by Unknown
“‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘If you promise to walk a lady home.’
“I agreed at once. I do not think the idea to decline so much as formed in my mind. My feet just started working. I felt her elbow slip into the crook of my own, and hot blood rush to my face. The moon was waning, and for that I was glad, for she would surely have seen the colour in my cheeks had it been full. The city was still alive all around us, and cars motored back and forth, seemingly without number.
“‘You want to know why I looked you up, Daniel?’ she said.
“‘It’s because … Oh, we turn here.’ We were now on a street parallel with the hotel. I could see her teasing me, could see her stifling a smile. We stopped under a fire escape and she looked up at me. The moonlight painted cold Venetian blinds on her face. ‘I’ve seen you looking at me, every day as I work, and that excites me like nothing has in a long time. And I don’t know why. And then I came out for a drink, only to find you there. I … well you know what happened then.’
“She looked deeply into me then, Mr Goosby … nakedly, vulnerable. I put a tentative hand on her hip, and she moved into it … closer to me, till our noses almost touched.”
Herzer stopped suddenly. Looking at Goosby, he smiled wistfully. “We kissed there. Only the moon watched us.”
Goosby listened, fascinated.
Herzer’s smile transformed his features, so that Goosby could see the once-handsome man beneath his grizzled exterior. Herzer took time to think of his next words, then said, “It was a – how do you people say it? – uh … tornado romance?”
Goosby chuckled, but it was honest and without rancour. “Whirlwind. You mean whirlwind.”
Herzer cackled gleefully, then coughed as his body was wracked with shudders. Wheezing, he said, “Yes, that’s it! Forgive me, but my health seems to be walking out on me. Yes, it was a whirlwind romance. After we kissed, she took me back to where she stayed. She told me we could not be seen at the hotel, because fraternising with the guests could cost her her job. Her apartment was close to the hotel and it did not take us long to walk there. She led me by the hand to her bedroom, and there we made love. Oh, Mr Goosby, it was sweet … so sweet.”
Herzer’s eyes welled up again, and he blinked back the tears before they could spill over. One renegade ran down the contour of his cheek, but he seemed not to notice. “We talked deep into the night until we both eventually succumbed to sleep. In the morning, we had breakfast together. The window was open, I remember, and every sound seemed to have greater clarity to me. Every breath, every mouthful of food seemed more favourable. It was a very … strange and exalting sensation. Only now can I see it for what it was, Mr Goosby. It was the absence of darkness. In shorter rhetoric, it was happiness. And since that day, my life seems to have been losing it, as though there’s a leak somewhere in me, and it has seeped out, one drop at a time.
“We talked for a little while, and she excused herself from the breakfast table. When she came back, she was dressed the way I had seen her the first time – in her uniform, ready for work.
“She walked over slowly, uncertainly. I could see something was wrong. Her brow was furrowed and her jaw worked minutely, as though she were chewing over the words she wanted to say.
“‘This … never happened,’ she said, coming closer, trying to be as gentle as possible. ‘It was good, beautiful in fact, but … it never happened.’
“She could see a protest on my lips, and said, ‘My job.’ And I understood. ‘If you come back, maybe, in a different time, when you aren’t staying at the hotel, then maybe it could work. But not now. Oh God, I’m sorry, Daniel. I’m sorry.’
“She bade me farewell, and left, telling me I could use anything in her apartment, and asking that I leave her keys in my hotel room. But I had to be gone when she returned.
“By this time, my heart was on fire. Not just with anguish, but something else entirely. I sat alone in that tenement and felt something racing through me. Something building, like a nuclear reaction, or –
“And suddenly, the television in the small room imploded. The screen went in a whoosh of glass and smoke. A thin smog filled the room, and the smoke alarm went off. Water sprayed down from the overhead sprinklers, but it did nothing to cool my heart. I looked around the room wildly, hoping for some solution. My eyes happened upon the fuse box through the undulating curtain of water, and that, too, exploded out of the wall. Its smoking hulk landed on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. The wires snaked from it like vines on a tree.
