by John Farris
In his room he had to search both closets and a chest full of possessions collected in his recent youth before he came up with the binoculars. He took them to Barry's room, where he had from her windows a better view down toward the pond, unobstructed by the high long barn. Barry was in the trees by then, Meanness slouching along behind her, but he easily picked his sister up with the powerful glasses. She did, indeed, appear to be headed for the dock and the rowboat. Needles of sun shot through the trembling image he maintained; her head in close-up seemed disembodied, like a balloon drifting away from a holiday parade, her hair windswept and pale red, firing off glints of magnetism.
About forty yards from the water she paused, looking around, taking her time, as if she were afraid she had been followed. Then she took a different path, to the gristmill.
Dal put the binoculars down, took off his own glasses, and rubbed his strained eyes. After half a minute, when his vision cleared, he tried to find Barry again. She wasn't in sight, but Meanness turned up, flushing woodcock from low brush on the near side of the diamond-faceted millrace. And the boat remained tied up at the deserted dock, another two hundred feet away beyond a cattail marsh.
Dal returned to his room, pulled some hunting clothes from a cedar closet—boots, camouflage jacket, and loose-fitting trousers—and changed. He put the binoculars into the case and hung the ease from his shoulder.
As he walked down the stairs to the foyer he was conscious of the insidious scratching sounds again.
Something—he couldn't have said what—drew him to the family room.
As if his presence had been detected by whomever—or whatever—was making them, the sounds stopped suddenly. His heart jumped to a faster beat.
Dal's eyes lingered on the leather casket Alexandra had brought the night before. He had much on his mind, but, paradoxically, he was drawn to the casket as if nothing else mattered for now.
There was something unexpectedly cold in the air of the room. It was as if, within a few steps of the foyer, he'd become immersed in a pool of ether. He wanted to back out, but couldn't. And his hands no longer seemed to be under his control. He was, suddenly, almost ill with fright; but his hands wanted to open the casket.
It was locked. He couldn't budge the top. Relief jetted through him. The key was nowhere in sight. Barry must have done something with the key, but for his life Dal couldn't recall what.
Scratch, scratch.
The leather of the casket was cured hard as paving stones. He remembered the silken lining, the crisp parchment wrappings around the daggers. He thought he heard, in addition to the persistent scratching, a crackle of paper—as if the daggers were moving around inside the casket, trying to dig their ways out of it.
The hairs on the nape of his neck stirred icily.
Dal, unlike other members of the family, never had had a fondness for lore and legends, the mysticism of his forebears; although Barry's queer talents had always been matter-of-fact for him. Those things he could live with. But this was something without the realm of faerie stories and shadow shows, an uncharmed evil that, he felt, threatened death in their house. He was pale as a wafer; his heart throbbed as if it were racing toward a seizure. He turned and got out of the room, evading the thickening atmosphere of disaster, and went after his sister.
He went down to the gristmill the hard way, deliberately off trail, approaching from the hill side, where there were no windows. Then, limping fiercely from the strain on his weak knee, he edged around to the millrace. There was a fluent runoff from all the rain with the surfaces of the big boulders, usually high and dry and dappled with lichen, now inches under the clear spuming water. The mill wheel loomed woodenly and almost to the top frames of the second-story windows, which had so much dirt and cobweb on them they rejected the quivering light of the sun.
Dal found, lower down, a smaller window to look into. His view was of interlocking dark angles past which, as if in the center of a kaleidoscope, Barry and Mark could be seen, both of them bright and small, sitting face to face by the grinding stones eating the lunch she had packed and talking tranquilly.
He fumbled the binoculars from their case, shifting his weight to ease the hurt in his bad knee, and focused through the window. Something cold and blunt insinuated itself between his legs, causing his balls to shrink tight. It was Meanness, but he'd almost let out a yelp of terror.
"Go on," Dal said sternly to the dog. "'Get home!"
