Unspeakable

by Graham Masterton

  Holly reached over to Daisy's nightstand and plucked out a Kleenex. She dabbed at Daisy's eyes and then said, "Blow. That's better. Now are you going to tell me why you don't want me to go with Ned?"

  "Because of Uncle Mickey. If you like Ned, then you won't go out with Uncle Mickey anymore."

  "I see. You really like Uncle Mickey, huh?"

  Daisy flushed and nodded.

  "I like Uncle Mickey too. But we're not dating or anything like that. We work together, that's all, and I like to think that we're friends, but that's about as far as it goes."

  "You don't have to marry him or anything."

  "Oh, thanks."

  Daisy was almost hurting with the effort to explain what she meant. "It's just that he reminds me of dad. I mean, he doesn'tlooklike dad, but when he's here- when he came to supper and told me that story-hefeltlike dad."

  To her surprise, Holly suddenly found that she had tears in her eyes too. She stroked Daisy's forehead and said, "Yes. Yes, I know what you're saying."

  A Night Visitor

  There was no moon that night and the apartment was intensely dark. Holly lay awake until nearly two-thirty in the morning, watching the red numbers on her bedside alarm clock counting away her life. She had promised Daisy that she would do everything humanly possible not to like Ned, and that even if she did, she would still invite Uncle Mickey round for supper and let him stay to tell her bedtime stories.

  She heard a ship hooting mournfully on the river, and then another, as if they were whales mating.

  She remembered waking up one morning to find David sitting in the white-painted rocker by the bedroom window, his eyes narrowed, looking through the two-inch gap between the blind and the windowsill. He seemed to be waiting.

  "David?" she had asked him. At that instant he had whipped his head sideways, his eyes tightly shut, as if something were flying directly toward his face.

  Six days later he was dead. She often wondered if he had experienced a premonition of what was going to happen to him.

  The bedside clock flicked to 2:33. Holly turned onto her back and stared up into the darkness. This is what it must be like, being blind.

  As she lay there, however, she became aware that there was an even darker darkness, and it appeared to be hovering right over her. It kept shifting its shape, but it looked as if it had outspread wings and was steadying itself in some unfelt updraft.

  The longer she stared at it, the blacker it became, black and ruffled like a monstrous bird. She knew that there was nothing there. How could a giant raven be flying over her bed? Yet, she was sure that she could see it rising and falling and constantly altering its appearance, and she began to feel a chilly dread of what it was going to do to her.

  She carefully reached out with one hand toward the nightstand. She found the cable that led to her bedside lamp and tried to locate the switch. Up above her the dark shape spread wider until it was covering almost the entire ceiling.

  She found the switch, and she was just about to turn on the light when the shapedroppedon her with a rush of feathers and freezing-cold wind. She cried out"Aaahh!"and threw up her hands to protect her face, knocking the lamp onto the floor.

  She waited. Silence. She opened her eyes and gradually lowered her hands. The bedside clock said 2:57. The room was still dark, but she could sense that there was nothing there. She climbed out of bed and groped her way over to the main light switch. When she turned it on, she saw that her sheets were violently twisted, as if she had been fighting, and that the red pottery lamp was broken into three large pieces. David had brought her that lamp from San Francisco.

  She went to the bathroom for a drink of water and stared at herself in the mirror. She hadn't noticed before, but she was beginning to get dark circles under her eyes, as if she were ill or very tired.

  She was still standing there when Daisy appeared.

  "Mommy? I heard something."

  She tried to smile. "That was only me. I was having a bad dream just like you did."

  "It wasn't you."

  Holly turned around and put her hands on Daisy's shoulders. "There's nobody else here, pumpkin. I promise you."

  "It wasn'tinside. It wasoutside,tapping at my window."

  "Honey, we're three stories up. Nothing can tap against your window."

  "It sounded like a bird."

  "A bird? How do you know?"

  "I could hear its wings. It was tapping against the window with its beak and it was flapping its wings too."

  Holly said nothing but bent forward and kissed the top of Daisy's head.

  "It was a bird," Daisy insisted. "It was a bird and it was trying to get in."

  Mirror Lake

  They reached the cabin at Mirror Lake just before noon. The water was so still that it reflected a perfect upside-down world with dark sawtooth pines and scatterings of red-and-yellow maple leaves. The cabin itself was painted a rusty red, with a gray shingle roof and a veranda running the length of it. It stood on a small promontory on the southeastern side of the lake, next to a sagging wooden jetty where an old green rowboat was tied up.

  Doug climbed out of the Voyager and stretched. He was wearing a logger's jacket in orange and brown check, with a lamb's-wool collar and a cap to match. "Smell that ozone!Haaahh!Smell that pine!Haaahhh!"

  Katie wore a bulky maroon sweater with elks on it and a knitted hat pulled down low over her forehead, so that she looked like an affluent bag lady. "I thought Ned would be here by now. He only had to drive up from Government Camp. I hope he'scoming."

