Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  When Broillard refused, Shellane swept his legs from beneath him, and he went sprawling atop the grave. He propped himself up on his elbows.

  “Lie flat,” Shellane told him. “Get familiar with the pose.”

  Reluctantly, Broillard obeyed. “What you gonna do?”

  “I know how she died. You drained the life out of her. You beat her down inch by fucking inch. You had her trapped. You took over her home, her business and, for her kindness, you hammered on her until she didn’t care enough to live.”

  “You didn’t know her! She was a liar! Anything she wanted she’d lie to get it! She…”

  Shellane kicked him in the side; Broillard gasped, clutching the injured area.

  “You didn’t know her, man,” he said again.

  “If she lied, it was because you tormented her. You gave her no reason to be truthful.” He nudged Broillard’s leg. “Come on, Avery. Confess your sins. Cleanse your soul before you come face to face with the Creator.”

  Broillard’s eyes were squeezed shut. “Please…Please don’t.”

  Shellane wanted to hurt him, but each time he contemplated doing so, he lost focus. The sky above had the look of a flat gray lid; a maple leaf skated sideways back and forth on the breeze before settling to the ground. “Grace,” he said, testing the truth of the name, finding that it provoked not dread but desolation.

  “I’m sorry…I…” Broillard began to weep, his words fractured by sobs.

  “Shut up,” Shellane told him.

  “I didn’t want her to die!” Broillard said. “I was all fucked up, I just…”

  Shellane put his foot on Broillard’s stomach, a light pressure, and Broillard tensed, sucked in his breath.

  “I want you to lie there for an hour,” Shellane said. “One full hour. Maybe she’ll come to you.”

  “No, man. I…”

  Shellane pressed down harder with his foot.

  “Maybe she’ll want something from you. Tell her you were fucked up. Stoned. Drunk. Stressed out. Tell her you were crazy. That your creative spirit was suffocating. Buried under a rock of circumstance. And as you struggled to liberate your essence, you accidentally kicked her in the heart ten thousand times. I know she’ll be merciful.” He kneeled beside Broillard. “A full hour. You leave before the hour’s up, I’ll find out. Do you know how?”

  Eyes still shut, Broillard shook his head.

  Shellane put his mouth close to the man’s ear and whispered very softly, “She’ll tell me.”

  Of course he had his doubts. Doubts assailed him as he drove back to the cabin. There must be an explanation other than the obvious. A twin sister, an actress hired to play a part. Something. But that was ludicrous, soap opera-ish. The idea of a ghost was much more logical, and what did that say about the world? That the occult could seem more rational than the mundane. Yet he suspected that he must not believe it. If he did he would be more frightened of returning to the lake; he would want to run into the cabin, scoop up his belongings and be gone. Or was it that he was half a ghost himself? So diminished and deadened by his sins, he was accessible to death’s creatures, immune to their terrors. This struck him with the force of truth, and he tried to dredge up some awful fear hidden momentarily from sight, a mortal terror that would humanize him. He conjured new images of Grace. Imagined himself in bed with a corpse, a skull filled with maggots, a mummified tongue. But she was none of those things. Whatever the physics of her substance, it was akin to his own. When he saw her, he thought, maybe then he’d be afraid. Now it was all speculative, but when he saw her…that would be the test of his humanity. Then he’d know if she was too real for him, or if he was sufficiently unreal to be real for her.

  The lake had gone a deep ocean blue under the prison sky, sluggish waves piling in to scour the shingle, and the boughs of the evergreens lifted with the hallucinatory slowness of undersea life. The cabin looked forlorn, a shabby relic. Grace was standing among the trees behind it, watching the road as he pulled up. Like a tiny figure placed in the corner of a landscape to lend perspective and a drop of color. He sat in the car, waiting for her to call out, but she remained silent. He climbed halfway out, one foot on the ground, one on the floorboards, and stared at her across the roof of the car. In her jeans and plaid jacket, she looked entirely ordinary. He wanted her to be real. Whether ghost or flesh-and-blood, it made no difference so long as she was real. As he walked toward her, she folded her arms and ducked her head. He stopped a few feet away, thinking that he would see death in her; but she was only herself. Mouth held tightly. Eyelids lowered. He started to frame a question, but could not come up with one that didn’t sound absurd. Finally he said, “I know what happened to you.”

