Nightlight

by Michael Cadnum

  He knew, then, that he should tell her about the dream. The way it recurred. The way they had all experienced it. Instead, he said, “There is something on these tapes that can help us.”

  “I expect the tapes are much like his graveyard films.”

  “Inconclusive?” he asked, borrowing her word.

  “Very.”

  As he warmed himself at the fire he found himself watching the stuffed head of the deer. The hair had worn away from parts of the neck, and bare, leathery hide showed through. The dark hairs on its snout were much like the hairs of a cat. Its ears were as large as a man’s hands, and its glass eyes were dark brown; they seemed to stare down into the room.

  15

  The stones were gray words pressed into a surface as black as a burned field. I could not see them—but if I looked away, toward the totally empty black, they were all around me.

  So I have come again. They all knew why I was here. I could sense them inhaling the emptiness around them. Inhaling the dark.

  Breathing me.

  I was empty. There was nothing left. There was only the Other in me now, that Voice that called me and breathed into me.

  I was fading, like someone overexposed. Even in the darkroom film will cloud. Even far away from light. I was blank, now, empty.

  I thought: You have not left me alone.

  Of course not, He said, His Voice in me like pleasure. You know how much I love you.

  Not wanting to say it. And wanting it. That was all that was left of me.

  Yes. I know.

  Why have you waited so long?

  I thought: just a few pictures. Just a few, and then I’ll go.

  My camera. I clutched it, thankful for it. Ideal for this. Not as ideal as the Hasselblad, but that camera needed a tripod and I did not want to drag a tripod over the walls and into this place. It would slow me down, and they could catch me here.

  Oh, Len. I have waited so long.

  Just a few pictures. I held my breath. The Leica would see. An M6, with a Summilux lens. My hands trembled. Just a few pictures. The camera was cold and heavier than usual, because I was weak, all the strength evaporating from me.

  Before His strength.

  I’ve waited so long.

  Just a few pictures. Then I’ll go.

  Come and see me Len. Let me love you. Bring the camera. I want everything you want.

  Granite is so cold. So perfect, entirely, from its skin, through to its heart. Pressing my forehead against a stone, I could not enter it. I could not plunge into the perfect, other world.

  Come to me.

  That Voice like a bow across a cello string, a tight, hard string, and I knew He had me, and I wanted Him. I could feel myself tighten, wanting His Voice across me.

  Come to me, Len.

  He was all that I was not, and his Voice everything I wanted, and yet I trembled. It was too cold, and the camera too heavy, and my arms water clouding into ice.

  I ran. The spear-pointed fence burned my hands with its chill, and I fell on the outside, weeping.

  Please.

  He was begging.

  Come back. That Voice like silk across granite. Please.

  His voice is me, His perfect strength:

  Don’t make me wait any more.

  16

  Paul’s aunt, Mary Lewis, watched the performance of Romeo and Juliet, admiring as always the healthy young men with their genital bulges, but she could not pay much attention to ballet on this night. Mark, her most recent boyfriend, tugged a well-tailored pant leg and put his two hands together.

  He was a handsome man, but all of her men had been handsome, including her husband Phil. Phil had been dead only seven years, but already he seemed, like his rows of books, to belong to the past. A rich and vigorous past, but one that was unattached to the present except as objects of memorable beauty. Phil had been the best-looking, and for a while the most intelligent, of all of them. Shortly after Phil’s death she had retaken her maiden name, and lived as though Phil had died long ago, in another age.

  The first act ended, and the dancers acknowledged the applause. The orchestra became what orchestras always become when they stop playing, a collection of gawky men and women with a jumble of sheet music, gossiping cheerfully among themselves like so many bus drivers, or substitute teachers.

  “You seem restless,” said Mark.

  “I am, a little.”

  “Still having trouble sleeping?”

  She should not confide so much in Mark. He might become possessive. She put her fingers to her hair, aware that one did not easily discuss one’s sleeping habits, even if in a private box.

  Still, she must have mentioned it in passing a few days ago. She was a private person, but we all have to share our little anxieties. She would, however, never share her big anxieties. Or perhaps she should call them her big terrors.

  She could never discuss them with anyone.

  “You ought to visit my doctor. I’ve told you about him before.”

  “Often,” she smiled, meaning: too often.

  “If nothing else he could suggest some pills. I know—you don’t take pills. I hate them. But you’re wearing yourself out.”

  This, she knew, was a gentle way of telling her that her nerves were affecting her looks. This was bad news indeed.

  “I have an excellent doctor,” she began, but she didn’t, really. She had a doctor she had known since her Stanford days, a jovial man as careful with his patients as with his horses, and fortunately she had never taxed his command of medicine. She had always been healthy. Never sick. Strong, always.

  Physically, at least.

  Of that other side of her, of that twisted, animal side—that was what Phil called it—no one knew, except for one person. One frail mortal. The only person she cared about in the world, who was being strangled year by year with what she had done to him.

  Discovering what she really was had driven Phil away from her. He had not even tried to save his son, feeling that it was too late.

