First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (25 page)

I stood there, humiliated; I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Get out of here,” she said. The flowers in her eyes seemed to be writhing.

I was only too glad to be dismissed. But as I reached for the front door, she called out.

“You think I don’t know you? I know all about you,” she said. “I used to watch you from the window in the mornings when you walked past. Didn’t the little Doctor tell you I was his patient before he gave up on me?”

I stumbled through the door and outside into the night where it was rainy and cold, and I could breathe again. I hadn’t noticed the house when I arrived, I’d been so full of my own thoughts. Now I went out into the roadway and looked back. It was the big white house with four pillars. And I remembered the moving curtains. The face I thought I’d seen there must have been the face of Amber Tristesse.

I went to the turreted mansion the following Wednesday. Amber Tristesse had arrived before me and had already
taken a pipe. The flowers in her eyes were in the process of contracting when she saw me and concentrated on me.

“Want to come with me afterwards?” She said this in a wheedling voice I’d never heard before. “Want to come home with me?”

“No,” I said.

“Afraid?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Poor baby,” she said, pretending to pout. Then she lay back and her eyes turned inward, searching for the half-opened entranceway to the place that spawned her dreams. I looked for a mattress at the furthest end of the room from her and lay on it. At four in the morning, when I rose to leave the turreted mansion, her mattress was empty.

The rest of that spring was fairly typical. Week after week of rain washed away the dirt left behind by winter. Then the sun shone and the warm days seemed as though they’d never end.

I saw Amber Tristesse—I couldn’t think of her as Gladys Brown—one more time.

We were in her warehouse apartment, and we’d made love, in the dark, as usual. Afterwards, she fell asleep lying on her back. I’d never seen her naked, but this time, I felt I needed to. I slipped out of the bed softly and switched on the light. She didn’t wake. I lifted the corner of the sheet and pulled it gently away. She might have been as beautiful as I’d always imagined, but all I could see was the stain that marked her from breast to navel—a dark purple stain that was a mirror image of my own. I was staring at it in shock when I became aware that her eyes were open, and the flowers were throbbing, throbbing, like hearts beating.

I awoke, sweating, and was thankful it was only another
nightmare. And yet, it seemed a fitting place to meet her. Yes, the woman I loved had become an inhabitant of my nightmares.

S
O MY NIGHTMARES
began again in earnest not long after the end of my affair with Amber Tristesse—and they included her. My weekly visit to the old mansion wasn’t helping. So I started going there more often: sometimes three or four nights a week, except Wednesdays. I knew that going so often was unwise; but the more I went, the more I needed to go.

As for women: the relationship with Amber Tristesse seemed to have broken the ice. I quickly became friendly with other women who hung around the seedy bars in the early hours of the morning. Though friendly is hardly the word: it wasn’t their friendship I was looking for, and they knew that. Sometimes, in return, they wanted money, sometimes a paid visit to the mansion. From week to week I could barely remember their names.

This state of affairs lasted about six months. Then I stopped. Cold turkey. I woke up one day in a motel room with a woman I didn’t know beside me in the bed, and I was filled with self-loathing; I’d had enough of myself. I decided at long last I preferred a clear sense of what was real in this world and what wasn’t—even if it meant putting up with the nightmares. Even if it meant death. I stopped going to the old mansion. I made my apartment my prison for eight whole days, and I sweated and suffered:
eight awful days till my hand was steady enough to hold a cup of coffee.

Then I took the next step: I began going to the Xanadu, which I’d completely neglected for months. I told Lila Trapper she could expect me for two hours each day. One of her eyes seemed to believe me, the other looked doubtful. I wasn’t too sure myself.

One day I was passing a pet store and saw some black-and-white kittens in the window. I remembered Mrs Chapman’s cat, Sophie, and thought perhaps it might be good for me to have a distraction. I bought one of the kittens and named it Minnie. At times during the next few months, the need to look after that little cat was all that stopped me from going back to my old ways, or from swallowing one of the pills I’d inherited from Doctor Giffen.

