Joy-Ann sighed, but more by way of sympathy than from shared philosophical distress. “Well, it’s a mystery to me too,” she said in a tone that politely closed the door to further discussion. She looked across the cemetery, which had darkened to a deeper green as the sky had grown overcast. It was such a beautiful, restful, lovely place—the best of all possible back yards. She didn’t understand how Adah could suppose it didn’t exist. It obviously did exist. Joy-Ann was standing on it, and so for that matter was Adah. You couldn’t stand on something that didn’t exist. That was only common sense.
Poetry—there was Adah’s problem. All that poetry had weakened her common sense. It wouldn’t do to argue the matter with her, though. Best just to steer her away from subjects that got her speculating along poetical lines and concentrate on practical matters, such as how to get Giselle out of that willow tree she was stuck in and up into heaven where she belonged.
Joy-Ann turned to Adah and smiled a bright, cheerful smile. “Well, this was lovely, but I think we’d better be heading back, don’t you? It looks like it means to rain.”
CHAPTER 50
It was ten o’clock. The drapes were drawn and the lights burning throughout the house. Perhaps, if he had gone to bed, he might have been able to sleep, but he didn’t want to. Sleep seemed dangerous. He needed to control his mind, and reading seemed ideal for that purpose, but when he had sat down to read, he’d been unable to make his eyes move along the lines of print. The television was out of the question: all this insanity had begun when he was watching TV.
Fear, a diffuse physical ache of fear, had spread through his whole body, like the ache of flu or fever. The thought of food nauseated him. His body stank with sweat. He kept thinking he was about to have the trots, but when he sat on the toilet he couldn’t produce so much as a fart. And behind these several discomforts, like someone waiting with a knife behind a curtain, was the fear. What the object of that fear was he couldn’t have said, except that it was out there in the real world, not just in his head, and it was out to get him.
Then the doorbell rang, and he knew that whatever he had feared was there at the door, demanding to be let in. He felt powerless either to bar the door or to answer it. Yet for all the intensity of his fear, he could not even now imagine whose hand it could be that was turning the knob of the door. A devil, a witch, a goblin from some children’s storybook—nothing would have surprised him.
But when his caller stood revealed as the son of his neighbor, Michael Sheehy, he felt he’d been made a fool of. Fear could not reasonably take such a form as this.
The boy just stood there in the doorway smiling at him, a smile that seemed to imply some long-established understanding between the two of them. He said nothing, and Glandier could think of nothing to say to him. Not “What are you doing here, young man?” Clearly, that would be inadequate, for in a sense he already knew what Jack Sheehy was doing here—in the sense that he could see, in the boy’s eyes, so intently fixed on his own, that gleam of malice and complicity he’d seen in the eyes of Alice Hoffman’s Scottish terrier.
“It’s so bright in here,” the boy said. He reached for the switch beside the door and turned off the overhead light.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Glandier at last brought out.
“No, I don’t suppose I should.” He flashed a smile that any advertiser of breakfast food would have been happy to print on his cereal boxes, it was that overdone and professional. “Not so late as this. Like it says on TV: ‘It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?’ They don’t. But you do.”
With a conspiratorial wink he disappeared into the kitchen. One by one he switched off each of the three kitchen lights and returned with a large bag of garlic-flavored potato chips. He took a seat in the corner of the sofa next to the lamp pole.
“I suppose,” he said, reaching up, without looking, and turning off the lights on the pole, “that it’s difficult for you to think of me as yours. It’s all happened so suddenly, and there’ve been no written instructions. It was only yesterday that we took care of that creep out there on the lake. What was his name? I don’t think I ever knew. No, wait—it’s right here in my little memory bank: Nils Gulbradsen, right?”
Glandier nodded.
The boy grinned and ripped open the bag of potato chips. “How’s that for data access, huh? Jack read that in the paper this morning.”
“Read what?”
“Oh, come on, don’t play dumb with me. You were there. I was there. And there were two other witnesses. What do you think, that you’ll be arrested for attack-training a blue heron?” He stuffed a handful of potato chips into his mouth and chewed zestfully.
“This afternoon’s another matter,” he went on, spluttering half-chewed bits of chips across his plaid flannel shirt. “Of course, the very fact that I’m sitting here enjoying your hospitality is a sign that I didn’t get caught. And I’m fairly sure there were no witnesses this time, except the sort of witness who tells no tales.”
The boy went on eating potato chips imperturbably. At last Glandier had to ask, “What… happened this afternoon?”
“Didn’t you watch the six o’clock news? It was the feature story, even before Reagan’s budget. After all, how often does a Catholic priest get murdered in the Twin Cities? And so mysteriously.”
“You killed a Catholic priest? Why?”
