Nothing but the Night

by John Williams

  He floated aimlessly about the grounds for a while, remembering with sudden certainty the loveliness of unimportant, unostentatious little things. The green velvet feel of damp grass beneath his feet; the soughing of the wind through the maple trees; a night-bird’s lonely call. In the distance, beyond his sight, he could hear again the faintest whisper of the running stream as it followed its interminable way over the moonlit rocks and ghostly fern down to the sea, down to the sea. He listened, waiting for another whisper, for a throaty voice. But no sound came.

  Later, he thought; later I will hear it.

  Then, as if he were a formless vapor wafted along by the gentle insistence of a summer breeze, he floated over the tops of the symmetrical maple trees, above the rough-grained ribbon of the driveway until he was quite near the house; and, like the wind, he explored tiny crevices in the walk, rattled about the dusty windowpanes, soughed in and out under the eaves, around the corners of the building. On one side there was a trellis up which crawled soft obscuring vines. He had almost forgotten the feel of the vine’s tiny white flowers. It was a living feel, as if he touched his fingers to cool impersonal flesh.

  Nothing had changed: it was the same. And yet—and yet there was something lacking, something not quite there which he could not name. It was not a tangible thing, this lack. It was more nearly an atmosphere which the place had once possessed and now had no longer.

  Then he recognized it; and it was so simple that he found himself surprised that he had not been able to tell it from the first.

  The house was deserted. Of course. It was only a ghost, a shell; the heart and flesh of it were no longer there. A beautifully constructed hulk, haunted by invisible and soundless spectres.

  Effortlessly, he moved away from the house and gazed upon it from some distance. He did not want to go inside just now. Later, yes, when he was more used to being back.

  But now he thought of the brook at the foot of the hill, behind the house; and he thought of the tall grasses, and he wondered if they were still pressed down by the former weight of two close bodies, still hollowed into an earthy bed. And his thought of it was his propulsion; he drifted over the house and down the hill toward the sound of the running water.

  The sound was real; it filled his ears. But when he reached that spot, he discovered only a cracked and fissured gulch where no water ran. Dry rocks jutted up from the bed to taunt him. Dead branches overhung and dipped into the former stream, disturbing nothing save the air. Yet still the liquid sound of rushing water filled his hearing.

  And he was afraid. For an imponderable force seemed to gather about him, and it was as necessary for him to let it seep inside him as it was for him to breathe. This force propelled him back the way he had come, up the hill and toward the house. At last, he fought no more against it, struggled no more, dumbly accepted an inevitable power which he somehow knew would admit no opposition.

  He found himself once more above the house. And as he was pulled down before the front entrance, he clearly understood where he must go.

  He went through the magically opened door into the long hallway. It was very dark, but he did not need his eyes. He took a few inquisitive steps forward. His fingers touched a door that stood slightly ajar. The door yielded, and he walked into the large familiar room; and he caught his breath sharply with the pain of remembering.

  Nor here, in this room, was there any change that he could see; there was only the ghost-like atmosphere which clung like fog and would not be dispelled, more awful than any tangible difference ever could have been. Here still were the deep soft carpets where he had stood, where he had wriggled bare luxurious toes. The walls, with their rich wainscoting, were if anything more mellow and urbane than he remembered. And there was the piano, the exquisite mass of ivory and rich wood; and there the sheets of music on the rack; and all was waiting.

  In a few moments, the lights would come on. He would be in his own room, above him somewhere in the unexplored darkness, and he would hear those resonant tones trembling through the long halls, diminishing, finally reaching his ears, deliciously faint, so that he was obliged to strain his hearing just a bit—not so much to cause distraction, just enough to stimulate his attention and intensify the music’s beauty.

  Then the necessity for movement was upon him again, and he went out of that room, down the hallway, and up the sweeping stairs, the familiar stairs whose banisters gleamed with a time-burnished oaken glow, the stairs which guided and led him he knew not where.

  But that was not true. He did know where. Quite suddenly, he remembered where.

  He would go up and turn to the right at the first landing and there would be a small door and he would open it and there would be his room and the bed where he slept and in that room would be the faint fragrance of her perfume which lingered still in the quiet air. And he would lie down on the bed and listen for the music, the deep dulcet tones of the piano downstairs. And after the music started, he would wait for it to end, no matter how beautiful it was, and he would listen for the steps which must follow, listen for them to fall upon the floor outside his room. Then the door would open, slowly, provocatively, and he would close his eyes and fill his lungs with the beautiful anguish of waiting.

  When he neared that first landing, as the distance between him and the room became shorter and more unendurable, he was aware that something strange and rather frightening had happened to him. He neither knew his own identity, from where he came, nor what circumstance had brought him here, back to this place. Or was this possible—that he had never really left this familiar house, that he had been only the victim of a peculiarly impelling nightmare of the future? All those things—those dreadfully unpleasant things which flitted now so vaguely about the edges of his memory—had they really happened? Or were they mere figments of an early, febrile dream?

  But the questioning voice grew weaker and weaker and died at last. His mind was sealed tightly, hermetically against consideration. He would not, could not allow questioning to enter and threaten his present world whose balance was too fine for him to risk the upsetting force of thought.

