But there was no sun. There was only white light, and an ever-changing sky.
"Where’s the sun?" he asked.
The thin man said that he did not understand this either.
"The
sun
,
goddammit
!" David shouted. He grabbed the man’s shirt collar, drew the man close. "The
sun
. It’s part of the damned
solar system
, which is part of the damned
galaxy
, which is part of the damned
universe
!"
"I don’t know," the man said without emotion. His breath smelled strongly of onions. "Perhaps we could talk about it. I would very much like to talk about it. I have things to show you . . ." The man stopped talking in midsentence.
Around them, the light was quickly beginning to fade.
~ * ~
Did she have them all? wondered Karen Duffy. All the poems and letters (unfinished letters) and little, odd pieces of fiction (
were
they fiction?). She had looked everywhere, in all of the books that Christian himself had written, and in most of the other books, too. She had found that he had hidden nothing in the other books. These unfinished letters he had written and the things that Anne Case had written were very personal, so he had chosen a very personal hiding place for them. His own books.
But wasn’t he afraid that a visitor—her, for instance?—would find them?
Or had he somehow wanted them to be found?
She had the poems and the fiction in one pile, the letters in another, on a coffee table in front of her. The piles were high—almost thirty pages of letters, she guessed, perhaps thirty or forty pages of poems and fiction (if it was fiction).
She’d unfolded them, laid them out neatly, and now she was looking bemusedly at them, finding interest, for the moment, only in the ink Christian had used—black fountain pen—and in the small, meticulous hand that Anne used. Nothing was typed, and that didn’t surprise Karen. After ten books, Christian still did not use a typewriter for his first drafts. He always wrote them in longhand. "It’s closer to the blood and sinew," he had told her.
She picked up one of Anne’s poems and started reading.
~ * ~
"Very sturdy-looking man," the woman said to Fred Collins. She’d been jogging on the street in front of Anne’s house, and Collins, taking a chance, had stopped her to ask if she jogged there often. Yes, she had told him. She jogged there practically every day, and every evening, too. She lived only a mile away, on Hyacinth Crescent. She jogged five miles a day, up Hyacinth Crescent—a half mile—to Forest Drive, to Poplar Ridge—another mile—and finally here, to Troy Road. Collins then had identified himself, explained his purpose for being at the house, asked if she had ever seen anything unusual as she jogged past. She didn’t know what he meant by unusual, she said; perhaps he meant had she seen any men coming and going from the house. She had. She remembered one man in particular. "A stocky man. Square-faced. Not really good-looking so much as sturdy-looking. A very sturdy-looking man. Very . . . mannish-looking, if you follow me."
"And you say that you saw no one else but this man?" Collins asked now.
She shook her head. "I didn’t say that. There
was
another man. A young man. But I saw him only once. A month or so before the murder, I think."
"Could you describe him?"
She nodded. "He was young, as I said. Average height. Average build." She paused. "Rather pale, I remember. Almost unhealthy-looking."
Brian Fisher
, Collins realized. The woman was clearly describing Brian Fisher, whom David Case had said had been Anne’s lover, and who had probably been at the house often.
But who was the other man? The stocky, mannish-looking one?
"Do you remember the car that the stocky man was driving?" Collins asked.
She shook her head. "I’m not good with cars. It was gray. Silver. Monotone, anyway. A big car, I think."
"But you couldn’t say what make?"
"I’m sorry, no."
~ * ~
The tall, thin man was running. David was running behind him. David felt the brick street hit the soles of his feet and found it oddly reassuring. As he ran, he found the caress of air moving over his face reassuring, too. The dull ache in his side, his lungs straining for oxygen, the sound of his own voice—"Where are we going? Why are we running?"—all of it was oddly reassuring, oddly comforting.
And yet he could sense fear all around him. From the man ahead. From within the houses, where the people walking had retreated when the light had begun to fade.
Fear?
he wondered.
Was it fear? Were they—the people in the houses, the man running—afraid?
Of what?
"Why are we running, dammit?"
"The darkness," the man called back, and David remembered a phrase he had heard very recently—
the small creatures of darkness
. His brain flashed a quick and awful picture of thousands of rodent-like animals moving like oil over the brick streets, devouring everything in their path.
The small creatures of darkness
.
Rats. A
plague
of rats!
He was convinced.
He ran faster. He caught up with the man ahead of him and shouted, "Rats?"
