32

Speke closed his eyes, crouching in the kitchen.

He pressed his eyelids together so hard he saw lights, and thought: this could not be Clara. The thought was definite: Not Clara. This was another one of those macabre jokes. Surely that thing he had just seen wasn’t human at all. Once again, just like the body in the grave, this was some kind of animal. That’s all. Nothing more than that. It was just another one of Asquith’s tricks with a dead deer.

Now, he told himself. Look now.

He made himself wait a long moment, a long hesitation on the high dive of reality.

He opened his eyes.

His mind came and went like a pulse. He pulled himself to his feet, and reality switched off and on, like a mercury switch. He clung to the butcher block table to keep from falling, and he heard the great panting, as of a huge beast, a loud shuddering in-and-out of breath.

The light was magnified to a nearly blinding glare. The kitchen faucet gleamed, a truncated arc of sterile chrome. He had been stripped of his humanity, and he was a frightened beast, now, a creature of no name, no past, no hope.

It was Clara.

Innocent. The word hammered him. Clara was an innocent person, a good person. And the kitchen was black-red with the wreck that had been her body.

The refrigerator made a low, interior chuckle, the mutter of digestion. The presence of this death, and its scent, shocked his body into knowledge. He had to do something. He had to take revenge. He had to strike back, in Clara’s name.

First, he thought, cover her. Cover the woman, the broken, besplattered thing that had been a human being. He found himself in a bedroom, tugging at a quilt, dragging it, the mantle of cloth sweeping behind him until he hesitated again outside the kitchen.

Asquith was someone—something—he had never dealt with before. Envy did not commit such deeds. This was not spite or the desire to reclaim one’s life. Everything, every option, he told himself with a nauseating lucidity, had to be reconsidered.

When he stepped into the kitchen again he gagged at the sight. The room was hotter now, the smell of flesh ripe in the air, not putrescent but wet and heavy. Death was ascending here on the estate, a sick power breaking over the sky, and he was not equal to the battle. He had thought himself strong. He had been mistaken. He was strong enough to struggle against anything alive. He was not strong enough for this.

The big quilt hovered in the air over what was left of her. He whispered her name: Clara. He had never known or understood a thing in his life. It was that simple: he knew nothing. All his knowledge vanished. He had enjoyed his fame, the glee of seeing his name in advertising and on marquees. He had watched videotapes of this talk show, and that interview, until the tapes got streaky. Stick the mike in my face and watch me talk.

The quilt settled over the rise and fall of the body, and its thickness blotted up the blood, growing sodden as he watched, islands and continents of fluid fanning out, the weight pulling the quilt down around what it hid.

And there was so much it could not hide. A human being, he saw, was only so much meat.

He clung to the table, gazing at the knife cuts scarring the wood. He was amazed that he could still command his hand to move, and that it would obey.

On the sun-yellow linoleum lay a thing, unrecognizable and bloody, and for an instant, as his eye fell upon it, he knew that this was some strange, geometrically perfect organ torn from Clara.

Then he realized what it was: a cleaver. That’s all it had taken to do the job, an ordinary object, because Clara had been only a creature, after all. Undone by that wedge with a handle, that inert thing.

Wading through nausea and a yellow haze that seemed to ascend upward from the floor, Speke grappled with a drawer handle. Must find one, his mind ordered him, must find one right away.

His hand sought a weapon. The tool his hand fell upon was, he knew, an innocent thing in itself, wood that had never felt or dreamed, steel that was, in human terms, equivalent to nothing.

Clara, I should have protected you. It’s my fault that fiend was here in the first place.

And then Speke had a thought as definite as a splash of ice, a thought that struck him as cruel and at the same time thoroughly honest: thank God it wasn’t Sarah.

He closed his hand around the handle. To him this common implement was death, and life. To touch it steadied his hand. The handle was worn by use and by dishwater into the gray brown of a mule deer’s hide, of driftwood. Three brass rivets were coin-bright. Ten or so inches of molybdenum steel, the blade was heavy, a slender, daggerlike counterpart to the cleaver.

Speke nearly dropped it. What are you doing? he asked himself. What are you thinking?

Its similarity to a weapon was no accident, Speke saw. What cleaves flesh in the battlefield is not only brother to the kitchen implement, it is the same tool. The dining room is an extension of the slaughterhouse.

You were so glad Asquith was alive.

The ancient hunter sense rolled forward in his soul again, and he found himself looking upward, as though trying to make the ceiling and the walls invisible with his gaze. The thought paralyzed: what if he’s still in the house.

