The light was probably on in her bedroom. The window was too big to be a bathroom window.
He wondered what she slept in. Despite the wind, it was a warm night….
The street was absolutely empty.
A person back in her driveway would be hidden by the corner of her house and couldn’t be seen from Klein’s, which was dark anyway. Across the street was an open field—high grass and trees. A redwood fence blocked the neighbor’s view on the other side.
He released the parking brake, shifted to neutral, and coasted downhill. He was nearly to the general store again before he started the engine. Then he turned around and drove back up the street, pulling off onto the little road that led down to the preschool. He turned around again and parked near the corner.
He would give himself two minutes. That’s all. Just a quick look. Would he knock? Of course it was late, but he was in the neighborhood and he saw that her light was on …
He smoothed his hair in the mirror, then took a bottle of breath freshener out of the glove compartment and sprayed his mouth.
A thrill of fear surged through him. He mustn’t be caught. Not this time. They would never believe that he wanted nothing more than to know her. And he was on the edge of success with Klein—too close to screw things up.
He pictured her lighted window, the dark driveway.
Swiftly he unwrapped the gauze bandage around his hand. Then, carefully, he wrapped it around his face, leaving slits for his eyes and nose and mouth, tying the two ends behind his head and checking the result in the mirror.
Without another thought he climbed out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition and all the doors unlocked. He jogged up the street, turning his face away from the few houses he passed. He slipped into the shadows of the eucalyptus trees that edged her driveway, and took one last look down the empty street, wishing there was more wind, if only to mask any noise he might make on the gravel drive. It would come up again any moment, but he couldn’t wait. Even now she might be turning out the lights, and he would have lost an opportunity.
Carefully he walked toward the window, which was shaded by louvered blinds. He barely breathed, stepping softly, keeping his hands off the windowsill. He crouched just a little, trying to see between the close-fitting slats, his heart pounding in his chest. He made out a dresser, the corner of the bed, the edge of a doorway.
The bed moved. He glimpsed a bare foot for a second as she shifted positions.
His breath caught, and a thrill ran through him that was nearly electrical. He swiveled his head around, again checking the driveway. He had to see more. He was intoxicated with the possibility of what might be revealed to him. The window was badly located, the angle wrong, most of the bed hidden. Unless she got up off the bed the night would be wasted.
He moved farther down the driveway, his crepe soles scrunching softly on the gravel.
Beth was aware suddenly that it was quiet outside. The wind had diminished, and the silence was eerie with premonition. She lay in bed, propped up on her elbow, trying to read herself back to sleep. She had set the phone on the floor behind the nightstand so that she didn’t have to look at it.
Beyond the bedroom door the house was nearly dark. She could see the dim glow from the night-light in the hallway, but that was all. For a moment she considered turning on lights throughout the house, but that was foolish—the kind of thinking that worked you into a state once you got going with it.
A cricket started up outside the window, and there was a rustling of leaves in the eucalyptus trees along the driveway. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.
She looked up from her book and listened. Silence again. And then the swish-scrape of a leafy branch against a window screen. She couldn’t concentrate on the book, and found herself suddenly thinking about the disappearance of Amanda and David. Peter had been hit hard by it, full of pain and confusion. For the first time now she wondered what had happened to them.
It was crazy, of course, to think that these phone calls meant anything at all, and twice as crazy to think that there was some link between the calls and the disappearance. She wondered, though: if Amanda and David hadn’t left the canyon, then where were they? What had happened to them?
The cricket abruptly quit chirruping. She had become oblivious to it, but she was immediately aware now of its sudden silence and of the low-key swish and rustle of the wind.
She heard something else.
Footsteps on the gravel driveway, the measured crunching of sharp rocks compressed by a shoe sole.
She held her breath, waiting. There was nothing more— only silence, the whisper of the wind and the scraping of dry leaves.
