Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007

by Barbara Callahan

  As you are my wife, so I am your husband. Symmetry, sanctity.

  This valentine I’ve designed for you, in homage to the sanctity of marriage.

  On the drive from the airport, you will have had time to think: to rehearse. You will repeat what you’ve told me and I will try to appeal to you to change your mind but of course you will not change your mind Can’t return, not for more than an hour for that is the point of your returning: to go away again. You are adamant, you have made up your mind. So sorry please forgive if you can you are genuine in your regret and yet adamant.

  The house, our house: 119 Worth Avenue. Five years ago when we were first married you’d thought that this house was “beautiful” — “special.” Like the old residential neighborhood of similarly large houses on wooded lots, built on a hill overlooking the university arboretum. In this neighborhood known as University Heights most of the houses are solidly built brick with here and there a sprawling white colonial, dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century. Our house is dark-red brick and stucco, two stories and a third part-story between steep shingled roofs. Perhaps it is not a beautiful house but certainly it is an attractive, dignified house with black shutters, leaded-glass windows, a screened veranda, and lifting from the right-hand front corner of the second floor a quaint Victorian structure like a turret. You’d hurried to see this room when the real-estate agent showed us the house but were disappointed when it turned out to be little more than an architectural ornament, impractical even as a child’s bedroom.

  On the phone you’d murmured Thank God no children.

  Since you’ve turned off the car’s motor, the air conditioning has ceased and you will begin to feel a prickling of heat. As if a gigantic breath is being exhaled that is warm, stale, humid, and will envelop you.

  So proud of your promotion, Daryll. So young!

  How you embarrassed me in the presence of others. How in your sweetly oblivious way you insulted me. Of course you had no idea. Of course you meant well. As if the fact that I was the youngest “senior” professor in the humanities division of the university at the time of my promotion was a matter of significance to me.

  As my special field is Philosophy of Mind so it’s “mind” that is valued, not trivial attributes like age, personality. All of philosophy is an effort of the mental faculties to discriminate between the trivial and the profound, the fleeting and the permanent, the many and the One. Pride is not only to be rejected on an ethical basis but on an epistemological basis, for how to “take pride” in one’s self? — in one’s physical being, in which the brain is encased? (Brain being the mysterious yet clearly organic repository of “mind.”) And how to “take pride” in what is surely no more than an accident of birth?

  You spoke impulsively, you had no idea of the crudeness of your words. Though in naiveté there is a kind of subtle aggression. Your artless blunders made me wince in the presence of my older colleagues (for whom references to youth, as to age, were surely unwelcome) and in the presence of my family (who disapproved of my marrying you, not on the grounds that you were too young, but that you were but a departmental secretary, “no match” intellectually for me which provoked me to a rare, stinging reply But who would be an intellectual match for me? Who, and also female?)

  Yet I never blamed you. I never accused you. Perhaps in my reticence. My silences. My long interludes of utter absorption in my work. Never did I speak of the flaws of your character and if I speak of them now it is belatedly and without condemnation. Almost, with a kind of nostalgia. A kind of melancholy affection. Though you came to believe that I was “judgmental” — “hypercritical” — truly you had no idea how I spared you. Many times.

  Here is the first shock: the heat.

  As you leave the car, headed up the flagstone path to the front door. This wall of heat, waves of heat shimmering and nearly visible rushing at you. “Oh! My God.” Several weeks away in mile-high Denver have lulled you into forgetting what a midsummer heat wave in this sea-level Midwestern city can be.

  Stale humid heat. Like a cloud of heavy, inert gas.

  The heat of my wrath. The heat of my hurt. As you are my wife I spared you, rarely did I speak harshly to you even when you seemed to lose all control and screamed at me Let me go! Let me go! I am sorry I never loved you please let me go!

  That hour, the first time I saw your face so stricken with repugnance for me. Always, I will remember that hour.

