Innocence: A Novel (11 page)

Her father, as forward-looking as he was indulgent, had prepared for his daughter’s future, so that she would be able to thrive after he passed away, a prudent step considering that he died before her fourteenth birthday. Assuming that Gwyneth would be no less a recluse at eighty than she was as an adolescent, assuming that the confidence and freedom she got from her Goth disguise or from any different look she might later adopt would always be limited, he created a web of trusts to ensure her lifetime support. But the trusts were also designed to allow her to draw upon them and benefit from them in numerous ways with the barest minimum of interaction with trustees, in fact with only one man, Teague Hanlon, her father’s closest friend and the only confidant that he fully trusted. After her father’s murder, Hanlon had been her legal guardian until she turned eighteen; he would be the primary trustee of the interlocking trusts until his death or hers, whichever came first.

Among the things that the trusts provided were eight comfortable though not extravagant apartments located in different but appealing parts of the city, including the one in which we sat now together at breakfast. This choice of residences allowed her a change of scenery, a not inconsiderable boon if her reluctance to go out resulted in day after day during which her experience of the city was restricted to the view from her windows. In addition, her father supposed that because of her natural elegance and her elfin beauty—which she denied possessing—she might attract the unwanted attentions of a dangerous man, whereupon an apartment could be easily abandoned for
immediate relocation to another ready haven. Likewise, a fire or other disaster would not leave her homeless for so much as one hour, an important consideration if her social phobia rendered her more terrified of human contact and more reclusive as the years went by. She also kept moving from residence to residence as a means of discouraging well-meaning neighbors from making any attempt to be neighborly.

She rose from the table to fetch the pot from the coffeemaker.

The night was in retreat from the city, first light less than half an hour from possession of its streets.

I declined another cup.

Nevertheless, she poured one for me.

Returning to her chair, she said, “Before you go, we have to settle a few questions.”

“Questions?”

“Will we meet again?”

“Do you want to?”

“Very much,” she said.

Those two words were not just music, they were an entire song.

“Then we will,” I said. “But what about your … social phobia?”

“So far you haven’t triggered it.”

“Why is that?”

She sipped her coffee. The silver-snake ring, as delicate as the nose that it ornamented, glimmered when the candle flame fluttered, and seemed to circle round and round through the pierced nare from which it hung.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe next time, I’ll turn away from you and run, and want to be alone forever.”

She stared directly at me, but I was too far from the candle for her to see anything more than a hooded figure with gloved hands, and
nothing more visible within the hood than there would have been if I were Death himself.

She said, “Come by this evening at seven o’clock. We’ll have dinner. And you’ll tell me more about yourself.”

“I never go out until after midnight. Too dangerous.”

Following a silence, Gwyneth said, “Do you have hope?”

“If I didn’t, I would long ago have died by my own hand.”

“Belief and trust, twined together, can meet any danger. Do you fear death, Addison?”

“Not my own death. Not the way people fear their death in books. I sometimes worried that my father would die. And when he did, the loss was worse than I imagined. The pain.”

She said, “I want to hear all about your father and your life, at dinner.”

My heart felt enlarged, not swollen with grief as it had been after Father died, but with complex emotions, swollen but not heavy, buoyant. I reminded myself that the heart is deceitful above all things, though I was sure it did not deceive me now.

I pushed my chair back from the table and got to my feet. “Leave the window open. At that hour, I’ll have to be very quick, out of the storm drain and up the fire escape.”

Rising from her chair, she said, “The rules don’t change.”

“The same rules,” I agreed. “You don’t look, and I don’t touch.”

She smiled and quoted me: “ ‘We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.’ ”

After following me through the apartment to the dark bedroom, she remained in the open doorway to the softly lighted hall as I switched on my flashlight, dimmed it with fingers across the lens, and went to the window.

