“What impresses me most is that he’s such a good kid. I think he’s going to need as much protection as encouragement. Apart from that, just stand back and enjoy the show. But, hell, I’m just making this stuff up, I don’t know anything.”
Laurie moved against me once more, put an arm around my back, and then broke apart and held out a slip of paper. “Posy found a listing for a Donald Messmer in Mountry. While I spend a little time with Cobbie, would you like to see what he has to say?”
I took the paper from her.
The fireplace came through into a kind of television room or den with track lighting aimed down at half-empty shelves. Toy trucks and children’s books were scattered across the carpet. I sat on the sofa and picked up the telephone, but the first person I called was Nettie.
“Your Mountry trash came around this morning,” she said. “I told that sorry excuse for a man he needed more than a big mouth and a baseball bat to scare me. Sent them away with their tails between their legs. You don’t happen to have a piece, do you?”
I laughed. “No, I don’t have a gun.”
“Get one. Show iron to fools like that, they get out of your face lickety-split.”
Rinehart’s book dug into my side, and I took it out of my pocket before dialing the other number.
Posy’s CD-ROM had located the right Donald Messmer, but it took me a couple of minutes to get him talking.
“You saw my name on the marriage license, and you got curious about me, huh? Guess I can’t blame you for that.”
I thanked him and called him Mr. Messmer.
“Star let you know I wasn’t your dad, I hope?”
We spoke a little more. Messmer said, “I’m real sorry about your mom. If you don’t mind my saying so, I was nuts about her. I would have done anything for Star Dunstan.”
It was the reason he had married her. Two months after getting pregnant and moving in with Rinehart, Star’s infatuation had curdled into fear. When she had confided to Messmer that she thought Rinehart intended to injure her, the child, or both of them, Messmer helped her escape from Buxton Place. They were married by a justice of the peace and fled across Ohio and into Kentucky, where Messmer had family. When his relatives proved hostile to Star, the couple went to Cleveland. They took jobs in restaurants and lived together in reasonable happiness. A month later, Star went for a medical checkup, and everything changed.
“I was this stupid kid,” he said. “If something was more than five minutes ahead of me, I couldn’t think about it. The idea of having a child was almost more than I could handle, so I just tried to forget it, figuring it would work itself out. When she came back from the doctor and said it was twins, it was like, Sorry, Don, you’re spending the next twenty years in slavery.”
“And the twins weren’t yours,” I said.
“I’m glad you can understand that. A week later, I was shaving in front of the mirror, and this corpse looked back at me. I packed my stuff and took off. I should have been a better guy, but I did what I did. Does that make sense to you?”
“You did her a favor by getting her away from Rinehart.”
“That’s a nice thing to say. The truth is, we wouldn’t have stayed together anyhow.”
After arriving in Mountry, he tended bar until he had saved enough money to buy his own place, which he still ran. His wife had died three years ago, and he had two daughters and six grandchildren. When Messmer looked back at the young man who had run away from Edgerton with Star Dunstan, he saw a person he could scarcely recognize.
“Do you know a man named Joe Staggers?”
“Everybody in Mountry knows Joe Staggers. Most wish they didn’t. Why, you run into him somewhere?”
“It’s all a mistake, but Staggers thinks he has a grudge against me.”
“The asshole’s whole life is a mistake.” I could hear him wondering how far he wanted to go. “This grudge, was a guy named Minor Keyes involved in that?”
“So I hear,” I said.
“If you’re going to be around more than a couple days, you might see can you borrow a weapon from someone. Staggers is a mean son of a bitch.”
Cobbie was polishing off his spaghetti at a table in a windowed alcove next to the kitchen door. Laurie asked, “How did it go?”
“He’s a nice guy. Have you ever been to Mountry?”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“Let’s promise never to go there.”
Cobbie chanted, “Somewhere, somehow, someone’s gotta be kissed.”
