The water at least was hot and soothing. He lay in the tub, closed his eyes, struggled to free his mind from the terror—Was that how it would get him? Sink into his mind like a fungus? The bubbles were fragrant and oily. He let the hot water trickle into the tub to raise the temperature. It burned his toes, crept up past his ankles, advanced like a living thing toward his fork. “Destroy me!” he whispered, but it was only ritual. His mind was still in the living room, still with the graphs, still with the mine. He sat up, the water boiling hot now around his hips, and sipped cognac. “Mel!” he whispered. “Grendel!” But he got no response. He lay back. It was hot on his back and chest, and he flinched, but he stayed down. He tried to imagine the room, the fat mindless beast stalking her, circling, observing her from every angle. “Your brother deserved to die!” he hissed. He was breathing heavily, stroking, clawing, but still his mind refused to participate, still it watched him coldly, contemptuously, faintly disgusted. He sat up and turned off the hot water. In spite of a gathering nausea, he finished the snifter of cognac. He rested his head on the edge of the tub. “Oh, damn you!” he cried. He grew uncomfortable. Hastily, he soaped his armpits and genitals, rinsed, and got out.
He dried himself before the mirror, slipped into his lounging robe, returned to the living room for a cigarette. He decided to eat something, but poured more cognac instead. He pulled the blinds, turned on lights. Outside, it was dark, still blustery. He curled into the chair, patted his lap, and Mel hopped up, made herself comfortable. On her haunches, a streak of still-fresh blood. “Poor little sister!” he said, stroking her gently. Tears came, and he sniffled. He would kill Nyx someday. Yes, he would! Mel’s fur was silky against him, but she fidgeted. Smell of soap, probably. Yet he felt too weary, too wretched, to bother to go get the fish oil. He sighed, shuddered. “Oh God!” he whispered, then grew suddenly angry. “What’s the matter with you?” he cried.
He jumped up from the chair, flipping the cat to the carpet, and strode into the bedroom to dress. Enough of this babying around! He’d go tonight! To hell with the risks! He had to see Bruno and get this thing straightened out, and right now. Tonight!
9
Snow pyramided the old Chevy and drifted deep in the streets, so Miller walked over, feeling faintly ridiculous. Hark ye to the White Bird. Oh boy. In the wind, he chainsmoked, lighting from the butt end of the old the new. The snow flew, though he could see, during lulls, that not much new snow was falling. Maybe no one else would show up. There was that to hope for.
Many reasons, but all of the inopportune instant with no time to think them out, had prompted him to accept when Marcella had called to invite him: the germ of a salable story, his own everlastingly perverse amusement with eccentricity, and so on, but mostly, he supposed, it was a kind of sudden gamy wish to raise a little hell. West Condon was going stale on him, needed a spectacle. Moreover, he had been standing nude and elegantly if awkwardly protracted, having been drawn to the phone from under knowledgeable hands, and had too self-consciously seen himself as for the sweet moment suspended between two female hungers (Golgotha: that timeless ubiquitous image!). Happy Bottom, with characteristic impatience, had lobbed a pillow, bringing down his tacked-up list of ever-ready phone numbers: hastily, then, he had acceded to the request of one thief, not to forfeit the voracity of the other.
House lights laid down luminous trapdoor patches on the snow here and there, but mostly, on the walk to the Brunos’, there was just a darkness and a lot of blowing snow. A leonine first of March: which led to the possibility it might go out with the Lamb. Miller laughed, stepped up his pace, enthused once more by the chance to look in on these types. After all, they needed him, for he believed he might have been indirectly responsible for having set the date. Marcella had called him the day after Clara Collins’ eighth of February pageant to tell him all that had happened and what her brother had said, though this time she’d asked him not to print it. They were planning to meet again the following Sunday in response to her brother’s pronouncement, she had said, but Miller, already committed with Happy for that night, had suggested an alternative reading of “Sunday week”: a week of Sundays. He had had vaguely in mind seven weeks from the eighth, but it had apparently got interpreted finally, by way of Eleanor Norton’s arcane sources, as tonight, seven Sundays from Bruno’s rescue.
