“Sleep,” Morse said, and mixed him yet another dose. Lerner drank it off at a gulp, choked, gasped for a moment, then relaxed against his pillows.
Little by little the shadows of the room turned bronze, then brown. For a time the old man seemed still to be conversing with Morse; he heard voices, one of which sounded like his own, and unless mistaken he heard spoken the word perdu. But the voices became still; he found himself enjoying a brilliant scene of people waltzing at a masked ball. Then nothing.
Next morning he woke with his head, as usual, filled with ashes. For a time he lay in bed, unable even to reach for the bell. When his mind cleared, he rang as usual, but no Morse appeared. Nor anyone else.
After ringing again and again, Lerner, cursing, stretched out a trembling arm, drew the wheelchair beside the bed and despite a shock of pain, wrestled himself into it. Where the devil was everyone? He trundled to the door of his den and flung it open.
The safe door stood ajar. He rolled into the room and put a trembling hand inside. The manuscript was gone. Well, thought Lerner, he was always a clever fellow.
The house was utterly silent. Morse must have sent Cleo and the cook away. Lerner spun the chair this way and that. What to do, what to do? The telephone was out of reach, and anyway Morse might be waiting in the hallway. The old man peered back into the bedroom, but with only the one barred window it was a trap without an exit. He couldn’t lock himself into the den, for the key to the hall door had vanished years ago – possibly removed by Morse, so that he could enter at will.
And he’d put his life into the hands of this man! Soon he’d be coming to accuse Lerner of murdering his real father. Coming with the razor, but not to shave him.
He turned to his desk, pulled out a handful of ancient bills that stuffed a pigeonhole, pushed aside a panel at the back and touched a hidden spring. A second panel opened into a dark recess. He thrust in his hand and pulled out the Remington. He clamped it muzzle-first in his left armpit, broke it open and checked the load of six brass cartridges. He snapped the weapon shut again. The hammer was stiff, but he cocked it easily with his one hand accustomed to doing the work of two.
He hid the gun under his lap robe and wheeled himself back into the bedroom. Closing the door to his den behind him, he waited for Morse – an old and crippled wolf, but not a toothless one.
Yet his first visitor appeared, not at the door, but in the mirror. Monsieur Felix couldn’t bear to miss out on what was about to happen, and suddenly there he stood in the clouded pier glass – one eye gleaming, thin smile widening like an arroyo between the blue chin and the great blade of a nose. Perhaps he was too eager, for Lerner read his mind.
Why, he wondered, did I ever imagine his vengeance would stop with Royal? Did I not call him swine, connive at his death, supply the weapon that killed him? Did I not write my confession at his command? In an opium dream, did he not cause me to speak the word perdu that let Morse open the safe? Is it not his pleasure now to destroy me and Royal’s son at one stroke? For either I’ll kill him and perish of my infirmities, or he’ll kill me and go to the hangman for murder.
At that moment the door slammed open and Morse entered, razor flickering in his hand. His face was swollen, his eyes drugged to pinpoints, his smile an arid duplicate of the one in the mirror. He whispered, “I’ve come to scrape your throat, Uncle.”
Lerner pulled the revolver from under the lap robe. Morse halted like a man suddenly transmuted into stone. In the fearsome quiet that followed, Lerner spoke to him for the last time.
“Whatever else I’ve done in a long and mostly foul existence, Morse, remember how at the very end I saved you from the hangman’s noose and gave you a new life for my brother’s sake.”
Two crashes of thunder. The shards of the mirror were still tinkling on the floor when Lerner slumped in his chair, the pistol slipping from his hand.
The smoke was dense, and through it Monsieur Felix, emerging from the shattered mirror, passed like a shadow seen in fog. He stared at Lerner, absolutely baffled. The vatic power he depended upon, the power that enabled him to plan his murders a decade or more in advance – why had it been blind to this possibility?
J’ai perdu son âme, he thought, almost in despair. I’ve lost his soul.
