Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  On the ground lay the piece of pipe, a couple of feet long and half-hidden by junk. She grabbed the end, twisting it out from under scrap wood and debris, then knocked it against the chimney stones to shake loose the clinging webs and leaves and dirt. Gripping it solidly, she swung it at a heavy granite boulder, the cornerstone of the chimney. The pipe hit it with a dead ring, rust flakes spraying across the backs of her hands. She hit it again, harder, knocking off a fragment of stone that flew up and stung her cheek, and she dropped the pipe and wiped her cheek with her sleeve.

  The wind gusted, swirling through the lattice behind her, raising a cloud of leaves and dust that nearly choked her. She buried her face in the crook of her arm, waiting it out. Abruptly she swung the pipe again, slamming it into a patch of bricks now, the echoing thump filling the cellar. Cracks radiated outward from where the pipe crushed into the brick, and mortar and brick chips cascaded to the ground. At the next blow a grapefruit-sized stone broke free and fell out whole. She stepped out of the way, leaned back and chunked the pipe into a patch of cracked bricks, which showered to the floor in a dusty avalanche.

  The air swirled with brick grit and windblown leaves and rang with the sound of falling debris and of iron clanging over and over against stone until finally she tossed the pipe aside, unable to swing it any more, and began to pull fragments of brick out with her hands. Abruptly a patch of bricks fell inward, exposing a rectangular hole, nothing but black air behind it. She stopped, suddenly fearful, almost surprised to discover so suddenly that she’d been right: the deep base of the chimney was hollow. Carefully now she dislodged more bricks and stones, wiggling them out of their slots and depressions. Lines of mortar tugged away, and loose bricks simply fell out, tumbling to the floor.

  The flashlight … She turned and saw it through the hovering dust, lying where Peter had dropped it. She picked it up and pushed the switch, the light feeble and dim until she shined it into the utter darkness of the cavity within the hollow chimney. At first she could see nothing, just a cloud of dust slowly settling. Then she could see that something stood against the outside wall of the chimney, maybe two feet away from her—a couple of narrow shelves suspended from chains and hooks affixed to the mortar. There were objects sitting on the shelves, ill-defined shadows growing slowly visible in the setting dust….

  On the top shelf a black beaded purse sat tilted against the stones. There was the likeness of an owl on it in white beads, and the name “Esther” beneath the owl’s feet. The beadwork was ragged and patchy as if the purse had been carried for years, perhaps by a child. Next to the purse stood a photograph in a frame of hammered copper—the likeness of a man and a woman. She shined the flashlight on it. Even through the dust the man’s eyes looked dark and obsessed. The woman held Something in her hand, which was curled back across her chest, and she gazed at some distant point, as if her mind were miles away. Next to the photograph lay a silver-handled hairbrush and matching hand mirror, the mirror’s dust-hazed glass reflecting the darkness above. Lying atop the mirror was a gold ring—a wedding band—and a bracelet that was a spiral of tarnished silver set with dark stones that might have been jet. Beside the mirror sat a crystal bulldog with garnets for eyes. Behind it, also tilted against the stones, was a book with a pale leather binding, on the cover of which was painted a single blue lupine. A crystal perfume bottle sat open and alone near the edge of the table, its faceted stopper lying beside it.

  When she saw the dark residue of the evaporated scent in the bottom of the bottle, it seemed to her that she could smell jasmine on the cool cellar air. She knew exactly why the bottle had been left unstoppered. Then into her mind came the image of the woman in the photograph, walking along the windblown ridges above the canyon, her dress and hair blowing out behind her. She clutched a handful of enormous papery white poppies that stood out against blue sky like clouds.

  13

  ONLY VAGUELY CONSCIOUS OF THE SOUND OF THE WIND and of a muffled pounding somewhere far away, he stood in the doorway watching her for an indeterminate time. She hadn’t looked up when he whispered her name, hadn’t glanced away from the fire. The logs in the fireplace settled, a wash of sparks rising up the chimney, and the wind keened through the dark night.

  And even if she knew him after the long years, what would he say to her that she didn’t already know?