  As if, for the five years of our cohabitation, you’d been in disguise, you’d been playing a role, and now, abruptly and without warning, as if you hadn’t known what you would say as you began to scream at me, you’d cast aside the disguise, tore off the mask and confronted me. Don’t love you. It was a mistake. Can’t stay here. Can’t breathe. Let me go!

  I was stunned. I had never imagined such words. I saw your mouth moving, I heard not words but sounds, strangulated sounds, you backed away from me, your face was contorted with dislike.

  I told you then: I could not let you go. Would not let you go. For how could I, you are my wife.

  Remembering how on a snowy morning some months before, in late winter, you’d entered my study in my absence and propped up a valentine on the window sill facing my desk. For often you did such things, playful, childlike, not seeming to mind if I scarcely noticed, or, noticing, paid much attention. The valentine came in a bright red envelope, absorbed in my work somehow I hadn’t noticed. Days passed and I did not notice (evidently) and at last you came into my study to open the envelope for me laughing in your light rippling way (that did not sound accusing, only perhaps just slightly wounded) and you drew out of the red envelope a card of a kind that might be given to a child, a kitten peeking out of a watering can and inside a bright red TO MY VALENTINE. And your name. And I stared at this card not seeming to grasp for a moment what it was, a “valentine,” thrust into my face for me to admire.

  Perhaps I was abrupt with you then. Or perhaps I simply turned away. Whereof one cannot speak, there one must be silent. The maddened buzzing of flies is a kind of silence, I think. Like all of nature: the blind devouring force to which Schopenhauer gave the name will.

  Your promise was, at the time of our marriage, you would not be hurt. You would not be jealous of my work, though knowing that my work, as it is the best part of me, must always take priority over my personal life. Freely you’d given this promise, if perhaps recklessly. You would not be jealous of my life apart from you, and you would not be hurt. Bravely pledging I can love enough for both of us!

  And yet, you never grasped the most elemental logistics of my work. The most elemental principles of philosophy: the quest for truth. Of course, I hardly expected you, lacking even a bachelor’s degree from a mediocre land-grant university, to understand my work which is understood by very few in my profession, but I did expect you, as my wife, to understand that there can be no work more exacting, exhausting, and heroic.

  But now we are beyond even broken promises. Inside our house, your valentine is waiting.

  As a younger man only just embarked upon the quest of truth, I’d imagined that the great work of my life would be a definitive refutation of Descartes, who so bluntly separated “mind” and “body” at the very start of modern philosophy, but unexpectedly in my early thirties my most original work has become a corroboration and a clarification of the Cartesian position: that “mind” inhabits “body” but is not subsumed in “body.” For the principles of logic, as I have demonstrated by logical argument, in a systematic geometry in the mode of Spinoza, transcend all merely “bodily” limitations. All this, transmuted into the most precise symbols.

  When love dies, can it be revived? We will see.

  On the front stoop you will ring the doorbell. Like any visitor.

  Not wishing to enter the house by the side door, as you’d done when you lived here.

  Calling in a low voice my name: “Daryll?”

  How strange, Daryll is my name. My given name. Yet I am h
ardly identical with Daryll and in the language of logic it might even be claimed that I am no thing that is Daryll though I am simultaneously no thing that is not-Daryll. Rather, Daryll is irrelevant to what I am, or what I have become.

  No answer. You will try the door knocker. And no answer.

  How quiet! Almost, you might think that no one is home.

  You will take out your house key, carried inside your wallet, in your purse. Fitting the key into the lock you will experience a moment’s vertigo, wishing to think that the key no longer fits the lock; that your furious husband has changed the locks on the doors, and expelled you from his life, as you wish to be expelled from his life. But no, the lock does fit. Of course.

  Pushing open the door. A heavy oak door, painted black.

  Unconsciously you will have expected the interior of the stolid old dark-brick house to be coolly air-conditioned and so the shock of over-warm, stale air, a rancid-smelling air seems to strike you full in the face. “Hello? Daryll? Are you…”

  How weak and faltering, your voice in your own ears. And how your nostrils are pinching at this strange, unexpected smell.

