The Horses of the Night (17 page)

As I dressed, hiking a lightly starched shirt over my shoulders, I stepped back, aware that I had nearly stepped on the plume. I had not left it there, on the carpet, and yet I did not doubt that the plume could shift and twitch, and ride currents of air like a living thing. I knelt, quickly, and when I settled the jacket over my back, and shot my cuffs, I slipped the plume into my breast pocket.

When I was dressed, still adjusting my tie, I was down the stairs quickly and into my father's presence full of questions. Questions about what to do with Mother, questions about Rick's character, questions about memories I knew he would share with me.

He was beaming, delighted, staying where I had left him. He made that slightly pouty, upside-down smile that meant: I'm giving you my most critical appraisal and you look great. I wanted to dance, to run around him in a circle like a pup.

There was a knock at the door.

Our eyes met.

“You will find that in this new life you have assumed,” said my father, “time is always bleeding away.”

“What will happen if we do nothing?” I said.

“Stratton,” he said gently, “you have already joined with Them, long ago.”

I must have looked incredulous.

“It's true—with your love for power, with your ambition, your fascination with your own future.”

The knocking had stopped. But now it continued, each blow echoed by a shudder of my body. Each blow slammed the solid oak of the door, wrenching it in its frame.

We do not lose our minds as we might lose a credit card, or a car, or even an empire. We lose it, and gain something else.

This knocking would awaken every sleeper in the neighborhood. This thought was a link with a knowledge I had suppressed: All of this could not be happening. It was impossible. I was mad, inescapably ill.

And yet, I told myself, the pounding at the door shaking the very air in my lungs—did it matter? Did it matter—if my madness made real things happen? Or if every good and bad thing was a coincidence—did that mean that I had to flinch from the pleasure, the joy?

I was like a man who had swallowed an elixir, a liquor that destroys the perception and loses the memory. The toxin was a part of me. I could not turn back.

“Hurry,” said my father. “Open the door.”

23

The knock resounded, an echoing imperative. Each blow made me wince. It seemed unending, the knock persisting, so heavy the floorboards quaked.

This was not an ordinary reverberation in the air. This was another event that was both real and not real, within time and beyond it.

When I opened the door I would be taking a further step in agreeing to something I did not understand. I looked back at my father and his expression was strained, his smile forced. A good man, he had often said, stands up to what he fears. I saw now, though, that much of my father's sure-handedness, and much of his insouciance, had been an act. My love for a dangerous sport, risking riptides, may have been the desire to prove myself equal to a man who was by no means equal to himself.

He must have read my thoughts, or sensed them like high-amp voltage through his own considerations. “You've always been slow to make up your mind,” he said.

I tried lying to myself. It was only a knock, and certainly, I reasoned, it may be someone innocent, a neighbor in need of help. The knock came again, and my instincts made me want to cringe, hide. “I won't. If I don't answer it, nothing bad can happen.” I felt reduced to childishness, and reduced to a boy's diction, and a boy's stubbornness.

He did not speak for a moment. “There's no sense putting it off forever.”

I nearly asked him what he himself had done, what he had bartered and what he had gained, in dealing with such an army. “I won't talk to them.”

He could not keep the slightly patronizing tone from his voice. “You're being foolish.”

I began to argue, but he put his fingers to his lips. I turned back to the door, certain that my father's love for me was strong enough to keep me from harm. The pounding continued, the barrier shivering with each blow.

“I will never open the door,” I said, in a whisper.

There was a breath behind me, at my nape, and I turned to see my father sweating, his hand taking my shoulder in a grip that was not strong so much as urgent, a bony pinch, the clench of a desperate man.

I saw that if I did not release the latch and let the barrier swing wide, he would suffer. He was suffering now, with a look in his eye like the pain I had seen in Blake's. He could not say it. He could not beg. He was proud. If much of his courage during life had been an act, it had been a good one, a noble act, even, a reliance on manners and good humor.

“We have to accommodate our visitors,” he said, “since they are so insistent, and since we have no real choice.”

“A contract coerced,” I said, quoting one of my old teachers, “is no contract.”

“Remember this,” he said. “I love you.”

The words took all the light, all the dark, all sensation from my body.

I turned. I strode across the hardwood floor to the door, and the walk stretched, each step falling shorter than the one before it. I would never reach the door. I would never stop my father's pain and cut short this pounding, each blow staggering the house, now, shuddering the walls. Nails squealed in the joists and the foundations groaned.