  Her ultimate threat had been that she would go public and tell the press the same lie that she had told her husband. Which, of course, she would never have done. But Phil had returned. Not as a husband, of course. And not even as a healthy man, because the lie had wasted him, and left him a bitter, gray shadow. He had died only a few years later, unable to speak to her, unable to bear her presence. It was as if he had died of hatred.

  She naturally wanted anything but publicity. That was why she had asked that nephew to try to find Len, because the young man was smart enough to locate Len, and smart enough to keep quiet about anything disgusting he might uncover. He was also self-absorbed enough that he might never realize the truth at all.

  “Really,” Mark was saying. “I’m worried about you.”

  Her looks were suffering. This was a bitter truth.

  “Maybe I will,” she said with mock weariness, which she hoped disguised the genuine exhaustion she felt. She touched his chin with a coquettish gesture of both affection and disapproval. “If it makes you happy.”

  The crowd was that interestingly multicolored hive of tasteful and outlandish clothes, furs and silks mingling with peculiar denims she supposed passed for stylish among the unmoneyed. She smiled and nodded at a familiar face, praying that the greeting might not have to flower into speech later in the evening, and then settled back into her chair, hoping that the box rail would shield her from the eyes of what was, after all, society.

  “I thought Prokofiev was one of your favorite composers,” Mark was saying, manfully attempting to hold idle but intelligent conversation.

  “Oh, he is, of course,” Mary responded, but why “of course”? And why even bother to respond, when at last the fear she had so successfully buried inside her for so many years was burning inside her like a white-hot splash of lead? “Although I suppose I prefer Mahler.”

  “I think I do, too.” Mark showed his perfect, capped teeth, and she studied his salt-and-pepper handsomene
ss for a moment.

  She had always been lucky in her choice of men, and they had always thought themselves fortunate to have won her attention, if only for an evening. And this was such a successful man, a lawyer by inclination, although not need, an expert on horses and small and very fast cars, the names of which she could never remember. A charming man in every way, as she knew she was charming, bright-eyed and attractive, although her youth was but a distant—painfully distant—flash of diamonds and champagne.

  In one sense, though, age would not matter, because she had a reputation for elegance and what that society columnist with a glass eye had called “the magic of knowing exactly what to say.” What not to say, she reminded herself. What not to say, even to herself.

  But now the nightmares, and Len’s disappearance, made the hour a bit late. It was far too late to help herself. She had damned herself to ash, if there were any justice. But perhaps there was still a speck of hope for Len.

  She smiled at that thought.

  The musicians turned pages of music and quieted into a group of people who could be ignored, except for the sounds which they produced.

  “My strong little girl” her father had called her, smelling of leather and cognac and those spicy cigars he had made to his own recipe in London. Strong was a word he used more than any other. Instead of saying he felt well, or happy, he would say he felt strong. This desire for, and pleasure in, strength made him survive a fencing accident when she was a girl, an accident which she witnessed, teddy bear in hand, in the brightly lit expanse of the private gym.

  The grinning Frenchman had been sweating with the workout her father was giving him when he lunged forward so gracefully he stayed for a moment, out of a desire never to make another less perfect movement again, ignoring the fact that the foil had shattered through a flaw in French metallurgy, and that the point had slipped into the only portion of flesh exposed beneath the fencing mask her father wore, which made his head resemble the gigantic single eye of a fly.

  Her father had put a hand to his throat as if only slightly concerned at the sudden scarlet freckles that appeared on his padded chest. His hand, too, became splashed with amazingly bright splotches of crimson, and a long rat’s tail of red appeared at her father’s throat, then vanished. It appeared again, and only then did Mary understand that her father’s life blood was squirting into the resin-scented air.

  The Frenchman had turned to Mary, as men had always ever since turned, for help. Wordless, and instantly pale, the Frenchman’s English was gone and he gaped at her as if she were to blame for the frailty of steel. She turned away from him, as one turns from savagery, and ran across the green lawn to the telephone.

  Her father survived to fence again, with the same Frenchman, perhaps secretly hoping that a foil would snap in a similar fashion, skewering another throat.

  There were no more accidents, except for the last, fatal one, her father brought down “like William the Second,” her mother had exclaimed. A fellow hunter had discharged his gun, mere birdshot, into the side of her father’s head. His head was damaged only slightly, but mortally. It had been, oddly, not a sad event for Mary. Her father had wanted to die in a manly way, and while birdshot was scarcely warlike, she had not seen her father’s perfect, embalmed corpse as one that had been insulted.

  It was early in the morning when the news came. Her mother had been up since even earlier in the morning, when it was still dark, and although this was not unusual Mary sensed that her mother was in pain.

  She rarely spoke to her mother. She loved her, she supposed, but it was the same love she might have had toward a delicate work of art in a distant corner. Her mother’s hands always trembled, even when she gathered flowers. There was always a tremor, a vibration, as if life itself hummed too violently for her body.

  Her mother was in the study, with the heads of animals she detested, a pale figure under the trophies on the wall. “What’s the matter?” said Mary.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” her mother said. Not a complaint. A simple report.

  “You should stay up late and get tired.”

