The skipper of the boat had smelled the smoke, saw the ashes floating in the air and covering everything, acres of land, and gone to see for himself. “I heard the boom last night,” he had said, “Didn’t know it had come from here!” He shook Lynn by the shoulders. “Were the others in the house? Answer me for God’s sake!” But she had only looked at him and wept. During the voyage to the mainland she had done nothing but moan and sob. They put her in a hospital for awhile. By the time they were ready to question her, they already knew all the answers.
Or thought they did.
Apparently there had been a cavern filled with natural gas situated directly underneath the Burrow’s mansion. As no bodies or living souls were found anywhere on the island, it was assumed that the others had been inside the old house, that somehow a fire had started, and when it hit the leakage from the cavern seeping into the subcellars of the mansion—boom! Everyone had perished. The fire had been so hot, the explosion so severe, that there was absolutely no chance of ever recovering any bodies.
Lynn just nodded her head. “Yes. I guess everyone else was inside the house. I just remember an explosion. Yes. Yesyesyesyesyes.”
She did not tell them anything about necromancers, books, monster, demons, or murders. If she did, she knew that they would never let her out of the hospital.
But when the dreams, the nightmares, started a few days after her release, she decided to seek professional help. She told her psychologist everything. After five months of therapy, he had all but convinced her that her friends had died in an explosion, and that there had been no necromancer, no murders, no book. And most especially, no trip into the future.
When the day came, the day in which she had supposedly arrived in the future from a year in the past, she stayed in her bedroom all afternoon —and nothing happened. She had not brought that book into the house—who was left to write it now? she had no intention of doing so—and she had not seen a phantom image of herself reaching out from the misty past to grab it off the night-table.
There. She was satisfied. She had been a sick girl, a very sick woman. Delusions. She had not been psychic, only psychotic.
But she was well now. Her friends were dead-killed in a tragic explosion—and she was alive, and that was that. She had been lucky that she had stayed in the guest house that fateful night, though she couldn’t quite remember why she had done so. Probably she had been in her room recovering from a fight with John. She remembered that they had been quarreling that weekend.
And so here she was, a whole year after that same fateful day, the day she was supposed to have arrived in the future. Two years had gone by since she’d made her time trip, and she knew that she was safe, that nothing had ever happened, that there were no demons or maniacs and that the shadowy figure she had thought she’d seen in her bedroom on her journey ahead had never existed, and would never, could never possibly, do her any harm.
It was two p.m. It was around that time that she had sat down on her bed, said those magic words, prepared herself to—
Stop it, she told herself. You had been a silly, deluded person then, a fool. But you’re better now. This day should no longer have any special significance for you. Nothing happened last year —and that was the year you supposedly entered the future—so certainly nothing will happen this year. How could it? That whole trip into the future had been nothing but a fantasy, a ridiculous, childish fantasy.
The door bell rang.
Lynn made sure she was properly covered in her robe, and peeked through the peephole. It was a woman. Something familiar about her. An old friend from somewhere? Even talking to a saleslady would be better than spending the afternoon brooding.
Lynn opened the door. “Hello?”
“May I come in, Lynn? I have to talk to you.”
Lynn’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. She took one good look at the face of the woman in the hall, and felt as if all her carefully structured sanity would come tumbling down in pieces.
Lynn took the chain off the door with trembling hands, stepped back, and let the woman in.
Andrea Peters stepped into the apartment and made herself at home.
“How—how can you be alive? They—they searched the island. The explosion … Everyone was killed.”
Andrea sat down on the sofa, smoothed her skirt. She looked wonderful—with a new hairstyle and bright, fashionable clothes. “Not everyone,” she said. “I managed to get out and away from the house before Betty blew the roof off.”
“The cavern of natural gas …”
“I suppose it was underneath the house, all right. Yes—I’ve read newspaper accounts of the ‘Lammerty Island Tragedy.’ But whether it was the gas or Betty’s—peculiar talents—which blew up the house—or both—I suppose we’ll never know.”
