Errantry: Strange Stories (9 page)

He signed off on the final sheaf of contracts and returned them to the Realtor. “You’re in Brooklyn now?” she asked, turning back toward the house.

“Yes. Green Park. A colleague of mine is in Singapore for a few months, he’s letting me stay there till I get my bearings.”

“Well, good luck. I’ll be in touch soon.” She opened the door of her Prius and hesitated. “I know how hard this is for you. I lost my father two years ago. Nothing helps, really.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Thanks. I know.”

He’d spent the last five months cycling through wordless, imageless night terrors from which he awoke gasping; dreams in which Anthea lay beside him, breathing softly then smiling as he touched her face; nightmares in which the neuroelectrical storm that had killed her raged inside his own head, a flaring nova that engulfed the world around him and left him floating in an endless black space, the stars expiring one by one as he drifted past them.

He knew that grief had no target demographic, that all around him versions of this cosmic reshuffling took place every day. He and Anthea had their own shared experience years before, when they had lost their first and only daughter to sudden infant death syndrome. They were both in their late thirties at the time. They never tried to have another child, on their own or through adoption. It was as though some psychic house fire had consumed them both: it was a year before Jeffrey could enter the room that had been Julia’s, and for months after her death neither he nor Anthea could bear to sit at the dining table and finish a meal together, or sleep in the same bed. The thought of being that close to another human being, of having one’s hand or foot graze another’s and wake however fleetingly to the realisation that this too could be lost—it left both of them with a terror that they had never been able to articulate, even to each other.

Now as then, he kept busy with work at his office in the city, and dutifully accepted invitations for lunch and dinner there and in New Canaan. Nights were a prolonged torment: he was haunted by the realisation that Anthea been extinguished, a spent match pinched between one’s fingers. He thought of Houdini, arch-rationalist of another century, who desired proof of a spirit world he desperately wanted to believe in. Jeffrey believed in nothing, yet if there had been a drug to twist his neurons into some synaptic impersonation of faith, he would have taken it.

For the past month he’d devoted most of his time to packing up the house, donating Anthea’s clothes to various charity shops, deciding what to store and what to sell, what to divvy up among nieces and nephews, Anthea’s sister, a few close friends. Throughout he experienced grief as a sort of low-grade flu, a persistent, inescapable ache that suffused not just his thoughts but his bones and tendons: a throbbing in his temples, black sparks that distorted his vision; an acrid chemical taste in the back of his throat, as though he’d bitten into one of the pills his doctor had given him to help him sleep.

He watched as the Realtor drove off soundlessly, returned to the garage and transferred the plastic bin of Christmas lights into his own car, to drop off at a neighbour’s the following weekend. He put the tin box with the letters on the seat beside him. As he pulled out of the driveway, it began to snow.

That night, he sat at the dining table in the Brooklyn loft and opened the candy tin. Inside were five letters, each bearing the same stamp: RETURN TO SENDER. At the bottom of the tin was a locket on a chain, cheap gold-coloured metal and chipped red enamel circled by tiny fake pearls. He opened it: it was empty. He examined it for an engraved inscription, initials, a name, but there was nothing. He set it aside and turned to the letters.

All were postmarked 1971—February, March, April, July, end of August—all addressed to the same person at the same address, carefully spelled out in Anthea’s swooping, schoolgirl’s hand.

Mr. Robert Bennington,

Golovenna Farm,

Padwithiel,

Cornwall

Love letters? He didn’t recognise the name Robert Bennington. Anthea would have been thirteen in February; her birthday was in May. He moved the envelopes across the table, as though performing a card trick. His heart pounded, which was ridiculous. He and Anthea had told each other about everything—three-ways at university, coke-fuelled orgies during the 1980s, affairs and flirtations throughout their marriage.

None of that mattered now; little of it had mattered then. Still, his hands shook as he opened the first envelope. A single sheet of onionskin was inside. He unfolded it gingerly and smoothed it on the table.

