Night Relics (44 page)

She was staring at him, waiting for him to say something.

“That’s all,” he stammered. “What I want to say is that I know I haven’t been paying any attention to us, to you. It’s obvious
now. But I swear it wasn’t obvious a couple of days ago.”

She nodded now, instead of shrugging. And it wasn’t exaggerated; the nod wasn’t meant to be ironic. She understood him. He
reached across and squeezed her arm
again, and although he had to force himself to do it, he said, “I love you,” and then sat back in his chair, the words sounding
rusty from disuse.

She smiled just a little, as if at the idea of him trying so damned hard to do something he wasn’t very good at. “I was thinking
of going to the AA meeting at Saddleback Hospital Tuesday night.”

“Why?” he said, suddenly coming to her defense. “There’s no way you’ve got
that
kind of problem. Just because I might have said a couple of stupid things …”

“They weren’t stupid things. They might have been
mean
things, but they were true.”

He started to argue with her, but then stopped abruptly. He was doing it again—pretending that nothing mattered, that it was
better to keep your head in the sand. “All right,” he said. “There’s no harm in checking it out. Maybe I’ll tag along.”

She set her coffee cup down and stood up, leaning against the porch railing. The moon was just showing above the ridge, and
the sky was full of stars. He stood next to her and put his arm around her awkwardly, half expecting her to shrug it off.
After a long time she said, “It’s beautiful out here when the wind blows,” and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

B
ETH FOLLOWED
P
ETER THROUGH THE BACK DOOR, DOWN
the wooden stairs, grabbing onto the handrail to steady herself against the wind that swept across the road and rushed through
the forest trees. The gray trunks of alders bent before it, and the heavy limbs of oaks and sycamores swung ominously in the
darkness. Moonlight shone on the bricks of the walkway, illuminating the leaves that skittered past, the moon itself barely
risen above the ridge.

Something moved along the edge of the house, in the dark shadow of the rock retaining wall. Peter stopped abruptly, shouting
to warn her, and she grabbed his arm to steady him, looking past him, expecting to see the boy. Instead, a man stood staring
straight back at them, through them, his dark coattails flapping in the wind, his hair wild, eyes livid with rage. He held
a piece of broken tree limb in his hand, which he threw angrily into the forest, suddenly striding forward as if he meant
to run them down. Peter trod backward, pushing Beth behind him, and just then the man vanished. For an instant he was a mere
patch of pale radiance like moonlit dust, and then he was gone.

She was aware of the boy crying now, the sound of it close, impossibly loud on the wind. She stood clutching Peter, who breathed
heavily, his face a mask of fear. He shut his eyes and said to her, “Did that look like me?”

“What do you mean?” she half shouted, barely able to hear him above the wind. The night was full of noise, the crying and
a deep buzzing like bees in a hive.

“He looked like me.”

She shook her head and shouted, “
No
, he didn’t.” The man, ghost, whatever it was, hadn’t looked anything like Peter. He was dark, with deep eyes, and heavy browed….
“Let’s go back in,” she shouted, pulling on Peter’s arm. But he cocked his head then, listening, as if just now conscious
of the crying.

The latticework gate blocking the open cellar swung slowly open on its hinges, and something darted past, straight into the
cellar. A cat? She’d seen only a gray shape. Peter stepped warily toward the gate, shining the beam of a flashlight along
the retaining wall. They stopped outside, peering in, Peter playing the light across the stone piers and the broad base of
the chimney.

Was the boy under there? She pictured the face at the window, blank and staring, discolored by the yellow light of the candles.
It’s just a little boy
, she told herself, listening to the crying. It was farther away now, maybe deeper under the house, maybe somewhere off within
the fringe of the woods.

“All right!” Peter shouted. “Come on out!”

There was no response, no movement in the darkness. He bent over and shined the flashlight into the recesses of the cellar,
but the beam was weak, and the cellar itself was full of rubble and stone piers and wooden supports that threw myriad shadows,
making it impossible to see clearly beyond a few feet.