  Holly walked to the very edge of the lake. She was wearing black: a black windcheater with a fur hood, black jeans, and black leather boots. Although her world was always silent, she could almostfeelthe silence here. Beyond the lake, above the treeline, Mount Hood loomed, only three and a half miles away, ghostly and grand.

  This close, the mountain's gravity was overwhelming, even though its whiteness made it almost invisible. She felt as if it were pulling her toward her destiny with a greater force than ever before.

  "What do you think?" asked Doug, joining her at the lakeside.

  "It's beautiful. So peaceful."

  "You should be here when the geese are mating. It's like a traffic snarl."

  Katie called, "Are you going to give me a hand with the shopping, Doug?"

  "Sure thing. Did you remember the pickles?"

  "I sure did. I bought some of those Rocotillo peppers you like too."

  Doug was silent for a moment, and then he said, "My grandfather built this place. He used to say that you could stand by this lake and talk to God."

  They carried their bags into the cabin. It was chilly inside, and musty, but as soon as he had taken his case to his bedroom, Doug took the fire screen away from the gray stone hearth and started to build a fire. Katie led Holly through to a small bedroom at the back, with pine furniture, a hand-sewn quilt on the bed, and a view of an overgrown yard, with bracken and rusty-colored ragwort.

  On the wall hung a small oil painting of a woman standing in a field. She was wearing a blue apron and a bemused smile, as if she couldn't understand why anybody would think that she was interesting enough to paint. Not far away from her, perched on a single fence post, was a large black bird with ruffled feathers.

  Holly went through to the kitchen, where Katie was unpacking the shopping. "We'll go down to Lyman's Hotel for lunch; you'll love it. But this evening I'm going to cook my famouschuletas veracruzana."

  In the living room, Doug had already got a good fire crackling. The living room had a high ceiling with exposed rafters and was furnished with big, comfortable couches upholstered in flowery chintz. The rafters were hung with copper pots and pans, and all around the walls there were glass cases containing stuffed fish: salmon, trout, steelhead, and sturgeon.

  "My grandfather was mad for fishing," said Doug. "See that baby at the far end? That sturgeon? That weighed nearly fifty pounds."

  Suddenly he lifted his finger. "That'll be
Ned."

  He opened the front door and Holly saw a bronze Land Cruiser parked next to Doug's Voyager. Katie came out of the kitchen and said, "You're going to like this guy, I promise you."

  "What did I say?" Holly retorted. "No matchmaking, if you don't mind."

  "How about a beer? Come on, I know it's a little early, but this is our weekend off."

  "Sure, I'll have a beer."

  Doug came back into the cabin, closely followed by Ned.Well,thought Holly,at least he isn't a short, pudgy guy with a comb-over.In fact he was tall and broad-shouldered, with wavy reddish-blond hair and clear caramel-colored eyes and a square, suntanned face that put Holly in mind of Robert Redford but thirty years younger and with a much thicker neck. He was wearing a navy sports coat, a blue-checkered shirt, and Armani jeans.

  "Holly, this is Ned Fiedler. Ned, I'd like you to meet Holly."

  Ned nodded and grinned. Then he made both of his hands into Y shapes and made a pulling-apart gesture, after which he pointed directly at Holly and made a circular gesture over his head.

  Holly smiled. "I'm sorry I lip-read but I don't sign. Signing has a totally different grammar, and I never needed to learn it."

  Ned flushed. He looked helplessly at Doug and said, "What do I do now?"

  "Youtalk,that's all," said Holly. "So long as I can see your lips, I can tell what you're saying. And thanks for trying to learn some ASL . That was very considerate of you."

  "Was I any good at it?"

  "Well, I think you just about managed to say 'How you, big hat?'"

  Katie came out of the kitchen with four bottles of Portland Ale. "We're real glad you could make it, Ned. I've been trying to persuade Holly to have a weekend off since Labor Day."

  Ned raised his bottle to Holly and said, "I'm glad I could make it too. Here's to us, and here's to having a great time."

  "To us," they chorused. "And to having a great time."

  Ned Gets Serious

  They went for lunch to Lyman's, a picturesque redbrick hotel built in 1905 and surrounded by larches. It stood on a promontory overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, and through the windows of the old-fashioned saloon bar they could see the river shining as it ran between the hazy, sun-gilded mountains. The water was wide here, and it was crisscrossed with the multicolored sails of sailboards, reds and yellows and blues.

  "You ever tried windsurfing?" Ned asked Holly. "Amazing sport. Really amazing. And this is the best place in the whole darn world to do it. You got your strong, steady winds, anything between fifteen to thirty-five miles an hour, and at the same time you've got your strong opposing currents."

  "I'm more into cycling. Well, I have a little girl and most weekends we take our bikes around Forest Park."

  "A little girl, huh? How old?"

  "She was eight in May. She's very good company."

  "You ought to bring her along with you one weekend. I could teach her how to windsurf. You, too, if you like."