“I bolted for the door, coughing and whooping through the smoke. I dared a last glance back at the ruined apartment. Small fires were popping up near live wires, and being extinguished almost immediately. The entire kitchen floor and the hall leading up to the front door was a shallow flood. My heart felt like an overworked engine. Sharp pains emanated from it and seemed to stab my entire body.
“I somehow managed to get downstairs, and as I was lurching out of the double doors of the building, I saw Katherine inexplicably hurrying back.
“I hid then, Mr Goosby. I knew there was no ostensible reason that I might have caused the fire, but in my heart, I felt it was true. I had felt that power drawing from me, directing itself onto whatever aggravated it … I knew I could not go back. I was a coward. What I should have done was warned her. Warned her of the water, and of the electric wires. But I hid in an alley with my collar turned up and my hat pulled down. People were gathering outside the building now and looking up to where smoke poured out of the window and the alarm brayed like a Bedlam inmate.”
Herzer took a moment to catch his breath. Goosby suddenly felt time catch up with him. How long had he been here? Three hours? Four? He held his wrist to the candlelight and looked at his watch. But it had stopped working. His ex-girlfriend had got it for him as an anniversary present. That had been two years ago. The watch had never given him any trouble. Why would it quit on him now? In this house? No. He was open-minded, but to countenance the supernatural was definitely beyond the frame of possibility.
“What happened to Katherine then?”
Herzer was staring into nothing but his thoughts once again. He snapped back to reality like a man waking, and stared intently at Goosby.
“I think it would be better for me to show you, Mr Goosby,” he said grimly.
“Show me?” And for a moment Goosby was sure that Herzer would leave the room and return dragging the decayed and maggot-infested corpse of Katherine Cracraft, like a caveman’s trophy. Herzer did leave the table, but when he came back, he had in his hands a small newspaper clipping. He passed it across the table. Goosby could see that the man’s hands were trembling. When the transaction was done, Herzer put his hands in his lap and sat like a rebuked schoolboy.
As Goosby read through the article, his expression changed from pity, to depression, to rage, and finally, to wooden horror.
The clipping read:
BLAZE CLAIMS FOUR
Early yesterday morning, four people – a woman in her late twenties; a child of four; and two firemen – were killed when a fuse box in an apartment on the third floor of the Dolphin Court apparently exploded out of the wall.
Investigators theorize that the fire started when a faulty main leaked water into the hazardous wires. This in turn created smoke, which activated the emergency sprinklers. The water and electricity quickly started fires, which consumed most of the apartment.
The apartment, which belonged to Katherine Cracraft, was entirely gutted.
Upon arrival at the scene, fire fighters entered the building and began to evacuate the residents. One woman, who was later identified as Cracraft, was carried out on a stretcher, and rushed to an ambulance. She was however pronounced dead at the scene.
A child, four year old Henry DuChamp, had apparently hidden in a cupboard, three doors down from Cracraft’s apartment. Firemen later found him dead of asphyxiation and smoke inhalation. Two fire fighters, both men in their middle thirtie
s, were also claimed by the blaze, which ultimately consumed the entire third floor.
A woman at the scene, who has asked not to be identified, said she had seen smoke pouring out of one of the windows of the building. “Everything around it was orange and red. People were running out of the building, and a woman was screaming, ‘My baby! Help my baby!’ Then another woman pushed her way past everyone else towards the building. I thought she was trying to help. But when she came out again, she was nothing but a charred husk.”
Forensics at the scene were unwilling to confirm the cause of the blaze, saying, “At this stage, it would be conjecture at best,” but adding that a “full investigation was underway…”
Goosby dropped the news clipping on the table. He was tired. He felt ineffably worn out by the whole scoop, and by this man, whose heart must be as blackened and broken as this whole goddamned house. He wanted to leave, to go home and have a hot shower and a few capfuls of whiskey before passing out. His head hurt. The scar along his temple throbbed. He couldn’t remember the last thought he had had. It panicked him.
