“You don’t have to explain,” he said.
“It’s habit. I used to have to explain it to Avery all the time. He liked hearing me explain it.”
Shellane set the letter on the table and pressed the play button on the recorder. Avery’s voice, tinny and diminished, issued forth over a strummed guitar:
“Beauty, where do you sleep tonight?
In whose avid arms, do you conspire…?”
“Our boy’s waxing Keatsian,” said Shellane.
“Turn it off.”
“…beauty is everywhere they say,
but I just can’t find a beauty like thine…”
“Please!” said Grace.
Shellane switched off the recorder. “Sure sounds like he loves you.”
“I believe he did once. But you can’t tell with Avery. He’s adept at mimicry.”
They stood without speaking for a time, then Grace pressed herself against him. “I shouldn’t have pulled you into this,” she said.
He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that he would not have foregone the experience of being with her. But though he believed this to be true, he no longer was certain of it. That he could accept her to the point that he could dismiss, even dote upon, the symptoms of her strangeness—this fact had, almost without his notice, so shredded the fabric of his emotions, it had grown difficult for him to separate hope from desire.
After she had gone into the bedroom, to become whatever she became without him, he dressed and sat at the table, studying his lists. They revealed no pattern, no truth other than the nonsensical and menacing truth that he was in love with a dead woman. In love, also, with her deathly condition, with her odd glow and the curious behavior of water on her skin. It was a splendid absurdity worthy of an Irish ballad. The trouble with such tunes, though, they tended to neglect the ordinary heart of things, things such as the commonplace mutuality that had developed between them, and that was the matter truly worth commemorating in song. Nobody sat around scratching their ass or discussing the character of an ex-husband in an Irish ballad. They were all grand sadness and exquisite pain. Of course, sadness and pain were likely headed his way, and he had little doubt they would be grand and exquisite. As if anticipation were itself an affliction, his thoughts spun out of control, images and fragments of emotions whirling up and away, prelude to a despair so profound it left him hunched over the table, eyes fixed on the lists, like a troll turned to stone by an enchantment he had been tricked into reading.
The last of the gray light blended with the mist forming above the lake. Shellane stirred himself, went to the stove and heated a can of soup. He leaned against the counter, watching steam rise from the saucepan, remembering an interview he’d seen with a man who had directed a horror movie—the man said his film was optimistic because, though its view of the afterlife was gruesome, that it lent any credence whatsoever to the afterlife was hopeful. Shellane supposed this would be a healthy attitude for him to adopt. But the prospect was so completely daft…It had been a long while since his Catholic schooldays, and the concepts associated with religion—virgin birth, the Assumption, the hierarchies of angels, and so forth—had lost their hold on him. Now he was being forced to confront a concept even less logical, one concerning which his knowledge was so fragmentary, any conjecture he made about it had the feeling of wild speculation.
Once his soup was hot, he went on the Internet, accessed a Roman Catholic dictionary, and looked up Limbo. According to doctrine, Limbo referred to a place in which unbaptized children, souls born before the advent of Christ, and prudent virgins awaited the Second Coming, at which point they would be assumed into Heaven. Grace did not appear to fit any of these categories; thus it followed that the Church was a bit off-base in its comprehension of the afterlife. No surprise there. Yet the idea of a halfway house, an interim place where souls were parked for the duration, for some term pertinent to their lives—this accorded with what Grace had told him. The black house, however, seemed to incorporate an element of punishment, to be less a limbo than a state of purgatory. A kind of boutique hell targeting a select clientele? “Fuck,” he said, switching off the laptop, and stared at his uneaten soup.
Grace, fully dressed, came out of the bedroom. “I have to go,” she said absently as she crossed the room. He watched her leave, sat a moment longer, then once again said, “Fuck,” heaved up to his feet, grabbed his jacket off the peg beside the porch door, and followed.
