Dagger Key and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  He took Broillard by the elbow. “Let’s go.” He opened the door to the porch, admitting a glare of the lowering sun, and guided him through it. “You wouldn’t want to piss her off. She gets pissed off, she does all that Exorcist shit.”

  Broillard shook free of Shellane’s grasp. “You’re fucking with me, man. You got my imagination playing tricks, but I know you’re fucking with me. I’m calling the cops.”

  He started for the outer door, but stopped dead. The door stood open, and framed there, barely visible against the light, a glowing silhouette had materialized. It was as if an invisible presence were drawing the light in order to shape a rippling golden figure with the swelling hips and breasts of a woman, limned by a paler corona that crumbled and reformed like superheated plasma. The figure was so faint, it seemed a trick of the light, similar to an eddy on the surface of a pond that briefly resembles a face. But it brightened, acquiring the wavering substantiality of a mirage, and Shellane saw that the light within the outline was flowing outward in all directions, a brisk tide radiating from some central source.

  Broillard made a squeaky noise in his throat.

  “Grace?” Shellane said.

  With a womanly shriek, Broillard sprang for the door and burst through the figure, briefly absorbed by its golden surface. He went sprawling over the bottom step, rolled up to his knees, and ran. The figure, its brightness diminishing, billowed like a curtain belling in a breeze, then winked out.

  Shaken, unable to relate this apparition to what he knew of Grace, Shellane went back inside. The sheets of paper on which Broillard had scribbled his song lay on the floor. He picked them up and stood at the table, unable to think or even to choose a direction for thought. Finally he crossed to the bedroom door and opened it. Grace was still asleep, lying on her side, one pale shoulder exposed. He touched her hip and was so relieved by her solidity, he felt light-headed and sat down on the edge of the bed. She turned to face him, reached out with her eyes closed, groping until her fingers brushed his thigh.

  “Grace?”

  “I’m here,” she said muzzily.

  “Avery’s gone.”

  “Avery?”

  “Don’t you remember? He was here…a minute ago.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t wake me.” She stretched, twisted onto her back, and looked up at him. “What did he want?”

  “He wrote you a song.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “It really sucked.” Shellane crumpled the pages in his hand. “You don’t remember him being here?”

  “I was asleep.” Her brow furrowed. “What’s the matter?”

  He told her how she’d acted with Avery, how she acted the afternoon he had come inside her house—another occasion she did not recall—and about the apparition. She listened without speaking, sitting with her knees drawn up, and when he had done she rested her head on her knees, so he could not see her face, and asked him if he loved her; then, before he could answer, she said, “I realize that’s a difficult question, since it’s not altogether clear what I am.”

  “It’s not a difficult question,” he said.

  “Then why don’t you answer it?”

  “Every minute I stay here, I know I’m in danger. You probably don’t understand that…”

  “I do!”

  “Not all of it, you don’t. The fact remains I’m in danger and yet I feel at home. Easy with this place and with you. That frightens me. You frighten me. What you might mean frightens me.”

  Her injured expression hardened, but she continued to look at him.

  “There’s an old Catholic taint in me wants to deny it,” he said. “It’s telling me this is unnatural. Against God. But I love you. I just don’t know what’s to come of it.”

  She said nothing, fingering an imperfection in the blanket.

  “And you?” he asked.

  She shrugged, as if it were trivial. “Of course. But I wonder if I’d love you if you weren’t my only option.”

  His face tightened as he parsed meaning from the words.

  “See how we hurt each other,” she said. “We must be in love.”

  The light dimmed, clouds moving in from the south to shadow the lake. They started to speak at the same time. Shellane gestured for her to go on, but she said, “No…you.”

  “Where do you go when you leave?” he asked. “What happens to you?”

  “Limbo,” she said.

  The word had the sound of a stone dropped into a puddle. “That’s where unshriven infants go after they die…right?”

  “‘Unshriven.’” She laughed palely. “You’re way too Catholic, Roy. Limbo’s just what I call it. I don’t know what it is.” She touched the place on his palm where he had picked up the splinter. “You were there. You saw it.”

  “I did?”

  “The black house. The one you asked me about.”

  He took this in. “You’re saying the afterlife’s a house on the lake?”

  “Not on the lake. You could walk around the entire lake, you wouldn’t find it.”

  “I found it,” he said.

  “You weren’t walking anywhere near the lake.”

  All the half-formed suspicions he’d entertained regarding his fate seemed to mist up inside his head, merging into a dark shape. “Then where was I?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know…if you want.” She slid down in the bed, curled up in the way of a child getting cozy. “It was night when I died. Avery was off playing somewhere, and I wasn’t feeling well. My chest hurt…but I had an ache in my chest all the time, so I didn’t think it was anything. I went outside to get some air and I was walking along the shore when I had a feeling of weakness. It came on so suddenly! I could tell something was really wrong, and I tried to call for help, but I was too weak. I thought I’d fainted because the next I knew I was sitting up and a fog had gathered. I wasn’t in pain anymore, but I felt…odd. Disoriented. I kept walking and before long I came to the house. I was terrified, but there was nowhere else to go, so I went inside.”

