Nightlight

by Michael Cadnum

  “I don’t believe in Hell, my dear,” she said lightly.

  He actually smiled. It was little more than a twitch. “You will find the secret eating you rotten.”

  “Good heavens, Phil. What a ghastly image.”

  “And there won’t be anything you can do.”

  “Be quiet, Phil. Nobody knows what is going to happen to anyone.”

  It seemed as if she had enjoyed the last word. Phil was quiet, and after a while was very quiet and they buried him. It was not the most happy victory in the world, because, although she would never have told him, she had admired Phil’s love for books, and the fact that he cared enough for his son to let his horror of his son—and his wife—destroy him.

  Her new position as a widow had its charm, and she accepted the clucks of sympathy and the dignified flirtation of eligible money with a good grace. And she was beginning to round into the sort of person who, if she did not have everything, had learned to genuinely dislike what she did not have.

  And then Len became very strange.

  19

  There had been something of the night about him from the beginning, the way he would lie awake with wide eyes, and look into her eyes when she asked, “What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”

  “I can sleep if I want to,” he would answer, or “Don’t worry about me, Mother.” His voice too solemn, his tone too aware of things a child should not even guess. From the very beginning she had sensed her father in him. The way he watched her, mocking her with the lift of an eyebrow. The way, if she was upset, he would say, “You mustn’t let these things bother you.”

  “Come and see what I have found,” he said one evening in that careful, low voice.

  Immediately she did not want to know what this seven-year-old had discovered. And immediately she wanted to: more than anything she had ever desired.

  But she did not move. “I’m reading now,” she said. “Can’t you bring it to me?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Is it too heavy?”

  He smiled, humoring her. “No, it’s not too heavy.”

  “It’s too … delicate,” she guessed, trying to treat him as if he were an ordinary child, someone who was at heart playful.

  He cocked his head. “Why, yes, in a way. It is very delicate. In a way.”

  “I suppose I’ll just have to come look.”

  He led her down the hall, held the door for her in a well-mannered way, then shut it tight and smiled knowingly, in a way that made her step back and put her hand out to the television set for strength.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “It’s nothing that will hurt you.” He emphasized you.

  “I must say you have my full curiosity,” she said with a laugh. “Whatever could it be?”

  He opened the closet door. “I keep it in darkness. Not complete darkness, of course, but then darkness is really almost never complete. There is always a little bit of light if you wait long enough to see it.”

  “You don’t expect me to go in there.”

  He gazed at her seriously, one hand on the door. “That would be best.”

  “Bring it out here.”

  “To bring it into this much light would be agony for it.”

  “Agony?” He had used the word easily.

  “Great pain,” he said.

  “This is a dim room. The curtains are drawn. You could scarcely read. I don’t think that whatever it is would experience agony. At any rate, you’ll have to bring it out; I’m not going to—.”

  He waved her silent, and vanished into the closet. He stepped out of the dark place with a glittering jar, which he placed gently on his desk. He studied the jar with an expression she could not read. When she stepped forward he put a finger to his lips. “Wait,” he whispered.

  He fumbled into the closet, and withdrew a paper cup covered with a paper lid which a rubber band held in place. He gave her the paper cup without speaking, and to her horror something fluttered within it, like the beating of a tiny heart.

  “Look,” he whispered.

  The jar was empty. A cylinder of glass, a dull gleam where it reflected the line of the curtains. Except, as she studied it, she saw that it was not entirely empty. A crack ran down the side of the glass, a crooked finger of darkness that was not, she saw, stepping closer, a crack at all.

  A long skeletal forefinger pointed downward, sealed like a relic in the churches of Italy, a holy digit aged to the point of timelessness. Such things had a certain purity. They were certainly harmless.

  She stepped closer, the fluttering thing in her fingers quiet for a moment. It was not a finger. It was a twig. A crook of wood, sealed as if in a vacuum, a relic of earth. It seemed to radiate silence, and she did not want to move lest she disturb something that should be allowed to sleep.

  Her eyes were adjusting to the bad light of the room, and she realized that the twig was not alone in the jar. A span of gauze surrounded it like an aura, stretching sloppily from one side of the glass cylinder to the other. It was as if the twig had been used to capture cotton candy, but only a little bit, a few filaments. The pale tissue caught the light from the slit in the curtains, and glowed, like breath on a window.

  Len lowered his hand to the lid of the jar, and touched it. He watched the twig for a long time. They would never move again, either of them. They would stand like this until dust covered them, and nothing that happened in the world would reach them.

  The fluttering in the paper cup started and stopped.

  Something moved in the jar.

  A glittering black eye lowered itself from the twig on nothing, and paused. Legs stretched themselves out from the bunched body. The thing waited, listening to them breathe.

  There was no doubt in her mind: It was watching them, in the agony Len had described. It was listening to them, to their lungs and their nostrils, but also to all their organs as they worked. The thing in the jar took them in, and waited.

