Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  Beth lay there oblivious to it in the quiet room, not moving, and Pomeroy was edgy with impatience. There had to be something he could do—tap on the window, break something—that would make her shift position, get up, anything. Then he would go. That would be it. There would be other nights, other visits. Right now he just wanted to know something about her, something that would make their relationship more intimate. He had never had that, ever. Linda hadn’t let him in, hadn’t given him a chance to relate to her on a deeper plane….

  A gust of wind pounded into him just then, nearly throwing him into the window. There was a sharp crack from overhead, and a limb tore its way downward through the foliage of the eucalyptus trees, crashing onto the garage roof and sliding to the driveway.

  Pomeroy ducked away, scuttling out of the moonlight, deeper into the backyard along the wall of the garage. The noise of the falling limb had been tremendous, enough to wake the neighbors. Fear slammed through him, and he wondered suddenly whether there was a gate on the other side of the house, so that he could get out to the street without using the driveway. He looked around for a place to hide. If he had to he could go over the back fence, into the hills….

  The light inside the room went out just then. The blinds shifted. He pressed himself against the garage wall, out of the moonlight. Beth looked out from inside the room, straight at where he had stood just moments before. She could no doubt see the broken branch, which blocked half the driveway. He held his breath watching her. After a moment she dropped the blind, and he moved forward along the garage, hurrying toward the window again in case she turned the light back on. Maybe she would come outside! He prepared for it, trying to think of the right thing to say— that he was worried about her, the wind and all …

  But the bedroom stayed dark. If she was going anywhere she would turn the light back on. His anticipation drained away as he realized that she was probably just going to bed. It would be impossible for him to see her clearly inside the darkened room. He knew that from experience.

  The wind gusted again, howling through the trees. Beth heard the sudden crack of a limb breaking, then the sound of it hitting the garage roof and sliding in a leafy rush to the driveway. She reached across and flipped out the light, got out of bed, and stood by the backyard window. Carefully, she lifted the edge of the blinds and looked out at where the broken limb lay against the garage door. Moonlight shone on the leaves and across the lawn.

  She dropped the blinds, then walked out of the bedroom and into the dark kitchen. Through the window she could see the hills and the fields beyond Klein’s property. The dry grass rippled in the moonlight. The wind shifted through the trees.

  Something moved near the Kleins’ gate, nearly in the shadow of the poolhouse. Beth froze, her hands on the sink. It was a person—someone standing, waiting.

  Slowly she turned around and reached for the wall phone, the Kleins’ number coming to her in a rush.

  There was no dial tone. She remembered then that the phone was off the hook in the bedroom, and simultaneously the person moved, stepping out of the shadows. It was Klein himself, wearing his bathrobe. He turned and walked around the edge of the pool as if heading back into his house.

  She thought of the footfalls on the gravel outside the window.

  Pomeroy felt betrayed. Everything had come to an untimely ending because of the wind. He wasn’t ready to leave yet. Not yet. Crouching, he hurried across the lawn toward the back door, treading as lightly as he could on the wooden stairs.

  The wind that blew down off the ridges seemed to have gotten into his head, scattering his thoughts like leaves, and he couldn’t see any farther than the next moment. His vision narrowed so that the door, the doorknob, the cheap locking mechanism filled his mind, drawing his hand forward magnetically, inexorably. Through the dark window he could see a washer and dryer, an old sink. His fingers tingled as he fondled the cold brass knob.

  He pictured her rising happily off the bed, tossing her book aside. He was home! He’d been away—business. But he was home now. They’d brew a cup of coffee, talk, listen to the wind.

  Gently, he leaned into the door, closing his eyes, watching it swing open in his mind, picturing the darkness that lay beyond, the woman lying on the rumpled bed in a moonlit room, the thin nightshirt….

  Surprised at first, she’s relieved to see it’s him. She’s frightened of the wind, frightened of being alone. He touches her. He’s home now. They’ll be together, inseparable.

  The knob turned in his hand.

