“Please let me out in front of the gate. She said she would be in the house.”
He pulled up before the house as instructed. As he accepted the generous note I handed him, he said, “Shall I wait on you, sir?”
“No, I may be a little while. I’ll walk back.”
He gave me the sparkly eye under his cap. “Are you sure, my friend, that you are not acquainted with Senhora?”
“She must be a decade my senior, sir. Shame on you.”
He winked and drove away.
***
I stood there for a moment looking through the gate at the house. With the black shutters out of the view, it looked like any other house. And yet, from the perspective of one who had been here before ‘when the masks were involved’, wasn’t there something disturbing about its normalcy, too? It seemed so benign, surrounded by its fruit trees, a leafy collage adorning its door. But what secrets did it hide? A lab in the cellar? Bodies of twins and triplets in the attic? Adolf Hitler’s moustache in a jar in the freezer?
Suddenly I felt very ridiculous, standing there in my sack of tingling nerves, a parody to complement the elephant-headed SS uniform in a Monty Python spoof. No, that was an inaccurate depiction. It wasn’t an audience’s eye I saw myself through, but his eyes. If he’d had a window through which to gaze from the other side, how must I have looked to him as I perpetuated the dead master’s terror in the holy name of closure? What was I doing here at the house of the lunatic’s crazy sister? Trying to learn why the man she called a brother had slain one of my daughters and violated the other? Wasn’t it obvious—he had been a fucking lunatic. A psychotic fucking lunatic. Now he was a dead one. The story had ended. All of this . . . this posthumous attention was immortalizing him, a black coronation for the black miracle worker. And I, the one placing the ebon crown upon his wretched head.
God, but I would go insane, too, if it didn’t come to an end.
I turned and strode around the wall to the gravel driveway, noting with satisfaction the late model sedan parked there. As I approached the mournful building, its blinds exactly as I’d seen them last, my pace slowed, the purposeful stride becoming a composed—or was it, respectful?—walk. My frustration quit flaring; my anger at him, her, me, the universe faltered against my minimal efforts to refuel it. Mostly, the emotional exertion just felt like energy wasted.
No one greeted me; no one waited for me this time. As I climbed the threshold, I didn’t even have enough in me to accept the looming déjà vu. In the change the place triggered, my receptors had dried up to all but the blandest sensory data. The knob turned in my fist, and I pushed the door inward—if there were chimes or bells, they were lost on this visitor—upon a room full of costumes and shadows. The impressions that met me as I stepped inside, Marie Antoinette, Spanish conquistador, Mexican bandit, Blackbeard, were dull. The room was sparsely lit, and borrowing that from a rear area where I could hear a sewing machine tat-tatting. I stepped across the room to the doorway, running my fingers through the varied fabrics of a rack of costumes, trying to draw feeling from the whispers as I formulated my words in advance. A photo hanging on the wall adjacent to the doorway, and in an advantageous position relative to the flow of light, prompted me to pause. There they were, the three of them, young serious-faced girls in frilled white dresses and white shoes, the darkly dressed persons of who were presumably their parents standing solemnly behind them. It was a black and white photo, and all the more sober for it.
The machine must have quit its suturing while I was absorbed in the picture, because when I turned, she was there, half concealed by one of the racks of costumes in the next room, watching me.
“Where is your brother?” I said, indicating the picture.
“You are playing a dangerous game, Mr. Ocason. You were told—”
“I never told you my name.”
She stepped out from behind the rack, her features becoming less instead of more visible because the light, which came from a separate interior room, her sewing place, was now directly behind her.
“And I never told you mine. Yet I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you knew it.”
“Fine, Ms. Cunhedo. Let me tell you something else I know. I visited the morgue in Rio Tago today.”
“You went to the police after coming here?” I thought I saw a change of expression in the silhouette. “That is an unusual development.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am. I did not speak to the investigator about you. I was only interested in the body of the man you call your brother.”
She leaned against the rack, the side of her face coming into view. The change of expression completed itself, in a full, unloving smile. “And what do you think you have discovered, sir?”
