Vinia woke to the sound of a rabbit running down and across an endless moonlit field; but it was only the soft, quick beating of her heart. She lay on the bed for a moment, getting her breath. Now the sound of the running faded and was gone at a great distance. At last she sat up and looked down from her second-story bedroom window and there below, on the long sidewalk, in the faint moonlight before dawn, was the hopscotch.
Late yesterday, some child had chalked it out, immense and endlessly augmented, square upon square, line after line, numeral following numeral. You could not see the end of it. Down the street it built its crazy pattern, 3, 4, 5, on up to 10, then 30, 50, 90, on away to turn far corners. Never in all the children’s world a hopscotch like this! You could Jump forever toward the horizon.
Now in the very early, very quiet morning, her eyes traveled and jumped, paused and hopped, along that presumptuous ladder of chalk-scratches and she heard herself whisper:
“Sixteen. “
But she did not run on from there.
The next square waited, she knew, with the scribbled blue chalk 17, but her mind flung out its arms and balanced, teetering, poised with her numb foot planted across the 1 and the 6, and could go no further.
Trembling, she lay back down.
The room was like the bottom of a cool well all night and she lay in it like a white stone in a well, enjoying it, floating in the dark yet clear element of half dreams and half wakening. She felt the breath move in small jets from her nostrils and she felt the immense sweep of her eyelids shutting and opening again and again. And at last she felt the fever brought into her room by the presence of the sun beyond the hills.
Morning, she thought. It might be a special day. After all, it’s my birthday. Anything might happen. And I hope it does.
The air moved the white curtains like a summer breath.
“Vinia ... ?”
A voice was calling. But it couldn’t be a voice. Yet-Vinia raised herself-there it was again.
“Vinia ... ?”
She slipped from bed and ran to the window of her high second-story window.
There on the fresh lawn below, calling up to her in the early hour, stood James Conway, no older than she, seventeen, very seriously smiling, waving his hand now as her head appeared.
“Jim, what’re you doing here?” she said, and thought, Does he know what day this is?
“I’ve been up an hour already,” he replied. “I’m going for a walk, starting early, all day. Want to come along?”
Oh but I couldn’t ... my folks won’t be back till late tonight, I’m alone, I’m supposed to stay ...”
She saw the green hills beyond the town and the roads leading out into summer, leading out into August and rivers and places beyond this town and this house and this room and this particular moment.
“I can’t go ...” she said faintly.
“I can’t hear you!” he protested mildly, smiling up at her under a shielding hand.
“Why did you ask me to walk with you, and not someone else?”
He considered this for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He thought it over again, and gave her his most pleasant and agreeable look. “Because, that’s all, just because.”
“I’ll be down,” she said.
“Hey!” he said.
But the window was empty.
They stood in the center of the perfect, jeweled lawn, over which one set of prints, hers, had run, leaving marks, and another, his, had walked in great slow strides to meet them. The town was silent as a stopped clock. All the shades were still down.
“My gosh,” said Vinia, “it’s early. It’s crazy-early. I’ve never been up this early and out this early in years. Listen to everyone sleeping.”
They listened to the trees and the whiteness of the houses in this early whispering hour, the hour when mice went back to sleep and flowers began untightening their bright fists.
“Which way do we go?”
“Pick a direction.”
Vinia closed her eyes, whirled, and pointed blindly. “Which way am I pointing?”
“North. “
She opened her eyes. “Lefts go north out of town, then. I don’t suppose we should.”
“Why?”
And they walked out of town as the sun rose above the hills and the grass burned greener on the lawns.
There was a smell of hot chalk highway, of dust and sky and waters flowing in a creek the color of grapes. The sun was a new lemon. The forest lay ahead with shadows stirring like a million birds under each tree, each bird a leaf-darkness, trembling. At noon, Vinia and James Conway had crossed vast meadows that sounded brisk and starched underfoot. The day had grown warm, as an iced glass of tea grows warm, the frost burning off, left in the sun.
They picked a handful of grapes from a wild barbed-wire vine. Holding them up to the sun, you could see the clear grape thoughts suspended in the dark amber fluid, the little hot seeds of contemplation stored from many afternoons of solitude and plant philosophy. The grapes tasted of fresh, clear water and something that they had saved from the morning dews and the evening rains. They were the warmed-over flesh of April ready now, in August, to pass on their simple gain to any passing stranger. And the lesson was this; sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in flickery light or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.
“Have a grape,” said James Conway. “Have two.”
They munched their wet, full mouths.
They sat on the edge of a brook and took off their shoes and let the water cut their feet off to the ankles with an exquisite cold razor.
My feet are gone! thought Vinia. But when she looked, there they were, underwater, living comfortably apart from her, completely acclimated to an amphibious existence.
They ate egg sandwiches Jim had brought with him in a paper sack.
“Vinia,” said Jim, looking at his sandwich before he bit it. “would you mind if I kissed you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, after a moment. “I hadn’t thought. “
“Will you think it over?” he asked.
“Did we come on this picnic just so you could kiss me?” she asked suddenly.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong! It’s been a swell day! I don’t want to spoil it. But if you should decide, later, that it’s all right for me to kiss you, would you tell me?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, starting on her second sandwich, “if I ever decide.”
The rain came as a cool surprise.
It smelled of soda water and limes and oranges and the cleanest, freshest river in the world, made of snow-water, falling from the high, parched sky.
First there had been a motion, as of veils, in the sky. The clouds had enveloped each other softly. A faint breeze had lifted Vinia’s hair, sighing and evaporating the moisture from her upper lip, and then, as she and Jim began to run, the raindrops fell down all about without touching them and then at last began to touch them, coolly, as they leaped green-moss logs and darted among vast trees into the deepest, muskiest cavern of the forest. The forest sprang up in wet murmurs overhead, every leaf ringing and painted fresh with water.
“This way!” cried Jim.
And they reached a hollow tree so vast that they could squeeze in and be warmly cozy from the rain. They stood together, arms about each other, the first coldness from the rain making them shiver, raindrops on their noses and cheeks, laughing. “Hey!” He gave her brow a lick. “Drinking water!”
“Jim!”
They listened to the rain, the soft envelopment of the world in the velvet clearness of falling water, the whispers in deep grass, evoking odors of old, wet wood and leaves that had lain a hundred years, moldering and sweet.
Then they heard another sound. Above and inside the hollow warm darkness of the tree was a constant humming, like someone in a kitchen, far away, baking and crusting pies contentedly, dipping in sweet sugars and snowing in baking powders, someone in a warm, dim, summer-rainy kitchen making a vast supply of food, happy at it, humming between lips over it.
“Bees, Jim, up there! Bees!”
“Shh!”
Up the channel of moist, warm hollow they saw little yellow flickers. Now the last bees, wettened, were hurrying home from whatever pasture or meadow or field they had covered, dipping by Vinia and Jim, vanishing up the warm flue of summer into hollow dark.
“They won’t bother us. Just stand still.”
Jim tightened his arms; Vinia tightened hers. She could smell his breath with the wild tart grapes still on it. And the harder the rain drummed on the tree, the tighter they held, laughing, at last quietly letting their laughter drain away into the sound of the bees home from the far fields. And for a moment, Vinia thought that she and Jim might be caught by a sudden drop of great masses of honey from above, sealing them into this tree forever, enchanted, in amber, to be seen by anyone in the next thousand years who strolled by, while the weather of all ages rained and thundered and turned green outside the tree.
It was so warm, so safe, so protected here, the world did not exist, there was raining silence, in the sunless, forested day.
“Vinia,” whispered Jim, after a while. “May I now?”
His face was very large, near her, larger than any face she had ever seen.
“Yes,” she said.
He kissed her.
The rain poured hard on the tree for a full minute while everything was cold outside and everything was tree-warmth and hidden away inside.
It was a very sweet kiss. It was very friendly and comfortably warm and it tasted like apricots and fresh apples and as water tastes when you rise at night and walk into a dark, warm summer kitchen and drink from a cool tin cup. She had never imagined that a kiss could be so sweet and immensely tender and careful of her. He held her not as he had held her a moment before, hard, to protect her from the green rain weather, but he held her now as if she were a porcelain clock, very carefully and with consideration. His eyes were closed and the lashes were glistening dark; she saw this in the instant she opened her eyes and closed them again.
The rain stopped.
It was a moment before the new silence shocked them into an awareness of the climate beyond their world. Now there was nothing but the suspension of water in all the intricate branches of the forest. Clouds moved away to show the blue sky in great quilted patches.
They looked out at the change with some dismay. They waited for the rain to come back, to keep them, by necessity, in this hollow tree for another minute or an hour. But the sun appeared, shining through upon everything, making the scene quite commonplace again.
They stepped from the hollow tree slowly and stood with their hands out, balancing, finding their way, it seemed, in these woods where the water was drying fast on every limb and leaf.
“I think we’d better start walking,” said Vinia. “That way.”
They walked off into the summer afternoon.
They crossed the town limits at sunset and walked hand in hand in the last glowing of the summer day. They had talked very little the rest of the afternoon, and now as they turned down one street after another, they looked at the passing sidewalk under their feet.
“Vinia,” he said at last. “Do you think this is the beginning of something?”
“Oh, gosh, Jim, I don’t know.”
“Do you think maybe we’re in love?”
“Oh, I don’t know that either!”
They passed down into the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to her street.
“Do you think we’ll ever be married?”
“It’s too early to tell, isn’t it?” she said.
“I guess you’re right.” He bit his lip. “Will we go walking again soon?”
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s wait and see, Jim.”
The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she shook his hand gravely.
“Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
They stood there.
Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, “Good night.”
He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.
In the middle of the night, a sound wakened her.
She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home, everything was locked and secure, but it hadn’t been them. No, this was a special sound. And lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing warmth and moist bark and empty, tunneled tree, the rain outside but comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful darkness.
And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer-night room to touch it, was coming from her drowsy, half-smiling mouth.
Which made her sit bolt upright, and very quietly move downstairs, out through the door, onto the porch, and across the wet-grass lawn to the sidewalk, where the crazed hopscotch chalked itself way off into the future.
Her bare feet hit the first numbers, leaving moist prints up to 10 and 12, thumping, until she stopped at 16, staring down at 17, hesitating, swaying. Then she gritted her teeth, made fists, reared back, and ...
Jumped right in the middle of the square 17.
She stood there for a long moment, eyes shut, seeing how it felt.
Then she ran upstairs and lay out on the bed and touched her mouth to see if a summer afternoon was breathing out of it, and listening for that drowsy hum, the golden sound, and it was there.
And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.
To say that I have been haunted for the rest of my life by the affair Finnegan is to grossly understate the events leading up to that final melancholy. Only now, at threescore and ten, can I write these words for an astonished constabulary who may well run with picks and shovels to unearth my truths or bury my lies.
The facts are these:
Three children went astray and were missed. Their bodies were found in the midst of Chatham Forest and each bore no marks of criminal assassination, but all had suffered their lifeblood to be drained. Only their skin remained like that of some discolored vineyard grapes withered by sunlight and no rain.
From the withered detritus of these innocents rose fresh rumors of vampires or similar beasts with similar appetites. Such myths always pursue the facts to stun them in their tracks. It could only have been a tombyard beast, it was said, that fed on and destroyed three lives and ruined three dozen more.
The children were buried in the most holy ground. Soon after, Sir Robert Merriweather, pretender to the throne of Sherlock Holmes but modestly refusing the claim, moved through the ten dozen doors of his antique house to come forth to search for this terrible thief of life. With myself, I might add, to carry his brandy and bumbershoot and warn him of underbrush pitfalls in that dark and mysterious forest.
Sir Robert Merriweather, you say?
Just that. Plus the ten times ten plus twelve amazing doors in his shut-up house.
