Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (16 page)

Not so predictable,
he thought.
You didn’t go over there
.

But he knew that meant little. Under other circumstances, he would have jumped at the chance to be with a woman like Diana and been just as grateful as, no doubt, the room service guy felt at that very moment.

The noises in the next room reached an initial crescendo, with Diana crying out in a throaty, shuddery orgasm followed almost immediately by the groan of a man stunned by his own good fortune. If last night was any indication, though, Diana would not let it go at that. As soon as the guy had a few minutes’ rest . . .

The groan had not stopped. The man’s voice began to rise and fall, perhaps with each spasm of his own orgasm. It sounded like he was still coming, like she had brought him to the height of ecstasy and somehow managed to keep him there. The guy cried out to God but even those words were barely more than grunts.

The headboard slammed the wall in quick rhythm, punctuating each spasm. Diana talked to him, urged him on, and Tim wondered what kind of woman this was, what tantric magic she had that could keep a man locked in ecstasy, and suddenly he knew that while he would always know he had done the right thing, he would also forever regret not having felt what the lucky son of a bitch next door was feeling in that moment.

And then the room service guy began to cry.

In the midst of his climactic groaning, he sobbed and began to say “please” every few seconds. The tone alone told Tim that the man wanted it to end. That he had had enough.

Diana laughed.

“Come on, baby,” she said. “Fuck me harder.”

Then it was her turn to moan, sounding the way some lovers did when they were locked in a deep kiss, or during oral sex. Tim’s erection had returned full force even as he listened with growing unease. The room service guy’s cries sounded full of pain, now, even fear.

Tim reached out and turned on the light. Sitting up in bed, he stared at the wall, trying to decide what exactly he was hearing.

You’re to blame for what happens
, Diana had said.

But what, exactly, was happening? This did not sound like sex anymore, not like ecstasy. And now that he thought about it, some of the groans the previous night had sounded full of pain to him as well. What the hell was the woman doing to this guy?

He picked up the phone and reached out to punch the button for the front desk, but hesitated. What the hell would he say? Instead, he put the phone back in its cradle and climbed from the bed. Tugging on the pants he had worn that day, he ran the whole thing over in his mind. He could bang on the wall or go out into the hall and knock on the door, but if he was wrong . . . if this was just extraordinary sex or some S&M thing he was too naïve to understand, he would feel foolish. And to Diana he would appear jealous and full of regret, and he did not want to give her that satisfaction.

Diana’s muffled moaning grew louder. The headboard kept banging, although if he was correct the rhythm seemed to have slowed. But in the midst of the man’s groaning he felt certain now that he heard sobs and weeping.

That’s not pleasure.

Fully awake now, he went to the slider, unlocked it and drew it open as quietly as possible. Hesitating only a moment, he went to the railing that separated his balcony from Diana’s and carefully threw his leg over, settling his weight on the railing a moment in order to shift his weight from one balcony to the next.

You’ll be arrested
, he thought.
Peeping Tom. Pervert. She’ll think you just wanted to see.

But such reservations did not stop him. Something was wrong. He could feel it in the rising of the small hairs on the back of his neck and the icy dread that raced through him as he crept across Diana’s balcony.

Her slider was open halfway. The crash of the surf on Santa Monica Beach, just behind him, covered any noise his bare feet might have made. He paused just outside the slider, hidden from within by the curtain hanging on the other side of the glass. But where the slider was open, the curtain had been drawn back to let moonlight into the room. Tim took a deep breath and held it, then carefully leaned in so that he could get a glimpse into the room.

Diana knelt astride an olive-skinned man, rocking herself back and forth on him, riding him hard enough to keep the headboard slamming the wall. The sensual curves of her body in the interplay between moonlight and shadows made Tim catch his breath. But then he noticed the way the man’s body bucked beneath her, the way his hips seemed to come up off the bed with her, not as if he were thrusting into her but as though with each motion she dragged him up with her, as though her sex had clamped onto him and tugged again and again, milking him, attached in some unfathomable way.

So entranced was he by the strangeness of that, and by the swaying of breasts, that at first he did not notice the wrongness of the shadows around her face. The man continued to cry out, his eyes rolled back to the whites, his cheeks looking sunken—Jesus, he looked sickly, how old was this guy? Diana had her mouth against his chest and at first Tim thought she must be licking his nipples or his skin, but then Diana shifted in the moonlight, drew her head back a bit, and Tim’s heart seized in his chest.

