The master bedroom boasted two adjoining sitting rooms where husband and wife might dress and undress in privacy, visible to no eyes other than their own and those of their valet and maid. To the sitting room with the more feminine decor, where her bags had been taken and unpacked by Mrs. Thayer, Elena now retreated and took off her clothes. When she was without a stitch, she admired herself in a tall old looking glass, smiling with total absence of false modesty. Her body was sumptuous and full-bosomed, satin to the touch, with the olive skin of her father, and a curly nest at her center like a swatch of soft fur. Her brushes had been set out on the dressing table. She selected one, but instead of sitting down to brush her dark hair, she did it standing up, nude, in front of the full-length mirror, watching her breasts bob and quiver as she brushed the gleaming thick mass in long strokes. Once, she winked at herself.
The gaze of a cold, unmoving eye made her drop the brush and catch her breath in sudden fright when she glimpsed it in the glass.
Turning quickly, her hands covering breasts and thatch in a reflexive movement, she saw that the eye belonged to a personage at the opposite side of the room: insolent, dissolute, clad in the tight breeches, cutaway coat, and tall silk hat of a Regency rake, he might have been taken for Beau Brummel had not a small brass plate on the picture’s frame identified him as Sir Percival Mainwaring (1785-1826). He appraised her nudity coolly through a lorgnette. She stuck her tongue out at him.
Downstairs, Bud impatiently waited only six minutes, not ten, before climbing the staircase to the master bedroom. Even so, she was already in bed when he walked into the room: the lights were turned off, but he had no difficulty discerning the familiar curves of her shape under the coverlet, thrown into relief by a cool wash of moonlight from the windows.
“My little eager beaver,” he muttered playfully, as he began to undress there in the bedroom. No sitting room for him: he was in no mood to stand on ceremony, and he let the clothes fall to the floor. Nude in the moonlight, he was a well-proportioned, muscular young man, and, at the moment, spectacularly virile. “Here I come, ready or not,” he crooned, and climbed under the coverlet.
She was lying on one side, her naked back to him. He pressed the whole length of his body to hers, then immediately recoiled.
“Damn, you’re cold!” he complained. “And you’re all wet... soaking... what did you do, take a cold shower and come to bed without toweling off?”
“What did you say, dear?” Elena asked as she walked through the door from her sitting room, clad in a filmy nightgown.
“Christ!”
Bud sprang from the bed as if kissed by a scorpion.
“What’s the matter?”
He crouched naked in the dark, on the carpet next to the bed, gasping. “Who...” he said in choked fragments, “who’s that... in the bed?”
“Nobody!”
He stretched out a trembling arm and pointed his finger to the bed. “I felt her... she’s there...”
Elena snapped a switch, flooding the room with light. “Where?” The bed was empty.
“She was there!”
“Who?”
“How the hell should I know? I thought it was you. And then... you walked through the door.” His face was chalky.
She handed him his robe. “Come on, dear, get up off the floor. Put this on. You had a dream, that’s all.”
He got to his feet and wrapped himself in the robe. “A dream... no... couldn’t be...”
“Sure, don’t you see? You got into bed to wait for me, and you dozed off just for a few seconds and dreamt I was already in bed beside you.”
“Cold,” he said. “She was cold. Naked and wet.” He yanked the coverlet all the way off the bed. “If it was a dream,” he said, “how do you explain that?”
On one side, the sheet was wrinkled from top to bottom by the long, sodden stain of a drenched and recent occupant.
❖
Bud Kallen refused ever to sleep in that bed. He claimed it was “clammy,” even after the sheets had been changed, even after the mattress had been replaced. The young couple slept in one of the other bedrooms, he clinging to his wife all night, every night, like a child clinging to its mother.
It was not a conjugal embrace. The spearhead of his virility had been shattered that night, and did not regain its former edge. Elena began to feel it was her fault.
“No, honey, it’s not you,” he insisted one morning at breakfast. “It’s this damn house. Why don’t we sell it? Sloane said he could get us a good price for it.”
