Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  He knows that one of his friends will fall and break his arm. The mother of another friend is very ill but does not know it…

  Again Craine skipped, jumping past the text, moving to the next quotation.

  It began with a sense of disorientation, of dizziness, almost nausea, that suddenly congealed into physical pain that took my breath away. It was like an electric shock—suddenly every joint, every muscle ached. I hunched forward, almost fell, and could not straighten up. In my mind I saw beyond reality. I remained aware of my surroundings—Mallee and Berbers, the modern buildings, the traffic, passersby—but I could also “see” a different town. Different streets, old buildings, unpaved, narrow, haphazard streets and lanes …

  Then in my mind I saw a priest. Very old, bent, stooped, arthritic, crippled. He stood before us and was as real to me as Mallee and Berbers. In his arms he held an old metal box, a chest, perhaps two-by-one-by-one-foot deep. Then he began walking away, hobbling, shuffling, limping along one of those old lanes with his crippled gait.

  I followed, shuffling as he shuffled, bent and pain-wracked as he was—and ran straight into a stone wall. I stopped. The old priest disappeared. I went around the wall, and he was there, shuffling along, leading me.

  Craine looked up, checking with a part of his mind to see if Rush had come to his carrel—he had not—but mainly thinking, half in a daze, about other things: Two-heads Carnac, Dr. Tummelty’s interest in psychics, his own strong sense that he’d read all this before somewhere. Suppose he had not. Suppose, like the man who had written this, he simply “knew,” somehow, had read the book without ever seeing it. That was nonsense, of course; he knew that, in a way. But for the moment he let himself forget what he knew. It was a fact that psychics had sometimes been helpful in discovering bodies, even reenacting killings so that the police could work out who had done them. There was one in particular, some famous Dutchman …

  With a start, he realized that he had read the book. It was M. B. Dykshoorn’s biography, of course. Disgust leaped up in him—an emotion too violent, he realized even as it came, to be merely disgust. Fierce disappointment, then. Yes, that was it, yes. Craine grinned, angry. Ah, the tricks of the mind, or rather heart! Poor Gerald Craine wanted to be a psychic, yes. Wanted to save Elaine Glass without the usual nuisance—not even believing she needed saving, in fact; knowing full well … His mind snagged, and only after a moment did he know what had snagged it. He had seen something, surely not a memory: a man standing in the dark, among trees. He could smell them now, and felt again the simultaneous terror and guilt, as if he were himself both the killer and the victim. He jerked his eyes down to the book and read:

  The next morning at the town hall I found everyone in a rare state of excitement, for Mallee had come up with a remarkable discovery. On his map the day before he had charted the route I had taken on my psychic walk through the town. Because I had kept bumping into buildings and having to go around them in order to “follow” the old priest, my path bore little relation to the plan of the modern town. But when they overlaid my route on a map of the town as it had been at the time of the Iconoclasm—the year 1566—they discovered that my walk would have taken me through the streets of the town exactly as it was then—four hundred years earlier!

  There were pages of comment. Dykshoorn, like many clairvoyants of our time … The next quotation from Dykshoorn read:

  … I am convinced that if I have a definite psychic impression that something will happen, it will happen and cannot be avoided. Neither I nor any of the people involved can intervene to prevent its occurrence. If I see that a person will have an automobile accident, for example …

  Pages later, Craine read:

  Because of this deep emotional involvement, psychopathic murders are easier for me to work out than crimes committed in cold blood, where the killing is only incidental to the purpose of the crime. I never investigate killings by members of organized crime, for example, because …

  He skipped again.

  Can I see my own future? The answer is yes and no, sometimes and occasionally. Whenever I try to find out what will happen in my own life, my gift turns out to be unreliable. I believe it is influenced by what I consciously or subconsciously want to happen. If I like the idea of something, or I’m looking forward to it, and I ask myself “Will it happen?” my gift always says yes, it will, and it will be just as you want it. But most of the time it doesn’t happen. It’s the same with my family, and sometimes with other people with whom I am very close. If I like them …

  Craine closed the book. “Thank you very much,” he whispered. He took off his glasses, folded them, and put them in his suit coat’s top pocket. Time, he thought, and then—consciously, at least—thought nothing.

