by Peter Straub
“No, I don’t suppose,” Davey said, still not looking up.
The moment of silence which followed seemed extraordinarily crowded to Nora.
“What did you do when you realized that she wasn’t there?”
Davey inhaled deeply and looked over her shoulder. “I was too scared to go home, so I walked all the way to midtown and took a hotel room under a phony name. Around noon the next day, I called Rod Clampett and asked if Paddi had turned up yet. He said he hadn’t seen her all day, but he’d tell her to give me a call when she showed up. Of course, she never did.”
“I guess you couldn’t exactly look for her,” Nora said. “But, Davey, excuse me, what’s the point of all this?”
“I have to get up and move around a little. Could you make some coffee or something?”
“I could make decaf,” she said, looking at the digital clock on the bedside radio. It was 2:00 A.M. She took from the couch a pale yellow robe, slipped it on, and tied its sash. Davey was sitting up in bed and staring at nothing. For a second, he looked like someone Nora had never seen before, an ineffectual man who would always be puzzled by life. Then he glanced up at Nora and was again her husband, Davey Chancel, trying to seem less distressed than he was.
“Nora,” he said, “do you know where that blue silk bathrobe is, the one from Thailand?”
“On the hook in the bathroom,” she said, and padded out to make coffee.
27
DAVEY SIPPED HIS decaffeinated French Roast and winced at the heat. “A little kümmel would go nicely with this mocha java, don’t you think?”
Nora shook her head, then changed her mind. “What the hey.”
Davey went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of Hiram Walker kümmel, all Nora had been able to find on her last visit to the liquor store. He frowned at the label to remind her that she should have gone to another liquor store, if not to Germany, to find decent kümmel, and filled his cup to the brim. Then he moved behind Nora and tipped perhaps half an inch of the liquid into her cup. A smell of caraway and drunken flowers filled the kitchen.
“Well?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” She sipped what tasted like a poison antidote with an accidental similarity to coffee.
“Yes, there is more. Yes, I’m kind of leery of telling you about it.”
She found herself taking another sip of the mixture, which seemed less ghastly than before.
“I left out one thing about the last time I was in Paddi’s loft.”
“Oh, no.”
“It wasn’t anything I did, Nora. I’m not guilty of anything.”
Then why do you look so guilty? she wondered.
“Okay, I did something.” He drank again and tilted back his head as if, like a bird, he had to do that to swallow. Then he lowered his head and folded his hands around his cup. “I told you about looking under her bed.”
Nora suddenly felt that whatever Davey said next would forever change the way she felt about him. Then she thought that his story about Paddi Mann had already changed the way she thought about Davey.
“I saw something under there.”
“You saw something,” she said.
“A book.”
Is that all? Nora thought. No severed head, no million dollars in a paper bag?
“After I fished it out, I thought she might even have left it for me. What do you think it was?”
“The Egyptian Book of the Dead? The, uh, that Lovecraft thing, the Necronomicon?”
“Night Journey. A paperback.”
“Forgive me,” she said, “but that doesn’t actually seem too startling.”
Davey held her eyes with his own and took another swig of his doctored coffee. “Uh huh. I opened it up. You know, maybe there was a note or something in it for me. But there wasn’t anything in it except what was supposed to be there. And her name.”
“Her name,” Nora said, feeling like an echo.
“Written on the flyleaf. At the top. Paddi Mann.”
“She wrote her name in it.”
“That’s right. I shoved the book in my pocket and took it away with me. A few days later I tried to find it, but the damn thing was lost.”
“It fell out of your pocket.”
“Here we go,” he said, and set his cup down. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.” Davey stood up and walked out of the kitchen, nervously straightening his blue robe.
Nora heard him return to the bedroom. A closet door opened and closed. In a moment, he reappeared holding a familiar black paperback. As if reluctant to surrender it, he sat down and held it up before him in both hands before offering it to Nora.
