by Dan Simmons
Culley mumbled something about not knowing if the colored girl was really from Nina.
Natalie laughed. “Are you bothered that I Use this black? Or are you jealous, dear? You never cared for Barrett Kramer either as I remember. How many of my assistants have you liked over the years, my dear?”
The nurse with the clown’s makeup spoke. “Prove yourself!”
Natalie wheeled on her. “Damn you, Melanie!” she shouted. The nurse took a step backward. “Choose which mouth you’re going to speak out of and stay with it. I’m tired of this. You’ve lost all sense of hospitality. If you try to seize my messenger again, I will kill whomever you send out and then come for you. My power has grown im mensely since you shot me, my dear. You were never my equal in the Ability and now you have no chance at all of competing with me. Do you understand?” Natalie screamed this last at the nurse with the lipstick carefully smeared across her cheek. The nurse took another step backward.
Natalie turned, looked at each waxlike face, and sat down on the chair closest to the tea table. “Melanie, Melanie, why does it have to be like this? My darling, I’ve forgiven you for killing me. Do you have any idea how painful it is to die? Do you have any concept of how hard it is to concentrate with that lump of lead from your stupid, ancient pistol lodged in my brain? If I can forgive you for that, how can you be so stupid as to endanger Willi and yourself—all of us— because of old grudges. Let bygones be bygones, my dear, or by God I’ll burn this rat trap of a house to the ground and carry on without you.”
There were five of Melanie’s people in the room, not counting Justin. Natalie suspected that there were more upstairs with the old lady, perhaps even more in the Hodgeses’ house. When Natalie paused in her shouting, all five flinched backward perceptibly. Marvin bumped into a tall wood and crystal cupboard. Plates and delicate, fussy figurines vibrated on the shelves.
Natalie took three steps forward and peered into the clown-nurse’s face. “Melanie,” she said, “look at me.” It was a flat command. “Do you recognize me?”
The nurse’s smeared mouth moved. “I . . .
I am not . . . it is hard to . . .”
Natalie nodded slowly. “After all these years is it still difficult for you to know me? Are you so far gone into yourself, Melanie, that you do not realize that no one else could know about you . . . about us . . . or if they did know, would simply eliminate you as a danger to themselves?”
“Willi . . .” managed the clown-nurse. “Ah, Willi,” said Natalie. “Our dear friend Wilhelm. Do you think Willi is clever enough for this, Melanie? Or this subtle? Or would Willi have settled things with you the way he did with that artist in the Imperial Hotel in Vienna?”
The nurse shook her head. Her eyes dripped mascara; eye shadow was laid on so heavily that her face gave the appearance of a skull in the candlelight.
Natalie leaned closer, whispering next to the woman’s rouged cheek. “Melanie, if I murdered my own father, do you think I will hesitate to kill you if you get in my way again?”
Time seemed to stop in the dark house. Natalie might have been in a room with carelessly dressed, damaged mannequins. The clown-nurse blinked, false eyelashes askew, eyelids moving in slow motion. “Nina, you never told me that . . .”
Natalie stepped backward, amazed to feel real tears wetting her cheeks. “I’ve never told anyone, my dear,” she whispered, knowing that her life was forfeit if Nina Drayton had told her friend Melanie what she had confided to Dr. Saul Laski. “I was angry with him. He was waiting for the trolley. I pushed . . .” She looked up quickly, locking her gaze with the blind stare of the nurse. “Melanie, I want to see you.”
The painted face moved back and forth. “Impossible, Nina, I do not feel well. I . . .”
“Not impossible,” snapped Natalie. “If we are to continue this effort together . . . to reestablish trust . . . I have to know that you are here, alive.”
Everyone in the room except Natalie and the unconscious boy was shaking his or her head in unison. “No . . . not possible . . . I am not well . . .” came from five mouths.
“Good-bye, Melanie,” said Natalie and turned to stalk out.
The nurse rushed to take her arm before she reached the courtyard. “Nina . . . darling . . . please don’t go. I am so lonely here. There’s no one to play with.”
