She pushed on.
A honeymoon.
This notion, which had only seemed bizarre before, was now utterly horrible to her. She shut it out of her mind. All she knew was that if the Summers had taken Dennis from her, then only the Summers could give him back.
But how? How how how?
And what if they were gone already and that wretched wooden house was empty? And what if she couldn’t find the Summers again?
She stopped, caught her breath. She had reached the edge of the clearing.
In the scattered rain, the small house appeared abandoned. Abandoned, scary, as if it were more than merely wood and glass, light, and shadow—the entrance to a dimension where she’d never traveled before.
She moved across the yard.
Rain fell on the roof with the sound of a hammer knocking the heads of nails.
Dripping, she climbed the steps of the porch. The damp wood underfoot creaked quietly, its resonance stifled by moisture. She pushed the front door open and the kitchen, shadowy and indistinct, appeared before her.
She moved inside.
It wasn’t the same place as it had been once. Everything shone. Everything glittered. Everything was clean and free of dust and dirt and cobwebs. Everything was changed.
She went toward the table.
The pink glass jar, which had so distressed her before, was now an object of total horror. Against it a photograph of Dennis had been propped. There was a meaning, a design, in a way the picture stood against the jar—only she wasn’t sure what.
She went closer. She knew that photograph. It had been taken on the last day of the recent school year. She recognized it—the pose, the forced smile, even the goddamn frame! How did the Summers get it? How did they manage to get ahold of that particular picture? But these were questions whose answers were unimportant—she was thinking only of Dennis.
The picture, the hair inside the jar—she felt she was gazing at relics of a dead child. It was an arrangement that somehow reminded her of a shrine.
She stood very still. The house was silent except for the rain, always the rain banging against the roof.
They’ve gone, she thought. It’s already too late.
She went inside the living room. An old upright piano, its wood gleaming, stood against the wall. The keys were as white as a baby’s first teeth. There was an oval coffee table with a lace cover placed across it. Logs had been stacked neatly alongside the empty fireplace and the hearth was filled with kindling. A brass fireside set stood alongside the wood—a poker, a brush, an ashpan. A short-handled ax was propped against the cut logs.
They’ve gone, she thought again.
Everything had been left neat and tidy in a way she thought was unwholesome, like a tableau in a museum. She didn’t move.
She could feel this house all around her. She could feel it touch her, reach out to her.
Slowly she turned her face back in the direction of the kitchen. A noise, a faint noise reached her, some soft sound that lay quietly under the relentless pounding of rain. Something that originated indoors—a paper rustling, something stirring in the chimney, brushing across wood. She wasn’t certain.
She looked down at her hands, splaying her bloodless fingers.
She gripped the handle of the ax.
She went back inside the kitchen and gazed at the dark stairs that rose to the upper part of the house.
Noise again. A soft sound filtered down those shadowy stairs, light as a whisper.
The ax was heavy in her hand.
They are up there, she thought. Up there in the dim reaches of this awful house.
She moved toward the stairs and placed her foot on the first step and listened again and what she heard float down toward her this time was the unmistakable sound of laughter.
Melodic and terrible.
She began to climb.
With blind purpose.
The husband stood in the hallway, in an attitude of puzzled defeat, as if he had lost to forces he couldn’t understand. Metger stared at him and thought, It’s twelve years ago, nothing has changed, the same rain falls in the same forest and a kid dies.…
“I don’t know,” Untermeyer said. “I don’t know what’s happened to the boy. My wife … my wife telephoned for a doctor. I don’t have any experience of this kind of thing.”
Max Untermeyer moved his face in an unreadable gesture and Metger remembered Ackerly and how Ackerly had looked all those years ago on a day the same as this one. The sense of repetition appalled him, filled him with the dread whose source he’d been seeking for a long time now.
Metger moved down the hallway. He glanced inside the living room. He didn’t want to look at the kid. He couldn’t bring himself to enter the room. The gunshot. Anthea Ackerley. The faces of her parents. The past crowded him.
A doctor is coming, he thought. Probably Pelusi. Lou Pelusi. And the conspiracy rolls on.
“Where is your wife?”
“I don’t know. I could hazard a guess. She’s probably gone to the Summers.”
“The Summers?”
“The boy spends a lot of time there. My wife has some funny ideas …” Untermeyer didn’t finish his sentence.
Metger thought, Anthea Ackerley, too, had spent a lot of time with the Summers.
Echoes. Too many echoes. This house. The rain. The sick boy. The Summers.
“What funny ideas?” Metger asked.
Max Untermeyer shook his head. He didn’t want to talk—that much was obvious. An expression of great fatigue went through him and he leaned back against the wall, his eyes shut and his mouth open and his hands dangling loosely at his sides.
Jerry Metger watched him for a time. And then he went outside, out into the rain, even as he felt all the years fall away. He stepped into the forest, and he thought, You knew you’d come this way again, Jerry. You’ve always known that.
There was a half-open door at the top of the stairs. Louise stood on the landing. She didn’t move.
The ax was heavy against her side.
Through the space she saw a pale oval mirror in which was trapped gray light. She saw the edge of a dressing table, an old phonograph.
