Deep within the eyeholes an orange glow ignited.
Then why did you come looking for me?
“What?”
The head swayed and the eye sockets glowed brightly.
Why have I been disinterred?
The voice did not seem to come from anywhere. Perhaps the rain confused Thomas’ hearing. Perhaps he only imagined it, but he felt compelled by it, by a profound authority inherent within its timbre.
“We seek the truth,” Thomas said, his teeth chattering.
Do you? But I am the master of lies.
“You’re a set of bones! A fossil! You are not real! We have no use for lies!”
No?
“Careful! Get that man away from there!”
Thomas jerked his head around. Peale was pointing down into the pit again, his face red and puffy even through the veil of rain. Below, workmen struggled with someone in their midst.
“Bennington—” Thomas hissed.
The Reverend was stretching a hand upward and shouting, his words only a mumble to Thomas. He twisted amid his captors. For a moment it seemed they had him subdued. But then he was free, struggling through the rising muck toward the huge skull dangling above him. He flexed and managed to jump. He fell a few feet short of the fossil, landing heavily in the hole from which it had been pulled.
Waist-deep, he flailed. Workmen converged on him.
Thomas pushed himself to his knees.
As you wish it, then. The truth is all you’ll have now. But you may come to miss me.
The intense chill Thomas felt came from within. The rain felt warm to him. His vision rippled through the water.
A gust of wind pushed the horned skull in a wide arc. On its return swing, a rope gave way with a loud snap. Helplessly, Thomas watched the head begin to lean out of one side of its bonds. A man reached out with a long pole and tried to hook the ropes above it to pull it toward the rim, but suddenly the entire mass rolled out and fell, crushing Reverend Bennington.
People screamed and shouted; more men climbed back down the walls of the pit to work at moving the giant head and rescue the man buried beneath it. Thomas crawled backward from the edge until he felt safely distant.
He struggled to his feet.
The ghost had changed. The smooth beauty of its skin was gone, replaced by a tatter of decayed flesh through which maggot-cleaned bone was visible. The clothes lay in torn and filthy strips on its bloated body. Blood vessels traced paths in the parts of the face and neck still intact and the eyes gazed at him with cataract dullness. Thomas choked at a brief smell of putrefaction.
“Richard—”
Abigail walked up behind the ghost and faced it. She stared, clearly able to see it now. Her eyes shimmered with tears.
She looked up at Thomas. “Let me have him.”
“What? Like this?”
Abigail’s gaze seemed to caress the specter. She nodded. “He’s beautiful.”
“He—”
Thomas swallowed. He closed his eyes. He realized that he did not resent Abigail anymore. She was choosing nothing he would choose, a decayed past and no clear future, but it was her choice now, not a reaction to him, and in so doing she absolved him. Whether that was her intention he could not say, but something new was now possible. He nodded. When he opened his eyes again, Abigail was gone, along with the horror image of their long-dead son.
He stood there till the rain abated, wondering what he had just done. The excited shouts of workers and spectators finally drew him back to the pit.
Bennington’s body was being dragged up the steep slope with a rope tied to his ankles. The skull, now inverted, was rising up smoothly. From this angle, it appeared to be a kind of elephant’s head. One side was caved in from the fall. Its empty eye socket collapsed. No power remained there; it was just a skull, empty and unexciting.
Thomas shivered and walked away. There was nothing for him here, and he had work to do.
The Playground Door
Paul kept his hands folded neatly on his lap. He glanced down at his son beside him. Jonathan, four years old, imitated Paul—hands folded, back straight, his small face set in a precocious mask of seriousness. His legs dangled from the edge of the plastic chair. On the other side of Jonathan, Kay sat less formally, as if the bulk of her pregnancy would permit no straight back, no properness of posture, no dignity of occasion other than its own blatant claim on attention. Kay was proud, but tired. Paul had already decided that there probably would be no more children after this. Kay was small, delicate, and much too important to him to risk.
The room in which they waited was too cold, its décor stark—plastic furniture, off-white and pale-blue walls, accompanied by darker blue carpet that absorbed sound. No one else was present. The last family had left twenty minutes ago. One of them had made fragile sobbing sounds which had managed to escape the unfortunate carpet. The remaining silence had made the long wait even more difficult to bear.
Across from Paul a set of double doors swung inward and Paul’s heart struck hard once, twice, then calmed to normal as his father entered. At fifty-two, Eric Dover was in better shape than anyone else Paul knew, including himself. He walked with a long stride, arms slightly akimbo as if he were constantly ready to embrace. He wore jogging pants and a T-shirt. He looked supremely happy. When he saw Paul, his small blue eyes danced and his ever-present smirk grew to a full grin.
He hardly looks the grieving widower, Paul thought and stood extending his hand. His father took it briefly, then laughed and pulled Paul into a hug. Paul endured in what he hoped was dignity until Eric let him.
Kay had gotten to her feet and eagerly accepted a less hearty hug from her father-in-law. Paul saw her eyes glistening and hoped she would not start crying.
Jonathan stood looking up at the big man he called “Gra’pa.”
