UNEARTHLY

by John Farris

  "That something? Usually can't turn around without stepping on him."

  It seemed to exhaust him to talk; his words trailed off to a husky whisper. Mark bent over and patted the hound on the rump.

  "Go on, Mean. Go to Tom.

  The dog got to his feet and slouched toward his master.

  "Can I get you a whiskey, Tom?"

  "I could use one," Tom admitted. "How about you, doctor?"

  "I'm happy,"' Edwards said, and took a sip of his beer. Without appearing to pay much attention to Tom, he examined him closely. There was no sign of fever and his hand, while not firm, had been steady. Tom Brennan looked wasted, curiously used up, and Edwards pondered possibilities other than the flu.

  "Who's your family doctor?"

  "Kesseiring, in Pound Ridge."

  "I know him. He's a good man. What does he say?"

  "He told me I had one of those rare flu bugs that you can't do much about. He says I'll gradually get my strength back. But it's been over a month, and, damn it, I don't feel any better! Worse. I sleep and sleep."

  "Keeping your food down?"

  "When I feel like eating." Tom looked directly into the doctor's eyes, as if he'd been afraid to before. "Do you have any ideas?"

  Edwards smiled noncommittally. "What about symptoms you haven't mentioned? Back or chest pains? Is there blood when you cough?"

  "No.

  "Do you have problems urinating?"

  "I can give you the name of a good internist, if you want a second opinion."

  "Maybe I should go see somebody else—I think Kesseiring's been taking me for granted. But I hadn't had a sick day in twenty years before this hit me. Like a load of bricks, I'm telling you."

  "How long since you've taken a vacation?" Mark said, bringing Tom a whiskey.

  "I don't need vacations," Tom scoffed, sitting down slowly; rather, he lowered himself into a chair, like a much older, brittle man. Somewhat ashamed of his mysterious infirmity, he gazed at the whiskey in his glass.

  "That could be an answer," Edwards said. "A complete change of scene."

  Tom had a bracing sip of whiskey. "I don't know. Getting back to work would be a big help—it's really all I've ever needed."

  Mark produced a sketchbook from under one arm. "Would you mind looking at these, Tom?"

  Tom rolled another swallow of whiskey around on his tongue and opened the sketchbook. Edwards peeped over his shoulder. The pages of portraits were mostly of Barry. The book obviously represented several weeks of work. In the beginning the drawings were barely competent—uninspired, executed tritely, perspectives awry. Ultimately they showed a command of form, a burgeoning passion, and style: in the most recent work the girl leapt at you in all her varied beauty. A profile of Barry with kohl-streaked eyes and streaming hair had been worked into the Mithraic form of a bull: it had the power to raise the pulse. At the bottom of each of the later drawings there was a big slashing, exuberant M.

  "Did you do these, Mark?" the doctor asked him.

  "Yes."

  "You're getting somewhere," Tom muttered, fingering his lips as if to still a slight trembling; there was a signal of apprehension in the mannerism. He glanced up at Edwards. "I was all wrong about Mark. The first time he drew for me, I said to myself, Nope, he doesn't have it."

  "How long ago was that?"

  "January," Mark replied, lounging, his arms folded, smiling vividly.

  "That's what I call progress," Edwards said, marveling at the talent in evidence on the sketchbook pages.

  "I just kept working. I love to draw."

  Tom laid the open sketchbook in his lap and rested his eyes.

  "You're ready to try your hand at something new, watercolor, oil maybe."

  "I've started work on a tempera landscape," Mark said confidently.

  Tom shook his head. "No, no. That's a very difficult medium for a beginner. Took me years to really get the feel of it."

  "Barry showed me how to mix the egg yolk and the colors. I've been working a lot at night. In your studio, Tom. You said you didn't mind."

  It was clear that the idea shocked Tom; he seemed to be trying to remember the conversation, his assent. But after a few moments he gave up with a shrug.

