The Captive Condition (21 page)

All around me the underbrush rattled with the sounds of startled skunks and possums. An animal arrowed suddenly out of the cattails and stopped to snarl at the foolish trespasser before skittering away. Bugs crawled across my back and shoulders. Unsure if they were furry wolf spiders or a writhing cluster of mating earwigs, I scrambled to my feet, my mouth opened in a racked and silent scream.

The night took me in unknown directions, and soon I found myself wandering into a ring of mighty ironwoods, their massive limbs armored in silver leaves, the calloused bark transformed into a gallery of leering faces, some with horns and protruding jaws, tricksters of misdirection that led me down an ever-dimming course of counterclockwise circles. Eventually, the labyrinth emptied into a sizable clearing where shafts of moonlight pierced the dense canopy and revealed among midden heaps the ruins of a modest country estate.

In fascination we gravitate toward the irrational, and despite my spiraling fear and instinctual urge to flee, I felt that I was under the protection of some uncanny power. No one, not even somebody as batshit crazy as Lorelei, would follow me here. I slowed my pace, tried to breathe more easily, and in the eerie silence examined the remains of a dwelling slowly destroyed by the avenging hand of time. Only the bleached and eroded stones of the foundation remained, and around the crumbling structure there were few items of interest—an empty gas can, a pair of wire-rim spectacles with cracked lenses, a book whose leather cover had turned green with mildew, the pages crawling with wood lice and wireworms.

Not far from the foundation I came upon a rusted shell of an automobile propped on cinder blocks, an immense Jazz Age touring car with running boards and spare tires mounted on the side, a Duesenberg, a Cunningham, something out of a silent movie, a one-reel black-and-white comedy accompanied by music from a tinny player piano. I wandered through the clearing until I discovered buried beneath a thin layer of dirt and leaves a small steel door. Curious to know the secrets of this place, greedy to unearth its ancient artifacts, I crouched down and though I strained my back in the process managed to pry open the door.

With only a butane lighter to guide my way, fully prepared to reap the consequences of my own lunacy, straining to meet my fate bravely, gallantly, competently, I descended a winding staircase, its stone steps slippery with mold and the excreta of mice. Here the darkness was absolute, like a cavern. Translucent bugs scuttled blindly across dripping limestone walls fringed with moss and plugged with lichens. In the flickering light the cellar seemed to dance and spin, and with outstretched hands I groped the deteriorating masonry until my feet touched the floor and sank slowly into treacherous slime. Before me an enormous passage gradually sloped down into unknown regions, and I realized I wasn't in a cellar at all but in a raw, scoured pipe deep in the earth whose marvels were strange and terrific, a slippery black tube of immense dimensions shaped by the slow, steady trickle of calcite-rich water, the earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots covered in a thin film of oozing clay, its stalactites hanging like petrified icicles and crawling with millipedes and albino troglobites.

Along one of the walls I found a row of storage shelves, and lining those shelves from floor to ceiling were hundreds of glass jars, some the size of growlers, their contents sealed tight with zinc canning lids. Heedful of the dying light, I approached the jars and studied the small, fetal, fish-eyed things floating inside, bloated masses of flesh incubating outside their mother's womb, insensate creatures neither terrestrial nor aquatic caught in the collective grip of a curious dream, their eyes twitching, their forked and tufted tails swaying in a cloudy fluid that glowed goblin green.

The earth, blind to the needs of the people who inhabited it, incubated curious and horrible things in its womb, and I understood now that Normandy Falls contained a secret, a colossal creeping sentient madness hibernating beneath the fulgurite-pitted earth. For the better part of a century, the hereditary horrors of the Wakefield clan had been anticipating the arrival of a weary traveler who would set them free so they might lurk among the roadless reaches of swamp and forest and swim once again in the river. Because given enough time something always manages to escape from the laboratory and foul the water.

I felt like I was sleepwalking, that this entire episode was an extravagant horror show from some dimly remembered dream, but before I could scurry up the steps and slam shut the door, I thought I heard the faintest whisper, a mysterious cantillation. Like a squirming horde of mutant djinns desperate to explode from their magic lamps, the creatures, eager to bestow upon their liberator three wishes, turned their white eyes on me, and in the roaring silence of the cellar they asked me three questions.

“What is it that you seek? What is it that you need? What is it that you intend to do?”

