Nightlight (21 page)

“No time for pessimism. This lady's worried about her son. You'll loan the jeep, and you'll drive it, too.”

“The sheriff says it'll take them a week, and they might as well not bother. They started to push at it, but the crew gave up, or got called somewhere else. Just scraped it off the main road like so much sh—” Randolph stopped himself, and for a moment Mary thought that under very different circumstances she might be able to tolerate him.

“It'll be dark in another hour,” Ed said quietly. “We might as well get started.”

Randolph laughed. “Get started going nowhere.” But he picked up a yellow slicker lying on the floor in a puddle of its own making. “Get started letting my jeep sink to the bottom of a mud pile.”

“You go on and get the jeep,” said Ed quietly, “and lock this place up, or whatever you have to do. We'll be waiting outside.”

They stood under the edge of the roof. The horse watched them, as if he could not believe they were real. He put his head down to the grass, and then looked up again, glistening with water.

A sliding door groaned, and a lock rattled. Rain fell as far as she could see, until the hills across the road rose into the low clouds. An engine rumbled, and a white jeep rolled around the corner of the building.

Except that it wasn't entirely white. Rust holes gaped along the bottom of the chassis, and red rust divots scarred the hood. Rust had wept from the sores in the paint, and the tires were gouged. There was no top, and already water pooled in the valleys in the seats.

Randolph grinned from under a yellow rain hat like an inverted dish. “You'll see what I mean. We'll be back in ten minutes.”

Mary erected her umbrella, and sat in the back of the jeep, facing sideways. She gripped the umbrella hard, and lurched with the jeep as it bounded over ruts. She barely noticed where they were going.

She found that she had closed her eyes. When she opened them, fenceposts blurred past, and she had to fight her umbrella and finally close it. Rain ran through her hair like icy fingers, but she didn't mind it. She was going to be cleansed of all the bad things.

The jeep wrenched to a stop. “See!” cried Randolph. “There's no way.”

The side of a mountain had collapsed, leaving a cliff-face like a sliced loaf. Gray-blue stones the size of human heads scattered across a pudding of smaller, more jagged stones, and black roots stitched the surface.

30

The deer head looked down upon them as they sat before the fireplace. Paul cradled the hatchet as if it were a delicate relic, and Lise stabbed another stick into the fire.

“In a way,” Paul said, “I'm glad Len—or someone—hid the car.”

Lise hefted the poker and glanced at him.

“It makes it a criminal matter,” said Paul. “A matter for the police.”

“And that pleases you?”

“It brings it into the light of common experience. We aren't afraid of an evil place, or an evil person. We are harassed by a thief.”

“I find it difficult to be reassured.” Lise tried to be calm, even flippant, but Paul knew that her preoccupation with the fire was too intense. She constantly poked it, shoving logs, sending a train of gilt sparks up the chimney. She could not sit still.

She wrestled another log over the hearth. She nudged the wood box with her foot. “I have some bad news.”

Paul rose to help her.

“This is the last log,” she said.

A few scraps of wood, like monkey droppings, scattered across the dark interior of the box. Paul kicked the box, and it thumped like a large, empty trunk. “There's a woodpile behind the cabin,” he said. “I'll go get some more.”

She clutched his arm. “You're not leaving me in here alone!”

Paul faked a laugh. “Then we'll both go.”

“He'll come in while we're gone.”

Paul laughed again, almost genuinely. “For all we know he's upstairs right now.”

Their shadows quaked across the room.

“So what difference does it make,” Paul continued, “whether we get wood together or not. Stand here, holding the hatchet, or come with me—”

The ceiling groaned. They both looked upstairs, as if the ceiling were transparent and they could see through it into the rooms above.

“If he's up there,” she said hoarsely, “let's find him before he finds us.”

Paul pressed his thumb against the blade of the hatchet. It would be a vicious weapon. He realized that he had never actually picked up an object with the conscious determination to defend himself before tonight. He felt, suddenly, very weak.

