Then, slowly, Elizabeth turned her head to him. Conrad heard his heart beating in his ears as her deep green eyes slowly came into focus. The sweet features framed by the hanging hair began to seem animated. A tint of rose seemed to come into the white skin. She looked for all the world, Conrad thought, like a department store mannequin coming to life.
She raised her hand to her throat, unbuttoned her shirt, and bared her breasts to him.
“You can touch me,” she whispered, “if you’ll leave me alone.”
“Uh … ,” Conrad said. It was all he said. In spite of himself, his eyes flicked down over her. Her skin was smooth and white all over. Her breasts were small but gracefully shaped, and the sudden pink tips of them would have made him breathless, if he’d allowed it.
But he raised his eyes to her face. “Please button your shirt, Elizabeth,” he said.
Her lips parted. Her own eyes narrowed. “Don’t … don’t you want to touch me?”
Oh, boy, Conrad thought, don’t ask. “I want to help you,” he said evenly. “And I don’t think that’s the best way to go about it. Please button your shirt.”
Still looking confused, Elizabeth pulled the two halves of the shirt together. Conrad glanced away, afraid to let his eyes rest on her.
The poor bastard propositioned her, she just beat the living shit out of him. He could hear Sachs and his horsey laugh. And Robert Rostoff, he made a pass at her: whammo. She cut him up but good.
And what did you do to her, Jerry? Conrad thought. What did you do that made her go wild on you?
Don’t you want to touch me?
When he looked at her again, he was relieved to see she had buttoned the shirt. She had returned her hands to her lap. She had fixed him with a wary, but also curious, gaze.
Conrad leaned forward, spoke carefully. “Elizabeth … you’re accused of murder. Do you understand that?”
She did not answer right away. She gave a small, negative shake of her head. “I don’t … I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. There was a faintly automatic, singsong quality to her voice. It made her seem distant, as if she were commenting on events that didn’t concern her. “I don’t want to talk to you. You might be one of them.”
Conrad nodded, said nothing.
The girl reared back haughtily. “I mean, they all pretend they’re nice at first. Sometimes they fool me. But I know what they really want. I know.”
She looked at him from her high perch. She smiled, superior with her secret.
“All right,” said Conrad, “what do they want?”
She leaned toward him. “They want to take my mother out.”
“Your mother,” Conrad said with an encouraging nod.
“Yes. That’s what Robert Rostoff told me.”
“Robert Rostoff. The man who was killed.”
“Yes. He told me, he warned me. That’s what they were going to do.”
“And it made you angry.”
Elizabeth began to nod, but stopped. “Oh, no,” she said carefully. “Not me. I wasn’t angry. It was the Secret Friend. He got very mad. He did a bad thing. Very bad. That’s why I’m here. But it wasn’t me. It was the Secret Friend.”
Conrad waited a moment to see if she would say more, but she didn’t. She gazed past him, chewing her lip. She seemed to be trying to remember something.
Conrad prompted her. “The Secret Friend didn’t want them to take out your mother.”
“Yes. That’s right. Yes.”
“Why not, Elizabeth?”
“What?” She blinked and shifted her gaze back to him. “Well … because there would be worms coming out of her eyes by now,” she told him simply. “Worms and … and bony fingers coming out from her flesh.” She made a face, shuddered. “And her flesh would be all like rags with the bones coming out of it, and there would be her empty eyes with the worms in them …”
Conrad felt a small chill on the back of his neck. He actually glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was there, that no one was sneaking up behind him. (No one with worms, anyway, coming out of her eyes.) There was only the dimly lit little cell. The wooden door with the thin vertical window. The washbasin, the shadow of it stretched on the plastic table. The taut and empty bed.
He cleared his throat as he looked back at her. “Your mother is dead, you mean,” he said.
