The Key to Midnight (6 page)

She amazed herself, because with Alex Hunter, she was allowing an unusual intimacy. She was telling him things that she had never told anyone before.

He spoke so quietly that she could barely hear. “ ‘Emptiness.’ That’s another odd word choice.”

“I guess it is.”

“What do you mean by it?”

Joanna groped for words that could convey the hollow-ness, the cold feeling of being different from all other people, the cancerous alienation that sometimes crept over her, usually when she least expected it. Periodically she fell victim to a brutal, disabling loneliness that bordered on despair. Bleak, unremitting loneliness, yet more than that, worse than that.
Aloneness.
That was a better term for it. Without apparent reason, she sometimes felt certain that she was separate, hideously unique.
Aloneness.
The depression that accompanied one of these inexplicable moods was a black pit out of which she could claw only with fierce determination.

Haltingly she said, “The emptiness is like ... well, it’s like I’m nobody.”

“You mean... you’re bothered that you have no one.”

“No. That’s not it. I feel that I
am
no one.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“It’s as if I’m not Joanna Rand... not anybody at all ... just a shell... a cipher... hollow... not the same as other people ... not even human. And when I’m like that, I wonder why I’m alive... what purpose I have. My connections seem so tenuous....”

He was silent for a while, but she was aware that he was staring at her while she gazed blindly at the mural. At last he said, “How can you live with this attitude, this emptiness, and still be ... the way you are?”

“The way I am?”

“Generally so outgoing, cheerful.”

“Oh,” Joanna said quickly, “I don’t feel alienated all the time. The mood comes over me only now and then, and never for longer than a day or two. I fight it off.”

He touched her cheek with his fingertips.

Abruptly Joanna was aware of how intently he was staring, and she saw a trace of pity mixed with the compassion in his eyes. The reality of Nijo Castle and the actuality of the limited relationship that they shared now flooded back to her, and she was surprised—even shocked—by how much she had said and by how far she had opened herself to him. Why had she cast aside the armor of her privacy in front of this man rather than at the feet of someone before him? Why was she willing to reveal herself to Alex Hunter in a way and to a degree that she had never allowed Mariko Inamura to know her? She wondered if her hunger for companionship and love was much greater than she had ever realized until this disturbing moment.

She blushed. “Enough of this soul baring. How’d you get me to do that? You aren’t a psychoanalyst, are you?”

“Every private detective has to be a bit of a psychiatrist ... just like any popular bartender.”

“Well, I don’t know what in the world got me started on that.”

“I don’t mind listening.”

“You’re sweet.”

“I mean it.”

“Maybe you don’t mind listening,” she said, “but I mind talking about it.”

“Why?”

“It’s private. And silly.”

“Didn’t sound silly to me. It’s probably good for you to talk about it.”

“Probably,” she admitted. “But it’s not like me to babble on about myself to a perfect stranger.”

“Hey, I’m not a perfect stranger.”

“Well, almost.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “I understand. You mean I’m perfect but not a stranger. I can live with that.”

Joanna smiled. She wanted to touch him, but she didn’t. “Well, anyway, we’re here to show you the palace, not to have long boring Freudian discussions. There are a thousand things to see, and every one of them is more interesting than my psyche.”

“You underestimate yourself.”

Another group of chattering tourists rounded the corner and approached from behind Joanna. She turned toward them, using them as an excuse to avoid Alex’s eyes for the few seconds required to regain her composure, but what she saw made her gasp.

A man with no right hand.

Twenty feet away.

Walking toward her.

A. Man. With. No. Right. Hand.

He was at the front of the group: a smiling, grandfatherly Korean gentleman with a softly creased face and iron-gray hair. He wore sharply pressed slacks, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a light blue sweater with the right sleeve rolled up a few inches. His arm was deformed at the wrist: There was nothing but a smooth, knobby, pinkish stub where the hand should have been.

