Poe's Children (19 page)

My state was crippling my thoughts, yet even if I’d been healthy I couldn’t have imagined how he would look when he returned: excited, conspiratorial, smug. “I’ve got a story for you,” he said at once.

Most such offers proved to be prolonged and dull. “Oh yes?” I said warily.

He sat forward as though to infect me with suspense. “That village we went to—it isn’t called Lewis. It’s called Strand.”

Was he pausing to give me a chance to gasp or applaud? “Oh yes,” I said without enthusiasm.

“Lewis was another village, further up the coast. It’s deserted too.”

That seemed to be his punch line. The antics of patterns within my eyelids had made me irritable. “It doesn’t seem much of a story,” I complained.

“Well, that’s only the beginning.” When his pause had forced me to open my eyes, he said, “I read a book about your local unexplained mysteries.”

“Why?”

“Look, if you don’t want to hear—”

“Go on, go on, now you’ve started.” Not to know might be even more nerve-racking.

“There wasn’t much about Lewis,” he said eventually, perhaps to give himself more time to improvise.

“Was there much at all?”

“Yes, certainly. It may not sound like much. Nobody knows why Lewis was abandoned, but then nobody knows that about Strand either.” My impatience must have showed, for he added hastily, “What I mean is, the people who left Strand wouldn’t say why.”

“Someone asked them?”

“The woman who wrote the book. She managed to track some of them down. They’d moved as far inland as they could, that was one thing she noticed. And they always had some kind of nervous disorder. Talking about Strand always made them more nervous, as though they felt that talking might make something happen, or something might hear.”

“That’s what the author said.”

“Right.”

“What was her name?”

Could he hear my suspicion? “Jesus
Christ,
” he snarled, “I don’t know. What does it matter?”

In fact it didn’t, not to me. His story had made me feel worse. The noose had tightened round my skull, the twilit beach was swarming and vibrating. I closed my eyes. Shut up, I roared at him. Go away.

“There was one thing,” he persisted. “One man said that kids kept going on the beach at night. Their parents tried all ways to stop them. Some of them questioned their kids, but it was as though the kids couldn’t stop themselves. Why was that, do you think?” When I refused to answer he said irrelevantly, “All this was in the 1930s.”

I couldn’t stand hearing children called kids. The recurring word had made me squirm: drips of slang, like water torture. And I’d never heard such a feeble punch line. His clumsiness as a storyteller enraged me; he couldn’t even organize his material. I was sure he hadn’t read any such book.

After a while I peered out from beneath my eyelids, hoping he’d decided that I was asleep. He was poring over the notebook again, and looked rapt. I only wished that people and reviewers would read my books as carefully. He kept rubbing his forehead, as though to enliven his brain.

I dozed. When I opened my eyes he was waiting for me. He shoved the notebook at me to demonstrate something. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said without much effort to sound so. “I’m not in the mood.”

He stalked into his room, emerging without the book but with my stick. “I’m going for a walk,” he announced sulkily, like a spouse after a quarrel.

I dozed gratefully, for I felt more delirious; my head felt packed with grains of sand that gritted together. In fact, the whole of me was made of sand. Of course it was true that I was composed of particles, and I thought my delirium had found a metaphor for that. But the grains that floated through my inner vision were neither sand nor atoms. A member, dark and vague, was reaching for them. I struggled to awaken; I didn’t want to distinguish its shape, and still less did I want to learn what it meant to do with the grains—for as the member sucked them into itself, engulfing them in a way that I refused to perceive, I saw that the grains were worlds and stars.

I woke shivering. My body felt uncontrollable and unfamiliar. I let it shake itself to rest—not that I had a choice, but I was concentrating on the problem of why I’d woken head raised, like a watchdog. What had I heard?

Perhaps only wind and sea: both seemed louder, more intense. My thoughts became entangled in their rhythm. I felt there had been another sound. The bushes threshed, sounding parched with sand. Had I heard Neal returning? I stumbled into his room. It was empty.

As I stood by his open window, straining my ears, I thought I heard his voice, blurred by the dull tumult of waves. I peered out. Beyond the low heads of the bushes, the glow of the beach shuddered toward me. I had to close my eyes, for I couldn’t tell whether the restless scrawny shapes were crowding my eyeballs or the beach; it felt, somehow, like both. When I looked again, I seemed to see Neal.

