Hollander met me at the bar when I took my place beside the register. The seats atop their black swivels were higher-backed than usual, comfortably padded, with armrests that more rightly belonged to club chairs and lounges. I settled in, Sandy raised an eyebrow at me and I shrugged; Grace, all blonde and willows and green-eyed Irish, sat on my left with an exaggerated sigh.
“Charming,” she whispered, her lips so close to my ear I could feel her breath. The world was of the opinion we would marry someday.
“Jealous,” I said.
Hollander laughed, a little too loudly and I looked to him quickly. Though he was turned toward me and fingering his bow tie, he was watching the corner intently. The look was there; he was already thinking of how to be a rival.
“You know her?” I asked.
“No,” he said. It sounded as if he were choking. “Lovely, isn’t she?”
“I’ve seen better,” Grace said, and slid out of her seat. Her hand lingered on my forearm and I patted it absently.
“No,” Hollander told her as she made her way to a side table.
“No, no better, Thomas.”
“Well, maybe she is lovely,” I said, “but did you catch the way she was holding that kid’s hand? Any tighter and it would have fallen off.”
Hollander glared at me, startling me so much I leaned back and grabbed for the bar’s leather padding. “You know what your problem is, Tom? Do you ever think about your problem? You spend too much time in here, that’s what. You still think like a cop. And you don’t pay any attention to what’s going on outside there. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps that little girl did something terribly wrong outside and was being punished? Or perhaps she and her mother had an argument of some kind?”
It hadn’t occurred to me, but neither did I think it likely. Either that, or Elizabeth Corey was the best actress in the world . . . and the child a close second.
“Listen, Paul,” I said, ready to make amends for whatever it was I’d done wrong, “I just happen to have here a new deck of cards. Never before touched by human hands. What do you say we deal our Friday hand and see—”
“No,” Paul said. He dropped a bill on my hand and walked away, angling toward Stephenson and the company he was drawing. I looked to Sandy for a reaction, and some support, but he too was captured by the web spinning over there; and as I glanced around the room I noticed that no one else—or rather, none that I could see—seemed to be as taken by the Coreys as were me and my friends.
Paul reached the table, turned around and scowled, turned back and sat when Rex pulled out a chair. I suppose I should have gotten angry, or at least showed some emotion, but I couldn’t. I had done too much of that patrolling the Station’s streets, gotten too involved in too many people’s problems, people whose lives then drifted away from me once business was done and I was a uniform again. So I had taught myself to swallow it, crush it, until I was sure I wouldn’t be drowned again . . . and left to drift. Maudlin, self-pitying—I know all that, but it had served me quite well thus far, and I saw no reason to change now. No reason, that is, except perhaps Grace.
Elizabeth Corey.
That feeling of loneliness dissipated slowly, but what was left was an uneasiness I told myself was nerves—a worrying for Rex, and maybe just a bit of wistful, wishful thinking.
By the end of the evening Grace had had enough of Rex’s bellowings for champagne, and enough of the small party swirling over there in the corner. She rested next to me, pulling at the dark ribbon that held her hair from her face. We said nothing to each other, only bantered with Sandy, who was preparing to close down. Customers left, bills were paid and the party continued. I started for it once to give it an end, but Grace touched me on the elbow and slowly shook her head. In a way she was right: the sight of Rex laughing like that, hearing his voice raised in something other than melodramatic fury, was well worth hanging on to for as long as we could. So midnight passed, and one, and finally there were only the three of them, and the three of us. And Rex at last bowed low at the waist, nearly struck his nose on the table, and Elizabeth and the child took him away.
Not once did they glance in our direction.
Not once had I heard the woman speak, or the child giggle or laugh.
“Enough, by god,” Sandy said. He rolled his apron ceremoniously and tucked it under his arm like a swagger stick. Nodded. Departed. Grace slipped into a light sweater and kissed me on the cheek.
“Don’t take it so hard,” she said, ruffling my hair because she knew how I hated it. “Friends do get married now and then, you know.”
