Strangers

by Mort Castle

  She dipped her head so they couldn’t see the tears. “Vern,” she said, “we can’t thank you enough for looking after the girls this weekend.”

  “Hey,” Michael said, “remind me to get their suitcase out of the trunk before we leave, okay?”

  “They’re beautiful children and we’re glad to help,” Vern said. He squeezed Beth’s upper arm. “You know, well, Laura and I always wanted children and we could never…” Vern suddenly turned away, facing the huge stone fireplace, his back to them. “Let’s say we feel very close to all the Loudens, all right?”

  The door chimes rang. From the kitchen, Laura called, “Vern, get that, please! I’m busy.”

  Vern turned back to Beth and Michael, setting his glass on the copper-topped bar. “That has to be…”

  The chimes sounded again and Laura called out, “Vern!”

  “Excuse me,” Vern said, and he left the family room.

  “I don’t know,” Michael said in answer to Beth’s unspoken question. “Vern didn’t mention they’d invited anyone else this evening.”

  “I’m sure you remember…” Vern said when he returned with the new arrival.

  “Of course, the Loudens,” Jan Pretre said. “We met at the party over Labor Day. It’s Beth and Michael, right?” He shook their hands.

  “That’s right, Dr. Pretre,” Michael said.

  “Please, call me Jan,” he said.

  Beth recalled how interesting and easy to talk to she had thought the psychiatrist when she’d first met him. Now he seemed a different man, tense and brooding. He was holding himself stiffly, as though he didn’t feel right in his blue suit, and his eyes were sunken with weariness. The sharply trimmed salt and pepper beard that she had originally thought gave him a distinguished appearance now made him look weathered and aging.

  “A drink, Jan?” Vern offered.

  “Scotch rocks,” Jan Pretre said. “A hefty one, please. I need it.” He leaned an elbow on the bar and when Vern handed him the scotch, he took a good swallow. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to come in here like Captain Gloom, but I just had some disturbing news. That’s why I was late.”

  “What is it, Jan?” Vern asked.

  “I lost one today,” Jan Pretre said flatly. “He was seventeen, a nice kid. Super-bright, played guitar and wrote poetry. I really thought we were making headway. He was getting himself together.”

  Jan Pretre paused to drink. Then he tiredly said, “He had a one o’clock appointment. We talked about a girl he was dating and his decision to apply for admission to Yale. He told me things were working out. He thanked me for working with him. Then he went home and took a razor blade and slit his wrist. It wasn’t your typical teenage play for attention. There was no one else home. He didn’t just nick himself for a bit of blood and a lot of melodrama. It was a long cut, lengthwise down the vein. He was serious and now he’s dead serious.”

  Jan finished his drink. “So chalk up one more for Freud, Jung, Adler, and yours truly.”

  Vern refilled Jan’s glass without asking and then insisted on “freshening up” Beth’s. He patted Jan on the shoulder. “You can’t consider it your fault, Jan.”

  “Why, of course not,” Jan said bitterly. “As a psychiatrist I’m supposed to be objective and uninvolved. That’s what it says in the “How to Be a Headshrinker’ book. But it doesn’t work that way, Vern. A young man came to me, trusted me to set him right, and now he’s dead.”

  “Jan,” Beth said, “I know you’re a very good psychiatrist.”

  Jan Pretre’s brow furrowed. “What makes you say that, Beth?”

  She’d surprised herself by speaking. She knew she was at an emotional high, more open than she ordinarily would be, and in addition the old-fashioned was a potent tongue-loosener; one more might be a tongue-twister! Still, she wanted to say something to Jan.

  “You give a damn. I can tell that. People matter to you. That’s the kind of person I’d want to be my psychiatrist…”

  She laughed at herself then and then everyone else was laughing, too. She felt silly and felt it was okay to feel that way with these special people. Michael kissed her on the nose. “You ever think you’re Napoleon, honey, we’ll ask Jan to fix you right up.”

  The tension Jan Pretre had brought with him seemed broken but if any of it did remain, it was left behind in the family room as Laura Engelking summoned everyone to the dinner table.