His wife’s handwriting hadn’t changed much in forty years. The same cramped cursive, each
i
so heavily dotted in black ink that the pen had almost poked through the thin paper. Anthea had been English, born and raised in North London. They’d met at the University of London, where they were both studying, and moved to New Canaan after they’d married. It was an area that Anthea had often said reminded her of the English countryside, though Jeffrey had never ventured outside London, other than a few excursions to Kent and Brighton. Where was Padwithiel?

21 February, 1971

Dear Mr. Bennington,

My name is Anthea Ryson . . .

And would a thirteen-year-old girl address her boyfriend as ‘Mr.,’ even forty years ago?

. . . I am thirteen years old and live in London. Last year my friend Evelyn let me read
Still the Seasons
for the first time and since then I have read it two more times, also
Black Clouds Over Bragmoor
and
The Second Sun
. They are my favourite books! I keep looking for more but the library here doesn’t have them. I have asked and they said I should try the shops but that is expensive. My teacher said that sometimes you come to schools and speak, I hope some day you’ll come to Islington Day School. Are you writing more books about Tisha and the great Battle? I hope so, please write back! My address is 42 Highbury Fields, London NW1.

Very truly yours,

Anthea Ryson

Jeffrey set aside the letter and gazed at the remaining four envelopes.
What a prick
, he thought. He never even wrote her back. He turned to his laptop and googled Robert Bennington.

Robert Bennington (1932– ), British author of a popular series of children’s fantasy novels published during the 1960s known as
The Sun Battles
. Bennington’s books rode the literary tidal wave generated by J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, but his commercial and critical standing were irrevocably shaken in the late 1990s, when he became the centre of a drawn-out court case involving charges of paedophilia and sexual assault, with accusations lodged against him by several girl fans, now adults. One of the alleged victims later changed her account, and the case was eventually dismissed amidst much controversy by child advocates and women’s rights groups. Bennington’s reputation never recovered: school libraries refused to keep his books on their shelves. All of his novels are now out of print, although digital editions (illegal) can be found, along with used copies of the four books in the
Battles
sequence . . .

Jeffrey’s neck prickled. The court case didn’t ring a bell, but the books did. Anthea had thrust one upon him shortly after they first met.

“These were my
favourites
.” She rolled over in bed and pulled a yellowed paperback from a shelf crowded with textbooks and Penguin editions of the mystery novels she loved. “I must have read this twenty times.”

“Twenty?” Jeffrey raised an eyebrow.

“Well, maybe seven. A
lot
. Did you ever read them?”

“I never even heard of them.”

“You have to read it. Right now.” She nudged him with her bare foot. “You can’t leave here till you do.”

“Who says I want to leave?” He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away.

“Uh-uh. Not till you read it. I’m serious!”

So he’d read it, staying up till 3:00 a.m., intermittently dozing off before waking with a start to pick up the book again.

“It gave me bad dreams,” he said as grey morning light leaked through the narrow window of Anthea’s flat. “I don’t like it.”

“I know.” Anthea laughed. “That’s what I liked about them—they always made me feel sort of sick.”

Jeffrey shook his head adamantly. “I don’t like it,” he repeated.

Anthea frowned, finally shrugged, picked up the book and dropped it onto the floor. “Well, nobody’s perfect,” she said, and rolled on top of him.

A year or so later he did read
Still the Seasons,
when a virus kept him in bed for several days and Anthea was caught up with research at the British Library. The book unsettled him deeply. There were no monsters
per se
, no dragons or Nazgûl or witches. Just two sets of cousins, two boys and two girls, trapped in a portal between one of those grim post-war English cities, Manchester or Birmingham, and a magical land that wasn’t really magical at all but even bleaker and more threatening than the council flats where the children lived.

Jeffrey remembered unseen hands tapping at a window, and one of the boys fighting off something invisible that crawled under the bedcovers and attacked in a flapping wave of sheets and blankets. Worst of all was the last chapter, which he read late one night and could never recall clearly, save for the vague, enveloping dread it engendered, something he had never encountered before or since.

Anthea had been right—the book had a weirdly visceral power, more like the effect of a low-budget, black-and-white horror movie than a children’s fantasy novel. How many of those grown-up kids now knew their hero had been a paedophile?

