Folly

by Laurie R. King

  Like much The Hunter told her, there seemed to be a number of levels to the explanation, but Rae suspected that deep down, this petite, urban, Armani-clad woman couldn’t bear to picture her client swilling down wine from a tin mug as she crouched by the fire, a horny-handed daughter of toil. Wilderness might be unavoidable at this point in Rae’s life, but Civilization must not be abandoned completely.

  Besides which, they both knew that wine tasted better from good crystal.

  Rae was satisfied with the day’s work, which had seen a finish to the simple task of making a workbench, a task that had so rapidly become something far greater. On the one hand, to have wasted so many days on the painstaking artistry of the thing, down to the thread of inlay twining up one silvery leg that called forth the clear glistening cedar of the top and tied in the red-brown in the overarching madrone, was as she had told Dr. Hunt, a ridiculous waste of time. She had far too much to do in site clearance and wall raising, to say nothing of water-supply checking and septic-tank digging, to spend four and a half days on a frivolous structure like that.

  On the other hand, that very concentration on frivolity was what marked her as an artist and as a person. Drawers joined by tight and tiny dovetails, cabinets with inlay on the inside, for heaven’s sake, hand-forged brass hinges that echoed the design of the piece, and layer after layer of laborious French polish—ridiculous. Unnecessary. As crazy as deciding at the age of forty-two to keep the unexpected baby that would mean giving up, for the health of the child, two years of working with half the glues, stains, and finishes she depended on, and at a time when she was on the edge of becoming Big. But these kinds of decisions were the very center of Rae Newborn. For the first time in forever, she had begun to remember that.

  Rae went out of the tent (an action which, after ten days, still raised her pulse, but it was getting easier) to rinse the glass under the tap of her plastic five-gallon water jug. She wondered if Ed would bring the test results of the water sample she had sent to the lab—it would sure be nice to use water from the spring rather than this flat-tasting stuff, which had the flavor of its container. She set the glass upside down on the towel that served as a dish drainer and crossed the dark clearing to say good night to her completed workbench.

  Tonight’s quarter moon cast no more light than a candle, but Rae found that if she stood to one side, the glow from the tent was sufficient to illuminate the pale tangle of legs beneath the eighty-year-old slab of cedar. She had been astonished, as the door emerged from the concealing growth, to find it largely intact. The edge resting against the ground had needed trimming, and the hinged edge and part of its inner surface had been, as she wrote the psychiatrist, charred by the fire, but aside from a couple of holes in the inside (coat hook nails? Drilled holes for something mounted there?) the rest was solid. Massive, even. For some reason, it had been hinged to open outward, which she would have thought awkward over steps, but Desmond probably valued the space inside over the convenience. Rae had vacillated between trying to restore Desmond’s door to its place and using it as the bench top, but she decided she had made the right choice. The past was to be built upon and used, not to be ruled by. She would make her own door, not quite a twin of his, building her new on top of the transformed old. She might even be able to use the original latch, or have it duplicated at a forge.

  The bench’s builder ran her palm over the dim surface. The wood was smooth, despite the slight variations left by the plane—smoother certainly than the skin of her hand, which was rapidly resuming its old work-roughened, blistered, cut, and abraded state. Rae rarely sanded a flat surface, preferring the clean, cut finish of the plane to the soft nap left by even the finest-gauge sandpaper—although some woods, and many shapes, called for grit over blade. She even preferred the very act of planing, the all-encompassing dance of motion, the long, slow strokes, feeling the grain of the once-living tree beneath her hands. It was a bit like giving a massage, with every muscle called into play and the body’s weight balanced on the balls of the feet, her whole person working together at the service of the mind’s eye. She relished the slow rip of the steel blade slicing strongly through the wood fibers, and took pleasure in the rain of fragrant curls. She even enjoyed the preliminaries—tuning the plane, setting the blade, honing it to a razor’s edge. All in all, vastly preferable to clouds of fine sawdust.

