Although it was only 7:40, Laguna Beach appeared to have closed down for the night, the mist-shrouded hills sloping through silence to the sea, the traffic already midnight-light as the ocean sloughed off ever thicker masses of land-hugging clouds, a lone coyote howling out of a canyon as if lost and grieving for its vanished pack.
She drove Pogo’s Honda north into the blinding murk, which seemed appropriate, given that her life had become a dismal swamp of puzzles and enigmas, that all the potential futures she’d foreseen for herself were now dissolved into a soup of possibilities she did not want to contemplate.
Although the swarm of cultists that had descended on Fashion Island surely didn’t remain there hours later, Bibi went instead to another mall. She purchased new copies of the story collections by Flannery O’Connor, Thornton Wilder, and Jack London. She also bought a flashlight, batteries for it, and a Scrabble game.
From there, she traveled south once more, to Corona del Mar, where she cruised past the sweet bungalow in which she had lived for nineteen years, until she had moved to her apartment. A year later, Murphy and Nancy had sold the place to a couple, the Gillenhocks, who made their money in cattle-rustling and cockfighting. Well, the story was that they were successful investment bankers who were able to retire at fifty-three, but the one time Bibi met them, she felt that they were no more investment bankers than she was a concert pianist. The Gillenhocks had spent the past two years offering ever more money to the reluctant-to-move people who owned the property next door, until they acquired it as well, meanwhile working with an architect to design a residence that would, they no doubt hoped, leave their neighbors abashed and envious.
Only recently, the combined properties had been surrounded with a construction fence: chain-link with a green polyurethane overlay for privacy. Although the landscaping had been torn out and hauled away, the buildings had not yet been demolished.
She parked two blocks from the bungalow. She put batteries in the flashlight, which she would use only in the garage apartment. She left her purse under the seat and locked the car and walked streets that were familiar even in the obliterating fog.
The night was as still as a funeral parlor, the houses like mausoleums in the mist.
In addition to a large gate at the front, the construction fence featured another off the wide alleyway, to which houses backed up from parallel streets. All the garage doors were here. At any moment, a car might turn in at one corner or the other, the driver remoting a door ahead of him, and even in the near white-out, she would be seen.
The privacy material was fixed on the exterior of the fencing, and she had to slash it with Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade in order to be able to get toeholds in the chain-link. Unlike the rest of the fence, the gate had a toprail that covered the cut-off twists of steel, eliminating the risk of puncturing her hands. She went up and over the gate, into the carport next to the garage.
In the brick-paved courtyard, something about the angles and the juxtaposed planes of the surrounding buildings magnified the vague exhalation of the sea into a somewhat less faint draft that set the fog in slow motion counterclockwise. Bibi felt as if she were being drawn upward even before she climbed the stairs to the apartment above the garage.
The apartment door wasn’t locked. The place was empty. Nothing remained to be stolen. Vandals would be discouraged by the fact that the buildings were soon being torn down; no one cared what damage they might do.
She switched on the flashlight, partly hooding it with her hand, but confident that the pale glow wouldn’t inspire curiosity in anyone outside. The apartment had been stripped of furniture when the house sold. The blue-and-gray speckled linoleum, dulled by dirt, littered with bits of paper and a few dead beetles, had split in places and curled back from the baseboard.
Bibi stood where she had stood on the morning that she found him dead, when she was ten years old. He’d been at his breakfast when it happened, a bowl of cereal and a plate of toast on the table before him, his newspaper folded open to the opinion pages. He must have gotten to his feet before he’d fallen and hit his head on the corner of the table. He’d been lying on his left side. A lake of blood had gushed from nose or mouth, or both. Blood colored his staring eyes as well, and his lashes were jeweled with scarlet tears.
She’d thought someone killed him. Even so, she had not run in fright. She had been too devastated to have a capacity for fear; she had room only for grief. She’d said aloud, Grandpa, no. Oh, no, no. I still need you, Grandpa.
That had been the only time she ever called him Grandpa. For the first couple of weeks after he moved in above the garage, she didn’t know that he was her mother’s father. By then he was forever Captain to Bibi. He preferred it that way, too, because he felt that Bibi’s mother would be rubbed raw by hearing the G-word all the time. Nancy didn’t call him Dad. To her, he was Gunther, his first name. He said that Nancy had it right, that he had never been a good enough father to deserve to be called Dad. But as far as Bibi was concerned, he had become a perfect grandfather.
There had been no hostility between Nancy and the captain, just a distance that couldn’t be bridged, a staining sorrow neither knew how to wash away. There was even affection sometimes, moments when you could glimpse how things might have been between them.
The coroner declared the cause of death was an aneurysm, a rare type, that burst with force. The captain didn’t know he had it. He’d bled out so fast, there was no hope.
Nancy had wept, surprised by the intensity of her grief.
