Night Relics (35 page)

Stealthily, he crept to the window and peered into the bunkhouse through a narrow gap in the curtain. There were three beds,
two of them empty. The floor was strewn with clothes.

Esther lay on the center bed, partly covered with a sheet, her hair pulled back in a red ribbon. Lewis kneeled on the wooden
floor, leaning over her, his hand under the sheet, his lips on her neck. She shifted on the bed, moving one of her legs so
that her foot touched the floor. Her hand played across the back of his head. He heard their sighs and their breathing, the
two of them moving in the lamplight as the wind blew in a perfect frenzy now, hammering against the sides of the bunkhouse,
slamming at the bolted door. She bent at the waist, pulling herself toward him, her hand snaking around his shoulders.

He flung himself away from the wall of the bunkhouse, striding toward the ridge, screaming at the wind that blew into his
face. A shovel stood tilted against a leafless fruit tree, its blade caked with dirt. He closed his hand around the wooden
handle, feeling the familiar, weather-raised grain against his palm. Hefting it with both hands, he turned slowly toward the
bunkhouse again, hearing their voices in his mind, stepping up and across the wooden porch, his feet echoing on the floorboards,
and raised the shovel over his head, driving it against the wooden door with all his strength as the wind shrieked behind
him, filling him with rage and desperation.

T
HE PHONE WOKE
L
ORNA FROM A DEAD SLEEP.
S
HE SAT
up in bed, still only half-awake, thinking it was the alarm clock and that Lance had set it for some reason. It was on his
side, so she reached across to shake him and found the bed empty. It rang a second time and she remembered: he was asleep
on the couch. The telephone was ringing. She fumbled it out of the cradle and said hello.

“Hello, Lorna?” a voice said. She recognized it—him again. Instantly she was awake.

“Do you know where Lance is?” the man asked. His voice was almost sad, as if he were performing a tragic duty. For a moment
she wondered if he really wanted to know. Perhaps it was business; it wasn’t all that late. She stayed silent anyway, growing
more tense as the moments passed. Slowly she became fearful for her husband. She’d known that afternoon that there was something
dangerous going on. Lance had been tense….

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want you to know that he’s entertaining female guests in the poolhouse.”

There was a dial tone then. No laughter, no threats, just this matter-of-fact statement expressed in a voice full of earnest
concern.

She got out of bed and parted the blinds, looking out the window. The poolhouse was dark. Of course the man was a filthy liar.
She pulled on her robe and slippers and went out through the door, suddenly regretting that she’d rebuffed
Lance so hard that evening. It was only lately that they’d started taking their arguments to bed with them, and she’d told
herself this afternoon that it was going to stop, along with the rest, the drinking.

The couch in the living room was empty and the french doors stood open to the wind. There were newspapers scattered on the
floor from where they’d blown off a chair, and the curtains were blowing away from the wall, billowing up like bedsheet ghosts.
The backyard was empty in the moonlight, and the pool was full of leaves.

The gate was open. So that was it. He’d gone out into the hills again. Or had he? Had the man on the phone been right? There
was a movement just then, a stirring of the curtains in the poolhouse window. She sat down on the couch, where she had a clear
view of both the gate and the door to the poolhouse, noticing for the first time the glass of scotch on the coffee table.
The three or four ice cubes in it were only half-melted. He must have poured it ten or fifteen minutes ago.

How could the man on the telephone have
known
? She stood up, carried the glass to the sink, and dumped it down the drain. Then she rinsed it out and put it away in the
cupboard. Going out to the poolhouse would be idiotic. What if
he
was there, waiting? The same man who’d been prowling around Beth’s house last night. She peered past the edge of the drape,
looking at the poolhouse again. There was a movement, out toward the hills. Her breath caught, and she stepped back out of
the window. A man had appeared out of nowhere, out of the old orchard, carrying what looked like a shovel.