Righteous was the last to leave. He said nothing to me, only grumbled to himself, switched off the kitchen lights and used the rear exit.
Quiet; a deafening sound once filled with chatter, and I almost switched on the radio to keep me company. Instead, I wasted some time straightening a tablecloth here, a lampshade there. tying back the curtains and turning off the outside lights. Then I stared out at the road, at the occasional truck that muttered by, the once-in-a-while automobile that slowed until it realized the Cock’s Crow was closed.
The air conditioning was off, and perspiration began gathering down my spine. I stepped outside to breathe, and thought of what Grace had said. Marriage, however, hadn’t entered my mind, but I guess somewhere back there I knew it was inevitable. Rex was too much the poseur to escape such a challenging role.
With hands in my pockets, then, I strolled around the corner of the building, thinking that I was probably just as ridiculous a figure as my friend. I kicked at a pebble, a stone . . . and stopped, lifting my head as if someone had called me. Paul can deride my former profession all he wants, but something halted me then. Yet, when I turned around suddenly and stared at the wall of woodland on the other side of the road, there was nothing. No sound, no movement, not a hint of anything wrong.
I looked back at the cottage, at the porch light, at my bedroom window above.
I looked at the Cock’s Crow.
And without knowing why—and hating myself for it—I wished aloud Grace had stayed with me, and Elizabeth Corey was dead.
A week passed that was unusual only in that it was virtually uneventful. I did not see either Rex or Paul again, nor did I see the woman and her child those times when I was in town to do some shopping. I was tempted to call, but talked myself out of it each time with the admonition that Rex was a big boy now, that I was only feeling depressed last Friday and thus open to all sorts of unpleasant sensations, and if I didn’t mind my own business I would probably be slugged.
Friday night, however, Rex didn’t show for his comer display.
And on Saturday morning a sacrosanction was violated: I had two phone calls well before noon. Normally, I did not bother to even look at the receiver since all my friends knew better than to ruin my sleeping late. It was a luxury I permitted myself because, in spite of the roadhouse’s success, I was not about to let it guide me into an early grave. It was my place to enjoy, not to have it run me; and to enjoy it I opened late on Saturdays; four o’clock, in fact. That gave me enough time to test my pillow for defects, to take rides in my Hudson or read in the library or, as I’d planned for today, walk over to the park and listen to the concert.
Either a salesman or an emergency, I decided, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and scowling at the floor. I sat on the edge of the bed and yawned. The phone continued to ring. No salesman was that persistent, I thought miserably.
It was Paul; and though I could detect no panic or hysteria in his voice, there was a tone there I could not identify, one that made him sound distant, sound odd.
“Hey, about last Friday night,” he said, “I . . . Well, my nephew—you may know him, Frank Blaine—he was called up on Wednesday, I’m sure he’s going to be sent over, you see, and he’s really all the family I have left. I . . . I suppose I was—”
“Don’t worry about it, Paul.” Still groggy, I sucked at my teeth to get rid of the cotton growing there.
/> There was a pause, then, that set me wondering.
“Ah . . . Tom?”
“Still here, though you obviously haven’t looked at your clock in the last hour or so.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t mention it.” I grinned at the opposite wall. Paul could be made to feel guilty about the sun rising or Truman’s language.
“Say, you remember that woman Rex is going to marry? Elizabeth, I think her name is.”
I stuck my tongue out at the mouthpiece, kept my voice flat. “I remember her. What’s the matter?”
“I don’t think she wants to marry him.”
Finally I was awake, and whatever charity I’d been feeling had been replaced by sullen curiosity. “What? What makes you say a thing like that?”
His voice lowered even more, and I found myself leaning forward as though he were in the same room and whispering behind a hand. “Because I know, that’s how I know.”
“And that doesn’t make a damned bit of sense, Paul. Come on, what gives?”
“Tom, I really don’t know what to say. That is, I do know, but I don’t know how it’s going to sound, we being friends together and all. It’s . . . I just don’t know. How to say it, that is.”
