All taken in light so scant the judges of contests were amazed at their clarity, and he was asked to write a small book on light-gathering, a technical screed regarding lenses and wavelengths. She read it in secret, praying that it might disclose something about his thoughts, but it was a professional monograph, difficult to follow.
There were two metal boxes, however, which held small prints that she believed were the key to his interests. To his obsessions. One was unlocked, but she was afraid to look inside it. She was terrified what the photographs might disclose. The other was locked. A simple gray metal box, with a handle.
She asked him once, “Why don’t you do anything with the photos you keep in the metal boxes?”
He stared at her.
“They might be interesting, too.”
His pale face studied hers. He said, in a whisper, “Don’t you ever touch those boxes.”
It was not the whisper of her son.
Yet he must have wanted to tempt her, because he did not hide the boxes, or buy a safe that she could not in any way open. He left them in his room, beside a pile of photography magazines, and one day she spied the key to the locked box dangling from a pin on his bulletin board, and found another identical key in his desk drawer among paperclips, attached to a tag marked Dup.
As if he were inviting her to look. As if he wanted her, perhaps not quite consciously, to see what the boxes contained.
Sandy, who remarked on almost nothing, said once, “Young Mr. Lewis spends a lot of time out at night.” Setting the coffee service on the table, not meeting her employer’s eye. And eager to talk to someone, anyone, about her son, Mary had said, “Yes, he is a very mysterious young man, isn’t he?”
Sandy, as usual, said nothing, so Mary chattered on. “And I must admit that I wonder where on earth he spends his time.” Thinking that perhaps Sandy had glanced into the box on her way from room to room with her ostrich-feather duster.
“I made some sugar cookies,” said Sandy.
“Oh, delightful,” said Mary. Then, quickly, “I wonder if he has a lover somewhere.”
Sandy slipped out of the room, and the plate of sugar cookies was both a confession of ignorance and a rebuke. The cookies were delicate, cut in shapes of quarter moons. “They are delicious,” said Mary, eating only one corner of one moon. Of course Sandy would deliberately know nothing. She was proud of her discretion. And of course Mary would never forgive her for it.
The night came when Mary steeled herself to go into Len’s room and open the boxes.
She stopped him at the door of the study, the only room in the house where she still felt comfortable. He carried the usual photographic equipment, and barely glanced at her on his way past, and then she touched his sleeve with a finger. “Will you be late?” For once she wanted him to say yes.
“Probably,” he said.
“Shall Sandy leave something for you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He turned, but turned back again to look at her, almost seeing that she was going to look inside the boxes on this night. But he said, “Why are you reading that book?” in that electric whisper.
For a moment, she could not speak. It was the leather-bound Ovid, the one Phil had enjoyed more than all his thousands of books. But she could not read Latin.
“I wasn’t reading it. I was enjoying it. It’s a beautiful volume.”
He recognized weakness in her, if not a lie. “Beautiful, but empty.”
“Perhaps,” she faltered.
“And what is good in it you would not understand.”
“Would you?”
“Yes.” That whisper. “‘I bend close to tell of things that change, new being out of old.’”
She was icy. “Phil admired Ovid, he—”
Len laughed, quietly. “I will be late.”
She watched the shine of sunlight off the waxed wood of the floor, afternoon light, gentle and in harmony with every peaceful thing she had ever known, but she could not move. She was ice.
The gap in the row of books attracted her, and she slipped the book into it wishing for the first time in a long while that Phil were alive. She wanted to talk to someone so badly she ached.
“Len, Len,” she sobbed. Her Leonard. Her healthy, handsome boy had grown into a creature with the eyes of a dead man.
But all this was her own imagination. She tried to calm herself. She was the one who was peculiar; she had always known that. Whatever Len was, she had made him. She would redecorate. Bring in more flowers, great lances of gladiolus to give fire to the various dark corners of the house. She would have an aviary built and collect canaries. She craved the mindless jabber of birds. They were lively. They had no choice.
She would change everything. She would even take down the Patinir, the one Phil had admired. The translucent angel paused in the air before the shepherd, and she despised the lie. Whatever appears, conjured out of the thin afternoon air, is not an angel.
She paced the garden. She would rip out the roses. How much they reminded her of the truth: beauty with teeth. Her father—now she could barely think of him—had despised roses. “Flowers for women,” he had said. He liked clean-lined irises, lupines, phallic bursts out of the masculine earth.
She wept, and then she was strong. It was nearly dark, and she went into the house. When night was everywhere, and not even a dim glow of daylight was left, she went upstairs, turning on lights as she went, and stood before her son’s room.
The door was locked. A bright new dead-bolt gleamed at her.
She laughed. She was terrified of Len, but she was not weak. Sandy puttered somewhere in the kitchen, and would not see or hear anything Mary did. Mary was glad there was a lock on the door. It made her cruel.
She dismissed destroying the door with an ax, even if she could find one somewhere in the gardener’s shed. She would be crisp. Precise.
She called a locksmith, promising tremendous rewards for lightning service. A small man with freckles arrived panting, swore once or twice beneath his breath, and said he would have to damage the door.
