again.

The mirror made her feel very sad.

But these things, these toys, were meaningful. She could not quite recall their provenance, but they had the feel of magic about them. She would show them to Karen in the morning.

In the meantime she tucked them back out of sight in the drawer, switched off the light, and went to bed. In the darkness she could hear the snow beating against the window, a sifting sound like sand in an hourglass—twenty years, she thought, twenty years, my God!—and she watched the faint moonlight until it began to blur and she put her hand to her face and realized with some astonishment that she was crying.

That long night had not quite ended when Michael awoke, alone and desolate in the big upstairs bed.

He took his watch from the night table and held it up to the thin wash of streetlight that penetrated these old dusty windows.

Four a.m.—and he felt as wholly, mercilessly awake as if it were noon.

He sighed, stood up, pulled on his underwear and his Levi’s. He stood a moment at the window.

No more snow tonight. Stars beyond the fading margins of cloud, old streetlights down the back alleys and shuttered windows of this barren coal town. His breath made steamy islands on the glass. His vision of a better world had evaporated entirely. He could not even remember how it had felt. No magic in this place, Michael thought, only these cold empty streets. He shivered.

He wanted to go home.

The trouble with coming awake at 4 a.m., he thought, was that it left you feeling like a little kid. Vulnerable. Like you could cry at any minute.

These were things he had not allowed himself to think: that he was tired of being chased, tired of being afraid, tired of sleeping in strange beds in houses where he did not belong.

But these were thoughts a ten-year-old might have, and Michael reminded himself sternly that he was not ten years old … he only felt that way sometimes.

“Shit,” he said out loud.

He padded barefoot down the stairs past the other bedrooms, down to the ground floor. He switched on the kitchen light and poured himself a glass of milk. The tile floor was cold.

Impulsively, he pulled his wallet out of the right-hand pocket of his jeans.

He opened the card case.

It was still there… the number he had pilfered from his mother’s address book, his father’s phone number in Toronto. Hasty blue pen scrawl on old green memo paper.

There was a telephone in the kitchen—an old black dial phone on the counter next to the cookbooks.

Michael looked at it and thought, But what’s the point? Call long-distance, wake him up at 4 a.m.—or his girlfriend, for Christ’s sake—and get him on the line and say what? Hi, Dad. I just spent a few weeks in California. Well, sort of California. Got to see Kennedy’s funeral on TV. You should have been there.

Right.

But the ten-year-old inside him insisted, Home.

Bullshit. There was no home back there. Only an empty house, and his father living someplace Michael had never seen, with a woman Michael had never met.

That’s not true, the ten-year-old said. You could go back. You could make it be good again.

Bullshit, Michael thought, bullshit, bullshit. How good had it ever really been?

Not that good.

But he was dialing in spite of himself. Standing half dressed in this cold kitchen listening to the hum and chatter of the long-distance lines… and then a muted, brittle ringing.

“Hello?”

His father’s voice. Weary, irritated.

Michael opened his mouth but discovered that he was empty of words.

“Hello? What is this, a joke?”

He’ll hang up, Michael thought. And maybe that would be best.

But he whispered, “Dad?”

Long beat of silence down the wires from Canada. Then, “Michael? Is that you?”

Michael felt a moment of sheer, bottomless panic: there was nothing to say, nothing he could say.

“Michael, hey, I’m glad you called. Listen to me. I’ve been frantic—we’ve been worried about you.”

Michael registered the “we” as a very sour note.

“Michael, are you there?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Tell me where you’re calling from.”

No, Michael thought… that would be a mistake.

“Well,” his father said, “are you all right? Is your mother all right?”

“Yeah. We’re okay, we’re fine.”

“Has she given you any reason for dragging you away like this? Because, you know, that’s very strange behavior. That’s how it looks to me.”

Michael thought, You don’t know the half of it. He said, “I just called to hear your voice.”

I called because I want to go home. I want there to be a home.

“I appreciate that. Listen, I know this must all have been very hard for you to understand. Maybe we didn’t talk about it enough, you and I. Maybe you blame me for it. The divorce and all. Well, fair enough. Maybe I deserve some of that blame. But you have to look at it from my point of view, too.”

“Sure,” Michael said. But this wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear You and your mother come home, everything’s fixed, everything’s back to normal—some reassurance for the ten-year-old in him. But of course that was impossible. The divorce wouldn’t go away. The Gray Man wouldn’t go away.

“Tell me where you are,” his father persisted. “Hell, I can come and get you.”

And suddenly the ten-year-old was vividly alive. Yes! Come get me! Take me home! Make it be safe! He said, “Dad—”

But suddenly there was another, fainter voice, sleepy and feminine: “Gavin? Who is it?”

And Michael thought, No home to go back to.

The ten-year-old was shocked into silence.

His father said, “Michael? Are you still there?”

“It was nice talking,” Michael said. “Listen, maybe I’ll call again.”

“Michael—”

He forced himself to hang up. He looked at his watch. 4:15.

Chapter Twelve

1

Michael understood that it was his job to be the man of the family, which involved protection and standing guard.

