“I’ll send for tea,” I said.
Mr. Thorne brought the tea in my best Wedgwood china. Nina and I sat in the slowly moving squares of sunlight and spoke softly of nothing important; mutually ignorant comments on the economy, references to books that the other had not gotten around to reading, and sympathetic murmurs about the low class of persons one meets while flying these days. Someone peering in from the garden might have thought he was seeing an aging but attractive niece visiting her favorite aunt. (I draw the line at suggesting that anyone would mistake us for mother and daughter.) People usually consider me a well-dressed if not stylish person. Heaven knows I have paid enough to have the wool skirts and silk blouses mailed from Scotland and France. But next to Nina I’ve always felt dowdy.
This day she wore an elegant, light-blue dress that must have cost several thousand dollars. The color made her complexion seem even more perfect than usual and brought out the blue of her eyes. Her hair had gone as gray as mine, but somehow she managed to get away with wearing it long and tied back with a single barrette. It looked youthful and chic on Nina and made me feel that my short, artificial curls were glowing with a blue rinse.
Few would suspect that I was four years younger than Nina. Time had been kind to her. And she had Fed more often.
She set down her cup and saucer and moved aimlessly around the room again. It was not like Nina to show such signs of nervousness. She stopped in front of the glass display case. Her gaze passed over the Hummels and the pewter pieces, and then stopped in surprise.
“Good heavens, Melanie. A pistol! What an odd place to put an old pistol.”
“It’s an heirloom,” I said. “A Colt Peacemaker from right after the War Between the States. Quite expensive. And you’re right, it is a silly place to keep it. But it’s the only case I have in the house with a lock on it, and Mrs. Hodges often brings her grandchildren when she visits—”
“You mean it’s loaded?”
“No, of course not,” I lied. “But children should not play with such things …” I trailed off lamely. Nina nodded but did not bother to conceal the condescension in her smile. She went to look out the south window into the garden.
Damn her. It said volumes about Nina that she did not recognize that pistol.
On the day he was killed, Charles Edgar Larchmont had been my beau for precisely five months and two days. There had been no formal announcement, but we were to be married. Those five months had been a microcosm of the era itself—naive, flirtatious, formal to the point of preciosity, and romantic. Most of all, romantic. Romantic in the worst sense of the word: dedicated to saccharine or insipid ideals that only an adolescent—or an adolescent society—would strive to maintain. We were children playing with loaded weapons.
Nina, she was Nina Hawkins then, had her own beau—a tall, awkward, but well-meaning Englishman named Roger Harrison. Mr. Harrison had met Nina in London a year earlier, during the first stages of the Hawkinses’ Grand Tour. Declaring himself smitten—another absurdity of those times—the tall Englishman had followed her from one European capital to another until, after being firmly reprimanded by Nina’s father (an unimaginative little milliner who was constantly on the defensive about his doubtful social status), Harrison returned to London to “settle his affairs.” Some months later he showed up in New York just as Nina was being packed off to her aunt’s home in Charleston in order to terminate yet another flirtation. Still undaunted, the clumsy Englishman followed her south, ever mindful of the protocols and restrictions of the day.
We were a gay group. The day after I met Nina at Cousin Celia’s June ball, the four of us were taking a hired boat up the Cooper River for a picnic on Daniel Island. Roger Harrison, serious and solemn on every topic, was a perfect foil for Charles’s irreverent sense of humor. Nor did Roger seem to mind the good-natured jesting, since he was soon joining in the laughter with his peculiar haw-haw-haw.
Nina loved it all. Both gentlemen showered attention on her, and although Charles never failed to show the primacy of his affection for me, it was understood by all that Nina Hawkins was one of those young women who invariably becomes the center of male gallantry and attention in any gathering. Nor were the social strata of Charleston blind to the combined charm of our foursome. For two months of that now-distant summer, no party was complete, no excursion adequately planned, and no occasion considered a success unless we four were invited and had chosen to attend. Our happy dominance of the youthful social scene was so pronounced that Cousins Celia and Loraine wheedled their parents into leaving two weeks early for their annual August sojourn in Maine.