Tuesday, December 23, 2014–Thursday, January 1, 2015

After the fall semester ended and the winter settled in, Martin Kingsley rarely left his home. Every night, after eating dinner with his family and then helping Marianne put Christopher to bed, he marched dutifully downstairs to the stifling pit of his study. There, with the resignation of a galley slave, he labored late into the night, bleeding more words onto the page, consulting his voluminous notes on Flaubert, trying mightily to decipher the illegible marginalia he'd scribbled in his books over the years. It was depressing work and hard going, but the sorrowful circumstances surrounding Emily's death made everything in his life seem like an existential crisis and gave him the impetus to leave a modest legacy for his son, a small scrap of evidence proving that he'd been a productive member of society.

This didn't necessarily make the writing process any easier. His desk was in danger of becoming an altar of self-worship, and every night as he sat with pen in hand and pages spread all around him, he found it increasingly difficult to focus on the interminable revisions he needed to make. In some sense he felt trapped by a book he might never complete to his satisfaction, and even if he did manage to finish and publish it, he worried that his colleagues might revile him as an arriviste, a pretentious litterateur warped by black-hearted ambition. Worse, they might guess that he'd started the slow and irreversible descent into deviance and debauchery. Like a deep and brutal scar, his treachery shone plainly on his face, and by now it must have been clear to everyone in the department that he lacked the moral fortitude to extract himself from the treacly mire of his foul and wicked ways. Confronted for the first time with the grim possibility of professional extinction, he furiously revised sentences, deleted entire paragraphs, and because it was necessary for the preservation of his mental health, he pressed his hands over his ears whenever he heard from next door the faint cry of rusty hinges and the sound of heavy footsteps circling the swimming pool.

“Persistence!” he said with savage hope and a look of messianic determination.

As a kind of penance, he forced himself to work past midnight, lost for hours in his own loose and rambling thoughts, listening to the wind howl around the eaves, the branches rattling against the thin panes of glass. To aid him in his efforts, hoping it might provide him with much-needed inspiration, he drank mug after mug of the orange slurry he purchased from Xavier and then waited for the visions to begin. Despite its unpleasant oily texture and terrible aftertaste, he relished the toxicity of its dense vapors. The delightfully complex combination of food and drink made him feel, at least for a little while, oddly euphoric, almost invincible, but as the night wore on his mood darkened sharply and his stomach began to rumble.

Sometimes he fell into the fitful sleep of the insomniac, assailed by dreams of murderous solidity. In one recurring dream he sat on the patio outside Belleforest, waiting for Emily to arrive. As he sipped his wine, he watched a dozen townspeople gathering along the muddy embankment of the river to gawk at a limp and broken body bobbing in the turbulent waters. Trapped under a tessellated boulder balancing midstream, her tumid flesh stripped and peeled by the jagged rocks, her stomach bloated with corpse gas, Emily gazed blankly into the sky like an evil putto in some freak-show fountain. The wind picked up, the crowd gave a little cry, and all at once the powerful current freed her. With a silent scream Emily lifted her head and in a lifeless voice beseeched her lover to rescue her.

A whirlpool of brown foam pulled her under, and for a moment Martin thought she'd been swept toward the bridge and over the falls into the valley, but then he saw her rising slowly to the surface near the riverbank, her limbs weighted down by the turquoise sari. She struggled up the embankment and sidled through the muck, her hoary toenails scraping like talons against the rocks and stones. In her wake she dragged a stench as terrible as the raw sewage churned up by the eddies. She had changed, about that there was no question. The light in her eyes had been extinguished forever, replaced by a mocking expression that was cold and unforgiving, and her once lovely features had melted like candle wax, her nose gone altogether, eaten away by decay. Kingsley whimpered and turned from the hollow cavity at the center of her bloodless face.

“You did this to me,” she said.

He shook his head. “No, Emily, you made a mistake. A terrible mistake.”

“But you are not innocent, Martin.”

“Neither of us is innocent,” he said. “Now you must leave me alone.
Will
you leave me alone?”

Ignoring his strangled pleas for mercy, she brushed her gelatinous lips against his ear and in a voice that gurgled with festering water whispered, “First you must kiss me, Martin. Kiss me goodbye.”

