The Horses of the Night (15 page)

But it hadn't worked. Instead, sparring with the waves, fighting to keep breathing, I knew something. I knew something that did not make sense, any more than the slamming of the breakers around me represented logic: I had caused DeVere's death.

It was not too late. I could return to the simple shore of everyday life and escape whatever the woman represented. But as I swam, with strong, steady strokes toward the pinpoints of light, safety, home, I could feel the power leave my limbs. The cold was doing its work.

That's all right, I told myself, that boyish confidence returning to me as it often did here in the surf. Don't worry. The waves will wash you back onshore. It was the irony of such waves—they weighed like boulders but could not crush.

There was something wrong. I was swimming hard, but I was going nowhere. I had always been curious what it would be like, and now I would find out.

This was a riptide.

20

A riptide slices outward, away from the beach.

It cuts through the line of waves, a horizontal tornado of water that drags a swimmer far out, far away from land. Fighting against it is generally useless. The only chance is to swim across the riptide, parallel to the shore, because it is like a violent stream—deadly, but not wide.

A riptide is ugly, even at night, the boom and roll of surf flattened, choppy and thick. A riptide even smells different, less like an ocean and more like salt waste. And they are quieter than the ocean, more silent, and thick with sand clawed from the bottom.

Nona had said I was flirting with suicide. What would I choose to do, now that dying would be so easy, if not without a certain anguish toward the end?

I forced life into my arms. I knew the waves. This sport was one I understood and I made way across the riptide, only to realize that this current was wider and stronger than I had expected. I was much more weary, and stiff from the cold, than I had anticipated.

What are you? I asked myself. Aren't you a man who wishes other people dead? Aren't you a man who can make things happen with a thought?

That doesn't happen, I reminded myself. Wishes have no power. The body has power, and the ocean does. But thoughts are next to nothing. I swam hard, exhausted. The opposite bank of the riptide shrank away from me, as though my outstretched hand was surrounded with a force field.

With a last burst of strength I struggled out of the riptide. I reached the relatively powerless tossing of the surf, and treaded water there, my head back, panting, joyful.

I was elated. So that was a riptide, I thought. Not much of a challenge, really. You might even consider them overrated.

A nasty little thought flickered: far from shore. Too far.

Could I be this far from land? Was that vague streak to the east the beach? There wasn't any shore. There was no sense of direction. A wave broke over me.

Too tired
. When I spluttered to the surface to see a massive comber, I was eager to take advantage of it. I pumped my limbs to reach the same speed as the wave, and when it broke I let the flow crash around me, over me, thundering over my head, pressing my eardrums, momentarily deafening me.

The water tossed, churned, seethed. I did not have long before hypothermia would steal me away, make me leaden, lightheaded. But I was still confident. After all, the ocean is only so much water.

The sea around me changed, thickened.

The surf was quiet. I was being tugged even farther from shore. I understood what was happening but registered it as a bad joke.

This
was a riptide.

The sea made a humming, moaning sound as the water changed from a fluid that was all confusion to a cylinder, a gleaming black wall. I gulped air that tasted like powdered steel so I would have enough oxygen in my lungs.

I was treading water with legs that were nearly impossible to shift. My calf muscles knotted, twin cramps that would have been agonizing if my limbs were not numb.

The tide dragged me. The wind spun my hair, whipped my eyes now with spray. There was a cry, a long, human wail that I recognized only after several seconds was my own voice. The cry depleted my lungs, emptied them, spent all my air on a futile song. It was not a cry of fear so much as a cry of awe, a cry to accompany the thunder around me, as the bellow of a crowd might cause one's own voice to rise.

I recalled a voice:
What do you want?

Maybe you did want to die, all along.

It pulled me under. I was crumpled, flattened, pressed to the sand. This was not the wave-licked sand of the shore, either, but a hard, gnarled sand, stretched thinly over stone. This is what I felt. I could see nothing through my salt-stung eyes. The water was heavy. It was all darkness. All solid, like a man poured into the core of something, to harden, as though my body were gold and I had been allowed to flow deep within a crack in earth.

