Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  His thoughts are both roiling and “flat”—thoughts at a boil that nonetheless go nowhere. Like chapters in S____’s book so many times revised, and rewritten, the momentum of their prose has wound down. And the more L____ rewrites S____’s prose, the deeper he sinks into a bottomless sand that will soon cover his mouth.

  Indeed his lips have gone numb as if all sensation has drained from them.

  He keeps his distance from the woman, who sits very still, almost unnaturally still. He tells himself this is all very casual. There is nothing urgent, fated about discovering her. There is nothing doomed.

  This is a “good” side of the lake where the water is relatively clear of the algae that grows elsewhere in thick metastasizing slime clumps. All is calm today. Calmer. The lake’s surface reflects the sky dully like hammered tin.

  What is she reading?—L____’s heart contracts with yearning; he wants badly to know.

  (It is not a heavy book—not a long novel. Nor does the slate-gray cover, with calm pale letters, suggest a popular best seller.)

  From time to time the young woman glances up from the book as if it reminds her of something—a moment of tenderness, a private thought.

  He will not approach her, he thinks.

  He will respect her privacy. Her beauty.

  For he feels inadequate, of course. He is wearing his loose-fitting clothes that have been chosen to disguise his body and not in any way to reveal it. A T-shirt, khaki shorts. Running shoes and no socks. He launders his clothes in the washer in the house. He does not trouble to iron them.

  He will say—Excuse me. I happened to have seen … The other day, I think I saw you sailing …

  Here is a rude surprise: Children are approaching. First, middle school–age boys on bicycles, loudly calling to one another. Then a young couple with small children.

  The calm of the lakeside has been shattered. The father in T-shirt and rumpled shorts is chiding one of the children, who has displeased him in some trivial way, and the mother is trying to placate the father in a soft, pleading voice. Please. He didn’t mean it.

  L____ tries not to stare at these intruders with a look of rage. Thinking how much more beautiful it would be, and more merciful, if human beings did not utter words out of their contorted mouths but “signed” them as the deaf do, with precision and grace. He has frequently been impressed—indeed, fascinated—by observing a deaf interpreter sign to an audience at a public event. It occurs to him that the silvery-haired woman whose voice he has never heard is a kind of “sign”—her beautiful averted face, her shimmering hair, her slender and very still body.

  Yes, L____ is weary of those dull, banal, predictable and demeaning words that are uttered aloud, that abrade the ear. How he yearns for the beauty that is directed to the eye in silence.

  So absorbed in her book, the young woman seems scarcely aware of the intrusive family who have, to L____’s dismay, set down their picnic things on a nearby table. L____ wonders if they are aware that there is a much more attractive picnic area elsewhere in the park, in a shaded grove.

  Only mildly annoyed, it seems, the young woman glances around at the bickering family, and for a dazzling, heart-stopping moment, at him—but without quite seeing him, L____ thinks.

  (Yet: He has seen her. The impact of that face, those eyes, will remain with L____ for a long time.)

  It is time to leave! On his shaky legs L____ retreats.

  That night as he drifts into sleep he realizes—the silvery-haired woman had been reading his book.

  Vividly now he recalls the slate-gray cover, the pale, pearlescent letters—he is sure it was his book.

  His first book, a little-read novel titled Jubilation. Into which L____ had opened his veins and never quite recovered.

  It was L____’s first published novel, though it had not been the first novel he’d written. He had not ever written another.

  Of course, I’ve done other things. I’ve published other books. I am a “literary figure”—of a kind. I have even published poetry—poems. Not yet a book of poems.

  He is explaining to the silver-haired young woman, who listens intently. He is captivated by the way she brushes her hair out of her face with both hands, like one parting a curtain of some fine, shimmering material like silk.

  Of course, the Cattaraugus Public Library has Jubilation in its fiction collection. L____ has checked. At the time of its publication (in 1999), Mrs. McGarry or another librarian would have been sure to order it—unless L____’s mother donated a copy.