“Yes. Oh, yes. And if they took her out, you know, her soul might fly away. And then there might be nothing left of her anywhere.” She shook her head sadly. Looked at him earnestly. “Everyone has a soul, you know. Everyone. Even me. I can feel mine sometimes. I wouldn’t want it to fly away. I can feel it right there inside of me.”
Elizabeth lifted her hands from her lap. She lifted them to her shoulders, crossing her arms over her breasts. For a moment, Conrad was afraid she would undress herself again. But instead, she hugged herself tightly. She closed her eyes. She lifted her face to the light as if it were the sun. Rocked herself gently back and forth beneath it.
“I can feel it right now. I can feel my soul,” she murmured. “It’s still in here. I’m still in here.”
Conrad sat without moving. He watched her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Moment after moment, she rocked herself under the lamplight, hugging herself with her crossed arms. And then, as Conrad stared, the expression on her face began to change. Her mouth was tugged down, her chin wrinkled. Her lips began to quiver as if she were on the brink of tears …
With a sudden gasp, she opened her eyes and looked at him. Conrad felt it like a blow. He started back a little in his chair. Those eyes, those crystal green pools, had cleared to their very bottoms. He saw her agony in them. Naked and bright: the hard fire of pain at the center of her.
“Oh, God,” she barely managed to whisper. “I’m still in here.” One of her hands reached for him, took hold of his. He felt the heat, the desperate pressure of her fingers on his palm. “Oh, God, oh, God,” she cried to him softly. “Please. Please, Doctor. I’m still in here.”
The Cemetery
In the evening, Conrad went to the cemetery. It was a small and shabby place. Its old monuments and Celtic crosses stood skewed and chipped in the purple twilight. A chilly mist, rank with the city, wove its tendrils between the graves.
The spot he wanted was in the back, near the slanting iron fence. It was marked by a statue of a mourning woman. The cowled figure bowed over the gravesite, one hand gesturing down to it. Conrad went toward her, walking through the mist, among the stones.
As Conrad came near, he saw that the grave beneath the statue had not been filled in. He had expected that. Still, as he came to the edge, he felt a cold spot in his stomach. He looked down into the pit and saw the coffin lying at the bottom. It was a heavy gray box with a cross carved into the top of it. He raised his eyes and saw for the first time something odd about the statue above him. The mourning woman was smiling. She was staring down at him with a mad, bright-eyed smile. Seeing it, the chill of fear in Conrad’s stomach grew. His limbs felt weak and rubbery.
And then a sound came from the coffin below him.
Conrad wanted to run. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to look. He had to. He lowered his eyes to the open grave. The noise came again: a distant, inquiring murmur. Conrad knew the coffin was about to open—he had seen it happen in the movies a dozen times. But he still couldn’t run, couldn’t even turn away. He stood helpless as the lid slowly, steadily lifted. He began to moan with fear. He began to tremble.
The coffin opened and he saw her. He cried out wordlessly. She reached for him with her arms: two shafts of rotted flesh. She smiled at him as her eyes cracked open like eggs and the spiders came crawling out of them.
“I’m still in here, Nathan,” she whispered to him. “Don’t you want to touch me?”
With a cry, Conrad sat up in bed. His heart was hammering in his chest. He was gasping for air. Even now, it took a moment before he realized it had been a dream. The outline of the TV set came into focus in the dark. The
drift of the curtains, the smell of the October rain. He saw his wife beneath the covers and laid his hand on the rise of her hip.
“Shee-yet,” he said softly. He lay back against his pillow, feeling the sweat there. “Shee-yet.”
The dream stayed with him through the morning. The dream—and the girl. It was Saturday; his turn to take Jessica to her violin group. All the while he was getting her ready, talking and joking with her on the bus to Eleventh Street, listening to her play with the other children, he was thinking about the dream, about Elizabeth.
Conrad liked going to the group. He liked the old music school. He liked to walk through the halls and hear the sounds drifting out of the classrooms. The halting pianos, the screechy violins. He liked to glance in the dance room and see the girls in their leotards, practicing leg lifts at the barre. Children learning music, dance: it made him feel warm and melancholy.
