Jessie shrugged and said nothing. She could have said things, but it seemed safer not to. She had badly needed a friend in the weeks following her escape from the summer house, and Brandon had filled the bill admirably. She didn't want to distance him or drive him away entirely with a lot of crazy talk.
And there was something else, too, something simple and direct: maybe Brandon was right. Maybe her visitor had just been a soupcon of moonlight, after all.
Little by little she had been able to persuade herself, at least in her waking hours, that this was the truth of it. Her space cowboy had been a kind of Rorschach pattern, one made not of ink and paper but of wind-driven shadows and imagination. She didn't blame herself for any of this, however; quite the opposite. If not for her imagination, she never would have seen how she might be able to get the water-glass... and even if she had gotten it, she never would have thought of using a magazine blow-in card as a straw. No, she thought her imagination had more than earned its right to a few hallucinatory megrims, but it remained important for her to remember she'd been alone that night. If recovery began anywhere, she had believed, it began with the ability to separate reality from fantasy. She told Brandon some of this. He had smiled, hugged her, kissed her temple, and told her she was getting better in all sorts of ways.
Then, last Friday, her eye had happened on the lead story of the Press-Herald's County News section. All her assumptions began to change then, and they had gone right on changing as the story of Raymond Andrew Joubert began its steady march from filler between the Community Calendar and the County Police Beat to banner headlines on the front page. Then, yesterday... seven days after Joubert's name had first appeared on the County page ...
There was a tap at the door, and Jessie's first feeling, as always, was an instinctive cringe of fear. It was there and gone almost before she realized it. Almost... but not quite.
"Meggie? That you?"
"None other, ma'am."
"Come on in."
Megan Landis, the housekeeper Jessie had hired in December (that was when her first fat insurance check had arrived via registered mail), came in with a glass of milk on a tray. A small pill, gray and pink, sat beside the glass. At the sight of the glass, Jessie's right wrist began to itch madly. This didn't always happen, but it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar reaction, either. At least the twitches and that weird my-skin-is-crawling-right-off-the-bones sensation had pretty much stopped. There had been awhile there, before Christmas, when Jessie had really believed she was going to spend the rest of her life drinking out of a plastic cup.
"How's yer paw today?" Meggie asked, as if she had picked up Jessie's itch by some kind of sensory telepathy. Nor did Jessie think this a ridiculous idea. She sometimes found Meggie's questions--and the intuitions which prompted them--a little creepy, but never ridiculous.
The hand in question, now lying in the sunbeam which had startled her away from what she had been writing on the Mac, was dressed in a black glove lined with some frictionless space-age polymer. Jessie supposed the burn-glove--for that was what it was--had been perfected in one dirty little war or another. Not that she would ever have refused to wear it on that account, and not that she wasn't grateful. She was very grateful indeed. After the third skin-graft, you learned that an attitude of gratitude was one of life's few reliable hedges against insanity.
"Not too bad, Meggie."
Meggie's left eyebrow lifted, stopping just short of I-don' t-believe-you height. "No? If you've been running that keyboard for the whole three hours you've been in here, I bet it's singing 'Ave Maria.' "
"Have I really been here for--?" She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been. She glanced at the copy-minder on top of the VDT screen and saw she was on the fifth page of the document she had opened just after breakfast. Now it was almost lunch, and the most surprising thing was she hadn't strayed as far from the truth as Meggie's lifted brow suggested: her hand really wasn't that bad. She could have waited another hour for the pill if she'd had to.
She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:
No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I'll be damned if I can.
My hand was hurting like hell--whatever help I'd gotten from the aspirin was long gone--but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I'd forgotten. At first I couldn't remember what it was. I don't think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He'd been in the back seat, and he'd leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.
I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I
The words stopped at that point, with the little cursor flashing expectantly just beyond the end of the last unfinished sentence. It seemed to beckon to her, urge her forward, and suddenly Jessie recalled a poem from a marvellous little book by Kenneth Patchen. The book was called But Even So, and the poem had gone like this: "Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?"
