The Galloway Encounter

• Short story
• Horror

								
The Galloway Encounter

	Visiting the old woman was the last thing Beckett Fleeman wanted on a Friday afternoon. Hers was the case which had flitted around the office before sticking to Beckett’s desk. “Penelope Webster; 2235 Galloway Road, Lynchview, PA” read the top of a form—a familiar form to Beckett—a form of tedious checking-up-ons and checking-in-ons of old hags reeking of baking soda and old men neglecting unkempt lawns. The Lynchview Police caught wind of the Webster case since the husband had gone and gotten himself blown up in France during the siege of some town of indeterminate place. Lady Webster was therefore left alone, and, without visitations frequent enough to consider herself “taken care of,” the matter fell to the municipal police. A nanny job, Beckett considered it, a matter unfit for an officer of the law. When the request for a wellness check had come to the police department, Beckett had requested traffic duty downtown but was denied and sent off to clear the queue.
	Fleeman’s portly figure may be something akin to a sweetened hog revolving on some medieval spit, and he found it difficult to mount and dismount his patrol car. The suspension usually squeezed out a wince or two whenever its driver plopped down, and the efficiency of the machine took a noticeable dive according to the attendant mechanics. But Beckett dabbed his forehead and placed the file on the passenger seat. “Damn,” he thought, “it’s already 4. I should be off work by now.” Beckett drove towards the Webster House on Galloway Road, punctuated by more routines of similar grumblings about his fate.
	A Pennsylvania summer is, for everyone besides old women, a pleasant arc of earthly orbit. Green grows brown with lightened burnings; flowers reach out to one another with rendezvous of flittering messengers. But summers are a particularly nasty time for the elderly, what with their boils and warts covered by witch’s brews of dermatological ointments and medicinal creams running down the skin untethered from their arms like oiled paints on a leathery canvas. Beckett saw the scene on Galloway with a tinge of horror as this familiar arcadian vision blurred into a kaleidoscope of damp wood and mossy greeneries—not the planned, artistic garden-keeping befitting an elderly woman, but the hideously raw, samsaric masses of untamed projections of a singular soul overlapping in competitions for a drop of life. Beckett realized he had to flip on his headlights—the darkness of the canopy imperialized the thickets of weeds which crept up its bark, scratching towards unknown heights with gnarled tendrils. Down the road a mile or two, though Beckett was not entirely sure, lay the Webster House, which, if some reports can be taken as fact, was once the proud construction of a Webster some years ago who beat back the woods and planted his family within its idyllic navel. Now the house had fallen into the state anyone would expect of a woman advancing blindly towards oblivion—shingles ripped off by winter winds, boards of the porch eaten through by termites, invaded by roaches in every corner, worms reeling their way up through mounds of earth to grope towards terra incognita. Beckett ceased grumbling in his heart when a new feeling of pity alloyed with disgust came into full stride.
	Officer Fleeman puffed up the stairs to the front porch. The doorbell did not work. But his presence alone stirred something from within. He heard the grinding of metal on metal, and then the slow, painfully slow, opening of the front door.
	“Can I help you?” came the voice, followed by its owner. Beckett caught his first glance of Mrs. Webster through the screen door, its interlaced black obscured the finer details, but the image was there regardless. He made it an effort to note her appearance; after all, this was a wellness check, he thought, and so he needed to pay attention to such things. She had a redness in her cheeks that could have been mistaken for blush had Mrs. Webster been younger. Her skin seemed unusually lively, not the familiar pallid gloss of dehydrated skin that one comes to expect with the elderly. Her entire face was rounded out, filled with blood and life, and her eyes seemed screwed in to their sockets with a flick of intent guiding their movements. Fleeman cleared his throat.
	“Hi, I’m Officer Fleeman with the Lynchview Police. Wanted to come see how you were doing. A couple of folks called in for a wellness check; so, here I am.”
	“Some people called about…me? Who?” She asked.
	“Don’t know. If you wouldn’t mind, can I come in?”
	“Yes, yes.” Mrs. Webster undid the latches and opened the door. “Step into my parlor. I don’t get many visitors these days.”
	Beckett tugged on his belt a little, a silly routine he picked up some time back to signify he was “on the job.” He saw at once the aesthetic unity of the place: pink and white, lace and fabrics, quilts and needlework of all sorts, pictures strewn along walls in quasi-geometric designs running up and down walls, hallways, and stairwells. The house seemed larger on the inside, but Fleeman was still attempting to take in everything. His skills of observation were not as developed as he liked to boast at Christmas parties.
	Above all he noticed the rainbows of fiberworks draping over every square inch of furniture, the oeuvres of a woman unfamiliar with boredom. Crochet, knitting, cross-stitch, every artifact of needlework interlaced by the dexterous fingers manipulated by an obsessive mind. There was a bucket of assorted yarn in the corner underneath a lamp (without an outlet nearby), another tub placed next to the rocking chair, and still more and more rolls of yarn here and there wherever Beckett looked. This was the hoard of a Needle Dragon, a pile of yarn so magnificent, so large, that no woman could ever spin the entire stock in a single lifetime. Penelope Webster herself was bedecked in her own handiwork. She wore a black bandana over the crest of her head, a black and grey cardigan buttoned down over a white blouse meeting a black skirt. In her hands were a pair of knitting needles and a spare of hooks for projects when the others grew tiresome.
	“Now I don’t know why anyone would think me in need of a check-up. What a little world this is, people always buzzing about. Such nosy little…” her voice trailed off without a conclusion. Beckett effortlessly resisted inquiring into what she meant because he didn’t really care. 
	“Mrs. Webster, how do you do all of this?” Beckett asked, waiting for some evidence that she was sane and capable of taking care of herself and in no need of assistance at this time so Beckett could go home and prop up his feet after a helluva week as he had.
	“Patience, dearie, and a dreadful amount of time. My mother was a seamstress, and her mother a spinster. A whole line of us, you see, one thread I still keep alive when I can.”
	“Well, I won’t take up too much of your time…”
	“Care for some tea?” She asked, already rolling into the kitchen. Beckett could not turn her down even though his pity had now broken down into twin parts of condescension and revulsion, and so he waited in the living room, looking at the various pictures on the wall. He could hear the clinks and clanks of saucers coming down from shelves and the whistle of a kettle on a stovetop. Mr. Webster’s army uniform was more handsome than he, but his slight extruded lip and sunken brow seemed affected. Before Beckett could move on to the rest of the photos, not that he really wished to do so, Mrs. Webster wheeled back in balancing a tea set on her lap. She set it down on the coffee table, and poured two cups of tea.

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