The Horses of the Night (7 page)

“Thanks, Collie. I know the house is a wreck. It looks like something blew up in the sun room. We live in a construction yard. I know how hard it is.”

“No, sir, it's quite all right,” said Collie.

The contractor was a good person, who hired brilliant people, students at the Arts School. There were more reliable, and more boring, contractors, but I knew that by supporting Packard I was supporting, indirectly, the arts. The trouble was that I was, for the moment, out of money, and I had asked Packard to delay for awhile. He had been mystified, but I told him that I wanted to sketch the walls in their stripped state.

“I did make some extra sandwiches,” she said in a very low voice, virtually a whisper. It was the tone she nearly always used in my studio.

“I expect Nona tonight. She wasn't sure when. Apparently there was a strike in Chicago, and air traffic is a mess everywhere.”

Collie was a tall woman with gray-blue hair. She was the last of my family's servants from the old days, the halcyon days before my mother tried to harm the staff. Collie had been in the London blitz. She had always fascinated me as a boy, saying words in a way I thought unique to her: gair-idge. “I had to take my car to the gair-idge.”

A buzz bomb had landed in her back garden, a dud. Now she stayed with an elderly sister in Daly City, a woman who, ever since a fall down her front steps, was afraid to live alone. Collie's quiet courtesy did not make her seem meek. It made her, quite the contrary, seem stately and careful. “I know this place will look as lovely as all the others,” she said, switching from a whisper to a beautiful alto. “All your work turns out so lovely.”

When she was gone, I wished she had stayed on for a few minutes. I like to be around people like Collie, people with experience and deep feelings, and I sometimes find myself wearing solitude like borrowed, confining clothing. I adjusted the drafting table. The pencil made a satisfying whisper on the paper. The paper was the watermarked laid I bought by the kilo in Paris, and the hard-lead pencil soon lost its fine point as I roughed-in a sheaf of what I imagined would be asters, purple asters when I touched them up with watercolor.

Fern called just as I replaced the receiver. “There's a light in the house, upstairs, and another one on in what looks like the bathroom.”

“So he's home.”

“Someone is.”

“That's fine,” I said. “That's all I really need to know.”

“He's burning something in the fireplace.”

“That's what fireplaces are for.”

“Paper.”

I knew as well as Fern that newsprint and old letters smell different from applewood.

I called Blake, and there was no answer.

There was something wrong. I drew for awhile to give myself something to think about.

At last I threw down the pencil impatiently. I pushed redial again. No one answered. Now I was more worried than ever.

I nearly called my brother, Rick. My younger brother and I had a friendly but distant relationship, one that allowed him from time to time to call me to complain about alimony or his latest mechanic's bill, and it allowed me to hear someone lively, someone who reminded me of my father, if only in the timbre of his voice, his chuckle, and our shared memories.

I pushed redial again, persistent, faithful. Blake had always engaged a housekeeper. Surely he had a secretary. Nobody's phone simply rang and rang anymore. Something else always happened, a person or a machine took over to record your message.

I put down the phone and tilted my head, listening.

I wonder what it was that made me sense that the house was no longer empty. Collie must have slipped back, I told myself, remembering her sweater, or, as she would put it, her “jumper.” Or Nona—surely it was Nona—dropping by on the way back from the airport.

There was someone in the house.

Someone downstairs.

I stood, and the chair I had designed behaved as it was intended to, scooting on its silent rollers, rebounding soundlessly off the wall. Nona called it my mosquito chair because it floated so lightly.

How transparent a voice sounds when it is trying to sound confident against the dark. I called for Collie, and then for Nona. My shadow fell before me. Floors were solid redwood from the Russian River, except for the study, which was floored in koa wood from Hawaii.

There was no question. I was not alone in this house.

I stood at the top of the stairs, in the bad light, then, slowly, sliding one hand along the almost imperceptible dust of the banister, began to make my way down. The stairs were one part of the house that did not creak. Some craftsman in the 1880s had determined that this would be the masterpiece of stairways, wooden pegs so tight-fitted they did not give, except for that very slight flex that all wood has, that property that keeps it from breaking.

