Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  He watched the space in front of the empty chair, seeming now to see a shadow there, and he forced himself not to think, but to allow himself to see. Perhaps the pieces of the puzzle had been available to him all along; he had only to quit looking so hard….

  “It’s late for that, isn’t it?”

  The question seemed to irritate her, though there was no reason it should. A wife’s place, after all, was with her family. Running out after dark, leaving her husband and son alone, that was something so independent as to be almost immoral. What about your wedding vows, he wanted to ask her.

  “I promised Aunt Lydia that I’d read her a chapter. Remember? I told you a couple of days ago. She’s expecting me.

  “Well, she’ll have to find a way to bear your absence just this once.”

  “That’s a little ungenerous, don’t you think?”

  “Tell me, why is it that the woman continually calls on other people to be generous? We need a clearer definition of the word.” He sat there seething. Over the past eight years she must have read through half the English novelists to the old woman. It was an act of philanthropy—that was the implication—and he was a humbug if he denied it to either of them. Well, he’d see who was the humbug. If she was determined to leave, he’d at least make it sting a little.

  He watched her face as she stared at the fire, his mind falling under the same shadow that had darkened it for weeks now—the knowledge that things had changed between them, that she had changed. He had remained constant, but he was losing her. And after what he had sacrificed—his practice, his time, his very life. That was the irony of it; he had mortgaged his life for her, hadn’t he? And now he would lose her. She was still young, only twenty-five, and yet in most ways hadn’t managed to grow up, but had retained the flighty, silly mannerisms and enthusiasms of her girlhood, a lily of the field.

  And that was something that had attracted him—how long ago? Nearly seven years now. He would freely admit that his building the house in the canyon, inconveniently far from town, had been designed to remove her from the things in the world that would inevitably change her. But that which had been cheerfully frivolous in the girl he had married had transmuted into a baser metal over the years, losing its luster. The look in her face just now had been insolence, pure and simple. What else could he call it when she made her every trivial dissatisfaction apparent to him with a look or a toss of her head or a heavy sigh?

  “There’s a gale blowing. It’ll get worse.” He opened his book, as if the issue were settled. He knew it wasn’t, and didn’t bother to focus on the words.

  “I’m not afraid of the wind or the darkness, and it’s not really very late, is it?”

  For a moment he stared at the book in silence. It was clear that she had made up her mind. “Why on earth can’t that woman have books read to her during the day?” he said, and already he knew he was defeated.

  “She sleeps during the day. She’s an insomniac, remember?”

  “My memory isn’t the issue here. Surely the woman has fits of wakefulness during daylight hours.”

  “You might at least have the courtesy not to refer to her as ‘the woman.’ ”

  “And you might do me the courtesy not to be insolent. I’m your husband, and you should treat me as such.”

  There it was again—the change in her features that made it clear what she was thinking, her indifference to him, to his needs and his rights.

  “It’s barely seven-thirty,” she said. “I’ll be there and back before ten.” She busied herself unnecessarily now, slipping her book back into the case, straightening the pillow on her chair, making it clear that she was preparing to leave.

  “I suppose I’ll start up the sedan.”

  “I don’t want you to start up the sedan.” For a moment she looked irritated, out of patience, but then her features softened and she said, “Really, I’d rather walk. I love the canyon at night. This isn’t the first time I’ve been out after dark, is it? It’s very nearly routine.”

  He said nothing. That was the point, wasn’t it? Short of tying her up, what could he do? Aunt Lydia! Of course the old lady was her aunt, but what did that signify? Simply that Esther was at her beck and call, apparently twenty-four hours a day. “What about Lewis?” he asked. “Is the boy an illiterate? He can’t read to his own mother? Did the war deprive him of his faculties?”

  She closed her eyes, as if she were counting to ten. “I know nothing about the extent of his literacy. I suppose that in your eyes it was an act of betrayal that he didn’t die at Flanders. Perhaps you’re wrong in that. But as for Aunt Lydia, she read to my brother and me when we were children and now I read to her. You should come along, too. We’re reading Middlemarch.”