He had never learned to play an instrument himself. He could remember his mother saying to him once when he was in his teens: “Why don’t you learn to play an instrument, Nathan?” He could remember her sitting in the armchair in the family room at the back of the house. The window was behind her. The cherry tree just outside it cushioned her on a background of pink and white blooms.
She was sipping at a glass of grapefruit juice—grapefruit juice secretly laced with vodka—and she pouted at him. And she said, “Why don’t you learn to play an instrument?” It was the usual tone of voice she used for such advice. That same vaguely despairing tone in which she would say, “Why don’t you take up a sport, Nathan?” or “Why don’t you join an after-school club?” That faint, distant, unhelpful little voice.
And then his father, seated on the sofa, glanced up from his newspaper. Chimed in: “I always felt that if you can’t do something well, there’s no sense in taking the thing up at all.” Yes, and that was his usual advisory tone; his deep, wise-man’s voice. That was the voice in which he would sometimes tell his wife, “Well, of course I want you to give up drinking, dear. I just don’t think you ought to try it all at once, that’s all. A little at a time, that’s the secret.” A man full of good advice was dear old Dad.
But the truth was, it wouldn’t have mattered what they said, or how they said it. It wouldn’t have changed a damned thing if his mother had bought him a Stradivarius and laid the instrument in his hands with her blessing, or if his father had put an arm around his shoulders and cried, “Go forth, my son, to strive and achieve.” Nathan would still not have learned to play an instrument; he still wouldn’t have taken up a sport or joined an after-school club. He wouldn’t have done any of those things because they would’ve kept him away from home more. They would have left his mom alone more. Alone with her not-so-secret bottles of vodka and gin. Wasn’t that why she was making her faint little suggestions in the first place? To get rid of him? He thought so at the time in any case.
So—in any case—he enjoyed being here at the school now with his daughter. It made him glad for her—and a little envious of her too in a proud, pleasant way. He would sit cross-legged on the wooden floor of the upstairs dance room, a broad space with mirrors along the wall. The children would gather with their violins in a circle around the smiling young woman who taught them. They would saw their ways through “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star,” and “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” and “Song of the Wind.” And Conrad would watch his daughter and nod with approval. He was careful to show that approval on his face because she sometimes glanced up at him as she played. She would steal a look at him, then force down a secret smile when she saw him nodding.
But today his mind wandered. It kept going back to the dream, to the girl. He could still remember the clammy fear that had gone through him as he stood at the grave-side. He remembered it—and then thought of the little chill he had felt when Elizabeth Burrows first described her mother.
There would be her empty eyes with the worms in them.
That tingle of irrational doubt. The frisson of meeting up with madness.
He nodded and smiled quickly as Jessica snuck a peek at him. The group was playing “Oh, Come, Little Children.” It was one of the tougher beginner’s pieces. It had a complicated double upbow stroke at points. Last week, Jessie had been one of those who had to sit down while the more advanced students played it. But she’d been practicing all week long. Now, while a few kids still sat, she stood and played with the others. Conrad slipped her a wink when she glanced at him. She fought back her smile and returned her attention to the violin.
Conrad kept watching her, but with distant eyes. He was thinking again about Elizabeth.
They want to take my mother out. It made the Secret Friend angry. He did a bad thing.
There was always, in Conrad’s experience, that little chill, that shudder, when you first entered a mad person’s world. It was like edging forward into alien territory—and then suddenly stepping into quicksand …
Oh, there would be worms coming out of her eyes by now. And bony fingers coming out from her flesh …
You found yourself sinking into a subterranean jungle, a place of threatening shapes and shadows, of chthonic vampires reaching for you out of the morass …
And her flesh would be all like rags with the bones coming out of it, and there would be her empty eyes with the worms in them …
And yet, that world, that jungle—it was all made of the same materials as your world was. It was just as internal. The logic of it was just as complete. The true shaping hand was just as authoritative and unreliable and unknown. So it made you shudder because it made you remember that you also lived in an ignorance that might be madness …
The Secret Friend did a bad thing. That’s why I’m here.