Then something fluttered against the downhill lattice, not ten feet distant—a pale shape like a drift of suspended muslin
buoyed by the wind. Peter pointed the flashlight at it, and for an instant, just before the beam illuminated it, Beth saw
that it was the figure of the boy, standing with something in his arms—the gray cat. Then the light shone on it, revealing
a broad drape of dusty cobweb hanging from an overhead beam. The wind pushed it sideways, into an amorphous shape. There was
no cat, nothing at all human about the cobweb.

Peter stared at it for another moment before turning toward her. He took a step away from the gate. “Why don’t you go back
inside?” he said, gesturing with the light toward the candlelit parlor windows. She could see the old bookcases inside, along
the far wall, the decanter and glasses on top, the framed pictures, the two empty chairs. From outside it looked almost elegant,
pristine, unaffected by the years and neglect. She shook her head. “Not without you.”

The gate started to creak shut, and Peter reached out and pushed it solidly open, then rolled a rock in front of it, blocking
it there. He suddenly bent down and kissed her, and then, taking her hand, he ducked into the interior of the cellar.

She could just barely stand beneath the low beams, and she raked the air in front of her to push away cobwebs. The cellar
stretched away before them, the height of the ceiling diminishing nearly to nothing at the uphill end. The fireplace chimney
sat next to the gate, its wide base flaring down into the ground almost like tree roots. The chimney was massive, as if the
builder had gotten carried away with the abundance of river rock lining the creek and hadn’t known when to stop building.
The stones were mixed up with patches of clinker bricks, the joints slopping over with old mortar.

She followed Peter as he moved toward the center of the room, picking his way through the debris that lay in the loose dirt—scraps
of lumber and iron pipe, broken clinker brick, and old garden tools. He cast the beam of the flashlight into the far corners
and along the wall, stooping beneath sagging floor joists that were black with age and strung with the silky white orbs of
spider eggs.

Dead autumn leaves lay heaped in a low hillock against the wooden lattice that fenced the cellar, and Beth could hear the
snick, snick, snick
of something moving through them. They stirred in a mass, like a sleeping person shifting beneath bed covers. When the flashlight
shone on them,
Peter recoiled, as if he’d seen something there. She heard him whisper.

“What?” she asked.

Silence.

“You said something.”

“Nothing.” He turned the light away, sweeping it across the base of the chimney before shining it on the leaves again.

“I don’t think he’s under here,” Beth whispered. “What are you looking for?” There was a vague glow to the darkness, a phosphorescent
haziness, as if smoky moonlight were filtering through the lattice, filling the room. It came to her that smoke was drifting
downward from the fireplace in the room above. It swirled in the eddying winds. The hillock of leaves shuddered again.

“
She’s
here,” Peter whispered. The crying had diminished now, the wind momentarily hushed.

Beth held her breath, looking at the leaves. She could almost make out a human shape in it now—the curve of a shoulder and
hip, a woman lying on her side, covered in a cloak woven of autumn leaves.

“Amanda?” Peter whispered.

Beth put her hand to her mouth. Peter’s voice was husky, deeper. He stepped toward the leaves, falling to his knees in the
soft dirt and rock, reaching out a trembling hand to caress the assemblage of leaves with the beam of light.

“Peter?” Beth said to him, her voice rising. She pushed his shoulder.

He was oblivious to her. A gust of wind rattled the lattice, as if in answer, the leaves sighing out a sibiliant whisper.
Peter dropped the flashlight into the dirt. He shook his head slightly, as if denying something. His words sounded like a
quiet prayer. The room was aglow now, the dirt and debris of the floor shining silver. Tendrils of smoke gathered on the floor,
circulating in the drifting air. Peter bent forward and ran a hand carefully across the top of the leaves, which bunched together,
pressing up along the lattice
in a dark mass like a half-animated thing trying to rise. A scattering of them pushed through the lattice and whirled away
into the moonlit night.

Beth took an involuntary step backward, suppressing the wild urge to run toward the propped-open gate. She searched the ground
around her, looking frantically at the collection of junk that lay scattered in the dirt. There must be something, anything…. She
snatched up a straight stick, the handle of some long-ruined garden tool.

The leaves tilted toward Peter, shuffling together, drawn upright. A voice whispered—“Esther,” it said, a man’s voice, not
Peter’s, a voice full of sadness and longing. She turned and looked behind her, lifting the stick, but there was nothing there,
nothing but the heaped stone and brick of the chimney, occluded by the smoke that curled languorously before it, rising like
a candle flame.

