The Paradise War (9 page)

Click! The line went dead.

I replaced the receiver and glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty in the morning. I was beat. I disconnected the cord on the phone and stumbled back to bed.

It took longer to get to sleep this time. But just as I was snoozing soundly, I was awakened by a loud thumping on the door. “What have I done to deserve this?” I whined, dragging myself from my warm nest.

The door rattled again as I lurched toward it. “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming. Keep your shirt on.” I turned the key and opened the door. “Oh, Susannah, it’s you. What a surprise.”

She burst into the room as if launched from a catapult. “You needn’t bother pretending,” she stormed. I followed her to the door of Simon’s room. She gave the room a quick once-over and whirled to confront me. “All right, where is he?”

“I already told you. He’s not here.”

Susannah was a firebrand. A long-stemmed beauty with radiant auburn hair and a figure that could, and regularly did, stop traffic. Bright as needles and twice as sharp, she was two or three notches too good for Simon. Or anyone else, for that matter. I don’t know why she put up with an unregenerate rogue like Simon, or what she possibly saw in him. Their relationship seemed to me one long ordeal by fire—a venture more on the order of a military exercise than two hearts beating as one.

“You’ll have to ask Simon when he comes back,” I told her. “I really can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?” She stared at me, her dark eyes bright with anger. She was either deciding to dismember me where I stood, or calculating how much my dressed carcass would bring on the open market. “Is this somebody’s warped idea of a joke?”

“I think it may be,” I told her. And then I made the sad mistake of telling her about the aurochs in the newspaper, our hasty trip to Scotland, the cairn, and Simon’s sudden disappearance. I tried to make it sound matter-of-fact, but succeeded only in making her more angry and suspicious with each word. “But I wouldn’t worry,” I ended lamely. “I expect he’ll be back soon enough.”

“When?” Susannah asked pointedly. Her usually exquisite features were scrunched up in an ugly scowl. I could see that she was only seconds away from pulling off my ears.

“Oh, he’ll turn up in a day or two.”

“A day or two.” Extreme incredulity made her tone flat and husky.

“All right, a week or so—tops. But—”

“What you mean is, you don’t really know when he’ll turn up at all.”

“Not really,” I confessed. “But as soon as he realizes I’m not going to further this stupid practical joke of his, he’s bound to come dragging home.”

“A practical joke? You expect me to believe that?” She regarded me with a wounded yet supremely defiant look. “Well, I have news for you, mister,” she said crisply. “I have had the brush-off before. But never like this. If Simon Rawnson does not wish to see me again, so be it. Why didn’t he just say so—instead of sending his trained monkey along with some ludicrous story about going to Scotland to visit the Queen?”

“A cairn,” I corrected.

“Whatever!” She spun on her heel and started for the door.

“Wait, Susannah! You don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly!” she retorted. “Just you tell Simon that we are finished. I do not expect to see him again. And I am keeping the necklace!” She slammed the door so hard the walls shivered.

I hurried into the staircase after her. Susannah turned on me. She had reloaded both barrels and let fly. “And another thing! If I even so much as see Simon Rawnson in public again, I will cause the biggest stinking row he’s ever seen. That man will wish he’d never been born. You tell him that, the creep!”

“Listen, Susannah,” I said, reaching a hand toward her arm. It was a clumsy move. I almost lost my fingers.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” She slapped my hand away. “I’m going home and don’t either of you ever try to call me.”

Feeling about as low as a garden slug, I watched her sail away, silk skirt streaming. Wrath had transformed her already considerable beauty into something magnificent and wild—a force of nature, like a hurricane or an electrical storm. Terrifying, but wonderful to behold.

I watched Susannah descend the stairs and then listened to the quick click of her heels on the flagstones as she crossed the quad and was gone. Then I turned and shuffled back to my room. I hated myself for deceiving her. But no, I hadn’t deceived her; I had told her the truth. She had just assumed, for reasons of her own, that I was lying to her, and what could I do about that? Anyway, it was not my fault. It was all down to Simon—I had nothing to do with it.