The routine at the Fauves’ house was that Willis would wake up early and Jeanne would fix him a big breakfast. Then Willis would head off for a day or a half day at the mill and Michael and his mother and aunt would venture downstairs. Nobody yelled “The coast is clear!” or anything, but that was how it felt—they would wait for the thud of the big front door, for the sound of Willis’s feet on the porch. His old Ford Fairlane would rattle out of the garage, and then the house was safe.

Grandma Jeanne insisted on cooking. Her breakfasts were heroic—cereal, toast, eggs, mounds of bacon—and Michael was always turning down second helpings. This morning she let him get away without protest, though, and he noticed the absentminded way she circled from the table to the counter, the odd looks Karen and Laura gave her: something was up.

He was only vaguely curious. He knew why Aunt Laura had brought them here and he was grateful that she was, maybe, beginning to get somewhere with it. He understood that this was necessary, sorting things out from the beginning, but he had already guessed it was not the whole job. Not by a long shot. Because there was still the problem of the Gray Man.

The Gray Man could find them anytime.

Michael bolted a big helping of scrambled eggs, considering this.

The kind of move they had made from Turquoise Beach would throw the Gray Man off their trail, but not indefinitely. He had followed them before and he would follow them here. It was only a question of time. And Michael’s mother and his aunt were preoccupied, so it was up to Michael to stand guard.

Grandma Jeanne took his plate and rinsed it under the faucet. His mom put a hand on his shoulder. “Michael? We’d like to talk to Grandma Jeanne privately.”

He nodded and stood. Grandma Jeanne would not face him; she stared into the foaming sink. Aunt Laura nodded once solemnly, telegraphing to him that this was important, he had better clear off.

“I’ll be out,” he said.

“Stay warm.” His mother ruffled his hair absently. “Stick close to the house.”

He was careful not to promise.

The temperature outside was still below freezing but the wind had let up. The sun was out, melting snow off the sidewalks; Michael’s breath plumed away in the winter light.

He followed the same route he had followed the day before, along Riverside Avenue and out beyond the southern margin of the town, up the snowy hillside until he could see all of Polger Valley mapped out in front of him. He felt the power most clearly in high places like this.

In town, among people, it was blanked out by a dozen other feelings. Up here he could just listen to the singing of it, like some quiet but important song played on a radio far away. He felt it like an engine deep in the earth, humming.

It occurred to him how much all this had changed his life. Not too long ago his main worries had been his term exams and the logistics of enjoying Saturday night when you couldn’t drive a car. All that was gone now—all washed away. But, Michael thought, it never really was like that, was it? He thought, You knew. You knew it before Emmett got you stoned that day in Turquoise Beach. You knew it before Dad left. Knew you were special, or anyway different: singled out in some way. Michael felt the power in him now and guessed he had always felt it, just never had a name for it. He had been timid of it, the sheer nameless immensity of it, the way you might be afraid of falling if you lived on the edge of some canyon… but he had loved it, too; secretly, wordlessly. He remembered nights coming home from some friend’s house, winter nights many times colder than this, and he would be shivering in an overstuffed parka and the stars would be out and there would be an ice ring around the moon, and he would be all alone out on some empty suburban street; and he would feel the future opening up in front of him, his own life like a wide, clean highway of possibility. And there was no reason for it, no reason to believe he was anything unique or that his life would be special. Just this feeling. Time opening like a flower for him.

Still opening, he thought. He remembered his dream of the night before, the cities and prairies and forests he had seen. The vision had come across a great distance. He wondered whether he could reach it– whether he would ever be able to summon it back. Maybe it was too far; maybe it was out of his grasp, never more real than his dreams.

But he had seen it, and he felt intuitively that it was a real place. Maybe he could find his way there– somehow, someday. Maybe that was where his life was headed.

Maybe.

If they could deal with the Gray Man.

Walker, the Gray Man had said. Walker, stalker, hunter, finder …

Michael thought, He almost took me with him. That day before we left Toronto. Had me hypnotized or something, had me following him back down some ugly back door out of the world.

He remembered that place he had almost gone. He remembered the feel of it, the taste and the smell of it. And unlike the world he had dreamed last night, it was not very far away at all… Michael was certain he could find it again if he wanted to.

It might be necessary one day. It might tell them something.

Furtively now, he raised his hands in front of him.

This was probably not a good idea … he told himself so. But it was important, he thought. A piece of the puzzle. This was the step Laura or his mother would never take; this was Michael’s responsibility.

He made a circle of his fingers.

He looked through that circle at the town of Polger Valley, calm under a quarter inch of snow.

Felt the power in him… looked again, looked harder.

The town changed…

It was recognizably the same town. An old steel-mill town on the Monongahela. Maybe even, in a way, better off. The mill was bigger, a huge compound of coal-black buildings strung out along the riverside. There were complex piers busy with odd wooden barges; the river was crowded with traffic. But the town was also dirtier, the sky was black; the houses hugging this hillside were tin-and-tar-paper shanties. There was snow on the ground but the snow was gray with ash; the trees were spindly and barren. The traffic down at the foot of this hill was mostly horses and carts; the one truck that ambled past was boxy and antiquated-looking. Michael caught a faint whiff of some sulfurous chemical odor.

