Nightlight (11 page)

“Maybe it was. I can't remember.”

“I slept very well.” She seemed proud of this fact.

The coffee was ghastly. Paul winced, and apologized for bothering to make it. “Better to drink nothing, than drink something that tastes like antifreeze.”

Lise left to go for a walk, and Paul found himself hoping that she would not see the graves. He did not understand why, but he wanted to protect her from them.

He washed the dishes feeling meditative, which is how he usually felt when he washed dishes. He rinsed out the sink and dried his hands when he heard the pounding of steps on the front stairs.

Lise was wild-eyed. “The bridge is out!” she gasped.

For a moment, Paul could not move. Then they both ran outside, and down the long slope through the pouring rain. They staggered, panting, and held on to branches to keep from falling.

The creek was the color of milk chocolate. It surged and roiled, uttering a grumbling roar that shook them as they watched. Black stumps pierced the water, and foam swirled around them. It was not easy to see that the bridge was gone, because there was no evidence that there had ever been a bridge, except for the black timbers that punctured the flood.

Paul could not speak. He danced down to the edge of the creek, and the bank collapsed. Water tore at him as he reached for something to grasp. He found something, and squeezed. It was only mud.

For a few moments Paul thought: Don't worry. It'll be fine. But now he saw that it would not be fine. The torrent jammed him against a root, a gnarled, bronze-dark club thrust into the rain. He gripped it with both hands.

He could not pull himself up, and he knew if he let go he would die.

He was drowning.

This can't be water, he thought. It's too strong. He held on to the root, and strained to haul himself from the flood.

“Stay away!” he called to Lise, who skittered near the bank and slipped. She hunched herself away from the creek, calling words Paul could not hear. She held out her hand to him, as though at that distance her hand could help him.

He thought: Drowning.

And then he swung himself out of the flood. He crawled, feeling strangely amphibian, afraid to attempt his feet until he was far away from so much as a puddle.

It rained harder, and Paul let the clean rain wash the mud from his clothes, standing up in it, letting the cleansing drops strip him of mud and leaf rot.

They helped each other through the trees like two frail people. They undressed each other before what remained of a fire, and tossed new logs onto the coals. They drank still-warm coffee, and Paul was thankful for it.

“We're trapped!” he whispered. “There's no way out of here.”

They huddled in blankets.

“We'll get out eventually,” he continued. “It can't rain forever. Besides, there's no way the water can reach us.” He wanted to reassure her, and kept talking. “We're completely safe. We have plenty of food.”

She looked at him in a measuring way. “You could have drowned.”

“I know it. It was horrible.” He thought of it as something that was already in the distant past. “If it hadn't been for that root, I would have drowned.”

She put a hand out to him.

“Or, maybe not,” he said. “Who knows what might have happened? Another branch, or a rock somewhere.” But he had a very distinct image in his mind: his body, pale as chicken fat, crammed into the mud somewhere downstream. It was a particularly ugly image, and very real.

“We'll stay inside, in here where it's safe,” she said.

He did not answer.

“What do you know that I don't?” she asked.

“Nothing. I don't know anything.”

“What are you hiding?”

“I'm not hiding anything,” he said feebly, but he had always known that she was smarter than he was. “I have only suspicions. Doubts.”

“About what?”

“About Len.”

“We already talked about that.”

“There are some graves,” he blurted. “I didn't want you to know. I thought you might be afraid.”

“Christ.” She shook her head. “Why would some graves scare me? We knew he picked a place with something creepy about it. So he could take pictures of ghosts, or whatever.”

“You like this.”

“I'm not afraid of it. You've been trying to protect yourself, not me. Stop trying to defend me from the horrible. I'm quite capable of facing the world of the spirits without being defended by you.”

This was a very harsh rebuke, and Paul felt it deeply. He sulked into the downstairs bedroom, and stared at the tape recorder for a long time. It was an unremarkable room. The only things in it that were of any interest at all were the tripod, with a small camera, and the tape recorder, next to which were some TDK D-C90 cassettes. And the gray metal box.

He wasn't afraid. The real fear of the water surging around him had cleansed him of all imagination. He wrapped the blanket more closely around himself.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

He nodded that he was all right.

“It's been a difficult morning. We shouldn't wander around this freezing place dressed in blankets.”

“No, we shouldn't,” he said, but he did not move.

“Don't keep any more secrets from me,” she said.

He knew, then, that he should tell her about the dream. The way it recurred. The way they had all experienced it. Instead, he said, “There is something on these tapes that can help us.”

“I expect the tapes are much like his graveyard films.”

“Inconclusive?” he asked, borrowing her word.

“Very.”

As he warmed himself at the fire he found himself watching the stuffed head of the deer. The hair had worn away from parts of the neck, and bare, leathery hide showed through. The dark hairs on its snout were much like the hairs of a cat. Its ears were as large as a man's hands, and its glass eyes were dark brown; they seemed to stare down into the room.

15

The stones were gray words pressed into a surface as black as a burned field. I could not see them—but if I looked away, toward the totally empty black, they were all around me.

So I have come again. They all knew why I was here. I could sense them inhaling the emptiness around them. Inhaling the dark.

Breathing me.

I was empty. There was nothing left. There was only the Other in me now, that Voice that called me and breathed into me.

I was fading, like someone overexposed. Even in the darkroom film will cloud. Even far away from light. I was blank, now, empty.

I thought: You have not left me alone.

Of course not, He said, His Voice in me like pleasure. You know how much I love you.

Not wanting to say it. And wanting it. That was all that was left of me.

Yes. I know.

Why have you waited so long?

I thought: just a few pictures. Just a few, and then I'll go.