The hound looked at him, a side gash of teeth where his lips didn't come together; it was a benign sort of sneer. Then Meanness sat down and went after a flea with a big paw that for the most part just fanned the air with comic futility. Dal gave up trying to get rid of him and raised the binoculars again.
Barry came into his line of sight first, talking with her mouth full, pausing to brush away an airy gleam of bluebottle fly. Then Dal picked up Mark.
His hands began to shake so intensely he could barely keep the boy in focus. Mark was smiling. By now, needing surgery on his mutilated hand, he should have been half berserk from pain, too nauseated to put anything in his stomach.
Mark reached for the thermos and poured himself a cup of milk. He held the thermos in his right hand, the cup in his left. For four seconds Dal had a good close look at the left hand of Mark Draven. No swelling, no blood. All five fingers were intact. It did not look, in any way, as if a car door had been slammed on his hand.
Bitter liquid shot up into Dal's throat; he choked on it, lowered the binoculars for a few moments, then raised them quickly again and tried to steady his hands.
Barry's back was turned as she tidied up from their meal. Mark got up from the broad flat stone on which he was sitting. He stretched and yawned, dusted off the seat of his pants. Chaff flew like insects in the light. He returned to his easel and the painting he was working on, which Dal couldn't see.
Then Mark turned and looked deliberately at the window where Dal was watching, as if he were perfectly aware of Dal 's presence and had been for some time.
Dal, shocked, spun away from the window, nearly dropping his binoculars; as most of his weight shifted to his bad knee, he groaned. He began a hobbling panicked escape—he could not have managed to move more quickly if he feared that all the fiends of hell were contained inside the mill and would momentarily come flying after him. He had seen nothing in Mark's haughty handsome face—he had seen, or sensed, as he eavesdropped, too much that was uncanny, beyond explanation, ultimately horrifying.
Meanness trotted along as Dal hauled himself, sweating, up the long slope to the house. In the kitchen he pulled a bottle of Irish out of the pantry and had a generous four ounces, chased it with tap water, got his breath, and considered what he should tell his father. But nothing he rehearsed sounded right because he didn't know enough—not yet.
Dal limped through the house and went out the front door to his Mercedes. He had left the keys in the ignition. He drove madly to the Kinbote estate. The gates were open. There were two girls on magnificent horses on the greensward in front of the manor, house. Dal took the right-hand fork of the drive to Alexandra's cottage.
The front door was locked. She didn't answer his knock or his inquiry. He waited, knocking intermittently. Five minutes passed. Dal walked around the cottage, peering in at narrow leaded windows with occasional clear panes of glass. Not much of the interior was visible. What he did see seemed submerged in gloom, like a house in the ocean.
The girls on horseback had cantered nearer. He called to them. They told him they hadn't seen Alexandra all day.
A diamond-shaped pane in one of the living room windows had been cracked in half and patched, long ago, from the inside with transparent tape. The windows were draped. The broken pane punched out with little effort on his part. He reached through the opening and twitched the thick drape aside.
Sunlight over his shoulder pierced the room with the intensity of a laser. Birds chirped in high cages. There was an odor of cat food and incense. In the shaft of light Al
exandra looked up at him from the floor with a steely composure, one hard emerald eye narrower than the other. The light was dazzling. Her pupils did not react. Still, it took Dal a few moments to accept that she was neither meditating nor in a mystical trance of some kind. She was dead.
Chapter 33
Dal gained entrance to the cottage without difficulty, by reaching in and turning the handle of the casement window. Then he parted the drapes and stepped over the low sill. He was looking at the body and almost planted his foot on one of Alexandra's cats, which shot up in front of him with a horrendous screech. The birds went crazy in their cages; little feathers floated down through streaks of sun. He heard the clear voices of the two girls as they circled their horses on the lawn.
He touched Alexandra. She was rigorous and cold. There was a line of dried blood from one nostril to her chin. She was lying on her back near a small aluminum ladder with nonskid rubber cleats. His first assumption was that she had fallen from the ladder trying to reach the bird cages overhead. It was apparent that her neck was broken.
