But many of the drawings were wonderfully rendered, by artists who were obviously possessed of great talent.
"Do people get on ladders to do those drawings?" David asked.
The thin man rose from the chair he’d been sitting in and joined David at the window. "Yes, I’ve seen them do that from time to time. I’ve never done it myself, of course. I don’t believe that I’m so inclined. But the people who do it seem very happy. They smile. They laugh. They seem as happy as they can be, as happy as clams, I think, and seeing them doing these things, these things that make them happy, I feel very happy for them—"
David looked at the man’s face as the man talked. The man’s eyes were large, brown; they glistened, as if the man had been weeping, though David had not seen him weeping, and his mouth was heavy-lipped, the nose wide and flat.
David said, interrupting the man’s monologue, "I don’t believe that I’ve always been able to see your face the way I’m seeing it now."
"Nor I yours," the man said.
~ * ~
Christian Grieg thought, The Benefits of Suffocation by Pillow:
The primal, desperate, stiff gesticulations of a body experiencing oxygen starvation.
The quick and muffled noises of confusion and mortal frustration.
The irony of one strong man killing another with goose down.
The possibility that the victim will pee his pants.
And afterward, a last expression—frozen between life and death—of frothy horror and disbelief
.
~ * ~
The deputy sheriff had seen no cars parked at the cottages at this end of Sylvan Beach and he believed that the older deputy had been right; the beach was probably all but deserted at this time of year, so the chances that anyone had seen anything were remote, at best.
He radioed to the older deputy that he had found nothing, that he would now be checking the east section of the beach, made a quick K-turn, and started back the way he had come.
Moments later, the older deputy radioed the name of the murdered woman. "Last name Pierce, first name Violet," he said, and the younger deputy wondered if Violet Pierce had any relatives who would have to be notified. Of course she did, he thought. Everyone had relatives somewhere. (
I’m sorry, I have bad news; your wife—aunt, mother, grandmother, girlfriend, confidante—was murdered by a person or persons unknown. Before her death, she had the contents of a one-fluid-ounce jar of lilac perfume poured into her mouth
.)
He brought his car to a quick stop on the road. There was a garage attached to the little green cottage he was looking at; the garage door was closed. The deputy wondered about this. There were no windows in the garage door. Perhaps there was a car inside.
~ * ~
In the room, there were big, sturdy wooden chairs, and wide, overstuffed couches that nobody ever sat in; there was an empty bookcase, and a floor lamp minus a cord and switch. There were paintings on the wall, too—each a simple wedding of color and line, like an Easter parade seen through dust.
The room opened onto half a dozen other rooms similarly furnished. There were no doors between the rooms, and no doors at all in the house, not even in the entranceway, or in the back, where the kitchen led out to a thousand acres of clover. There were openings for doors, but no doors.
There were openings for windows, but no glass.
The house was like many others. It was the way houses were built here, as if planned from a memory that was incomplete.
People came and went from these houses, but no one claimed ownership of them and no one spent any time in them.
That was the way things were here, too.
The house was made of pine and green clapboard put together with common nails. It had two stories and an attic, a front porch, a back porch, and a cellar.
The creatures that lived in the cellar might, at a quick glance, have been mistaken for creatures that lived in many cellars. They burrowed into wood and dug holes in the ground. They made noises at night. And if the light was right, their eyes shone. They were creatures of the darkness, and they were as old as humankind. People had created them and people sustained them.
On occasion, rain came to the area where the house had been built. It pelted the stone tile roof, cascaded over the edge to the ground, soaked in, and was gone. Evaporation did not exist here.
Sometimes, people danced in the house and around it.
The people had no names. In this place no one did.
Darkness came.
The creatures that lived in the cellar of the house moved gracefully, like water, up the stairs and across the floors, through the doorways and over the windowsills, out into the fields of clover.
Nothing moved in these fields. So the things returned to the cellar.
Light came.
~ * ~
A barely perceptible groan escaped the body lying half in the doorway to the green cottage.
Christian Grieg, standing nearby, goose-down pillow in a blue striped pillowcase in hand, heard it and smiled. "Well now, Davey boy," he said. "Alive, alive-o."
It pleased him immensely that David was alive.
His fingers trembled.
He got down on his haunches, put his hand to David’s chest. There was no movement, no life. Only warmth.
