Sitting in the bath she had a sudden horror that this was the day for Mrs. Meadowes, the cleaning lady. A twice-weekly visitation of utter cleanliness and vigor, she nevertheless doted on David, and, naturally, bullied Pamela. Frantically Pamela toweled and scattered talc. She never seemed to know where she was with Mrs. Meadowes. Her days and times of arrival seemed to be in constant flux. And now, come to think of it, Pamela remembered she was to meet David for lunch.
She grasped the phone and dialed the Meadowes’ number. An incoherent child answered, presently to be replaced by a recognized contralto.
“Oh—Mrs. Meadowes, Pamela Taylor here—I’m dreadfully sorry, but I simply couldn’t remember—is it today you’re coming? Or is it tomorrow or something?”
There was a pause, then the contralto said carefully:
“Well, dear, I can fit you in tomorrow. If you like.”
“Oh, good, then it wasn’t today. Thank you so much. Sorry to have bothered you. Goodbye.”
There had been something distinctly strange about the Meadowes phone call, she thought as she ate her grapefruit. Probably something to do with that appalling child. She switched on the radio. She caught a news bulletin, as she always seemed to. Somewhere a plane had crashed, somewhere else an earthquake—she switched off. Angela had frequently told her that she should keep herself abreast of the news, not bury her head in the sand. But she simply could not stand it. Papers depressed her. They came for David, and when he forgot to take them with him to the office as he always seemed to nowadays, she would push them out of sight, bury them behind cushions and under piles of magazines, afraid to glimpse some horror before she could avert her eyes. David teased her a little. “Where’s the ostrich hidden my paper today?”
As she constructed her peach-bloom cosmetic face before the mirror she thought of Angela, vigorously devouring black gospels of famine, war, and pestilence with her morning coffee. James liked her to know what she was talking about at their dinner parties. He rated a woman’s intelligence by her grasp of foreign correspondents and yesterday in parliament. It was in a way rather curious. Angela had met James in the same month Pamela had met David.
She took the car with her into town, a feat she performed with some dread. David was a superb and relaxed driver, she by contrast, sat in rigid anxiety at the wheel. Her fears seemed to attract near disasters. Dogs, children, and India rubber balls flew in front of her wheels as if magnetized, men in Citroens honked and swore, and juggernauts herded her off the road. Normally she would take the bus, for David often used the car, but today it lurked in the garage, taunting her, and besides she was pushed for time. She reached the restaurant ten minutes late, and went to meet him in the bar, but he had not yet arrived. Bars were unfortunate for her, and alone she shunned them. David said she had a flair for being picked up; men who looked like mafioso would offer her martinis, and all she seemed able to do in her paralyzed fright was apologize to them. She left the bar and went into the restaurant and ordered a sherry at her table.
The room felt rather hot and oppressive, and all the other tables were filling up, except her own. She drank her sherry down in wild gulps and the waiter leaned over her:
“Would madam care to order now?”
“Oh—no thank you. I’m sorry, you see, I’m waiting for my husband—”
She trailed off. A knowing and somber look had come over the man’s face. “Oh, God, I suppose he thinks I’m a whore, too.” She took out a cigarette and smoked it in nervous bursts. She could see another waiter watching her from his post beside a pillar. “I shall wait another ten minutes and then I shall go.”
It was fifteen minutes past two when she suddenly remembered. It came over her like a lightning flash, bringing a wave of embarrassment and relief in its wake. Of course, David had told her very last thing last night that the lunch would have to be canceled. A man was coming from Kelly’s—or Ryson’s—and he would have to take him for a working snack at the pub. She felt an utter fool. Good heavens, was her memory going this early? She almost giggled as she threaded between the tables.
She shopped in the afternoon, and ate a cream cake with her coffee in a small teashop full of old ladies. She had bought David a novel, one of the few Graham Greene’s he hadn’t collected over the years. She had seen for some time that he was having trouble with his present reading—the same volume had lain beside the round-faced clock for over a month.
