“I don't want to kill anybody,” he said, the boy speaking again. “All right, I killed the old fraud and I don't regret that. I'd do it again and again for what he did to me.” He touched his nose. “And what he did to my Ma, who never hurt a soul in her life. I'd do it all over again …”
“What about the old man?” I asked, cautious, but drawing nearer to him. If only I could reach him, touch him, embrace him, show that I was not an enemy but blood of his blood, a member of his family.
“The old man led you to us.” The ugly voice again. “He had to die. Had to have his face bashed in. The nun is next.”
I saw now the dangerous contest we were engaged in, that two adversaries confronted me, not only the boy himself but another presence altogether, a presence residing within him, as if the fade itself had assumed a personality, perverse and deadly.
“What has the nun got to do with it?” I asked. “Why should you hurt her?” Was it possible to stay in touch with the boy through this other personality?
“She knows,” the voice crackled. “She pretends. She makes believe she's good, but she's not. She spies on us … ”
“Shut up,” I cried. “I'm not talking to you. I don't want to have anything to do with you. I'm talking to the boy, Ozzie Slater. Not you …”
The boy looked directly at me and I realized he had kept his eyes away from mine from the beginning of our encounter, looking distantly over my shoulder. Now our eyes met.
“Are you really my uncle?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “My sister Rose is your mother. You'd love her, Ozzie, if you knew her. She loves you …”
“She gave him away,” The other voice, harsh, accusing.
“She had to give you away,” I said, gently, reasonably, trying to ignore that voice, trying to keep the conversation between me and the boy. “She had no choice. She was young and had no control over her life at that time. She was desperate …”
“What kind of mother gives her baby away?”
“She wanted you to have life,” I said. “She wanted her baby to live. She could have had an abortion, killed you in the womb. Instead, she went through the pain of labor, the pain and the blood. And she gave you to the nuns, to find a good home for you. Does that sound like she didn't care?”
“What's she like? Is she pretty?”
“She's beautiful. And she loves you deeply. She's the one who told me about Ramsey. I knew that one of my nephews with the power of the fade was somewhere in the world. She sent me to you. Told me about you. How she had to give you up and how sad she's been ever since. And I tracked you down. Because of her …”
“What do you want with me?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“To help you, like I said. I know the power you have. And how that power can be a terrible thing. I have that power too. My uncle had the power before me. He came looking for me to help me the way I've come looking for you. It's handed down from uncles to nephews through the years.”
“You're bluffing.” The harsh accusatory voice. “All this stuff about power. We've got the power. It's something you want from us. To use it for yourself. That's why you're here.”
“I don't want anything,” I said. “Not for myself. But for you. I want to help you …”
“How can you … help me?” And now it was another voice altogether, a child's small voice not only lost and bewildered but confused. A child who might have been me a generation ago.
“First, you must stop what you're doing,” I said. “That nun. Nothing must happen to her. You must leave her alone. Come with me …”
“To the police?”
“No, not the police. I'll arrange for you to see a doctor first. We'll leave Ramsey. I'll take you to a hospital in Boston that specializes in cases like yours. And then, yes, the police. But not in the way you think. There are ways to handle these things. You are not at fault, Ozzie, for what you've done. You are a victim …”
Was I making sense to him? Was I reaching him?
“You're a liar,” he cried, his hand moving toward his belt in a swift and sudden movement. Then a knife appeared in his hand, the blade glinting in the moonlight.
Instinctively, I leapt forward and knocked it to the ground. As I raised my eyes, I saw the boy start to dissolve, like smoke dissipating in the air, so quickly that it was difficult to believe he had stood in front of me a moment or two before.
Stepping backward, I felt the wall behind me, knew that that particular avenue of escape was not possible. Simultaneously, I saw the knife rise from the ground, held by those invisible hands.
Almost hypnotized, I watched the knife slashing at the air like a miniature sword. Then it became still, suspended, knife-point directed at me. Now it began to move toward me, dangerous, deadly. I cringed, bracing myself as it came closer, closer. The tip of the blade tore my shirt, then penetrated my flesh, pausing before the final fatal plunge.
But the plunge did not come.
Instead, laughter: lewd and lascivious, a chortling of triumph.
“First, you, then Sister Anunciata …”
Her name leapt in my ears as I remembered Rose's voice— Sister Anunciata, small, built like a fire hydrant— the nun who had arranged for her son to be adopted, had helped her through the most difficult days of her life.
“Kill him:’
“Wait,” the boy said.
“Why wait? He has to die anyway.”
“He's my blood. He's my uncle …”
“He's lying.”
“He said he has the power like me. My uncle would have the power. It's in our blood.”
“Have him prove it, then.”
The knife was still at my stomach, only its tip in my flesh and the pain muted. But I knew my position was precarious, that the voice could at any moment command the boy to press deeper with the knife.
“Make him prove it,” the voice demanded.
“All right,” the boy said, impatient, and harsh. And then softer as he addressed me: “Prove it to me,” he said. “Prove it to the voice. Make yourself gone, unseen.”
“Who is the voice?” I asked, low and whispering, playing the game, desperate as it was, of postponement.