Good question, Jessie thought, and let her eyes wander from the VDT screen to Meggie Landis's face. Jessie liked the energetic Irishwoman, liked her a lot--hell, owed her a lot--but if she had caught the little housekeeper looking at the words on the Mac's screen, Meggie would have been headed down Forest Avenue with her severance pay in her pocket before you could say Dear Ruth, I suppose you're surprised to hear from me after all these years.
But Megan wasn't looking at the pc's screen; she was looking at the sweeping view of Eastern Prom and Casco Bay beyond it. The sun was still shining and the snow was still falling, although now it was clearly winding down.
"Devil's beating his wife," Meggie remarked.
"I beg your pardon?" Jessie asked, smiling.
"That's what my mother used to say when the sun came out before the snow stopped." Meggie looked a little embarrassed as she held her hand out for the empty glass. "What it means I'm not sure I could say."
Jessie nodded. The embarrassment on Meggie Landis's face had lensed into something else--something that looked to Jessie like unease. For a moment she hadn't any idea what could have made Meggie look that way, and then it came to her--a thing so obvious it was easy to overlook. It was the smile. Meggie wasn't used to seeing Jessie smile. Jessie wanted to assure her that it was all right, that the smile didn't mean she was going to leap from her chair and attempt to tear Meggie's throat out.
Instead, she told her, "My own mother used to say, 'The sun doesn't shine on the same dog's ass every day.' I never knew what that one meant, either."
The housekeeper did look in the Mac's direction now, but it was the merest flick of dismissal: Time to put your toys away, Missus, her glance said. "That pill's going to make you sleepy if you don't dump a little food atop it. I've got a sandwich waiting for you, and soup heating on the stove."
Soup and sandwich--kid food, the lunch you had after sledding all morning on the day when school was cancelled because of a nor'easter; food you ate with the cold still blazing redly in your cheeks like bonfires. It sounded absolutely great, but...
"I'm going to pass, Meg."
Meggie's brow furrowed and the corners of her mouth drew down. This was an expression Jessie had seen often in the early days of Meggie's employment, when she had sometimes felt she needed an extra pain pill so badly that she had cried. Megan had never given in to her tears, however. Jessie supposed that was why
she had hired the little Irishwoman--she had guessed from the first that Meggie wasn't a giver-inner. She was, in fact, one hard spring potato when she had to be ... but Meggie would not be getting her way this time.
"You need to eat, Jess. You're nothing but a scare-crow." Now it was the overflowing ashtray which bore the dour whiplash of her glance. "And you need to quit that shit, too."
I'll make you quit them, me proud beauty, Gerald said in her mind, and Jessie shuddered.
"Jessie? Are you all right? Is there a draft?"
"No. A goose walked over my grave, that's all." She smiled wanly. "We're a regular packet of old sayings today, aren't we?"
"You've been warned time and time again about not overdoing--"
Jessie reached out her black-clad right hand and tentatively touched Meggie's left hand with it. "My hand's really getting better, isn't it?"
"Yes. If you could use it on that machine, even part of the time, for three hours or more and not be yelling for that pill the second I showed my face in here, then I guess you're getting better even faster than Dr. Magliore expected. All the same--"
"All the same it's getting better, and that's good ... right?"
"Of course it's good." The housekeeper looked at Jessie as if she were mad.
"Well, now I'm trying to get the rest of me better. Step one is writing a letter to an old friend of mine. I promised myself--last October, during my hard time--that if I got out of the mess I was in, I'd do that. But I kept putting it off. Now I'm finally trying, and I don't dare stop. I might lose my guts if I do."
"But the pill--"
"I think I've got just enough time to finish this and stick the printout in an envelope before I get too sleepy to work. Then I can take a long nap, and when I wake up I'II eat an early supper." She touched Meggie's left hand with her right again, a gesture of reassurance which was both clumsy and rather sweet. "A nice big one."
Meggie's frown remained. "It's not good to skip meals, Jessie, and you know it."