“Well, I don’t suppose this is . . .” Nora noticed that she was as reluctant to take the book as he was to let go of it. She stopped talking and accepted it. Printed on the flyleaf, which had become slightly discolored, in small clear letters with a ballpoint pen, was PADDI MANN. Beneath her name, Davey had signed his own.
“So it turned up,” Nora said.
“Where, do you suppose?”
“How should I know?” She took her hands off the book, thinking that she did not actually care where the book had surfaced, and for some reason hoping that she would not have to find out. She braced herself for another of Davey’s inventions.
“Natalie Weil’s bedroom.”
“But—” Nora closed, then opened her mouth. No longer able to bear the expression in Davey’s eyes, she looked down at her fingers spread on the edge of the table as if she were about to play the piano. “This book, the same book.”
“This same book. I saw it when we went in, and after that big cop took us out, I went back, remember? I opened it up and just about passed out. Then I shoved it in my pocket.”
“What made you go back in? Did you suspect that it might be—?”
“Of course not. I wanted to take a closer look at it.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t know how it got there.”
“I didn’t put it there, if that’s what you mean.”
“You never gave Natalie a copy of Night Journey.”
He looked at her in real exasperation. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”
Nora guessed he did.
“Someone took it from me. He killed Paddi and left the book for me to find. Later that week he stole it from me. And the same person killed Natalie and left it in her bedroom.”
“The wolf killed Paddi Mann?” Nora asked, too confused to speak clearly.
“Lord Night? What does he have to do with it?”
“No, sorry, I mean our wolf—the Westerholm Wolf.” She waved her hands in front of her, as if she were erasing a blackboard. “That’s what I call the... the guy. The man who murdered Natalie and the others.”
“Our wolf.” Davey seemed disturbed, and Nora feared that his disturbance was caused by her appropriation of an animal sacred to Hugo Driver. “Yeah. It was the same guy. Okay. It has to be. He’s not much like Lord Night, though.”
“Davey,” she said, “not everything is related to Hugo Driver.”
“Night Journey is. Paddi Mann was certainly interested in Driver.”
She had made him defensive. “Davey, all I meant is that he couldn’t have left Paddi Mann’s copy of Night Journey in Sally Michaelman’s bedroom, or in Annabelle Austin’s, or any of the others. And maybe he didn’t steal yours. He probably found it.”
Davey was vigorously shaking his head. “I bet there’s some correspondence between the women he killed and certain parts of the book. In fact, that’s obvious.”
“Why is it obvious?”
“Because of Paddi,” he said. “Paddi was obviously Paddy, don’t you think?”
“Paddi was Paddi,” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“In the book. The mouse. The mouse named Paddy, who tells Pippin Little about the Field of Steam. Jesus, don’t you remember anything? Paddy is... Sometimes I wonder if you ever even read Night Journey.”
“I r
ead parts of it.”
“You lied.” He was looking at her in absolute astonishment. “You told me you finished it, and you were lying to me.”
“I skipped around,” she said. “I apologize. I realize that this is important to you—”
“Important.”
“—but aren’t you maybe a little upset that a man who killed five women is—”
“Is what?”
“—somehow connected to you? I don’t know how to say it, because I don’t really understand it.” A flash of pain exploded behind the right half of Nora’s forehead and sent a hot tendril down into her pupil. She leaned back in her chair and placed her hand over her eye.
“I’ll never be able to get to sleep. I think I’ll go down to the family room and put on some music.”
Nora waited to be invited into the family room, so that she could refuse. She heard him push back his chair and stand up.
He told her that she could try lying down. He advised aspirin.
Nora removed her hand from her face. Davey tilted the square brown bottle over his cup and poured out several inches of amber liquid that reeked of caraway seed.
“You said you had that manuscript you found in the conference room, the Clyde Morning book? Would you mind if I took a look at it?”
“You want to read Clyde Morning?”
