Ariel

by Lawrence Block

  She put the kettle on.

  Damned old house. Crazy house, with a stove that turned itself off and on according to its private whims. Crazy old house with music cutting through walls and ceilings like a sword slashing a silk shawl.

  She stood at the counter, feeling the damp floor through her shoes, and measured instant coffee into a mug. David’s breakfast dishes were washed and put away, she noticed, and she was sure she had left them undone. Of course a kitchen that could blow out pilot lights of its own accord might wash dishes by itself if it felt like it.

  She felt herself smiling at the thought. No, the child must have washed the dishes. Unless the ghost had taken to walking by day.

  The ghost …

  She could remember more clearly now. She had awakened sometime in the dim middle of the night, waking from a sleep she felt must be too deep for her to have been dreaming. And the woman, wrapped in her shawl, was in her usual position in the corner of the room. Although the drug she’d taken had clouded her mind, she felt her visual perception was good … the woman was more clearly defined than she had been the night before.

  Once again, the woman had turned just prior to her departure, turned to show Roberta what she was holding. The night before Roberta had perceived something that flickered. This time she had gotten a better look, and the woman had been holding—what?

  A mirror.

  Yes, yes, she remembered! The woman had held a mirror, and had extended it toward her for an instant before fading and disappearing. It had flashed and flickered, reflecting light that was not there, and Roberta had recognized it as a mirror because she had looked into it and seen—

  And seen herself.

  God, she remembered it so clearly now! She breathed deeply, trying to come to terms with the memory, and placed her palms on the kitchen counter for support.

  And then she felt it.

  That sudden touch of cold air on the nape of her neck. She recognized the sensation immediately but tried to find an explanation for it. Was it a trick of the mind, touched off by her recollection of what she had seen last night? No, it was real enough. Well, could she have left the front door open on her last trip with the groceries? But she distinctly remembered kicking it shut. Of course the latch might not have engaged, and perhaps the wind—

  No.

  There was something behind her. Something behind her. Ariel, she thought, and as before she could feel those pale little eyes on her, touching her like cold damp hands.

  But that was impossible. The music, the horrible wailing of the flute. It was going on, as loud as ever, so loud her skull was pulsing in time to it.

  And now the teakettle whistled.

  She made herself stand absolutely motionless. With very economical hand motions she inched upon the drawer in front of her. Her right hand slipped inside once the drawer was a couple of inches open, and she groped around until she managed to find one of the long knives and retrieve it very carefully from the drawer.

  The child was upstairs playing her hellish music and someone was standing behind her. Not David. David didn’t sneak up on people.

  Someone. Or something.

  She tightened her grip on the knife. Please, she thought, let it be an overactive imagination. Let it be the house making me crazy, let it be the shock of Jeff’s death, let it be a reaction to too much Valium, too much excitement, too much stress, too much of everything—

  The teakettle went on whistling, contending with the music of the flute. She couldn’t just stand there forever. Sooner or later she had to turn around.

  She turned.

  And Ariel stood framed in the doorway, her little eyes staring, her mouth open.

  Roberta screamed. The teakettle whistled, the taped flute played on, and she screamed and screamed.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Roberta’s funeral was held Monday afternoon. Erskine was there, of course, accompanied this time by his parents, but he and Ariel didn’t get a chance to talk. Tuesday he came to the house but there were other people around. Ariel didn’t really talk to anyone else either, although she participated in various conversations. She got through them with her mind turned to another channel.

  She didn’t even write anything in her diary. The night of the funeral she read through several earlier entries before putting the book away in a drawer.

  Then finally Erskine came over Thursday after school. David was home, reading a book and smoking his pipes, and he didn’t object when she asked if she and Erskine could go upstairs.

  When they were in her room with the door closed they were nervous with each other at first. Erskine kept walking around, picking things up and putting them down again, and she wished he would just sit down.

  “Well,” he said. “How long’ll you be out of school?”

  “I’ll be back Monday.”

  “So you wind up missing a week, huh? Listen, don’t sweat it. You didn’t miss anything so far.”

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “They never teach anything anyway.”

  “I know.”

  “Tashman’s giving us a test next week. And I can get your homework assignments tomorrow so you can do them over the weekend if you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If you don’t feel like it they won’t hassle you. Veronica was in school today and they told her don’t worry about making up the work she missed.”

  “How is she?”

  He shrugged. “She looks all right. I don’t know if she’s really sick or not. I wish I knew one way or the other. It’s hard to have sex fantasies about someone when you think they might be dying.”

  “That’s really creepy.”

  “Well, I feel creepy today,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Why don’t you play the flute or something?”

  “I can’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Not until Monday. It was the same thing when Caleb died. David says it’s a way of showing respect. I didn’t understand it about Caleb because I used to play for him all the time, but she hated my flute so I guess it makes sense.”

