Hard Rain

by Peter Abrahams

  He was still looking at this long, narrow scene when he heard more car sounds, again from the north; but these grew louder instead of fading away, and so rapidly that he barely had time to step into the shadows before the car itself appeared, flashing by at enormous speed. But it was a van, not the kind of car he was looking for, and it was out of sight in seconds, leaving behind three or four notes from a car stereo, bent once by musicians, bent again by the Doppler effect, and a glimpse of painted flames.

  Zyzmchuk returned to his room, splashed cold water on his face and dressed. As he was tying his shoes, he heard another car go by, also very fast, also headed south. It had disappeared by the time he went outside. He didn’t give it much thought: the sound of the dark-haired woman driving off must have awakened him. He got into his own car and drove north.

  On the other side of Zyzmchuk’s windshield, an all-black world glided by. The sky was blackest, next the strip of road, finally the fields and trees on both sides, shading almost into gray. He hit ninety miles an hour as he crossed the state line, leaning over the wheel, searching for two red dots in the blackness. But they never appeared. Zyzmchuk drove into Bennington, turned around and went back to the 1826 House. The lights in room 19 were still on; the open suitcase with the red sweater still visible through the parting in the curtains. Zyzmchuk entered his own room, undressed and went back to bed. There was nothing else to do.

  But he couldn’t sleep.

  It wasn’t just a matter of eyelids determined to spring open; the little outing had stimulated his heart. It had pumped fresh blood through his arteries, waking him fully.

  3:10.

  Zyzmchuk lay impatiently in bed until four, listening for cars, and when none came, hoping his body would slow down. Then he gave up, put on his sweats and his J. C. Penney sneakers and went out. Roadwork.

  Zyzmchuk set off toward the campus. He hadn’t gone a mile before he realized the falsity of this nighttime surge of energy. In the back of his mind, he had known he would pay for his lack of sleep; he hadn’t known the payment would be demanded so soon. Now, as he pounded past the music building, with its hulking shadow of the steel guitarist, he faltered. Faster, he willed himself, as he had many times in the past; he knew his body—sometimes it had to be driven, that’s all, but once it reached the plateau, it remained there. Faster. Faster. Push. But this time, and it was the first time in his life, his legs, thick, strong, powerful, did not obey. He ran on, but pounding slowed to plodding, slowed still more. Zyzmchuk stopped and sat down, resting his back against the cold steel guitarist. He wasn’t at all winded, didn’t ache anywhere, yet knew he couldn’t go on. He pressed his thigh with his fingers, as though examining a strange object: it seemed, as always, full of muscle. But when he got up and tried again to run, the same thing happened.

  Zyzmchuk walked slowly across the campus, still feeling the cold steel at his back and absorbing the implication, immense yet mundane: you’re going to be fifty-seven in a few weeks. This is what it means.

  Zyzmchuk walked past the music building, down stone steps and around a square brick structure that had the look of a dormitory. He crossed the lawn and came to a street, quiet and still. A van was parked by the curb—a black van with a flash of red on the side, possibly the van that had sped by the 1826 House a few hours before. Zyzmchuk stared at the van for a minute or two before he realized that he knew the car parked right behind it.

  Zyzmchuk looked around. He scanned the façade of the dormitory, noted lights shining in the stairwells but not the rooms; saw a closed hatch cover on the lawn, poked it lightly with his foot; then, walking away, stepped on something hard: a broken lock.

  A moment later, Zyzmchuk had the hatch cover open and was peering down a dark hole. His powerful flashlight lay in the toolbox at the motel. He considered going back for it, but first checked the cars parked on the street. Few of the drivers had bothered to lock their doors. Zyzmchuk found a book of matches on the dashboard of the fifth car he tried.

  He struck a match at the mouth of the hole. Flickering yellow reflections marched down the shiny rungs of a steel ladder. Zyzmchuk followed them.

  At the bottom he lit another match and examined the floor. Many feet had left prints in the moist earth; one set, much smaller than the rest, was bare.

