Nightingale Songs (10 page)

"I can't," he said. "I just can't face them."

"But you
must
." I wanted to shake sense into him. "It's the only way to stop this."

"I--" he stammered. "I'm going to bed. I need some time."

"Of course," I acquiesced, though I couldn't help but feel his lack of action was a mistake. He left me and I heard his heavy steps echo and multiply in the small stairwell, as though his past were ascending with him.

I listened to his footfalls as he prepared for sleep, resigned to the scrutiny he was under no matter what he did. He would never be forgiven for those crimes he did not commit. The crowd outside my window whispered their gossip with increased fervor once Alistair was no longer there to watch them. I had known each member for many years, and yet I couldn't help at that moment being filled with anger and disappointment over what they were doing. They were driving an innocent man mad.

It was then I heard the sounds of agitated movement above me, and resolved to take the action Alistair would not. I retrieved my coat from the closet and stepped outside to face his accusers.

Their numbers seemed to have grown in the time it took me to leave my house, and I half wondered if the whole town had not already converged there. Few of them moved as I approached, and despite my obvious displeasure at what was happening, fewer still seemed at all concerned to see me. Even Mrs. Rutherford was there, standing defiant and judgmental. I put on the most authoritative voice I could muster. My
doctor
voice.

"Please, move along. Give the man some peace."

"He's a killer, Dr. Reilly. Having high-price attorneys doesn't make him innocent." Those around her who were listening nodded in agreement. The rest continued to whisper their gossips amongst themselves.

"It's not true, though. The media, the stories, all of them are false. All you need to do is look into it. I assure you, Mr. Burden is as innocent as you or I."

She eyed me suspiciously. "You, perhaps."

Then, before I could respond, I heard a bloodcurdling noise, one that silenced everyone around me. It came from my own home, and it was a scream of such terror that it froze my very core. Mrs. Rutherford's brow furrowed as she looked at me, but I didn't stay to find out the reason. Instead, I ran back to my home, back toward my friend's side. Behind me, part of the crowd must have followed.

With every step I took, I knew I'd made a mistake. I shouldn't have left Alistair alone in his state. He was still far too susceptible to his imagination, to the guilt that the world broadcast onto him. He took in their suspicions and made them real, and as I climbed the stairs towards him I realized I'd been wrong to think he could overcome it all so easily. Part of my brain heard the stampede of feet behind me, and I suppose in hindsight it only made things worse, but my concern for my friend blinded me to that possibility, and I wonder now if that was not the final straw in what happened. Part of me hopes not, but if it wasn't, then I have to give way to an explanation that still doesn't make sense to me, even though I was there to witness it first hand.

I burst through the guest room door to Alistair's aid and stopped immediately. The room was frigid, and what I saw -- or at least
think
I saw -- I surely couldn't have. There on the bed lay Alistair, his hands pressed into the pillow that covered his face while the rest of his exposed body struggled. And yet, just beside him, I thought I saw shadows bent like two pairs of hands, and they too were pushing the pillow down. Alistair was kicking out violently, and I ran to grab the pillow from his face but I could not budge it. He held on too tightly, pressing it with unbelievable strength in some bid for release from all his torments. And yet as I tried in my panic to stop him it almost seemed as though he were trying to help me, as though he was in fact working to push the pillow away. But I knew that was impossible. I tried with all my strength to stop his suicide, but could do nothing -- even when he stopped kicking it took a few moments for me to work the pillow free from his clenched fists. When I did, it fell away from his face to reveal a rictus of terror lying beneath. I stepped back, horrified, and then, in the darkness of the room, I saw two shadows move. I'm not sure what cast them as there was nothing nearby, yet the pair started towards me with a sound like the whisper of silk, as though they were night made solid. I took a few steps back but they came too quickly and rose to overtake me. I lifted my hands instinctively before my face and shut my eyes, and then heard the sound of Mrs. Rutherford behind me, screaming.

"What have you done?"

I opened my eyes to see a crowd of people standing at the door, staring in at my dead friend and me.