The weeks after Captain’s death had been hard for all of them, hardest for Bibi. When the golden retriever came to her out of the rain, a friend when she most needed one, she called him Olaf, because that was Captain’s middle name. Gunther Olaf Ericson, United States Marine Corps, retired.
She had warned the dog to stay away from the apartment because evil dwelt there. But nothing wicked had roamed those rooms when the captain lived in them. Because of him, it was a fine place. The evil came only in the weeks after he passed away.
Now, twelve years after those bad days, she had returned to learn if that evil might still linger. Or if not the abomination itself, something that would help her to recall what had happened in the attic. As she had written in her little spiral-bound notebook, that incident was one of three lost memories that were somehow the roots of her current crisis.
Call this shock therapy.
Or desperation.
She had not brought the butane lighter. On the walk between the motel and the Honda, she had dropped it in a public trash can. She hadn’t purchased another lighter at the mall. If she achieved some breakthrough, the recovery of a crucial memory, she would not be able easily to employ the captain’s memory trick and erase the newfound knowledge before putting it to use.
Following the flashlight, she went from the kitchen into the empty living room, darkness reclaiming the apartment behind her, darkness to either side of her, darkness retreating ahead, but only where the cold white LED beam forced it to relent.
She’d been aware of an unpleasant smell in the kitchen; but it lacked strength. By the time that she reached the bedroom, the odor intensified. A stink nurtured by two years of abandonment. Mold thriving in the walls. Mouse piss.
In the bedroom closet, she reached to the dangling pull-cord with her left hand and drew down the folding ladder.
Bibi did not switch on the attic lights. The electricity had probably been disconnected in preparation for the demolition crew. Even if power was available, she preferred not to ascend into the glare of the gable-to-gable string of bare light bulbs that she had been grateful for twelve years earlier. She had been scared on that previous adventure but also driven by a not unpleasant expectation; and she wanted to recapture as much of that mix of feelings as she could, the better to jar her memory. As an adult, she didn’t scare as easily as she had back in the day. A greater measure of darkness might juice the fear factor.
When she reached the top of the
ladder and stepped into the attic, the flashlight silvered the fog drifting through one of the screened vents just under the eaves, a slowly churning mass, almost pulsing, like the ectoplasm summoned from another world during a séance. She recalled the long fingers of fog questing through the same opening on that Sunday morning twelve years earlier.
The central aisle flanked by rows of shelving was as before, although everything once stored there had long ago been removed. The shelves were backed with sheets of Masonite, preventing her from seeing into the side aisles until she arrived at the head of each.
On that far-away Sunday, maybe there had been a presence in the next to the last aisle on her left, though Bibi did not expect to encounter it now. She hoped only that, standing where she had stood then, teasing herself into a similar frame of mind, she might recall a useful fragment that had survived the flames of the captain’s memory trick.
The flashlight flensed away the darkness to the left, and no figure loomed there. She probed the side aisle to her right. It was likewise deserted.
A final pair of side aisles were unexplored, but logic insisted that she needed to remain in the precise spot where she had stood on that previous occasion. She faced to the left, trying to summon a recollection of whoever or whatever had moved from shadow into light.
She listened to settling noises in the old structure, of which there were many, breathed in the rankness of mold and rodent droppings, shivered not from fear but from the chill of the night, and waited, waited.
Although uneasy, even apprehensive, she wasn’t fearful to the degree she had been as a young girl. She doubted that she could recapture that anxious mood to a sufficient extent in the current environment. So she switched off the flashlight, plunging the attic into perfect darkness.
That was better.
Her apprehension acquired a sharper edge. The settling noises seemed to become more numerous and were certainly more intimate than they’d been before. Some might have been caused not by the shifting of inanimate materials, but instead by mice or rats, or by songless night birds roosting in the rafters. Without vision, she had a keener sense of smell. The odors were not more pleasant, but richer, with greater nuance. She thought that she heard someone breathing nearby, a quick and shallow respiration, but when she held her breath, she realized that she had been listening to herself.
The recollection came with no flash-and-dazzle, no trumpets of revelation, only two voices, hers as a child and the captain’s. The conversation that she recalled had occurred long before his death, not here in the attic, outside in a place where the black limbs of a tree cradled orange fire but were not set ablaze.
“Holy shit,” Captain says.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, Bibi. Bad language.”
“It’s okay.”
“I mean, look at me,” Captain says, “I’m still shaking.”
“Me, too.”
“Good God, you kept this all to yourself for so long.”
“Like eight months. I had to keep it myself. Till you.”
“But I’ve been here six months.”
“I had to be sure, would you be okay to tell.”
“Sonofabitch. Sorry, Bibi. But sonofabitch! This is nuts.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“No. Of course you’re not, sweetheart. You’re the furthest thing from crazy. That isn’t what I mean.”