  “What it’s like in the house?” Shellane asked.

  “When I’m there I feel kind of how I did with Avery. Dejected. Faded. I’m always getting lost. The people there…Nobody talks much to anyone. Maybe I’m projecting, but I get the idea everyone’s like me. They’re people who gave up and now they’re just moping about. There are some others, though. Tall…and really ugly. That’s what I call them. The uglies. I don’t think they’re human. There aren’t very many of them. Maybe twenty. They chase after us—it seems like it’s a game for them. They can’t kill us, of course. But they hurt us…and they use us. Men, women. It doesn’t matter.”

  “They use you sexually?” he asked.

  A nod. “They act like animals. They’re strong, but incredibly stupid. But they know how to move around in the house without getting lost.”

  Shellane recalled the naked man who had pursued him in the woods. “You ever see them around the lake?”

  “The uglies? Sometimes they follow me out, but they won’t go far from the house. They only follow a little ways.”

  “Why’s it so difficult to get around inside the house?”

  “It’s not difficult, it’s just you never know where the doors will take you. The house changes. You go through a door and it kind of sucks you in. Like…whoosh!, and you’re somewhere else. But you can’t retrace your steps. If you go back through the same door, you won’t wind up in the room you left. I try to figure it out, but it seems I never have enough energy. Or I’m too busy hiding from the uglies.”

  “But you return here,” he said. “You learned how to do that.”

  “That’s different. It’s not like I understand what I’m doing. I get a strong feeling that I have to leave, so I head for the nearest door, and when I step through I’m back at the lake. I think it’s the same for the others. At least I’ve been in rooms when people suddenly space out. They get a blank expression and then they take off.”

  She tugged a
t him, drew him down beside her. He lay on his back, studying the water stains on the ceiling, appearing to map a rippled white country with a sketchily rendered brownish-orange coastline. His arm went about her, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Thinking about the house?”

  “It doesn’t do any good.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “But you’re going to do it anyway?”

  “I’m good with problems. It’s what I did for a living.”

  “I thought you were a thief.”

  “I wasn’t a snatch-and-grab artist. I stole things that were hard to steal.”

  A gust of wind shuddered the bedroom window, and coming out of nowhere, a hard rain slanted against the panes.

  “When you pass through the doors,” he said, “you say it feels as if you’re being sucked in. Does anything else happen?”

  “I get lights in my eyes. Like the sort that come when you’re hit in the head. And right after that, I’ll get a glimpse of other places. Just a flash. I can’t always tell what it is I’m seeing, but they don’t seem part of the house.”

  “What makes you think the ugly ones know how to get around in the house?”

  “Because whenever they take me with them, we always go the same places. They don’t display any uncertainty. They know exactly where they’re headed.”

  “Do they do anything to the doors before opening them? Do they touch anything…maybe turn something, push something?”

  She closed her eyes. “When I’m with them, I’m afraid. I don’t notice much.”

  “You said there are about twenty of them?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What about the rest of you…How many?”

  “The house is so big, it’s impossible to tell. A lot, though. I hardly ever see anyone I’ve seen before.”

  “It doesn’t look all that big.”

  “When you’re standing outside,” she said, “you don’t really get the picture.”

  Shellane worried the problem, turning it this way and that, not trying to reach a conclusion, just familiarizing himself with it, as if he were getting accustomed to the weight and balance of a stone he was about to throw. He heard a rustling, saw that Grace had picked up the sheets of paper on which Broillard had scrawled his lyrics and was reading them.

  “God, this is…” She made a disparaging sound. “Delusional.”

  “He’s better when he writes about feelings he doesn’t have,” said Shellane. “Grandiose, beautiful feelings. He’s got no talent for honesty.”

  “Not many do,” said Grace.

  When she left that afternoon, he did not follow her, though he intended to follow her soon. That was the one path available to him if he was to help her, and helping her was all he wanted now. He sat at his computer and accessed treatises on the afterlife written from a variety of religious perspectives. He made notes and organized them into thematic sections. Then he wrote lists, the way he did before every score he’d ever planned. Not coherent lists, merely a random assortment of things he knew about the situation. Avenues worth exploring. Under the word “Grace” he wrote:

  —becomes a real woman in my company

  —can taste things, drink, but doesn’t eat

  —lapses into ghostly state around others (once with me alone)

  —endures a state of half-life at the house

  —feels that there is something she’s supposed to do

  —“knows” I can help her

  He tapped the pen against the table, then added:

  —is she telling me everything?

  —if not, why?

  —Duplicity? Fear? Something else?

  It was not that he sensed duplicity in her, but her situation was of a kind that bred duplicity. Just like a convict, wouldn’t she be looking to play any angle in order to improve her lot? And wouldn’t that breed other forms of duplicity? It was not inconceivable that she might love him and at the same time be playing him.

