by Gideon, John
This last thought shook Lindsay, and her iron-woman bearing faltered. “That’s not a fair question! Lorna wasn’t herself during—”
“It is a fair question,” insisted Nora. “Your sister was kind and decent. She lived to bring joy to others—in her art, her friendship, her generosity. She would have wanted nothing more than for us to help and love each other. The best way to keep her memory alive is to be like her, don’t you think?” Lindsay suddenly broke down. Tears gushed from her blue eyes, and her mouth contorted in a stifled sob. She had fought back this onslaught since that dark hour on Saturday morning when the coroner had called from Greely’s Cove.
Nora rose and went to her younger daughter, now her only daughter, and wrapped her in motherly arms, cradled her head as she cried, daubed at her tears with wadded Kleenex. They huddled in a pair of dinette chairs, patting and stroking each other’s heads until the onslaught finally subsided.
Red-eyed and stuffy-nosed, Lindsay said, “Oh, maybe you’re right, Mother. I’ve been acting like a slug.”
“No you haven’t, dear,” said Nora, caressing her daughter’s blond hair. “You’ve been acting like your father, that’s all. I’ve always said that you inherited his spirit.”
“I’ll back off over this custody thing,” said Lindsay. “I’ll even try to be helpful—really I will. But I’m going to stay on guard, Mother. If things start to go wrong for Carl, I’m going to be on hand to take care of Jeremy. Lorna would’ve wanted that, don’t you think?”
Nora cradled her daughter’s head against her shoulder again and sighed. “Yes, dear, you may be right. You just may be right at that.”
Mitch Nistler woke from the deep sleep of exhaustion and, as usual, panicked. He was late again. The old Westclox alarm clock on his fourth-hand bed table showed 8:38, and dust-specked sunlight streamed through a grimy bedroom window. He should have been up and at work long before the winter sun had risen this far.
He climbed out of his lumpy bed with its tattered blankets and herded himself toward the bathroom, stepping awkwardly over a clutter of magazines, beer cans, and fast-food refuse. While urinating, he became aware of a strange new reality: He was not hung over. His head was clear and free of the familiar ache. His stomach was not threatening revolt. Tired though he was, he did not feel alcohol-sick, as he did on most mornings.
Then a dam burst in his head, and a torrent of memory surged into his consciousness. He saw his hand with a scalpel, poised above Lorna Trosper’s naked body, saw the blade slicing through her cold, clean flesh, the cherry-red blood welling out. He saw himself shoving a trocar into her innocent heart and heard the whine of the aspirator as it sucked. He smelled formaldehyde and humectants and sassafras and lavender—
My God! Had he actually done it?
The rest came back to him in mental gobs, and he staggered out of the bathroom, clothed only in yellow-stained undershorts, a gawky little man with fish-white skin and wild, frightened eyes. In the dead, dark hours of the morning he had transported the embalmed corpse of Lorna Trosper to this very house on the forested edge of Greely’s Cove. In his tortured little mind, he had called it a homecoming.
Between the entrances of his bedroom and the kitchen stood a door that was peeling twenty layers of ancient paint. Beyond it was a narrow stairway to the second floor.
He pulled open the peeling door and trudged up the dusky, narrow stairway, dodging cobwebs. The stairs creaked and snapped under his meager weight. On the upper landing was a pair of doors, and beyond each a tiny bedroom. He halted at the top of the stairs, where dust and grime gritted against his bare soles. Until now he had never used the upstairs, because he had been too lazy to attack the clutter and filth that had accumulated there during past tenancies.
He went to the door on the right and shoved it slowly open, stirring the mingled smells of sassafras, lavender, and other perfumes that hung thick in the air. The corpse of Lorna Trosper, encircled in feeble sunlight that poured through a crusty window, lay on a dilapidated bed, still cocooned in the clean sheet that Mitch had expropriated from the Chapel of the Cove. With her golden hair splayed against the moth-eaten mattress and her satiny skin aglow, she looked every inch an angel.