Then he turned his gaze on Morse. His trademark smile slowly rekindled, as he recalled the deepest secret of the young man’s life: how, as a child, he’d entered the nursery in this house, turned Elmira’s son over in his crib, and pressed the baby’s face into the mattress until he suffocated – all out of fear that the white child would take his own place in Lerner’s favour.
Now the poor devil needed help, which Monsieur Felix was always happy to supply.
Gradually Morse recovered from his shock. First he’d forgotten to breathe; then panted like a winded animal, heart thundering. Now his breath evened, his heart slowed to a regular beat. He folded the razor and put it into his trouser pocket, while cool thoughts seemed to rise from some unshaken region of his mind.
I must touch nothing. I must telephone the police. I must report the suicide. His illness and the drug will explain everything. And aren’t the police identifying people by their finger-marks these days? Well, his finger-marks are on the pistol’s grip.
But there was something else. The police – suppose they decide to bury the evidence and hang me as they’ve hung other blacks, for the mere pleasure of it?
A thought tickled the back of his mind. There’s something in the desk.
He turned back into the den. Took the razor out again and threw it into the safe, so it wouldn’t be found on him. He slammed the iron door, spun around, knocked the pile of ancient bills off the desk and reached his arm to the elbow inside the open hidey-hole. What was he touching?
He pulled out a leather purse with a string closure, opened it and grinned at the cylinder of gold double-eagles it contained. Why, the old devil, he thought. Here’s his secret cache, and all the time I thought it was in the safe!
A few bribes would enable him to handle the police, and that was all he knew or cared about now. The fact that he would soon be rich – that he would have power beyond the imagining of ordinary people to exercise an appetite for cruelty that had grown up in him during a lifetime of stifled rage – all that remained to be discovered.
The Demon stood behind him, smiling, lending him useful thoughts, mentoring him, delighted as always to be the Overseer of human destiny.
Aha, le p’tit diable! whispered Monsieur Felix. Him I won’t lose.
PINCKNEY BENEDICT
* * *
The Beginnings of Sorrow
PINCKNEY BENEDICT GREW UP on his family’s dairy farm in the mountains of southern West Virginia. He has published two collections of short fiction (Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard) and a novel (Dogs of God).
He currently serves as a professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.
“‘The Beginnings of Sorrow’ evolved out of my long-standing fascination with werewolf tales,” explains the author, “from the Roman soldier in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis, for example, up to the fairly recent (and terrific) film Dog Soldiers.
“I wanted very much to write a werewolf story in reverse, one in which a dog painfully and protractedly becomes a man.
“Setting that story on a failing farm in the Appalachian highlands seemed natural to me, as did the rapid disintegration of the world outside the farm, communicated as it is by television: a fantasia on the hermetic environment in which I was raised.”
“Whoo-oo-oo-oo-hooh-hoo-oo! Oh, look at me, I am perishing in this gateway . . . I howl and howl, but what’s the good of howling?”
—Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog
VANDAL BOUCHER TOLD his dog Hark to go snatch the duck out of the rushes where it had fallen, and Hark told him No. In days to come, Vandal probably wished he’d just pointed his Ithaca twelve-gauge side-by-side at Hark’s fine-boned skull right that mome
nt and pulled the trigger on the second barrel (he had emptied the first to bring down the duck) and blown the dog’s brains out, there at the edge of the freezing, sludgy pond. But that unanticipated answer – any answer would have been a surprise, of course, but this was no, unmistakably no, in a pleasant tenor, without any obvious edge of anger or resentment – that single syllable took him aback and prevented him from taking action.
Vandal’s old man, now: back in the day, Vandal’s old man Xerxes Boucher would have slain the dog that showed him any sign of strangeness or resistance to his will, let alone one that told him no. Dog’s sucking the golden yolks out of the eggs? Blam. Dog’s taking chickens out of the coop? Blam. Dog’s not sticking tight enough to the sheep, so the coyotes are chivvying them across the high pastures? This dog’s your favourite, your special pet? You wish I would refrain from shooting the dog? Well, sonny, you wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which gets full first. Blam. Nothing could stop him, no pleading or promises, and threats were out of the question. But that was Xerxes in his prime, and Vandal wasn’t a patch on him, everybody said so, Vandal himself had ruefully to agree with the general assessment of his character. So when Hark said no, Vandal just blinked. “Come again?” he said.
