Winter Tides (13 page)

He rubbed his face, trying to wake up. Two nearly
sleepless nights had exhausted him, but ever since he had met Anne his mind had been active at night, and this morning he had awakened even more tired than when he had gone to bed. He had been
visited
in the night—by the girl of his dreams, literally speaking. His dreams had been overwhelmingly sensual, with such a real-time, waking quality to them that he had felt more drugged than asleep.

In his mind he had always carried with him the image of the perfect woman, what he liked to think of as his silent partner. Over the years she had seemed to look vaguely like a dozen women, made up out of elements of the less perfect specimens he had known—the women who had starred in his films, a couple he had known in school, a waitress, a girl from his neighborhood who had often been neglectful about pulling down the shades at night….

Now his dream woman had a face, a form, a name. She looked identical to Anne. He called her the Night Girl. Anne, clearly, was the Day Girl.

He realized now that he had simply been waiting for Anne’s arrival for years, and that he had been waiting even more avidly for the arrival of the Night Girl. She was certainly not Anne herself, this woman whom he summoned at night. He knew that absolutely. What she was, he couldn’t say. Perhaps she was a succubus, a being conjured up from beyond this world—a demon, if that’s how you wanted to look at it. But Edmund didn’t look at it that way. Edmund didn’t believe in demons. If he had to classify himself, he would call himself a pagan, and what he believed—what he had learned from his study of magic—was that good and evil, devils and angels, were an invention of Johnny-come-latelies, and that the spirits of darkness and the spirits of light were simple entities, like apes and fish, neither good nor bad, although they could certainly be useful.

The woman in his mind had simply been waiting patiently for a persona, like an empty vessel waiting to be filled. It had been Edmund who had seen how perfectly Anne filled that vessel. It had been Edmund who made the two of them one.

There had been something in Anne’s story about moving south from Canada that had started him thinking. She had told him that she seemed to have been drawn here, almost inevitably, although clearly she had no idea why. Well,
he
had an idea, and soon he would tell her what it was.
He
had drawn her here. It was as simple as that. There was a magnetism between the two of them, a deep connection, a psychic bond that he had felt upon first meeting her. It was partly sexual—yes, indeed it was—and partly artistic. But all in all it was too powerful a bond to define easily. He could sense that Anne the Day Girl was at least partly opposing it, which was exactly as it should be. It clearly meant that she felt it too, a passion that
had
to be disconcerting to her, because it was so deep. There had been instant recognition on a level that couldn’t be admitted, not all at once. And Edmund had always believed that quick personal familiarity was cheap, nearly always a sign of a shallow mind. If Anne had reacted too quickly to him, if she had come onto him, he would have been deeply disappointed in her; she wouldn’t have been the Day Girl after all.

He heard footsteps now, and he stopped dead still to listen. From outside? Someone in the building? The footsteps continued, neither diminishing nor growing louder. It sounded exactly as if someone were walking below, pacing up and down on the floor beneath the balcony, although that would be impossible, given the clutter of junk down there. He stood up and walked to the office door, swinging it open silently a couple of inches and looking out. There was no one in sight. He stepped out onto the balcony, darting a glance over the railing. Pieces of Collier’s foam castle littered the floor below. Now that he was out of the office and in the vastness of the warehouse itself, it sounded to him as if the footsteps had receded into the distance somewhere—perhaps out in the parking lot. The sound faded before he’d gotten halfway down the stairs, where he paused for a moment and listened, waiting for them to start up again.

Out of nowhere he recalled suddenly that the Earl had given Anne permission to store paintings inside one of the disused storage rooms.

Had
she? Edmund had been out most of the day.

He walked to the storage room door, turned the knob, and swung the door open, immediately spotting the shadow of the paintings, which were stacked against the wall. There were a couple of cardboard boxes of stuff, too, which must also be Anne’s. He stepped inside and waved his hand around the dark room until he found the pull string to the ceiling light. Even with the light on, the room was dim. He sorted through one of the boxes, which was filled mostly with old clothes, a child’s clothes, apparently, along with a couple of pieces of embroidery and a red, knee-length felt coat. There were moth holes in the coat, and it smelled musty, as if from long years of storage. He shoved it back into its box along with the embroidery, then closed up the lid again, putting the box back where it had lain against the wall.