“Are you all right?” Alex asked, apparently sensing the sudden tension in her.

She wasn’t able to speak.

The one-handed man drew closer.

Fifteen feet away now.

She could smell antiseptics. Alcohol. Lysol. Lye soap.

That was ridiculous. She couldn’t
really
smell antiseptics. Imagination. Nothing to fear. Nothing to fear in Nijo Castle.

Lysol.

Alcohol.

No. Nothing to fear. The one-handed Korean was a stranger, a kindly little
ojii-san
who couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. She had to get a grip on herself.

Lysol.

Alcohol.

“Joanna? What’s happening? What’s wrong?” Alex asked, touching her shoulder.

The elderly Korean seemed to advance with the slow-motion single-mindedness of a monster in a horror film or in a nightmare. Joanna felt trapped in the unearthly, oppressive gravity of her dream, in that same syrupy flow of time.

Her tongue was thick. A bad taste filled her mouth, the coppery flavor of blood, which was no doubt as imaginary as the miasma of antiseptics, although it was as sickening as if it had been real. Her throat was constricted. She felt as if she might begin to gag. She heard herself straining for air.

Lysol.

Alcohol.

She blinked, and the flutter of her eyelids magically altered reality even further, so the Korean’s pinkish stump now ended in a mechanical hand. Incredibly, she could hear the compact servo-mechanisms purring with power, the oiled push-pull rods sliding in their tracks, and the gears
click-click-clicking
as the fingers opened from a clenched fist.

No. That was imagination too.

“Joanna?”

When the Korean was less than three yards from her, he raised his twisted limb and pointed with the mechanical hand that wasn’t really there. Intellectually Joanna knew that he was interested only in the mural that she and Alex had been studying, but on a more primitive and affecting emotional level, she reacted with the certainty that he was pointing at
her,
reaching for
her
with unmistakably malevolent purpose.

“Joanna.”

It was Alex speaking her name, but she could almost believe that it had been the Korean.

From the deepest reaches of memory came a frightening sound: a gravelly, jagged, icy voice seething with hatred and bitterness. A familiar voice, synonymous with pain and terror. She wanted to scream. Although the man in her nightmare, the faceless bastard with steel fingers, had never spoken to her in sleep, she knew this was his voice. With a jolt, she realized that while she had never heard him speak in the nightmare, she
had
heard him when she was awake, a long time ago... somehow, somewhere. The words he spoke to her now were not imagined or dredged up from her worst dreams, but recollected. The voice was a cold, dark effervescence bubbling up from a long-forgotten place and time: “
Once more the needle, my lovely little lady. Once more the needle.
” It grew louder, reverberating in her mind, a voice to which the rest of the world was deaf—“
Once more the needle, once more the needle, once more the needle
”—booming with firecracker repetitiveness, until she thought her head would explode.

The Korean stopped two feet from her.

Lysol.

Alcohol.

 
Once more the needle, my lovely little lady ...

Joanna ran. She cried out like a wounded animal and turned away from the startled Korean, pushed at Alex without fully realizing who he was, pushed so hard that she almost knocked him down, and darted past him, her heels tapping noisily on the hardwood floor. She hurried into the next chamber, trying to scream but unable to find her voice, ran without looking back, convinced that the Korean was pursuing her, ran past the dazzling seventeenth-century artworks of the master Kano Tan’yu and his students, fled between strikingly beautiful wood sculptures, and all the while she struggled to draw a breath, but the air was like a thick dust that clogged her lungs. She ran past richly carved transoms, past intricate scenes painted on sliding doors, footsteps echoing off the coffered ceilings, ran past a surprised guard who called to her, dashed through an exit into cool November air, started across the big courtyard, heard a familiar voice calling her name,
not
the cold voice of the man with the steel hand, so she finally stopped, stunned, in the center of the Nijo garden, shaking, shaking.