Posy sprang from her chair. “Bedtime for the Rat Pack.” She wiped the red smears from Cobbie’s face. “All right. Upstairs.”
“Do I have to?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Would I lie to you?”
“Have to have to?”
She looked at me. “Cobbie wondered if you could make out a list of CDs he would like.”
“I’ll try to hold it down to the top one hundred.”
“Maybe we can get Ned to say good night to you once you’re in bed.”
Cobbie looked at me with a blast of anticipatory joy. I would have bet anything that Stewart never tucked him in or read to him at night.
“And I’ll read you a book,” I said, “but it has to be a short one.”
“Goodnight Moon,” he said. I felt an inexplicable chill of resistance.
“Goodnight Moon?” Posy said.
Laurie said, “Isn’t that a little babyish for you?”
He shook his head. “Goodnight Moon.”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s about the perfect way to go to sleep.” The same part of me that had resisted “Something’s Gotta Give” was saying no no no to Cobbie’s chosen book. I knew it came from the same place, wherever that was.
“You’re a lucky kid,” Posy said.
Laurie smiled at me and told Cobbie, “Just once.”
He kissed her and flew out of the kitchen, Posy behind him.
Laurie drank the last of the wine in her glass without taking her eyes from my face. “I don’t suppose you have three or four children you play with every afternoon and read to every night, one after the other.”
“Six,” I said. “Plus the twins in Boulder.”
My mouth went dry. I had intended to say “San Diego,” but Boulder had come out as if a wizard had put a spell on my tongue. For the third time, a powerful and irrational unease spread its wings. Boulder?
Laurie stood up to get the bottle. “You know, Stewart never read to Cobbie at bedtime, not once. What happened to your glass?”
“I left it in the other room,” I said. “Hold on, I’ll find the dog sled.” When I returned, I sat down next to her and put From Beyond on the table.
Laurie flipped through random pages. Something made her snicker, and I said, “What?”
She grinned. “ ‘Mr. Waterstone,’ creaked the old librarian from the musty darkness of his sinister lair, ‘the means by which you acquired that ancient text are of no interest to me.’ In books, I don’t think people should creak or anything else like that. They should just say things.”
“Edward Rinehart may not be the author for you, he surmised.”
She closed the book. “Tell me about Donald Messmer.”
I condensed Messmer’s tale without mentioning what he had said about Joe Staggers. “It’s funny. I thought there’d be more. I’m almost disappointed there isn’t.”
“It’s amazing, how much you got done in one day. Now you can think about the rest of your life.”
Posy Fairbrother swung around the entrance to the kitchen and came as far as the central island. “Your admirer awaits you. He hasn’t looked at Goodnight Moon for so long it took me ages to find it, but he promised to go to sleep after one reading. Laurie, what can I do while Ned is being wonderful?”
“Help me with the hollandaise for the artichokes, and if you put a salad together, I’ll handle the rest.”
“Do you want me to clean up afterwards?”
“One of us will
.” Laurie pushed her chair back and stood up in a single gesture. The glowing shield of her face revolved toward me. “Ready to be wonderful all over again?”
56
Separated by expanses of ocher wall, doors stained to look like rosewood marched toward a floor-to-ceiling window with an arched fanlight. The second door on the right stood partially open.
Sending out waves that would set off a Geiger counter, the book lay on the chair beside Cobbie’s bed. Already yawning, he was hugging the teddy bear. A stuffed black cat and a stuffed white rabbit stood guard at the foot of his bed, and a foot-high Tyrannosaurus rex reared on the headboard.
Margaret Wise Brown’s hymn to bedtime seemed almost poisonous. To distract myself, I asked Cobbie how my namesake was getting along. Ned the bear and Tyrannosaurus rex had become excellent friends. Was Cobbie ready for his book? Yes, emphatically. Hoping that I was as ready as he, I opened the book, turned sideways and held it out so he could see the pictures, and began to read.