T
HE INTERIOR OF THE POOLHOUSE WAS DIM, VAGUELY ILLUMINATED
by moonlight through the partly open curtains. The wind hummed
in the eaves and things whirled past beyond the windows, their shadows flickering briefly across the walls and floor. The
scent of candle tallow and jasmine and dusty pine came to him, and Klein let himself imagine that the soft light playing across
the floor was cast by the pair of candles burning in his dreams. He glanced at the woman, nearly invisible in the soft darkness.
He could see her moving, hear the rustle of her dress, her shoulders showing pale white in the light of the moon.

It was the dream again. He toyed with that idea—that he was dreaming, asleep in the house. It wouldn’t be the first time that
he was conscious of dreaming but still lost in the dream itself, and he forced himself deeper into it, picturing the candles,
the bed against the plank wall, the scent of her perfume. He didn’t want to lose it, this dream that was a sheltered place,
dark and secretive, the rest of the world nothing but an abandoned illusion, reduced to the sound of the wind.

The candle flames flickered. He knelt on the floor at the edge of the bed, tracing the curve of her elbow through the woolen
blanket. “Esther,” he said out loud, noticing for the first time that she had a red ribbon in her hair. She turned to him,
her hand on the back of his neck, pulling him to her, and he knew that he had come finally to a place
he was destined to be, that they had found one another again at last.

But just as this thought came to him, the walls shook with a gust of wind, and he looked up uneasily, listening to the door
rattle, hearing something in his head like the drone of flies. “The wind,” he whispered. She sat up languorously, wrapping
an arm around his shoulders, sealing his lips with her fingers, her black hair a shadow, a scrap of nighttime darkness, her
pale skin a clever reflection of moonlight. He had the feeling that he was falling, not quickly, but drifting like a leaf,
free at last from something he could neither see nor define.

The door rattled again, as if there was a hand on the latch. He sat forward, listening. The room shook with wind. The night
outside was alive with a crashing and rustling. Something chunked solidly into the door, scraping down the length of it, and
suddenly all his night fears sprang in upon him—the horror that inevitably shattered his dreams, hidden from him until the
end. The woman sat up, clawing at his shoulder now, trying to hide herself with the covers as if she, too, knew what it was
that had found them there. The door panel bowed inward with the force of the wind, quivering and thrumming.

With a shriek it tore itself open, slamming inward. The air was suddenly full of leaves and dust, the wind blowing full into
his face with such force that he turned his head away, cowering backward against the wall. He opened his mouth to scream,
and dry particles of windblown debris choked him, filling his throat. There was the heavy banging sound of a table turning
over, and in the moonlight he could see the curtains flailing against the windows.

A shadow moved through the swirling, wind-driven debris, a dark wraith that was partly human, partly animate rage. Klein turned
his head away, not wanting to see it, knowing that in his dream he turned his head away, and that he saw it anyway, and he
knew each time that the shadow would take the form of a man, of Esther’s husband.
As if the room had tilted sideways, he felt himself sliding, and he grabbed frantically at the bedstead with his right hand,
realizing at the same moment that there was no bedstead, and clutching a sofa cushion instead. He threw his left hand and
forearm across his face as the shadow moved past the edge of the door, the moonlight glinting on the steel blade of the shovel.
Klein slid onto the floor, curling into a ball and covering himself, looking wildly around for a means of escape but driven
against the wall by the tearing wind.

The man raised the shovel over his head—dark hair and eyes, his clothing torn and dirty, his mouth open in a scream that was
either silent or was lost in the wind. Klein saw the blade slash downward, heard the woman’s screams. The room reeled around
him. As if from the vantage point of a dream, he saw the dying man on the bed—not himself, but a man young and frail seeming
with wide, terrified eyes, his hands flailing in front of him, the woman scrabbling away across the sheets, and the blood-flecked
pine boards behind them white with moonlight. Klein
knew
this man, as if they shared some common history, but like water fading into sand, the knowledge dissipated and was gone.

Something brushed past him in the dim light, a moving shadow that trailed across his flesh like cobweb. He heard a shuffling
noise and saw, standing against the white panel of the poolhouse door, a man holding a shovel—not the murderer from his dream,
but someone he vaguely recognized, blurred behind the veil of swirling leaves. Klein pushed himself backward, clutching the
sofa cushion in front of him as the man staggered out into the night. A moment later he heard the clatter of the shovel hitting
the pool deck, and then, almost at once, an explosion that sounded like gunfire.