  Hanging up the phone, she walked past the table and into the service porch. She would check the dead bolt and then go to bed. It couldn’t have been Klein in her driveway. Not wearing his bathrobe. Maybe he had heard something himself, and had come out to investigate.

  The service porch was dark, but she didn’t bother turning on the light. She reached for the dead bolt as she stepped in front of the door, and saw at that moment, just inches beyond the glass, a man’s bandage-wrapped face, his hand rattling the knob.

  26

  THE SUBURBAN SAT ON THE TURNOUT WHERE HE HAD LEFT it, the keys in the ignition. He climbed in and sat for a moment resting, his head against the steering wheel, his eyes closed. The dark, shattered shapes at the base of the falls drifted into his mind again—the image identical to what he had imagined that afternoon, driving home from the suburbs.

  He opened his eyes. It had been dark, and he had been spooked by the scream, by the windy night. It would have been easy to imagine shapes in the confusion of shadows cast by the rocks….

  Except that the hiker last week had seen the same thing.

  Small comfort. He wasn’t crazy; he was seeing ghosts.

  He fired up the engine and drove toward home, keeping his eyes on the road ahead, not looking into the side mirror at all. Some distance up he passed the house of his nearest neighbor, Mr. Ackroyd, an old man who had lived in the canyon for nearly fifty years. The house was dark. The Suburban’s headlights illuminated a climbing rose on a trellis that sheltered one end of the broad front porch. A profusion of white blooms overhung a couple of weathered rockers.

  The comfortable look of the place made the solitude and darkness of the canyon settle on him like an increase in gravity, and he thought about the house on Monterey Street again—music on the stereo while he cooked dinner, David assembling Lego castles on the living room floor, Amanda working in her study.

  A quarter mile farther on he turned down the drive through the trees, his house visible ahead. It was a canyon hybrid of a Queen Anne cottage, with high-peaked gables and decaying gingerbread, built on rock piers in order to survive the occasional seasons of heavy rain, when the creek flooded the narrow canyon floor.

  Shaded by oaks and sycamores, the house looked as if it had never seen the sun. Despite the dry weather, the old roof shingles were green with a patchy carpet of moss that grew down into wooden rain gutters. The attic window yawned black and empty in the dirty white siding, ragged lace curtains stirring fitfully in the wind that blew in through the cracked panes. Sunlight and moonlight, Peter thought suddenly, were two distinctly different kinds of illumination. Maybe in the morning the place wouldn’t look so much like it needed to be fumigated by a priest.

  He locked the car and went in. Despite his having lived in and worked on the place for months, it had an abandoned, lonesome quality to it. Like a bat chased off by sunlight, the sensation fled only when Beth or Bobby were around. He pulled off his jacket and turned on the water in the sink, drinking a couple of mouthfuls right out of the tap. The cuts on his hands were nothing more than scrapes, the skin sandpapered off in a couple of dirty patches. He splashed water on his face and then shoved his head under the faucet, washing off trail dust and then rubbing his hair dry with the dish towel. Then he pulled a beer out of the old propane-powered refrigerator before going through the house and lighting every wall lantern he came to until there wasn’t a darkened room left. The propane tank outside held 250 gallons. He could
burn the lamps all night long for a month and not empty it.

  He wandered aimlessly, too full of restless energy to go to bed, too fatigued to work. Finally he settled in the parlor, looking over the torn-up walls and the seedy old furniture. He could picture again the ghostly willow tree he had seen that morning. Then it had seemed like a psychotic episode to him; now it seemed like something else entirely.

  Although the parlor had been built at the same time as the rest of the house, it had slipped further into decay over the years—the plaster falling off the ceiling, the floor settling out of level, the wall studs and moldings full of termite burrows. There was a stone-and-clinker brick fireplace with a broad hearth, but the joints had loosened, and now the fireplace floor was littered with chunks of broken mortar and decomposing brick.

