She felt suddenly numb. She felt as if she would scream.
~ * ~
The elderly man had pulled around the blue Toyota, had stopped a couple of feet in front of it, and now was looking in the Toyota’s driver’s window. He knew that the woman in the front seat was dead. Her face was buried in the seat; he could see only her luxurious crown of black hair, and he could smell the lilac perfume that had been splashed all around the inside of the car. But he knew the woman was dead because her left arm—the right was beneath her—hung over the front of the seat at an odd angle, so her palm was facing him, and he thought he could see blood here and there—on her gray coat, on the floor, on the seat itself. He also knew she was dead because he had a
sense
of such things. He had watched his wife die, and his best friend; his daughter, very recently; his mother. He knew about death and how it sat so leadenly on people. There was no doubt of it. He didn’t have to reach in and check her pulse. This poor woman was dead.
He sighed. The woman wouldn’t be able to watch her grandchildren grow, if she had any; she’d never become a great-grandparent, as he was, would never be able to really appreciate what a long life can give to a person—the richness of memories and the wisdom and harmony of age, and a willingness—even an eagerness—to leave this life for something that was doubtless worlds better. All of that had been taken from her. And that, more than simply the act of violence which had been committed against her, was a real crime.
Poor woman.
The elderly man put his hand on the bottom of the open driver’s window. The metal felt very cold, icy cold. But then, everything felt cold to him these days.
He was sorry for this woman because she would grow no older. He was glad for this woman because she had left the earth behind.
He was envious of this woman.
He took his hand off the driver’s window. He went back to his car, got in, drove to his cottage three miles down Sylvan Beach Road, and called the Sheriff’s Department.
~ * ~
There were no lights illuminating the stairway looming in front of him, and David was afraid. The metal steps disappeared into darkness halfway to the second floor.
He put his hand tentatively on the wood banister. It was warm to the touch, as if other hands had been on it very recently.
David said to the thin man, "I’m sorry. I can’t go up there."
The man, standing just behind him, asked, "Something’s preventing you from going up there?"
David nodded. "My fear."
The man, surprising David, said nothing.
"You don’t understand fear, do you?" David asked, his gaze still on the dark stairway above him.
"I don’t understand the word," the man answered, and started to elaborate, when David interrupted.
"Then you don’t understand the concept." He took his hand off the banister, backed up a step, toward the thin man, felt the man back away, too. "I can see that there is much that survives death," David said. "Language, for instance." He turned, stared into the darkness that was the man’s face. It was framed by the light coming in the open door just behind him. "So if you don’t understand the word
fear
, then the concept died with you." He stepped quickly around the man and headed for the doorway. "I’m sorry. I can’t talk with you. This isn’t why I came here." He closed his eyes against a sudden onslaught of pain. "This isn’t at all why I came here."
The thin man watched David leave the building and, when David was down the street a bit, went to the doorway and called after him, "You’ll want a place to be when the light is gone. Being on these streets when darkness comes is foolhardy indeed."
David stopped walking.
He looked back.
For an instant, a breath, he saw the man’s face. Wide nose, large, closely set eyes,
underslung
jaw. Then it was lost in shadow again and David easily convinced himself that he had seen nothing more than his own mental construction of the man’s face.
David shouted, "I’ll take that chance."
"I’m sorry?" The man said.
"I said I’ll take my chances."
"Chances? There are none," the man shouted.
"Good," David said, misunderstanding him, and went on his way in search of his sister, Anne, though he had no idea where to begin.
~ * ~
In the room in the house without doors, a woman wept. She looked to be in her early sixties, heavyset, black-haired. Her weeping was soft and unself-conscious. While she wept she also smiled. Eventually, her smile changed to laughter and her weeping grew more intense, so she was laughing and crying at the same time.
The woman was new to this place. She had come into the house, and into the room, because it was familiar, as were weeping and laughter, and she desperately needed the familiar.
Eventually, her weeping and laughing subsided.
Karen Duffy could not ignore the fact of the pages that had been squirreled away in a copy of Christian’s first novel, nor the fact of his letter hidden in another copy of the same novel. Certainly there had to be more. Certainly this man she had professed to love was hiding something. Clearly it was not, as she had first thought, something heinous. (How could it be? She knew him well enough to know that he was incapable of anything more than simple anger or rudeness.) Clearly it was something mundane—a love affair that had probably ended long ago, when it would have been none of her business, anyway.
The fact that Anne Case had been brutally murdered had no bearing on her relationship with Christian.
Clear enough.