Were the doors used? Not one in nine. How had they appeared in Sir Robert’s old manse? He had shipped them in, as a collector of doors, from Rio, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and mid-America. Once collected, he had stashed them, hinged, to be seen from both sides, on the walls of his upper and lower chambers. There he conducted tours of these odd portals for such antique fools as were ravished by the sight of the curiously overdone, the undersimplified, the rococo, or some First Empire cast aside by Napoleon’s nephews or seized from Hermann Goering, who had in turn ransacked the Louvre. Others, pelted by Oklahoma dust storms, were jostled home in flatbeds cushioned by bright posters from carnivals buried in the windblown desolations of 1936 America. Name your least favorite door, it was his. Name the best quality, he owned it also, hidden and safe, true beauties behind oblivion’s portals.
I had come to see his doors, not the deaths. At his behest, which was a command, I had bought my curiosity a steamship ticket and arrived to find Sir Robert involved not with ten dozen doors, but some great dark door. A mysterious portal, still un-found. And beneath? A tomb.
Sir Robert hurried the grand tour, opening and shutting panels rescued from Peking, long buried near Etna, or filched from Nantucket. But his heart, gone sick, was not in this, what should have been delightful, tour.
He described the spring rains that drenched the country to make things green, only to have people to walk out in that fine weather and one week find the body of a boy emptied of life through two incisions in his neck, and in the next weeks, the bodies of the two girls. People shouted for the police and sat drinking in pubs, their faces long and pale, while mothers locked their children home where fathers lectured on the dooms that lay in Chatham Forest.
“Will you come with me,” said Sir Robert at last, “on a very strange, sad picnic?”
“I will,” I said.
So we snapped ourselves in weather-proofs, lugged a hamper of sandwiches and red wine, and plunged into the forest on a drear Sunday.
There was time, as we moved down a hill into the dripping gloom of the trees, to recall what the papers had said about the vanished children’s bloodless flesh, the police thrashing the forest ten dozen times, clueless, while the surrounding estates slammed their doors drum-tight at sunset.
“Rain. Damn. Rain!” Sir Robert’s pale face stared up, his gray mustache quivering over his thin mouth. He was sick and brittle and old. “Our picnic will be ruined!”
“Picnic?” I said. “Will our killer join us for eats?”
“I pray to God he will,” Sir Robert said. “Yes, pray to God he will.”
We walked through a land that was now mists, now dim sunlight, now forest, now open glade, until we came into a silent part of the woods, a silence made of the way the trees grew wetly together and the way the green moss lay in swards and hillocks. Spring had not yet filled the empty trees. The sun was like an arctic disk, withdrawn, cold, and almost dead.
“This is the place,” said Sir Robert at last.
“Where the children were found?” I inquired.
“Their bodies empty as empty can be.”
I looked at the glade and thought of the children and the people who had stood over them with startled faces and the police who had come to whisper and touch and go away, lost.
“The murderer was never apprehended?”
“Not this clever fellow. How observant are you?” asked Sir Robert.
“What do you want observed?”
“There’s the catch. The police slipped up. They were stupidly anthropomorphic about the whole bloody mess, seeking a killer with two arms, two legs, a suit of clothes, and a knife. So hypnotized with their human concept of the killer that they overlooked one obvious unbelievable fact about this place. So!”
He gave his cane a quick light tap on the earth.
Something happened. I stared at the ground. “Do that again,” I whispered.
“You saw it?”
“I thought I saw a small trapdoor open and shut. May I have your cane?”
He gave me the cane. I tapped the ground. It happened again.
“A spider!” I cried. “Gone! God, how quick!”
“Finnegan,” Sir Robert muttered.
“What?”
“You know the old saying: in again, out again, Finnegan. Here.”
With his penknife, Sir Robert dug in the soil to lift an entire clod of earth, breaking off bits to show me the tunnel. The spider, in panic, leaped out its small wafer door and fell to the ground.
Sir Robert handed me the tunnel. “Like gray velvet. Feel. A model builder, that small chap. A tiny shelter, camouflaged, and him alert. He could hear a fly walk. Then pounce out, seize, pop back, slam the lid!”
“I didn’t know you loved Nature.”
“Loathe it. But this wee chap, there’s much we share. Doors. Hinges. Wouldn’t consider other arachnids. But my love of portals drew me to study this incredible carpenter.” Sir Robert worked the trap on its cobweb hinges. “What craftsmanship! And it all ties to the tragedies!”
“The murdered children?”
Sir Robert nodded. “Notice any special thing about this forest?”
“It’s too quiet.”
“Quiet!” Sir Robert smiled weakly. “Vast quantities of silence. No familiar birds, beetles, crickets, toads. Not a rustle or stir. The police didn’t notice. Why should they? But it was this absence of sound and motion in the glade that prompted my wild theory about the murders.”
He toyed with the amazing structure in his hands.
“What would you say if you could imagine a spider large enough, in a hideout big enough, so that a running child might hear a vacuumed sound, be seized, and vanish with a soft thud below. How say you?” Sir Robert stared at the trees. “Poppycock and bilge? Yet, why not? Evolution, selection, growth, mutations, and-pfft!”
Again he tapped with his cane. A trapdoor flew open, shut.
“Finnegan,” he said.
The sky darkened.
“Rain!” Casting a cold gray eye at the clouds, he stretched his frail hand to touch the showers. “Damn! Arachnids hate rain. And so will our huge dark Finnegan.”
“Finnegan!” I cried irritably.
“I believe in him, yes.”
“A spider larger than a child?!”
“Twice as large.”
The cold wind blew a mizzle of rain over us. “Lord, I hate to leave. Quick, before we go. Here.”
Sir Robert raked away the old leaves with his cane, revealing two globular gray-brown objects.
“What are they?” I bent. “Old cannonballs?”
“No.” He cracked the grayish globes. “Soil, through and through.”
I touched the crumbled bits.
“Our Finnegan excavates,” said Sir Robert. “To make his tunnel. With his large rakelike chelicerae he dislodges soil, works it into a ball, carries it in his jaws, and drops it beyond his hole.”
Sir Robert displayed half a dozen pellets on his trembling palm. “Normal balls evicted from a tiny trapdoor tunnel. Toy-size.” He knocked his cane on the huge globes at our feet. “Explain those!”
I laughed. “The children must’ve made them with mud!”
“Nonsense!” cried Sir Robert irritably, glaring about at trees and earth. “By God, somewhere, our dark beast lurks beneath his velvet lid. We might be standing on it. Christ, don’t stare! His door has beveled rims. Some architect, this Finnegan. A genius at camouflage.”
Sir Robert raved on and on, describing the dark earth, the arachnid, its fiddling legs, its hungry mouth, as the wind roared and the trees shook.
Suddenly, Sir Robert flung up his cane.
“No!” he cried.
I had no time to turn. My flesh froze, my heart stopped.
Something snatched my spine.
I thought I heard a huge bottle uncorked, a lid sprung. Then this monstrous thing crawled down my back.
“Here!” cried Sir Robert. “Now!”
He struck with his cane. I fell, dead weight. He thrust the thing from my spine. He lifted it.
The wind had cracked the dead tree branch and knocked it onto my back.
Weakly, I tried to rise, shivering. “Silly,” I said a dozen times. “Silly. Damn awful silly!”
“Silly, no. Brandy, yes!” said Sir Robert. “Brandy?”
The sky was very black now. The rain swarmed over us.
Door after door after door, and at last into Sir Robert’s country house study. A warm, rich room, where a fire smoldered on a drafty hearth. We devoured our sandwiches, waiting for the rain to cease. Sir Robert estimated that it would stop by eight o’clock, when, by moonlight, we might return, ever so reluctantly, to Chatham Forest. I remembered the fallen branch, its spidering touch, and drank both wine and brandy.
“The silence in the forest,” said Sir Robert, finishing his meal. “What murderer could achieve such a silence?”
“An insanely clever man with a series of baited, poisoned traps, with liberal quantities of insecticide, might kill off every bird, every rabbit, every insect,” I said.
“Why should he do that?”
“To convince us that there is a large spider nearby. To perfect his act.”
“We are the only ones who have noticed this silence; the police did not. Why should a murderer go to all that trouble for nothing?”
“Why is a murderer? you might well ask.”
“I am not convinced.” Sir Robert topped his food with wine. “This creature, with a voracious mouth, has cleansed the forest. With nothing left, he seized the children. The silence, the murders, the prevalence of trapdoor spiders, the large earth balls, it all fits.”
Sir Robert’s fingers crawled about the desktop, quite like a washed, manicured spider in itself. He made a cup of his frail hands, held them up.
“At the bottom of a spider’s burrow is a dustbin into which drop insect remnants on which the spider has dined. Imagine the dustbin of our Grand Finnegan!”
I imagined. I visioned a Great Legged thing fastened to its dark lid under the forest and a child running, singing in the half-light. A brisk insucked whisk of air, the song cut short, then nothing but an empty glade and the echo of a softly dropped lid, and beneath the dark earth the spider, fiddling, cabling, spinning the stunned child in its silently orchestrating legs.
What would the dustbin of such an incredible spider resemble? What the remnants of many banquets? I shuddered.
“Rain’s letting up.” Sir Robert nodded his approval. “Back to the forest. I’ve mapped the damned place for weeks. All the bodies were found in one half-open glade. That’s where the assassin, if it was a man, arrives! Or where the unnatural silk-spinning, earth-tunneling architect of special doors abides his tomb.”
“Must I hear all this?” I protested.
“Listen more.” Sir Robert downed the last of his burgundy. “The poor children’s prolapsed corpses were found at thirteen-day intervals. Which means that every two weeks our loathsome eight-legged hide-and-seeker must feed. Tonight is the fourteenth night after the last child was found, nothing but skin. Tonight our hidden friend must hunger afresh. So! Within the hour, I shall introduce you to Finnegan the great and horrible!”
“All of which,” I said, “makes me want to drink.”
“Here I go.” Sir Robert stepped through one of his Louis the Fourteenth portals. “To find the last and final and most awful door in all my life. You will follow.”
Damn, yes! I followed.
The sun had set, the rain was gone, and the clouds cleared off to show a cold and troubled moon. We moved in our own silence and the silence of the exhausted paths and glades while Sir Robert handed me a small silver pistol.
“Not that that would help. Killing an outsize arachnid is sticky. Hard to know where to fire the first shot. If you miss, there’ll be no time for a second. Damned things, large or small, move in the instant!”
“Thanks.” I took the weapon. “I need a drink.”
“Done.” Sir Robert handed me a silver brandy flask. “Drink as needed.”
I drank. “What about you?”
“I have my own special flask.” Sir Robert lifted it. “For the right time.”
“Why wait?”
“I must surprise the beast and mustn’t be drunk at the encounter. Four seconds before the thing grabs me, I will imbibe of this dear Napoleon stuff, spiced with a rude surprise.
“Surprise?”
“Ah, wait. You’ll see. So will this dark thief of life. Now, dear sir, here we part company. I this way, you yonder. Do you mind?”
“Mind when I’m scared gutless? What’s that?”
“Here. If I should vanish.” He handed me a sealed letter. “Read it aloud to the constabulary. It will help them locate me and Finnegan, lost and found.”
“Please, no details. I feel like a damned fool following you while Finnegan, if he exists, is underfoot snug and warm, saying, ‘Ah, those idiots above running about, freezing. I think I’ll let them freeze.’ “
“One hopes not. Get away now. If we walk together, he won’t jump up. Alone, he’ll peer out the merest crack, glom the scene with a huge bright eye, flip down again, ssst, and one of us gone to darkness.”
“Not me, please. Not me.”
We walked on about sixty feet apart and beginning to lose one another in the half moonlight.
“Are you there?” called Sir Robert from half the world away in leafy dark.
“I wish I weren’t,” I yelled back.
“Onward!” cried Sir Robert. “Don’t lose sight of me. Move closer. We’re near on the site. I can intuit, I almost feel-“
As a final cloud shifted, moonlight glowed brilliantly to show Sir Robert waving his arms about like antennae, eyes half shut, gasping with expectation.
“Closer, closer,” I heard him exhale. “Near on. Be still. Perhaps . .
He froze in place. There’ was something in his aspect that made me want to leap, race, and yank him off the turf he had chosen.
“Sir Robert, oh, God!” I cried. “Run!”
