Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  —Christ Jesus let them not die forever who have done Thee service and blessed Thee and eaten the Bread of Thy Salvation for their sustenance. Let them not go into the night of nothing and be lost.

  —Is it the first wind? Dee asked again. Is it? Answer.

  —He has prepared a place for those who have abandoned the way. They will be cast into darkness and will sleep. Christ let them sleep and not be slain.

  John Dee’s hands circled the stone. He would not release her. He said:

  —Madam I abjure you.

  —Pity, O pity, she said, her great eyes wide. Pity like a naked newborn babe.

  She shivered where she knelt, for the wind seemingly blew also in the place she was. She clasped her nakedness, and tried to draw her flailing gown around her, which the wind wanted. Dee ceased to question her. His heart was full. She was no longer preaching or teaching. She prayed, and prayed not for human souls, but for herself: as frightened as a child on a night of storm, as an orphan of war pleading for her life with pitiless victors, who did not seem to hear.

  EIGHT

  Up on Mount Whirligig the wind threshed the aged trees, never cut, of the woods around The Woods Center for Psychotherapy. The center itself—made of wood a century almost ago, and having suffered a lot of weather since—rode out the blow like an old galleon, creaking and moaning to wake the guests (never patients, never inmates) and start their dreads. The flag rope beat the tall metal flagpole rhythmically, ringing like a tocsin.

  It was long after lights-out, and the long wooden halls were dark, but an altercation of voices (high and hysterical, calm and low) was taking place in the women’s bathroom at the end of the third floor west. Noise of cascading waters. A door slammed. The pat of bare feet walking swiftly down the hall, someone following the mutterer on rubber soles, a whispered entreaty or command, the barefoot one fleeing down the stairs. She appeared next in the odorous kitchen, where a night man found her; when she began to empty the shelves of their contents, big boxes of salt and spices, huge cans of tomatoes and corn and peaches, he found she was too strong to stop, and went for help, waking the second floor east pounding on the resident’s door.

  Somebody had flipped: those awake in their beds listened intently. Disruptions in the night weren’t unheard of here, and they were discussed in detail at breakfast, who was that up at two A.M. This one though a true psychotic event, which was rare at The Woods. It now traveled from the kitchen up to the big game room, having involved the third floor west monitor who found her in the bathroom, the therapist whom the monitor had awakened, the night man who found her after the other two lost her, and the resident he had awakened, who was Mike Mucho, doing his monthly stint. None of them were ready to use force to subdue her, but they were not having any luck getting her to take a pill, or a shot, or get back in bed.

  They got her to sit quietly for a time, in a conversation area by the pool table; her face was filmed with pale sweat, her eyes looked from one to another of them as though trying to determine what sort of beasts they were. Then, abruptly, she slapped her knees with both hands and got up, time to be going, and was fighting her way through their restraining hands (blindly, as through a thicket) when Ray Honeybeare, dressed in a plaid robe and carpet slippers, appeared before her.

  It seemed to Mike later on a kind of providence that among those who had been awakened to deal with the girl there was no one who would want to keep Honeybeare away from her. She stopped when she saw him, seeming to recognize him as a person, as she had not the others. He only looked at her curiously, his rumpled face calm.

  Then the show changed venue again, back toward the disrupted kitchen. She stepped that way deliberately at first, then with reluctance or uncertainty, as though a kind of possessing will came and departed and came again within her; they all followed, Honeybeare among them, hands in the pockets of his robe. More lights were coming on, doors opening, the curious coming to the top of the stair to look down into the kitchen.

  She turned there to face Honeybeare.

  Hands still in his pockets, Honeybeare fixed the girl with his pink-rimmed blue eyes, tiny gems discarded in the ruin of his face. The wind shook the kitchen windows, and the cedars outside moaned. He said:

  “Tell me your name.”

