Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “You’re wrong,” Dave said.

  “Oh, I don’t think I am. I’ve often wondered what you did to that little girl before you drowned her. Why you had to drown her … My goodness!” He said with mock surprise. “Just look at your face. Why, I believe you’re about to have a seizure.” He laughed theatrically. “You are so damned easy, Dave. I believe I could talk you insane, if I wanted to. I managed it with Miss Hippie. You heard the tape. I don’t have time, though, alas, and in fact your part in this little production is very brief. Hardly worth putting your name in the credits. I thought that we’d start the film with a close-up of the angry hero, who, once again, has failed miserably to help his lady love. And then the heroine will have her turn to watch the hero die. Just like that. Bang. Quick as a blink. She’ll be terrified at the sight of it, and that’s just what we want. Raw terror. Close-up of her eyes dilating with it. Or maybe not! Maybe we’ll all be surprised at what happens, because I always leave room for the elements of chance, intuition, and visitations from the world beyond. Always. But one way or another, fear will be the controlling emotion here.

  “But we have to hurry, don’t we? At nine o’clock another show starts next door, tentatively titled ‘The Fires of Hell,’ and I’d like to have everything ready by then so that we can go on simultaneously.”

  The lights dimmed again suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, and the warehouse fell into a sepia-tone shadow. Edmund glanced up at the lights, and a brief look of joy and confirmation crossed his face. The electrical buzzing that had accompanied the last brownout started up again, like a swarm of bees in a wall, and the sound of pacing rose around them as if it hovered on the fog beyond the old clapboard walls. Edmund stepped backward, looking around hastily, licking his lips. He whispered something, but Dave couldn’t catch the words. Edmund seemed to see something, someone … and he cocked his head, squinting, and then darted a glance at Anne. Cool air rose around them again, as if it filtered up from beneath the floor, and there was the sharp smell of smoke and ash again, distinct and near, as if they stood inside a burned house. The smoke smell was mingled with the stench of burned bone and hair.

  Edmund laughed out loud with a shocking suddenness, and Dave threw his hands up defensively. The walls of the warehouse hummed with the sound of the pacing now, and the cloth leaves on the forest trees vibrated. Edmund stood still in the brown light, his eyes wide open, his tongue darting across his lips, the muscles in his cheeks jerking. He looked around, his eyes full of anticipation. He held the pistol on Dave as he bent over to pick up a roll of duct tape from a stack of piled wooden casks. He stepped forward, shifting the pistol so that it pointed at Anne.

  “I’m going to ask you to turn around,” he said to Dave. “I’ll ask you to put your wrists together behind your back.” With his teeth he yanked at a strip of tape, then ripped it loose. “You’ve got a couple of seconds left to pretend to act gallantly, Dave, before I tape your wrists. After that, it’s all over except for the shouting and the fireworks. So if you’re going to be heroic, you’ve got to hurry up. Any second now it’ll be too late. Don’t let another little girl drown, Dave. There’s nothing in this pistol but a bullet. It’s true that it’s a .45 caliber bullet, which will blow a hole in you that we could drive a gerbil through, but … hey! I might miss. I’m five feet away from you. Make your move, Dave. You heard Miss Hippie’s bright voice on tape. You don’t want Anne to sing those same songs, do you?”

  Dave sat silently, watching the pistol, watching Edmund. The room hummed more loudly than ever, and there was the continual echo of footfalls and the lights dim and yellow. There was the sound of creaking, and the room seemed to pulsate with a throbbing heartbeat of slowly increasing pressure. There was a crackling noise then, like paper crumpling, and a thin line of smoke rose from the red-coated doll sitting next to Anne. Edmund glanced at it, his eyes widening in a mixture of triumph and wonder. He started to speak, but just then, as if someone had put a match to it, the doll ignited. The collar of its coat caught fire, the flames running down the arms and out across the chest, the big plastic buttons warping and folding. A doll across from it exploded, spewing out a pinwheel of flaming bits of cotton wadding. The doll next to it went up, too, and then another, and in moments all of the dolls burned with a wild fury that lit the warehouse like daylight.