He froze. One hand and arm orchestrated the air, feeling, probing, while his other hand delved, brought forth his silver-coated flask of brandy. He held it high in the moonlight, a toast to doom. Then, afflicted with need, he took one, two, three, my God, four incredible swigs!
Arms out, balancing the wind, tilting his head back, laughing like a boy, he swigged the last of his mysterious drink.
“All right, Finnegan, below and beneath!” he cried. “Come get me!”
He stomped his foot.
Cried out victorious.
And vanished.
It was all over in a second.
A flicker, a blur, a dark bush had grown up from the earth with a whisper, a suction, and the thud of a body dropped and a door shut.
The glade was empty.
“Sir Robert. Quick!”
But there was no one to quicken.
Not thinking that I might be snatched and vanished, I lurched to the spot where Sir Robert had drunk his wild toast.
I stood staring down at earth and leaves with not a sound save my heart beating while the leaves blew away to reveal only pebbles, dry grass, and earth.
I must have lifted my head and bayed to the moon like a dog, then fell to my knees, fearless, to dig for lids, for tunneled tombs where a voiceless tangle of legs wove themselves, binding and mummifying a thing that had been my friend. This is his final door, I thought insanely, crying the name of my friend.
I found only his pipe, cane, and empty brandy flask, flung down when he had escaped night, life, everything.
Swaying up, I fired the pistol six times here into the unanswering earth, a dumb thing gone stupid as I finished and staggered over his instant graveyard, his locked-in tomb, listening for muffled screams, shrieks, cries, but heard none. I ran in circles, with no ammunition save my weeping shouts. I would have stayed all night, but a downpour of leaves, a great spidering flourish of broken branches, fell to panic and suffer my heart. I fled, still calling his name to a silence lidded by clouds that hid the moon.
At his estate, I beat on the door, wailing, yanking, until I recalled: it opened inward, it was unlocked.
Alone in the library, with only liquor to help me live, I read the letter that Sir Robert had left behind:
My dear Douglas:
I am old and have seen much but am not mad. Finnegan exists. My chemist had provided me with a sure poison that I will mix in my brandy for our walk. I will drink all. Finnegan, not knowing me as a poisoned morsel will give me a swift invite. Now you see me, now you don’t. I will then be the weapon of his death, minutes after my own. I do not think there is another outsize nightmare like him on earth. Once gone, that’s the end.
Being old, I am immensely curious. I fear not death, for my physicians tell me that f no accidents kill me, cancer will.
I thought of giving a poisoned rabbit to our nightmare assassin. But then I’d never know where he was or if he really existed. Finnegan would die unseen in his monstrous closet, and I never the wiser. This way, for one victorious moment, I will know. Fear for me. Envy me. Pray for me. Sorry to abandon you without farewells. Dear friend, carry on.
I folded the letter and wept.
No more was ever heard of him.
Some say Sir Robert killed himself, an actor in his own melodrama, and that one day we shall unearth his brooding, lost, and Gothic body and that it was he who killed the children and that his preoccupation with doors and hinges, and more doors, led him, crazed, to study this one species of spider, and wildly plan and build the most amazing door in history, an insane burrow into which he popped to die, before my eyes, thus hoping to perpetuate the incredible Finnegan.
But I have found no burrow. I do not believe a man could construct such a pit, even given Sir Robert’s overwhelming passion for doors.
I can only ask, would a man murder, draw his victims’ blood, build an earthen vault? For what motive? Create the finest secret exit in all time? Madness. And what of those large grayish balls of earth supposedly tossed forth from the spider’s lair?
Somewhere, Finnegan and Sir Robert lie clasped in a velvet-lined unmarked crypt, deep under. Whether one is the paranoiac alter ego of the other, I cannot say. But the murders have ceased, the rabbits once more rush in Chatham Forest, and its bushes teem with butterflies and birds. It is another spring, and the children run again through a loud glade, no longer silent.
Finnegan and Sir Robert, requiescat in peace.
Very late at night he heard the weeping on the lawn in front of his house. It was the sound of a woman crying. By its sound he knew it was not a girl or a mature woman, but the crying of someone eighteen or nineteen years old. It went on, then faded and stopped, and again started up, now moving this way or that on the late-summer wind.
He lay in bed listening to it until it made his eyes fill with tears. He turned over, shut his eyes, let the tears fall, but could not stop the sound. Why should a young woman be weeping long after midnight out there?
He sat up and the weeping stopped.
At the window, he looked down. The lawn was empty but covered with dew. There was a trail of footsteps across the lawn to the middle where someone had stood turning, and another trail going off toward the garden around the house.
The moon stood full in the sky and filled the lawn with its light, but there was no more sadness and only the footprints there.
He stepped back from the window, suddenly chilled, and went down to heat and drink a cup of chocolate.
He did not think of the weeping again until dusk the next day, and even then thought that it must be some woman from a house nearby, unhappy with life, perhaps locked out and in need of a place to let her sadness go.
Yet ...?
As the twilight deepened, coming home he found himself hurrying from the bus, at a steady pace which astonished him. Why, why all this?
Idiot, he thought. A woman unseen weeps under your window, and here at sunset the next day, you almost run.
Yes, he thought, but her voice!
Was it beautiful, then?
No. Only familiar.
Where had he heard such a voice before, wordless in crying?
Who could he ask, living in an empty house from which his parents had vanished long ago?
He turned in at his front lawn and stood still, his eyes shadowed.
What had he expected? That whoever she was would be waiting here? Was he that lonely that a single voice long after midnight roused all his senses?
No. Simply put: he must know who the crying woman was.
And he was certain she would return tonight as he slept.
He went to bed at eleven, and awoke at three, panicked that he had missed a miracle. Lightning had destroyed a nearby town or an earthquake had shaken half the world to dust, and he had slept through it!
Fool! he thought, and slung back the covers and moved to the window, to see that indeed he had overslept.
For there on the lawn were the delicate footprints.
And he hadn’t even heard the weeping!
He would have gone out to kneel in the grass, but at that moment a police car motored slowly by, looking at nothing and the night.
How could he run to prowl, to probe, to touch the grass if that car came by again? What doing? Picking clover blossoms? Weeding dandelions? What, what?
His bones cracked with indecision. He would go down, he would not.
Already the memory of that terrible weeping faded the more he tried to make it clear. If he missed her one more night, the memory itself might be gone.
Behind him, in his room, the alarm clock rang. Damn! he thought. What time did I set it for? He shut off the alarm and sat on his bed, rocking gently, waiting, eyes shut, listening.
The wind shifted. The tree just outside the window whispered and stirred.
He opened his eyes and leaned forward. From far off, coming near, and now down below, the quiet sound of a woman weeping.
She had come back to his lawn and was not forever lost. Be very quiet, he thought.
And the sounds she made came up on the wind through the blowing curtains into his room.
Careful now. Careful but quick.
He moved to the window and looked down.
In the middle of the lawn she stood and wept, her hair long and dark on her shoulders, her face bright with tears.
And there was something in the way her hands trembled at her sides, the way her hair moved quietly in the wind, that shook him so that he almost fell.
He knew her and yet did not. He had seen her before, but had never seen.
Turn your head, he thought.
Almost as if hearing this, the young woman sank to her knees to half kneel on the grass, letting the wind comb her hair, head down and weeping so steadily and bitterly that he wanted to cry out: Oh, no! It kills my heart!
And as if she had heard, quite suddenly her head lifted, her weeping grew less as she looked up at the moon, so that he saw her face.
And it was indeed a face seen somewhere once, but where?
A tear fell. She blinked.
It was like the blinking of a camera and a picture taken.
“God save me!” he whispered. “No!”
He whirled and stumbled toward the closet to seize down an avalanche of boxes and albums. In the dark he scrabbled, then pulled on the closet light, tossed aside six albums until finally, dragging another forth and riffling pages, he gave a cry, stopped, and held a photo close, then turned and moved blindly to the window.
There he stared down at the lawn and then at the photograph, very old, very yellowed with age.
Yes, yes, the same! The image struck his eyes and then his heart. His whole body shook, made an immense pulsation, as he leaned at the album, leaned on the window frame, and almost shouted:
You! How dare you come back! How dare you be young! How dare you be what? A girl untouched, wandering late on my lawn!? You were never that young! Never! Damn, oh, damn your warm blood, damn your wild soul!
But this he did not shout or say.
For something in his eyes, like a beacon, must have flashed.
The crying of the young woman on the lawn stopped.
She looked up.
At which instant the album fell from his fingers, through the burst-wide screen, and down like a dark bird fluttering to strike the earth.
The young man gave a muted cry, whirled, and ran. “No, no!” he cried aloud. “I didn’t mean-come back!” He was down the stairs and out on the porch in a matter of seconds. The door slammed behind him like a gunshot. The explosion nailed him to the rail, half down to the lawn, where there was nothing to be seen but footprints. Either way, up the street lay empty sidewalks and shadows under trees. A radio played off in an upstairs window in a house behind trees. A car passed, murmuring, at a far intersection.
“Wait,” he whispered. “Come back. I shouldn’t have said-“
He stopped. He had said nothing, but only thought it. But his outrage, his jealousy?
She had felt that. She had somehow heard. And now. ..?
She’ll never come back, he thought. Oh God!
He sat on the porch steps for a while, quietly biting his knuckle.
At three in the morning, in bed, he thought he heard a sigh and soft footsteps in grass, and waited. The photo album lay closed on the floor. Even though it lay shut, he could see and know her face. And it was utterly impossible, utterly insane.
His last thought before sleep was: ghost.
The strangest ghost that ever walked.
The ghost of someone dead.
The ghost of someone who died very old.
But somehow come back not as her old self.
But a ghost that was somehow young.
Weren’t ghosts always, when they returned, the same age as when they died?
No.
Not this one anyway.
“Why . ..?” he whispered.
And dream took over the whisper.
One night passed and then another and another, and there was nothing on the lawn but the light of a moon that changed its face from outright stare to half grimace.
He waited.
The first night a more than ordinarily casual cat crossed the yard at two a.m.
The second night a dog trotted by, wearing his tongue half out of his mouth like a loosely tied red cravat, smiling at trees.
The third night a spider spent from twelve-twenty-five until four a.m. building a baroque clockface on the air between lawn and trees, which a bird broke in passing at dawn.
He slept most of Sunday and awoke with a fever that was not an illness at dusk.
Late in the twilight of the fifth day, the color of the sky somehow promised her return, as did the way the wind leaned against the trees and the look of the moon when it finally rose to set the scene.
“All right,” he said, half aloud. “Now.” But at midnight, nothing.
“Come on,” he whispered.
One o’clock, nothing.
You must, he thought.
No, you will.
He slept for ten minutes and woke suddenly at two-ten, knowing that when he went to the window-
She would be there.
She was.
At first, he didn’t see her, and groaned, and then, in the shadow of the great oak far out on the edge of the lawn, he saw something move, and one foot came out, and she took a step and stood very still.
He held his breath, quieted his heart, told himself to turn, walk, and take each step down with precision, numbering them, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, moving in darkness with no rush, six, five, four, and at last one. He opened the front screen door with only a whisper, and was on the porch without frightening what might be out beyond waiting for him.
Quietly, he moved down the porch steps to the edge of the lawn, like one who stands on the rim of a pond. Out in the center of that pond, the young woman stood, trapped like someone on thin ice that might at any moment break and drop her through.
She did not see him. And then ...
She did a thing that was a signal. Tonight her hair was fixed in a knot at the back of her head. She lifted her white arms in a gesture and with one touch of her fingers, a touch of snow, loosened her hair.
It fell in a dark banner, to blow and repattern itself across her shoulders, which trembled with their shadows.
The wind stirred her hair in the night and moved it about her face and on her uplifted hands.
The shadows laid down by the moon under every tree leaned as if called by the motion.
The entire world shifted in its sleep.
The wind blew as the young woman waited.
But no footsteps sounded along the white sidewalks. No front doors opened far down the street. No windows were raised. No motion caused front porches to creak and shift.
He took another step out onto the small meadow of night.
