A siren on the block behind us.
Down the center of the street a small dog trotting, head bobbing happily as it checked the houses on either side.
A long time ago, far longer than I care to remember these days, a dear friend now, a new friend then, had shown me around the Station once I’d settled in the house and made myself known, enthusiastically filling me in on needed gossip, pointing out the shops to patronize or avoid, cannily introducing me to those she knew wouldn’t condescend when they learned of my profession, or back me into party comers to tell me their dreams.
She also introduced me to Abe Stockton.
And the two of them together gave me my education, my courses on what is possible, what is not, and what lay in shadows between.
I opened the album and picked up the four photographs Callum had discovered in the pocket.
He put down his whiskey.
Then I handed him the sheets of paper, the writing so fine it couldn’t be seen in the dark, and waited while he held them up to his eyes, squinting, refusing to dig into his pocket for his glasses. He grunted. He sneezed and blew his nose. He turned the pages front to back and shook them in his hand. When he was done proving he’d examined them, he placed them carefully on the floor between us.
“Okay,” he said.
“Abe liked music, you know,” I said quietly. Callum snorted. “Right.” He retrieved his glass.
“Chamber orchestras and opera, I’ll bet. He probably sang arias in the shower.”
“Country.”
He gaped, then laughed. “Country? As in ‘You left me, darlin’, for another man, and now I’m drinking as hard as I can’? That country?” He laughed again and slapped his thigh. “Jesus. I mean . . . holy Jesus, you gotta be kidding. God, he was old, but he wasn’t senile, you know.”
I shifted the photographs from one hand to the other. Back and forth. Staring at the dark. “It’s not as bad as all that, you know.”
“Oh, sure. Cowpokes and cowgirls sitting around the old campfire, crying their eyes out at the top of their nasal voices.” He crossed his legs. “Country.” He snarled at his glass. “Honest to god, I never in my life would’ve thought Abe was struck with that stuff.”
I couldn’t help a quick smile. “You ever listen to it?”
He looked at me to be sure I was joking. Then he saw I wasn’t, and he shook his head slowly.
“All right, then,” I said. He waited.
“Look,” I told him, “he told me once he could understand that kind of music better than most of the others. The words, I mean. He said the songs told stories he could get through without having to blast out his eardrums. Heavy metal, he said, was iron, not singing.”
Callum looked at me again, one eye nearly closed.
“I’ll be damned. You like that crap, too.” He grinned. “Son of a bitch, don’t you learn something every day.”
I shrugged. What the hell.
Then he leaned forward, glass held in both hands between his knees. “Okay. So Abe like twangy noise. What does that — ”
“Rimer Nabb,” I said, holding up the pictures.
He sat back again, heavily. “You’re shitting me.”
Then he leaned forward a second time, toward me. “But they can’t be. Look at them. They can’t be, they’re too old.”
I shuffled them as if they were cards, dealt them onto my lap as if they were Tarot. “This one is Rimer,” I told him, beginning with the one on the far left and making my way down the row, “and here’s Tallman Evers, Willy Peace, Frieda Harks.” I stared at each one, not quite believing it myself. It had taken me all day to decide I was right. “I thought I recognized Frieda, all that hair and that smile, and as soon as I did, the others just kind of naturally fell into place.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” Callum said quickly, reaching out to take them up, and pulling back to grasp his drink again and glance out at the yard. “You’re wrong. Relatives, probably.”
“Yeah,” I said doubtfully.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
It would have been easy just to shrug, but I didn’t.
Instead, I held them up one by one for him to see. Musicians and memories and music trapped in photographic amber.
“Read,” I told him, nodding to the papers he’d put on the floor.
He shook his head, saw my face, sighed his best martyr’s sigh, and shoved his chair back until he was against the wall and the living-room light drifting over his shoulder. “If I go blind, I’ll sue.”
I didn’t say a word.
I just showed him the pictures.
