The former Prince stood stock-still, momentarily dazzled by the glare of the headlights. If Jessie had dropped the transmission into drive just then, she probably could have driven forward and killed it. The thought even crossed her mind, but in a distant, almost academic way. Her hate and fear of the dog had gone. She saw how scrawny it was, and how the burdocks stuck in its matted coat--a coat too thin to offer much protection against the coming winter. Most of all she saw the way it cringed away from the light, its ears drooping, its hindquarters shrinking against the driveway.
I didn't think it was possible, she thought, but I believe I've come across something that's even more wretched than I am.
She hit the Mercedes's horn-ring with the heel of her left hand. It uttered a single brief sound, more burp than beep, but it was enough to get the dog started. It turned and vanished into the woods without so much as a single look back.
Follow its example, Jess. Get out of here while you still can.
Good idea. In fact, it was the only idea. She reached across her body again with her left hand, this time to pull the transmission lever down into Drive. It caught with its usual reassuring little hitch and the car began rolling slowly up the paved driveway. The wind-driven trees shimmied like shadow-dancers on either side of it, sending the fall's first tornado-funnels of leaves whirling up into the night sky. I'm doing it, Jessie thought with wonder. I'm actually doing it, actually getting the puck out of here.
She was rolling up the driveway, rolling toward the unnamed wheel-track which would take her to Bay Lane, which would in its turn take her to Route 117 and civilization. As she watched the house (it looked more than ever like a huge white skull in the windy October moonlight) shrink in the rearview mirror, she thought: Why is it letting me go? And is it? Is it really?
Part of her--the fear-maddened part which would never entirely escape the handcuffs and the master bedroom of the house on the upper bay of Kashwakamak Lake--assured her that it wasn't; the creature with the wicker case was only playing with her, as a cat plays with a wounded mouse. Before she got much farther, certainly before she got to the top of the driveway, it would come racing after her, using its long cartoon legs to close the distance between them, stretching out its long cartoon arms to seize the rear bumper and bring the car to a halt. German efficiency was fine, but when you were dealing with something which had come back from the dead... well...
But the house continued to dwindle in the rearview mirror, and nothing came out of the back door. Jessie reached the top of the driveway, turned right, and began to follow her high beams down the narrow wheelruts toward Bay Lane, guiding the car with her left hand. Every second or third August a volunteer crew of summer residents, fueled mostly by beer and gossip, cut back the underbrush and trimmed the overhanging branches along the way out to Bay Lane, but this had been an off-year and the lane was much narrower than Jessie liked. Each time a wind-driven branch tapped at the car's roof or body, she cringed a little.
Yet she was escaping. One by one the landmarks she had learned over the years made their appearance in the headlights and then dwindled behind her: the huge rock with the split top, the overgrown gate with the faded sign reading RIDEOUT'S HIDEOUT nailed to it, the uprooted spruce leaning amid a stand of smaller spruces like a large drunk being carried home by his smaller, livelier friends. The drunk spruce was only three-tenths of a mile from Bay Lane, and it was only two miles to the highway from there.
"I can handle it if I take it easy," she said, and pushed the radio ON button with her right thumb, doing it very carefully. Bach--mellow, stately, and above all, rational--flooded the car from four directions. Better and better. "Take it easy," she repeated, speaking a little louder. "Go greasy." Even the last shock--the stray dog's glaring orange eyes--was fading a little now, although she could feel herself beginning to shake. "No problems whatsoever, if I just take it easy."
She was doing that, all right--maybe a little too easy, in fact. The speedometer needle was barely touching the 10 MPH mark. Being safely locked in the familiar surroundings of one's own car was a wonderful restorative--already she had begun to wonder if she hadn't been jumping at shadows all along--but this would be a very bad time to begin taking things for granted. If there had been someone in the house, he (it, some deeper voice--the UFO of all UFOs--insisted) might have used one of the other doors to leave the house. He might be following her right now. It was even possible that, were she to continue puddling along at a mere ten miles an hour, a really determined follower might catch up.
