The Architecture of Fear (6 page)

He ate a sandwich, drank cold milk, and sat in the living room until he couldn't see anymore.

Go to bed, he told himself.

Go to bed, his mother always told him; you're not going to learn anything by studying so late. Besides, the light in here is terrible, and you'll be wearing glasses for college. Go to bed, Timmy, I'll call you in the morning.

Go to bed, Ellen said, and remember your promise.

He shifted on the couch, stretched out his legs, made himself yawn. Without turning his head he glanced toward the black telephone on the table beside him. He could call, he supposed; there were any number of women who were already letting him know by their looks and by what they didn't say, that they'd be glad to have him call.

Well, maybe not any number of them. Two or three. Two, if he were pressed to be brutally honest.

He could call. He could go out. He could sit in the Inn or the Mariner Cove and talk about the weather, his life, her life, the state of the union; he could look into her eyes, at her lips, at her chest, at the way her hands cupped around the stem of a wine glass or the handle of a knife or the corner of a napkin as she touched it to her lips.

He rose.

He could.

But not yet.

Not until he knew.

And he pulled on his coat, shoved on a hat, and went outside, down the steps, down the walk, across the street to the high stone wall. He checked the street for approaching headlights, for pedestrians, then crossed the narrow band of grass and reached for a familiar handhold, a stone slightly out from the plane that helped him reach the top, that served as a step when he hauled himself up, that vanished into shadow when he straddled the top and looked down.

Inside.

At the tombstones and mausoleums and crypts and copper plates, at the shadows of dead flowers and the shadows of the trees and the shadows the moon cast from nothing but the wind.

He sat there for nearly ten minutes before he jumped, sprawling on the brittle grass, biting his lips against the pain that filled his ankles and knees. Tasting blood. Feeling tears. Then, with a groan, he rolled to his feet and followed a row of oak trees to his right, almost to the low iron fence that marked the cemetery's back section, the older graves, the ancient ones, whose headstones were weather-smooth and whose disintegrating coffins had caused the ground here and there to form shallow bowls.

He hesitated, feeling the wind again, feeling the kiss of the snow that hissed on his shoulders and rattled the leaves. A shudder, and he stepped around a gnarled leafless tree to a narrow path he followed for only ten paces. His hands, stinging from the jump, bunched in his pockets. His head bowed.

And he waited for Ellen for almost a full hour.

Watching the square cut of her gravestone; watching the black fill the words, and the dates, and the name in Gothic script; watching a leaf try to climb it, fall back, and huddle; watching a tuft of uncut grass bend away from him and tremble.

He waited until his shoulders had epaulets of white.

He waited until he felt the freezing on his cheeks.

"There's got to be a reason, a good one, you know," he said at last, his voice cracking in the cold. "I can't just go out and do it. You think anyone, any of our friends, would believe I killed myself from grief?"

The leaf tried to climb the gravestone again.

His shoulders lifted to keep the wind from his spine, and the epaulets shattered and drifted down his arms.

He pulled a hand from a pocket and stared at the back, at the palm, and half-curled the fingers, suddenly clenching them until his nails threatened to break the cold, stiff skin.

"But you promised me," she said sadly.

He turned his head and saw her standing on the path, muffler around her neck the way it used to be, when they were younger—up over her chin, nearly covering her mouth; and the red tam-o'-shanter now catching the snow, and the red boots whose tops were hidden under her coat.

Cheeks reddening, nose red-tipped, eyes bright in the moonlight, made glass by the cold to shine and reflect and let him see the hidden smile.

He turned away from the grave and walked toward her, head down and hand back in the pocket. She took his arm and led him back toward the entrance, and for a while, the short while it took before he began to be afraid, he remembered her as she was and allowed himself to sigh. In her time she was the most beautiful woman in the Station, not wealthy, not poor, pursued by the best and the worst of the unmarried males until she'd seen him in the showroom, standing beside a touring car with one hand in a jacket pocket. Posing, she'd said later; he was posing just for her, and it had been love at first sight.

