"Mr. Case—"
"But he’s wrong, Detective. He’s very wrong."
I
n 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 existed in the cellar might, upon 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.
~ * ~
David filled up his five-year-old Subaru at a Chevron station on Route 96, a couple of miles east of Batavia, and then picked up a hitchhiker who rode with him for a half hour. David often picked up hitchhikers. After college, in the late sixties, he had spent several months hitchhiking across the United States and Canada—"an odyssey of self discovery," he had called it—and he knew what it felt like to wait for hours for a car to stop. The hitchhiker tried to strike up a conversation, but David explained that he was not in the mood for talk, so the hitchhiker fell quiet until David dropped him off just outside Rochester, when he said, "Thanks, enjoy your trip."
David was driving to Syracuse, New York, 120 miles east of Batavia. He owned a cabin on Oneida Lake. It had been in his family for half a century and it was just barely habitable. It had flooded regularly, had been repaired regularly, and David had recently made plans to have it bulldozed and a new building erected.
He sang along with whatever was on the radio as he drove. It was a habit, and he was seldom aware of it, especially now, with his mind on other things—on his sister, on Brian Fisher, on questions of life and death, rebirth and retribution.
David had a small, black steel case in the car with him. It was about the size of a cash box, and it had a three-position combination lock built into it. The case contained several doses of A2d-40, a drug in testing at Laude Pharmaceuticals in Batavia, where David had worked for ten years as a pharmacological researcher. A2d-40 was designed to lower body temperature and metabolism during surgery, and inhibit blood flow. It had been in testing and development at Laude Pharmaceuticals for five years and there were problems with it. Its side effects were minimal—possible memory loss, possible clotting factor difficulties in older patients—but the tolerance level of individual patients to the drug varied widely. A few cc’s might produce the desired effects of lowered body temperature and metabolism in some patients, while other patients might experience coma. These results had been demonstrated only in animal testing. The drug had yet to be tested on a human being.
~ * ~
In the room, a man wept. His weeping was soft and unself-conscious. While he wept he also smiled. Eventually, his smile changed to laughter and his weeping grew more intense, so he was laughing and crying at the same time.
The man was new to this place. He had come into the house, and into the room, because it was familiar, as were weeping and laughter, and he desperately needed the familiar.
~ * ~
Ninety miles east of Batavia, David stopped at a roadside restaurant to have coffee. He spent a quarter of an hour chatting with the waitress because he was her only customer and she seemed to need to chat. Then he got back into his Subaru and continued driving. He realized before long that he was hungry. It was not an overwhelming hunger, not something he couldn’t ignore. So he did ignore it.
~ * ~
The house was empty.
Darkness came.
The creatures that lived in the cellar 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 creatures returned to the cellar.
Light came.
~ * ~
Twenty miles west of Oneida Lake, the Subaru backfired, coughed, and its engine shut down. David pulled the car to the shoulder, got out and opened the hood. He was miserably incompetent with engines—he could, he realized, have just as easily been looking into the guts of a refrigerator. He took the air cleaner off, peered into the carburetor, watched tendrils of light gray smoke rise out of it. This was okay, he decided; carburetors were where the gasoline and air mixture ignited, so of course there was smoke. He put the air cleaner back, checked the oil. The crankcase was full.
He told himself that he was in no hurry. But that, he knew, was a lie. He closed the hood, got back into the car, tried to start the engine. It turned over, backfired, then died. He waited a few moments, then tried it again. This time the car started and he pulled onto the road and continued his trip.
He thought, not for the first time, that he had not been able to say goodbye to Anne. It was the kind of mistake that God made from time to time—fashioning a death without the chance for good-byes. It was cruel and unfair, and for most people there was no chance to rectify it.
There had been no explanations, either. No answers. Only an aching point of emptiness. One moment she was alive. And then she was dead. As if she had rounded a hill in a car and had collided head-on with a truck. No time for explanations. No time for answers. Merely an instant of violence, followed by a lifetime of separation.
