34

As soon as he entered the woods, and hurried through the shadows of the ancient trees, Speke realized his mistake.

The outside belonged to Asquith. He could be anywhere, armed with anything. The shapelessness of this place was to his advantage, and the sinuous branches and the multifoliate green seemed to be almost his doing, as though he were a primal force.

Asquith had those magic hands, that quickness that could turn anything into a weapon. He had even turned Speke’s mind against itself. The birds announced it in the shrubbery: the entire sky was a spotlight Asquith could play on him, savoring every moment. The wild, open scan of possibility was Asquith’s.

Within Speke, a voice of caution sounded: go back. Don’t take another step.

The scream had been bait. Come out, Asquith was saying—come out where we can really play, unconfined by any rules. Because there aren’t any rules any more, Hamilton, he could imagine Asquith saying. There are no rules, and nothing human. This is life against life’s enemy. And you lose.

There was a whisper in the grass behind him.

Speke spun. There was an instant spice of crushed grass blades, and, when he continued into the woods, the scent of the dry herbs and grasses all around.

The trees seemed to creep forward for an instant, the path shrinking to an earthen ribbon. He had loved this place once, long ago, because of its magic. This was a place where anything was possible. He could hear Asquith in his mind, as clearly as a snapping stick: admit it, dear Hamilton. You were prepared for everything but this.

Maria. He listened, hard, to every sound, every flaw in the silence. Maria, wherever she was, made no sound at all. Someone who had been really hurt would still be uttering some sort of gasp, a whisper, some sort of sound—not this vacuum of human sound, this fluttering, heat-splashed silence.

It was amazing that branches still inhaled the wind as always before, and that leaves skittered across the bare patches of dirt as always. Sparrows bounded across the open path, and the sky was the same color as it always had been. The sky, the blank, bright heavens had always seemed kind before now. That had been only an illusion, the misjudgment of a child. The sky was empty and without love.

This was Asquith’s triumph, the greatest theater any human had ever performed, turning the bulk of nature against one man and the people he loved. Speke made himself take a slow breath. Be logical. Take things very slowly. Review your situation. Take a reality inventory. Palms icy wet. Legs wobbly. Guts churning.

He had nothing to do but to search, hunting carefully through the place he had once found a sanctuary, a countryside of refuge.

“Maria!” he called.

He searched along the path, pausing beside the stones where the Indians had ground the acorns into flour, generation upon generation, until the holes were sunken into the gray of the stone.

He called again.

He climbed through the woods, into places where even the deer did not wander. He knew that Asquith must have chosen one of the springs as his command point, the staging area for his circus. Asquith had always felt at home among trees, whether in the scrub and thicket of jungle or the steep, spanning spread of oaks. Speke recalled how the old Asquith had lived, but this new Asquith was a stranger.

The spring whispered, sounding so much like human speech that Speke hushed his breath and listened. Then he felt his way carefully forward, inching, knowing that Asquith could burst upon him at any moment.

It was with something like pleasure that he studied the tight-rolled sleeping bag, camouflaged but still there, if you knew where to look, if you knew your quarry. Here was the fuming spoil of a campfire, although what seemed to be smoke at first glance was only the stir of ash that his step gave forth.

There were crumbs, faint golden dust on the carpet of dried leaves. An ant was just discovering one of them, and a fly was just arriving to scribble the air over yet more crumbs, and then Speke saw what lay beyond the poison oak, the dark sill that reflected the trees.

Blood.

Asquith had not bothered with finesse this time. He had used this jagged stone, a wedge the size of a loaf of bread, but tapered at the end that was now blood-bright.

But there was no body. Maybe—was it possible? Maybe this, too, was a ruse. It’s not too late. I could run, of course, up the road to the highway. But that would give him a few miles of scrub and woodland to follow me through, preparing an ambush. Maybe he was up there already, in the manzanita, peering.

The blood was fresh, blue transparent bubbles winking in its surface. Beyond the pool there were spatters of it, a trail, bright splashes that said, as though Asquith actually spoke the words: follow me.

Maybe this blood was more stagecraft. Maybe it wasn’t real. Speke took refuge in the old actors’ rule: act as you would feel.

The pebbles of the path crunched under his feet. For a while he followed the gouts of blood, but then they dwindled, and gradually there was no blood to follow. It didn’t matter, because he had already understood that the next act would begin exactly where the play had started.

Maybe the blood had been squeezed out of a tube, and the tube was flat and empty now. Maybe he had Maria trussed up, and could tweak a scream out of her without really hurting her. Surely Asquith was basically a sick person, not an evil one.

A lizard skin glittered on the pale gravel of the drive. He carefully avoided stepping on it, but it cringed away, that empty wraith, that tough, translucent leather, as though it knew.

He didn’t like this silence.

He stood unmoving. He ran his eyes across the tree line. The house was up the slope to the left. Wind tossed and stilled itself.

Women. You butcher women.

You planned it all along, this slaughter. Let’s put Speke on a spit and watch him sizzle: hurt the people he loves. Maybe you always knew you would have this delightful vacation. Bring a packet or two of stage blood, and have a wonderful time, driving Speke slowly to the point of madness, or maybe to the point of drinking himself to death. But you forget that I am not the same man I used to be, drinking you under the table in Cozumel.

