Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (2 page)

She looked at herself in the car mirror, at her blond hair and delicate features. She had been told that she looked like Julie Christie, but she had never believed it. Until she had met Stephen it had been difficult for Lauren to believe that anything truly good might happen to her.

It was not that she was a pessimist, really, at least not when it came to the world in general. Whenever the cynical old fogies at
People Beat
began spewing apocalyptic claptrap about nuclear holocaust or the inevitability of the decline of good journalism it was always she who challenged them, she who argued that there was something inherently good in the human spirit, something that, no matter how dark the world became, would never let it sink into the mire of total moral turpitude.

And she believed it. She did not know why. Perhaps it was some past-life thing—for she had certainly not been raised in a religious environment in this life. But whatever the cause, there was a deep and abiding conviction in her that there was something akin to grace in the universe, that the cards of fate were stacked ever so slightly on the side of innocence and that good things were just a little more likely to happen than bad.

Except when it came to her.

Her reasons for excluding herself from this mantle of grace were deep, lost in the painful fragments of her childhood, but she knew that one of the fragments was her father. Her earliest memories of her father were of a proud man, handsome, outgoing, and always in command of the situation. Born to parents who had emigrated from the south side of London to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, he had risen from poverty to ownership of his own tool-and-die business and by the time Lauren was born had purchased quite a nice home for her and her mother in the Forest Hills section of Queens.

Lauren’s memories of those early years were rapturously happy, and although she did not see her father much, she remembered the brief stretches of time she was able to spend with him as almost luminous, they were so qualitatively different from the rest of her life. She could still remember the brands of candy he would bring her when he came home from work, and how she would endlessly trace and retrace the design in the kitchen linoleum as she waited for him to finish showering in the basement—her mother never let him come into the house proper until he had showered and changed out of his work clothes—and come upstairs at the end of the day.

It had nearly killed her when one day he didn’t come home and for weeks her mother refused to tell her anything. When she was seven and after nearly six months had passed, her mother finally explained to her the meaning of the word “divorce” and told her that her father would never be coming home again. As for why, Lauren was given only sketchy fragments about there being another woman involved and about how her father had decided to live with her instead of them. But because these fragments were beyond the comprehension of a seven-year-old, Lauren could only imagine that somehow the divorce had to do with her, with something she had done. And perhaps also with some secondary and less consequential crime committed by her mother.

In time Lauren became convinced that if only she could see her father she might be able to make amends for whatever it was she had done, but her mother told her that after the divorce her father had moved out West and had left no forwarding address. Her relationship with her mother had never been good, and after the divorce it too got worse. Although Lauren recognized now that her mother’s increasing inability to cope with Lauren or with even the most trifling of everyday events was due to her own devastation over the divorce, it only intensified Lauren’s feeling that somehow she was the victim of some terrible mistake, that if only she could locate her father she might be able lift the horrible curse that had befallen her.

Her feeling that she was the victim of some dark spell increased when she was eight and her mother was confined to a wheelchair with severe rheumatoid arthritis. From that point on until Lauren went away to college at the age of seventeen, she was her mother’s chattel and slave—a nurse when her mother became too ill to take care of herself, and a punching bag when her mother recovered enough to recall the pain and bitterness that had placed her in the wheelchair in the first place.

It wasn’t until Lauren was in her early twenties and had landed her first job—as an assistant to a staff writer at the
Village Voice
—that her mother accidentally let drop that her father had not moved out West but was living in Westchester. At first she was furious at her mother for withholding the information from her for so long, and they had a terrible argument. But then afterward Lauren was ecstatic and her dream of reclaiming some of the lost happiness of her youth was rekindled.

Another year passed before she finally reestablished contact with her father. Perhaps because it was a moment she had looked forward to for so long, she just didn’t want to rush into it. Or perhaps she wanted to wait until she had a more impressive job (and she did, for by that time she had become a staff writer at
People Beat).
Whatever the case, it was with both joy and profound nervousness that she visited her father’s spacious home in Westchester.

The meeting was anticlimactic to say the least. Far from being the luminous and larger-than-life figure she remembered, her father was short and paunchy. In fact, he was exactly the sort of man she usually detested—perfectly coiffed hair (stiff with hair spray and carefully combed in a large wavy sheet to conceal a burgeoning bald spot), shiny and manicured nails, oppressive cologne. And of course there was the cigar, a Dunhill Montecristo No. 1.

Nor was he even the warm and affectionate man she remembered, let alone the knight to wipe clean all the ruinous memories of her childhood. He was stiff and ill at ease. Rather than being impressed at her successes, he seemed resentful of them. They spent an uncomfortable afternoon together, and when it was over Lauren was appalled to realize that she had felt more relaxed with his wife, a darkly tanned and vaguely blowsy redhead named Tiffany, than she had with him.

Her father was not the only man with whom she had had an ill-fated relationship. About six months after the Westchester fiasco a girlfriend invited her to go to a gallery opening, and there, while looking at sculptures created by placing bundles of multicolored wire beneath the wheels of subways and while drinking white wine out of a clear plastic wine goblet, she met the the man who was to become the second significant male figure in her life, a Hungarian painter named Miklos.

As with Stephen, her attraction to Miklos had been immediate. Miklos was not as handsome as Stephen was, but he possessed a certain panache. Tall, thin, and given to wearing only the newest Italian fashions, he cut a most striking figure. He was also one of the best-read human beings she had ever met, and what with his intoxicating accent and her discovery that he was a staggeringly talented painter, her heart was quickly lost to him.

For the better part of a year their relationship proceeded without a hitch. Although she had had several boyfriends in college, he was the first man to bring her regularly to orgasm. He was also the first man she had ever met who was sensitive to every one of her foibles, and they quickly developed such a rapport they both started remarking that it seemed almost as if they could read each other’s minds.