It was not a person. It was a creature of some sort. There was the sound again. A fluttering, a big lift and fall, something flying. It was the sound of a bird, very big. Not like one of the African grays my cousin had kept in Santa Barbara. This was a very large winged creature, feathered and strong, fluttering with a noise like a sail loose in the breeze.

Christ, I thought. There's a bird caught somewhere downstairs.

And not just a bird. It's a condor, at least. My mind went blank, canceled by the single thought: the feather.

I took each step slowly, expectantly, descending into the dark vault of my home.

9

The light wouldn't go on in the first room I tried. The light switch in the next room worked, but only a carpenter's lamp flashed on, a shape like a helmet full of light. Furniture loomed under plastic, the plastic glazed with plaster dust.

I flinched. The rustling of the wings receded before me, a coy presence.

There is an instinctive sense of size, of girth, of the heft and presence of a large, living creature. That's what I felt now. There was a creature my size, or slightly smaller, in my house.

Not every room was being remodeled, not every room was stripped to its ribs. But now every room I entered, in the poor light, was one under repairs, dusty, shrouded. I did not want to speak out loud. It's terrible when that happens—when the sound of one's own voice fills a room, puny and unreal. “Show me where you are,” I said, my voice sounding thin.

Was there a gap in my sense of time? There seemed to be. When I was aware of myself, and the walls around me, the sound of the wings was gone.

There was nothing.

I laughed, a sound that made the silence of the place all the worse. So, you see, I told myself. Everything is fine. No need to worry.

I experimented mentally with a phrase: auditory hallucinations. I reasoned with myself. I could be suffering a delusion of some sort. But why did I feel so wide-awake, so keen?

Jesus, I thought. What if it's happening to me?

But then—someone
was
there, in the distant hall, in the next room, plaster grit crisp underfoot.

This was not a winged creature. This was the step of someone human. I recognized this step. But surely, I thought, this is too wonderful to be true.

But maybe I was wrong. I shrank back against the solid expanse of a wall.

Real. She was real.

“That's exactly where I left you,” she said.

The light, and the shadow, drifted over her. A small woman, dark, shapely. Anyone else would have been startled to find me in half light, but she smiled and put her arms out and held me.

“What happened?” she said. “Strater, you're trembling.”

“Didn't you hear me?” I asked.

“No, I didn't. I just got here.”

I kissed her. I held her close to me, and for a long time I did nothing but keep her in my arms.

Then I gazed into her eyes, hungry for the sight of her. She knew how I felt, and responded, kissing my lips, the lids of my eyes, as though curing me of every doubt I had ever endured.

She asked, after a long, intimate silence, “What happened with DeVere?”

“Nothing.” I did not want to talk about DeVere, or about myself. Our time together was precious. “They haven't decided yet. About the award. The jury's still considering.”

I could not shake the thought that Nona wasn't really here, that she was an illusion. I ran my fingertips over her face, her lips, the soft feathering of her eyebrows, like a blind man seeking to reassure himself. “They must be blind,” she said. “There's nothing to think about. Your work is the best.”

The sound of her voice was medicine. “The airports were a mess?”

“Unbelievable. A strike in one city, and people everywhere are sleeping on airport floors.”

Her finger had healed. I kissed the place where I had put the Band-Aid.

“They loved my proposal,” she said. “They loved it, Strater.” She used my nickname with what sounded to me like special affection. “But I couldn't get any money out of any of them. Children aren't in fashion.”

I cupped Nona's face so I could gaze down into it. “I'm so glad to see you,” I began to say. But the words were not enough. I kissed her yet again.

We went upstairs.

Her hair was dark, not true black but black with a radiance, a reddish tint that caught even the weak moon from the clerestory windows, and held it. Her eyes were dark, too, and when she looked at me there was the strangest glow.