I am not sure when Nina and I came up with the idea of the duel. Perhaps it was during one of the long, hot nights when the other “slept over”—creeping into the other’s bed, whispering and giggling, stifling our laughter when the rustling of starched uniforms betrayed the presence of our colored maids moving through the darkened halls. In any case, the idea was the natural outgrowth of the romantic pretensions of the time. The picture of Charles and Roger actually dueling over some abstract point of honor relating to us thrilled both of us in a physical way that I recognize now as a simple form of sexual titillation.
It would have been harmless except for the Ability. We had been so successful in our manipulation of male behavior—a manipulation that was both expected and encouraged in those days—that neither of us had yet suspected that there was anything beyond the ordinary in the way we could translate our whims into other people’s actions. The field of parapsychology did not exist then; or rather, it existed only in the rappings and knockings of parlor-game seances. At any rate, we amused ourselves for several weeks with whispered fantasies, and then one of us—or perhaps both of us—used the Ability to translate the fantasy into reality.
In a sense, it was our first Feeding.
I do not remember the purported cause of the quarrel, perhaps some deliberate misinterpretation of one of Charles’s jokes. I cannot recall who Charles and Roger arranged to have serve as seconds on that illegal outing. I do remember the hurt and confused expression on Roger Harrison’s face during those few days. It was a caricature of ponderous dullness, the confusion of a man who finds himself in a situation not of his making and from which he cannot escape. I remember Charles and his mercurial swings of mood—the bouts of humor, periods of black anger, and the tears and kisses the night before the duel.
I remember with great clarity the beauty of that morning. Mists were floating up from the river and diffusing the rays of the rising sun as we rode out to the dueling field. I remember Nina reaching over and squeezing my hand with an impetuous excitement that was communicated through my body like an electric shock.
Much of the rest of that morning is missing. Perhaps in the intensity of that first, subconscious Feeding, I literally lost consciousness as I was engulfed in the waves of fear, excitement, pride—of maleness—emanating from our two beaus as they faced death on that lovely morning. I remember experiencing the shock of realizing, this is really happening, as I shared the tread of high boots through the grass. Someone was calling off the paces. I dimly recall the weight of the pistol in my hand—Charles’s hand, I think; I will never know for sure—and a second of cold clarity before an explosion broke the connection, and the acrid smell of gunpowder brought me back to myself.
It was Charles who died. I have never been able to forget the incredible quantities of blood that poured from the small, round hole in his breast. His white shirt was crimson by the time I reached him. There had been no blood in our fantasies. Nor had there been the sight of Charles with his head lolling, mouth dribbling saliva onto his bloodied chest while his eyes rolled back to show the whites like two eggs embedded in his skull.
Roger Harrison was sobbing as Charles breathed his final, shuddering gasps on that field of innocence.
I remember nothing at all about the confused hours that followed. The next morning I opened my cloth bag to find Charles’s pistol lying with my things. Why w
ould I have kept that revolver? If I had wished to take something from my fallen lover as a sign of remembrance, why that alien piece of metal? Why pry from his dead fingers the symbol of our thoughtless sin?
It said volumes about Nina that she did not recognize that pistol.
“Willi’s here,” announced Nina’s amanuensis, the loathsome Miss Barrett Kramer. Kramer’s appearance was as unisex as her name: short-cropped, black hair, powerful shoulders, and a blank, aggressive gaze that I associated with lesbians and criminals. She looked to be in her midthirties.
“Thank you, Barrett dear,” said Nina.
Both of us went out to greet Willi, but Mr. Thorne had already let him in, and we met in the hallway.