“I want to see the first new Blackbird Book,” Nora said, but Davey acknowledged this conciliatory sally only with a frown and a shrug of his shoulders. “Would you get it for me?”
Davey tilted his head and rolled his eyes. “If that’s what you want.” He went into his “office.” Nora could hear him talking to himself as he worked the catches on his briefcase. He came back into the kitchen, awkwardly holding a surprisingly slim stack of typing paper held together with rubber bands. “Here you are.” He set the typescript on the table. “Tell me if you think it’s any good.”
She said, “You doubt the great Clyde Morning?”
Already at the kitchen door, Davey turned to give her a look that pretended to offer her sympathy for being left alone, and escaped.
She removed the rubber bands and tapped the bottom edge of the manuscript on the table. Then she folded over the last page and looked at the number in the top right-hand corner. Whatever miracles of the narrative art the hope of Blackbird Books had performed in Spectre, he had contained them within 183 pages.
From downstairs floated the eerie sound of Peter Pears singing words from a Britten opera Nora had heard many times but could not place. The voice seemed to come from an inhuman realm located between earth and heaven. Death in Venice, that was what Davey was listening to. She picked up the slim manuscript, carried it into the living room, switched on a lamp Sally Michaelman had sold her, and stretched out on a sofa to read.
BOOK III
AT THE DEEP OF NIGHT
AT LAST THE CHILD LOST ALL HOPE AND ADMITTED TO HIMSELF THAT THIS DARK LAND WAS DEATH, FROM WHICH NO RELEASE COULD BE HAD. FOR A TIME HE LOST ALL STRENGTH AND REASON, AND WEPT IN PANIC AND DESPAIR.
28
EARLY THE NEXT morning, Nora turned her back on Long Island Sound, ran over the arched wooden bridge at Trap Line Road, and came into the twelve acres of wooded marsh known as the Pierce A. Gordon Nature Conservancy. The air was cool and fresh, and behind her seagulls hopped along the long, seaweed-strewn beach. She had reached the midpoint of her run, and what lay before her were the pleasures of the “Bird Shelter,” as Westerholm natives called the Conservancy, where for just under fifteen minutes she enjoyed the illusion of passing through a landscape like that of the Michigan wilds to which Matt Curlew had taken her on weekend fishing trips during her childhood. These fifteen minutes were the secret heart of her morning run, and on the morning after her first literally sleepless night in years, Nora wished no more than to stop thinking, or worrying, or whatever it was that she had been doing for the past four hours, and enjoy them. Familiar trees filled with cardinals and noisy jays surrounded her. She looked at her watch and saw that she was already nearly five minutes behind her usual time.
Davey’s crazy story had affected her more than she liked to admit. In the past, Davey’s embellishments, when not clearly self-serving, had been in the service of either color or humor. Though nothing if not highly colored, the tale of Paddi Mann had seemed to conceal more than it gave away. Even if he had been trying to emphasize the extent to which he had been seduced, he had overdone his effects.
Other things, too, had distressed her. Nora had read the first twenty-odd pages of Spectre in such a swirl of doubt and anger that the sentences had instantly disappeared from her memory.
What right did Davey have to demand that she be interested in a second-rate author? For his benefit, Nora had absorbed a lot of information about classical music. She knew the difference between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, she could identify fifty operas from their opening bars, she could tell when it was Horowitz playing a Chopin nocturne and when it was Ashkenazy. Why did she have to bow down to Hugo Driver?
At this point, Nora’s conscience forced her to acknowledge that she had, after all, lied to Davey about reading Driver’s book. She had closed the manuscript, gone downstairs, and paused outside the family room door. Death in Venice poured from the speakers. She slowly pushed open the door, hoping to see Davey sitting up and making notes or staring at the wall or doing anything at all that would prove he was at least as awake as she was. Covered to the throat by a plaid throw rug, eyes closed and mouth fluttering, Davey was lying on the couch. Exactly as she had foreseen, Mr. Sensitivity had loaded the two Britten CDs into the player, stretched out with the rug wrapped around him like a baby blanket, and trusted that she would be asleep before he was.