He moved cautiously through the fog, listening, peering ahead, and thus he noticed the point at which he crossed over from the lakeshore into whatever plane it was that Grace had made her home. The wind suddenly died, the sounds of the spruce boughs swaying were sheared away, and his anxiety spiked. Despite the cold, a drop of sweat trickled down his back; he felt a pulse in his neck. Each step he took seemed the step of a condemned criminal walking toward the death chamber. Legs weak, mind bright with fear. When he came in sight of the black house, its gabled second story lifting from the murk, he did not think he could go on. Even without the motive force of the wind, the fog boiled around him, as if alive, and the notion that it might be a form of ectoplasmic life, tendrils and feelers plucking at his clothes, trailing across his skin, wanting to touch him…that got him moving again.
He paused at the door. The knob was of black iron and had the shape of an open hand. He would have to give it a shake in order to enter, and the dire symbolism inherent in this made him less eager to proceed. He had a memory of himself as an altar boy, kneeling, striking the bell as the priest intoned the litany, gazing up at the great gold cross mounted against crimson drapes, participating in the medieval magic of the mass. Whatever he had believed then, he wished he could believe it now. He wished he could take the power that had inspired his awe, all that glorious myth and promise, into his shaking heart. But if the house proved anything, it was that God was far more perverse than the Church had ever dreamed. He imagined the fingers of the fog traipsing across the back of his neck, and the fingers of the iron hand seemed to press into his wrist, trying to feel the hits of his heart. Before further doubts could assail him, he clasped it firmly and gave it a turn.
White lights stabbed into his eyes. It was precisely as Grace had described—like the actinic flashes caused by a blow to the head. And then he was drawn deep inside the house, hurtling forward as if on a walkway that was moving much too fast for safety’s sake. For an instant he thought he had been transported to the ground floor of a parking garage. A dark, musty space with a strip of brilliant light to his left. Then either his vision steadied or the house settled on a form, and he realized that he was facing a row of large round holes—perhaps forty or fifty in sum—piercing a wall of black boards, yellow radiance spilling from them. He strained his ears, listening for signs of life. Hearing none, he came closer. The holes were of equal dimension, six feet wide and high, each opening onto a small cell, unfurnished except for a bowl set in the floor. These bowls were the radiant source, light spraying up from them. The first cell he came to held no prisoner and was littered with dried wastes. Shreds of a slick transparent membrane adhered to the edges of the hole. As far as he could tell, the membrane had not been affixed to the wall, but had been extruded from it, as though it were, like the great fist outside, a natural production of the wood. The second hole was also empty, the membrane shredded. Shellane reached in to learn if the bowl could be lifted out and used to light his way. The radiance burned him, provoking a prickly, crawly sensation like that deriving from an inflamed rash. In the third cell sat a figure that appeared to be made of dull, tarnished gold. It had the bulbous shape and pudgy face of an infant, but was the size of a man. Swaddled head to foot in a golden robe that seemed of a piece with its flesh and left only the face exposed beneath a tightly fitted cowl. Its features had an Asiatic cast, and Shellane recalled photographs of Chinese babies clothed in similar fashion. He was so certain it was a statue, when the creature twitched its head toward him, mouth open in what appeared to be a
full-throated scream (though he heard nothing), he fell back a step. He punched at the membrane, which was stretched tight across the entrance to the cell. The blow had no effect; the shreds hanging from the entrances of the first two cells were flimsy, the surface of the intact membrane was hard and rubbery. The huge baby lowered its head and, with a chubby hand that emerged from the sleeve of its robe, pawed in apparent agony at its face and gave another silent scream.
Five more cells were occupied, three by normal men, all naked. The other prisoners were two extremely tall men, also naked, with grayish skin and deformed faces, similar in every regard to the man who had chased Shellane along the margin of the lake…except that their deformities were not as severe as his had been. Sunken eyes; their mouths gashes with thin, ragged lips; flat noses, elongated skulls; ruffs of flesh at the back of their necks. This last caused Shellane to realize that his pursuer had not been wearing a mask and to speculate that, due to his fear, he must have exaggerated the man’s deformities. The chests of the two gray-skinned men displayed a peculiar articulation, as if they had too many bones. Their genital areas were hairless and their eyes so deeply recessed, shadowed by prominent ridges, they gave back not a glimmer of light. On seeing him, they reacted in fright, scrambling back against the rears of their cells and gaping. One of the ordinary-seeming men—scrawny, with a careworn face and stringy gray hair—was initially disinterested in him, but after Shellane had been standing in front of his cell for a minute or so, he pushed himself up against the membrane, pleading with his eyes, mouthing words that Shellane could not understand.