  The match went out. Zyzmchuk didn’t bother to light another. He patted the brick wall on either side of the ladder, finding, as he’d thought he would, a switch. He flicked it; a bulb flashed on over his head, and others, every thirty feet or so, casting yellowish pools that didn’t quite meet but provided adequate illumination down a long tunnel.

  Zyzmchuk went forward. He moved quickly, aware of wires and cables, dripping water and fetid smells, all expected, all instantly ignored. He was looking for something else, although he couldn’t name it: he’d know it when he saw it.

  The tunnel divided. Zyzmchuk knelt, studied the floor. Footprints pointed back and forth at the entrances to both halves, but the freshest prints lay to the right. There were four sets of these: the first made by a man in leather shoes, the kind businessmen wear; the second by another man, heavier than the first, who wore waffle-soled shoes and might have been limping; the third by a woman in some sort of sensible shoes, loafers perhaps; and the fourth, not really a set, but a single print left by a small bare heel. Zyzmchuk followed them, not because they meant anything to him, but because they were the freshest.

  A few minutes later, he found that the tracks led to a low, padlocked door in the left-hand wall. Zyzmchuk tugged at the lock, testing the possibility of ripping the hasp out of the wood. The door, and the frame, swung open.

  Zyzmchuk crawled through. He was in another tunnel, more dimly lit than the main one. He kept going. Cobwebs swept through his hair, stuck to his face; he didn’t pause to wipe them away. He was hurrying now, although he couldn’t have explained why.

  Space opened around him. Zyzmchuk found himself in a round, rock-walled chamber with a higher ceiling, but not quite high enough for him to stand upright. Lying in the dust in front of him was a U.S. passport.

  Zyzmchuk opened it. He saw a photograph of a man he didn’t know and a name: Gerald Brenner. He leafed through the pages. There were many stamps in Gerald Brenner’s passport, too many to examine now.

  Zyzmchuk rose, stooping, and examined painted walls, a bed and the entrance to another tunnel, over which he read: “I Kill Therefore I Am.”

  A perversion of Descartes’s aphorism; beyond that, it meant nothing to him. Probably it represented some undergraduate joke; still, he quickened his pace even more as he entered the tunnel. But he had to slow down almost immediately: the tunnel was unlit. Glass crunched under his shoes. He stopped and lit a match. A broken light bulb lay at his feet. And a few yards ahead, the tunnel floor disappeared abruptly in a void.

  Zyzmchuk moved to the edge and spun the match into the blackness. Before it went out, he glimpsed another steel ladder, leading ten or twelve feet straight down, and the continuation of the tunnel at a lower level.

  Zyzmchuk climbed down the ladder, lit another match. To one side of the ladder was a cracked wooden door, sagging on its hinges. He thought for the first time of his gun, locked in the safe in his apartment, as he pushed the door open.

  It led to a small, dusty storage room. In the flickering match light, Zyzmchuk saw another smashed light bulb, broken furniture in crooked stacks, moldy cardboard boxes, littered fast-food wrappers and soft drink cans. One of the wrappers contained a half-eaten hamburger with onions and ketchup.

  Zyzmchuk sniffed it—not at all spoiled—and moved farther into the room. A couch stood against the side wall, in reversed position, its high back facing the room. He held the match over it and found the dark-haired woman, supine on the other side, her sweater drawn up around her neck.

  Zyzmchuk pulled the couch away from the wall, quickly but gently, and knelt by the woman’s head. Blood, glistening deep red in the feeble match light, had soaked her hair, still seeped through it on
to torn and dirty cushions. Zyzmchuk touched her throat. The skin was cool and dry; a slow, heavy pulse beat beneath it. Lowering his head to hers, he felt her breath on his face. Warm breath. It smelled of nothing. Perhaps blood.

  Jessie Shapiro. Or Jessie Rodney. She breathed on his face two or three more times. He pulled the sweater down over her breasts.

  He spoke her name. “Jessie? Jessie?”

