Not a Creature Was Stirring (2 page)

The nut on the phone had given her a flawless description of her living room as it had existed six months ago, which meant he was one of the people who had attended the fantasy fan convention in Chicago last June. That meant he could be either harmless or not, depending. Depending on where he was. Depending on his psychiatric history. Depending…

Bennis brushed it off, irritated. The way she reacted to these calls always made her feel like a hypochondriacal old maid. And it was so asinine. This idiot hadn’t been in her apartment. If he had, he’d know it had been redecorated. Still…

She headed for the living room, down the long hall bracketed by built-in bookshelves holding only the books she had written. One shelf was given over to copies of
Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia
, her second novel and the first fantasy ever to make
The New York Times
hardcover fiction best-seller list. She prodded Michael Peteris with her toe as she passed his place on her Persian rug and dropped down on a green plush Louis XVI chair she’d bought because it “went with the room.” That was before she realized nothing would ever go with this room, because it had been built at a time when people who knew nothing about history were trying to invent it.

“Michael,” she said, “tell me what to do about the nut.”

Michael turned over and put his hands behind his head. If he hadn’t been as tall and broad as he was, he would have been ugly. He looked, as Bennis explained to Emma when Emma asked, “very Greek.”

“What you’re going to do about the nut,” he said calmly, “is what you always do about the nuts. Call Jack Donovan down at the station. Get a tap put on your phone. Then—”

“I’m tired of this, Michael. I really am. I want to be Stephen King and not have to go to conventions. I want—”

“From what you tell me, Stephen King does go to conventions. And if you’re tired of this, move.”

“Oh, hush,” Bennis said.

Michael shrugged and turned away. This was an argument he had no interest in repeating. Of course she should move. She’d known that the first time a nut called—the one who said he’d put a rogue troll in her underwear drawer—even before she’d asked him and he’d told her.

“Who else was on the phone?” Michael said. “I heard it ring twice.”

“What?” Bennis said. “Oh. That was my sister.”

“Emma, Myra, or Anne Marie?”

“Myra.”

“You are going to be in a bad mood tonight. Oh, well. What did she want?”

“What?” Bennis said again. “I’m sorry. My mind’s wandering.” It was, too. She was thinking about Daddy. She shook it out of her head and said, “Myra. Well, she wanted me to come home for Christmas. For the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s.”

“But that’s wonderful,” Michael said. “You call Jack. You get the tap put on the phone. Then you pack up and go to Sewickley, or wherever.”

“Wayne. That’s not what she wants me to do. She wants me to go out to Engine House. My mother just got out of the hospital.”

Michael sat up. “Do you realize what you just did? You told me about the nut first.”

“And that shocks you,” Bennis said.

“It would shock anybody.”

“Not if they grew up at Engine House.” Bennis stood, went to the drinks cabinet, and fished her cigarettes out from behind the gin. So much for cutting down on smoking by keeping your cigarettes in an inconvenient place. When she got a real nicotine fit, there was no such thing as an inconvenient place.

She went back to the chair, lit up, and said, “Besides, this isn’t exactly news. I’ve been living with this thing of Mother’s for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen years.”

“What’s she got?”

“Some kind of multiple sclerosis. I don’t understand it exactly. She’s been in and out of hospitals for years.”

Michael blew a stream of air into the room, like a pregnant woman hyperventilating to take her mind off labor. “Jesus God,” he said. “And half of you live out of town. What are you people, anyway?”

“Down dirty furious at my father, for one thing,” Bennis said. “Besides, I don’t think the rest of them know. I mean, Anne Marie knows. That’s why she’s never left home. Daddy knows, because he’d have to. I know because I was home once when she had one of those attacks.” She considered it. “Bobby might know. I’m not sure.”

“You mean your mother hasn’t told anybody?”

“Of course not. She wouldn’t want to be an object of pity.”

Michael shot her a look that said this attitude made no sense to him at all, and Bennis shrugged. Of course it didn’t. He came from an absurdly extended family, full of immigrant great-aunts and just-off-the-boat quasi uncles, people who stuck together because they were trying to get someplace. He would never understand how the Main Line worked.