Part I: Dialing The Wind
On the back porch, in the dark, the mandolin played softly, the doubled notes not hesitant, only slow, floating just long enough in the summer’s cool night to let the dulcimer join them, high and sweet and gently insistent. In the background, out of the shadowed corner where spider webs glinted, a deep-voiced guitar added a slow chord or two to bind the rest together in black-satin-ribbon harmony, while the draw of a scarred bow across a time-weary fiddle suggested a melody without a name, a hymn without words, a bittersweet laugh and a caught sigh before weeping.
On the back porch, in the dark.
And quiet; only loud enough for those playing, and anyone nearby, to hear what was done, dream what was intended, understand what was left when the last note drifted into the roses ahead of the creak of an old chair.
The porch, unpainted and darkly stained by the weather, was as long as its small house, the narrow yard that it faced deep and overgrown and ending in a steep slope walled with trees too close together for moonlight to touch the ground. There were a few flowers, mostly dying, and some grass, mostly brown, and a low picket fence against which a woman leaned, unseen, hoping the four would play once more before she made her way to bed.
She was tall, long legs in jeans, long torso in a plaid shirt whose sleeves were rolled clumsily to her elbows. Her hair was dark blonde cut close and brushed back, and she touched at it with her fingertips, drew her hand across one cheek and settled it at the flat of her chest. Waiting. Listening. Glancing up at the stars, and over to the woods a solid black now the music was ended.
There was no sense looking at the porch.
The musicians were invisible without a light from the house, and the glow from the moon barely reached the roof. She had tried several times to see who it was over there, man or men, woman or women, but she was sure that one of them was Rimer Nabb. The others could have been ghosts for all she knew.
She yawned then and nearly laughed aloud because bored was definitely not the way she felt tonight.
Behind her, a hissing sprinkler cast a mist over a lawn newly reseeded and struggling to survive; to her left, on Thorn Road, an automobile sputtered and clunked to a halt at the curb and backfired twice before its headlamps snapped out. She couldn’t see it for the high hedge that marked her neighbor’s front yard and curled around it to join the fence, but she supposed it was Bruce Kanfield, home late from the office, or one of his daughters, home late from a date.
Date, she thought; let’s play Remember When.
Then the music lured her gaze back to the house, and she couldn’t help wondering, again, what Nabb had done to his place that made it seem as if it had been here for centuries.
As far as she could tell, from observation and some willing gossip from the neighbors, the dark green Cape Cod had been built old, as if it had been here first and the rest of the world dropped in around it.
She yawned again without covering her mouth and turned slowly away when it was clear the playing was over.
Tomorrow, she vowed, as she’d vowed almost every day since mid-June, tomorrow I’ll bring him some fresh bread or something and tell him how much I like it. Maybe he’ll ask me over so I don’t have to sneak around just to listen.
An insect brushed her ear.
Something stirred in the woods.
She had heard the music for the first time several weeks ago a
nd had thought she’d left the radio on in the kitchen. Once there, however, she’d discovered she was wrong and decided it must be someone else’s down the street, uncaringly loud. But when the tune stopped abruptly and began again from the beginning, she’d realized the music was live, and she had sworn softly to herself as she’d stalked to the back door. Angered. because she hadn’t come all the way to Connecticut, half her life behind her in sealed cartons and dust, a sealed coffin and a grave, just to have to listen to some half-brained idiots practicing goddamn hillbilly songs, for god’s sake, that played even by the best of them grated her nerves to a raw temper.
It made her feel as if she was no longer in control.
And it was control she needed. Now, more than ever.
Out the door then, and onto the narrow redwood stoop that would, in time, become a porch of her own. Hands firmly on her hips, mouth tight, eyes narrowed, head turning in jerks like a nervous bird until she realized it was coming from the house to her left.
Wonderful. Just what she needed — some stupid amateur band to murder her sleep.
After a few seconds’ hesitation, she’d stomped across the freshly seeded yard with every intention of raising a fuss. She didn’t care about being neighborly. Summer nights were private, and she didn’t appreciate violations.