I made one other major decision: to change my birthday. Often, lying on the bed, I’d contemplate the photograph I’d brought from Doctor Giffen’s: of my parents at the skiing resort. He had told me I was conceived there. So I considered that day, before all their troubles—and mine—began, as a day worth remembering. I did a quick calculation, taking into account the fact my sister and I were premature, and settled on the last day of October.

Strangely, after I did that, my state of mind began to improve even more. Incredibly, my nightmares disappeared. Without any scotch, or drugs, or unusual effort on my part, they stopped. My dreams were ordinary: an extension of my waking life. I slept soundly. This went on for two years, and I started to think I had once again survived the storm: I might at last be able to live a sane, ordinary life. I was now approaching my thirty-third birthday, according to my new method of calculating.

Then everything went wrong.

I was helping out in the Xanadu one Saturday morning—a sunny day at the beginning of September. Lila Trapper asked me if I’d mind delivering an itinerary to a client in St Janus, a little town a few miles west of Camberloo. I was only too pleased to get out of the office.

The road was busy and I drove carefully: I hadn’t trusted myself with a car for a long time. Aside from the usual traffic, there were a number of horse-drawn buggies moving slowly along the gravel shoulder of the road. They belonged to the Hagarites, a severe religious sect for whom the clock had stopped in 1800. Men, women and children, they were all dressed in black. They were on their way back from the St Janus Farmers’ Market, where they sold their wares. If I half-closed my eyes, I could easily persuade myself they were the inhabitants of St Jude, cast up here by the big wave, thousands of miles from their island home.

Even the stone farmhouse, with its small verandah and neat garden—I noticed it as I passed the final buggy at the corner of Bergson and North King—looked quite a bit like Aunt Lizzie’s cottage. Not far from it, at the edge of a field, was a crude, hand-painted billboard.

I’d seen the billboard before and not paid much attention to it. But this sunny day, in the car, I was struck by the awkward, old-fashioned language. And especially by that peculiar word “mote.”

I dropped off the itinerary and was back home around three o’clock. Black-and-white Minnie came to greet me at the apartment door and nuzzled against my legs, purring.
She was happy, and I was relatively contented at having got out of the office and done something useful. Otherwise, I’d nothing particular in mind; in fact, my mind was almost blank—a state I’d found to be very useful during the period of my reformation.

So, there I was, just after closing my apartment door, right in mid-stride on my way to the living-room when I saw it.

A black spot.

It was just in front of my eyes, floating through the room. I reached out and swiped at it with my right hand, as if it were a mosquito. It didn’t go away. It wasn’t something that landed on a ceiling, or a wall, or a carpet; but it was everywhere I looked. It was just a tiny speck, and sometimes it seemed to be sliding, like a falling star. If it wasn’t in the room outside of me, I thought, it must be something in my eye, a speck of dust, though it wasn’t at all painful. Blinking didn’t help. I couldn’t even tell whether it was in my right eye or my left. In fact, it seemed to be in both. I shut my eyes completely. I could still see the spot as clear as clear could be. Then it disappeared.

This first experience only lasted a minute. At the time, I thought I really must have succeeded in blinking it away. And I remember thinking of it as a “mote”—the word I’d seen on the billboard.

In this simple way the horror began.

For the next few weeks, from time to time, the mote would appear: mainly when I was at home; but not always. Once it came when I was on the phone to a client at the agency. I didn’t let it bother me too much, but I was very aware of it. Another time, it came when I was driving. I was just making a left turn from Thorndale onto Fisher; I was so distracted by it I almost hit a car coming the other way.
I pulled into the Beechwood parking lot and waited for my eye to clear.

That near-accident convinced me that the problem was becoming more than just a nuisance—so I looked for help.

My own doctor, Doctor Lu, a man whose astute Oriental eyes always made me think he saw more than I wanted him to see, sent me right down to an ophthalmologist with an office in the same building. I knew her, too—a tall, talkative woman who’d booked vacations at my agency. I stared into a device, and she stared back at my eye through a scanner on the other side, all the time talking about her travel plans for her next vacation.

