The Horses of the Night

by Michael Cadnum

  “It’s hardly news that my mother was sick,” I said, shifting in my chair.

  “She was more than sick,” said Dr. Ahn.

  I prepared my next question with care. “What sort of figures did she see?”

  “Beings that she felt were very powerful. Supernatural presences.”

  I managed a wry smile. “This kind of hallucination must be fairly common, after all.”

  “Not really.”

  “What kind of advice did these visitations give her?”

  She took a moment before answering. “It’s interesting that you assume that they gave her advice.”

  “What else would divine messengers give?” I said it with a smile, but she did not smile in return.

  “She believed that your father was involved with other women. Women that were trying to woo him away from your mother. She was so afraid of losing your father. She was afraid of the scandal, the public shame at losing him.”

  “She is proud,” I said, perhaps to forestall what I was hearing. “She taught us that to be respected is all we have. Take that away, and what are we? We have only our pride. Our good name.”

  “These spirits killed your father,” said Dr. Ahn.

  “They killed my father,” I echoed, feeling dull-witted.

  “So she believed,” said Dr. Ahn. “These entities, these hallucinations, your mother believed, poisoned your father. Of course, your mother’s own hand did the deed. She was not aware of committing any act at all.”

  I could not take a breath. “That’s absurd!” I said, when it was possible for me to speak.

  “Don’t you remember how you begged us not to have an autopsy?” said Rick. “Don’t you remember how you donated all that money to the blood bank in exchange for the medical examiner’s quick handling of Dad’s case? It would upset Mom too much, you said.”

  “I was right. She hated the thought of an autopsy. They’re so ugly, maiming the poor corpse—”

  “It’s because you guessed,” said Rick. “You guessed that she killed him.”

  I could barely whisper. “Ridiculous!”

  “You knew, Stratton,” said Dr. Ahn. “Or, you tried with every ounce of your spirit to forget.”

  “How did I know?”

  “You heard Mother talking to her spirits,” said Rick, his voice broken.

  “No, I never did hear any such thing.” But my words faded.

  I tried to convince myself. Never.

  I had denied the truth. But it came back to me now. Or did it? I was still able to escape what was closing in on me, the heat of my own memory.

  58

  The process had begun in Paris, with Valfort and the candle flame.

  My brother’s eyes acted on me more powerfully than any hypnotic suggestion.

  No, I tried to reassure myself. Surely not. You don’t really remember.

  I can never sleep as others can. I lie awake in the long nap, the baby brother dozing, the mother lifting her voice. The shrubbery is brambled. The trees pruned, scars the shape of closed eyes where there were branches.

  It was easy to recall in that instant. She stood among the fleshy, topsy-turvy past-peak roses, and spoke to what I thought must be my father, must be—was it possible—a relative we had not yet met. Such a loving, lovely voice.

  And then I saw, in my mind, a flash of what I had wanted to avoid.

  Ahn’s eyes were like Valfort’s eyes. Something of my session with him rose up within me.

  “I don’t,” I said brokenly, “want to remember.”

  My mother spoke to beings which were not there. She spoke to spirits. And I had always known this, even as a child. It had been our secret, our family’s secret.

  I could remember her now, how she would speak, nearly singing, standing in the back garden. Or she would be in her bedroom, holding discourse with what we all knew—and could not mention—was nothing. Nothing at all.

  My father had never acknowledged it, but it was evident that this aberration on the part of my mother was acutely embarrassing to him. Was it possible? Had I actually forced myself to deny this memory of my mother’s sweet voice asking, “Why have you come to see me again?” A fresh tone in her voice, a spritely tone, unlike the tone she used with anyone else. How I must have envied her spirits!

  Painful. Too painful, the sound of her voice.

  Everyone must have known. Friends, casual acquaintances. It must have been plain to so many.

  Dr. Ahn’s voice was gentle. “And now your brother wonders if the same sort of delusions are troubling you.”