But something was compelling him to stay. If asked what it was, he would have had no answer, but he liked to think it was the keen journalist in him that wouldn’t rest until he had the full story. He liked to think that, and he also liked to think that his stories would someday get published somewhere big, like the Times. But he knew better, on both counts.
There was something inexorable here. Something with firm hands that kept him in his seat, something that couldn’t be resisted, like a strong current.
“She died…” Goosby said, and could feel the words, pensive and despairing, die on his tongue almost before they were out.
Herzer’s eyes blazed suddenly with an intensity that Goosby hadn’t previously seen. ”What do you think?” he cried. “Let me put your body into a furnace and see what happens, Mr Goosby!”
He leapt to his feet suddenly. His tall, wasted figure painted sinewy shadows on the wall behind him.
“I meant no disrespect. I—” Goosby tried, but he couldn’t finish.
Herzer lapsed into a kind of frenzy then - a litany of his life and his dark secrets – and Goosby could do nothing but embrace his subjugation to write it all down. It was almost theatrical. The candles threw every move Herzer made into agonized relief.
“I did not mean to kill her! It was my fault, but it was not mine entirely! I did not mean to! I did not mean to!” The phrase became incantation. “I did not mean to! It was my heart! It just … broke those appliances. It broke this house, it broke that fuse box, and it broke her! It broke me!
“After I left that morning with my head hung in shame, not knowing that Katherine had just perished, I went back to my hotel. I put the keys she had given me on my bedside drawers. I was too tired for work, and I slept most of the day away. I woke up around dusk to a sickening pink sky. The sun was setting and looked to me like a cauldron of blood over which shapeless clouds floated.
“I went down to the lobby, hoping to catch a glimpse of Katherine. Hoping perhaps just to smell her lingering perfume. She was not there, but another man I worked with walked rapidly to me. He told me that McLeod was dead. The strength in my legs disappeared and I sank down against the far wall near the elevators. Eyes turned to look at us, but I did not notice.
“The man told me that McLeod had been walking across a street when he’d suddenly doubled over without warning. A woman driving on the road with her daughter had not seen him, and the car had sent him sprawling. When someone turned him over, they had found shards of an old pocket watch, gold and beautiful, lodged into one eye socket. The rest of the watch lay in the road, smashed, as if it had exploded.
“Do you see, Mr Goosby? It was me. I did it.” It came out as a whisper, but anger had started to rise in the man’s eyes once again.
Goosby had had enough. He rose from his chair and matched Herzer’s gaze. “You can’t honestly believe that,” he said.
Herzer took two steps forward, and Goosby took a compensatory one back. “You don’t believe my heart corrupts? You fool!”
Herzer’s hands enfolded Goosby’s temples like a straitjacket. Goosby tried to pull them away, but they were firmly clamped. The fingers held implacably, though their grip was painless. “Let me go!”
An image began to materialise. Herzer’s leering face fell away and Goosby found himself sitting in the driver’s seat of his old car. Rain fell in heavy sheets, beating on the roof. The wipers clicked feverishly against the pounding rain.
He’d been here before. And now there would be…
Headlights shot out of the darkness, picking out dancing shrubbery and large, hulking trees through the curtain of rain.
The loose ends of the memory Goosby had had earlier, when he had just arrived at Herzer’s house, cross-connected now, with prophetic finality.
The truck – a ’65 Ford with a mauve finish - was going much too fast. The road was slick with rain. Goosby saw the truck coming and tried to turn away. But he pulled the wheel too hard. The tyres locked. His car first skidded, then hit something, and was thrown on its side. Goosby exited the windshield like a well-dressed projectile. His head slammed into the mercilessly hard wood of an ancient oak, and his body went limp.
Everything started fading then … and the blackness encroached… There was a face. It loomed out of that dark, weeping, leering. Herzer.
