Her hand raised, she stopped and stared at a spot a couple of feet from the floor, nearly at the bottom of the blouses and sweaters that hung on the closet rod in front of the connecting door. It took her a moment to focus on it clearly, to separate the closet shadows from the clothing and from the dark angular outline of the paneled door. Then she made it out: a jagged blackness, as if the panel itself had been kicked out and then shoved back in, the wood splintered around it.
She spun around, clutching her jacket to her chest, and saw, facing her across the room, a video camera on a tripod, a red light glowing on top of it. The sight of it sent a thrill of fear through her, and with both hands she threw her jacket at the camera, knocking it against the wall. The tripod balanced on one leg for a moment, and then crashed to the floor. Anne stepped hastily past the foot of the bed toward the open door, and it was then that Edmund stepped into the doorway and stood with his arms folded and his lips pursed, contemplating her as if sizing her up. She stared back at him, stepping back toward the closet, gauging the distance to the bedroom windows, which were closed, the street fifteen feet below, impossible to reach. Scream? She suppressed it. She waited for him to speak.
“I let myself in,” he said.
“Most people knock first.” She managed to get this out, and the act of speaking calmed her a little. She remembered then that the front door was open. If he had been hiding in the bathroom or kitchen, it still might be. He didn’t have any apparent weapon, and she glanced around her, looking for something she could use against him but seeing nothing except a ceramic teapot….
One of her paintings hung on what had been a bare wall, and the sight of it was instantly disconcerting to her. It was a painting of a northern California roadside store above the ocean. It had been smeared with paint, and the first thought that came into her mind was of Elinor. The smears weren’t random, though. Someone—Edmund—had daubed red and black streaks on it as if trying to shadow or darken the sky and the grass and the silver gray of the redwood siding on the ramshackle store. The painting was wrecked, the childishly applied red paint looking like something out of a comic-book depiction of Hell.
“What exactly is wrong with you?” she asked him, her sudden anger pushing fear aside. He seemed to recoil a little bit, but then he smiled.
“I have something I have to ask you, and I want you to answer me absolutely truthfully. I want you to know that I’m here only to ask you this question.” His voice had the monotonous tone of a sham guru, and she was struck again by his similarity to Elinor. His demeanor and tone were so obviously fake that even he had to know how insane he sounded.
“You came here to ask me a question, but you couldn’t just knock on the door and ask me like any sane human being would do? You had to break in and screw up one of my paintings first?”
The muscles in his neck jerked, and his eyes were abruptly mean and bitter. He forced a smile, though, and then his face grew placid and empty again. “Will you answer?”
“I don’t know. Go ahead and ask.” He still hadn’t moved out of the doorway, and she forced herself not to glance at it.
“But will you answer?”
“Just ask me the question, you crazy goddamn creep.” She realized that she was close to the edge, and she fought to control herself.
Perhpas sensing it, he smiled again, wider now, as if he knew that his voice and his insane sense of purpose was pushing her. “What do you know about the fire that burns in the deep woods?” he asked.
She stared at him. Whatever she had expected, this wasn’t it.
“Have you been to that fire?” He narrowed his eyes at her, as if he were particularly keen to hear the answer.
“I … God. That’s your question?” She had expected something else—a trip to Club Mex, a proposal.
“That’s my question.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“And yet you painted a picture of that fire?”
“Me? I painted a fire in the woods?”
“In the dead woods—the insects, the leaves, the glow of firelight? Anne …” He shook his head, as if he were a little bit surprised at her. “I’ve seen the paintings. I’ve seen the dolls. I’ve seen the work of the Night Girl.”
“The dolls? Those were the work of my sister. My sister painted those pictures. My sister made those dolls.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” he said. “How very right of you to call her your sister. I’ve got a name for her. I call her the Night Girl, because we find each other in the darkness. Do you want to know what I call you?”
“No, Edmund, I don’t.” She tensed herself now. Edmund was completely out of his mind. If she was going to run, she would have to choose the moment carefully. Trying to string him along wasn’t going to work. When the time came, she would have to hit him hard….
“The Day Girl. I call you the Day Girl.”
“That’s good,” she said, nodding and smiling. “Do you want to know what I call you, Edmund?”
“No I don’t, Anne. I no longer expect that you’ll be civil with me, that you’ll give me a chance. You’re too far gone in denial, and I can’t help you. I can only help the Night Girl. I only want to help the Night Girl now. The Day Girl has ceased to interest me. The Day Girl has become a hindrance. Are you aware, Anne, that a diamond is nothing more than a compressed lump of coal?”
“Since I was about five, I think.”
“People are like that.”
She shifted her weight, and he responded by squaring himself in the doorway, blocking it entirely.
“We’re partly diamond and we’re partly coal. We want to think we’re all diamond, but we’re not, Anne. Our deepest and most secret desires are coal. Our dreams are made of coal dust. A psychologist will tell you that we don’t remember our dreams because we repress them. But I believe we should embrace them. For years now I’ve tried to capture those dreams on film, and believe me, I’ve done pretty well. Look at this …”
He took a photo out from under his coat and held it in the light. Immediately she looked away, remembering what Jim Hoover had told Dave about Edmund’s fascination with pornography.
