Seven Days
Page 29
The man turned to me. He seemed to be in a good mood again. “The telephone is in the living room. You can go through the dining room. It’s in the back. I’ll go get your bicycle off the street and we can put it in the trunk of the taxi when it comes.”
I thanked him, and he went outside. Then I noticed the little cuts on my hands were bleeding a little more than I’d realized. I went to the sink and turned on the tap. At that moment, Maude came down to the kitchen and I explained to her that I wanted to wash my hands. She looked at me for a long while in silence, almost intimidated. She had big, dark, magnificent eyes. Too bad they were so afraid. She finally said in her small voice, “You should disinfect them too.”
“That’s not really necessary.”
“Oh yes, or else they’ll get infected. There’s disinfectant in the bathroom upstairs—the second door on the right.”
And she lowered her eyes, as if frightened and surprised at having spoken so much. As I climbed the stairs, I saw her open a cupboard, grab a broom, and start sweeping the floor mechanically, as if she wasn’t aware of what she was doing.
I climbed the steps. I imagined the kind of couple they were. He was the macho good ol’ boy, master of the house. She was the submissive wife, her life dreary and sad. Some clichés are accurate.
A long, windowless hallway ran the length of the second floor. I passed the first two doors, one on the left and the other on the right. Both were closed. A few steps later I stopped in front of another door on the left and put my hand on the knob. Then I remembered that the bathroom was on the right, but I had already opened the wrong door. It was a bedroom, and it was dark. I could make out the silhouette of the little girl sitting on the bed. She turned her head toward me.
“Don’t be afraid. Your mom told me I could come upstairs. I was looking for the bathroom and got the wrong door. I’m sorry.”
She looked at me silently, and in spite of the dim light, I could see that she was pale, as if she were ill. Which was perhaps the case, because shouldn’t she have been in school?
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
She stared at me, still without a word. Her eyes were huge and jet-black—deep. Like the big pupils of a lifeless fish. Her long ebony hair elongated her pale face. Frankly, she intrigued me. What was she doing there, sitting all alone in the semidarkness?
“You should open your curtains. The sun is shining outside.”
She didn’t move, not a hair, and still said nothing as she looked at me with her big, gawking eyes. I wouldn’t want to have a kid who looked like that. Definitely not.
I gently closed the door again. She must be sick. That must be it.
There were two doors left. The one at the far end was closed and the other one on the right was open, revealing the bathroom. I quickly found the disinfectant, and cleaned and dried my hands.
It was when I returned to the hallway that I heard the groan.
Not a sigh or a murmur, but a real groan. Of fatigue, of fear, or of suffering, I couldn’t really say. I thought of the little girl, but a second groan told me it was coming from behind the door at the end of the hall. I walked toward it without feeling afraid yet. Why would I be afraid? I was sure everything was okay; I was starting classes in a few days, I was going to call a taxi in two minutes, and the house seemed completely normal. There was no reason for a mere moan to make me afraid. It could have been anything. When I heard the sound a third time, I simply knocked on the door and called out innocently, “Is everything okay?” At the fourth moan, I went ahead and opened the door slowly, already prepared to apologize.
What an idiot. What business was it of mine anyway?
The first thing I noticed was the walls of the room. They were bare and an atrocious sickly green color. And there were stains. When I saw them, I immediately said to myself, God, that’s blood! Was that when I started being afraid? No, not really. Everything was happening too fast.
The room was totally empty, not a piece of furniture—no bed, nothing. Just a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and someone in the corner, lying facedown on the floor, wearing a pale blue shirt and faded jeans. There was more blood on the floor under the person—too much blood.
“What . . . what the hell happened to you?”
I had absolutely no thoughts in my head. I saw someone who was moaning, lying in his own blood, and the question came out all by itself.
The guy lifted his head. In spite of his face being completely covered in blood, I could see his eyes turned toward me. His moan took the shape of words, and I made out “Help me . . .”
I was finally scared. And that fear was summed up in a shout screamed silently by my entire soul: Get the hell out of here now!
I turned around and hurried down the hallway. I didn’t run. In spite of my fear, part of me was saying that it would be foolish to run. Running would be a confirmation that I really was in danger.
I saw the stairway at the end of the hallway, far away. Suddenly, I could hear the voice of the man downstairs.
“You let him go upstairs? Dammit, what were you thinking?”
“But . . . but you told me . . . you told me I could go upstairs! I thought . . . I said to myself that if you’d finished, that . . . nobody was up there anymore.”
I heard someone quickly climbing the stairs. I started running, but the man appeared at the end of the hallway and I stopped short. We sized each other up for a brief moment. His friendly expression had given way to a mistrustful stare and he asked me where I was coming from.
“From the bathroom. Your wife told me I could come upstairs . . .”
To my surprise, my voice sounded perfectly normal. My face must have looked normal too because the man hesitated.
“Why were you running?”
“I wasn’t running.” This time, my voice betrayed me a bit.
The man screwed up his eyes, then his gazed moved behind me. I realized he’d seen the open door.
“You saw him, didn’t you?”
