The piranha was asleep, its ax-blade body drifting easily in the huge tank. The tank made a pleasant gurgle, one that in any other time Speke would have found soothing.
He waited outside his office, listening. This was the only room of the house he felt was truly his, and yet it was in this room that he had seen Asquith’s stare. He fled the office, and switched on a lamp in the television room.
He stopped, unable to trust his eyes.
The tape had, in fact, vanished. He had been very frustrated. But here it was, back again, right where it was supposed to be. He had to pick it up to be certain that his new tape was back again, shake it, read the label in the very poor light. It was Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, a movie he had seen in a revival house in San Francisco years before. In fact, he had seen it with Asquith, who had slipped a half pint of tequila into his Fanta, swallowed a couple of big red Seconals, and had fallen asleep hours before the band of marauding brigands choked on their last sword.
The tape had vanished. But now it was back exactly where it had been for days, waiting for him to watch it. That used to charm him—the effervescence of this place. Now it seemed shifty, unsettled. He had been looking forward to seeing the tape for quite a while, but hadn’t had the opportunity. Not, he told himself, with all the annoying little distractions of his life recently. The movie was sitting on the television, waiting as though it had been there all the while—invisible, perhaps.
He had ordered the tape just a few weeks ago, but now that afternoon on the phone to the distributor in North Hollywood seemed like a distant epoch, a moment in the Devonian when dragonflies ruled the earth. It had been a day in which his mind had been untroubled enough to think of things like old movies.
He drank scotch, tilting the bottle, and when the liquor was gone—it did not take long—he put the empty bottle beside him on the sofa, as though anticipating that he might need a handy weapon.
Where would I be, he wondered, slipping the tape from its sleeve, without television? Imagine, he thought, Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower of London without a television.
He slipped Tape One into the VCR, and settled into the sofa. I, Hamilton Speke, do intend to sit out the night with my sword at my side. I will be as steady as a samurai, and I will think of nothing at all. Not a thing.
The screen fluttered and purred. Speckles of static streamed by. Speke folded his hands. The speckled tape illuminated the room with moon-gray bursts of light.
When he saw it, he did not realize, at first, what he was seeing. Surely that wasn’t a face. Surely that wasn’t a dim visage forming slowly out of the streaks and speckles of static.
Surely it was not Asquith’s face.
It stared.
Asquith’s face stared at him, and even when he blinked, and leaned forward, and shook his head, the face remained. Speke fell to his knees, still gripping the empty bottle.
Stop looking at me! his mind shrilled.
And then it was gone.
It’s gone now, he told himself. See—everything’s fine. The face is gone.
A nightmare has a special quality that lets the dreamer know: this is a dream. It was like the difference between videotape and film. The quality of light, the intensity of hues, the texture of a dream are unlike a real, actual event. Speke knew that he was awake. He knew it just as he might know when he heard a recording of Fats Waller or Billie Holiday that he was experiencing a voice from the past.
He was awake. This was not a dream. He knew that much. He lifted the bottle, holding it like a club, and stared around at the room. Where else would Asquith appear?
He seized the remote control with unsteady fingers, and rewound the tape.
There, he told himself. There’s nothing there. Just a speckle or two of static. No reason to be upset.
He held his breath. The stare was there, but so dim you could almost not see it. Speke pushed “pause,” and the face seemed to be composed of shadows, half-grays and blurs. Someone else might not be able to see it at all.
But it was there. Asquith was there.
Speke forced himself to move deliberately. He stood, feeling the stiffness from digging the grave in his shoulders and thighs. He balanced the bottle carefully in his hand. He gripped the bottleneck, swung the bottle back, and hurled the bottle into Asquith’s face.
There was an abrupt burst, and the television glow in the room vanished. Everything went black. The silence was imperfect—there was an electronic buzz. A metallic stink drifted to where he crouched, hands on his knees. There was the dullest light from the walls themselves. Bits of glass glittered on the carpet.
He crept, as silently as possible.
Don’t move. Don’t take a step. What is that in the tank with the piranha?
Nothing. There’s nothing there.
Maria was awake, sitting up in the bed.
“I’m just putting on some clothes,” Speke whispered.
“What’s the matter, Ham?”
“I couldn’t sleep.” He buttoned his shirt and snapped his pants.
“I heard a noise.”
“No noise.” He stepped into his boots, tugging first one, and then the other. “A perfectly quiet night.”
“What’s wrong? There’s something wrong, I can tell.”
“There’s nothing wrong. You want some sort of signed statement from me, is that it?”
He had never spoken to her like this. “I’m sorry, Maria. Please forgive me. I didn’t mean to shout.”
“You haven’t seen him again?”
“I’m sorry, Maria.”
“You have.” Her tone was definite, sure.
Speke didn’t respond.
She streaked past him, a flutter of nightgown and a light step. He put out his hand to stop her, but she was gone.
He caught up with her in the office. She switched on the light and raced to the windows, fumbling at them, flinging them open.
The scent of the damp earth, and the night hush, drifted into the room.
