Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  He was fairly sure that somewhere in the apartment he would find evidence of Anne the Night Girl—a painting, perhaps another one of the dolls, a suggestive article of clothing…. The bed had been made with a certain amount of care, with a half-dozen throw pillows leaning against the headboard. Unnecessarily making the bed was typical of the Day Girl, an obsession with things being nice in some childish sense of the word. He found a collection of ceramic dogs on one of the bookcase shelves, all of them dusted, perfectly arranged. They were cheaply made, dime-store items, really. He was momentarily surprised at Anne’s taste, but of course this was the Day Girl again, probably full of nostalgia for childhood trinkets. He picked one out, a dachshund, slipped it into his pocket, and then went on to the dresser.

  In her dresser he found nothing interesting beyond predictable items of lingerie. He stood looking at these for a moment, feeling the fabric between his fingers, waiting for inspiration. But nothing came to him. He wasn’t a thief. If what he found suggested nothing to him, then he would take nothing. The three paintings that were unwrapped and leaning against the wall of the bedroom were the same sort of thing that he already owned, nature paintings, mainly—beautifully done, but without the depths of the Night Girl’s work. There were other paintings that were wrapped in paper, but he didn’t dare open them. He could sense that they were more of the same, that Anne had hidden her most profound pieces; most likely she had hidden them from herself.

  Leaving the doll on the bed, he wandered into her bathroom now, where he looked inside the shower, smelling the soap and the shampoo, picturing the door opening, her stepping out onto the shaggy pink rug, reaching for the towel. … The medicine chest was uninteresting, just some headache remedies, antacid, cold and flu medicine. He looked for birth control pills, but couldn’t find any. One of the cabinet drawers held various articles of feminine hygiene, which he examined and put carefully away again. He went back out into her bedroom and lay down on the double bed, running his hands over the bedspread. He moved the throw pillows aside and pulled the bedspread down over the pillow that he imagined Anne slept on, the soft, pale field of her dreams. It smelled like fabric softener. He put his own head down, listening to the quiet evening through the open window.

  He pictured a twilight landscape, himself standing at the edge of a woods, leaves drifting from the trees. He was aware of his own nakedness, and in his dream his own body was mingled with the body of the doll that lay near him on the bed. Instead of embarrassment, his nakedness and his newfound anatomy felt right to him. He saw something shifting back in among the trees, a clearing, firelight. There was movement around the fire, shadows of restless figures in strange postures. In the dream he moved toward them, motivated by intense sexual urgency, feeling the nearness of the Night Girl in the surrounding darkness. And into his mind drifted the utter certainty that in this dream he was crossing a threshold, moving through a borderland from day into true night, and he was overwhelmed with a combination of nameless dread and animal desire as a beastlike shadow separated itself from the other shadows cast by the firelight and moved toward him through the darkness of the woods….

  He lurched awake, bathed in sweat, his heart pounding, uncertain exactly where he was. His hands were sticky in his surgical gloves, and he gaped at the doll on the bed beside him.

  Voices! That’s what had awakened him. Out in the hallway! He scrambled to his feet, looking around wildly. No, they were on the street below. It sounded like Anne’s voice. He ducked below the level of the windowsill and peered out at the sidewalk. It was Anne, accompanied by Dave, angling arm in arm across the street toward the building. Dave was laughing like a moron, the damned …

  Edmund fought down his sudden anger, yanking the spread up over the pillows now and hastily pulling it straight. He rearranged the throw pillows, hearing the street door slam shut downstairs, then muffled voices again, inside the building now. Picking up the doll, he turned to the open closet door. In a moment he’d be gone….

  And then, in a rush of wild emotion, he remembered the chain lock on the door. He hurried through the bedroom and into the living room, hearing them out in the hallway now. Carefully, knowing that they were only a foot away, just on the other side of the door, he slid the chain latch through its slide, then noiselessly extended the chain itself so that it wouldn’t rattle or knock. At the same moment that he heard Anne’s key slide into the dead bolt, he turned back toward the bedroom, moving as noiselessly as he could, thankful now that the two of them were chattering away. From the darkness of the bedroom he heard the bolt click, heard the door hinges squeak open, and he watched through the crack in the bedroom door as the light switched on in the living room.

  30

  “WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN I GOT AN EASEL FROM MY UNCLE and aunt who lived in Scotland,” Anne said. “I have these two wonderful uncles, you know—identical twins. One of them moved to Vancouver Island back in the 1930s, which was where my mother was living at the time, when she was about five. Uncle Johnny was twenty, and the other uncle, Billy, stayed in Scotland, in a little village called Haddington, which is near Edinburgh, just a few miles from the North Sea. We used to go for the summer, six weeks at a time, and this one summer my uncle and aunt gave me an easel, like I said, that my uncle had made out of hawthorne. It had all these wonderful copper hinges and pins to hold it together when you set it up, and you could take out the pins and collapse the whole thing so that it looked like a bundle of sticks. My aunt sewed an immense bag for my paints and canvases, with little pockets and cubbyholes and with the face of a Scotty dog embroidered on the front. I could unbutton the whole thing and lay it out flat on the ground like a picnic cloth.