  “She spoke to angels,” I breathed. “Like the angels in the Bible. The ones that announce that a barren woman will have a child.”

  “Did she tell you they were angels?” asked Dr. Ahn.

  I wondered. “I assumed they were,” I said.

  “It was a little lie you told to yourself,” said Rick. “To make the truth sweeter.”

  How hard and ugly Rick’s voice sounded.

  “This is happening to you, Strater,” said my brother.

  “I have ghosts killing people for me, you mean?” I was shivering, the sensation in my body that of deep cold, a feverish, sick chill.

  “That’s what I mean,” he said.

  I wanted to avoid what I was about to say, but perhaps my brother’s unloving voice made me respond with this recollection, perhaps as a way of hurting him, perhaps to show that my memory was, for the moment, entirely free. “I saw her in the garden. Behind the rhododendrons. I saw her there.”

  Words stuck.

  “She was always disturbed,” said Rick, plainly dismissing what I was beginning to say.

  “She was talking to a man, I thought at the time. She was saying how much she loved him. I thought it was a man I must know. I was happy. Happy to hear her say such good things, because she and Father didn’t really say things like that to each other, not when we could hear them. And maybe never—they were cold toward each other. And so I peeked.”

  I was icy. “I should not have looked. That was bad. That was very bad.” I closed my eyes then. Don’t, I told myself, say any more.

  “She was naked,” I breathed, “and she was making love. With no one.”

  “She was sick,” he said. There was something ugly in his voice.

  I gazed upon my brother. “Why are you so harsh, Rick? Maybe you don’t like these memories any more than I do.”

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  I turned to Dr. Ahn. “Why didn’t you tell the police when you uncovered all of this?” I asked.

  “At the time of your father’s death, and for a matter of two or three years afterward, I didn’t know. Only in the years that followed, when we discussed her life, and searched the memories that she saved from the past, and the ones that she invented, did we begin to uncover the truth. By then, she was in the hospital your family built, ordered there by the court. I felt that it would be senseless agony to share this truth with you.”

  “This sort of sickness,” Rick began. “This tendency. It can be inherited, right?”

  “You think I hold congress with spirits? Is that what you think, Rick? None of this has anything to do with me. Come right on out and say it. Go ahead.”

  I stood and paced.

  We are real. Don’t let this woman deceive you.

  I put my hands to my head.

  “I don’t believe you,” Rick said. “I believe you are just like Mother.”

  “And if I am? What will you do to help me?”

  “I should leave now,” said Rick. “This is the sort of thing that should be done in private, doctor to patient.”

  “Stay here,” said Dr. Ahn.

  “Stratton is your patient,” Rick protested.

  I realized why this room had seemed so right for this conversation with Dr. Ahn. My mother’s presence, her taste, the weight of her personality, was everywhere suddenly. The vase of irises—it was as though my mother had put them there herself.

  “You’re afraid to
talk to me, aren’t you, Stratton?” said Dr. Ahn.

  “No,” I said, truthfully. “I’m not afraid.”

  “What are you hiding?” she asked.

  Quite a bit, I nearly said. “Do you have anything else to tell me?” I said.

  “What do you have to tell me?”

  “Someone tried to kill Nona. While she was here in the hospital. It was me, wasn’t it? I tried to take her life.”

  Dr. Ahn looked, if anything, satisfied that I had mentioned Nona. “Valfort says that someone tried to suffocate her. She spoke about it, a gush of words Dr. Valfort couldn’t quite catch. She says someone put a pillow over her head. When she was first here after the beating, when there were nurses coming and going, and she was in a twilight state.”

  “How could it have been me? I was in a room by myself.”

  “Immobilized?”

  “Hardly. I could walk. I was in pretty good condition when you consider—”

  Why would I try to kill Nona?

  “You can get help, Stratton,” said my brother.

  Help. I can get help. The thought made me sit back and reconsider all that I had heard. I was shuddering, quaking inwardly, but I took a long moment to ask myself how.

