About the Author (32 page)

In my mind’s eye I see her in her hiding place, on some upper floor of the Halberts’ house. She has received a phone call from Chopper telling her that everything’s okay, that I will give her the money. So she thinks she is out danger. She weeps with relief. She thanks heaven that I could find it in my heart to take pity on her, to show mercy. Meanwhile, a hulking shadow is advancing toward her on stealthy feet, is rising in the shrubbery outside, is moving toward the open window, is clenching its fists and baring its teeth.

Morning now. Peaceful. So impossibly peaceful. I’m sitting here by the little window in the front den, scribbling and looking out over the valley, where the sun is coming up, steeping the hills in pure, clear light. So that’s that. Almost done now. All finished, except for getting it down on paper. I’ve got some time yet. Janet won’t be back for a few more hours. I can do this properly; I can take my time.

Of course, I had to try to warn her.

It was just after one A.M. when I finally realized I could stand it no more and hurried out to my car. I drove through the dark town. I had it in my mind to reach her before Tommy did, to tell her that he was on his way and that her only hope was to come with me. I would offer to ferry her to the airport and buy her a plane ticket to anyplace she wanted. I would give her cash from the airport ATM and a check for five thousand dollars to help her get set up in her new life. There was only one condition: she would have to leave the laptop with me.

I had no way of knowing if she would go for this. All I knew was that I had to try.

I parked on River Road, then hurried along the deserted blacktop toward the Halberts’ A-frame. I crept up the wooded driveway. Every time my shoe accidentally scraped at the pebbles, I braced to feel a bullet, fired from Les’s gun, rip into my body. But no gun was fired. Indeed, there was no sign of life on the premises. All the interior lights were off.

But the front door, I saw with an ominous start, was ajar. Of course I knew right then that something was up, but I could not turn back. I had to see this through to the end. I eased the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.

Filtered moonlight lay here and there, illuminating a patch of carpeting, a curving sofa back, the gaping black fireplace. To my left was the staircase going up. I began to climb.

At the top, I found myself in a dark, narrow passage. I knew the geography of the house, knew that the hallway opened out into a soaring loft space. I moved cautiously into the room—the same one where Janet and I had eaten dinner with the Halberts and their guests just a few months before. It looked different now. The floor was littered with tipped-over chairs, scattered kitchen implements, shattered glass from a lamp. The clouded moon shone dully through the huge window that filled one wall of the loft. Against the adjacent wall, a dark, irregular shape was suspended. It hung a foot or so above the ground, rotating slightly. I moved slowly toward it.

It was a body.

It was Les. She hung from a rope that had been looped under her armpits and then pulled over a low ceiling beam. She was naked, and her hands were cuffed behind her back. On her breasts and belly there were a number of irregular dark circles, like raisins embedded in her flesh. Cigarette burns. Her head was bent at an awkward angle downward, her bruised face tucked sideways into the curve of her shoulder. From her right thigh protruded a penknife—presumably the one that had been used to cut and prod at several areas of her abdomen.

There was no reason on earth for me to touch anything—every reason, in fact, for me to turn and run out. I cannot quite explain it, but something about the
indignity
of her body hanging there . . . I seized the knife and pulled it out of her leg, then I reached over her head and began to saw at the rope. I had sawed halfway through when the remaining strands snapped, and she fell—fell against me, rubbery, cold, inert. I heaved her off, and she dropped to the floor with a sickening
thump
.

I stood there frozen. I felt a hot, gulping spasm welling in my chest. Yet I fought down the sobs. For even as I stood over her mutilated corpse, even as I contemplated the results of my actions, I became aware of a new emotion stirring to life within me, within the deepest recesses of my reptilian brain: the furtive, twitching, slithering instinct toward self-preservation. Yes, I found myself thinking about the laptop. And suddenly I was peering around the room, trying to think where Les might have secreted the computer—that final piece of evidence linking me, now, not only with the crime of literary theft but with an act incalculably worse.

I stepped over her body and hurried to a nearby bookcase. I began to pull volumes off the shelves. I was breathing hard, panting, crying a little. There were several hundred books on those shelves. And what even made me think that the laptop would be hidden there?

I had just paused to collect myself, when I heard, from behind me, a quiet electronic chime—a bright major chord.

