Fog Heart

by Thomas Tessier

  Carrie touched the railing at the top of the staircase. The living room was dark, though some light filtered in from outside. Within a few moments she was able to make out certain large and familiar shapes – the Roche-Bobois, the home entertainment unit. No one there. Nothing happening. Just those sounds, louder now, as if she were closer to the source.

  Carrie started slowly down the stairs. There was nothing to see when she reached the living room, but those sounds continued all around her – as if she’d now stepped into the middle of some invisible activity. Heavy lifting. Deep grunting. More of that leaden pacing back and forth, nowhere. Wordless voices, somehow distorted – a low rumble of simmering agitation.

  Carrie hit the wall switch and the table lamp went on. The living room was suddenly cast in the warm, familiar glow of muted light. No one there, of course, nothing happening. But the same noise persisted. Incredible. Carrie was still struggling out of her beer-hazed sleep, but she was at last beginning to understand that she was in the middle of another event.

  She took a few steps into the room, and felt something passing by just inches from her. She turned and looked around, but saw nothing. It happened again, a blurry movement in the air that she glimpsed briefly and dimly out of the corner of her eye. It made her think of leathery wings rustling and unseen birds sweeping past her.

  The noise was constant. Carrie hadn’t heard anything on the three previous occasions so this was a new turn. And already it had lasted longer than the other incidents. Someone was running. Carrie picked out the sound of running footsteps from the jumble of noise. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen. Carrie went to the hallway and looked in that direction. Suddenly the noise was a tremendous clatter and the grotesque sepia creature flew out of the darkened kitchen. He ran right past her, and Carrie felt the rush of air in his wake. She rocked back a step. She caught her balance and edged into the hallway.

  The door at the far end was wide open. She knew that it had been closed: it always was, when that room wasn’t in use. It was the second bedroom, Oliver’s office. The lights were off but the room was faintly illuminated. Carrie approached the door.

  It didn’t look anything like Oliver’s office. A chipped and faded linoleum floor. Walls made of cheap wood, painted a garish blue. Tinny, alien-sounding music floated like smoke in the air. Carrie noticed the heat. Sweat broke out across her forehead and face. There was a metal bed with a thin mattress on it. A woman flat on her back. The man knelt over her body. She was between his legs, and he was sitting on her belly. Strangling her. The woman’s legs kicked and jumped uselessly. Carrie gasped.

  He turned and stared at her. When she saw him run by on the way from the kitchen, she hadn’t been quite sure. But now Carrie knew that it was the same figure, the one she had encountered at Monsieur Chauvet’s apartment. Those warped and smeared features.

  His whole face was twisted, and his eyes were out of kilter. But he seemed to focus on Carrie now, and immediately those eyes struck her as undeniably human. This was no demon or fiend from any hellish otherworld. It was – or had been – a man. And the recognition of that was somehow far worse than anything else she might have imagined. Carrie stumbled back a step or two and reached for the door to steady herself. Instead, she knocked it loudly against the wall.

  He leapt off the bed and was on her in an instant, his hands at her throat. Carrie sagged dizzily. The stifling stench of an unbearable odour. The force of his eyes, which seemed to push her own eyeballs back into her brain. His grip like a metallic cable winding around her neck, cutting off her breath.

  The sense that she was dying.

  Carrie pressed her hands against his face and tried to shove him away. His skin felt like rippled glass coated with a thin layer of slime. The tinny music was louder, a shrill pain in her ears. She realized that she was in the room, on that bed, and he was sitting on her belly as he choked her. Carrie was the other woman. Her hands slid off him, and it was impossible to resist or push him away. Futile. She was dying. But then there was a mangled shout from the doorway, a sudden flurry of activity nearby, and a few moments later she was alone.

  Carrie saw nothing now but knew he was gone. She was on her knees, one hand gripping the corner of the desk for support. She followed the light and made it into the living room. I am still alive, she told herself, though she hardly believed it.

