I prepared my question guardedly, choosing the words. “What are these powers being offered to me?” I lowered my voice. I did not want to ask the next question. “And who offers them?”
He put his hands in his pockets, in a way that meant: At least we are talking business. It was another gesture I recognized from former times. “Someone is coming to see you.”
“I don’t want to see anyone.”
“It doesn’t matter.” His voice was light, manly, but his words were so at odds with his tone that I was not certain that I had heard them correctly.
I turned away, feeling a stubborn twist inside me.
He continued, “Accommodate Them—you have no choice.”
“The soul,” I said, my voice ragged. “So we have souls, after all.”
“Who mentioned the soul? You’re confused, Stratton. The soul has nothing to do with this.” He thought for a moment. “But maybe that’s the best way for you to understand this. You remember the story. The Faust myth. A man interested in magic—in the darker kind of magic—makes a pact with Satan. He does it for power, and for knowledge.”
“I’m familiar with the tale,” I responded, my voice hoarse.
“He has years of power, and even makes love to Helen of Troy.” He smiled, as though seeing it before his eyes, the copulation between Faust and the immortal. “In Marlow’s Dr. Faustus, when Faustus knows that he is lost, he stands looking upward on the last night of his life and he utters an apostrophe, to the sky, to the rolling of the planet that gave him life. It’s a line fashioned from Ovid. ‘O lente, lente, currite noctis equi.’” He paused, as though uttering Latin took his breath away. “‘Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.’ But the night is never slow enough. It always ends. Once you have enjoyed congress with these powers, you will not escape.”
“Faustus could have escaped.”
He tilted his head. We had loved our philosophical jousts. “How?”
The argument was one I did not believe, but we were so far into the cellar of theology that my own opinions barely mattered. “By asking God’s forgiveness.” Perhaps I had expected the air around me to throb when I spoke of God, but there was no sound, no movement.
“It was too late.”
The argument belonged in an all-night drinking session, matching whiskeys with one of my ex-Jesuit tutors. I felt my innards contract, as at the sight of my own name on a death warrant. “I don’t like this.”
“They come for you tonight. Don’t make the mistake of hubris, on the one hand, believing you can outwit Them, or cowardice on the other, attempting to flee. You have lost all your freedoms. It’s time to accept your prize.”
“I have entered into no contract.”
“You have, just as Rick has so many times in dealing with loan sharks, just as I did in agreeing to a price for a work of art at an auction by waggling my fingers.”
“I’ve done nothing.”
He lifted his hand. “You’re about to say that you’re innocent.” It was my father’s tone exactly, the way he didn’t look at my eyes when he spoke but looked to one side, as though playing to an invisible audience.
This is all incredible—and yet, why not play along for awhile? Choose your questions carefully. “Why,” I asked, “do they want me?”
“Who can say?”
He looked younger than I would have expected. My next words were a shock to me. They were heavy, ugly. “You’re dead.” I did not mean this to sound as wooden as it did. When my father laughed, I recognized beyond doubt that whether this was an illusion or not, this phantom captured exactly my father’s gentle imperiousness, his humor, his impatience.
I saw, too, how much I had changed in the last eight years. Eight years ago I had been twenty-seven, and an immature man, in some ways, eager to win my father’s approval, eager to establish my name in a profession. Now I was not so hungry for praise, from my father, or from anyone else.
I did not move. I did not believe it. It looked and sounded right, but it was not.
“You have to get dressed.”
“Does it matter what I’m wearing?”
“You are about to engage in an important transaction. Your allies understand the importance of costume. You don’t,” he said, quietly exasperated, as so often, “have that much time, Stratton.”
“I would have thought that the powers we enjoined were timeless.”
He made a cheerful gesture, waving off my remark. “We aren’t.”
“Not even the dead?”
“One of us is still alive.”
It was his sort of argument. I saw how equal we were in intelligence, in temperament. I suspended judgment. This was my father, and yet it could not be. I loved this man, this fleshly, apparently real human being, and yet I was not certain what this creature might really be. In radical, stoic confusion I ascended the steps to change my clothes, and reserved all critical judgment. I was experiencing something no man ever really experienced. And yet here I was. I could not understand it; I stopped trying.
I turned back, and there was his figure in the hallway, looking upward. He even cast a shadow, a long, distorted shape flowing behind him across the koa-wood floor.
“Wear a business suit,” he prompted. “Nothing too formal.”
“We’re going to be doing business, are we?” I asked, intending irony.
“You are,” he said.
“Will you,” I asked, fighting to keep the tremor from my voice, “stay with me?”
“Not for much longer.” He saw my pain. “I can’t.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“I promise you that I’ll wait.”
I was going to lose him, all over again. I could not take another step. I wanted to throw myself back down the stairway and cling to him. The fact of his physical presence, the fact of his fatherhood, struck me as thoroughly as the force of gravity, or the heat of a fire.
