[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind

by Charles L. Grant

  Pat stood at the stone embankment and watched as a young man scrambled into a sailboat, a frail thing, a tiny thing, and breasted the swells. She might have screamed, she might have been shouting, all she could think of was Lauren and the spanking the child would get for frightening her so.

  The young man—Paul? Andrew?—cupped his hands around his mouth and called for Lauren. The girl turned, the girl waved, the girl stood in the center of the small rowboat in the dark water and faced the dark wind, hands on her hips proudly. Black hair. Black eyes. Summers with her mother, the school term with her father in San Diego.

  She was eight years old when the first wave unbalanced her, eight years old when the second capsized the boat.

  She was eight years old when, two hours later, her body washed ashore, and it took almost a full day before Pat understood Lauren wasn't pretending.

  Too much. It was really too damned much. What on earth did they expect of her, all those people clamoring for her attention, all those eyes glued on the clock, all those hands touching the stone and trying in vain to turn it to art? And watching. Always watching her every move, hoping that by examining the crook of her hand, the grip on the mallet, the cock of her head, they would know how she did it and be able to do the same. They would know, so they watched. Watching. Every minute of every class until she'd dismissed them early and ran out of the building. Into the Union where she'd taken a table at the loneliest corner. No one sat with her, but she knew they were watching. Whispering. Knowing what she had faced already today, knowing what the dean had in store for her later. They knew, and they watched, and before she had done she could no longer taste whatever spread across her tray.

  She had driven less than a mile down Chancellor Avenue toward the village when she realized she was being followed. Yet there was nothing substantial to prove her suspicions. Hers was the only car on the road, there was no one standing just back of the trees, there was no one ahead, waiting in the road.

  Following. Closer. Close enough to touch.

  As the young boy had been—Paul? Andrew?—when he'd reached out for Lauren and the boat had gone over. He'd panicked, lost control, and the moments wasted before he'd stripped off his clothes and leapt into the bay were the moments it took for Lauren to drown.

  Close enough to touch, while Pat had stood gripping the stone wall and screaming until she tasted blood in her mouth.

  She swallowed hard and straightened, swiping the tears from her cheeks with the trembling backs of both hands. One. The other. Diving into her handbag to root out a tissue. Daubing. Blowing her nose. Scanning the road in both directions, trying to discover who it was who followed.

  My god, she thought; my god, my god.

  She coughed, and hiccoughed. She blew her nose again and tossed the tissue out the window. It would be just her luck now to have Fred Borg come by in his patrol car and give her a ticket for littering; or worse, Chief Stockton and his granite voice, granite face, leaning in the window with a laconic Down East lecture.

  Then she grabbed hold of the wheel at nine and three and pushed until her elbows had locked. Fool, she told herself then; you're a half-baked fool and you're going to blow it all if you don't stop feeling so sorry for yourself. But it had all come down on her so suddenly, and with such intensity, that she really didn't blame herself for wanting to flee. On the very day the class decided it was going to spy on her, on the day Harriet told her about the tornado, on the day Constable would tell her volumes about her future, on this day Lauren would have been sixteen.

  Her wrists began to throb.

  And the longer she sat there punishing herself the more she understood she was using the girl's birthday only as an excuse. She was preparing herself for failure, reeling in snippets of blame and tying knots she could point to as stumbling blocks unforeseen. It was natural, it was not extraordinary, and if she didn't get moving she was going to be late for her afternoon seminar.

  It was only a matter of minutes, then, before she had parked in front of the house and was up the stairs to her apartment. The idea had been ridiculous from its inception just before noon, but the longer she scoffed at it the more she couldn't shake it loose. And when she had fled the cafeteria it was the first thing she had thought of to give her flight direction.

  Homer snarled on his kitchen perch.

  Pat grinned at him and ran a thumb along teeth she had made quite deliberately sharp.

  "You," she told him, "are coming with me. If you don't bring me luck, I'll use you to bash Constable's skull."

  She jammed the statuette into her handbag and took the stairs down two at a time. Laughing to herself. At herself. Depression and gloom lifting when she burst onto the porch and saw Kelly angrily kicking a flat tire at the rear of her car.