  They were in the family room. The door was closed. It had been, as Vern said, “a veritable banquet:” French onion soup, tossed salad, prime rib and double baked potatoes, and a glazed peach tart. Beth and Laura were doing the dishes while the men, as Vern put it, “withdrew for brandy and talk of Parliament, the troubles in the colonies, and other such matters of interest to highborn gentlemen.”

  Michael sipped his Courvoisier and then, shaking his head, said to Jan Pretre, “That was some sad story about the kid’s suicide. I mean, I was almost in tears.”

  Framed by his beard, Jan Pretre’s teeth shone white in a predator’s smile. “It was a goddamned tragedy. The poor prick came to me with his penny-ante problems. All he needed to hear from me today was that he shouldn’t kill himself. Well, let’s say he didn’t hear that. I gave him a push, a nudge, led him to gawk at a mirror and see a useless piece of shit staring back and I knew he was gone. I talked him into suicide and he obliged.”

  They all laughed. “That’s it, you know,” Jan Pretre said. “That’s why I became a nut-doctor. Society hands you a license granting you power over its nothing people. You haul them onto the rack, you twist them and bend them and listen as they scream and cry, and you’re a fine guy because you’re helping them.

  “That’s why so many Strangers wind up as cops or social workers or preachers or surgeons. Or dentists. Or chiropractors. You see John Doe and Jane Dip when they’re hurting like hell and you can make them hurt even more if you handle it right. John and Jane don’t suspect a thing. Cop Stranger who blasts the ass off an old bum in an alley gets a commendation for stopping an armed robbery and Doctor Stranger who slices away three-quarters of your guts becomes ‘the wonderful man who saved my life.”

  Vern’s laughed boomed. “Conventional folk wisdom: the surgeon loves the knife.”

  “So do we,” Michael said. There was silence for a minute. Then Michael said one word—the question: “When?”

  Jan Pretre answered the question with a question. “Growing impatient, Michael?” His tone was chiding.

  “No,” Michael said, and then, more quietly, changed it to, “Yes.”

  “Don’t,” Jan Pretre said, and now he was speaking in a warning voice. “Don’t get impatient, Michael. Impatient means careless. Careless means you don’t think like you should. It means you do things you shouldn’t and you don’t notice what you had damned well better notice. Do you understand me, Michael?”

  “Yes, Jan.”

  “Michael, Michael,” Jan Pretre said, his tone changing again. “It was so many years ago when we met, when I first saw the blood-fire around your head. I told you who you were, Michael, told you that you were not alone and that you’d have to wait, wait for Our Time, wait and never let the nothing people have a hint of who you were. That’s just what you’ve done, Michael. Only a little while longer, a single tick of the Eternity Clock, and the waiting is ended. You will be with us then, Michael, if you stay completely in control of yourself, not losing patience or forgetting caution.”

  “I understand, Jan,” Michael said.

  “That’s good, Michael. That’s fine.”

  A half hour later, Michael and Beth went home.

  At eight o’clock Saturday evening, he stepped out of his home office. There was work he’d had to do: write a memo about a new oil absorbent, a note to the Indiana sales rep expressing his disappointment at the drop in last month’s sales, a letter to go to the clients of the late Herb Cantlon stating that it had been Superior Chemical’s pleasure to serve them and that it was hoped that… It
was meaningless make-work, he thought, the banal time-wasting he had to do.

  He walked down the hall. The washroom door was closed. Beth was bathing. She was happily singing in a childish, off-key soprano, “She’s a maniac… Mane-EE-Ack!” the main theme from the movie Flashdance.

  Beth was back to her old self, he thought, loving Wifey Dear. In fact, you could make that ultra-loving WD. In bed last night she had been burning for him. He hadn’t heard her squeal and moan that way since…hey! Maybe since ever!

  It was easier for him if Beth weren’t acting as though she started the day with a glass of vinegar. Let her keep on smiling a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval smile right up until…

  The light was on in Marcy and Kim’s room. Michael glanced in. In a quilted blue and white housecoat, Claire Wynkoop was seated on Kim’s bed. Her right arm seemed confined in an invisible sling, the fingers rigidly curled. With the slow, exaggerated blink of an animated cartoon character, she looked at Michael.

