by Paul Pipkin
“Well, the walls were built by the Indians and finished out by the Dutch,” I began. “Nothing will endure forever, babe.” The cloudy afternoon light dimmed abruptly, and I looked at the darkening, churning sky. There was a lot of circulation up there, and it was about to rain. With a sudden apprehension, I knew I’d made some ghastly mistake.
Maybe I was accustomed to the flat Texas horizon. Perhaps I had stupidly not thought of how, above the cloud deck, the sun might be setting just a hair earlier beyond Woodstock. While the higher Catskills weren’t all that lofty, dusk seemed to settle much faster than anticipated. Whatever might be responsible for the effect, maybe only the slight change in latitude added to a mere degree of elevation—it was as though the shadow of the haunted hills was already coming down over Rhinebeck.
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THE LEGENDS OF THE GORGES AND HOLLOWS were not whom I feared, however. I now think that I had known what to fear since reading Madeleine’s Testament. Below us, toward the River, the lights had come on in some of the houses. Friendly lights, which might guide one home in a benign evening.
When I looked back to Justine, I was alarmed. She was biting her knuckle so hard that she had drawn blood, and her face was a mask of stark holy terror. Her eyes had changed color and looked blind, to anything including me, seeing altogether elsewhere.
She whirled and ran madly up the hill behind us, oblivious to my calling after her, falling once, then scrambling on ahead. Oh shit, I thought I knew her. Despite everything, I’d continued to persuade myself of that. Then she pulls something like this! I’d pursued Linda on suicidal sprints toward highways more than once, but I’d been in much better shape back then. If this youngster was going to run amuck on me, I did have a problem.
Even so, I chased after her through the deepening gloom. In the fading light I almost collided with the wall of a large structure. Long, tall, and narrow, it was of the configuration that the old New Yorkers called a “saltbox barn.” Sagging in abandonment with its paint long eroded, it was nonetheless evident from the various window casings at upper and lower levels that it had once been converted to habitation. There was no glass left in the staring windows, and a large front doorway yawned mutely empty.
Following Justine’s hysterical weeping, I found her kneeling on a dirt floor, as if the cavernous space she was facing were a cathedral. The place had been entirely gutted, remnants of good Depression-era parquetry bearing silent testimony to the two missing floor levels. High above, I could see the darkening sky through tears in the roof. If this indeed had been Willie’s barn, all trace of his loving work had been gone these many years.
“It’s the dream,” she moaned miserably as I knelt beside her. “I forgot the dream, and now it’s come after me.” Gone were the faintest intonations of the young woman I’d known, and hearing nothing but the speech of the old Bronx was chilling. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed away to the west. The crew of the Half-Moon, I thought crazily, remembering the legend, bowling with their ninepins up in the Catskills.
“I believed I’d awakened, but I kept waking up again, here,” she cried with the terror of an abandoned child. “Oh, my Lord in heaven, please help me. Oh, help me wake up!” Her voice lapsed into a croaking whisper, seemingly akin to the dream experience of “silent screams,” which one cannot seem to get out of one’s throat.
The lightning flashed again, closer, and I could see that she had a profuse nosebleed. As in despair, she flung herself on the dirt and thrashed about, in a virtual fugue state. I endeavored to pin her down; there were certainly nails and God-knew-what in the debris around us. I’d succeeded in embracing her with a good grip when she threw up. Blood, snot, and then puke. I was getting the full treatment and hoped it was good for the soul, because I was not letting go. I noted with indifference my heart pounding to the unaccustomed exertion. If I were going to lose her there, I’d just as soon be dead, rather than face a meaningless world without her.
She had gone into full babble mode, and I frantically worked to decipher what it was she perceived. It seemed she believed herself on a parquet floor, adjacent to a bedroom where she’d gone to sleep; though other dream images and renderings continued to intrude. Some amber light source she was seeing, like a heating grate or a night-light, became the “scare furnace,” and other distractions such as that.