“Take a look,” he said gently. “It’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you’ve been told it might be. I’m giving you a chance, Anne. Let me help you.”
She continued to stare at the floor. She wouldn’t look at his damned picture.
“Look at it!” he yelled, and he bounded across the floor and grabbed her arm before she could react. She screamed now, and tried to pull away. He pushed her over backward so that she sprawled on the bed, and in the next instant he held a knife in his hand, a thin stiletto with a blade five inches long. He bent over her, his eyes wide and his mouth working as if he’d lost control of his facial muscles. He held the photo up, and she stared at it. It was nearly completely black, only the faintest light.
“Do you see?” he asked.
She nodded her head.
“There!” He pointed at the photo, at a patch of darkness slightly darker than the background, the vague shape of something that appeared to have been moving when it was photographed, like a time exposure of a woman walking.
“You see her. Of course you see her. Do you recognize yourself in her?”
She stared at him. There was nothing she could say.
She’s the Night Girl, Anne. She’s my soul mate in the late hours. She does my bidding as I do hers. So please, Anne. Don’t tell me about your twin sister. I know your sister. The one thing that I don’t know, and I’ll tell you this truthfully, is how the Day Girl and the Night Girl can become one, just as they used to be. Because I’m afraid that the Day Girl simply doesn’t interest me very much.”
He backed away from her now, still holding the knife, the blade glinting in the lamplight. She sat up and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. The knife changed everything. “I don’t think you understand what I’m sayin
g,” she told him. “The paintings and dolls in storage were made by my sister Elinor. She’s my actual sister.”
“You haven’t been listening to me.”
“I’m telling you the truth. I can introduce you to her. She lives in Victoria, but …”
“You haven’t been listening to me,” he said again.
“You’re right,” she said. “And anyway, my sister’s dead.”
“Now at least you’re telling the truth. You killed her, Anne, and you can bring her back. You and I together can bring her back.”
“I wouldn’t want to.”
“Because you’re afraid of her.”
Anne nodded.
“Fear is our most limiting factor. Getting rid of our fears is the liberation of our art. And I mean all our fears, Anne, including the fear of our own sexuality. Our sexuality, in all its manifestations, might be the most private matter of them all, Anne, but within the confines of that privacy, its energies need know no limitations. It was your dolls that made me realize that you would understand what I mean. I can easily imagine that there were dolls that even you hid away and looked at only in secret. Even you believed that sometimes you’d gone too far. I’d like very much to see your secret things, Anne, because I don’t believe that we can go too far. I don’t believe that there’s any such thing….”
She closed her hand over the bedspread, then lunged toward the door, whipping the bedspread around toward him and ducking past it at the same time, trying to throw it over his head. With the edge of her fist she hit him on the cheekbone, and he caught her wrist, sweeping the bedspread aside with the hand that held the knife. The cloth caught on the blade, and Anne kicked him hard in the groin, then slammed her heel down onto the toe of his shoe. He doubled up, but held onto her wrist, twisting her arm up and away, trying to shake the bedspread off the knife. Pain lanced through her wrist and forearm, and she stood on tiptoe trying to relieve the pressure and grasping for the teapot on the dresser. Her hand closed over the handle, and she smashed it down on his head with her free hand, jerking her other hand from his suddenly weakened grasp and turning toward the door, grabbing the knob and dragging it shut after her. There was a grunt, and the door slammed against something, and in that moment he grabbed her ankle and she flew forward onto the floorboards, slamming down hard enough to take the breath out of her.
Immediately she threw herself over and tried to scramble to her feet, but he held on, stretched on the floor in the doorway, his chin pressed to the ground. Blood trickled out of his hair from where she’d hit him with the teapot, and his wild face was twisted and inhuman, his mouth open and panting. His grip on her ankle tightened as he used her weight to lever himself forward. He shook his right hand loose of the bedspread now and held the knife in the air as if he would plunge it into her leg. She shook her head at him and held her hands up. She saw then that the front door was locked, the chain fastened, and she felt absolutely trapped. The blinds were drawn on the windows, too. Edmund had seen to all of it as soon as she was safely in the apartment.
He stood up carefully, still holding onto her ankle, bending over and pointing the knife at her chest. “Up,” he said.
She stood up, and he took her wrist in his free hand.
He composed himself, contorting his face as if stretching all the muscles, relieving the strain. “Do I bore you?” he asked.
She shook her head, still watching the knife.
“Good, because I have much more to say to you. Much more. It’s time we got started.” He pulled her toward the bedroom. “Come on,” he said. “We have a long journey ahead of us.” He closed the bedroom door and then pulled the dresser in front of it, kicking the shards of teapot aside. Watching her out of the corner of his eye, he stepped beside the bed, then bent over and righted the camera, angling the wide lens toward her. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” he said, sighting through the eyepiece. He was six feet away from her.