Very gently, Jessie said: "Some things are more important than meals. You know that as well as I do, don't you?"
Meggie glanced toward the VDT again, then sighed and nodded. When she spoke, it was in the tone of a woman bowing to some conventional sentiment in which she herself does not really believe. "I guess so. And even if I don't, you're the boss."
Jessie nodded, realizing for the first time that this was now more than just a fiction the two of them maintained for the sake of convenience. "I suppose I am, at that."
Meggie's eyebrow had climbed to half-mast again. "If I brought the sandwich in and left it here on the corner of your desk?"
Jessie grinned. "Sold!"
This time Meggie smiled back. When she brought the sandwich in three minutes later, Jessie was sitting before the glowing screen again, her skin an unhealthy comic-book green in its reflected glow, lost in whatever she was slowly picking out on the keyboard. The little Irish housekeeper made no effort to be quiet--she was that sort of woman who would probably be unable to tiptoe if her life depended on it--but Jessie still did not hear her come or go. She had taken a stack of newspaper clippings out of the top drawer of her desk and stopped typing to riffle through them. Photographs accompanied most, photographs of a man with a strange, narrow face that receded at the chin and bulged at the brow. His deep-set eyes were dark and round and perfectly blank, eyes that made Jessie think simultaneously of Dondi, the comic-strip waif, and Charles Manson. Pudgy lips as thick as slices of cut fruit pooched out below his blade of a nose.
Meggie stood beside Jessie's shoulder for a moment, waiting to be acknowledged, then uttered a low "Humph!" and left the room. Forty-five minutes or so later, Jessie glanced to the left and saw the toasted cheese sandwich. It was now cold, the cheese coagulated into lumps, but she wolfed it nevertheless in five quick bites. Then she turned back to the Mac. The cursor began to dance ahead once more, leading her steadily deeper into the forest.
36
That eased my mind a little bit but then I thought, "He could be crouched down back there so the mirror doesn't show him." So I managed to get turned around, although I could hardly believe how weak I was. Even the slightest bump made my hand feel like someone was jabbing it with a red-hot poker. No one was there, of course, and I tried to tell myself that the last time I saw him, he really was just shadows... shadows and my mind working overtime.
But I couldn't quite believe it, Ruth--not even with the sun coming up and me out of the handcuffs, out of the house, and locked inside my own car. I got the idea that if he wasn't in the back seat he was in the trunk, and if he wasn't in the trunk, he was crouched down by the back bumper. I got the idea that he was still with me, in other words, and he's been with me ever since. That's what I need to make you--you or somebody--understand: that's what I really need to say. He has been with me ever since. Even when my rational mind decided that he'd probably been shadows and moonlight every time I saw him, he was with me. Or maybe I should say it was with me. My visitor is "the man with the white face" when the sun is up, you see, but he's "the thing with the white face" when it's down. Either way, him or it, my rational mind was eventually able to give him up, but I have found that is nowhere near enough. Because every time a board creaks in the house at night I know that it's come back, every time a funny shadow dances on the wall I know it's come back, every time I hear an unfamiliar step coming up the walk I know it's come back--come back to finish the job. It was there in the Mercedes that morning when I woke up, and it's been here in my house on Eastern Prom almost every night, maybe hiding behind the drapes or standing in the closet with its wicker case between its feet. There is no magic stake to drive through the hearts of the real monsters, and oh Ruth, it makes me so tired.
Jessie paused long enough to dump the overflowing ashtray and light a fresh cigarette. She did this slowly and deliberately. Her hands had picked up a small but discernible shake, and she didn't want to burn herself. When the cigarette was going, she took a deep drag, exhaled, stuck it in the ashtray, and returned to the Mac.
I don't know what I would have done if the car battery had been dead--sat there until someone came along, I guess, even if it meant sitting there all day--but it wasn't, and the motor started on the first crank. I backed away from the tree I'd hit and managed to get the car pointed down the lane again. I kept wanting to look in the rearview mirror, but I was afraid to do it. I was afraid I might see him. Not because he was there, you understand--I knew he wasn't--but because my mind might make me see him.