But once she’d reached the fence, the music changed, and she had swallowed her planned outburst, cocked her head, and had listened, breath shallow, eyes sometimes burning, wondering how the mandolin knew how lonely she was.
Every third night. Alone in her yard.
Ending as it did tonight, in silence, without applause.
A last glance to the next yard then, damn how did it know, and she pushed inside. The small kitchen was dark, but she didn’t turn on the light. Instead she headed straight down the short hall into the foyer with its brass umbrella stand and the new grandmother clock that refused to keep the right time. The door was locked, and stayed locked when she checked it a second, a third time.
Then she swerved into the living room and hesitated, unsure why she’d bothered to come. Out of preference there wasn’t much furniture — a large couch, two armchairs, an end table, an oak sideboard; milk-glass vases with dried flowers for permanent color against the white walls, the draperies for the bay window a dark floral print. A marble-top coffee table with an unused marble ashtray.
It suited her. It was comfortable. And tonight, for some reason, it was unimaginably large.
She stood for a moment at the window, watching the empty street, the upstairs lights in the Tudor across the way, arms folded across her stomach, head tilted to one side as if she were listening to someone whispering in her ear. Then she sniffed, scratched her head, and finally decided it was too late to do anything but sleep.
And sleep, when it came, was filled with sighing music that reminded her of what she was.
And eventually, the figure of a man who walked down a tree-guarded country road, head tilted solemnly as if listening to a companion much shorter than he, hands gesturing lazy punctuation to his conversation until he reached the top of a grassy knoll, where he turned to face her, features in soft shadow in the shadow of an old tree, unmistakably smiling though she couldn’t see his lips, while a flock of large dark birds wheeled silently overhead, darker against the blue sky, darker suddenly against the night sky, tearing out the stars, turning the moon to silver rags that drifted down over the head of the man still smiling, his arms outstretched to embrace her as she ran toward him, suddenly slowly because the road had turned into a bog, slowly because the bog had turned to quicksand, slowly because the quicksand had become the sea at high tide that closed over her, tumbled her, left her on a rocky beach over which a flock of dark birds wheeled under a placid blue sky.
She stared at them until they froze, baking silhouettes against the sun.
She blinked at them until they shrank, became narrow, became distant, became cracks in a newly plastered ceiling the contractor claimed was only settling, not to worry.
Cracks that blurred until she wiped the tears away with the backs of her hands.
The king-size bed was damp, sheets clammy, two lace-edged pillows bunched near the footboard. But she didn’t move to get up. Her legs ached, her stomach was hollow. Twitch one finger, and she knew she’d fall apart.
She knew she had had the dream; she remembered nothing but a vague notion there was dying to be done.
The tears were supposed to have stopped months ago. Years. Control she should have had, and couldn’t find, and it was wrong.
“Jackass,” she muttered crossly, and sat up with a groan, hitching herself back until her spine rested against the carved headboard and she was able to stare across the mattress to the vanity’s gold-framed oval mirror. “Oh god.” Against all nature’s laws her reflection looked a lot worse than she felt — hair atangle and matted wetly to her brow and ears, vague shadows beneath her puffy eyes, the skin from her breasts to the folds of her waist pale as paste. “Oh . . . god.”
She squinted at the clock radio on the nightstand to her left, rolled her eyes at the hour, and shifted her feet to the cool bare floor. Wriggled her toes. Stretched and heard sockets pop, scrubbed her scalp vigorously, and pushed herself standing while she scratched at her thighs.
“Exercise,” she commanded as she parted the curtains to look out at the backyard. The sky was low with an even grey overcast, the trees faintly blurred, as if hiding behind fog. The sill was damp and sticky. Beads of dew were caught in the screen. The smell of rain. And a quiet that in sunlight would have been serene.
Without the sun, it was just quiet.
Get going, she ordered.
“Screw you,” she answered. “It’s Saturday. I’ll live.”
