Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “Ten dollars an hour for the five hours I’ve already got in this, another fifty for my services, and ten an hour to get me back home again. And I don’t mean to the Seal Beach Pier, either. I mean home. I don’t mind a cab, but you pay for the cab, tip and all. I don’t stiff a cab driver on a tip.”

  “Well … I don’t think that’s out of line at all.”

  “Good. Because if you do, you can let me off right up ahead, right here at Seventh Street, and I’ll walk to my place.”

  Edmund drove through the green light at 7th, and then made the light at Main, accelerating up the Highway toward Newport Beach. “That won’t be necessary. I’m happy to pay you a fair price. Your services are invaluable to me.”

  “Your idea of a fair price and my idea are two different things. I hope you don’t mind my saying that.”

  “I don’t mind at all. But it seems to me that we’ve already exhausted the wage talk, Mr. Mayhew. We’ve got a ways to go, and I want to think something through. You wouldn’t mind if I put on a little music?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Thank you.” Edmund pushed a cassette into the player and turned up the sound—a randomly chosen volume of “Melodies of the Masters.” It was perfect mood music, all the great melodies, just the good parts, not drawn out so far that you got bored by them. He kept his eyes on the road, listening to the music and trying to put the old man out of his mind, which would have been more possible if he didn’t stink so badly. He glanced at him again, but Mayhew was looking out of the window, and in that moment, with the highway lights glowing through the windshield, he was a dead ringer for the Earl. It wasn’t just the way he looked, either, it was his whole attitude. It was a bum attitude. A lazy, shiftless, ignorant, lily-of-the-field attitude, and it made Edmund sick. The Earl had made some money by dumb luck, and then when his wife died—Edmund’s mother—he just quit. It was as simple as that. He had given up, and had decided to act happy, and had surrounded himself with forty tons of weird juju crap.

  Casey was the same way, of course, except he was a drunk. Their mother had died giving birth to Casey, which was the first and last piece of evidence Edmund needed that the world wasn’t fair, that it didn’t matter a damned bit who lived and who died. Casey was bound for a life in the streets, just like Mayhew, begging for money, lying, drunk without even trying to hide it. The worst part about that attitude was how damned superior they were about it despite the damage they did. They had the world all worked out. They wore their crappy rags like a coat of many colors, like any self-respecting man wore his three-piece suit, and they would tell you to your face that it was your suit that was the problem, that it was you. Then they’d ask you for ten dollars an hour, which they’d spend on bourbon and canned pudding.

  He couldn’t remember a time that he hadn’t been ashamed of his father, of their crappy car, of his crappy sack lunches and his Sears and Roebuck jeans. And they were rich, too. He had read enough of Freud to understand complexes. He knew that a man’s desire to kill his own father was simply the desire for freedom, the desire to rid himself of influences that kept his own energies bound and gagged, his spirit blocked. Patricide, according to Freud, was simple freedom.

  There were locked doors that had to be opened. Some men had opened those doors and been overwhelmed by what lay on the other side—their nighttime selves, shadows of unimaginable things. But those shadows only hid the secret colors of the world, a palette of deep hues that an artist might borrow from—a daub here, a tint over there—in order to paint his own way into wholeness and self-actualization.

  The fog rolled across the Highway now, and the late-night lights of Corona del Mar slipped past, the town asleep. Edmund recalled the painting he had seen in the storeroom, the Night Girl’s painting—the confusion of leaves and insects, the shadows, the dark suggestion that there was something hidden back in among the nightmare trees, something waiting and watching, breathing from the very brush strokes themselves, something that only the strong and the truly curious would want to see. Perhaps only the strong and the curious could stand to see it.

  Whatever it was, it was something that Anne the Day Girl blocked out of her world by day just as she blocked it out of her paintings. Only by finding her way into the night again would she find her way to the heart of it once more. If you could look at truth squarely, without fear, without judgment, you could see straight into the deep and hidden realms of your mind, as into the depths of a suddenly still tide pool. And there in that hidden realm lay true darkness, the combination of all natural colors….