The boy nodded. “Father—” He swallowed a mulch of potato chips, cleared his throat, and enunciated syllable by syllable. “—Windakiewiczowa. As for why, he didn’t leave me a lot of choice. You see, all I intended to do was finish the job on your brother-in-law before he makes trouble for you. I thought I was being so clever and efficient. I’d put a bottle of bleach into a box that a liquor bottle had come in, and then gift-wrapped it in paper that had Get Well Soon written all over it in little pink ribbony letters. It got me into the hospital like a charm, but first I had to wait most of an hour while the wife of the fat nerd in the same room was visiting, so I went down to the official waiting room and played Space Invaders until I ran out of quarters. Fascinating game. Anyhow—” He broke off to munch another handful of potato chips. “Anyhow, when I went back, there was this priest sitting by his bed with a goddamn rosary. As though heaven had posted a guard at the door or something. I was pissed off. Naturally, I didn’t want to attract attention to myself by loitering in the corridor, so I had to think of a way to get the priest out of the room. So I knocked on the door and opened it a crack and said a priest was wanted in the emergency ward, which naturally he believed. So when he went off, I went in and moved a chair over to the other side of the bed and got up on it and made a slit in the top of the plastic bag that was feeding into his arm intravenously. And then I unwrapped the bleach bottle and started pouring bleach into the IV bag. There are probably deadlier poisons, but I figured that bleach in the bloodstream would do the job. And it would have, I’m sure, only what happened is that the old priest had left something in the room and came back for it, and so I was caught in the act. I’ll tell you, Dad, I thought I was sunk. Do you mind if I call you Dad?”
Glandier shook his head.
The boy dug his hand into the potato-chip bag, then looked up with a camera-ready impish grin. “Hey, I’ve been hogging these all to myself.” He held out the bag. “Here, you have some.”
Glandier shook his head.
“You’re sure?”
“How did you kill the priest?” Glandier demanded.
“It wasn’t easy. I mean, think of it, there I was up on the chair, and like a dummy I’d dropped the razor blade I’d used to slice open the IV bag. What could I use as a weapon? Not the damned IV bag. But then I got inspired. I hopped down from the chair and tore off the tape that was holding the IV line to the guy’s arm. The priest must have thought I was attacking the guy in the bed, because instead of running off for reinforcements, which he should have, he came after me with ‘See here, young man, what do you think you’re doing!’
Glandier reached for the knob of the lamp reluctantly. There was no way to dim the light without first turning it off completely, and all the other lights in the house were out. He didn’t want to be alone in the dark even a moment with an eleven-year-old homicidal maniac. On the other hand, he didn’t want to annoy him by any kind of refusal. He closed his eyes and turned the knob through two clicks, so that the bulb was burning only 50 watts.
“Thanks, that’s much more agreeable.” The boy helped himself to more potato chips. “So, where did we leave off? I’d just killed Father Windakiewiczowa, right, and the nerd? Well, just to be sure they were both dead I hunted about for the razor blade I’d dropped and sliced open both their jugular veins—without getting a drop on myself, which is not that easy. And then, not forgetting my original purpose in coming to the hospital, I stuck the IV needle back in Bing Anker’s arm and let nature—gravity, that is—do the rest of the job. Only I’m afraid I botched it. I missed the vein, and according to WCCO, no serious harm was done. For which you have my apologies.”
Glandier nodded.
“Proud of me?” He flashed another sunlight-on-Shredded Wheat smile.
Was there, Glandier wondered, any way to approach this situation rationally? He was certain he wasn’t having a hallucination. Michael Sheehy’s son was actually here in his living room confessing to a double murder that he had probably committed. The wisest course, in ordinary circumstances, would have been to phone the boy’s father and let him handle the problem. But that clearly was not a practicable solution. The boy knew too much. Glandier didn’t dare risk offending him in any way. Furthermore, he seemed genuinely interested in helping Glandier—in his own mad way. So perhaps the wisest course would be to humor him and to suggest less compromising ways of being helpful.
“Of course,” the boy went on, “you’re worried about my long-term goals. I can understand that, but there’s not much I can say by way of reassurance. You see I act… impulsively. There’s no organized agenda, no game plan—just promptings. I wasn’t even intending to pay you a visit tonight, until I saw the news on TV and started wondering if you were watching too and what you must have thought. I mean, I’m your son, true enough, but that doesn’t mean my every waking moment is spent thinking about you. I have my own independent existence.”
“There is a lot of this,” Glandier said carefully, “that I don’t understand.”
“Don’t try to. Just enjoy the ride.”
“You say you’re my son…”
“Hey!” He looked up, eyes glinting with mischief. “You wouldn’t want me to say I was your lover, would you?”
Glandier blenched.
The boy laughed. “Just kidding, Daddy-O, just kidding. Anyhow, you would need a whole lot of loosening up before you’d be ready for child-molesting. Those are deep waters.”
“I have no intention of ever… ever doing anything like that!”
“See what I mean? You can’t even speak the dreaded word. Not to worry. I didn’t come over here to seduce you, Pops. To be perfectly frank, sex is not one of my vital interests. Violence is another matter. I love violence. Really, I’m not that different from any other eleven-year-old these days. Just a little more open and straightforward.”
“I would consider it a favor—” Glandier began, then broke off, afraid to say anything the boy might take exception to.
“You want me to go home, I’ll bet.”
Glandier nodded.
