The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  She was about to set the picture back on the bedside table when she found herself drawn into it, drawn down beyond the faces of Dick and Charlotte, beyond the quay where they stood. There, in the background, was some kind of blurry shadow imposed between the Summers and the steamship, something that must have been moving at the precise moment when the photographer took this picture.

  Louise screwed her eyes, held the picture toward the light falling at the window, stared hard. At first she thought it was smoke blown from the funnels of the ship, because it looked more like a shapeless drift of dark cloud than anything else. But when she examined it even more closely she realized that the amorphous shadow had some kind of recognizable form. She watched it emerge from the murky background, watched it take shape in front of her narrowed eyes.

  She thought she knew what it was. A horse. A horse hauling some kind of cart, a flurry of motion that had defied the photographer.

  Maybe it was pulling luggage for the steamship. Maybe it carried coals for the ship’s engine room.

  A goddamn horse. When did they stop using horses and start using motorized vehicles? Trucks?

  She returned the photograph to its place beneath the bedside lamp, picked up Dennis’s discarded clothing, then left the room. A horse, she thought. How old did that make the picture?

  She dumped the dirty clothing in the washing machine in the kitchen, then she stood for a long time looking out the window at the pines. The Summers and Dennis must have exchanged photographs, if indeed Dick and Charlotte did have a picture of the boy. Well, wasn’t that nice and cozy, tit for tat, trading keepsakes?

  She moved listlessly through the house, room to room, upstairs, down, paused once to examine her reflection in the downstairs bathroom, absently noticed tufts of hair adhering to Dennis’s hairbrush. She roamed without purpose through the emptiness of this forest house, seeing herself—as if from a place above—as little more than a mere domestic speck, the disenchanted wife, the betrayed woman.

  She ran a hand across her face. A project. She needed a project. Maybe she’d brew up some soup and take it up to Frog in a flask. A whole Care Package. She’d be the lady from the Welcome Wagon, Forest Branch. She’d be a regular rustic Florence Nightingale, trudging up through the forest to repair a sick, superannuated hippy. Poor Frog. And his dandelion tea.

  She sat down in the living room. An image of Max and Connie Harrison floated through her mind, a little wispy thing she didn’t want to pay attention to—a tableau in wax. Max Wax. Was he at this moment humping the woman? Were they both barebacked and clinging sweatily to one another in Connie’s room at the Fuckleberry Inn?

  Louise rose. The house was silent.

  Horse-drawn carts. What was it about horse-drawn carts that came back to her? She went to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a shot of scotch. She felt it spread throughout her body as she drank it. If you could consume enough of this, you’d never need to think about your wandering husband or your absent son or your sick friend out there in the forest. No, you’d have oblivion, for which she could make out a pretty decent case right now.

  She strolled to the window. Stood there. Blanked out her mind. Observed the pines. Finished her drink. Poured another.

  Then she went inside Dennis’s room, took the photograph, and carried it back to the living room, where she propped it up on the mantelpiece.

  A horse-drawn cart. An old steamship. A young couple. Guess the date. Pin the tail on the fashion.

  Mrs. Louise Untermeyer, of San Francisco, California, this is your chance to win $64,000 … Are you ready?

  1920?

  1910?

  Louise shook her head from side to side.

  This was absurd. Even so, she continued to stare at the picture. She finished her scotch and uncorked the bottle, pouring herself a third glass somewhat more generous than the previous two. She stood at the mantelpiece. Charlotte and Dick looked out at her.

  She saw them as she’d last seen them, caught up in the crazed whirl of the polka. The old couple dancing. As if they might dance forever. And Dennis, Denny lingering in the shadows of the stairs.

  She turned away from the picture. Her brains felt fogged. She set her glass down on the coffee table, noticing how she spilled tiny slicks of scotch on the polished wood.

  She drew a deep breath, held it. And then she reached out to pick up the telephone.

  Lou Pelusi said, “I really don’t appreciate you barging into my office, Jerry. I’ve got patients to see. People are waiting for me.”

  The sheriff sat down facing Pelusi’s desk. He had a look of dark determination on his face—a man, the physician thought, in something of a hurry. Pelusi fingered his Elgin timepiece, stared at the hands, then flipped the lid shut.

  “I won’t take up too much of your precious time, Lou.”

  Pelusi stood up. “Is it your wife? Is something wrong with Nora?”

  Metger shook his head. “Nora’s fine.”

  “Good.” Pelusi moved meaninglessly around his office, his white coat brushing against things. He saw himself pick things up and set them down again, as if the mere act of touching and readjusting gave his movements some kind of significance. He was conscious of Jerry Metger staring at him. He wanted to get out from under that look because it was making him uncomfortable. More than uncomfortable—downright miserable.

  “I don’t have a lot of time, Jerry.”

  The sheriff said nothing for a while.

  Pelusi opened and closed the drawer of a filing cabinet. Unnerved, he walked back to his desk and his white coat billowed behind him.

  “Florence Hann,” Metger said.

  Pelusi looked down at his desk calendar. He tore off a sheet, crumpled it. “What about her?”