She tried to squirm away from me, seeking after a vanished staircase. She was mumbling about plaster saints, African masks, and shelves of witches’ dolls. Like a little child, she was terrified of looking at the painted faces—for fear of surprising them looking back.
The memory images were so intense that they were patently visible to her. I tried to help her recall that at least some of those memorabilia were packed away back home, but she would only keep begging, “Help me, help me. Oh, Willie, à 1’aide! Wake me up, please wake me up …” Torturously, I pieced the thing together. She was not seeing merely where she wanted to be, but where she thought she was!
I had to stay with her, incoherent and out of it as she might be. If there were any hope of pulling her back, I had to go with it. I could only pray that there would be another day, when review of my interpretation of her semicoherent snatches had proven sufficient to the purpose. I cannot begin to recount the discursive bits and pieces from which I was obliged to frame an overall sense.
She rambled on about those other things Willie had kept upstairs, the witch’s cradle, the rack. She longed to feel the chains from the rafters against her naked flesh. Even the thought of being placed on the torture instruments was comforting and desirable as compared with … The lightning flashes again defined the present moment, and I thought, God help me, I know what’s happening here! The girl in my arms had never been in this place, but within her, no longer so deep, were the memories of how the other Justine had known it over the years, and especially on her last night together with Willie in 1945.
To her, it was as if she were sleeping here on that night, having a nightmare from which she couldn’t awaken. Unconscious, her mind had drifted, as Dunne had theorized, into an unknown future and found … this present moment. To her, this was the dream. This nightmare—a world with her beloved Willie gone, the barn gutted, such a dark and sad place. She was trying with all her might to consolidate the memories that had defined that other self, fight her way back to an acceptable reality, to him.
I reacted as if to an evil demon, as Willie had perversely wanted to be seen, or perhaps feared that he might really be. “No, Seabrook, you bastard! You can’t have her!” I screamed out, though maybe only in my mind; I’m not sure. “You didn’t care for her before, and now she has another chance. Let go of her!”
But I could feel her slipping away, somehow detaching from the here-and-now. I knew she would joyfully quit this life if she imagined that she would wake in his arms on that other night. The war had ended, Uncle Sam was the last man standing and girding himself as the new Romulus. Her countrymen had imagined the dawn of a brave new world, but something within her would know that darkness had been closing over hers.
For the rest of her life, and into another, her unconscious mind would never escape the accusation of the unremembered dream—the prescient dream that had warned of their last chance. She would sacrifice anything to go back and change things. How could I, above anyone, fail to encompass the horror in that recognition? What else she might be going through as the memories that had composed another life slammed mercilessly into her mind, one thing was certain. That reality was not the horror to be escaped from; it was this one.
As I tried to pray, the lost ones of my own life closed in around me. The circle nearly complete, only my place was yet empty. I tried to believe that they would be waiting for me, and pleaded God to forgive my own hurtfulness and neglect. I thought I was going to vomit, too. I’d never been so conflicted, didn’t even know for what the hell I was praying. To let her go was impossible. Yet comprehension of her pain was unbearable.
A maud
lin little offering of my life for hers could not begin to touch the love that gripped Justine’s soul, or divert its purpose. She had reawakened with a passion I had never known, even in my adoration of her. If she could not find him here, she would reach for that other night. Her youthful beauty, her brand-new future, were as nothing compared to the goal before her eyes. She would sacrifice her life, her self, her sanity, just to go back to that other night and make it different. If she could not find him here …
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“MADELEINE!” I yelled in her face over the crashing thunder. “Justine,” I corrected when I failed to immediately get her attention, “don’t you know it’s over, babe? The aching and the loneliness are over. The hurting can end now. We live in an otherworld, and I’ll always be there to hold your hand. I promise you that, and may I be damned if I don’t keep it.”