“Well, now,” Eric said, regarding his grandson. “Why the long face? You keep that up you’ll be just like your dad! You’re too young to be so grim.” He squatted down so he was at eye level with the boy. “Do I get a hug from you?”
Jonathan stepped forward and reverently wrapped his small arms around Eric’s neck. The solemnity the child gave to the act nearly erased the smile from Eric’s face. Paul watched the tiny ritual with a sense of pride in his son that mitigated some of the absurdity Eric brought to the occasion. For an instant Eric’s face changed. Paul thought he saw a tear form, the mouth turn down slightly, and perhaps a moment of regret. Paul blinked, and then Eric was hugging Jonathan and lifting him off the floor.
“God, you’re getting big!”
The illusion that his father was treating the moment non-trivially vanished leaving Paul a bit confused as if he had tasted something he couldn’t quite place. His father almost, almost, showed a sober emotion appropriate to what he was about to do.
“I appreciate you coming,” Eric said, setting Jonathan down. “I wouldn’t want to do this without seeing you all one last time.”
“You’ll see us again,” Kay said.
“Sure, but not like this. Hell, you’ll both be my age when I wake up.”
“Dad—”
Eric shook his head. “Don’t. We’ve already discussed it.”
Paul felt his mouth tighten. “But you’re not even sick.” He tried to keep his voice steady, but he heard a plea in it anyway.
Eric’s eyebrows went up. “I’m sick of this age, son. The world is dreary.”
“Who says it’ll be any better in thirty years?”
“Maybe it won’t. But it’ll be different.” He shook his head. “I’ve made my decision.”
Paul glanced at Kay, then at Jonathan. No, this was not the time to have it out, not in front of Jonathan, not here in the waiting room of the cryotorium, not when everything was about to happen, not when Eric had set his sights on what he wanted. It was never a good time to have it out. What would be the point in any case? Eric always won.
Paul sighed. “There’s time later.”
Eric nodded, but s
eemed uncertain for a moment. Paul studied the narrowing of eyes, the slight downward jerk of the brow, the hesitant set of the mouth—only a moment, and then it was gone. These brief moments were the only times Eric actually seemed real to Paul.
“We can talk about it in thirty years,” Eric said and laughed.
“Why thirty years?” Kay asked.
“Why not?” Eric answered. “Actually, that’s what they recommended. For some reason thirty is a break point. After that it goes up to fifty, then to a hundred. I didn’t understand it. Fifty seemed too long, twenty didn’t seem long enough.” He laughed again. “That left thirty.”
Paul looked toward the windows. Through the vertical blinds he saw the pleasant parkland thick with evergreens that surrounded the cryotorium. It had rained earlier, and the foliage seemed aglow: a latent vitality just beneath the surface of everything, unspoiled by choices. Paul thought of Jonathan that way—he had not made any mistakes yet, taken no wrong turns, everything good was still implicit in the child, frozen at a perfect moment. He wished he could keep it this way. Paul envied his son.
“Well,” Eric said, “you’ve got the house for the next thirty years. If you’re in doubt about anything, just check the file labeled ‘Disposition’ or ask my lawyer.”
He nodded, looked back at his father, and said, “You can depend on me.”
Eric patted Paul’s shoulder. “I know.”
For another instant they locked eyes. Paul sensed the importance of the moment, a spark of connection between them rising out of Eric like a sphere of light drawing them together. I should say something, Paul thought, and a long list of things he wanted to say to his father scrolled through his mind. “I love you” was somewhere in the middle, but before he got to that particular line the bubble dissipated, the instant ended, and Eric smiled grimly and looked away. Then he was hugging Kay and roughing Jonathan’s hair, laughing once more.
“See you in thirty years,” he said loudly and walked away.
Paul watched him depart and felt his lips open, his tongue moving in the silent shaping of final words, unvoiced. Eric was through the doors; Paul felt his body jerk, as if a line had been attached to him and suddenly yanked free, and he took a single step forward.
“Let’s go home,” Kay said.
They drove to the house in silence. Though Paul felt Kay’s emotions like rising humidity, he did not want to say anything to color the day in an inappropriate shade.
As they pulled up the driveway, Paul considered the lazy way the house sprawled up the side of a low hill. It had taken his father and his Uncle Nathan years of work. Paul had fond memories of playing in its unfinished parts when he was a boy. The house had grown year by year until his mother’s death. That had been the only time Paul remembered seeing his father somber.
For all of three or four months, Eric had not smiled, laughed, made a joke, or allowed anyone to lift his spirits. As Paul thought about it now, it seemed as though the man had concentrated all his grief into as short a time as possible, lived with it intimately, cloistered it and cultivated it, and paid attention to nothing else until it was all used up.
When Eric was done with his grief, he started seeing other women. Eric just moved on as if no dramatic life change had ever happened, as if his wife’s death had made no impact, no dent on his life at all. He was the same man, and Paul had hated him for that. Perhaps if he had shown a change, acted differently toward life, his friends, his son, then Paul might have accepted his actions. But Eric remained the same. Through his outrage, Paul had been unable to detect a significant difference in his father from the time before his mother had died and this man who could not seem to sustain proper grief.