  There was no answer. Her eyes, he saw as the match went out, remained closed. Long lashes curled in the yellow-brown light, then vanished.

  Zyzmchuk lit another match, his last, and examined her head. The wound was over her right ear, not deep but long and jagged. He had nothing clean to cover it with. His clothes were dirty from the tunnel, so were hers. All he could do was wipe his hands together hard in the hope of rubbing away the dirt and then lay one of them on the wound. He applied pressure.

  The dark-haired woman’s blood wet Zyzmchuk’s palm, seeped through his fingers. He sat on the couch, rested her head on his lap and pressed harder. Time passed in black silence. Her blood stopped flowing.

  “Jessie?”

  No reply.

  No, he thought, reaching for her throat. But she wasn’t dead: he felt the even pulse, stronger than before, felt her breath on his face. He ran his hand over her body, searching for more wounds, or signs of internal damage. He found none.

  Then Ivan Zyzmchuk lifted Jessie Shapiro in his arms and took her out of the storage room. He knew at once he’d have no trouble carrying her out of the tunnels, or much farther if he had to. His fatigue was forgotten. He didn’t feel her weight at all.

  29

  The sound of crying played like background music in her sleep. It seemed, as before, to float up from somewhere below, but not, this time, from the bottomless depths of a flooded basement. This time, she knew even without investigating, the crying came twisting up through endless black tunnels.

  That was one difference.

  The other was that the crier was no longer Kate, but herself. And the words she cried were, “Daddy, Daddy.”

  When it became unbearable, Jessie opened her eyes.

  Silence. The room was thick with silence. It had the consistency of honey. Honey filled her ears, her head, formed a thin film over her eyes.

  The room was her motel room. She recognized the floral curtains, the beige carpet, the TV where the white-suited preacher had pranced. Someone had rearranged the furniture, that was all. Oh yes, and removed the fireplace.

  That and her suitcase. It was gone, too.

  Jessie sat up. Up, up snapped her head, like something at the end of a rubber band. The room tilted and started whirling. Jessie fell back on the pillows.

  The whirling slowed and stopped. The room righted itself. Honey flowed from her mind, as though a plug had been pulled. Memories flooded in. Jessie put her hand to her head and felt gauze bandages.

  She tried sitting up again. This time she did it without unhinging the room. She shifted her legs to the side of the bed, pushed back the blankets. Every movement required great effort. She’d put on weight. Three or four hundred pounds.

  Jessie lowered her feet to the floor and paused to gather her strength. After a while she gave up and took her chances at standing without it. There. Up. Not so tough. The room tilted again, but quickly settled back into place—just showing her it still had the power.

  Jessie took a step. She instantly lost the three or four hundred pounds and grew several feet. That made walking a challenge—like stilts, only not so much fun. She moved her other foot and swayed like a sapling in the breeze. First one way, then the other. But soon she started to get the hang of it. In only two or three minutes, she went all the way to the bathroom.

  Jessie looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t like what she saw. It wasn’t just the pale skin, the purple pockets under the eyes and the white bandage wrapped like a turban that bothered her. It was the expression in the eyes themselves, an expression of fear and worse, much worse, helplessness too. The kind of look a woman couldn’t show to the world, the kind of look Barbara hated. Could a bang on the head do all that?

  Jessie turned away.

  Maybe a bath would make her feel better; maybe a bath would wash that expression from her eyes. She reached for the taps and noticed for the first time that she was wearing a terry cloth robe. A nice robe—soft, clean, comfortable, but not hers. It was cut for a much bigger person, perhaps for the same person whose shaving kit lay beside the sink.

  Jessie looked in it: A Bic razor, a hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste. A Spartan kit, not at all like Pat’s, or Philip’s, bulging with grooming supplies. That was mildly interesting observation number one. Mildly interesting observation number two was that her own toilet bag wasn’t there.

  Jessie sat on the edge of the tub. She considered her options. Call the motel manager. Call Buddy Boucher. Draw a bath. She was still considering them when a key turned in the lock and the front door opened.