  “It seems she was stricken by a mysterious malady, Lou. I’m interested in hearing your diagnosis.”

  Pelusi managed a small smile. Florence Hann, he thought. A sense of dread touched him—the small hairs on the back of his neck quivered. A darkness moved in front of his eyes. “She collapsed early this morning,” he said. “I haven’t made a thorough diagnosis, Jerry. I’ll see her later today. I gave her some Thorazine to help her relax, get some sleep …”

  “Thorazine,” Metger said.

  “It’s standard,” Pelusi remarked. “My educated guess is she’s suffering from some kind of strain, some kind of nervous pressure. Like I say, I’ll look in on her later, then I’ll know more.”

  Metger touched the butt of his gun lightly. “It’s funny,” he said. “It’s funny how something similar happened to my father. One day he was fine. The next—knock-knock, nobody’s at home. Doesn’t that strike you as funny, Lou?”

  “Coincidence,” Pelusi said.

  “Yeah. Sure.” Metger stared at the papers strewn across Pelusi’s desk. Pamphlets from pharmaceutical houses, brochures, notepads, prescription blanks. “How do you explain this coincidence, Lou?”

  “What’s to explain?”

  Metger stood up. “Two healthy adults become zombies overnight—”

  Pelusi studied his timepiece again. “You can annoy certain people behaving this way.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing.”

  Metger was silent for a time.

  “I’ll go on barking, Lou. And it’s going to get louder before I’m through.”

  Pelusi frowned. He fiddled impatiently with a small metal nail clipper. He watched Metger go toward the door, where the sheriff stopped and, smiling, turned his head.

  “You know what I wonder, Lou?”

  Pelusi said nothing.

  “I wonder what they pay you … Mainly, I wonder if it’s worth it all in the end.”

  And then Metger was gone.

  Pelusi gazed at the closed door and what he remembered now was how—in the early morning dark before the damp dawn had come up—he’d gone to Florence Hann’s house and how he’d thrust his needle inside the woman’s arm and the way Bryce Dunning had smothered her scream with a pillow. He remembered
this now and a sense of despair went through him.

  He hadn’t meant to get in this deep. Even when he’d first agreed to come to this place and Ted Ronson had shaken his hand and winked and mentioned something about an old sickness that kept recurring, something that had everybody puzzled, something nobody really wanted to talk about because that kind of talk didn’t do much but scare people away, even then Pelusi hadn’t dreamed he’d do the things he’d done.

  But now …

  He could hear it falling apart. He could hear the whole thing crumble around him. A desperate tidal sound, coming again and again and again.

  43

  “I just couldn’t go through with it, that’s all.”

  Professor Pyotr Zmia watched the woman sling her clothes untidily into her suitcase. She did so quickly, with a hasty disorder he found distasteful. He wanted to tell her how she had failed him, but he thought better of it—people had their weaknesses, which sometimes they liked to think of as scruples.

  “I assume you’re leaving,” he said. There was a weariness in his voice. This same tiredness echoed throughout his body. He had known it before, of course, had known when his strength was leaving him and he was assailed by a sense of his own time running out. The internal clock, he thought. Periodically it had to be rewound, it had to find a fresh source of energy.

  “I want to put some distance between myself and this dump,” she answered. “As quickly as I can.”

  He observed her. She smoked a cigarette furiously.

  “I still don’t get it,” she said. “You pay me to try and ruin and guy’s marriage. It’s sick. Sick. And I went along with it.”

  Sick, the professor thought. It was not an apt description.

  He smiled at Connie Harrison. The cycle was almost ended. The woman had, up to a point, played her part admirably. What did it matter that she’d failed at the end? The thing was in motion and there was no way of stopping it now. As for himself, he would disappear as he always did and after a while he’d be little more than a mystery, quickly forgotten. And who could say he’d ever played any kind of role at all? Other than Connie Harrison, who could really point a finger at him?

  “I don’t think I want to know,” she said. “Even if you wanted to tell me. Which I doubt.”

  The professor stepped out onto the balcony of the hotel room. Carnarvon had grown during the last twelve years. In their haste to push forward the frontiers of progress—ah, terrible misconceptions!—Americans covered woodlands and fields with their hideous dwelling places and their playgrounds.

  He considered Everett Banyon a moment. He thought about the thousands and thousands of acres around here that had been in Banyon’s family for generations. Banyon had created a whole slew of corporations, an entire maze of companies, whose single purpose was that of wheeling and dealing in land. Everett Banyon’s worst nightmare would be to lose his holdings, to see his dreams of condominiums and hotels and health spas crumble under him.

  Which would not happen, of course. Not as long as Banyon and his successors kept to their part of a bargain that had been forged a very long time ago. The professor remembered now how one of the early Banyons, Clarence II, had come to him with a certain proposition concerning the Summers.

  Immortality was how Clarence Banyon II had put it. If a way could be found to bestow immortality on the Summers, whom Clarence considered a very odd pair making an even odder request, then several thousand acres of fine real estate would remain in the Banyon family in perpetuity.

