by Jeffrey Ford
“The Madonna,” said Melody. She leaned over the mother to get a better look at the baby. Of course, there was no contact, but she looked at Owen and smiled. As she moved away, the glow of her arm passed over the wrist of the young woman, and he noticed a small black circle with a cross in it upon her dark skin. It was in the same spot he’d seen it on Helen’s killer, and where Mrs. Hultz said she’d spotted it on the gas station attendant. Melody pulled away but he asked her to light the area again with her arm. She did and it wasn’t his imagination. They looked at it together and turned to each other.
Melody said, “What is it? What does it mean?”
Minutes later, they were outside on the street in front of the school. Melody told Owen she had to go to get up early to do some work before the day began. “See you at the bench,” she said. Before he could tell her goodnight, she was gone, vanished like a light being switched off. He turned and headed home, wondering when he’d be pulled back to himself, as morning was near. He didn’t bound exuberantly in his usual manner, covering a lot of ground, but walked slowly as if his experiences of the night, witnessing the lives of others, acted upon him like gravity, holding him down. He went a long way, lost to his thoughts, until something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye—a flicker of pale blue. Looking up across the street, he saw a sleeper, not Melody, standing atop the roof of a two-story house.
The person—man or woman, he couldn’t tell from the distance separating them—had his/her back to him and was standing right on the ridge of the peak, leaning forward and back slightly as if shifting position as the breeze blew harder and softer. Owen was excited to see another traveler in the night world. He said nothing but walked over to the house and leaped up onto the roof, hoping the person would engage with him. As he came up behind the individual and was about to speak, he peered down into the backyard and was struck silent. There, filling and overflowing the confines of the yard, was a miasma, its yellow mist blotting out the bottom of the swing set, clothesline poles, and some small dogwood trees. It was a roiling, ever-undulating sulphur dream. He could hear it crackling and hissing.
The individual he’d approached took a step down the other side of the pitched roof. Owen watched, and as well as he could make out the details, the person was a middle-aged man. He heard the fellow praying and crying, and watched as he took two more steps on the downward slope.
“Wait!” cried Owen as it slowly dawned on him what was happening.
The man took off running the last few steps, launched himself high into the night, and as he gracefully floated toward the yellow fog, he turned in midair and looked back at whoever was behind him. There was a smile on his face as he descended, until his first contact with the miasma. It was as if he’d deluded himself into thinking this would be a painless close to a painful life. Wherever he touched it, his ethereal form turned to fizz, like the bubbles in champagne. They drifted upward and popped, amid the man’s screams, which resonated throughout the neighborhood. No one in the waking world could hear. The suicide’s mouth and eyes were wide with agony, and his pale blue glow flickered. He shot an arm out toward Owen, as if he’d changed his mind and suddenly wanted to live. The disintegration process drew out its work like a torturer. The clouds rolled up to envelop him, and minutes passed in torment before there was nothing left but the advancing miasma.
Owen bounded away and in his ascent was drawn back to bed.
8
OWEN WOKE TO THE memory of the man choosing to be erased from existence, and as he got out of bed, he wondered how bad life would have to be to throw it away like that. He promised himself not to think about it anymore and decided not to tell Melody what he’d witnessed.
It was Sunday, and the library wasn’t open, but he went in anyway to do some research. After performing a few simple chores left over from the preceding week, Owen sat at his computer and searched for what the figure of the circle with the cross in it could possibly mean.
He found numerous variations of the image and a lot of information. In Western culture, harking back to early ancestors in the Indus River Valley, and becoming more widespread throughout Europe in the Bronze Age, the symbol stood for the power and majesty of the sun, hence it was known as the solar cross. It often adorned rulers and powerful warriors. To Native Americans of the Mound Builder culture, it represented the four directions and the sacred qualities of each. In India and China, the arms of the cross were broken and turned to create a swastika within the circle, symbolizing the cycle of life. Later, this variation was appropriated by the Nazis and came to represent death. He found the search for a specific meaning interesting, just the kind of pursuit he enjoyed, but when he was finished, he still wasn’t sure what to make of it.