  She sat down on the sofa, fell onto her side, curled her legs up close to her, and began to shiver. She was cold, and reached up to pull the afghan over her body. Her face felt damp, and she touched it. Blood, from her nose or mouth. She tried to wipe it away, and her face felt sticky with it. She remained on the sofa until daylight filled the room. Then she got up and tottered into the kitchen. She knew the number.

  ‘Hello?’ Sleepy.

  ‘Oona.’

  ‘This is Roz.’

  ‘Roz, this is Carrie Spence.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Suddenly alert, anxious.

  ‘It happened again, only worse. Much worse.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No.’

  15

  ‘What’s the point?’ Charley asked. ‘If you know what Fiona wants with us, why do we have to do this again?’

  ‘Because it’s part of it,’ Jan replied.

  It’s part of it. As if that made any sense. But they were on their way to see Oona again and there was no way out. Charley was perplexed, and a little worried. Jan was increasingly silent around their apartment. She sat and stared a lot.

  She still went to work, and presumably she still functioned adequately there since she hadn’t been fired. But at home she showed signs of being in retreat. She had started leaving her clothes draped over chairs or lying in a heap on the floor beside the bed, and she’d never been sloppy like that. Or she would do a pile of laundry but then leave the wet clothes in the washer. By the time Charley found them, they had more wrinkles than the late Mr Auden’s face.

  Charley felt as if he were caught in a zone of futility. He had a powerful desire to do something, to act in a way that would be useful and decisive and would protect Jan. But Jan believed in Oona, and that Fiona’s ghost had come for them.

  Charley was convinced that, before too long, this terribly sad delusion would crumble. Oona’s ambiguous and suggestive arias couldn’t work indefinitely. They would lose their power to hold Jan. Fiona had to appear. Fiona had to speak, and say something important. But she wouldn’t. Fiona was dead, and the dead stay dead. No matter how hard Oona tried, she would never be able to conjure up Fiona’s spirit or voice. Sooner or later Jan was sure to accept this unavoidable fact.

  It hurt, it really hurt to disbelieve. Half of the battle, Charley realized, was with himself. Even he wanted to think that his daughter survived in some way, and was trying to get in touch with them. It was such an attractive, seductive idea. The ghost of a life that had barely begun. Speaking to her parents across the great divide. Oh, yes, it was appealing. It seemed so right. It had a sense of fairness and justice to it.

  ‘You know, Jan…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not trying to start an argument or anything. And I do think Oona is remarkable in some ways. But I can’t help thinking that she must be … disturbed. Somehow.’

  ‘You mean, mentally ill?’

  ‘Well … disturbed,’ Charley said. This seemed a safer line to take than claiming Oona was an outright fraud. ‘I mean, it’s not natural, is it? People aren’t born that way. She must have been through something in her life to make her like that.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Of course it does. She—’

  ‘Did Yeats have a special talent? Cézanne? Mahler?’

  ‘All great artists have talent and vision,’ Charley replied. ‘But please don’t try to tell me your woman is in the same league with the likes of—’

  ‘Your woman,’ Jan repeated, with a laugh of contempt.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your woman this, your
man that. It’s the way you insist on talking, Charley. Those Irish phrases and idioms, as if you were born on the banks of the Liffey instead of a crossroads farm town in Wisconsin. As if you were a hard-drinking native Dubliner. I used to find it charming. Years ago.’

  ‘I’m Irish through and through,’ Charley muttered.

  ‘And you can tell who’s disturbed.’

  Jan laughed to herself. Charley held his tongue. He would not let it degenerate into another slanging match. The cow. He concentrated on the traffic. The usual bottleneck inching along into Westville, otherwise not too bad.

  The fact that Jan could needle him that way was in itself an encouraging sign. It showed that she had some fight left in her. That business with the bread knife had bothered him for a couple of days, but he’d watched her carefully and seen no repetition of it. Jan wouldn’t hurt herself or him – not if she expected some act of ghostly retribution from Fiona.