Alex led her to a garden bench and sat beside her in the brisk autumn breeze. Her eyes were unnaturally wide, and her face was as pale and fragile as bridal lace. He held her hand. Her fingers were cold and chalky white, and she squeezed his hand so hard that her manicured nails bit into his skin.

“Should I get you to a doctor?”

“No. It’s over. I’ll be all right. I just... I need to sit here for a while.”

She still appeared to be ill, but a trace of color slowly began to return to her cheeks.

“What happened, Joanna?”

Her lower lip quivered like a suspended bead of water about to surrender to the insistent pull of gravity. Bright tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

“Hey. Hey now,” he said softly.

“Alex, I’m so sorry.”

“About what?”

“I made such a fool of myself.”

“Nonsense.”

“Embarrassed you,” she said.

“Not a chance.”

Her eyes brimmed with tears.

“It’s okay,” he told her.

“I was just... scared.”

“Of what?”

“The Korean.”

“What Korean?”

“The man with one hand.”

“Was he Korean? Do you know him?”

“Never saw him before.”

“Then what? Did he say something?”

She shook her head. “No. He... he reminded me of something awful... and I panicked.” Her hand tightened on his.

“Reminded you of what?”

She was silent, biting her lower lip.

He said, “It might help to talk about it.”

For a long moment she gazed up into the lowering sky, as if reading enigmatic messages into the patterns of the swift-moving clouds. Finally she told him about the nightmare.

“You have it
every
night?” he asked.

“For as far back as I can remember.”

“When you were a child?”

“I guess... no ... not then.”

“Exactly how far back?”

“Seven or eight years. Maybe ten.”

“Maybe twelve?”

Through her shimmering tears she regarded him curiously. “What do you mean?”

Rather than answer, he said, “The odd thing about it is the frequency.
Every night.
That must be unbearable. It must drain you. The dream itself isn’t particularly strange. I’ve had worse. But the endless repetition—”

“Everyone’s had worse,” Joanna said. “When I try to describe the nightmare, it doesn’t sound all that terrifying or threatening. But at night... I feel as if I’m dying. There aren’t words for what I go through, what it does to me.”

Alex felt her stiffen as though steeling herself against the recollected impact of the nightly ordeal. She bit her lip and for a while said nothing, merely stared at the funereal gray-black clouds that moved in an endless cortege from east to west across the city.

When at last she looked at him again, her eyes were haunted. “Years ago, I’d wake up from the dream and be so damned scared I’d throw up. Physically ill with fear, hysterical. These days, it’s not so acute... though more often than not, I can’t get back to sleep. Not right away. The mechanical hand, the needle... it makes me feel so... slimy... sick in my soul.”

Alex held her hand in both of his hands, cupping her frigid fingers in his warmth. “Have you ever talked to anyone about this dream?”

“Just Mariko ... and now you.”

“I was thinking of a doctor.”

“Psychiatrist?”

“It might help.”

“He’d try to free me of the dream by discovering the cause of it,” she said tensely.

“What’s wrong with that?”

She huddled on the bench, silent, the image of despair.

“Joanna?”

“I don’t want to know the cause.”

“If it’ll help cure—”

“I don’t want to know,” she said firmly.

“All right. But why not?”

She didn’t answer.

“Joanna?”

“Knowing would destroy me.”

Frowning, he said, “Destroy? How?”

“I can’t explain... but I feel it.”

“It’s
not
knowing that’s tearing you apart.”

She was silent again. She withdrew her hand from his, rummaged in her purse for a handkerchief, and blew her nose.

After a while he said, “Okay, forget the psychiatrist. What do
you
suppose is the cause of the nightmare?”

She shrugged.

“You must have given it a lot of thought over the years.”

“Thousands of hours,” Joanna said bleakly.

“And? Not even one idea?”

“Alex, I’m tired. And still embarrassed. Can we just... not talk about it any more?”

“All right.”

She cocked her head. “You’ll really drop it that easily
^?
”

“What right do I have to pry?”