  Rancid-ripe. Sweet as rotted fruit, yet more virulent. Rotted flesh?

  Please forgive!

  Can’t return. Not for more than an hour.

  It was my fault, I had no idea…

  …from the start, I think I knew. What a mistake we’d both made.

  Yes I admit: I was flattered.

  …young, and ignorant. And vain.

  That you, the most brilliant of the younger professors in the department…

  Tried to love you. To be a wife to you. But…

  Just to pack my things. And what I can’t take with me, you can give to Goodwill. Or throw out with the trash.

  …the way they spoke of you, in the department. Your integrity, your genius. And stubborn, and strong…

  If I’d known more! More about men. Like you I was shy, I’d been afraid of men, I think. A virgin at twenty-five…

  No. I don’t think so.

  Even at the beginning, no. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I ever did, Daryll. It was a kind of…

  …like a masquerade, a pretense. When you said you thought you loved me. Wanting so badly to believe…

  Please, Daryll? Can you? Forgive?

  …only just time enough to pack a few things. The divorce can be finalized by our lawyers, we won’t need to meet again.

  The most brilliant young philosopher of his generation, they said of you. And he is ours…

  This masquerade. “Marriage.”

  So badly I wanted to be your wife. I am so ashamed!

  Daryll? Can you forgive me?

  Standing in the doorway of the living room you will see to your astonishment that sheets — bedsheets? — have been carefully drawn over the furniture, like shrouds. One of the smaller Oriental rugs has been rolled up and secured with twine as if in preparation for being hauled away. Books have been removed from the shelves that cover most of two walls of the living room and these books have been neatly placed in cardboard boxes. At the windows, blinds have been tightly drawn shut. Flies buzz and bat against the slats. There’s a green twilit cast to the air as if the house has sunk beneath the surface of the sea.

  The smell: What is it? You think Something that has spoiled, in the kitchen?

  You will not venture into the kitchen at the rear of the house.

  Though you enter the dining room, hesitantly. Seeing on the long oaken table a row of manila folders each neatly marked in black ink: FINANCES, BANK RECORDS, IRS & RECEIPTS, LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

  You will begin now to be frightened. Panic like flames begins to lick at you.

  And that sound: murmurous and buzzing as of muffled voices behind a shut door.

  “Daryll? Are you — upstairs?”

  Telling yourself Run! Escape!

  Not too late. Turn back. Hurry!

  Yet somehow you will make your way to the stairs. The broad front staircase with the dark-cranberry carpeting, worn in the center from years of footsteps predating your own. Like a sleepwalker you grip the banister, to steady your climb.

  Is it guilt drawing you upstairs? A sick, excited sense of what you will discover? What it is your duty, as my wife, to discover?

  You will be smiling, a small fixed smile. Your eyes opened wide yet glassy as if unseeing. And your heart rapidly beating as the wings of a trapped bird.

  If you faint… Must not faint! Blood is draining from your brain, almost you can feel darkness encroaching at the edges of your vision; and your vision is narrowing, like a tunnel.

  At the top of the stairs you pause, to clear your head. Except you can’t seem to clear your head. Here, the smell is very strong. A smell confused with heat, shimmering waves of heat. You begin to gag, you feel nausea. Yet you can’t turn back, you must make your way to the bedroom at the end of the corridor.

  Past the charming little turret-room with the bay window and cushioned window seat. The room you’d imagined might somehow have been yours, or a child’s room, but which proved to be impracticably small.

  The door to the bedroom is shut. You press the flat of your hand against it feeling its heat. Even now thinking almost calmly No. I will not. I am strong enough to resist.

  You dare to grasp the doorknob. Dare to open the door. Slowly.

  How loud the buzzing is! A crackling sound like flame. And the rancid-rot smell, overwhelming as sound that is deafening, passing beyond your capacity to comprehend.

  Something brushes against your face. Lips, eyes. You wave it away, panicked. “Daryll? Are you — here?”