  He waved his hand at her and shook his head. “I don’t need a soporific. I’m not the insomniac.”

  She moved toward the door, the conversation having ended. He wondered what she would say, what she would do if he simply refused to let her go. He had that right, as her husband. But he watched in silence as she left, his eyes on the back of her head, trying to make her feel the full weight of his stare. Moments later he heard the door to Jamie’s bedroom close. The boy was already asleep, thank God. The back door slammed shut, and he was struck with the knowledge that he smelled the scent of jasmine on the still air of the house. She’d put on perfume before going out.

  “Amanda!” Peter said, standing up out of his chair. He reached for the glass on the table, but there was nothing there. Momentarily confused, he looked down, expecting to see the faceted crystal glass, the decanter beside it. The empty table was scarred and discolored, part of its veneer peeled away.

  The sound of the door slamming echoed in his head, which throbbed with pain at his temples, as if he were hung over. Impossibly, he could taste the whiskey on his tongue, and he felt disoriented, not quite clear how long he’d been sitting there or why he was angry. But even as he thought about it, the anger dwindled away, leaving him chilled and empty. The moon was up now, the fire was burned down to a few glowing coals, and the candles were within an inch of burning out.

  He rejected the idea of going out into the kitchen to check the door. Why had he thought it was Amanda going out? It was so obviously just the wind. And just as this thought concluded, the fire sprang up in the fireplace again. The embers flared, licking at the bottom of the flue. He watched the leaf shadows dance on the wall, and his hand strayed across the tabletop and settled on the top of his restored glass. For a flickering moment he knew that the glass was wrong, and that the lingering scent of jasmine on the air simply couldn’t exist. But he picked up the glass and tasted the whiskey. The headache diminished as he thought about Lewis, home at last from the war, long awaited. Esther putting on perfume, going out on this wind-haunted night…

  24

  HE DIDN’T LIKE LEWIS. IT DIDN’T MATTER THAT HE WAS Esther’s cousin; the man was a parasite. The war-hero talk was nonsense. The man had avoided death—hardly something that could be construed as heroic. The least such a hero could do with his idle time was read to his invalid mother, but instead he wrote poetry, or rather a bad imitation of poetry, a grown man looking out at the world through big moony eyes with too much white showing under the irises as if he were drowsy with opium. He had a slight tubercular build and was no good at conversation. And he meddled, giving Jamie the damned cat. The damned thing had scratched the furniture to pieces. There was only one thing more intelligent than simply shooting it, and that would be shooting Lewis instead.

  Esther had prevailed upon him to let the boy keep it, but he could see now that it had been a mistake. He wanted no part of Lewis in the house. He was a slow poison, the single ruinous thing in their lives, and there was no doubt at all that he was the chief engineer of the change in Esther. He stared into his glass now, the heavy crystal making the half inch of whiskey seem far deeper than it was. The night blustered beyond the windows, and the floor was stippled with moonlight.

  There were thing
s that a man could overlook, things he could outright deny in order to have peace, to maintain the sanctity of his home. But when a man’s wife threw these things into his face, then he had to admit that his home had come undone. That was the dark truth. There came a point when he could deny it no longer, and either he acted decisively or else he admitted defeat and crawled off beaten.

  He sat scowling at the fire, full of self-loathing now as well as the rest. Damn the cat, and damn Aunt Lydia, too. The question had become as plain as a red flag: was she going to Aunt Lydia’s to read Middlemarch, or was she going to pay a visit to Lewis? That was what it had come down to. And now that it had, the question must be answered, the truth revealed.