“I will wait right here. I promise. Please hurry, Stratton.” It was the way he had urged me as a boy, as I dallied, toying with my socks, fighting with my brother over a favorite toy. The taste of my own childhood was in my mouth. This was not nostalgia. It was all back again, all here. My father had returned, and joy was beginning to flower in my heart. I saw that anything good was possible.
I hurried into the sort of suit that I would wear to a board meeting to stand before myopic capitalists with a pointer and blueprints. I was, without thinking, dressing as a young man would, to please his father.
As I dressed, hiking a lightly starched shirt over my shoulders, I stepped back, aware that I had nearly stepped on the plume. I had not left it there, on the carpet, and yet I did not doubt that the plume could shift and twitch, and ride currents of air like a living thing. I knelt, quickly, and when I settled the jacket over my back, and shot my cuffs, I slipped the plume into my breast pocket.
When I was dressed, still adjusting my tie, I was down the stairs quickly and into my father’s presence full of questions. Questions about what to do with Mother, questions about Rick’s character, questions about memories I knew he would share with me.
He was beaming, delighted, staying where I had left him. He made that slightly pouty, upside-down smile that meant: I’m giving you my most critical appraisal and you look great. I wanted to dance, to run around him in a circle like a pup.
There was a knock at the door.
Our eyes met.
“You will find that in this new life you have assumed,” said my father, “time is always bleeding away.”
“What will happen if we do nothing?” I said.
“Stratton,” he said gently, “you have already joined with Them, long ago.”
I must have looked incredulous.
“It’s true—with your love for power, with your ambition, your fascination with your own future.”
The knocking had stopped. But now it continued, each blow echoed by a shudder of my body. Each blow slammed the solid oak of the door, wrenching it in its frame.
We do not los
e our minds as we might lose a credit card, or a car, or even an empire. We lose it, and gain something else.
This knocking would awaken every sleeper in the neighborhood. This thought was a link with a knowledge I had suppressed: All of this could not be happening. It was impossible. I was mad, inescapably ill.
And yet, I told myself, the pounding at the door shaking the very air in my lungs—did it matter? Did it matter—if my madness made real things happen? Or if every good and bad thing was a coincidence—did that mean that I had to flinch from the pleasure, the joy?
I was like a man who had swallowed an elixir, a liquor that destroys the perception and loses the memory. The toxin was a part of me. I could not turn back.
“Hurry,” said my father. “Open the door.”
23
The knock resounded, an echoing imperative. Each blow made me wince. It seemed unending, the knock persisting, so heavy the floorboards quaked.
This was not an ordinary reverberation in the air. This was another event that was both real and not real, within time and beyond it.
When I opened the door I would be taking a further step in agreeing to something I did not understand. I looked back at my father and his expression was strained, his smile forced. A good man, he had often said, stands up to what he fears. I saw now, though, that much of my father’s sure-handedness, and much of his insouciance, had been an act. My love for a dangerous sport, risking riptides, may have been the desire to prove myself equal to a man who was by no means equal to himself.
He must have read my thoughts, or sensed them like high-amp voltage through his own considerations. “You’ve always been slow to make up your mind,” he said.
I tried lying to myself. It was only a knock, and certainly, I reasoned, it may be someone innocent, a neighbor in need of help. The knock came again, and my instincts made me want to cringe, hide. “I won’t. If I don’t answer it, nothing bad can happen.” I felt reduced to childishness, and reduced to a boy’s diction, and a boy’s stubbornness.
He did not speak for a moment. “There’s no sense putting it off forever.”
I nearly asked him what he himself had done, what he had bartered and what he had gained, in dealing with such an army. “I won’t talk to them.”
He could not keep the slightly patronizing tone from his voice. “You’re being foolish.”
I began to argue, but he put his fingers to his lips. I turned back to the door, certain that my father’s love for me was strong enough to keep me from harm. The pounding continued, the barrier shivering with each blow.
“I will never open the door,” I said, in a whisper.
There was a breath behind me, at my nape, and I turned to see my father sweating, his hand taking my shoulder in a grip that was not strong so much as urgent, a bony pinch, the clench of a desperate man.
I saw that if I did not release the latch and let the barrier swing wide, he would suffer. He was suffering now, with a look in his eye like the pain I had seen in Blake’s. He could not say it. He could not beg. He was proud. If much of his courage during life had been an act, it had been a good one, a noble act, even, a reliance on manners and good humor.
“We have to accommodate our visitors,” he said, “since they are so insistent, and since we have no real choice.”
“A contract coerced,” I said, quoting one of my old teachers, “is no contract.”
“Remember this,” he said. “I love you.”
The words took all the light, all the dark, all sensation from my body.
I turned. I strode across the hardwood floor to the door, and the walk stretched, each step falling shorter than the one before it. I would never reach the door. I would never stop my father’s pain and cut short this pounding, each blow staggering the house, now, shuddering the walls. Nails squealed in the joists and the foundations groaned.
In the midst of my eagerness to spare my father, in the midst of my hatred for the fist hammering the door, I had begun to change. The doubt was beginning to return. I was aware that it was all for my benefit, this theater. I felt myself imprisoned in an opera, a stage so exaggerated none of it could be believed for a moment. Only my love for my father was real, and it was with that love that I approached the door.
