by Jack Dann
‘The gods will get you for gloating …’ she warned herself, and though it was a joke, a little shiver of disquiet ran down her spine because at some level she did feel that this much luck had a price tag, and that sooner or later, she would have to have a leg amputated or get cancer to balance the books. ‘Idiot,’ she muttered, deciding that she had better get up and have a shower before she got any more morbid.
Pulling back the quilt to air the sheets, she found herself trying to remember what she had done the previous night. Maybe she had got drunk. She almost never drank, but it was possible she had tried one of the strange drinks David sometimes brought home from his trips abroad for her to try. But if she had got drunk, surely she would remember the early part of the evening, even if she had forgotten the rest.
‘Early onset of senility,’ she muttered, and drew open the curtains.
She gasped, for instead of the sunlit dew drenched garden with the sea shimmering behind it, there was a mist pressed up against the glass, obliterating everything but the cloudy shapes of the nearest bushes. Then something black flew out of the mist and smashed against the glass, shattering it and showering her with cutting fragments. She screamed.
Anna sat up, heart pounding, and felt her face with trembling fingers, but the skin was smooth.
‘A nightmare,’ she whispered and lay back to ponder the doubled oddness of dreaming you were waking, only to find you had woken into another dream. She looked at David’s side of the bed and wondered if she had subconsciously registered his quiet departure and that had been the seed for the dream. She was too wide-awake now to go back to sleep, so she got up and pulled on her kimono. Then she crossed to the curtains and drew them open.
To her astonishment, the garden and the road and the sea were all hidden behind a thick mist, just as in her dream. She stepped back from the window, but nothing came hurtling out of the mist. She laughed shakily and turned to make the bed, reminding herself that mists were not so extraordinary on this part of the coast. In fact, they were common in summer, and sometimes she got into the car and drove only to find the sun shining two kilometres away. It was one of the things she liked about her little stretch of the coast, that weather here was often anomolous.
Showering, she thought how as a child she had loved walking through the mist to school, pretending that she would pass through some hidden magical gate into a world full of adventure and danger, where she would find friendship worth dying for and the truest of true love, not to mention meaning and purpose. But of course there was only one world and only one way to escape it. So she had remained in the world with her grief-sapped father, the ghost of her mother and her bitter, half-mad grandmother. When her father finally committed suicide, she had continued living with her grandmother, whose corrosive bitterness scoured anyone with whom she came in contact, and her granddaughter most of all. The old woman had died when she was twenty-four, leaving Anna a small amount of money and her furniture. The house had gone because of something to do with capital gains tax, and it was only when Anna decided to sell an enormous lounge setting that she had been keeping in Leaf’s shed tor lack of space in her minute bedsit, that she discovered it was an antique. As were many of the pieces of furniture crammed in her bedsit and Izabel’s attic. Where her grandmother had acquired them, she had no idea. Perhaps someone had left them to her, or she had brought them as a job lot when she had left her philandering husband to set up on her own all those eons ago.
Their sale had brought in enough money for a new car, the cottage by the sea, and had enabled her to quit her job as an art teacher and paint. That she had then exhibited shyly and found unexpected success as an artist seemed to be part of that excess of luck that sometimes worried her.
‘I don’t know how you can see yourself as lucky,’ Izabel had said when she had once voiced this apprehension. ‘Your mother dies of cancer and your selfish father kills himself, leaving you in the clutches of your vicious, tightfisted cow of a grandmother. I’d say you paid in advance for your luck, it that’s how it works. Mind you this much luck is totally wasted on you, Anna.’
‘He wasn’t selfish,’ Leaf had reproached their vivid friend gently, for she had gone to school with Anna and had known her father. ‘He was just so sad. Think of it, his mother left his father and never allowed them to see one another again, and then his wife gets cancer and dies. I think he stayed alive as long as he could for Anna’s sake.’
‘Oh bully for him,’ Izabel sneered. ‘He kills himself when she is thirteen, which everyone knows is the worst age to have anything like that happen.’
‘All ages are the worst age to have that happen,’ Anna had murmured, but neither of them heard her.
Had she been scarred by her parents’ deaths or her grandmother’s terrible bitterness, she now wondered as she towelled herself dry. She did not feel scared but she supposed those things might be at the root of her excruciating shyness; especially with men. She had never been able to imagine that anyone could love her and Izabel maintained that was why no one did. According to her, men only wanted what they couldn’t have. They were natural hunters and Anna’s meekness and lack of confidence made her as exciting as a tortoise. Anna conceded her shyness, but maybe that was her nature as much as the circumstances of her childhood. And it was not as if she had ever been glamorous like Izabel, with her flaming red hair and gorgeous face and body. Nor did she have Leaf’s irresistable charm to distinguish her. She was merely ordinary looking and awkward of manner, and it had seemed foolish and vain to try to change that with clothes or make-up, as Izabel always urged. That would be too much like donning a mask, and if someone were won by it, then she would be doomed to wear it forever. Better to remain herself and alone.