“Sell the house?” she wailed. “Just when we’ve got the pool ready again, and a TV, and a new butler and a cook, and—”
“What’s that got to do with it? The pool and the TV antenna are good selling points.”
“I don’t want to sell it. Don’t you understand?”
“But why not? The cars alone are worth a mint, even if we keep one or two of them. That classic Rolls? It’s a collector’s item. And those priceless paintings! Gainsboroughs and Constables and...”
“You’re not a Mainwaring, that’s why you don’t understand. But I am.” He laughed metallically. “You’re a Kallen, that’s what you are. And before that, you were a Castillo—a spic, for Christ’s sake! Don’t pull that lady of the manor stuff with me.”
Her dark eyes had brimmed with hurt and fury. Now she tore away from the table, knocking over her coffee cup, and ran weeping from the room.
He found her huddled on a stone bench in the garden, her tear-streaked face held in her hands. He talked to her gently and contritely, apologizing, asking to be forgiven. He could be persuasively charming when it suited him. By the time they had returned to the house, she had agreed to invite Nigel Sloane to dinner at Mainwaring Hall some time that week.
Two evenings later, the solicitor was enjoying an excellent meal prepared by their new cook: turtle soup, halibut mousse, beef Wellington, fresh asparagus vinaigrette, with appropriate wines from the well-stocked cellar of the late Sir Giles. Offered his choice of either sherry trifle or Stilton cheese and biscuits “for afters,” he chose both, causing Elena to ask him how he kept his trim figure. She and Bud, true to American custom, were on perpetual diets. “Do you exercise?”
“Never,” he proudly replied, and asked if Elena were enjoying her swimming pool.
“I swim every day,” she told him, “and sometimes at night!”
“Sir Giles would have been happy about that.”
Coffee and cognac followed in the drawing room, and as Sloane touched a flame to a Havana cigar, he said, “Am I to understand that you have had second thoughts about selling?”
Bud thought it politic to let Elena speak. She said, “That’s the word, Mr. Sloane. Thoughts. Just thoughts, for now. Could we talk about it?”
“Of course. Any particular reason?”
She shrugged. “No.”
Bud rubbed his arms and said, “Chilly in here. We ought to have a fire. Ill ring for the butler.”
“Dear, you’ll broil us alive. I feel fine.” Her smooth arms and back were bare in her dinner gown. “The cognac will warm you up.”
Sloane returned to the subject of selling. “Yes, we can certainly investigate one or two interesting avenues of possibility.” He smiled. “But you two seemed to have been settling in so nicely. Haven’t seen The Black Wench, by any chance?”
“No,” Bud said, too quickly.
Elena asked, “Have you ever known anyone who has seen her?”
“Ah,” replied Sloane, “one can never say that one has known somebody who’s seen a ghost. The most one can say is that one knows somebody who says he’s seen a ghost.”
“And did you ever know anybody who said he saw the Black Wench?”
“In point of fact, yes.”
“Who?” asked Bud.
“Coles.”
“What? That old guy who quit the day we got here?”
Sloane nodded. “A few years ago, Sir Giles told me—laughing as he did so—‘I believe old Coles has gone
dotty. Claims to have seen the Wench. In the billiard room, of all places. Called him by name, he says. Gave him quite a turn. I told him to stop knocking back the cooking sherry or I’d sack him.’”
Elena asked, “Did Coles ever see her again?”
“He said he did—the very day the two of you arrived. He told me that was why he wanted to leave. All for the best, to my way of thinking. High time he’d been put out to pasture. And I did smell drink on his breath that day.”
Bud leaned forward. “How did Coles describe her? Was she naked? And black?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t cross-examine him.” His cigar had gone out. As he rekindled it, he said, “I wouldn’t place too much importance on that word ‘black,’ you know.” A long plume of smoke unfurled from his mouth. “Or ‘naked,’ for the matter of that.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elena.