  For there is motion in the room. A plane of something shifting, fluid, alive and iridescent-glittering: yet not human.

  In the master bedroom, too, venetian blinds have been drawn at every window. There’s the greeny undersea light. It takes you several seconds to realize that the room is covered in flies. The buzzing noise you’ve been hearing is flies. Thousands, millions? — flies covering the ceiling, the walls. And the carpet, which appears to be badly stained with something dark. And on the bed, a handsome four-poster bed that came with the house, a Victorian antique, there is a seething blanket of flies over a humanoid figure that seems to have partly melted into the bedclothes. Is this — who is this? The face, or what had been the face, is no longer recognizable. The skin has swollen to bursting like a burnt sausage and its hue is blackened and no longer does it have the texture of skin but of something pulpy, liquefied. Like the manic glittering flies that crawl over everything, this skin exudes a dark iridescence. The body has become a bloated balloon-body, fought over by masses of flies. Here and there, in crevices that had once been the mouth, the nostrils, the ears, there are writhing white patches, maggots like churning frenzied kernels of white rice. The throat of the humanoid figure seems to have been slashed. The bloodied steak knife lies close beside the figure, where it has been dropped. The figure’s arms, covered in flies, are outstretched on the bed as if quivering, about to lift in an embrace of welcome. Everywhere, dark, coagulated blood has soaked the figure’s clothing, the bedclothes, the bed, the carpet. The rot-smell is overwhelming. The carrion-smell. Yet you can’t seem to turn away. Whatever has drawn you here has not yet released you. The entire room is a crimson wound, a place of the most exquisite mystery, seething with its own inner, secret life. Your husband has not died, has not vanished but has been transmogrified into another dimension of being, observing you through a galaxy of tiny unblinking eyes: the buzzing is his voice, multiplied by millions. Flies brush against your face. Flies brush against your lips, your eyelashes. You wave them away, you step forward, to approach the figure on the bed. My valentine! My love.

  Hero Time

  by Andrew Klavan

  Copyright © 2007 by Andrew Klavan

  Art by Jason Eckhardt

  Andrew Klavan is the recipient of two Edgar Allan Poe Awards for his crime novels, and two of his books have been made into feature films, i
ncluding True Crime, directed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say a Word, which starred Michael Douglas. Stephen King has called Andrew Klavan “the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich.” Mr. Klavan’s new book, Damnation Street, was released by Harcourt in 2006.

  ❖

  Every man, were he to tell his secret thoughts, would confess that he occasionally daydreams about rescuing a woman from danger. One autumn night, Danny Easton got his chance.

  It was a Friday night, cool, clear, pleasant. He’d been out with his two best friends from the agency. They had burgers and beer and more beer and parted company around eleven. Danny decided to walk home — get some air, clear his head. He took the avenue along the western edge of the park.

  He’d tramped along a few blocks beside the park wall when a girl of about seventeen crossed the avenue at the intersection ahead of him. She was pretty in a coarse kind of way and she had a nice figure. Danny slowed down a little so he could stay behind her, so he could enjoy the sway of her overcoat and the flash of her legs. That was why he was watching when she reached a gap in the wall and turned into the park.

  It took Danny by surprise. The park was well lighted, but it could be dangerous at night. He wouldn’t have walked across it himself at that hour. As he watched the girl receding into the trees, he began to have a fantasy in which she was attacked by a rapist and he ran heroically to her aid.

  Just then — as if his imagination had overflowed into reality — she actually was attacked. Two men scuttled out from behind some rocks. One of them grabbed the girl around the throat and dragged her off into the shadows under a cluster of plane trees. The other hunched after them into the dark.

  It happened in a finger-snap and Danny’s world was suddenly all rush and heartbeat. He was over the wall. He was running tear-ass across the grass. His mind had shifted gears and was racing faster than events so that things seemed to be unfolding in slow motion. He seemed to have time to meditate on every detail.