Nightlight (17 page)

“No problem,” he said, and for a moment seemed friendly. He opened his hand and gestured upward. “This is a big place. A very big place.”

“Yes,” she said cheerfully, enjoying the obvious. “Yes, it certainly is.”

“You are an artist.”

“Yes. An artist.”

“I am, too.”

“Oh?”

“I paint.”

“Ah.”

But she saw him glancing into the living space, so she added, “I am a photographer, actually. Not quite a painter.”

“Photography,” said the locksmith, plainly disappointed. “That is an art, too.”

“Oh, yes. And yet there is something impressive about painting. What do you paint?”

“Mesas.”

“Ah.”

“From the desert.”

“Of course.”

“This is a very big place,” he said, and waved himself out, seeming, by his last words, to dismiss her, and her art, as acceptable but effete, using too much money, and too little skill.

23

“Since we are trapped here, we might as well try to figure out what Len was doing,” said Paul.

Lise's spirits had slowly sunk, and she now sat with folded arms, staring at the late-afternoon light filtering through the steady rain. “If you want. I'm not interested.”

“It'll give us something to do. Since we can't very well go out and collect butterflies.”

“Have you ever collected butterflies?” she asked, as if only half-aware of speaking.

“Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“I enjoyed it, actually. I always enjoy gathering information. Using my brains.”

“You didn't feel sorry for the butterflies?”

“Sometimes. But they are, after all, insects. And who knows what insects feel, if anything.” Although, he remembered the sound the soft bodies made against the glass of the killing jar, a fine, high chime of a warning, or even a welcome, across thin air.

“How did you kill them?”

“I don't remember. It was just a high school assignment. I didn't get any personal pleasure from it.”

She watched the rain.

“I think you're allowing yourself to sink into a very bad mood,” said Paul. “A very weak mood. You were so cheerful. It's still a vacation. Think of it as cozy.”

“You think of it as cozy. I don't like it.”

“So you're going to sit around and mope. That does a lot of good.” Paul was worried about Lise. Her confidence was gone. As a result, he tried to display more cheer than he could possibly feel.

“What would you like to do?”

“Like! It's not a matter of like. We're stuck. We might as well go through Len's stuff. Listen to his tapes. Things like that.”

She shrugged. “So, go ahead. Listen to his tapes.”

Paul spilled the tape cassettes across the floor. They clattered unpleasantly. He slipped the one closest to him into the battery-operated tape recorder and pushed the play button.

Nothing.

He turned up the volume, until the tape hiss was loud.

Still, nothing.

Or almost nothing. The sounds of someone moving around from room to room, casually, the creak and murmur of the floor. This floor, the one Paul sat on. A cough. The hiss of a sheet of paper.

Silence.

Paul popped that cassette out, and clicked another into the machine. More silence, and then the peal of a spoon stirring coffee or something similar in a cup. The tinkle of the spoon tapped several times against the rim.

Paul snorted. Len had simply recorded himself on his way from one room to another. He had recorded the equivalent of silence. Domestic nothingness. A harmless activity, he supposed. But very peculiar.

He punched the fast-forward button.

A voice. He stopped the tape and rewound it briefly.

“I used to think so, too.” Len's voice, he thought. Nothing more than that. A simple statement, made to the empty air. Paul understood that. He talked to himself sometimes, especially when he was cooking.

“That is exactly the point.”

Len's voice again. Thinking out loud. In this room by the sound of it, the voice was very close.

“Exactly. I wanted that total transformation.”

Paul jabbed the stop button. He fit another tape into the recorder and listened to more empty, or virtually empty, tape.

“He's talking to someone,” said Lise from the doorway.

“No he's not. Thinking out loud.”

“No, it's the way a person would speak to someone if you only heard one end of a telephone conversation.”

Len's voice: “You must let me. I have no choice.”

Empty tape, and then Len's voice again, “You are so perfect. Accept me, no matter how limited.”

Paul stopped the tape. “A lovers' quarrel. Embarrassing to listen to.”

“Why is there only one voice? There isn't a phone here.”

“Maybe she—or he—is answering very softly.”

He stabbed the rewind button, and turned up the volume,. Len's voice thundered, “I have no choice.”

And there was no answer.

Paul turned off the machine. “It doesn't make any sense.”

He wandered the cabin while Lise listened to more tapes. He deliberately tried to ignore the sound of Len's voice. He found a can of pork and beans in the cupboard and cranked the can opener. The single cube of pork fat nestled at the top.

The beans kept the shape of the can, standing upright in the pan, a cylinder of congealed beans. He stirred them with a wooden spoon.

Lise appeared in the doorway. “It makes sense.”

“How?”

“He's talking to someone.”

“A ghost?”

He was trying to joke, but Lise was grim. “There is another voice on the tape. You can barely hear it, but it's another voice.”

“Would you like some beans?”

“Come and hear it.”

“Lise, you're getting yourself all worked up about nothing. Len was just crazy, wandering around the cabin recording his own voice, who knows why, and that's all there is to it.”

“He was talking to someone.”

“In his head, maybe.”

“He was talking to someone and there is another voice on the tape. Why don't you come and hear it. Are you afraid?”

“I'm not afraid!” Paul was shocked at the fierceness of his voice. “No,” he said more softly. “I'm not afraid. I just don't want you leaping to all kinds of wild conclusions.”

“I won't leap to any wild conclusions,” she said, controlling herself. “Just come in and listen to this tape.”

Paul stirred the beans once, then turned off the fire. “I haven't eaten beans like these for a long time. Maybe they're good.”

She was waiting beside the tape recorder. He sat, and she pushed the button. “I will, of course, require manipulation,” whispered hoarsely, a voice like none other Paul had ever heard.