“Who are you-?” she gasped, and stepped back. “No, no,” he said softly. “It’s all right.” Another trembling had taken over her body. Where before it had been some hope, some anticipation, now it was fear. One hand stopped her hair from blowing; the other half shielded her face.
“I’ll stand right here,” he said. “Believe me.” She waited a long while, staring at him until her shoulders relaxed and the lines around her mouth vanished. Her whole body sensed the truth of his words.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I don’t either.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“What am I doing here?”
“You came to meet someone,” he said.
“Did I?”
The town clock struck three in the morning far away. She listened to it, her face shadowed by the sound.
“But it’s so late. People don’t walk around late on front lawns!”
“They do if they must,” he said.
“But why?”
“Maybe we can find out, if we talk.”
“About what, what?!”
“About why you’re here. If we talk long enough, we may know. I know why I’m here, of course. I heard you crying.”
“Oh, I’m so ashamed.”
“Don’t be. Why are people ashamed of tears? I cry often. Then I start laughing. But the crying must come first. Go ahead.”
“What a strange man you are.”
Her hand fell away from her hair. Her other hand moved away so her face was illuminated by a small and growing curiosity.
“I thought I was the only one who knew about crying,” she said.
“Everyone thinks that. It’s one of those little secrets we keep from each other. Show me a serious man and I’ll show you a man who has never wept. Show me a madman and I’ll show you a man who dried his tears a long time ago. Go ahead.”
“I think I’m done,” she said.
“Any time, start over.”
She burst out a tiny laugh. “Oh, you are strange. Who are you?”
“We’ll come to that.”
She peered across the lawn at his hands, his face, his mouth, and then at his eyes.
“Oh, I know you. But from where?!”
“That would spoil it. You wouldn’t believe, anyway.”
“I would!”
Now it was his turn to laugh quietly. “You’re very young.”
“No, nineteen! Ancient!”
“Girls, by the time they go from twelve to nineteen, are full of years, yes. I don’t know; but it must be so. Now, please, why are you out here in the middle of the night?”
“I-“ She shut her eyes to think in on it. “I’m waiting.”
“Yes?”
“And I’m sad.”
“It’s the waiting that makes you sad, yes?”
“I think, no, yes, no.”
“And you don’t quite know what you’re waiting for?”
“Oh, I wish I could be sure. All of me’s waiting. I don’t know, all of me. I don’t understand. I’m impossible!”
“No, you’re everyone that ever grew up too fast and wanted too much. I think girls, women, like you have slipped out at night since time began. If it wasn’t here in Green Town, it was in Cairo or Alexandria or Rome or Paris in summer, anywhere there was a private place and late hours and no one to see, so they just rose up and out, as if someone had called their name-“
“I was called, yes! That’s it! Someone did call my name! It’s true. How did you know? Was it you!”
“No. But someone we both know. You’ll know his name when you go back to bed tonight, wherever that is.”
“Why, in that house, behind you,” she said. “That’s my house. I was born in it.”
“Well”-he laughed-“so was I.”
“You? How can that be? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Anyway, you heard someone calling. You had to come out-“
“I did. Many nights now. But, always, no one’s here. They must be there, or why would I hear them?”
“One day there’ll be someone to fit the voice.”
“Oh, don’t joke with me!”
“I’m not. Believe. There will be. That’s what all those other women heard in other years and places, middle of summer, dead of winter, go out and risk cold, stand warm in snow banks, and listen and look for strange footprints on the midnight snow, and only an old dog trotting by, all smiles. Damn, damn.”
“Oh, yes, damn, damn.” And her smile showed for a moment, even as the moon came out of the clouds and went away. “Isn’t it silly?”
“No. Men do the same. They take long walks when they’re sixteen, seventeen. They don’t stand on lawns, waiting, no. But, my God, how they walk! Miles and miles from midnight until dawn and come home exhausted and explode and die in bed.”
“What a shame that those who stand and wait and those who walk all night can’t-“
“Meet?”
“Yes; don’t you think it’s a shame?”
“They do, finally.”
“Oh, no, I shall never meet anyone. I’m old and ugly and terrible and I don’t know how many nights I’ve heard that voice making me come here and there’s nothing and I just want to die.”
“Oh, lovely young girl,” he said gently. “Don’t die. The cavalry is on its way. You will be saved.”
There was such certainty in his voice that it made her glance up again, for she had been looking at her hands and her own soul in her hands.
“You know, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You truly know? You tell the truth?”
“Swear to God, swear by all that’s living.”
“Tell me more!”
“There’s little more to tell.”
“Tell me!”
“Everything will be all right with you. Some night soon, or some day, someone will call and they’ll really be there when you come to find. The game will be over.”
“Hide-and-seek, you mean? But it’s gone on too long!”
“It’s almost over, Marie.”
“You know my name!”
He stopped, confused. He had not meant to speak it.
“How did you know, who are you?” she demanded.
“When you get back to sleep tonight, you’ll know. If we say too much, you’ll disappear, or I’ll disappear. I’m not quite sure which of us is real or which is a ghost.”
“Not me! Oh, surely not me. I can feel myself. I’m here. Why, look!” And she showed him the remainder of her tears brushed from her eyelids and held on her palms.
“Oh, that’s real, all right. Well, then, dear young woman, I must be the visitor. I come to tell you it will all go right. Do you believe in special ghosts?”
“Are you special?”
“One of us is. Or maybe both. The ghost of young love or the ghost of the unborn.”
“Is that what I am, you are?”
“Paradoxes aren’t easy to explain.”
“Then, depending on how you look at it, you’re impossible, and so am I.”
“If it makes it easier, just think I’m not really here. Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I think I do.”
“It comes to me to imagine, then, that there are special ghosts in the world. Not ghosts of dead people. But ghosts of want and need, or I guess you might say desire.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, have you ever lain in bed late afternoons, late nights and dreamed something so much, awake, you felt your soul jump out of your body as if something had yanked a long, pure white sheet straight out the window? You want something so much, your soul leaps out and follows, my God, fast?”
“Why ... yes. Yes!”
“Boys do that, men do that. When I was twelve I read Burroughs’ Mars novels. John Carter used to stand under the stars, hold up his arms to Mars, and ask to be taken.
And Mars grabbed his soul, yanked him like an aching tooth across space, and landed him in dead Martian seas. That’s boys, that’s men.”
“And girls, women?”
“They dream, yes. And their ghosts come out of their bodies. Living ghosts. Living wants. Living needs.”
“And go to stand on lawns in the middle of winter nights?”
“That’s about it.”
“Am I a ghost, then?”
“Yes, the ghost of wanting so much it kills but doesn’t kill you, shakes and almost breaks you.”
“And you?”
“I must be the answer-ghost.”
“The answer-ghost. What a funny name!”
“Yes. But you’ve asked and I know the answer.”
“Tell me!”
“All right, the answer is this, young girl, young woman. The time of waiting is almost over. Your time of despair will soon be through. Very soon, now, a voice will call and when you come out, both of you, your ghost of want and your body with it, there will be a man to go with the voice that calls.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me that if it isn’t true!” Her voice trembled. Tears flashed again in her eyes. She half raised her arms again in defense.
“I wouldn’t dream to hurt you. I only came to tell.” The town clock struck again in the deep morning. “It’s late,” she said.
“Very late. Get along, now.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“You don’t need to know any more.” The last echoes of the great clock faded.
“How strange,” she murmured. “The ghost of a question, the ghost of an answer.”
“What better ghosts can there be?”
“None that I ever heard of. We’re twins.”
“Far nearer than you think.”
She took a step, looked down, and gasped with delight. “Look, oh, look. I can move!”
“Yes.”
“What was it you said, boys walk all night, miles and miles?”
“Yes.”
“I could go back in, but I can’t sleep now. I must walk, too.”
“Do that,” he said gently.
“But where shall I go?”
“Why,” he said, and he suddenly knew. He knew where to send her and was suddenly angry with himself for knowing, angry with her for asking. A burst of jealousy welled in him. He wanted to race down the street to a certain house where a certain young man lived in another year and break the window, burn the roof. And yet, oh, yet, if he did that!?
“Yes?” she said, for he had kept her waiting.
Now, he thought, you must tell her. There’s no escape.
For if you don’t tell her, angry fool, you yourself will never be born.
A wild laugh burst from his mouth, a laugh that accepted the entire night and time and all his crazed thinking.
“So you want to know where to go?” he said at last.
“Oh, yes!”
He nodded his head. “Up to that corner, four blocks to the right, one block to the left.”
She repeated it quickly. “And the final number?!”
“Eleven Green Park.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” She ran a few steps, then stopped, bewildered. Her hands were helpless at her throat. Her mouth trembled. “Silly. I hate to leave.”
“Why?”
“Why, because ... I’m afraid I’ll never see you again!”
“You will. Three years from now.”
“Are you sure?”
“I won’t look quite the same. But it’ll be me. And you’ll know me forever.”
“Oh, I’m glad for that. Your face is familiar. I somehow know you well.”
She began to walk slowly, looking over at him as he stood near the porch of the house.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’ve saved my life.”
“And my own along with it.”
The shadows of a tree fell across her face, touched her cheeks, moved in her eyes.
“Oh, Lord! Girls lie in bed nights listing the names for their future children. Silly. Joe. John. Christopher. Samuel. Stephen. And right now, Will.” She touched the gentle rise of her stomach, then lifted her hand out halfway to point to him in the night. “Is your name Will?”
“Yes.”
Tears absolutely burst from her eyes. He wept with her.
“Oh, that’s fine, fine,” she said at last. “I can go now. I won’t be out here on the lawn anymore. Thank God, thank you. Good night.”
She went away into the shadows across the lawn and along the sidewalk down the street. At the far corner he saw her turn and wave and walk away.
“Good night,” he said quietly.
I am not born yet, he thought, or she has been dead many years, which is it? which?
The moon sailed into clouds.
The motion touched him to step, walk, go up the porch stairs, wait, look out at the lawn, go inside, shut the door.
A wind shook the trees.
The moon came out again and looked upon a lawn where two sets of footprints, one going one way, one going another in the dew, slowly, slowly, as the night continued, vanished.
By the time the moon had gone down the sky there was only an empty lawn and no sign, and much dew.
The great town clock struck six in the morning. Fire showed in the east. A cock crowed.
Joshua Enderby awoke in the middle of the night because e felt someone’s fingers at his throat.
In the rich darkness above him he sensed but could not see his wife’s frail, skelatinous weight seated on his chest while she dabbled and clenched tremblingly again and again at his neck.
He opened his eyes wide. He realized what she was trying to do. It was so ridiculous he almost cried out with laughter!
His rickety, jaundiced, eighty-five-year-old wife was trying to strangle him!
She panted forth a rum-and-bitters smell as she perched there, toppling like a drunken moth, tinkering away as if he were a toy. She sighed irritably and her skinny fingers began to swear as she gasped, “Why don’t you, oh, why don ‘t you?”
Why don’t I what? he wondered idly, lying there. He swallowed and this faint action of his Adam’s apple dislodged her feeble clutch. Why don’t I die; is that it? he cried silently. He lay another few moments, wondering if she’d gain strength enough to do him in. She didn’t.
Should he snap on the light to confront her? Wouldn’t she look a silly ass, a skinny chicken aloft sidesaddle on her hated husband’s amazed body, and him laughing?
Joshua Enderby groaned and yawned. “Missy?”
Her hands froze on his collarbone.
“Will you-“ He turned, pretending half sleep. “Will you-please’ ‘-he yawned-‘ ‘move to your side - of the bed? Eh? Good girl.”
Missy moved off in the dark. He heard ice tinkle. She was having another shot of rum.
At noon the next day, enjoying the weather and waiting for luncheon guests to arrive, old Joshua and Missy traded drinks in the garden pavilion. He handed her Dubonnet; she gave him sherry.
There was a moment of silence as both eyed the stuff and hesitated to sip. He handled his glass in such a way that his large white diamond ring sparked and glittered on his palsied hand. Its light made him flinch and at last he gathered his phlegm.