Then he saw the faint outline, in mud, of a man's shoe near one of Alexandra's outstretched hands. He looked more closely at the floor. There were more traces of dried mud, along with gristmill chaff.
Dal stood up, his head pounding violently. Her death suddenly seemed less easy to explain.
While they had been hunting for Draven, he had been here.
One of Alexandra's cats scratched in the litter box next to the murmurous refrigerator. Dal looked around carefully for more footprints, followed them all the way to the kitchen door. Then he took a wet paper towel and began carefully to obliterate all traces of mud, working backwards to the dead woman. There he knelt, picked up all the bits of chaff and germ he could find. Dal wrapped them in a handkerchief, which he stuffed into his back pocket.
He left the house by the front door, the sun in his eyes like knives. He walked around the cottage and gestured urgently to the girls on horseback.
They rode up to him, and he explained that Alexandra was dead. The girls went galloping to the manor house.
Dal sat down on the stoop to wait. He'd left the front door ajar, and the cats wandered outside.
Within a few minutes Bob and Ellen Kinbote drove down from the manor house. He'd known them casually for years. They were in their early fifties, indescribably rich, without pretensions. Bob was partially bald and disliked hairpieces. Ellen had spent years working to fund health-care facilities in Third World countries and at the age of forty-seven had decided to become a doctor. She was now interning at a hospital in the city.
They went in at once and looked at the body. Dal stayed behind; he was so tense he felt as if his lungs were turning to stone. Bob made a couple of phone calls inside. Ellen came out dry-eyed but greatly saddened.
"Poor thing. Poor thing. She was such a delight to all of us."
"What do you think happened?" Dal asked.
"She must have fallen off that little ladder. At her age—"
Dal nodded.
"How did you happen to find her?"
Dal had prepared a story. She'd been over for dinner the night before, they'd made a date for today: he was greatly interested in looking at Alexandra's art collection. When she didn't answer his knock and he heard the cats crying inside he'd become concerned, found a loose windowpane, looked inside to see her lying on the floor. Ellen Kinbote accepted all of this without a flicker of suspicion.
"If there's anything I can do," Dal said. "I know Barry was really fond of her.
"We'll just have a simple service in a day or two. I'll call."
Dal went home, so sick with dread he could scarcely concentrate on the road. It was a quarter after five and getting cloudy when he walked into the house.
"Barry! Barry!"
Tom Brennan came out of the kitchen, where he'd been making a sandwich from the leftover veal roast. "Dal? What's up?"
"Is she here?"
"No, I don't think so. I haven't seen Barry. I've been in the studio all afternoon."
"Would you pour me a drink?" Dal pleaded. "I'll be right down."
He dragged himself upstairs to his room; his face inflamed, and opened the gun cabinet there. He took out a Mossberg twenty-gauge slide-action shotgun and filled the tube with three-inch magnum shells. He carried the shotgun to the kitchen and gulped the whiskey his father handed to him.
"What's the gun for?"
"Barry's with Mark. They're in the gristmill. I may need to use it to get her away from the son of a bitch."
"Dal, have you gone crazy?"
Dal laughed in an ugly way.
"I have to be crazy, don't I? There's no other explanation. Because these things can't be happening."
He stopped suddenly, head cocked, listening.
Scratch. Scratch.
"There it goes again. Hear it?"
"I've been hearing it all afternoon."
"Coming from inside that casket Alexandra left us," Dal said in a high voice. "God knows why she brought it here. I'm scared to look at it again." He sat down suddenly, the shotgun across his knees, and began to cry.
"Dad, I think—when Draven ran out of here last night, he went down to the gristmill. But he—didn't stay there long. Before we started to search for him he made his way over to Alexandra's place. She—she's dead—her neck was broken! And I'm sure—Draven killed her."
"For the love of God!" Tom said, almost as upset by Dal's nervous tears as the accusation Dal had made.