I dream this, she thought. None of this is real.
She pushed the door and it swung quietly and she stood on the threshold of the room, the blade of the ax hanging against her thigh.
I dream all this. I dream I am walking into a bedroom, a mad woman carrying an ax.
The room opened out before her. Its details came at her in one burst of rainy light falling from the window. A chest of drawers, polished cherry wood. The fullness of the oval mirror, hanging against the wall, catching faint images in its glass.
Louise swayed in the doorway. The blade of the ax locked against her thigh.
This room. This dreadful room. There was a large double bed with a brass headboard and the room was filled with a sense of weird serenity, the kind of silence that is intimate in its intensity, as if what had recently taken place here was an act of love.
Louise leaned against the doorjamb. The weight of the ax was impossible. She blinked against the rainy light.
The two shapes that lay on the large bed were naked, limbs coiled together, hands touching. The two shapes that lay there saw nothing but each other because everything else in the world had been frozen out of their awareness. They touched-fingertips, lips, feet—like things trapped in some lovely web of their own making. Lovely and beautiful and obscene.
Louise moved into the room. She was outside her own body, dreaming. A dream without end.
She saw Dick and Charlotte turn their faces toward her and the dream intensified, shifted, moved down into deeper layers of unreality. She felt the room tilt and go floating away from her, as if everything it contained were being sucked toward that gray rainy light at the window. Furniture. People. Air, especially air. Because she couldn’t breathe.
Dick and Charlotte.
Moaning, Louise swung the ax down at the bed and
the people moved away from her and the sharp cutting blade went through the material and the air was suddenly filled with feathers, as if hunters had come this way and made the air dance with the feathers of dead birds.
Dick and Charlotte.
And the dream deepened.
It didn’t matter to her that they were not the old people anymore, it didn’t matter that they looked exactly like the two people in the photograph taken on the quay in San Francisco with a steamship and the blurred shape of a horse, none of this mattered because she was going deeper and deeper inside a dream of lunacy, a place where she had the strength to raise and swing the ax again, missing a second time, feeling the clash of blade upon the brass of the bed, seeing a small spark rise up out of metal.
Feathers floated before her. The air parted with her third swing of the ax and she heard Charlotte laugh, saw the woman—her body glistening and her mouth open—roll away from the falling blade. And Dick was rising, a pale white bed-sheet half wrapped around him, Dick was rising and moving toward her with his arms outstretched.
Which was when she groaned and brought the ax up through the air, catching the side of the man’s thigh. Blood soaked through the bedsheet and suddenly even the settling feathers were red. The man moaned, clutched the side of his leg, slid to the floor beside the bed.
Charlotte had something that flashed in her hand.
Vaguely, Louise was aware of scissors coming at her and, before she could move her head aside, felt their awful blades puncture the place where neck joined shoulder and the pain, which should have been unbearable, was hardly anything at all, because this was all still a dream. Dick staggered up to his feet and somehow managed to get his hands around her neck and she felt the air being squeezed out of her body, a darkness dancing in front of her eyes, before she brought the ax up with an enormous effort and the blade sank somewhere between his legs and he screamed, falling away from her now.
Charlotte struck again.
A flash of blades.
Louise was aware of blood flowing out of her own wrists and suddenly she thought, I can’t hold the ax now, it’s slipping out of my fingers. I don’t have strength, even in my own mad dream I can’t find strength. Even here. In my own insanity.
Charlotte came at her again. Louise stepped to one side. She brought the ax up sideways, the only way she could, with the only strength she could find, and the blade rose up into Charlotte’s breasts and the woman slithered back, back across the room, striking the wall and holding her hands up to the place where her flesh had been laid open.
Louise slumped against the door.
Dick Summer, who barely moved, gazed across the room to the place where his wife lay. His eyes were moist. His mouth opened and closed in silence and yet it seemed to Louise he was saying something like Do it. Finish it. What are you waiting for?
Louise pushed herself across the room and brought the blade down once, twice, a third time, driving it into Charlotte’s skull and hearing the thud of sharp metal upon bone, again and again and again until Charlotte Summer no longer moved and her face was covered entirely with blood and even the saliva that dripped from her open mouth was scarlet.
Louise thought, I wake up now. Numb, unfeeling, I wake up.
Dick Summer slowly lifted a hand. He pointed a finger at Louise, as if the gesture were a threat he was in no position to carry out, and then his head tilted to an angle and he sat motionless on the floor, his eyes wide, his stare fixed directly at Louise.
And the dream moved into another horror. Here in this dark red room it shifted.
As wax will melt in flame, as paper will curl in fire, as flesh will turn to dust with the passage of time, so it seemed to Louise that Dick and Charlotte Summer, lying some ten feet from each other—although how could you measure distances in a nightmare?—were undergoing changes even as she watched them. Flesh shriveled. A darkness touched their bodies. Their faces altered. Beneath flesh there was the motion of skeletons, subtle differences in how they appeared in death, as if the whole process they had worked to stop, the passage of time they had tried to still, had caught up with them now.