  Michael stood in the doorway. “Are you doing all right, Mom? Anything you’d like me to bring you?” He doubted Claire Wynkoop even understood the question. All day she’d been little more than a clumsily animated mummy without its wrappings.

  The tendons on Claire’s neck twitched spastically. One, two, three, she blinked at him.

  Christ, Michael thought, the old crone really acted weird around him. Big change now that her gray matter had turned to Jello. He’d always been the number one boy, the dearly devoted son-in-law, and bet your ass he’d worked hard for that image.

  “I know you can’t really say anything yet, Mom,” Michael said. Sure, Mama-in-law, I want to do all I can for you now that you’re a fucked up wreck! “So if there’s something you’d like, how about you nod your head and we’ll figure it out from there, okay?”

  Claire Wynkoop didn’t nod her head nor, shake it from side to side. Her eyes zoomed in on Michael’s, clicked and locked onto that invisible “here to there” pathway, and blinked: one, two, three.

  “What is it, Mom?” Michael said. He stepped into the room.

  She seemed to shrink, cowering, as though she were somehow trying to recede so far into herself that she disappeared.

  Michael said, “Mom…”

  Claire glared at him. Her back straightened. She didn’t blink. There was no mistaking what he saw in her steady gaze. She hated him! She feared him!

  Claire raised her left hand. Around her head she made a motion as thought drawing a wild profusion of Little Orphan Annie curls. Then she pointed at him. The index finger of her left hand was accusing—condemning.

  Hate and fear—and she was telling him why!

  His heart raced. He had a strange sensation, completely unlike anything he had ever known: the skin around his eyes, his nose, the corners of his mouth, felt as though it were tightening.

  For a fraction of a second, he wondered if he were afraid.

  Michael moved closer. He bent at the knees, squatted, the tips of his shoes almost touching her slipper-shod feet. His voice was gentle, soothing, reassuring. “Mom, I think you see something and it disturbs you. I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t want you to be upset. Mom, I love you. You know that.”

  Her eyes were an icy denunciation.

  “Mom,” Michael said, “this is Michael, okay? I married your daughter. I’m the father of your grandchildren. Mom, I think you’re all confused and upset. You’ve been sick, Mom. It could make you see things that aren’t there, or things that aren’t true, that don’t make any sense. So, Mom, you trust me, okay?”

  Whether she did grant him her trust or if she simply decided that she was weary and worn down and could no longer cope with her knowledge, he would never know, but Claire raised her left hand. Then around his head she traced the outline of his aura. Goddamn her! She does see it! Goddamn her, goddamn her. She’s touching it—I can feel her touching…

  Claire’s lips moved. Her voice tiredly emerged with the timbre but not the volume of a long unoiled door-hinge: “Ruh-hed.”

  Ruh-hed. Christ, there was no doubt in his mind. She was somehow seeing his aura! For a moment, he envied her seeing what he himself had never seen either on himself or on anyone else.

  Then he knew he had to kill her.

  But careful, he had to be careful. He could not give himself away, not now, when The Time of the Strangers was so close. He had to be sure there would be no suspicion, that Beth would not think…

  Yes, he had to kill her.

  Now.

  And he did.

  — | — | —

  SIXTEEN

  “WHY DID you decide to see me?”

  “My husband thought it was a good idea. And I talked it over with a friend”—she was spitting out the words, one tumbling into and over the next—“who knows a lot about psychology. I mean, he is a psychologist and he teaches psychology. Really I guess that’s it.”

  She crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt, dug at the cuticle of her thumb with the nail of her index finger. Her gaze skittered across the office; she didn’t want to look directly at him. There was a Miro lithograph on the wall, a Mr. Coffee on a stand near the picture window, a mahogany desk. When she’d stepped in, she had almost expected a Victorian leather sofa, just like all the psychiatrist cartoons. No couch, though, just the two Danish modem arm-chairs they occupied, set at angles on either side of a low, tiered lamp table.