She did not read the poems and letters she found hidden around the house, in other copies of Christian’s nine books. She merely scanned a few lines of each poem or letter, and then set it down—poems here, letters there.
She would read everything thoroughly later. And maybe then she’d be able to make sense of it all.
~ * ~
"His name is David Case," Christian said to the woman gardening. He had pulled his car to the side of the road and was talking to the woman from the driver’s seat, his window rolled down. "And I know he has a cottage around here somewhere. I’ve been there, in fact." Christian gave her an embarrassed grin. "But that was some time ago, and for the life of me I can’t remember—"
"I know of no one named Case," the woman said. She was thin and square-faced; she wore a blue spring jacket and gray pants, and as she talked to him, she sat on her haunches and looked at what she was doing—removing rocks from her garden—rather than at Christian. Her tone was brusque. "And I know most of the people who live on Sylvan Beach."
Christian grinned thinly at her. "Thanks, anyway," he said, and drove off.
Why couldn’t he remember where David’s cottage was? he wondered. He’d been there not too long ago. Five years. But all he could remember of it was the living room, which was narrow and oblong and claustrophobic; the kitchen, not much larger than a phone booth—it was alive with fat brown spiders—and the rocky, precipitous lakefront. He couldn’t remember the cottage’s facade; perhaps it was much like most of the cottages here—small and squat and pleasantly painted beige or light blue or yellow.
Green.
It was green.
He remembered suddenly.
Green. White shutters.
Or white with green shutters.
He slowed the Buick around a hard curve. Cattails crowded the narrow road on either side.
He pulled the car left, into a narrow lane bordered on both sides by swamp. He stopped fifty feet down the lane. The car was not easily seen here by another car coming from either direction.
~ * ~
David thought of calling his sister’s name. In this magical place, perhaps she would hear him no matter where she might be, even if she were miles away, thousands of miles away. They would be connected by their love for each other; she would hear him, and they would be reunited, however briefly.
Long enough, clearly, for his questions to be answered.
Why had she been murdered?
Had she found peace and happiness at last? Who was her murderer?
He opened his mouth to call to her. He stayed silent.
This place wasn’t magical at all, was it? He had
expected
that it would be magical. He had expected that it would be a land of dreams. But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t
heaven
.
Heaven
was the place he had constructed in his own fantasies, the place that legend had built up for him over the years he had been alive on earth.
This wasn’t heaven.
This was . . .
Something in between.
There were people around him on the narrow street. They were moving slowly. Some were talking to themselves or to people walking with them. Their talk was, variously, animated, quiet, loud; what he could hear of the conversations going on made little sense—there were references to animals, to cold, to summer and, several times, to the darkness, and, once, to "the small creatures of the darkness." But he could not hear whole sentences. He caught snippets of sentences, phrases out of context.
Some of the people apparently turned their heads his way, but he could see no faces. A man appeared to give David a friendly nod and David nodded back, thinking how ludicrous the exchange was—two faceless creatures nodding to one another.
The people around him were dressed in varying ways (though it seemed to make little difference how one was dressed; the air was neither warm nor cold; it was much like water that has been heated to body temperature). A few wore what looked like cold-weather clothes—several layers of loose clothing, or clothes that looked like coats without buttons or pockets—and others wore very little. Short pants. Long sleeveless shirts. What looked like loose summer dresses made of a very thin cloth.
The bodies he saw—those that were not dressed in cold-weather clothes—were the bodies of men and women and children, and they were invariably healthy looking and nicely developed. Genitalia and sexual parts were much in evidence; penises peeked out from beneath short pants, breasts from the generous openings at the sides of shirts; bottoms twinkled in the bright daylight from beneath long shirts which moved up and down in time with walking.
David thought,
There is no shame here
. He didn’t like the thought, didn’t like himself for thinking it.
Why should there be shame
here
, of all places?
"You have to come back with me," David heard.
He whirled. The man who had brought him to this city was behind him. For a moment, half a breath, David saw his face. Wide nose. Large eyes. Dark brown skin.
David said, "What I
have
to do is find my sister."
The darkness that was the thin man’s face moved left and right. "I don’t understand that.
Sister
." A pause. "Darkness will come. You’ll want to be inside for it. If you’re not inside then I can’t be responsible for the consequences, believe me—"
"When?" David cut in.
"When?" the man asked.
"When does the darkness come?"
"I don’t understand that either," the man said. "
When
."
"Within the hour?" David explained. "In a few minutes? It’s very simple." He could feel his temper flaring. "When does the damned
darkness
come?" He looked up, toward the sun.