Sleepwalker (8 page)

They reached a small hill, and sat.

“Here,” said Irene. “Here—if we sit still, we can hear them bark.”

They were warm together, when he held her. Then Davis heard them. Distant clicks, like small sticks breaking.

“Foxes,” breathed Irene.

“Really?” said Davis. He was amazed. He had never heard a fox before now.

But then there was silence.

A long silence. Davis turned his head one way, and then another, but he could hear nothing.

“I frightened them away,” said Davis.

She did not speak at once. “Davis, I have something terrible to tell you.”

“What?”

“I made it all up, about the foxes. I only wanted to get you out here, in the beautiful field, in the dark.”

“You mean—there are no foxes at all?”

“Of course there are foxes. But the ones I talked about were pretend.”

She was warm when he held her. “What made the clicks?” he asked at last.

“There was nothing, Davis. You heard them in your mind.”

Davis insisted. “I want to find out what made the noise.”

The night was very dark, and he collided with it before he could see it. It turned slowly and shook its head, violently, and he heard the clicks of its halter.

He led it back, and it followed, huge and warm in the dark.

For once Irene was surprised. “You found the biggest rabbit in the world,” she laughed.

“It's a fox,” Davis replied.

The horse nuzzled him, with gusts of warm air from its nostrils.

Long after they had left it Irene was still laughing, and Davis was still stopping to look back toward the place where the horse stood, invisibly, in the darkness.

8

Oliver, redheaded and sweating, was attacking a stump of concrete in the side of Trench Three. A graduate student, a pale, pudgy young man with glasses, was scraping the surface of the trench floor. He was scraping in the approved manner, always in one direction, a small ridge of scrapings always before him, until it became a crest, and could be dumped carefully into a black bucket.

Peter had spent the morning repairing the generator. The repair had been simple. A belt had broken. Belts are made to be broken, and Peter had kept a spare in the tools department, but the spare was missing. An auto supply shop on Bootham had every kind of belt but the one he needed. At last, a shop in Fulford had a used belt, and Peter brought it back to the site, carrying it to the generator like a prize eel.

Now the generator rumbled pleasantly. The office lights were on, and Peter sat in the Portakabin, wiping his hands on the old Mickey Mouse T-shirt he kept for such purposes. He watched Oliver through the window as he crunched the dagger end of the mattock into the stump of concrete. Bits of concrete flew.

Oliver was a wiry man, long recovered from his minor concussion. For a lean man, he was very strong. Concrete burst through the air, and sweat gleamed on Oliver's arms.

Time stopped. The head of the mattock detached itself from the shaft. It seemed to will itself upward, spinning, a tight blur that looked too small to be a great span of iron. Peter parted his lips, but he could not cry out. He could not move. He could do nothing.

The spinning iron reached the apex of its flight, and seemed to hover. It rolled over, as though to view the scene below, deliberately. It was this apparent deliberateness that froze Peter. The mattock head adjusted the angle of its fall, did one slow cartwheel, and then it fell straight to the head of the graduate student. There was a sickening crack—a quiet crack, bone and iron.

The young man sagged forward, and for an instant looked like someone demonstrating the myth of the ostrich. Then he fell sideways, and his eyes were open.

Peter leaped down the steps, ran to the edge of the pit, and jumped. He fell much longer than he had expected to fall, but he had no thought for himself, or for his body. He sprawled when he landed, and scrambled, calling to Oliver, “Lift his legs!”

Peter searched for a pulse. There was nothing.

“Good God in heaven,” murmured Oliver. He held the man's feet, one under each arm.

“Where's his helmet?” muttered Peter. But it was obvious where it was. It lay at the foot of the ladder, beside the young man's coat, which he had carefully folded.

“I called for an ambulance,” cried Jane, far above.

“Wake up,” said Peter, putting his lips beside the young man's ear. “Wake up. We're all with you. Wake up—everything will be all right.”

He was talking to a dead man.

Peter gave him the kiss of life, working with trembling hands.

There was no pulse. The eyes stared. Peter's breath filled the lungs, and wheezed out of them, again and again. An ambulance wended from the east. The high-low, one-two of its call seemed to grow farther away at times. Time was not standing still, now. It was moving in jerks.

“Wake up,” called Peter. “Please wake up.”

“Dear God in heaven,” said Oliver.

Afterward, Peter would relive this moment time and time again. His hands were on the young man's throat, this inert flesh, realizing he didn't even know the name of this young volunteer. The eyes were still open, and the lips were gray.

And then the eyes closed. A corpse, and the eyes closed. Peter straightened, unable to believe what he was seeing.

The body laughed.

A dead body, laughing. A chuckle, really, and a derisive one. Oliver dropped the legs.

Both men watched as the body stirred. The eyes opened, and the whites clouded from flushed pink to bruise gray to black. The lips darkened to gray, and then, as both men held their breath, the lips, too, were black. The corpse seemed to stare at both of them with eyes that were black holes.

And then it laughed, an ugly, husky sound, like the baying of an ancient dog. The body shuddered, arms shivering, legs twitching. There was a single inhaled breath, an intake of air so hard it was nearly a scream. Its chest rose and fell, in jerks.

Peter sank to his knees, wondering what lay before him. The young man's lips began to color again, from eggshell blue to flesh pink. Peter put his hands on the young man's chest.

The whites of his eyes were a normal color again, and the eyes were blinking. A tremor passed through his arms. His lips parted. His broken voice asked, “What happened?”

“You'll be fine,” said Peter.

“You were dead,” said Oliver. “But you came back to life.” He looked at Peter. “Didn't he?”

Peter didn't answer.

But the broken voice stayed with Peter as he surveyed the trench. The ambulance had come and gone, and Peter was thankful to have the world return to its rubble and mud. Muck and rock: this was what he understood.