  He did not understand how it happened, but he suddenly found himself in the small bed inside his old room. The instant before, he had been waiting on the steps, peering through the gloom toward the door of his bedroom. Now he was inside, in the well remembered bed, the fresh sheets cool and crisp and fragrant above and beneath his body. He looked down the length of his body there; he saw the arm which lay lax on the coverlet. The hand was the hand of a child, delicate, sensitive, and brown; the fingers were long and slender, the nails pink and neat with the fresh glow of youth.

  And again, he was not surprised; for this was the way he had always been, this was himself. Everything else was nightmare. Here was reality, not dream. Here was the real world, here, secure in the lost time.

  Moonlight slithered through the open lattices of the window, and the indefinable odor of the night threaded its way into the room and mingled pleasantly with her perfume which was already there. The innumerable sounds of the darkness assailed his ears; the crystalline whisper of the summer air, the rustlings of a thousand insects crawling through the grass, the chirp of a cricket, the grunt of a bullfrog down by the pond. He shivered and snuggled carefully in the delicate moment.

  All day, it seemed to him, he had been running and playing in the sun, in the bright summer sun. Down by the brook, the grass had been trampled by his flying feet; and now in the respite of night, he imagined that grass laboriously righting itself, slowly resuming its proud pose, thrusting itself again upright to greet the morning sun.

  Altogether, it should have been a perfect day. But now he felt something had been amiss. He could not recall what it was, but a hazy awareness of it gnawed at his contentment as he lay securely in the bed of his childhood and waited for the music to come listing down the long dark halls. He closed his eyes. He could almost see his mother as she sat on the stool before the piano, dressed in white, her fingers
small dreams of old ivory, lightly touching the less perfect keys of the piano. He lay and waited for the sound, and the moonlight sifted through the lattices; and still the music did not come.

  And then, as a shaft of light splits darkness, he was speared by his remembering. He sat upright in the bed and remembered why the day had been imperfect. His mother had not been there. That was it. He had played in the grass, he had lain in that slightly too-wide bed of earth, but he had been alone. He could not quite uncover the reason for her absence—perhaps he had never really known. The fact of her absence made reason unimportant.

  There was no music. And suddenly he knew that there would be no music, ever again. And with that knowledge, fear grasped him coldly, and his heart beat so rapidly that he felt that his young breast could not contain its pounding.

  Then he heard the voices.

  Instead of the music he heard voices, although they came, he thought, from the place where the music should have come. The words were muffled by many thick walls, distorted by the journey through the long cavern of the hallway. But despite the distortion, he knew them, recognized the tones, remembered the timbres. It was his mother and his father.

  Indistinct as they were and so far away, still there was that in their quality of force and projection which incensed an approaching animal of dread that was padding toward him. Trembling a little, unwillingly, he slid out of his bed and crept across the room. He opened the door and cautiously descended the dark stairs. With each step he took his fear grew more unbearable. He wanted desperately to turn and flee and bury himself in the familiar sanctuary of his room between the cool sheets in the friendly darkness. Yet he knew he could not return. He knew he could never go back, now.

  At the foot of the stairs he paused. The sound of the voices was very near. Lightly, he stepped toward the music room.

  And with that forward step, that fatal step, the knowledge burst within him like a sharp explosion, and the thing which had been nameless could now be spoken, now be named.

  For he remembered the room from where the sound came; he remembered without knowing how the memory came to him, knew what he would find, what he would see, when he entered that room. But even with that dreadful previous knowledge, with that certainty inside him, he could only walk toward the door, his small bare feet sinking in the thick rug, drawn forward by a sanguine magnet of terror.

  He could distinguish the voices quite plainly now. He could hear the articulation of the words, he could recognize each syllable, each tone; but the words themselves were meaningless, and he could not understand them. It was almost as if they were foreign sounds formed by foreign lips.

  As he stood momentarily immobile in the center of the room, the sound crescendoed. The hideously angry phrases of his mother and the pleading cadence of his father’s voice blended in a desperate roar that sounded and resounded and echoed in his hearing’s cave. The door which separated him from the voices was closed, but a thin line of yellow light crawled into the darkness from a small crack at its bottom.

  Then he was standing there, his hand upon the knob. A spasm of trembling threatened to dislodge his grip, but he steadied himself and softly and quietly in the midst of that violence, he turned the knob and opened the door.

  When the door swung inward before his hand and the light streamed out to bathe him yellowly, an utter, ominous silence filled that room, as if the opening of the door were a prearranged signal. Yet neither his mother nor his father was aware that the boy stood framed in the entrance. They were caught in a fatal web of their own spinning, and no other thing could disentangle them.

  First, he saw his father. He was huddled abjectly with his back against the wall. His arms flailed the air before him with futile slashes; little animal-like sounds of whimpering streamed from his pale lips. But even in his wordless panic, there was upon his face, almost obscured by the abortive terror, an expression of blank impersonal horror and dawning comprehension and a transcending pity whose object was not himself but the figure mirrored in his eyes—the boy’s mother.

