14

Paul stirred some oregano into the scrambled eggs. The percolator was chattering, and although he did not care for percolated coffee, he had to admit that it was a jolly sound.

“To be absolutely fair,” he continued, “you should bring three friends, and share the food. One fish dish, one of poultry, and one of whatever seems most difficult. It can be fun, but after a while it becomes a little like scouting the minors for players with a major-league curve. You see a lot that are pretty good, but very few that are excellent.”

“I thought you like to do it all by yourself.”

“Yes, I do. I find the effort to be sociable and eat seriously at the same time to be a strain. So I wind up going three or four times to the same restaurant, ordering something different each time, probing for weakness. I always find it.”

“Always?”

“Perfection itself is a fault. The impeccable restaurant is usually sterile. Too quiet. Too pretty. Not enough hearty laughter.”

“You’re impossible to please.”

“No, once you realize you can ruin anybody with a few sentences you realize you have to try to be fair. You have to consider things objectively. What the restaurant offers for the price, for example. How much parking is available. Things like that. I’ve learned to at least try to be judicious.”

He poured coffee into two red porcelain cups. A scum of oil formed on the surface of the coffee, the inevitable result of perking. Paul had grown to dislike bad coffee, and wondered if bad coffee was better than none at all.

“Did you have a bad dream?” she asked.

Paul scraped the eggs onto the plates. One plate was a fine piece of Spode, the older Spode, when they were still reliable. The other was blue melmac. Paul served the melmac to himself, although the scratched cheapness was disgusting.

“Last night,” she continued. “I thought you had a nightmare.”

“I don’t know,” he lied. “I can’t remember.”

“It sounded pretty frightening.”

“Maybe it was. I can’t remember.”

“I slept very well.” She seemed proud of this fact.

The coffee was ghastly. Paul winced, and apologized for bothering to make it. “Better to drink nothing, than drink something that tastes like antifreeze.”

Lise left to go for a walk, and Paul found himself hoping that she would not see the graves. He did not understand why, but he wanted to protect her from them.

He washed the dishes feeling meditative, which is how he usually felt when he washed dishes. He rinsed out the sink and dried his hands when he heard the pounding of steps on the front stairs.

Lise was wild-eyed. “The bridge is out!” she gasped.

For a moment, Paul could not move. Then they both ran outside, and down the long slope through the pouring rain. They staggered, panting, and held on to branches to keep from falling.

The creek was the color of milk chocolate. It surged and roiled, uttering a grumbling roar that shook them as they watched. Black stumps pierced the water, and foam swirled around them. It was not easy to see that the bridge was gone, because there was no evidence that there had ever been a bridge, except for the black timbers that punctured the flood.

Paul could not speak. He danced down to the edge of the creek, and the bank collapsed. Water tore at him as he reached for something to grasp. He found something, and squeezed. It was only mud.

For a few moments Paul thought: Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. But now he saw that it would not be fine. The torrent jammed him against a root, a gnarled, bronze-dark club thrust into the rain. He gripped it with both hands.

He could not pull himself up, and he knew if he let go he would die.

He was drowning.

This can’t be water, he thought. It’s too strong. He held on to the root, and strained to haul himself from the flood.

“Stay away!” he called to Lise, who skittered near the bank and slipped. She hunched herself away from the creek, calling words Paul could not hear. She held out her hand to him, as though at that distance her hand could help him.

He thought: Drowning.

And then he swung himself out of the flood. He crawled, feeling strangely amphibian, afraid to attempt his feet until he was far away from so much as a puddle.

It rained harder, and Paul let the clean rain wash the mud from his clothes, standing up in it, letting the cleansing drops strip him of mud and leaf rot.

They helped each other through the trees like two frail people. They undressed each other before what remained of a fire, and tossed new logs onto the coals. They drank still-warm coffee, and Paul was thankful for it.

“We’re trapped!” he whispered. “There’s no way out of here.”

They huddled in blankets.

“We’ll get out eventually,” he continued. “It can’t rain forever. Besides, there’s no way the water can reach us.” He wanted to reassure her, and kept talking. “We’re completely safe. We have plenty of food.”

She looked at him in a measuring way. “You could have drowned.”

“I know it. It was horrible.” He thought of it as something that was already in the distant past. “If it hadn’t been for that root, I would have drowned.”

She put a hand out to him.

“Or, maybe not,” he said. “Who knows what might have happened? Another branch, or a rock somewhere.” But he had a very distinct image in his mind: his body, pale as chicken fat, crammed into the mud somewhere downstream. It was a particularly ugly image, and very real.

“We’ll stay inside, in here where it’s safe,” she said.

He did not answer.

“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”

“What are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding anything,” he said feebly, but he had always known that she was smarter than he was. “I have only suspicions. Doubts.”

“About what?”

“About Len.”

“We already talked about that.”

“There are some graves,” he blurted. “I didn’t want you to know. I thought you might be afraid.”

“Christ.” She shook her head. “Why would some graves scare me? We knew he picked a place with something creepy about it. So he could take pictures of ghosts, or whatever.”

“You like this.”

“I’m not afraid of it. You’ve been trying to protect yourself, not me. Stop trying to defend me from the horrible. I’m quite capable of facing the world of the spirits without being defended by you.”

This was a very harsh rebuke, and Paul felt it deeply. He sulked into the downstairs bedroom, and stared at the tape recorder for a long time. It was an unremarkable room. The only things in it that were of any interest at all were the tripod, with a small camera, and the tape recorder, next to which were some TDK D-C90 cassettes. And the gray metal box.

He wasn’t afraid. The real fear of the water surging around him had cleansed him of all imagination. He wrapped the blanket more closely around himself.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He nodded that he was all right.

“It’s been a difficult morning. We shouldn’t wander around this freezing place dressed in blankets.”

“No, we shouldn’t,” he said, but he did not move.

“Don’t keep any more secrets from me,” she said.

He knew, then, that he should tell her about the dream. The way it recurred. The way they had all experienced it. Instead, he said, “There is something on these tapes that can help us.”

“I expect the tapes are much like his graveyard films.”

“Inconclusive?” he asked, borrowing her word.

“Very.”

As he warmed himself at the fire he found himself watching the stuffed head of the deer. The hair had worn away from parts of the neck, and bare, leathery hide showed through. The dark hairs on its snout were much like the hairs of a cat. Its ears were as large as a man’s hands, and its glass eyes were dark brown; they seemed to stare down into the room.