Then I pushed the corner again, just enough to see that the wood block was hollow.
And I heard myself screaming as I leaned over, and looked in.
I don’t care for the dark, but I think now it protects me.
Just as I think that whatever lives in the orchard has turned everything around, and somehow filled me the day I ran through it so I couldn’t take any more — Mike’s worries about Amy, Stick’s rotten home, even Rich’s silent gloating over the prize he thought he’d won.
And my own troubles, most of them minor though I wouldn’t believe it.
Whatever it is, it filled me with emptiness, and I cast emptiness back.
They’ll never find the car that killed Richard, or learn why Mike lost control and Stick used a razor.
I pretended to care, and they knew I was lying and couldn’t escape the cold I gave them in return.
And Mary, my Mary with the flaming red hair, would probably run if I tried to explain and showed her the tomb and all the letters I never sent her that I keep in my drawer.
She would run, she would hate me . . . unless Aunt May is wrong and there are real miracles after all, and Mary, my Mary, would see how much I hurt and know how to save me from the dark in the orchard.
I can only wait to find out.
I can only lie beneath her image to stay away from the cold, out there, in the shadows, and pray that my clothes aren’t more baggy still, that I really can feel flesh still clinging to my bones ... and pray even harder that the darkform in my arms that I use for a bed and pillow is only a dream slowly rotting to nightmare.
I can only wait, and be patient.
For my Mary’s asleep.
I know.
I hear her breathing.
Part Two: I See Her Sweet And Fair
Rising like a nightflower against the full of the moon, lifting slowly to a grey silhouette
Brett saw the light from the Irving room window and almost jumped from the chair in his haste to avoid it. Ice spiderwalked his spine, his palms grew moist, and when he licked at his lips, he felt them dry and cracking
It’s only the moon. idiot, he told himself harshly; it’s only the damned moon.
But he pulled the shade down so quickly it snapped up again, rattled around the roller, cord and grip cracking sharp against the pane. He grabbed for the woven loop, cursed when it rapped his knuckle, and finally trapped it in both hands. A deep breath. A sigh. He lowered the shade a second time and held it until he was sure It wouldn’t fly free again.
He knew he was being foolish, but it was increasingly something he couldn’t fight off. The light the moon dropped on the carpet unnerved him, and though he ordered himself to stop behaving like a child, he couldn’t help a glance into each of the corners. His eyes closed briefly, his lungs tilled with a breath that he held until his hands finally stopped their trembling. Then he turned away from the window, took his chair by the hearth, and picked up the newspaper where he’d dropped it just before.
The headlines were familiar, as were the stories below them. He looked for the comics but they didn’t amuse him: he scanned the sports section, but knew none of the teams, he tried to decipher the stock market for nearly ten minutes, giving up with a grunt when his eyes started to water.
A book was next, jammed between the cushion and the armrest He couldn’t remember where he’d left off, so he skimmed until he discovered something unfamiliar. Alter three pages he put it back down — the names meant nothing, and he had no idea why they were saying those things about one another
The television was broken.
The radio was in the kitchen.
And his son was out with Evelyn Zayer, a girl who spent more time on the telephone than any forty he had ever known. Leslie. when he wasn’t complaining about Brett’s refusal to let him have an apartment of his own, laughingly called his good looks the family curse; Brett only hoped the boy would remember to finish his education and not run off to get married, and leave him alone.
An hour, and he kept glancing over his shoulder at the shade. at the dark window. Seeing the girl standing —
“Jesus will you stop it, for god’s sake?”
He got up, slapped the back of the chair and strolled into the kitchen, switched on the light and opened the refrigerator. His stomach told him he had better eat something soon or he’d start in earnest with the snacks and blow his diet all to hell. But nothing he saw appealed to him, nothing prompted his taste buds to wake up and demand. The cupboards were the same, and so was the pantry.
“But I’m hungry,” he insisted.
No, you’re not, you’re bored, he answered with a sour grin, and decided to cure it by getting the hell out and going for a walk.
He took his windbreaker from the hall closet, turned on a few lights m case Les came home before he did, and left, testing the door twice to be sure it was locked. Another grin, this one quick and bright, and he stepped down to the walk, looked up at the moon.
Out here, under the elm that had taken over the front yard, it seemed perfectly normal. Huge, almost white; and he couldn’tunderstand why something so lovely had bothered him tonight, and had bothered him every night for at least the past week.
Not true, he thought then; not true at all.
He could mark the moment it began from the first time he had seen his son in what they used to call action.
It was last Friday, and he had taken Denise Quarell to the movies, to the Regency Theater, newly constructed on an old parking lot east of the Mariner Cove. It was a beautiful place, in brick and white trim, and the only indication it was a theater at all was the ticket booth in front. There was no marquee, no posters, the walls flanking the entrance broken only by curtained windows that looked into the lobby.