  He saw the shadow of a woman walking among the roadside trees in the very moment that the car sped past her, and in that instant, when he was consumed by the very image of darkness, he knew who she was—the Night Girl, her black hair swept back on the ocean wind, her flesh pale in the misty moonlight.

  He braked hard, throwing Mayhew forward. The old man grunted, pressing his hands against the dash. The car bumped onto the shoulder, and there was the sound of flying gravel, a cloud of dust rising behind them, obscuring his vision in the rearview mirror. He threw the car into reverse and accelerated backward toward the fog-shrouded trees, a hundred yards behind him now, which bordered the entrance to a guarded, cliffside community. A cat swerved past, honking wildly, and Edmund slowed down, searching the night with his eyes, the trees looming up at them out of the fog.

  “Did you see her?” he asked, his voice husky. He licked his lips, stopping the car in front of the half-dozen trees—heavy-trunked camphor trees with long, ground-sweeping limbs.

  “Who?”

  “The woman. Did you see a woman walking?”

  “When?”

  “Just now, for God’s sake. Right here.”

  But there was no one visible now. On beyond the trees stood a barbed wire fence that divided the scrub-covered bluffs from the Highway. There were lights mounted on the outside of the tiny guardhouse, which sat square in the middle of the entrance road, and the lights illuminated the road itself, which was empty of people. Fog drifted through the trees. Another car passed on the highway.

  “I didn’t see any damn woman,” Mayhew said.

  “No, you wouldn’t have. Of course you wouldn’t have.” Edmund looked at him sharply, just now realizing the truth. Why should Mayhew have seen her? He didn’t have the power to see her. He had lost his capacity to see anything at all beyond the label on a bottle. Edmund waited another moment, then accelerated slowly forward again, suddenly anxious to discover what the night would bring him. She was with him. That’s why she had appeared to him. He recalled the dismembering of the spiders, the two of them crouched together on the carpet, breathing as one, his fingers capable of incredibly delicate work….

  And now he saw her again, walking in the fog, in the darkness. Again they passed her before he could slow down. He couldn’t see her in the rearview mirror.

  He slowed the car, although he knew he wouldn’t go back this time. He wouldn’t search for her. She would make herself known to him. He glanced at Mayhew, but the old man had clearly seen nothing, and when, a quarter mile farther on, she appeared again, Edmund said, “Take a look at that,” and nodded hard at the side of the road.

  “What?” Mayhew asked.

  “Boo!” Edmund yelled at him, straight into his face.

  Mayhew flinched, recoiling toward the window, his hand going for the door handle again. Edmund laughed. “Relax,” he said. “We’re nearly there. You didn’t wet your pants, did you? These are leather seats.”

  The music tape came to an end just then, and the sudden silence was full of significance. They were just north of Laguna Beach now, along a deserted stretch of highway a mile up from Scotchman’s Cove. There were empty foothills on the left; on the right lay vegetation-covered bluffs that stretched away toward the ocean. “The sounds of silence …” Edmund muttered, slowing down. He glanced again into the rearview mirror at the empty asphalt behind them, and then pulled off the road and onto the shoulder. />
  44

  SUDDENLY AWARE OF A SWISH OF SOUND, ANNE SET HER brush down and listened. But now it had disappeared, as if her awareness of it had stopped it. There was the noise of traffic, of activity down on the street, but nothing more. What she thought she’d heard had been closer, very close, like someone walking on the carpeted corridor outside. She glanced up at the door, which was bolted and chained, and then listened for another moment. There was nothing out there in the hallway, she told herself, and at the same time she knew that there was no way she was going to open the door and look.

  She realized that she was spooked: probably the incident of the note on the door had done it to her, the idea that Edmund Dalton had been up here lurking around, and that she hadn’t known it. It wouldn’t be the first time that a man had paid her an unwanted visit, but in the past she had always managed to be firm enough to get the point across. Edmund Dalton was too weird to get the point. Not that she had tried very hard to drive him away. In fact, obviously this was something that she was going to have to live with until she came right out and told him that she didn’t want him around, which she’d better do, or else stop complaining.