  In the cloudy swirl of his mind something vaguely like this went on, not that he’d be able to use it, consciously at least: that Dykshoorn was a man who had served the police, both in Europe and America, on countless occasions. There was no real doubt that he and others like him were on to something, never mind what. One might doubt his assertions that he could know the future or the four-hundred-year-old past; but there was no real doubt that he could find bodies and killers, an ability at least as outrageous as knowledge of the future and distant past. Remembering Dykshoorn’s book (not quite consciously), Craine remembered Dykshoorn’s fury at Rhine and the statistical parapsychologists, and his annoyance at those who gave the credit to God, as if the psychics of ancient Greece, or psychics who professed themselves atheists, were not equally to be trusted, insofar as (Dykshoorn would be the first to admit) any self-proclaimed psychic should be trusted. But the interesting point, to Craine’s fumbling mind, was Time. He remembered Dr. Tummelty’s curious phrase, “the bioplasmic universe.” Even in the depth of his daze, Craine had no real idea what it meant. But what it hinted was clear enough: that in some odd way the future has happened already, and the past is still happening.

  For an instant Craine’s mind switched on, shivering with anger. Most of the world would dismiss with scorn the possibilities he was secretly entertaining, even the stone-hard facts those possibilities were based on. Again and again bodies have been found, murderers have been identified, by psychic means. Matter of record. When one spoke of such matters with friends and acquaintances, their eyes glazed over, their smiles became fixed. One showed them clippings, gave the names of books. Glazed eyes. Fixed smiles. So Columbus must have felt. Galileo. Einstein. Fools! There’s a whole new world out there!

  All the same, it was exceedingly odd, no denying it—the idea that Time was a trick of perception, like the solidity of tables and floors—the idea that the future was inevitable, had happened already and could no more be changed by human will, human love, than the fall of Constantinople. How sad and silly it made all human labor!—ten thousand lives wasted moving stones for a wall that was doomed to be overthrown in half a century, surgeons working hour after hour, bent like boxers, every nerve on edge, on the heart of a man who’d been dead on the table from the beginning. If that was how God saw, the end and the beginning, then God help God! Craine clamped his eyes shut. Unhealthy way to think, he reminded himself. It was the cancer talking, maybe. A walking dead man saw the world with peculiar eyes. Young people’s hopes and dreams, what were they to a man like Craine? Fools! There’s no world at all out there!

  Abruptly, Craine jerked in his chair, then glanced at his watch. He must meet Elaine Glass at one forty-five. It was nearly one now, and he had a great deal to do. Rush might never arrive. He might have gone home for his mother’s funeral, he might have been hit by a train or taken sick …

  Craine closed the book and struggled up out of the plastic chair.

  At the first-floor pay phone he called his office. The book on clairvoyance was down in the lining of his coat, more or less out of sight.

  “Meakins?” he said.

  “Craine? Is that you, Craine?”

  “I’m at the Morris Library. I want you to come down here, take o
ver for me.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask questions, just listen. You got a pencil and paper?”

  After a moment Meakins said, “OK …”

  “Terrance Rush,” Craine said, “fifth floor, carrel thirty-four. You got that?”

  “Yes,” Meakins said, distant.

  “Good. Terrance Rush. He’s the guy in the blue and white runner’s jacket. I want—”

  “What?” Meakins said.

  “I said just listen, OK? I want you to come talk to him. See what it’s about. He was Elaine Glass’s teacher in freshman composition, or something like that. She wrote him a piece about the man in blue and white. I want you to come figure out the mystery. You got that?”

  “Hey, Craine—”

  “Sit and wait till he comes here. I got no time for the details, but I saw him in the jacket. He’s mixed up in it somehow. He’ll be no trouble—that’s my opinion. But all the same—”

  “You think it’s serious, this ‘threat’ she—”

  Quickly, Craine broke in: “Anything at your end?”