The lightning flashed again, and I saw the green eyes were open, trying to make me out. There was no time to think this through. I knew that I might succeed in waking her into a state comparable to schizophrenia, but at least she would awaken. Without the only reality upon which she would let herself be grounded, I had no confidence that she would.
“Willie?” she asked faintly.
“It’s me,” I answered earnestly, wondering at the eerie notion that I might, somehow, have just damned us both.
Her hands sought my face in the darkness. “Oh my, you’ve grown a beard,” she laughed weakly, “You always did look good with a beard.” A prolonged electrical burst revealed us to each other, and she threw her arms around my neck with joy and relief so intense as it melded with my own. “And I’ve missed you so much. Oh, my dear, dear Willie!” I wondered at what incomprehensible image she might be seeing. Was it like in a dream, where a figure might be two persons simultaneously?
The summer rain then came pouring through the holes in the roof above. At first she was deadweight as I lifted her, but she then more or less steadied herself. “We don’t belong here, Justine. This is all gone, all past. It’s behind us now, and we need to go on.” I hoped I was sending the right message; at least she cooperated as I helped her from the barn. It was slow going back down the hill, but given our condition, I didn’t mind a good soaking.
In the failing light, I could see that her new clothes were very much a total loss. There being no one about, I just stripped her down. She stood obediently and let the rain wash her while I got a suitcase from the trunk. When I turned back, her face was contorted with weeping, though her tears were lost in the rain.
“Oh dearest,” she sobbed, “I lost our little girl.” She sagged against the side of the car and I moved quickly to slide her inside. It took a moment for me to remember the matter of the second Justine’s suicide, but then it required no psych degree to recognize the gravity of this lament.
“Hush,” I whispered as I dried her off with some of my shirts. “I know; I know it wasn’t your fault. I wasn’t there to help.” Damn you, Willie, I cursed silently. At least Beam Piper had the decency to apologize for the mess he was leaving behind. Even when he had shot himself to death, he had remained a gentleman.
“But she’s gone!” This was so heartbreaking it was unbearable, listening to pain that a soul had not been allowed to unburden across decades; or even, I now wondered, across lifetimes? Before my conception, my mother had lost a pair of twins shortly after their birth. Even with me as a comfort, she had grieved for them the rest of her life. I had no clue how to address this, and as I struggled her into her jeans and jacket, I was preoccupied with our situation.
Reality check: I was in an officially ambiguous relationship with a young woman of indeterminate means. Said young woman appeared to be thoroughly schized out and still bore the evidence that she had been beaten. Such family as she possessed could be counted upon to be unremittingly hostile, and any professionals whose attention might be aroused would merely draw interpretations that rationalized their paychecks.
All probable interpretations looked bad for me, and we were in an alien world where I had no contacts within the system. Even Roder represented an unknown quantity in these circumstances. As if on cue, a police car cruised slowly down the road. It didn’t stop, but that just cinched my concerns. I started up and headed straight back to the bridge. Connecting with the Thruway on the Kingston side, I scrupulously observed every traffic regulation.
I’d as rather have gone to our lodgings for some rest and a better cleanup, but a bed-and-breakfast is not my usual speed of motel, where anything short of mayhem can go on with anonymity. I took the decision that our best course was to get back to the City as soon as feasible. There, at least, authority had not the time on its hands to become enthused with social concerns.
By the time I had settled back on the Interstate 87 run, Justine had dozed off. I gathered confidence that I had made the best judgment. We had not unpacked, and Rhinebeck held no further charms for me. As she slept away the miles, my mind was beset by brilliant memories and fantasies of my own. A strange composite from The Château: Justine being whipped, but with the elder Justine watching from the balcony? No, what was she watching? The blonde! It was the night I had bought the blonde, and I was holding out my hand, waiting for the girl to step down to me from the stage.