His mind tried to make sense of what he saw. He stared, breathless, as denial tried to fight back the horror and disgust and fear that filled him. Chills rippled across his body and his stomach churned. Bile roared up the back of his throat and he had to force himself not to vomit.

Diana’s mouth was distended, stretched into a pale, blue-veined funnel attached to the man’s chest, right above his heart. Her lips trembled with a quiet suction, the skin around them glistening wetly, but he could hardly tear his eyes away from the disgusting proboscis that her face had become.

The man’s cheeks were streaked with tears.

As Tim watched in mounting horror, the man’s face seemed to become thinner. His entire body had begun to wrinkle, even to wither, and Tim wondered what he had looked like before he had crawled into that bed.
Kirk’s no longer with me
, Diana had said of her previous night’s lover. So where the hell was Kirk now?

The room service guy’s head tossed to one side and for just a second, his eyes were on Tim. That was enough.

He swept the screen open and burst into the room. Diana glanced up but did not slow the thrust of her hips, the slam of the headboard, the suction of her hideous mouth.

“Get off him!” Tim shouted.

He grabbed her with both hands, gripped her upper arms from behind, and used his momentum to drag her off the bed, straining with the effort.
Too heavy. What the . . .

As Diana flopped to the carpet, Tim watched the room service guy dragged along with her, her pussy and that grotesque, distended mouth suctioned to his flesh. Her hips continued to piston onto him and he kept groaning, but his voice had become weaker now and his skin had begun to turn a hideous coal grey. Smoke rose from his open mouth, as if he were on fire inside.

“Jesus!” Tim cried. He wanted to bolt from the room, to pretend he’d never seen this thing, but he knew he would never erase it from his mind.

He reached down and tried to separate them but Diana flailed at him, fingernails furrowing his neck. She and her prey were on their sides on the carpet. The stretched funnel of her mouth still adhered to his chest, but now Tim saw the lips crawling caterpillar-like trying to keep hold of the flesh.

“No. No way,” he said.

Clutching at his bleeding neck, he stomped a bare foot onto that thin, pale flesh. Her mouth came free with a pop and he saw a black tongue, needle-thin and long—so long—slip from the man’s chest before she sucked it back between her lips and spun on Tim.

“What the hell
are
you?” Tim rasped.

Diana hissed, tore herself from the man, and leaped up at Tim. She attacked with her fingers hooked into claws and now panic raced like poison through his veins. What the hell had he done? Why had he intervened? He grabbed her by the wrists but she was strong. She spun him around and slammed him into the wall and that long mouth thrust at him, long black tongue darting out, and now Tim saw it had a glistening stinger on the tip. He shoved her backward, clenched his fist, and struck her in the temple. He punched her again and again, drove her against the mirrored closet door, which shattered into hundreds of shards that cut their feet as they grappled.

Tim caught only a glimpse of the room service guy out of the corner of his eye before the guy smashed him in the head with the telephone. He spun backward and crashed into the wall, sliding to the carpet even as blood trickled down into his right eye and pain clutched vise-like at his skull. Darkness danced around the edges of his vision and for several seconds he blacked out.

He opened his eyes again to the room service guy’s voice. Full of desperation, pitiful and withered, half the life already leeched from him, the poor bastard’s cock was still hard.

“Please. Finish,” he pleaded.

The hideously disfigured mouth on the creature Tim knew as Diana twitched, and then smiled. She reached out and took the lost soul’s hand and led him back to bed, mounting him again, reattaching her lamprey mouth to his heart and her sex to his.

Amidst the tortured music of the headboard and their moans, Tim managed to stagger to his bloodied feet. He nearly tripped over the guy’s uniform as he shoved the room service cart out of the way. Through the wreckage of the closet door he saw a body laid out on the floor inside. The shrivelled thing between its legs had once been a penis. The skin was like shrunken leather, split in several places to reveal dry, pink meat inside, and the cheeks had been torn badly enough to show bone. It looked as though all of the moisture had been sucked out of him, along with all of his youth and vigour, and his life.

Kirk. And now this guy.

Tim had tried. Whatever Diana had done to Kirk, and who knew how many guys before him, she was now doing to the room service guy, and like some kind of junkie, he needed it now, needed her to finish the job. The hook was in deep. The things that made him
him
had already been taken away.