  Pyotr Zmia had found a way. It wasn’t altogether pleasant and it involved grief for a number of innocent families, but until he could discover some other means of prolonging lives—his own as well as the Summers—then it would have to do. He leaned against the balcony rail, feeling very feeble indeed. He knew these signs in himself only too well and he was filled with a sense of urgency. Time, as it always did, was running out. A day would come, he thought, when he’d find a more permanent solution to the whole problem, but so far that hadn’t happened.

  The professor closed the balcony door. He gazed in the woman’s direction. She could not possibly understand the role she had played. She could never be made to see it. When one created cracks in the facade of a marriage, when one introduced fault lines, when one brought a small chaos into play, a stress that was filled with doubts and anxieties—then what parents, so preoccupied with the state of their union, could possibly pay attention to the needs and concerns of a small boy? What parents could help but neglect their offspring, when they were so utterly absorbed in questions of infidelity, in matters of the heart? When they were so totally afraid for their own relationship—and when their future looked uncertain? It had been a little psychic manipulation, bruising the flesh of the marriage, the professor thought.

  Poor Dennis. Lonely and overlooked and neglected, he had naturally been obliged to find companionship elsewhere. Poor Dennis, whose very substance had been eaten out. Yes, poor Dennis, who would provide for himself as well as the Summers.

  It had been rather a good scheme as far as it went, the professor thought. But now it was coming to an end.

  The woman looked at him. “If I ever see you on the street, I’ll cross to the other side. If I ever run into you, I’ll look the other way. I don’t know you. I’ve never known you.”

  “Admirable,” said the professor. But not quite good enough.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bad …” The woman shut her suitcase. “Nothing makes sense. And those old people …”

  “Forget. Forget it all.” The professor smiled.

  “I’ve already forgotten. I’m splitting.”

  Pyotr Zmia nodded his head. For a second he felt a strange little sympathy toward Connie Harrison. She had participated in events that would forever lie just beyond her understanding.

  Zmia stroked the side of his smooth face. She would never know about the ritual and conspiracy that had been at the foundation of this town for more years than even Zmia wanted to remember. She’d never know about the succession of mayors and city officials who’d been so well rewarded for their ability to contain and control a conspiracy. She’d never learn about the physicians who had been duped into participation, those fine medical doctors who had been bought and paid for and who thought they were keeping secret some strange ailment that occurred periodically in Carnarvon. She would understand the basic greed underlying the silences since she was greedy herself, but she’d never see down into the other levels of darkness that were the reality of this town. The delicate architecture of everything here: the Summers, the town officials who protected them, the misguided physicians who thought they were dealing with a problem that one day medical science could solve—all the intricate moving parts.

  He watched the woman move toward the door, lugging her case. Smoke from her cigarette made her screw up her pretty eyes. “We won’t be meeting again,” she said, “I hope.”

  He stepped in front of her and asked, “As a matter of my own curiosity, dear lady, how much did you actually convey to our mutual friend Max?”

  “Enough,” Connie Harrison answered.

  “Indeed, indeed.”

  The professor flexed his fingers. “By that, I take it you mentioned my name?”

  “Yeah. Wasn’t that naughty of me?”

  Professor Zmia smiled his most dazzling smile. He clamped his hands together, sighed, moved a little closer to the woman.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, stepping to one side to pass him.

  “I don’t mind in the least,” he answered.

  He was quick, astonishingly quick, his movement a blur. He fastened his delicate hands quickly around her neck.

  Her eyes widened—it was always the way. The eyes widened, then popped. After that the mouth fell open—creating a perfect oval, the professor noticed—and her suitcase dropped from her limp hands and she twisted her head backward in a curious manner and when finally he released her, stepping back from the woman, she slid to the floo
r as if her clothing were filled not with flesh and bone but potatoes, a sack of vegetables.

  Professor Zmia stared down at her. Then he went inside the bathroom and came back carrying a glass. Bending, he took a small knife from his pocket and made an incision in the woman’s wrist. He filled the glass with her blood, which he drank slowly. It was at best a temporary solution since the woman wasn’t exactly young and her body had been badly used and she’d never taken great care of herself—but it would have to do for the time being, despite the fact he considered it more than a little barbaric.

  He set the glass down. He looked at the woman as he wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  If she had ever known his name, she was most certainly in no position now to repeat it to anyone.

  44

  Louise put the telephone down. She was very cold. She went upstairs to the bedroom, where she found a sweater, which she draped over her shoulders. Then she went out on the sun deck. There was a faint moist wind blowing up out of the trees and bloated clouds scudded overhead. She leaned against the handrail. The trees shook.

  Of course none of it made sense.

  How could it?

  She smiled to herself. People make mistakes all the time. And that’s what this was. A simple error of fact.

  She moved around the deck, which vibrated very slightly underfoot. When the wind whipped up again she huddled deep in her sweater. She knew she should go indoors, light a fire, get warm. But she was reluctant to go back inside the house, go down the stairs to the living room.

  A simple little mistake.

  She shivered. She tried to light a cigarette and the wind snuffed out her match. What she ought to do, she told herself, is go back inside and pick up the telephone and say I really think you’ve got this all wrong, would you be so kind as to check it again, please?