[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind (10 page)

A man and woman walked by slowly, arm in arm,
heads together, laughing red-faced and slipping on the snow.
She recognized them as the editor of the
Station
Herald
and his wife, the Station's head librarian, was
about to call out a greeting when she heard, faintly and
briefly, the blare of an
airhorn
—a train pulling into the
depot three miles into the valley from where she stood.
It reminded her of the first day she'd come to
Oxrun
,
stepping down from the coach and slipping on a wet
piece of paper. She'd fallen directly into the arms of the
stationmaster, first name Herb, last name never known,
and had decided it had been a sign. Herb was gone now, to where no one knew, and it struck her that
Oxrun
seemed somehow to work that way—people lived
here and died and were buried in the Memorial Park,
they moved here and moved away with great vans filling
the street, or they were here one day and gone the next. No fanfares. No notice. As if the Station had decided it
no longer had need for them and swallowed them whole,
at midnight, without a moon.

She looked up and saw that the sidewalks were empty,
the street momentarily deserted.

A dead town.
Posing for Currier and Ives, refusing to
turn around to reveal the blood in the yards, the corpses
in the attics, the ghosts and the demons and the preternatural creatures that stalked the valley no matter what
time, no matter the season.
She was alone in
Oxrun
Station; everyone was gone. She took the four wide
steps apprehensively, willing a bus to chug around the
corner, demanding someone walk out of the Cove across
the street to her left, the Town Hall to her right. Her lips tightened.
Alone.
The last one in the world in a
village marked by the past and remaining there forever.
Alone.

And someone was watching her.

She
knew
it wasn't her imagination.

She
knew
her reverie had not included others.

There was someone watching her.
From behind a
partially closed door, from behind a curtain, from one
of the cars parked along the street.
From an alley.
From
a tree.
From the frosted glass behind her.

She spun around and ran back up the steps, shoved
open the right-hand door and saw no one inside. Wes
was gone from his post, and the police station was
silent. Her hand pulled away; the door swung shut on
well-oiled hinges. She backed away, felt a heel catch on
the edge of the top step and turned, fairly jumped to the
sidewalk and hurried east toward home.

She slowed only once, when she passed the Chancel
lor Inn. Larger now in daylight,
gloomly
under the
overcast, it scarcely seemed to be the place where her
troubles had begun.
If she hadn't remained at Janice's
party for so long, if she hadn't succumbed to Greg's
encouragement and the spirit of the others and taken all
those drinks, if ... if ... she slapped at her leg
angrily.
If wishes were beggars then horses could ride,
she told herself, faltered in her stride when she realized
how she'd mangled the epigram and laughed aloud. It
was a curious feeling; she still could not shake the
irrational fears closing in on her, but she knew too that
she was on her way to slipping away from them. All it
would take would be an overnight bag, a check to cash
at the bank, and within an hour she would be at the
station, waiting for the afternoon train to New York.

Through the front door, then, and the steps two at a
time, fumbling with her key furiously when she heard
the telephone's muffled ring. When the bolt turned over
she kicked the door inward, not bothering to close it as
she raced into the kitchen and grabbed for the receiver.

"Hello?"
Breathless, a hand to her chest.

The dial
tone,
slyly mocking until she slammed the
instrument into its cradle and glared at Homer.

"Well, speak up! Who was it?"

A shake of her head and she was in the bedroom,
grabbing the small suitcase from the closet, standing for
a moment in
judgement
of the array of clothes before
slipping out of her coat and skirt, exchanging the latter
for a pair of grey slacks that, she frowned, fit her a little
too snugly around the buttocks. She
kneaded
her thighs thoughtfully, made her choices and pulled her cosmetics
from the bathroom. As she crossed the
livingroom
she
glanced through the doorway to the kitchen, as if ex
pecting the phone to ring again. When it didn't, she
shrugged and headed for the landing, stopping again
with an exasperated groan when she remembered Kelly,
Abbey, and the car. The suitcase hit the floor with an unpleasant thump, tipped over slowly and landed on its
side as she returned to the kitchen and ordered a cab. A 
second
 
daring for the caller to try again, and she went
 
outside to wait.