Natalie stood still, her flesh crawling. “All right,” said the nurse with the skull face, “this way. But first . . . no weapons . . . nothing.” Culley stepped closer and searched Natalie, his huge hands compressing her breasts, sliding up her legs, touching everywhere, searching, probing. Natalie did not look at him. She closed her teeth on her tongue as the hysterical scream tried to break free from her.
“Come,” said the nurse, and with Culley carrying the candle they made a solemn pro cession of candles, from the parlor to the entrance foyer, from the foyer up the wide staircase, from the staircase to the landing where shadows leaped on a twelve-foot-high wall and where the hallway was as black as any tunnel. The door to Melanie Fuller’s bedroom was closed.
Natalie remembered entering that room six months earlier, her father’s pistol in her coat pocket, hearing the faint stirrings in the tall wardrobe and finding Saul Laski. There were no monsters then.
Dr. Hartman opened the door. The sudden draft blew the candle out, leaving only the soft green glow from medical monitors on either side of the high canopied bed. Fine lace curtains hung from the canopy like rotted cheesecloth, like the thick webbing of a black widow spider’s lair.
Natalie took three steps forward and was stopped just inside the room by a quick motion of the doctor’s grimy hand.
It was close enough.
The thing in the bed had once been a woman. Her hair had fallen out in large clumps, but what remained had been carefully combed out so it lay on the huge pillow like a corona of sick blue flame. The face was ancient, wizened, mottled by sores and etched with cruel lines, the left side sagging like a wax deathmask brought too close to the flames. The toothless mouth opened and closed like the maw of a centuries-old snapping turtle. The thing’s right eye moved restlessly and aimlessly, shifting now toward the ceiling and a second later sliding upward until nothing but the white showed, an egg embedded in a skull, covered by a loose flap of browning parchment.
Behind the gray lace, the face turned Natalie’s way, the snapping-turtle mouth making wet, smacking noises.
The clown-nurse behind Natalie whispered, “I am growing younger, am I not, Nina?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. “Soon I will be as young as when we all went out to Simpls before the war. Do you remember that, Nina?”
“Simpls,” said Natalie. “Yes. Vienna.”
The doctor moved them all back, closed the door. The five of them stood on the landing. Culley suddenly reached out and gently held Natalie’s small hand in his huge fist. “Nina, darling,” he said in a girlish, almost coquettish falsetto. “What ever you wish me to do shall be done. Tell me what to do next.”
Natalie shook herself, looked at her hand in Culley’s. She squeezed his palm, patting his arm with her free hand. “Tomorrow, Melanie, I will pick you up for another ride. Justin will be awake and alert in the morning if you wish to Use him.”
“Where are we going, Nina, dear?”
“To begin preparing,” said Natalie. She squeezed the giant’s callused hand a final time and forced herself to walk rather than run down the infinitely long staircase. Marvin stood by the door, no recognition in his dulled eyes, a long knife in his hand. When Natalie reached the foyer, he opened the door for her. She stopped, used the last of her willpower to look up the staircase at the insane tableau arrayed there in the dark, smiled, and said, “Adieu until tomorrow, Melanie. Do not disappoint me again.”
“No,” said the five in unison. “Good night, Nina.”
Natalie turned and left, allowing Marvin to unlock the outer gate for her, not turning or looking back even when she passed Saul in the parked station wagon, taki
ng deeper and deeper breaths as she walked, keeping them from becoming sobs by sheer force of will.
SIXTY
Dolmann Island Saturday,
June 13, 1981
By the end of the week Tony Harod was sick and tired of mingling with the rich and powerful. It was his measured decision that the rich and powerful had a pronounced tendency toward assholism. He and Maria Chen had arrived by private plane in Meridian, Georgia, the sweatiest seventh circle of desolation Harod had ever encountered, early on the previous Sunday evening only to be told that a different private aircraft could take them to the island. Unless they wanted to take a boat. It had been no decision for Harod.