The song came to an end. Conrad recalled himself just in time to give Jessica a thumbs-up. She was bouncing on her toes and grinning, giddy with her achievement.
“Tell me more,” he said to her. “Tell me more about this secret friend.”
He had not planned to see Elizabeth again until Wednesday. But Mr. Blum, his four-thirty session, had come up with another of the many diseases that helped him explain to himself why his wife had betrayed and deserted him. He’d called in the morning to cancel. Conrad, on an impulse, immediately phoned Mrs. Halliway, his five-thirty. He worked her in to a seven P.M. Tuesday slot and so had a chunk of evening free. Almost to his surprise, he found himself driving out to the Impellitteri facility.
He found Elizabeth just as she had been on Friday. Wearing the same clothes, sitting in her chair by the window, hands in her lap, eyes on the distance. Sachs had told Conrad that she hadn’t spoken again since his session with her. But she had been eating by herself and had gotten up to go to the toilet, though she always returned immediately to her chair. Sachs had not wanted to risk upsetting her again. He’d ordered the aides to keep watch on her but otherwise to leave her alone unless she asked for something. Conrad found this an act of extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence for Sachs. The jerk was obviously eager as hell to have this thing work out.
As for Conrad, though, he wasn’t expecting much. He was pleased the patient had dropped her silence with him, but he figured he was in for weeks of paranoid sparring, delusional rambling. He doubted he’d ever get much past that with her, in fact.
Still, when he came into her room, she did steal a glance at him. And while she didn’t exactly smile, Conrad thought he saw some small flickering of pleasure in her eyes.
He took his cassette recorder out of his pocket, pressed the red button, and set it on the table. Then he placed his chair in front of her and straddled it as he had before. He smiled. “How are you today, Elizabeth?”
She looked at him again, then looked quickly away. She didn’t answer.
“Your hair looks nice,” he said. He noticed she had brushed it. The straight fall of strawberry-blond was smooth and shining.
Again, he detected pleasure at the compliment. But she would not speak.
After a few seconds, he said, “You
’re not talking to me, is that it?”
This time, her glance at him was longer. It was still wary, but now, Conrad thought, there was something playful in it.
“You might be one of them.” The girl spoke softly, almost whispering. “Anyone might be. I don’t know.”
“Is that why you haven’t said anything all weekend?”
She inclined her chin slightly. “Dr. Sachs is one of them. I know that. And the others … I can’t tell.” She paused, pressed her lips together as if trying not to go on. “He can tell,” she said then.
“Who’s that?”
“Him. You know.”
“Your secret friend.”
She nodded.
“And what does your secret friend tell you about me?” Conrad asked.
Now she did smile. And it made Conrad catch his breath a little. The pink at the inner edges of her pale lips, the slight flush beneath the white skin. The way her small, perfect features brightened. Elizabeth looked down shyly.
“You didn’t touch me,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“He doesn’t come when you’re here. You don’t make him angry. You don’t …” She raised her eyes to him but her voice trailed away.
“Don’t what, Elizabeth?”
“You don’t want to take my mother out.”
“That’s right. So I’m not one of them?”
“No. I don’t … I don’t think so.”
Conrad nodded slowly for a few seconds. Stalling. Trying to gauge how far he could go. Finally, on impulse, he leaned forward a little and said, “Tell me more. Tell me more about this secret friend.”
It was a long moment before she answered. Very long. Elizabeth gazed at him thoughtfully. Conrad waited to see which way she would go. Probably, he thought, she would joust with him some more. Or, probably, she would fall silent; she would smile slyly and clutch her delusions to herself, protect them from him as if they were her children.
Or maybe …