But I am not naïve, and I am not vulnerable. My illness has shown me that I am more than flesh and blood. My soul dances around me, bold and ashamed at the same time, quivering and bold and frightened all at the same time. I am spirit, mostly, and spirit cannot be bested.
It is something I dearly want to believe. That my spirit—that part of me that is not bone and muscle—cannot be bested.
I told him, "You want to hurt me."
He said, "I don’t want to hurt you. I want to show you myself. What’s wrong with that? It’s only natural and good that I want to show my true self to the woman that I love."
"You have," I said. "You’ve shown me yourself. I hate what you’ve shown me. It’s awful. It’s monstrous."
His smile went away for a moment. He didn’t like me telling him he was a monster, and that was clear.
He said, "Monster mean’s anti-nature, it means perversion, it means something abhorrent, something unintended by God—"
I told him to leave. He refused. I told him that I would call the police if he didn’t leave. He still refused. I picked up the phone, pretended to dial. He laughed. He knew I was pretending. He’s a very smart man. I put the phone down.
He was besting me already, and I knew it. So did he.
I said to him, "Someday you’re going to hurt me. How can I allow that?"And I picked up the phone again. And in his full view I dialed the number for the police.
He came over immediately and grabbed my wrist very hard. He let go of it almost at once, as if the act had shocked him. Indeed, he looked shocked for a moment. Then he smiled again. The same sort of smile. His eyes moist.
He let go of my wrist and looked silently at me for a very long time. He smiled as he looked. The same smile. Same moist eyes. The eyes of a monster.
And at last he said, "I am a whole person, my love." Then he left the house.
For a long while, Karen stared silently, disbelievingly at the sheets of paper in her hand.
She felt suddenly numb. She felt as if she would scream.
~ * ~
The elderly man had pulled around the blue Toyota, had stopped a couple of feet in front of it, and now was looking in the Toyota’s driver’s window. He knew that the woman in the front seat was dead. Her face was buried in the seat; he could see only her luxurious crown of black hair, and he could smell the lilac perfume that had been splashed all around the inside of the car. But he knew the woman was dead because her left arm—the right was beneath her—hung over the front of the seat at an odd angle, so her palm was facing him, and he thought he could see blood here and there—on her gray coat, on the floor, on the seat itself. He also knew she was dead because he had a sense of such things. He had watched his wife die, and his best friend; his daughter, very recently; his mother. He knew about death and how it sat so leadenly on people. There was no doubt of it. He didn’t have to reach in and check her pulse. This poor woman was dead.
He sighed. The woman wouldn’t be able to watch her grandchildren grow, if she had any; she’d never become a great-grandparent, as he was, would never be able to really appreciate what a long life can give to a person—the richness of memories and the wisdom and harmony of age, and a willingness—even an eagerness—to leave this life for something that was doubtless worlds better. All of that had been taken from her. And that, more than simply the act of violence which had been committed against her, was a real crime.
Poor woman.
The elderly man put his hand on the bottom of the open driver’s window. The metal felt very cold, icy cold. But then, everything felt cold to him these days.
He was sorry for this woman because she would grow no older. He was glad for this woman because she had left the earth behind.
He was envious of this woman.
He took his hand off the driver’s window. He went back to his car, got in, drove to his cottage three miles down Sylvan Beach Road, and called the Sheriff’s Department.
~ * ~
There were no lights illuminating the stairway looming in front of him, and David was afraid. The metal steps disappeared into darkness halfway to the second floor.
He put his hand tentatively on the wood banister. It was warm to the touch, as if other hands had been on it very recently.
David said to the thin man, "I’m sorry. I can’t go up there."
The man, standing just behind him, asked, "Something’s preventing you from going up there?"
David nodded. "My fear."
The man, surprising David, said nothing.
"You don’t understand fear, do you?" David asked, his gaze still on the dark stairway above him.
"I don’t understand the word," the man answered, and started to elaborate, when David interrupted.
"Then you don’t understand the concept." He took his hand off the banister, backed up a step, toward the thin man, felt the man back away, too. "I can see that there is much that survives death," David said. "Language, for instance." He turned, stared into the darkness that was the man’s face. It was framed by the light coming in the open door just behind him. "So if you don’t understand the word fear, then the concept died with you." He stepped quickly around the man and headed for the doorway. "I’m sorry. I can’t talk with you. This isn’t why I came here." He closed his eyes against a sudden onslaught of pain. "This isn’t at all why I came here."
The thin man watched David leave the building and, when David was down the street a bit, went to the doorway and called after him, "You’ll want a place to be when the light is gone. Being on these streets when darkness comes is foolhardy indeed."
David stopped walking.
He looked back.
For an instant, a breath, he saw the man’s face. Wide nose, large, closely set eyes, underslung jaw. Then it was lost in shadow again and David easily convinced himself that he had seen nothing more than his own mental construction of the man’s face.
David shouted, "I’ll take that chance."
"I’m sorry?" The man said.