“I don't know,” he said, whispering, matching my own effort at conspiracy. “But he brings the urges. And I can't do anything but obey the urges. I'm not me when the urges begin.” I heard his snifHe, wondering if he was again wiping that bulbous nose, like the nose of a ruined clown. “Please disappear, prove who you are….”
“I haven't used the power for a long time,” I said. “I made a promise many years ago. A promise to not use it. Whenever I use the power, bad things happen. Someone dies. I don't want anyone else to die. …” I thought of my brother Bernard and Rudolphe Toubert and me. The murderer.
“You ‘// die.” The voice harsh, commanding.
At the same time, the knife dug a bit deeper into my flesh and although there was only a pinch of pain, I felt something warm oozing from me and my knees grew weak.
“Do it,” the boy pleaded.
I pressed forward, against the invisible wall, that small movement I had not called upon for years, uncertain after all this time whether it would work. Yet, I had no choice. I had no doubt at all that the boy, controlled by that other personality, could kill me and go on to kill the nun and who knows who else? Then the pause and the flash of pain and the cold, all of it fast, never as fast before, and I was in the fade.
I heard the fierce whisper:
“He's more dangerous now. We have to kill him.”
The knife flashed forward in a swordlike thrust but I swiftly stepped aside, nimble suddenly, as if the fade had given me energy and quickness along with invisibility.
“Where are you?” Puzzlement and awe in the boy's voice.
“Here,” I said, then moved away from the spot where I had spoken. “Do you believe me now?”
“Yes,” he said.
He disappeared, the stranger who was his uncle. Just like that.
In the winking of an eye. Becoming a vapor, a cloud of mist in the moonlight and then nothing. Ozzie had seen it happening to himself when he had practiced in front of the mirror but was shocked to see it happen to someone else. Shocked and scared because he felt at a loss, his knife pointing at nothing in the air, useless now as a weapon.
“Where are you?” he whispered again, as fear crept over him. He felt unguarded, open to attack.
No answer. Was he playing games, his uncle? Was he near or far, to the right or left?
Find him. Kill him.
That voice again. He would love to kill the voice but could not do it because the voice was himself.
You ‘re wasting time.
The knife was suddenly struck from his hand, and his wrist leapt with pain at the blow. The knife dropped to the ground and landed at his feet.
Pick it up.
As he bent to retrieve it, the knife skittered away, glinting in the moonlight, like a fish out of water, leaping in the air and then dropping to the ground a few feet from him. He also heard the rush of receding footsteps.
“Wait,” he said. “Don't go away …”
A moment of silence, then: “I'm right here,” the voice of his uncle somewhere nearby. “I knocked the knife away because we can't talk with a knife between us. And I need to talk to you. To you, not to that voice I keep hearing. That voice isn't you, Ozzie. That voice is the killer, not you. You have to be separated from the voice. You have to resist the voice, fight it, hold it off …”
See what he's trying to do? He's trying to turn us against each other. And he wants to lock you up. Do you want to be locked up?
No.
That's what he wants to do to you. You have to get rid of him.
But how?
Get that knife. And stick him.
I was astonished to hear those voices in that moonlit courtyard, listening to the boy arguing with himself, the two voices so different, the one harsh and demanding, bent on destruction, and the other young and fragile.
As I listened a wave of sadness stole over me, the kind of sadness that comes from loss—all the people we lose through the years—and now I was losing this boy, my nephew, a poor fader like myself with a savage loose inside him.
Now.
I heard the word with all its urgency and insanity, a single vicious syllable, and saw a stirring in the air, like branches being shaken, a sensation of movement in the moonlight, a scurrying. And I moved, too, leaping toward the knife, half tripping, lunging forward, hands outstretched.
The knife soared into the air before I reached it—he had beaten me to the spot—but once more his possession of the knife gave me an advantage and I was able to see where he must be standing.
I straightened up and kicked, aiming for his stomach, judging its height from the ground. My shoe met the target, sank into the softness of his stomach, deeper than I had hoped, and he bellowed with pain. At the same time the knife fell to the ground, loosened from his grip, and I went after it.
The instant I picked it up, I knew my mistake, knew that I had betrayed where I stood the way he had betrayed himself a moment before. I had also forgotten youth's capacity to absorb and throw off pain and I heard the rush of his body just before he crashed into me, his head butting my chest, taking my breath away, causing me to drop the knife, to emit my own bellow of pain. Before I could recover, his hands were around my neck, not the hands of a thirteen-year-old boy but the steel-like hands of a deadly enemy, ageless, and mad, gaining strength from the madness. The fingers tightened around my neck, mashing my Adam's apple into my throat, cutting off air—this was how it was to choke—leaving me unable to cry out, my arms thrashing around convulsively. As I fell backward I tried to twist away from him and landed on the ground in a hard thump that sent pain shooting along my spine. My hands reached out desperately as I twisted and fought with all my strength. My right hand somehow found the knife. I managed to grasp the handle, barely aware of my movements but aware of his body pressing against mine, the sweaty cheek against my cheek, the fingers even tighter around my neck and a lassitude growing in me as the sense of suffocation took away all desire, all thought, all resistance. I felt myself fading, not the fading of invisibility but a fading away of my entire being into oblivion.