Trained monkey, indeed!

7
M
AD
N
ETTLES

M
y plan, as far as I had one, was simply to carry on as if nothing had happened. Business as usual. If anyone rang up and asked Simon’s whereabouts, I’d tell them he’d run off to Wolverhampton with a shop assistant from Boots. Serve him right, the toad.

The way I figured it, he was probably waiting until I panicked and blabbed to the police or something. He wanted to see his name in the headlines, and me looking like a fool explaining to reporters how he’d crawled into a cairn and disappeared. Well, he could just wait until hell froze over. I did not intend on giving him the satisfaction.

For the next few days, I carried on my life in the ordinary way. I behaved exactly as before. I took my meals, browsed at the bookstalls, loitered in the library, lounged in my adviser’s office, chatted with acquaintances, pawed through my mail . . . In short, I sallied boldly forth into the frantic free-for-all of academic life I had come to know and love so well.

But work was impossible. How could I work? I could not, truly, ignore Simon’s disappearance any more than I could ignore the nose on my face—however hard I tried. The days passed and Simon did not return. The phone did not ring. Doubt began taking a toll on me. I kept thinking:
What if it is no joke? What if something happened to him? What if he really is gone?

Each day that passed brought a new worry. I lurched like a lopsided pendulum between anger and anxiety. Anger at his absurd prank, and anxiety over his safety. Day and night, I suffered a relentless rain of questions: Where was Simon? What was he doing? Where had he gone? Why was this my worry? Why me?

“When Simon comes back,” I promised myself, “I’ll kill him. I’ll cheerfully twist off his arms and beat him with the bloody ends. No, I won’t. That wouldn’t be civilized. I will, instead, sit him down and tell him calmly and rationally what a terrible, tasteless thing he has done. And then I will shoot him through his small, black heart.”

As the days passed into weeks, I grew steadily more listless, disheveled, ill-tempered, and cranky; I yelled at the scout whenever she poked her nose in, until at last she got fed up and stopped coming by. I roamed aimlessly around the streets, muttering to myself and cursing a great deal. My socks didn’t match. I didn’t wash.

If anyone observed my increasingly debilitated state, they gave no sign. I could not have occasioned less comment if I were a dust ball under the bed. I found myself deeply tempted to grow a hunchback and start swinging from the bell in Tom Tower.

My rapid descent into the slough of despond was matched by an equally steep decline in mental stability. I did not sleep well. Odd dreams troubled me—visions of leafy green men and extinct oxen rampaging through my bedroom, of wandering lost in a dark forest and the ground opening up beneath me and swallowing me whole, of being hunted down and pierced through the thorax by antique spears, of wolves howling in a forest dark, and a hideous horror with a face of grinning death, pursuing me relentlessly over a cold and desolate land—disturbing images that melted upon waking, leaving me exhausted and all the worse for my night’s rest.

I knew the cause of my slide into oblivion: my conscience was pulling overtime trying to attract my attention. From the moment I crawled into the cairn and realized Simon had vanished, my subconscious had begun hand-to-hand combat with my reason. The object? Getting me to admit to myself that what
might
have happened actually did happen, and that I had done absolutely nothing about it.

Still, it wasn’t so much Simon’s disappearance that hastened my decline. Unnerving as that was, the object of my inner conflict was not Simon’s vanishing act; it was his destination. Where, then,
had
Simon gone? That was the sixty-four-trillion-dollar question. And I knew the answer.

But I didn’t like to say it.

No, I would rather stew slowly in my own juices than admit what I knew to be true. Nature, however, has a subtle way of dealing with these amusing little dysfunctional games one enjoys so much. It’s called a nervous breakdown.

I began seeing things.