That was it, that did it. Nora took herself back to the living room and turned on the radio. She dialed until she reached a station pounding out James Cotton, blues with wheels, blues with guts, cranked up the volume, and sat down to start reading Spectre all over again.
Spectre was the second topic she wished to put out of her mind during the favorite part of her run. After about an hour’s reading, a certain possibility concerning Clyde Morning had occurred to her. This possibility, if true, might mean something to herself and Davey, or it might not. Then there was a problem with the book itself. As she had feared, Spectre was a slight book. It read like a fictional skeleton barely fleshed out by a writer too tired or lazy to keep his characters’ names straight. George Carmichael, the main character, had become George Carstairs by page 15, and by page 35 he had changed back to Carmichael. For the rest of the book, he switched back and forth, depending, Nora thought, on which name surfaced first in Clyde Morning’s mind when he reported to his typewriter.
Even worse was the exhaustion which weighed down the writing. Three different characters said, “Too true.” Far too many sentences began with the word “Indeed” followed by a comma. George Carmichael/Carstairs’s eyes were invariably a “deep, soulful brown,” and his shoes were always “crosshatched with scuff marks.” Neither sense nor grammar was safe. As he ran down the stairs, the sun struck George in his eyes of deep, soulful brown. When he “gazed longingly” at his beloved, Lily Clark, his eyes adhered to her dress. Or they flew across the room to meet her “tigress’ lips.” Half a dozen times, George and other people “wore out shoe leather” by “pounding the pavement” or “doublejumping the stairs.” After she had begun to notice these repetitions, Nora got up, found a pencil, and made faint check marks in the margin whenever one of them appeared.
When she had finished reading, pale light came slanting in through the windows at the front of the house. She returned to the kitchen for more coffee and discovered that she had ground beans from the package of French Roast that was not decaffeinated. Her radio station had pumped out blues all during the night and switched over to jazz while she read the manuscript’s last pages. A tenor saxophone was playing some ballad so tenderly that individual notes seemed to float through her skin. “Scott Hamilton,” said
the announcer, “with ‘Chelsea Bridge.’”
Scott Hamilton... wasn’t that the name of an ice skater?
Nora had looked up from the manuscript, dazed and uncertain. It was as if along with the sound of the saxophone, some secret thought, one not to be admitted during normal hours, had swum into her mind, taken form, and floated out. Carmichael/Carstairs and Paddi Mann had been part of this thought, but it was gone. The experience had made her feel oddly like a visitor in her own life. She stood up, put her hands on her hips, and twisted her back twice sharply to the right, then twice to the left.
Davey had not left the family room during the night, but her irritation with him had passed. After nearly a week of keeping his fears inside him, he had finally blurted out his confession. Even if only a tenth of it was true, it was still a confession.
Nora went downstairs and peeked in on her husband. Above the rug, his face was tight with an anxious dream. She switched off the light and turned off the CD player. Upstairs, she put Spectre back in its rubber bands. She felt at once utterly tired and completely awake. Why not now, in the gift of these extra hours, take her run, and then make breakfast for them both before Davey left for New York? Inspired, she put on her shorts and running shoes, slipped into a tank top and a cotton sweater, pulled a long-billed cap on her head, and left the house. After a few minutes of stretching in the dew-soaked grass on a front lawn that looked exotic in the unfamiliar gray-blue light of dawn, Nora was loping past the sleeping houses on Fairytale Lane.
Tendrils of doubt and worry continued to prod at her concentration as she ran through the almost hallucinatory landscape of the Bird Shelter. Paddi Mann was not a problem; nor, really, was whatever Davey had been hiding. Davey’s secrets invariably turned out to be less significant than he imagined. The problem was whether or not to tell him what she had inadvertently discovered about Clyde Morning.