The Moonflower

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Nevertheless, she put her question into words. “Why has he a grudge against you?”

  His fingers paused in their drumming. “That’s not your concern. I merely want to impress it upon you that during whatever tune you remain in this house you are to be on guard against Minato. Don’t speak to him. If he ever approaches you, get away from him quickly. He has a background of violence from the war.”

  He was alarming her now. “What about Laurie?” she asked. “Would he hurt Laurie?”

  He started to speak and she was sure he meant to deny this, but he broke off the words, watching her warily again. “He might, at that,” he said. “I don’t know. The point is that we can take no chances. The sooner you’re out of this house for good, the better. It may not be a safe place for either you or Laurie.”

  Was he merely trying to frighten her, using any weapon which came to his hand?

  “Why don’t you ask him to move out, if that’s the way you feel about him?” she said.

  “That’s easier said than done.” His sigh was one of exasperation—with her, not with Minato. “When are you leaving, Marcia?”

  There was no hope now that he would soften again. She sat up very straight in her chair, putting both feet on the floor, bracing herself a little. “I’m not going home. I want to stay here as your wife until you are ready to come home. After last night I can’t believe the things you wrote in that letter.”

  The flame that always burned deep in his eyes seemed to leap to angry life and his brows drew down, as his face darkened.

  “You can’t stay here,” he said harshly. “You’re tampering with things you can’t possibly understand. Go back to the States where you belong. Japan is not for you.”

  She slid out of the chair and went close to him. “Last night you wanted me. Why is it different now?”

  The anger in his eyes frightened her and for just an instant she feared he might strike her. Then he pushed roughly, furiously past her and went out of the room. A few moments later he had left the house and the shadowy room seemed to crowd in upon her, thrusting at her with hateful, alien hands. It was as if it were repeating Jerome’s words, “Get out! Go home!”

  She turned out the lights and fled from the dim fire glow. In the wide hallway, she stood for a moment listening, but the wind sounds disguised the familiar and created new creakings and whisperings, so that all the house seemed alive with strange portent. At night the servants retired to their own quarters unless they were summoned and the main part of the house stood hollow and empty except for herself and Laurie. For a moment she thought of going upstairs and looking about, trying that door into the other half of the house, just to make certain no one was there and that the door was locked. But such an exploration seemed foolish when Jerome had looked upstairs only a short while before and had found nothing wrong. It was even possible that his own anxiety had been staged to frighten her into leaving.

  The front door locked automatically and Jerome had closed it when he went out. Fortunately this half of the house had been westernized, with regular doors and windows so that it was not necessary to shut themselves in behind sliding wooden amado, as was the case in Japanese houses. The truly Japanese house was singularly easy to burglarize. But this one should not be.

  Nevertheless, she did not hesitate long in the dim hallway, but hurried to join Laurie in the cozier warmth of the bedroom they shared. The little girl sat on a low stool by the fire, with a chair pulled up close to hold her dolls and the miniature mask Nan had given her.

  She smiled at her mother. “Will you play with me tonight, Mommy?”

  Marcia was grateful for Laurie’s cheerful, outgoing nature. She sat on the rug beside her daughter and they made up stories between them, as they played with the dolls for an hour or so, until it was Laurie’s bedtime. When the child was asleep, Marcia sat on beside the fire, not reading—just waiting for the sound of Jerome’s return. How long could she play this waiting game? How long could she stay here in the face of his determination to have her leave? What home could there be for her in staying? And yet, and yet, last night …

  The memory should have warmed her, but now she shivered and gave up her watch beside the dying fire. He had never stayed out this late before. Where did he go on such occasions? Who were his friends? How very little she knew about the man who was her husband.