The fifty-five-minute boat ride had been rough, but even hanging over the railing waiting to lose his vodka and tonic and airline snacks, Harod had preferred bouncing from whitecap to whitecap to suffering the eight-minute flight. Barent’s boat house, marina, what ever it was, had to be the most impressive shed Harod had ever seen. Three stories tall, the walls of gray weathered cypress, the interior as open and majestic as a cathedral with stained glass windows reaffirming that image and casting shafts of colored light on water and rows of gleaming brass and wood speedboats with crisp pennants furled at the bow, the place was perhaps the most ostentatious obscure structure he had ever passed through.
Women were not allowed on Dolmann Island during Summer Camp week. Harod had known that, but it was still a pain in the ass for him to go fifteen minutes out of their way to drop Maria Chen off at Barent’s yacht, a gleaming, white thing the length of a football field, all streamlined super-structure and white-domed bulges and arrays housing radar and Barent’s ubiquitous communications equipment. Harod realized for the thousandth time that C. Arnold Barent was not a man who liked to be out of touch with things. A streamlined helicopter looking as if it had been designed for the mid-twenty-first century sat on the fantail, rotor idle but not tied down, obviously ready to rush islandward at a whistle from its master.
The water was full of boats: sleek speedboats carrying security men with M-16s, the bulky radar picket boats with antennae turning, various private yachts flanked by security vessels from half a dozen countries, and, becoming visible as they came around the corner of the island toward the harbor, a U.S. naval destroyer a mile out. The thing was impressive, slate gray and shark sleek, slicing through the water toward them at high speed, radar dishes turning and flags whipping, giving the impression of a hungry greyhound closing on a hapless rabbit.
“What the fuck’s that?” Harod shouted to the man driving their speedboat.
The man in the striped shirt grinned, showing white teeth against tanned skin, and said, “That’s the U.S.S. Richard S. Edwards, sir. Forrest Sherman class destroyer. It’s on picket duty here every year during Heritage West’s Summer Camp as a ser vice to our foreign guests and domestic dignitaries.”
“The same boat is?” said Harod. “The same ship, yes, sir,” said the driver. “Technically, it’s conducting blockade and interdiction maneuvers here each summer.”
The destroyer had come around so that Harod could see the white numerals 950 on its bow. “What’s that box thing back there?” asked Harod. “Near the rear gun or what ever that is.”
“ASROC, sir,” said the driver, swinging their speedboat to port and toward the harbor, “modified for ASW by taking out their five-inch MK 42 and a couple of three-inch MK 33s.”
“Oh,” said Harod, clinging tightly to the railing, spray mixing with sweat on his pale face. “Are we almost there?”
A souped-up golf cart with a driver in a blue blazer and gray slacks drove Harod from the dock to the Manse. Live Oak Lane was a broad avenue of grass clipped as close as a putting green between two lines of massive oaks stretching off to where they seemed to meet in the distance, huge limbs crisscrossing a hundred feet overhead to create a shifting canopy of leaves and light through which glimpses of evening sky and clouds offered a pastel counterpoint to green foliage. As they glided silently down the long tunnel created by trees older than the United States, photoelectric cells sensed the twilight and switched on an array of subtle floodlights and softly glowing Japanese lanterns hidden among the high limbs, hanging ivy, and massive roots, creating an illusion of a magical forest, a fantasy of a wyrwood alive with light and music as hidden speakers lifted the clear sound of classical flute sonatas into the evening air. Elsewhere in the oak forest, hundreds of tiny wind chimes added elfin notes to the music as a breeze from the ocean rustled the foliage.
“Big fucking trees,” said Harod as they glided through the last quarter mile of oak lane toward the extensive, terraced garden at the northern base of the south-facing Manse.
“Yes, sir,” said the driver and drove on.
C. Arnold Barent was not there to meet Harod, but the Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter was, a tall glass of bourbon in his hand, his face flushed. The evangelist crossed an expanse of black and white tile in an empty main hall that reminded Harod of Chartres Cathedral even though he had never been there.
“Anthony, m’boy,” boomed Sutter, “welcome to Summer Camp.” His voice echoed for seconds.
