He also had many books in his library. Those that weren’t self-written were donations from friends. He had pored over these books many times, always struck by the similarity between what they recorded and what people had shared verbally with him about their dreams. "But these are not dreams," he had decided, meaning—though he had could not have verbalized it—these are not fictions.
He changed his pants and left the room. The stairs to the ground level were long and poorly lit and they moaned ominously. (There were many rooms and apartments in the building but most were uninhabited; most of those that were inhabited were underground. Many people preferred such apartments, though he couldn’t imagine why. "I feel more at home underground," these people said.)
When he reached the bottom floor, he went out, onto the street.
It was full of people. Some walked quickly in the bright, early morning light, and he recognized them because they were always the same people. They moved with their heads down and their arms close to their sides, their eyes apparently unmoving. Once, he had asked one of them, "Where are you going this way?" (meaning so quickly and with so little attention to the surroundings; it was, as far as the man was concerned, a very strange way to move about in this beautiful place). That person had stopped suddenly and had given the man a quick and startled look. "I’m going to the countryside. Picnic. Hike," he said, and then had continued walking.
The man knew what picnics and hikes were. He’d been on many picnics and had taken many hikes. But the point was that the countryside would always be there and rushing to it with one’s head down neglected the beauty of the city.
Another person had said, "But there is no time." It was a very odd thing to say. What was time?
He thought now, as he walked, of the book he had read the previous evening. The book had been given to him by a woman who lived in his building. It spoke of many things which other people had spoken of; but it also spoke of something new. Famlees. And, in the same sentence, it referred to mutherfahthr, sons and dawters. This, in itself, was not wonderfully new. Several of the other books had spoken of phauthors or fathrs, or fahthers, and of mawthers (mothers, muthars) which he felt confident were the same as mutherfahthr. (They also spoke of mahmahs and dadees, though he had guessed that there was no connection.) But the book took all the others a giant step further. It linked mutherfahthr, sons and dawters under the collective word famlee.
"Theze r famlees," the book read. "And tha r guod comfertibel, distent." He knew what the woman meant at once, because as soon as he’d read the words his skin tingled a little and he felt warm. And the word that came from him often came from him then: "Shannon." And like all the other times the word had come from him, it carried with it a feeling of contentment and peace. But there was something else, too. Something that had never come to him before when he had mouthed the word—the mental image of a woman with red hair, large eyes, straight nose, lips slightly parted. This face lingered in his head for a long while, and then very slowly dissipated, like a morning mist.
It occurred to him then that the word Shannon had something to do with that woman. Perhaps it described her, somehow—had to do with her total self. She was Shannon which meant that she had red hair, large eyes, et cetera. Perhaps it meant that she brought him, particularly, the kind of warm and tingly feeling that he had first felt the night before, when he had come across the word famlee. He dwelt on these ideas as he walked.
He turned a corner and saw one of the faceless, clearly a child, at the opposite end of the avenue. He thought that the child had come out of a house that many of the newly arrived were seen to come out of (a large house with open doorways and windows; a house that no one used precisely because it was one of the houses that the newly arrived—those who were not faceless—came from) and the man’s thoughts turned abruptly from Shannon to this child.
He often encountered the faceless when he walked the city’s streets, and, like the people around him, he avoided them. Now he thought better of it. This one had such an air of helplessness about him. And fear, too. It was obvious in the way he held his arms outstretched, in the way he walked, as if every footfall held the promise of pain.
It was clear that the child was in a place with which he was unfamiliar, a place that frightened him. Just like one of the newly-born. But the newly-born very quickly overcame their fear. After a few moments, they became ecstatic, as if they had been away for a long time and now were home. The faceless, like this child, came and went as if they walked about in darkness, in a land of sorrow.
And, usually, they were quickly gone. They came and went like dreams. Very rarely, they stayed.
The child called out, "Mama, mama." Fear lay over him like sweat. "Mama, where are you? I can’t see you!"
The man looked on wonderingly. He stepped forward, caught the child’s hand. The child gasped. The man peered hard into the darkness that was the child’s face. He saw all but nothing. Beneath the darkness there was a face constricted in panic; it was like seeing a face through dark ice. The man held the boy’s hand tightly.
"What do you want?" the man said. "What is Mama?" He had no pity for the boy; he had no reason for pitying any creature here, so his tone was flat and apparently stern.
The boy was dressed in black swimming trunks. The man had no idea what swimming trunks were. The boy was wet; his blond hair, which outlined the darkness that was his face, clung to the sides of his head. He shivered.
The man said again, "What is Mama?"
The boy said, "Mama?" It was clear that he was weeping. The man knew about weeping. He had heard others weep, especially while they slept. And he had been told that he wept, as well. And laughed, too. Though he also laughed when he was awake. He did not weep when he was awake.
He said, "Why do you do that?"—meaning, Why do you weep? He thought that if the boy could answer the question it would lead him to an understanding of his own weeping, and to the weeping of others.
But then the boy was gone, as quickly and as without preamble as so many others. Like a star obliterated by clouds.