Fifteen minutes later she was on the platform.

An hour later she was taking a seat in the forward coach, the windows gleaming and clear, the smell of
 
lemon cleanser filling the compartment as the train 
lurched once, twice, and pulled slowly out of the station.

Her eyes closed as the rails clicked in increasing
 
cadence, opened a short time later when she felt almost physically the weight lifting from her shoulders. She
 
frowned and leaned close to the window, twisting until
 
her cheek was pressed against the pane. There was 
nothing but embankment and woodland as the train took
 
the hill's slope, and a grey glare that masked all sight of the valley. She knew she should have felt relieved, and gratified that her decision had been the correct one. Paradoxically, however, the dread returned for a second
 
fleeting as a spinning shadow. While she certainly did
 
not appreciate what was happening to her in 
Oxrun
,
 
neither was she comfortable with the sudden release. It
 
was almost as if whatever had been stalking her was
 
bound by the village, by the hills; and if that were so, then it would be waiting for her when she returned.

And if it was, she realized with a start that made her
 
gasp into her palm, 
then
 none of it was in her mind at all. It was real. 
And if it was real, then her father had 
been right all along.

"You'll suffocate there, Patrice," he'd said after hearing her decision. "I've been there once or twice, and it's no place for a city girl. No place at all. And think of Lauren, for heaven's sake."

"Lauren's with her father," she'd said flatly. "Don't
 
forget, I'm the one who has summers and holidays now."

He lifted his eyes to the ceiling for guidance. So 
much like her he could have been her reflection. "Patrice,
 
you're not thinking. 
Oxrun
 Station is a closed community. You'll not fit in. You are definitely not the small-town type.”

She'd gone anyway, and she had fit in for the most
 
part, but he would not listen to her when he heard her
 
reasons for fleeing as abruptly as she had. And she couldn't lie to him. Any story she might devise would 
be as transparent to him as all her stories had been, all
 her life.

He would say, "I told you so," and they would argue and she would return.

And when she returned . . .

She sat back, stripping off the gloves and caressing
 
the smooth leather seat beside her.

My god, she thought. 
And didn't bother to stop the tear that wriggled out to her cheek.

IT was after two in the morning when the train pulled
away from the station, slipping dark engine and darker
cars into the black as it crept across the valley toward
the tunnel on the far side that would break it away from
Oxrun
and into the flatland beyond. The platform was
deserted. The stationmaster had long since returned home,
and the only light came from a single bulb burning
behind the locked doors to the waiting room. Slowly,
Pat walked toward the stairs, her heels loud on the
wood flooring, her breath unseen but felt as it drifted
back into her face ahead of a light breeze. The overcast was gone; reluctantly, the clouds had broken into tatters
and tails and had left behind stars as cold as the snow.

The parking lot behind the station was empty, and
she moved around the corner to escape the wind, hold
ing her case close to her waist. She had called from
New York to have a cab waiting, but she wasn't sur
prised it hadn't arrived.
Oxrun
Cab and Limousine was
a small operation leisurely in its response, perfectly suited to the beat of the village.

And she did not mind. She didn't mind at all.

From the moment she stepped off the train and en
tered the cavern that was Grand Central Station she felt
as if a field of mild electricity had cloaked her gently. Her vision had sharpened, her fingertips tingled, and
even her parents' home had seemed less like a sterile
museum. She'd wandered around the penthouse without
touching a thing, had a drink and stood on the wind
swept terrace to look down at Central Park. There'd
been children playing, a policeman on horseback,
the
traffic streaming down Fifth Avenue toward the Plaza
Hotel. Vibrancy, she'd thought, knowing the thought
was a
cliche
, and she'd hurried back inside to make a quick meal in the white-and-gold kitchen.

She didn't much mind that her parents weren't there;
she hadn't come to see them, was relieved there would
be no inquisition to ruin her day.