Die, you bastard, die.
The harshness of the voice lit a small fire in my diminishing consciousness. I knew that I had to resist that madman in the boy, had to make one final effort to defeat him, whether or not I gained breath again. I fought against a gathering darkness that threatened to swallow me up and obliterate me, and managed to open my eyes. Through the mist and fog of my dimming sight, I saw the glint of the knife and remembered that the knife was actually in my hand. I had only to bring the knife down into the flesh of this monster whose fingers were around my throat, who was murdering me. That was all I had to do, but it seemed impossible. I had no strength left. Do it, I told myself, do it. This one last thing. I focused on the knife, felt my eyes bulging achingly as I concentrated the final remnants of my thought processes on it. The knife became my entire world, shining in the moonlight, poised above the madman I could not see but who was slowly taking my life away. I willed the knife to descend, gathered everything that remained of me and my life into that desire. And I watched the knife finally descending slowly, in downward thrust, and then faster, and I was no longer aware of the fingers that had now become a part of my throat or the blackness threatening the edges of my consciousness or the breathless world in which I was caught and held, knew only that the knife was coming down, coming down. When it plunged into his body, a cry of pain filled the air, terrible in its anguish, and at the same time there was a great rushing of air down my throat into my lungs, sweet, sweet air that filled my life's crevices as his fingers loosened their hold, although I still felt their imprint on the flesh of my neck. I stabbed again and again, could not stop, did not want to stop, my own madness taking over. He clung to me for a moment and a sob escaped his lips, the sob of a child crying itself to sleep at night, then he slumped against me and rolled away.
He knew he was doomed and dying when the blade first slipped into him, before the other stabbings, reaching a place deep and vital inside of him where nothing had ever gone before. He wanted to let go, let go. The voice was telling him to hold on. But he didn't want to hold on. The hell with the voice. Don V let go. I will, I will.
The pain, demanding and insistent, spread through his body like fire eating him up. Ma, he cried, Ma. He started to cry, opening his eyes to see if she was here but he saw only blood, a curtain of blood, his own blood. Just before he closed his eyes for the last time, giving himself up to the dark, knowing he had finally overcome the voice, he heard another voice, his mother singing to him, couldn't make out the words or the tune, her voice far away. He went toward her voice. Into the dark. Into nothing.
The boy emerged from the fade into the moonlight, slowly, in stages, his body appearing the way a film develops in a tray, my tears the liquid. His body was limp in that final fatal way of bodies after breath has gone, face slack and loose, something almost sweet in the face, in repose, as if untouched by time or pain or injury, the abused nose not repulsive now, still bruised and broken but noble somehow, like an old battle wound.
“Oh, Ozzie,” I said, tasting my tears as I spoke, aware of lights coming on in the convent.
As I stood over the boy, something moved inside me, in some unknown and uncharted territory of myself, something shifting and letting go, deep beneath the surface. Standing there, I felt, impossible, that I was going away from myself, away from pain, away from loss. Not in the fade but gone in another way.
Good-bye, I said.
But did not hear my voice.
And did not, did not know to whom or to what I was saying good-bye.
iction, of course.
That was the verdict Meredith and I reached by the end of my Manhattan summer. The word, in fact, became a kind of lifeline, something to clutch and hold on to. br />
“You have to be slightly insane to survive in the agent business,” Meredith said. Then, pointing to the manuscript, she said: “But the fade would take me way beyond the pale….”
I agreed. Then.
Shit. I must agree now.
Despite what I have pinned to my bulletin board here in my room, what I cannot resist reading over and over again.
Although it's November outside, it's winter here in the boardinghouse. My room is not exactly the Ritz and it's impossible to heat, but it is not a dump either. (Dorm rooms seem to be a myth at B.U. and I was lucky to find this place, from which, if I stretch at the window, I can see a patch of the Charles River.)
So here I am in Boston at the typewriter writing, as Paul Roget once sat in Monument, writing. But he wrote novels and short stories and I am writing—what?
I dunno.
Trying to put my thoughts into some kind of order.
Still trying to follow Professor Waronski's dictum of getting things down on paper, between the demands of a term paper that I must start sometime if Fm to finish before the finals in December and library research I must complete for a political sei project.
The hell with all that.
Let me go back to New York and Meredith and how we came to terms with Paul's manuscript.
For the most part, I was caught up in the frenetic world of Broome & Company, twelve-and fourteen-hour days of office activity while Meredith kept up her own frantic pace.
Days passed when we barely conversed, when I collapsed in bed at nine-thirty while she was still at the office or out somewhere at a publication party. Or on the telephone in conversations that seemed endless, filled with the jargon of the trade.
At various times we surfaced and seemed to discover each other all over again. Returning from St. Pat's one brilliant Sunday morning, Meredith said: “Rose is the key, Susan.” Bringing the subject up from out of nowhere. “If she were still alive, she could provide the answer. Did she or did she not have a baby out of wedlock?”
“Right,” I said, wondering if either of us would have had the courage to ask her that question.