But what had happened? There had been a dead body here in the trench, killed by a violent accident. It had died and returned to life. More than that, the mattock head had seemed to move on its own, purposefully.

Then his questions evaporated. Peter laughed. It was all, in a way, a bad joke. And, if one really thought about it, a fairly funny joke. This was not going to soothe the nervous workers. This was not going to help anyone work more calmly. This was not going to help Davis either. This was not going to help the grieving American sleep better at night.

Because as he gazed at the empty trench, and at the head of the mattock as it lay in a puddle, Peter understood something. He understood how much he hated Davis. It was as though a genius of hatred blossomed within him, and he could see clearly all that had been a blur before now.

He was going to make Davis regret coming back to York. He was going to frighten Davis, very badly. He was going to destroy Davis's sanity.

And then, Peter promised himself, there would be that most delicious task, a goal worth struggling to achieve. It would be entertaining. It would be great sport.

He would not simply murder him—that would be too simple. He would frighten Davis out of his mind, and then, with the ease of a man controlling a distant airplane, he would destroy the man he hated above all else in the world.

Even then, Peter tried to shake away this great hunger. Was it, he thought, just, really? Wasn't it a return to the old times, those old, buried nights, when he thought only of killing?

Don't do it, he tried to tell himself, actually speaking the words through his teeth.

Don't do it. Don't kill him.

9

Irene's new computer had arrived, and Davis dropped by in the evening to see it. Her flat was in the bottom of the building next to his, and it was a single very large room with a very small kitchen. They sat, drinking tea, and from time to time a person walked by above on the sidewalk, a flash of pant legs or the glitter of a dog chain.

“I have already set up my computer, Davis. I did not need your help.”

“I didn't assume you needed help. I was curious. I like working with computers.”

“Now I will be able to write my articles. I am contributing editor to two journals, Davis. I am very busy, you see, and do not often entertain a gentleman like this. In fact, I am very slightly embarrassed and I shall close the curtain—help me, please—lest people look down at us and think what people might well think.” She laughed when the curtain snagged and would not close at once.

“You are so continually happy that at times I resent you,” said Davis.

“It is because of your troubles, and your grief. You see me happy and you think I am detestable.”

“Not detestable. In fact, I don't know very much about you.”

“My résumé is all entirely accurate. If you read that carefully, then you know everything important about me.”

“Even now, I think you are joking. You are incorrigibly flippant.”

“I am sorry I trouble you.”

“You aren't sorry at all.”

“No, indeed, although I am sorry that you have such deep sorrows, Davis, and that is the truth.”

“If I could see you spend an hour without laughing at something.”

“No, you mean if I could spend an hour without laughing at you.”

To his surprise Davis found himself unable to take his eyes off hers.

“You think I am mocking you every time I laugh. Perhaps the source of my pleasure is quite unimaginable to you.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps I find joy in your presence, Davis, and that this is something you have not considered.”

Her lips, when he brushed them with his, tasted of cloves. He had not intended to kiss her, and in fact as soon as his lips touched hers, he backed away, and then found himself not backing away at all.

She was a person who never wasted a movement, or a moment. She put her fingers to his lips, although Davis was not about to speak, and had nothing to say. She smiled up at him, as though challenging him, but there was nothing mocking about her now.

She was slender. Her clothes lay on the floor, but she had cast them down so gracefully, for all the quickness of her movements, that they looked like dancing, abstract figures.

He had not held a woman, or really desired one, ever since that terrible day. He had, he realized, surrendered to the possibility of never feeling this way again.

“So, you see,” she said at last, when they lay drowsily in the semidarkness, “you are able to feel happiness, and to give it, after all.”

He was silent for a while. “I wonder if you can read my mind,” he whispered, not wanting to break a mood that amazed him. He would have been unable to name his feeling. It was a happiness that he had, without knowing it, believed he would never experience after Margaret's death.

“I can read your feelings, Davis,” she said. “It is very easy to do.”

“Then,” he whispered, “you must know how happy I am.”

She laughed, a low, loving laugh. “You will have much happiness in your life, Davis. You should not be afraid.”

Much later, when they woke, he asked her, “Aren't you ever sad?”

“You know that I must be sad sometimes, Davis. I have seen good people die.”

Davis felt a twinge of shame. Of course she must have mourned at times in her life, as everyone did. It was a part of the self-centered aspect of his grief. He had assumed that he was the only person who ever mourned.

“I come from a place where people die easily. There is always death.”

“It must be terrible.”

“I miss the egrets,” said Irene. “Everywhere I have lived, there have been cattle egrets. They wait around the buffalo as they feed, watching for millipedes to scurry. Even in Hawaii, there have been those white birds. But here in England, there are no such birds.”

“They have rooks,” said Davis. He wondered what time it was, and sat up. “And crows.”

“You must hate those birds,” said Irene.

He sensed a return of her mockery. “Why should I hate them?”

“The rooks are always laughing,” she said. “When you see a stand of trees, the great black birds are high in the branches, laughing and laughing, entertaining each other by their endless laughing. Davis, you would hate to be a rook. Do you think that nature is always sad? You must realize that sometimes it does nothing but laugh.”

Davis fumbled.

“What are you looking for, Davis?”

“My watch.”

She laughed. “Do you have an appointment in the middle of the night?”

He did not answer.

“And, furthermore, do you ordinarily remove your watch when you make love to a woman?”

“At least I amuse you,” said Davis ruefully. “I've never known a woman who found me so endlessly entertaining.”

“You are not only entertaining, Davis,” she said, in a different timbre. “You are a delight to me.”

He found her hand on his shoulder, and he found her pulling him down to her, and wanting him, opening herself, and he found himself forgetting everything that had ever happened to him, except this one room, and this bed.

10