“Well, ‘black’ hasn’t always meant the same thing, when applied to the color of people. Samuel Pepys, in his diary, refers to the wife of a Mr. Hater as ‘a very pretty, modest, black woman,’ but she was certainly no Negress, simply a woman of dark complexion. Shakespeare, in Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, calls ‘black’ characters who are obviously what we would call white. And in four or five sonnets about his beloved Dark Lady, he calls her ‘black,’ although it’s now believed that she was of Italian descent. The same is true of the word ‘naked,’ which in older parlance sometimes meant clad only in underclothing. So,” he concluded with a twinkle, “Sir Edred’s ‘naked black woman’ may have been no more than a late-night lady-love of his steward’s, a scullery maid, more than like, thoroughly English if a touch swarthy, and caught in her skivvies on the way back to her own bed. Wandered into the master’s closet by mistake, no doubt.”
Elena smiled. “More cognac, Mr. Sloane?”
“Just a drop, perhaps. Thank you. Now then: a sale of this property could begin with an auction of the paintings, motor cars, and other valuables; or, on the other hand—”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “Talking to you has helped me think more clearly. I don’t want to sell, after all.”
When Nigel Sloane had left, Bud held his temper until he was certain all the servants had gone to bed. Then he exploded: “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“He was so sensible,” said Elena. “So level-headed. He let me see that so-called ghost for what it really is: nothing at all. A servant girl in her underwear. A senile butler who’d been hitting the bottle. I’m not going to give up all this for some fairy tale.”
“‘All this’? This white elephant? This drafty old museum?”
“I have a right to change my mind.”
“What mind? You dumb spic!”
“That’s the second time in less than a week you’ve used that word. I know you’re sexually frustrated, and I’m sorry for you, but—”
“Just shut up about that! Getting out of this damn house is all the cure I need!”
She turned and walked away.
“Where are you going?” he shouted.
“For a swim,” she said, and ran swiftly upstairs, where she stripped and squeezed into a brief bikini she would have hesitated to wear on a public beach, and tripped quickly downstairs again on bare toes, out to the moonlit pool. The night-silence was cloven by a splash when, sleek as a dolphin, she dove cleanly into the water.
She swam the length of the pool, her arms slicing the water in strong, graceful strokes; then she reversed, swimming back toward the other end again. The exercise and the bracing effect of the chill water calmed her, draining the anger and tension from her body and mind. Having touched pool’s end, she decided to swim just one more length—no sense overdoing it—so she turned around and started once again for the deep end.
But now her heart was jolted by something she saw in the moonlight, moving toward the pool. It was luminous in the lunar glow, with the opalescence of bare flesh, vaguely human in outline, and yet not human.
Not human, because—although it had two arms that hung at its sides, two legs that were bringing it nearer and nearer the pool—it had no face.
She tried to scream but could only whimper.
Where a face should have been, there was an oval void, eyeless, soulless...
It drew even closer.
Suddenly she laughed with relief and recognition. It was her husband, in his swim trunks and scuba mask. The oxygen tank was strapped to his back.
“Bud, you idiot!” she said affectionately. “Scuba diving in a swimming pool?”
Without a word, he dove under the surface of the water. She giggled at his eccentric foolery, grateful that he was no longer angry and had chosen this bit of clowning as a way of making up.
She felt her ankles seized by his powerful hands. She laughed again. They had often played like this back home, when they were young surfers on the beach at Santa Monica. She kicked coquettishly, not really wanting to free her legs from his grasp.
She was pulled down, under the surface.
He continued to hold onto her ankles with hands that gripped like steel clamps. She kicked frantically now, coquetry forgotten, roiling the water, struggling to escape. Fear rushed into her very bone marrow as water filled her nostrils, her mouth. She beat upon him with her fists, but he eluded her. She tried to rip off his oxygen tank, his breathing tube, but he was too quick and too strong for her.
Freezing thoughts stabbed her. Why was he doing it? Because she wouldn’t sell? Even if she had sold, would he have done it later anyway, to get all the money for himself? If only the servants hadn’t gone to bed. If only their quarters overlooked the pool. But there was no one, no help...
The awful pressure of water was in her lungs, and it hurt. It hurt to drown, she realized through her panic, there was pain; hideous nauseating fear and pain. But soon the pain ebbed, and a numbness set in, and a softness, and a darkness....
