Fortnight of Fear (10 page)

I heard murmurings from the bedroom. The door was slightly ajar, and I could see sunlight and pale blue carpet. The sheets rustled. Jill said, “You're marvelous; you're magic; if only I'd known.”

God
, I thought,
I shouldn't have come. This is almost more than I can stand. And what am I going to look like if they discover me? A creeping cuckold; a jealous husband who couldn't satisfy his wife
.

“Promise me,” said Jill. “Promise me you'll never leave me.”

The man said something indistinct.

“All right,” Jill replied, with tart satisfaction. “In that case – I'll get the champagne out of the icebox, and we'll –”

I hadn't realized, listening to her talking, that she had climbed out of bed, and crossed the bedroom floor. She opened the door, naked, flushed in the face, and caught me, standing in the hall.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. The color emptied out of her face like ink spilled from a bottle.

Without a word, I pushed past her, and threw open the bedroom door.

“All right, you bastard!” I roared, in a voice so hoarse
that it was almost insane. “Get up, and get dressed, and get the fuck out!”

The man on the bed turned, and stared at me; and then I froze.

He was very pale. He was almost gray. His eyes had a stony far-away look that was more like a statue than a man. He was naked, his gray penis still glistened from sex. His chest was bound tightly with wide white bandages.

“Robbie,” I whispered.

He drew the sheet right up to his neck, but he didn't take his eyes away from me once.

“
Robbie?
” I repeated.

“That's right,” he nodded. “I was hoping you wouldn't find out.”

When he spoke, his words came out in a labored whisper.
Massive chest injuries
, that's what the doctors had told me.
He didn't feel a thing
.

I managed one mechanical step forward. Robbie continued to stare at me. He was dead; and yet here he was, staring at me. I had never been so frightened of anything in my entire life.

“What happened?” I asked him. “They told us you were killed instantly. That's what the doctors said. Don't worry, he didn't feel a thing. He was killed instantly.”

Robbie managed a tight, reflective smile. “It's the words, George. They work!”

“Words?” I demanded. “What words?”

“Don't you remember?
Immortooty, immortaty, ever, ever after
. I saw the truck coming toward me and I shouted them out. The next thing I knew, it was dark, and I was buried alive.”

He raised his hand, and turned it this way and that, frowning at it, as if it didn't really belong to him. “I don't know, maybe ‘alive' is the wrong word. Immortal, sure. I'm immortal. I'm going to live for ever, whatever that means.”

“You got out of your casket?” I asked him, in disbelief. “It was solid Cuban mahogany.”

“The one you paid for might have been solid Cuban mahogany. The one I kicked my way out of was pine, tacked together with two-inch nails.” He gave me a grim smile. “You should sue your mortician. Or then again, maybe you shouldn't.”

“Jesus.” I was trembling. I couldn't believe it was him. But it was really him. My own brother, gray-faced and dead, but still alive.

“Jill!” I shouted. “Jill!”

Jill came back into the room, wrapped in a red toweling robe.

“Why didn't you tell me?” I asked her, in a whisper, although I couldn't stop myself from staring at Robbie. He remained where he was, wrapped in his sheet, his eyes fixed on me with an expression that was as cold as glass. God Almighty, he
looked
dead, he
looked
like a corpse. How could Jill have –?

“I love him,” Jill told me, her voice small and quiet.

“You love him?” I quaked. “Jill, he's dead!”

“I love him,” she repeated.

“I love him, too, for Christ's sake!” I screamed at her. “I love him, too! But he's dead, Jill! He's dead!”

I snatched hold of her wrist but she yanked herself angrily away from me. “He's not dead!” she shrieked. “He's not! He makes love to me! How can he be dead?”

“How the hell should I know? Because of a rhyme, because of a wish! Because of who knows what! But the doctors said he was dead and they buried him, and he's
dead
, Jill!”

Robbie slowly drew back the sheet from the bed, and eased himself up. His skin was almost translucent, like dirty wax. From the bandages around his chest, I could hear a whining inhalation and exhalation. The scaffolding poles had penetrated his lungs; he hadn't stood a chance.