Harod leaned back and gawked like a tourist, looking up at an immensity of space bounded by mezzanines and balconies, lofts and half-glimpsed corridors, the open space rising to an arched roof five and a half stories above that was braced by exquisitely carved rafters and a maze of gleaming buttresses. The roof itself was a parquetry of cypress and mahogany set off by a stained glass skylight, darkening now so the reds struck dark wood with the deepening hues of drying blood, by dormers, and by a massive chain supporting a central chandelier so solid that a regiment of “Phantoms of the Opera” could have swung on it to no effect.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” said Harod. “If this is the servants’ entrance, show me to the front door.”
Sutter frowned at Harod’s language while a servant in a blue blazer and gray slacks clicked across an acre of tile to lift Harod’s battered carry-on bag and to stand at attention.
“Would you prefer to stay here or in one of the bungalows?” asked Sutter.
“Bungalows?” said Harod. “You mean like cabins?”
“Yes,” said Sutter, “if you consider a cottage with five-star accommodations, catered by Maxim’s, a cabin. A majority of the guests opt for the bungalows. It is, after all, Summer Camp week.”
“Yeah,” said Harod, “forget that. I’ll take the cushiest room they have here. I’ve served my time as a Boy Scout.”
Sutter nodded at the servant and said, “The Buchanan Suite, Maxwell. Anthony, I’ll show you the way in a minute. Come over to the bar.”
They walked to a small, mahogany-paneled room off the main hall while the butler took an elevator to the upper levels. Harod poured himself a tall vodka. “Don’t tell me this place was built in the seventeen hundreds,” he said. “Too damn big.”
“Pastor Vanderhoof’s original structure was impressive for its time,” said Sutter. “Subsequent owners have enlarged the Manse a bit.”
“So where is everybody?” asked Harod. “The less-important guests are arriving now,” said Sutter. “The princes, potentates, ex-prime ministers, and oil sheiks will be arriving for the customary Opening Brunch tomorrow at eleven in the morning. We get our first glimpse of an ex-president on Wednesday.”
“Whoopee,” said Harod. “Where’s Barent and Kepler?”
“Joseph will be joining us later this evening,” said the evangelist. “Our host will arrive tomorrow.”
Harod thought of his last sight of Maria Chen at the railing of the yacht. Kepler had told him earlier that all female aides, adjutants, executive secretaries, mistresses, and a few wives who could not be jettisoned earlier were welcome aboard the Antoinette while their masters let their hair down on Dolmann Island. “Is Barent aboard his boat?” he asked Sutter.
The airwaves minister spread his hands. “Only the Lord and Christian’s pilots know where he is on a day-to-day basis. The next twelve days are the only ones
on our host’s yearly calendar where a friend— or adversary— would know where to find him.”
Harod made a rude sound and took a drink. “Not that it’d help an adversary,” he said. “You see the goddamn destroyer on the way in?”
“Anthony,” warned Sutter, “I’ve told you before about taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
“What are they guarding against?” said Harod. “A landing by Russian marines?”
Sutter replenished his bourbon. “Not too far from the mark, Anthony. A few years ago there was a Russian trawler prowling around a mile off the beach. It had come up from its usual station off Cape Canaveral. I don’t have to tell you that, like most Russian trawlers near American shores, this was an intelligence craft loaded down with more sneaky listenin’ devices that you could shake a Communist stick at.”
“So what the hell could they hear from a mile out at sea?” said Harod. Sutter chuckled. “I imagine that that shall remain between the Russians and their Antichrist,” he said, “but it discomfited our guests and concerned Brother Christian, thus the big mean dog you saw patrolling nearby.”
“Some dog,” said Harod. “Does all of this security hang around for the second week?”
“Oh, no,” said Sutter, “what transpires during the Hunt segment of the summer’s entertainment is strictly for our eyes only.”
Harod stared hard at the red-cheeked minister. “Jimmy, do you think Willi’s going to show next weekend?”
The Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter looked up quickly with a flash of his tiny, lively eyes. “Oh yes, Anthony. I have no doubt that Mr. Borden will be here at the prearranged time.”
“How do you know that?”
Sutter smiled beatifically, raised his bourbon, and said softly, “It is written in Revelation, Anthony. It has all been prophesied millennia ago. There is nothing we do that has not been carved long ago in the corridors of time by a Sculptor who sees the grain in the stone much more clearly than we ever could.”