  Anne instinctively jerked away from the intense heat, turning her face aside, sliding off the rock and onto the ground, pushing herself away from the trees, away from the papier-mâché. One of the rocks began to burn, and smoke poured out, spiraling upward toward the open skylights overhead. The smoke from the dolls rose straight into the air, too, drawn toward the ceiling like the funnel of a tornado. The room thrummed with footfalls, a heavy bass chord played over and over again, and the lights flickered, the power ebbing until they were like smoky yellow moons overhead.

  There was a shout then, a man’s hollering, coming from some distance away and nearly lost beneath the heartbeat sound of the heavy air around them. Edmund glanced behind him, back in the direction of the loading dock and the warehouse door, the pistol swinging momentarily wide, and in that moment Dave leaped up and threw himself forward at a dead run, kicking through the campfire sticks and launching himself into the air as Edmund whipped the gun around toward him. There was the deafening roar of the gun firing past his ear, and Dave felt the barrel glance off his forehead in the instant before he slammed into Edmund’s chest, and the two of them tumbled backward into the litter of wooden casks.

  The casks gave way like bowling pins, and Edmund grunted heavily as his head cracked against the floor. He clutched Dave’s shirtfront and clubbed away at the back of his neck with the pistol. Dave levered his forearm across Edmund’s throat and pushed himself up, still deafened by the gunfire. He hit Edmund as hard as he could in the face. Edmund’s head snapped sideways, and Dave bent around and grabbed Edmund’s gun hand by the wrist, standing up and twisting his forearm, levering Edmund’s elbow against his own knee. There was the snap of a bone breaking, the pistol clattered to the floor, and Dave shoved it away with his foot, throwing himself off balance, the gun spinning, sliding in among the burning dolls. Edmund kicked him then, arching his back and throwing his weight into the kick, catching Dave on the hipbone. Dave stumbled backward, and Edmund turned over and scrambled to his feet, looking around wildly, spotting a scrap of two-by-two lumber from the kicked-apart campfire. He snatched it up in his right hand, his left arm dangling uselessly now. His face was a mask of rage as he stepped forward, swinging the club back and forth in front of him.

  Even through the thickening smoke, Dave saw that the lights were on now. Not just the night lights, but all the lights. Someone had thrown the breakers. Edmund lunged at him, cracking him on the forearm with the club, jerking it back again and swinging it at Dave’s head. Dave threw his arm up again, but he tripped on the debris underfoot, and felt the club hit him over the eye, heard the sound of it cracking against his skull. He smashed backward through the fallen casks, tripped, tumbled through broken barrel staves. Frantically he turned over and scrambled away, grabbing up one of the staves and standing up as Edmund rushed toward him. Edmund held the wooden club over his head, his mouth working insanely, his head shaking with a lunatic’s palsy. His eyes were slits, his mouth downturned, mumbling incoherently as Dave stepped in toward him, up-thrusting the broken stave into his chest, blocking the blow of the two-by-two with his forearm again, and grabbing the wrist of Edmund’s broken arm, wrenching it around and upward. Edmund screamed into his face, and Dave let go of his wrist and grabbed his shirtfront, stepping into him, pushing the stave into Edmund’s throat now, tearing a gash in the flesh of his neck. Edmund made a strangled noise and went down onto his knees, dropping the club and clutching his throat. Dave’s vision blurred, and he wiped his eyes with his hand, surprised at the wash of blood from the cut on his forehead. He tossed down the stave and picked up Edmund’s two-by-two as Edmund staggered to his feet, still holding his t
hroat, blood running out through his fingers. Anne had managed to crawl away from the fires now—a dozen of them, the rocks and dolls burning brightly.

  In that moment there was a wild banging and clattering behind Dave, and he half spun around, raising the club in surprise. It was Collier pushing through the piled sets and props, lunging heavily toward them with a heavy metal fire extinguisher in his hand. Edmund shrieked incoherently and stepped toward him, his face absolutely wild with loathing. Collier swung the extinguisher, holding it by the broad steel valve on top, the force of the swing spinning him half around. The bottom edge of the canister caught Edmund square on the side of his head, and he slammed straight to the floor and lay there, knocked senseless or dead. Dave leaped forward and caught Collier before he fell too, and then turned and ran back through the burning debris to where Anne sat against the warehouse wall. He pulled the tape loose from her wrists and ankles. She yanked the strip from her mouth, wincing with the sharp pain, and then rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. Dave put his arms around her and held her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, realizing then that he was shaking, and she hugged him back, then pushed him away and looked at his forehead. Collier stormed back and forth with the fire extinguisher, spraying down the dolls and the burning rocks, which were skeleton hulks of chicken wire and charred wood.