“Missy,” he said. “You haven’t long to live, you know.” Missy was hidden behind jonquils in a crystal bowl and now peered out at her mummified husband. Both perceived that the other’s hands shook. She wore a cobalt dress, heavily iced with luncheon jewels, little glittery planets under each ear, a scarlet design for a mouth. The ancient whore of Babylon, he thought dryly.
“How odd, my dear, how very odd,” Missy said with a polite scrape of her voice. “Why, only last night-“
“You were thinking of me?”
“We must talk.”
“Yes, we must.” He leaned like a wax mannequin in his chair. “No rush. But if I do you in, or if you do me in (it matters not which), let’s protect each other, yes? Oh, don’t look at me in amaze, my dear. I was perfectly aware of your little gallup last night on my ribs, fumbling with my esophagus, feeling the tumblers click, or whatever.”
“Dear me.” Blood rose in Missy’s powdery cheeks. “Were you awake all during? I’m mortified. I think I shall have to go lie down.”
“Nonsense.” Joshua stopped her. “If I die, you should be shielded so no one’ll accuse you. Same with me, if you die. Why go to all the trouble of trying to-eliminate-each other if it just means a gallows-drop or a french fry.”
“Logical enough,” she agreed.
“I suggest a-a series of mash notes to each other. Umm, lavish displays of sentiment before friends, gifts, et cetera. I’ll run up bills for flowers, diamond bracelets. You purchase fine leather wallets and gold-ferruled canes for me.”
“You have a head for things, I must say,” she admitted.
“It will help allay suspicion if we appear madly, anciently in love.”
“You know,” she said tiredly, “it doesn’t matter, Joshua, which of us dies first, except that I’m very old and would like to do one thing right in my life. I’ve always been such a dilettante. I’ve never liked you. Loved you, yes, but that’s ten million years back. You never were a friend. If it weren’t for the children-“
“Motives are bilge,” he said. “We are two querulous old pots with nothing to do but kick off, and make a circus of that. But how much better the dying game if we write a few rules, act it neatly, with no one the wiser. How long has this assassination plot of yours been active?”
She beamed. “Remember the opera last week? You slipped from the curb? That car almost nailed you?”
“Good Lord.” He laughed. “I thought someone shoved both of us!” He leaned forward, chuckling. “Okay. When you fell in the bath last month? I greased the tub!”
Unthinkingly, she gasped, drank part of her Dubonnet, then froze.
Reading her mind, he stared at his own drink.
“This isn’t poisoned, by any chance?” He sniffed his glass. “Don’t be silly,” she replied, touching her Dubonnet with a lizard’s doubtful tongue. “They’d find the residue in what’s left of your stomach. Just be sure you double-check your shower tonight. I have kited the temperature, which might bring on a seizure.”
“You didn’t!” he scoffed.
“I’ve thought about it,” she confessed.
The front-door chimes rang, but not with their usual joy, sounding more funereal. Nonsense! Joshua thought. Bosh! thought Missy, then brightened:
“We have forgotten our luncheon guest! That’s the Gowrys! He’s a bore, but be nice! Fix your collar.”
“It’s damned tight. Too much starch. One more plot to strangle me?”
“I wish I had thought of that. Double time, now!”
And they marched, arm in arm, with idiot laughter, off to meet the half-forgotten Gowrys.
Cocktails were served. The old relics sat side by side, hands laced like school chums, laughing with weak heartiness at Gowry’s dire jokes. They leaned forward to show him their porcelain smiles, saying, “Oh, that’s a good one!” loudly, and, softly, sotto voce; to each other: “Thought of anything new?”
“Electric razor in your bath?”
“Not bad, not bad!”
“And then Pat said to Mike!” cried Mr. Gowry.
From the corner of his mouth Joshua whispered to Missy, “You know, I dislike you with something approaching the colossal proportions of first love. You have taught me mayhem. How?”
“When the teacher is ready, the pupil will arrive,” whispered Missy.
Laughter rose in tumbling, whirling waves. The room was giddy, airy, light. “So Pat says to Mike, do it yourself!” boomed Gowry.
“Oh, ho!” everyone exploded.
“Now, dear.” Missy waved at her ancient husband. “Tell one of your jokes. Oh, but first,” she remembered cleverly, “trot down-cellar, darling, and fetch the brandy.”
Gowry sprang forward with wild courtesy. “I know where it is!”
“Oh, Mr. Gowry, don’t!”
Missy gestured frantically.
Mr. Gowry ran from the room.
“Oh, dear, dear me,” cried Missy.
A moment later, Gowry uttered a loud shriek from the basement, followed by a thunderous crash.
Missy hippety-hopped out, only to reappear moments later, her hand clutched to her throat. “Heavens to Betsy,” she wailed. “Come look. I do believe Mr. Gowry has pitched himself straight down the cellar stairs!”
The next morning Joshua Enderby shuffled into the house lugging a large green velvet board some five feet by three, on which pistols were clasped in display.
“Here I am!” he shouted.
Missy appeared with a rum Collins in one bracelet-jangly hand, her cane thumping in the other. “What’s that?” she demanded.
“First, how’s old Gowry?”
“Broken leg. Wished it had been his vocal cords.”
“Shame about that top cellar step gone loose, eh?” The old man hooked the green velvet board to the wall. “Good thing Gowry lurched for the brandy, not I.”
“Shame.” The wife drank thirstily. “Explain.”
“I’m in the antique-gun-collecting business.” He waved at the weapons in their neat leather nests.
“I don’t see-“
“With a collection of guns to clean-bang!” He beamed. “Man shoots wife while oiling matchlock garter pistol. Didn’t know it was loaded, says weeping spouse.”
“Touche’,” she said.
An hour later, while oiling a revolver, he almost blew his brains out.
His wife came thumping in and froze. “Hell. You’re still alive.”
“Loaded, by God!” He lifted the weapon in a trembling hand. “None were loaded! Unless-“
“Unless-?”
He seized three more weapons. “All loaded! You!”
“Me,” she said. “While you ate lunch. I suppose I’ll have to give you tea now. Come along.”
He stared at the bullet hole in the wall. “Tea, hell,” he said. “Where’s the gin?!”
It was her turn for a shopping spree. “There are ants in the house.” She rattled her full shopping bag and set out ant-paste pots in all the rooms, sprinkled ant powders on windowsills, in his golf bag, and over his gun collection. From other sacks she drew rat poisons, mouse-killers, and bug-exterminators. “A bad summer for roaches.” She distributed these liberally among the foods.
“That’s a double-edged sword,” he observed. “You’ll fall on it!”
“Bilge. The victim mustn’t choose his demise.”
“Yes, but no violence. I wish a serene face for the coroner.”
“Vanity. Dear Josh, your face will twist like a corkscrew with one heaping teaspoon of Black Leaf Forty in your midnight cocoa!”
“I,” he shot back, “know a recipe that will break you out in a thousand lumps before expiring”
She quieted. “Why, Josh, I wouldn’t dream of using Black Leaf Forty.”
He bowed. “I wouldn’t dream of using the thousand-lump recipe.”
“Shake,” she said.
Their assassins game continued. He bought huge rattraps to hide in the halls. “You run barefoot so: small wounds, large infections!”
She in turn stuck the sofas full of antimacassar pins. Wherever he laid a hand it drew blood. “Ow! Damn!” He sucked his fingers. “Are these Amazon Indian blowgun darts?”
“No. Just plain old rusty lockjaw needles.”
“Oh,” he said.
Though he was aging fast, Joshua Enderby dearly loved to drive. You could see him motoring with feeble wildness up and down the hills of Beverly, mouth gaped, eyes blinking palely.
One afternoon he phoned from Malibu. “Missy? My God, I almost dove from a cliff. My right front wheel flew off on a straightaway!”
“I planned it for a curve!”
“Sorry.”
“Got the idea from Action News. Loosen car’s wheel lugs: tomato surprise.”
“Never mind about careless old me,” he said. “What’s new with you?”
“Rug slipped on the hall stairs. Maid fell on her prat.”
“Poor Lila.”
“I send her everywhere ahead now. She bucketed down like a laundry bag. Lucky she’s all fat.”
“We’ll kill that one between us if we’re not careful.”
“Do you think? Oh, I do like Lila so.”
“Lay Lila off for a spell. Hire someone new. If we catch them in our crossfire, won’t be so sad. Hate to think of Lila smashed under a chandelier or-“
“Chandelier!” Missy shrieked. “You been fiddling with my grandma’s Fountainbleu Palace crystal hangings? Listen here, mister. You’re not to touch that chandelier!”
“Promise,” he muttered.
“Good grief! Those lovely crystals! If they fell and missed me, I’d hop on one leg to cane you to death, then wake you up and cane you again!”
Slam went the phone.
Joshua Enderby stepped in from the balcony at supper that night. He’d been smoking. He looked at the table. “Where’s your strawberry crumpet?”
“I wasn’t hungry. I gave it to the new maid.”
“Idiot!”
She glared. “Don’t tell me you poisoned that crumpet, you old S.O.B.?”
There was a crash from the kitchen.
Joshua went to look and returned. “She’s not new anymore,” he said.
They stashed the new maid in an attic trunk. No one telephoned to ask for her.
“Disappointing,” observed Missy on the seventh day. “I felt certain there’d be a tall, cold man with a notebook and another with a camera and flashbulbs flashing. Poor girl was lonelier than we guessed.”
Cocktail parties streamed wildly through the house. It was Missy’s idea. “So we can pick each other off in a forest of obstacles; moving targets!”
Mr. Gowry, gamely returning to the house, limping after his tumble of some weeks before, joked, laughed, and didn’t quite blow his ear off with one of the dueling pistols. Everyone roared but the party broke up early. Gowry vowed never to return.
Then there was a Miss Kummer, who, staying overnight, borrowed Joshua’s electric razor and was almost but not quite electrocuted. She left the house rubbing her right underarm. Joshua promptly grew a beard.
Soon after, a Mr. Schlagel vanished. So did a Mr. Smith. The last seen of these unfortunates was at a Saturday night soiree at the Enderbys’ mansion.
“Hide-and-seek?” Friends slapped Joshua’s back jovially.
“How do you do it? Kill ‘em with toadstools, plant ‘em like mushrooms?”
“Grand joke, yes!” chortled Joshua. “No, no, ha, not toadstools, but one got locked in our stand-up fridge. Overnight Eskimo Pie. The other tripped on a croquet hoop. Defenestrated through a greenhouse window.”
“Eskimo Pie, defenestrated!” hooted the party people. “Dear Joshua, you are a card!”
“I speak only the truth,” Joshua protested.
“What won’t you think of next?”
“One wonders what did happen to old Schlagel and that rascal Smith.”
“What did happen to Schlagel and Smith?” Missy inquired some days later.
“Let me explain. The Eskimo Pie was my dessert. But the croquet hoop? No! Did you spot it in the wrong place, hoping I’d pop by and lunge through the greenhouse panes?”
Missy turned to stone; he had touched a nerve.
“Well, now, it’s time for a wee talk,” he said. “Cancel the parties. One more victim and sirens will announce the arrival of the law.”
“Yes,” Missy agreed. “Our target practice seems to wind up in ricochet. About that croquet hoop. You always take midnight greenhouse walks. Why was that damn fool Schlagel stumbling about out there at two a.m.? Dumb ox. Is he still under the compost?”
“Until I stash him with he-who-is-frozen.”
“Dear, dear. No more parties.”
“Just you, me and-ah-the chandelier?”
“Ah, no. I’ve hid the stepladder so you can’t climb!”
“Damn,” said Joshua.
That night by the fireplace, he poured a few glasses of their best port. While he was out of the room, answering the telephone, she dropped a little white powder in her own glass.
“Hate this,” she murmured. “Terribly unoriginal. But there won’t be an inquest. He looked long dead before he died, they’ll say as they shut the lid.” And she added a touch more lethal stuff to her port just as he wandered in to sit and pluck up his glass. He .eyed it and fixed his wife a grin. “Ah, no, no, you don’t!”
“Don’t what?” she said, all innocence.
The fire crackled warmly, gently on the hearth. The mantel clock ticked.