  “Do you?” She gave an unhappy laugh. “I’m not sure I do.” Coppery strands of hair drifted across her face—she did not bother to brush them aside.

  “You died,” he said. “Two years ago.” Unable to speak for a second, he put a hand to his brow his fingers trembled. “How’s it possible…for you and me…?”

  “I’m not an expert on the subject,” she said with irritation. “I’ve only done it the once.”

  “But we can touch each other. That’s…It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t understand how it happened. When you put your hand on me, the first time, down by the water…I felt it. That’s all I know.” She shrugged. “I’m amazed you can even see me. No one else does, I don’t think.”

  “You were worried about Broillard seeing you. The other day on the beach.”

  “That’s how I react to him. I don’t go, ‘Oh, he can’t see me.’ I just react.”

  The wind poured through the trees, drowning out every other sound, and Shellane turned up the collar of his jacket. He found himself considering Grace’s edges, hoping to determine if they wavered or flickered or displayed any other sign of the uncanny. Which they did not. And yet there was something about her. That luminous quality he had first observed down by the water. With the gray sky above and trouble in the air, she should have looked pale and drawn; but she still had that glow, that eerie vitality, and he thought now this must be a symptom of her unnatural state. The desolation he’d felt beside the grave returned. He had an impulse to hurry back to the car, but his feet were rooted.

  “Avery told me,” he said. “I had a talk with him about the way he treated you, and he told me.”

  “You must have frightened him. For all his bullying, Avery’s a very frightened man.”

  “I was tempted to kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

  She let out a dismayed sigh. “I wanted you to. That’s why I told you that stuff about him. For a long time, getting back at him was all I thought about.”

  Some ducks that had been floating by the margin of the shore flapped up from their rest and beat against the wind toward the far end of the lake. Grace watched them go. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hated him so much.”

  “And now you don’t?”

  “No, I still hate him. But it doesn’t seem as important.”

  She held out her hand and he drew back, both a fearful rejection and one of embittered practicality. If she was a ghost—and what else could she be?—he was not relating to her as such, but rather as he might to a woman with a problem he did not want to get involved in. Like a girlfriend with a drug habit. Fear nibbled at the edges of his awareness, an old Catholic reflex serving to remind him that she was an abomination, a foulness, a scrap of metaphysics. But he could not turn away.

  “Why’d you think I’d kill Avery?” he asked.

  “I knew things about you from the first moment. It was so weird. I knew who you were. Not your name or anything, but I had a sense of your character. I could tell you’d done violent things.”

  “My name’s Roy Shellane.”

  She repeated it. “I didn’t think you looked like a Michael.”

  The wind came again, and she hugged herself.

  “I feel alive,” she said wonderingly. “Ever since you got here, i
t’s like I’m back in the world. I’ve never felt so alive.”

  He studied her face, trying to discern some taint of death, and she asked what was wrong.

  “I keep expecting things to be different now I know,” he said. “That you’ll turn sideways and vanish. Something like that.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “And I keep thinking I’m going to be afraid.”

  “Are you?”

  “Just that you’ll vanish,” he said. “And I guess it frightens me that I’m not more afraid.”

  The way she was looking at him, he knew she wanted him to reassure her. With only the slightest hesitancy, he stepped forward, half-expecting his arms to pass through her, but she nestled against him, warm and vivid in her reality. He felt a stirring in his groin, the beginnings of arousal, and this caused him to question himself again, to speculate about what he had become.

  “Roy,” she said, as if the name were a comfort.