  She clamped tight her jaws and raised her head, eyes fierce and the tendons standing in her neck. Mike Mucho, standing near her, could smell her fear. Honeybeare said again:

  “Tell me your name.”

  She did: she released it from her mouth, a string of meaningless plosives; she was shaking with terror or rage or both. As soon as he heard the name, Honeybeare drew his hands from his pockets, took the girl by her skinny elbows, and staring not at her face but at her breast said in a voice almost too small to hear: “Leave this woman alone. I tell you. In Jesus’ name.”

  Did the wind rise just then? Mike Mucho would later say it had. He felt himself, and The Woods, Mount Whirligig—all that the world is made of—loosen, and arise and stand in the middle of the air: to be held thereafter in their places only by consent, or by command.

  The girl after a long moment ceased to tremble. She seemed to wake, like a child from an attack of night terrors; to coalesce, as herself, in the kitchen pantry amid the spilled food and pots and pans, and to see all these things as she had not before been able to see them; and she began to sob, in grief and relief and embarrassment.

  Don’t you remember the wind of that late summer, September of 1977, or was it ’78, the night it blew so long and so universally? It blew not only in the Faraways and through the open windows of New York and Boston apartments, not only over the eastern sea, plucking up waves, breaking boats at their moorings: it blew countrywide, weather systems connecting one to another like paisleys across the Great Plains (the TV weatherman pointed them out in some wonder to Val and Mama, together in Val’s bed with the satin quilt pulled up and the woods alive around them); and it blew out on the other coast as well. Julie Rosengarten knew it, because a phone call from Big Sur woke her after midnight, and she talked about it and its meaning for a while, almost able to hear the singing of the continental wires in her ear, as waves can be heard in a shell.

  She was left alone awake, then, when her caller at length hung up after reassurances and long-distance hugs. A siren cried in the sounding tunnel of the streets, and her cats crept closer to her upraised knees. She picked up the phone again, said a number out loud to herself to remember it right, and called Beau Brachman in the Faraway Hills.

  Beau had no telephone in his apartment, but the woman who answered downstairs knew he wasn’t asleep; no one in the house was, children were crying, people going from room to room to push down windows. She went up the stairs to get him. Julie waited, listening to the distant wakened house.

  “Hi.”

  “Oh, Beau.” She pressed the receiver closer to her ear and mouth. “What is it, what is it?”

  “I don’t know, Julie. You know, sometimes a big wind is just a big wind.”

  “I talked to Leo,” she said. “In California. They felt it too. Beau, Hilary said her amber shattered. She was holding it in her hand, yesterday. It just shattered in her hand.” She waited. “Beau?”

  “I’m here, Julie.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Can’t be scared of change,” he said gently.

  “Well you can too. I am. I always am.”

  “If there weren’t change …”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” she said. “Or refused it. I don’t refuse it. Only, Beau …” She lifted her eyes to see the kitchen wall through the door, where a calendar on the wall, livid in a patch of streetlight, just then fluttered its leaves wildly and twisted on its nail. “Beau. I thought if you could just say that word for me. You know.”

  “You can say it for yourself, Julie. It works even better.”

  “I can’t. I can never remember it. And when you say it.”

  “All right,” he said. “But it’s yours too. Fo
r you.”

  “Yes.” She waited while Beau seemed to compose himself, and then she received the crabbed and complex word, she could never remember it till she heard it but when she heard, it went into her as familiar as wine. She let it warm her. She said it herself to him, and to her heart. When it had done its work, she could let the wind take her, where, instead of clinging to the branch: she sailed.

  “Beau,” she said. “I’m worried about Pierce.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Do you ever see him, do you ever like tell him …” Beau on the other end was silent, a receiving silence; she was to talk, not he. “He thinks he’s so strong. So tough-minded. But he’s brittle. He’ll break.”

  “Well it’s a hard thing he’s doing,” Beau said. “Isn’t it? At least he’s willing. He keeps pushing farther in.”