The door handle was cold, beads of condensation greasing it, water drooling to the floor as my grip closed around the brass. The metal grew even colder. My thumb found the latch tongue, and depressed it. Too cold, I thought, feeling my flesh stick to the handle, the handle growing colder with each heartbeat, until my skin was joined to the metal. The cold sang into the bones of my arms, into the muscles of my shoulder.
I wrestled with the door and began to drag it open, and yet the door had taken on the weight of something massive, swiveling on corroded hinges. Except that I knew the door was not more massive, and I knew the brass of the handle was not cold. It was my own weakness that made them so, and I was frail because I was afraid.
The door was open, and I stepped back.
I turned, beckoning to my father, and he was gone.
The knowledge made me stumble, and I caught myself against the wall. I called out, and yet my cry was a whisper. I called again, knowing the futility of it.
There was no need to search for my father, no need to cry after him. He had vanished into a void inside me, in my own psyche, the same wound that had produced him in the first place.
Doubt now replaced the joy, diluting even the fear. I had been deceived. This had not been my father. My tears, my love, had been wasted on a hallucination. All of this was a sham. But would a specter, a demon garbed in my father’s appearance, have expressed his love so fervently?
The silence was perfect.
The door was open, and there was nothing there. The staging had gone awry, and a character had missed his cue. I made a sound, half yelp, half growl. You see, I wanted to declaim to an audience, to a colisseum of assembled souls. You see—none of this is real. This is pageantry, this is the dazzle and the thunder of illusion.
As I stood before the black rectangle of the open doorway I felt something like disappointment. Because I had anticipated the sight of a divine being, a god, if only an evil, fallen god. And here was silence. I laughed. I mocked myself, shaking my head.
And I had been convinced, I told myself ruefully, that they would be able to hurt me, to torture that trick of light and reason that I had believed was my father. The legions I faced were frightening but swordless, empowering only the imagination. This was a little more than a new caliber of nightmare. I had survived such dreams.
The house was silent. The floor was solid under my steps as I reached the door, and swung it silently shut.
But it would not shut entirely.
Someone was out there.
Coming in.
24
She had changed. She was there before me, a figure of white, her hair and her gown floating in a wind that was silent, that stirred nothing else.
But she was different, taller, perhaps, or younger. She touched me as she stepped across the threshold. Her fingers were icy as they brushed my lips.
The door closed silently, as though moving with its own will. For a moment I was relieved to see her, grateful, nearly, that it was only her, this charming creature who both disturbed and delighted.
Then I understood. This was not just another visit. This was different. I sensed the hush of a crowd around us, through the walls, like the silent and yet audible weight in an opera house, a thousand lives weighing on the air.
But these were not lives. We were being watched by others, other creatures, other beings, invisible beyond the walls.
Trapped. Of course, I could run. There was the door. But why should I flee my own house?
Her eyes met mine. “It’s time,” she said.
It was hard to breathe. She turned at the entrance to the studio. She was, indeed, taller than I had recalled, and at once more slender and youthful and beyond age.
Tell her to get out. Flam
es snapped and spat in the fireplace. The color of the fire deepened, and the fire leaped higher, blue, and scarlet.
Despite the silence I felt rising within me, and the growing need I felt to take flight, I kept my voice firm. “I think it’s foolish,” I said, “to put me through this theater.”
She did not respond.
I could only whisper. “It was brutal. That—that thing—was not my father.”
The plastic canopies had been stripped from my furniture, and the chairs themselves were huddled together, like living things, mastiffs, drawn in closer together for protection. The furniture was unfamiliar to me, transformed.
The touch of this furniture, this brass-tacked leather, was enough to make me queasy. The leather had glazed itself with something like hair, the fine, sharp coat of a horse. The room around me was peeled of all familiarity. I was aware in a vague way of the unplastered walls, the gleam of nailheads, but what I saw were the glints and shiver of an armored host. Eyes, I thought, or spear points. I did not let myself look after a glance or two.
It was a fever, I told myself, a sick dream.
She gestured, inviting me to sit. The chair absorbed my weight, welcomed it, seemed to pleasure in it with a quiet groan. The leather breathed under me, around me. Some being held me lightly, taking its pleasure.
I stared into the fire. Don’t look to the left, I told myself, or to the right. I should have been furious. An assault had been made against my emotions. And yet, there was something about her, that sense that I knew her from long ago, that stilled me from being completely angry. I was mystified, but I could feel no hatred toward her.
She spoke. “You’re ready.”
I took a deep breath. I experimented with an incredulous laugh, something to buy time. Use your wits, I reminded myself. Stay steady. She had chosen a conversational tone, like a woman who had stopped by for a cup or two of Earl Grey. I kept my tone equally light. “Perhaps I should be grateful.”
She did not answer. I knew how a grandmaster must feel, considering openings in an international tournament, the eyes of a crowd upon his hand.
“But I’m not.” I turned to gaze at her. “What are you?”
The Horses of the Night Page 13