Mitch’s breath caught. He had embalmed and prepared many corpses during his tenure at the chapel, but he had never before succeeded in creating beauty like this. The tiny bedroom itself—despite the garbage heaped against its dingy walls—seemed a chapel, the old bed an altar. The perfumes that emanated from Lorna defeated the stink of dirt and neglect. Gazing upon her, scarcely daring to breathe or swallow, Mitch again felt justified for having taken her as his own. True, he had stolen and deceived. He had cremated an empty casket and packed its less-than-human ashes into a small jug that old man Kronmiller would unwittingly sell to Lorna’s relatives as the real thing. He had stolen Lorna’s body and embalmed it without the family’s permission—itself a crime that could land him back in Walla Walla. But he was untroubled: No one would ever know what he had done. Lorna would be his—not forever, of course, because embalming is far from permanent, despite the crap that funeral directors give out to their clients. For a little while, at least, she would be his—until bacteria and insects started their hellish work in earnest.
He approached the bed and touched the cool white sheet that clothed her. He pulled it downward until an alabaster breast lay bare.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you better than this,” he whispered. “I wish I could give you a castle. I wish—”
A small noise came from behind him, a tiny crack of ancient linoleum. He stopped breathing, eyes wide. Just the old house settling, he told himself. Old houses are full of tiny, unknowable sounds.
“I can’t give you much,” he said, gazing down again at Lorna’s sleeping face. “I can only give you myself. You’ll never know how much—”
The sound again—the creak-crack of brittle floorboards under shifting weight. A clammy chill enveloped his bare neck and shoulders, and he whirled around. His lungs heaved at what he saw, and his legs turned to ice water. Standing before him, smiling so tightly that all his perfect white teeth shone brightly, was a young boy, his huge hazel eyes gleaming with unnatural light.
Mitch choked on a clot of saliva, and he would have pissed himself had he not just emptied his bladder. He shook and shivered, and his hands flew reflexively to his crotch as he tried to hide his near-nakedness. His brain grabbled for any possible explanation of how this boy had gotten in, or who he was.
Who!
The recognition hit him. On rare occasions he had seen this boy around town, always in the shepherding company of his mother. Citizens had whispered behind their backs, clucking and shaking their heads, lamenting the fact that his mother had not put him away long ago. The boy was Jeremy Trosper. Lorna’s son.
Jeremy had a wicked, wicked grin. And a crazy, inhuman glint in his eye. Mitch Nistler’s world would come crashing down yet again, this time with brutal finality. Back to prison, for sure. With no chance of escape, because this little shit would go straight to the police, and—
“There’s no need to worry about that,” said the boy with a distinctly British accent, though Mitch had said nothing aloud; he’d been too terrified to speak. “You’ve done rather well, actually. I’m impressed; I really am.”
With a little nod of his head Jeremy turned to leave, but he paused at the door to look back at Mitch, who stood frozen, except for his open jaw that quivered like a new leaf in a spring breeze.
“I meant what I said. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Then Jeremy was gone, leaving only the sound of creaking stairs behind him.
At noon Carl Trosper’s former mother-in-law talked him into eating something, if only a small salad and a bowl of soup. A light meal usually helps a hangover, she declared, and he clearly needed help. Though four Excedrin and three cups of black coffee had dampened his gnawing headache, and a near-scalding shower had sweated out most of the evil humors he’d imbibed
the previous night, he was far from a hundred percent yet. He suspected that his eyes looked like a pair of piss-holes in the snow. Maybe something to eat would help, he allowed, so Nora bustled off to the kitchen, eager to serve.
The three of them—Carl, Lindsay, and Nora—had spent several remarkably civil hours together in the living room of the little house at 116 Second Avenue, coffee-ing and conversing like mature adults about Lorna and Jeremy, reliving past joys and hardships, venturing hope for the future. To Carl’s amazement and relief, Lindsay had lost her combativeness, having apparently given up her idea of challenging him for custody of his son. Though far from gushy in her endorsement of Carl’s intentions concerning the future, she was nonetheless coolly conciliatory.
