"Lilac perfume," the other deputy told him.
"Yes," said the elderly man.
"Is it?" said the second deputy. "It’s awful."
"Well, sure," said the first deputy, "but I think you’re putting that smell into the context of the event—"
The second deputy looked around at him.
"Huh?"
The first deputy shrugged. "Nothing. Just talking. Do you think I should try and go find someone who might know this woman?"
"You haven’t looked at her driver’s license?"
"Not yet. I thought I should leave everything alone."
The second deputy sighed. "Sure. You were probably right to do that. But you could have called the plate number into DMV." He straightened. "I’ll do that. You go and see if you can find someone who might have seen something here. This area’s mostly deserted this time of year, so I doubt you’ll have much luck." He paused. "I’ll radio you with this woman’s ID."
~ * ~
"Uhdarcknass," wrote the chunky man in the below-ground-level apartment, "like knowuthar chasez hymn awl over thuh plas—and he looks bahk and ittz ganeingon hymn fasst, he’s knott wonteeng 2b quik enuf oar he wants it to catch hymn, this theeng frum insid hymn—"
FOUR
It is ten years later. People are gathered for a séance in what was once Anne Case’s house. They’re clasping hands in a circle while the lights are dim.
Some of them have shut their eyes.
Some are looking about in the semidarkness, at the others, and wondering, variously, if this is a proper way for adults to spend their time; if the ones who have their eyes closed are sleeping, or if they really believe this stuff; if the woman of the house really thinks that the ghost of Anne Case still walks here.
And perhaps she does, some of them think.
Maude is the one who’s expected to lead this séance, but she’s temporarily at a loss because she has never led a séance before and isn’t certain of the protocol. It would be terrible, she thinks, to offend the spirits of those departed with the wrong terms or salutations. It would be even more terrible to offend the spirit of Anne Case or, and the thought is very fleeting, the stocky, mannish thing that she has seen in the house.
Does anyone know how to begin? Maude wants to ask. And she almost asks it, but, not wanting to appear foolish, begins instead, "We are gathered in this circle, Anne, to appeal to you to . . . to speak to us, to show us a sign. For ten years you have been silent. Now you may speak."
It’s a good beginning, she believes.
She continues, "I have seen you here, Anne, and I know of your loneliness—"
There’s a giggle from somewhere in the circle and Maude hesitates, looks around the circle stonily for the giggler, says, "I know this seems funny to most of you"—she hopes that she doesn’t sound too terribly severe— "and if I were in your shoes, I’d be giggling, too, I’m sure. But just imagine what can be accomplished here if we simply focus all of our . . . uh . . . spiritual energy on this for a few minutes."
"Sorry," Barbara says from across the circle. "I’m a little nervous about this whole thing, I guess."
Maude says, "It’s okay. We’re only human, after all." She hesitates, takes a breath, goes on, "Let’s start over again, shall we."
In a far corner of the house, something stirs, and awakes. It has been trapped in the house for nearly a decade, and it is tinglingly aware of a kinship between itself and the gathering of souls in the house. The love of darkness that they share.
FIVE
The view David had out the room’s tall window was of a wooden building across the narrow street; the street itself, made of brick; and, if he leaned out the window, and looked up, a long, rectangular slice of the furiously moving gray and blue sky.
The building across the street—it seemed only an arm’s length away, though that was probably an illusion; it was probably twenty feet or more from the window he was looking out of—was decorated with drawings done in what could have been charcoal, and with what looked like colorful oil paints—deep red, bright yellow, a strange, phosphorescent blue. Some of the drawings seemed to have actually been carved into the wood.
The drawings were everywhere. They snaked across the tops of windows, connected windows and doors. And they depicted many things. There were what looked like people. There were animals, buildings, mountains, trees.
Many of the drawings were childlike—some of the people were mere stick figures, some of the mountains simple triangular shapes, and the trees like straws with a ball at one end.
But many of the drawings were wonderfully rendered, by artists who were obviously possessed of great talent.
"Do people get on ladders to do those drawings?" David asked.
The thin man rose from the chair he’d been sitting in and joined David at the window. "Yes, I’ve seen them do that from time to time. I’ve never done it myself, of course. I don’t believe that I’m so inclined. But the people who do it seem very happy. They smile. They laugh. They seem as happy as they can be, as happy as clams, I think, and seeing them doing these things, these things that make them happy, I feel very happy for them—"
David looked at the man’s face as the man talked. The man’s eyes were large, brown; they glistened, as if the man had been weeping, though David had not seen him weeping, and his mouth was heavy-lipped, the nose wide and flat.
David said, interrupting the man’s monologue, "I don’t believe that I’ve always been able to see your face the way I’m seeing it now."
"Nor I yours," the man said.
~ * ~
Christian Grieg thought, The Benefits of Suffocation by Pillow:
The primal, desperate, stiff gesticulations of a body experiencing oxygen starvation.
The quick and muffled noises of confusion and mortal frustration.
The irony of one strong man killing another with goose down.
The possibility that the victim will pee his pants.
