The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  Here were the weatherbeaten old shacks again, their out-of-season lights dangling from the bleached shingles like withered blossoms. Here were the rusting truck cabins, here the abandoned fairground. Something caught my eye as this swung past: on the wooden booth where I had made out only the initials H and M the last time I’d passed, I could now read clearly the two words they stood for: Horned Man.

  Perhaps it was just the relative brightness of this earlier hour, but it seemed to me that the words had been freshly painted. There was something irresistibly festive about the look of them; I found myself vividly imagining the jubilant crowds of some age of comparative innocence lining up with their dimes, half-credulous, half-skeptical, eager to see just how the management was going to pull off this particular piece of audacity. And by clinging to this cheerful image, I was able to ignore for some time the strange pang of hurt – as though a stranger had sneered at me – that the sight of these words had induced. One-eight-hundred why hurt? I thought, one-eight-hundred end pain …

  From the train station in its lake of gray tarmac, I walked the mile or so to Lincoln Court.

  In daylight, the stillness and uninhabited feeling of the place were even more disconcerting than they had been at night. The blue mailbox on the corner had a weird, stressed air about it, as if it were willing itself to come to life so that it could scuttle away on its little legs. A parked car seemed on the point of breaking out in a cold sweat. I walked down through the long horseshoe of finished and unfinished houses: not a soul in sight. Yellowish canebrake, matted and fleshy from the winter, stood in the scrubland beyond, then a line of trees; all of it very still, with a watchful air. I remembered a description I had read, of the way people under certain kinds of pressure perceive the physical world; its forms and textures impinging with unnatural forcefulness; spilling out over themselves. Hypercathected, I believe the word was. Hypercathected reality.

  The house looked deeply asleep – curtains across the front windows; the garage door shut. I wondered if there was some trick by which you could tell whether or not a garage had a car in it, the way you can spin an egg to see whether or not it’s been boiled. But even if the car was still there, I realised, that wouldn’t prove Elaine hadn’t gone away. And at the same time I was still trying to account for my sense that she hadn’t gone away; my sense that this brother in Iowa hadn’t called as Roger Freeman had reported, not that I disbelieved Roger himself; rather that this brother had been impersonated by someone else (how would Roger know the difference?), perhaps didn’t even exist; that there was no car crash; that … That what? Beyond that thicket of doubt and counterdoubt my powers of speculation seemed unable to cast any light, petering out like a torchbeam in absolute darkness.

  It made me anxious, loitering by the house like this: I wondered suddenly if I was being watched, and immediately felt watched. Trying not to look as if I didn’t want to be seen, I approached the front door and rang the bell: no answer. The door handle, which was locked, had a keyhole right in it like the handles of hotel room doors. On a reluctant intuition, I took the key that had been left in my mailbox out of my pocket. Had this been anticipated, I wondered, my coming here? But I saw at once that the key wasn’t going to fit, and to the extent that one doesn’t like the idea of one’s apparently spontaneous decisions being somehow foreseen, this was a relief. But at the same time I realised that in some part of myself I had been considering going into the house and removing the letter I had allegedly written Elaine, and that I had perhaps all along been half-consciously hoping this key would be my means of entry; that this indeed had been my chief reason for coming here in the first place. Only now – now that I found myself obstructed in this wish – did I become fully conscious of the danger the letter up there in Elaine’s bedroom posed to me.

  I had given this letter almost no thought since Elaine first mentioned it that evening up in her bedroom. The revelation of its existence had been so abruptly eclipsed by the larger revelation concerning Barbara Hellermann’s death, and events since then had plunged forward at such a speed, that I hadn’t had a chance to puzzle out its origins, or even to remember that this was something I needed to do. Now though, standing outside Elaine’s house, I realised that without conscious reflection I had placed this letter along with the note, the key, the poster, and all the other varyingly mischievous phenomena of the past weeks, in the category of visible manifestation of Trumilcik’s malice toward me. And whatever the ultimate goal of this malice might have been, I could easily imagine the importance to it of a document that appeared to form an unequivocal link between Elaine and myself.