  “Unless it rained, every morning was the same. I ate oatmeal and made my bed up, fixed a box lunch, and then went out walking, carrying the easel and bag down a rocky path through the hills to this rushy little spring-fed lake in the glen. It was called Muck Pond, and it was very weedy, although the water was quite clear and beautiful. It was cold even in the summer, with the wind off the sea, and the sky was usually full of enormous clouds that had blown down out of Scandinavia. The hills were green, unbelievably green, and there were these shaggy sheep that roamed the hillsides. I was always a little afraid of the sheep, but I don’t think I would be today. They were wonderful to paint, because they would stand there forever just looking at you. Along the edge of the lake there was a woods that my aunt and uncle called a park, but they were very dark and wild, so I never went into them alone. If you followed the path far enough, it led through the woods and down along the lower end of the lake, where there was a cottage owned by a little old woman named Mrs. MacNutt—I swear, that was her name—who kept about a dozen cats and who we saw sometimes in town. A couple of times she had come out of the woods in the afternoon and had stopped to tell me about her cats, which was all right, except I really didn’t want to talk with anyone. Aside from Mrs. MacNutt, though, it was the most lonesome place you can imagine, and I almost never saw another human being there … except this once.”

  “My God!” Dave said, grabbing his forehead. “You saw a human being?”

  “Just shut up and listen. You want some more of this chicken, by the way?”

  “No, thanks,” Dave said. It was Mr. Lucky again—more kung pao chicken and fried dumplings. She poured tea into his cup out of a ceramic teapot that was a cobalt blue cube with a bamboo handle. “Go on,” he said, watching the pink glow of a neon light cast on the wall of the building across the street.

  “Well, one afternoon I stayed late, and it was getting on toward suppertime. I was standing about fifty yards above the pond, and there was a storm coming up, and the clouds were wild and black. I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye, down at the edge of the woods. I don’t know what—just something moving, something red, as if a person in a red coat, say, had stepped out of the woods and then directly back in, or had hidden herself behind a rock. When I looked, there was nothing, but for a little while afte
r that I had this creepy feeling that someone was there, watching me. Of course it occurred to me that it was old Mrs. MacNutt, and I half expected her to reappear in order to tell me about the cats or to warn me about the storm, but she didn’t.

  “Anyway, gusts of wind were blowing the grass flat in long, billowing waves, so that everything—the grass, the sky, the surface of the pond, the trees in the woods—was alive with movement, and the air was full of the wind moaning and with the rustle and shiver of the grass and bushes. I was very romantic at the time, very susceptible to all this, and I completely forgot that somebody might still be lurking in the woods. I had about finished the painting, and the weather was so spectacular that I just couldn’t leave. I had to be home before dark anyway, so I kept hoping that it wouldn’t start raining and ruin my canvas and that I could have another ten minutes. What happened was that I left the canvas on the easel and ran down to the edge of the pond. I don’t know how long I was there, probably about five minutes, looking at the reflection of the clouds on the lake and the green color of the rushes and the way the fallen leaves swept out over the edge of the water. When I turned around and walked back up, I saw that my easel had fallen down, and naturally I thought that the wind had blown it over. The canvas was lying there paint side up, but there was a long scar across it, as if it had scraped across one of the crossbraces of the easel when it had fallen.

  “It hadn’t, though. There was paint on the easel, but only where you’d expect it to be. Lying on the ground, though, as if someone had dropped it, was a broken stick, a little piece of a tree branch, and the broken end of the stick was clotted with paint.”

  “So someone deliberately scraped your painting while you were down at the pond?” Dave asked. “I bet it was Mrs. Nutt. You didn’t give a damn about her cats, so she sabotaged your painting. You can tell a lot about people from their names.”

  “Mrs. MacNutt. And, no, it wasn’t her. I saw who it was.”

  “A malicious sheep?”

  “A girl. Probably thirteen. I guessed she was thirteen.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Yes. I had set the easel back up and put the canvas on it before I saw the stick lying on the ground. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened, because it was just too strange, but as soon as I knew that someone had scraped the painting, I started shoving everything away, back in my bag, and collapsing the easel. I was looking around all the time, watching for them, and right then it started to rain, enormous drops. The wind was picking up, blowing the grass flat, and the rain was sweeping through nearly side-ways. It had gotten suddenly dark, too, because of the clouds, and I was crying, hauling all this stuff up the path, which was running with water. I looked back down toward the pond, and it was just wild with the rain beating it, and the rushes were tossing in the wind, and the trees along the edge were just a shadow behind the curtain of rain. But right there, at the edge of the woods, where the path entered the darkness, she was standing there again. She wasn’t moving now. She seemed to be watching me, although her face was turned slightly away. She wore a red coat, just as I’d thought, although in the darkness and the rain, that was the only color you could see in the landscape. Everything else was gray and black. It looked as if someone had colored in a little red patch on a black-and-white postcard.”

  “A red coat? You’re sure?”

  Anne nodded. “Why, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking about something. What did she look like besides the coat? Dark hair?”

  “In fact, yes. Dark hair and a red coat. Why are you asking this?”

