There were people around him, but they made no acknowledgment of him. And the man, having already forgotten what he had said, popped the fruit into his mouth, enjoyed the squish of it under his tongue, and continued picking.
The dust left the house.
Eventually, it found its way to a road.
Behind him, the darkness came.
~ * ~
Karen Duffy, fixing dinner for herself, felt very unclean.
She had let Christian make love to her not too long ago. She had enjoyed it, had enjoyed his kisses, had hungered after him, had wanted his hands on her.
Now, knowing what he was—
She stopped her thoughts there. What could she prove? What could anyone prove? His letters and Anne’s writings amounted to nothing more than scraps of paper, really.
It was no consolation. She knew what he had done, even if she had no real proof. What proof did she need? She wasn’t about to point the finger at him.
Perhaps, even if she had proof, she wouldn’t do anything. He had himself to live with, after all. Perhaps that was punishment enough.
No, she corrected herself almost furiously. If she had proof, he would be behind bars at that very moment.
She put her dinner preparations in the cupboard. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like eating. She wondered if she would ever feel like eating again.
~ * ~
"How is he?" David managed.
"Your friend?" asked the round-faced man. He had lain Christian’s body on the deck, not wanting to upset David. "I’m not sure." He gestured toward the back of the living room. "Kitchen’s that way?"
David nodded.
~ * ~
The dust that had become a man sensed the darkness behind it on the road.
The man turned, faced the darkness, and smiled.
He welcomed the darkness.
He embraced it.
It had always been his friend.
NINE
It is ten years later and, in the house where Anne Case once lived, Dorian, who had excused himself to use the bathroom, rejoins the circle and says to Maude, "I didn’t mean to wake anyone up. I’m sorry."
Maude gives him a questioning look. "I don’t understand."
"Apparently I woke one of your children. I heard him crying. I’m sorry." He takes the hand of the woman beside him. He’s ready to continue with the séance.
"You heard crying?" Maude asks.
Dorian nods. "Yes. When I was going upstairs. It sounded like it was on the stairs with me, at first, and that got me going, I’ll tell you." He grins, embarrassed. "I even convinced myself that I saw something up there. On the landing." Another embarrassed grin. "Then I realized that the crying was coming from one of the rooms up there, one of the bedrooms, it was so distant—"
"We don’t have any children," Maude cuts in.
"But I heard crying," Dorian insists. "Like someone was having a nightmare. Exactly like someone was having a nightmare." He pauses. The others look dubiously at him. He continues, "You know, the kind of nightmare that’s not so horrific that it makes you scream, or wake up. The kind that’s . . . claustrophobic, I guess." Again he pauses. Again, no one says anything. "The kind that makes you sweat," he continues. "Like whoever was crying was . . . trapped." He smiles nervously. "Like he was locked up somewhere—" In the dark, forever! he thinks.
The others look dumbly at him.
He says, "Trapped alone in the dark. Forever."
The others gathered in the house say nothing. There’s some nervous fidgeting.
Dorian looks silently at them.
He looks toward the stairs.
He looks at the group again.
"Thanks anyway," he says to them at last. "But I don’t think that I want to be here with you." He stands and quickly leaves the house.
~ * ~
The woman in the small, elegantly furnished room wrote, "Dyeeng dyeeng draseena leaf." She ,topped. She pursed her lips. Draseena? she wondered. What a very pleasant sounding word.
She continued writing.
She wrote voluminously.
She wrote of the draseena, of air, of open spasis, of Brien and Kristienne and Dayveed.
Her words came out effortlessly onto the paper. She put them into short, pleasant lines, and the pleasant lines into shapes on the paper; these shapes made her smile.
Sometimes, as she wrote, she read to the young man with her in the room, and he nodded and smiled afterward and told her that he was comfortable having her read to him.
Once, she glanced at the walls of the little room and a shiver ran through her.
That’s when she wrote, "The man with thuh nife iz in a bocks!" She wrote it again and again; "The man with thuh nife iz in a bocks! The man with thuh nife iz in a bocks! The man with thuh nife iz in a bocks!" At last, the young man with her, sensing her discomfort, went to her and put his pale hands on her shoulders, leaned over and whispered, "Let’s go out, now."
"To where?" she asked.
"Anywhere. These walls are so . . . confining."
She looked at him for a long while without speaking. Then she rose and, arm in arm, they went out into the light.
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