  It comes to L____ in a flash, he can learn the name of the silvery-haired woman if he visits the library and determines who has withdrawn the single copy of Jubilation in the past week … The possibility leaves him too excited to sleep.

  Chloroform makes of the most resistant body a very bride. The struggling hands, the clawing nails, the convulsive flailings of the limbs—all surrender within seconds.

  Her lover tells her: Please understand. I am providing a happy ending for you, who will be protected from the terrible erosion of time. In my arms you will always be young—you will always be my bride.

  You will always be worthy of love, and loved.

  In a dead faint he has fallen. Dead faint is exact for the brain is extinguished in an instant.

  Fallen heavily onto the ground in some public place, a chatter of excited voices, deafening sound of a siren, a siren too close, and strangers bending over him to “revive” him …

  The first he knows how very sick he is.

  Must’ve known. Fastidiously averting your eyes from the blood traces in the toilet.

  How ridiculous you are, how pathetic thinking you can deceive …

  Later in the hospital he will discover that his clothes have been expertly sheared by the EMTs to allow access to his body. Deft hands of strangers touching his body. Blood-pressure band tightening around his upper arm, forefinger pressed against the carotid artery in his throat, an unresponsive eyelid lifted, small light ray piercing the (sightless, unfocused) eyeball. A defibrillator on hand, which, fortunately, they don’t have to use.

  The patient knows nothing of this at the time, nor does he realize he has wet his underwear and trousers.

  Internal bleeding. Brackish-black blood. You never know. Until you know.

  2.

  “‘Evangeline.’”

  It is a beautiful name, an archaic name. He knew a girl with this name long ago in grade school, the daughter of a local minister who’d died, or moved away—all he can recall of Evangeline is the girl’s curly red-gold hair, silver barrettes in the hair, and the girl’s profile, the curve of her cheek. L____ had sat behind her in fifth grade and also in sixth grade, an accident of the alphabet.

  He does not think that the silvery-haired woman is Evangeline—for the minister’s daughter would be much older than this woman. (She would be L____’s age. Would L____ be interested in a woman in her early forties?) That Evangeline’s life would be much different than the life L____ can imagine for the silvery-haired woman. And perhaps she is not even alive now.

  So often L____ finds himself thinking that persons of his generation, his age, whom he has not seen in some time, are probably not even alive now.

  She tells him, We are all forgetting each other, constantly. Life is a shimmering stream. The light plays on the stream through the trees for just a measured distance, then it is gone—but the stream continues. We bask in the sunshine, then the sunshine is gone. But when the sunshine is gone, we are gone. So we don’t feel the loss. We don’t feel pain.

  Doomed love. Unrequited love.

  L____ recalls having read an appalling news item years ago. “Sinkholes” in a township in the Chautauqua Mountains, not far from Cattaraugus. Scudder Mills, a mining town. The local product was gypsum. A man, a homeowner, stepped into his backyard on the morning after a severe rainstorm and, in bright sunshine, the earth beneath his feet fell away.

  A gaping hole beneath, thirty feet, possibly fifty feet, the man fell
, helpless to save himself, and was smothered, horribly—calling, screaming for help—but there was no help.

  Earth filled his mouth, and he was silenced.

  This horror happened in Scudder Mills when L____ was a boy. In all, there were several sinkholes in the mining town, but no one else was trapped in this way and no one else died. At Lake Cattaraugus everyone talked of it. At home, at school. He tastes something sour and deathly in his mouth, recalling.

  Scudder Mills had been abandoned, the mining town declared a disaster area. L____ had forgotten about it until now.

  Thinking how doomed love is a sinkhole. He will fall, and fall, and never come to the bottom of the sinkhole. And if he cries for help, no one will hear. There is no one.

  “Not possible. No.”

  L____ has made a discovery in S____’s manuscript. Or, rather, in one of the variants of S____’s manuscript, written several years before S____’s death.