Jessie flicked her eyes up to the rearview mirror, wanting to reassure herself that this idea was only paranoia induced by shock and exhaustion, and felt her heart fall dead in her chest. Her left hand dropped from the wheel and thumped into her lap on top of the right. That should have hurt like hell, but there was no pain--absolutely none at all.
The stranger was sitting in the back seat with its eerily long hands pressed against the sides of its head, like the monkey that hears no evil. Its black eyes stared at her with sublimely empty interest.
You see... me see... WE see... nothing but shadows! Punkin cried, but this cry was more than distant; it seemed to have originated at the other end of the universe.
And it wasn't true. It was more than shadows she saw in the mirror. The thing sitting back there was tangled in shadows, yes, but not made of them. She saw its face: bulging brow, round black eyes, blade-thin nose, plump, misshapen lips.
"Jessie!" the space cowboy whispered ecstatically. "Nora! Ruth! My-oh-my! Punkin Pie!"
Her eyes, frozen on the mirror, saw her passenger lean slowly forward, saw its swollen forehead nodding toward her right ear as if the creature intended to tell her a secret. She saw its pudgy lips slide away from its jutting, discolored teeth in a grimacing, vapid smile. It was at this point that the final breakup of Jessie Burlingame's mind began.
No! her own voice cried in a voice as thin as the voice of a vocalist on a scratchy old 78-rpm record. No, please no! It's not fair!
"Jessie!" Its stinking breath as sharp as a rasp and as cold as air inside a meat-locker. "Nora! Jessie! Ruth! Jessie! Punkin! Goodwife! Jessie! Mommy!"
Her bulging eyes noted that the long white face was now half-hidden in her hair and its grinning mouth was almost kissing her ear as it whispered its delicious secret over and over and over: "Jessie! Nora! Goody! Punkin! Jessie! Jessie! Jessie!"
There was a white airburst inside her eyes, and what it left behind was a big dark hole. As Jessie dove into it, she had one final coherent thought: I shouldn't have looked--it burned my eyes after all.
Then she fell forward toward the wheel in a faint. As the Mercedes struck one of the large pines which bordered this section of the road, the seatbelt locked and jerked her backward again. The crash would probably have triggered the airbag, if the Mercedes had been a model recent enough to have come equipped with the system. It was not hard enough to damage the engine or even cause it to stall; good old German efficiency had triumphed again. The bumper and grille were dented and the hood ornament was knocked askew, but the engine idled contentedly away to itself.
After about five minutes, a microchip buried in the dashboard sensed that the motor was now warm enough to turn on the heater. Blowers under the dash began to whoosh softly. Jessie had slumped sideways against the driver's door, where she lay with her cheek pressed to the window, looking like a tired child who has finally given up and gone to sleep with grandma's house just over the next hill. Above her, the rearview mirror reflected the empty back seat and the empty moonlit lane behind it.
35
It had been snowing all morning--gloomy, but good letter-writing weather --and when a bar of sun fell across the keyboard of the Mac, Jessie glanced up in surprise, startled out of her thoughts. What she saw out the window did more than charm her; it filled her with an emotion she had not experienced for a long time and hadn't expected to experience again for a long time to come, if ever. It was joy--a deep, complex joy she coul
d never have explained.
The snow hadn't stopped--not entirely, anyway--but a bright February sun had broken through the clouds overhead, turning both the fresh six inches on the ground and the snow still floating down through the air to a brilliant diamantine white. The window offered a sweeping view of Portland's Eastern Promenade, and it was a view which had soothed and fascinated Jessie in all weathers and seasons, but she had never seen anything quite like this; the combination of snow and sun had turned the gray air over Casco Bay into a fabulous jewel-box of interlocking rainbows.
If there were real people living in those snow-globes where you can shake up a blizzard any time you want to, they'd see this weather all the time, she thought, and laughed.