And afterward, a last expression—frozen between life and death—of frothy horror and disbelief.
~ * ~
The deputy sheriff had seen no cars parked at the cottages at this end of Sylvan Beach and he believed that the older deputy had been right; the beach was probably all but deserted at this time of year, so the chances that anyone had seen anything were remote, at best.
He radioed to the older deputy that he had found nothing, that he would now be checking the east section of the beach, made a quick K-turn, and started back the way he had come.
Moments later, the older deputy radioed the name of the murdered woman. "Last name Pierce, first name Violet," he said, and the younger deputy wondered if Violet Pierce had any relatives who would have to be notified. Of course she did, he thought. Everyone had relatives somewhere. (I’m sorry, I have bad news; your wife—aunt, mother, grandmother, girlfriend, confidante—was murdered by a person or persons unknown. Before her death, she had the contents of a one-fluid-ounce jar of lilac perfume poured into her mouth.)
He brought his car to a quick stop on the road. There was a garage attached to the little green cottage he was looking at; the garage door was closed. The deputy wondered about this. There were no windows in the garage door. Perhaps there was a car inside.
~ * ~
In the room, there were big, sturdy wooden chairs, and wide, overstuffed couches that nobody ever sat in; there was an empty bookcase, and a floor lamp minus a cord and switch. There were paintings on the wall, too—each a simple wedding of color and line, like an Easter parade seen through dust.
The room opened onto half a dozen other rooms similarly furnished. There were no doors between the rooms, and no doors at all in the house, not even in the entranceway, or in the back, where the kitchen led out to a thousand acres of clover. There were openings for doors, but no doors.
There were openings for windows, but no glass.
The house was like many others. It was the way houses were built here, as if planned from a memory tha
t was incomplete.
People came and went from these houses, but no one claimed ownership of them and no one spent any time in them.
That was the way things were here, too.
The house was made of pine and green clapboard put together with common nails. It had two stories and an attic, a front porch, a back porch, and a cellar.
The creatures that lived in the cellar might, at a quick glance, have been mistaken for creatures that lived in many cellars. They burrowed into wood and dug holes in the ground. They made noises at night. And if the light was right, their eyes shone. They were creatures of the darkness, and they were as old as humankind. People had created them and people sustained them.
On occasion, rain came to the area where the house had been built. It pelted the stone tile roof, cascaded over the edge to the ground, soaked in, and was gone. Evaporation did not exist here.
Sometimes, people danced in the house and around it.
The people had no names. In this place no one did.
Darkness came.
The creatures that lived in the cellar of the house moved gracefully, like water, up the stairs and across the floors, through the doorways and over the windowsills, out into the fields of clover.
Nothing moved in these fields. So the things returned to the cellar.
Light came.
~ * ~
A barely perceptible groan escaped the body lying half in the doorway to the green cottage.
Christian Grieg, standing nearby, goose-down pillow in a blue striped pillowcase in hand, heard it and smiled. "Well now, Davey boy," he said. "Alive, alive-o."
It pleased him immensely that David was alive.
His fingers trembled.
He got down on his haunches, put his hand to David’s chest. There was no movement, no life. Only warmth.
He heard a car pull away on the road seventy-five feet north. He dimly noted the car’s passage, as if it were no more than a fly buzzing in another part of the room. He looked up briefly from his friend lying still. He saw dust rising in the dry, breezy, sunlit air above the unpaved road.
He focused again on David, on his own trembling fingers on David’s chest.
He thought that he had always liked his own fingers. He thought that they were artistic.
Perhaps it would be better indeed to bring peace to his friend with his fingers, his thumbs pressed hard to David’s windpipe, which was, he felt certain, the way such murders were carried out.
He glanced up again at the unpaved road seventy-five feet north. The dust was beginning to settle. It was no longer sunlit. A bank of clouds had come over.
Christian smiled.
He tossed the pillow aside.
He would bring darkness to David with his very own fingers, which is the way such things should always be between friends.
Personal.
And affectionate.
SIX
It is ten years later.
Something stirs in the house that once belonged to Anne Case, but no one gathered below for an impromptu séance is aware of it.
"We know of your presence here!" Maude declares loudly, feeling a little self-conscious about the volume of her voice and its pitch, close to a shriek.
Some of the others gathered in the circle glance at her and smile, then look back down again, and close their eyes. They have never seen Maude act this way before, and while it amuses them, it also leads them to think that she may be onto something. Perhaps there really is an entity (ghost, spirit, wraith, whatever) that walks the house, and speaks to her, and wants an end to loneliness.
It isn’t so hard to believe.
It is, after all, only what any creature wants. An end to loneliness.
While, above them, something has stirred and awakened and has begun to move through the space of the house toward the people gathered below.
It is a creature that knows nothing of time, but everything of pain. And loneliness.
It is a creature that craves the dark.
~ * ~
David thought, All of this is an illusion. None of it exists. These are dreams. I am still connected to the earth, and what I’m seeing here are only a dying man’s interpretations of earthly things.