“Damage the door, and I’ll kill you,” she said calmly.
The locksmith laughed, because of course it was a joke. “Very few men know how to pick a lock like this. It is a very good piece of equipment. Most men would have to drill, and wreck the lock.” He worked as he spoke, making a grimace of effort as he fit a long strip of metal into the slot. “Which is the quickest method. This method is difficult.”
Scarcely a method at all, she thought, but she remained silent. She even turned away, seething but outwardly calm, as the smell of sweat rose from the man and reached out across the hall.
She paid him extravagantly, as she had promised. The lock turned in her fingers, and the room was hers.
She did not enter for a while. She let herself feel quiet inside. Then she turned on the light, and shut the door behind her, propping a chair under the doorknob. If he returned and saw her here she could not guess what would happen.
The first box, the one that was never locked, was cold in her hands. She lifted it and was surprised that it was so heavy. She hesitated, hating herself for her cowardice, and opened the lid.
A file, with folders and tabs without any writing, blank tabs, as if there were no need for labels. In each folder nestled a series of photographs. Again she hesitated, but she forced herself to open a folder and leaf through the pictures.
She was relieved. More night pictures, most of them not very well done, she thought, certainly moodless. Murky, meaningless pictures. Early work of his, experiments, perhaps. Here she discerned a sidewalk, there a dark bulk of bush. Until, with growing horror, she crept her way through the file realizing that all the photographs were of cemeteries. Crypts, headstones, and interior shots of mausoleums done in very minimal light, at night, in secret.
Morbid, she thought to herself. Very. And yet, what had she expected? Pictures of naked women? Or, even, naked little boys? Of course not. She had understo
od that her son was a very peculiar person. Why shouldn’t he take photograph after photograph of cemeteries? Civilian cemeteries, military cemeteries, some displayed rather well, she thought, admiring a recently filled grave beneath the branches of, she decided, a cypress.
She would encourage him to bring these pictures into the study. They would discuss their artistic merits. There was probably a market for, say, a book of arty shots of graveyards. People found such places romantic, even peaceful. Most of these pictures were beneath his usual quality, but perhaps he was deliberately using sloppy technique, gathering information on cemeteries so he could return again and take even more pictures.
Certainly nothing very impressive here, she sniffed. Almost relieved, she tucked the files back into the box, and was careful to see that they were undisturbed in appearance.
But she was trembling. Her hands were cold.
The locked box awaited her attention.
She had seen enough. She had the general idea of what Len’s nighttime interests were; she did not have to see any more.
There was a sound in the hall and she froze. She could not breathe. When she realized that she was mistaken, she was weak. She found a chair and sat, breathing hard. She could not bear to look at the locked box. It was identical to the other one. Gray metal, with a chrome-colored handle, except that it was defended by a small padlock. A flimsy lock, really.
But enough to keep anyone from looking into the box. Enough to make her hands wet and make her legs too weak to move. Enough to mock her, a challenge, a way of telling her that she had made her son into a terrible thing.
She guessed what was in the box. She could not believe it, but so many times in her life she was unsurprised at the supposedly unexpected. She collected her strength. She made herself calm. And she opened the desk drawer and removed the key, a little slip of steel with notches in it.
The padlock fell open, and she detached it. She opened the box. There were more files, nameless manila tabs, but not as many. They leaned back upon themselves as if to avoid her hands.
She slipped one free of the box and paused for a moment before letting it fall open.
Pictures of a crypt. The pale marble of a tomb in moonlight. The tomb bore the name: Lewis.
She closed the folder, trembling so badly she nearly dropped it. She had long ago stopped visiting her father’s tomb, although it was a handsome one. To be reminded of his physical presence above ground in a steel box was ugly. She controlled herself, going numb, and slowly, deliberately, took out each folder and looked at each picture, her body growing rigid with horror.
Then, barely able to see, she slipped the folders back into the box, and locked it. She shuddered but she gripped herself, digging her nails into her flesh. When she stopped shuddering she put the boxes where she had found them, moving very slowly.
She took the chair from beneath the doorknob, but she did not bother to shut the door behind her. She did not bother to establish any pretense. Her face was frozen into what she knew must be a grimace, a mask of terror mastered by the most powerful will.
She took each step slowly, and passed by the study. She stepped across the dew-wet lawn in the darkest part of the garden.
She fell onto the grass and sobbed, shuddering, retching, blind with everything she had seen and wishing she had never had eyes, never lived beyond her childhood so she could never have been brought to this.
She hid her face in the damp lawn and groaned into it, and even when she was empty, belly and soul, she still could not move, but lay like a lifeless thing.
21
“You’ll have to go. You can’t live here anymore.”
Len met her eyes. “Why?” he whispered.
“You know why,” she said quietly.
For a long moment she thought he might strike her. But at last he laughed, a dry, empty, hissing laugh. He bowed, a quick jerk of his head. “I understand,” he said. Why did he seem amused?
For the next few years she had seen less and less of him, although she called him on the phone, hating the sound of his voice, which became almost entirely a whisper, like the sound of something dragged across snow. And he called her once a week, always polite, always secretive.