  He rested his chin on the top of her head and gazed out over the lake, at the heavy chop, the foot-high waves trundling toward shore, and felt a sudden brilliant carelessness regarding all his old compulsions.

  “I know you can’t stay,” she said. “But a little while…maybe that would be all right.”

  During the days that followed, it occurred to Shellane that theirs was a pure romance, free of biological imperatives, divorced from all natural considerations, and yet it seemed natural in all its particulars. They made love, they slept, they talked, they were at peace. Even knowing their time together would be brief, that was not so different from the sadness of more conventional lovers whose term of intimacy had been prescribed. Yet Grace’s abrupt departures continued to trouble him. For one thing, he was never certain she would return, and for another, he could not think where she went or into what condition she might have been reduced. If he asked, he believed she would tell him—if she herself knew—but he was afraid to hear the answer, imagining some horrid dissolution. Sometimes when he left her sleeping and was busy at his laptop or puttering in the kitchen, he would have the feeling that in his absence she ceased to exist and sprang back into being whenever he peeked in at her. But these were minor discords in the music of those days. The most difficult thing for Shellane was an increasingly acute feeling that his ability to interact with her hinted at either madness or the imminence of some black onrushing fate. The similarity of his youthful behavior to that of Broillard seemed to tilt the scales of possibility toward the latter, to hint at a karmic synchronicity. Yet he was not prepared to give her up. Whenever he considered leaving, this thought would be pushed aside by more immediate concerns, and though he realized he would soon have to leave, he was unable to confront the fact.

  Two days after he had learned the truth about her, while she lay sleeping, Broillard knocked at the door. He was in bad shape. Bloodshot eyes; disheveled; coked up, his sinuses mapped by hectic blotches. Like a vampire beginning to decompose in the strong sun. He wiped his nose and twitched, yet attempted to present a manly appearance by speaking in a stern voice and holding his shoulders square.

  “You’n me need to work shit out,” he said.

  “Not a good time,” Shellane told him. “I’m occupied.”

  “Yeah? Me, too. I’m occupied in figuring out why I shouldn’t call the cops on your ass.”

  “Perhaps what stays your hand is the thought that you don’t want them sniffing around your place, looking for drugs.”

  “You think I won’t go to the cops? I’ll call ’em right now.”

  “I’ll wait inside, shall I? We’ll have a chat when they get here.”

  Shellane started to close the door, but Broillard shouldered it open. Abandoning the tactics of machismo, he said with unvarnished desperation, “C’mon! I need to talk to you!”

  “It’ll have to be another time.”

  “If you’re fucking with me, that’s cool. I don’t care. I just wanna know!”

  “I’m not fucking with you,” said Shellane. “Grace is with me now.”

  Broillard stood on tiptoes, trying to see past Shellane into the cabin. “Where is she?”

  Shellane flirted with the notion that this might all be a hustle involving a fake grave and a pretend ghost, a variation on the Hooker with an Outraged Husband. “Seems I’m the only one who can see her,” he said.

  “Oh, sure…yeah.” Confidence soaring on chemical wings, Broillard made as though to push inside, but Shellane elbowed him back.

  “You’re more than a little thick, Avery. Where else do you think I learned the sordid facts of your life?”

  “She mighta called you…or written you a letter. Like maybe you’re a relative or something.”

  “Of course she did. ‘Dear Uncle, the other night Avery sent me to the outlet store to buy him a pair of cashmere socks. He prefers to masturbate in cashmere. We haven’t made love in four months—he says I’m too fat. But he’s gone through dozens of socks.’ Exactly the sort of thing she’d disclose to a relative.”

  Broillard gaped at him.

  “We’re all sad animals.” Shellane gave him a gentler shove, moving him back from the door. “Some of us manage to rise above the state.”

  “You think she’s such a saint? Maybe it was me fucked her up, but she wasn’t never a saint, man. She wanted something, she’d do whatever she needed to get it.” Broillard bunched his fists. “This is my fucking property, and I got a right to inspect it. I’m coming in.”