  “You’re hurt,” Anne said.

  Dave blotted the cut with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m all right,” he said. “It’s superficial.”

  The doll’s red coat lay on the floor, still flickering with a slow fire that smoldered along a blackened edge of the collar. Anne stood up and stomped the fire out, then kicked the burned coat back into the shadows along the wall. The doll was completely gone, consumed by the flames. Only one doll remained unburned—a male doll, its nylon flesh and its black robes miraculously intact. Still holding the spent canister, Collier stood looking at the doll, his face full of disbelief.

  “What the hell kind of sick crap … ?”

  “Edmund’s idea of a party,” Dave told him. “Turns out he liked to play with dolls.”

  Collier bent over and lifted the hem of the doll’s robes, daintily, with his fingers. He squinted for a moment and then dropped the robe again, shaking his head. “You know what?” he said. “I guess this doesn’t surprise me. That’s the stone truth. You find out that Edmund plays with obscene dolls, and all you can say about it is that it stands to reason. You okay, honey?” he asked Anne.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am. But it’s lucky he liked to hear himself talk. I think we better call an ambulance for him.”

  “Phone’s down,” Dave said.

  “We can use the phone at my place,” Collier told him.

  Dave cranked open a window in the nearby wall of the warehouse, letting in the foggy night breeze. There was still a reek of smoke on the air, but the smoke itself hovered far overhead, still drifting out through the skylights. They walked across to where Edmund lay on the floor. The raw wound in his neck had quit oozing blood. His mouth was half open, his jaw slack. Collier reached down and felt for a pulse.

  “He’s alive,” he said. “But he’s not sprightly.” He kicked Edmund’s leg a couple of times. “I wish the bastard would get up, so I could hit him again.” He pointed the fire extinguisher nozzle at him and cranked it on, hosing Edmund down with white powder so that he looked as if he had fallen into a flour barrel. “Just in case he was on fire anywhere,” Collier said to Dave and Anne. “You can’t be too safe.” He laughed out loud and set the canister down onto the floor. Then he stopped, frowning, and said, “What the hell’s that?”

  64

  DAVE LISTENED INTENTLY, HEARING IN THE DISTANCE THE sounds of commotion, yelling, a sharp scream, voices shouting together.

  “The theatre!” Anne yelled. She turned and ran, Dave and Collier following her, threading their way back through the props, past the storage room, past the spattered paint and out onto the loading dock. Dave recalled Edmund’s crazy chatter, his reference to the “show” going up at nine in the theatre.

  He passed Collier, following Anne along the back of the theatre, running blindly through the fog, past the shadows of cars in the parking lot toward the cloudy glow of the lamps on the outside wall of the theatre. There were people ahead, reeling out through the open side door. He saw old Parsons in his Lear robes, pulling off his false beard, doubled over coughing. The theatre was on fire inside. He could see flames through the door, up past the stage—the curtains burning. Thank God it was only a dress rehearsal. If the theatre had been full …

  Collier shouted hoarsely at his back, and he turned momentarily to listen to him. “Jenny!” the old man cried, and pointed at the theatre. Dave waved at him, pushing past people in the parking lot. He saw Anne stop to help old Mrs. deShane, who had the role of Cordelia’s attendant, and who sat on the pavement now, her hand pressed to her forehead. There was no sign of Jenny in the lot. Collier faded into the fog, running to check the bungalow. Jenny might be at home and not in the theatre at all. Collier wouldn’t have known it if she’d left the theatre in the last ten or fifteen minutes.

  Dave looked in through the theatre door, keeping below the smoke that roiled out from inside now. The fire sprinklers were on, and water was pattering down in virtually useless trickles. The fire was already too savage, too instantly out of control. He could see nobody else in the theatre itself. Nobody else was trying to get out.