No.
Well, Vandal thought. He looked out into the reeds, where the body of the mallard he had just shot bobbed in the dark water. That water looked cold. Hark sat on the shore, blinking up at Vandal with mild eyes. It would have struck Xerxes Boucher as outrageous that the dog should balk at wading out there into that cold, muddy mess, the soupy muck at the pond’s margin at least shoulder-deep for the dog where the dead mallard floated, maybe deep enough that a dog – even a sizeable dog like Hark – would have to swim.
But damn it if, on that grey November morning, with a hot thermos of his wife’s bitter black coffee nearby just waiting on him to drink it, and a solid breakfast when he got home after the hunt, and dry socks – damned if Vandal couldn’t see the dog’s point.
“Okay,” he said. “This once.”
He was wearing his thick rubber waders, the ones that went all the way up to the middle of his chest, so he took off his coat – the frigid air bit into him, made his breath go short – laid the coat down on the bank, set the shotgun on top of the coat, and set off after the mallard himself. The waders clutched his calves as the greasy pond water surged around his legs, and his feet sank unpleasantly into the soft bottom. He considered what might be sleeping down there: frogs settled in for the winter, dreaming their slick wet dreams; flabby catfish whiskered like old men; great knobby snapping turtles, their thick round shells overlapping one another like the shields of some ancient army.
They were down there in the dark, the turtles that had survived unchanged from the age of the dinosaurs, with their spines buckled so that they fit, neatly folded, within their shells; and their eyes closed fast, their turtle hearts beating slow, slow, slow, waiting on the passing of another winter. And what if the winter never passed and spring never came, as looked more and more likely? How long would they sleep, how long could such creatures wait in the dark? A long time, Vandal suspected. Time beyond counting. It might suit them well, the endless empty twilight that the world seemed dead-set on becoming.
Vandal didn’t care to put his feet on such creatures, and when his toes touched something hard, he tried to tread elsewhere. The pond bottom was full of hard things, and most of them were probably rocks, but better safe than sorry. He had seen the jaws on snapping turtles up close, the beak on the skeletal face like a hawk’s or an eagle’s, hooked and hard-edged and sharp as a razor. Easy to lose a toe to such a creature.
When he reached the mallard – it was truly a perfect bird, its head and neck a deep oily green, unmarked by the flying shot – he plucked its limp body up out of the water and waved it over his head for the dog to see. “Got it!” he called.
Hark wasn’t paying any attention to him at all. He was sitting next to the tall silver thermos and gazing quizzically at the coat and, cradled on the coat, Vandal’s shotgun.
“I told him to go get the duck,” Vandal said to his wife, who was called Bridie. Then, to Hark, he said, “Tell her what you told me.”
No, said Hark.
Bridie looked from her husband to the dog. “Does he mean to tell you no,” she asked, working to keep her voice even and calm, her tone reasonable. “Or does he mean he won’t tell me?”
No, the dog said again. It wasn’t like a bark, which Bridie would have much preferred, one of those clever dogs that has been taught by its owner to “talk” by mimicking human speech without understanding what it was saying. “What’s on top of a house?” Roof! “How does sandpaper feel?” Rough! “Who’s the greatest ballplayer of all time?” Ruth!
DiMaggio, she thought to herself. That’s the punchline. The dog says Ruth! but really it’s DiMaggio. Vandal laughed. He was a big broad-shouldered good-natured man with an infectious laugh, which was one of the reasons Bridie loved him, and she smiled despite her misgivings. The dog seemed delighted with the turn of events too.
“That’s the sixty-four dollar question, ain’t it?” Vandal said. He clapped Hark on the head in the old familiar way, and the dog shifted out from under the cupped hand, eyes suddenly slitted and opaque.
No, it said.
