So Dies the Dreamer

by Ursula Curtiss

  “The dreamer cometh.” It was from the story of Joseph and his brothers, which had haunted her as a child because, on a thundery summer afternoon, she had found a shirt of once-brilliant calico impaled on pussy willows in a field behind their house. And how did the rest of that infinite cynicism go? “Behold, the dreamer cometh. Come, let us kill him, and cast him into some old pit, and we will say: Some evil beast hath devoured him . . .”

  Charles’s dreams, evidence of his breaking-point. Come, let us kill him, and cast him— Sarah shivered once, uncontrollably, and turned her back on the mirror as though the cruelty lay there.

  What had Charles wanted of Kate Clemence on that last day, so urgently that he had telephoned her in Preston? Sarah was quite sure that the “terrible mistake” Kate had quoted referred not to his marriage but to the drugging of the nurse. Everything sprang from that.

  His sudden anxiety to talk to Kate suggested a new development of some kind. A suspicion of someone who had never crossed his mind before? He would know that he had been observed slipping away from the gamebird show to go back to the house and confront Nina; had he wanted to ask Kate—a neutral witness, not of his own family—who else had been missing from the show shortly afterward? Had he, in fact, needed the knowledge for a scheduled meeting, later, with the killer to whom he had so innocently betrayed himself all along?

  Sarah rubbed at her tight and aching temples. What mattered more than anything else at the moment was the question of a diary in a pheasant pen, a pretty little dark-blue volume whose key, dropping from the lock and settling into some crevice in or near the stable, Charles had found and recognized and kept.

  The necessity of finding it, of making solid sense out of the noted-down names of pheasants, was not a matter of abstract justice nor even, wholly, a desire to avenge Charles. It was simply the fact that Sarah could not go back to New York and take up her life again—and wonder, until the not-knowing made up her very existence, like a hole in a sculpture.

  It struck her, as she went down the narrow little stair, that she was placed almost exactly as Charles had been.

  “—still think he had something to do with all those mink,” said Milo.

  Hunter’s formidable eyebrows went up, his gaze stayed on the rug. “He had no great reason to love us, if it comes to that.”

  Bess turned flashingly. She said, “What on earth do you—?” but Milo was there before her, head tipped to one side, preparing the way for a profundity. “People never love their employers. It’s against nature. Do you find cats loving dogs? Worms getting up early?”

  They were talking about Peck, inevitably, because Mrs. Peck had called during the course of the afternoon to say that the police had made a routine check of her husband’s last hours. Although Peck had been inclined to belligerence when drinking, he had had no quarrels in Tod’s Bar and Grill nor, later, in Eddie’s Cafe. In fact, he had bought drinks for the house at Eddie’s and, pressed to repeat this hospitable gesture, announced with decorum that he was late for his date with a rolling pin as it was. After a brief encounter with a glass door which he had presumed to be open air, he had started home alone and unassisted.

  Cheerful, thought Sarah, studying her hands, because he thought there was more money where that came from. Never suspecting that he had been enticed into drunkenness, that his small demands, indicative of a larger knowledge or near-knowledge, had become intolerable. Certainly not looking for, and totally unable to cope with, the sudden thrust of hands in the cold quiet night.

  “. . . do you?” said Evelyn in Sarah’s ear. “I said, you never have to diet, do you? It’s wonderful the way some people don’t.”

  Did she work at being inane, wondered Sarah blankly, or was it a gift? No ordinary intelligence could produce such observations as, “Where would people be without furnaces?” or “I knew a woman once whose husband was in the insurance business.” (Pause, significant flexing of the round blue gaze, mysterious nod.) “There’s a lot of money in it.”

  That was one Evelyn. Another sprang out occasionally, a sharp hard awareness that counted up the mockings and stored them carefully away. How had either Evelyn liked having her usefulness in the household wiped out by a young, efficient, radiantly pretty woman? Milo’s habitual barbs would be much harder to take in that presence; watched, smiled over, Evelyn would have fumbled more than ever.