Marcella, who was the other and no doubt most telling reason for his coming, met him at the door, stood backlit by a dull hall bulb while he struggled with his boots. He tossed them with the others—he would not be alone—and flicked his cigarette out into the drifts, brushed the snow from his shoulders, entered. Marcella closed the door behind him, turned toward him, touching an index finger to her lips for silence as she took his coat. Her blouse, even in this poor light, was incredibly white. Alive. With it, she wore a coffee-colored skirt, pleated, a little juvenile maybe, but he was too caught up in the way her gently molded hips disturbed the pleats’ verticals to want it otherwise. She stretched up to toss his hat on the shelf above the coats, causing a new play of lights and shadows in the blouse. He touched her elbow gently, took the hat, laid it on the shelf, had the pleasure of her forearm’s lingering slide down through his fingertips. He’d forgot, in all the grosser scrabblings, that he could still enjoy things like that. He smiled down at her, feeling four-handed without either the camera or a body trained to his touch. “Am I late?” he whispered.
“No,” she said. “Mrs. Collins isn’t here yet. The others are in my brother’s room. I don’t think they’re tremendously happy you’re coming. They seem awfully afraid of publicity or something, I don’t know why.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’ll be careful.”
She led him through the living room, behind her old father Antonio slumped in a chair before the television screen, coffee can on the armrest beside him: homemade cuspidor. On the screen, three splay-pelvised girls dressed in animal skins did a kind of warped jazz ballet, the cheap set stunting their legs. Gabriel’s sisters, no doubt.
A large fancy cake sat on the dining room table, neatly encircled by plates, forks, cups, spoons, and napkins. He asked with a gesture if she had made it, and Marcella replied with a smile and a nod that she had. An antique cut-glass chandelier with electric candles, overbearing in this simple room of simple things, provided the light, left the room virtually shadowless except right under the table. Marcella showed him to a door leading off the back of the dining room: the downstairs bedroom which had been her brother’s since his return a month ago from the hospital. She knocked. Miller licked his lips. The game was on.
The door cracked open. “What is your message?” inquired a hushed male voice, so faint Miller barely understood it.
“Hark ye to the White Bird,” Miller replied, and then Marcella echoed him. The door opened, and they were admitted.
First thing he saw was Giovanni, sitting halfway up in bed, supported by a mound of pillows. He wore dark pajamas that exaggerated his pallor, had two or three blankets piled up on him to the waist. He turned his head—one thought of it more as a mechanical toy than a living man’s head—to look as Miller and Marcella entered. The others in the room did the same: pivoted silently toward them. The room was lit by a nightlamp beside the bed and a few candles placed about; aroma of tallow. At a small table near the foot of the bed, facing the door, sat Eleanor Norton, the high school teacher who had become Bruno’s spiritual counselor, and across from her, a squat pillowy woman in a cheap shiny dress. Black: must be one of the disaster widows. But which? When she turned to peek at him over her shoulder, he found her face familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Two young boys sat stiffly in chairs next to the far wall. The doorkeeper, of course, was Eleanor Norton’s husband, Dr. Wylie Norton. And it was very quiet.
“Good evening, Mrs. Norton, Dr. Norton,” Miller said into the silence. “How are you feeling, Giovanni? Much better, I hope.” He smiled at the others, added with measured concern, “I hope I haven’t interrupted any …?
??
“Not at all, Mr. Miller.” Wylie Norton smiled, extending his hand. “We’re glad you’ve come!” With Norton’s welcome, there were traces of relaxation all around. The two boys stood, came over, were introduced by Norton as Colin Meredith and Carl Dean Palmers, seniors at the high school. They were both shy, slow to commit themselves in any way, but Miller spoke frankly with them, and they were soon friendly. Meredith was a tall gangly boy with loose blond hair, a pink flush to his cheeks, tendency to stoop as he walked; Palmers was shorter, stockier, had a bad case of acne, seemed more mature, more aggressive. Miller noticed Palmers’ missing tooth and asked if he were the Palmers who played guard this year on the varsity football team. The boy grinned awkwardly and nodded, obviously pleased to have been recognized.
The name of the other one in the room came suddenly to mind, and he turned to the plump widow. “Mrs. Wilson, I’m Justin Miller. I don’t know if you remember me, but we—”
“Oh, yes,” she said quickly, kittenish little whimper of a voice. “You wrote up such nice things when I lost … when I lost …” And she began to pucker up.