I was feeling again. Feeling very acutely. And the taste of the next words in my mouth was good. “That he is decomposing. Rotting, Ms. Cunhedo. It begs the question, doesn’t it? How does he get around?”
If I’d presented mine with a certain smack, then hers was issued with outright relish: “Certainly not in the same body, you fool.”
They rose, the hairs, in spite of me. I gritted my teeth against it. Against all of it. “How is it no one knows of this brother? Who is he? Who was he, the man you call your brother?”
“Our conversation is finished. You were told not to return here. Now—”
The noise of a car door outside caused her to snap her head in that direction. She froze in that stance as she seemed to listen for . . . what? A moment later the front door opened, spilling a shaft of light into the shop. My receptors alive again, I accepted the sense of familiarity that accompanied his entrance, the vision of him as he stood there, his own silhouette in this place of shadows.
“Com licença. A Senhora Cunhedo está por aqui?”
Ms. Cunhedo came out of her pose, brushing past me rudely. “Sim, sou eu. Me desculpe.” She adjusted the knot in her hair, looking guilty of something. Looking . . . slightly shaken. “Eu pensei que você fosse outra pessoa. Como posso te ajudar, senhor?”
He gestured at me as he issued his next words, seeming to indicate that I was first in line. Whatever the meat of their conversation, this gentleman was obviously a customer, which left my mission here in a stasis that I was unsure what to do about. The lady, with a touch of the same perverse appetite she’d displayed moments before, lent a hand.
“O Senhor Ocason já estava de saída. Weren’t you, Mr. Ocason?”
Leaving? Was that what I was doing? Damn her and damn her customer. But what to do now as we stood there like less dramatic Sergio Leone characters looking at each other, the door still open for some reason in the stranger’s hand. So far in my search I’d avoided trouble for myself. The dialogue I’d just had with Sra. Cunhedo was as close to a confrontation as I’d experienced. If I advised the gentleman directly, and against her demonstrated wishes, to leave, I was putting myself in a potential situation. Conversely, if I did the leaving, she might not wait around for me to return. It was a risk I’d little choice but to take.
Without a word to her, and with the merest nod to him, I stepped by the gentleman and out into the early afternoon sunshine. The door, as though it had been waiting for my exit, closed behind me.
I was clueless as to my next move as I stood for a moment outside the shop observing the man’s shiny SUV with distaste. Where to go? Across the street into the woods? Would I be pushing her too far reappearing after he made his exit? A question I’d already asked myself several times posed itself. Would she be willing to call the police if I pressed her? Did she feel she had anything to hide, or didn’t she care? Clearly she hadn’t felt inclined to identify the body. It was all so outside the realm of what was normal, how could one anticipate anything?
I let my legs be my guide as I walked up the driveway, looking back once at the half-closed eyes of the shop’s windows before turning right and walking along the wall in front of the house. I passed the gate with a glance at the front door, wondering if the house was
indeed home only to her, then at the end of the wall, on an impulse, turned right again, heading toward the back of the place. As it occurred to me that I was repeating the march to the graveyard, only on the opposite side of the house, I bade my legs render kinder treatment to their neurological support system than that. The idea of biding my time among the stones, however imaginary the graves they marked, did not fill me with rare and singular joy. Then where was I going? To the house, you sly legs? Are we looking for a back way in? Somehow that idea didn’t appeal either. Not with the senhora entertaining next door.
I paused as I reached the rear of the wall, thinking about the man. Was it possible, I wondered, that he was one of her gentleman friends? He’d asked for her by name, but then when she’d come out she had talked to him as though to a customer she did not know. May I help you, sir? was what I’d taken from her reception of him. That could easily have been a pretext. Her reaction, the reaction she’d seemed to be trying to cover, had certainly been unusual. She’d looked like she had been caught in a pair of headlights. Caught . . . talking to me? The question was, had he been the person she didn’t want to be caught by, or was he someone else. It wasn’t as if the grieving shop looked open from the outside. He might have at least knocked (not that I had). Odder still, as I replayed his entrance he seemed familiar to me, and not only, I thought, in the déjà vu way. I hadn’t studied his features as he stood there against the encroaching daylight. He’d been only an interruption to me. But his stance . . . something about the way he just stood there, as though the world should come to him, clawed at memory.