Instantly, my phobia disappeared, and all sense of danger went away. Cobbie’s eyelids reached bottom when I was five pages from the end. I closed the covers and, in the spirit of Goodnight Moon, whispered good night to all and sundry. The phobia reasserted itself when I placed the book on the headboard. I turned off the lamp, realizing that I had learned something as mysterious as the original phobia: I was afraid of the jacket, not the book.
In my inner ear, Frank Sinatra belted out a fragment of “Something’s Gotta Give”: Fight … fight … fight it with … aaaall of your might …
Halfway down the stairs, I met Posy Fairbrother coming up. She was in a rush; she had to do at least four hours of work that night. All the more beautiful for being attuned to the task ahead, Posy’s face seemed nearly kittenish as she wished me a wonderful evening.
57
Laurie Hatch and I were borne along on a tide of conversation that seemed infinitely expandable into realms more and more intimate by grace of a shared understanding. I had not had an evening like it in at least ten years, and none of those soulful interchanges of my twenties had felt so much like real contact.
The conviction that one’s own experience has been mirrored by the other’s, that whatever is said will be understood, soon begins to confirm itself out of sheer momentum, and, of course, I did not dare to be as open as I appeared. Neither did Laurie. Of my “attacks,” Mr. X, the weirdness of the Dunstans, and the shadow-double who had saved my life, I said nothing. I never considered being completely honest with Laurie Hatch. She would have been alarmed, taken aback—I did not want to make her think I was crazy.
If conversations like ours did not always contain a degree of falsity, they would not be so profound.
We managed to get through a bottle and a half of wine, and the table was covered with serving dishes. “Why don’t we clear this stuff up?” I said.
“Forget it.” Laurie tilted back in her chair and ran a hand through her hair. “Posy will take care of that.”
“She has hours of work ahead of her. Let’s give her a break.” I carried bowls to the sink and scraped artichoke leaves into the garbage disposal.
Laurie helped me load the dishwasher and filled its soap trays. “I feel like one of the shoemaker’s elves. What were we going to do now, do you remember?”
“Did you want to hear the end of that Rinehart story?”
“The perfect farewell to Mr. Rinehart.” She emptied the last of the wine into our glasses and led me back to the sofa.
* * *
Curled next to me with her head on an outstretched arm, Laurie said, “This is the story you were reading when I showed up?”
“I was almost done.”
She took a sip of wine. “Professor Arbuthnot has discovered a book of the extremest age and rariosity. The three old men murdered in an opium den had been tattooed on their left buttocks with an ancient Arabic curse. On his way to interview a sinister dwarf, our hero catches sight of an infant with yellow eyes and a forked tongue.”
“This one’s a little different,” I said. “The whole first half sounds almost autobiographical.” I condensed Godfrey Demmiman’s early life into a couple of sentences and briefly described his adventures in the village of Markham, the obsession with his ancestral house, his simultaneous flight from and pursuit of the Other, leading to the night when he was drawn to the library on the top floor.
“Carry on, she implored.”
With the conviction that it was on this night that he should encounter the figure so long hidden from view, Demmiman entered the old library and eased the door shut behind him. Immediately, Demmiman became aware that his conviction was no mere fantasy. The Other’s presence etched itself upon the endings of his nerves, and as he took it in, he took in also the state in which he should discover his adversary.
After preparations no less fearful, no less uncertain than his own, the Other awaited his arrival with an equal terror, which served only to chill the blood in Demmiman’s veins. Nonetheless, Godfrey found it within himself to advance forward and cast his eye over the musty vacancy.
“Who are you, unholy figure?” he brought forth.
There came an irresolute, hesitating silence. “Come forth. By all that is within me, I must see you.”
The pressure of the silence about him nearly sent him in flight to the door. At the last moment of his endurance, a footfall sounded from a distant region of the library.