She turned on the radio, scowled at the static, glaring while she chased green digital numbers up and down their range until she found a station that worked — the tail end of the news, and a commercial, and the first notes of a hymn.
“Oh, great,” she said, the right side of her face pulling back in a mirthless smile. “Swell. I’m about to be saved.”
And beside the radio, a white telephone rang.
“Caroline! Thank heavens, you’re still home.” A breathy voice, hoarse without being unpleasant. “I was afraid you’d be away for the weekend.”
Caroline groaned without making a sound and slumped back onto the bed, bare feet crossed at the ankles. “Good morning, Adelle.” Flat. A perfunctory greeting intended to produce, among other things, guilt.
“My dear, you sound funny. Partying to all hours again?”
“I don’t party, Adelle. You know that.”
She didn’t dare. She might —
“More’s the pity. Then you’d have an excuse.” The laugh was oddly high. “But to the point.”
“No.”
“What?”
“No, Adelle. I am not coming in today. I am not coming in tomorrow. I am tired. It is my day off. I have not, in case you don’t remember, had a full day off since god knows when. June, I think. Maybe even last year.”
“But Caroline, I don’t —”
“I’m on strike.”
“Caroline, please.”
Beyond her window, beyond the backyard, the slope rose sharply. More evergreen than oak, spotted with an occasional cage of white birch and pocked with large and small boulders jutting out of the hillside where the underbrush didn’t grow. She watched a blue jay glide out of the woods and settle on the ground to eye the new grass as if it were a judge in a lawn contest.
The radio hymn ended, and a voice that startled her by its hoarseness began a gentle preaching. She stared at the station numbers for a moment, trying to recall if she’d ever heard the man before.
“Caroline, are you listening? Are you there?”
She turned down the volume, looked back to the window. “Honest to god, Adelle, what’s the matter with Marion or Stacey? Why the hell are you always picking on me?”
The ensuing pause was de
liberate, and she ignored it as she had ignored all the others she had suffered since the job had begun. Adelle Vanders was no doubt fluffing and puffing herself; she could see it clearly lifting that matron’s white-smocked substantial bosom, one hand patting that matron’s substantial bulge at the stomach, one foot stuffed into a supposedly stylish shoe tapping the floor impatiently while she lit her ninety-second cigarette of the day and blew the smoke at her knees.
The jay hopped closer to the house.
“. . . healing power,” the preacher said quietly. “Marion,” the woman said stiflly, “is visiting her mother in Hartford. A very sick mother, I might add. And Stacey, as you know full well, is on vacation.”
“And I am on my day off. Good-bye, Adelle.”
“Caroline!”
She looked down at her right hand and saw the telephone cord twisted cruelly around her fingers. The knuckles were fading to white. A dark vein rose at her wrist. She wondered what would happen if she stuck a pin in it — would the blood seep out in bubbles, flow out, gush out? Would she die, or just make a mess in the bedroom no one would clean up but her?
“Last week,” she said, “Marion was in Boston, visiting her very sick aunt. The week before that she was in Stamford, visiting her very sick brother. The week before that was probably Christmas and she was up at the North Pole, visiting Mrs. Claus!”
The cord tightened.
The jay jabbed at something she couldn’t see.
“Caroline —”
“And Stacey, by Christ, hasn’t been on vacation the whole year, you know; just since last week. Knowing her, she probably hasn’t even left town because she doesn’t want to leave her precious boyfriend. Probably fighting again. I think she must like it.”
Suddenly the jay shrieked and flew off, and she frowned, wondering if one of the neighborhood cats had come prowling, come hunting.
“. . . laying on of hands.” the preacher said; “just lay . . .”
“I think,” she continued when Adelle didn’t answer, “that Stacey caught it — the fighting disease, I mean — from that dingbat friend of hers. What’s her name — Jilly? God knows, they cry enough in the shop to keep the whole stock alive for a century.”
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 3: Dialing the Wind (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 2