  "That's not the way to do it, my dear," Pat called out, unable to keep a grin out of her voice. Kelly was, like her roommate Abbey, prone to hysterics over mechanical failures, gnats, and boy friends who didn't show up precisely on time. The younger woman claimed it was her Latin background, though Pat could not imagine anyone more blond, more fair-skinned, more schoolgirlish than Kelly.

  "Oh, Pat!" she wailed, racing to the steps with her mittened hands clasped to her chest. "Pat, if I don't get back to the bank on time today I'm going to lose my job."

  "So change the tire. Surely you know how to do that."

  "The spare's gone flat."

  Pat searched for sympathy, could find only the tolerance of a mother toward a scatterbrained child. She shook her head slowly and descended to the walk, slipped an arm around the woman's waist and turned her back toward the street. "Listen," she said, lowering her head, "if you swear to me on whatever it is you hold sacred that you'll have someone from King's get a tow truck over here to take care of whatever needs taking care of, I'll let you drive me back to—"

  "Oh my god," Kelly said in relief, and hugged Pat tightly, the beret-capped head barely reaching her shoulder, "you've saved my life."

  "Just be careful," Pat told her sternly as she took the passenger seat and handed Kelly the keys. "This thing may be new, but it's got personality. It doesn't like maltreatment.''

  Kelly, however, was beyond listening. She jerked the bench seat up as far as it would go, virtually rested her chin on the rim of the wheel as she charged away from the curb. Pat closed her eyes and mumbled a brief prayer, opened them when they pulled into King's a few minutes later and listened as Kelly charmed the mechanic on duty into heading over to Northland instantly, if not sooner. Then they were out on Chancellor and speeding east toward the school.

  "I haven't seen Abbey in a while," Pat said, trying to give her mind something else to think about besides the driving. "Is she all right?"

  "Oh, you know how it is," Kelly said, a practiced twist of her right hand flipping her air-fine hair back over her shoulder. "She thinks she's in love with this guy from Hartford. Insurance, yet, if you can believe it. She spent the weekend with him up at Stowe, and now she's trying to decide if she's going to marry him."

  "She certainly works fast."

  "She thinks that about every man she meets, almost," Kelly said sourly. "And every time it happens I have to bail her out. It gets pretty tiring after a while, you know what I mean? I mean, she's like a kid, for god's sake."

  Pat's nod was carefully neutral, remembering as she did the intense infatuation the woman had with Greg Billings only last summer. Greg had taken her out a few times, and each evening Kelly (or so she claimed) had been kept up until dawn with a blow-by-blow description of every move Greg had made, every word he had said. Pat, too, had grown weary of the affair by the time it had ended, and angry with herself for even hinting at the notion she might be jealous.

  "So how are the Musketeers?" Kelly asked.

  Pat grabbed the edge of the seat when the station wagon hit a small patch of ice and its tail swerved alarmingly.

  "Coming along," she answered when her voice returned.

  "Nice people."

  "Sure a
re. A little frustrating, though."

  Kelly laughed. "I can imagine. Y'know that cowboy one, Oliver? I think he has the hots for Abbey."

  "Like hell."

  Kelly looked at her, surprised. "Hey, no kidding! Whenever you're not around that pickup of his is always at the curb. In fact, he even tried to take her to work a few times."

  A pause. "Well, did he?"

  "I don't know," she said, shrugging. "I'm not her jailer, you know."

  Another moment's silence, another patch of ice.

  "Handles nice," Kelly said approvingly.

  "Yes."

  "Guess she was drunk or something."

  "What? Who?"

  Kelly glanced over, back to the road. "Oh, sorry. Thinking out loud, I guess. About that accident last night."

  Pat squirmed into the corner, as much to look at Kelly more easily as to avoid watching the road speeding dangerously at her. "What accident?"