The journey home was relatively uneventful. At the traffic lights a boy with a rucksack leaned to her window. She thought in alarm that he was going to demand a lift, or else tell her in an American voice of how he had found Jesus in San Francisco, but, in fact, he only wanted directions to Brown’s the chemists. It seemed such a harmless request it filled her with incongruous delight. Purple and ocher cloud drift was bringing on the early dusk in spasms of rain. With a surge of immeasurable compassion she offered him, after all, the lift she had been terrified of giving. David would be furious with her, she knew. It was a stupid thing to do, yet the boy looked so vulnerable in the rain, his long dark hair plastered to his skull. He was an ugly, shy, rather charming student, and she left him at the chemists after a ten-minute ride during which he thanked her seven times. It turned out his mother was Mrs. Brown, and he had hitched all the way from Bristol.
After he had gone, she parked the car, and went to buy fresh cigarettes. Coming from the tobacconists, she saw the cemetery.
She had forgotten she would see the cemetery on her errand of mercy. It was foolish, she knew, to experience this “morbid dread,” as Angela would no doubt put it. It was, nevertheless, a perfect picture of horror for her—the ranks of marble markers under the orange monochrome sky with rain falling on their plots and withered wreaths, and down through the newly-turned soil to reach the wooden caskets underneath ... She experienced a sudden swirling sickness, and ran through it to the car. Inside, the icy rain shut out, she found that she had absurdly begun to cry.
“Oh, don’t be such an idiot,” she said aloud.
She turned on the car’s heater, and started vigorously for home, nearly stalling. She was much later than she had meant to be.
There were no lights burning in the house, and she realized with regret that he would be late again. She coerced the unwilling car into the garage, and ran between the rustling pines. She clicked a switch in every room and resuscitated the television to reveal three children up to their eyes in some form of super sweet. Their strawberry-and-cream bedecked faces filled her with disgust. She had never liked children, and never wanted them. She paused, her hand on the door, a moment’s abstracted thought catching at her mind—had she failed David in this? She could remember him saying to her as she sobbed against him:
“I only want you, you know that, and nothing else matters.”
That had been after the results of the tests. In a way she felt she had wished herself into barrenness. She thought of Angela’s two sons, strapping boisterous boys, who went canoeing with their father, and brought home baskets of mangled catch from a day’s fishing, and spotted trains, and bolted their food to get back to incongruous and noisy activities in their bedroom.
“A man needs sons,” Angela had once said. “It’s a sort of proof, Pamela. Why don’t you see a specialist? I can give you the address.”
But then Angela and James had not slept together in any sense for ten years, Pamela thought with sudden, spiteful triumph, and it had always been a doubtful joy to them. She remembered David’s arms about her and that earthy magic they made between them, an attraction that had increased rather than diminished.
The phone rang.
It made her jump.
“Oh, damn.”
She picked it up, and heard, with the relevance of a conjuration, her sister’s cool, well-managed tones.
“Oh, hullo, Angela. I don’t want to be a cow, but this really is rather a bad time—I was just about to start dinner—”
“Pamela, my dear,” Angela said, her voice peculiarly solem
n, “are you all right?”
“All right? Of course I am. What on earth—”
“Pamela, I want you to listen to me. Please, my dear. I wouldn’t have rung, but Jane Thomson says she saw you in Cordells at lunch time. She says, oh, my dear, she says she saw you waiting for someone.” Angela sounded unspeakably distressed. “Pamela, who were you waiting for?”
Pamela felt a surge of panic wash over her.
“I—oh, no one. Does it matter?”
“Darling, of course it does. Was it David you were waiting for, like the last time?”
Pamela held the phone away from her ear and looked at it. There was a bee trapped in the phone, buzzing away at her. She had always been terribly afraid of bees.
“I really have to go, Angela,” she shouted at the mouthpiece.
“Oh, Pamela, Pamela,” Angela said. She seemed to be crying. “Darling, David can’t come back to you. Not now.”
“Be quiet,” Pamela said.
The bee went on buzzing.
“Pamela, listen to me. David is dead. Dead, do you hear me? He died of peritonitis last July. For God’s sake, Pamela—”
Pamela dropped the phone into its receiver and the buzzing stopped.