  With as casual an air as I could muster, I sauntered round to the back of the house and tried the back-door lock: again without success. As I moved on, I saw that the Venetian blind in one of the kitchen windows was half open. I peered in through the angled slats, and immediately a feeling of panic exploded inside me, even though what I saw amounted merely to a confirmation of what I had already been suspecting. There on the kitchen counter was the debris of the meal Elaine and I had shared almost a week ago, still not cleared away: dirty plates and cutlery, smeared wineglasses, crumpled serviettes. Lowering my head I could see through the narrow gaps between the metal slats to an area of the tiled floor where what looked like the remains of Elaine’s quiche had come crashing violently to the ground. Small insects were crawling over the pale curds and the gray, broken, brainlike florets of cauliflower.

  Any further ideas I might have had about getting into the house disappeared from me then. I turned from the window, and reeled away with a sensation of being almost involuntarily driven off, the movement of my wobbly legs more a stagger than a walk. As I turned out of Lincoln Court I remembered what had seemed inconsequential at the time, that on the night of my dinner with Elaine I had left the scrap of paper with her address on it in my office. No doubt it had come out of my wallet along with the twenty-dollar bills I had left for Trumilcik. It had been in his possession. Elaine’s address had been in Trumilcik’s hands! He had known where I was going; known where Elaine lived. The implications of this sank heavily through me, spreading a sensation of utter horror. To the image of myself and Elaine inside her house that evening, I was now compelled to add the figure of Trumilcik peering in from the outside, steel rod in hand.

  CHAPTER 13

  The following day, as I rode the subway up to Dr Schrever’s office, I found myself thinking of her notebook. It occurred to me that, like Trumilcik’s rod and the letter in Elaine’s painted box, this too had become a kind of unauthorised representation of myself; at large in the world, and impersonating me in ways that could threaten to be at the very least embarrassing. I would have liked to have had it in my possession, but short of snatching it from Dr Schrever and running out of her office with it – something I could hardly see myself doing – I didn’t hold out much hope of this.

  What did occur to me, though, was that I might be able to turn its existence to my advantage.

  The word ‘alibi’ seemed almost as absurd in relation to the humdrum routines of my life, as ‘Private Investigator’ had a week earlier, and yet it struck me that my trip to Corinth (something I had naturally had no intention of discussing with Dr Schrever) had acquired a new significance. It was my alibi; at any rate as far as Rosa Vasquez was concerned. Placing myself in Corinth on the night of her murder seemed suddenly much more important than any advantage I might gain by my discretion. And it seemed to me that Dr Schrever’s notebook was the natural choice for the document of record.

  Departing, therefore, from the policy of caution that had all but silenced me on her couch earlier that week, I made up my mind to tell Dr Schrever about Trumilcik after all. I would tell her the whole story: how I had come to suspect his presence in my office, how I had found his memoir and then gone on to discover his hiding place. I would tell her about the sheet and the rod, the vile offering he had left me in exchange for my forty dollars, the anonymous note, the Portland poster, the key … I
would describe (already I could feel the enormous relief of being able to do all this) my growing suspicion of his involvement in the death of Barbara Hellermann, and I would tell her how, in my attempt to track him down, I had made my strange journey to Corinth last weekend.

  Without being obtrusively so, I would be very precise about the timing of my trip and return. I would give a scrupulously accurate account of the journey, describing the bus ride up there, the rest-stop, the town, the shelter itself, all in the kind of minute detail by which reality makes itself felt. I would portray the people I had encountered along the way so faithfully that even if somewhere down the line they should forget or deny they had ever met me, no one would doubt that I had met them. Above all, I would be mercilessly honest about my own conduct and feelings: candid to the point of incriminating myself. That way – guilty of fraud and general duplicity – I would be immune to accusations of any more serious crime.