The man continued walking at once. There would be other faceless ones, he knew, and he would learn from them.
~ * ~
What David remembered most vividly about Anne was the aura of aloneness that surrounded her. It was not what he wanted most to remember about her, not the thing that other people noticed (mostly because they never got a chance to know her well enough to see it). Other people thought of her as "disarmingly intelligent," and "softly pretty" but with "an edge that makes you realize she’s not someone to be toyed with," and as "vaguely eccentric, all alone in that huge house, writing poetry." Who knew her as well as he, after all? He was her twin. He had known her all her life and had spent most of those years in awe of her because she so deftly and gracefully concealed her real self behind a facade of strength and easy wit and affability.
Who else knew her as well as he? Who knew that behind her apparent strength and wit and affability, she wanted desperately to be alone?
It was not that she disliked other people. She thought of herself as "inalterably unlike other people," and so she never cultivated any close friendships, except with her brother, because she was aware that he knew her almost as well as she knew herself, and because she loved him.
He would like to have been her confidant, someone with whom she could share what he saw as her almost constant torment. But, in the classic sense of the word, she confided in him only rarely. Instead, he found that he confided in her, that her vulnerability, her aloneness, her very illness gave her a perspective on being alive that he could not share. Nearly all possibilities were open to him. He could go anywhere, do practically anything. She could not. She was confined, by her illness, to familiar surroundings, and if she wanted to venture beyond them she had to do it in her imagination, and in her dreams. This, she had told him, gave her a real appreciation for what others, David included, seemed to take for granted—the freedom to move beyond the limits of the
four walls they called home.
FIVE
Christian Grieg put the phone down and stared blankly at Karen Duffy.
"What is it?" she asked.
A smile flickered across his lips, then was gone. Karen barely noticed it. He said, "David’s left the hospital."
"What do you mean, ‘left the hospital’?"
"I mean he walked out. He just walked out. Someone wasn’t doing their job, someone wasn’t watching him, and he just walked out."
"But . . . he wasn’t supposed to do that, was he?"
"Of course he wasn’t," Christian snapped. "He was under observation, for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t snap at me, Christian." Her voice was firm.
"Yes," he said noncommittally. "I’m sorry.”
“Do they know where he went?"
"Apparently not. He’s simply not there. He simply walked out."
They had been about to share a meal when he made his call to the hospital, at her insistence. The small table was set; the food waited to be served. But now Christian said, "We have to go."
"Where?" Karen asked.
"To find him."
"Do you think we could eat first?"
"No. There’s no time. Maybe we’ll catch a bite at some . . . at one of those fast food restaurants."
Karen was confused by Christian’s almost desperate enthusiasm to go in search of David. She wanted to get at the root of it, so she chose to delay him, which, she thought, would ultimately give her answers faster than direct questions would.
"It won’t take but a half hour to eat." she told him.
He gave her a disbelieving smile. "My friend is in trouble—"
"We have no proof of it," she cut in. She stood, walked past him into his kitchen, collected a bowl of vegetables and a bowl of pasta and carried them to the table. She looked at him. She said, "You can bring the wine in. And the sauce."
Be watched her silently, his mouth agape.
She pressed, "Did you hear me, Christian?"
"At the moment, food is unimportant," he told her, but his voice was weak and unconvincing. After a second, he added, his voice a little stronger, "Don’t do this, Karen."
"Do what?"
"I have to go. I have to find David. I have to know . . . " He stopped.
"Yes?"
"Are you coming with me?"
"What do you have to know, Christian?"
He ignored her question. "Are you coming? I’m not going to eat. I’m going to look for David."
"Dammit, what do you have to know, Christian?"
But he didn’t answer, and within seconds he was out the door.
~ * ~
Getting into Laude Pharmaceuticals was easy enough. David still had his ID card, and he knew the security guards.
The guard who let him in was a chubby, middle-aged man named Walt.
"I heard you were sick, Mr. Case," Walt said, apparently surprised to see David so late at night. Walt checked his watch; it read 12:15. "Going to be working late?"
David nodded and held out his ID card. Walt said it wasn’t necessary, then looked at it just the same because David’s face was thinner than he remembered and it had the beginnings of a beard. "Thanks," Walt said, handing it back. Then, after a short look into David’s eyes, he said, "Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Case? You don’t look very good."
"Yes," David said, "I’m okay. It’s nothing. Thanks for your concern."
"Yes sir," Walt said, and opened the door.
Then David was walking through the maze of corridors—lit dimly now—which led to his laboratory. And as he walked he thought of Anne, saw her face in his mind’s eye; saw it as if it were the face of a child. It was the way he had always thought of her, he realized. She was his twin, just as old as he was, but, in some ways, he thought of her as a child, especially in the past few years. Perhaps because of her vulnerability and her sensitivity. Her handicap. Her aloneness.
And as he turned and started down the final corridor to his laboratory, he wondered if that handicap had stayed with her; if, now—under some vast, bright, and unknown sky—she was on the verge of panic, desperately wanted walls around her, a floor beneath her, a roof overhead.