“You don’t mind, do you, my dear, if we exchange drinks?”
“Surely you don’t think I poisoned your drink while you were out?”
“Trite. Banal. But possible.”
“Well, then, fussbudget, trade.”
He looked surprised but traded glasses.
“Here’s not looking at you!” both said, and laughed.
They drank with mysterious smiles.
And then they sat with immense satisfaction in their easy chairs, the firelight glimmering on their ghost-pale faces, letting the port warm their almost spidery veins. He stuck his legs out and held one hand to the fire. “Ah.” He sighed.
“Nothing, nothing quite like port!”
She leaned her small gray head back, dozing, gumming her red-sticky mouth, and glancing at him with half-secretive, lazy eyes. “Poor Lila,” she murmured.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Lila. Poor.”
The fire popped and she at last added, “Poor Mr. Schlagel.”
“Yes.” He drowsed. “Poor Schlagel. Don’t forget Smith.”
“And you, old man,” she said finally, slowly, slyly. “How do you feel?’
“Sleepy.”
“Very sleepy?”
“Un-huh.” He studied her with bright eyes. “And, my dear, what about you?”
“Sleepy,” she said behind closed eyes. Then they popped wide. “Why all these questions?”
“Indeed,” he said, stirring alert. “Why?”
“Oh, well, because ...” She examined her little black shoe moving in a low rhythm a long way off below her knee. “I think, or perhaps imagine, I have just destroyed your digestive and nervous systems.”
For the moment he was drowsily content and examined the warm fire and listened to the clock tick. “What you mean is that you have just poisoned me?” He dreamed the words. “You what!?” He jumped as all the air gusted from his body. The port glass shattered on the floor.
She leaned forward like a fortune-teller eagerly predicting futures.
“I cleverly poisoned my own drink and knew that you’d ask to trade off, so you felt safe. And we did!” Her laugh tinkled.
He fell back in his chair, clutching at his face to stop the wild swiveling of his eyes. Then suddenly he remembered something and let out an incredible explosion of laughter.
“Why,” cried Missy, “why are you laughing?”
“Because,” he gasped, tears streaming down his cheeks, his mouth grinning horribly, “I poisoned my drink! and hoped for an excuse to change with you!”
“Oh, dear,” she cried, no longer smiling. “How stupid of us. Why didn’t I guess?”
“Because both of us are much too clever by far!” And he lay back, chortling.
“Oh, the mortification, the embarrassment, I feel stark naked and hate myself!”
“No, no,” he husked. “Think instead how much you still hate me.”
“With all my withered heart and soul. You?”
“No deathbed forgiveness here, old lily-white iron-maiden wife 0 mine. Cheerio,” he added faintly, far away.
“If you think I’ll say ‘Cheerio’ back, you’re crazed,” she whispered, her head rolling to one side, her eyes clamped, her mouth gone loose around the words. “But what the hell. Cheer-“
At which her breath ceased and the fire burned to ashes as the clock ticked and ticked in the quiet room.
Friends found them strewn in their library chairs the next day, both looking more than usually pleased with their situation.
“A suicide pact,” said all. “So great their love they could not bear to let the other vanish alone into eternity.”
“I hope,” said Mr. Gowry, on his crutches, “my wife will someday join me in similar drinks.”
It was at a magic show I saw the man who looked enough like me to be my twin.
My wife and I were seated at a Saturday night performance, it was summer and warm, the audience melting in weather and conviviality. All around I saw married and engaged couples delighted and then alarmed by the comic opera of their lives which was being shown in immense symbol onstage.
A woman was sawed in half. How the husbands in the audience smiled.
A woman in a cabinet vanished. A bearded magician wept for her in despair. Then, at the tip-top of the balcony, she appeared, waving a white-powdered hand, infinitely beautiful, unattainable, far away.
How the wives grinned their cat grins!
“Look at them!” I said to my wife.
A woman floated in midair. .. a goddess born in all men’s minds by their own true love. Let not her dainty feet touch earth. Keep her on that invisible pedestal. Watch it! God, don’t tell me how it’s done, anyone! Ah, look at her float, and dream.
And what was that man who spun plates, globes, stars, torches, his elbows twirling hoops, his nose balancing a blue feather, sweating everything at once! What, I asked myself, but the commuter husband, lover, worker, the quick luncher, juggling hour, Benzedrine, Nembutal, bank balances, and budgets?
Obviously, none of us had come to escape the world outside, but rather to have it tossed back at us in more easily digested forms, brighter, cleaner, quicker, neater; a spectacle both heartening and melancholy.
Who in life has not seen a woman disappear?
There, on the black, plush stage, women, mysteries of talc and rose petal, vanished. Cream alabaster statues, sculptures of summer lily and fresh rain melted to dreams, and the dreams became empty mirrors even as the magician reached hungrily to seize them.
From cabinets and nests of boxes, from flung sea-nets, shattering like porcelain as the conjurer fired his gun, the women vanished.
Symbolic, I thought. Why do magicians point pistols at lovely assistants, unless through some secret pact with the male subconscious?
“What?” asked my wife.
“Eh?”
“You were muttering,” said my wife.
“Sorry.” I searched the program. “Oh! Next comes Miss Quick! The only female pickpocket in the world!”
“That can’t be true,” said my wife quietly.
I looked to see if she was joking. In the dark, her dim mouth seemed to be smiling, but the quality of that smile was lost to me.
The orchestra hummed like a serene flight of bees.
The curtains parted.
There, with no great fanfare, no swirl of cape, no bow, only the most condescending tilt of her head, and the faintest elevation of her left eyebrow, stood Miss Quick.
I thought it was a dog act, when she snapped her fingers.
“Volunteers. All men!”
“Sit down.” My wife pulled at me.
I had risen.
There was a stir. Like so many hounds, a silently baying pack rose and walked (or did they run?) to the snapping of Miss Quick’s colorless fingernails.
It was obvious instantly that Miss Quick was the same woman who had been vanishing all evening.
Budget show, I thought; everyone doubles in brass. I don’t like her.
“What?” asked my wife.
“Am I talking out loud again?”
But really, Miss Quick provoked me. For she looked as if she had gone backstage, shrugged on a rumpled tweed walking suit, one size too large, gravy-spotted and grass-stained, and then purposely rumpled her hair, painted her lipstick askew, and was on the point of exiting the stage door when someone cried, “You’re on!”
So here she was now, in her practical shoes, her nose shiny, her hands in motion but her face immobile, getting it over with.
Feet firmly and resolutely planted, she waited, her hands deep in her lumpy tweed pockets, her mouth cool, as the dumb volunteers dogged it to the stage.
This mixed pack she set right with a few taps, lining them up in a military row.
The audience waited.
“That’s all! Act’s over! Back to your seats!”
Snap! went her plain fingers.
The men, dismayed, sheepishly peering at each other, ambled off. She let them stumble half down the stairs into darkness, then yawned:
“Haven’t you forgotten something?”
Eagerly, they turned.
“Here.”
With a smile like the very driest wine, she lazily unwedged a wallet from one of her pockets. She removed another wallet from within her coat. Followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth! Ten wallets in all!
She held them forth, like biscuits, to good beasts. The men blinked. No, those were not their wallets! They had been onstage for only an instant. She had mingled with them only in passing. It was all a joke. Surely she was offering them brand-new wallets, compliments of the show!
But now the men began feeling themselves, like sculptures finding unseen flaws in old, hastily flung together armatures. Their mouths gaped, their hands grew more frantic, slapping their chest-pockets, digging their pockets.
All the while Miss Quick ignored them to calmly sort their wallets like the morning mail.
It was at this precise moment I noticed the man on the far right end of the line, half on the stage. I lifted my opera glasses. I looked once. I looked twice.
“Well,” I said lightly. “There seems to be a man there who somewhat resembles me.”
“Oh?” said my wife.
I handed her the glasses, casually. “Far right.”
“It’s not like you,” said my wife. “It’s you!”
“Well, almost,” I said modestly.
The fellow was nice-looking. It was hardly cricket to look thus upon yourself and pronounce favorable verdicts. Simultaneously, I had grown quite cold. I took back the opera glasses and nodded, fascinated. “Crew cut. Horn-rimmed glasses. Pink complexion. Blue eyes-“
“Your absolute twin!” cried my wife.
And this was true. And it was strange, sitting there, watching myself onstage.
“No, no, no,” I kept whispering.
But yet, what my mind refused, my eye accepted. Aren’t there two billion people in this world? Yes! All different snowflakes, no two the same! But now here, delivered into my gaze, endangering my ego and my complacency, here was a casting from the same absolutes, the identical mold.
Should I believe, disbelieve, feel proud, or run scared? For here I stood witness to the forgetfulness of God.
“I don’t think,” said God, “I’ve made one like this before.”
But, I thought, entranced, delighted, alarmed: God errs.
Flashes from old psychology books lit my mind.
Heredity. Environment.
“Smith! Jones! Helstrom!”
Onstage, in bland drill-sergeant tones, Miss Quick called roll and handed back the stolen goods.
You borrow your body from all your forebears, I thought. Heredity.
But isn’t the body also an environment?
“Winters!”
Environment, they say, surrounds you. Well, doesn’t the body surround, with its lakes, its architectures of bone, its overabundances, or wastelands of soul? Does not what is seen in passing window-mirrors, a face either serene snowfalls or a pitted abyss, the hands like swans or sparrows, the feet anvils or hummingbirds, the body a lumpy wheat-sack or a summer fern, do these not, seen, paint the mind, set the image, shape the brain and psyche like clay? They do!
“Bidwell! Rogers!”
Well, then, trapped in the same environmental flesh, how fared this stranger onstage?
In the old fashion, I wanted to leap to my feet and call, “What o’clock is it?”
And he, like the town crier passing late with my face, might half mournfully reply, “Nine o’clock, and all’s well
But was all well with him?
Question: did those horn-rims cover a myopia not only of light but of spirit?
Question: was the slight obesity pressed to his skeleton symbolic of a similar gathering of tissue in his head?
In sum, did his soul go north while mine went south, the same flesh cloaking us but our minds reacting, one winter, one summer?
“My God,” I said, half aloud. “Suppose we’re absolutely identical!”
“Shh!” said a woman behind me.
I swallowed hard.
Suppose, I thought, he is a chain-smoker, light sleeper, overeater, manic-depressive, glib talker, deep/shallow thinker, flesh fancier...
No one with that body, that face, could be otherwise. Even our names must be similar.
Our names!
“...1...bl ... er...” .
Miss Quick spoke his!
Someone coughed. I missed it.
Perhaps she’d repeat it. But no, he, my twin, moved forward. Damn! He stumbled! The audience laughed.
I focused my binoculars swiftly.
My twin stood quietly, center stage now, his wallet returned to his fumbling hands.
“Stand straight,” I whispered. “Don’t slouch.”
“Shh!” said my wife.
I squared my own shoulders, secretly.
I never knew I looked that fine, I thought, cramming the glasses to my eyes. Surely my nostrils aren’t that thinly made, the true aristocrat. Is my skin that fresh and handsome, my chin that firm?
I blushed, in silence.
After all, if my wife said that was me, accept it! The lamplight of pure intelligence shone softly from every pore of his face.
“The glasses.” My wife nudged me.
Reluctantly I gave them up.
She trained the glasses rigidly, not on the man, but now on Miss Quick, who was busy cajoling, flirting, and repicking the pockets of the nearest men. On occasion my wife broke into a series of little satisfied snorts and giggles.
Miss Quick was, indeed, the goddess Shiva.
If I saw two hands, I saw nine. Her hands, an aviary, flew, rustled, tapped, soared, petted, whirled, tickled as Miss Quick, her face blank, swarmed coldly over her victims; touched without touching.
“What’s in this pocket? And this? And here?”
She shook their vests, pinched their lapels, jingled their trousers: money rang. She punched them lightly with a vindictive forefinger, ringing totals on cash registers. She unplucked coat buttons with mannish yet fragile motions, gave wallets back, sneaked them away. She thrust them, took them, stole them again, while peeling money to count it behind the men’s backs, then snatched their watches while holding their hands.