  If only life could be smoothed as easily, she thought.

  Now, however, came the question of the bench’s finish. Oil would darken the wood and leave it duller than a waterproof varnish would. On the other hand, an impermeable finish always looked artificial, riding the top of the wood like the layer of plastic it was, to say nothing of needing to be stripped and replaced every few years—or more often, given this damp climate. What if she—

  A sharp crack rang out from the hill behind the tent, and every muscle in Rae’s body lunged instantly for shelter. One moment she was meditating on her bench; a split second later she was cowering on the far side of the madrone, her face pressed against the cool inner bark, putting tree, workbench, clearing, tent, and fallen cedar between herself and the source of that broken branch.

  It was not repeated. Bile tasting of sour wine crawled up the back of Rae’s throat, her head swam, the old, familiar roaring arose in her ears. She turned and sank to the ground with the tree trunk at her back, dropped her head to her knees, and grappled with despair.

  How could a person live like this? she wondered. A raccoon steps on a dead branch, and that innocent noise acts like an electric prod? It was more than a year since those two bastards had driven up behind her on the road, and in all that time, all those months in the locked ward and under The Hunter’s care, rationality still hadn’t managed to drive a wedge between perceived threat and the body’s response.

  Her predecessor here, the builder of Folly, would have known all about the lasting effects of stress, even on a normal mind. The man who had painstakingly assembled that cedar door could have told her how long it took before shell shock began to fade away, before a backfiring car ceased to hit the brain like artillery fire and send the ex-soldier diving for cover.

  But then again, maybe Desmond couldn’t tell her how long it took; maybe for him, the visceral response had never lessened. Perhaps that was why he stayed here, far from civilization’s loud noises.

  Or was it not just civilization’s backfiring motors and clashing machinery? Did Desmond, too, panic at a mere crackling in the shrubs? Did his poor battered mind, too, read the noise as threat—the Kaiser’s soldiers creeping across no-man’s-land, perhaps? Is that why he had made a door heavy enough to withstand mortar fire?

  Rae wondered if Desmond Newborn had also kept a gun in his knapsack, just in case his nerves got too frayed to bear.

  Whatever it was, she was so very tired of carrying the loathsome burden around with her. It was not depression, it was not delusion, it was just the bone-weary sense of the futility of living. Who the hell cared if Folly got rebuilt? Who cared if Rae pulled herself together yet again, or if she swam off into the horizon? A lot of people would be relieved, in fact. Dr. Hunt would feel a pang of guilt—and, to be honest, Tamara would as well. But Rae’s only true mourner would be Petra.

  Petra whom she craved, Petra whom she was not allowed to embrace for fear the grandmother’s madness would prove either dangerous or contagious.

  Petra.

  Rae was sick of the burden. Sick and tired of the past constantly getting in the way of whatever future she might make, sick unto death of creeping around and jumping out of her skin at every little sound, filled to the brim with revulsion at her own timidity.

  She’d had enough, by God.

  Before she could pause to reconsider, she was on her feet, storming around her workbench, stumbling into the bright area around the tent, and when she was standing square in the shaft of light that fell from its open flap, she raised her arms and yelled at the dark wall of trees, “All right—here I am! Take a good look, damn you! I
’m. Not. Going. To. Hide. Any. More!” And to emphasize the vow, she bent to snatch up a length of firewood, then hurled it into the trees with all her strength. It hit, anticlimactically, on a branch barely ten feet away and dropped straight down, tumbling and ripping through the greenery. The thud of its landing was followed by a thin squeal and a brief, tiny scuffle in the leaf mold, after which a terrified silence fell over the clearing.

  Rae stood there panting, running that frightened squeak through her mind. What poor little creature had she just scared half to death? Innocently going its furry nocturnal way when this monstrous noisemaker leaps up out of nowhere and the sky comes crashing down.

  And if there really had been someone watching from the shadows, what on earth would he (not she, surely) have made of her actions? What if Alan, for example …?