Louise shut her eyes. She backed out of the room. Numbly, she started to go down the stairs.
She trailed the ax in her hand, hearing it bump against each step as she descended.
The man who was rising to meet her looked vaguely recognizable. It didn’t matter. Vaguely recognizable, a stranger, whatever—it didn’t matter.
He blocked her away. He gripped her by the arm.
“What have you done?” he asked.
Louise said nothing. She was aware of her own wounds, but only from some distant place, as if she were removed from her sense experiences and stood—small and hollow—at the end of a dark tunnel.
“What in the name of God have you done?” the man asked again.
Louise moved her lips. She said nothing.
“You killed them,” and it wasn’t a question.
Louise shut her eyes, swayed, imagined for a moment that she might fall and go on falling down this flight of stairs.
“Dear God,” the man said. His expression was one of hopelessness.
What was he doing here? she wondered. What was Professor Zmia doing in this place? If there were answers, they hardly seemed to matter.
“They had lived for two hundred years,” the man said. “Have you any idea what it is you’ve done? What it is you’ve destroyed?”
Louise shook her head.
“When they needed a child, I brought them one. When they needed fresh blood, when they needed young flesh, I brought it to them. When they needed a soul, if you like, I arranged it for them.…” The small brown man drew one hand across his face in fatigue, despair. “Immortality becomes an addiction. There is no death, no fear of death. You can have absolutely no idea of what that is like.…”
The man was silent. His hand fell away from his face.
“The need to feed. The need to devour to stay alive. Their need. And mine, my dear lady. Mine.”
Louise let the ax fall from her hand at last. It slipped down the stairs and lay somewhere at the bottom, making a sound she barely heard.
“I gave them Dennis,” the man said.
Dennis, she thought. It didn’t matter what this man had to say, it didn’t matter if what he had to tell her was every secret in the universe, she had only one thought—her son.
Denny.
“Your boy’s blood. His spirit.” The man stared up past Louise at the gray rectangle of the bedroom door where the terrible light lay still and framed. “There is a hunger. A wanting. A lust to live. For two hundred years I have been bringing them young children. For two hundred years all three of us have cheated death. For two hundred years we have been renewing ourselves whenever we needed to.…”
The man paused. When he smiled the expression was a weary one. “Dear lady. Dear lady. Your son was enough for all three of us. One small boy, filled with life and vitality, that was sufficient for all of us.… We shared the gift of immortality. We knew its secrets. What have you done?”
Louise looked past the man. Whatever he was telling her, whatever he was saying, it didn’t matter remotely. She stared down into the kitchen at the foot of the stairs.
Denny.
The thought of the boy was creating a pressure inside her head.
“Are you sure that what you’ve done will have saved your son?” the man asked. “Are you sure it’s over?”
Louise moved past him, pushing him aside. She heard him come down after her.
“Are you sure it’s finished?” he shouted.
She didn’t look back. She rushed out through the kitchen, went out into the porch, stepped toward the yard—and still Pyotr Zmia’s voice pursued her.
You don’t know what you’ve done!
Louise walked into the trees. She felt the rain fall against her face. Felt it mix with her own blood. She didn’t look back.
She entered the forest, which dripped all around her.
Halfway back to the redwood house, she saw Jerry Metger coming through the trees.
He gave the woman his jacket because her plaid shirt was limp, soaked right through with rain and smeared with blood. Her face had streaks of blood on it, which looked to Metger like something almost tribal, as if she’d dipped her fingers in the liquid and daubed herself with it. And her hand, badly punctured, would need bandaging, but that was something her husband could do.
As they moved across the clearing in the direction of the trees, he placed one arm tenderly around her shoulders. He was aware of her fragility—she seemed to him like something sculpted out of fine glass, a creature that would crack and break under the pressure of wind and rain. And yet …
She appeared quite unaware of her surroundings. She let the rainy wind blast her. She made no effort to lower her face or resist the weather in any way. She talked.
All she did was talk. About her son.
Yes, Metger thought. Let her talk. Don’t interrupt her now. She needs to talk.
They reached the trees. Already the sound of the foaming wash could be heard. In his mind’s eye Metger could see water clutch at branches, pinecones, anything nature had left loose and untidy, and sweep it along in its crazed rush to nowhere.
He paused. He wasn’t in any hurry to get to the redwood house. He wasn’t in any hurry to see the boy. No matter what Louise Untermeyer said, no matter what she’d made herself believe, he wasn’t in any hurry to go back to that house by the side of the dirt road.
There was a weird buoyancy in her voice. Her eyes were bright, lit by some inner flame.
He’s going to be fine, she said. The boy is going to be fine.
He smiled and nodded. The woman was traveling in zones to which he was denied access. But that was all right—let her believe what she needs to. She’s going to need every resource she can find.
Now she was talking about Dick and Charlotte Summer and it was babble that he couldn’t understand, it was wild talk of spells and potions and immortality, it was insane chatter about how the old people had drained life out of her son, but he was going to be okay now, he was going to be just fine, because she’d killed the Summers, she’d taken an ax and she’d chopped them apart, and that was why they couldn’t harm Denny anymore.
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