  She shook off the distracting thoughts and focused on the painting that was taking shape on her canvas. Most of the canvas was still just covered with gesso, the soft ripples of white priming partly covered with blue-gray sky. The sky was too carefree still, too much a springtime sky. She wanted winter—more gray, something that would contrast fiercely with the white and iron-gray of storm clouds. She didn’t like the painting yet, even though there wasn’t enough of it yet to dislike. Sometimes when she started a piece there was something in it—or in her—that was so perfectly right that she knew the work was going to be good. That wasn’t happening now.

  Tonight she felt particularly nervous, as if something were pending, a thunderstorm waiting to break. She squeezed gray paint onto her palette, picked up a can of copal, and dripped the liquid into the paint, mixing it with the brush and then dripping more copal into it to get the consistency right. She swirled the brush in turpentine to clean it, the pine smell of the turpentine rising around her. Realizing abruptly that she was dizzy, she capped the turpentine jar. Her blood rushed in her ears, and she could hear her own heart beating within the rush of blood. The lights in the room were unnaturally dim, as if the power had diminished, and she heard the sound of someone treading on carpet again, a languid swishing that matched her heartbeat. The sound grew more insistent, louder, well defined, as if a sentry were pacing beyond the door. And almost lost within the footfalls was a small ticking sound, an insect sound, the sound of a fingernail tapping on a window.

  “Elinor?” Anne whispered the name. She waited, holding her breath, not daring to move.

  There was a brief, acrid smell of musty burning, like smoke on a sudden gust of wind. She looked back at the windows, half expecting to see her sister’s reflection in the glass, and a wave of anger washed through her. She had put up with Elinor’s nasty games while her sister was alive, and here, all these years later, she was still putting up with them. “Elinor!” she said, louder now, in a voice that she meant to be commanding, but which sounded small and unconvincing to her. She was struck then with how cold the room had grown, a refrigerator cold that had entered the room like a presence.

  The tapping and clicking emanated from near her foot. She stepped away from her easel, full of the urge to run into the bedroom and shut the door, just as she had run out of the bookstore in Victoria, just as she had run from what she’d seen on the pier. Then she saw what it was that was rattling. A tube of red paint lay on the floor among a litter of other half-empty tubes and laid-out brushes. The tube rocked forward and backward, as if something small and ineffectual were trying to move it. The tube rocked again as she watched, the metal collar of the tube tap-tapping on the wooden floor. The tube fell momentarily still. And then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the cap on the tube began to turn. The tube itself began to shake, vibrating in the grip of a weak and unseen hand. The cap turned a quarter turn, and then, as if the focus of energy had exhausted itself, it fell still once more, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to hold its breath.

  Anne knew, though, that it wasn’t done; whatever had come into the room was still present. The tube vibrated again briefly, then was tossed a half inch into the air, clicking against the floor again, the cap turning slowly and smoothly now, as if something were putting tremendous effort into the struggle. She watched with horror and fascination, half tempted to stomp on the tube with her tennis shoe as if it were an insect, a living thing. The tube lay still now, but the cap continued to turn, abruptly falling off the end of the tube and lying before it paint side up. She realized that the footsteps had fallen silent, that the entire night was silent, the street noise held outside by the tremendous, cold pressure in the room.

  “Go away,” Anne said, forcing a calmness into her voice that she didn’t feel.

  The pressure in the room increased, and she swallowed to clear her ears. “Elinor, go away,” she said again.

  And then slowly, as if something enormous leaned its weight against it, the paint tube flattened along its entire length, the red oil squeezing out onto the floor. The tube itself vibrated urgently, slowly spinning counterclockwise, smearing through the already squeezed-out paint, faster and faster, dragging the paint in a whorl of patchy red across the floor. Anne stepped away from it, holding her hands up defensively. The tube spun like a top, then skittered away, clacking against the door and lying still. The lights in the room flared suddenly and then dimmed again, and the smell of smoke, of burning wool and rat hide, nearly choked her. The door shook on its hinges, clacking in its frame, the loose old iron knob clattering, the chain lock rattling. She stepped backward toward the bedroom, the pressure itself forcing her back, an invisible wall of moving resistance.