  There had been an incident years ago that had planted the germ of the idea in his mind. He could trace his dwindling unhappiness to that day—the two of them, Esther and Lewis, embracing as if … He couldn’t put words to it, although these several years later the scene was etched in his mind in the clearest sort of detail. Esther had laughed it off, waving her hand at him. Of all the silly notions—she and Lewis were cousins. They had grown up together. He was going off to war. A kiss was a natural thing between cousins. Never mind that it had occurred in an otherwise empty room and that the look of shocked surprise on her face had been as expressive as the novels she read to her aunt.

  And her laughter. What had once appealed to him chilled him now, roiling up dark billows of regret and loathing within him. He forced himself now to picture the face of his son—the dark eyes, the narrow build. People remarked on his resemblance to Lewis. Aunt Lydia herself had cackled over it more than once, no doubt with a good deal of nasty calculation: “Why, look at the two of you,” she’d say, seeing them together. “Who wouldn’t think you were father and son?”

  And for Esther he had given up the world! She might as well have slapped him in the face when she left a half hour ago. That’s what the slammed door meant; that much couldn’t be argued. He swirled the faceted glass in front of the candlelight, the smoky amber whiskey catching the light. Then he tossed it off and poured another, his hand shaking as he set the decanter down.

  He abandoned his thoughts abruptly and tried to read again, but he couldn’t. The words meant nothing. He could concentrate on nothing but the picture of the two of them together, Esther and Lewis, childhood companions, their names falling inexorably together. He stood up unsteadily and put the book down next to the glass, staggering just a little as he picked up the candelabra and stepped to the door.

  Right then he caught sight of his face in the mirror over the mantel, and for a moment he scarcely knew himself. He drew back in confusion, his mind a jumble of contradiction, his features so twisted by evil passion that his own face was alien and loathsome. The glass in the mirror was cracked and hazed with dust and reflected only a vague outline of the candlelit room behind him.

  Then a door slammed, or a shutter, and the noise revived him like cold water. He swept the glass and decanter onto the floor, his confusion gone, his mind suddenly clear and purposeful. He walked through the front room, pushing open the door to Jamie’s bedroom, holding the candelabra over his face and trying to read something in his features that would deny what was becoming more apparent by the month—that their marriage was a travesty, that he was a cuckold, and that the boy sleeping before him was a bastard.

  There was a movement at the foot of the bed—the cat, Lewis’s cat, shifting on the mattress. It stood up and stretched, clawing at the bedclothes, catching at the loops of thread and yanking them to pieces. Without thinking, he swung the candelabra at it, but the cat scampered toward the top of the bed, and the candelabra cracked into the edge of the doorframe, half the candles pitching out onto the floor, sdll alight. One landed on the bed cover, burning a hole in it, and he pinched the flame out with his fingers, cursing, and stomped out the flaming candles on the floor, turning in a rage to find the boy awake, staring at him, holding the cat to his chest. The wind shrieked under the eaves outside, and dark leaves flew in the moonlight beyond the window.

  The eyes, the damned eyes. You couldn’t get around them. He turned away, his chest heaving, then leaned down and clutched the cat by the fur at the back of its neck, yanking it out of the boy’s hands. The boy cried out, scrabbling across the top of the bed. “No!” he yelled. “Daddy, no! Don’t hurt it!”

  “Get dressed,” he said, his voice husky. He held the cat at arm’s length, letting it kick. Hurt it? He’d kill it and return it to its owner. Right now. Sometimes what a person needed to change a bad habit was a shock to the system.

  The boy dressed hurriedly, trying to smile, as if it would make a difference. Just like his mother—the smile that would turn the world right. Well, not this time. “Come along,” he said, his voice cold, and he pinched out the couple of remaining candles so that the house fell into darkness.

  25

  LORNA HAD COME HOME LATER THAT EVENING, IN NO mood to talk. He knew better than to ask where she’d been, but he could see that she was stone-cold sober, so she hadn’t been off drinking with a girlfriend. Her smile was forced, and the couple of pleasant things she had said to Klein set his teeth on edge. She’d pretty much gone straight to bed. He wrote the whole day off as a bad investment and decided to wait until morning to confront her. Now that he’d gotten the upper hand with Pomeroy things had steadied out a little; tomorrow would be a little brighter for all of them.

