“I think you’re exaggerating his strength.”
“Maybe, but there is a risk because you can’t be certain. And then there’s the other consideration, you going back down into the pits of that netherworld all over again for at least a year. . . .”
“No more than ten months.”
“OK, ten months. The point is, would it produce anything worthwhile? I personally don’t even think the basic idea is all that salable.”
“Neil thinks it is.”
“Well, I don’t agree, but that’s just my opinion.”
I can’t help getting annoyed because I know he’s absolutely wrong, and I tell him, “Well, I do, definitely.”
Now he’s annoyed. “OK, and that’s why you’re doing it, but I think you could have warned me.”
“I guess I didn’t because I already knew your reaction.”
This has degenerated into an argument, and I didn’t want it to. “David,” I say, trying to soften the tone and show him what it really means to me, “this project is crucial to me. It’s my first step into fiction, and if it works it’ll broaden my territory immeasurably. I believe in its possibilities and I want very much to do it, but it loses so much for me without the feel of your support behind me.”
He turns away and, shoving his hands deep into his pockets, walks across the room. I know he’s upset, but it’s a choice I had to make. Now he turns around and comes back to me. He’s understood. “You’re right,” he says, “it is your decision. You’re the expert. You wouldn’t tell me how to run my law practice, and I shouldn’t try to tell you your business. Johanna, I want to be behind you, you know that, but this damn thing makes me uneasy. It always has, right from the beginning when you first started with that creep. I don’t know why, but there’s always been something about your involvement with him that disturbs me. Who knows, maybe underneath it all I feel somehow threatened.”
“By Avrum Maheely?”
“Am I crazy?”
“Completely. But my kind of crazy.” And I put my arms around his waist and hug him as hard as I can.
“Hey! You got some grip there, kid,” he says, kissing my head. And together we walk off into the sunset—or down the hall anyway.
I begin my novel the next day. There is no point in putting it off, not if I expect to finish it in ten months. When the need for more legwork arises I’ll simply have to interrupt the writing, but I must get started now. Neil thinks I ought to call it AStudy in Terror, but that sounds too schoolbookish to me. The best I can come up with so far is Souls in Darkness; not great, but for the time being that’s my working title. I’ve been organizing my notes for a couple of weeks now and have a fairly workable outline. I sit at my computer and more or less allow my mind to go blank. What I am waiting for, of course, is the telephone call telling me I have won the two-million-dollar lottery so that I will never have to write another word or work another day in my life. The phone, alas, is silent. With a mighty sigh, I begin.
Souls in Darkness
(working title)
by
Johanna Morgan
Chapter One
In the lush green of the Adirondack Mountains, deep in the shadows of Mount Marcy somewhere between the town of Tahawus and the Opalescent River, they had found an old abandoned summer cottage, the splintering gray wood smoky with dry rot, and a few unwanted acres of scrubby, dusty landscape. The house was more of a shack than a cottage, and the road that led up to it was badly rutted and overgrown. Long before they’d arrived, the electricity had been cut off, but there was fresh running water out back, and if you emptied a pail of it into the toilet it would flush. More important to them was the privacy the location afforded. Their nearest neighbors, more than a half mile to the south, were two elderly brothers who ran a small vegetable farm and kept to themselves. Additionally, the side roads off the highway were unpaved and dangerous so they were rarely surprised by uninvited visitors.
In order to build the house originally, a large area immediately surrounding it had been cleared of trees, but the job had been sloppily done and the stubby trunks had never been dug up. Over the years, ugly, twisted branches had curled their way out of the stumps, giving the landscape a stunted deformity. Without the big trees for shelter the land was laid open to the biting winter winds that whipped down off the mountains and to the scorching summer sun.
The only time the landscape lost any of its rawness was in the deep winter months when heavy snows rounded it gently under thick, clean mounds of smooth whiteness. But now, in the high, hot midday sun of late July, it was at its meanest.