  "That sounds exciting."

  "Oh, believe me."

  There was a long silence while Holly picked at her grilled chicken salad with smoky mayonnaise, and Doug made a spectacular mess of his Dungeness crab baguette, dropping lumps of crabmeat onto the tablecloth.

  "Doug was raised by warthogs," said Katie. "That's why he eats like that."

  "Hey, I enjoy my food," Doug protested. "Irelishit, unlike you. I like to get physically involved with it."

  "So does the front of your sweater."

  They drank another toast. Doug put his hand in front of his mouth to suppress a burp, and then there was another long silence. Eventually, Holly said, "So, Ned wood pulp."

  He gave her what he obviously believed was a winning smile. "That's right. Wood pulp. Fascinating business, wood pulp."

  "What is it you actually do?"

  "I'm senior exec in charge of recycling. That means making the best use of residual fiber and other waste materials."

  "Oh, right."

  He put down his fork, with a neatly cut square of steak still on the end of it. "You see, not many people realize this, but there are all kinds of different waste materials. There'spreconsumer waste, which is leftover scrap generated in the paper-and box-manufacturing process. That's what we call 'clean' waste. Then there'spostconsumer waste, which is articles that have been used for their intended purpose and are ready to be discarded, such as OCC."

  Holly looked blank.

  "Sorry-that's short forold corrugated containers."

  "I see."

  Ned leaned closer. There was a shred of steak caught between his two front teeth. "Recycling is far more important than biodegradability, because very few items are actually biodegradable with current landfill practices. What I aim to do, Holly, is to capture used itemsbeforethey reach the landfill and put them to their best possible use."

  "You make it sound like a mission."

  "Itisa mission, Holly. You're right. At Hood River Forestry Industries, we consider it our duty to keep Oregon's forests protected and sustained, for the future of our children and our children's children."

  "Andtheirchildren, too, I'll bet," added Doug. "And their children's children's children."

  Katie nudged him and said, "How many beers have you had?"

  Ned kept on smiling with those clear caramel eyes, and Holly did her best not to stare at the shred of steak.

  "You ought to get Holly to tell you about her lipreading," said Doug as they finished their raisin ice creams. "She's so good that she can even tell what part of the state a person was raised in."

  "It's nothing," said Holly, embarrassed. "It's a knack, that's all."

  "Doesn't sound like nothing to me," said Ned. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs in his neatly pressed jeans. "Can you tell me what part of the stateIwas raised in?"

  Holly hesitated but Doug said, "Go on, Holly. Tell him."

  "I don't think so, really."

  "Oh, come on," Ned coaxed her. "I've got twenty dollars that says you get it wrong."

  Holly said, "Okay, it's a bet. Actually, you weren't raised in Oregon at all. Or at least your parents weren't."

  "I wasn't?"

  "No. Your accent is more like northeast Minnesota or northwest Wisconsin. Within a two-hundred-mile radius of Duluth, anyhow. Also, you twice used the wordsawbuckwhen you were talking about cutting wood, whereas in Oregon they tend to usebuckstandorbuck-horse."

  Ned turned to Doug and said, "Did you tell her that?"

  Doug grinned and shook his head.

  "You're sure? That isamazing. That is an absolutely amazing talent. My father started a lumber company in Babbitt, Minnesota, and I lived in Minnesota until I was seventeen. Then my father's company was taken over by North Minnesota Timber, and I was offered a job with Hood River. Amazing. And how did you know that stuff about sawbucks?"

  "I make a study of it-you know, local and colloquial phrases. It helps me to tell where somebody's from and what kind of person they are. You know, white-or blue-collar, city or country."

  "She does it for the Portland Police Bureau," said Doug proudly. "She's the only court-accredited lipreader in Oregon."

  Holly said, "Doug " She didn't like anybody to know about her police work. Obviously she had been obliged to take Doug and Katie into her confidence, because of the erratic times that she needed to take off from the Children's Welfare Department. But for her own protection she didn't want murderers and drug dealers and sexual perverts finding out whose evidence it was that had sent them to jail.

  But Doug plowed on. "Only yesterday she was lipreading this guy who's going to have somebody's wife murdered. Can you believe that? There he was, in the Compass Hotel, arranging to have this woman killed like he's ordering lunch."

  "That's amazing," said Ned. "You just don't realize what's going on all around you, do you, unless you know where to look."

  "Doug," warned Holly. Then, to Ned, "You don't want to believe everything Doug says, especially after five beers."

  "No,
no, I haven't told you the best bit," said Doug. "The best bit is, this guy was talking about how they're going to dispose of this woman's body once they've killed her."

  "Really? What were they going to do?"

  "Doug!" snapped Holly, and Katie shook his arm and said, "For God's sake, Doug, it isn't funny."

  "Of course it's funny. They're going to give the body to a guy they know in the wood-pulp business. Thewood-pulpbusiness! They're going to mush her up and turn her into cardboard boxes. So who's our number-one suspect?"