Then David had come into her life. She could still see Izabel in her peacock coloured coat, smiling as she introduced them, and David’s serious eyes above his soft wondering smile. ‘I might be a little out of my depth here,’ he had confessed, voicing her shy discomfort.
Slowly she rubbed into her face some of the expensive cream she had brought at his insistence when they had flown back from Paris, but she did not wipe the clouds from the mirror. Better not to look at her pale, plain face with its mouse-coloured eyes and mouse-coloured hair. It was not so much her mousiness that bothered her as the lines about her eyes that betokened her age and the slight thickening of her body, which might be the beginning of a middle-aged spread. Revolting phrase. As if you got soft and runny and incapable of holding your form when you got older.
Pulling on her favourite primrose silk kimono, she went to the kitchen to look at the clock but was distracted by the sight of the mist through the kitchen window. It obscured not only the back garden but the enormous hill that rose greenly up behind the house. Beyond it lay the vast wilderness of the national park. When she first used to come here she had been able to walk from her back door across blackberry-choked fields and up to the top of the hill where she would gaze at the forest that spread as far as the eye could see. But the older couple that had brought the land behind Anna’s encompassed the hill and they soon poisoned the blackberries, repaired the fences, and put in a bad-tempered bull to discourage anyone trying to climb them. They were possessive ex-city folk with a loathing for cats, and twice Anna had been forced to go to the council to rescue Electra after she had been lured into one of their traps. David disliked them intensely and had more than once suggested she simply make an offer of money for their land, which the pair would be unable to resist. But Anna had not wanted to do that. She did not like the neighbours any more than he did, but life was full of people with plans that elbowed you and stepped on your toes, and you could not buy out everyone. Life was about adapting and finding a way to live with other people.
Anna frowned, remembering a rare argument with David about the neighbours, in which he had accused her of being too passive. It had happened a month after the wedding, and a few days after David had first met Leaf. She had always wondered if her friend’s suppor
t of her refusal to act against the neighbours had precipitated the quarrel. ‘Don’t you ever want anything passionately enough to fight for it?’ David had demanded. ‘Will you always simply take what life gives you and strive for nothing?’
All at once the mist shifted and thinned so that suddenly Anna could see the bottom of the neighbour’s hill. Unexpectedly, there was a man in a long black cloak striding along its flank! Leaning on the sill and squinting, she decided that it was not either of her neighbours, who were both grey haired, for this man had shaggy black hair. Besides, the neighbours never walked anywhere. They used a noisy two-stroke tractor to traverse their property and even to collect the mail from the postbox at the front of the house. The man might be a visitor, in which case he would know about the bull. But what if he was a hiker and had come down the creek from the national forest?
Anna stood there indecisive, until the memory of David’s accusation of passivity drove her out the back door, across the veranda and through the trees to the waist-high fence which was the real border of her land. ‘Hey!’ she called.
The man stopped abruptly and looked across at her. He stood so still that he reminded her of a deer or a fox caught in the headlights of a car. Belatedly it occurred to her that she was wearing nothing but a thin kimono and was all alone. When the man began to come towards her with swift, purposeful strides, she had to resist the impulse to back up, reminding herself that she had called out to him. His face was extraordinarily pale, and if not for his dark eyes and his black brows and hair, she would have thought he was albino. That his clothes were black, only accentuated his palour so much as to be an affectation, except that somehow, despite his queer clothes and dramatic good looks, this man did not strike her as the sort who desired attention.
‘I just wondered if you realised this is private land,’ Anna said when he finally stopped on the other side of the fence. ‘There is a bull, you see. It’s not mine,’ she added and then she blushed at the foolishness of her words. Why was it that she was unable to utter a single sensible sentence when she met someone for the first time?
Still the man did not speak, and although his Slavic features showed little of what he was feeling, she had the strong feeling that he was astonished, though she could not imagine why. Surely she was not such an amazing sight wearing a kimono in her own back yard.
‘My husband and I saw you from the kitchen window. We thought you might not have realised that you had got onto private land. There is the bull you see. The neighbours let it loose and it has a very bad temper …’ She stopped, abruptly realising she was babbling on like an idiot. The man might not even speak English. That could be the explanation for his sombre, old-fashioned clothes and his silence.
‘I did not realise there was a place here. The mist,’ the man finally spoke, pointing behind her. He had a slight but definite accent, which she thought might be Russian or maybe Hungarian.
‘This is my land. Mine and my husbands,’ Anna said, then she blushed for surely in mentioning David so often and pointedly she was making it all too obvious that he was not at home. Get a grip, she told herself in Izabel’s sharp clear tone. She said calmly, ‘The land you are on is not my land. But I am trying to warn you that there is a bull loose.’
‘A bull?’ The man turned hastily, lifting his hands as if to defend himself. She saw from the breadth of his shoulders under the cloak that he was strongly built. But after a moment, he relaxed and glanced back at her. ‘The bull is not yours?’
‘No. The bull and the land you are on belong to my neighbour,’ Anna repeated, unease giving way to exasperation. ‘You must go along the fence there to reach the road.’