"Darkness!" the man shouted back. "Us."
"Us?" David shouted.
"Darkness," the man shouted. "We’re running from the darkness. It’s all right. We run, it follows. Just keep running, one foot in front of the other, arms pumping, air moving in, air moving out . . . ."
“H
ave we got far to go?" David shouted.
"To where?" the man shouted back.
Together, they turned a corner that led to what appeared, in the darkness, to be a narrower street. Apparently, it was unpaved, because David could feel the earth give a little beneath him as he ran.
"To your apartment," David shouted.
"I don’t know," the man shouted.
"Isn’t that . . . " David was getting short of breath. "Isn’t that where we’re going?"
"To my apartment?"
"Yes." David was breathing heavily.
"We’re running from the darkness," the man called.
"Shit!" David wheezed.
"Away from the darkness," the man repeated, and David could hear that he, too, seemed out of breath.
Far ahead, David saw what looked like daylight illuminating the tops of the city’s taller buildings.
~ * ~
Christian Grieg thought that his life was starting now. For its first forty years, who had he been? A stranger to himself. Someone who had tried to hide in his books. And reveal himself there, too. But doing that was a sign not so much of weakness (though it
was
that) as of dishonesty. A person must go into the universe
knowing
himself, and
being
himself—reacting to the world in the way that the world (nature)
intended
him to react, not the way society—
other people
—had programmed him to react. That was dishonest. That was a lie. It was a crime against himself, against nature, against the
universe
!
Oh, this was a happy day in a life filled with unhappy days, a life filled with self-deception. A happy day of self-knowledge and fulfillment.
He was being
himself
without constraint, acting upon the dictates of his nature without constraint.
Nature was without.
He
was without.
He
was nature.
He was the world’s first truly natural being since the time of cavemen.
But he was better. He had
intelligence
as well as naturalness.
How very like a God he was. How very like
he would go into the universe untainted, and the universe would accept him with great happiness, and all the others, so tentatively populating the universe with him, would know him and love him and realize that it was not their place to
forgive
him because
forgiveness
could not figure into the scheme of this—one does not forgive the black widow spider, or the cobra, or the lion because it acts naturally
he did not require forgiveness from the woman with the crown of black hair he did not require forgiveness from Anne Case
he was a whole, natural being in a world filled with weaklings and dishonesty, and he did not require forgiveness from anyone, save from himself for being at variance with the universe for so long for his whole life practically until
now
here
he was a whole man a whole man a whole man a whole
man a
~ * ~
David could hear movement from behind him as he ran. He thought that it must be very loud if he could hear it above his breathing and the clop-clop of his feet—and the breathing and the clop-clop of the feet of the man running just ahead of him.
He was hearing what sounded very much like a steady wind, or rushing water.
It was clear to him. He was hearing the plague of rats he had conjured up in his imagination. They were behind him,
just
behind him on that narrow, black street, in the darkness. They were at his heels, and the tap-tap of their millions of tiny feet was what he was hearing above the sound of his breathing and his own feet. The scrabbling of their tiny claws on the earth (or the pavement, or the brick) made a sound like wind or rushing water.
He did not want to look back. He knew that if he did he would see nothing. Only darkness. The light was ahead. He could see it illuminating the tops of the city’s taller buildings. There were spires, like the tops of churches, there were flat roofs on brick buildings, there were clocks—they seemed to be clocks; perhaps there were no hands, or no numbers, but they were in the shape of clocks—and all of these buildings were illuminated.
The
light
was there.
And that’s why this man was running. This man
knew
this place and so he was running for the light.
And behind . . .
David looked.
He saw darkness.
He wanted to scream at the darkness. He didn’t. Instead, he yelled, "Something’s behind us!"
And the man running ahead of him yelled back, "Us! The darkness!"
Then there was light again.
~ * ~
Christian Grieg saw the curve of the small lake, three dozen small lake-houses, movement here and there, caused either by the wind, or by animals—chipmunks, muskrats, squirrels finding their way to bird feeders that would, inevitably, be empty, because the summer people had yet to arrive.
The scene was blue and green and white-blue—the lake, the earth, and the sky—punctuated by the colors of the little lake-houses, square and rectangular shapes of yellow, light blue, brown. The wind moved the lake and gave it life.
It was a very cheerful scene. Christian enjoyed it. He smiled crookedly.