From the outside the house itself looked like a child’s first drawings, a perfect square with a pointed roof and an upright brick chimney complete with black smoke curling from its mouth. Below was the standard door, the usual two windows. The only thing wrong was its condition. It was run-down, dilapidated. It had broken windowpanes, a torn screen door, peeling paint. Its roof was badly in need of repairs. Only the chimney was intact and, in keeping with the shabbiness of the rest of the house, was black with soot.
Totally out of place in its shiny newness was a Harley Davidson motorcycle sporting every imaginable chrome attachment, leaning against the side of the house. More in keeping was the splattered can of white paint with a hardened paintbrush lying on the ground next to it. On the other side of the door was a pile of empty beer cans and used frozen-food containers alongside a mound of poorly cut logs.
No sounds rose from the house until the door was suddenly kicked open by a sandaled foot, and a young, slim, redheaded woman came out, her arms loaded with wet laundry. Her name was Imogene. She wore shorts cut from bleached jeans and had a red and yellow bandana tied tightly around her chest, flattening her small breasts. Her red hair was long and busy with curls that picked up the sun, giving it sparkling orange and gold highlights. She was pretty, almost beautiful, with peach-tinted skin that deepened to pink on her cheeks and to rose on her bow-shaped lips. She had large, round blue eyes under perfectly arched brows, a small, straight nose, dimpled chin, tiny ears—there wasn’t a mistake on her entire face, yet it lacked the animation of true beauty. Dominating the girl’s countenance was an odd lifelessness.
She walked carefully, trying to peek over her bundle of wash. Once she tripped slightly on a stone and one of the wet socks dropped to the ground, but she couldn’t see it so she continued on around to the back of the house.
She dumped the clothes on the slanting plastic top of a broken old bridge table with one collapsing leg. Another sock began to slide down, but she retrieved it.
Without much interest she began flinging the wet clothes over a clothesline that ran from a corner window out some fifteen feet to a slender oak tree. At first the T-shirts and jeans were fairly well spread out, but as she neared the end of the rope and ran out of space, the clothes began overlapping one another, and where the line wrapped around the tree they were hopelessly piled in a never-drying mound.
As soon as the last shirt was piled over the line she started back to the house. As she passed the dropped sock, without missing a step she kicked it into the open space under the house. Once in front of the house, she untied the bandana around her chest and wrapped it around her head to catch some of the curls and hold them off her perspiring neck. Her small, firm breasts had dark nipples that matched the rose of her lips and were as perfectly shaped. She sat down on a large, flat rock to one side of the doorway, waiting, doodling circles with a broken twig in the hard, dry dirt at her feet.
Five or ten minutes passed and then she heard what she was waiting for, the unmistakable whine of a motorcycle in the distance, and her dull blue eyes took on a slight sparkle. In seconds the sound became a roar as the bike sped over the pitted road, motor screaming as it hit the bumps and spun off the ground and then thumped down only to hit another bump. From the sound, it had to be going fifty miles an hour.
Imogene strained to see the bike through the trees, but she knew it could only be Avrum. No o
ne else took that road at such speed. Pleasure and excitement filled the emptiness of her face, and her lips spread into a smile of delight. Avrum was coming! She jumped up, her slim body arching expectantly, perfectly still. Waiting.
Moments later bike and rider burst through an opening in the thickly matted underbrush and skidded to a stop, sending a cloud of dry dirt flying in every direction.
The fine spray whipped Imogene’s naked legs, making her jump back momentarily. But before the dust had settled she was smiling and walking through it to greet Avrum. He seemed distracted by some private annoyance and barely nodded to her as he swung off the bike, his left leg arching gymnast-style over the handlebars.
Once off the bike, he shoved it to Imogene who, while Avrum brushed the dust from his clothes, wheeled it to the side of the house next to the other Harley.