“Melanie! You look marvelous! You grow younger each time I see you. Nina!” The change in Willi’s voice was evident. Men continued to be overpowered by their first sight of Nina after an absence. There were hugs and kisses. Willi himself looked more dissolute than ever. His alpaca sport coat was exquisitely tailored, his turtleneck sweater successfully concealed the eroded lines of his wattled neck, but when he swept off his jaunty sports-car cap the long strands of white hair he had brushed forward to hide his encroaching baldness were knocked into disarray. Willi’s face was flushed with excitement, but there was also the telltale capillary redness about the nose and cheeks that spoke of too much liquor, too many drugs.
“Ladies, I think you’ve met my associates, Tom Luhar and Jenson Reynolds?” The two men added to the crowd in my narrow hall. Mr. Luhar was thin and blond, smiling with perfectly capped teeth. Mr. Reynolds was a gigantic Negro, hulking forward with a sullen, bruised look on his coarse face. I was sure that neither Nina nor I had encountered these specific cat’s-paws of Willi’s before. It did not matter.
“Why don’t we go into the parlor?” I suggested. It was an awkward procession ending with the three of us seated on the heavily upholstered chairs surrounding the Georgian tea table that had been my grandmother’s. “More tea, please, Mr. Thorne.” Miss Kramer took that as her cue to leave, but Willi’s two pawns stood uncertainly by the door, shifting from foot to foot and glancing at the crystal on display as if their mere proximity could break something. I would not have been surprised if that had proved to be the case.
“Jense!” Willi snapped his fingers. The Negro hesitated and then brought forward an expensive leather attaché case. Willi set it on the tea table and clicked the catches open with his short, broad fingers. “Why don’t you two see Mrs. Fuller’s man about getting something to drink?”
When they were gone Willi shook his head and smiled apologetically at Nina. “Sorry about that, Love.”
Nina put her hand on Willi’s sleeve. She leaned forward with an air of expectancy. “Melanie wouldn’t let me begin the Game without you. Wasn’t that awful of me to want to start without you, Willi dear?”
Willi frowned. After fifty years he still bridled at being called Willi. In Los Angeles he was Big Bill Borden. When he returned to his native Germany—which was not often because of the dangers involved—he was once again Wilhelm von Borchert, lord of dark manor, forest, and hunt. But Nina had called him Willi when they had first met, in 1931 in Vienna, and Willi he had remained.
“You begin, Willi dear,” said Nina. “You go first.”
I could remember the time when we would have spent the first few days of our reunion in conversation and catching up with one another’s lives. Now there was not even time for small talk.
Willi showed his teeth and removed news clippings, notebooks, and a stack of cassettes from his briefcase. No sooner had he covered the small table with his material than Mr. Thorne arrived with the tea and Nina’s scrapbook from the sewing room. Willi brusquely cleared a small space.
At first glance one might see certain similarities between Willi Borchert and Mr. Thorne. One would be mistaken. Both men tended to the florid, but Willi’s complexion was the result of excess and emotion; Mr. Thorne had known neither of these for many years. Willi’s balding was a patchy, self-consciously concealed thing—a weasel with mange; Mr. Thorne’s bare head was smooth and unwrinkled. One could not imagine Mr. Thorne ever having had hair. Both men had gray eyes—what a novelist would call cold, gray eyes—but Mr. Thorne’s eyes were cold with indifference, cold with a clarity coming from an absolute absence of troublesome emotion or thought. Willi’s eyes were the cold of a blustery North Sea winter and were often clouded with shifting curtains of the emotions that controlled him—pride, hatred, love of pain, the pleasure of destruction.
Willi never referred to his use of the Ability as Feedings—I was evidently the only one who thought in those terms—but Willi sometimes talked of The Hunt. Perhaps it was the dark forests of his homeland that he thought of as he stalked his human quarry through the sterile streets of Los Angeles. Did Willi dream of the forest, I wondered. Did he look back to green wool hunting jackets, the applause of retainers, the gouts of blood from the dying boar? Or did Willi remember the slam of jackboots on cobblestones and the pounding of his lieutenants’ fists on doors? Perhaps Willi still associated his Hunt with the dark European night of the ovens that he had helped to oversee.