“Where have you been all these months? Why didn’t you let me know you were alive?”
Andrea studied her fingernails and shifted in her seat. “Because I didn’t know I was alive, Lynn dear.” She leaned forward to clarify. “I didn’t know who I was. The shockwaves from the explosion knocked the senses out of me. Total amnesia. Somehow I got down to the shore, dove into the water—probably in an effort to escape from the terrible heat. I was a little burned, you know. And out of my head. I don’t know how I stayed alive—pure force of will, I suppose. But the next thing I knew I was being picked up by the tides and carried back to the island. It rained all that day, Sunday, do you remember? I pulled myself off of the rocks and sought shelter. I huddled in the derelict, the Mary Eliza, must have just passed out and slept there for days. The people who searched the island didn’t do much of a job. They assumed everyone had died in the mansion. I don’t doubt they went around calling out names, but I never heard them, and they never came into the ship.”
“How did you get off the island?”
“A week later, two or three weeks later, I don’t remember, I had gone through the food in the guest house, eaten berries and grass, anything to survive. I couldn’t take the loneliness, the isolation, not knowing who I was. I swam out into the sea in an attempt to end my life. I figured I’d just swim until I was too tired to stay afloat. I read later that officials came over to investigate the explosion, but I must have been asleep in the ship when they came. I slept most of the time. I was in horrible pain. I ate in the house, but slept in the wreck. I was quite mad. A little wild thing trying to survive on her own.
“A trawler came upon me in the water. I had swung for quite a distance. It was a calm sea that day and I’ve always been a good swimmer. They pulled me into the boat and for some reason I made up a story. I was afraid to tell them I didn’t know who I was, afraid to ask for help. I said my skiff had overturned. If they noticed the healing burns on my skin they said nothing. They dropped me off at the nearest port—and I went on my way, pretending I had only to call someone and I’d be fine. I wandered around for awhile in a daze, then started hitching rides. I had gone all the way to Idaho when something snapped in my brain and I realized I was an amnesiac and that I had once had a life, an identity, and that I desperately needed help. I walked into the police station in Boise, began to cry and scream, and collapsed. I woke up in a hospital some miles away, and I stayed there for months. At the end of those months I had progressed enough to remember my name and where I lived. But nothing else.”
“I don’t understand,” Lynn interrupted. “If you went into the guest house, why didn’t you look through the rooms, through the clothes, the possessions, to see if you could find an I.D., something that would tell you who you were?”
“That’s just it. Nothing I did makes sense. Nothing is rational. Before she died, Betty told me she was going to ‘take me with her.’ But in those last seconds she must have known I’d gotten out of the house, that the explosion wouldn’t kill me. So she did something else. She did something to my mind. Perhaps the amnesia was all her fault too—I don’t know. But I do know that she worked a spell in her last breathing moment that made
me disoriented, disorganized, unable to do anything to help myself. Otherwise, I would have found out who I was and gotten home to Boston much, much quicker than I did.”
Lynn stood there and tried to take it all in. It was just incredible. And all the talk about “Betty” and “spells”—that was something the old Lynn would have welcomed, but the new Lynn did not like or understand. Part of her wanted to rush over to Andrea and hug her, welcome her back to the land of the living and thank God for keeping her alive. But there was something in Andrea’s manner and tone of voice, something disturbing in her very presence, and what it represented, that made her hang back. For lack of anything else to say, Lynn stuttered “I—I’ll go m-make us some tea. Would you like that? Okay? I’ll only be a minute.”
When she came out of the kitchen with the tea tray, cups, saucers, teapot, and cookies, Andrea was gone.
“Andrea?” Perhaps she was in the bathroom.
She walked down the hallway, heard movement in her bedroom. Now what would she be doing in there?
“Andrea?”
Andrea was against the far wall, near the closet, in the area of the bedroom that was always darkest. Lynn stepped across the threshold and looked across the room. “Andrea? The tea is ready. What are you doing?”
Something was wrong. Out of place.
Involuntarily, Lynn’s eyes went down to the top of the night table. No.