  The room was half full of old furniture: stuffed chairs, tables, bookcases, all of it crammed into the back corners and sitting on top of a Turkish carpet that Peter had rolled back in a vain effort to save it from plaster dust and wood chips. Open wooden crates held tarnished candelabras and books, odd pieces of crystal and broken art pottery, bug-eaten lace doilies, and cracked ceramic figurines. There was a dismantled Victrola, or at least parts of one, crammed into a crate along with random pieces of broken records and a half dozen framed prints of hunting scenes and of tree-shadowed cottages in somber forest glades.

  The roof of the room had leaked for years while the house had sat empty, and much of the wooden furniture was loose-jointed and stained with dirty rainwater. Most of the pieces would take so much work to repair that it would save time and money just to junk them, except that in some vague way Peter had become attached to it, as if it were a collection of mementos from some dim, half-remembered life.

  He could easily picture the room in its prime: the bookcases full of dark volumes, the chairs arranged in front of the fire, the Turkish carpet deep and plush, the plaster walls troweled smooth and hung with the dark-framed pictures. On the ceiling, the crumbling plaster filigree repeated elements of the carpet pattern, as if the ceiling were a dim reflection of the floor. The whole house had a pattern to it, a tediously careful design, like an ornately carved and assembled Chinese puzzle box. The man who had built it had clearly been obsessed, as if he’d had some higher or deeper purpose than mere shelter.

  Looking around the room now, Peter was flooded with the sudden notion that all of it could be restored. In his mind he moved the old furniture back into its customary place, tightening screws, wiping the tabletops with lemon oil, draping the doilies over the arms of the chairs. Perhaps with patience and the right tools he could cheat time and chance and human frailty, repair the damage caused by a leaky roof and the passing years. There was a certain promise pending in the old room, as if everything he needed and wanted was right there, obscured by dust and age, and if only he could find the necessary order, the perfect arrangement …

  As if the weather had suddenly changed, the room grew strangely cool, almost tomblike. Light headed, he leaned against the doorway and stared at the rubble in the fireplace. He listened vaguely to the wind blowing outside. The glow from the wall lamps diminished abruptly, and the room fell into shadow. There was the faint smell of jasmine on the air and the murmur of hushed voices as if from some far-off place. Slowly and languidly, a silver light began to leak out of the fireplace like drifting, moonlit fog—the same witchy light that had illuminated the room early that morning….

  27

  POMEROY HEARD BETH SCREAM AT THE SAME MOMENT that he saw her face through the window. He threw himself down the wooden stairs in a single, twisting leap, already running toward the driveway when he hit the lawn, hunched over, aware that he was illuminated by moonlight and wanting to distort whatever view she would get of him.

  In the shadow of the house he straightened up and ran flat out toward the street, glancing at the still-closed front door. There was a light on in the living room. She was calling the police. Of course she was calling the police.

  He leaped over a big eucalyptus log that edged the front lawn, ran across the street and into the darkness of the trees, unwinding the gauze around his face as he ran. Thank God he had wrapped his face up. She’d have got a clear look at him otherwise. It would have been over then, all of it.

  The wind tore the night to pieces, blowing through the high, dead grass in the field. He ran straight into it, lit by moonlight again, still hunching down. No way he was heading straight back to the car. Ahead of him the field was scattered with bushes, all of them shaking and bending in the wind. He could lose himself pretty easily out there, hide as long as he had to.

  He scrambled in behind a heavy stand of brush, pushing his way deeper into it. His hand was bleeding again from the cat bite. He tried to wrap it with the wrinkled strip of gauze, but he shivered so badly that he couldn’t get it started. Suddenly enraged, he slammed the bleeding hand into the brush, driving it again and again into a limb until the pain receded behind a numb ache.

  He was sobbing and sick, the wind clammy on his face, and he fought to be quiet, to control himself, holding on to limbs with both hands as if the wind would blow him away. He was washed with remorse. Just like with Linda! He had nearly wrecked it all. Suddenly he was gripped by an impulse to betray himself, to walk across to Beth’s door and admit everything. The very act of admission would make her understand what he wanted. He would beg her forgiveness, ask her to give him another chance….