He went north at last to do “research,” as he put it. And then she stopped hearing from him, and what was she supposed to do? She wanted to forget him completely, but that was impossible.
And then the nightmares had begun, the terrible dreams of the intruder in the seemingly peaceful place, the slow steps, and the terror that woke her night after night.
The terror that still kept her awake. She sat in her dressing gown. Rain pattered on the window, and she nearly prayed aloud for sleep. As if she could pray. As if she would be heard even if she did.
She would not be able to sleep. She probably should see Mark’s doctor. Sleeping pills would be a blessing, although she wondered if she might take the entire bottle, every single pill, and sleep forever.
The idea was almost amusing. Not that she would ever do that. No, she was not destructive to herself. Only to the people entrusted to her. She ate them like a vulture. She had not wanted to be evil. It had been tricked into her somehow, at some point. Some alloy in her makeup, the sort of fault that had made the foil snap and turn into a jagged rapier.
Sandy opened the door into the kitchen, spilling light across the floor. “Oh!” she gasped. “It’s you!”
“I thought I’d have a toddy, after all. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Sandy took over the filling of the kettle. “Tonight, I don’t know why. But tonight I am so nervous.”
“There’s no reason to be nervous,” said Mary.
“No reason! Every day all these ghastly things happen. Crazy men all over, hurting people. And always crazy men, you notice. Never women.”
“There are sick women.”
Sandy paused, bottle of rum in her hands. “Of course. Many miserable women. But they don’t go around hurting people. Strangling. Beating to death. Slaughtering innocent people in their houses. Men do that. Crazy men.”
Sandy added honey to the cup, and poured rum, the gurgling of the liquor like a sinister chuckle. The sound of it dazed Mary, and she gripped the counter top to bring herself back into what she supposed was reality: the gleaming stove, the faucet a hook that dripped water.
“Men who have no idea what it is to be a human being,” Sandy continued. “Who are totally wrapped up in their own minds. Who think the world is all inside their heads.” She stirred hot water into the cup. The spoon jangled in the china, and a drop of rum glistened on the countertop. “They should do something about these men.”
“What?” Mary whispered. “What can they do?”
“Sometimes I think it would be better for everyone if they did not have news about craziness. If when someone was killed, they didn’t even talk about it. How many times have I turned on the television and seen policemen carrying a bag with a body in it.”
Sandy was obviously nervous tonight. She was rarely so talkative. “Make a toddy for yourself,” Mary suggested.
“No. I will sleep well. Nothing interrupts my sleep. It’s just something about tonight. Made me scared.”
“The weather.”
“I like rain. Comforts me, makes me glad to be indoors. But do you know what? If they didn’t have the bad news on television, they’d never catch the crazy men who do all these things.”
“Naturally, if something happens, they have to tell us. No matter how ghastly it might be. It is, I suppose, their responsibility.”
“That’s right. They have to do it. They have to tell us the truth, even if we don’t want to hear it.”
The drink was still too hot. “We should,” said Mary weakly, “try to think of pleasant things.”
Sandy nodded. “We will.”
Mary turned on the television in her bedroom. Hills and trees, and a herd of wild beasts sprang into focus. A lioness lowered herself into tall, brown grass. The herd twitched. One of
the animals was aware of something. Another lioness hulked through the grass.
Her father had hunted in Africa many times, although he had rarely talked about it. What he had enjoyed there was a secret, a ripeness that he had held to himself. Once, squeezing a tick out of a dog’s fur, he had remarked that in Africa they had ticks as big as nickels.
The herd churned, and Mary turned off the television. She knew too much about hunters and their quarry.
Someone answered immediately, but she knew it was a switchboard designed more to screen than to admit as soon as she heard the tone of her voice. “I’m sorry, Dr. Kirby doesn’t have night duty.”
It was important.
“I can have you speak with the physician on duty.”
When would Dr. Kirby be in?
“We don’t expect him tomorrow, but we do expect him …”
Mary could, she supposed, insist on speaking to Kirby. She could identify herself, describe herself as a client, and insist on his home phone. But what could she say? How could she start from the beginning over the phone?
“Is there a message?” the voice was saying.
She had been obsessed with her father, and so broken by his death that she had imagined—or had she believed—that his spirit was alive in the body of her son. That burden had twisted her son into an inhuman thing. But Mary could not say any of this to the bland voice on the switchboard. “No, no message.”
“Can I tell him who called?”
Mary smiled to herself. Tell him that a woman who wishes she could change everything she ever did called up and wanted to say hi.
“No,” said Mary. “No message.”
Mary slept, waking briefly once as rain clawed the window. She listened for a moment to the rain, and then, once again, she slept.
This time the dream was more detailed than it had ever been. The house was dark, and cold, but somehow pleasant, a large fireplace before her with a half-charred log. There was a kitchen off to her left somewhere. She sensed it, and felt that something cheerful was possible there, perhaps even some sauce simmering on the stove. It was raining, but she was safe from the rain.
Nightlight Page 12
