Burial (48 page)

‘Then why did you take me out to dinner?'

‘Why did you accept?'

She didn't answer for a long time. When she did, she spoke very carefully and very seriously, making sure that her answer was clear, and that she wasn't befuddled by too much sparkling wine.

‘I didn't realize what kind of man you are. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that you had some kind of shadow following you. And you
do,
Harry, you can't deny it There's some kind of darkness about you, I can't describe it. But it's there, I can feel it, and it frightens me.'

I could have laughed. I could have cried. ‘It frightens
you
?' I asked her.

I was booked into the Thunderbird Motel on Indian School Road, an unprepossessing collection of concrete apartments that looked like an abandoned filling-station. It had frosted-glass balconies, every one of which was cracked, and plant-tubs littered with cigarette-ends and an ice-machine that made a grinding, ratding noise all night. Something dusty and scaly was lying in the middle of the walkway that led to my room. It could have been a dead armadillo but I didn't attempt to find out.

The Thunderbird wasn't the Biltmore, but the price of my plane ticket to Phoenix had already stretched my Mastercard to the point where I had started stammering when the girl at the United Airlines desk had swiped it through the computer.

I arrived back at the Thunderbird at about ten past eleven, after I had driven Nesta home. She lived in a neat suburban house near Chris-Town. The net curtains had twitched as she pecked me on the lips and climbed out. After the front door had closed behind her, I had switched the car radio onto
Bat Out Of Hell
, deafened-for-life volume, and swore myself a terrible and comprehensive oath that I would never date a librarian again. All that stuff about ‘Why, Ms Hempstead, without your glasses, you're — you're beautiful!' is bull. Nesta had been just as plain without her glasses as she was with them on; and her brain had been plain, to match. And her observation that I had a shadow following me had put me seriously out of sorts.

We all have a shadow following us, for God's sake. That doesn't mean we want to be reminded of it.

I took a sixpack of Coors back to my room, kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the bed to watch television. The room was small and square and very chilly but surprisingly airless, and
brown
. The carpet was brown, the drapes were brown, the bedcover was brown-and-orange striped. They seem to have a thing for brown in Arizona. The only decorative touches were a huge Indian-pottery ashtray on top of the television, and an amateurish picture of an Apache chief, with the caption, ‘It is better to have lightning in the hand than thunder in the mouth.' I paraphrased that as, ‘It is better to have dollars in the bank than it is to have limitless credit.'

I watched
Terminator 2
for a while, and finished a couple of beers. Then I undressed and showered. The tiles in the bathroom were brown. Even the water was brown.

After my shower, wrapped in my old faded-yellow bathrobe, I went out onto the balcony, still towelling my hair. After the deathly Kelvinator chill in my room, the night air was warm and dry and soothing. I could hear a man and a woman loudly and drunkenly arguing, and the distant yowling of coyotes. I felt as if I had arrived here from another planet

I was just turning back to my open door to fetch myself another beer when I glimpsed a young woman walking quickly across the motel courtyard below me. She was visible only for a fraction of a second before she vanished underneath the balcony, and I couldn't see much more than her shoulders and the top of her head. But the back of my neck fizzed with shock, because I was sure that I recognized her.

I leaned over the balcony. The man and the woman were still arguing. ‘—
of all the Goddamned insane things to do — of all the dumb-ass stupid ridiculous things to do
—'

I listened, but the night was filled with too much arguing and traffic-noise and distorted radio-music for me to be able
to hear footsteps. I heard a door slam, but that could have been anybody's.

Wrapping my towel round my neck, I walked along the balcony as far as the steps, taking care not to tread on the dead armadillo. I thought I saw a shadow moving, and heard the sharp shuffle of a shoe on dusty concrete, and I called out, ‘Karen?'

I waited, straining my ears.

‘Karen?' I repeated.

I wasn't at all sure that it was Karen. The odds against it being Karen were about a zillion-to-one. Even if she was still here in Phoenix — even if Misquamacus hadn't spirited her away to someplace else — how would she know where I was staying?