“Who?”
My voice sounded like a cracked whistle. This wasn’t working at all now.
He nodded gently, his face dark.
“You saw him.”
Suddenly, I lost it. My voice got as shrill as a child’s and I started to scream.
“What happened to that guy? Did you do that to him? Why did you do that to him? Were you trying to kill him? What’s going on here? You did that to him, didn’t you? Why? He’s covered in blood. Why? He . . . you . . . What’s the matter with him? Is it you? Is it you?”
I stopped for a second, and then I said coldly, “I’m leaving.”
I started walking, convinced that nothing could stop me from leaving. When the man grabbed me by the shoulders to stop me, I was shocked and indignant. I started yelling that I wanted to get out of there immediately, squirming like a child having a temper tantrum.
I saw his fist go up, but I didn’t understand why. Stupidly, I assumed he was shooing a fly or something. A second later, I was punched in the nose for the first time in my life. The effect was explosive. Everything started spinning, and my vision went blurry. As I was reeling, I admitted to myself that I was in danger. You don’t just hit decent people like that, especially when they’ve just had a little accident—an unfair accident too, caused by a damn black cat.
The man grabbed me under my arms and dragged me with my heels trailing on the floor. I had no strength to fight back. I heard a door open. Then, I was thrown. I collapsed on something soft. A bed. I was on my back and my vision gradually cleared. Above me a face—long, white, disturbing—was staring at me shamelessly. The little girl. I was in her room. A ray of hope. In a soft, unsteady voice, I asked her to go get help.
“Anne,” roared a voice, “get out of your room now!”
The little girl didn’t move. I managed to reach a hand toward her. I was still having trouble speaking. I repeated, “Go . . . get . . . help.”
She stared at my hand for a long time and then her eyes
turned back to my face. Two big, dull eyes, empty, without surprise, pity, or fear—nothing. It was awful. I think I moaned.
I heard grumbling, half-angry, half-disgusted, and the little girl was pulled away. I closed my eyes, gathered all my strength, and finally managed to sit up, just in time to see the door close again. After a few seconds, I stood up. I was terribly dizzy, and felt like vomiting as I staggered to the door and turned the knob. Locked.
From the outside?
I pulled on the knob, pounded the door, and shouted for someone to open it. I quickly looked around the room. A child’s bedroom, but soulless. Decorated, but joyless. Dolls and drawings, but sad and dusty. I walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains. The sun poured into the room, blinding me. I tried to open the window. Impossible.
I looked for something to throw, or a stick. There was a little child’s chair. I grabbed it and threw it against the window. It bounced off with a strange noise, but not a single crack appeared in the window. I picked up the chair again and hit the window two, three, four times with all my strength. The window shook, but didn’t break.
An unbreakable window.
I looked at the window for several seconds, completely bewildered.
I pressed my face against the glass and started yelling for help. But outside the window, there was only the vacant lot. The houses to the left were too far away for anyone to see me.
Then I heard sounds. I moved away from the window and listened. A door opened to my left. No doubt it was the door of the room at the end of the hallway, with the horrible bloodstained green walls, where the . . . the . . .
I heard heavy footsteps in the next room, the sound of someone crawling, terrified little cries. Then, a dull thud. And another. Silence. Then something—or someone—was dragged past my door. Next I heard the man’s voice, out of breath and furious, shouting, “Maude, I told you your walk was too short! Go for another twenty-minute stroll with your daughter.”
Ten seconds later, a door closed downstairs. The dragging sound immediately started again in the hall, moving farther away. Footsteps on the stairs, accompanied by intermittent noises, thunk . . . thunk . . . thunk. His head . . . the poor guy’s head was banging on every step of the staircase.
This image propelled me against the door, and I started yelling again, begging for the door to be opened. I was in a state of total panic. I was certain the man was going to come back upstairs and give me the same treatment the other guy had received. Then I would be dragged down the hallway, it would be my head thumping on the steps . . .
I pounded the door with both fists, screaming. I finally stopped, out of breath, and listened again. Someone was coming up the stairs. I backed up a few steps, afraid, without taking my eyes off the door. Two seconds ago, I had been begging for it to be opened, but now I didn’t really want it to be. The footsteps came closer, accompanied by a metallic squeaking, as if something was being rolled. The sounds went past my door. I guessed they were now in the terrible green room. I pressed my ear to the wall—muffled sounds of wet rubbing. The room was being washed. The blood was being cleaned up.
I felt like I was going to be sick.
Dizzy again, I sat down on the bed. After a few minutes, I heard the metallic squeaking again in the corridor and then it disappeared down the stairs.
The man would come back. He’d come back, open the door, and laugh and explain everything to me. Because it was a misunderstanding. Obviously. My nice bike ride couldn’t end like this. It was impossible. Yes, that’s the right word: impossible.
A misunderstanding.
A key in the lock. I leapt to my feet and stood in the middle of the room, my eyes riveted on the door.
It was the man. He was holding a gun at hip level. I don’t know anything about firearms, but it looked like a hunting rifle, and the barrel was pointing straight at me. I never took my eyes off that weapon.