23
THE WOMAN ACKROYD HAD BEEN FOLLOWING HAD DISAPPEARED, perhaps literally. The trees cast heavy shadows across this part of the canyon despite the moonlight, and minutes ago she had vanished into the leaf-shaded darkness, utterly invisible in her black dress. He ascended the steep path that led from below the lower campground up toward the ridge, stepping carefully, planting the tip of his walking stick against half-buried roots and rocks. He had no business playing around like this in the darkness. If he fell he’d break a hip. God knows when they’d find him.
A half hour had gone by since he’d seen her through the window. He had been reading, the propane lamps off, no light but an oil lamp. The road beyond the front porch had been lit by the moon, and the wind stirred the dark trees opposite the house. When he read at night, he kept an eye on the road. It was common to see deer abroad at night. In the nearly fifty years he’d lived out there he’d probably seen every kind of animal that lived in the Santa Ana Mountains, and he’d gotten into the habit of watching the canyon at night like an astronomer watched the stars.
It wasn’t only animals that he watched for. There were rumors of other things wandering in the canyon at night. A few days ago someone had seen two bodies at the base of the falls. It was a matter of the wildest coincidence—it had to be—although he would have been more convinced of that if bodies had been recovered. That would have ended the mystery. It was the inexplicable disappearance of those bodies that seemed to signify.
The wind shuddered through the canyon now, and when he climbed out of the shelter of the narrow gorge and onto the open face of the hillside it nearly staggered him. He had a clear view of the trail for another hundred feet, and she was nowhere in sight. So she wasn’t ahead of him. Or else she was so far ahead of him that it was hopeless. He made his way back down again, to where he was out of the wind and could rest. He was quickly tiring out, and if he had any hope of retracing his steps, perhaps following the trail up the creek, he had to do it now. In another few minutes he’d be winded.
He had recognized her—thought he’d recognized her— in that moment of utter clarity and certainty when she’d stepped out of the shadow of the trees and onto the road a half hour ago. She seemed not even to see the cabin, or to see him behind the window, even though he must have been clearly visible in the lamplight. He hadn’t bothered with his coat, just picked up his stick by the door and went out, able to keep her in sight only for a few moments. After that he had listened for her voice on the night wind, guessing the direction she’d taken.
Faintly, from somewhere up the canyon, he heard it again, a plaintive wail. God help her, he thought, setting out again, working his way down the trail. She was searching for someone. It was what he feared—feared and hoped for. The trail leveled out, running down toward the creek. There it was again, her voice, even fainter now. She was below Falls Canyon! He should have guessed that she’d double back up the canyon.
He waded into the cold water, stepping carefully, pushing between the willows on the opposite bank. A little path edged the creek—a game trail, running a hundred yards down to where the creek crossed the road, then another fifty yards to the mouth of Falls Canyon. He stumbled forward, catching himself with the stick, climbing the steep bank and crossing the road, then half sliding down to the creek again an
d into a clearing at the edge of the old campgrounds.
Drifts of autumn leaves lay knee deep along the rocky outcroppings of the west wall of the canyon. He stepped through them carefully, probing with his stick, breathing heavily, already worn out, and the climb up to the ridge still ahead of him. Already it seemed to him that his imagination must have gone utterly around the bend. The woman he followed had died sixty years ago.
Abruptly he stopped, stepping back into the shadows. There was a truck parked at the roadside, a battered Chevy Suburban. Moonlight shone on foil-colored window tinting, stenciled with some kind of desert scene. He recognized the truck. It belonged to his neighbor. Obviously the man had parked it and left it. But why? To follow her?
He hurried forward again, the trail angling upward now, rising between sandstone outcroppings. He had waited so long for this, watching, disbelieving the stories, captivated by them. He put one foot wearily ahead of the other, plodding upward, listening to his heart thump in his chest, knowing that it was futile to go on—far too steep. He couldn’t hope to …
She screamed then—one long wail in the sudden stillness. He stopped and closed his eyes, waiting to hear something more, and yet knowing what the silence meant. Wearily, he turned around and headed home. He had no desire to confront his neighbor, to swap stories about what they’d seen and heard, about what it might mean.