I turned. The sound had come from a dark corner of the loft. At first I could see nothing in that darkness; then a weak gray light began to rise, like the pale, lifeless glow of a television screen. A heavy, slab-shaped face became visible: Tommy. He was sitting in one of the Halberts’ womby recliners, his grim features lit from below by the ghostly iridescence shed by the laptop that rested on his thigh.

“This what you’re looking for?” he asked.

I said nothing. I couldn’t speak. Indeed, it was several moments before I even registered that he was pointing a gun—Les’s revolver?—at me.

“She told me all about it,” he said, gesturing at the computer in his lap. He chuckled. “Eventually.” It was then that I noticed the high-pitched wheeze in his breathing. There was something wrong with him: he was in extremis somehow—panting, sweating. “I know what you did,” he went on. “Now, you pay
me
.” He jerked his head toward Les’s body. “The bitch got me.” He pointed at the place in his lower abdomen where a great deal of blood stained his clothing. “Took me by sur—” He stopped and let out a series of mincing little yelps. “Fuck,” he whimpered. “Surprise.” Then he chuckled moistly. “But I got . . .”

The rest of the sentence died away. His head drooped slowly forward. His gun hand, I noticed, had wilted, the weapon now pointing at a region of the carpet a few feet in front of him.

I waited. Nothing happened.

A minute went by. Nothing continued to happen.

“Tommy,” I said at length. “Tommy?”

Could it be, I wondered, that he had petered out in midsentence? It was so unlike the movies.

I moved toward his slumped form.

“Tommy?” I said.

I was standing over him now, taking care not to step into the pool of blood that had collected around his chair. He seemed as utterly quenched of life as Stewart on his morgue slab. With my foot, I reached out and nudged at the pistol in his hand. He made no response. I nudged a little harder, and the gun came loose from his fingers, dropped from his hand, and fell to the floor with a splash.

Perhaps precisely because I had seen so many movies and recognized the importance of being properly armed when in the haunted house, I crouched and picked up the gun. The handle might have been submerged in a vat of molasses, it was that sticky. I trained the weapon on Tommy. With my free hand I grasped the corner of the laptop, which still sat on his thighs. I lifted it free. The machine was warm in my hand, like a live thing. Fumbling, I managed to close it and tuck it under my arm, all the while keeping the gun on him. Then I backed slowly away, taking care not to trip over Les’s body, which lay there immobile in the moonlight. As I stepped over her, I glanced down and saw that she was staring imploringly at me.

I shouted in alarm. Then I leaned in closer for a better look.

No, her eyes were closed tight. I’d been hallucinating. I finished stepping over her and started to head for the stairs.

“Hey,” she whispered.

I stopped. I turned and looked at her. She had managed to roll onto her side now and was staring at me. I wasn’t hallucinating. She was alive. Barely.

“Please,” she breathed through her cracked lips.

I stood there in an animal half-crouch, the laptop under one arm, the gun in my hand, my eyes darting around. . . .

“Fuck,” she rasped, sounding a little more like herself now. “C’mon. . . .”

That brought me to. I crept slowly toward her.

I stood over her. She was mewling now, helplessly, from the back of her throat. Her eyes looked up at me beseechingly.

What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t carry her out of there. Couldn’t take her to a
hospital
. Couldn’t call the police. Too much explaining to do. I looked around for some way out of the nightmare. Should I simply run? Leave her to expire, slowly, with only Tommy’s corpse for company? Certainly that would be the sensible thing to do, yet I found I couldn’t do it, either.

Then she began to make a new noise in the back of her throat, a rasping sound—“G-g-g-g”—that I at first took to be a death rattle. Then I realized she was trying to say something. Finally she got it out: “G-g-g-gun,” she said. Her eyes—those terrible eyes—were riveted to my hand.

Then I got it. She was staring at the revolver in my fist. She was begging to be put out of her misery.

I shook my head no. “No!” I said aloud.

“Please. . . .”

After several moments of disorganized inner debate, I placed the computer on the ground, stuffed the gun into my belt, then walked resolutely across to the sofa. I picked up a cushion and took it over to Les. I bent down over her and began to lower the incongruously elegant pillow toward her face. She closed her eyes, and I saw the tension, the fear, the horror drain away from her features, the forehead smoothing out, the lips relaxing into something that almost resembled a smile. Her awful suffering was about to end.