All the same, in that split-second glimpse, I had seen hair that was just like Karen's, and shoulders that were just like Karen's, and there had just been
something
in the way she carried herself that made me think that it
could
be her.

Wishful thinking? Well, maybe. But I stayed where I was at the top of the steps, still listening.

After three or four minutes, the door to one of the ground-floor rooms opened and a fat man with hairy shoulders came out. He saw me and stared up at me suspiciously.

‘You got a problem, friend?' he asked me.

I shook my head.

‘I'm waiting for somebody, that's all.'

He eyed me up and down, spat out of the side of his mouth, and then went back into his room. I thought: classy joints I have stayed in, number two hundred and thirty-six.

I went back to my room and locked the door behind me. I sat on the bed and had a long think, but I was too tired to think of anything sensible. Apart from being tired, I was filled up with one too many beers, and a gnawing apprehension about tomorrow. I knew that visiting the Great Outside was probably the only way for me to find Karen and
Misquamacus, but the Great Outside was death. It was what we prissy clairvoyants like to call “the world beyond the veil.” I wasn't at all sure that I really wanted to make a visit, even if that visit was intended to be temporary.

I switched on the television, and found myself watching
A Day At The Races
. I changed channels to the news, but there were no new updates on what had happened in Las Vegas.
A hundred square miles of south-western Nevada are virtually a no-go area … rescue pilots have reported running into dust clouds as high as twenty thousand feet
. I switched the television off again, and the bedside lamp, too.

I lay in darkness for a while, listening to the air-conditioning and the sounds of the night outside. It probably took me no more than ten minutes to fall asleep.

I was awakened by the feeling that there was somebody standing in the room with me. The feeling was so strong that for a moment I was too scared to open my eyes, in case it was true.

When I did look around the room, however, there was nobody there. A faint light was straining in between the dark-brown drapes, and the single red eye of the television pilot-light was still glowing, so if there
had
been anybody there I would have seen them at once. I had probably felt nothing more than the fading vibrations of a nightmare.

I rolled over and checked my watch on the nightstand. It was two-twenty-five in the morning, in those dark and tiny hours when the Reaper is cutting down the bearded grain, and the flowers that grow between.

I lay back on my pillow for a while, trying to imagine what
the day was going to bring. But the Great Outside was unimaginable. All I could think of was darkness and more darkness.

I was right on the edge of nodding off to sleep again when I heard a faint squeaking noise from the bathroom. Not a mouse, or a cricket. More like the sound of human skin rubbing against ceramic tiles.

There
was
somebody there, in the bathroom. I lay totally still and held my breath and kept on listening and listening. My heart ran a slow, deep marathon inside of my ribcage, and I could hear my blood rushing through my ears. For a very long time, though, over a minute, I heard nothing at all. A plane droning high in the sky; a truck rumbling and rattling. More nothing. And then
squikkk
.

Slowly, carefully, I climbed out of bed and reached for my clothes. You have no idea how much noise you make when you step into a pair of cotton-twill trousers. It sounds like thirty undisciplined carnie workers putting up a three-ring tent made of Cellophane. I buckled my belt and decided to forget about the polo shirt. I stood in the gloom of my chilly room still listening, still listening.
Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming, dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
.

‘Who's there?' I said, in a voice as weak as watered milk. ‘Is anybody there?'

I glanced towards the door. The chain was still fastened, the door was still locked. If somebody had managed to break into my room, they must have come in through the bathroom window. I didn't quite understand
how
, because although the bathroom window was quite wide it was only about six inches high, not nearly high enough for anybody to squeeze through it.

I padded on bare feet towards the bathroom and stood outside the door for another half-minute, listening. The hair on the back of my neck was prickling and I was shivery
and goose-bumpy all over, but that was because of the chilly air-conditioning. Leastways, that was what I tried to tell myself. Frightened?
Moi
? Of squeaking noises in the night? I was almost paralysed with terror.