24
“NO!” KLEIN LURCHED AWAKE, SITTING UP AND THROWING his hands across his face.
“What?” Lorna shouted, startled out of a sound sleep and instinctively recoiling toward the edge of the bed.
Klein’s chest heaved with exertion. Slowly he lowered his hands, looking around him at the dim room as if he only half recognized where he was.
“It’s all right,” Lorna said. She put an arm around him. “There’s nothing there.”
“There was someone. The wind. At the edge of the bed …”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “How could there be? You’re not making any sense. You’re still half-asleep.”
“I … I don’t know,” Klein said. “I thought I saw …”
He lay down again. What Klein had thought he saw next to the bed was a man with an upraised shovel, his face a mask of jealous, murderous loathing. There had been the sound of the shovel cutting the air, the blade descending …
“Well, whatever you saw,” Lorna said, “it was just a dream. It’s gone now.”
“Yeah,” Klein said.
But it wasn’t gone. He had seen it too often for it to be anything like gone. It was waiting for him. He had only to fall asleep again. He looked at Lorna, who had shut her eyes and pulled the covers over her, and with a quick surge of passion and longing he remembered the face of the black-haired woman who had lain next to him in bed just moments ago.
He couldn’t sleep any longer. There was too much wind, too much moonlight. He lay still until he was sure Lorna was asleep, and then got quietly out of bed, picked up his bathrobe from the chair, and went out into the living room, where he poured himself a glass of scotch out of the decanter. He filled the glass with ice cubes and sat down where he could see through the french doors, out toward the hills.
It would have been good to swim, but he didn’t have the energy to do anything but sit there and sip the drink. And besides, the pool was full of leaves, the surface nearly covered with them like some kind of autumn centerpiece.
The dream recurred on windy nights. Always it was the same: the wind, the moonlit hills, the woman in black descending from the shadows, him going out through the dry grass to meet her. In the dream there was no pool, no wrought-iron fence. The house and property were as they had been years ago, long before Klein had torn down the remains of the old house and rebuilt. There were horses on the meadow and a long wooden bunkhouse where the stucco poolhouse now stood.
Only the hills and the sound of the wind were the same, the sound of leaves scraping against wooden siding and curtained windows. As he lay with her in the bunkhouse he could smell tallow and wool, raw pine boards and the jasmine scent of her perfume. The wind pressed on the door, tendrils of it skittering underneath and moving the window curtains, finding its way through knots and chinks in the siding.
It had been a long time—months since they’d been together. She had tried to come to him, but she was a virtual prisoner. Now and then they met in the woods, briefly, her husband’s shadow looming in both their minds.
On the bed in the bunkhouse they tore at each other’s clothing, and she pulled the blanket up to cover them, her hands stroking his back, holding him as he kissed her bare shoulders, her neck, her breasts, the two of them moving together beneath the blanket. She curled her fingers in his hair, pressing him to her, wrapping her legs around his, clinging to him.
Then, always then, the door slammed open and something cast a black shadow on the moonlit floor. The wind rushed in, moaning, swirling, tearing away the loose woolen blanket. He scrambled forward, trying to cover her, the wind shrieking in his face, the shadow by the bedside coalescing into the form of a man holding a garden shovel.
The sod-caked blade lanced toward him, skiving down through the air. There was the sound of his scalp tearing, the shovel grinding against bone, slamming him backward against the mattress, and beyond that, as if she were already separated from him by a great distance, the sound of her scream. Then nothing but plunging darkness and the faint, momentary knowledge that she still gripped his arm.…
Klein stood up, shakily refilling his glass.
