Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  There were leaves and trash strewn everywhere, under the sofa and chairs, heaped up in the corners. He took down the curtains and shook them out, then hung them back up. Then he turned the Ping-Pong table upright, opened the closet door, and took out the broom and dustpan. Methodically he swept the place out, filling the trash can and hauling the leaves out to the fence. The room needed to be vacuumed but, like the painting, that could wait. He’d get to it. Bit by bit he would erase and eradicate his errors….

  He put the broom and dustpan away and was on the verge of going back out into the sunlight when he remembered the gun. Slowly he walked to the sofa and lifted the cushion. Beneath it lay the .38 from his nightstand—the gun that Lorna had brought out to shoot the man she thought was assaulting him.

  The guy who needed to be shot was probably out in the canyon right now, leaning on people. He slipped the pistol into his pants pocket and went after his car keys on the kitchen counter.

  2

  POMEROY SLOWED THE ISUZU, PEERING INTO THE WOODS and brush along the creek, trying to spot the boy again. He’d caught a glimpse of him a moment ago, walking among the trees. The wind moved through the vegetation now, stirring the willows and alder saplings so that the forest was full of movement. It had to be the same kid that had wrecked his camera; there was no mistaking the thrift-store clothes. He had given up on the idea of its being Beth’s son, though; a woman like her simply couldn’t have a kid that far out of hand.

  There he was! Heading up along the creek, in no particular hurry. Pomeroy stepped on the accelerator, and the Isuzu banged along to the closest turnout, where he pulled in, cutting the engine and setting the parking brake. He jumped out and clambered down the bank, through the dry grass and into the willows along the creek, shouting, “Stop right there!” as he ran, even though the kid was out of sight again.

  Pomeroy slowed down, getting his bearings and making up his mind. He wasn’t about to back down. There was no excuse for kids to be running wild like this, stealing things, doing malicious damage to other people’s property…. There was a movement ahead of him, beyond the willows, and he crouched in the shelter of a tangle of roots where the creek had eaten the bank away. Hadn’t the kid even heard him? The wind wasn’t making that much noise. It made him suddenly nervous, the kid fooling around like that, as if maybe he wanted him to catch up.

  Pomeroy looked around carefully, making up his mind about going on. Then the boy stepped across the creek and headed up the other side of the canyon, kicking his way through the tall grass of a clearing toward what was pretty clearly a cut in the wall of the ridge, maybe a little side canyon, its entrance obscured by a stand of oaks. Keeping low, Pomeroy followed, finding a rocky ford where the kid had crossed the stream. A little section of trail lay exposed on the hillside above, some distance above the top of the oaks, and he suddenly wondered if it led up to the trail that wound back down into Trabuco Oaks.

  Beth had headed up that way two days ago after he’d chatted with her in front of the old man’s house. When he saw the boy climb up onto the section of exposed trail, vanishing beyond the rock and brush, he set out at a run, leaping over fallen limbs and ducking into the deep shade of the big oaks. The wind blew straight into his face as it funneled down out of the side canyon, and a little leaf-choked stream trickled through scattered rocks from a spring somewhere above.

  He found the trail and set out hurriedly, then stopped in his tracks, listening to a strange noise that seemed to float down toward him on the wind. He could swear it was the sound of a child’s crying. After a moment came the clear sound of a woman’s voice, clearly calling out a name. The wind picked up just then with a rush of creaking and rustling, but Pomeroy had heard enough. In a rush of understanding he connected the boy’s strange clothing—the suspenders and out-of-date shirt and pants—with the hippie-looking woman out at Klein’s fence.

  Of course! He felt ashamed of himself for suspecting that Beth would have anything to do with a man like Klein or would use her son for any such purpose. A woman like her! It was Klein and this hippie woman all along, conspiring against him. Good God, maybe the kid was Klein’s son! A little bastard!

