Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  Adrenaline has damped down her spaciness, but as she relaxes, feeling more secure, it returns. The walls play tricks, the wallpaper washes to the orange end of the yellow spectrum and its design of little red paddlewheelers begins to churn upstream, morphing into cowboys riding mechanical bulls. She has a memory of the mystic wood, of the silver flash she saw in the crotch of a hickory tree while passing through a gateway—she wishes now that she had gone in that direction, explored a silver dimension. The calm that she longed for earlier begins to settle over her. It’s almost four o’clock, the digital radio on the night table tells her. That means she spent more than an hour in the study, because she recalls the kitchen clock said it was two-thirty when she came in from the cold. What a waste. More than an hour staring at cocks and pussies. The skin of the women felt warm in the photographs.

  Jackson.

  Her temper is tissue-thin as regards him. One moment she pities him, the next she thinks of him as a madman, and the next she’s angry. When she comes down from her high, where will she be? Angry, she decides. Anger is the bedrock of their marriage. She realizes that now. Anger and betrayal. He betrays her by not being who he seemed, she betrays him by pretending to be who she is not and then acting like herself in secret. She doesn’t want to think about the marriage, yet she can’t stop herself. Who could have imagined that anger and betrayal would forge so powerful a bond. Stronger than love, than money, stronger than the matrimonial spell. It’s an addiction, a sickness, a designer drug created by them, for them, and they couldn’t quit using. But she has kicked it now. She’ll make a last attempt at pulling Jackson out of Bullardonia, but it will be strictly pro forma. Want to go back to Chapel Hill? No? Okay. See ya.

  She feels as though she’s sinking deeper and deeper into the mattress, on the brink of being submerged, and has a sudden desire to be clean. With an effort, she staggers up and goes into the bathroom. A shower would be nice, but it can wait. She sheds her clothes and scrubs herself with a wash rag, clearing away a layer of scum. She examines her face. It’s a disaster. The way she looks is partly due to the peyote and partly to the mirror, which is pitted, clouded, chipped, and warped…She, too, is pitted, clouded, chipped, and warped, albeit less permanently. She swabs at the mirror and succeeds in smearing soap across its surface. She takes a fresh rag, runs the tap over it, and scrubs harder. When she pauses to judge her work, the reflection staring back at her is Janine’s.

  She’s become such an old hand at dealing with apparitions, she gives a start, but stops short of being shocked. She’s horrified, mainly. The woman in the mirror is ten, fifteen years younger than Janine, her hair two shades redder, face agonized and mouth restrained by a ball gag. But it is definitely Janine. She lashes her head to and fro, her trophy breasts swaying, and bugs her blue eyes, trying to endure whatever is being done to her. And then she vanishes. Sanie retreats a step and turns to the bedroom. Sprawled on the bed, a leg hanging off the side, is a woman of late middle age wearing a blond wig, set slightly askew, and a poorly fitted Merry Widow—it’s loose in the bodice, stretched tight over her pouchy belly, and cuts into the tops of her raddled thighs. The instant before the woman vanishes, Sanie spots red droplets on her lips and chin, a stippling of red on her chest. That tears it. Sanie can accept ghosts, but not the blood of Rayfield’s victims. She bolts for the door, then remembers she’s naked. She throws on a flannel shirt and searches for jeans, recalls that they’re all in the wash. She puts on her cut-offs—she’s in a panic and they fall to hand. It’s only ten minutes walk to Snade’s, she tells herself; she can withstand the cold for ten minutes. She shoulders her purse and, once again keeping her eyes low, goes out into the hall, out among the chill presences there, catching glimpses of their gaud and disarray as she tiptoes down the stairs, holding on to the banister.

  The study door is closed.

  Jackson’s home.

  He usually leaves the car keys beside the sink. She decides it’s worth taking a look. She doesn’t trust her eyes, can’t tell if there’s a seam of light beneath the kitchen door. She hesitates, then gives the door a tentative push. Jackson is sitting in Rayfield’s chair, reading a paperback, and she thinks that, like Rayfield, he’s naked, then realizes he’s shirtless and wearing a pair of shorts. She’s willing to bet that Rayfield also kept the house hot, and, if Jackson stays a few weeks longer, the shorts will be rendered passé.