Something had been put there.
It was the object. The book. A copy of Late at Night was on the top of the night table, in the exact same position that it had been in when …
Andrea spoke. “Yes, Lynn. That’s the book. You see, you made a mistake. You didn’t go one year into the future. You went two. ”
Lynn froze, felt tears approaching. “NO NO NO. I thought I was safe, thought I had only imagined …”
“While I was in the hospital,” Andrea continued, “I did a lot of writing. For therapy. I wrote down my dreams, Lynn. In a narrative form. My counselor read them. She said they were weird, the stuff of horror stories. I didn’t know what to do with all my jottings—there was enough for a book. I didn’t know where it all came from—nightmares, I supposed—but it seemed so very vivid. When I got out of the hospital, I fixed it up, made some changes, sent it to an agent. A literary agent. The first publisher bought it, Lynn. Said it would make a great paperback original. I decided to publish it under the pen name Max Schumann. Maxine is my middle name. My mother’s maiden name is Schumann.”
“Please. I don’t want to hear any more.”
“But it wasn’t until the book came from the printer, when I got my author’s copies, that I remembered. Everything. I had not survived an explosion on Lammerty Island, I had survived much worse. Everything in the book was true! It was the cover that did it; seeing the cover, holding the book in my hands, it all came back to me in a flash.
“And I remembered why subconsciously I had never wanted to see you again, why I never let you know I was alive. Because I remembered Ernest Thesinger, and what your stupidity did to him.”
“That’s not fair,” Lynn shouted. “It was Betty. Betty was the one who killed him. And the others.”
Andrea shook her head. “Betty’s greed for power was ignited by the presence of the book on the island. A book for the future—it was mystical, magical, a focal point for psychic forces. Betty might never have done anything had it not been for the book.”
Andrea was in a cold, calm rage now, her eyes two burning black pools of hatred.
“I sent Ernie after the book. Because of your meddling in things no human being should meddle in, Ernie is dead. You and that damnable book.”
Suddenly it was two years “ago” and Lynn was stepping into her room from out of the past, blending with her future self. She was looking down at the night table, sensing a sinister presence to her right.
Andrea was on her right.
And then Lynn looked up and saw Andrea taking the scissors from her shoulder bag.
Lynn screamed.
“All Your Damn Fault!”
And with each word the sharp metal implement stabbed downwards into Lynn’s writhing body. From each wound flowed out enormous quantities of deep red blood. The scissors flicked open, shut—cutting, slicing.
Lynn’s body collapsed in a grisly heap on the bedroom floor.
Calmly, Andrea stepped over the body, entered the bathroom, and washed the blood off the scissors. She knew she had passed beyond sanity, that Betty Sanders was still getting even with her from the grave. But she did not care. Lynn had paid—as all who fooled with the cosmic scheme must pay. Ernest Thesinger had been fully avenged.
She looked back into the bedroom. Blood was soaking into the carpet, spreading out in a widening puddle around Lynn Overman’s body. Andrea felt nothing. She looked at the night table, but the book she’d put there was gone, taken away by the Lynn of the past.
Which had come first? she wondered. It was such a paradox. If the book had not been written, none of the story told within might have ever occurred. And if events had not transpired the way they had on Lammerty Island, the book would not have been written.
Which came first? The chicken or the egg? To ponder such things too long was to court madness. Was it possible that the future could affect the past? How was it that the book had been there for Lynn to find when she went into the future? If she had not gone into the future, Andrea would have never written the book.
There was, could be, no answer. Mysteries within mysteries. The world kept turning, time kept moving—backwards, forwards, sideways, who ever knew?—and there was no answer.
Andrea left the apartment and made her way down to the sidewalk. It was a nice, sunny day, the sky clear and a cool wind blowing. Sooner or later they’d find the body, and she would have to tell them what had happened. No one would believe her. If she kept her mouth shut, she might get away with it.
Then again, she had her book to consider, Late at Night. Might it not sell better if she was a notorious figure?
As everyone knew—murder was good for business.
Late at Night Page 27