They are sitting in the chairs on the small balcony outside his apartment. The sun is orange, but still more than an hour from the sea, blazing through the branches of the ancient front-yard ficus that towers over the bungalow, beaming fire and spilling shadows into the courtyard.
Captain says, “So you decided right from the start, you can’t ever tell your mom and dad.”
“Not ever, never.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know so much why,” Bibi says. “I just know I can’t because…of the way they are. Yeah, they’re real nice and real smart, and all….”
“They’re good people,” Captain agrees.
“I love them lots.”
“You better damn well love them, missy. They deserve it.”
“Yes, sir. I know. I do.”
“You never stop loving them.”
“No, sir. I won’t.”
“They brought you into the world because they wanted you. And they sure love you to pieces.”
“But if they knew,” Bibi says, “they’d get it all wrong.”
“Almost anyone would, not just them.”
“They wouldn’t mean to.”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
“But if they get it all wrong, what happens to me? To them and me and everything?”
“That’s something to worry about, all right.” He holds his hands up and stares at them. They are still trembling. He looks at Bibi. “How old are you for real?”
“Same as yesterday. Six and a half.”
“You are and you aren’t.”
“You know what I mean about Mommy and Daddy, how they are?”
Captain is quiet, but he’s thinking so hard and fast that Bibi wouldn’t be surprised if suddenly she heard his mind spinning. Then he says, “Yeah, I do. I know what you mean. But I’m not sure I can put it into words any better than you can.”
“So is it wrong not to tell them?”
“I can’t believe you kept it to yourself, almost eight months since it happened. Afraid and never showing it.”
“But is it wrong not to tell them?”
“No. It’s not wrong or right. It’s what’s best for you…for everyone.”
The silent sun slides limb by limb through the tree, and the mosaic of light and shadow on the courtyard floor slowly changes.
Captain says, “Tell me, what do you need most?”
“You mean…like what?”
“What do you most want to do about all this?”
“I wish none of it ever happened. I don’t want to be scared so bad.”
Captain says, “So you need to forget what happened, why it happened, how it happened?”
“But I can’t. I can’t ever forget.”
He held out one of his big hands, and she put her tiny hand in it, and they sat like that for a while, holding hands from chair to chair, as he seemed to think about the situation, and then he said, “Maybe there is. Maybe there is a way to forget.”
Bibi snapped from memory into the present, from the orange light of a westering sun into the pitch-black attic, when someone behind her put a hand on her right shoulder.
Startled, she simultaneously switched on the flashlight and fumbled it, dropped it. The beam rolled on the particleboard floor, sweeping a bright arc across the center aisle.
She ducked away from the hand on her shoulder, reached down, grabbed the flashlight, rose, pivoted, and slashed empty air with the beam. No one.
The last two side aisles—one to the left, one to the right—still had not been explored. If someone had actually put a hand on her, he might have retreated into one of those spaces.
Valiant girls were never conquered by their fear. Valiant girls understood that if everyone backed away from confrontation with evil, this world would be a prison from pole to pole, ruled with cruelty and brutality by the worst of humanity, no corner left for freedom. Every retreat, every appeasement, was one step down a staircase to Hell on Earth.
She drew the pistol. A one-hand grip was never good, but she needed her left for the flashlight. Forward then, swivel to the left, to the right. If someone had touched her, he wasn’t in either of the last two aisles, and there was nowhere else that he could have gone.
Like a community of ghosts, fog escorted her down the apartment stairs and across the courtyard to the bungalow. She had come here to visit the two places where the lost memories of her youth might still be found, the second being her former bedroom. Because the house had been stripped of everything having value—from used appliances to antique fixtures—and because demolition would soon occur, the back door was u
nlocked.
She entered a house that had once been warm and welcoming, that had resonated with conversation and laughter and music, where her dad and mom had sometimes pushed aside the kitchen table to dance in the middle of the floor, where Olaf had been the family fur child for six happy years. None of those memories had been purged from Bibi, and she expected, after an absence of only three years, to be bathed in nostalgia when she crossed the threshold, to see at every turn the best moments of a blessed childhood and adolescence.
Instead, the air hung cold and damp and thick with a fungous scent. The flashlight revealed dirt and damage everywhere it probed: a ceiling discolored and sagging from an unchecked roof leak, holes in the plaster through which ribs of lath were revealed, a largely decomposed rat with eyeless sockets and tight grin of pointed teeth, empty hamburger containers and soda cans and candy wrappers perhaps discarded by the salvage workers in the first phase of demolition. But the disrepair and debris did not alone transform the familiar into the alien. Beneath the chill in the air and the bleakness of ruination lay another coldness, a frigid emptiness that had nothing to do with the want of furniture or the lack of central heating, that resulted from the absence of the human spirit.