  “Hey,” she says blithely, goes to the sink and scoops up the keys.

  “Where you going?” he asks.

  “Snade’s. Want anything?”

  “Snade’s.” He says it as he might the name of a great enemy. “I wondered why you got all dressed up.”

  I thought I’d go for a little spin, she thinks. Chapel Hill, New York, the world.

  “All my jeans are in the wash,” she says. “I’ll only be outside for seconds, and I didn’t think it would be a big deal. Okay?”

  He shakes his head ruefully. “What in God’s name is going on with you, Sanie?”

  The harsh yellow light, as much as his question, rankles her, makes her imprudent. In that light the kitchen is the yellowest, ugliest room ever. Speckles and stains and discolorations, many of which aren’t there to ordinary eyes. A hideous yellow cube full of hideous yellow objects.

  “What’s going on with me? I’m going to Snade’s,” she says. “I was thinking maybe I’d get a couple of beers, but then I thought…Wait for it! This is big. Then I thought…chips. What do you think? It’s a tough decision and I need a second opinion. Chips? Or pretzels?”

  “Sanie.” Another head-shake. How he’s suffered. The intemperate behavior he’s been forced to overlook.

  She can’t stop, the peyote’s got her all brave and snippy. “I figure it’d be best to make an on-the-spot decision. An informed judgement. Give the bags a squeeze. Check the expiration dates.”

  “Sanie.” He turns to her. His face is a mess. It looks as if he’s an actor half-done putting on his Quasimodo make-up. “The way you’re acting…I can’t get a handle on you.”

  She mocks his southern accent by thickening her own. “I just can’t get a handle on you, neither.”

  A sigh. “I wish you could see me, Sanie.”

  His inflection, redolent of paternal regret and tenderness, chills her.

  “I wish you’d prune back your craziness a little,” he says. “I wish you’d purge yourself of all the frantic garbage that gets in the way of your thinking straight, and take a serious look at me. You have to look deep, look close. You used to be able to look right into my soul, but nowadays you don’t even give me a glance.”

  The chill spreads throughout her body, weakening her knees. Because it was so soft, she thinks, hardly more than a whisper, the ghost voice never conveyed the undertone of menace that floors Jackson’s voice.

  “One glimpse is all you’ll need to remind you of who I am,” he says. “Why’nt you take a look?”

  She starts for the door, but he flings out an arm, blocking her path, and she backs against the sink.

  “You’re afraid of me?” His laugh rides a little high and cracks. “Don’t be afraid, Sanie. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not afraid.” She irons out a quaver in her voice. “I’m thirsty.”

  She walks around the opposite side of the table to avoid his arm, and he stands.

  “If only you could see me, Sanie, I know you’d understand.”

  Despite the broken record aspect of his words, his creepy tone of voice, anger shows in his face. At last. A genuine emotion. He positions himself in such a way that he can block her, whichever route she chooses. The rear door…She thinks she can make it. He sometimes locks the screen door, but she’s so terrified, she’s ready to bust through it. She recognizes how foolish she’s been to be afraid of him all these years, yet never believe he would hurt her.

  “Let me get my beer,” she says. “We can talk after.”

  “Why won’t you look at me, Sanie?”

&n
bsp; “I am looking, okay?” She inches toward the door; she’ll sprint into the woods, where he’ll never find her. “What are you doing, Jackson? I love you.”

  That flusters him, interrupts the rhythms of his madness. His mask, his inch-deep pose of masculine gentleness and fond regard, shatters and something is revealed beneath that terrifies her even more; and yet it seems inadequate to the moment, dismasted by her declaration of love. She thinks she should repeat it. Maybe that will sedate him. But she’s so frightened and the rear door is so close…She springs for it and wrenches it open, punches out the screen with her elbow while fumbling with the catch. He hauls her back, slings her against the sink, and she goes down onto the floor. She crawls behind the table, scrambles to her feet. For the space of four or five seconds, they watch one another across the table, breathing heavily, and she senses some heretofore unstated principle hardening between them, a fundamental enmity exposed. She darts toward the inner door and he drags her back a second time, tries to hit her with his fist, misses…but his forearm slams into her shoulder and drives her sideways. Her head smashes the glass front of a cupboard. She stumbles away, glass in her hair, dazed and blinded by blood, clawing at his face, and feels a tremendous blow on her temple.

