P. has gone to the city to do some research, and to take part in a conference on eco-criticism — a word in which I hear echoes of mountains inhabited by animals mocking our desperation to understand nature when, instead, we should simply allow it to act upon the course of our lives.
It’s the first time since we moved into this house that I’ve been alone in it. The solace of my solitude enhances the peace of where we are, and I try to enjoy these days without words rendering my voice hoarse, and aim to rediscover the silence free of human noise that has been my natural environment for years.
In the chair I’m sitting in, all I can hear is the wind’s whistling and the gentle snoring of the cat sleeping beside me. I won’t work this evening, I’ll just listen to the creaking house and then go to bed.
A hand has just knocked on the window of my bedroom on the second floor, the hand of a woman in distress calling, Help me, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know if it’s Heather, Sissy Morgan, Elisabeth Mulligan, or one of the other characters who’ve pleaded for sympathy over the years, and I’m not all that bothered about finding out, since the absurd fear of hearing a voice in the bedroom next door has kept me awake ever since a rustling of fabric dragged me from the numbness into which we are plunged by the fleeting images we experience before sleep. I was swimming in the cloudy waters of a mountain lake when I heard the sound of fabric being rubbed between two hands. I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart beating, alarmed by the feeling of a vague but real threat weighing on the silence of the house.
I’ve not moved since then, because I’m almost certain that as soon as I drop my guard, P.’s voice — even though P. isn’t here — will pipe up behind the partition separating our two bedrooms to wish me “Goodnight, honey, goodnight,” due to some phenomenon reproducing sounds after their echo has faded, as if their effect were so imprinted by their regular enunciation that they repeated by themselves, or perhaps because, quite simply, the fear of fear sometimes has us imagine all the possible and familiar resonances of horror at its most intimate. Given all this, the woman whose nails are scratching my windowpanes is just one bad dream among many.
Dawn finally came, the pink at the horizon illuminating motionless clouds. There’s no mark on the window from the scratching nails, P.’s bedroom breathes the cold air of empty spaces, and the cat is calm, completely untroubled by the ghostly presences that amount to nothing but my own anxiety.
I make myself a strong coffee and sit down at my desk, where more concrete problems than those disturbing me during the night await. Who killed Jackson, and what did Heather know about the accident? These are the questions I need to answer if I am to establish whether I imagined the scene I witnessed at La Languette — Heather angrily screaming at Ferland and McMillan, Don’t come near my dog, you fucking maniacs — or if this was just me projecting from a past whose violence still permeates the countryside if you look at it from a certain angle, just as the echoes of certain voices can also be found in it.
The simplest solution would be to ask Heather, but I’m afraid she’d be waiting for me with her gun and would terminate me before the final scene. In any case, I feel as though I lost contact with her the moment I entrusted Vince with the task of making her live again for me, and particularly since I understood Howard W. Thorne was still contemplating schemes of revenge beside a tombstone under which a body lies that I dare not exhume to compare its features with my own.
I have pushed Heather toward inertia and am unable, now, to think of her as anything but pale and trembling in the middle of the endless autumn, engulfed by leaves turned red and falling unceasingly among trees offering up their bare trunks to the cold. I have to get her out of there, must absolutely get her out of there before the mould that has attacked the seats of her Buick starts to make blemishes on her skin.
Meanwhile, Heather dreams of a sea she has never known; of unfurling foamy waves submerging the rocks at the edge of the beach in a spectacular roaring, their din increasing as the waves come in, they’ll soon be where she is, inundating the forest and tipping over the car we’ll watch drifting with the docks toward the dried-up rivers.
For P.’s homecoming I’ve prepared a herb omelette, a green salad, and an apple pie — my “famous apple pie,” as I call it — made with the fruit of the apple tree that leans by the fence whose rails we’ll need to move if we don’t want the tree’s lower branches to be damaged. And I’ve opened a bottle of the Ardèche wine P. really likes, no doubt due to his memories of the region, good memories, somewhat darkened by the death of his friend from there.
He proposes a toast to the dead friend and I propose another to all our dead loved ones, because they are increasingly numerous, because we live right at the heart of a zone slowly depopulating to the rhythm of passing seasons that break our bones. Then he tells me about his trip, about the finds he made in certain bookstores and the stench of the city, its dense, heavy air, before asking me how I spent my solitary days. I don’t have much to tell him, because solitude is silent, and I have no intention of telling him about the voice in the night, Good night, honey, good night . . . So I tell him how Heather climbed onto the roof so she could scratch at my window, adding that she might be dead right now as we’re drinking the Ardèche wine, drowned by the fury of an unknown sea and lengthening the list of our dead loved ones.
P. says no, she can’t be dead because I look more and more like her every day. “Your hair,” he says, “the paleness of your skin,” which he touches with his fingertips. Then the sun goes down and we go to bed. When I turn out my lamp, I hear his voice on the other side of the partition wishing me “Goodnight, honey, goodnight,” and a shiver runs through my sweat-drenched body.
Vince doesn’t know how Jackson died. All he knows is that Jackson was run over by a vehicle, that Heather cried for a week before she disappeared in La Languette, and that he barely saw her during this time, barely talked to her, because she was constantly shouting or murmuring, “Jackson, Jackson, my love.” Nothing else, just these shouts and murmurs, a troubling anger. “I don’t know anything else, what do you want me to say?”
When he stops he is out of breath, and I can hear the tick-tock of the clock on the old stove, which emits a kind of trill when the second hand passes the 12. I abandon him to this preoccupying noise, my coffee already cold on the linen placemat.
I have to get Heather out of the woods. I have to get Heather out of the woods. I pound the desk as I wrack my brains, unable to figure out how to change the impetus of Heather’s situation, and all the while Vince is surrounded by the haunting tick-tocking of the clock; he lowers his head, eyes too heavy to contemplate the future and tells me I need to move fast.
It’s impossible for Heather to be dead, P. has confirmed. It’s impossible that she doesn’t exist, because the phenomenon of sympathetic assimilation, where one person takes on another person’s features and vice versa, requires two people. What he forgot to add is that at the end of the process — when the assimilation has evolved to the point where they are mistaken for each other — one of the two has to retreat and let the other one take over. Will it be Heather or me who quits the stage before the curtain falls?