Chapter 22

She fled, knowing that she must not answer that phone, hurrying out the door and racing down the drive toward the car. She got it started on the third try, backed out of the drive, and aimed it into the fog that seemed as unreal and crowded with phantoms as her foggy perceptions. A part of her mind realized that Arthur would not call back. It must have been Gus or Richard calling. But suppose it was Arthur? Suppose he once again whispered the name of a woman who was dead?

If Richard were with her the world would become sane. If Gus were with her he would reel out good sense the way he had once reeled computer printouts, even making sense of statistics. Gus would listen to her and nod. He would not understand the possession of one person by the spirit of another. He would listen, though, and account for the fog that swirled and eddied in her mind. He would speak gently, firmly, and she would regain the memory of good sense.

Without Gus, though, her memory faltered from moment to moment. She was driving aimlessly, it seemed, and yet the car felt as if it knew where to turn, where to stop, and finally where to park. Meredith understood that she had driven downtown. At least she found herself back in the car, parked a few blocks from the post office, with the engine cold and reluctant to start. She knew she was wearing the clothes she had worn the day before, and they were rumpled from sleeping in them.

She had slept, she realized. She had pulled the car to a stop in this place some time long ago and fallen back on the seat, exhausted. Now the fog was gone from the lanes of the streets and sunlight shone down into them, but that fog still clung to her thoughts. The world felt cloaked in cotton.

Sometime near midmorning, and long after she had begun to notice strangers staring, she combed her hair carelessly in a restaurant bathroom. The face she found in the mirror was her own, but drawn with exhaustion. More than anything else, that look reassured her. It meant she was still fighting back, even though the battle seemed hopeless.

She could not control what she wanted to do. She knew that she walked along the streets and into stores, but she could not remember why. Moments of lucidity surfaced, startling her into awareness like fixed stars above a chartless ocean. Those moments left memories: a vision of herself standing in the aisle of an expensive department store staring down at a display of perfumes; another vision as she walked past a beautiful mannequin in a shop window and leaned close to the glass to study the delicate features. She had wanted to become that mannequin, permanently fixed in perfection, nearly as much as she had wanted to wear all the perfumes and extravagant clothing she had found in the stores. The yearning was like a tearing inside her heart, as strong as physical pain, yet it could not possibly be fulfilled.

She felt locked in a dream, and if the dream could not come true it was not because she did not completely believe in it. The yearnings could never be fulfilled because the woman who that dream insisted she was, a hopelessly plain and unwanted woman, hardly deserved the attention curious sales clerks paid to her.

Despair was the enemy Meredith fought. Her memory of those hours would surely be lost, but her will, her unquestioning insistence that she deserved to live, remained. The other woman whose frightened eyes startled strangers, whose tiny voice excused herself for standing in anyone’s way, might not care if she lived, but Meredith fought back. She willed herself to keep moving, to get through the hours somehow, because sooner or later Richard would come home. None of the hallucinations had been able to last when he was near. Maybe he would even come home early. He was worried about her. She clung to that hope, repeating his name over and over in the depth of her mind.

By midafternoon, Richard’s name had become a mumbled, repetitive prayer beneath her thoughts. Then she thought of Gus. She stumbled through traffic to a phone booth. The phone seemed an alien thing, something she must not touch. She willed herself to courage.

“Doctor is in a meeting,” the secretary said. “Is this an emergency?”

Meredith gasped, spoke a name, but she could not remember for a moment whether the name had been her own, or if she had said Patty. She replaced the receiver, cutting off the secretary’s cold, professional voice.

As afternoon faded, lights winked on in store windows and strangers hurried past. It would be more than a day before Richard’s flight arrived, and even if she could wait at the airport she did not have the courage to drive there. The woman who inhabited her now was too terrified to negotiate the complex shuttlings of the highway. She returned to her car and followed a route that crept through side streets to take her home. Her mind rebelled at the idea. Home was the wrong place to go, but compulsion pressed her and there seemed to be no other choice.

