The Horses of the Night (38 page)

“It's true. I want to tell you everything. Shall I begin? Shall I tell you about a feather I found? A feather that could make my wishes come true?”

Rick did not know what expression to wear on his face. “Things like that don't happen.”

“Maybe it's just a talent that Mother gave me, along with her feeling that the world should be a place where people can look out a window and see something beautiful. Something that makes them want to go on living.”

“You're serious,” he said, speaking almost entirely to himself, in a tone of discovery. He straightened his shoulders. “Whatever you want to tell me,” said Rick solemnly. “I'll listen.”

I felt like a comic, trailed by the spotlight, about to announce in his brisk, delightful way, the medically verified terminal illness of each member of the audience.

I told them all—the entire story, from the cold riptide to that moment we all shared, the three of us, in the chilly air-conditioned air of the hospital.

No Divine voice interrupted me. The Assembly of the Others was silent—empty.

It is not enough, at last, to confess, to share the secrets. These days that have accumulated are gone. The weight the mind feels is all the places and people who are not present. The landscape knows without knowing a thing: It is inhuman and lovely, trees and lagoons. The gardener spades, fertilizes, reseeds. We tell the story of what has happened. We think the story is true. The sky is a hole big enough for the world.

Neither of them spoke. And it might have taken a long while, or it might have been a fairly short recitation of events, of hallucinations.

I knew that as I spoke I was altering my future, because never again would I be allowed to think of myself as a normal human being. I was destined to stay in the hospital I had designed, with the person from whom I had inherited my illness.

At last I had told everything.

Dr. Ahn and Rick were diminished, stunned figures. I concluded, “All I want to know is: Did I really kill DeVere? Did I kill Blake?”

Rick was pale.

The answer was obvious. “I must have,” I said.

I felt desolate, stripped of my memory of even recent events. But it was good to know the truth.

“What should I do?” I said at last. I turned to face Dr. Ahn. “Tell me what to do.”

She did not want to speak. She was sorry, I felt, to have come here today. “I can't tell you. There is so much I can't understand—about your family, about the mind. I had such hopes as a young woman. I believed in myself.”

I said, “If I stay here in this hospital I'll be close to Nona—”

“But you won't get well,” said Rick, completing my thought. “Besides, you aren't certain that you didn't try to hurt her. It might be better to stay away from her.”

My breath was gone. Rick had used a matter-of-fact tone, but his words punished me. It was impossible to think for a few moments. Then I nodded weakly. It might be better to stay away.

Rick found himself able to smile. “Have some faith. People recover from things like this.”

Rick had always believed. He had always been sure. I envied him at that moment more than at any other time in my life.

“I have no special knowledge anymore. Ignorance is almost like a blessing.” Dr. Ahn was thoughtful. “I want you to go to Los Cerritos tonight. I know the staff there, and we can begin to help you.”

“I'll drive him,” said Rick.

Dr. Ahn did not respond. When she spoke again it was not to mention Rick driving me, and it was not to discuss any of what I had described. She said,
“Someone
killed Ty DeVere and Blake Howard.”

“Perhaps they were suicides after all,” said Rick.

“And it's possible,” I said, before Dr. Ahn could make any further remark, “that Nona is mistaken. Maybe no one tried to take her life here in the hospital. Maybe it was a dream.”

“Why not?” said Rick, as though someone had suggested a party.

“That would be the best hope,” said Dr. Ahn. “That it was all a waking dream, every last blow, every drop of blood.”

“You don't believe that?” I asked.

She shook her head sadly. “Valfort is sure you have done harm. I'm not.”

“Then the men killed themselves—like Peterson,” said Rick lightly.

She could not answer for awhile. “Maybe I have always wondered if there are such things as angels,” she said.

“It would be a wonderful thing if there were,” said Rick, sounding bright, tired of heavy talk, eager for some sort of action.

“Wonderful,” agreed Dr. Ahn. “But frightening.”