It hit me with the same functional metallic click that the door of the SUV provided, almost simultaneously, as the gentleman I’d come into contact with yesterday in the hotel’s ‘business center’ apparently prepared to leave. The noise was repeated a second time, as if two people were getting in the vehicle. I thought to race back to catch them and . . . what? Throw a rock through the windshield? It was too late anyway as the gravelly sound of departure made its way to my ears. I peered around the corner of the wall watching for their passage, but seconds ticked by with no sound of movement, though I thought I would have heard the SUV driving away in the opposite direction. Then, as I was considering crossing to the other end of the wall to monitor from there, the nose of the vehicle appeared, moving very slowly as the driver, I’d no doubt, scanned the area for me. Under the weight of implications my mind had yet to process, I wasn’t surprised to find my heart beating in my ears as I rested my back against the wall, readying myself for the worst. If the man felt I could not have made it to the switchback at either end of the stretch of road, then his departure might well not mature.
I cannot describe how strange a game it is that involves such across-the-board-ignorance on the part of one of its chief participants. The motives, the very natures of his fellows being so unknown to him as to assume a mystique that belonged in mythology, not in the real zone of taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight. Yet it was the senses that were most profoundly acted upon, precisely because of the separation. As I held up the wall that surrounded Sra. Cunhedo’s home, blood pounding through the concrete, I could literally taste the exhaust of that vehicle, hear every pebble its big tires crept over, feel the vibration of its humming modern engine. In the midst of it, my mind kept ticking, my lips taking up a silent mantra: Had they wanted me dead, I’d surely be dead. Had they wanted me dead, I’d surely be dead.
But this behavior was not characteristic of me. Nor should I have expected them to simply leave, knowing I was in the neighborhood. If I was to learn what I needed to learn, then I should be acting, not hiding behind a wall like a frightened animal—particularly when the potential answers were right there, in that vehicle. I took a deep breath, and stepped out from behind the wall. The SUV had come to a stop, its tail having just cleared the end of the wall, and was idling directly in front of me. I stood there only a moment, unable to see any movement behind the lightly tinted front windows from the distance, then proceeded at a determined stride which lengthened as I went. Adrenaline surging, I thrust my chest forward, challenging the bullet sitting in the chamber, daring these presumptuous motherfuckers with their ‘we’re-welcome-in-your-house-but-you’re-not-welcome-in-ours’ routine.
As I was just about upon the vehicle, it suddenly accelerated away, leaving the face of the driver still watching me from out of the scratch of loose stone, the wryest of grins pulling at its features. The finality of it was such that it seemed almost preplanned. Maybe it was. Maybe the whole thing had been a charade as I remained standing at the edge of the street for a few minutes after the SUV rounded the ess curve, briefly appearing again in the gap through which I had first viewed the house. A few minutes to wonder what had become of the woman, who had not been in the passenger seat. A few minutes to remember another utility vehicle, a vehicle that had come down a logging road in Germany, its opaque rear windows not so unlike those of the present case.
As I retraced my tracks along the wall, circling by the rear way to the shop, somehow I couldn’t picture Sra. Cunhedo moseying down any forest paths that didn’t lead to gravestones.
***
The knob turned obediently. It knew me, my touch, my energy, my chi’i, as did the spaces beyond, presenting themselves in angles and folds and ruffles. A Tales from the Darkside sequence of flowing, shifting camera perspectives, the costumes exhaling, inhaling on their racks. I did not tiptoe, nor did I announce myself as I proceeded to the sewing room, a single-windowed claustrophobic compartment stuffed with fabric, her place of insulation, of tat-tatting it all back together again. She hadn’t always been inhuman; I’d sensed that when she spoke of redemption. Here was perhaps the womb, the retreat from the chaos of knives and disguises. Tat-tat. Tat-tat.