He did discover that a certain variation of the cross, where its arms extended a bit beyond the circumference of their circle, was known as the Celtic cross and widely used by Aryan hate groups. The form of the cross he was researching, the solar cross, adhered to the inner circle and was more like a wheel with spokes. There were so many variations of the design, it seemed like an idea humanity came into being with. The young woman with the baby they’d encountered the previous night made the idea of the tattoo being an Aryan hate symbol unlikely. He figured the group must have some larger purpose, but then remembered Helen on the floor behind the counter and the grim flower of her throat. That’s when he gave up his search, the information he’d already found having swamped him.
In the afternoon, the rain came down harder, and since there were no patrons, for lunch he sat on the adult side and watched the downpour through the big window while eating his sandwich. It was then he hatched a plan to get Melody to go downtown with him and visit the house of the gas station attendant on Margrave Street. If he had more time before being snatched back to himself the previous night, he could have searched the woman’s apartment for clues to her connection to the others marked with the tattoo. She didn’t strike him as very threatening or nefarious, considering how lovingly she had held and rocked the child. He wondered what Melody would think of the plan. He’d have to explain the whole tattoo connection and about his “stakeout” with Mrs. Hultz.
Still, he was almost sure she would go with him. Although he was getting to know her a little better every night, he felt she was holding something in reserve. Perhaps she was waiting until she knew she could trust him. On the other hand, he wondered if it was that he was uncertain of her. She was spending a lot of time showing him the ropes of the night world. He had to ask himself why. She did say it was sort of her duty to help a fellow traveler. Owen doubted most people would go out of their way for a stranger, but then, maybe that was one of the lessons the night world taught.
In the afternoon, despite the umbrella, Owen got soaked heading home. Once there, he made a dinner of a bowl of Frosted Flakes and a banana. To him, cooking was burning, and things rarely turned out edible. Every two weeks, he went to the grocery store, the only time he ever used the car in his parents’ garage, and he’d stop into the Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town and have a decent meal. Otherwise, he subsisted on frozen pizza, macaroni and cheese, PB&J. Mrs. Hultz, who had him over occasionally for dinner, told him that at thirty-five, it was time to “join the adult world.” Every time he thought about her saying it, he smiled—but as quickly cringed. He didn’t understand what one’s diet had to do with adulthood.
From the time he ate until bed, he was occupied at the kitchen table, having brought out all his boxes of magazines, the scissors, and glue. He hadn’t worked on the project since the day Helen was shot. For the last few years, since he’d quit smoking, he’d been making collages from the figures and scenes of old books and magazines. The goal was a hundred collages. One for every night of a collage story to be called upon completion 100 Nights of Nothing. He’d stolen the idea from the artist Max Ernst after receiving a collage novel at the library—A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. He thought the cutting of the scissors an appropriate rep
lacement for smoking. With earphones on and classic country music crying in his skull, he toiled away. It took him months to do each page. Singing along to the songs was part of it, and a powerful concentration not even the persistence of nicotine craving could pierce. There was a story to 100 Nights, but Owen had yet to discover what it was.
He slept and suddenly found himself on a corner in town. He had no idea why he was there or how he got there, but the wind was high and the single streetlight half a block away made it darker than if it didn’t exist. He heard somebody coming from the west, dragging their feet, making slow progress. Owen worried it might be a member of the solar cross gang, coming for him. Adrenaline exploded in him and he tried to run, but his legs were too tired, as if they’d turned to stone. Instead, he backed up against the brick wall of an abandoned factory. The figure passed beneath the streetlight, an old shambling man, carrying on like a television zombie. When the stranger was upon him, he realized it was his father, or his father’s corpse or ghost, and it said in an everyday tone, “This is a dream. You want to go back.”