Yet in the moment before I pressed the pillow against her face, I pictured her involuntarily struggling, wriggling, writhing. . . . I threw the cushion aside. She gasped in exasperation and began to weep. I was nearly weeping, too, aware that my actions were as much a torture to her as Tommy’s had been. I could not seem to kill her. But I also could not abandon her. I was caught, trapped—

Then I had another one of my
ideas
.

On the Halberts’ cordless phone, I punched in 911.

A woman answered: “Burlington Police Department.”

“Please . . . help . . . me,” I gasped. “Stabbed . . . And there’s a . . . girl . . . dying.”

The woman asked for the address. I told her. Then she started to ask more questions. Where had I been stabbed? How many people were in the house? Had anyone been shot? I ignored these queries.

“For God’s sake,
hurry
,” I said, and hung up.

I took the phone over to Tommy. I lifted his dangling right hand, opened the fingers (which were already starting to grow rigid), and placed the phone in his bloody palm. I then carefully wrapped his digits around the receiver one by one, taking care to get his gore on the dialing buttons, obliterating my prints. Then I placed his hand, still clutching the phone, in his lap.

I hurried over to Les and knelt down beside her. Incredibly, I found myself stroking her forehead.

“I’ve called the police,” I said. “They’ll be here soon, with an ambulance.” I babbled on, telling her not to worry, to hold on, speaking soothingly about the morphine, the opium they would bring—all the while marveling, on some other tier of my consciousness, about how absurd it all was, how preposterous that I should be sitting there, her head cradled in my lap now, cooing comforts to her, begging her to stay alive, my would-be victim, the person whom I had twice now plotted to kill. And somewhere else in my brain I was wondering whether I should not be hissing at her that I had the computer; that I was no longer under her control; that if she tried to squeal on me to the police about stealing Stewart’s novel, they would never believe her. I rejected that plan. What sense was there in tormenting her with all that now? It was by no means clear that she would even live to see the Burlington Police; she seemed to be sinking fast, and they had to come from many miles away.

Her eyes had closed again. I found myself recalling a moment, long buried, from our one-night stand in Washington Heights, when we were lying in my sofa bed together after the first or second or third round of our exertions. I, as usual, was going on grandiosely about my dreams of being a fiction writer, about the novels and short stories I would one day write—when she finally had enough and snapped, “So what the fuck are these
articles
of yours about, anyway?” Somehow the fact of her using the incorrect word (
articles
for
short stories
) made my heart quail with an unexpected tenderness toward her, an emotion that I had completely erased from my memory until this moment, as I sat there with her dying head on my lap.

It was time for me to go. With no traffic or speed limit to impede them, the police would be able to make the trip from Burlington to New Halcyon in half an hour. Ten minutes had already passed. I eased her head off my lap and laid it gently on the floor. She did not react. I told her that the ambulance would be there soon. I told her to hold on. I glanced over at Tommy. He had not moved; I was sure he was dead; and I was glad of it. Not the remotest flicker of remorse troubled my conscience on his behalf. Les was another story. The last thing I said to her before I ran out of there was “Good luck.” She made no reply.

I rushed down the stairs to the first floor, then remembered the penknife, which had my fingerprints on it. I ran back and retrieved it from the floor, then quit the house for good. I scurried down the driveway to my car, climbed in, and drove home.

And now I am sitting here at my desk. Janet will be home within the hour. I have disposed of my bloodstained clothes and shoes. I have gotten rid of the knife and Les’s gun. I have carefully mopped my car’s door handle, steering wheel, and seats. Not too long after I got home, I heard the sirens. I stopped what I was doing and listened as their warped wailing entered the valley from over the western hills. It sounded like a fleet of cruisers and ambulances. They must have awakened the entire town as they peeled through the village, then plunged down River Road, wobbling into silence in front of the Halberts’ place. After a silence of some minutes, a single siren started up again. It then wailed away, receding into the distance, toward Burlington. I believe that must have been the ambulance. I am telling myself that they must have found Les alive, must even now be rushing her to the hospital for resuscitation and treatment. I am telling myself that I am not, after all, a murderer.