Memory sweetened events of course, and in the four years (and five months) since that afternoon, she’d replayed the scene often.
Now, in remembering it, the bruises were trophies of their passion, her tears proof positive of her feelings for him.
The day following, he’d disappeared. Flitted off to Bangkok or Easter Island, some place where he had no debts to answer. She’d mourned him, couldn’t help it. Nor had her mourning gone unnoticed. Though it was never explicitly discussed, she had often wondered if the subsequent deterioration of her relationship with Rory had not started there: with her thinking of Frank as she made love to his brother.
And now? Now, despite the change of domestic interiors, and the chance of a fresh start together, it seemed that events conspired to remind her again of Frank.
It wasn’t just the gossip of the neighbors that brought him to mind. One day, when she was alone in the house and unpacking various personal belongings, she came across several wallets of Rory’s photographs. Many were relatively recent: pictures of the two of them together in Athens and Malta. But buried amongst the transparent smiles were some pictures she couldn’t remember ever having seen before (had Rory kept them from her?); family portraits that went back decades. A photograph of his parents on their wedding day, the black and white image eroded over the years to a series of grays.
Pictures of christenings, in which proud god-parents cradled babies smothered in the family lace.
And then, photographs of the brothers together; as toddlers, with wide eyes; as surly schoolchildren, snapped at gymnastic displays and in school pageants. Then, as the shyness of acne-ridden adolescence took over, the number of pictures dwindled—until the frogs emerged, as princes, the other side of puberty.
Seeing Frank in brilliant color, clowning for the camera, she felt herself blushing. He had been an exhibitionist youth, predictably enough, always dressed a la mode. Rory, by comparison, looked dowdy. It seemed to her that the brothers’ future lives were sketched in these early portraits. Frank the smiling, seductive chameleon; Rory the solid citizen.
She had packed the pictures away at last, and found, when she stood up, that with the blushes had come tears. Not of regret. She had no use for that. It was fury that made her eyes sting. Somehow, between one breath and the next, she’d lost herself.
She knew too, with perfect certainty, when her grip had first faltered. Lying on a bed of wedding lace, while Frank beset her neck with kisses.
Once in a while she went up to the room with the sealed blinds.
So far, they’d done little decorating work on the upper floors, preferring to first organize the areas in public gaze. The room had therefore remained untouched. Unentered, indeed, except for these few visits of hers.
She wasn’t sure why she went up, nor how to account for the odd assortment of feelings that beset her while there. But there was something about the dark interior that gave her comfort; it was a womb of sorts, a dead woman’s womb. Sometimes, when Rory was at work, she simply took herself up the stairs and sat in the stillness, thinking of nothing; or at least nothing she could put words to.
These sojourns made her feel oddly guilty, and she tried to stay away from the room when Rory was around. But it wasn’t always possible. Sometimes her feet took her there without instruction to do so.
It happened thus that Saturday, the day of the blood.
She had been watching Rory at work on the kitchen door, chiseling several layers of paint from around the hinges, when she seemed to hear the room call. Satisfied that he was thoroughly engrossed in his chores, she went upstairs.
It was cooler than usual, and she was glad of it. She put her hand to the wall, and then transferred her chilled palm to her forehead.
“No use,” she murmured to herself, picturing the man at work downstairs. She didn’t love him; no more than he, beneath his infatuation with her face, loved her. He chiseled in a world of his own; she suffered here, far removed from him.
A gust of wind caught the back door below. She heard it slam.
Downstairs, the sound made Rory lose his concentration. The chisel jumped its groove and sliced deeply into the thumb of his left hand. He shouted, as a gush of color came.
The chisel hit the floor.
“Hell and damnation!”
She heard, but did nothing. Too late, she surfaced through a stupor of melancholy to realize that he was coming upstairs.
Fumbling for the key, and an excuse to justify her presence in the room, she stood up, but he was already at the door, crossing the threshold, rushing toward her, his right hand clamped ineptly around his left. Blood was coming in abundance. It welled up between his fingers and dribbled down his arm, dripping from his elbow, adding stain to stain on the bare boards.
“What have you done?” she asked him.
“What does it look like?” he said through gritted teeth. “Cut myself.”
His face and neck had gone the color of window putty. She’d seen him like this before; he had on occasion passed out at the sight of his own blood.
“Do something,” he said queasily.
“Is it deep?”
“I don’t know!” he yelled at her. “I don’t want to look.”
He was ridiculous, she thought, but this wasn’t the time to give vent to the contempt she felt. Instead she took his bloody hand in hers and, while he looked away, prized the palm from the cut. It was sizable, and still bleeding profusely. Deep blood, dark blood.
“I think we’d better take you off to the hospital,” she told him.
“Can you cover it up?” he asked, his voice devoid of anger now.