"I know what you're thinking," she said as they walked through the locked gates.

"Just remembering, that's all."

"I know."

She always did. She knew when he'd made a sale before he even told her, knew when he'd lost his mother before the call even came; she knew about the woman in Harley, about the woman in Hartford, about the woman in the house three doors down who killed herself by lying on the tracks out in the valley and letting the express cut her in half.

On the sidewalk he paused and looked behind him. "I'm not going to do it."

"I know that too," she said.

An owl screamed.

"You're not mad?"

"Was I angry before?"

He shrugged; it had always been impossible to tell how she felt about anything. And when his escapades had been confessed, she'd only made him warm cocoa and watched him drink it, without a word.

"Well, I'm not angry now," she said, hugging his arm to her side as they stepped off the curb and started toward home. "I knew you wouldn't be able to keep your promise."

"Ellen—"

"A silly promise anyway, don't you think? Lovers don't kill themselves for love anymore. That's only in the movies."

"It would..." He turned at a sound, saw an automobile coming at them, too fast to stop. "It was the gesture I was thinking of, Ellen. I'm not stupid, you know."

"I know," she said. "But sometimes you forget."

The car swept past them, the driver a black ghost with a green-lighted face.

"Now think of how you'd feel if he'd hit you," she said, guiding him up the curb and onto the pavement. "Think of the squirrels, Timmy. Think of the squirrels and the way they look on the street when they try to do something foolish."

Then she took him into the house, helped him off with his coat and hat, and told him to go into the kitchen—there was cocoa waiting, and she didn't want it to get cold.

He watched her go up the stairs, into the dark where the dust lay in inches and the windows were shattered and the green mold on the bed had crept over the sheet; he heard her walk down the hall where absent pictures left scars on the wallpaper that was left, where the floorboards were rotting, where the doors were off their hinges.

The house, in its time, had been more Ellen's than his.

And he knew neither one of them was letting go until they were good and ready.

"Ellen?"

"Hush," she called. Whispered.

"Ellen—"

"Come to bed, love." Whispering. The breath of the furnace, the sigh of a shadow. "Stop stalling and come to bed."

The hell with you, he shouted silently; I sold a goddamned Rolls Royce today without even half trying! Tomorrow I'll sell another. The hell with you! And the hell with this place!

He raised a hand, raised a fist, looked at it and grinned bitterly because he knew it was empty. Then he sighed and went into the kitchen, sat at the table, and picked up the cup.

A sip that scorched his tongue.

"I'm going to call someone tomorrow," he declared loudly. "I am, Ellen. I really am."

"I don't think so," she called back from the top of the stairs.

He put down the cup hard, smashing it, spilling the cocoa over his trousers and shoes. He felt the heat and closed his eyes.

I am, he thought; goddammit, I am.

No,
Ellen told him.

He looked up and saw her, as she had been, as she was.

She held out a hand.

Plaster floated from the wall.

Now come to bed, Timmy, and think of the squirrels.

Scott Baker lives in Paris. His novels and stories of the fantastic, such as
Dhampire
and "The Lurking Duck," are often grounded in the horrific, and his story "Still Life with Scorpion" won the World Fantasy Award in 1981.

In the following story, Tracy goes to Paris, expecting a pleasant year living with her sister and studying at the Sorbonne. But Tracy's sister is gone and the Sorbonne is closed. Truly alone for the first time in her life, Tracy retreats into a strange round house.

The trickle of tear gas leaking in through the tightly shut windows caught in Tracy's throat, was making her cry—and yet for an instant, even though she knew that Liz might be out there with the other students the police were clubbing, all she could think about was how Father had warned her to watch out for the taxi drivers in Paris, that they always took advantage of Americans to take them the wrong way and run up their bill. The riots would give her driver the perfect excuse.

He leaned on the horn. All the drivers were stuck, honking and yelling as the students who'd evaded the police charge streamed across the street, leaping over car hoods, yelling to one another and back at the drivers.