And for the rest of the day she walked.
Window-
shopped.
Ducked out of the cold and into a gallery now and then to warm her cheeks and check the competition.
She stayed away from the Spartan. Curtis wouldn't like
seeing her, feeling as if she were putting pressure on
him to accept her students' pieces for the show in June.
As it was, she was already beginning to doubt it would
happen. The man, though a friend who'd helped her when she'd started, had a reputation as well, and she knew she could push him only so far.

A comedy double-feature at the Little Carnegie: the
Marx Brothers, and Cary Grant, from the ridiculous to
the sublime.

A snack at the Russian Tea Room, and when she returned to the street she found herself checking her
watch.
Twice.
Three times as she slipped into a taxi that brought her back to the place where it all began, and all ended.

And she realized then, as she'd never done before, that New York was now no longer her home. As she
rode back to the station she smiled to herself, wondering how her mother would respond if she ever told her she actually missed an
Oxrun
weekend: the quiet, the walks
through the Station's own park, the games in the middle
of the street, the shops . . . and the absence of a feeling
of being hemmed in. In spite of her mind's reactions to her struggle and the aftermath, she realized that what
Oxrun
had given her was freedom from entrapment.

She giggled, again when the cabbie stared in the
rearview mirror and accelerated slightly.

She grinned most of the way home, and now broke
into a quiet laugh when the old Buick touring car swung
into the parking lot and flashed its lights at her.

Yesterday it would have been menacing; this morn
ing, under the stars and in the quiet, it was warm and it
was welcome, and she nearly fell asleep on the short ride home.

On the second-story landing, the wall facing the stair
well had been painted an earthen brown and was cen
tered by a large oval mirror framed in elaborately scrolled
and gilded oak. Beneath it, a long, narrow table, cherry
wood and polished to such a degree that even now it
picked up the dim bulb downstairs as if the wood itself
were glowing. She paused on the top step and glanced to her right at the
Evanses
' door. There was no light at
the threshold; they were still in Florida. Two paces
forward and a turn on the worn fringed carpet, and toe
kicked heel, tripping her into the table. The pain was
sharp, brief, a scolding for her clumsiness, and when
she righted herself, rubbing at her leg gingerly, she saw
the envelope floating on the tabletop, her name printed
in red ink across its face. She poked at it with a
forefinger, thinking nothing at all but a faint puzzle
ment, and felt a hard bulge. She lifted it by one comer
and the bulge shifted noisily, the sound of her station wagon keys clattering together. She nodded.
Looked at
the floor as if she could see through it to Kelly's apartment below.
A grin.
Perfect, she thought as she 
stuffed
it into her pocket.
Absolutely perfect.

 
*
 
*
 
*

A touch to the
thermostat,
and within moments the
pipes in the baseboard heating system began to pop and
slam. From the workroom
a sound almost like
hissing.
A floorboard near the center of the
livingroom
creaked
when trod upon. The draperies had all been drawn, and
an imperfect meeting of the French doors set the fabric
whispering against a draught. The refrigerator hummed sporadically. Wind in the attic. She pulled off her boots
and left them by the front door, the soles of her feet
rustling through the nap of the carpeting she walked over.

The sound of her breathing.

Not exactly a symphony, but so familiar as to be
inaudible until she stood at the side of the bed and listened, and smiled.

The canopy in swirls of green and yellow billowed
darkly above her. Here the draperies had been tied
back, and the streetlight was gentle in the bedroom air; soft, like smoke. She lay with her hands cupped behind her head, knees drawn up somewhat to bulge the floral
quilt. There was a light but not unpleasant scraping at
the corners of her eyes, a lulling rhythm to her breath
ing; yet she would not allow sleep to overcome her
now. This was a day not to be released without some
moments of savoring, without some leisurely reflection.
She understood that something in her life had been
altered, though exactly what and for what reasons were
still elusive. The fear she had felt leaving the Station
had been replaced by something she could only call a
sense of well-being, a sense that bordered almost on
belonging.
But not quite
...
not quite.
Almost, but not
quite.

Her smile was languid. She could feel it at her lips, a
reaction without strain.