“Sure. I’ll get a clean binding. Come on—”
“No,” he said, shaking his ashen face. “If I take a step, I think I’ll pass out.”
“Stay here then,” she soothed him. “You’ll be fine.”
Finding no bandages in the bathroom cabinet the equal of the staunching, she fetched a few clean handkerchiefs from his drawer and went back into the room. He was leaning against the wall now, his skin glossy with sweat. He had padded in the blood he’d shed; she could taste the tang of it in the air.
Still quietly reassuring him that he wouldn’t die of a two-inch cut, she wound a handkerchief around his hand, bound it on with a second, then escorted him, trembling like a leaf, down the stairs (one by one, like a child) and out to the car.
At the hospital they waited an hour in a queue of the walking wounded before he was finally seen, and stitched up. It was difficult for her to know in retrospect what was more comical about the episode: his weakness, or the extravagance of his subsequent gratitude. She told him, when he became fulsome, that she didn’t want thanks from him, and it was true.
She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.
“Did you clean up the floor in the damp room?” she asked him the following day.
They’d called it the damp room since that first Sunday, though there was not a sign of rot from ceiling to skirting board.
Rory looked up from his magazine. Gray moons hung beneath his eyes. He hadn’t slept well, so he’d said. A cut finger, and he had nightmares of mortality. She, on the other hand, had slept like a babe.
“What did you say?” he asked her.
“The floor—” she said again. “There was blood on the floor. You cleaned it up.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said simply and returned to the magazine.
“Well I didn’t,” she said.
He offered her an indulgent smile. “You’re such a perfect hausfrau,” he said. “You don’t even know when you’re doing it.”
The subject was closed there. He was content, apparently, to believe that she was quietly losing her sanity.
She, on the other hand, had the strangest sense that she was about to find it again.
Kirsty hated parties. The smiles to be pasted on over the panic, the glances to be interpreted, and worst, the conversation. She had nothing to say of
the least interest to the world, of this she had long been convinced.
She’d watched too many eyes glaze over to believe otherwise, seen every device known to man for wheedling oneself out of the company of the dull, from “Will you excuse me, I believe I see my accountant,” to passing out dead drunk at her feet.
But Rory had insisted she come to the housewarming. Just a few close friends, he’d promised. She’d said yes, knowing all too well what scenario would ensue from refusal. Moping at home in a stew of self-recrimination, cursing her cowardice, and thinking of Rory’s sweet face.
The gathering wasn’t such a torment as it turned out. There were only nine guests in toto, all of whom she knew vaguely, which made it easier. They didn’t expect her to illuminate the room, only to nod and laugh where appropriate. And Rory—his hand still bound up—was at his most winning, full of guileless bonhomie. She even wondered if Neville—one of Rory’s work colleagues—wasn’t making eyes at her behind his spectacles, a suspicion that was confirmed in the middle of the evening when he maneuvered himself to her side and inquired whether she had any interest in cat breeding. She told him she hadn’t, but was always interested in new experiences. He seemed delighted, and on this fragile pretext proceeded to ply her with liqueurs for the rest of the night. By eleven-thirty she was a whoozy but happy wreck, prompted by the most casual remark to ever more painful fits of giggling.
A little after midnight, Julia declared that she was tired, and wanted to go to bed. The statement was taken as a general cue for dispersal, but Rory would have none of it.
He was up and refilling glasses before any-one had a chance to protest. Kirsty was certain she caught a look of displeasure cross Julia’s face, then it passed, and the brow was unsullied once’ again. She said her good-nights, was complimented profusely on her skill with calf ’s liver, and went to bed.
The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they? To Kirsty this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn’t blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.
But her spinning head had an inept hold on such ruminations, and the next minute Rory was up, and telling a joke about a gorilla and a Jesuit that had her choking on her drink before he’d even got to the votive candles.
Upstairs, Julia heard a fresh bout of laughter. She was indeed tired, as she’d claimed, but it wasn’t the cooking that had exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for the damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She’d called them friends once, these half-wits, with their poor jokes and their poorer pretensions. She had played along with them for several hours; it was enough. Now she needed some cool place, some darkness.
As soon as she opened the door of the damp room she knew things were not quite as they had been. The light from the shadeless bulb on the landing illuminated the boards where Rory’s blood had fallen, now so clean they might have been scrubbed.
Beyond the reach of the light, the room bowed to darkness. She stepped in, and closed the door. The lock clicked into place at her back.
The dark was almost perfect, and she was glad of it. Her eyes rested against the night, their surfaces chilled.
Then, from the far side of the room, she heard a sound.
It was no louder than the din of a cockroach running behind the skirting boards.
After seconds, it stopped. She held her breath. It came again. This time there seemed to be some pattern to the sound; a primitive code.
They were laughing like loons downstairs. The noise awoke desperation in her.