  Violence could be born out of a thing like that, probably was, uncounted times per day, behind the innocent death certificates issued all over the world. It mightn’t start out to be murder any more than a chance comment started out to be a blazing argument. But once it was done, there was no going back, and any subsequent killings would not take the name of murder either, but of self-preservation.

  “I see you still wear your ring,” said Evelyn in a confidential tone.

  They both looked at the narrow band of platinum.

  “Shouldn’t I?” asked Sarah, trying hard for amiability. “Or is there a rule under the circumstances?”

  “Oh no. It’s just—” began Evelyn, and launched into the saga of a friend who had lost her husband in a fire, and although she was young and most attractive and had a tidy little sum of money in bonds, her men friends were put off by the fact that she continued to wear her wedding band. Whereas the truth was that she had put on weight and couldn’t get the ring off. A woman should never let herself go, should she?

  Sarah nodded and shook her head now and then, and thought how empty the room was without Harry Brendan —like food without salt, or a cigarette without a match. He was over at the Clemences’ now, parrying Rob’s incivilities, teasing Kate, sitting close to all that handsome calm. He would forget Sarah. He would find her, if he should remember her, by comparison small and ill-tempered.

  How was it possible to ache like a sophomore at the very thought of Harry and Kate? It was Bess who had first bracketed their names together as an accepted thing—and perhaps it was; they had known each other for years, they had Charles in common, Harry himself was the knotty kind of problem that would afford great scope for Kate’s special talents. Old loyalties generally won out over new attractions, however startling and strong.

  Sarah became aware that Evelyn’s low confiding voice had stopped. She said mechanically, “How awful,” and Evelyn gave her an astounded look. “To have married all those oil wells? Frankly, I think it was the best thing she could have done.”

  Dinner, coffee, the dishes afterward over Evelyn’s automatic protest. For the first time Sarah was acutely aware of the total blackness of the country night at the windows, unbroken by light or any sound other than an occasional mournful brush of wind around the chimneys. All the birds —Midnight, the pheasants who would break the dawn with their high metallic shrieks, the bantam rooster who would answer with an eagle-sized crowing—were asleep in their feathers, fed and watered and protected through another day.

  Presumably even Long John slept, hoarding his grievances until morning—but how very black it was going to be in the stable, how startling the ray of the flashlight that hung from the wall of the passageway to the barn. I won’t think about it now, thought Sarah, and instantly her mind began to embroider the stable floor with rats, clawing secretly about for corn or turkey pellets or even an unwary pheasant. Long John had killed a rat once, drilling a savage hole in the ugly gray head. . . .

  “Do you feel all right?” asked Evelyn curiously, and Sarah said yes, putting away the dish she had been wiping in blank circles. She wanted to know, nonchalantly, if Bess ever had any trouble with rats, and Evelyn gave a little shudder. “Peck kept them down with poison, because of course wherever there’s feed . . . He found a rat-hole in one of the stable pens once, but he stopped that up. Anyway they wouldn’t come in the daytime,” said Evelyn, turning to give Sarah a reassuring glance. “Only at night.”

  However casual she had seemed, Bess had obviously marked this as an occasion to celebrate. Before Sarah had a chance to follow Evelyn out of the kitchen, while the red rub
ber gloves were still subsiding after being blown into, Hunter appeared in the doorway with a tray holding Bess’s treasured liqueur glasses, stemless little bubbles of pale clear yellow, their etched leaves studded with tiny painted flowers. “Benedictine? Brandy? Or a mixture?”

  He had Bess’s ability to look as natural with the delicate glasses as he did with a hayfork. “Brandy, please.”

  Hunter switched on the light above the liquor cabinet in the wall opposite the crow’s cage. The crow said, “Awk, hi, Milo,” in an irritable mutter and went back to sleep. Hunter added bottles to the tray; he said without looking at Sarah, “You’re satisfied about Charles, then.”

  It was still somehow a shock that this brusque remoteness had looked so sharply and exactly into her mind. “Satisfied doesn’t seem to be quite the word,” Sarah said with care. “I’ve learned about Nina, if that’s what you mean.”

