"So?" Kenner coaxed.
Collins handed the sheet back. "If she was raped, then I’ll concede that Fisher probably did it. But it doesn’t jive with his profile—"
"That profile was done postmortem. What use is it? He killed himself, he killed her, so of course he raped her. What could be clearer?" It was to Kenner’s credit that his pointed questions were clearly not rhetorical.
"Of course it’s clear, Leo," Collins said. "I simply don’t believe it." He shrugged. "And for me, that throws a monkey wrench into our whole investigation. If Brian Fisher didn’t rape her, who the hell did?"
"Uh-huh. Well, I believe that he did rape her. But the point is, Fred, even if he didn’t, then the bald and unattractive fact remains that he did indeed kill her, and that’s what we’re interested in here. Am I right?"
Collins said nothing.
~ * ~
It is ten years later and Maude and Peter are talking, filling the air with chitchat that is better than discussing their love life, which has become nonexistent in the last few weeks, though neither can pinpoint why.
Maude says, in answer to a question Peter asked her hours before, "No, they never really found her murderer." She turns her back to Peter so she can put on a blue negligee. She believes that his eyes are on her, and she resents it.
From the bed, with the blankets pulled up to his chin against the cold, early winter night, Peter says, "Someone confessed. I was talking to Lynn today"—the house’s previous owner; she’s holding the mortgage and keeps in regular touch—"and she said that someone confessed."
"I know that." Maude turns, faces him.
"You look very nice," Peter says, and smiles appreciatively.
"Thanks," she whispers, as if not wanting to acknowledge his remark.
"Really," he says with enthusiasm. "You look very fetching. Do you wear that every night?" He pauses, though not long enough for her to answer, then goes on, frowning a little, "Yes, I guess you do."
She nods slightly, as if embarrassed. She indicates the negligee. "It’s getting too cold for this thing."
"I’ll keep you warm," he says with a leer.
"Sure, thanks," she says without enthusiasm, and comes to bed, climbs in next to him, but lays on her back and puts her hands behind her head. "I still hear her," she says.
"Our ghost?" he says.
She nods.
"Same time, same place?" He grins.
She looks sharply at him. "Don’t joke about it. Please."
He looks at her a moment, decides she’s being serious, then says, "Sorry. It’s just that I’ve never heard her—"
"So you think I’m crazy?"
"No." Silence.
"That was a very unconvincing negative, Peter."
Silence.
She glances at him. His gaze is on the ceiling. She says his name. He looks at her, grins. "Let’s make love," he says.
She looks away. "I can’t. I’m sorry."
He sighs loudly. "Can you give me a reason?”
“Do I need to?"
"I asked for one."
A short pause, then, "I don’t have one, I guess." Another pause. "I’m just not in the mood.”
“Headache?"
"No."
"Maybe you don’t find me attractive anymore?”
“No."
"No?"
"Yes, I find you attractive—"
"It’s her, isn’t it? It’s your ghost."
Silence.
"She’s made you . . . shy, or something.”
“That’s absurd."
Peter shakes his head quickly. "I understand now. I understand completely. You think she’s watching us." He smiles, though he realizes it’s a mistake; he can’t help himself. "You think some woman who was murdered ten years ago is going to watch us making love so you . . . just don’t make love. My God, my God, that’s—"
"She was murdered here, dammit. In this house. In this very room, for all we know—"
"Not true. She was murdered downstairs. That’s what Lynn told me."
"Oh, fuck Lynn!"
"I may have to." Peter closes his eyes. He’s put his foot in it now, he realizes. He whispers, eyes still closed. "Sorry. That was stupid."
Silence.
He looks at Maude. She’s crying softly. He sighs. "Really," he says. "I didn’t mean it. It was a real, real stupid thing to say."
Maude shakes her head.
"That’s not why you’re crying?" Peter guesses. Maude nods. She manages, "I’m crying because of her."
"Lynn?"
"No, for God’s sake! Will you shut up about her. I’m talking about Anne Case. I . . . feel her in the house. I feel that she is very sad, and that she needs someone. A friend."
"You?"
Maude shakes her head."I couldn’t, even if I wanted." A pause. "And I do want—"
"Now you’re spooking me."
She says, as if in sudden revelation, "Let’s make love. Now. Right now!"
Peter pulls back from her. His brow furrows. "What an invitation to a hard-on."
"But . . . I mean it. Let’s make love. You don’t want to make love?"
"Of course I do. But not because you think your . . . friend is going to be watching. Not to show her you sympathize, or that you understand, or that you’re willing to share me with her—"
"That’s disgusting! That’s repulsive! How can you talk like that? How can I make love to someone who talks like that?"
"Maude," he says, "you’re sounding very unlevelheaded."
She says nothing for a moment. She wants to say, You mean, I sound female right? but she’s not sure which way that will take them, or the discussion. She’s trying to steer the discussion, and she knows it. She says, "I don’t mean to sound that way." She pauses, adds, "Some of what you say has merit."
"Some of it?"
"Most of it." Another pause. "All of it."