Finally, just as I got to Bay Lane, I did look up. I couldn't help it. There was nothing in the mirror but the back seat, of course, and that made the rest of the trip a little easier. I drove out to 117 and then up to Dakin's Country Store--it's one of those places where the locals hang out when they're too broke to go over to Rangeley or to one of the bars in Motton. They mostly sit at the lunch counter, eating doughnuts and swapping lies about what they did on Saturday night. I pulled in behind the gas pumps and just sat there for five minutes or so, watching the loggers and the care-takers and the power company guys go in and come back out. I couldn't believe they were real--isn't that a hoot? I kept thinking they were ghosts, that pretty soon my eyes would adjust to the daylight and I'd be able to see right through them. I was thirsty again, and every time someone came out with one of those little white Styrofoam cups of coffee, I'd get thirstier, but I still couldn't quite bring myself to get out of the car ... to go among the ghosts, you might say.
I suppose I would have, eventually, but before I could muster enough courage to do more than pull up the master-lock, Jimmy Eggart pulled in and parked beside me. Jimmy's a retired CPA from Boston who's lived at the lake year-round since his wife died back in 1987 or '88. He got out of his Bronco, looked at me, recognized me, and started to smile. Then his face changed, first to concern and then to horror. He came to the Mercedes and bent down to look through the window, and he was so surprised that all the wrinkles were pulled out of his face. I
remember that very clearly: how surprise made Jimmy Eggart look young.
I saw his mouth forming the words "Jessie, are you all right?" I wanted to open the door, but all at once I didn't quite dare. This crazy idea came into my head. That the thing I'd been calling the space cowboy had been in Jimmy's house, too, only Jimmy hadn't been as lucky as I had been. It had killed him, and cut off his face, and then put it on like a Halloween mask. I knew it was a crazy idea, but knowing that didn't help much, because I couldn't stop thinking it. I couldn't make myself open the fucking car door, either.
I don't know how bad I looked that morning and don't want to know, but it must have been bad, because pretty soon Jimmy Eggart didn't look surprised anymore. He looked scared enough to run and sick enough to puke. He didn't do either one, God bless him. What he did was open the car door and ask me what had happened, had it been an accident or had someone hurt me.
I only had to take one look down to get an idea what had put a buzz under him. At some point the wound in my wrist must have opened up again, because the sanitary pad I'd taped around it was entirely soaked. The front of my skirt was soaked, too, as if I'd had the world's worst period. I was sitting in blood, there was blood on the steering wheel, blood on the console, blood on the shift-lever... there were even splatters on the windshield. Most of it had dried to that awful maroon color blood gets--to me it looks like chocolate milk--but some of it was still red and wet. Until you see something like that, Ruth, you just don't have any idea how much blood there really is in a person. It's no wonder Jimmy freaked.
I tried to get out--I think I wanted to show him I could do it under my own power, and that would reassure him--but I bumped my right hand on the steering wheel and everything went white and gray. I didn't pass out completely, but it was as if the last bunch of wires between my head and my body had been cut.
I felt myself falling forward and I remember thinking I was going to finish my adventures by knocking most of my teeth out on the asphalt ... and after spending a fortune to get the top ones capped just last year. Then Jimmy caught me ... right by the boobs, as a matter of fact. I heard him yelling at the store--"Hey! Hey! I need a little help out here"--in a high, shrieky old man's voice that made me feel like laughing... only I was too tired to laugh. I laid the side of my head against his shirt and panted for breath. I could feel my heart going fast but hardly seeming to beat at all, as if it had nothing to beat on. Some light and color started to come back into the day, though, and I saw half a dozen men coming out to see what was wrong. Lonnie Dakin was one of them. He was eating a muffin and wearing a pink tee-shirt that said THERE'S NO TOWN DRUNK HERE, WE JUST ALL TAKE TURNS. Funny what you remember when you think you're getting ready to die, isn't it?