  "No, I don't mind. Not at all. Need to think about getting back to work myself, but I—"

  He opened Mark's sketchbook to a blank page and reached for a pencil in a vase. Mrs. Aldrich brought in a basket of crisply fried mushrooms. Mark and the doctor helped themselves; Tom waved the basket away and sat hunched, mendicant, eyes contemplating the white paper. He made an attempt to draw, then stopped, grimacing, feeling the poverty of it. Nothing recognizable had emerged. He looked up, and for a moment his eyes were transparently fearful.

  "Can't remember a day when I haven't had a pencil or brush in my hand, drawing something. Now I—feels damned awkward."

  With his left hand he touched his head, then moved the joined fingers lightly to the top of the pencil.

  "Nothing happening between here and here. That's strange, isn't it?"

  "All artists find themselves blocked from time to time, don't they?"

  "I suppose so." Tom replaced the pencil, handed the sketchbook back to Mark and reached for the whiskey, which Mark thoughtfully had replenished.

  "Tom," Mark said, "I have most of the tomato plants in. I'll start the beans tomorrow."

  "Squash. Don't forget acorn squash. Tomorrow I—hell, I just might be up to giving you a hand."

  "Hey, terrific!"

  Tom drank; his body tensed as if to ward off a chill, or a pain that might have been spiritual rather than physical.

  "Cold in here. Maybe I'll go outside and catch some sun."

  "Wait. I'll walk with you." Tom had already started to rise, but he sank back obediently. Mark flickered a look at Edwards.

  "Time for me to be on my way," the doctor said, taking the hint.

  "I'll go out with you. Tom, back in a minute."

  "No, no, take your time," the artist said vaguely. On their way to the front door Mark asked in a low voice, "Do you think there's anything to worry about?"

  "Difficult to say. Some strains of flu just have to work out of the system.

  "That's what I told Barry." He stepped outside with Edwards, gazed at a bumblebee cruising across heaps of starred impatiens flowering by the stoop. He suddenly jumped straight up to touch the wingtip of a bronze eagle atop the lighting fixture over the door; it was more than ten feet from the surface of the stoop. He dropped back easily, with a grunt of pleasure, looked over the red-and-black car parked behind the Chevy. "Is that your car? What kind is it?"

  "Porsche."

  "They're fast, aren't they? Barry's teaching me to drive. What I like—I like to go fast." One hand shot out straight, palm down."Vvvoom."

  Edwards was amused. Mark could be intimidating—in bulk, the breadth of his mind, his talent. In other respects, including the occasional banal choice of expression ("Hey, terrific!"), he was almost adolescent.

  "Thanks for the drink, Mark. If you should change your mind—"

  "I won't." Mark extended his hand, they came to grips, he hurt without seeming to try. He said blandly, "Barry and I both wish you wouldn't come here again."

  Once more Edwards felt the heady sense of dissociation from reality, as if he were talking to a vaguely sinister stranger who had poppd up there in the garden to replace John Doe. He unobtrusively flexed his right hand, which pained him.

  "All right. But I'd like for you to know that I'm always available, if you need me."

  Mark said nothing more—just leaned back against the door jamb and regarded him with eyes gone a little dusty from uninterest. He ran a hand through his healthy mane of hair. Meanness appeared behind him, nose thrust against the screen, whining. Mark smiled then and went in; the hound rose and Mark grabbed his forepaws playfully, danced him around.

  Edwards paused before getting into his Porsche, took out a professional card, wrote on the back, BARRY, SORRY T
O HAVE MISSED YOU, circled the new telephone number on the card, and went back up to the front door. He slipped the card between the doorbell backing and the siding of the house. He was about to leave again, but he heard Tom Brennan weeping.

  And Mark said, his tone sharp, "Tom, don't do that!"

  Tom's response, muffled by tears, was unintelligible.

  "It worries Barry to see you crying. You don't want to make her unhappy, do you?"

  "Nooo."

  "Barry's very happy. We both want her to stay happy."

  "I'm sick. I'm sick. I don't know what's wrong. Why do I feel like this?"

  "It'll be over soon, Tom."

  "You think so?"

  "Yes. I'm sure of it."

  Edwards felt a wormy writhing at the nape of his neck. He had heard physicians whom he hadn't much admired use that exact tone of voice when speaking to patients they knew were terminal.

  "I wish I—I wish I could spend just one good day painting. Why isn't it there anymore? Oh, God, I wish you'd either let me paint or let me die!"