  He pushed on, not knowing what any of this meant, but knowing that he could use it. He had to meet the woman, follow her, speak to her. He would automatically have a certain power over her…. As he climbed he watched the trail ahead closely, so as not to come on them unawares. Better to seem as if he were just out hiking. The kid would be knocked sideways seeing him, but so what? He’d keep his mouth shut.

  There was the woman’s voice again. She sounded pretty worked up, and there was the crying again from the kid. The wind slammed down the trail so suddenly and so hard that he staggered backward, nearly pushed off his feet. He had a sudden vague premonition that he was reading this wrong, that there was something involved here that he didn’t understand. Was the wind trying to turn him around? He searched the sky. It was cloudless, clear blue, as if inviting him to climb higher—at least up onto the ridge.

  Heavy dry brush closed in from either side, and the trail was so steep, and it switched back so often, that he couldn’t see far enough ahead to gauge how close to the top he was. He was sweating freely, and the flies swarmed around his face in the heat, buzzing infernally. He wiped his forehead and listened for footsteps ahead, but the wind blasted through the vegetation and he heard only the sound of the flies and of his own feet scrabbling across the broken rock.

  Then suddenly the trail opened out ahead of him, the ridge leveling off some distance above into a nearly flat scrub-covered plateau. Mountains rose again beyond it, rough and dense with vegetation, but the trail he was following wound away to the west now along the edge of the plateau. He stepped out into a broad clearing and then stepped hurriedly back again, hunching down behind the edge of the brush. There she stood, Klein’s back-door bimbo, not twenty yards away, dressed just as she had been yesterday afternoon and last night. Her hair was a windblown frenzy, and the dress, clearly, had seen a lot of wear. Clearly she was some kind of local white trash, a drug case or something. He knew that Klein was low, but taking advantage of a woman like this …

  She took the boy’s hand and was hurried forward, the boy crying now for all he was worth, and the wind blowing her skirts up around her legs. Surprised, Pomeroy stepped out into the open and shouted, setting out after them. The wind threw his words back into his face. If they heard him, they didn’t care. Ahead lay a dense stand of dark alders clustered along what must have been a spring—the source of the little creek at the bottom of the canyon.

  Making up his mind, he set out at a run, overtaking them near the trees. They were tangled and dense, heavy with undergrowth, and even with the sun high in the sky, the interior of the little copse was dark with shadow. There was the sound of water splashing somewhere below, weirdly clear despite the rush of wind on the unprotected ridge. The woman hesitated for a moment before a dark hollow in the branches, an arched window of moving shadows. Lunging forward, Pomeroy grasped her shoulder with one hand and the boy’s elbow with the other.

  “Whoa up there, little lady,” he said, trying to sound pleasant even though he had to raise his voice to be heard.

  She slipped from his grasp like smoke, not even turning to look at him. He realized that she was weeping—something was going on here; something more than he understood. The boy pivoted around and looked Pomeroy full in the face, his wide-open eyes staring and dark with fear as if he were looking into a pit. Clearly he comprehended nothing. His face was almost idiotic with fear. Pomeroy stepped backward in sudden alarm. The boy clutched a cat to his chest, cradling it in his right arm, and for one terrible moment Pomeroy was certain that the cat was the same one he’d shot yesterday, that the boy had been carrying the dead cat around for the past twenty-four hours. Then the darkness of the overshadowing trees swallowed the two of them, and Pomeroy was left alone with the wind.

  Recovering a little, he shouted, “Wait!” and bent forward w
arily, shading his eyes from the leaves and dust that the wind raised into the air around him. He groped into the darkness within the trees, stretching out his arms to fend off the moving branches. There was the sound all around him of wood snapping and of the roaring wind, and then suddenly, piercing through all of it, the nightmarish sound of a woman’s scream.

  Pomeroy edged forward, pushing out through bushes to find himself suddenly at the edge of a cliff, looking downward over the edge at cascading water. He reeled backward, stepping into the shallow creek, realizing then what the scream had meant, what the woman had done. Even then he wondered if he could use it against Klein. The dirty bastard! Clearly what had gone on last night had driven this poor woman to suicide.