I turned to look at her and quoted something that she had said
earlier. “ ‘There is one who comes and goes infrequently, but I won’t speak of that.’ ” When she said nothing, I asked, “Will you speak of that at dinner?”

“Perhaps. But as I said before, it’s nothing that’ll put you at risk. Not in any way.”

When I raised the window, the beam of my light reminded me of the words hand-printed on the windowsill with a felt-tip marker, which I had half seen when I first entered. If they were words and not just symbols, they were in a foreign language, and in fact they somewhat resembled letters of the Greek alphabet, with which college sororities and fraternities named themselves.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Remember the sun. Go, Addison. Go, while you still have the night.”

Switching off the flashlight, I slipped out of the room, onto the fire escape, where the air was cool, and all around the city seemed to be rising from its dreams, the millions of its cells waking one by one.

As I descended the iron steps, I heard the window sliding shut behind me and the latch being engaged.

Suddenly I was sure that I would never see her again, and the thought was so piercing, so sharp with intuition, that I froze on the iron, there above the alleyway.

AFTER A MOMENT, I FOUND MY HOPE AGAIN AND
continued down the fire escape. At the second-floor apartment, light still glowed at the window, and the draperies remained partly
open. But this time movement in the room caught my attention in passing.

I would not have stopped, would not have moved closer to the glass, if I had glimpsed only the man. But in the room with him was one of the Fogs.

The man appeared to be in his thirties, as ordinary as anyone, with a pleasant face and hair damp from a recent shower. He wore a sapphire-blue silk robe and stood barefoot before an entertainment center, sorting through a small stack of DVDs.

The Fog traveled that living room, swimming through the air from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor and up again, like an eel lazily exploring an aquarium with which it had long ago grown bored. White from end to end, lacking eyes and mouth, in fact without any features whatsoever, it should have seemed no more threatening than a blind worm. But it inspired such repugnance that a sour mash of coffee and brioche rose in the back of my throat, and though I had to swallow hard to force down that acidic mass, I could not look away from the thing, wondering what its intentions might be, for I had never before seen one in such an intimate setting.

On the coffee table in front of the sofa, an ice bucket chilled a carton of orange juice and an open bottle of champagne. A waiting glass, empty at the moment, suggested that the man in the robe would have mimosas for breakfast.

He selected a DVD from the small collection and inserted it into the tray of the player. Oblivious of the circling Fog, he went to the coffee table and poured equal measures of orange juice and champagne into the tall glass, sipped it once, then again, and put it on a coaster on an end table next to the sofa.

As the man sat down, the Fog attacked. I had never witnessed such a thing before, nor had Father or his father, as far as I know. If
what transpired next was common, the Fogs took great trouble to conduct their assaults only where there were no witnesses, where their prey was alone and vulnerable. Though only Father, his father, and I could see these creatures, the response of the prey would have alerted anyone present to the fact that something extraordinary was occurring. As the serpentine form abruptly lashed the man and wound around him, he reacted as if he’d taken an electric shock, his entire body stiffening. He tried to move his encircled arms but could not, tried to thrash up from the sofa, without success, and opened his mouth as though to scream, but no thinnest cry escaped him. His face flushed red, features contorting in what appeared to be agony one moment and ecstasy the next, eyes rolling and protuberant with fear, but jaws slackening in surrender, the cords of his neck as taut as cables. Although the predator apparently had no mouth, I thought that it would somehow devour him, but instead
he
devoured
it
against his will. The Fog inserted itself into his silent scream, pressed into his mouth. The beast no longer seemed to be merely coherent mist. Now it looked as muscular, as torsional, as powerful as a python, and it fed itself to him insistently, relentlessly. His cheeks bulged with the mass of it, and his throat swelled grotesquely as the Fog forced itself down his esophagus. As it had wound around him, now it unwound while he swallowed more and more of it, although when his arms were free, he made no meaningful use of his hands, only clenched them into fists to beat on the sofa and upon himself.