Or was it Neal? The unsteady stifled glow aggravated the distortions of my vision. Was the object just a new piece of debris? I found its shape bewildering; my mind kept apprehending it as a symbol printed on the whitish expanse. The luminosity made it seem to shift, tentatively and jerkily, as though it was learning to pose. The light, or my eyes, surrounded it with dancing.

Had my sense of perspective left me? I was misjudging size, either of the beach or of the figure. Yes, it was a figure, however large it seemed. It was moving its arms like a limp puppet. And it was half-buried in the sand.

I staggered outside, shouting to Neal, and then I recoiled. The sky must be thick with a storm cloud; it felt suffocatingly massive, solid as rock, and close enough to crush me. I forced myself toward the bushes, though my head was pounding, squeezed into a lump of pain.

Almost at once I heard plodding on the dunes. My blood half deafened me; the footsteps sounded vague and immense. I peered along the dim path. At the edge of my vision the beach flickered repetitively. Immense darkness hovered over me. Unnervingly close to me, swollen by the glow, a head rose into view. For a moment my tension seemed likely to crack my skull. Then Neal spoke. His words were incomprehensible amid the wind, but it was his voice.

As we trudged back toward the lights the threat of a storm seemed to withdraw, and I blamed it on my tension. “Of course I’m all right,” he muttered irritably. “I fell and that made me shout, that’s all.” Once we were inside I saw the evidence of his fall; his trousers were covered with sand up to the knees.

IV

Next day he hardly spoke to me. He went down early to the beach, and stayed there. I didn’t know if he was obsessed or displaying pique. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to be near me; invalids can find each other unbearable.

Often I glimpsed him, wandering beyond the dunes. He walked as though in an elaborate maze and scrutinized the beach. Was he searching for the key to the notebook? Was he looking for pollution? By the time he found it, I thought sourly, it would have infected him.

I felt too enervated to intervene. As I watched, Neal appeared to vanish intermittently; if I looked away, I couldn’t locate him again for minutes. The beach blazed like bone, and was never still. I couldn’t blame the aberrations of my vision solely on heat and haze.

When Neal returned, late that afternoon, I asked him to phone for a doctor. He looked taken aback, but eventually said, “There’s a box by the station, isn’t there?”

“One of the neighbours would let you phone.”

“No, I’ll walk down. They’re probably all wondering why you’ve let some long-haired freak squat in your house, as it is.”

He went out, rubbing his forehead gingerly. He often did that now. That, and his preoccupation with the demented notebook, were additional reasons why I wanted a doctor: I felt Neal needed examining too.

By the time he returned, it was dusk. On the horizon, embers dulled in the sea. The glow of the beach was already stirring; it seemed to have intensified during the last few days. I told myself I had grown hypersensitive.

“Dr. Lewis. He’s coming tomorrow.” Neal hesitated, then went on, “I think I’ll just have a stroll on the beach. Want to come?”

“Good God no. I’m ill, can’t you see?”

“I know that.” His impatience was barely controlled. “A stroll might do you good. There isn’t any sunlight now.”

“I’ll stay in until I’ve seen the doctor.”

He looked disposed to argue, but his restlessness overcame him. As he left, his bearing seemed to curse me. Was his illness making him intolerant of mine, or did he feel that I’d rebuffed a gesture of reconciliation?

I felt too ill to watch him from the window. When I looked I could seldom distinguish him or make out which movements were his. He appeared to be walking slowly, poking at the beach with my stick. I wondered if he’d found quicksand. Again his path made me think of a maze.

I dozed, far longer than I’d intended. The doctor loomed over me. Peering into my eyes, he reached down. I began to struggle, as best I could: I’d glimpsed the depths of his eye-sockets, empty and dry as interstellar space. I didn’t need his treatment, I would be fine if he left me alone, just let me go. But he had reached deep into me. As though I was a bladder that had burst, I felt myself flood into him; I felt vast emptiness absorb my substance and my self. Dimly I understood that it was nothing like emptiness—that my mind refused to perceive what it was, so alien and frightful was its teeming.

It was dawn. The muffled light teemed. The beach glowed fitfully. I gasped: someone was down on the beach, so huddled that he looked shapeless. He rose, levering himself up with my stick, and began to pace haphazardly. I knew at once that he’d spent the night on the beach.