Traffic still clogged the main thoroughfares. A circuitous route took nearly an hour to bring her home. By the time the neighborhood grew familiar, Meredith felt exhausted. Each approaching car seemed aimed straight into her headlights, and the thickening fog promised dangers on every side. Her neck hurt from leaning forward to stare through the windshield, but when the Johnsons’ house came into view half a block away she eased backward slightly. The Johnsons’ house was dark, but in a way that awful house aided her. She began to feel the first stirring of anger. Anger helped. Beyond it lay some deeper emotion, but it felt unrealized, faint as a whisper.

Farther up the street, where a sports car usually stood in the drive, warm light flowed through open curtains. She did not see Sally Fielding’s car, but Sally’s lights were on.

Gradually, as if struggling upward from sleep, a memory tugged at Meredith. She was supposed to see Sally tonight, but what time? And could she face Sally feeling this way, uncertain from one minute to the next whether she would fade into the woodwork or weep? As she turned into the drive, her relief was tinged with panic, but the panic faltered before anger.

Beyond the windshield the darkened windows of her house offered no welcome. She checked the clock on the dash. It was surely too early, but perhaps she could avoid the gray emptiness inside that house and go directly to Sally’s. Meredith pulled her weary body from the car and headed toward the lighted windows.

She rang the bell and heard no movement inside. The open front curtains showed the living room. Meredith was about to turn away when a detail of the furnishings caught her eye. She choked, and found herself weeping.

The walls were patterned with bright blue paper, and a broad orange sofa stood along one wall. The adjacent wall displayed a painting of a ship racing through waves, and beneath it was a polished wood bar with a brass railing around it. Meredith remembered seeing that gleaming bar before, filled with tall bottles and an ice bucket. Now it stood empty.

She had been in this house in her dream. Ed Johnson had been there, too, telling his filthy jokes, and she had fled the people and their voices. She remembered Arthur hurrying her to the door. And the tall red-haired woman, her hair piled high on her head, must have been Sally. The room was lit now, as it had been that night, and the same terror gripped her. Yet this was worse than a dream because it was really happening.

There was some disarray about the room. A young boy’s skateboard poked its nose from behind the orange couch. A school satchel lay on the coffee table. Sally had children, and she had taken them somewhere. Meredith’s anger returned hesitantly, but the anger was not at Sally. Someone—something—was trying to quell her, maybe even take her life. She tested other emotions. She unconsciously brought her hand to rest on her waist. She knew, suddenly, and without knowing why, that she had conceived. She did not just believe it, she knew it. She looked at Sally’s living room, at the intelligence and sense of a woman who had said she would not trade her children for a chance to redecorate the White House.

Her steps were loud as she raced from the porch and down the long front walk, the cold air on her cheeks real as a slap. Her anger turned to determination. She could fight back. She would fight back. Another life needed her.

All day she had fought the certainty building in her, but now she knew. Drifting between the foggy, dreamlike wandering and lucid moments of awareness, Sally’s words had kept echoing. “Poor little thing,” Sally had called the young wife. “Shy, timid like a dormouse, walking in like some Hollywood princess.” They described perfectly the woman she had seen in the mirror last night. Those words could have come from the lips of any stranger who had seen her today. That timid spirit was trying to possess her completely, and that spirit was going to fail. Meredith suppressed her anger. When you were too angry you could make mistakes.

When she entered her house the attack began, and in spite of her determination it was worse than anything she could have imagined. Visions and dreams drifted. Gray walls were coated with ice. She felt searing, stabbing pain at the sight of the empty house. Arthur was gone. She had tried. She had wanted to love him, had wanted to make love to him. But she could not, and he had given up. He had turned away from her.

She walked aimlessly through her downstairs rooms, hugging her arms against the glacial chill that rolled from the walls. It would not help if she turned up the heat. Nothing could warm the seed of ice that had been planted inside of her. It grew like some monstrous frozen child, swelling huge until it penetrated even her thoughts.