Things did not go as smoothly as I would have liked afterward. Though it was agreed that I'd had far too little opportunity to asphyxiate Alistair Burden between the time his screams were heard and I was found with his body -- not to mention the lack of any clear motive -- there was still the suspicion that I'd somehow managed to use my knowledge of medicine to do the deed. Much like Alistair before me, I was freed from inquiry, but not absolved of possible guilt.

Needless to say, my practice did not last long after my name was ostensibly cleared. Even Polly, who had been with me for longer than I could remember, simply stopped coming in one day -- which was fine, I supposed, as I no longer had any patients lined up in my waiting room. Despite my own advice, I said nothing to anyone about what had happened for fear I would have to explain what it was I thought I'd seen, and I'm still not entirely sure how to do that.

Ultimately, I could no longer stay in New Hamburg, and not simply because I could hear my neighbors, those same people I'd been treating for years, whispering about me as I passed them on the street, much as they had done to poor Alistair a short time before.

You see, the feeling I could not shake, the one that made me leave the quiet town of my childhood, was that when Mrs. Rutherford screamed, "What have you done?" I am not so sure it was to me she was speaking.

And if it wasn't. . . . Well, I would rather not think too much about that.

She'd swapped photographs. Halford pretended he hadn't noticed, or that if he had it didn't bother him, but in truth it hurt far more than he let on -- far more than he expected it to. Had Libby known that he'd spotted the callous swapping of their wedding day portrait for one of her and Peter on tropical vacation, she made no mention of it either -- and Halford wasn't sure if that made him feel irritated or grateful.

"Like I said, Libby, I'm looking for a box of blueprint hardcopies and files. I need to reconstruct our failed archive server, and I can't find them anywhere. I've checked my entire apartment and in the storage locker and they aren't there. I must have left them behind when I moved out." It took all his effort to remain civil and conversational, but it was worth it if Libby's guilt was stoked. If she had any. "I probably left them here accidentally."

"
Accidentally
," she repeated, her voice suggesting she didn't believe that word truly existed. The look in her eyes made his blood turn to fire. How dare she look at him as though
he
were the untrustworthy one. He had to swallow his anger before he could speak. He didn't know why he let her crawl under his skin, but it was obvious she enjoyed it.

"It's a pretty simple question," he spit as soon as his power of speech returned, disappointed at how quickly she could make him break his vow. "Did you find anything or not?"

Libby took a long drag from her cigarette, squinting from either smoke or suspicion, and then blew a steady stream concurrently from both her nose and mouth. Halford was reminded of a dragon.

"You can check downstairs if you want. If we found it, either Pete or I would have put it down there. Or thrown it out. I'm not sure which."

Halford smiled that smile that didn't reach his eyes, didn't show his teeth. The kind of smile that wasn't a smile at all. It was clear she was trying to drive him insane. Perhaps it was some ploy to get something, but what he didn't know. She already had the house he spent all those months renovating. What more than his home could she need?

In hindsight, he had no idea why he'd married her. It was always clear they weren't suited for one another, but at the time he somehow convinced himself it didn't matter, and then managed to convince Libby of the same. It took no time at all before their homelife collapsed, but Halford held on, buried himself in the repairs to their new house, certain that when it was complete it would miraculously fix all their problems. Libby didn't seem to have any interest in helping, he noticed, instead she spent more and more time on her computer. He encouraged it, hopeful the distraction would allow him to work faster, unaware of the contact she was making with her former lover. While Halford worked to repair their new home's foundations, Libby was destroying those of their marriage, meeting Peter surreptitiously in out-of-the-way hotels, and then eventually his and Libby's newly renovated bedroom.

Halford was unsure what was worse: discovering the two adulterers together, or doing so in the house he'd poured so much love into fixing. The ground beneath him seemed to shake when he discovered the truth, and he blamed it for his stumbling gait as he tried to escape the constricting hallways. At that point, when he was at his weakest, he would have signed anything that kept him from seeing the house again. Even as he was moving his things out for good the place already felt foreign, everything having shifted in some imperceptible way so it no longer resembled the home he'd spent so much time building. Instead, it had become merely a house, a place that he wished to never remember.