The road ahead was quite visible, but the steady rain dissolved the hard edges of reality. I remembered Justine on the escalator at the Marriott, moving away from me, as if seen from a ship leaving the shore. That conjured up an image of Willie on the gangway of the old Berengaria, holding out his hand to a timid young Madeleine-Justine, who was afraid to embark. He stood sidewise to her, waiting with his hand extended. I snapped on the dome light and checked on Justine. She was still dead to the world, but I could see from her eyelids that she was in REM sleep. Maybe another new wrinkle in this thing?
Years before, I had consorted for a while with Anton LaVey, the Aleister Crowley of the late century. He had remarked to me a proposition—that partners who sleep together may experience synchronization of elements of their endocrine glandular systems, much as women’s menstrual cycles will match pace. He had speculated that this might explain occasional shared dreams and the like. Could Justine be projecting something? Even so, I suspected that the principle was intimately linked with the question of time. In any event, I knew that I could no longer deny the essential nature of the being beside me.
She awakened in about another hour. My peripheral vision is still good for my age, and I became aware that she was studying me. When I smiled at her she heaved a sigh. “Look it, when you’re little and ask where you were before you were born? I know the answer to that now, believe you me. But everything else is a fright.”
Her tone turned demanding, “Will you please tell me how long? I’m plainly all grown-up.” Upon verification that she was twenty-six years old, she sniffed, as if slightly irked. “Well! I s’pose that’s not as bad as it might of been. Oh dear, you did get old again, didn’t you?” I wasn’t expecting her to be up for tactfulness and tried to laugh it off. This was in spite of the distinct impression that in the woman I was now seeing there could well be a world-class bitch.
“We can’t seem to keep from doing that, can we?” I tried to joke around it.
“Look it, fellow, lay off of the soft-soap. As if I can’t tell you’re ham-acting?” She asked quietly, but with an edge of steel, “You know that liars go to hell? I need a damned drink.” I directed her attention to her purse. As she hefted the battered old hip flask, I had no doubt as to whom it had originally belonged. Bathtub gin! Like the curious combination of drugs in the old snuffbox, the clues had been there before me all along. Her remarks cut through the farce I’d felt obliged to perform. I knew precisely what she meant and responded in all seriousness.
“I believe that you believe I’m Willie. And now I have to believe that you are who and what you say. Isn’t that enough for right now?” I wanted to touch bases with her present-life persona, and tried to get her to consider the associ
ation of her identity with a particular set of memories, but she wasn’t up for it. Morphing into the likeness of a college girl on a mescaline trip, she drifted off into the molded dashboard and digital displays, as if everything was new and enchanting.
Before reaching the City, things continued on the edge of bizarre at a local “hot shop.” I’d been thankful to avoid the presumably comforting, near-identical character of chain restaurants. Commercially contrived déjà vu, in our present circumstances, would only have moved me along toward a graver disorientation.
As I finally decided that I would have to fetch her out of the rest room, she emerged—putting her hair-brush into her purse. It occurred to me that I’d never seen Justine without a purse, even when in Goth drag. When I asked if she were all right, she haughtily announced that she did her hundred strokes at the same time every evening.
Then she wasted yet more time by insisting I feed her the oatmeal I’d ordered to get something bland into her stomach. I got through this by presenting it as an obvious game for the perception of onlookers. It was an ordeal, infantilism not being my thing. But the way she took to the game gave me a further insight. Her conscious contents were overwhelmingly those of her predecessor, but she related to them as would a much younger person.
While I did not forget that she might contain all of the other Justine, at least up to 1945, including that woman’s own youth, the behavior suggested that brain chemistry was a definite factor. I was further heartened when she giggled and apologized for “hurling” on me. There seemed reason to hope that the strong physical reality of the present might eventually reorganize the weakly connected past memories, rather than the reverse. I was thinking about this as we reached the City. Traversing the tunnel beneath the River, I felt her tense up again. Following her gaze to rivulets of moisture seeping down its sides, I sympathized.