  "Wishes breed not," Mark replied, and to Edwards it sounded like a quote, a snippet recalled from long days of omnivorous reading. "Come on, Tom. Get on your feet. Let's take a walk. You need the air. You'll sleep better if you have a little fresh air."

  "I don't want to sleep!" the artist cried. "It's too hard to wake up!"

  Mark's voice was soothing now, patient."Barry'll be home in a little while. Come and look at the garden. It's going to be the best garden we've ever had."

  Edwards felt he'd overstayed. He backed away from the screen, although because of the angle he was not detectable from the doorway of the family room. Then he turned and crunched across the gravel to the low-slung car that gave him so much pleasure. But at the moment he was at odds with tranquility, simple pleasures, the fullness of the day. Thoughts of John Doe had iced his mood. The homeless John Doe, now more than at home, with a new name and the satisfied, settled-in posture of one to the manor born, an attitude of proprietorship that transcended mere effrontery.

  Perhaps Mark Draven knew more about himself than he was telling. And he had decided, as a convenience, or for more urgent reasons, to ignore all that he remembered.

  Edwards opened the door of the Porsche and caught a swinging glimpse of his face in the side mirror, a mean-spirited smirk, then the handsome old house in the background, unpainted clapboard and layered stone, strong chimneys and foot-square beams. Some parts of the house, he had heard, were nearly three centuries old. Oak trees on the property had the girth of a similar great age. It was a house that had endured with grace and character. There was a serenity in view that couldn't be denied: streaked sun, flowering crab, and cheery, piping birds.

  The doctor felt depressed, dissatisfied with himself and the distorted vision of things he was trying to impress on the household. Perhaps it was just a case of thwarted ego: he knew he could take no credit for the astonishing gains that the former John Doe had made in the last four months. If he believed that something was wrong here, it was due to a cranky misinterpretation on his part. Tom Brennan was weak from a tenacious case of flu, that was all—Mark worked in the garden and read the Romantic poets, Mrs. Aldrich suffered with the population of daytime TV dramas and cooked wonderfully in the kitchen.

  And Barry—Mark had said it—was happy. She was very happy.

  Chapter 23

  "Is that you, Barry? We meet again."

  Barry had been pondering a shopping list in the dairy section of the supermarket, trying to decipher Mrs. Aldrich's loopy handwriting, in which one letter looked much like another. How to tell the o's and e's from the d's and i's? She turned, confused, saw no one paying attention to her, turned in the opposite direction, and spied Alexandra Chatellaine, a market basket on one bare tanned arm, coming down the produce aisle, her sagacious eyes as green as the husks of fresh corn piled in a bin behind her.

  "Alexandra—hi."

  She sailed along without the familiar black cane, her head held high as always. She attracted glances through some mysterious, extra dimension of well-being that seemed hers alone by divine sanction.

  "You look well. What a lot of color for this season!"

  "I've been outdoors every day for a month. I hope we don't lose this great weather. How have you been?"

  "Still working for passing marks in the school of life." Barry smiled politely. "Shall we shop together? I need very little, but it's so boring alone, and everyone looks the same, stunned by the prices and that pacifying music that never stops playing." She reached past Barry for a half-pound of unsalted butter and popped it into her reed basket. "How is your young man? Come out of the wilderness yet?"

  "Oh, he's doing so well! You should see him now. By the way, his name's Mark. Mark Draven."

  "Progress indeed. What does he recall of himself?"

  "Nothing."

  "Isn't that remarkable? A tabula rasa, on which an entirely new personality has—I assume—been impressed."

  "He's one of the most intelligent men I've ever met. And he's very talented. He'll make a painter. That's what he wants, more than anything."

  "And of course he still has the good looks that made him such a favorite at the hospital."

  "Ummm," Barry mused, not so subtly aglow. She put milk and brown eggs into her shopping cart and they went on to Meats, where Alexandra picked out a half-pound of calves' liver and Barry chose a dozen center-cut lamb chops and a couple of big roasting chickens.

  "I hope your father is well."

  "No, he hasn't been."

  "That is a shame."