  “He wasn’t to blame. Neither of them was,” said Hunter astonishingly. “It was on the cards from the beginning. Charles was impressionable, Nina . . .” He shrugged. “This isn’t the Victorian age. Nobody but Charles would have made such a mountain of it.”

  Did he really believe what he was saying, Sarah wondered amazedly, or did he only intend her to think that he did? Charles was impressionable, he had said—and what about Hunter? He hadn’t gotten those knowledgeable eyes, nor the subtle lines of experience at their corners, from nowhere. And a startling softness, even an idealism, often lay under just this kind of no-nonsense coating. Hunter turned suddenly and caught her inspecting gaze, and for a moment he did not seem remote at all.

  In the living room Sarah sipped her brandy, listened idly while the others talked, responded when Bess asked her tactfully about her plans. She said that she might go away for a while, she had always wanted to see the Southwest, but that she would probably end up at an advertising agency again. It was the only job she knew, and she would have to work at something; she couldn’t simply settle down and do nothing all day. It seemed at once real and unreal as she said it, like a needed operation for which the date had not yet been set.

  Predictably, Milo began to hum the “Serenade to a Wealthy Widow.” Bess stopped him with a glance. Time seemed to have stalled, as though everybody knew exactly what was in Sarah’s mind, until Evelyn said with a patient air, “Can I take these glasses out now? I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m asleep on my feet.”

  “Not your feet, precisely,” said Milo, peering across at her, but all at once sleep was in the air. The wind seemed louder and colder, the night blacker, beds inviting, the very lamplight exhausted. Bess told Sarah to have a good sleep. Milo touched his jaw reflectively and said he would take some aspirin up with him. Hunter stayed in the dining room, hand on the light switch, until Sarah had mounted the stairs to the attic room.

  The house settled into darkness. Water gushed through the pipes and died into silence, footsteps ceased, doors closed with finality. Sarah turned her own bedside lamp off and smoked four cigarettes, carefully spaced, before she put on her flat and soundless slippers, eased her door open, and tiptoed down into blackness.

  xvi

  EVEN AT THE DOORWAY into the barn, the flashlight beam sharp as a shout in the darkness, Sarah was not fully committed.

  She knew it, she had known it in a carefully buried way ever since the plan to find the hidden diary had first entered her head. That was why her brain had supplied her with the thought of rats, the possibility that the flashlight might not be there or its batteries dead, the much likelier possibility that the Clemences would still be up, and notice and act upon a light moving about in the stable.

  The flashlight hung from its accustomed hook; there was no sound of rats; the Clemence house was dark. Hunter had put the car in and closed the heavy sliding barn door; from the distance beyond the dully gleaming bulk of metal there was a faint feathery alarm from the quail and then the usual tapestried country quiet.

  Sarah stood perfectly still, one hand on the latch of the door behind her, ready to re-open the way to security. (Or was it?) She was not brave by nature, and ridiculously sinister notions came to her constantly: what if she looked behind the chair where she was reading and a total stranger stood there, still as a statue, just staring at her? What if she came upon her stone marten scarf secretly chewing a morsel of meat in its narrow dark jaws? What if she went to meet a train and saw herself getting off and coming toward the car, or baby-sat for a friend and saw the tiny pink feet in the bassinet with their soles dirtied?

  The night and the barn about her were real, but as yet untried. It was not like a high diving board, mounted in public view; she could lift the latch of the door and go back and no one would be the wiser. Any shame would be as private as the project itself.

  It was a trick of light that made up her mind. When she moved the flashlight beam, it shot across the piled logs at the end of the barn. The open doorway into the stable, its wooden ramp hidden, turned into a tall black space like the one Charles had faced. Fatally weak, fatally trusting, plummeting through the bottomless night air.

  She would always see that if she went back now. She would remember what all those people had managed to suggest to her, and she would think: Fifteen feet more, or twenty, and I could have proved they were wrong.

  Or was the doubt hers, as much as the necessity?