  “Where angels fear to tread,” Julie said. A lump of grief filled her throat, and tears came to her eyes; unmoored as she was, she was subject to feelings. Fellow-feelings, for those on the way, which meant everyone really: it was hard. “I wonder if he knows people worry.”

  “Oh,” Beau said. “It seems to me Pierce wouldn’t really believe that people think about him when he’s not there.”

  “Will you watch him?” she asked. “I don’t mean … But will you?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time, and she could see his abashing smile, over the hundred miles between them; his smile that might be amused at her for worrying, or at the stumblings of others, who weren’t often really hurt, any more than the children he supervised: get up, dust off the pants, hustle on.

  “Okay,” he said at last.

  “Ooh,” Julie said, a word like the wind’s. “Oooh listen to it now.”

  Down Maple Street from Beau’s, the maple outside Pierce’s building stroked the roof and windows, trying to get in. Pierce had closed the windows of the sunporch, all but one, and at that one his son stood, having been called from his bed, the narrow white bed on the sunporch, the windowed sunporch.

  He turned away at length from the coursing clouds and the night, and went to his father’s bed; no room now for him in it. He stood over his father’s sleeping form for an indeterminate time naked shivering happy, fed full on all that had happened here. Now he would be succeeded by others, chastening ones and not so kind, not so easily detached either. He bent over his father and kissed his whiskery cheek.

  The kiss ought to have awakened Pierce, but did not, not quite; a voice did moan very softly far within, the voice of the smaller Pierce far within, the Pierce who took this kiss, who witnessed this departure. Then his son turned away to the open window, to the night and the wind. He stood for a moment out on the roof in the streetlight shattered by the maple’s flailing leaf-shadows, clasping his nakedness, afraid. Pallidula rigida nudula, pale little bare little shiverer, no more games for you now; what will become of you, where will you go? Pierce in his dream saw the boy there: and at that his eyes did open, awake and wide.

  He sat up after a minute, unable to locate what had awakened him. He swung his feet out of the bed onto the cold floor. He thought it was drink that had awakened him, the economy of drink, knocks you right into sleep but shakes you awake later to even the score; or was it the wind, or the restless stirring of the body beside him, filled with its own dreams, he was unused to a big unquiet woman in his bed, never again would be used to it maybe; maybe he should go sleep in his chair.

  He rose carefully, went out to the sunporch, ought to shut that window. He put his hands on the sash, and then thought he would stand there awhile until he was quieter, and then go back to sleep. So he waited for a long time, hollow and open, in the wild pour of air. But his heart was not going to be, could not be quiet: not until it came back again into his breast, not until it returned to him from wandering “those roads to nothingness, where bodies cast no shadows, and mirrors reflect nothing.” And he would not sleep again until he woke.

  Far away from there (no not so far away, it seemed to Pierce an uncrossable distance but it was short as the wind went, through the Delaware Water Gap, along the wrinkled river, fast following the new interstate where the great trucks navigated, and up into the mountains) Sister Mary Philomel awoke in her bedroom at Queen of the Angels School.

  It was the wide wasteland of the middle night, which she had never been familiar with except in those days (all but forgotten now) when she had lain sleepless and sweated in tummy pain. She seemed to come wide awake all in an instant, not by hesitant dreaming degrees, and she knew there was a reason, though not what reason. What a storm though. She felt the air in her dark room move palpably in sympathy with the air outside.

  What is it? she asked the room and the night. Sitting upright in her bed, not conscious of having sat up, she crossed herself and began a quick prayer, her eyes traveling around the long-familiar room, hers for nearly twenty years now. Up to the crazed plaster of the ceiling; down the wall over the crucifix and faldstool; across her own feet making tombstones under the gray coverlet; now and at the hour of our death; over the bed’s edge to the floor, to where her slippers lay, to where.