  “Well—” There was a pause. Craine could see Meakins’ blush. Meakins said lightly, “Hannah’s mad as hell, you know.” Too casually, he said, “Royce came in, cleaned out his desk.”

  Craine waited.

  Meakins said, “He’s really mad. You know how he gets.”

  Craine said, “What else?”

  “I’ve got a note here from Hannah. She wants you to remember your checkup in Baltimore, the seventeenth.”

  “I remember.”

  “You’re not supposed to eat for the whole day before. Take these enemas and pills and things. You’re planning on it, right?”

  “I’m aware of it.”

  “Hey listen, I don’t mean to, but—”

  “I’m planning on it.”

  “OK.” He was silent for a moment. “Another note from Hannah. ‘No news on tumps.’ That mean something to you? The rest of the note says, ‘Not in the dictionary.’ ”

  “OK,” Craine said. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to think, but at once he felt dizzy and opened his eyes again. “Royce is really mad, eh?”

  “Well, I’d avoid him.”

  Craine nodded through the phone. “Can’t blame him, I guess.”

  “Something else,” Meakins said. “McClaren keeps calling. At first he was crabby. Now he’s polite.”

  “Sounds bad.”

  “That’s what we thought.”

  “All right,” Craine said, “I’ll look him up, maybe.”

  “You all right, Craine?” Meakins asked.

  Craine thought about it. At last he said, “Get over here as quick as you can and check on Rush. Terrance Rush. Student assistant. Check out his general feelings about Ms. Glass. Don’t be too obvious, needless to say.”

  “Will do,” Meakins said.

  “OK,” Craine said. “OK.” Then, thoughtfully, he hung up.

  Ten feet from the phone, Craine paused, put his fist to his mouth, then turned back. He checked the phone book, then called the English Department.

  “Hello. Is Janet there?” he asked.

  There was a pause. “Janet?”

  “I’m trying to get in touch with one of the secretaries at the English Department—young woman named Janet.”

  “Oh. Janet Cizike.”

  “That’s it,” Craine said, not that he knew.

  “One moment please,” the voice said. A few seconds later he heard the voice of the girl who had offered to help.

  “Janet?” he asked, making sure.

  “This is Janet,” the voice said.

  She sounded distant, oddly unfriendly, but she was the one.

  “This is Gerald B. Craine,” he said. “Detective.”

  “Oh, hello,” she said. Her voice was cooler than before. He decided to brave it out.

  “You said you’d like to help Ira,” he said. “As it happens, there’s something you could do for me.” He waited. Nothing. He said, “I think you mentioned that you have files on the department’s graduate assistants.”

  “Yes—”

  “I need to see the file on Terrance Rush.”

  He listened to the musical humming of the line. At last, in a changed voice, as if she were covering the receiver with her hand, she said, “Mr. Craine, our files are, you know, confidential.”

  “Quite rightly!” he said. “Just as they should be!” He looked behind him, then said rapidly and softly, “Listen, one minute you say you want to help him, the next you’ve changed your mind, or somebody’s gotten to you, God knows. I try to be everywhere at once, but it’s not easy. You want to help him, help him. Otherwise—”

  “I’m awfully busy right now,” she said. “If you wanted to call me at home, after five … I’m in the phone book.”

  “You’ll have the file?”

  “Why yes—at least I’ll try,” she said brightly.

  Craine thought about it. “You’re a good girl, Janet. I’ll come over.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I hope your mother’s well?”

  He smiled. “She never complains,” he said.

  “I’m glad. Well, good-bye, then.”