  "Honestly, Pat," Kelly said with a tolerant grin. "Don't you ever listen to the radio up there? For heaven's sake, how do you know what's going on in the world?" She shook her head slowly. "Well, last night, out on Mainland, some girl wrapped herself around a telephone pole." Her voice lowered in a parody of mystery. "In a little car just like this, in fact. At least, that's what I gathered from the report I heard. Right smacko into a pole, killed her right away. The way I figure it, she was over to Harley and fell asleep or something, see. The guy on the radio said it happened just after midnight." She gave an exaggerated shudder. "It was dumb, you know. I mean, who goes out drinking on a Wednesday night, anyway? In the middle of the week. Stupid. Poor kid."

  Pat looked away, distantly sorry for the accident victim and feeling her own mortality much closer to home. She sniffed, felt herself relax somewhat as Kelly slowed to take the college entrance.

  "Kelly, did you . . . that is, I was going to stop by this morning on the way out to work, but I guess you and Abbey had already gone. I, uh, wanted to apologize for last night. I mean, for the noise I must have made coming home."

  "Noise?" Kelly frowned, wrinkling her nose as if a distasteful odor had suddenly invaded the car. "I didn't hear a thing, Pat, not a thing. I was dead to the world, if you want to know the truth. I didn't hear you at all." She glanced sideways, her face grey-shadowed by the trees that closed overhead. "Pat. Oh, Pat, you got tanked up again, right?"

  "Slightly."

  "Great. Open mouth and insert foot. Hey, if I'd known I would have said—"

  "It's okay, Kelly, it's okay. Meant or not, I deserve it."

  The overcast deepened, and she knew the next snowfall would not be a mere dusting.

  "Y'know," Kelly said, "you oughta try smoking now and then instead of hitting the hard stuff. Relaxes the hell out of you . . . and it's a lot safer than alcohol.''

  Pat said nothing. She had heard this same argument from her several times, and though marijuana was not as alien to her as Kelly seemed to believe, she'd never been able to enjoy the highs she'd heard so lovingly described. It had taken her only a handful of times to learn that the equivalent of a single joint only put her to sleep, and that, she'd decided, she could do just as well on her own.

  Kelly took the narrow service road around the buildings much slower than she'd driven out from town, commenting on the age of the students as if she were decades older, being slightly too uninterested in the looks of the men and the marital status of the few instructors they noted. Pat kept her comments to herself, smiling instead and wondering if she were more green-eyed than concerned about her roommate's easy conquests of men. Abbey, though Kelly's age, had always seemed to her to be far older, far more in control of her life. But maybe, she thought, that was an outward compensation for her handicap—Abbey Wagner was deaf.

  She had no time to speculate further. Kelly suddenly slammed on the brakes behind Fine Arts and began a flurry of promises to guard the station wagon with nine lives, if not more, to leave a tankful of gas when she and Abbey returned from work that evening, and an eternal vow never to leave her own car vulnerable again.

  Pat laughed and nodded through it all, slid out and slammed the door. Immediately, she hurried through the side entrance, not wanting to see how Kelly would reverse the compact vehicle and leave the campus. I may have to ride in it, she thought, but I don't have to watch it.

  On the other hand, Kelly's infectious high humor had served to dispel all the remnants of her gloom. A silent thanks, then, as she reached the second floor, and her cheery "good afternoon" to her one-thirty class surprised even her with its firm optimistic ring.

  The studio/classroom was large and well lighted, arranged through several hectic semesters of trial and error to comfortably accommodate a full dozen students, their workbenches and materials, and a space of her own behind a tall rattan screen she'd purchased down on Centre Street three years before.

  The class was gone.

  Oliver and her friends had sensed her need for solitude and had left without their usual extra hour or so of talk, of gossip, of worrying over how their latest projects would be completed. They said nothing about an accident, and Pat assumed the woman involved had not been from the Station. Forgot it as soon as Oliver wished her solemn good luck, Harriet rose up quickly to kiss her cheek, and Ben gave her one of his rare genuine smiles. The word was out. Though she had said nothing to them herself for fear of jinxing the outcome, it would have been a poor excuse for a campus if her efforts had gone unnoticed, and unremarked, and the day of judgement passed over without some sort of reaction.