Just as when his mind had transformed the small fish that swam in the shallows of Oneida Lake into swiftly moving insects, biting mosquitoes into foraging honeybees, and the earth itself—the lake he’d been walking in; the cottages that lined it—into a ghost of itself. (Just as he had told himself, too, that he was wearing corduroy pants, white shirt, shoes. He was wearing nothing; nor was he naked. He formed for himself the image of his hands as he moved, the right and left inward curves of his shoes as he moved. He conjured up the sounds of his feet trudging over the floor. But there was no sound except the whispers of his past.)
So now, as well, he was dreaming.
The thin and annoyingly talkative man with him here was a character in the dream.
The window he—David—stood at was a fixture in the dream, and so was the building across the street and its intricate and colorful drawings, the brick streets, the furiously moving sky.
All of it was a dream. No more than a dream.
A face came to him. It was oval, pretty, smiling. It was framed by dark wood. (These snapshots were nothing more than animal protein and a couple layers of dye and silver nitrate that the light got at for a microsecond.)
"Anne?" he said. "My God, what am I doing here?"
The thin man touched David’s hand, which was on the windowsill.
David looked up from the man’s hand to his face. It was lost in darkness.
Words came from the darkness. "I think that you must go back to wherever you came from. I think that you can stay here no longer."
~ * ~
The deputy pulled in behind Christian’s Buick, which was parked fifty feet down a narrow dead-end path bordered on both sides by cattails, radioed in the car’s license number, and was told, after a few moments, that there were no "wants or warrants" for the car’s registered owner.
The deputy hesitated, ready to back out onto Sylvan Beach Road.
After a couple of seconds, he shut the patrol car off, closed the door, and approached the Buick cautiously, one hand on the strap that held his service revolver in its holster.
He unstrapped the revolver, put his hand on the grip. He barked, "Is there anyone in the car?"
The cattails around him danced in a sudden brisk wind.
The deputy pursed his lips. He was a little scared, and he knew precisely why—the murder of Violet Pierce; this car abandoned here, on this narrow, dead-end path that was bordered by tall cattails.
The quiet.
Of course he was scared.
He drew his service revolver, pointed it straight up. "You in the car!" he barked. "Out. Now!"
But he could see no one in the car, and he suddenly felt foolish as well as scared.
Around him, the cattails danced.
"Dammit!" he whispered.
Distantly, from somewhere on the lake, he heard the ragged hum of an outboard motor.
~ * ~
Christian Grieg thought, All these things are foolish.
Pillows.
Goose down. Big rocks and thumbs
Thumbs
such foolish things.
The watchword was affection. David was his friend. He loved David. He had always loved David.
David was deserving of his affection and his gentle touch and caress and he had
himself breathed life into David not too long ago and not too far from this very spot either
breathed life into him so why not
WHY NOT
SUCK IT OUT OF HIM, the very air, the air that pumped his lungs up and kept him in this twilight sleep WHY NOT
lay down beside him there with affection and pinch his nose shut and do that same thing he had done before only
IN REVERSE,
SUCK OUT THE LIFE, SUCK OUT THE LIFE
~ *
~
The woman crouched in a doorway and looked up at the slice of moving sky high overhead. She felt alone, it was true. She felt hemmed in, it was true. She felt the need for space, and the need for closeness, and the two needs fought themselves within her and made her insides knot up. It was true.
But she did not feel pain.
And she remembered pain. It was like a tug from behind that was designed to keep her from moving forward.
She felt a little dizzy, even as she crouched in the doorway. But then she stood, shakily, the word "Brian" escaped her, and was gone, and forgotten.
A shadow moved swiftly at a distance down the narrow brick street. It darkened the houses as it made its way toward her. But when she looked up, thinking that something must be flying over, a bird, perhaps, something very large, she saw nothing. And when she looked back, down the narrow street and the close-packed houses, she saw nothing. The shadow had gone.
"Christian," she said, and then the name was gone, too.
She was bathed in light.
And her memory of pain began to fade.
~ * ~
"Uhdarcknass," wrote the chunky man in the below-ground-level apartment, "like knowuthar chasez hymn awl over thuh plas—and he looks bahk and ittz ganeingon hymn fasst, he’s knott wonteeng 2b quik enuf oar he wants it to catch hymn, this theeng frum insid hymn. it chaases lika dawg awoolf, a murdereeng theeng and it wonts2 overwelm hymn, eet hymn, mak hymn itself"
SEVEN
It is ten years later. The people gathered in what was once Anne Case’s house are of various minds about what they’re doing, sitting in a circle, listening to—making themselves a part of—entreaties being made to the dead to appear, to show themselves.
One woman thinks mostly of her son, and the tough time he’s having in school. She’s worried about his future. She thinks that he may end up in a dead-end job and be unhappy for the rest of his life because he will always have to worry about money. Her thoughts are only partially with what Maude is doing. She thinks that it’s a bit silly.
Another woman is frightened. She believes that there are things moving in the house and that they intend harm to them all, and that Maude is being foolhardy indeed playing with the supernatural in this way.
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