I warned him with a growl that may have been his name.
“All right, all right! I don’t think so . . . I don’t think so, Tom, because she’s here, with me, now.”
I looked up at the wall over my chest of drawers, at the framed picture of my folks in front of their Colorado home, at the aerial photograph of Manhattan I had cut from an old Look because of the lights that reminded me too much of stars. “What do you mean,” I said as slowly as I could, “she’s there now.”
“Just what I said,” he told me, confidence somewhat returned.
“When I got up—you know I’m an early riser, matter of habit—when I got up and went out for the paper she was standing on the porch with the kid. And Tom . . . she has a black eye.”
“Who’s got a black eye?”
“Elizabeth.”
I rubbed a hand hard over my face, through my hair, over my thighs until they reddened. “How?”
“She says Rex gave it to her.”
Immediately, I recognized what was wrong with the teacher’s voice: there was a suppressed rage there, a subterranean boiling looking for the crack that would free it in explosion. In twelve years of knowing him, I’d never heard it before.
“That’s not right,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Damnit, you know him, Paul” you know him as well as I do. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, he even hates the zoo. And you can’t blame it on drinking: he falls asleep when he gets drunk, for god’s sake. Strike a woman? Elizabeth? Forget it. That’s wrong. It’s not true.”
“Elizabeth doesn’t lie.”
“What does the kid say?”
“Nothing. She’s sitting by her mother now, just holding her hand and . . . I . . . oh my god, Tom, what am I going to do?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly to the panic in the question. I swallowed, waited, listened to him breathe. “Fix the eye best you can, give them something to eat. Then, when you’ve calmed down, give Rex a call and find out the truth. Good god, Paul, I’m not your father, you know.”
The rage was back, its direction altered. “You really are a cold fish, aren’t you, Tom,” he said quietly, and rang off before I could reply.
There was no sense in trying to sleep again, so I pushed myself from the bed, disgruntled and grumbling, and took a dissatisfying shower. The day’s heat was already crawling into the shadows, the dim light made by the drawn curtains and shades, and I had almost written off my friend’s queer behavior to heatstroke or worse when the telephone rang again. I hoped it was Rex. I had tried his place twice before heading for the bathroom, and there’d been no answer. I wasn’t surprised; knowing him, he was probably garbed in sackcloth and out looking for Miss Corey, lumbering through the street like a lost bear in search of honey.
I was right. “Thomas, I—”
“Where the hell have you been?” I snapped. “I’ve been trying to get you all morning.”
He did not answer immediately, and I could bring to mind no image of him standing in the hallway of that white elephant he’d inherited. And that was curious; usually, I could tell from his tone what posture he had taken. Now, however, there was only a moment’s silence and an odd hissing on the line—or, rather, in the background, sounding through his home.
“Rex?”
“Thomas, she’s gone.”
“Yes, I know. Paul just called me in a hell of a panic. She’s gone over there, was there when he got up this morning.” I waited. “Rex, what happened?”
“She’s gone, Thomas.”
“I know, Rex. Just tell me what happened, all right? Paul says she has a black eye. She claims you gave it to her.”
“I want her back, Thomas. I need her.”
I took a deep breath and held it, released it slowly. Patience was what I needed now. He wasn’t whining or threatening; it was, more than anything, supplication. And it frightened me.
“Listen,” I said, “we’ll take care of it, Rex, don’t worry. But first I have to know if you really—”
“Thomas, what’s it doing over there?”
Over here? It was just over two miles from the roadhouse to Stephenson’s home; whatever it was doing here it was doing over there. “It’s baking, Rex, the same as it’s been for the last week. I would fry an egg on the parking lot, but Righteous would quit because I was moving in on his territory.”
“No,” he said.
“I know that,” I said, unable to conceal a small swell of disgust. “I was just kidding, for god’s sake.”
“I mean, you’ve looked outside already today, haven’t you? It’s raining, isn’t it?”
I blinked, but pulled aside the shade just in case. The sun was white, the colors bleached. As far as I could tell, the nearest clouds were in Canada. “No,” I said. “Rex, what’s going on?”