She stared at the dark curtains and saw the endless crevices that hid in each fold. The row of books on the mantel lay like a drift of black snow, and the gray carpet stretched endlessly over the floor, a vast bleak ice field. An extension cord hung from a wall plug, dripping its coils over the ice. She stooped to touch it and it trickled through her fingers like cold water.

She stretched it taut between her hands until it burned her palms. It was strong. It would hold. In her mind she saw the knot it would make over the railing, a dark swelling above the charcoal line of the wood. That knot would yank once, hard, and then the glacier would finally cover her. She stood drawing the plug from the wall, the black cord trailing after her steps across the living room.

She paused at the foot of the stairs and looked up. Above her the harsh geometry of the stairwell spun dizzyingly. Mad angles met diagonal lines and seemed to shift and overlap. They would whirl as she fell. They whirled now as she almost felt herself falling already, gulping freezing air as she passed through it before the cord bit into her neck. The ceiling turned on an unseen axis and she heard a high-pitched, ringing scream in her ears. She tried to cover them, but the sound would not stop. It cut into her like icicles as she stumbled and ran, dragging the cord toward the hall.

The telephone was ringing. Through a haze of confusion and anger Meredith fought her way toward the shrill bursts of sound. Maybe it was Arthur. Maybe Arthur still loved her. Maybe Arthur was calling to save her from death. Her fingers trembled over the phone. She fought against visions. Maybe Richard was calling.

“Meredith?”

She gripped the cold receiver, too confused to reply. Who was Meredith? Then she remembered.

“Is Meredith Morgan there?” It was a lilting female voice.

There was a life to protect. She was Meredith Morgan. She told herself that she must never, never forget that. “Yes, I’m here, yes.”

“Lordy, you must have been halfway down the block. Sounds like you’re getting out of shape.”

Meredith suddenly heard the harsh rasping in her throat, her shoulders shuddering as she gasped for breath. “I ran. I had to run to answer. Sally?”

“Sounds like you ran. Yes, it’s Sally, and I’ve got bad news. Mark got tied up on that buying trip. I’ve got to run some errands for him—I’m dropping off the kids with a sitter and heading downtown to take care of them now. So I guess we’ll have to take a rain check for tonight.” Sally paused, her voice suddenly uncertain. “Say, are you okay? Say something, will you? Or would you rather just breathe?”

“No. I’m sort of shaky.” Breath came in long, clutching spasms. Meredith felt that she would not choke, and she heard her own voice. The timid quaver of the young wife faded. “I had to run for the phone. I was on my way . . .” She trailed off to stare down at the black extension cord—the hanging wire, the wire that could choke and kill—as it emerged from her grip.

“Level with me, kid. Are you alone, or is some raping bastard standing there making you talk?”

“I’m alone, truly I am.” The word rape wailed through her mind. From somewhere deep in her heart, terror spread like an icy hand. She breathed heavily.

“If you’re upset or something, well, hell, I can delay the errands.”

“I’ll be okay.” Some sort of confidence was rising in her. She felt that she had just discovered something important, but did not yet know what it was. The confidence was not very big, but it was there.

“You’re sure? I mean, you sound a little bit better, but are you sure you want to be alone tonight?”

Meredith knew what she must do. She somehow understood that if she did not take action now, no one could save her or the child who even now formed inside her. Gus could not. Richard could not, nor could Sally. “I am sure,” she said. “Actually there was someone I needed to see. I won’t spend the evening alone.”

Sally laughed lightly. “If you put it that way—mysteriously, I mean—I hope it’s a man. An old hopeful from college, dreadfully handsome.”

Meredith felt insane laughter welling up, but she choked it back before it could spill over into hysteria. “It’s not that good, I’m afraid. Good, but not that good.” She hung up the phone and felt her confidence rise. Whatever caused death and ice to run through this house seemed willing to allow her to leave, willing that she find Arthur Watson. It even seemed that it wanted her to go.