Owen woke on his back to sleep paralysis. It didn’t matter how many times it happened; it was always frightening and put him in a panic until his ethereal self let go of his body and he began to rise. When he passed through the roof of his house, he immediately heard the rain. He didn’t feel the cool drops, but the sound of them on leaves in the street, in puddles, sounded like music to him. The wind from the dream with his father followed him into the night world. This weather in his waking life would have drawn a scowl, but now the streetlight glistened off shimmering leaves and he found it enchanting.
By now, he was able to run without launching himself to the moon, and he bounded away to the yard with the picnic bench. His heart sank when he discovered Melody wasn’t waiting for him. The rain bounced off the tabletop and he wondered how it was he could sit at the table or run along the roofs but could also pass through walls unseen and unfelt. There were shifting abilities to his perceived mass, and they seemed to be at the whim of his newly discovered state. It was still true, though, that he couldn’t touch anything, and so it didn’t make much sense at all. In the house behind him, a child was screaming. The parents screamed back. Owen got up and walked closer to the back door. Finally, he heard the child yell as if she was falling off a cliff, “There’s a ghost in the backyard.” So the spirit couldn’t sneak up on him, he turned, and halfway through his spin, he realized the child was referring to him.
He passed through the hedge at the back of the property to hide. He shook his head while muttering to himself. There were so many exceptions to the rules of the night world, he wondered why there were even rules. He sat on the ground in the rain, peering through holes in the hedge, watching to see if Melody came. Eventually, after having time to think about it, he had to concede that there were just as many exceptions in the waking world. In fact, he loved those contradictions and sought them out for his reading online—Schrödinger’s cat, spooky action at a distance, the double-slit electron study. These so-called “anomalies” were the loaves and fishes of his days, allowing him to believe reality had a mind of its own. An hour passed and Melody never showed. Feeling unsure, he struck out on the night’s mission. It was too boring to just sit, staring through a hedge, not being able to control when he would awaken.
It was some distance downtown, so he took to the street he used to get to work—the one the Busy Bee was on—and bounded down the center of it in giant leaps that took his heels to the height of telephone poles. During one jump, he looked to his left and saw, five or six blocks away, visible even through the downpour, the yellow smudge of a miasma settling upon a rooftop, and reminded himself of all the cautions Melody had schooled him on. He stopped at the Busy Bee and stood outside its lighted window, which had been repaired. It appeared to be operating as it had before the tragedy—open all night—a young man with a ponytail behind the counter. Amazing, he thought, how life and commerce go on even after such a loss. When he left the scene, it was more like he was fleeing, escaping memories that wanted to drag him into depression. With all this on his mind, he was relieved when he finally made it to the center of town and found Margrave Street.
He no longer bounded but walked slowly, peering through the rain and the dark, trying to make out the house with the path to the front door. He recalled it was a larger piece of property than most of the others. In the night world, though, things looked different. There were two houses that could have been the place. He walked up the drive of one, passed through the front door into a darkened house. The first thing that struck him was noise coming from a back room. It sounded as if someone was being strangled. He crept down the hall, cautious, even though no one could hear him. He found the room the commotion was coming from. Passing through the door, he saw, by the glow of a night light, a young woman, naked, straddling a young man, naked, and moving frantically like a kid hyped up on sugar, riding a rocking horse. Owen put his hand in front of his face, a modesty lost to the fact that he could see through his palm.
He noticed there was a sleeper in the corner, crouched down, assiduously watching the young couple as if performing a scientific study. When Owen noticed his pale blue glow, the old man turned to him, winked, smiled, and gave a stiff mechanical thumbs-up. It wasn’t that the couple having sex was devoid of any allure, but with the other sleeper there, it was too much of a reminder of the creepy nature of his home invasions. Had the old man not been there, who knows what the librarian might have done. Instead of returning the greeting, he jumped up through the ceiling and roof and landed in the front yard. He was upset with himself for becoming what he’d promised he wouldn’t. Also, he realized that hadn’t checked to see if the young man was the one from the gas station. He should have looked for a beard, but it wasn’t what his sight had been trained on.