Whatever was stored in the other box lay wrapped in tissue. He carefully unwrapped a soft object, which turned out to be a female doll apparently stitched up out of nylon stockings. The stitching at first appeared to be erratic, completely careless, but then he saw that there was an effect to it, that it had clearly been purposeful. The doll had an unsettling organic quality to it, and the stuffed nylon was fleshy, almost suggesting tumors, disease. The stitched-on eyes appeared at first to be comical, but then he saw that if anything they were the opposite of comical; they were astonishingly, morbidly sexual, full of languid desire. The doll’s lips were stitched in red, its mouth slightly open. It was clothed in loose, removable garments, and he probed its nylon flesh with his fingers to check for anatomical accuracy. He was rewarded. This was brilliantly done, seriously done. If ever there were a voodoo doll worthy of the name, he had found it here among Anne’s effects. There was a unique sickness here that he could only admire, a perverse carnality that excited him. The doll even felt warm to the touch, as if it generated its own heat. He unwrapped two more, a male and then another female, lifting their robes to peek underneath. His mind raced with suggestions—what he might do with them!

And to think that Anne had made them! He had known, of course, that she had a deeper element to her, the Night Girl element, but he had never guessed its extent. The male doll had oversized sexual organs. It was even circumcised! He checked deeper in the box, discovering that it contained a dozen or more dolls, a regular orgy of them, each of them wrapped carefully in tissue. Anne had taken her dollmaking damned seriously. And yet she had hidden them here, in these cardboard boxes. He wondered what else she had to hide.

He turned to the paintings, all of them framed, wrapped with heavy brown parcel paper and taped shut with masking tape. He hurried out into the warehouse, his imagination wild with anticipation, and found a razor knife and a roll of tape the same width as the tape that secured the parcel paper. He sorted through the paintings, picking one out at random. Carefully he slit the old tape, right at the seam where the paper was folded across the top. He pulled the paper back and eased the painting two-thirds of the way out of it, laying it flat on the floor beneath the ceiling lamp. It was a landscape painting, dark and dim, with twisted trees and a gray sky. As with the dolls, his first thought was that it was simply ugly, but as he studied it, once again he saw that it wasn’t, that it was eerily accurate in a nightmarish sort of way—full of the dark suggestion of moving shadows, of secret fleshy things….

The limbs of the trees were delicately rendered, spidery and distinct, but the trunks were deformed with bulbous appendages and growths that called to mind the stark carnality and deformity of the dolls. Dim light shone through the trees from behind, as if somewhere back in the woods a diffused yellow light glowed—firelight.

He knew that fire. He had seen that fire himself.

The knowledge that Anne had seen it too was simply thrilling. And that she could depict it so clearly, with all its magical suggestion…. Here and there in the woods a band of dim yellow streaked out from between the trunks of the trees, illuminating what at first looked like dead leaves. He bent over, squinting at the picture, and saw that the leaves were cunningly painted to suggest other organic forms—the carapaces of beetles, leggy spiders, crabs,
cricketlike scuttling creatures out at night at the fringe of a dead woods. Several of them suggested human faces, with blank eyes and slack, open mouths.

He sat back on his haunches and drew a breath. He had never seen anything like this. Clearly he had misjudged Anne, and misjudged her badly.

But then he knew that he hadn’t misjudged her at all. Quite the contrary. This
confirmed
nearly everything that he had suspected: Anne the Day Girl was wholesomeness personified. She was the girl next door: radiant, sunshine, spring and flowers. But the dolls and these nightmarish paintings were something else again. They revealed a side of her that she kept carefully hidden from the day—her deepest, secret desires and fears.

What did
Anne
imagine was going on back there in those dead woods, around that hidden fire?