Her buttocks shifted against the cool sheet, her toes
wriggling as though trying to dig in.

Well-being; belonging.
She did not frown and she did
not struggle. It was only a feeling, and one she knew
she would never really be able to put words to in proper
fashion. It was an abstraction.
An impulse.
And an undercurrent of determination that slipped very close to
anger
—for whatever it was would have to be protected or she would be vulnerable again to the memories that didn't deserve the power they'd had. They were memo
ries, nothing more.

Memories . . .

Her eyelids fluttered and lowered. Her legs straight
ened so slowly she scarcely
notice
their moving. And her arms slipped in stages down to her sides.

She slept.
Without dreams.

Woke when she could no longer hide from the sun.
A
stretching, then, and a groaning, and absolutely no guilt
at all when she saw that the time was less than ten minutes to noon.
A roll onto her stomach, a thumping
at the pillow, the muffled squeal of a child behind the
scrape of a sled's runners.
With one eye she peered at the window, saw the hard blue of the sky and the
shadows on the sill. The eye closed. She sighed. She
smiled into the pillow and suddenly vaulted from the
bed.

By one, she had showered and dressed, had washed
and dried the dishes from a breakfast she'd almost
gulped down so as not to see the calories from the eggs
and toast and bacon. A muttering as she replaced Homer on his shelf by the door. Then she drifted through
the apartment to pull back the draperies and flood all the rooms with brilliant yellow light. When she was
done, she paused in the center of the
livingroom
for a
moment, remembering she had come to some sort of
conclusion just before she'd fallen asleep. It eluded her, however, and it didn't bother her. Whatever it had been
had taken root somewhere, and it must have been good
or she wouldn't have felt so fine, so loose, with so much ready and patient energy.

She nodded once, sharply. Today she would finish
Greg's gift. Or come as close to it as she could. She didn't know why, but it felt right she should work on
it
—not the sculpture at the college, but the statuette in
her workroom. When he had first seen Homer and had
heard the story behind it, he'd laughed and touched it
gently, hoping (he told her) that some of its luck would
rub off on him. She'd never forgotten it, nor had she
forgotten the pleading and the frustration that had briefly
darkened his face. It had taken her some while before
she'd decided to make a copy, some while longer be
fore she knew it would be a mirror image of the original
instead of an exact duplicate.

She nodded again. Yes, it was right. His increasing
dreary moods and periods of self-doubt, his virtual
surrender to his students in lieu of working on his
own
—who knows, she thought, he may even break out
of his slump and stop feeling so jealous.

The telephone rang. She turned casually and took her
time walking to the kitchen. It didn't matter if whoever
it was hung up before she got there; if it was important
they would call
back,
and if not she didn't want to hear
it. Not today, when everything was so fine.

As she lifted the receiver she almost yawned, and
nearly choked on a laugh when she heard Greg's voice.

"Well, speak of the devil."

A pause.
"Pat, are you all right? I mean, do you have company or something?"

"Nope," she said, reaching out for the nearest chair and pulling it toward her. "I'm alone and getting ready
to do some work."

"You didn't come in yesterday." No accusation, not
exactly a question. "Luckily, I was able to come to your rescue and keep Danvers from raising the roof.''

A palm clapped to her forehead. "Oh my god, I forgot about him completely. I was going to call
—"

"I know, I know," he said, a rim of laughter in his
voice. "It was a good thing Harriet saw me first. When
she told me, and when I called you and you weren't home, I sashayed into the schmuck's office and told
him you had an interview in Minneapolis, contracted a
vicious form of typhoid on the way and wouldn't be in
until Monday. I'm not sure he bought all of it, but at least you'll live through the weekend." His laughter
broke loose, then, while she grinned at the window.
"Seriously, though, are you okay, Pat? I mean,
there's
nothing wrong, is there? I was . . . well, I hate to admit
this, you realize, but I was worried about you. And
when I dropped by after classes you weren't there. Did
you, uh . . ."

"Yes," she said, drawing up her legs to set her heels
on the cushion's edge. "Yes, I went to New York. I had to, Greg."