“You see,” she whispered. “We can't do anything. We can't even protect our fire.”

A log settled with a sound like a foot crushing snow.

Lise's hands were sticky with sap, and smelled of pine. He kissed her fingers and said, “We'll protect it. We'll search the upstairs, and we'll find him if he's up there.”

She looked away. “All right,” she whispered.

“When I was a boy I was afraid all the time,” said Paul. “Every closet had to be shut, and the curtain completely drawn, not open even a crack, before I could sleep. I was afraid something would peek in at me. What, I have no idea.”

He was aware, suddenly, of all the blank, black windows.

“So what we are going to do is go up and make sure no one is in this cabin. And when we have determined that the population count is zero, we will consider all the closets shut, and all the curtains drawn, and we will go get some wood.” He liked the confident sound of his voice, and so he added, “And that's all there is to it.”

“We'll stand guard tonight. Neither of us will sleep.” Her face was pale, and she looked, suddenly, too thin.

“Ridiculous. We'll both sleep in shifts.”

“All right.”

“So everything will be resolved, step by step,” he said, standing on the bottom step, as if to illustrate his point. Except that the hatchet in his hand belied the confident ring in his voice, and he felt his way up the steps, feeling his legs grow heavier and heavier.

She joined him, the flashlight in her hand spilling a dim oblong of light on the bathroom door ahead of them. The doorknob was cold, and the door opened with a croak, but the faucet gleamed and the room was quiet.

Paul touched the toothbrush. “So,” he said, eyeing the bristles. “This room is secure.”

In Len's bedroom Paul took the flashlight from her hands, and knelt beside the bed. A single dust mouse rolled over once with his breath. A button winked in the dull light, the button off a shirt, Paul guessed, a plain, white button, the sort of button that was always falling off one's cuff when it was time to hurry.

Had Len been in a hurry? Was he afraid to see Paul and Lise?

A few clothes in the closet, clothes hangers glittering like fine bronze hooks. A belt curled in the corner of the closet, an object Paul had missed when he had peeked into the closet before. A plain black belt, with a row of holes for the buckle tongue. Only one hole had been used, the third, and it was distended into an oval.

“What is it?” Lise hissed.

“A belt.”

“You were staring at it like it was a mystery.”

“No mystery. I have two belts practically identical to this at home. It tells me simply that Len neither puts much weight on, nor takes much weight off. A constant fellow. Steady.”

The belt made a loud snap when he dropped it, and the buckle dragged for an instant against the floor as a kink in the leather relaxed.

Paul knelt and hooked his finger into a slipper. He shook it, instinctively, perhaps to guard against scorpions, but it was empty. “A leather slipper,” said Paul. Gold-yellow words gleamed: Moss Brothers, London.

The perfect contempt for cheapness expressed in this slipper was obvious. “Len is a simple fellow, but he enjoys a little quality.” The slipper dropped with a slap beside its mate.

The doorknob down the hall twinkled, and neither of them moved. This last room was the one that seemed coldest as they approached it, and when at last Paul stood before it he could barely move.

“Don't open it,” Lise sobbed. “Please, Paul, I can't stand it.”

He gripped the doorknob, and turned it.

The cot was set up against the wall. The single clothes hanger gleamed in the beam of the flashlight, its color faintly red, like Mars on a clear night. Because it was the only object of any kind in the closet, Paul touched it.

It was icy. Plain metal, like any clothes hanger, twisted into a hook. “Ordinary,” said Paul, kneeling.

“What is it?”

“I heard it grind under my foot, or felt it. A safety pin.”

Paul opened it, and closed it, and when he tossed it into a dark corner of the room it made a fine, dry rattle, and then was silent.

They made sure all the doors were shut, regretting that they could not be locked, and then groped their way down the stairs. “That's what is so striking about Len,” Paul said. “He's so ordinary. I mean, apart from his odd hobby.”

Lise stood in the entrance to the room that held the tape recorder. Although cluttered with equipment and tape cassettes, this room was plainly empty.