Bennis stretched her legs, crossed her feet at the ankles, and said, “The thing is, no matter how much I love my mother, a week at home with Daddy would just about kill me. That old son of a—never mind. If you could come with me—”

“I can’t. I’ve got the Andrekowicz thing.”

Bennis made a face. She didn’t want to hear about the Andrekowicz thing. Bodies in pieces all over the South Side. “Well, there you are. I don’t want to see my father, and no matter what Myra says, he doesn’t want to see me. He only talks to Bobby and Anne Marie because he has to. He wrote the rest of us off years ago.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say about an old man in a wheelchair.”

“The old man in the wheelchair is going to last another twenty years,” Bennis said. “A lot longer than Mother. And he deserves it less.”

“Which is supposed to mean what?”

“Which is supposed to mean I think I’ll go call my brother Chris. Myra must have called him. Maybe he got more out of her than I did.”

“I like your brother Chris,” Michael said. “Only don’t tell him I always think his poems are jokes. He gets weird about it.”

Bennis hauled herself out of her chair and headed back toward the bedroom and the phone.

When the light went off on his console for the third time in fifteen minutes, Chris Hannaford told his listeners (all 226 of them) not to forget to boycott grapes, started a Grateful Dead record, took off his sweatband, and dropped the sweatband over his light. A little later, he would read some of his poetry, and that would be nice, but what he wasn’t going to do any more was answer the phone. Oh, no. First he’d been stuck with his sister Myra, which was a little like accidentally ingesting a triple dose of Benzedrine. Then—

He felt his stomach start to cramp and leaned over, counting until it went away. He was losing his nerve. He was coming apart. And that second phone call hadn’t helped.

They were going to kill him.

The Dead record was winding to an end. He got another from the stack and flipped it on without introduction. The masses never minded getting their music straight. Mostly he wouldn’t oblige them, of course. Just because the idiots wanted to pretend that literature began with Paul McCartney and ended with Bruce Springsteen didn’t mean he had to agree with them. He’d won four dozen awards for his poetry, been published in everything from
The Atlantic
to
The New Kionossa Review,
and was (if he had to say it himself) the driving force in the survival of poetry in post-Reagan America. Actually, someone else had said it for him, in
The Yale Review
. A friend who still lived in New Haven had sent him the article. He’d been embarrassed as hell at first, but after he’d thought about it he’d realized it was nothing but the truth. Who else was there?

His stomach cramped up again, and he forgot all about it.

They were going to kill him. They had practically said so when they called. How in the name of God had he got himself involved with these people? What was he—aside from the driving force, etc.—but an ex-preppie Yale boy with a little family money and even fewer brains? He must have been tripping.

Except that he didn’t trip. He didn’t do much of anything but smoke marijuana, write poetry, show up for work—and gamble. When he put it like that, it made him want to laugh. Gambling was what got people in trouble in thirties detective novels. Getting in hock to mob-connected bookies was a hard-boiled private-eye cliché. That kind of thing didn’t happen to people in real life. It didn’t exist in real life.

(We don’t hear from you in four days, we’re gonna take your thumb.)

He nipped the second record for a third, still not able to talk. The spasms were so bad, he had to put his head between his knees to keep from vomiting. That comic-opera voice on the phone, for God’s sake. The thought of his thumb (right or left?) lying on the pavement in Santa Clara in a mess of blood and pulp. Four days.

He felt the sweat break out on his forehead and knew he was going to be better. The sweat always hit him just before and after these attacks. He sat up, waited for the record to finish, and said,

“That was the Dead times three, ladies and gentlemen. ‘Truckin,’ ‘Sugar Magnolia,’ and ‘Uncle John’s Band.’ Give me a minute here, we’re going to have a Chris Hannaford special. An uninterrupted album.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
.”

He chose it because it was sitting right there on top of his stack. He spun it onto the turntable, nipped off his mike, and sat back, a tall, cadaverous, long-limbed man with the trademark Hannaford hair and a face that had seen too many bars, too many late nights and too much trouble. Now that the attack was over, he could think.