On my way to see Nona, to say good-bye, I stopped by the children's hospice. I felt athletic in my sweatpants and sweatshirt, and noted to myself the irony that I was coming not from the outdoors but from confinement.

I was eager to see Stuart. I thought that maybe I would have time to make him another one of my paper horses.

But his bed was empty, perfectly made up and abandoned. Every sign of Stuart's presence, his comic books, his posters, was gone. Stuart was no longer here.

I told myself: When I open my eyes I will look and I will see him.

He was not there.

Nurses were watching. Keep an eye on Stratton Fields, they must have been cautioned. But because my family had built so much of the hospital, they would keep their distance, hover, follow me wherever I went, surrounding me with a careful silence.

Not here.

Stuart is gone.

Rick and Barry followed me, giving me a few moments with Nona. I leaned over her bed. What could I tell her?

Don't leave her, I told myself. Stay here with her, where you belong.

I kissed her lightly so she might not stir from her sleep.

She opened her eyes. For a moment she looked fearful. Then relief flushed her features. “I'm so glad it's you,” she said.

There was no way I could bring myself to tell her that we had lost Stuart. We would grieve together someday, when she was strong.

Her eyes were beautiful. I wanted to stay just as I was, gazing at her. “Who else would it be?”

Her voice was weak but distinct. “I remember my dream,” she said at last.

I waited for her to speak again.

“Rick,” she said. “I'm afraid of Rick.”

Part Six

60

I wanted my brother at home, in the house that belonged to my family. I wanted to be in the rooms that had heard my father's voice, felt the whisper of my mother's step.

There were questions I needed to ask him, and there was something I needed to destroy.

I had lost track of time. It was night, and I was surprised at the darkness. We left the hospital, and I felt like someone recovering a land he had lost, a survivor of a one-man voyage. The parking lot was not especially remarkable, but it looked, with its red lights and carefully delineated parking spaces, like a fragment of a beautiful world.

Ask him, I told myself. Ask him why Nona is afraid.

Something about Rick. Something about Rick isn't right. Something about Rick has never been right. Has it?

“Hurry up,” said Rick, but I was amazed at the sounds of the darkness. I gazed around at the buildings, the sky. A car started. Someone laughed. People were talking, their voices far away.

I reminded myself that I couldn't leave Nona here. Something bad would happen to her.

Underfoot was the solid, gritty asphalt. I would have to call Renman. I would have to tell him that his experiment had worked. No doubt he had known that I would eventually end up with the same constellation of symptoms as my mother. Renman must have figured that I would do no harm, given a chance to spin out some of my own plans. The wise, careful man had won. I could bear him no malice. I had enjoyed my hours in the light.

“We're not driving straight there,” I said. “There's something I have to do.” It had nothing to do with Renman, or with packing one of my bags for a long stay away from home.

“Dr. Ahn's meeting with Dr. Skeat. They'll be waiting.”

“I insist.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, but his determination was flickering.

“It will take just a few minutes.”

No response.

“A few minutes. That's all.”

Rick examined the keys in his hands. He looked around at the cars, the obscure figures of passing people on the sidewalk.

“I don't like it,” he said after a long moment. The stiff, distorted conical shapes of the junipers, the winking red brake lights of passing cars, all seemed to trouble him.

An older brother has a lingering, minor sort of authority. “What harm can I do?”

We both seemed to find that amusing, in a grim way. Rick gave a toss of his shoulders, as though to say: murder, suicide. Nothing much.

He started the car. “I can have clothes shipped up to you. Books, tapes. You name it.”

“Home first. Please.”

“It's a bad idea.” There was, however, no force in his words.

I thanked him, but the way he drove troubled me, wrenching the Alfa from one lane to another, glancing into his rearview mirror. At one point I asked him to slow down, and he did not seem to hear me.

It is an ancient irony, which Milton illuminated perhaps without fully understanding it himself: in the old story Adam fell because he loved Eve, because he was enough like God to be unable to forget his heart's companion.