The dinner was spoiled before she realized how late he was going to be after all. He had told her the conference might run on, and not to wait up for him. She waited, however, until midnight. Upstairs, she took the book from his bedside table and replaced it with the Graham Greene—it would surprise him when he found it.
She hated to sleep without him, but she was very tired. And she would see him in the morning.
Outside, the pines clicked and whispered, but she did not listen.
THE NIGHT PEOPLE by Michael Reaves
Born in 1950 in San Bernardino, California, Michael Reaves currently resides in Woodland Hills (close enough to Los Angeles to commute and far enough to avoid the smog). He attended Clarion in 1972 and made his first sale to Clarion III. Since then Reaves has sold a dozen or so short stories to places like Twilight Zone Magazine and Fantasy & Science Fiction—as well as ten novels, including Darkworld Detective, The Shattered World, and Hellstar (the last with Steve Perry). This is in addition to well over a hundred teleplays—mostly Saturday morning animations—but including scripts for such shows as The Twilight Zone. His latest books are “a fantasy noir called Street Magic” from Tor and a sequel to The Shattered World. Reaves and rising fantasy star Steve Perry are also working on a film for Catalina Productions called The Omega Cage, based on their forthcoming novel.
Things had not changed that much. I found a basement single in one of those old brick-and-black-iron buildings downtown, just off Evangeline, near the Underground City. It was $275 a month for two rooms, a Murphy bed, and a refrigerator that rattled like a snake. There were only three wall outlets and most of the windows were painted shut, but it also had a tiny fold-down desk, a built-in bookshelf, and space for an easel. The whole place was very small, but that did not matter.
It was not a quiet building; there were children, and the landlady in the apartment upstairs communed with God regularly and enthusiastically. That didn’t matter either. I bought a stereo cassette player with headphones and wore soft-wax earplugs when I slept, which was often past noon. I had realized at least one lifelong, though minor, desire: after years of rising at dawn, I was now staying up as late as three or four a.m. I had become a night person.
I adjusted to it surprisingly easily. When I awoke, I would exercise; a garage sale had provided me with a bench and some weights. I found an old mailbag in a trash bin behind the post office, filled it with rags and beans and rice, and hung it from one of the many water pipes that crisscrossed the ceiling. I would beat on it regularly; I had no particular skill, but it helped, along with pushing weights, to discharge some of the tension that had built up during the past few months. The pipes were also very useful for chin-ups and vertical sit-ups. After an hour or so of that, I would paint—as much as ten hours straight sometimes except for meals. To save money I made an easel and mixed my own pigments in the sunlit alley behind the building.
Despite extensive use of drop cloths, flecks of paint stippled the walls and the old hardwood floors, and the kitchen sink was soon stained with a dark rainbow. I opened what windows I could and bought an ancient, clattering fan, but the pungent smells of paint, thinner, and linseed oil were still almost overpowering. I lived in dread of a surprise visit from the landlady, who already viewed me with suspicion due to the Justin Courtenay prints I had hung on one wall. There were two of them: The Night People and Eros Exotica, his most famous works. The former’s street scene alone, with its Boschlike decadence and surreal evil, must have immediately labeled me in her mind as a devil worshiper, and as for the latter—I’m surprised she did not attempt to have me evicted.
When my vision would blur from eyestrain and fumes, I would go out. Sometimes I would sit at a tiny wrought-iron table in one of the jazz clubs on King Snake Road, nursing a drink and listening to horns scorching the blue air; mostly I would just wander the streets and watch the colorful pirate parade of night life. Like a vampire, I now seemed to feel fully alive only after dark. I visited my old neighborhoods and haunts, reliving scenes from my childhood that had faded to sere daguerreotypes of memory. I tried to feel something, anything, and couldn’t.
I was back in New Delphi, the city where I’d been born. But I wasn’t home.