  White light splinters behind her eyes. She doesn’t lose consciousness, but she can’t tell where she is. Floating, it seems. Stretched out and floating. Like a woman levitated by a magician. Gradually she becomes aware that she’s lying on the floor. Jackson kneels beside her, saying things she can’t understand due to the ringing in her ears. She doesn’t have to hear them; she’s heard them whispered ever since she arrived. He hooks his arms beneath her armpits, lifts her, clamps a hand behind her back for support, as if they’re about to whirl out on a dance floor. She’s so dizzy, she doesn’t care what’s going on. She’s sick to her stomach, too, and, when he lifts her again, balancing her on his shoulder, using her legs to bump open the kitchen door, she thinks she might throw up; but she passes out instead.

  The world fades in again, illumined by a less harsh yellow light. Her temple throbs and a male voice is droning on and on, making the throbbing worse. Blearily, she identifies the bedroom by a water stain on the ceiling. Her face is damp—someone has wiped the blood from her eyes. She can’t pull her thoughts together. Thrashing about, she discovers that she’s secured, wrist and ankle, to the bedposts. She screams, tries to yank a wrist free, and Jackson moves into her field of vision. He’s removed his shorts and is half-erect. He talks to her in that namby-pamby voice, that fake, fatherly tone. She screams again as he climbs onto the bed and positions himself between her thighs. “No…don’t!” she says tearfully. His cock butts her inner thigh. Revulsion sparks a panic. Her mind seems to short out and, once awareness returns, she finds that his erection has wilted. His battered face is suspended above her, taut with rage and frustration. Something takes shape in the air behind him, waxing from a smudge of color into a disembodied presence—withered neck, a shawl of gray hair, piece of chin, an eye. A decaying grin centers these relics and she has the idea that Rayfield is leaning over Jackson’s shoulder, urging him to complete the violation, adding the force of his dementia to his son’s. Then, beside her, the Merry Widow pops into view. The old woman struggles to breathe, coughing up droplets of blood. Her throat is bruised and oddly indented. Powder caked on her sunken cheeks, her wig tipped over one eye as though in drunken abandon. Giving in to fright, Sanie bucks her hips wildly, hoping to unseat Jackson, and he begins to beat her. It’s a dispassionate beating. Workmanlike. With his features lumped and empurpled, he’s a mutant from a low-budget sci-fi movie. A mutant pounding nails. He pins her by the neck and throws the punches one at a time, methodically. They land on her hips, ribs, and stomach, robbing her of breath, of voice. It feels as if he’s killing her, and she wants to scream, but she’s reduced to staring dumbly at him, scratchy noises in her throat generated by each impact. Saliva hangs a thick string from his parted lips and flaps about when he hits her. He emits a grunt with every blow, very like the grunts he makes when he comes. Shadows pass across his face, or it might be they’re passing across the surface of her eyes. Pain drives her into hiding.

  When she regains her senses, she wishes she hadn’t. Her body aches all over and she has a wicked spike of pain beneath her left breast. Voices in the hall. Through the half-open door, she spots Jackson, naked. Will in his robe. And Frank Dean. Wearing coveralls. She tries to call out, but still can’t find her voice. He’s carrying a lug wrench. Holding it up beside his head and staring balefully at someone. He moves forward, vanishes, and Louise comes into frame. They’re all ghosts, Sanie thinks. Will, Jackson, Louise, herself, Frank Dean. Whether actually there or not, they’re ghosts. Creatures of the vortex. Controlled by that mighty engine, an ancient ghost wafts by, two-thirds of a fat dowager with a crepey throat, wearing shreds of a ball gown. She hovers beside the latest generation of Bullards, as though interested in their problem, preparing to offer advice.