  Len held a hand toward her, and she could not move. His fingers twitched impatiently. She gave him the paper cup, and he held it to his ear, his lips parted.

  With a metallic chuckle the lid of the jar unscrewed. He held the metal disc above the jar, and then gently found a place for it on the desk. He snapped the rubber band free of the paper cup, and in an instant the paper was off and he held his hand over the container.

  The moth fell. The white body with gray wings flew, going nowhere. It stopped, then struggled again, shifting lower in the jar. It dangled, and was free.

  And not free, as quickly, as one strand gripped the creature, and it fought, wrestling, wings fluttering, a loud thrumming that echoed in the glass. The glass resounded with it, chiming with it, a brilliant note in the dim light of the room.

  The gleaming black eye with elegant legs eased across the gauze. It poised over the white and gray body and, imperceptibly moving its legs, was on it, legs wrapping it, body eclipsing it.

  Nothing moved for a long time.

  The black legs felt upward, and touched the twig, finding a place on it to rest. The white cylinder in the filaments shivered, and then did not move at all, held frozen in the air like a thing that had no weight.

  The lid clattered, and Len screwed it tight. “It’s not dead,” he whispered.

  “No?” she heard herself ask.

  “No.” He studied the jar for a moment. “No, it’s only asleep. The fluid has been injected so that it might go to sleep. It’s asleep, now, and it will keep a long time, until the time has come.”

  She said nothing.

  “And when the time has come,” he continued, “it will be as fresh as if it were still fluttering around outside. Fresh, and new. And then, after it has been sucked empty, it will keep forever, a perfect specimen that nothing can damage in any way. Because the fluid saves what it destroys.”

  She forced herself to lay a hand on his shoulder. “This is fascinating,” she began.

  “I knew you would like it,” he whispered. “I kn
ew you would think it was wonderful.”

  “You have done some reading,” she murmured.

  “I have read all about them. I know everything about them, and about all kinds of other things, too.”

  “Don’t you wonder if, in some way, it might be dangerous to have such a thing?”

  He drew away from her. “It’s not dangerous.”

  “It could be, though, don’t you think?”

  He smiled at her indulgently, in a way that froze her. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  “I only want to protect you from being hurt.”

  His eyes searched hers. “No you don’t. You’re afraid.”

  She could not speak.

  “You think you are like the victim. You think you will be captured like that, and put to sleep. But I think I am like the hunter.”

  “It’s a beautiful creature.”

  “It hates light. It wants to be deep inside things, where it can wait without eating for a long time. When we are in the house, talking and moving around, it can hear us. It hears everything.”

  “But it doesn’t understand.”

  “We don’t know what it understands.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. We are people. We have words. An animal that small doesn’t even know about words.”

  “It doesn’t need words.”

  The black abdomen shrank to the top of the jar, and was invisible.

  Mary did not know what to do. She could not bring herself to touch the jar, much less empty its contents anywhere. And she did not want to betray Len. Certainly all boys were interested in things like that. Perhaps he would be a biologist.

  Weeks went by, and every night she knew the creature in the jar was listening to every move she made. She knew that Len spoke to it, confiding things to it, and when she saw Len lurking at a screen, glass in hand, she said nothing.

  One day Len stopped her on the stairs. “I want to show you something,” he said.

  “Really?” she said with brittle cheer.

  She followed him into his bedroom. The jar was already on the desk. Without speaking he unscrewed the lid, and turned the jar over.

  Mary gasped. A black, shriveled thing rolled across the desk. It lay still, a tiny black hand.

  The jar was decorated with moths, several of them suspended in mid-jar. Each one was, as Len had said, perfect. It was the beginning of an impeccable collection.

  “This was bound to happen,” she said.

  “I don’t see why.”

  “It was just going to happen. Eventually, it always does.”

  “I gave it everything it needed.”

  “Of course you did. And I’m sure it was happy.”

  “Naturally I knew that someday this would happen. I am not so ignorant. But I thought it would be years from now. It was so safe here. So secluded. Nothing could hurt it.”

  She touched his hand.

  “Now its victims are more perfect than it is.”

  She expected tears, but there were none. His voice was hard. “You can find another one,” she said.

  “No. I don’t want another one.”

  Relieved, she picked up the jar. The bodies quaked in the web. “We might as well dispose of these.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “And perhaps you would take the remains and put them outside?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me. I thought it was perfect.”

  “Nothing is perfect.”

  He did not answer. He folded the crumpled thing into a piece of paper. “I’ll burn it,” he said.

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “It always wanted to be invisible, so I will make it invisible.”

  “Good.”

  “It told me that darkness was better than light. That light just showed the surface of things, but when it was dark you could see what was really there.”

  He stared at the folded paper in his hand. “It knew all kinds of things it had just begun to tell me.”

  On one of those cool San Francisco evenings, as she sat before a fire arranging roses in a vase, he slipped to her side. “It’s all right,” he said, trembling.

