by James, Terry
When at last my breath was coming slow and steady, I closed my eyes. At some distant remove I sensed that I was cold and wet, and that I should try to do something about it. I decided to give it more thought after a little rest. I must have drifted off to sleep, because I awoke sometime in the night to a blood-red moon. So red that the sand before me was glowing like hot coals. I was freezing. Everything was still. No sound at all from the ocean. I raised my head. For a strangely enchanting moment I thought I was in hell. The ocean was on fire. The surface was heaving thickly, like lava, searing ingots of yellow light piercing slabs of molten iron and ruby red, all the way to the horizon. It was terrifyingly beautiful. The stink of sulphur hung densely in the air. The only thing lacking was the screams of the damned. I stared awestruck for as long as I could bear it, then I dropped my head and closed my eyes and prepared to be judged.
When I awoke again, the sky and the ocean were their usual misty morning gray. I was so cold I literally couldn’t move. I concentrated on one agonizingly stiff limb at a time, eventually regaining some control of my body. It took about half an hour, but I managed to get up on my knees. After that I had to rest. It felt as though my entire mass was crammed into the right half of my skull, and it was pressing to get out.
Eventually I rolled over to a seated position. I was completely caked in sand, from the tips of my shoes to the shoulders of my coat. It was all over my face, encrusted in my hair. I started to wipe it off. I don’t know why. It had probably saved my life.
Out of the mist a jogger materialized, a middle-aged man in black shorts and a white T-shirt, a brief hitch in his otherwise fluid stride the only indication that he had spotted me. He veered up the berm, into the sand, until he was standing before me, breathing deeply of health and vigor. Hands on hips he said:
“Hey, man, are you all right?”
He had a full brown mustache, cheerful cheeks, a bald crown. Somehow or other I knew he was a lawyer. It took everything in me to conjure up an affirmative little grunt and nod.
He studied me dubiously. “Are you sure?”
I nodded again. He wasn’t convinced, but he wisely turned away and resumed his run, no doubt filing me away as just another homeless drunk on the beach.
I stayed put for a while, letting some of my mass drain from my brain. Somehow I conjured up the will to stand. The will preceded its fruition by quite some time. My head was spinning. I looked around for my hat, but it was gone, washed out to sea. Slowly at first, then with increasing assurance, I trudged back through the sand to the parking lot. At the restrooms I stopped and, leaning against the cinderblock wall, dumped wet sand from my shoes.
I hobbled the rest of the way up the road, the sound of the ocean gradually receding behind me. The sun had not yet breached the foothills. I doubted it ever would. I got into the car and sat there in a state of perfect stupefaction. Never again, I promised myself. The car was soon filled with the sour reek of my binge. I was not fit to drive. I pressed the ignition, put the heater on full blast, turned the car around, and drove back up the road to the highway.
33
IT WAS AFTER two when I reached Sunset Acres. The heat was stifling, billowing up in waves from the asphalt. There was a big, gaping hole in my head where my brain should have been. I got out and crossed the yard to the porch.
The door was locked. I cupped my hands to the window and peered in. She wasn’t in the living room. I knocked again. I waited. Not a sound from within.
Wiping the sour perspiration from my upper lip, I left the porch and went around the side of the house and back to the conservatory. The yard was engulfed in the shimmering pulsations of cicadas, a strange, hypnotic sound, like ray guns in ’50s sci-fi movies. The brilliance of the sunshine reflecting off the leaves and bark of the eucalyptus trees hurt my eyes. I peered through the glass of the conservatory. She wasn’t there.
The back door was also locked. With a papery flutter where my heart should have been, I walked out to the shed and grabbed the ladder and carried it around to the front of the house. I leaned it against the roof of the porch and started up it. Halfway up I went woozy and had to stop. When it had passed, I carried on.
Three steps toward the study window a shingle gave way under my right shoe and broke loose. I lunged forward and caught the window ledge as the shingle slid down and disappeared over the edge. I kneeled there panting, waiting for my pulse to return to normal. When it became evident that it wasn’t going to—if anything it seemed to be getting faster—I shoved the window up and climbed in.
The door was closed. I crossed directly to it, opened it and stepped out into the hall.
“Imogen?” I called out.
No response.
I walked down the hall to our bedroom. The strawberry finches paid me no heed as I stepped in. Her water glass was still on the bedside table. In all our time togther I had never known her not to take it down with her to the kitchen when she got up in the morning.
On my way down the hall I stepped into the bathroom, just to be sure. The sight of myself in the mirror gave me a shock. My face was as pale and bloated as a drowned corpse’s. Overnight I had aged twenty years.
After confirming that she wasn’t in my nap room, I went down the stairs to the dining room. All was still and quiet save the ticking of the clock. A quarter after two.
I went through the kitchen and out the door to the conservatory. The lunch things were still on the table: the loaf of French bread, the wedge of cheese, the jar of beets. Set for two. She hadn’t yet cleared the dirty dishes. All that remained on the plate at my seat was a small crust of bread and a peach pit. The diffused sunlight was bringing out every little detail: the hardened pores of the bread, every ridge of the pit, the oil on the tiny sliver of cheese, the dried red smears of beet juice on the plate.
Back in the living room I told myself, despite all evidence to the contrary, that she must have gone out for a walk.
I had just taken a step toward the sofa when a gunshot rang out from upstairs. A single, emphatic report. Large caliber. So loud it set my ears ringing.
I reached for my revolver but it wasn’t there. I rushed up the stairs.
An intense column of sunlight was radiating out of the partially open doorway of the study. The scent of burnt gunpowder hanging in the air. I paused at the door, listening, then, hearing nothing but my heartbeat in my ears, pushed it open.
No one there. I stepped in. In my earlier rush I hadn’t noticed the neat stack of typing paper on the desk, about three inches thick. An old familiar dread came over me as I approached the desk, telling myself to just turn and walk away. In the end I couldn’t resist the spare beauty of those four black lines surrounded by all that whiteness.
Heir Apparent
a novel
by
Walter Morris
I turned the page.
Chapter 1:
That morning when the cops came knocking, I was dreaming that a man had shot me in the head. I saw the flash. I heard the bang. But I didn’t feel a thing. Who this man was and why he wanted me dead, I no longer recall.
I looked up from the page with the chilling sensation that she was watching me at that very moment, recording my every thought and action. A burst of sunlight flooded the room, so intense that at first nothing else could be discerned within it, and when, gradually, shapes did begin to return they were not what they should have been, not the planes and angles of walls and floors and shelves but something altogether more amorphous, no discernible edges at all, only what appeared to be translucent red jellyfish, slowly pulsing, no shadows, no edges, no corners, pulsing to the throb of my heartbeat, gently contracting, swelling, and above the thumping, or around it, another sound, a single high-pitched note, an E-flat, just within the range of human hearing, and then I saw it, floating in mid-air, a small dense, metallic object, drifting slowly towards the source of the light, pulling me along with it, everything within me contracting, expanding, flowing out into the light, no con
tours, no density, no differentiation, drifting for what seemed like an eternity, until gradually the light began to diminish, the thumping of my heartbeat to soften, edges, shapes, and distance to return, and I saw that I was floating in a sea of blood, rimmed by distant ice cliffs, and above it all two watery planets were shining down on me like enormous eyes, and they were full of love.