Kingsley woke suddenly to a sky glowing pink with morning sunlight, and into his heart crept a profound feeling of isolation and bitterness. In the terrible silence of dawn, his home seemed nested with domestic dangers of all kinds. This was unfair. He wanted to move on with his life, wanted to enjoy the holidays in peace with his family, but now he sensed an unmistakable presence behind him.

“You must have fallen asleep down here again.”

His wife loomed over his desk, the sleeves of her thermal shirt rolled above her elbows. Kingsley found it difficult to meet her censorious gaze and hastily picked up the coffee mug he'd knocked over during his dream. Even before Emily's death there had been small fissures in his relationship with Marianne that now threatened to become deep crevasses. There were serious disputes and long stretches of icy silence that sometimes lasted for days. Things were now at their most fragile, and he worried that his marriage was on the verge of total collapse.

“Evidently your ghosts were misbehaving, Martin. You were dreaming of Emily Ryan, weren't you?” She jerked open the blinds, and when the light touched his face she said, “Oh, yes, I can still see her in your eyes.”

Two days before Christmas, Kingsley returned to his desk, which he now believed to be haunted, and resumed the awful business of putting his book into some semblance of order, but as he riffled through his manuscript with all of its clumsy typographical errors, its biases, distortions, its intellectually slothful misattributions, he heard a knock at the back door, a loud rapping, a testing, a clawing. When he saw Charlie Ryan standing on the stoop, he let out a small gasp and jumped from his chair. So the great abuser of booze and women had come at long last to collect his due.

Charlie wore his workman's clothes, the Carhartt jacket, flannel shirt, faded jeans, steel-toed boots. Behind him lurked the twins, their knotted and greasy hair tied in pigtails, their pudgy faces dulled by grime, their chapped lips frozen into insolent smirks. Kingsley hadn't seen the girls since the wake, and he'd wondered if they had crawled inside the coffin and been interred with their mother in the churchyard. He remembered reading an essay about those horrid practices in India known as
sati,
whereby the bereaved were voluntarily buried with loved ones.

Marianne, when she heard the knock, came racing from the kitchen. She opened the door and knelt to take the girls in her arms. “We're so happy to see you. Aren't we, Martin?” She nudged him. “Are you hungry, girls? You look hungry. We were about to sit down to a late dinner.” She waved them all into the house. “Please, come in out of the cold.”

Charlie stepped back and tested out a sober smile. His mouth moved with inarticulate anxiety and then twisted into an expression that roughly resembled a grin, a flash of yellow incisors, a prolonged bulge of bloodshot eyes, a flare of hairy nostrils, but he was so out of practice with the simple mechanics of smiling, of making the upward turn of his lips appear natural and spontaneous, that he succeeded only in looking deranged, like a man who'd seen a ghost or was waiting for one to arrive and rattle off a long list of his sins and to describe in excruciating detail the unspeakably shameful contents of his conscience. Disheveled, unshaven, underfed, he might have been an ulcerated inmate just released from solitary confinement and trying without much success to reintegrate back into society, but it was becoming abundantly clear to Kingsley that what the man really needed was to be institutionalized indefinitely and closely monitored each day, his meals brought to a padded cell and fed to him, intravenously if necessary, by a pair of strapping male nurses.

“I'm sure,” Charlie said, “Madeline and Sophie would appreciate a home-cooked meal for a change.” He gave the twins a gentle shove, a man unaccustomed to coddling his children. “You girls go ahead without me. I think I'm gonna stay outside and have a smoke with Professor Marty. I have a few things I'd like to discuss with him.”

Kingsley cleared his throat. “Oh, I don't smoke. I wouldn't dare. I have an addictive personality. I'd get hooked on them, I know I would. Books, reading, those are my only vices.”

“Is that so?” Charlie laughed gently. “Well, join me anyway.”

Having skimmed several articles about body language in his wife's fashion magazines, Kingsley recognized Charlie's posture as one of unease rather than a bold display of aggression. Nevertheless, in order to buy himself more time, Kingsley acted the part of absent-minded professor and claimed to have misplaced his winter coat. He looked at his neighbor, searching for signs of violent and erratic behavior, the rolling white eyes of a man half mad with grief and jealousy, and every time Charlie reached a hand inside his jacket Kingsley imagined he saw the glimmer of a black barrel.