He squinted across town to the police station and the courthouse, plain gray stone buildings a quarter mile away down Riverside. He saw the flag flying over the courthouse and recognized that it was not an American flag, not a familiar flag at all: something dark with a triangular symbol.

Bad place, Michael thought. You could feel it in the air. Poverty and bad magic.

This is his home, Michael thought: this is where Walker lives. Not this town, maybe, but this world.

He shivered and blinked away the vision. His hands dropped to his side.

Maybe they would have to follow Walker into that place. Maybe that was their only choice. It might come to that. But not yet, Michael thought. He felt soiled, dirty; even that brief contact had been chastening. He moved down the hillside toward Polger Valley—how clean it suddenly seemed—thinking, Not yet, we’re not ready for that yet… we’re not strong enough yet for that.

He was halfway home down Riverside, past the Kresge’s and the Home Hardware, when Willis pulled up next to him.

“Hey,” Willis said.

Michael stood still on the cracked sidewalk and regarded his grandfather warily through the rolled-down window of the Fairlane…

“Get in,” Willis said.

Michael said, “I wanted to walk.”

But Willis just reached over and jerked open the door on the passenger side. Michael shrugged and climbed in.

The car was dirty with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts, but it smelled only faintly of liquor: Willis was sober today.

Willis drove slowly down Main. He looked at Michael periodically and made a couple of attempts at conversation. He asked how Michael did in school. Okay, Michael said. Was it messing him up to be out for so long? No, he figured he could make it up. (As if any of this mattered.) Willis said, “Your old man left?”

Michael hesitated, then nodded.

“Shitty thing to do,” Willis said.

“I guess he had his reasons.”

“Everybody has some goddamn reason.”

Turning up Montpelier, Willis said, “Look, I know what it is you’re running from.”

Michael raised his head, startled.

“You can only make it worse,” Willis went on, “doing what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do, though. I think you know exactly what I mean.” Willis was talking now from way down in his chest, almost to himself. He downshifted the Fairlane and slowed, approaching the house.

Willis said, “Timmy used to go off like that. Off up into the hills or God knows where. And I knew what he was doing, just like I know what you’re doing. I could smell it on him.” Willis pulled into the driveway and on up into the tiny, dark garage. He pulled the hand brake and let the motor die. “I smell it on you.”

Michael reached for the door but Willis caught his wrist. Willis had a hard grip. He was old but he had hard, stringy muscles.

“This is for your own good,” he said. “You listen to me. It brings him. You savvy? You go out there and make a little door into Hell and he climbs out.”

Michael said, “What do you know about it?”

“More than you think. You don’t give me much credit, do you?”

Michael felt Willis’s huge anger rising up. He shifted toward the door, but Willis held tight to his wrist.

“My Christ,” Willis went on, “didn’t your mother teach you anything? Or maybe she did—maybe she taught you too fucking much.”

Michael remembered what Laura had told him, how Willis used to beat them. He realized now that it was true, Willis could do that, he was capable of it. Willis radiated anger like a bright red light.

“Admit it,” Willis said, “you were up in those hills opening doors.”

Michael shook his head. The lie was automatic.

“Don’t shit me,” Willis stormed. “I’m a good Christian man. I can smell out the Devil in the dark.”

It made Michael think of the sulfurous stink of Walker’s world.

“I don’t do that,” he said.

Willis’s grip tightened. “I won’t have you drawing down that creature on us again. Too many years—I lived with that too goddamn long.” He bent down so that his face was close to Michael’s face. The dim winter light in the garage made him seem monstrous. “I want you to admit to me what you’ve been doing. And then I want you to promise you won’t do it again.”

“I didn’t—”

“Crap,” Willis said, and raised his right hand to strike.

It was the gesture that angered Michael. Made him mad, because he guessed his mother had seen that hand upraised, and Laura, and they had been children, too young to do or say anything back. “All right!” he said, and when Willis hesitated Michael went on: “I can do it! Does that make you happy? I could walk out of here sideways and you’d never see me go! Is that what you want?”

Willis pulled Michael close and with the other hand took hold of his hair. The grip was painful; Michael’s eyes watered.

“Don’t even think it,” Willis said.

His voice was a rumble, gritty machinery in his chest.

“Promise me,” Willis said. “Promise you won’t do it again.” Silence.

Willis tugged back on Michael’s hair. “Promise!”

Michael said, “Fuck you!”

And Willis was too shocked to react.

Michael said between his teeth, “I could do it here! You ever think about that? I could do it now.” And it was true. He felt the power in him still, high-pitched and singing. He said without thinking about it, “I could drop you down through the floor so fast you wouldn’t be able to blink—do you want that?”

Willis was speechless.

Michael said, “Let go of me.”

Miraculously, he felt Willis’s grip loosen.

He wrenched open the door before Willis could reconsider. He stumbled down onto the oily concrete.

“You’re lost,” Willis said from the darkness inside the car. “Oh boy… you are damned.” But there was not much force left in it.

Michael hurried into the house.