On the bike, Avrum’s long, muscular trunk made him look taller than five six, but even at that unimpressive height he was powerful, his physique hardened by years of serious exercise with barbells and pulleys in all those foster homes he’d been in and out of, and isometrics and hard labor during the ten years he had accumulated in prisons. He had always taken great pride in his body; it was the one thing no one could take from him. They had sent him to some of the most miserable homes and jails over the years, but he’d always had the mental discipline to shut out the worst of it and concentrate on self-improvement, most of it physical. When it was possible, he took great care to choose clothes that accentuated those hard-won accomplishments. Today his upper body was sheathed in a thin, onionskin, nylon T-shirt of an iridescent blue that flashed with a silver sheen when the light caught the roll of his muscles.
No one was certain exactly how old Avrum was. He claimed to be twenty-seven but looked closer to thirty-five. It was his starkness and intensity that aged him. His deep-brown hair hung almost to his shoulders and was dense and straight with a coarseness that made it stand out dramatically around his long, angular face. Except for his eyes, his other features were ordinary, but the eyes were remarkable. Large and almond-shaped, they were rimmed with dark, thick lashes that accentuated the huge, black-brown irises that seemed to be flecked with tiny red suns. In a relaxed state or even when he was stoned on drugs they were never quiet, always radiating a kind of electrical energy arresting in its intensity.
It was that energy that had drawn Imogene to him the first time she saw him in Anna’s sandal shop off St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. She had known Anna Butler from her old neighborhood in Brooklyn and ran into her accidentally one day when she and Arnold were hanging out in Washington Square Park. Imogene greeted Anna like a long-lost sister and immediately confided that she’d been seeing Arnold for only two weeks when her mother found out that he was black and threw her out of the house. Now she said, she had to live with him, and she was very lonely and didn’t like him so much anymore because he was so mean to her. She told Anna how Arnold had made her have sex with some men and then kept all the money. He did that a lot now. One time when she’d made a fuss about the money he’d punched her in the neck, and she could hardly move her head for a week. That was when she decided to get a job. But it was really hard to find one because she couldn’t type or anything like that, and when she tried to work in Duane Reade the cash registers got her all confused and made her cry, and they said she couldn’t stay. But Anna was very nice to her and let her come to her shop almost every day, and pretty soon she was giving Imogene little things to do, like helping to soften the leather or running errands, and she even paid her when she could. Imogene loved Anna more than anyone else, even her mother.
Anna used to talk a lot about her friend Avrum Maheely and how he was so special. She made him sound practically like another Jesus, and Imogene began dreaming about him at night, and she was dying to meet him. One time, around the end of the summer, Anna said that Avrum was coming in from upstate and if Imogene came to the shop that Saturday she could meet him.
That Saturday morning she arrived at the shop well before Anna and had to wait outside. She sat on the warm cement stoop and watched every man who walked by, trying to guess which one was Avrum.
It was one of those hot, gummy New York mornings, the kind that plasters your clothes against your skin and makes your thighs stick together, but Imogene made no attempt to move out of the sunlight streaming down from just above the roof of the brownstone across the street. She liked the closeness of the heat; it made her feel loved. Especially today. The warmth of the sun and the anticipation of the special man she was going to meet made her clitoris pulsate, and she longed to slide her finger around inside herself. She was always happy when she masturbated. She did it often because it made her feel good and it was easy. Most things were so difficult she’d give up halfway through. Like school; that was much too hard. And then her family moved around so much that she was always missing all the important work, and finally, when they moved to Georgia and nobody got around to registering her, she was glad because by then she was more than two years behind the other twelve-year-olds and knew she could never catch up. From then on she stayed at home and tried to help her mother with her younger brothers and sisters, but that didn’t work so well either. Though she tried her hardest all the time, her mother, who had a quick temper and an even faster hand, was never satisfied. She had never seen her own father, and the father of the younger kids hardly ever came around. When she was fifteen, her mother moved the family to Brooklyn, and that was the last they ever saw of him.