  No, not his mother. It was the same body, slight and beautiful, clad in the white dress he loved so well; the same pale crown of hair rested on the proud head and the features were the ones he had known, the lips were the ones that had so often caressed his face. But the eyes . . . Those orbs denied the evidence of all other similarities. He had never seen those eyes before; they were mad, writhing things which danced and glowed unceasingly, unbelievably incongruous in the serenity of the surrounding flesh.

  She stood motionless, her slim back pressed firmly against the opposite wall, looking at the boy’s father, at her husband. She did not speak. In her hand there was a gun, unbelievably huge and black and sinister in the small, pale, caressing fingers that held it.

  And at that instant, all of this was very old and familiar to him, a thing he had seen and known in some previous life; and the horror which constricted his throat and would not let him speak—that too was as old and familiar and futile as the dream in which he forever lived.

  Everything seemed to happen with impossible slowness. He saw his mother’s finger tighten, he saw the gun jump wildly, twice; then the quick puffs of flame and smoke issued from the barrel, and he heard two reports, sharp and flat, as if someone had slapped two boards together with two distinct, almost inseparable blows. He saw his father’s body jerk spasmodically, this way, then that, heard him gasp for his breath, then groan uncontrollably as if two giant hands powerfully pressed his lungs, then released their hold, allowing the air to come back sharply in.

  The boy turned his dull unbelieving stare upon his mother. The serenity of her face was gone, destroyed; and in its place there was a deeply exultant, mad, fierce ecstasy. He could not tear his eyes away from that face grown suddenly strange and unknown. It swelled in his vision, menacing and insatiable, threatening to devour with its intensity all that it saw.

  The grotesque mask lasted only for a moment. Then it fell apart, and the contorted face smoothed out; and although the mad things still writhed in her eyes, there was something new, some desperate, sane courage, like his father’s, shining through, some steely determination which could not be obscured by the madness.

  The bared teeth disappeared as she relaxed her lips. The perfect mouth opened slightly. She swung the gun up slowly. She inserted the still-smoking barrel into her mouth.

  He heard the muffled report and saw the head jerk backward. The slight body toppled to the floor and lay there, white, incredibly small, and relaxed. And feeling returned to him. But before it came, he was numbly aware that his father had stumbled across the room, was gasping hurried words into the telephone. Then, he screamed.

  Dimly, he heard his father’s voice, a surprised, muffled ejaculation through pain, as he was discovered for the first time in the room. But he was past heeding, past caring. He screamed and screamed, dug his fists hard into his eyes as if he might tear away the image of the wild mad face which was now an ineluctable part of him and his memory. Then he heard, from an impenetrable distance, his father’s gasping, pain-filled voice again, talking to him, pleading with him. He felt his caressing, soothing, heavy hand upon his shoulder, felt the placating movement that tried to comfort him. He opened his eyes. He saw his father as he knelt before him, his face furrowed in agony, one arm pressed tightly against his torn chest. The boy looked at the hand which grasped his shoulder, a hand he had once known. And as he looked, the horror doubled and came back to him; for that hand was covered and oozing with blood, and he felt the hot dampness of it as it seeped through his clothing. He screamed again, struck out in blind fear at his father’s averted face, tore himself from his clutch, and ran in senseless desperation until the great red sea which swam before his eyes was obscured by merciful darkness, until he, himself, was swallowed by darkness, until he was nothing and felt no more . . .

  Someone was tugging at his sleeve. He heard a voice calling his name, over and over, speaking to him.

  ‘What is it?�
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  He sat down.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Claire’s face swam hazily in front of him. When he answered her, his own voice was distant, strange, hollow in his ears.

  ‘Wrong?’ he said. ‘Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all. I just remembered something for a minute.’

  Gradually, his eyes swung back into focus; and with some relief he looked about him, recognizing his surroundings. Claire’s face became sharp and clear before his gaze; she was still smiling with her heavy-lidded, secret delight. A blue cloud of cigarette smoke hung around her head like a garland.

  He felt a moment of relief and gratitude for being back in the familiar, tawdry night club. But the confused clatter and clamor of the place began to grate against him, and his relief dissolved as a little shudder of revulsion ran through him.

  ‘Did you like her?’

  He looked at Claire blankly.

  ‘Who?’

  She laughed. ‘Why, Volita; who else?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes. Very much.’

  ‘The way you looked at her! And wouldn’t even sit down after she had finished. You looked like you had seen a ghost.’

  ‘A ghost,’ he repeated mechanically. ‘Yes.’

  Then, just for a moment, the vision threatened him again.

  He shook his head, he reached beneath the table, grasped Claire’s hand, pressed it tightly as if it were the reality he truly desired.

  ‘God,’ he muttered thickly. ‘God.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked concernedly. ‘Are you feeling sick?’

  There was a sticky cloud of almost tangible sordidity which hung about, which was the atmosphere of the Club Luisant; and it seemed to settle upon him and congeal, entering the pores of his skin, saturating him with an evil dankness, so thick and heavy that he could hardly breathe. He wondered how he could ever have imagined that this place was in any way delightful.