❖
When she emerged from the pool, she staggered away aimlessly, unsure of her own intentions. She felt giddy, she couldn’t see very well, everything looked distorted, she didn’t walk normally, she felt as if she were floating. Well, that wasn’t surprising, she told herself, after what she’d just been through. She was lucky to be alive.
Had she lost consciousness at some point? She couldn’t be sure. How long had she been held underwater? It had seemed like hours, but time, as Mr. Sloane had said, was only an illusion.
She found herself nearing the stables, and the horses whinnied and reared as she passed.
Horses? She peered at the animals. Yes, there were horses in the stables, all right. No cars. Although that puzzled her, she knew there had to be a logical explanation, and she made her way toward the house.
She still couldn’t see clearly. The house looked different, somehow. It wavered before her eyes, throbbing and pulsating. She wandered without purpose into the strangely mist-softened billiard room, startling old Coles, the butler...
“Coles?” she said aloud. But he shouldn’t have been there. He’d left Mainwaring Hall the day they’d arrived. In that moment, Elena knew she was dreaming. And that explained the horses in the stable. She hoped it explained Bud’s attempt to kill her, too. Please, God, let that be part of the nightmare.
The house twirled and gyrated—or was it the world, the universe?—and a wave of dizziness swept over her, a vast roaring filled her ears, she felt as if she were in the center of a tornado’s raging dark funnel. The feeling passed.
She entered the library, as it rippled and miraculously shrank to a small den of a chamber. A man sat at a desk, reading an immense book by the light of a guttering candle. He was gray-bearded, with a large nose and a mole, and he wore a cloth hood over his head. He looked up at her. His eyes bulged. His mouth fell open.
“Who art thou?” he croaked. “Dost seek to tempt me? Avaunt, thou black devil! In the Name of Jesu, I charge thee, take thy nakedness hence!” He fell back in his chair, trembling.
/> Elena backed out of the shrunken library, shattered by the vivid reality of this dream, and moved toward the undulating staircase. She felt she was not climbing it so much as riding it, as she might ride a smooth, silent escalator. Her bare feet could not even feel the stairs; but that was the way of dreams.
When she entered her husband’s sitting room, she saw his wet swim trunks and scuba gear in a heap on the floor.
(And lightning flashes of knowledge seared her.)
His back turned to her, Bud was now dressed in crisp pajamas and robe, fluffing his hair with her blow dryer.
(She came to know that time is not a river flowing in one direction, but a whirlpool spinning round and round; that a spirit released from the prison of flesh can spiral unfettered into Past, recent Past, distant Past, years, centuries before its own death, its own birth.)
After stuffing the damp scuba gear into a duffel bag and throwing the bag into a cupboard, Bud picked up the phone and dialed. “Is this the police?...”
(She knew why Coles had fainted at the door upon seeing her the day they arrived: he had recognized her from the earlier sighting in the billiard room some years before.)
“This is Mr. Kallen at Maine Wearing Hall. Something terrible has happened out here...”
(She knew how naked her bikini-clad body must have looked to Sir Edred in his seventeenth-century study; how black her olive skin and dark hair were by his standards.)
“An accident in the swimming pool... my wife... I’m afraid she’s...”
(And finally she knew that none of this was a dream; that she had been murdered; that the legendary ghost of Mainwaring Hall was no scullery maid or African slave girl; that she herself, Elena Kallen, was, always had been, forever would be, the Black Wench.)
A split second before he felt her, Bud smelled the pungent chlorine of the pool—Sir Edred’s “stench of Hell”—and then she reached out and laid a hand of ice upon his shoulder.
With a cry, he spun around and saw his wife, in her bikini, glistening with the water that had killed her. Water trickled from her ears, her nostrils, her gaping mouth, ran in a rivulet between her breasts, formed a glittering gem in her navel, snaked down her tapered legs into a puddle at her feet. Howling, Bud Kallen leaped backward, pressed his spine to the wall, and slid slowly down the flocked wallpaper as if he were a lump of custard flung there by a spoiled child, until he was huddled on the floor, eyes distended, moaning, vomiting, fouling his clothes, a mass of quivering, whining terror.
Lovers and Other Monsters Page 28