  Quiet in her flat slippers, shivering in the thin wool dress that had no collar or folds or loose sleeves to trammel her as she went in and out of the pens, Sarah advanced into the stable. Now that she had committed herself she didn’t hesitate. She picked up the stick Milo had used to kill the mink, telling herself that she might have to pry up a plank, but comforted by the strong well-balanced weight of it. She located the Elliots with a sweep of the flashlight, roosting side by side in their nesting box, and unfastened the catch of the mesh door and went inside.

  She stooped consciously, so as not to rise up to her full height and alarm them, but she needn’t have worried; the Elliots, so active and distrustful by day, stared glassily ahead of them without stirring a feather. Perhaps they were terrified into immobility, or adopted it instinctively as a defensive measure. At any rate they didn’t bother Sarah. She stirred the litter away from the planks with her slippered foot and probed at the corners with the stick. The planks were old but tight, and there were no new nail-heads and no stopped-up place to indicate the rat-hole that Peck had found and investigated.

  Peck’s death notice, because he had also found a diary?

  The Silver had become alerted by the light and the sound of her progress; Sarah heard him grunt throatily and jump down, almost as heavily as a small child, from wherever he had been roosting. In the passing beam of the flashlight he faced her, magnificently black and white behind his crimson face. No one, he seemed to say, is going to bother my wife.

  Sarah slipped into the Reeves’ pen. The cock didn’t like it; from an icy gold carving he sprang into a wild whir of wings, veering close to Sarah’s bent face, veering back again. The hen, catching alarm from the beating feathers, shot madly around the enclosure, hit the wire, was stunned, and flew up again to a branch of the leaning bough. Sarah, who had lowered her head and not dared to look, proceeded by inches to the back of the pen.

  Like the Elliots’, the planks here were old and firm and untampered-with, at least as far as she could tell. The board partition met the flooring firmly, with no room for crevices. A long arch of barred tail-feather was within inches of her hand; the Reeves cock, however disturbed, could not prevent that in this enclosed place. Sarah moved respectfully around it, edged out of the pen, and fastened the door behind her.

  She had somehow known it would be the Silvers: because they had been moved, because Charles had thought their pen innocent; most of all because of her own dread of them. Sarah stood motionless in the stable, the blackness about her deepened and thickened by the ringed disc of brilliance from the flashlight, the barn smell, at this moment, something she knew she would never forget. It was
compounded of old timbers and litter and feed, hay and cement and leather, the whole brought alive by the indefinable scent of the birds. It wasn’t a rank scent, or even musty; they were kept too scrupulously clean for that.

  Was it possibly the smell of her own fear, or of anything done in darkness and secrecy?

  Sarah could hear her heart and feel the moment when it accelerated slightly. Moving quietly, she crossed the cement floor and removed the lids of two metal containers before she found the one that held corn. What had Charles said the pheasants would do anything for? Raisins, or boiled potatoes. She hadn’t seen any raisins on the kitchen shelves; she had an unstrung vision of herself going back inside and furtively boiling potatoes in the dark.

  She would have to try the corn.

  The Silver cock grunted as she approached the door of the pen, and the throaty sound rose and quickened almost to a honk as she opened it and stepped inside. The door closed behind her, and the cock came unhesitatingly forward; when Sarah released the stream of corn, he struck savagely at one kernel and then another, dashing them to one side. He stopped only when Sarah thrust the heavy stick toward him, at an angle across her own unprotected shins.

  It stopped him. It also enraged him; his crest rose higher, and the crimson felt seemed to spread and engulf his furious face. He didn’t back as she advanced with the stick; he dropped into a flanking position. Sarah moved the stick accordingly, turned her body slightly, shot the stream of the flashlight across the flooring of the pen.

  At once, the light picked up a shiny point in the litter. Sarah bent for it unguardedly and felt lightning strike the outer end of her right eyebrow and flame down in an arc that was an outline of pain to come. It came, stinging savagely from the rake of a claw that had aimed for her eye, but in her hand she held the thing she had reached for.