“I fell asleep on the airplane for a couple of minutes,” she breathed. “And you know what I dreamed?”

She unbuttoned my shirt, each button taking far too long. I sensed some awareness in her, some discovery that made her look up at me, into me as though she could see something in my mind.

“You're trembling like someone who's gone swimming recently.”

“I've given it up,” I whispered.

“It's suicide,” she said, but neither of us were drawn into conversation now.

She put her lips to my ear. “Do you know what I dreamed?”

I shook my head.

“I'll show you.”

She was a glow in the darkness. Her lips tasted of cognac, although I was certain that she had not been drinking, and of something else, something unnamable.

Later, downstairs again, I made tea laced with the rum Collie kept in the cubboard with the Earl Grey and orange pekoe. Even in her absence, Collie's character was a part of the house, in the strong, naval rum, in the way the kitchen towels were folded, tidy and what Collie called “seamanlike.”

Nona wore one of my silk dressing gowns. It flowed over her, and made her look like a sorcerer's apprentice.

My rooms were usually the picture of hurried efficiency, a marriage of software and oak furniture, ferns and phone proposals. Now each room looked like a quarry in the half light, and white dust, faint and visible only when smudged, covered every surface.

She took in our surroundings. “I thought they were coming to fix all this pretty soon.”

Not even Nona knew the extent of my financial trouble. I nodded, shrugged: me too.

“Jesus, you can't live like this.”

Nona is a woman who will not suffer delay, or fools. “They said they were running late.”

“Running
isn't exactly the word. What's the matter, Stratton?”

“It's you. You vanquish speech.”

She smiled, acknowledging the flattery. But she was a physician. Human frailty attracted her eye. “I've never seen you so nervous.”

“I'm worried,” I said, trying to undercut the meaning of the words with a soothing voice. “You've never seen me worried before?”

“Not like this.”

“There's something wrong with Blake Howard.” I gave her the barest sketch of Blake's mood, my theories, and touched upon the subject of his unanswered phone. I didn't bother explaining that what upset me at the moment was that I was sure I had heard a winged creature, in this hall, in this room.

What I had really meant to say was: There is something wrong with me.

I was about to tell her about the wings. I parted my lips, dazzled by her, wanting to tell her everything. There were wings, I nearly said. Big wings, feeling the story melt and dissolve, because I knew it was foolish. The rooms were empty. There was nothing here, just as there was probably nothing wrong with Blake.

“They must have had some good things to say about your proposal,” I said, sipping the fragrant tea.

“They loved it. Everyone wants to know more about what they are calling ‘my children's dreams.'
My
children. As though they all belonged to me.”

“They do, in a way.”

“They're calling it a landmark study of children's dreams. Everyone says it would be great if we could spend more money on children. They say, ‘We love your ideas, Dr. Lyle.'”

“But they won't come up with the money,” I said.

“Money's a different matter altogether.” She stopped herself. “I'm worried about you. Look at your house. Naked pipes. Struts. This is supposed to be your dining room. Stratton Fields's dining room. You're a famous man. My place should be a mess. I need malpractice insurance. I need a secretary. You don't need this. You have things on your mind.”

She held me.

I was used to keeping problems to myself. It was a family tradition. My cousin, the one with the African grays, had been kidnapped outside a casino. He had, family rumor had it, crushing gambling debts. Something went wrong, and negotiations went awry, or perhaps the kidnappers quarreled among themselves. The cousin was found in a suitcase in Lucca, cut into pieces.

I told her the truth, as simply as I could. “I'm having a little financial trouble. A cash shortage.”

She listened to my silence, as though she understood it more thoroughly than she understood my words. “You let things like that bother you?”

“My family has its secrets.” This was understatement, but Nona could read the most brief comment, the gesture, the nervous cough, and see exactly what was being said. I had discussed my family only in the vaguest terms, and Nona was not the sort of person to linger over ancient sorrows.