After Nora went into the kitchen, Lindsay offered to help Carl get control of the yard around the place, and he remembered that her hobby was gardening and landscaping. Lorna had always coveted her sister’s way with green things.
“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed,” Lindsay said, “but the shrubbery is almost all dead—which is a little strange, since all the neighbors’ yards are in good shape. I doubt we can save any of it.”
Indeed, Carl had noticed the yellowing junipers and ragged spirea, once so lush and beautiful—special joys to Lorna. Even allowing for winter nakedness, the spirea looked withered and brittle, as did the lilacs that grew along the property lines.
“I’d appreciate your help,” he said. “My thumb has never been very green. In fact, it’s burnt umber.”
“By the way, Carl,” Nora called from the kitchen, “that son of yours is certainly getting his ration of sleep, isn’t he?”
Carl glanced at his watch and decided it wouldn’t hurt to check on the boy. He came back from Jeremy’s room, looking unsteady.
“What’s wrong?” asked Lindsay, “He’s gone,” said Carl. “His bed is made—like it wasn’t even slept in.”
“I saw him go to bed last night,” said Lindsay. “I even tucked him in.”
“He obviously made the bed when he got up,” said Nora, “though I’ll admit it seems a little out of character for a thirteen-year-old boy.”
“But when did he get up?” Carl asked, chewing on a thumbnail.
“Apparently very early,”said Nora.
Just then the front door opened and Jeremy walked in, looking freshly scrubbed and well groomed, dressed as he had been the previous day in a Nike T-shirt and sweatpants. The only addition was a gray hooded rain parka of lightweight Gore-Tex. After hanging his parka in the entry way closet, he sat down in an armchair and crossed his legs.
“I hope I didn’t worry anybody,” he said with a trace of accent that Carl found strange. “I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went for a walk.”
“You mean you’ve been walking all this time?” asked Carl incredulously. “Something like five hours?”
“A little more than that, I should think,” answered the boy, sounding very adult despite his smooth, childlike voice. “I was thinking about Mom, you see. She meant so very much to me, and walking just seemed like a good thing to do.”
There it was, thought Carl: the evidence of pain he had yearned to see in his son. It would have comforted him had it not been delivered with such polished maturity, had it not seemed contrived. There was not a glitter of tears in the boy’s hazel eyes, nor a hint of sorrow in his handsome face.
“Jeremy,” he said, “I think you and I should have a little talk. Why don’t we go to your room?”
Fifteen minutes later Carl returned to the living room alone, having closed Jeremy’s door behind him. Nora brought him his soup and salad on a TV tray.
“Well, what did you talk about?” asked Lindsay.
“We negotiated a little agreement,” answered Carl, talking around a bite of lettuce. “He’s free to come and go as he pleases—during the daylight hours, that is—if he tells me where he’s going. And if he has a change of plans after leaving the house, he’s to call and let me know. We were both very reasonable, and he seems to accept the fact that I’m in charge.” Carl looked pleased with himself, and he shoveled more salad into his mouth.
“Isn’t that a lot of freedom for a child who’s undergoing therapy?” remarked Lindsay. “Don’t you think a tighter rein might be advisable?”
“Not until he demonstrates that he needs it. I keep trying to remember what I was like at his age, and I’ve got to admit that Jeremy seems a hell of a lot more sophisticated and mature than I was. My parents let me come and go pretty much as I wanted, so it seems only logical that—”
“But you were undoubtedly a perfectly healthy, normal child,” protested Lindsay, “and you had both parents to look after you. That’s a major difference.”
“Good point,” said Carl. “I should probably get Dr. Craslowe’s advice on this thing, shouldn’t I?”
“It certainly wouldn’t hurt,” said Lindsay. “You’ll have your chance in an hour. Our appointment with him is at one-thirty.”
The three of them chatted awhile longer, each glancing now and again down the short hallway at Jeremy’s closed door. Carl caught himself doing it after noticing the others.