It was warm in the car. He reached over and covered the black steel case on the seat next to him with his white jacket. The drug inside the case was susceptible to light and to temperature extremes. It also kept poorly. At Laude Pharmaceuticals, it had a shelf life of three days.
David passed over a long bridge and turned on the radio; a Beatles tune came on. He listened to it a few moments, switched channels, got a Simon and Garfunkel song, and turned the radio off.
He found that he was weeping softly and he realized that he had been weeping for some time as thoughts of Anne had come to him. Weeping for her pain, for the abrupt change in her existence, for the end of a routine she had grown comfortable with—like the trauma a fetus experiences when it is thrust out of the soft and warm world of the womb and into a world of cold, and of hard edges.
Death
, he thought,
is the end of our comfortable routines
.
He slowed the car and made a sharp right onto Route 12. Oneida Lake was fifteen miles west. He’d be at the cabin within twenty minutes.
~ * ~
It was daylight in the room and nothing moved, except the dust. It covered everything. It moved as if from the force of wind, though there was no wind. It rose and scattered and collected itself, it wafted into the space of the room, settled, and collected.
The dust was dark. Like the earth.
It was made of earth.
THE FOLLOWING DAY
C
hristian Grieg angrily put the phone down and looked at Karen Duffy, seated on a white loveseat nearby. He snapped, "David took some damned drug. He’s in a hospital in Syracuse."
Karen looked at him a moment, then asked, incredulous, "Suicide?"
Christian answered, "I don’t know." He paused. "He admitted himself to the hospital, but it sure sounds like suicide, doesn’t it? It sure as hell
sounds
like it!" He crossed the room to the closet, got his coat. Karen stood. He said to her, "You’re coming with me, right?"
"To Syracuse?"
"Yes."
She nodded. "I’d like to."
He gestured at her short brown coat on the back of the loveseat. "Good. Then get your coat, and we’ll leave."
~ * ~
In the five days since Anne’s death, a patina of dust had collected in her big house.
A window in a first floor room had been left open and two martins had come in through it. They had flown happily about in the cavernous first floor, then had flown up to the second floor. Now, they couldn’t find their way back to the open window. But they weren’t hungry. Small insects had flown in through the same window.
Spiders lived in the house; too, especially in the third floor ballroom, whose door was open. Eventually, the martins would find their way to the ballroom.
At the kitchen sink, water dripped. It was a small and slow drip. It hit the side of the drain, slid over the edge and went down almost soundlessly.
In a second floor bedroom, a nerve plant drooped from thirst.
In the parlor, a weight-driven wall clock stopped.
Flies had begun to dehydrate on windowsills.
~ * ~
The doctor at Syracuse General said to Christian Grieg and Karen Duffy, "He’s recovering. It looks good. The prognosis is good." The doctor was a chunky man with a round, red face and small gray eyes. He paused, then went on, "The drug he took was unknown to us, so we were uncertain how to deal with it, as you can imagine, but the prognosis is good for a quick recovery. Thank goodness he admitted himself, otherwise . . .” They were standing outside David’s room. They had yet to go in. The door was partway open and Karen could see that David was awake, with his gaze on the ceiling. She said, "Then he really did try to kill himself?"
The doctor nodded at once. "It bears all the earmarks of a suicide attempt, yes. He told us he had made a mistake. That was the word he used. ‘Mistake.’ He denies that he was attempting suicide. He denies it quite vehemently, in fact."
"Of course he does," Christian whispered; then, louder, "May we see him now?"
"For a few minutes," the doctor answered. "He’s weak, as you can imagine, so please don’t tax him unduly."
"We won’t," Christian said. He took hold of Karen’s arm and they went into David’s room.
~ * ~
David was remembering that there had been no light at the end of the tunnel, that there had been darkness, as if night had fallen, and a sky filled with . . . what? Not stars. Not the Big Dipper here, Orion there,
Cassiopea
, the
Pleides
. Not stars, but patterns of energy, as if he were looking through a dark blanket at the rising sun.
And the sounds all around him had been at once familiar and unfamiliar, like a recording of night sounds played backward at slow speed.