Someday soon, when the time was right, he would put the question to her, draw her out, reveal that he knew her on this darker level, that he admired it, that he comprehended it, that it touched him in places that were difficult to speak of except to someone with a common soul, someone who was willing to expose hidden passions. Yes, he
knew
her now.

He was suddenly aware of the sound of footsteps again, as if someone were walking along the path behind the warehouse now, scuffing their feet on the hard-packed soil. He stood silently, listening. Collier? The footsteps continued, monotonously repetitive, someone walking heavily in place, just outside. He stepped to the tilted-open window and looked out through the dusty glass, but he could see nothing outside except the fog, which pushed up against the wall of the warehouse with an almost perceptible pressure. The footsteps sounded slightly more distant to him—not as if they’d moved away, but as if perhaps they’d always been distant, out in the parking lot, perhaps, and he’d been fooled by the acoustics of the foggy night. And then the sound stopped abruptly, and the night was silent again.

He turned back to the painting, stooping to examine the boles of the trees, and right then he felt something behind him—cool air, a hovering presence, as if someone were
standing silently, regarding his back. He stood up slowly, his breathing shallow, and turned around to face the open window. Tendrils of fog wisped through the hardware cloth screen, and the misty air seemed to him to be suggestively shaded, as if the fog itself were adrift around the contours of a human face, the face of someone peering straight through the window. He drew back involuntarily and put up his hands, but the illusion vanished. Clearly there was nobody there, nothing, no sign of movement.

It had been his imagination, perhaps, enflamed by the painting perhaps, seeing things in the breeze-blown fog.

He breathed deeply and worked the tension out of his shoulders and neck. Clearly he had been spooked by the dolls and the paintings, which was a testimony to their raw power. Abruptly, the footsteps started up again, a slow tread that might easily be someone in the parking lot after all. His Mercedes was parked out there. He wouldn’t put it past Dave to key his car or do some other damned cowardly thing because of the tiki trouble. He nearly laughed out loud as he hurried back through the warehouse, recalling the shocked look on Dave’s face. If only he’d had his camera to record it!

He looked out through the window next to the front door. Through the fog he could see the ghostly shape of his Mercedes. He switched on the light over the loading ramp and stepped out into the cool night. He could smell the fog, feel its dampness, and now he could hear the low sound of surf booming in the distance. He realized that he didn’t have any kind of weapon, and he ducked back inside and picked up a pry bar from Dave’s toolbox, then went back out again. He stood for a moment, watching and listening, hefting the pry bar, full of the sensation that someone was lurking nearby, hidden by the fog.

Off to the right, standing at the edge of the empty lot, was the black insect shape of the oil well and the vague shadow of chain link. He could see a telephone pole along the street, and the wall of the warehouse rising behind him. Suddenly the footfalls sounded again, loudly now, as if from all around him at once, the sound echoing off the high wooden wall of the warehouse. He saw a movement in the
fog near the back corner of the lot, near where the oil well stood nearly hidden in the murk. He gripped the pry bar and glanced behind him, ready to slide back in through the open door and lock it….

And then a misty shadow separated itself from the rectilinear darkness of the oil well and chain link and moved toward him through the mist—just a dim shape in the darkness, the footsteps closer, more insistent. The fog swirled around the moving figure. He was struck with the uncanny notion that it was the Night Girl, that she had come to him out here, in the open, shrouded by fog. He was thrilled with the sudden dangerous idea of leading her out into the dark privacy of the weedy lot….

He stepped forward, overwhelmed with eagerness as the dark form materialized more solidly in the mist.

It wasn’t the Night Girl, though, not unless she had taken on a different form—the form of a girl now, literally speaking. He dropped the pry bar into the gravel behind him and licked his lips, waiting for her to come closer. The idea that she
might
be the Night Girl transformed into some other shape appealed to him. And why shouldn’t she be? It had been he himself who had summoned her in the first place, who had endowed her with Anne’s figure, with Anne’s face, and with Anne’s persona. Some hidden desire from his subconscious mind could have called up a different image now—younger, absolutely innocent, naive.