  A lovely group, she thought as she wiped her hands on a well-used damp rag; a great bunch of people.

  She stood in front of a sculpture she'd been working on for several weeks, the stone taken from the same area where she'd found the piece for Homer. It was just under forty inches high, the base ten inches wider, an intricate series of looping curves and abrupt angles almost but not quite ready to be polished. She laid a finger on her right cheek, a thumb to her lower lip, and she studied it. Her head tilted in concentration. For those who asked she said it was untitled as yet; for herself, however, it was Greg at his desk—or rather, it was his shape, his form, barely recognizable as human to the untrained eye, a dizzying snap into focus once the subject was revealed. It had taken her too long—with too long to go for the span of her life—to study the Moores and the Segals, the O'Keeffes and the Pollacks, before she had developed a synthesis she felt comfortable with, that suited her, that allowed her to slice away what she thought was the mundane to what she hoped was the artistic.

  For the most part it worked.

  She had already shown in Boston and New York, and much to her parents' distress and amazement had sold virtually every one of the pieces she could bear to part with. But it was hard. It was close to physically painful. These leavings of marble and stone, those castings in bronze, had often become such intense parts of her life that there were times when she wondered why she bothered with them at all. To see them admired on pedestals, under spotlights, was one thing—they were children on stage, children on screen, children adults turned to watch as they raced down the street; to have them taken away forever, however, was a rending of a soul already much battered.

  Greg had known exactly what she'd been trying to say when she hadn't been able to stop crying after the sale of a piece only last November.

  "You think I don't feel that way about my canvases?" he'd asked. "But why bother doing it at all, Pat, if we're going to be the only ones to see them? It's like . . . well, it's like Emily Dickinson. All that scribbling on wrappings and newspapers, and nobody knew how tremendous she was until after she'd died. My dear," and his voice deepened, his hands darting professorial to his lapels, "artists starving in garrets went out with the nineteenth century. I may never get rich, but I'll be damned if I'm going to starve. And who the hell am I to say this one can't enjoy . . . well, can't enjoy my children as much as I? If they don't leave the nest they're going to get moldy."

  Maybe, she tho
ught as she dropped a clean cloth over the bench and cleaned up her tools, placing them in racks affixed to the wall. Maybe. But it doesn't make it any easier, does it. She hefted a large wooden mallet thoughtfully, then set it on the floor just as a sharp noise filled the room like a shriek. She froze, looked at the mallet, shook herself in a scolding and stepped around the screen.

  Greg stood on the threshold, smock off and patched suit jacket on. His tie was askew, as was his smile. The noise had been his fingernail drawn down the blackboard where Pat made her class sketches.

  "You aren't ready," he said in mild admonition.

  She glanced at the tall windows. The sun had already slipped below the trees, the stormclouds' grey now turned to gunmetal. The dim light was cold. The sky seemed to be less than a hand's breadth above the highest branches.

  "It's beautiful, isn't it," he said quietly.

  She nodded. It was.

  "So," he said with a clap of his hands, "which role do we play, Doc? The lions or the Christians? If you want my opinion, I hate raw meat."

  She shook a fist at him, hurried to the row of sinks by the door and washed her face and hands in cold water. A brush snagging through her hair, her own smock to its hooks, and she picked up her handbag, turning her back momentarily so he couldn't see the pat she gave to Homer's head. Then she took hold of his arm and led him away, one hand trailing behind to switch off the lights.

  The corridor was deserted. The lights inlaid in the walls and covered by white glass had been dimmed. A red light over the fire exit glared cyclopean.

  The conference room was in the corner down the hall from her office, but when they reached it he surprised her by moving on toward the front, past her office, past his own room as well.

  "Round and round," he said when she looked quizzically at him. "For luck we'll pretend it's a carousel, okay?" He gestured toward the curved wall of the auditorium. "A peeling lion there," he said, pointing. "A llama, an ostrich, a bench for two, one for four." They were on the east side, darker, all the rooms empty, a chill that seemed writhing in the recesses of the ceiling. "Here a chick, there a chick, and over there a purple galumph."