"I said I’ll take my chances."
"Chances? There are none," the man shouted.
"Good," David said, misunderstanding him, and went on his way in search of his sister, Anne, though he had no idea where to begin.
~ * ~
In the room in the house without doors, a woman wept. She looked to be in her early sixties, heavyset, black-haired. Her weeping was soft and unself-conscious. While she wept she also smiled. Eventually, her smile changed to laughter and her weeping grew more intense, so she was laughing and crying at the same time.
The woman was new to this place. She had come into the house, and into the room, because it was familiar, as were weeping and laughter, and she desperately needed the familiar.
Eventually, her weeping and laughing subsided.
TWELVE
Karen Duffy could not ignore the fact of the pages that had been squirreled away in a copy of Christian’s first novel, nor the fact of his letter hidden in another copy of the same novel. Certainly there had to be more. Certainly this man she had professed to love was hiding something. Clearly it was not, as she had first thought, something heinous. (How could it be? She knew him well enough to know that he was incapable of anything more than simple anger or rudeness.) Clearly it was something mundane—a love affair that had probably ended long ago, when it would have been none of her business, anyway.
The fact that Anne Case had been brutally murdered had no bearing on her relationship with Christian.
Clear enough.
She did not read the poems and letters she found hidden around the house, in other copies of Christian’s nine books. She merely scanned a few lines of each poem or letter, and then set it down—poems here, letters there.
She would read everything thoroughly later. And maybe then she’d be able to make sense of it all.
~ * ~
"His name is David Case," Christian said to the woman gardening. He had pulled his car to the side of the road and was talking to the woman
from the driver’s seat, his window rolled down. "And I know he has a cottage around here somewhere. I’ve been there, in fact." Christian gave her an embarrassed grin. "But that was some time ago, and for the life of me I can’t remember—"
"I know of no one named Case," the woman said. She was thin and square-faced; she wore a blue spring jacket and gray pants, and as she talked to him, she sat on her haunches and looked at what she was doing—removing rocks from her garden—rather than at Christian. Her tone was brusque. "And I know most of the people who live on Sylvan Beach."
Christian grinned thinly at her. "Thanks, anyway," he said, and drove off.
Why couldn’t he remember where David’s cottage was? he wondered. He’d been there not too long ago. Five years. But all he could remember of it was the living room, which was narrow and oblong and claustrophobic; the kitchen, not much larger than a phone booth—it was alive with fat brown spiders—and the rocky, precipitous lakefront. He couldn’t remember the cottage’s facade; perhaps it was much like most of the cottages here—small and squat and pleasantly painted beige or light blue or yellow.
Green.
It was green.
He remembered suddenly.
Green. White shutters.
Or white with green shutters.
He slowed the Buick around a hard curve. Cattails crowded the narrow road on either side.
He pulled the car left, into a narrow lane bordered on both sides by swamp. He stopped fifty feet down the lane. The car was not easily seen here by another car coming from either direction.
~ * ~
David thought of calling his sister’s name. In this magical place, perhaps she would hear him no matter where she might be, even if she were miles away, thousands of miles away. They would be connected by their love for each other; she would hear him, and they would be reunited, however briefly.
Long enough, clearly, for his questions to be answered.
Why had she been murdered?
Had she found peace and happiness at last? Who was her murderer?
He opened his mouth to call to her. He stayed silent.
This place wasn’t magical at all, was it? He had expected that it would be magical. He had expected that it would be a land of dreams. But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t heaven.
Heaven was the place he had constructed in his own fantasies, the place that legend had built up for him over the years he had been alive on earth.
This wasn’t heaven.
This was . . .
Something in between.
There were people around him on the narrow street. They were moving slowly. Some were talking to themselves or to people walking with them. Their talk was, variously, animated, quiet, loud; what he could hear of the conversations going on made little sense—there were references to animals, to cold, to summer and, several times, to the darkness, and, once, to "the small creatures of the darkness." But he could not hear whole sentences. He caught snippets of sentences, phrases out of context.
Some of the people apparently turned their heads his way, but he could see no faces. A man appeared to give David a friendly nod and David nodded back, thinking how ludicrous the exchange was—two faceless creatures nodding to one another.
The people around him were dressed in varying ways (though it seemed to make little difference how one was dressed; the air was neither warm nor cold; it was much like water that has been heated to body temperature). A few wore what looked like cold-weather clothes—several layers of loose clothing, or clothes that looked like coats without buttons or pockets—and others wore very little. Short pants. Long sleeveless shirts. What looked like loose summer dresses made of a very thin cloth.
The bodies he saw—those that were not dressed in cold-weather clothes—were the bodies of men and women and children, and they were invariably healthy looking and nicely developed. Genitalia and sexual parts were much in evidence; penises peeked out from beneath short pants, breasts from the generous openings at the sides of shirts; bottoms twinkled in the bright daylight from beneath long shirts which moved up and down in time with walking.