Kirk’s no longer with me.

I guess I was a little too much for him.

Tim opened the door and staggered out of the room and down the corridor on bloodied feet. He banged the elevator call button and then ran on to the stairwell door and slammed it open. Ever since Jenny’s death, the people who loved him had told him that she would be watching over him. He had never quite believed it—she had gone from this world, a wall thrown up between them—but after this night he was not so sure. It seemed that even those walls could be thin at times.

As he raced down the steps to the lobby, he wondered again if Jenny had ever forgiven him for what he had done. Yet for the first time, it was an idle curiosity. He had loved her as well as he was able and knew she had loved him in return, but she was gone now, and would never be able to give him the forgiveness he sought. He would have to claim it for himself. And he would. Tim had done his penance.

Tonight most of all.

On that particular October morning—a lovely fall day, a Wednesday—the autumn light fell across the rooftops of Oxford with a hint of gold sufficient to transform the view from mundane to wondrous. Colin Radford, a young man of serious scholarship, found himself so taken by the panorama visible from the classroom window that he had difficulty following the threads of Professor Sidgwick’s lecture on Suetonius. This was especially troubling when Colin considered that the biographies which comprised the Roman historian’s
De Vita Caesarum
had been amongst the most compelling reading that the young man had encountered in his time at Oxford, second only to the comedic plays of Aristophanes.

Colin Radford adored university—all of the thinking, the constant discourse over questions of philosophy, scholarship, and theology. At times he felt as though he had been waiting all of his life to escape dreary Norwich, with its forbidding cathedral and the chill wind that swept across the Channel all the way from the Russian Steppes. He had found in Oxford a truer home, where men put their minds to work upon the mechanisms of intellect. There were kindred spirits here, competitive though they might be.

So for Colin to allow his mind to wander required a vista of unparallelled beauty. And yet on certain mornings, Oxford glistened in such a way as to have earned the lyrical nickname that romantics had bestowed upon it.

The City of Dreaming Spires, they called it.

Had he known on that morning that he would never see it again, Colin would have been filled with such grief as to make him weep. And yet there was much more grief to come.

A Mods student named Chisholm hurried into the room the mo-ment the lecture concluded, earning a disapproving glare from Professor Sidgwick, even as he handed a folded sheet of cream parchment to the bespectacled old man. Colin watched Sidgwick dismiss the lad with a sniff and then glance at the note, which could only have come from the Headmaster’s office. Somehow, even before it happened, he knew what would come next. Sidgwick lifted his gaze, glanced around the room, and they locked eyes.

“Mr. Radford, come here, if you please.”

Colin felt a strange heat prickle his face. He did not fear Sidgwick the way he knew some others did, though if he thought the professor had caught him drifting during the lecture he might have done well to be afraid of his wrath. Yet the look on the old man’s face, the way he stroked his pointed beard, and the almost militaristic manner in which he held that crisp letter still half-raised in his right hand, made the young scholar cringe.

“Yes, sir,” Colin said, and as the other students departed, he made for the lectern.

Sidgwick looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. “You’re from Norwich, lad? I’d never have thought it.”

The significance of this—whether it contained compliment or insult—escaped Colin, so he did not reply.

“Instructions from the Headmaster,” Sidgwick said, proffering the note in his right hand, fingers bent as if in a claw, half-crushing the parchment. “You’re to return home at once. You’ve a train leaving in less than two hours, so you’d best be on your way.”

Poison twisted in Colin’s gut. Expelled? How could it be? He’d done nothing.

“But, sir—” he began.

Sidgwick must have read the reaction in his face, for the old man instantly waved a hand in the air as though to erase such thoughts.

“It’s not expulsion, boy. You’ve been summoned.”

Reluctantly—as if by not doing so he might avert his fate—Colin took the note.

“But why?” he asked as he unfolded it and began to read.

Sidgwick did not wait for him to discover it on his own. “It appears,” the professor said, “that your father has disappeared.”

The Radford ancestral home rested on a hill in the city of Norwich, on the eastern coast of England. The 17
^th
-century manse neither perched nor loomed upon its hill, and though there were many trees on the sprawling grounds, neither could it rightly be said to nestle there. Even to say the old house ‘stood’ on that slope, with its distant view of the blue-grey waters of the English Channel, would have been a kindness. No, Colin had always thought of the house as resting there, after more than two hundred years providing hearth and shelter for the Radford family, its halls echoing with the shouts and laughter of Radford children.