She trapped a live doctor now!
“Have you a thermometer!?” she asked.
“Yes.” He searched. His face panicked. He searched again. The audience cued him with a roar. He glanced over to find:
Miss Quick standing with the thermometer in her mouth, like an unlit smoke. She whipped it out, eyed it.
“Temperature!” she cried. “One hundred ten!”
She closed her eyes and gave an insincere shake of her hips.
The audience roared. And now she assaulted her victims, bullied them, tugged at their shirts, rumpled their hair, asked:
“Where’s your tie?”
They clapped their hands to their empty collars.
She plucked their ties from nowhere, tossed them back.
She was a magnet that invisibly drew good-luck charms, saints’ medals, Roman coins, theater stubs, handkerchiefs, stickpins, while the audience ran riot, convulsed as these rabbit men stood peeled of all prides and protections.
Hold your hip pocket, she vacuumed your vest. Clutch your vest, she jackpotted your trousers. Blithely bored, firm but evanescent, she convinced you you missed nothing, until she extracted it, with faint loathing, from her own tweeds moments later.
“What’s this?!” She held up a letter. “’Dear Helen: Last night with you-‘”
A furious blush as the victim tussled with Miss Quick, snatched the letter, stowed it away. But a moment later, the letter was restolen and reread aloud: “’Dear Helen: Last night-‘”
So the battle raged. One woman. Ten men.
She kissed one, stole his belt.
Stole another’s suspenders.
The women in the audience-whinnied.
Their men, shocked, joined in.
What a magnificent bully, Miss Quick! How she spanked her dear, idiot-grinning, carry-on-somehow men turned boys as she spun them like cigar-store Indians, knocked them with her brontosaur hip, leaned on them like barber-poles, calling each one cute or lovely or handsome.
This night, I thought, is lunatic! All about me, wives, hilarious with contempt, hysterical at being so shabbily revealed in their national pastimes, gagged for air. Their husbands sat stunned, as if a war were over that had not been declared, fought and lost before they could move. Each, nearby, had the terrible look of a man who fears his throat is cut, and that a sneeze would fill the aisle with heads .
Quickly! I thought. Do something!
“You, you onstage, my twin, dodge! Escape!”
And she was coming at him!
“Be firm!” I told my twin. “Strategy! Duck, weave. Zigzag. Don’t look where she says. Look where she doesn’t say! Go it! now!”
If I shouted this, or merely ground it to powder in my teeth, I don’t recall, for all the men froze as Miss Quick seized my twin by the hand.
“Careful!” I whispered.
Too late. His watch was gone. He didn’t know it. Your watch is gone! I thought. He doesn’t know what time it is! I thought.
Miss Quick stroked his lapel. Back off! I warned myself.
Too late. His forty-dollar pen was gone. He didn’t know it. She tweaked his nose. He smiled. Idiot! There went his wallet. Not your nose, fool, your coat!
“Padded?” She pinched his shoulder. He looked at his right arm. No! I cried silently, for now she had the letters out of his left coat pocket. She planted a red kiss on his brow and backed off with everything else he had on him, coins, identification, a package of chocolates which she ate, greedily. Use the sense God gave a cow! I shouted behind my face. Blind! See what she’s doing!
She whirled him round, measured him, and said, “This yours?” and returned his tie.
My wife was hysterical. She still held the glasses fixed on every nuance and vibration of loss and deprivation on the poor idiot’s face. Her mouth was spoiled with triumph.
My God! I cried in the uproar. Get off the stage! I yelled within, wishing I could really yell it. At least get out while you have some pride!
The laughter had erupted a volcano in the theater, high and rumbling and dark. The dim grotto seemed lit with unhealthy fever, an incandescence. My twin wanted to break off, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, too many bells on too many days: no reward, no food. His eyes were glazed with his insane predicament.
Fall! Jump in the pit! Crawl away! I thought.
The orchestra sawed at destiny with violins and Valkyrian trumpets in full flood.
With one last snatch, one last contemptuous wag of her body, Miss Quick grasped my twin’s clean white shirt, and yanked it off.
She threw the shirt in the air. As it fell, so did his pants As his pants fell, unbelted, so did the theater. An avalanche of shock soared to bang the rafters and roll over us in echoes a thundering hilarity.
The curtain fell.
We sat, covered with unseen rubble. Drained of blood, buried in one upheaval after another, degraded and autopsied and, minus eulogy, tossed into a mass grave, we men took a minute to stare at that dropped curtain, behind which hid the pickpocket and her victims, behind which a man quickly hoisted his trousers up his spindly legs.
A burst of applause, a prolonged tide on a dark shore. Miss Quick did not appear to bow. She did not need to. She was standing behind the curtain. I could feel her there, no smile, no expression. Standing, coldly estimating the caliber of the applause, comparing it to the metered remembrances of other nights.
I jumped up in an absolute rage. I had, after all, failed myself. When I should have ducked, I bobbed; when I should have backed off, I ran in. What an ass!
“What a fine show!” said my wife as we milled through the departing audience.
“Fine!” I cried.
“Didn’t you like it?”
“All except the pickpocket. Obvious act, overdone, no subtlety,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“She was a whiz!”
“This way.” I steered my wife toward the stage door.
“Of course,” said my wife blandly, “that man, the one who looks like you, he was a plant. They call them shills, don’t they? Paid by the management to pretend to be part of the audience?”
“No man would take money for a spectacle like that,” I said. “No, he was just some boob who didn’t know how to be careful.”
“What are we doing back here?”
Blinking around, we found we were backstage.
Perhaps I wished to stride up to my twin, shouting, “Half-baked ox! Insulter of all men! Play a flute: you dance. Tickle your chin: you jump like a puppet! Jerk!”
The truth was, of course, I must see my twin close-up, confront the traitor and see where his true flesh differed from mine. After all, wouldn’t I have done better in his place?!
The backstage was lit in blooms and isolated flushes, now bright, now dark, where the other magicians stood chatting. And there, there was Miss Quick!
And there, smiling, was my twin!
“You did fine, Charlie,” said Miss Quick.
My twin’s name was Charlie. Stupid name.
Charlie patted Miss Quick’s cheek. “You did fine, ma’am!”
God, it was true! A shill, a confederate. Paid what? Five, ten dollars for letting his shirt be torn oft, letting his pants drop with his pride? What a turncoat, traitor!
I stood, glaring.
He glanced up.
Perhaps he saw me.
Perhaps some bit of my rage and impacted sorrow reached him.
He held my gaze for only a moment, his mouth wide, as if he had just seen an old school chum. But, not remembering my name, could not call out, so let the moment pass.
He saw my rage. His face paled. His smile died. He glanced quickly away. He did not look up again, but stood pretending to listen to Miss Quick, who was laughing and talking with the other magicians.
I stared at him and stared again. Sweat oiled his face. My hate melted. My temper cooled. I saw his profile clearly, his chin, eyes, nose, hairline; I memorized it all. Then I heard someone say:
“It was a fine show!”
My wife, moving forward, shook the hand of the pickpocketing beast.
On the street, I said, “Well, I’m satisfied.”
“About what?” asked my wife.
“He doesn’t look like me at all. Chin’s too sharp. Nose is smaller. Lower lip isn’t full enough. Too much eyebrow. Onstage, far oft, had me going. But close up, no, no. It was the crew cut and horn-rims fooled us. Anyone could have horn-rims and a crew cut.”
“Yes,” my wife agreed, “anyone.”
As she climbed into our car, I could not help but admire her long, lovely legs.
Driving off, I thought I glimpsed that familiar face in the passing crowd. The face, however, was watching me. I wasn’t sure. Resemblances, I now knew, are superficial.
The face vanished in the crowd.
“I’ll never forget,” said my wife, “when his pants-fell!” I drove very fast, then drove very slow, all the way home.
Good evening. Welcome. I see you have my invitation in your hands. Decided to be brave, did you? Fine. Here we are Grab onto this.”
The tall, handsome stranger with the heavenly eyes and the impossibly blond hair handed me a wineglass.
“Clean your palate,” he said.
I took the glass and read the label on the bottle he held in his left hand. Bordeaux, it read. St. Emilion.
“Go on,” said my host. “It’s not poison. May I sit? And might you drink?”
“I might,” I sipped, shut my eyes, and smiled. “You’re a connoisseur. This is the best I’ve had in years. But why this wine and why the invitation? What am I doing here at Gray’s Anatomy Bar and Grill?”
My host sat and filled his own glass. “I am doing a favor to myself. This is a great night, perhaps for both of us. Greater than Christmas or Halloween.” His lizard tongue darted into his wine to vanish back into his contentment. “We celebrate my being honored, at last becoming-“
He exhaled it all out:
“Becoming,” he said, “a friend to Dorian! Dorian’s friend. Me!”
“Ah.” I laughed. “That explains the name of this place, then? Does Dorian own Gray’s Anatomy?”
“More! Inspires and rules over it. And deservedly so.”
“You make it sound as if being a friend to Dorian is the most important thing in the world.”
“No! In life! In all of life.” He rocked back and forth, drunk not from the wine but from some inner joy. “Guess.”
“At what?”
“How old I am!”
“You look to be twenty-nine at the most.”
“Twenty-nine. What a lovely sound. Not thirty, forty, or fifty, but-“
I said, “I hope you’re not going to ask what sign I was born under. I usually leave when people ask that. I was born on the cusp, August, 1920.” I pretended to half rise. He pressed a gentle hand to my lapel.
“No, no, dear boy-you don’t understand. Look here. And here.” He touched under his eyes and then around his neck. “Look for wrinkles.”
“But you have none,” I said.
“How observant. None. And that is why I have become this very night a fresh, new, stunningly handsome friend to Dorian.”
“I still don’t see the connection.”
“Look at the backs of my hands.” He showed his wrists. “No liver spots. I am not turning to rust. I repeat the question, how old am I?”
I swirled the wine in my glass and studied his reflection in the swirl.
“Sixty?” I guessed. “Seventy?”
“Good God!” He fell back in his chair, astonished. “How did you know?”
“Word association. You’ve been rattling on about Dorian. I know my Oscar Wilde, I know my Dorian Gray, which means you, sir, have a portrait of yourself stashed in an attic aging while you yourself, drinking old wine, stay young.”
“No, no.” The handsome stranger leaned forward. “Not stayed young. Became young. I was old, very old, and it took a year, but the clock went back and after a year of playing at it, I achieved what I set out for.”
“Twenty-nine was your target?”
“How clever you are!”
“And once you became twenty-nine you were fully elected as-“
“A Friend to Dorian! Bulls-eye! But there is no portrait, no attic, no staying young. It’s becoming young again’s the ticket.”
“I’m still puzzled!”
“Child of my heart, you might possibly be another Friend. Come along. Before the greatest revelation, let me show you the far end of the room and some doors.”
He seized my hand. “Bring your wine. You’ll need it!” He hustled me along through the tables in a swiftly filling room of mostly middle-aged and some fairly young men, and a few smoke-exhaling ladies. I jogged along, staring back at the EXIT as if my future life were there.
Before us stood a golden door.
“And behind the door?” I asked.
“What always lies behind any golden door?” my host responded. “Touch.”
I reached out to print the door with my thumb.
“What do you feel?” my host inquired.
“Youngness, youth, beauty.” I touched again. “All the springtimes that ever were or ever will be.”
“Jeez, the man’s a poet. Push.”
We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.
“Is this where Dorian is?”
“No, no, only his students, his disciples, his almost Friends. Feast your eyes.”
I did as I was told and saw, at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a lineage of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more splendid and more beautiful...
I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his demi-Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.
I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.
“Yes, aren’t they,” he said.
“Come,” whispered my new friend. “Run the gauntlet. Don’t linger; you may find tiger-tears on your sleeve and blood rising. Now.”
And he glided, he undulated, me along on his soundless tuxedo slippers, his fingers a pale touch on my elbow, his breath a flower scent too near. I heard myself say:
“It’s been written that H. G. Wells attracted women with his breath, which smelled of honey. Then I learned that such breath comes with illness.”