  "It isn't anything, really—he's run-down from the flu. And—he's been sort of in the doldrums lately, doesn't know what to do with himself when he isn't working. I'm having friends over Saturday night for dinner—that'll cheer him up." Barry added, with a belatedness Alexandra pretended not to notice, "You'll have to come, if you're free."

  "I'd be delighted."

  A bag of brown rice, a large bottle of Perrier, some fresh vegetables and toiletries—Alexandra soon finished her shopping. But she continued to tag along with Barry through the checkout, chatting away in a kind of ecstasy, as if she'd gone weeks without having a soul to talk to. Barry listened with half an ear and nodded tolerantly and became aware that Alexandra had more in mind than merely passing the time of day. Her none-too-casual questions about Mark, and their relationship verged on interrogation. Barry became uncomfortable; she began to answer stiffly or not at all.

  "He sounds quite ideal for you," Alexandra said in summary, and they parted outside.

  Alexandra transferred her groceries to the racks on the sporty Puch she had ridden nine miles from her home, and Barry loaded up the Volvo in the parking lot. It was nearly four o'clock. She'd been in town since shortly after noon, first at the dentist's, then at Copperwell's; she was anxious to get home and be with Mark.

  But as she pulled out of the parking space and headed for the exit she saw Alexandra standing in consternation beside her unchained but motionless moped; she backed up and asked if anything was wrong.

  "It won't start," Alexandra said, exquisitely baffled.

  Barry left the motor of the station wagon running and got out. She'd owned a moped when she was fourteen but had ditched it in a rather scary accident; thereafter she swore off everything that ran on two wheels. She tried all she knew, but the little two-stroke engine wouldn't kick over.

  "Could be out of gas."

  "Do you think? It quite runs forever on a single gallon. I'm always forgetting to add any." The gas gauge wasn't working; with a stalk of celery Alexandra plumbed the small tank. It was half full.

  "Oh, my. Something very drastic seems to have happened."

  It was obvious to Barry that Alexandra couldn't pedal the Puch home, and though she was running late it would be cruel to leave the elderly woman stranded.

  "I think we can load it into the Volvo. I'll drive you home. But how will you get it fixed?"

  "Don't worry abou
t that. The gardener's son is a wizard with mechanical things. In exchange for fixing my toaster I taught him to breathe properly, which did wonders for his acne."

  One of Shopwell's bag boys gave Barry an assist with the moped, which wasn't so much heavy as it was awkward, and they made room for it in the wagon.

  The Kinbote estate was some thirty acres of botanical elegance surrounding a sixty-five-room mansion of a speckled gray granite that reminded Barry of tombstones. There were several cottages on the grounds, in one of which, a stone's throw from the same brook that ran through their own property, Alexandra lived. Barry wrestled the Puch out of the Volvo and wheeled it into the foyer of the gabled cottage, where Alexandra liked to keep it. The cottage had a small bedroom and a living room with a high ceiling, a kitchen you could barely turn around in without barking your elbows.

  Alexandra insisted on brewing tea and Barry didn't have to be coaxed to stay a few extra minutes: there was a great deal to look at within the small space—a wealth of Asian and Oriental art. Brocade drapes closed against the sun produced a churchly interior light, cranberry red, in which swam motes of gold. Alexandra kept dabs of little birds in ornate cages, large cats in gray fur loose as cassocks. Incense in braziers made Barry's nose twinge and ache.

  But the tea was good, reddish in color, slightly sour and penetrating—it seemed to flow beneficently through every cell of her body. From a lacquered trunk with as many secret drawers and compartments as a magician's stage prop Alexandra produced mementos of her long career in places Barry scarcely had heard of: Bhutan, Sikkim, Kham. There was a leather face mask, on which the features of a provocative woman with slanted eyes had been painted. The mask was designed to protect the complexion during long rides across steppes scoured by gritty winds. Barry fell hard for a pair of tall snow-white boots made of Tibetan felt with thick red soles and artful piping. She also loved the leather bolero jacket and a silk blouse of a blazing purple shade; she had a strict eye for color: and had never seen anything to match this blouse. It was, Alexandra told her, the color of the sky in the highest places of the world.