  Meanwhile he would bunk down on the couch. He poured out a glass of scotch and iced it up, lying down in his bathrobe and watching the wind blow across the top of the pool, herding the leaves into the shallow end and making a kaleidoscope picture out of the moon’s reflection. If anything, the wind was blowing harder than it had all week.

  From where he lay he could see through the wrought-iron fence, out to where the dry grass waved on the moonlit hillside, the wind flattening it out in sheets and runnels. He sipped his scotch and waited, not sleepy, but full of sharp anticipation. It occurred to him that it was a perfect night for Lorna to be sore at him—him on the couch and her holed up in her bedroom—but then he thrust the idea aside, getting up to refill his glass.

  He stood at the window, watching the shadows, listening to the night. He could almost hear her voice, the woman’s voice, on the wind. “Come on,” he said softly, picturing her in his mind, the two of them together in the dimly lit room of his dreams, the smell of jasmine and tallow and pine…

  And then he saw her.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again she was gone. He searched the shadows with his eyes, his breath stopped. He set his glass down quietly on the coffee table and opened one of the doors, the wind blowing into his face. She had been descending along the ridge trail, and perhaps had slipped out of sight beyond the poolhouse, even then crossing through the orchard toward the gate. He flipped on the outdoor lamp, and in that moment she appeared beyond the fence, stopping in the darkness of the poolhouse shadow, just at the edge of the circle of light. He flipped the light off and went out through the door.

  For a second he couldn’t see her, but he knew she was there as he hurried to the fence, grasping the cold wrought iron. She stepped out of the shadow then, the moon shining on her face and hands. “Esther,” he said, her name materializing in his mind. She smiled at him, and he reached up to unlatch the gate.

  26

  THE NIGHT WAS A TORRENT OF NOISE AND MOVEMENT. The cacophony of wind and of blowing leaves and creaking limbs shattered the cold deliberation that had settled on his mind minutes ago, reducing it to a broken glass jumble of rage and jealousy and suspicion. He turned his face away from the wind and strode out into a circle of moonlight that played across the top of the low stone retaining wall behind the house. The cat, as if panicked by the wind, snarled and kicked, and he tried in vain to grapple the writhing thing around the neck with both hands, forgetting utterly about Jamie until, with a wild cry, the boy grabbed his arms and hoisted himself off the ground, trying to force his hands
apart and save the cat.

  He flung the boy aside, staggering sideways with the force of it, and in that moment the cat twisted loose, dropping to the ground on all four feet and disappearing in an instant into the windblown darkness beyond the rock wall. Cursing out loud, he lunged after it, climbing onto the wall, pushing into the tangle of vines that crept out of the edge of the forest. Picking up a broken limb with both hands, he flailed at the bushes, beating them to pieces in his rage to punish the cat. He felt Jamie’s hands on his arm again, dragging at him, and heard him sobbing, pleading with him to stop. The crying filled him with an inexpressible anger, and he swung the limb sideways as the boy jerked away, ducking beneath it. He saw the cat reappear in the moonlight along the top of the wall, nearly at the end of the house, then dart away into the darkness of the open cellar. In his rage he slammed the limb against the stones, snapping it off short. He flung the leftover piece into the darkness.

  Jamie cowered against the wall of the house now, shrinking away, afraid to look at his face. The boy broke and ran along the wall, dodging out of the way, calling for the cat. Dr. Landry let him go. Neither the boy nor the cat was of any interest to him any longer. He was wasting his time here. He had to hurry if he wanted to catch them together. In his mind he pictured Lewis, and then Lewis and Esther together, embracing in a dimly lit room. His breath whistled in and out of his lungs, and the wind stung his eyes as he staggered back into the house, searching for the door key, yanking out cupboard drawers and spilling their contents onto the kitchen floor.