This sound was as fabulously strange to her ears as that feeling of joy was to her heart, and it only took a moment's thought to realize why: she hadn't laughed at all since the previous October. She referred to those hours, the last ones she ever intended to spend by Kashwakamak (or any other lake, for that matter), simply as "my hard time." This phrase told what was necessary and not one thing more, she felt. Which was just the way she liked it.
No laughs at all since then? Zilch? Zero? Are you sure?
Not absolutely sure, no. She supposed she might have laughed in dreams--God knew she had cried in enough of them--but as far as her waking hours went, it had been a shutout until now. She remembered the last one very clearly: reaching across her body with her left hand so she could get the keys out of the right pocket of her culotte skirt, telling the windy darkness she was going to make like an amoeba and split. That, so far as she knew, had been the last laugh until now.
"Only that and nothing more," Jessie murmured. She took a pack of cigarettes out of her shirt pocket and lit one. God, how that phrase brought it all back--the only other thing with the power to do it so quickly and completely, she had discovered, was that awful song by Marvin Gaye. She'd heard it once on the radio when she'd been driving back from one of the seemingly endless doctor's appointments which had made up her life this winter, Marvin wailing "Everybody knows... especially you girls ..." in that soft, insinuating voice of his. She had turned the radio off at once, but she'd still been shaking too badly to drive. She had parked and waited for the worst of the shakes to pass. Eventually they had, but on the nights when she didn't wake up muttering that phrase from "The Raven" over and over into her sweat-soaked pillow, she heard herself chanting, "Witness, witness." As far as Jessie was concerned, it was six of one and half a million of the other.
She dragged deep on her cigarette, puffed out three perfect rings, and watched them rise slowly above the humming Mac.
When people were stupid enough or tasteless enough to ask about her ordeal (and she had discovered she knew a great many more stupid, tasteless people than she ever would have guessed), she told them she couldn't remember much of what had happened. After the first two or three police interviews, she began to tell the cops and all but one of Gerald's colleagues the same thing. The single exception had been Brandon Milheron. To him she had told the truth, partly because she needed his help but mostly because Brandon had been the only one who had displayed the slightest understanding of what she had gone through... was still going through. He hadn't wasted her time with pity, and what a relief that had been. Jessie had also discovered that pity came cheap in the aftermath of tragedy, and that all the pity in the world wasn't worth a pisshole in the snow.
Anyway, the cops and the newspaper reporters had accepted her amnesia--and the rest of her story--at face value, that was the important thing, and why not? People who underwent serious physical and mental trauma often blocked out the memories of what had happened; the cops knew that even better than the lawyers, and Jessie knew it better than any of them. She had learned a great deal about physical and mental trauma since last October. The books and articles had helped her find plausible reasons not to talk about what she didn't want to talk about, but otherwise they hadn't helped much. Or maybe it was just that she hadn't come to the right case histories yet--the ones dealing with handcuffed women who were forced to watch as their husbands became Purina Dog Chow.
Jessie surprised herself by laughing again--a good loud laugh this time. Was that funny? Apparently it was, but it was also one of those funny things you could never, ever tell anyone else. Like how your Dad once got so excited about a solar eclipse that he blew a load all over the seat of your underpants, for instance. Or how--here's a real yuck--you actually thought a little come on your fanny might make you pregnant.
Anyway, most of the case histories suggested that the human mind often reacted to extreme trauma the way a squid reacts to danger--by covering the entire landscape with a billow of obscuring ink. You knew something had happened, and that it had been no day in the park, but that was all. Everything else was gone, hidden by that ink. A lot of the case-history people said that--people who had been raped, people who had been in car crashes, people who had been caught in fires and had crawled into closets to die, even one skydiving lady whose parachute hadn't opened and who had been recovered, badly hurt but miraculously alive, from the large soft bog in which she had landed.