Perhaps that was why when he returned for his blueprints, Halford could not remember how to access the basement. His memories had become jumbled as though in a dream, and in his mind's eye he could remember only the entrance to the cellar of his childhood home, the doors located at the rear of the house beneath the omnipresent shade of a towering oak and the small wooden treehouse his father had built for him in its sturdy branches. Halford wandered disorientated, searching his memory for the true direction, and finally found the door just off the kitchen, but even then, confronted with the answer, his memory objected.

"Wasn't this stairwell on the
other
side of the hall?" he asked. Libby looked at him with barely contained disgust.

"I'm sure I would have noticed."

"And here I thought
I
was the one who failed to notice things."

He enjoyed saying it, even if ultimately the joke was on him.

Libby watched him from the top of the stairs as he descended, and he could smell the smoke from her cigarette chasing him like a spirit downward into its depths. The stairwell was set at an odder angle than he remembered -- the treads both too narrow and too close together -- and he wondered if Peter hadn't made ill-considered changes to the house. Halford was forced to keep one hand on the wall as he traveled down too many steps, the temperature of the plaster growing colder and rougher, the damp softening everything. By the time he reached the bottom of the short flight, the smell of smoke was gone, replaced with the tang of mildew and something else. Something stronger, like an earthy garden, combined with a strange musky odor. It was also darker than he remembered. Darker, and colder.

"Libby, can you turn on the light?"

"The switch is down there," she said. Her voice sounded so far away.

There should have been a bulb in the stairwell, providing enough light to lead Halford forward, but it was either gone or burnt out, another symbol of his rival's neglect and ineptitude. It was gratifying, at least, to learn he was better at something than Peter, considering how little use Libby had for her husband once the truth was exposed. How could Halford hope to compete with someone like that, especially when Libby made it clear there was no competition at all? The marriage, in an instant, had become a dark void, no different than the basement of their house, and like the basement he wanted out of it as soon as possible.

Halford tried to recall where in the darkness the switch for the light was. He groped forward in the emptiness, feeling for the wall he hoped was a few feet before him. Above, he could hear Libby's heels -- or were they cloven hooves? -- as she walked across the kitchen floor, a series of deep vibrations rattling the pipes overhead with each landing. The noise drilled into his nerves, drawing forth the irritation he had been trying to keep at bay, and in his distraction something hard caught his foot above the ankle and he nearly tripped on the same concrete floor he remembered once pouring. When he righted himself he wondered what it had been, but there was nothing there. Whatever it was he must have kicked it unknowingly into the dark.

He fished the lighter from his pocket -- the same lighter he once carried for Libby and had never been able to throw out -- and used the small circle of light it produced to scan the wall for the missing switch. It took him longer to find it than he expected, its position evoking no familiarity at all when the dim circle revealed it. Why couldn't he recall something so simple, he wondered, and when he turned on the overhead lamp, the sensation was amplified. Nothing was where it ought to have been.

One of the reasons Halford had selected a house in such need of repair was the basement -- its size and depth provided ample room for growth and customization. He had worked on it after finishing the rest of the house, knowing it would require most of his attention and yield the largest reward. He had just barely finished it before he had to leave it behind, but even in that short span he would have thought he had its layout committed to memory. Instead, what he saw not only confused but also unsettled him. He knew that in the warmer, temperate climate all sorts of things grew underground, and the only way to keep them at bay was to keep the room dry. Without a dehumidifier running, the wood would soften and bend, the walls would buckle, the concrete crack, so Halford made sure it ran all day. As he and his wife grew more distant -- Halford with the repairs, Libby with her computer -- the basement became more and more of a refuge, a place where he might find room to store more than just his boxes of office files.

But a year later, under the overhead lamp's low-wattage glow, he barely recognized the room he'd spent so much time on. The geography was inexplicably different; walls stood where his memory told him they hadn't before, and the room's overall shape bore no resemblance to the blueprint in his mind. He tried to make connections to the floor above, spot load-bearing beams and pillars, and yet there were none. It was impossible, unless somehow he had become turned around in the dark. That had to be it. Otherwise he couldn't be standing where he thought he was. Even if somehow replacing those load-bearing walls were possible, it was obvious no new material had been used in the basement since Halford last saw it. If anything, the wood, the floor, it all looked older, softened as though weather damaged. Halford looked around but couldn't reorient himself. Was it possible a person could forget a place so thoroughly? A house he had bought and lived in for so long? It was like looking in a mirror and not recognizing the face staring back.