  Before she turned off the lights in the bedroom, she opened the door into the hall and listened once more to the moaning wind sounds, the creakings. But though ghostly footsteps seemed to rustle along the galleries above, nothing came down the wide dark stairs. Far away, in the other part of the house, someone was playing a samisen again, and singing to the music. How forlorn and melancholy Oriental melody sounded to the western ear. And what a paradox the Japanese were. Underlying their literature, their painting, their music, was so often a note of tragedy. In the arts tragedy seemed only a step away most of the time, and in life too, as Alan had said. There was frequent mention of suicide in the papers, often among young people thwarted in love and unable to accept the old ways their parents set down for them.

  Only last week a young couple had jumped into the flames of Mihara volcano on the island of Oshima—as so many hundreds had done before them. When life thwarted them, they gave themselves so readily back to the gods. Yet always in the streets, or among the Japanese one met, there was friendliness and apparent good cheer. In Japan one never heard harsh words or raised voices. Courtesy and good manners were the rule, with no resentment shown toward a recent enemy. All this made it hard to understand how such a people could be brutal in war, or given so readily to tragedy in their personal lives.

  She closed the door and wished vainly that she had some way in which to lock it. Tonight, for the first time in Japan, she did not feel safe and secure. She had not been really afraid before, even on her first night here, before Jerome had returned, but tonight—perhaps because of his words about Minato, because of his search upstairs, and because Jerome himself had gone out of the house, she felt uneasy and fearful. How far removed was her present mood from the happy one of the afternoon she had spent with Alan Cobb.

  Before she got into bed, she went to the window and looked out into the windy night. She could see the tops of pine frees, black against the cloud strewn sky. There was something about Japanese pines that made them like no others. They were truly the pines of Japanese prints, their trunks twisted, their foliage falling into layered, delicate patterns. A thin moon crescent rode the clouds and she felt a sense of relief that at least there was no full moon tonight.

  Earlier Sumie-san had brought a hot water bottle for her bed, and her cold feet sought it for comfort as she burrowed beneath blanket and quilt.

  The samisen was silent now and Marcia lay staring into the dark, listening for Jerome, wondering why he did not come back. At length, in spite of herself, her eyelids grew heavy and she drowsed a little, pulled herself awake and drowsed again.

  It might have been close to three in the morning when she came suddenly wide awake, with all drowsiness banished and all her senses alert. She did not know whether or not Jerome had returned, but the sound which had startled her awake was not that of his key in the door. It was the same sound she had heard earlier in the evening—a wind-wrought sound of creaking upstairs that sounded like soft footsteps.

  So light they were, so faint, that she would have heard nothing if the gallery floor had not creaked as if beneath some weight. It was the wind again, she told herself and listened for the night sounds outdoors. But the wind had died down and the night beyond the window had a misty look as if fog were rising in the garden. Yet still the faint, light creaking sounded from the floors above. No—now it was on the stairs. As if light spirit feet trod the polished wood, descending with the barest whisper of sound.

  She tried to think of Jerome’s assurance that only he held a key to that upstairs door. But the creaking was no longer on the stairs, it drifted faintly across the hall and was suddenly arrested i
n silence. Where had the sound stopped? Midway in the hall? No, it had come closer than that. If someone had really come into this part of the house and down the stairs, he was poised now just outside her door, listening surely for any sound within.

  She thought of screaming and did not dare. To scream was to announce dangerous knowledge of the intruder’s presence. If Jerome were still away, who would come to help her? Two frightened women in the servants’ quarters? No, it was better to lie in frozen silence, stiff and quiet, pretending to sleep, even though her eyes stared into the thick darkness of the room. Darkness that gave way, even as she watched, to a shaded sliver of light as her door opened softly. The sliver widened and a suffused radiance entered the room.

  Only in pretended sleep lay some possibility of safety for Laurie and herself. Marcia closed her eyes, tried to breathe naturally and not in frightened gasps. If only Laurie did not hear the intruder, if only she stayed asleep.