“Now, now!” intervened Eleanor Norton. “Please remember, Mrs. Wilson, we must all stand firm!” She glanced up sharply at Miller, partly accusing, partly as though seeking—but seeking what? Some kind of signal, or—?
Miller nodded firmly. He thought of saying something like “I’m sure that’s how Eddie would want it,” but it was just too cornball, he might start grinning, so he kept silence. He let his gaze lift past the two women toward Giovanni, fixed, he hoped, with an adequate awe. For the moment, at least until he understood better what was going on, what had happened, what was expected, it was the best he could do for Mrs. Norton. On the wall over the headboard of the bed, there was a crucifix. Other things framed here and there. What looked to be an old wedding portrait of Antonio and Emilia: something of the old woman in Marcella, all right.
“We have been discussing certain instructions, Mr. Miller,” Eleanor Norton said suddenly. She had a precise gentle voice that cut cleanly through the silence. “Instructions from … from the worlds beyond us.” She paused. Miller, coming back to the table, noticed now the book open on it between the two women, a blank book, bound, the kind used for record-keeping. “These are messages received over the recent weeks from … from them, by way of extrasensory perception.” Miller didn’t know what to say to that, so he merely returned, unsmiling but genuinely attentive, her gray-eyed gaze. This, he knew, was his worst test. Marcella’s soft proximity bolstered him, yet he felt vaguely uneasy about her presence, witness to this act of his. “We are anxious, all of us, to comprehend what we can from them, and we are quite naturally … pleased, Mr. Miller, to have with us in our endeavors the sincere interest of all fellow beings whose motives are pure and who will … that is, who will participate in our meditations in a spirit of hope and honesty and … in a positive spirit, let me say.”
“Of course, Mrs. Norton. Let me—”
“But do understand, we are not like … like evangelists, Mr. Miller. Quite the contrary. We believe in quiet unpretentious and unadvertised gatherings.”
“Sure,” said Miller. “I can understand that you’re concerned about my being a newspaper editor. But I can assure you, Mrs. Norton, that my interest here has nothing to do with my paper, and I’ll never publish anything in it unless you want me to. Unless,” he added, feeling adventurous and addressing the whole room, “we all do.”
The doorbell rang. “That must be Mrs. Collins,” Marcella said, and left him to stand alone. Miller watched her go, moving lightly, a spontaneous gladness seeming to lift her up. She glanced back at him from the door and they exchanged smiles, surprised at each other’s attention.
Miller pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, turned to offer one to Wylie Norton, standing beside him, but Mrs. Norton came up, put her hand over his pack: “Please, Mr. Miller. No smoking.” And she turned her head significantly toward Bruno, who watched them darkly.
“Of course,” he said, returning the cigarettes to his pocket. Here but a couple minutes, and he’d already forgot that the sick miner was even in the room. As for Mrs. Norton, she seemed jumpy and peremptory, but Miller guessed it was at least partly due to Clara Collins’ imminent arrival. Eleanor had had Bruno—and Marcella, too—entirely to herself until three weeks ago when Clara Collins appropriated him to her own vision. The February eighth show, as he understood it, was a kind of emotional steamroller, with Eleanor Norton finally outlasting them all and obtaining a tenuous kind of intellectual control over Clara.
After four times through the white bird routine, more ridiculous than ever from this side of the door, the widow Clara Collins strode noisily in with her daughter Elaine, the coalminer Willie Hall, and a woman who turned out to be Mabel Hall, Willie’s wife. Miller had had no idea the Halls would be here, Marcella hadn’t mentioned them, yet he wasn’t surprised, recalling his interview of Hall, Oxford Clemens’ buddy, just after the disaster. Hall, he remembered, lived by hunches.
The Halls were introduced to everyone. Talk was about the snowstorm. Some took it as a portent. The boys, also new here apparently, were introduced to Clara and Elaine, though Carl Dean said he recognized Elaine from a study hall they had together. While Elaine, hand covering her mouthful of bad teeth and small shoulders hunched, received shy attention from Meredith and Palmers, her mother swung horsily around the bedroom, greeted Bruno, the Nortons, Betty Wilson, never waiting for a reply. She seemed intent, nervous, self-important, yet respectful. She lugged a large shiny patent-leather handbag out of which she now pulled a man’s handkerchief, blew her nose stoutly. As she strode long-legged—Miller thought of trotters—over to him, he realized she was nearly as tall as he was. Then he saw that she was wearing heels tonight. White ones, odd for midwinter. Nylons, wrinkled, sparkled above the ankles with melted snow. “It’s a good thing you come,” she said to him, and he understood immediately that he would suffer no challenges from her. Somehow from the beginning, maybe because of his interest in her husband and the note, she had clearly supposed him friendly to any cause of hers. “We need folks like you here.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come before,” he said.