  What he feared much more was that Jan might suffer a mental breakdown. Driven over the edge by a poisonous mixture of Oona’s antics and lingering guilt. Then what? Treatment and care. Was his own future role to be that of a nurse? Charley found it an appalling prospect. But he couldn’t leave her just as things got really bad. He might have a peculiar notion of marital fidelity, but he had remained with Jan all this time and he’d never desert her merely for the sake of convenience.

  That was faithfulness, the genuine item, and it made Charley feel a little better to affirm it once again.

  * * *

  ‘Is it all right to speak?’ Charley asked. ‘I mean when you’re in the middle of your – thing. I wouldn’t want to interrupt anything important.’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Oona said. ‘If something occurs to you, just say it. You won’t do any harm.’

  ‘Ah, good.’

  So agreeable, this Oona. He still didn’t know quite what to make of her. She seemed perfectly innocent, a sunny and cheerful young lady who was out to help. Pleasant, attractive. She imposed no special rules or conditions, which was the opposite of what you would expect for events like this. And while they took place in the little snuggery at the back of her living room, Oona gave the impression that she could stage them anywhere, almost at the drop of a tweed hat.

  This session began as the first one had, with Oona jabbering on while she rubbed their hands and touched their faces. It was easy enough to endure, but still seemed rather silly.

  ‘You’re so sensitive,’ Oona was telling Jan.

  Oh, yes, he’d had occasion to observe that – once or twice a year, perhaps. Since when was being guilt-haunted the same thing as being sensitive? Jan, of course, was eating it up. Her eyes tearful already, her head nodding in agreement. Yes, yes, I’m so sensitive, please tell me more.

  It was so disheartening. With Maggie, at least, it could be described as a kind of research. She might believe in it but she was also investigating something that could be traced back to her studies of old Celtic folklore. The crazy women with the gift of vision. Witches or seers, whatever. Charley and Jan had no such rationale. Just an old tragedy, and nothing Oona said would ever change it in any way.

  ‘Wenda wenda wenda—’

  She was on track. They had explained this. Oona often had to cover old ground to find the way. Every time out she advanced a little further along. So they said.

  ‘Wenda wenda when the when the—’

  ‘Laird,’ Charley prompted.

  ‘When the laird the laird the laird—’

  ‘When the last Laird of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride, and woo a dead maiden to be his bride,’ Charley quoted, ‘he shall stable his steed in the Kelpie’s flow, and his name shall be lost for ever more.’

  Oona’s mouth continued to move but she had gone silent, her eyes blank and her fingers making empty gestures in the air. Roz gave him a puzzled look but said nothing. Jan’s expression was one of tight-lipped, hard-eyed annoyance.

  ‘Sir Walter Scott,’ he told Roz. ‘The Bride of Lammermoor. It rang a bell the last time, and I tracked it down. It may not be exactly word for word, but that’s more or less it.’

  ‘How interesting,’ Roz said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ A cool one, that girl. ‘What do you suppose it means?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ A hushed tone, telling him to shut up.

  ‘Well, she’s quoting Sir Walter Scott,’ Charley persisted. ‘I find that rather curious, and I’d—’

  Jan and Roz waved him silent. They were gazing at Oona, who was flat on her back, her limbs straight and her body shuddering tightly. Sweat was pouring off her face, which had turned bright red and now was shading into a ghastly purple. Her breathing was somewhat quickened but still close to normal. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a painful grimace. Her jaw jumped, and the words came out in tortured clots of sound.

  ‘Youdontwanna bay bee Idontwanna bay bee—’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Charley said softly, but angrily.

  ‘Wickedwickwickedwickwickedwick—’

  Oona’s hands flapped uselessly. She looked half dead. The colour had drained from her face, and her skin was streaked with grey and white. Her eyes were shut, but tears flowed freely from them. As before, Charley found these physical changes impressive and weirdly fascinating, but he also resented them.

  And there hadn’t been anything wrong with the bloody wick in that ancient Everglo paraffin heater. That wasn’t it at all. It shouldn’t have been used in the nursery, that was the unfortunate truth of the matter. Nothing more, nothing less.

