“Oh Jesus,” I said out loud, “it’s a possum.”
My first instinct was actually to laugh. Possums are inherently absurd creatures. They try so hard to look scary with the hissing and all, but they’re so bad at everything. I’d seen possums try to run away and run headfirst into trees. If you spend any time around them, you eventually realize this. “The Virginia opossum,” my father once dryly said, “is the closest we have to a refutation of ‘survival of the fittest.’”
“What are you doing?” I said to the creature, standing up and moving toward the door. “This isn’t a good place for possums.”
It stood on its hind legs and scratched at the door again, for all the world like Smiley trying to get in.
“Don’t tell me that someone has a pet possum and lost it.” I peered through the glass at it and it raised its head to look at me.
There was something on the side of its head. At first I thought it must be a trick of the moonlight or a distortion of the glass. But when I shifted to one side, nothing changed. A growth as large as my thumb hung from the right side of its face. Some kind of tumor?
“You poor thing,” I murmured. Sympathy warred with curiosity, but neither were going to cause me to open the door. Letting wild animals into the house was a good way to acquire bites, fleas, or both.
It gazed at me with dark, strained eyes. The one on its right was half closed where the growth pressed against it. As I watched, it stretched up to claw at the door again, and I saw another tumor on its side, even larger than the first.Is this some kind of disease in the local population? The marsupial equivalent of bubonic plague?
“Shoo,” I said, making flapping motions with my hands. “Get out of here. I’m very sorry for you, but I don’t think I can help.”
It ignored me and jumped for the doorknob again. This time it caught it in both paws and swung a hind leg up to brace against the doorframe.
The knob began to turn.
“No,” I said, grabbing the knob and holding it in place. “Stop it! I don’t know why you want to get in, but it’s not going to happen!”
I felt the knob try to twist in my hand. It was a strangely revolting feeling, as if the cold metal were some live animal sliding against my fingers. Except that I loved most live animals, and I didn’t like this atall.
There was a latch somewhere. I hadn’t bothered to throw it for days, since it didn’t seem likely that anyone was going to walk through the woods to Halder’s house, climb up the outside, and break in through my balcony. I hadn’t figured on diseased possums.
The knob moved again as I felt up the frame for the latch. “Stop that!” I hissed at the creature. It ignored me.
I wasn’t scared. That was the oddest thing to me, in retrospect. I was exasperated and baffled, yes, but it was apossum. Not even a particularly healthy possum. My heart was pounding, yes, but more from astonishment than fear.
At last my fingers found the sliding metal bolt. I threw it across the door and released the knob. It immediately turned all the way to the left and the door rattled against the bolt. The possum dropped back to the ground and stood for a moment. I could see its teeth in the moonlight as it opened its mouth. Was it panting?
In the hall, the clock tolled out midnight.
The creature stood up again and pushed against the door. I stared down at it. It couldn’tpossiblyunderstand doors. Possums, in my experience, barely understood rocks. What was going on?
It can’t be rabies. Possums hardly ever get it, and a rabid possum certainly wouldn’t be thinking clearly enough to work a doorknob.
The door rattled against the bolt again as it pushed. Despite what I thought I knew, the creature was certainly acting as if it understood doors. It had turned the knob until it unlatched and now it was trying to open the door.
It occurred to me that if I hadn’t woken up when I did, it would be in the room with me at this very moment.
I still wasn’t exactly afraid, but prickles of unease went through me at the thought. I told myself that I was just concerned that Smiley would get in a scrape with it and get some disease, not that I was thinking of it snuffling along the baseboards or climbing the bedsheets.Waking up to see the creature’s lopsided stare, the strange growth squeezed against its eye…
It hit the door with force this time, shoulder first. The door slammed into the bolt again, hard enough to rattle the glass in the casement. I jumped back, startled. Smiley made a low, grating sound, not quite a yowl, the sound of a cat that is contemplating violence.
“Go on,” I said, a bit desperately. “Shoo! Possums do not belong here!”
It would be absurd to think that it listened, but the creature stopped. It gazed up at me for a long, long moment. There wasa dark blotch at one end of the tumor that looked horribly like another eye staring back at me.
Then it turned and waddled away.
I sagged against the wall beside the window. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” I whispered. “What was that all about?”
Should I go tell someone? But who would I tell? Mrs. Kent had gone home with Mr. Kent, and the only other people in the house were Halder and Sally. I couldn’t imagine that Sally would handle an apparently crazed possum very well, and Halder would just yell at me for waking him up for a mammal.Assuming he believed me in the first place. Probably he’d just tell me that possums don’t act like that and decide I was a hysterical female.
The frustrating thing was that he’d be right—not about the hysterical bit, but that possumsdon’tact like that. I rubbed my temples. A new disease? Not rabies, but maybe something else. I knew that there were diseases in sheep that made them act strangely, although I’d never heard anything about trying to open doorknobs. Then again, I didn’t know much about sheep.God knows that there are enough diseases that make humans act strange, maybe there’s some brain fever in possums now.