I called it Feeding. Willi called it The Hunt. I had never heard Nina call it anything.
“Where is your VCR?” Willi asked. “I have put them all on tape.”
“Oh, Willi,” said Nina in an exasperated tone. “You know Melanie. She’s so old fashioned. You know she wouldn’t have a video player.”
“I don’t even have a television,” I said. Nina laughed.
“Goddamn it,” muttered Willi. “It doesn’t matter. I have other records here.” He snapped rubber bands from around the small, black notebooks. “It just would have been better on tape. The Los Angeles stations gave much coverage to the Hollywood Strangler, and I edited in the … Ach! Never mind.”
He tossed the videocassettes into his briefcase and slammed the lid shut.
“Twenty-three,” he said. “Twenty-three since we met twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem that long, does it?”
“Show us,” said Nina. She was leaning forward, and her blue eyes seemed very bright. “I’ve been wondering since I saw the Strangler interviewed on Sixty Minutes. He was yours, Willi? He seemed so—”
“Ja, ja, he was mine. A nobody. A timid little man. He was the gardener of a neighbor of mine. I left him alive so that the police could question him, erase any doubts. He will hang himself in his cell next month after the press loses interest. But this is more interesting. Look at this.” Willi slid across several glossy black-and-white photographs. The NBC executive had murdered the five members of his family and drowned a visiting soap-opera actress in his pool. He had then stabbed himself repeatedly and written 50 SHARE in blood on the wall of the bathhouse.
“Reliving old glories, Willi?” asked Nina. “DEATH TO THE PIGS and all that?”
“No, goddamn it. I think it should receive points for irony. The girl had been scheduled to drown on the program. It was already in the script outline.”
“Was he hard to Use?” It was my question. I was curious despite myself.
Willi lifted one eyebrow. “Not really. He was an alcoholic and heavily into cocaine. There was not much left. And he hated his family. Most people do.”
“Most people in California, perhaps,” said Nina primly. It was an odd comment from Nina. Years ago her father had committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a trolley car.
“Where did you make contact?” I asked.
“A party. The usual place. He bought the coke from a director who had ruined one of my—”
“Did you have to repeat the contact?”
Willi frowned at me. He kept his anger under control, but his face grew redder. “Ja, ja. I saw him twice more. Once I just watched from my car as he played tennis.”
“Points for irony,” said Nina. “But you lose points for repeated contact. If he were as empty as you say, you should have been able to Use him after only one touch. What
else do you have?”
He had his usual assortment. Pathetic skid-row murders. Two domestic slayings. A highway collision that turned into a fatal shooting. “I was in the crowd,” said Willi. “I made contact. He had a gun in the glove compartment.”
“Two points,” said Nina.
Willi had saved a good one for last. A once-famous child star had suffered a bizarre accident. He had left his Bel Air apartment while it filled with gas and then returned to light a match. Two others had died in the ensuing fire.
“You get credit only for him,” said Nina.
“Ja, ja.”
“Are you absolutely sure about this one? It could have been an accident.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Willi. He turned toward me. “This one was very hard to Use. Very strong. I blocked his memory of turning on the gas. Had to hold it away for two hours. Then forced him into the room. He struggled not to strike the match.”
“You should have had him use his lighter,” said Nina.
“He didn’t smoke,” growled Willi. “He gave it up last year.”
“Yes,” smiled Nina. “I seem to remember him saying that to Johnny Carson.” I could not tell whether Nina was jesting.
The three of us went through the ritual of assigning points. Nina did most of the talking. Willi went from being sullen to expansive to sullen again. At one point he reached over and patted my knee as he laughingly asked for my support. I said nothing. Finally he gave up, crossed the parlor to the liquor cabinet, and poured himself a tall glass of bourbon from father’s decanter. The evening light was sending its final, horizontal rays through the stained-glass panels of the bay windows, and it cast a red hue on Willi as he stood next to the oak cupboard. His eyes were small, red embers in a bloody mask.
Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984 Page 63