Breathe soon.

I will have to breathe soon.

My thoughts were distorted. I was warm. Yes, this is how it happens, said a voice in me, a travel narrator. First the swimmer is overconfident. Then he forgets. He can't swim. He can't breathe.

Then all thoughts slipped away, like the long, satin trains of a wedding, the half-thought: It's over.

Save me
.

If I had spoken the words, if I had been able to articulate my lips, the sound would have been quiet, but intense, unmistakable. It was a prayer.

Make me strong
.

Aren't prayers futile? Aren't human wishes mere garlands, things turning into air? But this nothingness was no longer the flat slab of weight that had existed just an instant before. Something had lifted, the density of the water, or of my own body, was transformed.

Something had my arm. My arm was lifted upward, and my body began to rise upward, too, trailing after my arm in a way that struck me as barely comprehensible, as though my arm had become an eel, a vibrant, living creature of its own. And my other arm. And my legs, too, thrashing, driving me.

Part Three

21

Easy, I told myself wryly: a night's swim.

A wave smashed over me, around me, carrying me to a place where my feet scrabbled along a sandy bottom. The surf erupted around me, but it was a beach, now, with the breakers dying on the sand.

Nothing to be afraid of.

I spat brine. So soon back, I marveled. So soon saved.

So this was earth. I had that profound sense of gratitude and dislocation that arises after danger. The waves hissed, bubbling, simmering to where I stood, so I strode higher, leaving suction scars on the wet sand, until I reached the flour-dry sand of the beach the waves rarely touched, sand graveled and littered with stones, and trash that rustled in the light wind.

Sometimes we take refuge in the certainty that life continues, the stars rolling gradually along their slope. But at times it seems inexorable, inhuman, the dull squat of objects upon the earth. There it was, the pile of clothing, where it would have been, loyal to nothing, if I had drowned.

The wind was strong. I hated the insensate nature of my clothes as I approached them. How dull and common everything was. I despised the warning signs, the sight of the tiny sparks of headlights on the road. Surely I would be unable to dress.

That is, however, exactly what I did. I planned my way into my clothes, and the plan worked. My skin was salt-sticky, but the sleeves accepted my stiff arms, the pants my clumsy legs, and I felt like a man purloining clothing that the very act of theft caused to become not only his own, but his own fit. My tailor, a patient man with a by-appointment-only shop off Union Square, would have been pleased.

It was difficult to thrust my sandy feet into the socks, but I welcomed the sensation. I usually left the surf glad to be alive, but now I felt life-stunned, dazed.

What had happened? I had found the strength to swim back to the shore. That was all. There was nothing remarkable about that.

I drove carefully. The passing streetlights, the
CLOSED
signs in the liquor-store windows, all were of the ordinary, the steady, reliable world.

Nona's apartment was dark, her bedroom window a rectangle, and a gray, vague curtain. This was not unusual. She was working late, or gone: Dallas, Vancouver, Mexico City.

I locked the garage door. I tugged at the heavy padlock, testing it. Cold, and gritty with sand, I found my way into the garden in the darkness, and gazed up into the giant gingko tree. I could not understand the full green it now displayed, the vast full life that lifted and swayed in the wind.

Why was I reluctant to slip the key of my own house into its lock? It was raining now, and warm. My hand was shivering. The key missed, scratched, and finally found its slot.

I have to talk to someone about this, I thought. I have to talk to someone very badly. I'll talk to Nona—or have her suggest one of her colleagues.

But where would I begin? Surely one of my old teachers would help me, one of the defrocked priests, the sort of men who declined evil into its categories as one might study Latin verbs.

I wandered the house, making an inventory of the familiar half-finished rooms with plastic draping the furniture. I ascended the stairs and poured myself cognac. I was pleased to get out of my limp, sandy clothes. I was sticky, and I felt the beginning of a soreness in my calves. Collie would see the sand all over the bathroom tomorrow and would, as always, not comment on what she considered yet another Fields eccentricity.