  Jackson notices Sanie watching and slams the door. The muffled voices lull her and she loses track of things. She wakes after an indefinite time and can’t hear them talking anymore. Her head feels huge, balloonlike, with a pulse in her temple rapid as a bird’s, yet her mental clarity is better than it has been. She looks at her right wrist. The knot’s a relatively simple one. She pushes herself up, bracing against the headboard, and gasps with the pain that lances her left side. She stretches her neck, trying to reach the knot with her teeth. So close. Frustrated tears start from her eyes, but she keeps at it. On her fifth try, she snags the knot and bites down and begins worrying at it. The velvet tie around one ankle comes loose from the bedpost and that makes things easier; but she has to enlist all her determination and her strength to untie her other ankle. She’d like to collapse, but doubts she’ll survive if she does. Favoring her left side, she limps to the closet and takes down a dress with buttons in front. She shrugs into it, ever so slowly, buttons a few of the buttons. Puts on a coat the same way. Then she remembers her purse, her cell phone. She empties the purse on top of the bureau. Jackson’s taken the phone. Wobbly, she rests her head against the bureau. It’s obvious that she can expect no assistance from Will or Louise. Will must have alerted Jackson to her intentions—that must have been what he meant when he said, “I expect we should help him.” But then she realizes that if he did tell Jackson, he did so not because of any reason she might think of—it’s something ridiculous. Some elliptical, daffy logic that would make sense only to Will and the rest of Bullard Nation.

  In the depths of the closet, against the back wall, there’s a collection of walking sticks. She paws around inside it, hanging onto the door, and clutches at them, gathers three. Soft white pine with knobbly grips, whittled and sanded smooth by Rayfield. Under any other circumstance, she would be loath to touch them. She chooses one to lean on, another to use as a weapon, and hobbles toward the door, every step, every muscular action, a new adventure in pain. When she started out, she thinks, it was just about a ten-minute walk to Snade’s; now it’s going to take forever.

  NINETEEN

  Descending the stairs one at a time, Sanie’s afraid of being caught, but she is not afraid of what will happen if she’s caught. Jackson has hurt her, she believes, as badly as she can be hurt short of killing her. Her ears are ringing, the pain in her side is worsening, her jaw is swollen and aching, her vision is blurred, and she’s scarcely able to walk—symptoms that do not augur well. She no longer thinks she’s risking much by seeking to escape, and she wishes that she had arrived at this conclusion sooner.

  She lowers her right leg onto a step and braces against the banister, then eases the left side of her body down, careful not to plant her foot too heavily, or else her hip will send a shriek of pain up into her spine; and when she reacts to that, something—a rib, probably—stabs her deep. She’s almost at the bottom of the stairs when she hears voices issuing from the study, through the partly open door. Four voices, all speaking
at once, the most assertive belonging to Jackson, the once and future Bullard, the newest Bullard of Bullard Hall. Sanie can tell they’re arguing, but she doesn’t listen. She concentrates on her cautious movement, on the next step, and the next.

  Miraculously, she makes it past the study without being seen. A quick glance into the room reveals Will’s back blocking all of the potential sightlines. It’s gone dark outside. Once down the road a piece, she can go into the fields and hide. She reaches the bottom of the stairs and minimizes the creaking of the front door. On the porch, she rests her head on a support post, gathering herself. It’s only three steps to the ground, but there’s no banister to grab onto and she’s worried that she will fall. The wood is cool on her brow, seeming to transmit solidity, strengthening her. She thinks ahead to Snade’s and her buddy Gar. She pictures his solicitude, feels the warmth of the store, and imagines he’ll offer a restorative drink of some pigsty bourbon, for which she’ll be unendingly grateful. And a telephone. She’ll be all over that phone. The shit is going to hit the fan at Bullard Hall. Assault, unlawful restraint, drug possession, rape. She hopes Jackson likes jumpsuits. He’s going to be wearing a nice bright orange one the next few years.

  “Sanie.”

  Galvanized by fear, and then driven by a fury like none she’s felt before, she drops one of the sticks and swings the business end of the other two-handed toward the sound of Jackson’s voice, striking him on the hinge of his jaw. Her momentum causes her to totter off-balance and she fetches up against the door frame, crying out from a knifing agony under her ribs. Jackson is spun away from her, clutching his jaw and cursing. Fueled by a murderous conviction, Sanie rights herself, ignores the pain, and, as he turns toward her, swings the stick again, bringing it down onto the crown of his head. His knees give way and he crumples, slumping onto his side, moaning. Will, Allie, and Louise stand in the hallway behind him, displaying stupefaction.