“He was reading when I left him,” he volunteered, hoping to satisfy Nora’s and Lindsay’s curiosity about what Jeremy might be doing in there. “He says he’s become quite a bookworm since he learned to read. Judging from the mountain of books in his room, I’d say that’s an understatement. I wonder where he got them all.”
“It’s truly remarkable,” said Nora. “You may have a prodigy on your hands, Carl. I just hope—” A shadow of apprehension darkened her face, and she left her thought unsaid.
At 1:15, Nora announced that Lindsay and Carl should leave for their appointment with Dr. Craslowe at Whiteleather Place, and Lindsay volunteered to drive them in her Saab. After buckling herself into the driver’s seat, she lamented the gathering clouds in the northwestern sky. The first tentative drops of rain were falling by the time they turned off Second Avenue onto Frontage Street.
“You must have had quite a blowout last night with your buddy, the police chief,” said Lindsay as they headed south down the main drag, parallel to the shore. “Has the piper been fully paid?”
Carl smiled at this reference to his hangover. “We had a lot of catching up to do, and I’ll admit that we caught damn near all of it.”
Lindsay turned west on Sockeye Drive, and the village of Greely’s Cove started to recede in favor of dense woods. A glance at Carl’s disturbed face aroused her curiosity.
“You were saying?”
Carl felt an itch to share the things Stu had told him, if only to vent his own wild, inexact apprehensions and to check Lindsay’s reaction against his own. How would she react, he wondered, if she heard that several of the missing citizens of Greely’s Cove had paid visits in the dead of night to people they had left behind?
Like old Elvira Cashmore, for example, the aged widow whose lawn Carl tended as a boy. Scarcely two weeks after her disappearance, Sig Knutson, longtime Little League coach and Elvira’s occasional escort to movies and picnics, called the police station at three in the morning, his voice quaking with fright. Elvira had just visited him, he croaked over the phone. She’d somehow managed to climb onto the roof of his garage, which offered access to his second-story bedroom window, and had thumped on the glass to wake him. Later, in an interview with Stu, the old boy said that Elvira had beckoned him to follow her, wanting him to join in what Sig thought was a “feast.” Too, she had spoken of “dreaming”—at least that’s what Sig thought she’d said, because he’d been too frightened to open the window in order to hear her clearly. He’d fetched a flashlight and beamed it against her face. Much of Elvira’s cheek and neck were gone—-bloody bones showing through scabby holes in the flesh; naked stems of arteries and veins, twitching with her heartbeats. And in her eyes, an unhealthy gleam that seemed hungry. Sig’s hysterical screaming had driven her away.
Like Peggy Birch, the s
choolteacher who disappeared in November and allegedly visited her husband, George, several weeks later in the blackest part of the night. The particulars of this visit were indistinct, since George had not called the police to file a report but had confided in a couple of friends the following day. Something about Peggy’s visit had been extraordinary, although that was hardly the right word. The sight of his wife had turned George into a raving, jittering maniac. The following night he had loaded his old Remington shotgun, rammed the muzzle between his teeth, and tripped the trigger with his big toe, blowing most of his head off.
Like Wendell Greenfield, the fifty-one-year-old service-station operator who disappeared in October and visited his wife, Debra, on a dark November night. During a raging storm, yet. Pounding on the back door, insisting that she follow him somewhere, until she grabbed the family revolver from a kitchen drawer and scared him off. Most of the flesh of his right arm was missing, and his voice seemed to come from inside Debra’s own head. Needless to say, she was frightened out of her ever-loving wits.
How would Lindsay respond to these things? Carl wondered. Would she simply dismiss them as the raving of grief-sick survivors? Or try to reconcile the similarities among the stories by calling them collective hallucinations or dreams? He wanted to know.
So he told her everything Stu had related the night before, quickly and matter-of-factly, omitting the florid adjectives that Stu had used. And he told her about his friend’s creeping worry that something evil had settled in Greely’s Cove, a darkness that “sort of hangs in the air like it’s not quite invisible,” a darkness that throws the local life processes out of kilter.
And he told her about Lorna’s suicide note.