Jeffrey spent a half-hour scanning articles on Bennington’s trial, none of them very informative. It had happened over a decade ago; since then there’d been a few dozen blog posts, pretty equally divided between
Whatever happened to . . .?
and excoriations by women who themselves had been sexually abused, though not by Bennington.

He couldn’t imagine that had happened to Anthea. She’d certainly never mentioned it, and she’d always been dismissive, even slightly callous, about friends who underwent counselling or psychotherapy for childhood traumas. As for the books themselves, he didn’t recall seeing them when he’d sorted through their shelves to pack everything up. Probably they’d been donated to a library book sale years ago, if they’d even made the crossing from London.

He picked up the second envelope. It was postmarked ‘March 18, 1971’. He opened it and withdrew a sheet of lined paper torn from a school notebook.

Dear Rob,

Well, we all got back on the train, Evelyn was in a lot of trouble for being out all night and of course we couldn’t tell her aunt why, her mother said she can’t talk to me on the phone but I see her at school anyway so it doesn’t matter. I still can’t believe it all happened. Evelyn’s mother said she was going to call my mother and Moira’s but so far she didn’t. Thank you so much for talking to us. You signed Evelyn’s book but you forgot to sign mine. Next time!!!

Yours sincerely your friend,

Anthea

Jeffrey felt a flash of cold through his chest.
Dear Rob, I still can’t believe it all happened
. He quickly opened the remaining envelopes, read first one then the next and finally the last.

12 April 1971

Dear Rob,

Maybe I wrote down your address wrong because the last letter I sent was returned. But I asked Moira and she had the same address and she said her letter wasn’t returned. Evelyn didn’t write yet but says she will. It was such a really, really great time to see you! Thank you again for the books, I thanked you in the last letter but thank you again. I hope you’ll write back this time, we still want to come again on holiday in July! I can’t believe it was exactly one month ago we were there.

Your friend,

Anthea Ryson

July 20, 1971

Dear Rob,

Well I still haven’t heard from you so I guess you’re mad maybe or just forgot about me, ha ha. School is out now and I was wondering if you still wanted us to come and stay? Evelyn says we never could and her aunt would tell her mother but we could hitch-hike, also Evelyn’s brother Martin has a caravan and he and his girlfriend are going to Wales for a festival and we thought they might give us a ride partway, he said maybe they would. Then we could hitch-hike the rest. The big news is Moira ran away from home and they called the POLICE. Evelyn said she went without us to see you and she’s really mad. Moira’s boyfriend Peter is mad too.

If she is there with you is it okay if I come too? I could come alone without Evelyn, her mother is a BITCH.

Please please write!

Anthea (Ryson)

Dear Rob,

I hate you. I wrote FIVE LETTERS including this one and I know it is the RIGHT address. I think Moira went to your house without us. FUCK YOU Tell her I hate her too and so does Evelyn. We never told anyone if she says we did she is a LIAR.

FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

Where a signature should have been, the page was ripped and blotched with blue ink—Anthea had scribbled something so many times the pen tore through the lined paper. Unlike the other four, this sheet was badly crumpled, as though she’d thrown it away then retrieved it. Jeffrey glanced at the envelope. The postmark read ‘August 28’. She’d gone back to school for the fall term, and presumably that had been the end of it.

Except, perhaps, for Moira, whoever she was. Evelyn would be Evelyn Thurlow, Anthea’s closest friend from her school days in Islington. Jeffrey had met her several times while at university, and Evelyn had stayed with them for a weekend in the early 1990s, when she was attending a conference in Manhattan. She was a flight-test engineer for a British defence contractor, living outside Cheltenham; she and Anthea would have hour-long conversations on their birthdays, planning a dream vacation together to someplace warm—Greece or Turkey or the Caribbean.

Jeffrey had emailed her about Anthea’s death, and they had spoken on the phone—Evelyn wanted to fly over for the funeral but was on deadline for a major government contract and couldn’t take the time off.