Now, as the carriage which had awaited him at the train station climbed the long drive up to the front door, Colin stared at the house and considered another interpretation for his insistence upon the lazy imagery that accompanied the house’s personification in his mind. Absent his father’s inhabitance, the house seemed a body without its soul, a still husk of a thing, awaiting burial. Whether his own arrival might breathe some new life into the stones and beams of the place he quite doubted, as he had no intention of remaining forever, or even for very long, once his father’s whereabouts had been ascertained.

For all the golden, autumnal beauty he had cherished in Oxford, here in Norwich there was only grey. The sky, the stones, the prematurely bare trees, the pallor of its citizens, and the wind-chopped water of the Channel, all grey.

The carriage came to a halt and it was not until he had climbed down and retrieved his single case that he realized he had taken for granted the comfort afforded him by the familiar clip-clop of horses’ hooves on the road and the rattle of the conveyance itself. Without it, here on the hill, the only sound remaining was the wind, which, when it gusted through the hollows and eaves of the old house, moaned with the grief of a forlorn spirit or a heartbroken widow.

Fortunately, Colin Radford did not believe in ghosts. Prior to university, he had lived all of his life in this house and he knew it as a lonely place, but not haunted.

Still, he hesitated as the carriage driver snapped his reins and the carriage began to roll away. The sound that had been a comfort receded; soon not even its promise would remain and the wind would rule. Better to be inside. The timbers and stones still moaned, but sorrowful as they were—grey sounds in a grey house in a grey city—they were familiar sounds.

As he started toward the door, it swung inward. Colin looked up, expecting Filgate or one of the other servants, but the silhouette that greeted him—stepping forward, bent and defeated—belonged to the nearest thing the estate did have to a ghost: his grandmother, Abigail.

“Took your time about it, didn’t you?” she said.

Trouble on the rails had delayed his arrival in London until after the last train had left for Norwich for the day, so he had been forced to spend the night in the capital and board the rescheduled train this morning. But the old woman’s disapproving tone and baleful gaze discouraged any explanation. Let her think what she wished.

“I came as quickly as possible,” he said, carrying his case into the foyer, where he set it down as Grandmother Abigail closed the door.

They faced one another in the elaborate foyer, surrounded by the odd religious icons that had been his father’s passion and then peculiarity over the years.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that he’s turned up,” Colin said.

Grandmother Abigail shook her head, her lips quivering slightly, a tiny yet startling concession to her fear for her son.

“Not a trace, Collie. Not a trace,” the old woman said, and then the familiar, hard mask he knew so well returned. “Word has spread throughout the city for people to be on the lookout for him, but there’s been no word. The grounds have been searched and every room in the house, from attic to cellar, but the only thing down there is Edgar’s mechanism.”

Colin frowned. “Mechanism?”

His grandmother fluttered her hand in a way that revealed a new delicacy in her, one that he had never seen before, brought on now by fear or advancing age or some combination of the two.

“A strange contraption of metal and wood, with no purpose I ever saw or he ever shared,” she said, her disdain obvious despite her concern for her son.

“I never imagined Father as much of an inventor,” Colin said, mystified.

“He began building it last year, not long after an argument he had with that ugly Irish spiritualist.”

Colin shivered. Finnegan had been a charlatan, no doubt, but his father had always seemed somehow to enjoy the man’s company. The birdlike man with his small eyes and misshapen nose had always tried to get Colin to call him ‘Uncle Charlie,’ but as a boy he had only managed it once or twice, and as a young man, Colin had wanted nothing to do with him.

But he’d been away at university for more than a year, home only for brief visits in the summer and at Christmas, and had never thought to enquire about Finnegan. He had not even been aware that his father and the ugly Irishman had had a falling out.

Perhaps Sir Edgar Radford had finally realized that no matter what he claimed or what sort of show he put on, Finnegan’s mediumship was a sham. The Irishman had been trying to help the man contact his dead wife for more than a decade.

“Do you want to see it?” Grandmother Abigail asked.

Colin frowned. “See what?”

“Why, your father’s mechanism. The very thing we were just discussing.”

“I’d think my time better spent in joining the search, wouldn’t you?”