My camera. I clutched it, thankful for it. Ideal for this. Not as ideal as the Hasselblad, but that camera needed a tripod and I did not want to drag a tripod over the walls and into this place. It would slow me down, and they could catch me here.

Oh, Len. I have waited so long.

Just a few pictures. I held my breath. The Leica would see. An M6, with a Summilux lens. My hands trembled. Just a few pictures. The camera was cold and heavier than usual, because I was weak, all the strength evaporating from me.

Before His strength.

I've waited so long.

Just a few pictures. Then I'll go.

Come and see me Len. Let me love you. Bring the camera. I want everything you want.

Granite is so cold. So perfect, entirely, from its skin, through to its heart. Pressing my forehead against a stone, I could not enter it. I could not plunge into the perfect, other world.

Come to me.

That Voice like a bow across a cello string, a tight, hard string, and I knew He had me, and I wanted Him. I could feel myself tighten, wanting His Voice across me.

Come to me, Len.

He was all that I was not, and his Voice everything I wanted, and yet I trembled. It was too cold, and the camera too heavy, and my arms water clouding into ice.

I ran. The spear-pointed fence burned my hands with its chill, and I fell on the outside, weeping.

Please.

He was begging.

Come back. That Voice like silk across granite. Please.

His voice is me, His perfect strength:

Don't make me wait any more.

16

Paul's aunt, Mary Lewis, watched the performance of
Romeo and Juliet
, admiring as always the healthy young men with their genital bulges, but she could not pay much attention to ballet on this night. Mark, her most recent boyfriend, tugged a well-tailored pant leg and put his two hands together.

He was a handsome man, but all of her men had been handsome, including her husband Phil. Phil had been dead only seven years, but already he seemed, like his rows of books, to belong to the past. A rich and vigorous past, but one that was unattached to the present except as objects of memorable beauty. Phil had been the best-looking, and for a while the most intelligent, of all of them. Shortly after Phil's death she had retaken her maiden name, and lived as though Phil had died long ago, in another age.

The first act ended, and the dancers acknowledged the applause. The orchestra became what orchestras always become when they stop playing, a collection of gawky men and women with a jumble of sheet music, gossiping cheerfully among themselves like so many bus drivers, or substitute teachers.

“You seem restless,” said Mark.

“I am, a little.”

“Still having trouble sleeping?”

She should not confide so much in Mark. He might become possessive. She put her fingers to her hair, aware that one did not easily discuss one's sleeping habits, even if in a private box.

Still, she must have mentioned it in passing a few days ago. She was a private person, but we all have to share our little anxieties. She would, however, never share her big anxieties. Or perhaps she should call them her big terrors.

She could never discuss them with anyone.

“You ought to visit my doctor. I've told you about him before.”

“Often,” she smiled, meaning: too often.

“If nothing else he could suggest some pills. I know—you don't take pills. I hate them. But you're wearing yourself out.”

This, she knew, was a gentle way of telling her that her nerves were affecting her looks. This was bad news indeed.

“I have an excellent doctor,” she began, but she didn't, really. She had a doctor she had known since her Stanford days, a jovial man as careful with his patients as with his horses, and fortunately she had never taxed his command of medicine. She had always been healthy. Never sick. Strong, always.

Physically, at least.

Of that other side of her, of that twisted, animal side—that was what Phil called it—no one knew, except for one person. One frail mortal. The only person she cared about in the world, who was being strangled year by year with what she had done to him.

Discovering what she really was had driven Phil away from her. He had not even tried to save his son, feeling that it was too late.

Her ultimate threat had been that she would go public and tell the press the same lie that she had told her husband. Which, of course, she would never have done. But Phil had returned. Not as a husband, of course. And not even as a healthy man, because the lie had wasted him, and left him a bitter, gray shadow. He had died only a few years later, unable to speak to her, unable to bear her presence. It was as if he had died of hatred.

She naturally wanted anything but publicity. That was why she had asked that nephew to try to find Len, because the young man was smart enough to locate Len, and smart enough to keep quiet about anything disgusting he might uncover. He was also self-absorbed enough that he might never realize the truth at all.

“Really,” Mark was saying. “I'm worried about you.”

Her looks were suffering. This was a bitter truth.

“Maybe I will,” she said with mock weariness, which she hoped disguised the genuine exhaustion she felt. She touched his chin with a coquettish gesture of both affection and disapproval. “If it makes you happy.”

The crowd was that interestingly multicolored hive of tasteful and outlandish clothes, furs and silks mingling with peculiar denims she supposed passed for stylish among the unmoneyed. She smiled and nodded at a familiar face, praying that the greeting might not have to flower into speech later in the evening, and then settled back into her chair, hoping that the box rail would shield her from the eyes of what was, after all, society.

“I thought Prokofiev was one of your favorite composers,” Mark was saying, manfully attempting to hold idle but intelligent conversation.

“Oh, he is, of course,” Mary responded, but why “of course”? And why even bother to respond, when at last the fear she had so successfully buried inside her for so many years was burning inside her like a white-hot splash of lead? “Although I suppose I prefer Mahler.”

“I think I do, too.” Mark showed his perfect, capped teeth, and she studied his salt-and-pepper handsomeness for a moment.

She had always been lucky in her choice of men, and they had always thought themselves fortunate to have won her attention, if only for an evening. And this was such a successful man, a lawyer by inclination, although not need, an expert on horses and small and very fast cars, the names of which she could never remember. A charming man in every way, as she knew she was charming, bright-eyed and attractive, although her youth was but a distant—painfully distant—flash of diamonds and champagne.

In one sense, though, age would not matter, because she had a reputation for elegance and what that society columnist with a glass eye had called “the magic of knowing exactly what to say.” What not to say, she reminded herself. What not to say, even to herself.