“Well, maybe jist as good you didn’t.” Trace of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “We had a couple purty rough nights. But this’n’s apt to be a mite better.” The Halls tittered nervously.
Miller asked about the meeting on the eighth, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it, except to repeat Bruno’s six-word message. As for the small and uneventful gathering on the fifteenth, she only shrugged, said that Mrs. Norton had received a “kinder prophecy like” that something was sure to happen this night, the first of March. Something, uh, final? Nope. “It ain’t the eighth.” He pursued further the matter of Mrs. Norton’s talents, seeking skepticism, but saw clearly that Clara was impressed by them, thought Eleanor “a fine Christian woman,” believed that it was God who had brought them all, each with his different gifts, together. “She’s been a great comfort to me, Mr. Miller, and she’s taught me more about the Holy Bible than I ever knowed before.” He wondered if she’d changed her mind about the Second Coming, but before he could ask, she was gone, trotting away from him as abruptly as she had come, her feet broad and knobby in the white pumps.
Marcella stood at his side, and in the moment they had together he asked her what exactly they were expecting tonight. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps … the coming of light.” Was that irony he heard? Was she, like him, having fun with all this? He wished to know what she meant, but feared to risk too much. Instead, he asked her why she had told him that tonight’s password was designed “to keep out the Baxters.” Did Abner Baxter have something to do with it?
“He’s the one who hates Mrs. Collins. He’s the man who turned all her friends against her and made his own wife the president of Mrs. Collins’ Evening Circle.”
“Was he here on the eighth??
??
“Yes. He’s a fat man with red hair and a furious temper.” She made funny puffing gestures of fatness and fury. “He made everybody walk out and leave her alone. He’s with the enemy.”
“The enemy? Who are they?”
“Why,” she said with a smile, as though surprised he should ask, “the powers of darkness.”
He smiled in return, but it made her stop smiling, and that confused him. “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny,” he said to cover for his smile, “that a redheaded preacher should be the devil’s advocate?”
“If you saw him, you wouldn’t think so,” she said, and there was no smile at all.
Elaine Collins and Carl Dean Palmers had become engrossed in a quiet argument about religion. Colin Meredith, severed, walked over to join him and Marcella. Affected, the boy’s walk, but not effeminate exactly. The nice child, the ever-willing friend, the shy young man who would fade into the shy old bachelor, fastidious, moody, kindly, especially toward small children. He explained that he had known Mrs. Norton for several months, that she had been helping him establish contact with superior spirits. He had introduced his friend Carl Dean to her, and although Carl Dean was skeptical at first, they had both come to have a lot of faith in her. She was extremely sincere and intelligent and unselfish, and she had done a great deal for him, not so much yet for Carl Dean maybe, but she had made a whole new person out of him, leading him away from the love of earthly things to love of things of the spirit. He had brought an end to all his bad habits, and had even discovered that sometimes he did attain to a kind of communication with the other world. Well, maybe not exactly a communication, but something very much like it. It took literally hours and hours of meditation and humility and self-searching and seeking without thought, but once in awhile something happened, something really unbelievable, it was like—like a light turning on inside. Afterwards, after this kind of terribly exhilarating experience, he couldn’t explain it, or even describe it, it was beyond the capacity of human language, like Mrs. Norton always said. But, really, it was wonderful, a truly extraordinary experience—but then, Mr. Miller probably already knew what he meant. Beside him, Marcella nodded for him; she seemed pretty caught up in what this silly kid had to say. Also, Meredith said, he sometimes received—like Mrs. Norton, through his right hand—messages from his dead mother and father, but that was mainly thanks to another woman he had known a couple years before in the orphanage; Mrs. Norton didn’t seem too excited about these writings from his parents, though of course she said they were surely true. She herself, she had told him, had received her very first communications from recently dead earth people, or spirits that assumed their parts. Now, with her help, he was learning how to achieve much greater things.