“There’s nothing there,” she said. “I told you, Ham. It’s in your mind.”
“I never said I saw him outside.”
“Where else did you see him? Ham, tell me. What’s happening?” Her voice did not sound surprised, or even anguished. Despite her words, she seemed to have been through this before.
“It’s all right, Maria. Everything is fine. Do I seem upset?”
“You’re trying to act calm, but—yes. You seem upset.”
“I’m upset, okay. I admit that. But I’ll be fine.”
“Ham—I’m worried about you.”
He held her, and she was not trembling. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Ham, I’m afraid of what this is doing to you.”
“What’s it doing? Disturbing my sleep? Making me a little restless? That’ll pass. I’ll be fine. Everything will be just fine.”
He snapped off the light, and the darkness made them huddle together.
“I’m going out,” he said.
She stiffened, and for the first time seemed anxious. “Stay here, Ham,” she whispered, but he imagined that he heard another message behind her words: go out, and make sure it’s safe here.
He stepped through the open windows, onto the dew-fresh lawn. There was the slightest wind, a rustling in the trees, a sound like great lungs slowly inhaling oxygen, and just as slowly letting it go.
With each step, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was not taking a walk. He was not going forth to revisit the terrible place. He was setting forth as though to an agreed-upon meeting, a rendezvous. It was a short walk, just a nighttime stroll. He was walking, however, from one world to another. He was stepping from the walls of logic to the chamber where he had taken a life.
It had been a clever joke: put the face of the dead man on the videotape. That’ll give old Ham a shock.
But who would do such a thing?
Why can’t I close my eyes, utter some charm, and be a child again? Why can’t I slip
back down the staircase just a few days, when none of this had taken place. He had been avoiding the Outer Office. Normally, days would go by and he would have no reason to visit the Outer Office, but now he had no practical excuse. He had been, simply, afraid.
He was afraid now, turning the knob, half-hoping he had locked it, determined when the door swung silently open. He was frigid in his bones with the realization that what he was doing was dangerous. He was afraid, but he was also angry.
The phrase stitched him: playing with my mind. Someone, or something, was playing with his mind. He did not believe in ghosts, and yet like any rational man he had to admit to himself that the world was a strange place, rich with possibilities.
If ghosts were real, wouldn’t they tend to haunt the place where they died?
How innocent the Outer Office looked. Here, leaning against the wall, was Maria’s watercolor, that interplay of yellows and greens Speke had seen as an unlikely hand grenade. It was, he saw now, a pineapple—not one of her better pieces.
The mantelpiece was glossy in the light from overhead, the stone an unearthly green. Speke forced himself to touch the corner of the mantelpiece. Here, he told himself, his hands trembling. Here is where it happened.
He knew that if he touched the stone itself it would awaken the powers of the air.
There was a step, a whisper, foot pressing a dry leaf. Or was it, perhaps, the whispered sound of his own name. Surely, that’s what it was, that breathy syllable.
“Ham.”
Asquith stood, pale in the light from the cottage.
Staring at Speke with those glittering eyes.
19
She had so much to tell him. And yet, it all seemed to slip away from her, and nothing mattered except the two of them, lying exactly where they were.
Playing hide and seek as a girl had been like this, her face pressed against fermenting leaves, so still she was someone pretending to be dead among slain bodies, escaping searchers who were very nearly not playing at all, hunters prodding bushes for the kill.
Perhaps a sound woke her. A shout, she thought, or a voice in a dream. It was hard to tell. She held her breath, and she could hear only the quiet footsteps of her own heartbeat. How peaceful she was, drifting in and out of sleep. Surely there could be no harm, anywhere in the world.
She listened, but there was only the huff of the wind above the cottage, in the trees. The sound had been something in her own mind, she decided, a cry to stir herself.
What sort of shapes had she seen in the plaster of her ceiling as a girl? Faces, of course, swollen-cheeked cherubs and grinning buffoons and benevolent grandees, all made of nothing, of light and trowel-swirls. The mind will search for a face anywhere, and see it where there is only textured chaos. And what did her parents talk about, out in the living room, in their adult lives? She recalled only the lift and fall of their voices, casual, affectionate.
Such a precipitous affair was not common for her. But she did not question what she was doing. Her father would have understood: Chris was a man you could talk to. It was time to tell everything. She shook his shoulder. It was perfect dark, except for the dimmest gray around the curtain. A single bird raised its song, like the squeak of a tin box from which morning escaped.
She snapped on the nightstand lamp, blinking against the sudden spill of light. “Chris, I have to talk to you.”
“Sarah.” Like a name spoken in a dream.
“I have to talk to you. Wake up.”
He smiled sleepily. “I don’t want to wake up.”
“We’ll go to my place. I’ll make coffee, and we can talk. I want to show you some things from my files.”
He sat up, suddenly alert. “What is it? Sarah—is something wrong?”
“Yes. But now I know what to do.”
His body was tense. “What happened?”
She laughed. “It’s not an emergency.”