I took a hot bath, the water so hot it hurt. But I stayed in the steaming tub, adding some of the bubble bath I always bought when I was in Paris, at the shop in Rue Mouffetard. I let the water absorb the arctic from my muscles.

Don't think, I told myself. Don't think about DeVere, or what was left of him. Don't think about the feather.

When I was out of the tub, monk-robed in terrycloth, my feet in slippers, I began to feel the first stirrings of appetite. A swim does that to me, and cold does it, too, and I had certainly, I thought dryly, been experiencing a little cold and wet lately. I would pad down through the shrouded furniture and find something Collie had left in the kitchen, perhaps one of her country terrines, or some of her hand-crafted sourdough.

I tried calling Nona, but she did not answer. Rick's voice told me that I had reached his telephone number. I left a message: “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” And as I spoke I became aware of the change in the house, the subtle alteration in the silence.

I listened. There could be no question. I put down the receiver carefully. I stood, my breath hushed.

I crept down the stairs. I leaned against the wall, just outside the study.

There was a fire in the fireplace.

So what? It's just a fire. Some smoldering kindling had ignited. This was not, however, a small, minor fire among forgotten splinters. This was a blazing fire, a classic sort of crackle-and-glow.

I stepped into the room.

I hated myself for being disappointed. There was no waiting figure in white. Was I actually looking forward to seeing her? What a fool I was! It was like looking forward to an episode of psychosis.

Many people would trade places with you, I chided myself. This was an opportunity to see for myself what was only the subject of superstition, of legend. But as soon as this weak enthusiasm erected itself, I turned away from it. It might be madness—it might be the worst evil. Either way, I would leave it and return to my normal life. I did not comprehend, for the moment, how facile my thinking was. Like many optimists, I am primarily capable of keeping myself from grief, and from horror.

On my way through the shrouded sitting room I stopped. The half-plastered walls, the peaks of the plastic canopies over the furniture looked both eerie and homey. I made my way to the wall, but the light would not switch on, and I had not expected it to.

But my eyes were accustomed to the firelight by now, making it quite easy to see. All was well, I reassured myself. There was nothing amiss. But why did I stand there, unmoving? My hand was on the useless, obsolete light switch, the pushbutton type, the type attached to cloth wiring. I could not move from where I stood.

I could not take a single step, because there was something wrong. It was impossible to see what it was. But it was real. There was something that was not right.

Then I heard it.

The slightest rustling, the briefest whisper of a plastic drop cloth. Not a cloth being lifted, and not a cloth riffling in a wind. There was only a briefest noise, as of someone sitting quietly, turning his head, his head and body covered by a dust cloth.

And that is exactly what it was.

There was someone sitting in the radiance from the fire, light both poor and brilliant enough to make me wish I could mistake what I saw, the profile, the posture. There was a man sitting under that translucent canopy, and I knew who it was.

I knew, and I couldn't breathe, shrinking to the wall, groping for something to keep me upright. I could not bear to stand just as I was, unable to turn my head.

And I didn't want to look away. I didn't want to do anything but stand as I was, with time finished, the world stopped completely.

I knew now why Mary falls to her knees in so many of the paintings of the Annunciation. If a messenger from Heaven arrives, even with good news, we cannot be human beings and fail to experience the sensation: May this not be true.

Even when the beloved voice spoke I sensed that this was not a voice from Heaven. As charged as I was with love I wished I could have fallen utterly deaf before I heard those words.

“It's too late, Stratton.”

I stretched forth a hand, but could not take a step, wanting to speak, my tongue powerless.

“It's too late,” he said again. “You can't go back.”

It was my father's voice.

22

The plastic canopy over the shadow figure shifted, began to slip away, and then fell clear with a slithering whisper as the figure lifted its arms.