Goosby staggered back, panting harshly. Herzer stood before him. Tears streamed down his face. He was pounding his chest. “Do you see it now?”
“H-how?” Goosby managed.
“I am not the only one with secrets, it seems, Mr Goosby. How is your memory since that accident? Do you even remember my name?” Herzer jeered.
“You can’t know about my accident!”
Herzer seemed to hesitate. “Well,” he said at last, as if marvelling at the phenomenon himself, “this is a new … symptom. It seems my heart allows me to see the darkest parts of the mind.” His voice diminished to a croak, and his hand rested on his heart. There was a pained expression on his face which Goosby thought didn’t look too healthy. He fell into the chair again, his chest rising and falling thinly.
Goosby got to his feet, supporting himself on the back of the chair. His notepad and pen lay on the floor, forgotten. “You’re saying you really do this? That electronics really do not work around you?”
“Have you heard nothing I have been saying?” Herzer screamed. “I’ve killed five people. That I know of! I hide here in isolation, hoping that I do not kill more!”
A rattling cough, then: “I’m just waiting for my darkness, Mr Goosby. I hope never to see anything that runs off current in my life again.”
“I’m not sure whether to believe you, or whether you are crazy,” said Goosby. “But I think I have enough material for the story. You can let me out now, Mr Herzer.”
He had just turned to go, when the reels of the tape recorder ground to an audible halt. Herzer’s face – old, shrivelled, deathly – animated itself suddenly. “What was that?”
Involuntarily, Goosby’s hand snaked over the bulge in his sports jacket pocket, aware of it for the first time in an hour.
“What was that, Mr Goosby? It feels… Oh God.”
He started forward like a draped phantom. His hands twisted into claws. “You did not. Please, tell me you did not!”
“Get back!” Goosby shouted. He scooped his notepad and pen into his bag, and bolted down the hallway with it trailing behind him like a dog. The fetid odours of rot and decay were suddenly cloying.
“You brought something in here, didn’t you?” Something snapped in Herzer, like an over-taut piano wire.
Goosby reached the door. He hauled it open with everything he had. The night air welcomed him like a lover’s embrace, and he fell into it, overbalancing, onto the porch. Herzer was behind him, lurching and coughing and screaming. He was crazy.
“I can see what you have in your pocket! I can see that sound recording d
evice! You set my heart alight with its presence! How dare you! How dare you!”
Goosby turned onto his back, propelling himself away with his feet.
Then his eyes widened. “That feeling—”
…And the tape recorder exploded in his pocket. Shards of plastic and metal ripped into the deepest crevices of his heart. His body arched and gouts of blood sprayed upward amid flecks of burnt cotton and scorched plastic.
Herzer’s hand went to his own heart like a vice; the other grabbed the door frame for support. “Oh! Oh, Mr Goosby!”
The last thing Goosby saw before the darkness closed in was the raving figure of Herzer, dancing like a marionette shadow. And there might have been a word - “Katherine.”
Kenneth arrived at the house a little after noon. He talked to a few policemen who had closed the area off, then walked professionally over to the porch. He knelt beside the covered figure of Goosby. Looking around, he saw men occupied with everything but the corpse.
Hesitantly, he peeled back the sheet, and stared into the blank eyes of Goosby. The reporter’s face was set in a terrified grimace.
Poor bastard.
He was about to replace the sheet when he noticed Goosby’s bag next to his leg. Glancing around quickly, he snatched the bag. Then he stood up and once more looked for the police officers.
It came to him in a single flash. Headlines flickered in his imagination. I’ve got it, he thought. The whole scoop.
It was a tragedy, of course. But this was news. It wasn’t every day that you had a dead reporter to corroborate a story.
He turned around and noticed with a start the other corpse. The wind had blown the sheet half off. It looked like little more than a skeleton with a few ragged patches of hair. Herzer was propped against the far porch railing; one hand lay listless and limp in his lap.