"No, no listen to me! I don't know who—or what—Draven is. But Alexandra must have known. What I can't answer—the awful thing is—Barry probably knows too. And she doesn't care."
"What do you mean about Mark? Try to calm down and make some sense—"
Dal had to nod a couple of times, painfully, to get the words flowing again.
"I was down at the gristmill this afternoon. I was able to get a good look at his left hand—the one that was smashed by the car door last night. But there wasn't anything wrong with it. His hand was as good as new. Now how could that be?"
Tom looked on silently, doubtingly; Dal, aroused, cried out passionately, "We saw the finger that was cut off! I put it in the refrigerator. But it's not there now. So there's no evidence the accident happened!"
Dal pulled the wadded handkerchief from his back pocket and spread it on the table; bits of chaff clung to the cotton cloth.
"This came from Alexandra's house. Mark must have had chaff on his clothes and shoes from the gristmill.
Some of it fell on the floor when he killed Alexandra. But I—I rubbed out his footprints and picked up all the chaff. Because—how could we explain to the police what he is, when I don't even know myself?"
Dal paused, feeling as if he were coming apart, nerves unraveling, the bones of his chest separating; the heart of him was going to drop on the floor like an egg falling from a bird's nest. He looked at the whiskey bottle, but willed himself to stay out of that refuge.
Tom, groping to make sense of his son's confused explanations, said, "His hand—are you sure you saw—"
"I'm not mistaken! I know what I saw! He grew a new finger overnight! God, oh, God, Mary Mother of Mercy. Mark got so good at painting, and you got so sick. If I hadn't come home, in another week you might have been dead too." Dal gazed at his father, loving him, his tongue horror-struck to the roof of his mouth. He wiped tears from his cheeks.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
"What are we going to do, Dad?"
Tom shook his head, still unable to fully comprehend Dal's fright. The screen door opened and Barry came in like a breath of fresh air, cheeks reddened and humid, as if she'd sprinted partway up the hill.
She barely gave them a glance as she headed for the back stairs.
"Hi, everybody!"
"Barry!" Tom called. "Where're you going?"
"Take a bath, I'm itchy."
"Barry!"
She came back to the kitchen, sobered by her brother's thunder, an
d looked from his face to the gleaming shotgun.
"What are you doing with that?"
"Barry, where's Mark?"
She gave her head a fractious twitch and scrubbed a mosquito bump near one ear.
"Gristmill. You know that. You were spying on us this afternoon." She looked at both of them grimly for a few moments, then smiled slightly. "Mark'll be up in a little while."
"He's not coming in this house," Dal said.
"Is that so? Dal, he has just as much right to be here as you do."
"Why did he run away last night? Why has he been hiding in the gristmill?"
"Hiding? That's bullshit! He was forbidden to set foot in Dad's studio, or have you two forgotten? So now he's working—trying to work—in the mill. Dal, you're being impossible, I don't want to talk to you. I need a bath."
"He's hiding because neither of you know what to say about his new finger, do you?"
Her chin came up. Her indrawn breath hissed almost inaudibly between clenched teeth.
"What new finger? He's just like he always was. Perfect. Nothing happened."
"Barry, we saw—"
"Nothing happened! Nobody can prove any different, can they? Can they!"'
"Oh, kid. What kind of trouble have you got yourself into?"
"I'm fine! I've never been happier. Why don't you leave—"
"Barry, Alexandra's dead. Draven broke her neck last night."
The girl faltered then, as if she'd lost her place in the fast shuffle, the desperate game of emotional Ping-Pong she'd been playing with them. Dal had a glimpse of just how frantic his sister was, the lengths to which she might go to keep Mark Draven with her. Instead of being angry he felt a new surge of fear, followed by a brief unstable period of calm.
"But you know that already," Dal said. "Mark told you all about it—over lunch."
Barry shrugged, not admitting anything. "He told me—he said—she had an accident. It wasn't anybody's fault! Mark wouldn't hurt—"