“How clever. Do I smell of hospitals and medicines?”
“I didn’t mean-“
“Quickly. You’re rare meat in the zoo. Hup, two, three!”
“Hold on,” I said, breathless not from walking fast but from perceiving quickly. “This man, and the next, and the one after that-“
“Yes?!”
“My God,” I said, “they’re almost all the same, look-alikes!”
“Bull’s-eye, half true! And the next and the next after that, as far behind as we have gone, as far ahead as we might go. All twenty-nine years old, all golden tan, all six feet tall, white of teeth, bright of eye. Each different but beautiful, like me!”
I glanced at him and saw what I saw around me. Similar but different beauties. So much youngness I was stunned.
“Isn’t it time you told me your name?”
“Dorian.”
“But you said you were his Friend.”
“I am. They are. But we all share his name. This chap here. And the next. Oh, once we had commoner names. Smith and Jones. Harry and Phil. Jimmy and Jake. But then we signed up to become Friends.”
“Is that why I was invited? To sign up?”
“I saw you in a bar across town a year ago, made queries. A year later, you look the proper age-“
“Proper-?”
“Well, aren’t you? Just leaving sixty-nine, arriving at seventy?”
“Well.”
“My God! Are you happy being seventy?”
“It’ll do.”
“Do? Wouldn’t you like to be really happy, steal some wild oats? Sow them?!”
“That time’s over.”
“It’s not. I asked and you came, curious.
“Curious about what?”
“This.” He bared me his neck again and flexed his pale white wrists. “And all those!” He waved at the fine faces as we passed. “Dorian’s sons. Don’t you want to be gloriously wild and young like them?”
“How can I decide?”
“Lord, you’ve thought of it all night for years. Soon you could be part of this!”
We had reached the far end of the line of men with bronzed faces, white teeth, and breath like H. G. Wells’ scent of honey ...
“Aren’t you tempted?” he pursued. “Will you refuse-“
“Immortality?”
“No! To live the next twenty years, die at ninety, and look twenty-nine in the damn tomb! In the mirror over there-what do you see?”
“An old goat among ten dozen fauns.”
“Yes!”
“Where do I sign up?” I laughed.
“Do you accept?”
“No, I need more facts.”
“Damn! Here’s the second door. Get in!”
He swung wide a door, more golden than the first, shoved me, followed, and slammed the door. I stared at darkness.
“What’s this?” I whispered.
“Dorian’s Gym, of course. If you work out here all year, hour by hour, day by day, you get younger.”
“That’s some gym,” I observed, trying to adjust my eyes to the dim areas beyond where shadows tumbled, and voices rustled and whispered. “I’ve heard of gyms that help keep, not make, you young ... Now tell me...
“I read your mind. For every old man that became young in there at the bar, is there an attic portrait?”
“Well, is there?”
“No! There’s only Dorian.”
“A single person? Who grows old for all of you?”
“Touche’! Behold his gym!”
I gazed off into a vast high arena where a hundred shadows stirred and moaned like a tide on a terrible shore.
“I think it’s time to leave,” I said.
“Nonsense. Come. No one will see you. They’re all... busy. I am Moses,” said the sweet breath at my elbow. “And I hereby tell the Red Sea to part!”
And we moved along a path between two tides, each shadowed, each more terrifying with its gasps, its cries, its slip-pages of flesh, its slapping like waves, its repeated whispers for more, more, ah, God, more!
I ran, but my host grabbed on. “Look right, left, now right again!”
There must have been a hundred, two hundred animals, beasts, no, men wrestling, leaping, falling, rolling in darkness. It was a sea of flesh, undulant, a writhing of limbs on acres of tumbling mats, a glistening of skin, flashes of teeth where men climbed ropes, spun on leather horses, or flung themselves up crossbars to be seized down in the tidal flux of lamentations and muffled cries. I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched by their bestial moans.
“What, my God,” I exclaimed, “does it all mean?”
“There. See.”
And above the wild turbulence of flesh in a far wall was a great window, forty feet wide and ten feet tall, and behind that cold glass Something watching, savoring, alert, one vast stare.
And over all there was the suction of a great breath, a vast inhalation which pulled at the gymnasium air with a constant hungry and invisible need. As the shadows tumbled and writhed, this inhalation tugged at them and the raw air in my nostrils. Somewhere a huge vacuum machine sucked in darkness but did not exhale. There were long pauses as the shadows flailed and fell, and then another savoring inhalation. It swallowed breath. In, in, always in, devouring the sweaty air, hungering the passions.
And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium airs.
“Dorian?” I guessed.
“Come meet him.”
“Yes, but ...” I watched the wild, convulsive shadows. “What are they doing?”
“Go find out. Afraid? Cowards never live. So!”
He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive, I could not feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was locked by my blond young friend. “Ready?”
“Lord, I must go home!”
“Not until you meet,” said my host, “him.”
He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place, like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air stirred on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the wilted odor of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the tide was there with that immense inhaled breathing that rose and was quiet and began again.
“I see no one,” I said.
“Let your eyes adjust. Wait.”
I waited. I watched.
There were no chairs in the room, for there was no need of chairs.
He did not sit, he did not recline, he “prolonged” himself on the largest bed in history. The dimensions might easily have been fifteen feet by twenty. It reminded me of the apartment of a writer I once knew who had completely covered his room with mattresses so that women stumbled on the sill and fell flat out on the springs.
So it was with this nest, with Dorian, immense, a gelatinous skin, a vitreous shape, undulant within that nest.
And if Dorian was male or female, I could not guess. This was a great pudding, an emperor jellyfish, a monstrous heap of sexual gelatin from the exterior of which, on occasion, noxious gases escaped with rubbery sounds; great lips sibilating. That and the sough of that labored pump, that constant inhalation, were the only sounds within the chamber as I stood, anxious, alarmed, but at last impressed by this beached creature, cast up from a dark landfall. The thing was a gelatinous cripple, an octopus without limbs, an amphibian stranded, unable to undulate and seep back to an ocean sewer from which it had inched itself in monstrous waves and gusts of lungs and eruptions of corrupt gas until now it lay, featureless, with a mere x-ray ghost of legs, arms, wrists, and hands with skeletal fingers. At last I could discern, at the far end of this flesh peninsula, what seemed a half-flat face with a frail phantom of skull beneath, an open fissure for an eye, a ravenous nostril, and a red wound which ripped wide to surprise me as a mouth.
And at last this thing, this Dorian, spoke.
Or whispered, or lisped.
And with each lisp, each sibilance, an odor of decay was expelled as if from a vast night-swamp balloon, sunk on its side, lost in fetid water as its unsavory breath rinsed my cheeks. It expelled but one lingering syllable:
Yessss.
Yes what?
And then it added:
Soooo...
“How long ... how long,” I murmured, “has it ... has he been here?”
“No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever’s not bad .
What else?”
I swallowed hard. “Is ... is he?”
“Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss, depravity’s guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule, imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take bacterial snows. Dorian.”
The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves, and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.
A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word:
Yessss .
“He’s welcoming you!” My host smiled.
“I know, I know,” I said impatiently. “But why? I don’t even want to be here. I’m ill. Why can’t we go?”
“Because”-my host laughed-“you were selected.
“Selected?”
“We’ve had our eye on you.”
“You mean you’ve watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you permission?”
“Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked.”
“Who said I wanted to be picked!?”
“If you could see yourself as we see you, you’d know why.”
I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous suctions.
Yessss, it whispered.
Lisssst, it murmured.
“And list it is!” My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to screen my name, address, and phone.
He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.
“Single,” he said.
“Married and divorced.”
“Now single! No women in your life?”
“I’m walking wounded.”
He tapped his pad. “Visiting strange bars.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily three nights a week.”
“Twice!”
“Going to the gym, look, every day. Workouts excessive. Prolonged steam baths, overlong massages. Sudden interest in sports. Endless basketball, soccer, tennis matches every night, and half the noons. That’s hyperventilation!”
“My business!”
“And ours! You’re balanced giddily on the rim. Shove all these facts in that one-armed bandit in your head, yank, and watch the lemons and ripe cherries spin. Yank!”
Jesus God. Yes! Bars. Drinks. Late nights. Gyms. Saunas. Masseurs. Basketball. Tennis. Soccer. Yank. Pull. Spin!
“Well?” My host searched my face, amused. “Three jackpot cherries in a row?”
I shuddered.
“Circumstance. No court would convict me.”
“This court elects you. We tell palms to read ravenous groins. Yes?”
Gas steamed up from one shriveled aperture in the restless mound. Yessss.
They say that men in the grip of passion, blind to their own darkness, make love and run mad. Stunned by guilt, they find themselves beasts, having done the very thing they were warned not to do by church, town, parents, life. In explosive outrage they turn to the sinful lure. Seeing her as unholy provocateur, they kill. Women, in similar rages and guilts, overdose. Eve lies self-slain in the Garden. Adam hangs himself with the Snake as noose.
But here was no passionate crime, no woman, no provocateur, only the great mound of siphoning breath and my blond host. And only words which riddled me with fusillades of arrows. Like an Oriental hedgehog, bristled with shafts, my body exploded with No, No, No. Echoed and then real:
“No!”
Yessss, whispered the vapor from the mounded tissue, the skeleton buried in ancient soups.
Yessss.
I gasped to see my games, steams, midnight bars, late-dawn beds: a maniac sum.
I rounded dark corridors to confront a stranger so pockmarked, creased, and oiled by passion, so cobwebbed and smashed by drink, that I tried to avert my gaze. The terror gaped his mouth and reached for my hand. Stupidly, I reached to shake his and-rapped glass! A mirror. I stared deep into my own life. I had seen myself in shop windows, dim undersea men running in creeks. Mornings, shaving, I saw my mirrored health. But this! This troglodyte trapped in amber. Myself, snapshotted like ten dozen sexual acrobats! And who jammed this mirror at me? My beautiful host, and that corrupt flatulence beyond.
“You are selected,” they whispered.
“I refuse!” I shrieked.
And whether I shrieked aloud or merely thought, a great furnace gaped. The oceanic mound erupted thunders of gaseous streams. My beautiful host fell back, stunned that their search beneath my skin, behind my mask, had brought revulsion. Always when Dorian cried, “Friend,” raw gymnast teams had mobbed to catapult that armless, legless, featureless Sargasso Sea. Before they had smothered to drown in his miasma, to arise, embrace, and wrestle in the dark gymnasium, then run forth young to assault a world.
And I? What had I dared to do, that quaked that membranous sac into regurgitated whistling and broken winds?
“Idiot!” cried my host, all teeth and fists. “Out! Out!”
“Out,” I cried, spun to obey, and tripped.
I do not clearly know what happened as I fell. And if it was a swift reaction to the holocaust erupted like vile spit and vomit from that putrescent mound, I cannot say. I knew no lightning shock of murder, yet knew perhaps some summer heat flash of revenge. For what? I thought. What are you to Dorian or he to you that frees the hydra behind your face, or causes the slightest twitch of leg, arm, hand, or fingernail, as the last fetid air from Dorian burned my hair and stuffed my nostrils.
It was over in a second.
Something shoved me. Did my secret self, insulted, give that push? I was flung as if on wires, knocked to sprawl at Dorian.
He gave two terrible cries, one of warning, one of despair.
I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked, scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.
My fingernail!
And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its own boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outgassed whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.
“Christ! What have you done!? Murderer! Damn you!” cried my host, riven to stare at Dorian’s exhaustions unto death.
He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, “Lock this! Lock! Whatever happens, for God’s sake, don’t open! Now!” The door slammed. I ran to lock it and turn.
Quietly, Dorian was falling away.
He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a massive disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas. Even as I watched, the last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent underlined its death.
My God, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean shores where bathers come at dawn ...
Even now ...
I stood, eyes shut, waiting.
For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.
There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but especially the golden door behind me.
I spun to see as well as hear.
I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled, struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.
I felt a great mass ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.
I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.
Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.
What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those beauties.
The police will come, I thought, soon. But .
No matter what ...
I would not unlock that door.