  He turned back into the darkness, covering his eyes against the dirt and leaves that flew into his face, trying to grope his way back out toward the arch of sunlight, which glowed now like the mouth of a cave. Creek water filled his shoes. The gale lashed through the foliage, and a heavy spray of wind-whipped water and leaves slapped his pants and shirt and face. He slipped on wet rocks, falling forward, reaching out to break his fall with his hands and opening his mouth to shout, plunging into water up to his elbow. His mouth filled with grit and wet leaves, and he clamped his teeth down, gagging on the debris in his throat.

  Pushing himself to his feet, he lurched forward out of the creek bed, groping for something to hold on to. The tree limbs flayed themselves leafless, whipping at his face and back and arms. Something hit him on the back of his head—a broken-off tree branch, slamming down with all the fury of the wind behind it. He staggered like a drunken man, looking wildly around, trying to breathe, but sucking in dirt and fragments of leaves. The wind crashed and hummed, and the arch of sunlight and open air was obscured by windborne stuff, swirling tighter and tighter until it looked to Pomeroy like a dense curtain of leaves and twigs and branches that was roughly the height and shape of a man.

  He took a step backward, grabbing onto a limb to steady himself. He could almost imagine that the black void in the thing was an open mouth, the focus of the terrible humming of the wind. A shower of pebbles and dirt flew toward him suddenly, cast from within the whirling mass of forest trash, forcing him farther back into the trees and undergrowth. Behind him—ten feet? twelve?—lay the edge of the cliff. The thing tottered forward, groping toward him, broken branches thrusting out from its side like rude arms. Mulch and dust dribbled from the open hole of its mouth and were sucked back into the revolving mass. Pomeroy heard the sound of the waterfall at his back as the thing drew near. With a desperate scream he lunged blindly toward it, flailing with his arms, trying to sweep it aside and escape once again into the sunlight.

  He tripped on a limb and fell hard, the broken stump of a branch tearing his shirt and chest. He felt his face peppered with dirt, and he squeezed shut his mouth and eyes and groped blindly forward on his hands and knees. A twig wiggled down into his ear like an insect antenna, and he snatched at it, suddenly terrified, screaming despite himself and feeling his mouth fill instantly with muddy leaves and mulch. He pushed himself to his feet, coughing and spitting and windmilling his arms in front of him, pressing his chin into his chest. Something hit him hard in the small of the back, and he staggered forward, barely keeping his feet, bursting out of the trees and into the open air.

  Without looking back, he lurched through the high brush, into the clearing where he’d first come upon the woman and boy. From behind him he heard the snapping of branches and a sound like dry leaves being crushed in a box. He screamed, redoubling his pace, angling down the path, the wind driving at his back now, hurrying him forward. He plunged down the steep hillside, and within an instant he was running headlong, the vegetation along either side passing in a blur. Still he could feel the awful rush of wind pushing at his back like hands, and he could hear the humming of it in his ears and the snapping and breaking of vegetation.

  He looked wildly over his shoulder now, and in that moment he tripped and was flung face forward. He threw out both arms to catch himself and felt the unmistakable snap of bones in his right wrist as he tumbled downward, smashing to a stop against an almost vertical wall of stone, his breath slamming out of him as if his lungs had collapsed. Wheezing for breath, he managed to stand up for a moment and stagger a few feet forward before his ankle gave out and he collapsed onto all fours, only to be jolted by the rushing storm of tumbling, windborne debris that had followed him down from the top of the falls. He was jerked to his feet, the sticks and limbs and wind working his arms and legs as if he were a spastic puppet, forcing open his eyes and mouth and nostrils, stopping his breath with dry leaves and sand. Staring up into the sun, he tore at the stuff in his mouth with the fingers of his good hand, unaware now of the roaring of the wind, of anything but the desperate need to breathe.

  3

  PETER AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND OF A car engine shutting off nearby. A door slammed, and there was the sound of footsteps on gravel. He looked around in confusion before knowing where he was—at Beth’s, where he’d collapsed into dreamless sleep some time after midnight. He opened the blinds, and daylight flooded the room.