Whiff
!—the machine blew a measured puff of air into my eyeball. That startled me and stopped her from talking. She stared through her eyepiece for a long time.

“I thought I saw something,” she said. “But I can’t find it now.” She tried the test again.

Whiff!

“No. I can’t see anything,” she said. She became talkative again and reassuring. The problem, she said, might be one of those little fragments of protein that drift in the eyeball inside that mini-ocean around the iris. It was probably nothing more than a piece of debris, or flotsam, and in time, with luck, it would float out of range and I’d never see it again.

I was walking back along the corridor to Doctor Lu’s office when the mote appeared. He shone a little light into my eyes and spent a long time searching. I could see the mote, but he couldn’t.

“To be on the safe side,” he said, “I’m sending you down for a brain scan.”

The lab was at the other end of the building, and when I got there, the mote was still quite visible to me. Good, I thought. Now I’ll find out what you are. But no sooner had
the technician attached the electrodes to my skull, than it disappeared. Afterwards, he examined the plate very carefully.

“No,” he said. “Nothing to worry about here. Your brain’s quite normal.”

I did worry, but not too much. The mote’s appearances never lasted very long, and, as a matter of fact, something about them was different—they’d become quite pleasant.

I remember the first time that happened. I was sitting in the armchair of my living-room, looking out onto the Park. The trees were beginning to show the first signs of fall. At that moment, the mote appeared, and I felt a kind of euphoria—almost as though I were back on the mattress in the turreted mansion, and had taken that long, first draw on my pipe. There was a friendliness about this appearance of the mote—an intimacy. I realized, it was
my
mote. Like Minnie, who’d hang around my neck purring when we were alone, but would run into the bedroom and hide if a stranger came into the apartment. Yes, whatever the mote was, it was all mine, and was nothing an ophthalmologist or a brain specialist could detect.

T
HIS PLEASANT PHASE
lasted for about two weeks, in the course of which the trees, deprived of their summer heat, changed colour. During that brief time I had come to the conclusion that I was, in a way, privileged. I’d been singled out for something unique and delightful. Every time the mote appeared, it gave me a jolt of happiness. The fact that
it had taken to appearing two or three times a day now didn’t bother me.

I even began to convince myself that I was in charge: that I was the one who
willed
the mote’s appearance whenever I needed a lift.

But after four weeks, something began to happen that had nothing to do with my wishes.

I first noticed it one evening in the middle of October. I got home from the agency around six. I’d brought some files to go over before heading out for dinner. As I sat down at my desk to look at them, it struck me that I hadn’t seen the mote all day.

The thought no sooner crossed my mind than it appeared. And almost right away I noticed the difference. It had always been black, but now it seemed even blacker than before. But no, something else was happening. The more I examined its appearance, the more certain I was that the change wasn’t a matter of shade, but of size.

Yes. The mote was getting bigger while I watched.

Nor did I feel any euphoria this time. On the contrary, there was something menacing about it, I didn’t know why. Fortunately, it didn’t stay long. But it made three more appearances that evening. Each time, it started at its old size, and then became a little bit bigger, then went away.

I tried not to take this development too seriously. I thought of the lizard in the beams of the cottage on St Jude, and how it would puff itself up to frighten me, even though it was harmless. That night in Camberloo I made myself think of the little lizard, and tried not to worry.

Things remained this way for a week. The mote was definitely bigger. And it only appeared at night, in my apartment.

That is, till one Tuesday afternoon.

I was at the agency talking to a client on the telephone, and, suddenly, the mote appeared. I hung up, locked my office door and sat down again.

The mote this time kept growing till it was bigger than I’d ever seen it. From being nothing but a speck, it developed till it was the size of a black eye-patch; then it grew bigger yet, like one of those black manta rays we used to watch rising to the surface from the clear deep water around St Jude. I couldn’t believe how big it was, and it still kept growing and growing, round and black. I could see nothing but the mote. I felt like a man trapped in a cave, its entrance blocked off. The centre of my mind had been eclipsed; only an aureole of light, of memory, was left around the edges.