  “Was Jenny inside?” Dave shouted at Parsons’s nephew, who was playing the Duke of Cornwall.

  The boy shrugged at him and held his hands out hopelessly. “Earlier,” he gasped, “she was downstairs, playing in the costume room. I don’t know…. “ He broke out in a fit of retching and doubled over. Dave thought instantly of Elinor swept out in the rip, how she had disappeared into the open ocean so quickly, virtually within moments. He turned away and hunched in through the open door, ducking beneath the head-high haze of smoke that hung overhead like a lowering cloud.

  He shaded his eyes with his hand and crouched on the floor, watching flames run up the heavy leg curtains at the left of the stage. The old velvet material went up like tinder, whooshing like wind through a door, and he heard the crackling of wood burning. The stage was on Are, flames flickering from beneath it along the front apron. The canvas backdrop for Lear’s scene on the heath smoked and smoldered, and the Duke’s Styrofoam palace poured out a poisonous reek of smoke.

  He set out toward the stairs down to the basement, keeping low, thankful for the little bit of water from the ceiling sprinklers and breathing through his shirt even though he knew it was probably a useless precaution. Near the top of the stairs he turned to glance back at the door, hoping that they’d found Jenny in the bungalow, that someone would wave him back out of there. The doorway was empty. Beyond it were the moving shadows of people milling in the lot. There was the sound of the burned-through leg curtain whumping down onto the stage in a cascade of Are and sparks and smoke, and the air around them was filled with the uncanny noise of the fire and the sound of distant sirens out in the night.

  Hurry up, Dave thought, hearing the sirens, but he pushed on, forced by the smoke and the heat toward the stairs to the basement, shading his face from the heat coming off the burning curtains. He descended the stairs into relative coolness, the basement still preserved from the smoke and flame. There were nearly a dozen basement rooms and corridors—bathrooms, prop room, dressing rooms, costume room. Jenny might be in any of them. She loved the costume room most, but it was at the far end. There was a basement exit in the costume room, and for a moment he was full of hope that she would have gone out the basement door and escaped through the alley that ran between the warehouse and the theatre. He would certainly have to go out that way; there would be no going back through the theatre itself. He thought about the basement door, which was almost always kept locked unless someone was hauling costumes in and out. He couldn’t recall that anybody had been. Not tonight.

  H
e threw open both bathroom doors and switched on the lights. The rooms were empty. He went on, down the first corridor toward the props room, listening to the low rumble and roar of the fire, things falling above, and he felt the heat from overhead now, from the burning stage above him. “Jenny!” he shouted, continuing to shout as he opened the prop room door, stepping inside, finding the light, realizing at that moment that he would be dead blind if the electricity went out.

  “Jenny!” He overturned a prop table, pushed in behind boxes of junk. “Jenny!” There was no answer. She wasn’t there. She wouldn’t be playing any games; she’d be scared senseless. He went out, still calling her name, down to the end of the corridor where another door was closed in front of him. Surely if she were down here, she could hear the noise of the fire overhead, feel the heat, smell the smoke that now filtered like ghosts through the broken plaster of the ceiling. A patch of ceiling gave way just then, falling to the corridor floor in a dusty explosion. He kicked through it, opening the door, looking into the dressing rooms. They were littered with makeup boxes, hair dryers, scattered stools, the mirror lights glowing. He saw his own wild reflection in the lighted mirrors, and was shocked at his bloody forehead, at the blood on his shirtfront.

  “Jenny!” He called her name once as he ran out. Again she wasn’t there, and it was clear in a moment that she wasn’t in the adjacent dressing room either. He slammed the door shut behind him and set out down the last stretch of corridor toward the costume room. The air smelled of burning, and the theatre shook with noise, as if a storm were raging above. But even in his haste, barely masked by the creaking and roaring and crashing, he heard something that made him pause—a steady, slow drumming and scraping, the too-familiar sound of footfalls on concrete. Instantly it recalled to him the slow rhythmic crashing of surf in his nightmares, and he felt on the heated air of the basement the unmistakable presence of Elinor’s ghost.