Slowly the door swung shut, the wind fell off, and the leaves and dust settled in the room. He sat in the darkness waiting,
pressed into the corner and listening to the slow scraping of feet on the concrete outside.

T
HE DOOR STRAINED INWARD WHEN HE PUSHED ON IT, THE
wind howling around him, pounding against the wood siding of the bunkhouse, straining the old iron door latch. He stepped
back, raising the shovel over his head, his mind a chaos of broken images like the moon’s reflection shivered by a stone.
Throwing himself forward, he drove the shovel into the door. The wood deflected the blade and it slashed down across the door
panel, the sound grating in his ears like a shriek. In his mind rose the picture of a man’s visage, eyes broad with terror,
blood welling out of an open gash. He struck the door again, along the edge now, and felt the latch snap, the door slam inward,
the wind sweeping him into the room in a wild rage.

The candles guttered and went out. Moonlight glittered on a rustling vortex of leaves that tore through the room, the silver
light shining on Lewis’s face, betraying the craven terror in his eyes. Esther was a dark shadow above a dim white blanket.
His mind veered away from her, flickering with staccato images like the stuttering frames in an antique movie: the quick,
narrow vision of a face rushing toward him down a tunnel; the moving hands of two card players at a moonlit table; a dead
cat in the bottom of a box; a wooden flute lying on the cracked tiles of a fireplace hearth; a narrow, rock-walled, night-dark
canyon alive with the rush of water and wind; two broken shadows in a pool of moonlit water….

He reeled forward, gripped by the sudden throat-seizing fear of falling, overwhelmed with the anguished knowledge of who lay
dead or dying in that black pool. He reached out to grip the corners of the table before him, saw playing cards spinning past
far below in a dark void. “Peter …” He heard her whisper, knew her voice….

And a shadow moved away from him like a torn-off shred of darkness. He staggered back, released suddenly by the wind, and
through the litter of leaves and dust he saw the dark figure of a man—separate from him now—raise the shovel into the air.
He heard the woman scream and the groan of effort from the man’s throat as the shovel hatcheted downward….

He turned and plunged out through the open door, into the night, nearly stumbling into the leaf-choked swimming pool. He looked
around with the wild, empty fear of a suddenly awakened sleepwalker, hearing the sound of a woman’s scream tear through the
wild night air. An empty chaise longue, propelled by the wind, skidded toward him across the concrete deck, spinning around
and dropping into the pool, and he could hear the clicking and husking of dry sycamore leaves as they blew against the wrought-iron
palings, gripping the black metal like paper hands.

Abruptly he knew where he was—the dark, rocky hills rising behind him, cut with the black ribbon of the ridge trail. He saw
movement in the lighted window next door—Beth, her kitchen window. He was suddenly conscious of the weight of the shovel
in his hands. The poolhouse door slammed shut behind him and then blew open again, and he saw the long scar in the white paint.
He threw the shovel down and sprinted toward the fence, leaping up and grabbing the redwood boards and propelling himself
upward, feeling the fence shudder as he boosted himself over with his elbows, a splinter of wood scraping his cheek.

Something exploded behind him like the crack of a firecracker, and he threw his hands over his head even as his
feet jarred with the impact of hitting the ground. Gunfire! They were
shooting
at him! He crouched down and sprinted across the leaf-strewn lawn toward the back porch, praying that the door would be unlocked.

W
HEN SHE SAW THE MAN WITH THE SHOVEL,
L
ORNA
ducked back out of sight behind the drape, throwing her hand to her mouth. He was half-obscured by windblown leaves and dust,
but he clearly wasn’t the man who’d been over to see Lance that morning. A jealous husband? In a sudden panic she turned toward
the bedroom. The wind howled outside with a power that nearly took her breath away, and a hailstorm of leaves and twigs pelted
the doors and screens. There was a fearful pounding just then, like someone breaking down a wall, and she looked out just
as the poolhouse door slammed inward, the man with the shovel silhouetted against the darkened interior. She saw him raise
the shovel with both hands and heard simultaneously a woman’s scream and the hoarse shouting of a man’s voice.