  “Awake?” Beth asked, pushing the door open a crack.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven. I’ve been down to Benny’s doughnuts. Coffee in a second.”

  She shut the bedroom door, then opened it again. “Why don’t you take a quick shower?” she asked, closing the door again.

  Peter got out of bed. He was still dressed in his clothes. He glanced in the mirror, unhappy at the reflection. He looked as if he’d been dragged through the forest by wild pigs.

  Beth had a tray set up in the bedroom, the windows open, sunlight streaming in. He sat on the bed and picked through the box of doughnuts. “No jelly?”

  “All out,” she said. “You don’t get to be picky this late in the morning.”

  He pulled out a glazed and a strawberry frosted, and Beth took a chocolate-chocolate. “We’re going to get crumbs on the bed,” Peter said, licking the sugar glaze off his fingers before trying to dust doughnut crumbs off the bedspread.

  “Let’s not care about that,” she said. “Let’s eat these doughnuts as if we were millionaires and could buy a hundred bedspreads.”

  “Millionaires eat doughnuts different than we do?”

  “They just eat more,” she said. “Unlimited doughnuts. That’s one of the attractions of being rich.”

  “Where’s Bobby? He ought to be in on this, eating like a rich man.”

  “School,” she said. “It’s Monday. Holiday’s over. I arranged for him to spend the night with Julie and Simon. That way you and I can investigate your house for monsters.”

  Peter didn’t say anything. That wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, mixing Beth up in everything. “We’ll see,” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “We’ll see together.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

  She shrugged, as if she didn’t care what he meant.

  After a moment he asked, “Why’d you get a dozen?”

  “Cheaper.”

  He didn’t ask the obvious question, but picked up another doughnut just to do his part. It was going to take a major effort to make this pay. He looked at the doughnut but couldn’t bear the thought of eating it, so he put it down, noticing just then a wooden, three-tiered Chinese box that lay on Beth’s dresser. It was lacquered a dark blood-red and painted with white flowers and viney-looking gold leaves.

  “Treasures?” Peter asked her, gesturing at the box with his coffee cup.

  “Probably not the kind of treasures you’re thinking of.”

  “May I?”

  “Knock yourself out. Nothing very exciting to anyone but me.”

  It dawned on him suddenly how little he really knew about her—her day-to-day habits, the things that made her laugh and cry. He removed the lid from the top box. Inside lay a little collection of baby toys—a plastic rattle
in pastel colors, a comical stuffed dog with the name “Binky” embroidered on it, a chewed-on pacifier, a fuzzy rabbit with a missing ear, a baby’s ID strap from the hospital. He lifted the first box and looked at the contents of the second.

  “More of the same,” Beth said. She picked up a baby bottle with a picture of a duck on it. “This was his last bottle. One day I told him that when he threw it into the trash he would turn into a boy, with all the baby gone out of him. So he did. Right then. Didn’t wait more than three seconds. He walked straight into the kitchen and jammed it into the can under the sink. I started crying, and as soon as he wasn’t looking I took it out and kept it.”

  Peter sorted through the dozen or so photos that had lain beneath the bottle—Bobby in all sorts of moods, wearing little hats, grinning up from his bath in the kitchen sink, toddling across the carpet. “This was taken on his third birthday,” she said. “I made him a three-layer cake with three colors of frosting.” The photo was cut neatly in half lengthwise. Whoever had been sitting next to Bobby at the table had been trimmed.

  “Cutting-room floor?” Peter asked, remembering the photo on Ackroyd’s wall. Somehow he had never wanted to cut Amanda out of his life, not that way.

  She nodded. “It was Walter. Later, when we were splitting things up, I sent him his half of the photos. I should be ashamed, shouldn’t I?”

  “Clear and effective statement, I’d say.”

  “Maybe. But it’s the kind of statement you make when you’re out of your mind. Later on you wish you’d kept your mouth shut. I’ve got the negatives. Someday I’m going to have a new set printed up.”