  She began, reluctantly at first, to laugh. Alan knew his wife was nuts, even in ways not covered by mental illness; he had more than once said that was why he married her in the first place, but this would have taken even that much-forgiving man aback. Picturing his expression, the curious raised eyebrow above those gorgeous yellow-brown eyes, made her laughter come harder, until she plunked down into the canvas chair and bellowed aloud—startling the island wildlife still more, she had no doubt. Rage and despair and grief and manic humor all welled up together, and she raised her face to the moon, that source of all lunacy, and howled and laughed and wept until the tears were gone.

  Then she rose up again, drew a great breath, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Alan, I miss you like hell, you fucking bastard, Alan! Why the fuck couldn’t you have been more careful, you murdering shithead, oh Alan, oh, God damn it.” Her voice trailed off to a mumble, and then she closed her eyes and stood swaying gently, feeling empty, utterly, weightlessly empty. Even so, when the crackle repeated itself from the hillside, farther up this time, she flinched: only a twitch, but still a reaction.

  Even that was too much. “Oh, God,” she moaned aloud, although she could not have said if it was a curse or a prayer. In either case, the reaction was the same. She yanked her sweatshirt off over her head and bent to unlace and step out of her boots, and then she turned and walked downhill, away from the light, bruising her stockinged feet and wrenching her ankle as she picked her painful way to the water.

  One step, and two into the bone-chilling water, then to her knees. When the level reached her thighs, she began to have trouble catching her breath; at waist level she thought she would be forced to retreat. The water was black against the black land—creepy to venture into, and impossible to see the sandy patches in—and her rapidly numbed feet came down on rocks slick with eelgrass and no doubt a variety of squiggling creatures, but she struggled on until the icy swell of water reached her chest. She remained upright a moment longer, quailing, and then she dropped, surrendering to the frigid benediction of the night sea …

  … To come up moments later with a whoop, spluttering and coughing and shouting incredulous curses at the temperature of the water and at the sharp and exhilarating wash of fear when the weight of her sodden clothing threatened to pull her down. She splashed madly for shore and sprinted clumsily for the comparative warmth of the tent, where she stripped off and toweled dry, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. She dressed in many layers of warm things, dove into her bed, and pulled the sleeping bag up over her wet hair.

  That night, Rae dreamed. In one episode, something huge and amorphous but not unfriendly heaved itself up out of the cove to talk with her about Chinese cooking. In the next, a lovely green twinkle that she somehow knew was an elf floated above the rock top of the island, telling Rae that he was with the U.S. Coast Guard and wanted Rae’s permission to set up a spy satellite tower here to watch for Japanese submarines. Another time, Rae reached down to pull her hammer out of its loop and came up with one of Dr. Hunt’s elegant glasses in her hand, to her annoyance. And then a final dream, just before her true wakening, more fully remembered if no more fully understood:

  The house called Folly stood completed on its foundation, graced with the two towers, quirky and delightful and perfect in its proportions and its location between rock and water. It was nighttime and the house glowed with light, warm yellow illumination pouring from its windows, casting a path down the hill from its open door and streaming out of the high narrow windows at the tops of the towers, turning them into lighthouses, twin beacons of guidance and comfort shining out in the wilderness.

  As Rae drew nearer, she could see and hear that a party was going on inside, an elegant formal dance with a string quartet and a thousand candles in a ballroom far larger than any fifteen-by-twenty-four-foot cabin had a right to be. Beautiful young women in sparkling gowns whirled and dipped, tall young men in the stark dignity of black and white accompanied and gazed with appreciation, glasses of champagne quenched thirsty throats, and the party was being judged a success. Then the picture seemed to tremble, and the brightly gowned women began, one after another, to stretch their arms up over their heads, sway, and suddenly transform into flame. The ballroom cheerfully caught fire and began to burn.

  Rae woke in the cool gray light of dawn with those rich yellow flames in her mind’s eye.