He seemed to sense it, too. There was a cool current in the air, a trickle of unease. Had there been, after all, a sound in the darkness outside?
He squeezed her hand. “You startled me.” Then, “I must have been dreaming.”
She could not speak for a moment. She had too much feeling: gratitude, passion, sense of purpose. She had always believed that she had a special obligation to Hamilton Speke. She felt it now—loyalty, but also a loyalty to the truth. “I have so much to tell.”
He stroked her hair. “You’re the most alluring woman I have ever met.”
How wonderful he looked, tousled and sleepy. How silly she must look, she told herself, but that didn’t matter.
“Lures deceive,” she said. She meant it as a light verbal parry, but the heaviness of the truth she was about to share silenced her, and she looked away.
She tossed aside shyness as unworthy. She crept from the bed, and, in the dim light, dressed herself, slipping into her clothing like an actress assuming an accustomed role.
But the role was different, now. She could share the truth with someone. They both dressed, as unself-conscious as children, except that she thought: just like children. Real children, she knew, would never have such a thought.
They stepped through the dew-dampness to her cottage in the barely stirring light. There was a scent of sage and tinder-dry wild rye and wild oats, and an extra scent she had never been able to identify. The smell of silence itself, perhaps, silence and light, steeped in the earth.
The kitchen light was cheerful but too bright for a moment. “Don’t think I brought you here just to make you coffee. I don’t believe in impressing men with my ability to provide nourishment.”
He smiled, a smile that rose up through him, and suffused his face, and his eyes. “You can impress me in more ways than that.”
Her knees were weak for a moment. She had to look away.
She adopted her most adult tone. “I’m too reluctant to tell you anything so serious,” she began.
“Take your time. We don’t have to rush headlong into seriousness.”
“First, I want you to read something. Just a single page of typing.”
She found the page in a folder in the bedroom, and hurried back into the light.
“A double-spaced page of printout,” mused Chris. “Dialogue. And some … stage directions?” He looked at her questioningly, and then he read for a moment.
It did not take long. When he was done, he set the page on the table, face down.
The words were impossible, but she forced herself to speak. “It’s Ham’s recent work.”
He did not respond. He smoothed the paper before him, like a man clearing haze from a window. “He’s supposed to be working on something about traveling in Mexico. Everyone’s been talking about it for years. The Black Cat …”
“He’s been working on the same scene over and over again, two young men lost in the jungle. He writes the same stage directions over and over, the color of the light, the offstage sounds of waves, parrots. He deletes, rewrites, rediscovers, forgets what he has written. The sound of the surf, what the men are wearing. He writes it again and again, each time slightly differently.”
“The play isn’t nearly done?”
She turned to the coffeemaker. She poured, and asked, “Do you want a cup with a right whale on it, or a harbor seal?”
“I don’t know. That’s a hard decision. How can I face a question like that so early in the morning?”
She gave him the whale.
Then she lowered her eyes. “I don’t think the play exists.”
“He’s stuck. That happens to playwrights, and biographers, too.”
“There’s something wrong with Ham.” The time had come at last, and she could not continue.
He waited.
“When I first read the early plays, I knew they were magnificent, and I admired Ham so much for being able to write them.”
She stilled that nervous flutter in her breast. She waited, though, before continuing, “And he has never disappointed me, personally. He’s genero
us, spontaneous. He loves life. I admire, him, Chris. Very much.”
“But there is something wrong with him these days,” suggested Bell.
There is, she thought. Something very wrong. The next words choked her. She couldn’t possibly utter them. She whispered, at last, “I’m beginning to wonder how much of the old plays he actually wrote.”
Bell blinked.
“I never questioned it for a long time. For years. But then I realized that all the plays were written on the same cheap drugstore typing paper, with the same ribbon, and they all looked—felt—like manuscripts which had been produced about the same time. But that was only a glimmer of doubt … a hunch.”
She had once thought she would never be able to voice these suspicions. Now everything was changed. Still, she chose her words with care. “What convinced me was when he showed me things he had begun to write, things he started during the last year or two, after all the original manuscripts, even the screenplays and the songs, had been depleted.”
Bell glanced at the sheet of paper face down on the table. “And that’s a sample of his recent work.” He pursed his lips. “It’s well written, though. What there is of it.”
“I kept telling myself that I was wrong, and I was able to suppress my doubts.”
“Didn’t Speke realize that you were …” He searched for words. “Suspicious?”
“Ham is so important to me.” She was surprised at the way her voice shook as she said these words. “I don’t care who wrote the plays. Does it really matter? I’m concerned that the man, Hamilton Speke, is in trouble, and he needs my help.”
“He must have written the plays.” Bell looked around the kitchen, as though to make sure the room were still there. “You’re suggesting a kind of hoax.”
“No, I’m suggesting that we don’t know anything about Ham’s creative life, not really. We don’t know where the plays came from, and why they’ve ceased.”
“What you’re suggesting is outrageous.”
“You misunderstand me—”
Ghostwright Page 13