  How could spirits kill someone? Unless the spirits themselves were corporeal. Could spirits do harm in the world, pick things up—actual, material things of weight and texture?

  Spirits need help. Spirits need a human agency. These hands. These two hands.

  “Rick,” I said at last. “Tell me what you knew about Mother.”

  59

  “Nothing,” he said. “I knew nothing.”

  He took a step back, and I followed him. A chair fell over behind us. “You didn’t help her, knowing how much she hated to get her hands dirty?”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say, Stratton.”

  Rick was agitated, but he was able to hold it in. I was so close to him that I could sense the workings of his emotions, the interplay of uncertainty and confidence.

  “That’s why I forgot, isn’t it?” I said. “Because the truth was too much to bear. You helped her.”

  My brother slapped me.

  I was shocked at what I had said. I was shocked at his blow. My jaw did not work, and I gasped, a half-laugh, a sound of wonderment.

  I rubbed the numbness on my cheek. “I wonder what that means?” I said after a long silence. “Yes. Or no.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that, Stratton,” he said, his eyes hard. “You can’t get me confused with your sickness. I’ve helped you in ways you can’t even guess. I’ve been a good brother to you. Stratton the man of dignity. Stratton the gentleman. I crash my car, lose my money, and people say: just like his father.”

  “Dad wasn’t like that.”

  “Like me, you mean. Sure he was. You remember Dad the way you want to, practically inventing him. All he wanted was constant adoration. He played around with other women. I knew it. Everyone knew it. You’re good, Stratton. Nobody in the whole family was like you. You always did belong to some other time. Not this place. Not now. You were the one who cared.”

  “Don’t say bad things about yourself, Rick. You’re a good brother.” I put my arms around him. “And you hit pretty hard, too.”

  We laughed, with tears in our eyes.

  Then, emboldened by emotional fatigue, or with my desire to be truthful, I said, “Rick is right. I hear voices. I see people who aren’t there. People made of light.”

  Dr. Ahn looked at me like someone hearing a recitation, a poem she had heard many times before.

  Go on, I told myself. You’ve started. Don’t stop. “I am sicker than Mother ever was,” I said.

  The walls seemed to step back. Dr. Ahn closed her eyes, and then slowly opened them. She was not a therapist in this conversation. She was a bearer of a part of the truth, a Cassandra who was believed. And Rick was not happy, it seemed, at my sudden confession. His lips worked but he didn’t say anything.

  “It’s true. I want to tell you everything. Shall I begin? Shall I tell you about a feather I found? A feather that could make my wishes come true?”

  Rick did not know what expression to wear on his face. “Things like that don’t happen.”

  “Maybe it’s just a talent that Mother gave me, along with her feeling that the world should be a place where people can look out a window and see something beautiful. Something that makes them want to go on living.”

  “You’re serious,” he said, speaking almost entirely to himself, in a tone of discovery. He straightened his shoulders. “Whatever you want to tell me,” said Rick solemnly. “I’ll listen.”

  I felt like a comic, trailed by the spotlight, about to announce in his brisk, delightful way, the medically verified terminal illness of each member of the audience.

  I told them all—the entire story, from the cold riptide to that moment we all shared, the three of us, in the chilly air-conditioned air of the hospital.

  No Divine voice interrupted me. The Assembly of the Others was silent—empty.

  It is not enough, at last, to confess, to share the secrets. These days that have accumulated are gone. The weight the mind feels is all the places and people who are not present. The landscape knows without knowing a thing: It is inhuman and lovely, trees and lagoons. The gardener spades, fertilizes, reseeds. We tell the story of what has happened. We think the story is true. The sky is a hole big enough for the world.

  Neither of them spoke. And it might have taken a long while, or it might have been a fairly short recitation of events, of hallucinations.

  I knew that as I spoke I was altering my future, because never again would I be allowed to think of myself as a normal human being. I was destined to stay in the hospital I had designed, with the person from whom I had inherited my illness.