What was it like, coming down? they had asked the skydiving lady. What did you think about when you realized your chute hadn't opened, wasn't going to open? And the skydiving lady had replied, I can't remember. I remember the starter patting me on the back, and I think I remember the pop-out, but the next thing I remember is being on a stretcher and asking one of the men putting me into the back of the ambulance how badly I was hurt. Everything in the middle is just a haze. I suppose I prayed, but I can't even remember that for sure.
Or maybe you really remembered everything, my skydiving friend, Jessie thought, and lied about it, just like I did. Maybe even for the same reasons. For all I know, every damned one of the case-history people in every damned one of the books, I read was lying.
Maybe so. Whether they were or not, the fact remained that she did remember her hours handcuffed to the bed--from the click of the key in the second lock right up to that final freezing moment when she had looked into the rearview mirror and seen that the thing in the house had become the thing in the back seat, she remembered it all. She remembered those moments by day and relived them by night in horrible dreams where the water-glass slid past her along the inclined plane of the shelf and shattered on the floor, where the stray dog bypassed the cold buffet on the floor in favor of the hot meal on the bed, where the hideous night-visitor in the corner asked Do you love me, Punkin? in her father's voice and maggots squirmed like semen from the tip of its erect penis.
But remembering a thing and reliving a thing did not confer an obligation to tell about a thing, even when the memories made you sweat and the nightmares made you scream. She had lost ten pounds since October (well, that was shading the truth a bit; it was actually more like seventeen), taken up smoking again (a pack and a half a day, plus a joint roughly the size of an El Producto before bedtime), her complexion had gone to hell, and all at once her hair was going gray all over her head, not just at the temples. That last was something she could fix--hadn't she been doing so for five years or more?--but so far she simply hadn't been able to summon up enough energy to dial Oh Pretty Woman in Westbrook and make an appointment. Besides, who did she have to look good for? Was she planning to maybe hit a few singles bars, check out the local talent?
Good idea, she thought. Some guy will ask if he can buy me a drink, I'll say yes, and then, while we wait for the bartender to bring them, I'll tell him--just casually--that I have this dream where my father ejaculates maggots instead of semen. With a line of interesting conversational patter like that, I'm sure he'll ask me back to his apartment right away. He won't even want to see a doctor's certificate saying I'm HIV-negative.
In mid-November, after she had begun to believe the police were really going to leave her alone and the story's sex angle was going to stay out of the papers (she was very slow coming to believe this, because the public
ity was the thing she had dreaded the most), she decided to try therapy with Nora Callighan again. Maybe she didn't want this sitting inside and sending out poison fumes for the next thirty or forty years as it rotted. How much different might her life have been if she had managed to tell Nora what had happened on the day of the eclipse? For that matter, how much difference might it have made if that girl hadn't come into the kitchen when she did that night at Neuworth Parsonage? Maybe none ... but maybe a lot.
Maybe an awful lot.
So she dialed New Today, New Tomorrow, the loose association of counsellors with which Nora had been affiliated, and was shocked to silence when the receptionist told her Nora had died of leukemia the year before--some weird, sly variant which had hidden successfully in the back alleys of her lymphatic system until it was too late to do a damned thing about it. Would Jessie perhaps care to meet with Laurel Stevenson? the receptionist asked, but Jessie remembered Laurel--a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who wore high heels with sling backs and looked as if she would enjoy sex to the fullest only when she was on top. She told the receptionist she'd think it over. And that had been it for counselling.
In the three months since she had learned of Nora's death, she'd had good days (when she was only afraid) and bad days (when she was too terrified even to leave this room, let alone the house) but only Brandon Milheron had heard anything approaching the complete story of Jessie Mahout's hard time by the lake... and Brandon hadn't believed the crazier aspects of that story. Had sympathized, yes, but not believed. Not at first, anyway.
"No pearl earring," he had reported the day after she first told him about the stranger with the long white face: "No muddy footprint, either. Not in the written reports, at least."