Myra was out there somewhere, getting a bug in her ass about dear old Daddy. Myra always had a bug in her ass about something. That was her thing. Just like being a first-class son-of-a-whore was Daddy’s thing.

Just like gambling was his thing.

He thought about calling Bennis and decided against it. She’d got him out of the hole that first time without asking questions. She’d get him out of this one the same way. He wasn’t going to ask her. In direct contradiction to the way he lived and the things he said when he had anyone but Bennis for an audience, Chris had a streak of moralism in him. Bennis would let him bleed her forever. For precisely that reason, he couldn’t go to her. After all, he was the one with the nice little chunk of family money. Bennis had what she made and nothing more.

(We’re gonna take your thumb.)

They were going to take his thumb. Yes, they were. And after they took his thumb they were going to take the rest of him, piece by piece, because this time he was in for $75,000 and there was no way he could pay it. Not now, not tomorrow, not two days from tomorrow. What the hell had he bet in on, anyway?

Did they know about Engine House? Probably. But he knew his father. Engine House was a fortress. Daddy was the ultimate paranoid.

He rubbed his hands against his face and went back to trying to think.

“You must understand,” the chairman of the English department was saying, “no matter how liberal the times have become, we cannot, in cases like this, ignore the traditional consequences.” The chairman of the English department looked like a fish wearing a toupee. At least, he looked that way to Teddy Hannaford, and Teddy had always prided himself on his powers of observation and his ear for a good metaphor. Simile. Whatever. The chairman of the English department was a turd, and all Teddy wanted on earth was not to have to listen to him.

Unfortunately, at the moment he had no choice. He sat awkwardly in the chairman’s visitor’s chair, his right leg in its brace as stiff as a length of hardwood, thinking they could have saved half an hour if the chairman had just fired him outright. Instead, the fish was making a speech. And a banal one at that.

Teddy started to put a hand to his head and stopped himself. Unlike everybody else in the family, he had not been born with hair that flourished under any and all conditions. He was going bald at the top and thinning in every other place. It was not something he could think about with charity. They, after all, were just fine—Bennis and Emma and Bobby and Chris and even Anne Marie. He never counted Myra, because Myra was a housewife. Nobody took housewives seriously. But the rest of them—. Emma was young and pretty. Chris was screwing every blonde in Southern California. Anne Marie was always in the society magazines. Bobby had been given the biggest chunk of money. And then there was Bennis.

Sometimes, when he went into the Waldenbooks in Kennebunk and saw all those ridiculous books taking up more shelf space than Dreiser, he wanted to scream. Bennis had been the pain of his life for as long as he could remember. Here she was again, making idiots of them all with stories about unicorns and knights in shining armor. They even carried her trash in the college bookstore. And
The New York Times Magazine
had done a silly article called “The New Face of Fantasy Fiction” and put Bennis right on the cover.

No matter what the chairman of the English department said this interview was about, it was really about Bennis. Teddy knew. He also knew it was Bennis’s fault his leg was in a brace and his knee wouldn’t bend. He hadn’t figured out how that worked—Bennis had been in Paris the day Daddy had taken him for a ride and tried to kill him—but he was sure he would be able to unravel it if he put his mind to it.

The fish squirmed in his chair, cleared his throat, and tried a smile. “There is also,” he said, “the question of your alleged motive in this, uh, action.”

“Motive?” Teddy could practically feel the antennae rise up out of his head, like the retractable ears on a Martian in a fifties alien invasion movie.

“Miss Carpenter,” the chairman said, “claims you made this suggestion to her as the means by which she could receive credit on a paper you were writing for
NEJLA
with research you had used from her final project in Victorian Authors.”

NEJLA
was the
New England Journal of Literary Arts
. What the fool was trying to say was that Susan Carpenter claimed Teddy had told her she’d have to sleep with him if she wanted her name on the article he was submitting to
NEJLA
on women in the Victorian novel. Where the fish had it wrong was in that bit about “using some of Miss Carpenter’s research.” He had not used some of Miss Carpenter’s research. He had stolen her paper outright.