“Out,” the man said.
I hesitated. What did he mean? Get out of the room? Out of the house? Leave?
I walked toward the door, and the man stepped back to let me pass. I found myself in the hallway.
“Go into the room behind you.”
He meant the green room.
So it wasn’t a misunderstanding after all.
I didn’t move. He repeated the order with a hint of impatience in his voice. My eyes were still riveted on the barrel of the weapon. I had a feeling a snake or some other unsavory creature was going to come out of it. I started to back away. No way was I going to turn my back on that rifle. We went into the green room. There was no sign of the dying man or his blood. Total emptiness.
My back bumped against the wall. No choice but to stop. The man stood unmoving in the middle of the room for a few seconds, his weapon still pointing in my direction. I heard him sigh, then say only, “Okay.”
I started crying. It was too much for me. Not loud, painful sobbing, just big tears flowing from my eyes, accompanied by weak moans. I was going to die. I knew it. He was going to kill me, and I was going to die for nothing, without ever knowing why. That idea was more horrible, more harrowing than death itself.
My legs were starting to go rubbery when I heard the man say, “What am I going to do with you now?”
Did I dare hope? I finally looked at him. He didn’t look crazy or enraged. Or even dangerous, in spite of the weapon pointed at me. He just looked . . . annoyed. He had his rifle in one hand and was rubbing his mustache with the other as he looked at me with puzzlement, like someone who had to go to a boring party and was wondering how he could get out of it. His expression struck me as so incongruous that I immediately stopped crying. He laughed, as amused and jovial as he’d been before.
“You’re wondering too, aren’t you?” He chuckled again.
I couldn’t believe it. He was threatening me with a gun and found it funny!
In a sniveling voice, I begged him not to kill me. He seemed dismayed by this and said he had no intention of killing me. Once again, tears streamed down my cheeks, but this time they were tears of relief.
“You thought I was going to kill you?” he said with a shocked expression. “What gave you that idea?”
How could I answer that? He’d hit me and was threatening me with a gun, and he wondered where I’d gotten that idea? Even if I explained it to him, I didn’t think he’d understand. He simply did not seem to grasp what was happening, what was really happening. I considered the possibility that this man was crazy, clinically insane. But was it possible? Was it possible for a crazy person, a really crazy person, to live in a house with his family?
I thought again about the woman, and the little girl . . .
“Oh, come on, kid, I’m not going to kill you, of course not. You can put that idea right out of your head.”
Now I was really sobbing. Just knowing that I was going to live unhinged me.
“It was the sight of that guy all covered in blood that got to you, huh? The guy, the blood, the rifle . . . Yeah . . . Yeah, I can understand that . . .”
Downstairs, a door opened. The man didn’t even react. I finally dared to speak. My voice still trembling, I asked without even thinking, “The other guy . . . is he dead?”
He turned serious again and looked at me for a long time. I was still waiting for an answer. If he said yes, I would go into hysterics again. But what he did was worse: he totally ignored my question.
“I won’t kill you, because you haven’t done anything wrong. Basically, you just saw something you shouldn’t have seen. That wasn’t your fault, was it?”
He gave me a friendly smile, as if to show his goodwill. I’ve never seen someone go from one expression to another so quickly, changing emotions with such volatility. It was so unsettling that I almost forgot my fear. Almost.
“Hey, wasn’t your fault, was it, kid?”
“No,” I finally answered. “No, not my fault at all.”
He nodded and added, more solemnly, “You have to be just. Always.”
He sighed.
“You’ve seen things. Almost nothing, but enough to get me in trouble. When you leave here, you’re going to run to the police and tell them you saw a half-dead guy in a quiet little house . . .”
I told him no, I’d never do such a thing. When I left there, I’d be so happy that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone. And, when I said that, I wasn’t lying. The idea of notifying the cops hadn’t yet occurred to me.
“I believe you,” the man said softly. “I’m sure that right now you mean what you’re saying. But later, once you’re home again, once you’ve calmed down . . . then, you’ll start thinking . . .”
He tapped his forehead with his index finger, looking serious again.
“Your good citizen’s conscience will tell you that you can’t let a dangerous fellow like me remain at large . . . Because that’s what you think, isn’t it? That I’m dangerous? Because of what you’ve seen, you’re convinced I’m a dangerous man, aren’t you?”
His voice was gradually getting louder and he was clutching his weapon. Terrified by his growing anger, I assured him that I would say nothing, that I knew nothing about him, that I didn’t know him . . . anything I could think of to try to convince him. But his voice got even louder, his mouth twisted, and he took two steps toward me.
“Don’t bullshit me. I know people, you know. I know all of you. You see just one detail, one thing out of context, and that’s it, you judge! A half-dead guy in my house, so that means I’m a criminal, right? That’s what you think, all of you!”
He was shouting now, his eyes dilated with rage, the rifle shaking in his hands. I pressed myself against the wall, as if I hoped to melt into the plaster.
“You don’t know,” he screamed. “You don’t know anything, you don’t understand. You know nothing!”