Tracy sank down in her seat, tried to hide. She was here to be a student; she had the papers from the consulate in her purse. What if the soldiers thought she was one of them, dragged her out of the taxi and beat her up or threw her in jail?

One of the students saw her. He rapped on her window and shouted something, grinning at her, then pulled at the door handle, but the doors were locked and he couldn't get in. He was tall and scrawny, with long greasy hair, a scraggly beard, huge bloodshot eyes. Tracy shrank down in her seat, closed her eyes and pretended she wasn't there, that she was back home in Downers Grove, or driving into Chicago in Robbie's car with all her friends, anywhere but here.

The driver yelled something at the student. Tracy opened her eyes again in time to see him starting to get out of the car. The student slapped the car roof and ran off to rejoin the others. A moment later they all were gone, though she could still hear them somewhere a few blocks away. The driver was swearing to himself now, and even though Tracy had no idea what he was saying, it was obvious he hated being here as much as she did. Somehow that made her feel less helpless.

He turned around and asked Tracy something. He was fat, unshaven, oily, he sounded furious with her, but all she could do was shake her head no and say, "Jeu neu parla pa frawnsee," the way Liz had written it out for her phonetically in her last letter, almost two months ago. She pushed the piece of paper with Liz's friend's address on it at the driver again.

It wasn't fair of Liz to treat her like this. Liz should have been at the airport. Even the American papers she'd been reading on the plane over had been full of the student riots, what they were calling the May Revolution. Liz had to know how frightening it would be for Tracy; she knew how shy her sister was, that Tracy didn't speak any French and didn't feel safe alone even in Chicago. She needed Liz.

And even if Liz had had some good reason for not being at the airport, she should still have been waiting at her apartment. Not just have left a note taped to the door, where anybody could have read it, telling Tracy to go stay with some stranger, so she had to find her way there on her own through a city where people were rioting and burning cars. If their father ever found out he'd yank them both right back to the States.

In a way she was lucky that the whole thing had started just when she was due to leave, while he'd been off on a fishing trip in northern Michigan. By the time he got back it would all have probably died down and he might not ever know anything had happened at all. He didn't watch TV and never read anything but the local paper, and he didn't even believe much of what he read there; the only reason he read it at all was to make sure they printed his advertisements right.

It was night by the time the driver finally extricated them from the traffic jam and got her where Liz had sent her, a closed black metal gate in an ugly gray concrete wall out in some deserted part of the city, all sinister-looking warehouses and blank walls, a few storefronts with gray metal blinds locked down over them. The streetlight at the end of the block was too far away for its light to reach all the way to where she was and the street was too narrow for the half-moon she could glimpse overhead to illuminate anything.

She checked to make sure the number on the gate really matched the one Liz had written down, and that the gate was unlocked, then tried to pay the driver what the counter showed she owed, plus ten percent for his tip. But he just started yelling and gesturing at her all over again and wouldn't give her back her bags until she gave him another fifty francs.

Her eyes were still watering from the tear gas. She felt as though she was about to break down altogether as he drove away, but she wasn't going to let him see her cry. She pushed the gate open and dragged her suitcases in, then closed it again and looked around.

Her eyes had adjusted to the dark a bit better now. There was enough moonlight for her to see that everything inside the wall was totally different from anything the neighborhood could have ever led her to hope for. There was a three-story house, almost like back home, except it was round instead of square, with a conical roof rising to a central peak. There was even a tree, its branches whipping back and forth in the wind and brushing against the only lighted window she could see—all reds and greens, like a stained glass window—up on the top floor, where Liz's note had said her friend's apartment was.

Somehow it all helped—the round house, the tree, the stained glass window, all the unexpected differences hidden behind the ugly outer wall. Maybe she was going to find things here she would never have even guessed existed, in places she would never have thought to look. She felt herself beginning to regain a little of the excitement the riots had driven out of her.