Much as she loved Vandal, and much as she had hated his bear of a father, with his great sweaty hands always ready to squeeze her behind or pinch her under her skirt as she was climbing the stairs, always ready to brush against her breasts – glad as she was that the mean old man was in the cold cold ground, she couldn’t help but think at that moment that a little of Xerxes’ unflinching resolve wouldn’t have gone amiss in Vandal’s character, in this circumstance. She wished that the dog had said pretty much anything else: Yes, or better yet, yes sir. Even a word of complaint, cold, wet, dark. Afraid. But this flat refusal unnerved her.
“He takes a lot on himself, doesn’t he? For a dog,” she said.
“Talking dog,” said Vandal, his pride written on his knobby face, as though he had taught the dog to speak all by himself, as though it had been his idea.
Hark had begun wandering through the house, inspecting the dark heavy furniture like he had never seen it or the place before. Not exploring timidly, like a guest unsure of his welcome, but more like a new owner. Bridie thought she saw him twitch a lip disdainfully as he sniffed at the fraying upholstery of the davenport. He looked to her for a moment as though maybe he were going to lift his leg. “No!” she snapped. “Bad boy!”
He glanced from her to Vandal and back again, trotted over to Vandal’s easy chair with his tail curled high over his back. He gave off the distinct air of having won some sort of victory. “Come here,” Bridie called to him. She snapped her fingers, and he swung his narrow, intelligent head, looking past his shoulder at her.
No, he said, and he hopped up into Vandal’s chair. Bridie was relieved to see how small he was in the chair, into which Vandal had to work to wedge his bulky frame.
There was room for two of Hark in the seat, three even, so lean was he, slender long-legged retriever mix. Vandal nodded at him with approval. The dog turned around and around and around as though he were treading down brush to make himself a nest, in the ancient way of dogs. In the end, though, he settled himself upright rather than lying down, his spine against the back of the chair, his head high.
“Xerxes wouldn’t never allow a dog up in his chair like that,” Bridie said. And was immediately sorry she had said it. Vandal had adored and dreaded his brutal, unstoppable old man, and any comparison between them left him feeling failed and wanting. Xerxes, Xerxes. Will he never leave our house?
“Xerxes never had him a talking dog,” Vandal said. He handed the dead mallard to her. Its glossy head and neck stretched down toward the floor in a comical way, its pearlescent eyes long gone into death. It was a large, muscular bird.
“Not much of a talking dog,” Bridie said. She turned, taking the mallar
d away into the kitchen when she saw the flash of irritation in Vandal’s eyes. She didn’t look towards Hark, because she didn’t want to see the expression of satisfaction that she felt sure animated his doggy features. She wanted to let Vandal have this moment, this chance to own something that his father couldn’t have imagined, let alone possessed, but it was – it was wrong. Twisted, bent. It was a thing that couldn’t be but was, it was unspeakable, and it was there in her living room, sitting in her husband’s chair. “Not much of one, if all it can manage to say is no.”
Hark reclined in the easy chair in the parlour. The television was tuned to the evening news, and the dog watched and listened with bright gleaming eyes, giving every appearance of understanding what was said: wars and rumours of wars. Earthquakes and famines and troubles. None of it was good at all, it hadn’t been good in some little time, but none of it seemed to bother him in the least. He chewed briefly at his own hip, after some itch that was deeply hidden there, and then went back to his television viewing.
Vandal sat on the near end of the davenport, not appearing to hear the news. From time to time he reached out a hand to pet Hark, but Hark shifted his weight and leaned away, just out of reach. It was what Bridie had always striven to do when Xerxes went to put his hands on her but that she had somehow never managed, to create that small distance between them that would prove unbridgeable. Always the hand reached her, to pet and stroke and pinch, always when Vandal’s attention was turned elsewhere. And them living in Xerxes’ house, and her helpless to turn him away.
About the third time Vandal put his hand out, Hark tore his gaze from the TV screen, snarled, snapped, his jaws closing with a wicked click just shy of Vandal’s reaching fingertips. Vandal withdrew his hand, looking sheepish.
“No?” he asked the dog.
No, Hark said, and he settled back into the soft cushions of the chair, his eyes fixed once more on the flickering screen.
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