  “I guess.”

  “Even if it doesn’t, I don’t want to argue with him. We had this long conversation the other night. I think maybe he was drunk. Does your father get drunk?”

  “Never.”

  “David was talking louder than usual, plus he would be cheerful one minute and sad the next. It was a little weird. He talked about Roberta and he talked about God’s will, and how maybe everything was for the best. And how it’s just the two of us now and we have to take care of each other.”

  “Does that mean you get stuck with all the housework?”

  “We’re going to get a cleaning woman. Roberta used to have help with the heavy cleaning once a week but we’ll have someone come in every day. At least that’s what he said. I guess she’ll do the cooking, too. We haven’t had to cook anything so far. People brought tons of stuff to the house after the funeral. Plus there’s all the groceries Roberta bought the day she killed herself.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, I don’t feel like playing music. I haven’t felt like it since she died.”

  “What do you feel like doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you figure they really loved each other?”

  “David and Roberta? No.” She reconsidered. “He told me they did. He also said she loved me, and I know she didn’t. Or maybe she did some of the time. When she wasn’t crazy.”

  “Why did she kill herself?”

  “I don’t know. Why did the Funeral Game man kill his family and himself? Why do people do things like that? Because she was crazy, I guess. It was really weird.”

  “What happened exactly?”

  “I’ll tell you if you give me a chance. I was up in my room and I heard her come in with the groceries. And then the next thing I knew the teakettle was whistling and I came downstairs because it just went on whistling and didn’t stop. I had the tape recorder going a
nd the teakettle wasn’t blending with it too beautifully, and I thought maybe she put the kettle on and went out again and forgot it.”

  “So?”

  “So I went to the kitchen and there she is standing like a statue with her back to me. And the teakettle’s screaming away like mad and old Roberta’s standing there as if she’s frozen. I didn’t know what to do. It was crazy.”

  “And?”

  “And just as I was ready to go turn off the kettle myself, she turned around. Except it was more like a lion or a panther springing … I mean, turning around all in one motion. And here comes the worst part. She had a knife in her hand.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m not kidding. A carving knife with a blade this long.”

  “Sure, and the next thing you knew she cut your head off with it. Come on, Jardell.”

  “That’s what I thought she was going to do. I swear I did. That’s how she was holding it. And you never saw anything in your life like the look on her face. She was completely crazed.”

  “Honest?”

  “No, I’m making the whole thing up. Of course it’s honest.”

  “We always talked about crazy Roberta but I never knew she was really that far gone.”

  “Nobody knew. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her like that. I thought she was going to kill me.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She just started screaming. That’s all. Just opened her mouth and screamed her head off.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you think? I got out of there. I just grabbed my coat and ran.”

  “Out of the house.”

  “I would have run out of the state if I knew the way. I just took off like a maniac. I got all the way over to your house before I remembered you weren’t home.”

  “Where was I? Oh, right. Visiting Aunt Claire.”

  “Then I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go to the movies but I didn’t have any money with me so I couldn’t. I wound up at the library. I couldn’t find anything very interesting but each time I started to go home I thought of Roberta and went looking for another book.”

  “And while you were at the library—”

  “She was killing herself.”

  “How did she do it, exactly?”

  “She had these tranquilizers and I guess she took a lot of them first. Then she closed herself up in the kitchen and shut the door and everything and turned the gas on.”

  “You mean the stove?”

  She nodded. “She shut off all the pilot lights and then turned on the stove and the oven. And I think she put her head in the oven, or maybe I’m mixing it up with Sylvia Plath.”

  “The one who wrote those poems named Ariel? I’ll have to get that book one of these days.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Well, just to see what it’s like. I thought she killed herself in her car.”

  “No, she put her head in the oven.”

  “Are you sure? I read something about her. I thought she sat in her car in the garage with the motor running.”

  Ariel looked at him, then at the portrait on the wall. “I’m pretty sure it was the oven,” she said. “Anyway, we don’t have a garage.”

  He stared hard at her, his eyes protruding behind his glasses. Then he said, “Who found her? David?”

  “Uh-huh. They’d taken her away by the time I got home.”

  “Jesus. Ariel? How do you feel about it?”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about it, if you want to know. I suppose it’ll take me a week or so before I figure out how I really feel.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I mean, will I miss her? We didn’t get along very well but maybe I’ll wind up missing her all the same. How can I tell for sure?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  “That’s right.”

  He studied her. “You’ve changed,” he said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know exactly. You seem older.”

  “Really?”

  “You even look different. Your face.” He nodded at the portrait. “More like her.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah … Ariel?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Didn’t do what?”

