Ghosts and Other Lovers (17 page)

But that had nothing to do with these stones. He scooped them off the ledge with one hand, half-turned, and flung them away as far as he could. He thought they went over the sagging back fence, but he could not see where, amid the shadows and the weeds, they fell.

 

 

He had done a lot in two days, and Paul Staunton was pleased with himself. All his possessions were inside and in their place, the house was clean, the telephone had been installed, and he had fixed the broken latch on the bathroom window. Some things remained to be done -- he needed a dining-room table, he didn't like the wallpaper in the bathroom, and the back yard would have to be mowed very soon -- but all in all he thought he had a right to be proud of what he had done. There was still some light left in the day, which made it worthwhile to relax outside and enjoy the cooler evening air.

 

He took a chair out, thinking about the need for some lawn furniture, and put it in the same spot where he had sat before, beneath the gentle mimosa. But this time, before sitting down, he began to walk around the yard, pacing off his property and luxuriating in the feeling of being a landowner.

Something pale, glimmering in the twilight, caught his eye, and Paul stood still, frowning. It was entirely the wrong color for anything that should be on the other side of the fence, amid that tumbled blur of greens and browns. He began to walk toward the back fence, trying to make out what it was, but was able only to catch maddeningly incomplete glimpses. Probably just trash, paper blown in from the road, he thought, but still . . . He didn't trust his weight to the sagging portion of the fence, but climbed another section. He paused at the top, not entirely willing to climb over, and strained his eyes for whatever it was and, seeing it at last, nearly fell off the fence.

He caught himself in time to make it a jump, rather than an undignified tumble, but at the end of it he was on the other side of the fence and his heart was pounding wildly.

Standing stones. Three rocks in a roughly triangular formation.

He wished he had not seen them. He wanted to be back in his own yard. But it was too late for that. And now he wanted to be sure of what he had seen. He pressed on through the high weeds and thick plants, burrs catching on his jeans, his socks, and his T-shirt.

There they were.

His throat was tight and his muscles unwilling, but Paul made himself approach and walk around them. Yes, there were three standing stones, but beyond the formation, and the idea of them, there was no real resemblance to the rocks in England. These stones were no more than four feet high, and less than two across. Unlike the standing stones of the Old World, these had not been shaped and set in their places -- they were just masses of native white limestone jutting out of the thin soil. San Antonio lies on the Edwards Plateau, a big slab of limestone laid down as ocean sediment during the Cretaceous, covered now with seldom more than a few inches of soil. There was nothing unusual about these stones, and they had nothing to do with the legends of growing, walking stones in another country.

Paul knew that. But, as he turned away from the stones and made his way back through the underbrush to his own yard, one question nagged him, a problem he could not answer to his own satisfaction, and that was: why didn't I see them before?

Although he had not been over the fence before, he had often enough walked around the yard -- even before buying the house -- and once had climbed the fence and gazed out at the land on the other side.

Why hadn't he seen the stones then? They were visible from the fence, so why hadn't he seen them more than a week earlier? He should have seen them. If they were there.

But they must have been there. They couldn't have popped up out of the ground overnight; and why should anyone transport stones to such an unlikely place? They must have been there. So why hadn't he seen them before?

The place where the stones grow
, he thought.

Going into the house, he locked the back door behind him.

 

 

The next night was Midsummer Eve, the anniversary of his father's death, and Paul did not want to spend it alone.

 

He had drinks with a pretty young woman named Alice Croy after work -- she had been working as a temporary secretary in his office -- and then took her out to dinner, and then for more drinks, and then, after a minor altercation about efficiency, saving gas, and who was not too drunk to drive, she followed him in her own car to his house where they had a mutually satisfying, if not terribly meaningful, encounter.

Paul was drifting off to sleep when he realized that Alice had gotten up and was moving about the room.

He looked at the clock: it was almost two.

"What're you doing?" he asked drowsily.

"You don't have to get up." She patted his shoulder kindly, as if he were a dog or a very old man.

He sat up and saw that she was dressed except for her shoes. "What are you doing?" he repeated.

She sighed. "Look, don't take this wrong, okay? I like you. I think what we had was really great, and I hope we can get together again. But I just don't feel comfortable in a strange bed. I don't know you well enough to -- it would be awkward in the morning for both of us. So I'm just going on home."

"So that's why you brought your own car."

"Go back to sleep. I didn't mean to disturb you."

"Your leaving disturbs me."

She made a face.

Paul sighed and rubbed his eyes. It would be pointless to argue with her. And, he realized, he didn't like her very much -- on any other night he might have been relieved to see her go.

"All right," he said. "If you change your mind, you know where I live."

She kissed him lightly. "I'll find my way out. You go back to sleep, now."

But he was wide awake, and he didn't think he would sleep again that night. He was safe in his own bed, in his own house, surely. If his father had been content to stay inside, instead of going out alone, in the gray, predawn light, to look at three stones in a field, he might be alive now.

It's over, thought Paul. Whatever happened, happened long ago, and to my father, not me. (But he had seen the stone move.)

He sat up and turned on the light before that old childhood nightmare could appear before him: the towering rocks lumbering across the grassy field to crush his father. He wished he knew someone in San Antonio well enough to call at this hour. Someone to visit. Another presence to keep away the nightmares. Since there was no one, Paul knew that he would settle for lots of Jack Daniel's over ice, with Bach on the stereo -- supreme products of civilization to keep the ghosts away.

But he didn't expect it to work.

In the living room, sipping his drink, the uncurtained glass of the windows disturbed him. He couldn't see out, but the light in the room cast his reflection onto the glass, so that he was continually being startled by his own movements. He settled that by turning out the lights. There was a full moon, and he could see well enough by the light that it cast, and the faint glow from the stereo console. The windows were tightly shut and the air-conditioning unit was laboring steadily: the cool, laundered air and the steady hum shut out the night even more effectively than the Brandenburg Concertos.