He heard a car pull away on the road seventy-five feet north. He dimly noted the car’s passage, as if it were no more than a fly buzzing in another part of the room. He looked up briefly from his friend lying still. He saw dust rising in the dry, breezy, sunlit air above the unpaved road.
He focused again on David, on his own trembling fingers on David’s chest.
He thought that he had always liked his own fingers. He thought that they were artistic.
Perhaps it would be better indeed to bring peace to his friend with his fingers, his thumbs pressed hard to David’s windpipe, which was, he felt certain, the way such murders were carried out.
He glanced up again at the unpaved road seventy-five feet north. The dust was beginning to settle. It was no longer sunlit. A bank of clouds had come over.
Christian smiled.
He tossed the pillow aside.
He would bring darkness to David with his very own fingers, which is the way such things should always be between friends.
Personal.
And affectionate.
I
t is ten years later.
Something stirs in the house that once belonged to Anne Case, but no one gathered below for an impromptu séance is aware of it.
"We
know
of your presence here!" Maude declares loudly, feeling a little self-conscious about the volume of her voice and its pitch, close to a shriek.
Some of the others gathered in the circle glance at her and smile, then look back down again, and close their eyes. They have never seen Maude act this way before, and while it amuses them, it also leads them to think that she may be onto something. Perhaps there really is an entity (ghost, spirit, wraith, whatever) that walks the house, and speaks to her, and wants an end to loneliness.
It isn’t so hard to believe.
It is, after all, only what any creature wants. An end to loneliness.
While, above them, something has stirred and awakened and has begun to move through the space of the house toward the people gathered below.
It is a creature that knows nothing of time, but everything of pain. And loneliness.
It is a creature that craves the dark.
~ * ~
David thought,
All of this is an illusion. None of it exists. These are dreams. I am still connected to the earth, and what I’m seeing here are only a dying man’s interpretations of earthly things
.
Just as when his mind had transformed the small fish that swam in the shallows of Oneida Lake into swiftly moving insects, biting mosquitoes into foraging honeybees, and the earth itself—the lake he’d been walking in; the cottages that lined it—into a ghost of itself. (Just as he had told himself, too, that he was wearing corduroy pants, white shirt, shoes. He was wearing nothing; nor was he naked. He formed for himself the image of his hands as he moved, the right and left inward curves of his shoes as he moved. He conjured up the sounds of his feet trudging over the floor. But there was no sound except the whispers of his past.)
So now, as well, he was dreaming.
The thin and annoyingly talkative man with him here was a character in the dream.
The window he—David—stood at was a fixture in the dream, and so was the building across the street and its intricate and colorful drawings, the brick streets, the furiously moving sky.
All of it was a dream. No more than a dream.
A face came to him. It was oval, pretty, smiling. It was framed by dark wood. (
These snapshots were nothing more than animal protein and a couple layers of dye and silver nitrate that the light got at for a microsecond
.)
"Anne?" he said. "My God, what am I doing here?"
The thin man touched David’s hand, which was on the windowsill.
David looked up from the man’s hand to his face. It was lost in darkness.
Words came from the darkness. "I think that you must go back to wherever you came from. I think that you can stay here no longer."
~ * ~
The deputy pulled in behind Christian’s Buick, which was parked fifty feet down a narrow dead-end path bordered on both sides by cattails, radioed in the car’s license number, and was told, after a few moments, that there were no "wants or warrants" for the car’s registered owner.
The deputy hesitated, ready to back out onto Sylvan Beach Road.
After a couple of seconds, he shut the patrol car off, closed the door, and approached the Buick cautiously, one hand on the strap that held his service revolver in its holster.
He unstrapped the revolver, put his hand on the grip. He barked, "Is there anyone in the car?"
The cattails around him danced in a sudden brisk wind.
The deputy pursed his lips. He was a little scared, and he knew precisely why—the murder of Violet Pierce; this car abandoned here, on this narrow, dead-end path that was bordered by tall cattails.
The quiet.
Of course he was scared.
He drew his service revolver, pointed it straight up. "You in the car!" he barked. "Out. Now!"
But he could see no one in the car, and he suddenly felt foolish as well as scared.
Around him, the cattails danced.
"Dammit!" he whispered.
Distantly, from somewhere on the lake, he heard the ragged hum of an outboard motor.
~ * ~
Christian Grieg thought,
All these things are foolish.
Pillows.