In Brooklyn they all lived with Uncle Fred, and he was even more impatient with her than her mother had been, calling her dummy and smacking her around whenever she made a mistake. She was always crying, but nobody seemed to care. Until she met Arnold. That happened about two weeks before her sixteenth birthday, and when he found out it was her birthday he bought her a beautiful soft green sweater. Then he took her to his house and he showed her how to make love, and it was the first time she could ever remember a grown-up person hugging her and loving her. She was happy when her mother made her leave home because she wanted to stay with Arnold forever. Then Arnold changed. He still made love to her often, but it was different. He hardly ever talked and almost never kissed her anymore. And then he started bringing home those other men, and when she got sullen and didn’t want to cooperate he began to talk to her like her mother and Uncle Fred, and she stopped liking him.
Now Avrum Maheely was coming soon, and Anna said she would love him, and she trusted Anna.
She waited almost an hour, and then she saw them walking down the street. With the sun directly behind them and the heat waves rising from the pavement, they were only blurred outlines, but Avrum’s was crowned with something very dark that seemed too full for ordinary hair. She was confused and a little frightened and kept her eyes fixed on him. Excitement replaced the confusion as he came closer and she could make out his face and see that it was indeed only hair and that he was looking directly at her. He walked straight to her and his eyes held her, and when he put his hands on her arms, she was conquered. He said very little to her, but it was as if he had always known her, and she felt trusting.
Other people came to the shop to see him all day and into that night. There were long discussions. To Imogene, Avrum sounded like a priest, but his sermons had a rhythm like poetry and were filled with words and thoughts she couldn’t begin to understand. She sat as close to him as possible, and the sound of his voice comforted her. She stayed with him that night and they made love on the cot in the back of the shop, and when he went back upstate the next day, she went with him. Nothing was said; he never asked her to go; it was just understood that she would be with him from then on. And in the two years she had lived with him, her attachment had only deepened and gotten stronger. With Avrum, Imogene was complete.
Now, in front of the mountain shack, Imogene could see that Avrum was angry, but it didn’t matter as long as he wasn’t angry at her, and from the pat he gave her on the cheek she knew he wasn’t. He wa
lked into the house.
“Where’s the van?” he asked.
“Skip and Little Willie took it to pick up supplies,” she answered.
With the shutters closed it was dark inside the house. Slivers of sunlight slipped between the warped slats, sending half a dozen long white stripes across the floor and over the body of a man sleeping on two big, raggedy couch cushions. The only other light was from a couple of candles burning in saucers on the floor. Besides the sleeping man there were two women. One was curled up asleep on a small rug against the far wall. She lay in a fetal position with her ripely pregnant stomach resting on her lap. The other woman was Swat; she was at an old-fashioned, white-speckled stove, stirring a small pot of chili.
The screech of the screen door and the sound of Avrum’s boots made louder by his angry step woke the two sleeping people and caused the large-boned woman at the stove to stop stirring and turn toward him.
“Those fuckin’ niggers,” he exploded, “I can’t wait till they wipe ’em all out!” Avrum threw himself down on a big, worn armchair that leaked white stuffing through its bursting seams. “Does this place have to look like midnight all the time? Open the fuckin’ shutters, will you!” This was directed to Frank Helmet, the man on the cushions, who was by now sitting up and wide awake.
“Hey, man, we were only trying to keep it a little cool in here.” His tone was vaguely annoyed, reflecting the abruptness of his awakening.
“Open it,” Avrum snapped back.
“Come off it, Avrum, it gets like a fuckin’ oven with the sun baking in.”
Without a word Avrum got up, walked over to Frank, jerked the slim young man up by his shoulders, and rapped him once, hard, across the chin with the side of his hand, karate-style. Frank’s head snapped back against the blow, his body tightened and his arms shot up to shove his aggressor away, but at the first contact with Avrum’s body, his hands froze and, an instant later, fell to his sides. The room was still.
Save Johanna! Page 4