It was vacant now, the insulated core of her world, and so were the rooms around it. No hiding dame; no elegant gestures ready to emphasize casually uttered Revelation. He had taken her away to be punished for her loose tongue. Yes, that’s what he had done. She had been impinging on his sport, and he had taken it unpleasantly. Her gentleman. Her brother. Whoever, whatever he was. Together, maybe just the two of them, maybe a whole army, they formed a cult, a culture around multiple births. Twins, triplets, it didn’t matter. All were welcome. Just bring a throat; or, if you were ovulating, jelly. There was always a place for you, particularly if you were . . .
Female.
Was that it, the key I was looking for, as I stepped back into the main room, staring at the photograph of the triplets on the wall. Eight females, Kristin, Kathy, these three and the triplets one of them had conceived. All multiples, all identicals, all victims to one degree or another of violence. Yes, a picture that couldn’t be captured on film was materializing now. At the center of it, a son who felt omitted, perhaps as his father lavished more than a father’s attention on his sisters, loving them with a scientific eye as well. The boy had been damaged irrevocably, had become the omitted one, invisible to the townspeople, but not to the sisters, who would suffer very much, in his mind, for passing the edits. And maybe others, too, had suffered. Faces he’d found in crowds, names he’d read in birth announcements, mentions in author profiles. Maybe many had suffered, in accord with Investigator Pinto’s allusion to similar attacks, patterns, MOs.
And the man who had taken Uiara Cunhedo away? Maybe he had been poisoned by the surviving sister, who had been poisoned by her godlike brother, to whom we were all, men and women alike, samples. Maybe it was just that twisted. Maybe the son had become a more demented version of the father, and the sister had projected the brother upon her lovers, who accepted the fantasy with enthrallment, awe. Maybe her brother had let me kill him because he knew, in his deranged martyrdom, the legacy would go on. The world was full of egos and complexes, entire religions built upon arrogant notions of transcendence. Here had been a man with the power of life and death in his hands. Personalities flock to such men, Mengeles to Hitlers. And if that holy scepter science had been invol
ved, in the form of a man who had worked on the Nazi ideal, the design toward a Master Race, all those keywords I had left out of my internet search in favor of attaching them to mystifications that exposed my own enthrallment and awe, then the justification for assuming such power had been readily available. For it was a scientific god, not the hammer of the Old Testament, who inspired the greatest terror among mortals as he inserted his needles into his experiments at will, tuned his program to taste. Just as a Darwinian evolution laid the bloody groundwork for a more focused use of talon and tooth, an evolução of human intent and presumption, with perhaps godhood itself at the shining end of the carnage-littered path.
Would I take such a theory to Pinto? I didn’t know. Did such a theory ring truer than the concept of a self-propelled design toward ascendance? For a human being bound by flesh and the laws of his universe? Yes.
As the triplets on the wall bled in again, I asked of them: “Am I such a human being?”
We can only speak for the moment in which we are trapped, they seemed to say. Today, you are what you are. Tomorrow? Who’s to say about tomorrow.
9
Having no desire to be caught exposed on the open road, I decided to find another route back. The most obvious option was the shoreline, assuming it was traversable. I suspected the street descended around the next hill to the vicinity of the shore, but even taking it in the opposite direction from town smacked of tempting fate, which I was sure had had enough of me today. If I needed proof of that, I’d only to look at the small gash in my arm. How I’d mustered the balls to even consider it, I don’t know, but when I’d wandered from the shop back to the gate in the rear wall, checking its lock, I’d spooked a rather large but mobile lizard perched on top of the wall, which had managed in its flight to relocate a piece of glass (like castle defender, like castle defender) that caught the edge of my forearm as it fell. Whether I would have followed through with the idea of entering the Cunhedo home was another question I’d no answer to, but I’d taken my luck at surface value, if I may be pardoned the witlessly obvious reference to the incision in my flesh, and turned my back on the wall for good.
The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Page 10