  He could see now that she looked like photographs of their mother—the raven hair, the dark eyes full of a sadness like the passing of seasons as she stared over the top of her book, mesmerized by the flames. He hadn’t been old enough to see it when she’d died—neither the resemblance to his mother nor the autumn shadow in her eyes. He realized now that all his memories of her were circumscribed by a few brief years of his boyhood like the handful of trinkets in his pocket. The scattered moments were reflected in the pages of illustrated books read in a sunlit back garden, in rainwater pattering against parlor windows behind tin soldiers ranked along the wooden sill, in dusty country roads where they would find the first wildflowers of spring. She would let him pick only a few, only the prettiest, because a star would fall out of the sky, she said, and somewhere a person would die, for each flower in the bouquet.

  Now, as he watched her sitting before the fire, the sadness in her eyes was as clear to him as the passing years, and he regretted that he’d left the quiet of his house and come out into the night. The wind blows to the south, he thought, and goes round to the north; and on its circuits the wind returns….

  He opened his hand and looked at the painted tin soldier that he’d been holding in his palm like an amulet. After a moment he returned it to his pocket.

  14

  A SCATTERING OF CHILDREN’S TOYS STOOD ON THE SECOND shelf—marbles and a windup tin duck, a pocketknife, and the carved wooden head of an Indian that sat atop three dusty books, the spines turned away so that she couldn’t read the titles. A dozen feathers lay next to the books, their quills tied together with a string. There was another framed photograph, too, this one of a thin ascetic-looking boy with sleepy eyes. He stood holding a gray cat in his arms in a sunlit clearing in the woods.

  The hollow within the chimney was a shrine, set up to the memory of the woman and boy, the collection of trinkets reverently arranged, and then the narrow room sealed up like a crypt. She was reminded suddenly of Peter, arranging and rearranging the parlor with a thoroughness that was nearly fanatic, trying to re-create something, to reanimate something that was long ago dead and gone….

  She set the flashlight on a shelf of broken brick so that it illuminated the interior of the chimney, then leaned in, reaching through the darkness to pick up the perfume bottle. The scent of jasmine was strong within the enclosure, mingled with the smell of smoke. She cast her eyes downward to the floor below the edge of the shelf. Against the wall lay a tin pail, a rusted trowel, a gallon jug, and a small heap of brick. Sitting atop the brick was a glass tumbler and a tarnished silver flask.

  Beside the flask lay a dead man, his face tilted up toward the light.

  She jerked her hand back, accidentally sweeping the glass stopper off the shelf with the edge of her palm. Something pushed her, solidly, like hands against her shoulders, and she reeled backward, grabbing onto an edge of broken brick to keep from falling. She heard the stopper clatter against the tin pail, its ringing echo reverberating against the walls of the chimney.

  There were sounds of movement in the room above, telegraphed through the stones of the chimney itself, growing in volume until she could hear every small rustle and click, even the breathing of the three occupants, as if the reanimated family had grown even more insistently real. She pressed her hands over her ears, trying to crush out the noise, but that seemed only to magnify it, and her head was filled with the sound of voices raised in anger, a woman’s drawn-out scream, the plaintive cries of a lost child wandering through the windy, midnight darkness….

  A wild, disconnected terror arose in her mind, like a night fear rising through a dark and inc
ongruous dream. In her panic she turned toward the open gate, suddenly compelled to flee. Beyond the moonlit wall the forest trees bent and waved, ridden by the wind. She heard the sound of a woman’s voice, calling from somewhere far away, from the open spaces above the canyon. And then abruptly, as if awakening from a dream, she realized that the voice was her own. She stood looking around her at the dim cellar, breathing in ragged gasps.

  Picking up the flashlight, she forced herself to look at the thing on the floor inside the chimney. It sat in a slumped heap, a mummified human dressed in dusty rags, the leather-covered skull bent forward across the collarbone. Its cheekbones showed through rents in the dried skin of its face, the color of dirty ivory in the reflected light, and its hands were curled and brown like monkey paws.