David thought, There is no shame here. He didn’t like the thought, didn’t like himself for thinking it.
Why should there be shame here, of all places?
"You have to come back with me," David heard.
He whirled. The man who had brought him to this city was behind him. For a moment, half a breath, David saw his face. Wide nose. Large eyes. Dark brown skin.
David said, "What I have to do is find my sister."
The darkness that was the thin man’s face moved left and right. "I don’t understand that. Sister." A pause. "Darkness will come. You’ll want to be inside for it. If you’re not inside then I can’t be responsible for the consequences, believe me—"
"When?" David cut in.
"When?" the man asked.
"When does the darkness come?"
"I don’t understand that either," the man said. "When."
"Within the hour?" David explained. "In a few minutes? It’s very simple." He could feel his temper flaring. "When does the damned darkness come?" He looked up, toward the sun.
But there was no sun. There was only white light, and an ever-changing sky.
"Where’s the sun?" he asked.
The thin man said that he did not understand this either.
"The sun, goddammit!" David shouted. He grabbed the man’s shirt collar, drew the man close. "The sun. It’s part of the damned solar system, which is part of the damned galaxy, which is part of the damned universe!"
"I don’t know," the man said without emotion. His breath smelled strongly of onions. "Perhaps we could talk about it. I would very much like to talk about it. I have things to show you . . ." The man stopped talking in midsentence.
Around them, the light was quickly beginning to fade.
~ * ~
Did she have them all? wondered Karen Duffy. All the poems and letters (unfinished letters) and little, odd pieces of fiction (were they fiction?). She had looked everywhere, in all of the books that Christian himself had written, and in most of the other books, too. She had found that he had hidden nothing in the other books. These unfinished letters he had written and the things that Anne Case had written were very personal, so he had chosen a very personal hiding place for them. His own books.
But wasn’t he afraid that a visitor—her, for instance?—would find them?
Or had he somehow wanted them to be found?
She had the poems and the fiction in one pile, the letters in another, on a coffee table in front of her. The piles were high—almost thirty pages of letters, she guessed, perhaps thirty or forty pages of poems and fiction (if it was fiction).
She’d unfolded them, laid them out neatly, and now she was looking bemusedly at them, finding interest, for the moment, only in the ink Christian had used—black fountain pen—and in the small, meticulous hand that Anne used. Nothing was typed, and that didn’t surprise Karen. After ten books, Christian still did not use a typewriter for his first drafts. He always wrote them in longhand. "It’s closer to the blood and sinew," he had told her.
She picked up one of Anne’s poems and started reading.
~ * ~
"Very sturdy-looking man," the woman said to Fred Collins. She’d been jogging on the street in front of Anne’s house, and Collins, taking a chance, had stopped her to ask if she jogged there often. Yes, she had told him. She jogged there practically every day, and every evening, too. She lived only a mile away, on Hyacinth Crescent. She jogged five miles a day, up Hyacinth Crescent—a half mile—to Forest Drive, to Poplar Ridge—another mile—and finally here, to Troy Road. Collins then had identified himself, explained his purpose for being at the house, asked if she had ever seen anything unusual as she jogged past. She didn’t know what he meant by unusual, she said; perhaps he meant had she seen any men coming and going from the house. She had. She remembered one man in particular. "A stocky man. Square-faced.
Not really good-looking so much as sturdy-looking. A very sturdy-looking man. Very . . . mannish-looking, if you follow me."
"And you say that you saw no one else but this man?" Collins asked now.
She shook her head. "I didn’t say that. There was another man. A young man. But I saw him only once. A month or so before the murder, I think."
"Could you describe him?"
She nodded. "He was young, as I said. Average height. Average build." She paused. "Rather pale, I remember. Almost unhealthy-looking."
Brian Fisher, Collins realized. The woman was clearly describing Brian Fisher, whom David Case had said had been Anne’s lover, and who had probably been at the house often.
But who was the other man? The stocky, mannish-looking one?
"Do you remember the car that the stocky man was driving?" Collins asked.
She shook her head. "I’m not good with cars. It was gray. Silver. Monotone, anyway. A big car, I think."
"But you couldn’t say what make?"
"I’m sorry, no."
~ * ~
The tall, thin man was running. David was running behind him. David felt the brick street hit the soles of his feet and found it oddly reassuring. As he ran, he found the caress of air moving over his face reassuring, too. The dull ache in his side, his lungs straining for oxygen, the sound of his own voice—"Where are we going? Why are we running?"—all of it was oddly reassuring, oddly comforting.
And yet he could sense fear all around him. From the man ahead. From within the houses, where the people walking had retreated when the light had begun to fade.
Fear? he wondered.
Was it fear? Were they—the people in the houses, the man running—afraid?
Of what?
"Why are we running, dammit?"
"The darkness," the man called back, and David remembered a phrase he had heard very recently—the small creatures of darkness. His brain flashed a quick and awful picture of thousands of rodent-like animals moving like oil over the brick streets, devouring everything in their path.
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