Beyond the cells lay a door taller and wider than the first; the doorknob was a clenched fist of black iron. Shellane was still afraid, but he was operating efficiently now. Fear had become a resource, an energy he could tap into, a means of refining judgment—he did not necessarily heed its promptings, but remained aware of them. He inspected the frame and the wall beside it for projections, a declivity that might conceal a control, a switch. At about eye level he found a patch of wormy ridges in the surface of the boards, like a cross between circuitry and varicose veins. He tried pushing at them and felt some give; he pushed harder but achieved no result. At length he opened the door and was swept forward into a space full of shattering light. Like hundreds of flashbulbs being set off. For a second, he seemed to be in a place that was all bright movement and crystalline geometry, and then he found himself on a balcony guarded by a sway-backed railing, overlooking a confusing perspective of other balconies and windows and doors and stairways, above and below and beyond, every structure fashioned of black wood. The scene was confusing partly because of the lack of variation in color, and partly because the architecture had such a uniform character, an Escher-esque repetitiveness of form. It reminded him, in sum, of old wooden tenements in New Orleans with their courtyards and step-through windows and rickety stairs. These structures, with their sagging balconies and cockeyed doors and unevenly set windows, had the same louche aura and arthritic crookedness, the same apparent degree of age and disrepair. But unlike New Orleans, there were no planter boxes, no music, no bright curtains, no brightness of any kind apart from the white glare in which everything was bathed. Instead of a sky, the space was roofed with boards and massive beams, but it was unclear if what he saw was a single enormous building or many separate ones. About a dozen people were in sight and, whether on balconies, in the various rooms, or passing along the street of boards below, they went slowly, hesitantly, their movements suggesting that they were on medication. He wasn’t close enough to see their faces, but they appeared to be of ordinary human dimension.
A stairway led down from the balcony on which he stood, and he descended it, passing empty rooms, crossing other balconies. Three floors down, he encountered a pretty black-haired woman leaning against a railing. Her pale blue eyes flicked toward him—they matched the background color of her flowered summer dress. Though she was young, no more than eighteen or nineteen, a consequential term of disappointment was clearly written in her kittenish face.
“I’m looking for a woman named Grace Broillard,” he said.
“Good luck.”
“You know her? Red hair, green eyes. About thirty.”
She refitted her gaze to the crooked black distance. “Goodbye.”
He was silent a moment. “I need some help, okay?”
“Help? That’s a concept I’m not familiar with.”
He rested a hand on the railing next to hers. “What’s wrong with you? I’m not asking you to do anything except answer…”
“I don’t want to talk,” she said. “I don’t want to share your pain. I don’t want to hear about your pitiful life. I’ve…”
“I’d like to ask you some questions, that’s all.”
“I’ve got my own pitiful life to think about. So fuck off.”
He put a hand on her arm, and she looked up angrily; but anger faded, replaced by shock.
“Shit, man!” She placed a hand on his chest as though to feel his heartbeat.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
“You’re alive.” This was voiced in an astonished tone, reminding him of how Grace had behaved toward him on the beach that first day.
“You didn’t notice?” he asked after a pause.
“Un-uh.” She touched his hair. “You’re going to be very popular here…as long as you stay alive.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of how you make me feel. I’m assuming the effect isn’t specific to me.” She smiled. “It’s okay if it is.”
“What did you see just now that made you aware I was alive?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t notice, I guess. Life’s not something you expect to find here.”
Shellane thought about the gray-haired man in the cell. He had ascribed his delayed reaction to his presence to the fact of his being in pain; but that might not be the case. He had stopped only briefly in front of the other occupied cells.