Grandmother Abigail dropped her eyes, as though worried what he might see in them. “Perhaps.”

“And yet?” Colin prodded.

The old woman lifted her gaze. “The infernal thing troubles me, that’s all. In the past few weeks your father spent so much of his time down there, and he grew increasingly irritated at any intrusion. Fervent in his efforts and . . . hostile, yes, toward anyone who might question them. But you see I had no desire to linger in the cellar. The thing makes me uneasy, even if it doesn’t . . .”

Dread climbed his spine on skittery spider legs. “Doesn’t what?”

Again she glanced downward. “It doesn’t work, of course.”

“What is it you’re keeping from me, Grandmother?”

With that, she shook her head and waved him toward the stairs. “Go on. Put your things away. Martha has seen to your room, and I’ll have a meal prepared for you. I imagine you’ll wish to speak to Thomas Church, who is organizing the search.”

Grandmother Abigail turned away, bent with age, and began to retreat along the corridor that led to the kitchens. “Perhaps it’s better you keep away from the thing after all.”

Befuddled, Colin watched her go. The old woman had never treated him with the kind of warmth many associated with the role of grandmother, nor did she exhibit the witch-like sort of behaviour often portrayed in stories. Neither kindly matron nor wizened crone, Abigail Radford kept mostly to herself and had a fondness for coffee over tea and biscuits rather than scones. When not knitting or strolling the grounds on watch for ‘pests,’ she had forever seemed to lurk just over young Colin’s shoulder, ready to tut-tut at any seemingly imminent infraction. If he attempted to slip into the kitchen for an early taste of dinner or to snatch a cooling scone from a baking sheet, she would be there. If he jumped on his father’s bed, slid on the banister, or tried to climb up onto the roof of the house, Grandmother Abigail seemed ever present, and able to dissuade him with a clucking of her tongue and the knitting of her brow.

A grey, joyless woman. And yet he knew she believed her efforts were all to keep him safe, and that in her way she loved him, a vital bit of knowledge for a boy who had grown to manhood without the benefit of a mother.

As a child he had been told that his mother had gone off with the fairies and that one day she might return. A million fantasies had been born of this lie, and he had often imagined himself wandering into the woods in pursuit of his beautiful mother, joining her in the kingdom of the fairies, living with sprites and brownies and other creatures of magic and mischief. By the age of eight he had begun to realize that this was mere fancy, but it was not until he turned twelve that his father had told him of his mother’s drowning.

Now, with his father having also ‘vanished,’ he could not help but remember the lies about her death. Had Edgar Radford also gone ‘off with the fairies’? Had the old man wandered off in the grip of some dementia, been killed by brigands, or suffered some fatal misadventure?

Colin meant to find him, no matter the answer. The idea that his father’s behaviour had altered so radically over the past year with Colin completely unaware of the changes unnerved him. He would join in the search. If necessary, he would begin it again and conduct it himself.

Yet even as he made this silent vow—climbing the stairs and striding down the corridor toward his childhood bedroom—he realized just how impossible a task he had set for himself. Norwich was no tiny hamlet, but a city, with thousands of dark nooks and shadowed corners, not to mention the woods and hills, and the ocean that had claimed Colin’s mother. And if Sir Edgar had left Norwich somehow . . . well, he would be found only if he wished to be found, or if some unfortunate happened upon his corpse.

The quiet emptiness of the house—despite the presence of his grandmother and the servants—closed around him, suffocating, as he stepped into the bedroom. A fire had been laid in the fireplace and logs crackled and popped, low flames dancing. The room had been decorated in shades of blue and rich cream and it ought to have been filled with warmth—if not of the fire then at least of memory.

Yet it was cold.

He did take a look that afternoon at what his grandmother had called Edgar’s mechanism, once he had searched his father’s study and found no note or journal or other document which might indicate the man’s state of mind prior to his vanishing. Sir Edgar had left only the mechanism behind.

Though its intended use confounded him, Colin did not find himself unsettled by the machine the way the old woman seemed to be. Concerned, yes, even troubled—its seeming lack of purpose made him worry for the state of his father’s mind—but nothing more than that. If anything, the madness inherent in the contraption’s design made him hopeful that his father remained alive somewhere, that dementia had crept into his life and he had subsequently wandered off somewhere, forgotten the way home, and would eventually be found and returned to his family.