Not for the first time, he thought of seeing a psychiatrist. In the morning he would get the name of a good one. Tough on a young boy to lose his father, he thought, killing his third drink. So much worse for the boy who finds his father's dead body in mysterious circumstances. But one had to move beyond that. There was so much more to life than the details of an early trauma.

As he rose and crossed the room for another drink (silly to have left the bottle all the way over there, he thought), a motion from the yard outside caught his eye, and he slowly turned his head to look.

It wasn't just his reflection that time. There had been something moving in the far corner of the yard, near the broken-down fence. But now that he looked for it, he could see nothing. Unless, perhaps, was that something there in the shadows near one of the fig trees? Something about four feet high, pale-colored, and now very still?

Paul had a sudden urge, which he killed almost at once, to take a flashlight and go outside, to climb the fence and make sure those three rocks were still there.
They want me to come out
, he thought -- and stifled that thought, too.

He realized he was sweating. The air conditioner didn't seem to be doing much good. He poured himself another drink and pulled his chair around to face the window. Then he sat there in the dark, sipping his whiskey and staring out into the night. He didn't bother to replace the record when the stereo clicked itself off, and he didn't get up for another drink when his glass was empty. He waited and watched for nearly an hour, and he saw nothing in the dark yard move. Still he waited, thinking,
They have their own time, and it isn't ours. They grow at their own pace, in their own place, like everything else alive.

Something was happening, he knew. He would soon see the stones move, just as his father had. But he wouldn't make his father's mistake and get in their way. He wouldn't let himself be killed.

Then, at last -- he had no idea of the time now -- the white mass in the shadows rippled, and the stone moved, emerging onto the moonlit grass. Another stone was behind it, and another. Three white rocks moving across the grass.

They were flowing. The solid white rock rippled and lost its solid contours and re-formed again in another place, slightly closer to the house. Flowing -- not like water, like rock.

Paul thought of molten rock and of lava flows. But molten rock did not start and stop like that, and it did not keep its original form intact, forming and re-forming like that. He tried to comprehend what he was seeing. He knew he was no longer drunk. How could a rock move? Under great heat or intense pressure, perhaps. What were rocks? Inorganic material, but made of atoms like everything else. And atoms could change, could be changed -- forms could change --

But the simple fact was that rocks did not move. Not by themselves. They did not wear paths down cliffs to the sea. They did not give birth. They did not grow. They did not commit murder. They did not seek revenge.

Everyone knew this, he thought, as he watched the rocks move in his back yard. No one had ever seen a rock move.

Because they kill anyone who sees them.

They had killed his father, and now they had come to kill him.

Paul sprang up from his chair, overturning it, thinking of escape. Then he remembered. He
was
safe. Safe inside his own home. His hand came down on the windowsill and he stroked it. Solid walls between him and those things out there: walls built of sturdy, comforting stone.

Staring down at his hand on the white rock ledge, a half-smile of relief still on his lips, he saw it change. The stone beneath his hand rippled and crawled. It felt to his fingertips like warm putty. It was living. It flowed up to embrace his hand, to engulf it, and then solidified. He screamed and tried to pull his hand free. He felt no physical pain, but his hand was buried firmly in the solid rock, and he could not move it.

He looked around in terror and saw that the walls were now molten and throbbing. They began to flow together. A stream of living rock surged across the window-glass. Dimly, he heard the glass shatter. The walls were merging, streaming across floor and ceiling, greedily filling all the empty space. The living, liquid rock lapped about his ankles, closing about him, absorbing him, turning him to stone.

White Lady's Grave

 

I
thought, when I moved to Scotland, that I was leaving romance behind, but here I am, in it over my head.

 

Men have called me beautiful, called me princess, wooed me, sometimes left other women, even their wives, for me. Usually in the end I found it was not me they loved but a fantasy-figure, something from their own imaginations. Their love was a private world I couldn't enter. But I kept hoping, kept trying to get in, to make them see me, to make the happy-ever-after dream come true. All through my teens and twenties I fell in and out of love, recovered, went on to the next man, bruised but still believing. In my thirties my enthusiasm soured. I began to question the truth of this story which had been my life.

Then I met Angus, a stocky, red-headed Scotsman, and although he wasn't my physical type, he won me over with his gentleness, his warmth, his sense of humor, and his practical attitude toward life. I didn't have to pretend with him; I didn't feel I was risking his disappointment every time I opened my mouth to say what I really thought.

Angus wasn't a dreamer, he was a doer. He had a proposal which appealed to me: we would run a fish farm in Scotland, perhaps doing a bit of bed-and-breakfast on the side, in the season. It would be a wholesome, outdoor, rural life, particularly good for children.

I liked the idea of having children, and I longed to get out of London, which had become murky with memory and the failure of desire. By going away with Angus I thought I could escape my own history and the doomed inevitability of repeating it.

Before, when I'd gone away with a man, whether for a weekend or a life together, there had always been the sense that I was being swept away, that I was only acceding to a force greater than myself. But when I married Angus, it was an act of will.

I willed myself to be happy, and I was. We both were. Our new life together was different and satisfying, and even though, after three years, there was no sign of a child and I was nearly forty, I was determined we would be happy ever after.

So I felt no intimations of danger when I noticed the stranger in the bar of our local hotel that August evening, even though he was looking at me. I thought marriage, contentment, and age all protected me from romance. There were lines on my face, gray in my hair, and my body had thickened with the passage of years. So I looked back at the stranger, feeling quite safe, and accepted his offer of a drink. Angus was just the other side of the room, playing billiards. I was friendly in the way you can be when you expect everyone to know you're married.