  She rose by shuddering degrees an inch off her mattress, hands still clasped together, and alighted again: for, right by the bed, so close that she had at first not seen it, stood St. Wenceslaus, her old wormholed boxwood saint, who had been in his accustomed place on the dresser last night when she closed her eyes.

  Sister Mary Philomel slid to the edge of the bed, felt for her glasses on the table there, and when they were on looked down at the saint. Crown on his head, scepter in his hand, glue line visible where he had been broken and mended. Him. But on his face a strange constricted needful uncomfortable look not his at all. She looked across the dim rug and up the chair and the dresser to the lace doily where he had stood: the path he had taken to come down and stand by her bed here, a painful impossible journey to have made.

  What’s wrong? she asked him, not aloud, and bent down to him, her hands on the bed’s edge. When she looked at his face thus closely it was clear what the matter was: she put out her hand, and took from the old king’s distended jaws the thing stuck in his mouth.

  It was a key. The wind bumped and rattled from attic to basement. A small cold brass key.

  Thrilling with shivers but unafraid, Sister Mary Philomel threw aside her covers and put her feet out and into their slippers. The saint’s face was passive and saintly again and only a little grouchy, as he always had been. When she had lifted him with reverent wonder and set him back in his accustomed place, she put on her robe, and put the little key into her pocket. She stopped at the small square of mirror illuminated by a nightlight and tugged straight her nightcap. Down she went then through the dormitory, passing between the rows of white bedsteads where twenty girls slept, some as though dead, some in contorted stricken postures, nightgowns rucked up, breathing fast; some moving or muttering dream-slowly. Two, wind-awakened, whispered to Sister as she passed, but Sister hushed them and went on.

  Down the narrow back stairs to the second floor, past the rooms where her sisters slept, down the waxed and carpeted broad front stairs (robe rising in a billow on the uprushing night air) to the first floor, where by the wall there stood a great ancient chest, beeswax-blackened, paneled and carved. It had come to Queen of the Angels from the hospital in Bondieu after the expansion there, manhandled by puzzled laborers out of the truck and up the front steps, heavy as lead. Only when she stood before it did Sister Mary Philomel marvel that she had known, immediately and without question, what the key caught in the poor saint’s jaws was meant to open; only when she drew the key out of her pocket did she wonder why she had come instantly to open it. Leave well enough alone, she told herself. Then she knelt on the parquet before the chest, and put the key into its lock.

  The vigil lights in their red glasses shuddered; Sister Mary Philomel heard a far-off cry, a cat maybe, or a lost child, or a wind-tormented hinge. When she turned the key she felt a stirring, as though with the t
urning of the one key all the drawers and compartments within (which no one in her memory had ever seen) also opened one by one in sequence. She had the piercing feeling that she had not simply unlocked something but had started something into life, something that had long expected her, had awaited her, or someone like her, to come and do the proper thing at last.

  Just at that time a white Tempest convertible (which had left the Interstate at Pikeville an hour before and driven almost under the windows of Queen of the Angels) passed through the vanished hamlet of Hogback and up and around the next flank of the mountain. Where the wide paved road parted to go up to the old strip mine on Hogback’s side, the Tempest chose the other road, dirt, downward; the driver gratuitously cut the engine, and the ghostly car freewheeled silently around a bend through the crunching gravel and came to a halt by the creek’s side.

  The driver slid across the red upholstery and pushed open the passenger’s door; got out. The bridge was the same, she thought, or was a new bridge not different from the old one; she stepped carefully across it on her narrow high heels.

  Already she wanted to turn back; she wanted not to have come; but volition was not hers now, and whatever had replaced it within her carried her swiftly surely across the tumbling water and up the path. Past the great boulder, that had never been removed from the premises, left as a sign. The pines above on the mountain had grown, where on more than one night she had slept, long ago, long years ago. Was there a dog under the porch? None woke. She went up to the door; it was unlocked, unlatched in fact, and she pushed it open and went in, leaving it open behind her.