  “I don’t know, really. You finish your story, and then We’ll get on to mine, to what happened to me the other night. I think you might find it interesting. Anyway, what did you do?”

  “I screamed and ran, carrying all my stuff. The path curved up through some rocks, and I lost sight of the pond and the woods, and when I came out of the rocks again, where I could see, she was gone. My uncle was coming along the path, and he grabbed my easel and bag and took me home, although I carried the canvas, which was a complete wreck. I ended up throwing it away.”

  “Did you tell anybody what happened? About the girl in the red coat?”

  “No. I couldn’t.”

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t?”

  “I couldn’t because the girl in the red coat was my sister.”

  “Your sister?”

  “I recognized the coat. She was a long way off, but I knew it was her. I had felt it when I saw her at first, but I knew it when I saw her the second time. I don’t mean I knew it in any rational way; I just knew it, intuitively.”

  “Then that was even more reason to say something about it—not that I normally approve of ratting people out, but that was dangerously creepy behavior. Or—let me guess—she was paying you back for something you’d done to her.”

  Anne stared at him for a moment and then said, “My sister had been dead for a little over two years.”

  He nodded at her. “That’s … a complicating factor.”

  “And it wasn’t the first time I’d seen her, and not the last time, either. Now, tell me: what happened to you the other night?”

  31

  EDMUND KNELT IN THE DARK CLOSET, STRAINING TO HEAR the conversation that filtered back from the living room. He caught evocative snatches of it, but it was maddeningly incomplete. It didn’t sound like love talk to him, although he told himself that it didn’t matter one way or another. If Anne was attracted to a loser like Dave, it was merely impulses of the Day Girl in her; it was superficial. He knew he could find a way to brush it aside. He could see one of them move briefly past the edge of the door, and he strained to see more. He didn’t dare open the door any wider. If only Anne were alone in the apartment!

  Her fascination with Dave hinted at a level of superficiality that rather surprised and disappointed him. The Night Girl demonstrated such an incredible depth of perception that it was nearly unthinkable that the two, the Day Girl and the Night Girl, should be so distantly related in sensibilities. He had thought that there would be evidence of Anne’s dual nature when he examined her personal effects, but there was absolutely none. Instead of two sides of the same coin, they appeared to be two different coins altogether, and this struck him as being almost pathological, perhaps evidence of a severely split personality. He certainly didn’t want to involve himself with a nutcase.

  For long minutes there was nothing more to be seen beyond the door. His legs cramped up, and he moved around the closet to loosen up. Somehow he was compelled to stay, even though his spying on them was not only fruitless, but it made him mad. Several times he made up his mind to go, but each of those times he lingered, waiting for something. It dawned on him now that he had lost control. He wasn’t steering the car any longer; it wasn’t his foot on the accelerator. He had become passive. Probably it was at least partly anger—the same anger that he’d felt earlier when he’d seen Dave and Anne together drinking coffee. Anger and loss of control weren’t conducive to his art; they were weaknesses.

  He told himself this, but he didn’t leave. He crouched in front of the door again. Their voices were low, like flies buzzing, as if they were baiting him. Probably he wasn’t meant to accomplish anything tonight. And he certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with Anne when she was polluted with Dave’s persona. He wasn’t interested in being the next in line. Tomorrow, perhaps, some of tonight’s pollution would drain away, and she’d be more approachable, more worth approaching.

  He stood up again and examined the dark space around him with his flashlight. There were a couple of boxes on the floor, but they contained nothing interesting, just some clothing and a box with a few pieces of costume jewelry. He looked at it blankly, waiting for it to suggest something, but it was all junk—rhinestone pins and gaudy necklaces and a cheap pocket watch with a train engine etched into the hinged cover.

  He was struck with the desire to create something right here,
something for Anne—a simple piece that would startle and shock her, edge her mind out of the rut it had fallen into under Dave’s tired influence. What he wanted here was a simple tableau—an artistic arrangement that would disarrange her! Suddenly happy with his own brilliance, he took a moment to pull his gloves on again before bending down and folding back the lid of one of the boxes. He bent his doll in the middle and set it so that it reclined in a bed of Anne’s clothing, looking straight back at him so that it would seem to be looking into Anne’s own eyes when she discovered it.

  He arranged the doll’s robe so that it was less discreet, more truthful. It would remind Anne that somewhere within her lay obsessions and desires that she couldn’t continue to deny. He felt its flesh for signs of living heat, but the doll was cool to the touch. If it ignited in the closet … Well, then it ignited in the closet. He couldn’t help that. It would simply be a fait accompli He wasn’t going to start second-guessing his instincts now. That was the death of an artist.

  He concentrated on his task, letting his mind run, and almost immediately it settled on the pocket watch in with the costume jewelry. He dug out the watch, wound it up, and set it to the correct time. Carefully he lay the watch between the doll’s legs. It was perfect. It hid a small part of the doll’s nakedness, so it made the whole tableau more subtle, superficially less indecent. And yet the watch and its placement suggested hidden things. Time was running, the watch seemed to say. Soon something would come to pass, something that was long meant to come to pass….