That Christmas they were married, and two months later she found out she was pregnant. It was, however, the beginning of the end. Despite Miklos’s initial excitement at the prospect of having a child, as her pregnancy advanced he became increasingly irritable. Although they had both agreed on having a baby, he fought bitterly when she tried to convert a portion of their loft to a nursery, and by the time the baby was born he had become totally convinced that being a successful father and a successful painter were two mutually incompatible things.

They toughed it out for another few months before Lauren took their son, Garrett, and moved into an apartment of her own. Although it wasn’t until another year had passed that she filed for divorce, she never really saw Miklos again.

Throughout Garrett’s childhood, her bad luck with men continued. After Miklos she met Peter. Peter worked for a rival magazine, and her relationship with him ran smoothly until he stole a story idea from her that she thought she had discussed with him in confidence. After Peter she met Julian, who turned out to be one of the worst hypochondriacs she had ever met. And after Julian, Stan, a stockbroker who seemed perfect in every way, until he was indicted on an insider-trading charge.

And after that things continued pretty much the same. Sometimes she would go for months without dating at all. And whenever she did meet someone she was interested in she knew that at some point, before the relationship became too serious, she would discover some fatal flaw. Sometimes she would find out the man was married. Sometimes she was forced to end the relationship out of sheer boredom. But whatever the reason, she seemed destined to meet nothing but jerks and losers.

Until she met Stephen.

Her first several weeks with him she was as nervous as a cat, fearful that at any moment she might discover some terrible crack in his seemingly perfect personality. But there was none. She even speckled her conversations with him with subtle and carefully worded questions designed to draw him out, but always he gave the right answers. More than that, every day with him, every hour and second, was an experience too wonderful to be true. During the day he would take her shopping at Bendel’s or to the designer boutiques at Saks and allow her to buy anything she wanted. At night they would go to parties at the Palladium, or at the home of some famous writer or movie star, and the next day they would have front-row seats for a private performance of a Broadway play. Indeed, just when she thought she had had the most nearly ultimate experience possible, Stephen would top himself again. He would fly them both to Paris on the Concord for lunch. Or fill her apartment with ten dozen red roses. Or leave a pair of diamond earrings from Cartier’s on her pillow. Or tell her he loved her at precisely the moment she needed to hear it the most.

In the brilliant afternoon sunlight that filtered in through the window she looked at him, at his sculpted profile and curly black hair. It was an added plus that he was as good-looking as he was. He was tall and muscular and had the intensity of a young Marlon Brando, with a Roman nose, square chiseled chin, and limpid and arresting green-gray eyes. He was also one of the most alive people she had ever met. Constantly on the move and never tiring at the prospect of exploring something new, he always had a sparkle about him. He could be soft and tender when the moment demanded. He could be intellectual and discuss everything from Proust to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But he could also just as easily drop the polite and boyish façade and exude a brute masculinity, a raw, take-charge sensuality that, although it embarrassed her to admit it, nearly took her breath away.

She gave his hand another squeeze. Had someone told her a few months back that she would be quitting her job at
People Beat
and getting married again, she would have laughed in his face. She would miss working at the magazine, and she recognized what a profound change marrying Stephen had made in her life, but she was glad she had made the decision. She loved him more than any man she had ever met, and the fact that he loved her made her feel like the luckiest woman alive.

From the backseat came the sound of a page turning, and she turned around to glance at her son, Garrett, his nose as usual buried in a book. Her only concern was how the eleven-year-old was going to adjust to all the changes that had taken place in their life. It had taken her days of talking just to get him used to the idea that she had married Stephen. When she told him they would also be leaving New York and spending the summer in the mountains, he had just about died. It was an understandable reaction. After all, she was all the family he had, and now he was going to have to get used to having a stranger for a father and to adjust to an entirely new environment as well. In the end he had begrudgingly consented to the move, but she knew that he was still far from happy about it.

“What are you reading?” she asked, caring less about the subject matter of his book than about how he was feeling.

“It’s about UFOs,” he returned.

“UFOs?” Stephen said, puzzled.

“It’s space,” she explained. “Ever since he saw
E.T.
he’s been obsessed with anything that has to do with outer space.”

Stephen looked back at Garrett. “So what do you think about the Adirondacks so far?”

Garrett leaned forward with a scowl. “There haven’t been any houses for hours.”

“But that’s just the point,” Stephen countered. “I rented a place for us up here for the summer so we could get away from everyone else, be someplace where there’s lots of peace and quiet.”

“But will we even be able to get television up here?”

“Sure we’ll be able to get television. We’ll have all the comforts of home. Marty’s seen to everything. You’re going to love it up here. Just wait and see.”

“Yeah, I know,” Garrett huffed as he slumped back into his seat.

Lauren looked quickly at Stephen. She hoped that he had not taken Garrett’s peevishness too personally, that he realized Garrett was reacting not to him but to the upheaval in his life in general. It worried her slightly that Stephen had never had any children of his own—had never even been married before—and she hoped he understood that contending with such displays of mood was all part of being a father. In addition, Stephen’s schedule was so hectic and demanding and he was on the road so much that he and Garrett had not really spent much time together yet. That was one of the reasons she had been so excited about their moving to the mountains for the summer. She hoped it would give them all the opportunity to spend some time together and become a true family.

She was just about to try to initiate some further conversation among the three of them when suddenly the Porsche hit a bump and they turned off the road. She looked ahead and saw that they had pulled into a narrow driveway pitted and gullied by endless rains and so enclosed by trees that it seemed as if they had entered a dusky green tunnel. Difficult as it was for her to believe, the drive was even steeper than the mountain highway they had just turned off, and even the powerful Porsche strained to make the climb.