When he could no longer delay the inevitable, he put on his shoes and donned his winter coat. Fulminating against his miserable fate, nearly incapacitated by fear, he followed Charlie outside. They walked across the patio, through the gate to the Ryans' yard, and over to the Adirondack chairs beside the pool.

“I wanted to speak to you in private,” Charlie said. “Here, take a seat.”

Kingsley brushed away the snow and prepared himself for that long-overdue, inexpiable exchange of words, wondering how pathetic he would look as he pleaded for his life. It was a scene he'd rehearsed over and over again in his mind.

“Haven't seen any pirates, have you?” Charlie asked.

Kingsley shook his head. Maybe the man had cracked, after all. “You're the only pirate I've seen, Mr. Ryan.”

Charlie grunted. He searched the pocket of his flannel shirt for a cigarette and scowled when he found an empty pack. Through the clamped teeth of an agitated addict, he said, “Started smoking when I was twelve, if you can believe that. What a world, huh?” His voice was low, slightly emphysemic. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I'm shipping out after Christmas. I need to get back to work. In this day and age, when half the people in this town are out of a job, an able-bodied man can't simply walk away from a steady gig with a good salary and excellent benefits.”

“You're absolutely correct.”

“How am I supposed to earn a living in a place like this? Wash dishes, tend bar, wait tables at Belleforest?”

“That would be crazy.”

“I think it'll help me get my head straight, too, returning to the ship. Oh, I know it's not what you'd call an ideal situation, but hell, you have to consider the predicament I'm in. It's been nearly four months since I've worked, and I'm running low on cash. Confidentially, just between the two of us, I'm flat broke. So you see, I have no choice in the matter, do I?”

Kingsley nodded vigorously. “I think you're making the right decision.”

“The girls may not understand any of this now, but one day they will. I think.”

“Of course they will.”

“I'm certainly glad you see things my way, Professor. Because I don't want to send the girls away to live with my sister. I'd rather have them stay here in school with their friends. Things have been hard enough, you know, and a move in the middle of the school year would be another trauma. I haven't been much good to them, I admit that. For a while I was on one helluva bender. But I'm better now. Much better.” He shrugged. “Well, what family doesn't have its little problems?”

Kingsley dug his fingernails into his palms. He thought he heard a faint scratching, and then he remembered the bats in the walls. To keep from visibly shaking, he lowered his head and focused on the brittle leaves swirling near the base of an oak.

Charlie leaned toward him and now spoke with unsettling calm and clarity. “I don't know how to ask you this so I'll just come right out with it. Would you and Marianne be willing to take the girls in? You're such good people and the girls love you. They especially love Christopher. Like a brother. I'm not asking you to support my children financially, understand? Money isn't the issue here. I'll transfer cash into your account every month.”

Kingsley squirmed. Gastronomic juices swirled and gurgled in his empty stomach. “Well, uh, you see, the thing is my wife is throwing this big party…”

“Would you at least think about it for a day or two? Talk it over with her? The girls know they're safe here. It's like a second home to them.” Charlie seemed to ponder his dereliction and cocked his head as if trying to decipher some kind of message, however oblique, in the winter wind. He stood up slowly, sweeping snowflakes from his knees. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.” He reached a hand inside his coat, but instead of the
.38
he produced a worn paperback. “I think this belongs to you.”

Martin didn't look at the cover. He knew perfectly well which book it was.

Charlie stomped through snowdrifts shining like the white marble of eroded headstones, but before going inside his house he looked back and said, “No man really knows his wife, Kingsley. Women keep secrets. Even from the people they love most.”

A mass of swirling Arctic air had descended on the town, and a thin layer of snow sparkled red and green from the lights draped across the houses on the street. Above the swaying treetops, the gray hammer of cold air pounded the clouds into dust, the twilight into fine purple particles that drifted in the unrelenting wind. For almost thirty minutes Kingsley sat alone and stared at Charlie's trail of footprints, but the longer he sat there the more convinced he became that he saw another set of prints beside them. He marveled at the high arches and tiny toes that led to the edge of the pool. Though he wasn't a religious man and could never bring himself to believe in an afterlife, he thought he sensed Emily's presence and suspected she'd been standing there all along, listening to her husband speak, even making him say the words, her hands planted on her hips, her eyes blazing with hellfire, but if Emily had been watching them and monitoring their conversation, she had already vanished under the tarp and deep into the obdurate heart of the water.