  Her mother smiled wanly, the smile of an adult advised by a fourteen-year-old child. “I stay up past midnight. I read, and I think.”

  Yes, thinking. Mary knew what her father thought about his wife’s “thinking.” “Idle brooding,” he said. “Sucking on the past like a tick. Absolutely no use to anyone.”

  “You should run around and get tired.”

  “Mary,” her mother said suddenly. “I had a terrible dream.”

  Mary did not say, “Father says you dream too much,” but she thought it, and her mother sensed the thought. Her mother clutched the robe at her throat and stood. For a brief moment Mary wanted to protect her. “Did you have breakfast?” she asked.

  “You know I can hardly stand the thought of food in the morning,” her mother said.

  “You need your strength,” said Mary, repeating a phrase she had heard somewhere, but already she was not interested in whether or not her mother ate.

  “In the dream, there was something wrong with your father.”

  Mary scratched her thigh.

  “Your father lay down in the leaves. He looked straight up into the trees, and then suddenly looked straight at me. What a terrible look! I could hardly move! And he grinned, such a ghastly grin.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mary slumped, disappointed. The dark eyes of the moose looked ahead across the room, and seemed to regard her for a moment with a kind of amusement. “That doesn’t sound too scary.”

  “No, I guess it really doesn’t. But what woke me up was realizing that it wasn’t a dream.”

  “It’s silly,” said Mary, and regretted it. Her mother had feelings, after all.

  “Yes, it is silly.” Her mother laughed gently, and Mary left to have scrambled eggs and cocoa.

  The phone rang, and Henrietta answered it, the woman with skin the color of butterscotch, and a gentle New Orleans syrup in her voice. Mary paid little attention, annoyed with the scum that had formed on her chocolate.

  Henrietta appeared, however, and put one large hand over Mary’s. “You better go in and be with your mother,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Henrietta’s eyes looked deep into Mary’s, trying to will the knowledge into her. “I think your mother should be the one to tell you,” she said.

  “It’s an accident,” said Mary.

  “Yes, it’s an accident.”

  Mary wanted to ask more, but she had run out of questions. Accidents involved cars, and everyone she knew drove very well. Her father had run into something, she supposed.

  She ran into the study, but the heads of animals looked down into an empty room. She found her mother in a little-used bedroom. Plastic sheets covered the Chippendale, and the frames on the wall held simple etchings, bridges over anonymous rivers, troubadours singing to women who looked away, admiring butterflies.

  “There’s been an accident,” said Mary.

  “Close the door,” said her mother.

  Her mother rarely gave a simple command. Mary closed the door, but kept her back against it.

  Her mother held her hands palm-down in her lap, and spoke as if to them. “Something has happened.”

  Mary felt a flicker of confidence. She had known this much already.

  “While they were hunting.”

  Mary flashed into uncertainty.

  “A gun went off—” Her mother stopped and clenched her fists. When her hands had relaxed again, she said, “And your father was hit.”

  A grinning face, thought Mary. So he can’t be in pain.

  “They thought he could be helped, but there was nothing the doctors could do.”

  Mary realized that she was supposed to understand, but she didn’t. “A gun went off and Father was in the way?”

  “Yes. And the shot hit him, and now he’s dead.” Dead was said as a high, pure note.
Her mother wept quietly. Mary touched her, incredulous. Only her mother’s grief told her the truth.

  She climbed into a plastic-shrouded chair, and listened to the shuddering of her mother’s narrow body. Mary had never conceived of such a thing, and was nearly nauseated. When she could move again, she crept from the room, and downstairs, into the study.

  The heads of the animals surveyed her, and surveyed the room, and surveyed the chair her father had used, and the row of pipes beside the humidor. All those eyes, gleaming, dark, promising her that her father was powerful. They were proof, these conquered beasts. Her father’s might was not diminished.

  And when she saw his body she was convinced that he was not really there. His face was too delicate, his nostrils tiny slits, his lashes perfect.

  He wore a black wool suit, and a tie of dark blue, in her father’s usual Windsor. His hair was impeccably combed, as if her father had just paused before a mirror. The life had been blown from him by magic. He was entire, undamaged. He would smile, and wink and say, “Silly, huh?”

  He said nothing.

  The fellow hunter was an old drinking friend of her father’s, a cardplayer with a red face and hairy hands. He appeared at the funeral white and shrunken, eyes seeing nothing. He looked much more ruined than her father, and although she would see the man from time to time at weddings or other funerals, the man never regained his previous color, and seemed shorter, as if in a moment he had lost his strength, firing not shot but vitality into the unsuspecting skull of his companion, killing him as breath kills a candle.

  One evening several days later her mother called her into the study. Mary stepped into the room, then shrank to the wall. The dozens of trusting eyes were gone.

  “I couldn’t stand to see them,” her mother said.

  Now Mary wept. Her father’s presence had been stripped from the house. She could not despise her mother, although she wanted to. Her mother’s voice was thin as she explained, “They reminded me of so much pain. So much unnecessary pain.”

  Her mother held out her arms to Mary, and they held each other, but Mary felt that her mother had made a mistake. Her father belonged in this house. She knew that he would find a way back.