“Maybe you can help me,” she said. “And maybe I can help you find your friend. I bet the jerks have got her.”
“The jerks?”
“Do you even know where you are? The freaks, the creeps. The tall, geeky fucks.” She disengaged from him and retreated along the railing. “If you can’t find her, she’s probably with them.”
“I don’t follow,” he said. “She could be anywhere. Why would you think she’s with them?”
“That’s how it works here. If you know someone from outside the house, you never stray far from them inside it. So if you can’t find her, she’s probably with the jerks.” She went back to staring out at the black tenements. “You’re not going to help me, are you?”
Her shift in mood had the same abruptness as Grace’s withdrawals, the same switched-off quality, and he wondered if this was a condition of the place or if the people who gravitated here were all prone to similar behavior.
“I don’t know if I can help,” he said. “But I need to find this woman before…”
“Yeah, I know. Grace. The love of your life or some shit. Gotta find her.” She walked off several paces. “Keep going through the doors. You’ll hook up eventually.”
“You want to come with me?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if you want to come…”
He eased up behind her, trying to see her face. She was weeping and appeared no longer to recognize that he was there.
Shellane abandoned the stairs, passing through a number of rooms in rapid succession. One contained several items of furniture, notably a dusty standing mirror in which he glimpsed a haggard, rumpled version of himself, and in three of them he found a single person, two women and a man. They treated him much as had the black-haired woman. They did not recognize immediately that he was alive and, once they did, they answered a few questions, asked for his help, then lost interest. Based on their reactions and what they told him, he constructed a hypothesis.
Religious perspectives on the afterlife were, of cour
se, inaccurate; but it might be that none of them were completely inaccurate. Perhaps the afterlife consisted of many planes, and these planes—or rather a misapprehension of their nature—had given rise to the various religions. Might it not be possible, then, that one such plane had been appropriated by a sub-order of creatures whose power was slight, and who were capable of capturing a certain type of enfeebled soul? Perhaps they were themselves enfeebled—creatures perceived as terrifying by the earthbound, but to those who were familiar with them, those whose fear was colored with contempt, they were jerks, creeps, geeks. The uglies. Metaphysical lowlifes. It seemed a ludicrous proposition until he compared it to the ludicrous propositions of the major religions. The salient difference between those propositions and his own was that his was based to a degree on personal observation.
Beside each door were small patches of ridges in the wood similar to that he had found beside the second door he’d tried. He pushed at them in sequence, two at a time, all to no avail. But then he gave the knob of one door a quarter turn, not sufficient to disengage the lock, and the seams beside the door pulsed as if some charge or fluid were passing through them. He was elated to find that some orderly process was involved. There must be a sequence—many sequences—of constrictions that affected the doors, causing them to take you to different quarters of the house. Either he was not strong enough to manipulate the ridges or else there was some other factor involved that he did not understand.
The last door he tried delivered him into a tunnel with walls of black boards…though at first glance they had the irregular, roughened look of wood in a natural state, making it appear that he was walking along inside a huge hollow limb. Like the fist that protruded from the exterior of the house, the boards here were warped into shapes that simulated nature. Thin gaps between them glowed whitely, effecting a dim lighting. The other parts of the house he had investigated—despite the people he’d encountered—had seemed sterile. Lifeless. But here he caught a vibe of animal presence, and as he proceeded along the tunnel he smelled a fecal odor and observed signs of rough occupancy. Gashes and indentations in the wood; boards that had been pried loose. Evidences, he thought, of rage or frustration or some allied emotion. Or perhaps of a vandal’s idiot frenzy. The tunnel wound downward at a steep angle for approximately forty feet, then straightened and narrowed to the point that he could touch both walls at once; after a stretch of about sixty feet it widened by half and, as he rounded a bend, he spotted Grace standing a few yards ahead, her back pressed against the wall. When he called out, she turned her head and stared at him with an aggrieved expression. Drawing near, he saw that she was imprisoned by bands of black wood that encircled her waist and neck, leaving her arms free.
Dagger Key and Other Stories Page 20