The first incident happened very early one morning. I had spent another sleepless night and decided to take a walk along the river. I slipped through the quad and took the lane leading to the meadow and the riverwalk. That early in the morning I had the place to myself, and just as I was passing the field where the college’s cattle are kept, I saw a large gray hound loping across the pasture, coming at an angle toward me.

At first, I didn’t think anything of it. There are lots of dogs around, after all. But as it drew nearer, the size of the thing registered— the animal was seriously larger: almost as big as a pony. It had a short, curly coat and extremely long legs that ate up the ground at an astonishing rate. And it was coming right for me. I stopped and stared as it leapt the cattle fence without breaking stride. The dog landed in the lane a scant few yards away. Only then did it see me, for it turned as if startled and flattened its ears, baring its incredibly long teeth in a snarl.

I stood stock-still, my heart racing. The dog, if that is what it was, growled menacingly low in its throat and raised its hackles. But I did not twitch a muscle—I was too scared to move. The great hound, still growling, turned down the lane and dashed off. It vanished in the morning mist from the river. But in the instant it turned, I saw that it had an odd-looking collar made of iron chain—the antique kind with curious hand-forged square links.

Despite the fact that I had never in my life seen a dog so huge, I told myself that someone’s pet had escaped from the kennel. Only that, and nothing more.

And then, a few days later, sitting by the window sipping tea on a rainy afternoon, I glanced out into the quad and saw something brown and hairy moving on the lawn. In the gloom of a thick overcast, I could not be certain exactly what I saw. At the time I would have sworn it was a pig—but a different sort of pig from any I was familiar with. Long-legged and lean, with a thick, bristly coat of dark reddish-brown and two curved tusks issuing from the sides of his pinched and narrow face, it carried its tail in a comical flagpole fashion— straight up over its sloping back.

With my face pressed against the glass, the window quickly steamed up. When I rubbed away the fog, the creature had disappeared. And with it any certainty that I had seen anything at all.

The next day, I saw a wolf in Turl Street.

Tired of being cooped up all day, I had ventured out late and it was growing dark. The streetlights were lit and some of the shops were already closed. I had gone to the covered market for a loaf of bread and, returning, I turned down Turl Street, which bends so that you cannot see either end from the middle. I had just entered the narrow street when my scalp began to prickle—as if someone were watching me with evil intent. I walked a few yards, and the prickly sensation spread down the back of my neck and across my shoulder blades. I felt evil eyes boring into my back. Instantly frightened, I imagined I heard a faint scratching click on the pavement behind me. I walked a few steps further, listening to this strange sound, whereupon, utterly convinced I was being followed, I turned abruptly.

I had never seen a real live wolf before, and thought it another giant hound, but then saw its shaggy coat and its great pale yellow eyes. It walked with its head low, its long snout to the ground as if scenting a trail. When I stopped, it stopped, giving me the distinct impression that I was being stalked. The door of a camera shop stood not ten feet to the right of me, and I thought to run in the door and escape. I took one cautious step sideways. The wolf tensed. I heard a sound like gravel churning in a cauldron and realized it came from the animal’s throat. We stood looking at one another across a distance of no more than fifteen or twenty feet. I decided to make a rush for the door, and was just working myself up to it when the door swung open and someone came out of the shop. I half turned, flung out a hand to the stranger to stop him. “Wait!” I said. The fellow grimaced at me—I suppose he thought me a beggar after loose change—and pushed brusquely past. When I looked again, the wolf was running up the Turl toward Broad Street. I saw its gaunt sides gleam silver in the streetlights, and then it was gone.

I told myself I hadn’t actually seen it, that the episode with the giant dog had unnerved me. But the next morning the
Daily Mail
carried a story about a wolf seen running loose in the streets of Oxford. Numerous people had witnessed it. Police had been called out, and animal control, but they couldn’t locate the beast. Speculation was that the wolf had escaped from someone’s illegal menagerie and had fled to the open countryside.