“I dug my way out of the soil with my bare hands,” he told me; and there was a certain kind of terrible pride in his voice. “I rose out of the earth at three o'clock in the morning, filthy with clay. Then I walked all the way to the city.
Walked!
Do you know how difficult that is, how far that is? And then I called Jill from a public telephone in Brooklyn; and she came to rescue me.”

“I remember the night,” I told him.

He came up close. He exuded a strange, elusive smell; not of decomposition, but of some preservative chemical. It suddenly occurred to me that embalming fluid must be running through his veins, instead of blood. He was my brother; I had loved him when he was alive. But I knew with complete certainty now that he was dead; and I loved him no longer.

Jill whispered, “You won't tell, will you? You won't tell anybody?”

For a very long moment I couldn't think what to do. Jill and Robbie watched me without saying a word, as if I were a hostile outsider who had deliberately set out to interfere, and to destroy their lives.

But at last I grinned, and nodded, and said to Robbie, “You're back, then! You're really back! It's a miracle!”

He smiled lopsidedly, as if his mouth were anesthetized. “I knew you'd understand. Jill said you never would; but I said bull. You always did, didn't you? You son-of-a-gun.”

He rested his hand on my shoulder; his dead gray hand; and I felt the bile rise up in my throat. But I had already decided what I was going to do, and if I had betrayed any sign of disgust, I would have ruined it.

“Come on through to the kitchen,” I told him. “I could use a beer after this. Maybe a glass of wine.”

“There's some champagne in the icebox,” said Jill. “I was just going to get it.”

“Well, why not let's open it together,” I suggested.
“Why not let's celebrate. It isn't every day that your brother comes back from the dead.”

Jill dragged the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around Robbie like a toga. Then they followed me into the small green-tiled kitchen. I opened up the icebox, took out the bottle of champagne, and offered it to Robbie.

“Here, you were always better at opening up bottles of wine than I was.”

He took it, but looked at me seriously. “I don't know. I'm not sure I've got the strength any more. I'm alive, you know, but it's kind of
different
.”

“You can make love,” I retorted, dangerously close to losing my temper. “You should be able to open a bottle of champagne.”

His breath whined in and out of his bandages. I watched him closely. There was doubt on his face; as if he suspected that I was somehow setting him up, but he couldn't work out how.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Jill coaxed him.

I turned around and opened one of the kitchen drawers. String, skewers, nutmeg grater. “Yes, come on, Robbie. You always were a genius at parties.”

I opened the next drawer. Tea-towels. Jill frowned and said, “What are you looking for?”

Robbie began to unwind the wire muzzle around the champagne cork. “My fingers feel kind of
numb
, you know? It's hard to describe.”

I opened a third drawer, trying to do it nonchalantly. Knives.

Jill knew instantaneously what I was going to do. Maybe it was genuine intuition. Maybe it was nothing more than heightened fear. But I turned around so casually that she didn't see the nine-inch Sabatier carving-knife in my hand, she was looking at my eyes; and it had penetrated Robbie's bandages right up to the hilt before she understood that I meant to kill him. I meant to
kill
him. He was my brother.

The champagne bottle smashed on the floor in an explosion of glass and foam. Jill screamed but Robbie said nothing at all. He turned to me, and grasped my shoulder, and there was something in his eyes which was half panic and half relief. I pulled the knife downwards and it cut through his flesh as if it were over-ripe avocado; soft, slippery, no resistance.

“Oh, God,” he breathed. His gray intestines came pouring out from underneath his toga, and on to the broken glass. “Oh God, get it over with.”

“No!” screamed Jill; but I stared at her furiously and shouted, “You want him to live for ever? He's my brother! You want him to live for
ever
?”

She hesitated for a second, then she pushed her way out of the kitchen, and I heard her retching in the toilet. Robbie was on his knees, his arms by his sides, making no attempt to pick up his heavy kilt of guts.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Get it over with.”

