The Rascal by Eric Arvin Page B

bought the cottage. And he had to live with her. She would make an effort. Maybe something could be salvaged, even if it was just a shadow or an act. Chloe decided that, like Lana, she could learn to act.
    She entered the open doorway of the old barn with some trepidation. This was Jeff’s space and she felt like an invader. Her arms were still crossed and she massaged her elbows. She stood in the door space for a moment. The light from the gray sky came through the wood walls and ceiling of the barn like some divine light. It had the feel of something spiritual. Of a cathedral. But it was not at all comforting, just overbearing and ready to crush her with accusations.
    She found Jeff on the muddy floor of the barn behind a reassembled stack of rotten firewood. He was tightening a bright yellow rope. It trailed out the barn door to the well. Beside him, more rope snaked and coiled. He seemed to be constructing some kind of pulley system using the barn as tethering. The firewood served as uneven shelves for Jeff’s mountain climbing gear. Jeff had the skill for climbing mountains. He had done it many times with the company, leading tours. Chloe had done fewer of those type of tours. The altitude did not appeal to her. She could lead tours through the lower hills of a range, but nothing that involved crampons or ice picks.
    She looked out toward the well as she leaned against the barn. “So, that’s the well,” she said, her voice weak and wary. “Are you going to descend? To see what’s down there?”
    Jeff looked up at her. His face was smeared with black mud, one especially thick wipe across the left cheek. He studied her momentarily. His fingers stopped working the rope. Chloe realized he wasn’t studying her, he was judging her. She suddenly felt very bare—naked, but in such a way she had never been before. Vulnerable and stripped of even her skin.
    “What do you want?” Jeff said. His voice was deep and angry. The whites of his eyes glowed in the relative darkness of the barn. If he were frothing at the mouth, he could not have seemed more vicious.
    “I just came out to—” But she was stopped short, her attention grabbed by a new, disturbing air. At first, she thought it was her own stammering, but there was an unmatched quality to this sound. It was a giggle—menacing, but a giggle still, and it came from nowhere that she could see.
    She looked at her husband, suddenly on alert. “Did you hear that?”
    “What do you want?” he repeated. His stare had not changed. He dug his fingers into his forearm, scratching ferociously. Chloe noticed his skin was now raw in that spot, as if he had a rash or bug bite there and had been scratching for a while.
    “I just wanted to see what you were up to,” she said. She began edging away. She had never feared Jeff before, but this… This hardly seemed like Jeff. She felt like a cornered animal. As she moved off, Jeff returned his attention to the rope.
    Chloe walked, chilled and frightened, back to the cottage. She kept her eyes on the ground. She would wait until she got inside the cottage before she’d allow a single tear to fall. But there would be tears. It was over. It was all over. Their marriage. Their friendship. Everything. There was nothing left to pick over.
    ***
    Jeff was immersed. He did not have time for Chloe’s cloying attempts to regain her footing in his life. He had a project to work on, and it had begun to swallow large swaths of his time. He could not resist the well. He had to know what lay far below in the darkness.
    He tightened and untightened the same length of rope again and again, not realizing what he was doing. The feel of the rope, the sense of purpose, put him at ease and took him out of his unsatisfactory life. The barn and the well had become his sanctuary.
    He had been dreaming so vividly of late. Even while working on the well, he would find himself lost in the dreams. There was a boy, around twelve or thirteen judging by his