He moved down the street to the other place he thought might be the house of the attendant. As soon as he passed through the door, he saw the long-haired, bearded fellow sitting at a small table in the living room, the television on. In front of him was a notebook, a cup of coffee, and a silver nine-millimeter pistol. Owen walked behind the chair and looked to see what was written in the notebook. There was a list of four names, a line through three of them. The last, without a line through it and the only female name on the list, was Kiara. Owen’s first thought was it could have been the woman he and Melody had visited the night before. The man wrote something next to the woman’s name in a tiny, loopy script too small to make out.
Owen moved away and looked around to see what else he could find. There were local newspapers scattered on the kitchen counter. He saw the one in which the reporter called his admission that he hadn’t played the hero at the Busy Bee a confession. Then he could see from the headlines that all of them had front-page stories about the robbery. Stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet was a photo of what looked like, as far as Owen could remember, Helen’s killer. He had his arm around the shoulders of a woman holding a baby. She was definitely the young mother he and Melody had stumbled upon in the apartment building next to the school. Looking at the photo, he tried to figure out how he was going to let the police know about it. If he told them the truth, they’d send him away for psychiatric evaluation.
On the dresser in the bedroom, Owen found the stub of a paycheck from the gas station with the attendant’s name on it—Aaron Feit. He mouthed the name, and just then the man entered the room, sat on the bed, and put his boots on. In the living room, he stuffed the pistol into the waist of his jeans and threw on a waterproof poncho with a hood. Then he left the house. Owen passed through the door behind him and followed him down the road, away from town.
9
A RIGHT AND A LEFT down long streets in the rain, and Feit finally stopped walking. He stepped off the sidewalk into the darker darkness beneath a stand of tall oak. With the leaves blocking some of the downpour, he pulled back his hood and took out a pack of cigarettes. The instant Owen saw them, he had an ur
ge to smoke again.
It was obvious from where his quarry stood that Feit were there to watch the house across the street. It was a sizeable place, nearly a mansion, but so well set back amid the border of the barrens that its corner turrets and second floor with gabled roof and two dormers were lost to the passerby. The whole structure was covered in some kind of dark brown wood shake. There was light in every other window.
Feit took out his phone and made a call. The name he spoke was “Kiara.” Owen moved as close as possible so as not to miss a word, and Feit partially passed through him. “I’m outside Crenshaw’s now. All the lights are on. Just checking to see if there isn’t another one in there with him. I can take care of him, but . . .” He listened for a time to Kiara. There was a pause. “How’s William?” he asked. He nodded and hung up. Feit and Owen stood on the corner in the wind and rain, watching. Owen noticed faint classical music coming from an open window in the left-hand turret and saw shadows move throughout the rooms.
An hour later, when Feit gave up and headed away, Owen lingered on the corner. He was fairly confident either this fellow was going to rob the big old house, or he and Kiara were going to. It was obvious whoever lived there was well off. Owen stepped into the street and was crossing it before he realized he was going to pay a visit to Crenshaw. By then it had stopped raining and the wind had died down. He guessed it to be somewhere around three AM in the waking world. He swept up the long flight of front steps leading from the sidewalk and, without hesitating, passed through the door into a hallway of polished wood and a flowered runner leading him toward the inner rooms of the house.
The place was stately, with antique furniture and a lot of polished wood. The walls were covered with oil paintings and in some of the rooms, especially a darkened one, there were painted canvases in frames stacked again the walls. The pictures he passed were beautiful night scenes, stars with a gauzy glow, and pale maidens half asleep or sleepwalking yet carrying out tasks by the seashore. In one, a large canvas on the main wall of a well-lit room that appeared to be used for entertaining, there was an eerie scene of a piece of marble statuary in moonlight—a woman with flowing hair and a writhing snake around her naked waist. Then, like a cutaway, beneath the marble form, under the ground, there was a room with a satin divan. Draped across it, in an almost-awkward position, was an image of an old man, asleep. The attitude of the figure caught his eye.