He closed his eyes. God, he prayed that it wasn’t true. Why should such torture follow the incredible obscenity of her rape and murder? Wasn’t it obvious that death was the end of such imperfection? Weren’t the blind suddenly sighted, the deaf able to hear even the whisper of small insects; weren’t the paraplegic as swift and surefooted as any earthbound creature? But those were very different kinds of handicaps. They were centered in the blood and bone and nerves. Anne’s handicap went much deeper. It lived in the deepest recesses of her mind. She had never known why she was the way she was. No one had. But she’d suffered with it for half a lifetime.
And there was no guarantee now that she was not still suffering.
David stopped walking suddenly. He shook his head. "Good Lord," he whispered. It wasn’t possible. How could she possibly have carried her illness with her into death? It was insanity even to consider it.
But he had to consider it.
Because, in life, she had considered it.
("David, I think that this . . . thing, this sickness is part of me, part of my soul. I can feel it. It’s the way I’ve always been. I think that I will never be without it."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about, Annie. Really, I don’t."
"Someday you will, David.")
And what if she were right? What if—how old had she been?—her fifteen- or sixteen-year-old mind, a mind which had always been so much keener than his, so much more in tune with the world around it (which was, after all, its undoing), had whispered to her an awful and undeniable truth: that her sickness would follow her through eternity.
If that were so, then the place where she dwelt now had truly to be hell.
David could not deny that the possibility was very real; as hard as he tried, he could not rationalize it away. It stayed. It mocked him. It screamed that as much as he wanted to believe that death had brought peace to his sister at last, he could easily be wrong.
In his office, he located the A2d-40 he needed and within minutes had left the building and was driving to his cottage on Oneida Lake.
~ * ~
It is ten years later. Maude is standing quietly just inside the doorway to the third floor ballroom. She’s wondering if Anne ever came to this room—because she knows that Anne lived alone; she thinks that a woman living alone would have no reason to come up here—and she’s trying to sense Anne’s spirit in this huge space, trying to catch sight of it as—Maude supposes—it moves sullenly from place to place.
This is a bright, early summer morning, and shafts of yellow sunlight filter in through the tall windows. There’s a lot of fine dust in the air. Maude notes it. She remembers reading that most house dust is made up of bits of human skin.
The dust diffuses the sunlight.
She fancies, then, that she sees something dark and (she strains to see and understand) . . . tense moving in the far half of the empty room, through the diffuse sunlight. She smiles uneasily. Dark and tense? No. Dark and graceful. That would be Anne. That would be the spirit of Anne Case.
But then the thing is gone suddenly and she stops smiling. "Anne?" she whispers. "Are you still here, Anne?" There is no sound. The room is quiet and empty and the sunlight is diffuse and nothing moves.
When she leaves the room a quarter of an hour later, she locks the door behind her. She’s not sure why. She believes that Anne’s spirit is gentle and nonaggressive. She believes that she would welcome it, speak with it, if it showed itself. But she’s not sure what, exactly, she saw in the third floor ballroom. Something tall, stocky, mannish, her memory tells her, but she rejects that image out of hand. She does not want a spirit that is tall, stocky, and mannish moving about in her house. That would be the stuff that nightmares are made of. Better a lithe and gentle spirit. The spirit of Anne
Case.
~ * ~
"I saw her today," she tells her husband later.
"Who? Our spook?" he says.
"Please don’t refer to her that way. It’s . . . disrespectful."
Peter chuckles a bit; then, upon a scornful look from Maude, says, "I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. ‘Spook’ is a very acceptable word."
"No. Not to me. It’s . . . ungentle, uncaring. Doesn’t it . . . move you, Peter, that some poor woman was murdered here? Think of the agony she must have suffered."
"I would say that any murder victim probably feels agony, Maude."
"Yes, but not just any murder victim’s spirit walks about in our house."
There’s silence for a moment. Then Peter says, "You’re really quite sure of that, aren’t you?”
“Yes."
"That simple?"
"For God’s sake, Peter, I’ve seen her."
"Have you? I mean, have you really? Enough that if you were to see her photograph you could say, ‘Yes, the spook I saw in my house is this woman’?"
Silence.
"Maude?" Peter coaxes.
"I’ve seen her photograph. I went to the newspaper and looked in their morgue—that’s what they call their library of old newspapers, you know. A morgue. Makes me shudder. And, yes, the spirit I’ve seen here is definitely Anne. I have no doubt of it."
"Same eyes? Same nose, same mouth? Everything matches?"
"Oh, dammit, Peter! Not everything in life can be . . . quantified."
"Quantified?"
"You know what I mean. Not everything is black or white, hot or cold, up or down." She pauses. "No, if I have to be entirely truthful, I have not seen the woman in the photograph. There, do you feel better? Does that make you feel superior, Peter?"
"No reason to get angry." He’s concerned. She’s making much more of the whole thing than he thinks is healthy. "I just can’t say that I’m as . . . caught up in this—"
"But I know it’s Anne as surely as I know anything. Didn’t I tell you I saw her today? Didn’t I tell you that?"
"What exactly did you see?"
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