It had been ten years, not counting two visits to my parents after they had moved to Blessed Shoals. I had long since lost touch with those few friends I had made in high school and four years of art school. Perhaps, I told myself, I would look them up. There was no hurry—we tend to think of people left behind as being frozen in time’s ice, waiting patient and unchanged. Perhaps I would see them eventually. But for now there was to be nothing but work.
Samantha had been a night person; the times we retired together in Los Angeles had been rare. I was always asleep by twelve at the latest, while she rarely closed her eyes before four a.m. A few times we would pass each other in that gray, still time just before dawn—she on her way to bed, I to put in a few hours at the light board before hitting the gym.
Maybe the difference in our circadian rhythms was a sign of basic incompatibility I should have heeded from the beginning, but initially, in fact, I found it charming. I envied Samantha; I had always longed to be a night person, had always thought it a badge of creativity. Many of our friends were writers, artists, or musicians, and did most of their work in those quiet, neon-lit hours.
But to me the land that lay beyond midnight was an immense terra incognita. I had forced myself to stay awake all night a number of times, and each had left me feeling like the walking dead for days afterward. At last I had accepted my diurnal nature; regretfully, for I viewed the night as a separate, magical world, and longed to be part of it. I never felt quite right about working to the prosaic sounds of car engines warming and garbage cans rattling, rather than to a mysterious romantic silence broken only by an occasional siren or police helicopter.
In one respect, the split shift that Samantha and I lived was advantageous; we could only afford a two bedroom apartment, which meant that one room had to serve as both her office and my studio. I think that, had we labored in that small area at the same time, what happened between us would have happened much sooner. We were both at the same stage in our careers; I had sold several paintings and lithographs and been shown in some of the trendier galleries along Melrose Avenue, while she had placed a dozen short stories in small-press magazines and anthologies and was working on a novel. We supported ourselves by freelancing for animation studios which produced children’s cartoons for Saturday morning television. She wrote the scripts and I drew the storyboards. It paid very well; three months’ work let us spend the rest of the year on our own labors of love.
I met Samantha by calling to compliment her on a script she had written, one which I was boarding. Six months later we were living tog
ether; exactly one year after that, to the day, I left Los Angeles.
Samantha and I had become lovers before we had become friends, and only later discovered that, despite appearances, we had nothing in common. There was a gulf between us that was far wider, far deeper, than the difference between day and night. Looking too long and too deeply into that gulf—that, and not the petty bourgeois bickering we had constantly engaged in, had been our mistake. It had driven me away from Los Angeles, which, despite its night life, is a city of harsh brightness, a land where people drive miles beneath a desert sun to visit tanning parlors. It had brought me back to New Delphi, the epitome of the Deep South, a true city of night, surrounded by pre-Cambrian bayous. Magic still lived here, and here I could, I hoped, put down on canvas what I had left behind, before it was too late.
I had been there nearly a month when I turned thirty. No doubt in reaction, I rose early and worked out long and hard that day, beating the bag, jumping rope and lifting weights until every joint and muscle ached and the windows were fogged. My usual schedule was to follow this with a blenderful of fruit, brewer’s yeast, protein powder, and bran, and then to start mixing colors. Instead, I took a walk.
It was a bright spring day, the air already hinting at the approaching summer warmth and humidity. I thought briefly about how intolerable my rabbit-hole would be and how it would affect the painting if I did not somehow find the money for an air conditioner. I think it was the first time I had let my thoughts venture more than a week into the future since I had moved in.
The crowds seemed larger and slower-moving. Though full of variety, they were drab compared to the perennial Mardi Gras ensemble that filled the streets after dark. There were more cars with out-of-state plates; tourist season was beginning.
I had not been outside before dusk in nearly two weeks. The afternoon sun was giving me a headache, despite the mirrored sunglasses I wore. I decided suddenly to take the Underground City tour. It had been nearly fifteen years since I had last seen it, but I remembered it very well. The thought of the cool, damp brick streets, the deserted storefronts and houses spotlighted by lightbulbs, and most of all the quiet, was very appealing. I bought a ticket and joined the tour group that was already descending the concrete steps.
The Year's Best Horror Stories 14 Page 11