What would she not do, to be free of such company?
She swallowed, and spoke to the darkness.
“I hear you,” she said, not certain of why the words came, or to whom they were addressed.
The cockroach scratches ceased for a moment, and then began again, more urgently. She stepped away from the door and moved toward the noise. It continued, as if summoning her.
It was easy to miscalculate in the dark, and she reached the wall before she’d expected to. Raising her hands, she began to run her palms over the painted plaster. The surface was not uniformly cold. There was a place, she judged it to be halfway between door and window, where the chill became so intense she had to break contact. The cockroach stopped scratching.
There was a moment when she swam, totally disoriented, in darkness and silence.
And then, something moved in front of her.
A trick of her mind’s eye, she assumed, for there was only imagined light to be had here.
But the next spectacle showed her the error of that assumption.
The wall was alight, or rather something behind it burned with a cold luminescence that made the solid brick seem insubstantial stuff. More; the wall seemed to be coming apart, segments of it shifting and dislocating like a magician’s prop, oiled panels giving on to hidden boxes whose sides in turn collapsed to reveal some further hiding place.
She watched fixedly, not daring to even blink for fear she miss some detail of this extraordinary sleight-of-hand, while pieces of the world came apart in front of her eyes.
Then, suddenly, somewhere in this ever more elaborate system of sliding fragments, she saw (or again, seemed to see) movement.
Only now did she realize that she’d been holding her breath since this display began, and was beginning to become light-headed.
She tried to empty her lungs of the stale air, and take a draught of fresh, but her body would not obey this simple instruction.
Somewhere in her innards a tic of panic began. The hocus-pocus had stopped now, leaving one part of her admiring quite dispassionately the tinkling music that was coming from the wall, the other part fighting the fear that rose in her throat step by step.
Again, she tried to take a breath, but it was as if her body had died, and she was staring out of it, unable now to breathe or blink or swallow.
The spectacle of the unfolding wall had now ceased entirely, and she saw something flicker across the brick, ragged enough to be shadow but too substantial.
It was human, she saw, or had been. But the body had been ripped apart and sewn together again with most of its pieces either missing or twisted and blackened as if in a furnace. There was an eye, gleaming at her, and the ladder of a spine, the vertebrae stripped of muscle, a few unrecognizable fragments of anatomy. That was it. That such a thing might live beggared reason—what little flesh it owned was hopelessly corrupted. Yet live it did. Its eye, despite the rot it was rooted in, scanned her every inch, up and down.
She felt no fear in its presence. This thing was weaker than her by far. It moved a little in its cell, looking for some modicum of comfort. But there was none to be had, not for a creature that wore its frayed nerves on its bleeding sleeve. Every place it might lay its body brought pain: this she knew indisputably. She pitied it. And with pity came release. Her body expelled dead air, and sucked in living. Her oxygen-starved brain reeled.
Even as she did so it spoke, a hole opening up in the flayed ball of the monster’s head and issued a single, weightless word.
The word was:
“Julia.”
Kirsty put down her glass, and tried to stand up.
“Where are you going?” Neville asked her.
“Where do you think?” she replied, consciously trying to prevent the words from slurring.
“Do you need any help?” Rory inquired.
The alcohol made his lids lazy, and his grin lazier still.
“I am house-trained,” she replied, the riposte greeted with laughter all around. She was pleased with herself; off-the-cuff wit was not her forte. She stumbled to the door.
“It’s the last room on the right at the end of the landing,” Rory informed her.
“I know,” she said, and stepped out into the hall.
She didn’t usually enjoy the sensation of drunkenness, but tonight she was reveling in it. She felt loose-limbed and light-hearted.
&nbs
p; She might well regret this tomorrow, but tomorrow would have to take care of itself.
For tonight, she was flying.
She found her way to the bathroom, and relieved her aching bladder, then splashed some water onto her face. That done, she began her return journey.
She had taken three steps along the landing when she realized that somebody had put out the landing light while she was in the bathroom, and that same somebody was now standing a few yards away from her. She stopped.
“Hello?” she said. Had the cat breeder followed her upstairs, in the hope of proving he wasn’t spayed?
“Is that you?” she asked, only dimly aware that this was a singularly fruitless line of inquiry.
There was no reply, and she became a little uneasy.
“Come on,” she said, attempting a jocular manner that she hoped masked her anxiety,
“who is it?”
“Me,” said Julia. Her voice was odd.
Throaty, perhaps tearful.
“Are you all right?” Kirsty asked her. She wished she could see Julia’s face.
“Yes,” came the reply. “Why shouldn’t I be?” Within the space of those five words the actress in Julia seized control. The voice cleared, the tone lightened.
“I’m just tired . . .” she went on. “It sounds like you’re having a good time down there.”
“Are we keeping you awake?”