  His eyes drew away from hers. “You didn’t just happen to kill her, did you? Like in a dream?”

  She stared at him.

  “Just kidding,” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Sure, that’s just what I did. First I smothered Caleb in his sleep, never mind that I happened to love him, and then I took a car and ran over Graham, and then I fixed it so Veronica got leukemia—”

  “Is that what she’s got?”

  Her eyes flared. “I don’t know what she’s got. But whatever it is I gave it to her, right? And then I shot Debbie Channing and Greta Channing and his wife, I don’t remember her name—”

  “Elaine.”

  “I don’t care what her name was. Then I shot her, and then I put him in his car and shot him, and then I made Roberta take pills and put her head in the oven. What kind of a person do you think I am?”

  “Ariel, I was kidding!”

  “You’re supposed to be my friend. How could you say a thing like that?”

  “I said I was kidding.”

  “That’s no way to kid.”

  “I’m sorry. Ariel? Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “Only dogs get mad.”

  “Well, don’t be angry.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Ariel?”

  “I’m not angry,"” she said. “It’s okay.”

  “Are you sure?“

  “I’m sure.”

  He reached for her hand. At first it lay lifeless in his. Then she returned his squeeze and both of them relaxed.

  “Hey, Ariel?”

  “What?”

  “How do you make a dead baby float?”

  “What?”

  “I said, how do you make a dead baby float?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s a riddle. How do you make—”

  “A dead baby float. I don’t know.”

  “You give up?”

  “All right, I give up.”

  “Well, it’s easy,” he said. “You take one dead baby, two scoops of vanilla ice cream, some chocolate syrup—”

  “Gross,” she said.

  “—and some soda water, and a maraschino cherry—”

  “Utterly gross and disgusting,” she said, but then she started to giggle, and for the life of her she couldn’t stop.

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR:

  Introducing Ariel

  In 1995, G & G Books, a creature of Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, had a project in the works that they called The Lawrence Block Library. Their first entry was a first hardcover edition of the third Matthew Scudder book, In the Midst of Death. It sold out right away, so they followed it with Ariel. I tried to steer them in another direction, because Ariel had already been published in hardcover by Arbor House, and it seemed to me that collector demand for a second hardcover edition would be minimal. Indeed it was, and the book did not sell well. That, alas, was the end of The Lawrence Block Library, but the book did include an author’s afterword and here it is:

  In the summer of 1975 my life was in what one of Sean O’Casey’s characters would call a state of chassis. A thirteen-year marriage had ended two years previously, and my totem ever since seemed to be that legendary bird born with one wing shorter than the other, and consequently doomed to fly around in ever-diminishing concentric circles.

  Each of my relationships ended a little more quickly than the one before it. This pattern reached full bloom in July, when I cleaned out my apartment on West Fifty-Eighth Street,
Manhattan, sold or gave away almost everything I had left after the divorce, and crammed everything that remained into a Ford station wagon that was in no better shape than I was. I drove to Buffalo, where I was to move in with a blameless young woman with whom I’d been keeping company.

  When I pulled into her driveway, she came out to meet me, a mask of concern on her face. “I don’t think this is going to work,” she said.

  “Now you tell me,” I said.

  I thought about that bird, the one with wings of unequal length, the one flying in ever-diminishing concentric circles. Such birds are rare, and for good reason. What happens to the bird, ultimately, is that he flies up his own asshole and disappears.

  And that, in a manner of speaking, is what I decided to do. I sorted the stuff in the Ford wagon, gave about half of it away, and stowed the rest in my mother’s attic. Then, after spending a reasonably carefree month on Fire Island, New York, with my daughters, I got back into the Ford and pointed it south.

  I had a sort of a plan. Since I didn’t seem capable of living anyplace, I was going to try living no place. I was on my way to California, but I was in no hurry to get there. In the meantime, I would try to operate with two ground rules. I would not stay anywhere for more than a month, and I would try to get out of town before I was asked to.

  Along the way, I’d do what I always did. I’d support myself by writing.

  This was what I’d always done, although I seemed less deft at it lately. Since the marriage broke up I’d written the fourth Chip Harrison book and the first three Matthew Scudder novels, along with what would turn out to be the last of many pseudonymous works. But that was all in the first fifteen months or so, and now it had been almost a year since I’d managed to get anything finished. I was starting to get a little nervous, sort of like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, but at least I knew what I was going to do next, because my agent had landed me a contract. I was going to write a book called The Adopted, about an adoption that didn’t work out.

  Not my idea. It was the prospective publisher’s idea, and I pretended to know what he had in mind. Then I went off and pretended to write it.

  First place I went was Rodanthe, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I spent a month there, fishing off the long pier, literally existing on what I hauled out of the water. I wrote a couple of short stories, but what I mostly did was fish.