Lorna had given him a long article about hypnogogic hallucinations, waking dreams. They were apparently common. Nearly everyone had them at one time or another— nighttime visions of strange people and shapes and animals. They occurred when a person was perched right on the edge of sleep, eyes open but already drifting into unconsciousness. They were the source of ghost stories and stories of alien encounters, evidence of witchery, satanic visitations.
Klein had read the article carefully, almost desperately. When he had put it down he was very damned sure that it had nothing to do with him. His dream, if it was a dream, was too lush, too ordered, too much a product of all his senses. He’d had his share of sensual dreams over the years, nightmares too, but never anything like this. He couldn’t begin to tell Lorna the details of it. It was the kind of thing a man kept to himself.
He listened for a moment to the silent house. Then, making up his mind, he drained his glass and set it on the coffee table. Tying his bathrobe shut, he unbolted the door and stepped out into the night, shutting the door quietly. He walked around the edge of the pool to the gate, where he stood watching the hills. Behind the poolhouse and outside the wrought iron fence stood a dozen small fruit trees, their leaves mostly fallen by now. Years ago there’d been an orchard there, and Klein had pulled out the last few stunted trees when he’d cleared the land. He’d found a scattering of old tools in the debris of the old bunkhouse—a rusted spade and some cultivating tools—which he’d kept even though they were mostly junk.
The wind blew softly now, stirring the meadow grasses, the moon drifting low in the sky. Beneath the leafless fruit trees the shadows of moving limbs intertwined like the avenues of a maze. The old spade stood against the crotch of a peach tree, its weather-silvered handle shining in the moonlight.
He thought of his dream again—the door swinging open, the shovel slicing toward his face …
He flinched and turned his head, and for one brief moment the stucco-and-aluminum poolhouse was gone, and what he saw was a long wooden bungalow, candlelight glowing through the windows, the door standing half-open. It swam in his vision like a desert mirage, and he staggered back into the fence, his fingers closing on the cold wrought iron. The wind rose in a howl, blasting the surface of the pool, blowing wet leaves into the air. There was a wild cracking noise from somewhere beyond the fence, and the sound of a limb tearing through shrubbery. The eucalyptus trees along his neighbor’s driveway whipped like saplings.
Then the
poolhouse was as it had been—no candlelit bunkhouse, no door standing open. He turned frantically to look out into the hills, sensing that for a moment she had nearly come to him. She had been out there, moving through the trees, drawn inexorably to him just as he had been drawn out of the house and into the windy night.
He waited for another minute, staring into the wind, knowing that the time had passed, that something had shifted and then had shifted back again. He pulled his robe tighter, retied it, and walked around the pool deck toward the back door, suddenly bone weary.
25
POMEROY ADJUSTED THE BANDAGE AROUND HIS FACE, wishing he had tied it more securely. The knot was too tight to loosen. Wind stirred the trees overhead, and the moon, low in the sky, illuminated the backyard beyond the corner of the house.
There was another window, this one facing the bed. One slat was cocked open in the blinds, and a long blade of light shone through it. He peered between, his heart pounding.
She lay on top of the covers, her head propped up on her hand, reading a book. She was dressed in an oversize T-shirt that was pulled up over her thigh. Moistening his lips, he studied the shape of her body beneath the fabric and wondered what was hidden by the shirt’s hem. If only she’d move …
He glanced around, charged with fear and expectation. He was visible from Klein’s backyard, but to hell with that. The house was dark. Klein was asleep. He was safe. He could wait as long as he had to.
She shifted position suddenly, and he bent anxiously toward the window, nearly putting his face to the glass. Her nightshirt moved on her thigh. Filled with a wild frustration, he nearly knocked on the window. Then she was settled again, reading her book.
The eucalyptus trees overhead suddenly thrashed in a hard gust of wind, showering him with leaves and hard, pyramid-shaped seeds. Instantly the wind was howling, slamming furiously down from the hills. The tall trunks of the trees creaked ominously as they swayed under the onslaught.
Night Relics Page 11