  It is shocking to him but seems unmistakable: The distinguished scholar-critic-historian S_____, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for forty years, seems to have plagiarized a part of a chapter on medieval “saints’ lives” from a scholarly article available online through Google Scholar. The plagiarism is almost verbatim, though S____ made of several paragraphs one single-length paragraph and substituted arcane words for plainer words—exsiccation, thrawart, immergence, adnate.

  L____ tells himself that S____ intended to delete these passages at a later time; at least a skilled writer like S____ would recast them more thoroughly, so that their origins in the work of another scholar would not be so obvious. (L____ has checked: there is no footnote attributing the source.) L____ decides that the wisest strategy for him is simply to delete the passages as if they’d never existed. (S____’s editor has these files also, but L____ doubts that S____’s editor will ever read through the massive manuscript, still less detect plagiarized passages.) It is urgent for L____ to protect S_____, at least S____’s reputation.

  Problem is, deleting passages means that L____ will have to provide a transition of some kind. He fears that he will be incapable of doing this, replicating S____’s elegant prose. And he can’t help but wonder if S____ has plagiarized elsewhere in the manuscript.

  His work as an indentured servant for the dead man will never end. He sees that now. Another, even more shocking discovery after L____ has been away from the manuscript for forty-eight hours, and returns to take up another, later section: Mixed in with S____’s scholarly writing is a kind of journal, or diary. It is a very different kind of writing altogether and (L____ thinks) it must have been inserted in the manuscript by mistake.

  Chloroform is the most pragmatic. Swift, clean, leaves no (visible) trace and he knows where to purchase it without being questioned …

  And,

  Swiftly and deftly the chloroform-soaked cloth is pressed over her mouth, nose. She fights him bravely, desperately. He will see her eyelids flutter. He will see the light go out in her eyes. But she will not have seen his face …

  L____ is appalled by what he reads. But he is excited as well.

  He has discovered approximately forty pages of prose charting the stalking and murder of an unidentified woman. The prose is intense, intimate, obscenely poetic. It is possible that S____ was writing a darkly erotic novel or a quasi-journal tracking the obsession/disintegration of a personality resembling his own, but not himself; but in all of his career S____ had never published fiction, so far as L____ knew.

  What is particularly upsetting to L____ is that the “erotic” material is in a section of the manuscript that S____’s editor was supposed to have read. Yet clearly he had not.

  L____ will have to delete these pages also. He won’t allow himself to keep reading but will delete without reading.

  He must protect the elder writer, who cannot protect himself.

  All must be hidden! Erased. No one must know.

  He flees the house. He is scarcely able to breathe; the air has turned thick and porous.

  It is the brackish odor of the rotting lake. Dead things in hot sunshine. Ripe, rank smells. He is terrified that the body is partly exposed, there in the marsh. An outflung arm, a satiny-smooth pale leg. It has occurred to him too late, turkey vultures will circle in the sky. The ungainly wide-winged black-feathered scavengers will draw attention, out in the marshes …

  Then he realizes that none of this has happened yet—“We are safe.”

  He shudders with relief. Tears streak his cheeks; he has not cried like this in years.

  He has not glimpsed the silvery-haired woman in many days.

  He has deleted the offensive passages in S____’s manuscript—the plagiarized material and the obscene material.

  He has concentrated on another part of A Biography of Biographies. He is determined to salvage what he can of the remainder of his life.

  He has even succumbed to an invitation from family friends, to come to dinner one night the following week. He will bring the older couple a bottle of good red wine and a bouquet of flowers from his mother’s garden—white carnations, daisies, roses growing wild behind the house.

  His hand will be shaken vigorously by his host. He will be hugged, kissed by his hostess.

  We have missed you here in Cattaraugus! Have you returned to us for good?

  He shudders at the prospect. Yet, he will prevail.

  He will manage not to show surprise at how old the couple has become, whom he has not seen in fifteen years; as they will manage not to show surprise at how old L____ has become, whom they have not seen in fifteen years.

  Several mornings in succession he is wakened by the sound of a woman or a girl sobbing.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”—quickly he rises from bed to investigate, his heart pounding in dread.