  She could sense the light through her closed eyelids now, as it advanced into the room, grew more concentrated as it approached her bed. What was intended? Was she to be stabbed as she slept? Smothered? Someone stood beside her bed, holding a lantern high so that the light fell upon her face. An unfamiliar scent reached her, the scent of some sweet night flower in a woman’s perfume. It was a woman, not a man who stood beside her bed.

  She opened her eyes a slit, even though the fluttering of her lids must be evident to the person who stood there. In the lantern light she saw the smooth white silk of a kimono. She let her gaze widen, travel upward to the brilliant scarlet of a gold-embroidered obi and to a pale hand that held something long and slim and shining. For a single, horrified instant Marcia thought it was a knife. Then the woman made a sudden movement with her hand, flicked open an ivory fan, and raised it to her face.

  Marcia stared upward, dazzled by the light, trying to seek past it to the face of the woman in white. But a draping of cloth covered her head and left her face shadowy behind the fan. Whoever it was wanted to conceal her identity.

  “Who are you?” Marcia murmured softly. “What do you want?”

  The shrouded head bent gently in a bow, and the softest of voices spoke to her. “Gomen nasai,” the woman said and Marcia knew the words meant “Excuse me.” The lantern was lowered and the woman turned away. Softly she padded across the room in her white tabi and went out the door. Marcia lay with every muscle tensed, listening to the creaking journey in reverse … across the hall, up the stairs, along an upstairs gallery. Then the night was silent and mist drifted thick against the window panes.

  A cold reaction of terror flooded through her. She fumbled for the lamp beside the bed and then flung back the covers. Laurie lay quietly asleep. All the house was still when she opened the door and listened. No wind creaked against wooden timbers. On all sides the emptiness, the loneliness, seemed to press upon her until she could not endure it. What if that figure in white returned, what if … With a faint sob she rushed toward Jerome’s door and opened it.

  “Jerome!” she whispered urgently to the silence. “Jerome, are you there?”

  A creaking of his bed answered her as he sat up, and she clung to the door for a moment in a trembling rush of relief.

  “What is it?” he said, and turned on the light. “What’s the matter?”

  That fearful moment when the woman in white had stood beside her bed was still petrifyingly real in Marcia’s mind, and she did not hesitate. She flung herself across the room and into her husband’s arms. For a moment her teeth chattered so hard that she could not speak clearly and he held her gently, smoothed back the hair from her damp forehead as if she had been a child.

  “You’re all right now,” he said kindly. “You must have had a bad dream.”

  Love for him welled up in her, painfully sweet. Held like this with her cheek against his chest, she could hear the sure, steady beat of his heart. But tonight there was no quickening of response in him, and after a moment he put her gently out of his arms.

  “Here,” he said, “get this blanket around you. You’re clammy cold.”

  She sat on the edge of his bed, huddled in the blanket, missing his arms, longing to slip beneath the covers and get as close to him for warmth and comfort as she could. But he sat up beside her and rubbed her hands briskly in his big warm ones. Gradually the chattering stopped and she could speak.

  “Someone came downstairs from the other part of the house,” she whispered. “Someone came into my room.”

  She felt the stiffening that ran through his body. “Nonsense, Marcia. The door upstairs is locked. No one could come through.”

  She nodded vehemently. “Yes—someone did! A woman dressed in white. She was carrying a lantern and she stood beside my bed and looked at me. When I opened my eyes, she put a fan in front of her face so that I couldn’t recognize her. Was it Chiyo? Is there something—wrong with Chiyo?”

  Jerome put an arm about her shoulders and held her still. Quietly he insisted that what she had imagined was impossible. He had dreams like this sometimes too—when for a little while the dream seemed to spill over into reality, so that it was difficult to know where one ceased and the other began. That was all that had happened to her—a disturbing dream.

  She clung to him helplessly, repeating … until gradually as his soothing words went on, she began to doubt herself. Was it possible? Had the things that had happened in this house built themselves up in her subconscious mind until they had spilled over into an extraordinarily vivid dream?