After that I stayed awake. I couldn’t imagine the state of his mind, and I was a little afraid of being asleep when he returned. But when, hours later, he came in to raid the kitchen for a piece of cheese, he seemed hardly to see me. He was muttering repetitively under his breath. His eyes looked dazzled by the beach, sunk in his obsession.

“When did the doctor say he was coming?”

“Later,” he mumbled, and hurried down to the beach.

I hoped he would stay there until the doctor came. Occasionally I glimpsed him at his intricate pacing. Ripples of heat deformed him; his blurred flesh looked unstable. Whenever I glanced at the beach it leapt forward, dauntingly vivid. Cracks of light appeared in the sea. Clumps of grass seemed to rise twitching, as though the dunes were craning to watch Neal. Five minutes’ vigil at the window was as much as I could bear.

The afternoon consumed time. It felt lethargic and enervating as four in the morning. There was no sign of the doctor. I kept gazing from the front door. Nothing moved on the crescent except wind-borne hints of the beach.

Eventually I tried to phone. Though I could feel the heat of the pavement through the soles of my shoes, the day seemed bearable; only threats of pain plucked at my skull. But nobody was at home. The bungalows stood smugly in the evening light. When I attempted to walk to the phone box, the noose closed on my skull at once.

In my hall I halted startled, for Neal had thrown open the living-room door as I entered the house. He looked flushed and angry. “Where were you?” he demanded.

“I’m not a hospital case yet, you know. I was trying to phone the doctor.”

Unfathomably, he looked relieved. “I’ll go down now and call him.”

While he was away I watched the beach sink into twilight. At the moment, this seemed to be the only time of day I could endure watching—the time at which shapes become obscure, most capable of metamorphosis. Perhaps this made the antics of the shore acceptable, more apparently natural. Now the beach resembled clouds in front of the moon; it drifted slowly and variously. If I gazed for long it looked nervous with lightning. The immense bulk of the night edged up from the horizon.

I didn’t hear Neal return; I must have been fascinated by the view. I turned to find him watching me. Again he looked relieved—because I was still here? “He’s coming soon,” he said.

“Tonight, do you mean?”

“Yes, tonight. Why not?”

I didn’t know many doctors who would come out at night to treat what was, however unpleasant for me, a relatively minor illness. Perhaps attitudes were different here in the country. Neal was heading for the back door, for the beach. “Do you think you could wait until he comes?” I said, groping for an excuse to detain him. “Just in case I feel worse.”

“Yes, you’re right.” His gaze was opaque. “I’d better stay with you.”

We waited. The dark mass closed over beach and bungalows. The nocturnal glow fluttered at the edge of my vision. When I glanced at the beach, the dim shapes were hectic. I seemed to be paying for my earlier fascination, for now the walls of the room looked active with faint patterns.

Where was the doctor? Neal seemed impatient too. The only sounds were the repetitive ticking of his footsteps and the irregular chant of the sea. He kept staring at me as if he wanted to speak; occasionally his mouth twitched. He resembled a child both eager to confess and afraid to do so.

Though he made me uneasy I tried to look encouraging, interested in whatever he might have to say. His pacing took him closer and closer to the beach door. Yes, I nodded, tell me, talk to me.

His eyes narrowed. Behind his eyelids he was pondering. Abruptly he sat opposite me. A kind of smile, tweaked awry, plucked at his lips. “I’ve got another story for you,” he said.

“Really?” I sounded as intrigued as I could.

He picked up the notebook. “I worked it out from this.”

So we’d returned to his obsession. As he twitched pages over, his feet shifted constantly. His lips moved as though whispering the text. I heard the vast mumbling of the sea.

“Suppose this,” he said all at once. “I only said suppose, mind you. This guy was living all alone in Strand. It must have affected his mind, you said that yourself—having to watch the beach every night. But just suppose it didn’t send him mad? Suppose it affected his mind so that he saw things more clearly?”

I hid my impatience. “What things?”

“The beach.” His tone reminded me of something—a particular kind of simplicity I couldn’t quite place. “Of course we’re only supposing. But from things you’ve read, don’t you feel there are places that are closer to another sort of reality, another plane or dimension or whatever?”