  ‘Adare–Adare–Adare–Adare–Adare—’

  Jan clamped a hand over her mouth and Charley could feel the skin tighten on his face. The bitch. The anger he felt undercut the creeping sense of fear on the edge of his mind. It had never been in any newspaper or media report, as far as he knew. It had never been made public because it was irrelevant. Everybody knew about that cursed jerrycan of fuel, but not that it had the name Adare on the side of it in chipped letters. Adare being the name of the local shopkeeper who had supplied it to Charley. There was no way Oona could know – Christ, he was tired of thinking that each time Oona said something she wasn’t supposed to know.

  ‘A daring bird of omen bird of doom daring to daring to dare to come come come oh no oh no oh no don’t come—’

  Charley exhaled. Dare. Daring. So it wasn’t necessarily a mention of Adare at all. Just another case of the words sounding alike, being virtually the same, and thus triggering a connection in his mind and Jan’s. He would tell her that later, not that it would do any good. But you have to put things on record.

  ‘Dunsany had a bird of doom,’ he pointed out affably. ‘It’s in The Gods of Pegana, his very first book. Every writer worth his salt has at least one bird of omen or bird of doom in their work – it’s required. Symbolism 101.’

  But Jan and Roz ignored him. Fair enough. He was playing the spoilsport and they had no use for it. But it seemed to him that someone had to take on that role, however thankless it might be, and he was the only person present with the detachment to see through the veil of dubious links and associations.

  ‘Dontdontdontdontdont – don’t lettem come don’t lettem come don’t wanna – don’t wanna – baybee – the corbies come the bird of doom the corbies shadow in the room – oh no oh no—’

  ‘Fiona,’ Jan wailed helplessly.

  Oona writhed and twisted, pinching her arms and body. Her skin turned white then red where she picked at it. There was a look of strange pleasure on her face, a kind of fierce smile that seemed to defy her obvious discomfort.

  Her light cotton dress was drenched in places with sweat and stuck to her. The sleeves were bunched up above the elbows, the loose skirt crushed in a clump between her knees. Her hair hung in damp, tangled strands. Oona’s eyes opened and closed, rolling about aimlessly, seeing only within.

  A trance. Okay, so she goes into a trance state, as much as anybody ever can. Charley would give her that. But there was no spe
cial benefit or magic to it. It was a form of escape. People push themselves into a trance and think they’ve made a mystical connection. But it was imaginary, illusory, the product of their own subconscious minds off on a toot. You could reach the cosmos and the past just as well by meditating serenely, or having a few pints in Mooney’s on a quiet afternoon.

  ‘Don’t go don’t go don’t go now—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jan sobbed.

  ‘Don’t leave the laird the bird the shadow the smoke the lie in the lie of the light – the glow—’

  ‘Fiona, I’m so sorry…’

  It was possible, just possible, to look at Oona in such an extraordinary state, to hear the words flowing and jumping out of her, and to believe it. You almost had to work harder to reject it. But you had to reject it, because otherwise everything else in your life spun out of control. And fell away, empty and drab and meaningless.

  If you could communicate with the dead, how could you spend your time doing anything else? If you could cross the barrier to the afterlife, or another dimension of being – whatever it might be – how could you go back to teaching, writing, cleaning house, watching a ballgame or dulling your mind with drink? Surely you would feel compelled to spend every waking moment of your life on it, trying to perfect it and understand it. To do anything else would be an outrageous waste of time and opportunity. You would have to devote your whole life to it.

  To the dead.

  Oona had fallen still. She looked wrung out and limp, like a floppy doll that had seen too much careless use. Charley hoped the show was over. He wanted to take Jan home.

  Oona sat up and looked around. Her eyes were clear and wide open now, but she still gave the impression of being blind, or of seeing something other than her immediate surroundings. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, but were lost.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Mam. Please don’t leave me here like this. Mam, please don’t. Stay with me, Mam. Take me with you. Don’t leave me here like this. Please don’t.’