“I sensed that. And I’d do it—but I’ve got a problem: I can’t sleep. It’s the chief disadvantage of my situation. If I sleep, then young Jack can get back in the driver’s seat. Not that he’d be able to do that much. I can resume control at will, I’m pretty sure. But why put it to a test? Anyhow, sleep is not one of my top priorities. For centuries I never existed, and after this sojourn in Willowville I may not exist for further centuries. So my motto is eat, drink, and be merry. Would you like to play cards?”
“But your parents—Jack’s parents, that is. Won’t they…”
The boy shrugged. “They think I’m in bed. If you don’t like cards, how about backgammon?”
“I’ve never played backgammon,” Glandier confessed.
“Cribbage?”
Glandier tried to think of a way to refuse. He couldn’t. He went to the bedroom to get the cribbage board and a deck of cards.
CHAPTER 51
The light touched her leaves like a lover going off to work, not wanting to wake her but not wanting to leave without saying goodbye. Fibers of consciousness that sleep had strewn through the branches of the willow retracted and were concentrated in a single focused unwillingness to be awakened, and then, the light brightening, she woke to the sound of the poet, Berryman, croaking in her ear. “Wake up, Giselle! Wake up! It’s morning. Listen to the robins. The breakfast grub is in the air. Come on, sleepyhead, wake up!”
“I’m up, I’m up,” she grumbled. “So stop your silly nonsense.”
“Then let me see you, huh?”
She sighed and made herself visible in human form, sitting—seemingly at her ease—at the lowest forking of the willow’s trunk, some four feet off the ground. “You’re still a frog,” she observed.
He puffed out his cheeks complacently and blinked. “I like being a frog. The skin fits. How about you? What’s it like living inside a tree?”
She closed her eyes and thought for a while before she answered. One of the advantages of a semi-vegetable existence was the different time scale. There was never any need to hurry.
“Sexy,” she said at last. “It feels stupendously sexy. There are all these little yellow whatyamacallems.”
“Catkins,” Berryman suggested.
“If you say so. Anyhow, there aren’t many of them left. A week or two ago when I was covered with the things it must have been incredible. Even now when the bees come at me it’s as though each one were a little vibrator. But there isn’t just one, there are hundreds—hundreds of little tiny orgasms all going on at the same time.” She sighed. “Trees are very happy in the spring. It probably makes up for the boredom other times.”
“It sounds like you’re considering taking up permanent residence.”
“The light feels good too,” she added thoughtfully. “Not sexy, but good.”
“What about blight, beetles, acid rain?”
She smiled. “What about death?”
“But you’ve survived death,” Berryman croaked.
“Sometimes I wonder about that. You know that old song we had to sing in grade school?” She began singing the song in an effortless, rich contralto. “Row, row, row your boat…”
“Row, row, row your boat,” he sang along happily (for the frog in him loved nothing so much as a round), as she continued.
“Gently down the stream…”
“Gently down the stream,” sang Berryman.
“Merrily, merrily, merrily…”
“Merrily, merrily, merrily.”
“Life is but a dream.”
She had made her point and fell silent—never, indeed, to make another point that the poet would hear her speak or sing.
Giselle slipped from sight into the willow, and Berryman sang on alone, beside the concrete-bottomed pond, that briefest and solemnest of elegies, the invention of his melancholy predecessor, Mr. Poe. “Nevermore!” croaked the enchanted frog, as though given foreknowledge of his and Giselle’s sundering. “Nevermore! Nevermore!”
Toward five in the morning, Glandier stopped being able to count his cribbage hands. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is…”
“Six,” Jack Sheehy prompted.
Glandier pegged six points on the board.
“And another pair is eight,” Jack pointed out, pegging these two points. He swept up the cards from the kitchen tabletop, tapped them into a neat pile, and shuffled them with stiff-fingered care.
The predawn light of another day was leaking into the house through all its uncaulked seams and cracks, making pencil lines of a lighter gray beneath the curtains and doors and turning the limp and long-unlaundered gauze about the kitchen windows to ectoplasm.
“Tell me,” said Jack pleasantly, as he dealt another hand, “how did you know where your wife would be, so you could go there and kill her?”
The fear that the dawning light had quickened in Glandier’s spirit now surged through all parts of his body, like sludge being stirred up from the bottom of a cesspool. Always until now he’d been able to refuse to imagine the darker possibilities that might issue from Giselle’s murder, to look the other way from the punishments the law allotted to convicted criminals. A flood of self-pity pressed against his glazed, dry eyes as he imagined himself a prisoner among other prisoners—blacks, most of them, and crazed, even there in prison, with drugs. Sealed away with such scum from the world of everyday pleasures: no car to drive, no office filled with employees to command, with other businessmen offering him the ikon of himself mirrored in uniforms of cloth, speech, and thought. He would do anything before he would let himself be reduced to such abject shame—but what could he do? Kill the boy? Useless, for it was not the boy who was a danger to him, but something inside the boy. Glandier had killed Sugar when that same something had been in the dog, and what good had come of that?
“Hey,” said Jack, snapping down the undealt cards in the middle of the table beside the cribbage board. “Wake up. We’ve got a game to play.”
THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Page 19