  Under the word “House” he wrote:

  —In my Father’s house, many mansions…

  —Philosophical speculations—particularized form of afterlife? For people who’ve given up. Who, failing to overcome problems, surrender to death. (Look up Limbo in Catholic dictionary)

  —The uglies (men?). Demons. Instruments of God’s justice. Forget Christianity. What if the afterlife is an anarchy? Lots of feudal groups controlled by a variety of beings who can cross back and forth between planes of existence.

  Science fiction, he thought; but then so was Jesus.

  —A maze. Hallucination?

  —Mutable reality?

  —The doors. Core of the problem? Can they be manipulated?

  He made several more notations under “House,” then began a new list under the heading “Me.”

  —Have passed over into the afterlife once, maybe, twice if dream can be counted. Why?

  He circled the word “Why”—it was an omnibus question. Why had he turned off the highway toward the lake? A whim? Had he been led? Was some ineffable force at work? Why had he, after years of caution, been moved to such drastic incaution? He wrote the word “Love” and then crossed it out. Love was the bait that had lured him, but he believed the hook was something else again.

  The lists were skimpy. His preliminary lists for taking down a shopping mall bank had been far more substantial. This would be, he thought, very much like the job in upstate New York, the house with the subterranean maze. He’d have to case the place while attempting to survive it…if survival was possible. And maybe that was the answer to all the “Whys?”. He could feel his body preparing for danger, cooking up a fresh batch of adrenaline, putting an edge on his senses. It was the kick he’d always been a chump for, the thrill that writing songs could not provide, the seasoning he needed to become involved in the moment. He had caught the scent of danger, followed the scent to the lake, and there had taken it in his arms. Like Grace, for the first time in a very long while, he felt alive.

  After waking, Grace liked to have a shower. It was not a cleanliness thing—at least so Shellane thought—as much as a retreat. He assumed that she must have taken a lot of showers when she was in the world, hiding from Broillard behind the spray, deriving comfort from her warm solitude. Shellane usually let her shower alone, but the next afternoon, he joined her and they made love with soapy abandon, her heels hooked behind his thighs, back pressed up against the thin metal wall, whose surface dimpled and popped when he thrust her against it. As they clung together afterward, he watched rivulets of water running over her shoulderblades toward the pale voluptuous curves of her ass, gleaming with a film of soap, dappled with bubbles. He saw nothing unusual to begin with—he wasn’t looking for anything. But then he realized that the streams of water were not flowing true, they were curving away from the small of her back, as if repelled by a force emanating from that spot. Curving away and then scattering into separate drops, and the drops skittering off around the swells of her hips. Fear brushed his mind with a feathery touch, a lover’s touch. Instead of recoiling, however, he moved his hand to cover the place that the water avoided, pressing his fingertips against the skin, and imagined that he felt a deep, slow pulse. This was the thing he most wanted, he thought. The seat of what he loved.

  “I’m drowning,” Grace said, and pushed him away. “There was a waterfall coming off your shoulder. I couldn’t breathe.”

  Her smile lost wattage, and he knew she must have understood the irony of her complaint. He cleared wet strands of hair from her face and kissed her forehead.

  “This must be so awful for you,” she said. “To feel comfortable with someone. Almost like normal. And to know it’s anything but.” Soapy water trickled into her left eye and she rubbed it. “It does feel like that sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Normal? Yeah, more-or-less.”

  She seemed disappointed by his response.

  He put his hands on her waist. “All th
e craziness that goes on between men and women, ‘normal’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe any relationship.”

  She slid past him out of the shower and began to dry herself. He had the feeling that she was upset.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m cold,” she said in a clipped tone, and briskly toweled her hair. Then, her voice muffled: “Are you always so analytical?”

  “I try to be. Does it bother you?”

  She left off drying and held the towel bunched in front of her breasts. “God knows it shouldn’t. I do understand how hard this…” She broke off and started drying her hair again, less vigorously.

  Shellane turned off the water, stepped out of the shower. The linoleum was sticky beneath his feet; his skin pebbled in the cool air. The back of his neck tingled, and he had the feeling they were not alone, that an invisible presence was crammed into the bathroom with them.

  “It’s almost over, you know,” Grace said. “One of these times soon, I won’t come back. Or else you’ll leave.”

  “We’ve got a while yet.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about what’s happening.”

  A noise came from the front of the house—a door closing. He threw open the bathroom door and peered out. Nobody in sight.

  “Who is it?” asked Grace from behind him.

  “Maybe the wind.”

  He wrapped a towel about his waist and went out into the living room. On the table next to his laptop was an envelope and a portable cassette recorder. The envelope was addressed to Grace. She came up beside him, wearing his bathrobe, and he offered the letter to her. She shook her head. He tore open the envelope and read from the enclosed sheet of paper.

  “Once again Avery offers his apologies,” he said. “He regrets everything.” He read further. “He claims he wouldn’t have treated you so badly if you weren’t unfaithful.”

  “He never changes!” Grace folded her arms and scowled at the letter as if it were a live thing and could register disapproval. “He was unfaithful to me every day…with footwear! And then when I…” She made a spiteful sound. “We hardly ever made love after we got married. I was just so desperate…”