  At last I had told everything.

  Dr. Ahn and Rick were diminished, stunned figures. I concluded, “All I want to know is: Did I really kill DeVere? Did I kill Blake?”

  Rick was pale.

  The answer was obvious. “I must have,” I said.

  I felt desolate, stripped of my memory of even recent events. But it was good to know the truth.

  “What should I do?” I said at last. I turned to face Dr. Ahn. “Tell me what to do.”

  She did not want to speak. She was sorry, I felt, to have come here today. “I can’t tell you. There is so much I can’t understand—about your family, about the mind. I had such hopes as a young woman. I believed in myself.”

  I said, “If I stay here in this hospital I’ll be close to Nona—”

  “But you won’t get well,” said Rick, completing my thought. “Besides, you aren’t certain that you didn’t try to hurt her. It might be better to stay away from her.”

  My breath was gone. Rick had used a matter-of-fact tone, but his words punished me. It was impossible to think for a few moments. Then I nodded weakly. It might be better to stay away.

  Rick found himself able to smile. “Have some faith. People recover from things like this.”

  Rick had always believed. He had always been sure. I envied him at that moment more than at any other time in my life.

  “I have no special knowledge anymore. Ignorance is almost like a blessing.” Dr. Ahn was thoughtful. “I want you to go to Los Cerritos tonight. I know the staff there, and we can begin to help you.”

  “I’ll drive him,” said Rick.

  Dr. Ahn did not respond. When she spoke again it was not to mention Rick driving me, and it was not to discuss any of what I had described. She said, “Someone killed Ty DeVere and Blake Howard.”

  “Perhaps they were suicides after all,” said Rick.

  “And it’s possible,” I said, before Dr. Ahn could make any further remark, “that Nona is mistaken. Maybe no one tried to take her life here in the hospital. Maybe it was a dream.”

  “Why not?” said Rick, as though someone had suggested a party.

  “That would be the best hope,” s
aid Dr. Ahn. “That it was all a waking dream, every last blow, every drop of blood.”

  “You don’t believe that?” I asked.

  She shook her head sadly. “Valfort is sure you have done harm. I’m not.”

  “Then the men killed themselves—like Peterson,” said Rick lightly.

  She could not answer for awhile. “Maybe I have always wondered if there are such things as angels,” she said.

  “It would be a wonderful thing if there were,” said Rick, sounding bright, tired of heavy talk, eager for some sort of action.

  “Wonderful,” agreed Dr. Ahn. “But frightening.”

  On my way to see Nona, to say good-bye, I stopped by the children’s hospice. I felt athletic in my sweatpants and sweatshirt, and noted to myself the irony that I was coming not from the outdoors but from confinement.

  I was eager to see Stuart. I thought that maybe I would have time to make him another one of my paper horses.

  But his bed was empty, perfectly made up and abandoned. Every sign of Stuart’s presence, his comic books, his posters, was gone. Stuart was no longer here.

  I told myself: When I open my eyes I will look and I will see him.

  He was not there.

  Nurses were watching. Keep an eye on Stratton Fields, they must have been cautioned. But because my family had built so much of the hospital, they would keep their distance, hover, follow me wherever I went, surrounding me with a careful silence.

  Not here.

  Stuart is gone.

  Rick and Barry followed me, giving me a few moments with Nona. I leaned over her bed. What could I tell her?

  Don’t leave her, I told myself. Stay here with her, where you belong.

  I kissed her lightly so she might not stir from her sleep.

  She opened her eyes. For a moment she looked fearful. Then relief flushed her features. “I’m so glad it’s you,” she said.

  There was no way I could bring myself to tell her that we had lost Stuart. We would grieve together someday, when she was strong.

  Her eyes were beautiful. I wanted to stay just as I was, gazing at her. “Who else would it be?”

  Her voice was weak but distinct. “I remember my dream,” she said at last.