  Unfortunately I never had a chance to implement this plan. Before I reached Dr Schrever’s office, this too had acquired a kind of protective force-field; one that seemed almost physically to hoist me up and drive me back in the opposite direction as fast as I could move.

  I had bought the Daily News as I got out of the subway, and was reading it as I walked up along the park. There had been nothing new on Rosa Vasquez in the Times that morning, but the News had a development to report, and it was as I was reading about this that I felt myself being turned around and driven back down to the Village, filled with a weird, sickened sense of the ghastly irony with which this fiasco seemed to be working itself out.

  She had had a stalker, this woman. The moment I read this, the reason for her reaction to me that afternoon in the park flashed on me with painful clarity. She too had thought I was Trumilcik! What gave it all its peculiar farcical desperateness was that, after seeing me throw something into the lake, she had notified the police, who had retrieved Mr Kurwen’s glass eye from the ice floe it had landed on, so that there now existed a possible connection between the woman’s assailant and this absurd, orbicular prosthesis. It was like a riddle: what do a glass eye and a motiveless killing have in common? The answer – not the true answer, but the only answer – could be triangulated, I realised, in Dr Schrever’s notebook. For all I knew, this had already been done. Hence the radical unapproachability of her office.

  My apartment felt emptier and more silent than ever. I moved through it, trying to think clearly what I should do. Turn myself in to the police with a wild, still-unverifiable story about a plot to make me look like a serial murderer? Try to flush out Trumilcik from wherever he was hiding now? (But then what? Ask him politely to please stop this inconsiderate behavior?) Or go somewhere, escape, get on a train or plane till things, as they say, ‘quietened down’?

  I was overwhelmed: stressed to the point where my mind simply froze like a stalled engine. In a vague, trance-like state, I gathered a few things together – warm clothes, passport and Green Card, various papers – and put them in my briefcase, not remotely knowing what I intended to do. Having done that, I immediately succumbed to a heavy, familiar inertia. I stared abstractedly out of the window without moving. So abstracted was I, in fact, that at first I thought the flickering silver light I could see out of the corner of my eye was just a reflection on the revolving ventilator fan across the courtyard. Even when I roused myself from my stupor and moved into the kitchen to throw out the few bits of fresh food I still had, it took me a moment to realise that the flickering spot had come into the kitchen with me and grown a little larger, and that this meant it had nothing to do with the ventilator fan, but was in fact an emissary from the world of pain, come to pay me another call in its familiar metallic livery.

  As it grew, spreading across my field of vision like a great, sunlit shoal of mackerel, I felt a burst of childish self-pity. I found myself thinking of my mother, childishly yearning for the soothing way she had taken up the management of these migraines when I was a boy, entering so intimately into the interstices of my pain, it seemed she might be capable of assuming the burden of it herself, relieving me altogether. And then, when conventional medicine failed to help me, the way she had sought out that homeopath, the old Finn with his tiny, mysterious pills … I wondered again what they were, wished I could call my mother to find out, and as the silvery obstruction vanished and the first wave of pain came crashing into my head, I felt with a pang the sadness of the state of affairs that had arisen between myself and my mother. The truth was I had lost touch with her over the years, and no longer had an address or phone number for her. I had always been aware of something not quite natural about this, but now, for the first time, I seemed to come face to face with its full, appalling strangeness. What was almost worse was that I had no real idea how it had come about! It was as though some deep rift or faultline existed in the terrain of my psyche, some hidden oubliette of consciousness, into which events – even momentous events like this – could fall without a sound.

  The ache pounded in my head, hammering at the inside of my skull. Hearing myself cry aloud with pain, I grabbed my coat and briefcase, and ran downstairs to the street. Now at least I had a specific goal to accomplish. I knew exactly where I was going: 156 Washington Avenue. I’d read the address enough times in the Manhattan Directory over the past week in my attempt to clarify the mystery of an apparent connection between Trumilcik and my wife, though that particular conundrum couldn’t have been further from my mind right now, fully occupied as it was by the immense discomfort of its own physical substance; that, and the frailly assuaging memory of a pair of white, cool hands pressing into my temples and forehead.