  Of course it is no one, nothing. The wind in the trees surrounding the house. Strange muffled cries of birds in the eaves.

  He listens. The mysterious sound has faded.

  Through the day at wayward times he thinks he hears this sound but doesn’t allow himself to be distracted. He concentrates on his work. He has begun the index. This is a daunting task but it signals the beginning of the end of the project, and about this L____ feels hopeful!

  And then, to his chagrin, L____ discovers more of the offensive material he’d believed he had deleted.

  Chloroform makes of the most resistant body a very bride. The struggling hands, the clawing nails, the convulsive flailings of the limbs—all surrender within seconds….

  In exasperation L____ deletes this. How disgusting! He is left shaken, bewildered. He is plagued by the (absurd yet appalling) possibility that offensive material of this nature will remain in S____’s manuscript, hidden in the file, to be (horribly, irremediably) printed and published in book form, embedded in the chaste scholarly prose of A Biography of Biographies. What a scandal, if this should happen! L____ can’t trust S____’s editor, certainly. He can’t trust the publisher’s copy editors and proofreaders, who are strangers to him; the fact is, L____ will have to trust himself, to make sure that all remnants of the offensive material, and of the plagiarized material, have been detected and deleted from the manuscript file. Yet he is terribly worried: can he trust himself?

  “Hello? Is someone there?”—he hears the sound of sobbing, somewhere close by.

  He has just emerged from a wine store, where he has bought a bottle of wine to bring to his parents’ old friends that evening. Out of restlessness he’s been walking, and, happening to see the wine store (it has a familiar name but seems to be in an unfamiliar setting), he’d decided to make the purchase now, rather than later, though it means carrying the wine bottle back up the long hill to Road’s End Lane. Now in the parking lot beside the wine store he hears, he thinks he hears, the sound of sobbing, but when he turns to look he sees no one, nothing.

  L____ is perplexed but not especially frightened. For this is not happening inside his head as he
has (sometimes) feared when he hears the sound in the early morning, in his house. It is not at all unlikely that a woman, a girl, a young boy, might be sitting inside a vehicle in the parking lot, sobbing. And that L____ has happened to overhear.

  But there are only a few vehicles parked in the lot, and no one is visible inside any of them.

  He listens closely. The sobbing seems to have faded.

  He walks on. He is feeling hopeful. The bottle has an attractive label: it is a Chilean chardonnay, new to him. He will enjoy himself that evening, he is determined. It has been too long since L____ has spent time with friends. He needs to engage in conversation, he needs to laugh. He needs to forget about S____ and he needs to forget about E_____. He will deflect questions that seem to him too private, too personal—about his health, his circumstances, the precise nature of the work he has brought with him to Cattaraugus—but he will do this in a discreet way; he will try to be gracious.

  Are you returned to us?

  We have been waiting for you—for years …

  He has left the wine-store parking lot and will return to Road’s End Lane. But by a circuitous route.

  Already it is late afternoon—past five o’clock. He must return home, he must shower and cleanse himself thoroughly before going out to dinner. He has a fear of offending the nostrils of others, who know nothing of his secret and must not guess it.

  He is walking in a neighborhood in Cattaraugus that is not familiar to him. As a boy he’d bicycled along some of these streets—narrow, hilly potholed streets—past shabby row houses and vacant lots, and yet all seems different to him. No one is out on the sidewalks, no one is in the streets. He has taken a wrong turn, it seems, though no turn in Cattaraugus will take L____ far out of his way, it is such a small town; and if there is danger, he is armed with the bottle of chardonnay.

  He finds himself crossing a pedestrian bridge. It is a very old bridge—miniature maple trees, no more than an inch high, are growing in the cracks between planks and in the plank railings!

  To his left, just visible through a maze of wood-frame houses and scrubby foliage, is a stretch of slate-colored Lake Cattaraugus. To his right is the sprawling New York Central railroad yard, desolate at this hour. Beneath the bridge is a marshy area, an inlet of the lake that has become shallow and mucky and infested with buzzing insects.