“Apart from his odd hobby,” she repeated, and they held each other, suddenly weary.

“He has sturdy clothes, but apart from his slippers, they aren't anything special. A few photography books. Nothing special. He even drinks Folger's and eats pork and beans. It's not that he has bad taste. It's like he has no taste at all.”

“It doesn't matter to him.”

“Exactly. He's not interested in clothes, or books, or food, or music, or booze, or anything as far as I can see. Aside from you-know-what.”

“So that his ordinariness isn't especially reassuring.”

She switched off the flashlight, and they stood, staring into the fire.

“A lot of people have strange habits,” Paul said. The belt, and the nearly new slippers, had made Len seem likable. Good old Len, Paul thought, sardonically. Just a little bit off in his spare-time activities. Just a little peculiar. “Strange habits,” Paul repeated. He was trying to reassure himself. It was not working very well.

She roused herself as if out of a daze. “So what?”

“That's a dumb way to argue. You can say ‘So what?' to the most brilliant statement in the world. So, maybe we should excuse Len his eccentricity.”

“I am not disapproving, exactly,” she said.

“John Donne was preoccupied with death, wasn't he?” Acknowledging that she was a Donne scholar, he added, “I mean, that's what I've heard.”

“Death is a common theme in many poets. Most good ones.”

“I mean, didn't he sleep in his coffin?”

“Oh, that.”

“Well, yes. The celebrated Doctor Donne, or Dean Donne or whatever he was, took naps in his coffin. Now that's a little peculiar, and yet people didn't go shunning him like a leper, did they? We have our private obsessions, but we can be perfectly normal in other respects, right?”

“He didn't really, though. He had his portrait drawn in his coffin, in his shroud, to be precise.” He was relieved to hear her slip into a pedagogical tone. “It's a charming picture of him, a little silly. A man with an Elizabethan moustache and a dim smile wrapped as if for burial, but looking not at all dead. His eyes closed, but as if for fun.”

“Maybe it was fun.”

“He did it because he wanted to see how he would look when he was dead. The idea of looking upon his own dead face fascinated him, because of the sheer impossibility of it. He was enchanted with paradox.”

“Ah.”

“Naturally, there was an odd—you might say neurotic—element to his makeup. But there was a witty element, too, and I haven't discerned any such aspect to your cousin's psyche.”

“You haven't really met Len. He was always a nice little kid. I didn't see him all that much, Fourth of July picnic, maybe once or twice over Christmas. For some reason my mother wasn't overly fond of Aunt Mary, although she always seemed like a very nice lady to me. I used to wish my mother were more like her.”

“‘Death be not proud though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,'” she recited softly, watching the fire.

“Well, he may have gotten that last part a little wrong,” Paul joked, but he could not laugh, and put out his hand to Lise.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“There's something I saw.”

She stood and walked quickly to the dark room, and stood in the doorway, the flashlight shining into the interior. She snapped off the light and backed away from the doorway, and Paul stopped her.

She was rigid, and she stared ahead seeing nothing. “The tape recorder,” she whispered.

He extricated the flashlight from her hands and stepped to the doorway. He did not turn on the flashlight for a moment, listening. Rain. Outside, and above them in the trees, wind. Nothing else.

He switched on the light, the shaft of the flashlight moist from his hands. The clutter of cassette tapes glittered in the patch of light, and in the center of the confusion the tape recorder was a series of dim points of light.

Paul stepped to the tape recorder, and when he saw what was wrong he could not kneel to examine it. His knees locked, and he could not even back away.

The tape recorder was running, the tape turning silently, and the
record
button was depressed. Paul put his hand out to the microphone and covered it, and it was like covering the gaze of a terrible eye.

31

He turned it off.

“I knew something was wrong when I was in here, but I couldn't figure out what.”

“You must have bumped it when you looked in here.”

“Don't you see,” she said, gripping his arm. “Don't you see what is happening?”

He rewound the tape recorder. “I've given up trying to see what is happening. I have decided to concentrate on not behaving like a fool.”