And as soon as the thought occurred it stung with all the venom of the truth. He is in the house—of course he is. And he is waiting.

For you.

Good, Speke breathed. Good. I’ll make him suffer.

But at the same time it was sickening. Don’t you remember those documents Holub left with you? You barely cast your eye over them. It hadn’t seemed important that Asquith had slaughtered innocent women.

He reminded himself of something especially ugly: Maria had something to do with this. Maria, the woman he had sworn to understand some day, this new, sudden stranger.

He would have left by the back door. He would have taken the few strides, and let his hand fell upon the knob—except that the knob was thick with gore, and with hair, a glistening protrusion, a brass knob becoming animal, glutinous and raw.

It was just as well, it was better to stay in the house. If Asquith was in the house he wanted to corner him. Let’s get this over, Speke thought. The swinging door squeaked more and more slowly, and more and more quietly, until it was still.

Clara—I want to talk to you. You should have had a priest. You should have died with a prayer. All the things he should have said to her stung him, the appreciation he had always felt and never uttered.

Animal. We are animal, and mortality is not an idea. It is real. He had never realized what a treasure Clara was. It’s so wrong to kill, he thought, except it wasn’t a thought at all. It was like having the wind knocked out of his body, empty of every breath ever taken, empty of sky, of life. This is the truth. To kill is a terrible thing.

Red jam.

There was a click, a creak of floorboard or hinge somewhere above and beyond him in the timbers of the walls. Don’t make a sound, he told himself. Hold your breath.

In here—he’s in the house. This house was life itself, and the dark creature that had been, long ago, his friend Asquith was here somewhere. Speke crouched, holding the knife before him in a way that surprised him, in a way that told him how frightened and determined he was. The knife played easily in his hand, balanced and ready to do the terrible thing he had just found so appalling.

Two conflicting thoughts sandwiched him: make it to the road, to the highway. Get help. And the stronger urge: stay here, and fight.

Avenge Clara.

What I need to do, he said to himself, nearly speaking aloud, is get into a very large room. A room where it would be very difficult to have him lunge in at me. This hall, for example, he said, think-talking to himself as though to a child, is a very bad place to be. There are too many doors. Any of the doors, including the swinging door behind him, could burst open at any moment. So you should creep, as he was beginning to creep, and slip into the very large room, the lounge, with its great high ceiling and its calmly bubbling aquarium. A natural fortress. For the moment, however, he stayed where he was.

“Asquith,” he whispered.

There was only the vast, non-answer of the house, silent and solid. Walls are not only refuge, they are also confinement. There was no oxygen in this air. None at all. Something had happened to the atmosphere here in this bad light, in this hall with its doors and silence.

“Asquith,” he said, in a full voice.

It’s worse when you talk, he realized. It really is. It makes the silence deeper, and it shows how really frightened you are, because that’s all you are, and you can’t pretend to yourself. You are all taken over, completely, by fear. Isn’t that right, Ham? Have you ever been more afraid?

The house gave a creak once more, the big structure adjusting just barely to a change in pressure. This was not the weight of a footfall. Outside, in the world under the sky, a wind was rising.

He has Maria. He has her, and he will hurt her.

“Asquith!” he called, a bellow so loud the hall reverberated.

Maria is in league with Asquith. That has been on your mind, Hamilton, admit it. Once you begin to doubt, there is no end to it. You know Asquith can do anything, including seducing any woman he desired. Perhaps you always sensed that your Mouse could as quickly leap from one bed to another. Jealousy is love’s shadow.

What power could Asquith have had over Maria? What control had he exercised for so long?

And why?

Speke surprised himself by slamming through the door into the bar. In one, smooth movement he dragged a massive oak captain’s chair to the door, and wedged it under the knob. To his amazement, when the chair was in place, he realized that the knife was in his teeth, like a pirate’s blade.

The steel had no flavor at all at first, until it warmed to the temperature of his tongue, his breath. Then it did have a flavor, a faint tang, the sullen absolute of steel.

Asquith could descend those steps to the rest of the house, the four steps that led to the dining room, the sitting rooms with their dried lavender and their Degas prints. Perhaps Asquith was even now tearing through his files, cutting up his software, urinating or bleeding or defecating all over everything.

There was no end to what Asquith could do. He was like water, and could take any shape. He was a serpent, who could be any configuration at all.

But you’re safe here, Speke promised himself, here with your old friend, the gleaming piranha.