It hadn’t been a table, and it hadn’t been a contest. It had been so wonderfully hot. The skin was coated with a second dermis of water, and that sweat had made it possible to drink tequila Sauza by the liter. They had sat under an areciba, a thorny tree that seemed to hold itself with some disdain away from the two of them. They had watched the sunrise.

Except it hadn’t risen. It had burst, exploded above a line of creamy thunderheads, and the two of them, who had been drinking all night, honing their drunkenness to a religious edge, had been too paralyzed to perch on their blue Honda motorcycles, too stricken to even stand. They could only gaze across the coral rubble at their feet and the smear of scarlet sun on the water. Then the rain had come, an early morning storm that was like the air turning to falling coins.

Then, just that quickly, the rain was gone, and parrots squealed through the air, steely cries that skewered the mother-of-pearl radiance. And the ground was covered with tiny frogs, frogs little bigger than grape pits, thousands of them, so the two men had been afraid to take a step. Had it been real, or had it been the booze, the monument of intoxication they had slaved to erect all night?

He missed his old friend. Nostalgia lanced him. It was more than nostalgia. It was friendship, deep friendship, a feeling toward Asquith he had forgotten during the events of this day. He wanted to ask his friend—were the frogs real?

He wanted to have a drink with his friend. A nice, long drink, like in the old days, one of those drinks they would have after popping amphetamines all night, a nice long walk down liquor lane, the sky growing bluer by the drink. Let’s sit and talk over a half gallon of Smirnoff, Asquith. Let’s have a meeting of the drink-stunned minds.

Then we’ll see you handcuffed and jammed into the back seat of a deputy sheriff’s Chevrolet. All the good in you I helped create. The bad is your fault, but I brought it here.

It was all an act, this standing in the growing heat, playing to an audience—unseen, but very perceptive—of two. Yes, you see how unafraid I am. You see me here, lord of lawn and tree.

Speke felt himself walking, observed the yellow oak leaves on the path, and the wrinkle of a lizard’s track in the dust, but he was astounded.

What are you doing? he asked himself. You can’t meet with him there, not where you thought you killed him, where you wrapped him in the carpet.

Where else? Where else should I lay a madman to rest, or a ghost, except where it all began? They would sit and they would talk. It would be like the old days, except there would be no typewriter. What would be hammered out would not be Act Five. It would be the truth.

What would his father have done in a situation like this? That solitary man, who loved his sons by being absent from them, repairing yet another burned-out centrifuge—this situation would never have happened to such a rational man. A psychotherapist had once offered the opinion that most of Speke’s ache for success was directed at the mother he never knew, and the father he had always been in the process of losing. And Art, his brother: what would Art advise him to do? Art was an expert on everything, wine, Beethoven, da Vinci. He loved nothing better than calling Speke on the phone to read him a bad review of one of his plays, or complain about the crude mix on one of his albums. The last time he called was to report that he had been unable to find the soundtrack of Stripsearch in the Macy’s record department. “You ought to complain about this,” said Art in his best I’m-only-thinking-about-you whine.

Asquith would be in the Outer Office. Speke was sure of that. He’ll be the star. All eyes on him. Because it was I he always wanted to impress. Asquith was a toxic drum, dropped into the sea. My plutonium. My creation.

He’ll be there.

He reached the secluded shelter of the Outer Office. He put his hand on the knob. The brass was warm. It was a warm day, even a hot day, perhaps the hottest in months, but he had not been aware of the temperature of the air. He studied the earth, the scatter of leaves and unraked twigs.

He was looking for footprints, and he did not see any. The knob slipped from his grip, and slipped a second time. His hand was boneless.

He opened the door.

Athena gazed down with her usual introspective wisdom and her blank eyes. Hemingway’s note, the Degas, all looked as though they had been hung in place just ten seconds before at the command of a director who even now was impatient to begin.

Speke sensed the presence before he saw it. Each detail in the room sharpened in his eyes. My stage office, he thought. It was as unused for real work as the desk and chair in a soap opera. The serpentine mantelpiece gleamed, and the mint-condition poker seemed newer than ever before, as though Clara had been at work here just this morning with her Brasso. The bare floor glistened where centuries ago the carpet had been dragged away.

The room was not, after all, empty.

Of course not, Speke thought. I never expected it to be empty. But his blood was stone.

There was the figure of a man half-hidden behind the curtains, the full-length drapes before the large windows. This figure was so taken, apparently, with the view out the window that he could not spare a greeting.

The figure gazed out into the woods, a shrouded half-presence. This specter did not move.

“I’m glad to see you,” said Speke, and his voice was strong.

I am still your equal, he wanted to say. I can still match you, dream for dream, act for act, because while you have all the cunning I have all the life.

There was no movement. The ghost behind the curtain gave no sign of having heard. If anything, the curtains were drawn in slightly, the phantom clinging to the cloth as to a robe. Then, soundlessly, the curtain shifted. A fold spread, then narrowed. A foot shifted. The curtain began to part.

His hand ached for the hilt of the knife, but his limbs could not move.

The figure stepped from behind the curtains. The sight of the face was what seared Speke, and stunned him so that he knew he would never move or speak again.

What stood before him was a hulk, hands blistered, face an eruption of wounds, eyes bright within a corrupted mask.