I waited and waited and waited and prayed that there was nobody in the bathroom. Please God or Gitche Manitou please may there be nobody in the bathroom. But then I knew that I had to push open the door and switch on the light and take a look. There was no escaping it. After all, I couldn't go back to bed and peacefully sleep for the rest of the night without knowing
for sure
that there was nobody there.

I cleared my throat. ‘Is anybody there?' I asked, manfully.

Oh, for sure. About a hundred loopy Disney voices are going to shout out, ‘Nobody here but us ghosts!'

I pushed open the door. It made a light juddering noise, banged against the tiled wall. The bathroom was slightly lighter than the bedroom, because a streetlight was shining through the window. I could make out the tub, the toilet and the washbasin. The light gleamed on the chrome-plated taps. The mirror gleamed dark. A good suicide mirror, that. The kind of mirror which disillusioned husbands stand in front of, and watch themselves cutting their own throats. What better place to finish a nondescript life, than the Thunderbird Motel?

I frowned at the frosted-glass shower cubicle. It
looked
empty. I hoped it was empty. But there was some kind of shadow in it, some kind of shape, which didn't seem to correspond with the tiling.

I felt as if the floor had dropped away beneath my feet.

There was somebody standing in the shower
. Oh, God. There was somebody in it. This was
Psycho
all over.
Wheeep, wheep, wheep, wheep
!

I swallowed a dry, sour swallow. My heartbeat, slow and deep, accelerated into a furious, erratic drumming. There
was no question about it. Somebody was standing in the shower, somebody white-skinned and naked, with no water running. Somebody silent, somebody still. It looked like a woman. I could just about make out her eyes, two dark smudges that looked like the blood-clots on the yolk of a fertilized egg; and the darkness of her hair.

I approached the shower very slowly, and raised my hand towards the door-catch.

The white figure didn't move, but she must have been watching me closely.

‘Karen?' I whispered.

There was a long-drawn-out moment of utter silence. No cars, no radios, no passing planes. I was about to take the catch in my hand, ready to pull the shower door open, and the white figure was obviously waiting for me.

‘Karen?' I repeated. ‘Is that you?'

Before I could touch it, the shower door unlatched itself, and swung silently open. Karen was standing naked in front of me, so white that she could have been dead and bled. She stood with her arms straight down by her sides, her dark eyes staring directly at me as if she were willing me to move, willing me to speak.

The light from the bathroom window made her shoulders and her breasts gleam white, but left the lower part of her face in shadow. It was impossible to tell if she were smiling or not, or whether she was simply standing there, expressionless, waiting for me to say something.

‘Karen?' (My heart going crazy now, one of those drum solos in which the sweat flies and the audience scream and the drummer eventually collapses.) ‘Karen, how did you get
in
here?'

She slowly lifted one hand. ‘Aren't you going to help me out of here?'

‘Karen … the door's locked … the window's too small. How did you get
in
here?'

She stepped out of the shower cubicle and stood in front of me, small and frighteningly pale. She lifted her hand and I clasped it in mine. It felt like no hand that I had ever held before, like cold, half-stewed okra. No wonder that, in India, they called okra ‘Ladies' Fingers.' They must have had first-hand experience of touching the spirits of dead women, or reincarnated women, or women who were still alive and who had been possessed by terrible spirits.

I wasn't sure which of those women Karen now was. Or whether this was Karen at all.

‘Harry …' she said. ‘It's so good to see you.'

‘Whaha — ' I began, and then I had to stop, because I couldn't pronounce my words properly. ‘What happened to you?'

‘I had to go, Harry, that's all.'

I squeezed her hand more tightly. I think I was almost afraid that I would squeeze some kind of cold, clear juice out of her fingers. But she stepped up closer, until her chilly nipples were brushing against my bare stomach, and she lifted her head as if she wanted me to kiss her.