  She stared at him, the house quiet now. How long ago had he locked himself away behind the layers of brick and stone? And the flask—poison? Did he drink it and then set about bricking himself in, mixing mortar in the pail while the poison worked? When the last brick was set, he must have lain dying in utter and complete solitude and darkness, waiting for the oil lamp to wink out, too weak from the poison to change his mind. It was nearly impossible to imagine the perverse will, the desperate self-loathing that would have been necessary to carry through with such a thing.

  The carefully arranged shrine was easier to understand—the choosing of the magic-laden objects, of photographs that captured exactly what it was about the person; the eyes had to be right, the mouth, even the tilt of the head. He had taken the top off the bottle of perfume, filling the narrow tomb with scent, maybe staring at the sad photograph, the beaded purse and the jewelry until darkness hid it from him….

  She bent forward, her hand closing over the crystal perfume bottle. Instantly she was slammed backward again, and she kicked through the debris on the floor, tripping and falling into the dirt. A voice shrieked in her ear as wind howled through the lattice, and the floor above her creaked ominously, as the entire room shifted on its stone piers.

  At that moment a man’s face flickered into existence in the dark window she’d broken into the chimney. The eyes jittered spastically, and the mouth worked as if the face would speak, but couldn’t. It was pale white, like smoke. She could see the chimney through it as it drifted toward her, the shelves full of trinkets hovering behind its eyes. Almost without thinking, she hurled the perfume bottle at it, pushing herself to her feet as the bottle flew straight through it and broke on the stones of the outer wall, showering the narrow shelves with glass fragments that rang like crystal bells.

  Again the ground heaved as if a wave had run through it, throwing her down again into the chalk-fine dirt and debris. There was a rumbling, like rocks turning over in a flooded river, and the beams and joists that supported the floor groaned and popped above her. Dust fell from the old wood, sifting out from between cracks in the floorboards, and a broad section of brick and rock fell out of the chimney in a dusty heap.

  15

  AMANDA AND DAVID SAT AT THE TABLE AT THE END OF the kitchen playing Crazy Eights, the pale cards spinning across varnished wood, their plastic surfaces reflecting a dull light. Peter walked slowly toward them. Behind him everything was dark, hidden—something he knew without having to look. The kitchen lay in shadow, and the cupboards and counter, the stove and refrigerator, were dark rectilinear masses without any real dimension, flat sketches of shadow. Only the distant table was illuminated with a glow something like the light of fireflies, emanating from the atmosphere itself.

  Suddenly he stood next to the table, looking down at the litter of playing cards. On the edge of the table, next to the window, sat a glass pitcher of green Kool-Aid and ice. Beads of condensation hazed the glass, and someone had drawn a smiling face in the moisture, long drips of water trailing away from either corner of the mouth. Beside the pitcher lay a plate heaped with Oreo cookies.

  Amanda poured Kool-Aid into a clear glass tumbler and set it in front of an empty chair, then gestured at the chair and whisked up the cards, shuffling them together, clicking the deck against the top of the table. There was darkness outside the window. Something that looked like sheet lightning shimmered in the distance. She flicked the cards out onto the table, dealing out three hands.

  Abruptly he was looking down at the table from above, as if he were floating on the ceiling. He could hear distant thunder now, although it occurred to him dimly that it could as easily be the sound of the wind. The light diminished, and the facedown card that left Amanda’s hand moved sluggishly in its course, a slowly spinning white bee against a red background, the tiny white diamonds around the bee revolving like a spiral nebula way off in the twilight.

  Slowly he was conscious that it was the wind blowing somewhere far away, outside, beyond the dark window. Its sound suggested to him that there was something he knew but couldn’t remember, something desperately important….

  He touched his forehead. On his fingers was a red smear of blood. Abruptly he pictured a man’s face in his mind, vaguely familiar, then the uncanny notion that it was his own face he saw, reflected in a fog-shrouded mirror. A curtain seemed to have lowered itself between the present moment and the past. Memories shifted in the darkness beyond it, memories shaped like the shadows of moving trees, or of hillsides, or of clouds in a windswept sky. Some forgotten thing wandered deep in his mind, lost in the darkness of unlit corridors. He could hear the echoing sound of its footsteps growing slowly louder until those footsteps became a heavy pounding that nearly shook the house.