‘The borders of this place are strong,’ the man said, his dark eyes now seeming to examine her closely. ‘I could not enter without being invited.’
This was such a peculiar thing to say that Anna wondered if the man had understood anything she had said. She said firmly but kindly, ‘Just go that way Follow the fence down to the road.’ She turned and headed back to the house.
‘Wait,’ the man called. ‘Will you tell me your name?’
Anna turned only to find that the mist had thickened so that she could no longer see the man or the hill. But some impulse made her call, ‘My name is Anna. Goodbye.’ She ran lightly through the trees to the porch and was inside the house before it occurred to her that it was a long time since she had moved so swiftly and easily. Maybe Leaf was right in saying that ageing was all in your mind. Then Anna grinned, remembering that Izabel had responded sourly to this pronouncement by saying unfortunately it was all in your body.
Anna looked out the kitchen window again, but the mist was thicker than eve,- and she could see no sign of the man. She hoped he had understood and was making his way to the road. Maybe when David came, he would go and pick the man up and offer him a lift to town. He had seemed very persuaded when Leaf had given him her random acts of goodness to counterbalance a world full of random acts of violence lecture; funny how he had gone from calling her a featherbrained hippie to admiring her genuine kindness and compassion. Thinking of David reminded Anna that she had come into the kitchen to look at the clock. It showed three o’clock, which was impossible. She put her head against the clock, and sure enough, there was no ticking. She shrugged. The real wonder was that the old clock had ticked on for so long, rather than that it had stopped. She grinned, thinking how often David had asked how she could endure something so ugly. The clock was in fact quite hideously ornate but Anna liked it anyway. Or maybe that was why she liked it. Ironically, it was the most valuable by far of the things her grandmother had left her, and David said she ought to sell it before it broke or was stolen. But she had refused, saying it was the only thing out of all her grandmother’s furniture that she liked and they had more than enough for their modest needs and for quite a few wants as well. It would be a nest egg for their old age.
Anna went into the living room to look at the little clock on David’s desk. Incredibly, it had stopped at three o’clock too. This was odd enough to give her pause because one clock ran on batteries and the other on an intricate antique system of tiny pulleys and pendulums. She was tempted to call Leaf, who was bound to have a vague but thrilling sounding theory that would cover the mist and the stopped clocks, but she resisted the impulse and returned to the kitchen. She reached out and touched the antique clock affectionately. She would take it up to the city, to the old watchmaker who had valued it, next time she went and get it repaired. In fact she might drive up with David on Monday. It would be fun to go with him for a change. Maybe she would book the Windsor for the night and they could stay and even see a show. Or go to a Jazz club. David would prefer that. The more she thought of the plan, the more it appealed and she went to find the hotel number, thinking that she could just pack a bag for them and slip it into the boot of the car and make the whole thing a surprise. She would wait to tell him until he said disconsolately that he supposed they had better head for the hills.
Finger poised to dial, it occurred to her that David had not said that for some time. In fact the last time they had gone to the city, he had only said cheerfully, ‘Let’s call in and see Leaf on the way home.’ The contentment in his voice had been profound, and she had stared out the window of the car to stop him seeing how moved she had been to hear him call the cottage home. She shrugged and dialed, then she stopped. There was no dial tone. The phone was dead. She stared into the receiver in disbelief; first the clocks and now the phone.
Maybe it was just the third thing. Leaf always said everything came in threes.
Anna’s stomach rumbled loudly and that decided her. Instead of waiting, she would drive into town. No doubt David had been waylaid and if he had tried to ring, she would not have got the call. Would he have got some sort of signal or message to let him know the phone was out, or would he simply think she had gone to the beach? It was possible that the mist had rolled in after he left, and only extended as far as Point Defiant. She had a mobil
e of course, but there was no reception unless you drove out to the point. She debated walking along the road to the neighbour on the other side to find out if their phone was out as well, but they might not be down for the weekend.
The phone began to ring. Anna stared at it incredulously then she dived on it, snatching up the receiver. ‘David?’
No answer.
She was about to hang up, when she realised she could hear someone speaking, but it was as if they were very far away. She pressed the receiver hard against her ear and strained to catch the words. ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard. ‘I never wanted this. I never meant you to be hurt…’
‘Izabel?’ Anna whispered. ‘Is that you?’
But now there was only a faint humming sound. Anna set the receiver down slowly and deliberately, and lifted the receiver again to dial David’s number. Then she realised there was no dial tone.
‘This is impossible,’ she said.
She went to the bedroom and threw off her kimono, pulled on jeans, canvas shoes and a frayed red T-shirt that had once belonged to her father and went to get the keys to her car. But they were not on their hook by the door. She stared at the bare nail incredulously. David had taken her keys along with his own once ages back but she had driven in another nail since then, so their keys had hung on different hooks. The only answer was that he must have absent-mindedly put his keys on her hook the previous night when he had got in. Normally it would not have mattered, but so many queer things had happened already that morning that their absence disturbed her. For some reason, she thought of the pills Izabel had given her when she had been so nervous before her first show that she had kept vomiting.