“Play it back.”

They listened again.

“See? Another voice.”

“A visitor,” Paul suggested.

“I suppose.”

Paul made a weak laugh. “So he had a visitor. Big deal.”

“Why aren't there any voices saying ‘Hello, how are you, very glad to drop by in the middle of nowhere to see you Len, how have you been'? How come no one says anything like that?”

Paul shrugged.

“How come all we have on the tape is a very strange voice saying ‘I will, of course, require manipulation.'”

“Odd sex practices.”

“It's not funny.”

“It's funny! Some old guy dropped by and Len was doing something funny with him.”

“I have a very deep feeling that something terrible is happening here.”

“I didn't want you getting excited.”

“I'm not excited.”

“Well, I'm not either, so let's go eat some beans.”

“This place is hideous. We aren't safe here.”

“We're perfectly safe. Is the river going to rise and wash us away?”

“I'm not afraid of the river.”

“Ghosts! You're afraid of ghosts.”

“If you're so smart, you explain all of this.”

“I can't. And I don't have to. An assortment of random data doesn't have to be explained.”

“I'm getting out of here.”

“You'll drown.” She was shivering, and he held her. “We're all right. I don't know what Len was doing, but I can't imagine how it could possibly hurt us.”

“We could find a rope and tie it to a tree and one of us could make it across the river.”

“Very doubtful. The current is very strong, and it's raining even harder now. And even if one of us—meaning me—made it across the river, then what? I'd be soaked, cold, and miles from anywhere.”

“What do you propose?”

“I propose we calm down, and realize that Len was just a silly guy, totally harmless, who doesn't happen to be home.”

Lise wandered to the metal box in the corner. She touched the padlock. “I want to open this box.”

“Why?”

She looked at him, hard. “I want to know what's inside it.”

“We can't go breaking open boxes just because we're curious. This isn't our home.”

“We don't have to break it open.” She fumbled through her purse, and brought forth a key. A tag dangled from it, and Paul touched it.
Dup
.

It looked, indeed, like it might be the key. It was the right size, the right weight.

He was very cold.

“We can't ransack the place,” he said hoarsely. “It isn't right.”

She looked at him steadily. “It's not a matter of ransacking. I want to know what is inside the box.”

“Love letters. Legal documents. A pornography collection. A stamp collection. Drugs.”

“Open it.”

Paul could not move. The key was between his fingers, a neutral slip of metal, neither warm nor cool. It clicked into the slot in the padlock, and the padlock fell open.

“There,” said Paul.

Neither of them moved.

The padlock glittered in his fingers, and he placed it carefully beside the tape recorder. It gleamed there in the early evening, reflecting the light from the ceiling.

The box opened, disclosing a row of manila folders, the tabs of which were slightly frayed. In the very front of the box, lying against the folders, was a cold tool the size of a butter knife.

“A scalpel!” breathed Lise.

Paul put that down, too, next to the tape recorder. He selected the first folder and leafed through it, with some relief. “Why, these are just pictures. More graveyard photographs. This is a series of the same crypt. Lewis.”

He stopped.

“Let me see.”

He gave her the folder, and his hand hesitated before touching the next. It withdrew the next folder, which left the box with a noise like a quick intake of breath.

Glossy black-and-whites, as before. First a sealed casket, shiny, like the husk of a huge insect. Then, to Paul's horror, the casket was open, to disclose a blackened, decay-splotched body in a suit. Picture after picture, some so close the mildew on the wing collar was plain, a spray of fine black paint.

The head had withered, and the nose had been eaten away, but the serene brow and near-smile were that of a relative Paul had seen in more lifelike photographs, Aunt Mary's father, the hunter, the sportsman brought down in a shooting accident.

“Don't look,” said Paul, giving her the folders.

She looked, sinking to her knees.

“His grandfather,” Paul began.

“I had always imagined,” said Lise weakly, “that such bodies were in a better state of preservation.”

“Colma is a very damp place,” said Paul.

“Apparently so.”

“Damp all year round, really.” Paul had a memory he did not want to mention: the body he had seen exhumed, years before.

He put the folders back into the box, closed the box, and locked it. “So what?” he said at last. “We knew Len had a very strange hobby. He's taken up portraits. Portraits of the deceased. It's a harmless enough pastime.”

“You forgot this.”

The scalpel was icy in his fingers. It gleamed in the electric light, and he saw the reflected eye, his own eye, along its perfect blade.

“We are in the hands of an insane man,” said Lise simply.

“I don't know about insane, exactly.”

“You have a lack of imagination.”

“You have too much.”

“I don't mean the ability to see things that don't exist. I mean the ability to see what is. The power to comprehend what is implied. That is what intelligence really is. You are pretending to be stupid.”

“Len has a fascination with death. Not a surprise. He has a fixation on the corpse, such as it is, of his grandfather. A sort of ancestor worship. A lot of people have a morbid streak.”

“I'm leaving. I'm not spending another night in this place.”

“All right. Supposing, just for a moment, that Len is utterly mad. He's not here. He's gone. We are all alone here.”

The light from the ceiling dimmed, stuttered bright again, and then died.

The entire house was dark.

24

Sounds seemed suddenly louder. The pounding of his own heart, the heavy rain against the window. He began to see as his eyes drank in the dim evening light, and he felt his way to the wall switch.

He snapped it on and off, idly. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Lines are always going down during these storms. We have the fireplace, and I think I saw a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers.”

“I'm not spending the night here.”

“You're going to swim the flood? You'll drown.”

“I'll sleep in the car.”

“No.”

“It's better than in here.”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don't think it's safe.”

“Not safe?”

“The bank might collapse. Get eaten away. And wash the car away.”