Perhaps not, Paul thought now, but he would never know. By the time his anger had passed he discovered that he could not know if Eric was simply showing the world a face and keeping everything in or if he was different and Paul had not known him well enough before. Paul had been fourteen when his mother died of cancer. But he had not known about the cancer then because Eric had kept that from him. One day he noticed that his mother was sick a lot, shortly after she left to go to a clinic. A few months later came the funeral. All through that time everything possessed a surreal aura, like light shot through glycerine. People moved with effort. Grief seemed a tangible thing, moments became encased in amber, and he remembered them long afterward as still-lifes.
I’ll have to wait thirty years now to ask, he thought. Maybe by then I’ll be able to.
“Why are we going to Gra’pa’s house?”
The question jolted Paul from his thoughts.
“We live there now, Jon,” Kay said.
“Why?”
“Grampa asked us to take care of it. It’s easier to do that if we live there.”
“We’re going to live there till he comes back?”
“Perhaps.” She smiled over her shoulder. “You like Grampa’s house, don’t you? You don’t mind living there?”
Jonathan nodded, but he looked uncertain.
Paul pulled into the garage. He got out of the car and opened Kay’s door. She smiled at him as he helped her out. Jonathan jumped from the rear seat and looked back down the driveway.
“Come on, Jonathan,” he called.
The boy remained motionless. Paul and Kay exchanged quizzical looks, silently asking each other if this was something important that needed attention or just Jonathan being Jonathan.
“Jon,” Kay called.
The boy turned. He looked like he had a question but did not know how to phrase it. Perhaps, Paul thought, he wonders why we have to go through all this nonsense for an eccentric old man.
“Let’s get some lunch, son.”
Jonathan nodded, took another look down the driveway, then followed his parents into the house.
Paul had been in his bedroom most of an hour when Kay came in. He sat on his old bed in his old room, the one he would always think of as truly his, and watched his wife move ponderously through the process of undressing. Paul was fascinated by her, especially now. Her breasts were swollen, the nipples large and dark, resting on the enormous mound of her pregnancy. Paul admired her legs.
She pulled a nightgown on, sat on the end of the bed, and brushed her hair for a few minutes.
“I thought,” she began and then shook her head.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, something. Tell me.”
She stood, set the brush on the dresser. “I thought we’d be in the main bedroom.”
“That’s Eric’s.”
Kay gave him a quizzical look.
“You disagree?” he pressed.
“Is it going to be his for the next thirty years? Everything?”
“It is, though.”
“Then we ought to move back to our house. I don’t think I want to feel like a guest here for thirty years.”
“But we’ve put ours on the market.”
“No one has bought it yet; we’ll just withdraw it.”
“I thought you wanted to live here.”
She nodded, eased herself into bed. “Yes, I want to live here. I don’t want to just stay here.”
“This is Eric’s house.”
“And he’s given it to us.”
“No, he hasn’t. He’s asked us to take care of it.”
Kay studied him, eyes narrowed. She let her hand brush his arm lightly. “Hon, we can’t pretend that we’re just watching his home for him. In the first place he told us that it’s our home if we want it. In the second place, we’ve got to get on with our lives and if we stay here we have to live here, otherwise we’ll be putting everything on hold, waiting for your father to return.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“If he was on a European tour for six months, nothing. But three decades is a little long for us to wait for him to come back before we decide who we are.”
Paul blinked at her. “That didn’t make any sense.”
“No? Okay. I�
�m tired. I need sleep.”
Paul watched her close her eyes. For a moment he was dismayed. Then he felt angry. How did she always manage to stir up a lot of uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings and then have the gall to just go to sleep before anything is resolved?
They had been in counseling a few years earlier. Paul had thought little enough of it all: Nothing for him had been solved, but he remembered some of the rules the counselor laid down. Never go to bed with an argument unfinished. There had been times as a boy he had wished he had known that with Eric. He glanced around at the walls of his room. Jumbled memories of Eric sending him to bed, this bed, in the middle of an argument flooded his mind. He glared at Kay.
“You and Eric are a lot alike,” he said.
Her eyes snapped open. “I think I’m prettier.”
The joke struck him wrong, and he got out of bed.
“Hey,” she said. “That was supposed to be funny.”
“What the hell did you mean by that? Not waiting for him to come back before deciding who we are. What does that mean?”
“Ah. I struck a nerve.”
She pushed herself upright and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She sighed, stood, and pulled on a robe.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go into the kitchen. If we’re going to fight I’m going to munch.”
Paul bristled. Of all the things Eric did continually that irritated, annoyed, and enraged him, it was by far his refusal to take arguments seriously that worked Paul into inexpressible states. Mute, he followed his wife to the kitchen.
Kay pulled a vegetable platter from the refrigerator, set it on the island, and plucked a celery stick from it. Her nonchalance scraped at his patience.
“I start?” she asked. Paul folded his arms and glared at her. She nodded.
“I start. Paul, I love you. That doesn’t change. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I wouldn’t be carrying our second child. I wouldn’t be trying to make this work, if I didn’t. But sometimes you can be the most perverse son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever known.”
Paul felt physically rocked. He dropped his arms and stared at her. She bit off half the celery stick.
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