I found the feather in the calfskin Milton. It left an imprint on the page, and the blood left a trace of black dirt.

It was a dim object, the blood filling its shaft. I found some matches in a drawer. A feather burns quickly, with the same frizzled swiftness with which hair will be consumed. I needed a second match to reignite it, but soon even the blood, which smoldered and gave off smoke, was gone, leaving a waxy residue of ash in the ashtray, and a sultry, clinging smell.

I put the volume carefully back into its place on the shelf.

Stratton
.

I am still here
.

I buried my face in my hands for a moment.

I didn't want her. I knew she did not exist. She had nothing to do with reality, with the land of day and night. The flickering image was there, to one side, that figure I had begun to realize was a symptom, a lapse of consciousness rather than a presence.

She had nothing to do with me. I averted my eyes, feeling the beginning of pain in my skull. Don't talk to her. Whatever you do—don't say a word.

She spoke my name again, a sound like a page turning.

She had never existed. Grab a few shirts, I ordered myself, and get out of here. I was a man sitting in the presence of a drug that had mastered him, poised, waiting for the toxin to take its grip.

She ascended into half-focus. And stood, milk-gowned, watching me, flickering, spinning. When I looked at her directly she dimmed, and when I looked away she grew sharp and bright.

“I'm finished,” I said. I had meant to say: I am finished with you.

Her voice was like wind in sails, rippling. “You have not lost us, Stratton.”

It was a struggle to remain upright. I did not answer her.

“What did you want? Your name. You wanted fame. And beyond that—nothing.”

I hurried through drawers. I packed this shirt, that notebook, feeling futile, my acts senseless, my shadow falling and flowing over the room. “I am a creature of my time,” I said.

I bit my lip. Don't. Don't talk.

“Ask, Stratton. Ask for something great.”

“Great?” I echoed the word mockingly.

Tell her to leave. Silence her. But I couldn't—that was the problem. She was proof of how sick I was.

But her words caught me.
Great
.

No, don't think, I told myself. Hurry. Leave now. My lip was raw. I whispered, “You're challenging me.”

Ask, I thought.

Why not ask?

I was excited for a moment. “I would like you to do something wonderful.”

“What is it you want?”

My emotion faded. “You won't be able to do it.”

We are real
.

I was disgusted with myself. “What are you?”

“Something beyond your grasp.”

“An angel?”

The silence pulsed around me. “You'll never understand.”

“The ghost of my sister—who died before she was born. Is that what you are?”

There was a laugh, like the rush of wind in a tree.

“All of the unborn, all the people who never had a chance to live, the shadow people who want a part to play in life.” I stopped myself. “Am I right?”

She did not answer.

“Nothing. An absence.” I took a deep breath. “You did harm.”

I was answered by the sort of silence a monument casts, a promontory, immense and dumb.

“I'm beginning to see that you can do nothing for me. The death of my adversaries, the conversation with my father, were all empty theater. It was all an effect of my imagination. And perhaps I actually killed Blake. And DeVere. With these hands.”

These hands. I knew it was the truth.

A whisper, from all around me. “Nona's return to life?”

I did not want to talk about Nona. “Valfort is a great physician. Besides, maybe you had her nearly killed, and kept her, until I almost took my life. As a game.”

The thought-voice was beautiful. “Have you lost faith in us?”

I wanted to laugh, but I felt sick. “You don't exist.”

She spoke as with the voice of a stadium, packed with voices:
You'll never understand
.

Don't listen
. “I have no interest in you. It's all in my mind.” I was panting. “You've been proving that to me, little by little, and now I'm convinced.”

“We are what you believe us to be.”

I shook with quiet laughter, but it was a furious laughter, and I ached to seize this smudge of light in my hands.

I closed my eyes. Even so I could see her radiance through my eyelids, suffused with the color of my own flesh. Was she toying with me? Or did she, in truth, have power?