I was shaking so much that I could hardly hold the knife. He tilted his head back, passive and quiet, his eyes still open, and like a man in a slowly-moving nightmare I cut his throat from one side to the other; so deeply that the knife-blade wedged between his vertebrae.

There was no blood. He collapsed backward on to the floor, shuddering slightly. Then the unnatural life that had illuminated his eyes faded away, and it was clear that he was truly dead.

Jill appeared in the doorway. Her face was completely white, as if she had covered herself in rice powder. “What have you done?” she whispered.

I stood up. “I don't know. I'm not sure. We'll have to bury him.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He's still alive … we could bring him back to life again.”

“Jill –” I began, moving toward her; but she screamed, “Don't touch me! You've killed him! Don't touch me!”

I tried to snatch at her wrist, but she pulled herself away, and ran for the door.

“Jill! Jill, listen!”

She was out in the corridor before I could stop her, and running toward the elevator. The elevator doors opened and the Italian-looking man stepped out, looking surprised. Jill pushed her way into the elevator and hammered wildly at the buttons.

“No!” she screamed. “No!”

I went after her, but the Italian-looking man deliberately blocked my way.

“That's my wife!” I yelled at him. “Get out of my goddamned way!”

“Come on, friend, give her some breathing-space,” the man told me, and pushed me in the chest with the flat of his hand. Desperately, I saw the elevator doors close and Jill disappear.

“For God's sake,” I snarled at the man. “You don't know what you've done!”

I shoved my way past him and hurtled down the stairs, three stairs at a time, until I reached the lobby. The doorman said, “Hey, man, what's going on?” and caught at my arm.

He delayed me for only a second; but it was a second too long. The swing doors were just closing and Jill was already halfway across the sidewalk, running into Central Park South.

“Jill!” I shouted at her. She couldn't possibly have heard me. She didn't even hear the cab that hit her as she crossed the road, and sent her hurtling over its roof, her arms spread wide as if she were trying to fly. I pushed open the swing doors and I heard her fall. I heard screams and traffic and the screeching of brakes. Then I didn't hear anything, either.

It was a strange and grisly task, removing Robbie's body
from Willey's apartment. But there was no blood, no evidence of murder, and nobody would report him missing. I buried him deep in the woods beyond White Plains, in a place where we used to play when we were boys.

We buried Jill a week later, on a warm sunny day when the whole world seemed to be coming to life. Her mother wouldn't stop sobbing. Her father wouldn't speak to me. The police report had exonerated me from any possible blame, but grief knows no logic.

I took two weeks away from work after the funeral and went to stay at a friend's house in the Hamptons, and got drunk most of the time. I was still in shock; and I didn't know how long it was going to take me to get over it.

Down on the seashore, with the gulls circling all around me, I suppose I found some kind of unsteady peace of mind. I returned to the city on a dark threatening Thursday afternoon. I felt exhausted and hung-over, and I planned to spend the weekend quietly relaxing before returning to work on Monday. Maybe I would go to the zoo. Jill had always liked going to the zoo, more to look at the people than the animals.

I unlocked the door of my apartment and tossed my bag into the hallway. Then I went through to the kitchen and took a bottle of cold Chablis out of the icebox. Hair of the dog, I thought to myself. I switched on the television just in time to see the end credits of
As The World Turns
. I poured myself some wine; and then, whistling, went through to the bedroom.

I said, “Oh Christ,” and dropped my full glass of wine on to my foot.

She was lying on top of the comforter naked, not smiling, but her thighs provocatively apart. Her skin had a grayish-blue sheen, as if it would be greasy to touch, but it wasn't decayed. Her hair was brushed and her lips were painted red and there was purple eye-shadow over her eyes.

“Jill?” I breathed. I felt for one implosive instant that I was going mad.

“I used the spare key from the crack in the skirting,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if her chest were crushed. I had seen her hurtling over the taxi, I had seen her fall.

“You said the words,” I told her, dully. “You said the words.”