Beth stepped past Peter, striking out with the stick, flailing at the moving leaves, slashing at them as Peter recoiled in
evident horror. He snatched frantically at the stick, stumbling to his feet. She evaded his grasp, lunged forward in a crouch
and whipped the stick left and right, leaves scattering, flattening against the lattice. The air was full of them, a sudden
whirlwind of leaves, the wind moaning, the walls vibrating.

“Stop!” Peter shouted, grabbing at her wrist, his face twisted into such an expression of fear and anger that she hardly knew
him. His features flickered in her vision, and she was filled with the strange sensation that Peter was falling away from
her, as if into a vast chasm, and that some other thing was rushing forward to occupy the space where he had been. The standing
smoke in front of the old chimney pulsed and swirled. Beyond it a shadow grew, filling the smoke with darkness and solidity.

Peter’s hand clasped her arm as he reached again for the stick. She jammed her elbow backward, feeling it hit his chest. Jerking
away from him and taking the stick in both hands, she waded forward into the leaves, swinging the
stick like a baseball bat. It tore through them, the dry leaves spinning behind it, the stick whirring around so fast and
hard that she turned with it, unable to stop it from cracking Peter on the forehead as he lunged in to grab at her again.

There was a sharp snap as the stick broke, and a simultaneous rush of wind and sound. She dropped the stick and grabbed Peter’s
shoulders with both hands as he stumbled forward, a line of blood appearing on his brow over his left eye.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted, trying to dab at the blood with the sleeve of her shirt and at the same time to drag him toward
the open gate. He shrugged away from her, staggering against a post that supported the floor. He touched his forehead with
his hand, looking blankly at his bloodstained fingertips. There was a sound like static on a television tuned to a dead station,
and disembodied voices drifted on the circulating air.

A window appeared in the twilight in front of her eyes, a pale, hovering rectangle that seemed to open onto infinite space.
Through it Beth could see a black shadow like something crouched toadlike in the far distance. The sound of the staticky wind
rushed in her ears. She could hear a tumult of faint noises above it, within it—the boy’s weeping, a woman’s voice calling
from somewhere far away, the sound of laughter and of glass clinking against glass, the cheerful fluting of “The Merry Old
Land of Oz.”

The shadow within the rectangle drew nearer, approaching her in little staccato leaps like a jerky black-and-white film. It
was the figure of a man, rushing forward now. She stepped backward, throwing up her hands, and felt a rush of cold wind that
droned through the cellar like flies in a paper cup. She threw her hands up in front of her face, recoiling from it, turning
toward Peter, then shouting out loud in fear and surprise.

Peter was gone.

A man stood in the center of the cellar—the man they’d seen outside. He seemed to look straight through her, as if
she weren’t there at all, his features growing slowly more animate, like a man just regaining consciousness.

She ran, through the propped-open gate, around the side of the house and out toward the windswept road, where she looked back
over her shoulder at the house. Shadows moved within the candlelit parlor, and the wind carried to her ears the myriad sounds
of the room coming back to life at long last.

A
CKROYD FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO READ, ESPECIALLY TO
read Chesterton, who demanded more concentration than he possessed tonight. There was too much wind, too much noise and movement.
The moonlit road outside was a constant distraction. He shut the book and laid it on the table. Since dark he’d seen no one
out and about in the canyon, not even a car. And probably he wouldn’t, not on a weekday night and with the Santa Anas blowing.
People were locked inside their houses, waiting out the darkness and the weather.

He stood up and walked to the bookcase, sliding back one of the doors and removing a big mahogany box. Inside the box lay
a set of painted tin soldiers, the paint half chipped off. He had lost a couple of the soldiers over the years, but that and
the chipped paint and the years themselves were simply the price you had to pay for your memories. Esther had never tired
of helping him build fortifications out of stacks of books on the parlor carpet—caves and canyons, tall towers with hidden
rooms smelling of dusty old paper, regiments of soldiers marching down
the long Sunday afternoons to do battle on fields of dark green Chinese wool.