After the show ended, he had waited for her on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and watching with quiet amusement the other customers leaving. There were, in his eavesdropping, the usual arguments and discussions about the film, the refreshments, the price of a babysitter, the time someone promised a mother to be home, July’s weather, school, and work. Then, as he turned away to drop his cigarette into the gutter, he heard his son pleading with a girl not to be that way, for god’s sake, it was only a movie and why shouldn’t he appreciate what he was seeing?
“And I suppose you weren’t appreciating that hulk in the jockstrap. “
“Well, for god’s sake, he’s a man!”
They passed him, and he turned his head just enough to see them, hip to hip, heads together, the girl gesturing angrily with both hands He stared at her back, then looked away and closed his eyes, trying to bring a name to the short brown hair. the slender body, the voice that sounded too young for her age. He snapped his fingers just as Denise joined him.
“You call?” she said.
“Amy” he said.
“No. Denise,” she told him, half turned him and grinned. “Do you remember me? I’m your date.”
He laughed “No, not you “
Frowning, she stepped back with hands on her hips. “Not me? You mean you’re out with two women tonight? Is that where you went when you said you were going to the men’s room, right in the middle of the nude scene?”
The tease was there, in her eyes, in the set of her lips, and he felt himself blushing He hadn’t left because of the naked woman. though he supposed his timing could have been better.
She saw how flustered he was and laughed quietly, slipped her arm through his and started them walking “What, if I may ask, were you talking about?”
“Them” And he pointed quickly at his son and the girl now a full block away “I Just remembered her name. “
“You could have asked me.”
“You know her?”
“Sure.” They passed the Mariner, forgetting for the moment their after-film drink. “She comes to the bank at least once a week. A regular savings demon. The worst I ever saw.” She thought for a moment. “That stuff last May. The boy who was killed in the car acci
dent?”
He snapped his fingers again. “Yeah, right!
Gus Buller’s kid. She was — ”
“His girlfriend,” she said. “So they say, anyway. They also say, if It hadn’t been for what Les did, she probably would have killed herself.”
He only grunted. Les was no genius, had no special artistic talents, but somehow he had developed the means to communicate well with people near his own age. He had met Amy Niles once or twice before, and after her boyfriend had died, he had spent a lot of time with her, talking, walking, getting her to go out and start living again.
Brett was damned proud of the boy; he only wished he knew how to tell him how he felt.
They had stopped talking then, had walked on in companionable silence until he realized they were on the last block before Mainland road, and Les and Amy were running across it to the slope and field beyond.
“Uh-oh.” Denise yanked him to a halt. “This, Father dear, is as far as we go.”
They made an abrupt and clumsy about-face, giggling as they turned back up the street, creating several definitely unpleasant scenarios that would be played out very loudly in public when his son turned around, saw him, and accused his father of being his shadow.
“You would not be long for this world,” Denise had told him
He had tried not to laugh when she pinched his waist, ducked away from a slap when he pinched her back — and ended up facing east, just as Les and the girl reached the top of the slope on the other side of the road. His son was already pushing through a gap in the bramble hedge; Amy had turned to face the village.
She was caught beyond the reach of any streetlamp, and the trees on Mainland’s eastern side blocked any house light from spilling across.
But the moon that night was high, and it gave her silver light, seemed to touch only her and not the brush around her.
She saw him.
He knew she saw him.
And he didn’t have to be any closer to see the look on her face — only a year or so older than Les, but at the moment, before Denise had grabbed his arm and pulled him on, he would have sworn she was a hag, less out of the movies than out of a bad dream.
Then a cloud hid the moon, and she vanished in black.
Foolish, he thought now as he reached the end of the block and moved on, the kids had only been doing what he himself never had the nerve to do, and Denise had finally teased him back to the Mariner Lounge with promises of free drinks.
But the moon, and the look . . .
Remembering how his next few nights had been filled with shadowed dreams. He had been unable to call them back when he woke in the morning, but the sweat on the sheets, the clammy feel of his skin, let him know what he’d been through, even if he hadn’t understood.
It was the look, and the moon, and, he supposed, an aftermath of the murder.
A week ago, the day after he’d seen Les and Amy. A young girl, a close friend of his son’s. Brett had met her and hadn’t much liked her, as he hadn’t liked any of the girls Les went out with these days. They were too modern for his taste, too forward, too blunt. Though he knew that someday one of those young women would take the boy away, he hoped Les had more brains than glands and wouldn’t be fooled until he was good and ready.
He turned another corner, heading nowhere in particular, and realized suddenly he was listening to the night, for the sounds he’d been hearing — footsteps, quiet footsteps, just within range, the maker just out of sight.
He told himself it was only caution, natural in a cop, and it was, after all, only someone else strolling around a near corner, the summer night air carrying the tread and muffling it.
Someone else. Nothing more.
It wasn’t Amy, it wasn’t the moon.
Thirty minutes later, still wandering, he felt an unseasonal chill seep through his jacket. He held his arms closer to his sides, hunched his shoulders a bit, and looked around to get his bearings. A lopsided smile. He was on Denise’s street and wasn’t surprised, rather hoped as he sped up that it was some sort of omen, or a signal from his unconscious that he wasn’t nuts, only lonely.