Now Peter’s amused. "You’re kidding. You wanted to share me with a ghost just to show her you could be her friend?" He smiles. The smile becomes a quick chuckle.
Maude says, "I didn’t realize it until you brought it up."
"It’s incredible. It sounds like a National Enquirer headline: Woman Shares Husband with Ghost. It’s a hoot."
"Please. You’re being unkind."
"To her?"
"Who else?"
"Darling, she does not exist. You may not believe that, but it’s regrettably true."
Maude says nothing. She knows that Peter will come around sooner or later.
They don’t make love that night.
THREE
The middle-aged woman who wrote of her own death couldn’t get it right because part of her was still bound to the earth and so she looked at death incorrectly.
"The missusgathered," she wrote, "and wept weeree teers invane for the maen lying ded."
What she saw with the misted eye of her memory was the end of existence. She saw a body being shuffled into the ground and dirt thrown over it and decay starting.
She wrote, "And he had ben a goudman, yes, and thair were meneechildren left two weepand remember."
As if it were a dream, she disguised herself from herself by changing her sex and her marital status (for in life she had been divorced, without children).
Only sometimes, when she looked back, she saw a silver thread rising up from the man’s body; she wrote of it, "Then the spidersthair were hard at wirk awl atonce tieing himup," although this characterization annoyed her and made her feel that she was being dishonest, though she couldn’t imagine why.
When she slept, she dreamt of her previous life, of the man she had loved then, of her mother, of a niece she had cared for. She walked with these people in her dreams, or she caressed them, or talked with them of the things which had once concerned her. And when she woke she remembered snippets of these dreams, the quick glimpse of a face, a smell that came and went as quickly as the beat of a wing. She told herself—as did many people here who had had similar dream
s—that these were visions of things to come, people yet to arrive, situations not yet formed; "those on the horizon," they were called.
There were names in her dreams, too. She remembered some of them clearly. Rebecca, Mark, Jason. Like many others, she mouthed the names from her dreams often. She whispered them under her breath, sang them, said them aloud at odd moments, surprising herself with them, as if they had escaped, unbidden, from within her. And like the others here, she had no idea what names were for. She knew only that when she said them, they brought her a feeling of happiness, or sadness or, sometimes, a feeling of deep closeness that made her skin tingle.
Her father was here, though he was not nearby. He was in one of the cities. And she saw him, too, in her dreams, though distantly; in her previous life, she had known him only a little. He had died when she was just starting school.
She wrote, "The missusgathered wept weery teers for the woman, buthey needant." She reread it and wondered about it. It spoke some truth to her, she realized, but it was a prickly and uncomfortable truth because she could not get hold of it. She stared at what she had written for a long time, trying to fathom it.
Elsewhere, others were doing similar things. Some who painted, some who wrote music, or sculpted, or wrote—all in answer to a great need within them—stepped back from their creations and wondered at them, heard the whisper of new truth in them, but could not hear it well enough to make sense of it.
But this did not happen to everyone. And when it happened, it was like the unexplained passing of a chill through the body (when it is said, perhaps, that someone has "just walked over my grave").
~ * ~
David knew that he was going to go back. He knew also that he’d have no trouble getting there.
It was here with him even now, in this hospital room—the smell of pine tar and dust and the distant sound of happy voices.
He’d have no trouble getting back.
It was nearly as simple as . . . stepping over.
("David Case?"
"Yes. Who is this?"
"My name is Leo Kenner. I’m a detective with the Homicide Division of the Batavia Police Department. Sir, do you have a sister named Anne Case?"
"I do. She lives in Batavia. She’s fine."
"I’m very sorry, Mr. Case, but—"
"She’s fine, I told you! I spoke with her very recently. I know what you’re going to tell me.
You’re going to tell me that something’s happened to her. Some . . . accident. You’re going to tell me that she’s hurt. But you’re wrong."
"I’m very sorry, Mr. Case. Your sister is dead. She was murdered."
Silence.
"Did you hear what I told you, Mr. Case?"
Nothing.
"I must ask you to come back to Batavia, sir, to identify your sister’s body."
"Murdered? My sister wasn’t murdered. She lives alone. She’s always lived alone. She can’t help it. People upset her. Things upset her. No one murders a creature like her. Who would want to murder her? You’re mistaken. You’re simply mistaken. Murder happens to people who are . . . obtrusive. She isn’t. This person, this body you’ve found; how was it murdered, Mr. Kenner?"
"I can understand your reluctance, sir—")
It was the injustice of it, after all. Like killing a child, like putting a knife into a child again and again and again.
~ * ~
It is the very minute of Anne’s murder and she knows that her killer stands not far away and that she cannot escape him. She has tried escaping him before. When his intention was not to murder her but to overpower her, to rape her.
"Hello, Anne," he says now. "I think you were expecting me."
She says nothing. She will not acknowledge him. She will not give him that satisfaction.
She hears the closet door slam against the wall. She flinches. She does not turn.
Moments pass.
She stares hard at the dying leaf of the Dracena, at the pathways of the veins; she sees that they change, from green to red to brown.