  “When I ask questions, Beth, I’m seeking information so that I can help you,” Jan Pretre said. “You didn’t answer my question at all, did you?”

  “No,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Jan.”

  “Not Jan, if you please, Beth,” he corrected. “Not here. This isn’t a social situation. We both want this to be a professional relationship and that means you’ve come to see Dr. Pretre. Is that all right?”

  She nodded.

  “Very well. I’ll ask you again. Take all the time you’d like thinking about it, but give me a real answer. What are you doing here? Why do you think you need—a psychiatrist?”

  Forcing herself to speak slowly, to put a pause between each word, she said, “I need help, Dr. Pretre.”

  She did; she had no doubt of that.

  That was why she had agreed to Michael’s suggestion: “I don’t know exactly what’s happening to you and I don’t know why it’s happening but we’ve got to do something, Beth!”

  That was how he’d begun, three days ago, Monday morning, at the breakfast table, after the children had gone to school. Michael spoke calmly, saying precisely what she herself thought, but the sound of his voice made the skin at the nape of her neck feel as though it were being pricked by dozens of tiny needles.

  “Beth,” Michael said. “I don’t think I can help you. You don’t talk to me and you don’t listen to me.”

  Talk to him? God, it required all her will to remain sitting there in the kitchen with him. She wanted to run out the door in her nightgown and slippers, jump into the Chevette and drive away, not giving a thought to a destination, or maybe yanking the wheel hard, the gas pedal to the floor, sending the car zooming from the highway into a telephone pole and ending it, ending this nightmare that possessed her during sleep and enshrouded her by day.

  “Remember Jan Pretre, the psychiatrist, Beth?” Michael said.

  She did. That afternoon, she’d made the appointment and now she was here, blurting still more of an answer to his question: “I feel, oh hell, I feel like I’m going crazy.”

  “Go on with that, Beth,” Jan Pretre said.

  “I have these recurring, obsessive thoughts, these delusions…”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it without the jargon.”

  “Oh, I’ve been thinking these crazy, crazy things I can’t get out of my mind, about Michael.”

  “I want you to be more specific, Beth. Tell me one particular crazy thing.”

  Head down, Beth studied her hand. She had ripped her cuticle bloody.

  She took a deep breath. “All right, this was abou
t a month ago, right after we saw you at Engelkings. Well, it was the day after that.”

  It came back to her as it had been coming back, repeating itself again and again, as the totality of the experience, its sights and sounds and smell—and terror. “I was bathing,” she said. “It’s funny because I remember thinking how happy I was. For the first time in a long time, yes, I was happy.”

  The smell of rose-scented bubble bath made her think of flowers she would see again next spring. She swirled a fingertip in the water, watching the islands of dissipating white bubbles break apart and then lazily link together in new shapes and sizes.

  “You know, it felt so fine that it was me there inside my skin that I started singing. Oh, I can’t carry a tune if it has only one note, but I was singing away, and slipping down in the tub so the water lapped at my chin, and then I heard…”

  Even with the bathroom door closed, the sounds were perfectly clear: There was a bump and then another so like it it might have been an echo. Something slid down the wall, like the sound of a rat’s running feet, and she heard the tinkling crackle of breaking glass, and she knew precisely what had happened: a picture falling from the wall by the staircase, the glass shattering. Then there was a bump—it was no louder than that—and then, just as Michael screamed, “No!” so heavy a thud that the house actually shook. At least, she thought she felt that. Footsteps pounded down the stairs. Michael screamed again, this time, “Beth!”

  She leaped out of the tub. She snatched a bath towel from the rack and tied it around her. The bathroom rug slipped underfoot. She fell against the vanity. It didn’t hurt then. Two days later, the bruise on her hip was a gloomy rainbow of color, it was still there, laded yellow and green.

  “So I ran out into the hall and I saw what had happened.”

  Mother lay at the foot of the stairs. Michael was beside her on his knees. Mother was dead She had to be. She looked broken, as though if you tugged at her hand it would come loose at the wrist, as if a touch would send her head rolling across the floor.