She ran again, straight at the open closet door, ducking inside and pulling the door shut behind her, instinctively finding the knob on the connecting door and twisting it, picturing the bolts that Dave had so helpfully installed top and bottom….
The door opened, stopping against the hanging clothes just as the door behind her wrenched open, too, the knob torn from her hand. She ducked forward, feeling his hand on her wrist again, twisting it away so hard that her elbow flew back and cracked on the door frame as she slipped through it, pulling the door shut behind her and throwing herself through the next, slamming it shut even as she heard him scrambling into the closet. There was no way to stop him, to lock the door. She looked around wildly, grabbing the edge of the lawyer’s desk and pulling it toward the door, which flew open then, hitting her in the back. She grabbed the rolling desk chair with both hands, picking it up and whirling it around as he came through the door, and the chair hit him square in the chest, two of its legs banging the closet door, Edmund stumbling backward, going down, sweeping the chair away. Anne threw the bolt on the door and ran out into the hallway without looking back, bolting for the stairs. For a moment she ran in near silence down the carpeted corridor, hearing him stumbling along behind her. He was close…. She darted a glance over her shoulder and gasped involuntarily when she saw how close, reaching toward her, his face intent, spittle flecking his chin.
There was noise ahead, the sound of a horn honking—muted, then strangely loud, and a light swept across the bottom of the stairs as she threw herself forward in an out-of-control rush, falling onto the stairs and rolling, the breath knocked out of her. There was a shout, and feet slamming past, and she realized that the street door was open, that someone had come in. She sat up, her heart slamming in her chest, and saw Edmund running back up the corridor. Dave bent over her, asking her how she was. She shook her head. “I’m all right,” she said.
Dave leaped up the stairs, but at that same moment there was the sound of a door banging shut. The building shook with the force of it, and then there was silence. Anne crawled to her feet, stepped through the door into the open air, and leaned against the wall in the foyer. Momentarily she heard feet on the stairs again, and Dave reappeared, coming down two stairs at a time.
She was crying in the instant that he hugged her, and he continued to hold her until she stopped and wiped her eyes. Together they walked back up to her apartment and called the police.
62
IT WAS COOL AND DARK BENEATH THE STAGE IN THE closed-up theatre, and the flashlight beam was blocked in nearly every direction by interlacing wooden posts and beams and by dusty old cardboard cartons of junk. The area under the stage had apparently always been a convenient dumping place, and Edmund pushed his way through the accumulated trash of thirty years—long-abandoned paint cans and broken-down Christmas ornaments and rolled paper signs and pieces of costumes and broken props. The place was an absolute firetrap. Edmund had even found a quart of acetone lying on its side, its paper label chewed off by mice. A couple of weeks ago it would have been pleasant to call the Are marshal anonymously and report the whole mess, if only to give Collier a little something to do with his time, but when he thought about it now, that couple of weeks seemed to Edmund like a year ago, a different life. Everything had changed. He had bigger fish to fry.
He laughed out loud at his own joke and shined the flashlight at the far back wall, pulling himself along through the heavy layer of dust and grime between the low crossbraces, hauling with him a canvas book bag half full of the stuff he had taken out of his room at the Mt. Pleasant. He brought the old can of acetone along, too, favoring it over the gasoline he had thought he was going to use. Just like with Mifflin’s lamp oil and Jenny’s doll and trading cards, the more he let serendipity play along, the more interesting and profound the results.
A broken-down box of junk blocked his way again, and he took a moment to slide it aside, averting his face from the dust. He played the flashlight over the next section of wall and saw what he was looking for—a duplex electrical outl
et, uselessly far back beneath the stage. He crawled to it, then settled himself comfortably, propped up the flashlight, and emptied the bag carefully, removing the light bulb with the hole chipped through the top. At the Mt. Pleasant he had crisscrossed the glass globe with masking tape before popping the hole through it with a spring-loaded center punch. The tape still clung to the bulb, and he debated for a moment whether to try to remove it. The torn pieces of tape looked inartistic to him somehow….
He decided to let it go. If he broke the bulb now, he would have to crawl out from beneath the stage and find another one, and he just wasn’t up to going through the rigamarole. He had broken three bulbs already, trying to get the whole thing right. He plugged the light socket cord into the wall and touched the two metal prongs of his tester wires to the metal contact. The test bulb lit, so the old wall socket was hot. Voila! The rest was easy. He had pictured the process in his mind a dozen times. He unfolded the plastic drop cloth and tacked it to the beams overhead, letting the bulk of the cellophane-thin plastic hang loosely around the edges. He bunched the front side of it and tacked it up temporarily in order to give himself air. Then, sitting beneath the tented plastic, he set a pie pan on the floor and carefully poured the acetone into it. He plugged the timer and the light bulb socket together, then set the timer for 2100 hours before plugging the timer into the wall. He wouldn’t need the extension cord, so he pitched it away into the darkness and threw the empty acetone can and the tester wire after it. Gingerly, he screwed the bulb into the socket and tacked the cord to an overhead beam so that the bulb dangled an inch over the pool of acetone. And then for a time he sat in perfect silence, waiting for the timer dial to move perceptibly.
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