She knows this man wants her death. He’s told her so. ("You can’t help it, Anne, my love. I’m going to murder you someday. I need it!")
He says now, "I have a knife, Anne."
She sees the dying leaf of the Dracena very clearly. She puts her hand on a small, white ceramic watering can near the Dracena. She sighs. Both she and the plant are going to die, she knows. She whispers, "Let me. . ." but does not finish the sentence—Let me water my plant. She feels that it’s a ludicrous thing to say, now, and she does not want to appear ludicrous in front of this man.
"Let you what, my love? Let you live?"
She says nothing. She realizes that she’s shivering from fear.
He says, "You’re toying with me, Anne."
Her eyes water. She wants to plead with him, but she can’t. It will do no good, she realizes.
He growls, "Don’t toy with me, Anne!"
What can she do? She turns her back completely to him. She makes an offering of herself. Then, desperately, though for only a moment, she wants a field to run in, open sky. It’s a memory from childhood. She understands this. She pities herself for it.
She knows that her death is at hand.
"And what if I told you that I loved you, Anne?"
She smiles a little. She thinks, Of course you don’t. How could you love anyone? Then, all at once, she feels the life, like wakefulness, slipping quickly from her. She gasps. It does no good. This surprises her, frightens her; all her life her breathing has worked.
But it doesn’t work now.
Her gasp is no more than a sound.
The air stops at the back of her throat, then the Dracena’s dying leaf sweeps past her and the dark hardwood floor comes up.
She’s in a wide tunnel.
A bright and friendly light shines at its mouth.
She moves happily toward the light.
FOUR
David threw his blanket and sheet off, swung his feet to the floor, stood.
And grew suddenly dizzy.
He crumbled, caught himself with his hands, so he was on all fours on the gray linoleum. "Damn!" he whispered. He should have realized. He’d been in bed for—what?—five days? Longer? Of course he was going to be weak. He had to give himself time.
He sat back on his haunches, so his long arms hung limply at his sides. He realized that he could not stand. An edge of dizziness floated in his head like water, and it started a hard pellet of nausea in his stomach. He leaned forward again, arms crossed at his stomach, eyes closed. The nausea dissipated, though not completely.
He took a long, deep breath and rocked gently on his haunches. How very connected to this life he was—to his bone and flesh and muscle. His stomach fought him, his head fought him. It was not the way of things in the whole of the universe, he knew. There were places where gravity seemed to work in reverse, and where muscle and bone, foot and hand might easily be creations of the soul and of memory.
He stopped rocking. The nausea was returning, it grew in his stomach like an egg.
He rocked.
The nausea retreated.
Eventually, he felt that he could stand. He pushed himself slowly to his feet and stood very unsteadily for a few seconds. Then, all at once, he found himself sitting on the bed, his heart pumping hard and fast, his head lowered.
He asked himself, Why do I want to go back? For Anne? He could not answer it concretely. He thought that of course it was for Anne. To find out why she had been the victim of such obscenity. He needed to know the answer to that question as much as he had needed anything in his life—as much as he had needed air on that hot afternoon five years ago, when the lake had closed around him and tried to suck the life from his body.
But—it was obvious—if he went back, he might not return.
Was that all right? Did that agree with him? Did it soothe him?
He didn’t want to think so. He wanted to believe that he wanted one adventure—this lif
e—done before he launched himself into another—the next.
He stood. Quickly, he realized that his legs and head and stomach were going to go along with his idea of leaving the hospital.
~ * ~
In one of the other cities on the Other Side, a man sat eating a green salad in his small, well-lighted apartment. The salad was without dressing, but the man had always preferred it plain and he ate it hungrily.
He was alone in the apartment. The walls were light blue, the ceiling white plaster, the floors bare wood. The man had lived in the apartment for a very long time.
He wore a gray sports coat and tattered brown pants. He was shoeless. His hands were long and thin and he kept them scrupulously clean. He sported a three-day growth of beard, however, and had been giving thought to letting the beard mature, though it was not what concerned him now.
As he ate, he thought about the names that he’d been recording in his notebook. And he thought about the dreams.
The names came to him from many sources. He was a man who was well liked and much spoken to, and there were many people who knew what he was doing in the apartment. So they shared the names with him (though they didn’t use the word names; the names were words, primarily, though some people called them symbols, and others called them manifestations). They shared their dreams, too. Like people everywhere, they were interested in knowing themselves better, and they supposed (as the man had suggested) that the names and the dreams were reflective of their inner selves, not merely—as so many believed—reflective of "those on the horizon," which, the man thought, was simply so much superstition, on a par with the widely held belief that there were lives after this life. He believed otherwise. He believed that there had been a previous life.
He finished his salad and took his wooden bowl to the sink to wash it. He turned on the faucet, waited a moment while the pipes in the old building clanged and cursed, and at last a spurt of water belched out, hit the bowl and splashed onto his pants. He backed up, though it was too late. He looked down at himself. Well, I can’t go outside like this, he thought. It looks like I’ve peed my pants.
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