  The squeezed-out tube of paint levitated for a moment above the floor. She turned and ran, pushing the bedroom door open in front of her, feeling something hit her on the leg in the moment that she was through it. The apartment fell silent now. Almost instantaneously the burning smell diminished in intensity until it was gone. She heard voices from down on the street, the sound of passing cars, distant music. She knew with utter certainty now that she was alone in the apartment. Elinor had vanished again, although certainly not because of any of Anne’s feeble commands. She opened the bedroom door and peered out. The lights were their normal cheerful yellow color, and there was no hint of the chill air.

  She picked up the sticky paint tube from the floor in front of the door and stepped out into the living room, dropping the tube into the wooden box that she kept her paints in. She hugged herself, licking her dry lips, wondering if the noise would start up again, if the temperature would drop.

  Elinor. She thought the name. Was this Elinor? Or was this something else, some ghost in the wires of her own psyche that she herself infected with the recollected remnants of Elinor’s dark and unhappy presence? Perhaps her own fear of Elinor’s ghost gave the ghost life. She had dragged it with her from Vancouver Island, as if it were another piece of luggage.

  In the living room she looked at the painting on the easel. There was a streak of red paint across the gray-green ocean. There was another smear of red paint on the back of her jeans where the tube had struck her.

  She picked up a palette knife and carefully scraped the painting clean, thinking of her birthday cake, of the traces of chocolate frosting on the canvas and floor, far from where the cake had fallen. Elinor’s destructive gestures struck her as feeble suddenly: all this ghostly energy expended, all the shaking and rattling and terrible pressure for the sake of some pitifully weak and infantile statement. Elinor, she thought, shaking her head, get a life.

  Her laughter diminished when she thought of Elinor’s paintings, and of the dolls, wrapped and boxed and stored in the warehouse. She hadn’t looked at her dead sister’s paintings when she’d wrapped them two months ago. She c
ouldn’t stand to. She quite simply hated and feared them in a way nearly equal to her hatred and fear of Elinor herself. And yet Anne had carted them along with her, those dolls and paintings—all that was left of her long-dead sister.

  A chill ran through her, and she abruptly picked up the telephone and dialed Dave’s number. But there was no answer at Dave’s end.

  45

  EDMUND LEFT THE ENGINE RUNNING. HE SAT STUDYING Mayhew, ideas flitting in and out of his mind like bats. He was hot, and his flesh tingled as if he were completely wired.

  “What the hell is this?” Mayhew asked him.

  “We’re meeting someone.”

  “Out here?”

  Edmund saw that there was a dirt road ahead on the right, leading out onto the bluffs. Synchronicity again—the music dying just at the moment that the road had appeared. It was all clicking, all coming together. What looked like coincidence always turned out to be something more. He drove forward slowly now and turned down the road, the car bumping along over rocks and chuckholes, the Highway disappearing behind them. Mayhew shifted uneasily in his seat, clearly wide awake. He darted a glance toward the door lock, and just to frost the cake, just to give him a thrill, Edmund pushed the lock switch, and there was the click of the doors locking. “Dangerous road,” Edmund told him.

  “Damn straight it is,” Mayhew said, looking uneasily out the window. “You know, I got Mends who know where I am.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with any of this,” Edmund said. “Mr. Mifflin, the man we worked with before, lives down in Laguna. We’re meeting him out here.”

  “Why?”

  “He stables his horses near here. He’s quite an avid equestrian.” There were, in fact, horse trails along the bluffs, and Mayhew didn’t contradict him. Edmund switched off the headlights now, and the sudden darkness was so deep that he braked hard and stopped the car. There were black shadows around them—the outline of ragged shrubs against the grayer darkness of the foggy night sky, which barely glowed with moonlight. He switched the dashboard lights back on.