  Someone was in the street.

  Pomeroy held himself dead still. It was Lance Klein. Probably Beth’ s scream had awakened him, and he headed down the center of the street now, his bathrobe billowing around him. He was looking hard into the shrubbery of the few dark houses. The white Cherokee wouldn’t mean anything to him.

  As if unsure of himself, Klein stopped. Then he walked slowly across to the stand of trees along the road opposite to Beth’s house. He stopped again, craning his neck, probably not wanting to get too close and be jumped by a prowler hiding in the darkness. Pomeroy nearly laughed out loud. No way Klein would head out into the field. Not on a night like this.

  The police, though, were a different matter.

  Klein turned around and hurried toward Beth’s house, and Pomeroy pushed out through the brush, edging along behind it. He could hear Klein pounding on the door. “Open it,” Pomeroy whispered. “Let him in.”

  He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled out into the wind, clutching the gauze in his damaged hand. The grass was high enough to hide him all the way to the street. Klein had quit knocking and was standing on the porch, shouting something. The door opened and he went in. The bastard, Pomeroy thought, still crawling toward the street. The dirty bastard. If he touches her … It was himself, Bernard Pomeroy, who ought to be inside that house comforting Beth. Everything had gone wrong. The damned wind. The moonlight. He should have read the signs. The wind didn’t cover anything; it just woke people up, made them look out the window every ten seconds, hearing noises.

  He was near enough to the street now. He stood up and ran, the air tearing in and out of his lungs in gasps. Tumbleweeds grabbed at his shoes. He expected a shout, the sound of doors slamming. His feet pounded on asphalt now, and when he reached the corner there was still no one in sight. Sliding into the car, he bent down across the passenger seat, just barely looking out at the road. Like last time, he let off the brake and the Cherokee moved off downhill, gaining silent momentum. He straightened up and checked the rearview mirror. Klein hadn’t come back out.

  He twisted the ignition key and switched the headlights on, rolling through the stop sign at the bottom of Parker and accelerating up the highway toward Coto de Caza. When he entered the first maze of suburban houses at the top of the hill, it dawned on him that he was safe. A vast wave of relief surged through him, and he screamed out loud. Fueled by the emotion, he screamed again and again until, winded and light headed, he forced himself to slow down and catch his breath.

  It was two in the morning when he pull
ed into the garage, and he was utterly worn out, his shoes full of dirt and foxtails, the cat bite filthy. He stood in the shower scrubbing himself down with a loofah pad until his skin was raw and the hot water ran out. Then he loaded his shoes and clothes into three grocery bags and covered them up with kitchen trash, fastening the tops with twist ties. He took them out and locked them into the garage cupboard. There was no way he could throw them into the condo Dumpsters. That’s where they’d look first. He would toss them out in two or three different spots tomorrow morning.

  He washed his hands again and poured hydrogen peroxide over the cat bite before putting a wide Band-Aid over it. It struck him then, while he was looking at the palm of his hand, that he had touched the knob on Beth’s back door. He had actually been standing there turning the knob! How in the hell had he let himself go like that? What had he hoped to accomplish? He had lost all regard for consequences.

  That’s what had happened to him last time. He had been lucky to pull a suspended sentence. Worse than that, though, had been the humiliation of being identified. It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t understood.

  He had been fingerprinted, too.

  Your whole life was nothing but consequences, lined up one after another, waiting to take a punch at you. When you looked away, even for a moment, one of them knocked you down.

  28

  THE SOUND OF BETH’S SCREAM DISORIENTED KLEIN AND for a moment he related it to the dream, to the final horrified scream of the woman beside him on the bed.

  Then he yanked shut the half-open french door and ran to the fence, climbing up onto a deck chair and looking over. A man was just then rounding the corner of Beth’s house, running hard, a strip of white cloth wrapped around his head, the loose ends trailing out behind him. The man threw his right hand out to catch the wall, braking his momentum and swinging up the driveway toward the street.