“It’s no good if the guy comes out, and he’s just another monster,” Laurie said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
* * *
Slowly, with dragging step, an indistinct figure emerged from the shadows. Demmiman found himself unable to breathe. Here was what for either release or surrender he knew he must confront at last. The intensity of his curiosity gave him the dim figure of a man decades older than himself and formed by experiences far beyond his own, experiences before which Demmiman knew his own imagination to fall short.
His dark, formal dress was that of a provincial man of business elevated to a tyrannical success. Scarcely had Demmiman taken in a white, exposed froth of beard than he saw, upon a forward step, that what had made the face indistinct was the pair of raised hands concealing it in—Demmiman felt—a gesture of shame.
He separated his feet and planted himself on the dusty floor.
The figure lifted its head and spread its fingers, seeming to sense his shift of mood. Then, as if in a sudden moment of decision, it dropped its hands and bared its face with an aggression Demmiman knew beyond his own capabilities. Horror held him fast. A thousand sins, a thousand excesses had printed themselves upon that face. It was the record of his secret life, hideous and inescapable, and yet, however coarsened and inflamed, the Other’s features were hideously, inescapably Demmiman’s own.
“Are you all right?”
“Why?”
“It sounded like your throat tightened up. Drink some wine, that’ll help.”
Had all his efforts been designed but to bring him face to face with this monstrous version of himself? Part of Demmiman’s humiliation lay in the recognition that the hideous being’s strength far surpassed his own. The Other stepped forward, blazing with the claim it made upon him, and he could not bear up before the demand for recognition. Godfrey Demmiman turned and ran for his life.
He thought he heard laughter behind him, but the laughter was only an echo of his shame; he thought dragging footsteps pursued him down the stairs but heard only the pounding of his heart. From half-open doors and shrouded corners, the lithe, misshapen creatures seemed to peer out, awaiting his final surrender.
He would not yield in defeat. He had been born to a great purpose, of which the encounter in the barren room was but the key that opened the lock. His destiny, Demmiman took in, held a majesty he had only begun to comprehend.
Demmiman advanced upon the door to the gallery, thrust it open, and found in his pocket the book of matches he had used to light the tapers in the crypt. The bright fla
me trembled as he knelt before the first of the long curtains. A small, quivering flame sprang to life and inched upward. Demmiman moved to the next and struck another match. When the second curtain was alight, he ran to the mouldering draperies across the gallery. Then, in the dancing, irregular light, he examined his handiwork.
Rows of flame from the upright columns spread across the floorboards and the ceiling. Scouts and runners had taken another of the rotting panels, and lines of red flame crept along the surface of the wall. The walls opened to the flames as if in welcome; the floor set itself alight in a dozen places. He backed into the smoky hall and let himself out into the night.
On both sides of the narrow street, the dirty brick and blank windows of abandoned buildings took no notice of the red glare visible within their neighbor. The alarm would come long afterward, when flames rose into the dark sky. Demmiman moved into the shelter of a doorway.
The ground-floor windows shattered and released plumes so dark as to obscure the blaze within. With a great rush, the fire took the second floor. Flames surged out and vanished within a massive column of smoke.
The third floor went, and the fourth followed. Above the roar of the conflagration, Demmiman fancied that he heard the high-pitched screams of the creatures trapped at the top of the house, and the thought of their panic caused a savage rejoicing in his breast.
The dark blanket swarming over the front of the building hid from view the topmost windows, and Demmiman sped across the cobblestones to secrete himself in the doorway of an adjacent building, from whence he was able to observe the final progress of the blaze. No sooner had he cast his eyes upward to glimpse the fifth-floor windows than the first signs of firelight shone behind them, then deepened from yellow to red.
A silhouette moved into the frame of the window nearest and looked out with supernal calm. The entire structure offered a groan of imminent collapse. The figure in the window cast its unseen eyes upon him. In the distance, a siren, then another, came screaming toward the blaze. The eyes hidden within the black silhouette maintained their hold.