“It’s raining,” he insisted. “There’s thunder, the gutters are stopped up, I can smell ozone from the lightning.”
“Rex, listen to me, friend—there is no rain. There is no thunder. It’s hot out there.”
I heard him catch his breath, the background hissing muffled as if he’d placed the receiver against his chest. Then a scratching, a labored sound. A scuffling as though he were walking around the foyer to the limit of the phone’s cord. I said nothing because he obviously wasn’t listening—either to me or to himself; I would have to wait until he calmed, so I could get through to him without shouting.
“Thomas?”
He sounded as though he were being strangled. “Still here, Rex, still here.”
“My god,” he whispered through a clearing of his throat. “My god, Thomas, I didn’t mean it.”
“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, it was a lousy joke, Rex.”
“Jesus, I didn’t mean it!”
I wanted to climb through the phone, then, and grab hold of his neck. “Rex, for crying out loud, calm down, damnit! You weren’t the first man in the world to hit a woman, you know. And you sure won’t be the last. For god’s sake—”
“But I didn’t, Thomas! You know me better than that. I never touched that . . . woman. It was the child, don’t you see? She was always there, whenever I turned around she was there, with her mother. Confound it, I love Elizabeth, Thomas. I wouldn’t hurt her for the world. I’ve never met anyone like her, not in all these years. But that child, Thomas. She was always there. Then she gave me a—”
He yelled suddenly, more like a shriek. There was an electrical pop! on the line that forced the receiver away from my ear, and before I could recover the connection had been broken. I shouted Rex’s name futilely several times, then called the operator and waited for a minute that seemed more like an hour before she returned to tell me the telephone was out of order. I didn’t waste any time arguing with her; I slammed
the receiver into its cradle, was dressed and in my car in less than five minutes, wincing at the scorching seats, hissing when I tried to grab the steering wheel and still maneuver without crashing. Then I raced to the Stephenson home, a large, gable-encumbered Georgian on the north side of Chancellor Avenue, on the far side of the park. Up the drive through a tunnel of heat-laden elms, out of the car almost before it stopped.
My shirt was drenched with perspiration, my hair plastered to my forehead and temples and feeling as though I’d been doused with slime. I had to lean against the fender for a moment or two just to catch a breath of air not quite fresh, though it was not as stifling as it had been in the car.
The heat, I thought; mad dogs and Englishmen and the Queen must be nuts.
I mopped my face with a forearm and moved on, suddenly reluctant.
The front door was ajar (though not wide enough for a man to pass through), and I pushed at it with one finger, thinking absolutely unreasonably that there was someone hiding behind it, ready to leap out at me—though to shout boo! or plunge a dagger I could not have said. The hinges creaked, as if balking at permitting the sun access to the grey slate foyer and the fan-shaped staircase beyond. I stepped over the threshold (holding my breath until I wasn’t stabbed) and called out. There was no answer, not even an echo. I coughed loudly. then called again ... and still there was nothing.
A breeze followed me in, cat-soft and sneaking, chilling the back of my neck and forcing me silently across the slate to the butler’s table set against the staircase wall. On it was the telephone, and I stared at it stupidly, reached out one finger and touched at it; it was warm, and no warmer than it should have been for the furnace smoldering inside. Despite the breeze the air was unmoving, tasting stale, as if none of the windows on any of the floors had been open for a month. I poked at the phone again, then stepped back and noticed with a puzzled frown that I had left a footprint in large swirls of pale dust that reached out from the table’s legs. The breeze gusted, the dust was gone, and lying hard against the baseboard was a small, blackened piece of cardboard. I dropped slowly into a crouch to get a better look, and when I reached out to pick it up, I was surprised to see that it was a flower. It was, in fact, a violet that looked as if it had been held deliberately over an open flame until it had writhed into a sickening spiral. I thought instantly of the nosegay on the child’s dress, dropped the rest of the way to my knees to search for signs of further scorching.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror) Page 8