The central room of the basement seemed too small -- its walls too close together, its ceiling so low that his head almost touched the ticking and groaning pipes running across it. All the bookcases Halford had built were still there, but their angles were no longer square, and the failing geometry disquieted him. Yet even natural entropy and failing memory could not account for such a different landscape. Did the floor always have the crack that ran through its center, bisecting the room? He squinted his eyes in the half-light. Was there something growing from that crack, or had something simply fallen from one of the sloping shelves? He bent down to look at the furry object and was surprised to find a dead field mouse just on its edge, no doubt inside hiding from winter. Ants had crawled up through the opening into the ground and had begun to feast on the rodent's carcass, stripping all the flesh from the front half of its body while leaving the rear untouched.

The echo of Libby's footsteps returned, rattling the ceiling. Was she pacing? Was that why the noise was so
regular
? Perhaps she worried what Halford might find in the basement, some secret she worked to keep from him. It seemed impossible there could be anything more worth knowing, but if it was there, he doubted he could find it in the mess. The floor was littered with crumpled paper and broken boxes, pieces of plastic or perhaps metal scattered indiscriminately everywhere, and though part of him felt offended that all his work had been destroyed so quickly, the rest remained unsurprised. Given enough time Libby made a mess of everything; the basement was just another in a long string of examples. Surveying the destruction, he wondered if rebuilding the server data was truly worth subjecting himself to the damp and the cold, and to suffering all the reminders of what he'd lost. He felt the resentment growing, threatening to split him open like a growing seed. If he hadn't needed those files -- if the company wasn't so dependent on rebuilding what they'd lost -- he would have stayed as far away as possible. It was like the house was full of all his old anger, and just being inside meant drowning in it. By staying away, as far away as possible, he could at least control the consuming rage that drove out almost all other thoughts. He had to close his eyes and take a deep breath, force himself to remember what he was suffering for below the ground. As he slowed his mind down, concentrated on what it was he needed, he realized the sound he heard, the sound that he thought was that of Libby's shoes, was not emanating from the ceiling at all but instead travelling along it from somewhere else in the basement, a slow deep drumming that lasted a few seconds. Perhaps the failing angles of the bookshelves were a clue. Perhaps it was the foundations of what he'd built that were failing, buckling under the weight of all they could no longer support, creaks like screams echoing through the veins of its body.

"Where would the box be?" he called back between cupped hands, then waited for his answer. It was mumbled and unclear, but he thought he heard Libby say, "Back," and then a sound like she was slamming a door.

But the single bulb overhead was not up to the task; its yellow circle was faint and dull and did nothing to dispel the shadows that grew like weeds across the warped and broken floor before gathering in the periphery, concealing what lay ahead. Halford let loose a chilled sigh; he would have to go further into the dark to find what he needed, and he was unsure if he wanted to face what no doubt awaited him there.

He stepped carefully toward where the light did not reach and was startled by the appearance of a wall where he was sure there once had been none. A corridor ran perpendicular to his mental layout, and peering down it only heightened his unease, a sensation dispelled once he recalled who was to blame for his current state. Had Libby not cuckolded him -- no, he swore he would not fall down that rabbit hole again, and already he had one foot firmly inside it. He was free of Libby and that's all he should worry about. Let her and her banker lover sail off together and leave him alone. All he needed from them was one simple thing: a box of documents that they should never have had in the first place, a box lost in the mess they'd made of his life. He turned to see the staircase he'd come down, the rectangle of kitchen light already faded to a dull grey, and cemented the sight in his mind. For some reason, fixing the landmark in space beyond the morass of debris seemed not only wise but also essential. Then, he took the turn into the corridor and followed its poorly built plaster walls as they seemed to narrow in on him. In the confined space, the odor of damp concrete and spreading mildew became amplified, the age and decay growing to such a degree that it was nearly impossible to contain. Were the walls stained black from it, or was it merely an effect of the shadows?