  The building was an old brownstone with chipped black lions on its stoop. The name I was looking for was on a buzzer marked Apt 5. I pressed it. To my surprise the door was buzzed open without any preliminaries on the entryphone. I trudged up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to the fifth floor and saw that the apartment door was open, spilling out voices and soft music. Behind it was a small entranceway with a coat-stand draped in winter coats.

  Almost immediately – several seconds before I became conscious of what I was looking at – I felt the same sense of being pushed away as I had felt outside Dr Schrever’s office earlier that afternoon and at Elaine’s house the day before: an invisible peristalsis of space, air, light, urging me – it had begun to seem – out of existence itself.

  I was turning, still unaware of what it was I had laid eyes on, when a voice said hello.

  I turned back, and there was Melody Schroeder, a glass of red wine in her hand. Her cheeks were pink and soft-looking. Her hair was short, almost shaven, though the effect was also one of softness, rather than toughness. She was looking at me with her odd, mischievous, secretively knowing smile. A delicious smell of cooking had wafted into the air.

  ‘I’m Lawrence Miller,’ I said. ‘You once –’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Well, I was wondering –’

  ‘Yes but I can’t help you.’

  I paused, blinking. The slightest effort of thought seemed to intensify the ache in my head.

  ‘Oh, you mean – no, no, it isn’t about Carol. It’s – I have a –’ I touched my head.

  Her eyes roved across my own with an aloof curiosity.

  ‘You do, don’t you?’

  ‘That was you, wasn’t it? Blumfeld?’

  She smiled. Only now do I see the cruelty of that smile: the same indolent, foreknowing expression that I note in retrospect as I recall the moment at our table months earlier, when she had first suggested, her husky voice all antic innocence, that expedition to the Plymouth Rock.

  ‘Here,’ she said. She brought a hand to my forehead – just one hand, the other still holding her wineglass. She was wearing a thumb-ring: gold and very thick. My eye rested on it blurrily as she gripped the front of my head and pressed in her thumb. There was something disturbing about it, I caught myself feeling; something delicately, elusively gross …

&nb
sp; ‘There. Now I’m having a dinner party which I’m afraid I can’t –’

  ‘She’s here, isn’t she?’ I interrupted, conscious suddenly of at least a part of what it was that had caught my eye earlier: half-hidden by the other coats on the rack was the unmistakable royal blue of Carol’s cape-like winter coat.

  ‘Yes she is.’

  I looked over Melody’s shoulder, but the corridor from this vestibule turned a corner, and the guests were not visible. From a flicker of shadow on the wall, I saw that they must be sitting in candlelight. That Carol was there, around that corner, where the voices and music and the smell of cooking were coming from, was a thought large enough to obliterate all sense of the pain in my head, and for a moment I thought Melody’s touch had worked another miracle. I tried to make out Carol’s voice in the drifting murmur of conversation. Just the sound of her voice would have been something to carry away with me. I could have lived on that and nothing else for days! Life itself – all I wanted of life – seemed just around that corner. A few steps and I could be a part of its candlelit, warm circle again.

  ‘You’d better go,’ Melody said.

  I nodded. There seemed a deep, unintended judiciousness to her words, as if she were telling me, rightly, that that unseen, golden image required precisely my own absence from it as the condition for its continued existence. As I turned to leave, I saw that the coat all but covering Carol’s was also familiar, and I realised with a jolt that it was this: the sight of the two of them together – this black coat with its split tails joined at the stylised rectangle of raised fabric, lying over Carol’s blue coat – that had created the strange force-field I had felt propelling me away from here when I had first reached the doorway, and felt again now, like a great blast of cold wind ushering me back out into the night.