  Hardly surprising, she thought over her first, meditative cup of coffee. (The squirrel sat on a branch directly overhead, calling down curses; Rae did not wince.) The burning of Folly was very much in her thoughts these days.

  Before the construction of the workbench had sidetracked her into four days of messing around, Rae had made the first forays into the jungle around the foundations. It was a little like Sleeping Beauty’s overgrown castle—assuming the castle had burned to the ground while the inhabitants slept.

  Rae could not remember when she had first heard that Desmond’s house had burned. Certainly she knew before she, Alan, and Bella came for their visit, because the bare, scorched stones of the towers and chimney had not surprised her. As soon as she’d reached the stone steps and seen the charred and crumbling threads of sill plate atop the foundation stones, she knew the fire must have been thorough. What it had not consumed in the first white heat, it had weakened, to fall and smolder gradually into ash— other than the door, which had fallen outside the burn zone.

  So the dream contained a trace of history—though just a trace, Rae reflected as she rinsed off her cereal bowl and went to collect her tools: She did not expect to find a silver chandelier and dozens of champagne bottles as she cleared ground.

  For seven decades the healthy vegetation of the Pacific Northwest had done its best to obliterate Desmond Newborn’s labors. Vine maple, red alder, huckleberry, and madrone had found footholds in the rich humus that resulted from the return of a wooden building’s component parts to nature; nettle, blackberry, thistle, and wild rose wrapped affectionately around the towers and tore at Rae’s skin and clothes; half a dozen kinds of fern had rooted between the stones; a veritable garden of wildflowers sprang up between the woodier plants—delicate white poison camas and yellow desert parsley were already in bloom, interspersed with blue larkspur and purple clover. Rae had brought a brush hook to the island, thinking the machete-like tool might come in useful; she had never thought that she would be swinging it for days on end.

  She was ruthless, hacking beauty and pest alike—with a few exceptions, such as the delicate shooting star that was just opening up among the skeletal remains of some floorboards. That, and a few like it, she dug carefully out and relocated farther along the hillside. Most of them would curl up and die, she knew, but they would have more of a chance than if they remained in the places they had chosen for themselves.

  So today, with the bench complete, Rae would return first to the ground clearing and then to her excavation of the foundations. Ancient cities, the archaeologists had found, were often slapped down on the remains of previous generations of buildings, but Rae intended to begin at bedrock. Grimly, she pulled on her thorn-proof gauntlets and reentered the fray.

  It was slow, sweaty work, hazar
dous underfoot because there was no way of knowing what the vegetation concealed, whether it was packed soil or a thinly covered scrap of rotted wall held together by air. She inched her boots ahead in cautiously tested increments until she had firm ground to stand on, tugging and unwrapping the vines and shrubs, spending most of her time dragging vast heaps of dying plant life over to the site of her future garden. She felt alone while she was working, but having a focus helped. Sometimes her body forgot to wince at sudden noises; occasionally she would go as long as an hour without a sudden conviction that someone was watching her.

  It took another two days to strip the ground bare, long, brutal hours of needle-sharp thorns and burning nettles, a wrenched knee from a piece of solid ground that wasn’t, and one terrifying close call when the heavy blade, which she had been too tired to notice was growing dull, bounced off a woody branch and sliced through the air half an inch from her hand.

  Two further days to remove the vegetation and reveal the thick decomposed layer of floorboards, siding, shingles, furniture, and whatever else Desmond had in his house when it burned.

  Two days of hacking, and now her real work could begin.

  Ten

  Desmond Newborn’s

  Journal

  November 11, 1918

  They tell me today that the Great War is over.

  The church bells rang out, the streets filled with shiny, upturned faces, and I had to walk and walk to find a place where I could stand beneath a tree and scream and scream and scream.

  Was I laughing? Was I weeping? I do not know.

  But I do know that the war will never be over. Never.

  November 28, 1918

  Thanksgiving Day. Why?

  I left the house and found my screaming tree again, but it seemed to me the rivulet at its feet was too shallow to drown a man.