I thought that I should smash through the window, go to the aid of the victim, but intuition restrained me. I was not afraid for my life, but somehow I knew that I could not grapple with the Fog any more than I could wrestle into submission a cloud of smoke. This was more than an encounter between predator and prey, more and different. Although I saw no evidence that the man had invited the assault
or that he’d even been aware of his peril prior to the attack, every moment of his struggle was characterized not merely by fright and horror but equally by what seemed to be a carnal acquiescence, as if he received the Fog with almost as much pleasure as terror.

The tail of the thing slithered out of sight between the man’s lips, his throat swelled obscenely one last time, and he slumped back against the sofa, gray-faced and exhausted. After less than a minute, color began to seep into his skin once more. His breathing returned to normal. He sat up straight and looked around as though bewildered, as if not quite sure what, if anything, had just happened.

Although I had witnessed the event complete, I couldn’t say with certitude what it meant. I felt reasonably sure, however, that the Fog still lived, that now it thrived like a parasite within the man, and that the silk-robed host, having been somehow induced to forget the hideous penetration, was unaware of what had taken residence within him.

The man reached for the mimosa on the end table, swallowed a third of it, and returned it to the coaster. He picked up the remote control from the coffee table, switched on the big-screen TV, and put the DVD into play.

Although the window was at an angle to the TV, I had a good enough view to allow me to see what appeared on the screen: a pretty girl of ten or eleven and a grown man. As he began to undress her, I realized that the horror of the recent assault was nothing as compared to the abomination that was about to play out on the big-screen TV.

The man on the sofa leaned forward. The collection of obscene DVDs had belonged to him before the Fog had combined itself with him, and it was he, only he, who smiled now and licked his lips, savoring the atrocity on the video as surely he had enjoyed it often before.

With the stealth that is at all times essential to my survival, I fled down to the alleyway, shaking with disgust, my eyes hot with tears.

I halted and peered up, not at the second-floor window but at the fourth. With such a man living two floors below her, was Gwyneth safe even behind locked doors and latched windows? I considered going back and warning her, but the quiet metropolis began to resonate with the sounds of its earliest-rising citizens. I realized that Gwyneth knew more about the city’s residents than I would ever know, and she understood at least as well as I did what corruption and pitiless cruelty might be hidden behind the masks that some people wore.

Faint color had faded the night along the eastern horizon, and soon it would saturate the sky. With gloved hands, I wiped at my eyes, and the blurred surroundings clarified.

I wanted light and cool fresh air and a vast openness into which I could run until I collapsed, but it was my burden to be an object of such loathing that I must shun the light, descend into darkness at dawn, and pass the bright day closed far away from those whom I would offend by my very existence. I hurried along the alleyway, seeking an entrance to the underworld.

THE NIGHT THAT I ARRIVED IN THE CITY … THE MALL
along the river where, through plate glass, the sly marionette watched passersby …

The globes atop the ornate iron lampposts glowed like illumined
pearls, and flecks of mica in the fired clay of the bricks sparkled underfoot as I walked away from the antique-toy store and north past other shops that offered window displays in which every item remained reliably inanimate.

Before I saw the man, I heard him. A shout, another, a shuddery scream of terror, and then his pounding footsteps.

I will never know who he was, although I suspect that he must have been a vagrant, a homeless person accustomed to bunking in a secret and protected nook somewhere in the open-air mall. He appeared from a break between two buildings, one of them a restaurant, running clumsily in buckled rubber snow boots that made sloppy squelching sounds on the bare bricks. He wore patched khaki pants, a pale-gray sweater over a plaid shirt, a stained corduroy sport coat with badly tattered cuffs, and a broad-brimmed hat the likes of which I’d never seen before and have never seen since.

Flames feathered back from the crown of his hat, but he seemed to be unaware that the danger was more immediate than the two men from whom he was running. As he approached, I pointed to his head and shouted, “Fire, fire!”