  Then the pounding stopped, the room grew lighter, and the notion that he was searching for something slid past him and was gone. The cards accelerated, spinning crazily, dropping to the tabletop and sliding away across it. David twisted an Oreo apart, holding the halves up in the center of each palm like stigmata, one black, one white with frosting. “To undo it, you unscrew it,” he said, then scraped the frosting off with his front teeth, leaving a dark sort of two-lane highway across the center of the frosted half.

  Peter picked up his hand. The twelve cards were sticky with chocolate and Oreo frosting and Kool-Aid. All of the cards were spades. Only the eight was missing. It dawned on him suddenly that he couldn’t win, not with this hand. She’d dealt him worthless cards on purpose. “This isn’t fair,” he said. “I have too many cards.” This was what he was doomed to: playing out a losing hand.

  He sniffed the air, smelling fireplace smoke now—the menthol smell of burning eucalyptus logs. There was the low sound of muttering voices, as if from the other room, but when he turned and looked through the kitchen door into the living room, he could see almost nothing at all, just hazy gray-tinged darkness like a densely foggy night. Shapes moved through it like shadows on a screen. He heard the pounding again, very distant now, but it meant nothing to him. On the tabletop, moving hands placed card after card faceup on the discard pile.

  “I don’t love you anymore,” Amanda said to him without looking away from her cards. “I used to, but now I don’t. It wasn’t easy, realizing that. Or maybe admitting it wasn’t easy. Maybe I realized it years ago. You know what’s funny?”

  He stared at her. “What’s funny?”

  “I can still remember why I loved you. None of the memories have changed, you know. I thought maybe they’d rot, like old pieces of fruit, but they didn’t. All of them are still there—the trip to Maui, that old apartment in Carlsbad, all those breakfasts at that waffle place downtown—remember that? The walnut-and-cinnamon waffles every Sunday morning? David growing up … Remember that school of crazy-looking squid we found? What island was that?”

  “Antigua,” he said mechanically.

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t change a thing—not any of that. It was all good, and still is. And yet what’s funny is all of it’s changed in some bigger way. We can still have all those things, we can still keep them, but we can’t have any more things, not together, we can’t. That’s what you need to know. It’s what you haven’t understood. Here, lo
ok at this,” she said. “I’ve kept it all.”

  From somewhere she produced the small handbag he had bought for her years ago, during their trip to the Caribbean. He peered inside as she held the handbag open. Down in the bottom lay a scattering of big jewels, lumps of facet-cut glass in gaudy colors like a kid’s pirate treasure. There were tiny shadows moving within the glass, and he was filled with the certainty that if he held them up to the light he’d see things in there—happier times, maybe. Abruptly he remembered a time when he and David had buried a cigar box full of rhinestones and dime-store rings and glass marbles in the back garden, late one rainy Sunday afternoon. How many years ago was that?

  “A long time ago,” David said, studying his cards. “I forgot all about it. I was just a kid then.”

  “So did I,” Peter said. “I forgot, too.” It was still buried out there, had to be, the mahogany cigar box bug-eaten and decomposed. He thought about going home and digging it up, but then it seemed that he already was home, although the direction of the backyard—or the back door, for that matter—was lost to him, hidden somewhere in the recesses of his memory.

  Amanda closed the bag and put it away someplace. “I’m keeping these safe,” she said. “But that’s all. There won’t be anything more to add to it. It’s finished, like a book.”

  He couldn’t answer her. He realized abruptly that the same thing was true for him. There were some things that had happened to them both, together, in some other lifetime—bright memories like fallen stars that he had picked up off the sidewalk and kept in his pocket. Already they were artifacts, museum pieces. Now there was nothing left between him and Amanda, no connection—that’s what she was saying. Nothing except David.

  He looked at his son, astonished at how grown up he looked. It seemed like only yesterday that he was four years old, not even in school yet, and they had all the time in the world. He wondered vaguely about the box of treasure out in the garden, whether digging it up would mean anything to David anymore.