  Shellane was about to repeat his original response, but then, thinking that Broillard might become a problem, he said, “All right. But you won’t be able to see her.”

  Once inside, Broillard stood in the center of the room, turning his head this way and that. “Is she here?” He fixed Shellane with a terrified look. “Where is she?”

  Shellane pointed to the refrigerator, and Broillard stared at it. “Grace?” he said; then, to Shellane: “What’s she doing?”

  “Watching. She doesn’t appear to be overjoyed at your presence.”

  Doubt and fear contended for control of Broillard’s expression. He sat heavily in a straight-backed chair beside the table. “Can she hear me?”

  Shellane sat opposite him, facing away from the refrigerator. “Give it a try.”

  Broillard made an effort to compose his face. “Grace,” he said. “I’m so sorry, baby. I was…”

  “She doesn’t like you calling her ‘baby,’” Shellane said. “She never liked it.”

  Broillard nodded, swallowed hard. “I didn’t want to hurt you, ba…Grace. It’s like I was watching someone else do the things I did. I don’t know what the fuck was going on.” His voice cracked and he covered his eyes with his right hand. “I’m so sorry!”

  Shellane glanced at the refrigerator. Grace was standing next to it, wearing only panties. Tears cut down her cheeks. A cold pressure pushed upward from the base of Shellane’s spine and he had the feeling that something very bad was about to happen.

  Broillard’s tone was urgent. “What’s she doing?”

  “Crying,” Shellane said.

  “Aw, Christ…Grace! I know I can’t make things right. But I’m…” Broillard fumbled in his trouser pocket, pulled forth several folded sheets of notebook paper. “I wrote something. About you…about everything. You want to hear it?”

  He looked to Shellane for guidance, and Shellane shrugged, as if communicating Grace’s indifference.

  “I don’t know how to talk to you, Grace,” Broillard said in a plaintive voice. “This is the only way I got.”

  Her face empty, Grace had come halfway across the room and was standing to his left as he addressed himself to the refrigerator, reading from the sheets of paper, singing the words in a muted but obviously practiced delivery intended to convey anguish:

  “Never thought it could happen,

  never saw the storm comin’,

  never once had a clue about

  how much you were sufferin’…

  It all was so damn easy,
>
  I took love for nothin’,

  What I thought was us livin’

  was the heart of your dyin’,

  and now all I remember is

  Grace Under Pressure…”

  As he reached the chorus, Broillard built his reading to the level of a performance, half-shouting the words. Shellane could not decide whether his loathing was colored by pity, or if what he felt was embarrassment at seeing another man act with such unabashed stupidity and arrogance.

  “…forever and ever,

  Grace Under Pressure…

  It’s all I can think of,

  the way you just sat there,

  with everything broken…

  Grace Under Pressure…

  Grace Under Pressure…

  Grace Under Pressure…”

  He began a second verse, and Grace stepped behind him, gazing at the back of his head with dispassion.

  “Aw, I wish I could breathe you

  straight through until mornin’,

  where a white dream arises

  from the bright flash of being…”

  Grace trailed her fingers across his neck, and Broillard broke off, stared at Shellane. “What just happened? She do something to me?”

  “Did you feel something?”

  “What’d she do? I got all cold and shit.”

  Grace appeared to have lost interest in Broillard. She was weeping again, her shoulders hunched and shaking, and Shellane recalled how she had acted the afternoon when he had come to her house. Silent; tearful; unmindful of him. He wondered why her fingers never left him cold. “She touched you,” he said.

  Broillard scraped back his chair and stood, hands braced on the table. He seemed poised to run, but unable to take the first step. His eyes were bugged, and he breathed through his mouth.

  “I don’t think she liked your song,” said Shellane mildly.

  “Is she close? Where the fuck is she?”

  “I wouldn’t move if I were you,” said Shellane, though Grace had wandered back toward the refrigerator. “You’ll bump into her.”