  Jessie rose, still shaky, and took the Bic razor from the shaving kit. She moved to the bathroom door.

  A man was standing in the main room: a big man in corduroys and a fisherman’s sweater, with iron-gray hair, cut very short. She knew right away that the razor wouldn’t be much of a weapon against him.

  He was watching her. If he noticed the razor, held up in her right hand as though it possessed the threatening power of a gun or a knife, he gave no sign.

  He said, “Where’s the nurse?”

  He didn’t speak loudly, but his voice carried effortlessly, as though from thick, long vocal cords, connected to something deep inside.

  “Nurse?” Jessie said.

  The man turned, opened the door, looked outside. A pouter pigeon-chested woman was ambling across the parking lot; she wore a white dress and carried a white styrofoam cup.

  “Hiya,” she said to the man as she came in. “Just nipped out for coffee.”

  “Nip on,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You can go now,” he told her.

  The nurse’s face tilted up belligerently; from that angle, she had a good view of the look in his eye and reconsidered whatever retort she had in mind. “I was only gone five minutes,” she said instead.

  The man nodded; at the same time he held the door for her. The discussion was over. The nurse’s mouth opened. It closed. She went out.

  The man turned to Jessie. They looked at each other. Jessie thought of saying, “Who are you?” The question sounded stupid in her mind. She left it unsaid.

  But he answered it anyway. “My name’s—” he said; there followed a word beginning with Z; two or three strange syllables she didn’t catch.

  “And what … what do you want?” Jessie asked.

  “Just checking up,” the man said.

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “No. He’s at the infirmary.”

  “What’s wrong with my head.”

  “Slight concussion. And a cut. He stitched it up.” The man’s gaze shifted to the turban. He frowned. “Not as neatly as some.” A look must have appeared on her face; the man saw it and quickly added, “But he got the job done, and nothing will show, when your hair grows back.”

  “Great,” Jessie said. Her hand moved involuntarily toward the back of her head.

  “Careful,” said the man, “with that razor.”

  Jessie lowered her hand, stuck the razor in the pocket of the terry cloth robe. “How many stitches did I get?”

  “Not too many. Twenty-five or thirty, I think.”

  The room wobbled slightly, as if about to go into the tilting routine.

  “Are you all right?” the man asked.

  “Fine, thank you,” Jessie said, a little icily, to counter any helplessness he might see in her eyes.

  “You’re welcome,” said the man. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  “I like standing.”

  Jessie watched him watching her. He had gray eyes to match his iron-gray hair. Was there something fam
iliar about him? “Are you with Mr. Mickey?” she said. The words were out before she’d given them any thought.

  “Mr. Mickey?”

  “Or it might be his first name. I don’t really know.”

  If Z-man thought these remarks nonsensical, he didn’t let it show. “Why would I be with him?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It was just a thought.” Maybe the two men were connected in her mind by their size and the strength they exuded; this man was not as tall as Mr. Mickey, but much broader.

  “A thought springing from what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying, exactly.” The man’s expression, until now neutral, shaded toward the unfriendly, without any physical change Jessie could identify. “Who are you?” she asked, this time aloud.

  “I told you my name.”

  “I didn’t catch it.”

  “My name doesn’t matter.” There was a pause. Then the man said, “I think I’ll sit, even if you don’t.”

  “Make yourself at home.”

  “Why not? It’s my room.”

  He sat in the soft chair on the other side of the bed. His movements were easy and economical; they might have been called graceful in a smaller man.

  “And this is your robe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are my things?”

  “Next door. In your room.”

  Jessie opened her mouth to say something, stopped herself.

  “Go on,” said the man.

  “I—I’m a little confused, that’s all.”

  He nodded. “A blow on the head will do that,” he said and in the same relaxed tone, added, “Who gave it to you?”

  “I—how did you know it was a blow?”

  “A glancing one,” the man said. “But with something heavy. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Is that what the doctor said?”

  The man shook his head. “He thinks you hurt yourself in a fall.”