“Aw, poor fella,” he said, laughing at himself as he turned into her yard.
She lived in a small two-bedroom cottage squeezed between two large mock-Tudors whose hedges seemed determined to absorb the smaller house. He took the slate walk at a run, took the steps to the porch in a single leap, and had his finger on the doorbell before he could change his mind.
She opened the door as if she’d been waiting.
“Hi!” he said brightly, thinking glumly that even Leslie could be more clever than that.
She was pleased to see him, it was obvious, but she was also puzzled. The freckles across her forehead almost vanished in a frown, while the dimples on her cheeks deepened when finally she smiled.
“Well, hi. You selling something?”
A jerk of his head over his shoulder. “A walk?
It’s a nice night. We could stop for a burger someplace. Maybe catch the late show? It’s a spy story, I think.
She laughed and waved him in. “Hey, Brett, don’t you believe in telephones?”
It wasn’t a refusal, but here, in this house crowded with furniture and soft lights, he felt abruptly claustrophobic The unease must have showed, because she grabbed a sweater quickly from the newel post and took his arm.
“Lead on, good-lookin’. Tonight I’m all yours” Halfway down the block in silence, and she tugged at his arm. “Something the matter?”
Her hair was short and auburn, her face and figure round, and in her Jeans and sweater she looked a full decade younger than his own thirty-nine.
“Something bothering you, cop?”
He denied it with a shake of his head. “Just restless. I took a chance you were home.” He winked “I got lucky.”
“You sure did. I was supposed to spend the weekend in Hartford, at some stupid banking conference. I changed my mmd at the last minute because, don’t you know, bankers ale so damned boring.”
She was an officer in the Savings and Loan on Centre Street, destined it was said for the presidency one of these days. That surprised him. Most bankers he had known in the past were singularly conservative, and Denise definitely was not of the same mold; they also grew cautious the more time they spent behind the desk, and if anything, she was even more enthusiastic than the day she’d first walked through the door. All that energy was amazing to him, and he didn’t know where she got it.
“Me, too,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I can’t for the life of me figure out what hold all that moneyhas over me.” She turned away, but he saw the smile. “I guess I’m just naturally greedy”
“Right.”
“I mean, it’s dirty, you know. That money is absolutely filthy.”
“Sure.”
“You wouldn’t believe what I look like when I get home.”
“I know.”
She stopped, made him turn. “Brett, I’ll enjoy the burgers, and I’ll enjoy the film, and I’ll probably enjoy the conversation, too, once I get used to being fed one word at a time.”
He rubbed his temple, his chin, and felt more than a bit silly. “Sorry.”
They walked again and decided on the luncheonette for their meal. And as they ate, he found himself responding to the most innocuous questions with baleful stories of his life, particularly how he had married Grace Black when they were juniors in college, had Les a year later, and little Alice five years after that.
“Too young.” he said “Once we grew up, we grew apart.
Three years ago. Grace had left him, with Alice. And on the road to her mother’s a truck had skidded, and the car she was driving slammed into it, and under.
He closed his eyes, set his mouth.
“How did Les take it.”
“I don’t know. Really.” He chuckled and raised an eyebrow. “In the beginning, he wouldn’t let go of me for fear I’d leave him too. Now It seems t
o be the other way around. I can’t let go, and he wants his own place.”
She gave him a look he didn’t quite understand. “You have to let go, Brett, you know. Sooner or later, you’ll have to let go.”
“Yeah. But . . . yeah.”
A long silence made him uncomfortable, made him think about living in that suddenly big house all alone.
“You ever consider getting married again?” she asked.
“It’s crossed my mind.”
“Three years is a long time these days.”
“You’re right. But I have Les to think of, too.”
He paid the check and they walked down to the theater.
“You love him, don’t you.”
He looked at her, puzzled “Of course. Did you ever think I didn’t? I mean, don’t I show it?”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Yes, if you’re worried about. It I was just asking.”
Funny question, he thought, but said nothing more, though it kept coming back, even during the film. It made him nervous. Was she proposing? He had a curious feeling that one more word, one pleasant look and she would think he was accepting. When he squirmed, she kissed his cheek and told him to knock it off before she called the usher and had him thrown out.
And later, in the lobby, he walked over to the concession counter to get a pack of cigarettes, turned, and saw her talking to a woman a bit taller than she, white-blonde hair, tight jeans, and snug blouse. He swore silently and wished there was a back exit handy, forced a smile on his lips when they saw him and waved.
Victoria Redding, the only policewoman on the force. He had taken her out several times over the past winter, enjoyed himself, and beyond their meetings at the station, hadn’t seen much of her since. From a large farm in Vermont, she fit right into village life with scarcely a ripple, and he was surprised when he wondered why he hadn’t taken her out again.
“Brett!” she said happily when he joined them, and made no bones about giving him a kiss that lasted a fraction longer than politeness required. “You like the picture?”
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 2: The Orchard (Necon Classic Horror) Page 6