Aren’t you safe?

Asquith could sprint through the atrium, like a guest in a hurry for that first martini. But otherwise there was no need for concern. All present and accounted for, Captain Speke. I’ll put his head upon the battlements.

But Asquith could do anything. Asquith knew. This was the genius that Speke had recognized in him. He knew that when one character was speaking, the others were silent, and that this silence played and worked upon, supported and shaped the speech of the actor who spoke. Silence itself was a substance, the air intaken before the utterance, and more—the earth upon which language stepped.

It was this silence that held Speke now. This silence that buried him standing upright, sword in hand. The piranha, pale as the knife, took a turn in his quiet world, both imprisoned and liberated from all care.

He hurried through the rooms of the house again, but this time he moved deliberately, confirming the truth. The creak and murmur of the roof was only the wind. The house was empty.

He stood before the front door, and then opened it, letting a gust of dry wind into the hallway, a leaf scuttling at his feet.

Before Sarah comes back. Because it was Sarah he kept returning to in his mind, as the piranha kept nearly stroking the glass of his world with his mouth. Sarah was at once the home he wanted to protect, and the one person he knew he needed to see again in order to remain sane—to remain himself, Hamilton Speke.

The trees swayed in the breeze, and then the breeze ceased, barely stirred, tossed again, alive with light.

Sarah. The thought of her surprised him, this faith in a woman he had come to see as a part of his life like a sun, or moon, or gravity. He had never thought of her this way before.

The rules of the game came clear to him again. Asquith wasn’t coming. Asquith was waiting. Asquith has all the time in the world, an eternity to wrap around your neck. You have to go out there, where he is. Asquith hides, you seek.

He wore the knife in his belt, like a Jacobean courtier. This game was one he had played before, in another age, in another life, with another Asquith. He stood at the front edge of the porch, drinking in the sunlight, the rise-and-fall tumble of the wind. Stay here. This is a position of strength. Show a little military strategy for once in your life. Stop bumbling around. Stand your ground.

Asquith is watching. He holds all the power. The outside belongs to Asquith. The house is a place he can only steal into, trespassing. The house is order, and trust. The woods are chaos, and they belong to the dark.

Maria’s studio, the cottage he had promised never to enter uninvited, was airless and warm, a room scented with the sap of still-moist pine and the electric presence of clean, perfect paper. Her flowers were scattered, tumbled here, pinned to a board there, and all of it seemed like a tomb unsealed after three thousand years.

Asquith had been here. He could not guess how he knew, but the hunter in him sensed it. Asquith had been here, sitting on this chair, drinking soup from this mug, perhaps.

He had to force his way into Sarah’s cottage, and before he had the door broken away from its frame he knew how pointless it was. Asquith wasn’t going to screw his way between the floorboards like a silverfish or a spider.

Speke’s legs were strong. The door was redwood panel and forged brass, but it splintered, and he entered Sarah’s refuge, and stood there, well aware that what he was doing was both futile and important. He was claiming the cottages, one by one. I am master here, he was saying. I belong here, and you, Asquith, do not.

There were two cups, washed and turned upside down on a clean white towel beside the sink. One of the cups was decorated with the emblem of a whale. Speke stood in the doorway to the bedroom, gazing at the well-made bed, the ordered beauty of the simple, even spartan, bedchamber.

The two names were linked now in his mind: Bell and Sarah. Of course. It could hardly be a surprise. But he put his hand out to the file cabinet to steady himself.

It sounded like the squeak of a screw in metal at first. A squeal, and he had a thought he must have plucked from the collective memory, from a book he had read, or a movie: something being slaughtered, some beast.

A beast was in agony, death agony, far off, beyond the trees, somewhere in the woods. It was the nature of the estate to distort the sound, and make it come from every direction at once.

He sprang from the cottage. He sprinted down the path toward the Outer Office. It was a long run, and when he burst into the office it was empty. There was the desk, and the naked floor where the rug had once decorated the office, the gleam of the mantelpiece and the never-used poker.

Again—a scream, somewhere in the woods.

This was not a farmyard shriek. This was human. That’s what humans were when you slaughtered them, when you butchered them alive. They were hurt animals.

But he did not know where to run. The screams had stopped, and the trees writhed in their unmoving contortions, the forest enigmatic, a place of secrets.

Asquith had Maria. Out there somewhere, almost too far away for the cry to carry. This was not the sound of someone feigning agony. This was not the sound of someone pricked with a knife.

A woman was being killed.