  “For now,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He hung up, felt in the slot to see if his dime had come back, then hurried toward the stainless steel exit doors. He showed his empty hands to the guard, remembering only that instant the book in his overcoat lining, a plainly visible lump if the guard cared to notice; but the guard nodded and at once looked down again at the paperback he was reading. “Filth,” Craine said, smiling, pointing at the paperback. The guard glanced at him, half smiled back, and read on. Out in the sunlight, Craine pondered a moment, getting his bearings, then set off briskly in the direction of the computer center. The air was strangely warm, like the breath of a cow. Overhead, dark clouds scudded northward.

  As soon as Craine opened the door he saw McClaren.

  “Well, well,” McClaren said, turning to face him squarely, his smile wide and frozen, his index fingers tucked into the pockets of his sport coat.

  “Detective Inspector McClaren!” Craine said, pulling his hat off and grinning like a crazy. Two uniformed policemen stood over by the window, holding Styrofoam coffee cups, Eggers and a man named Webb, skinny and nervous; even in uniform he looked like an accountant. There were desks, secretaries, reams of pale-green and white printout. Eggers smiled and nodded.

  “You finally checked in at your office?” McClaren said.

  Craine put on his Mickey Mouse sheepish look. “Couldn’t remember your phone number,” he said.

  “Ha ha,” McClaren laughed grimly. “Well I’m glad to run into you. I’ve been trying to get in touch.”

  “Some kind of trouble?” Craine asked.

  McClaren just looked at him, still smiling, speechless with disgust. When Craine went on staring, his expression insisting on innocence and drunkenness, McClaren, though not buying it, finally looked down. “You acquainted around here?” he said. He flicked his eyes toward one secretary, then another. “Miss Roberts, Miss Gupta”—he flicked his eyes back toward Craine, then away—“Gerald Craine, Detective.” The secretaries, one pink, one dark brown, shyly nodded. McClaren nodded toward the open door of an inner office. “Come on in,” he said, as if the office were his own, and moved toward it. The uniformed policemen remained where they stood. Bowing, smiling like a man caught naked, moving with the troubled advertence of a drunkard, Craine followed McClaren, who stood patiently waiting while he entered, then softly closed the door.

  “Well well,” McClaren said, “you do keep us guessing, Craine.” He went around behind the desk and drew the chair back, preparing to sit. He studied the chair seat, his mind somewhere else, then reached down and tested it for dust with his fingertips and, after a moment, sat. He looked at Craine in surprise. “Sit down,” he said.

  “Thank you. Thank you very much,” Craine said. When he was seated, formal as a man with his psychia
trist, hands folded carefully over his knees, he said, “So what seems to be the problem?” When McClaren merely looked at him, he added with studied stupidity, “Is this your office?”

  “Hardly,” McClaren said, and smiled. “It belongs to a Professor John Furth, old friend of mine—head of the computer center. He’s not in today.”

  “I see.”

  The office was small and astonishingly messy, computer printouts everywhere, a typewriter, apparently not used in years, piled high with books and papers, like the desk top, the bookshelves—even the aluminum standing ashtray had books on it. There were no windows, no pictures on the battleship-gray walls. Even to Craine’s half-dead nostrils the place was rank with old pipe smoke and something else, a smell like rotten oranges.

  McClaren sat cocked back, his balding dome tilted, motionless, as if suspended like a balloon. More fucking waiting game, Craine thought, and politely smiled. He too could wait.

  “So,” McClaren said, flicking his eyes away again. “I suppose we may as well get right down to it. I take it you’re here about April Vaught?”

  “Mmm,” Craine said.

  “I suppose there’s a natural measure of suspicion between us, I suppose,”

  McClaren said. His fingertips drummed elegantly on one of the books on the desk top. “For my part, I’d like to cut through all that, if possible. Though each of us works in his own way, I take it we’re after the same thing. Naturally, protecting your clients, as it were, there are certain things you’re not eager to tell me. But if I tell you what I know, perhaps, in reciprocity, you’ll tell me what you know.”

  “Mmm,” Craine said again.

  McClaren blushed with anger but steadily smiled. “It was in John Furth’s van that her body was found. I take it by your expression that that’s news to you.”

  “Yes it is,” Craine said.