  “What’s all right?” she said, tilting back from the flowers for a better view.

  “I can still hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  “The hunter.”

  Her hand stopped. It drew back slowly from the yellow bud and sank into her lap. “You can?”

  “It’s very distant, and very far away. But I can hear it if I listen very carefully.”

  She tried to smile. “Whatever does he say?”

  “He says he was never really in the jar.”

  “He does?”

  “He says he was somewhere else, and wants me to find him.”

  “Of course, you burned him up.”

  “That wasn’t really him. He says he’s waiting for me somewhere else.”

  “Oh, really?”

  The boy was trembling with excitement. “You don’t believe me.”

  “What does he sound like?” she asked, turning back to her flowers.

  “He sounds like this,” he said. “‘Len. Len. Listen to me.’”

  Mary’s arms were ice. She groped for the pruning shears to have something solid at her touch. The flowers blurred and faded. The fire was gray, without color.

  The boy had spoken in the voice of his grandfather.

  20

  Even Mary had understood that, in a real way, the spirit of her father did not live inside her son. At least, not every hour. She almost understood that it was only at night, and only in her imagination that this was so.

  “Your grandfather is in you,” she would tell him, when she began to see it as a strength. “His powerful spirit is in you, driving you like a powerful engine.” She gradually wanted it to be true.

  Len spoke rarely. Even she noted his profound silence, like a young man listening to commands no one else could hear. But one night she told him about his grandfather’s spirit and how it lived inside him, and he said, “I feel it. When you come to talk to me in the night, I feel him enter me as you step into the room.”

  Except that the next night she felt the soundless call even more powerfully, and entering the room heard him whisper in a voice so like her father’s she could not breathe, “Mary!”

  She would watch the young man take one of his father’s books and sit under a tree, and she would not know anymore what was real. She did not know what she imagined, and what Len imagined. She did not know what powers existed in the house, and in the trees. The city clanged and hummed around them, while in the yard, the secret garden, her son took photographs of birds, and flowers, and studied with tutors she learned to tolerate. The tutors, however, did not enjoy Len’s company.

  “Are you trying to tell me that my son is not intelligent?” she asked one prim young woman.

  “No, I’m not. What I am saying is that it’s impossible to tell.”

  “He is obviously gifted. He built his own darkroom. His photographs are remarkable.”

  “Yes,” said the young woman, with some impatience. “But he never speaks. He never writes. I suppose he can read, and that he has coherent thoughts. But I can’t help him if he never expresses himself.”

  The young woman hesitated, and then added, “He seems to ask about death more than is usual. He asks what it feels like to die. What the dead think about.”

  “I certainly wonder what it’s like. Don’t you?”

  Another hesitation. “From time to time.”

  “Sandy, would you please ask Len to meet us here in the garden.”

  There was a long silence, while the young woman examined her fingernails, which were badly bitten.

  Len appeared soundlessly.

  “This young woman tells me that you have trouble expressing yourself.”

  Len was only a few years younger than his tutor. He was a serious-looking young man with dark hair and pale skin. “I have no trouble,” he said simply.

 
; Mary thought that the interview was finished, but she added, “You must try to be cooperative with these tutors. They are here to help you.”

  Len bowed slightly, an odd formality making him seem, in a strange way, very old. He turned to the young woman and was suddenly charming. “You must forgive me if I seemed uncooperative. I have so many things on my mind.”

  “Of course,” the tutor responded, but she never came back.

  Len went to a college specializing in people who were taciturn but talented, and won awards for photographs of trees in minimal lighting, so that magnolias in the light of a fragment moon took on the look of a nervous system.

  He continued to live at home, but he changed, she could not say exactly when, or how. Gradually she could not see her father in him, but she saw something else. She could not understand what, but she was filled with a hunger to comprehend what she felt she had created.

  “Where do you go?” she would ask.

  A brief smile as he disengaged a wedge of grapefruit. “I take pictures.”

  “You didn’t come in until three last night.”

  “I’m an adult.” Said not petulantly, but simply.

  She tried to keep silent, but found herself speaking. “I worry about you. You never see anyone else. What will happen if I—” She hesitated. “Die.”

  She had intended to say “remarry,” although she had no one in particular in mind.

  He looked up at her, and into her, then looked away. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  She began to say that she was not afraid of him, but she stopped herself.

  She was.

  Every night he would leave just after sunset, and while she knew that many young men went out at night to drink or have sexual liaisons, male or female, she didn’t care which, she sensed that he had tasks to perform. He took complicated photographic equipment, tripods and metal tubes of film that dangled from a belt like ammunition.

  Most of his pictures he displayed openly in his tidy room. Trees, of course. How she came to despise the enigmatic profiles of trees. Eucalyptus, like tall, pale bones. Redwoods, like the fine-boned skeletons of fish. Poplars, leafless, delicate and anatomical, causing a twinge somewhere inside her body.