  “You must go to bed now and get some sleep,” he told her. “Come, I’ll take you back to your room.”

  She longed to say, “Let me stay here. Don’t send me away!” But she was thoroughly awake now and the terror was fading, giving way to the restraint that lay upon her where Jerome was concerned. There was nothing else to do but let him take her back to her room.

  There he tucked her in and bent to kiss her lightly. “Leave the light on,” he said. “You’ll feel better that way. Call out if you want me. You’ll be all right now and everything will look more sensible in the morning.”

  When he had gone she lay still and tense again, listening. Had it really been a dream? Was that possible? Or was there still a faint fragrance, a little like sweet cloves, hovering in the room? She breathed deeply, trying to catch the scent, but with her very effort it eluded her and she could no longer be sure that she smelled anything alien in the room.

  She lay for a long while, going futilely over the experience in her mind. It did not seem to be slipping away from her like a dream. She could remember everything that had happened with the utmost clarity and now one detail returned to tantalize her more than all the rest—one strange, incongruous touch that she had been only half aware of at the time. The woman’s white silk kimono had been folded across in the western manner, right side over left. But in Japan such a fold was used only in death.

  10.

  The next day seemed longer than any other Marcia had spent in this house. Jerome left early in the morning and did not return all day.

  Once in the late morning, driven by loneliness, she decided upon a gesture she had never dared make before, lest it annoy her husband. She would find a pretext to call him at the laboratory. Just to hear the sound of his voice, to talk to him for a few moments, would break the heavy silence that pressed in about her. Last night when she had been so frightened he had not been unkind. Surely he would not mind, even though he had always disliked interruptions.

  It was not easy to extract the laboratory number from Sumie-san and get her to put through the call. The little maid put repeated obstacles in her way, but Marcia was insistent, and with much shaking of her head, Sumie-san gave the operator the number. Then she handed the phone silently to Marcia.

  The signal in Marcia’s ear rang on and on, but no one answered and, when she finally hung up, she had the feeling that Sumie-san had known very well that no one would answer. Jerome either did not answer his phone, or he was not at the lab at a
ll. Of course any number of reasons might call him from his work, and there was no need to make something in her imagination of so slight a matter. Yet a feeling of uneasiness beset her.

  During the afternoon Nan Horner dropped in casually. As she grew accustomed to Nan, all Marcia’s early resentment of her had faded, and today her breezy, matter-of-fact presence was especially welcome. Marcia greeted her warmly, sent Sumie-san for tea and led Nan into the drawing room.

  Vigilance over the children next door had lessened and Laurie was outside playing with Tomiko, so Marcia and Nan could be alone.

  Nan was not one to beat about the bush. Teacup in hand, she came directly to the point. “Just wanted to see how you were doing. That young man I met here the other night—Alan Cobb—came in one evening to borrow some books on Japan. While he was there he told me about your outing to Nijo Castle. He said you looked a bit peaked and he thought you might either be coming down with something, or in a state of worry.”

  “I’m all right,” Marcia said steadily.

  Nan, brown as autumn leaves today in her tweedy suit, reddish brown scarf and brown walking shoes, regarded her with a frank and thoughtful stare.

  “If you ask me, you are looking a bit under the weather. And I know Jerry’s not apt to see what’s right under his nose. Sure you’re feeling all right? Newcomers usually get the collywobbles sooner or later. But once you get over them, you’ll be fine.”

  “There’s really nothing wrong with my health,” Marcia said with an effort.

  Nan gave her a long steady look and then set her teacup aside. “You know, I was prepared to dislike you when you turned up here as Jerry’s long-absent wife. I didn’t think I’d have any patience with you, or sympathy for you.”

  “You needn’t feel sorry for me,” Marcia said.

  “It’s not that I’m sorry for you,” Nan went on. “It’s more that I’ve begun to have a certain admiration for you. You came out here in the face of Jerry’s objections and I suspect that if it had been up to you, you’d have come a whole lot sooner.”