In the midst of my eagerness to spare my father, in the midst of my hatred for the fist hammering the door, I had begun to change. The doubt was beginning to return. I was aware that it was all for my benefit, this theater. I felt myself imprisoned in an opera, a stage so exaggerated none of it could be believed for a moment. Only my love for my father was real, and it was with that love that I approached the door.

The door handle was cold, beads of condensation greasing it, water drooling to the floor as my grip closed around the brass. The metal grew even colder. My thumb found the latch tongue, and depressed it. Too cold, I thought, feeling my flesh stick to the handle, the handle growing colder with each heartbeat, until my skin was joined to the metal. The cold sang into the bones of my arms, into the muscles of my shoulder.

I wrestled with the door and began to drag it open, and yet the door had taken on the weight of something massive, swiveling on corroded hinges. Except that I knew the door was not more massive, and I knew the brass of the handle was not cold. It was my own weakness that made them so, and I was frail because I was afraid.

The door was open, and I stepped back.

I turned, beckoning to my father, and he was gone.

The knowledge made me stumble, and I caught myself against the wall. I called out, and yet my cry was a whisper. I called again, knowing the futility of it.

There was no need to search for my father, no need to cry after him. He had vanished into a void inside me, in my own psyche, the same wound that had produced him in the first place.

Doubt now replaced the joy, diluting even the fear. I had been deceived. This had not been my father. My tears, my love, had been wasted on a hallucination. All of this was a sham. But would a specter, a demon garbed in my father's appearance, have expressed his love so fervently?

The silence was perfect.

The door was open, and there was nothing there. The staging had gone awry, and a character had missed his cue. I made a sound, half yelp, half growl. You see, I wanted to declaim to an audience, to a colisseum of assembled souls. You see—none of this is real. This is pageantry, this is the dazzle and the thunder of illusion.

As I stood before the black rectangle of the open doorway I felt something like disappointment. Because I had anticipated the sight of a divine being, a god, if only an evil, fallen god. And here was silence. I laughed. I mocked myself, shaking my head.

And I had been convinced, I told myself ruefully, that they would be able to hurt me, to torture that trick of light and reason that I had believed was my father. The legions I faced were frightening but swordless, empowering only the imagination. This was a little more than a new caliber of nightmare. I had survived such dreams.

The house was silent. The floor was solid under my steps as I reached the door, and swung it silently shut.

But it would not shut entirely.

Someone was out there.

Coming in.

24

She had changed. She was there before me, a figure of white, her hair and her gown floating in a wind that was silent, that stirred nothing else.

But she was different, taller, perhaps, or younger. She touched me as she stepped across the threshold. Her fingers were icy as they brushed my lips.

The door closed silently, as though moving with its own will. For a moment I was relieved to see her, grateful, nearly, that it was only her, this charming creature who both disturbed and delighted.

Then I understood. This was not just another visit. This was different. I sensed the hush of a crowd around us, through the walls, like the silent and yet audible weight in an opera house, a thousand lives weighing on the air.

But these were not lives. We were being watched by others, other creatures, other beings, invisible beyond the walls.

Trapped. Of course, I
could
run. There was the door. But why should I flee my own house?

Her eyes met mine. “It's time,” she said.

It was hard to breathe. She turned at the entrance to the studio. She was, indeed, taller than I had recalled, and at once more slender and youthful and beyond age.

Tell her to get out
. Flames snapped and spat in the fireplace. The color of the fire deepened, and the fire leaped higher, blue, and scarlet.

Despite the silence I felt rising within me, and the growing need I felt to take flight, I kept my voice firm. “I think it's foolish,” I said, “to put me through this theater.”

She did not respond.

I could only whisper. “It was brutal. That—that thing—was not my father.”

The plastic canopies had been stripped from my furniture, and the chairs themselves were huddled together, like living things, mastiffs, drawn in closer together for protection. The furniture was unfamiliar to me, transformed.

The touch of this furniture, this brass-tacked leather, was enough to make me queasy. The leather had glazed itself with something like hair, the fine, sharp coat of a horse. The room around me was peeled of all familiarity. I was aware in a vague way of the unplastered walls, the gleam of nailheads, but what I saw were the glints and shiver of an armored host. Eyes, I thought, or spear points. I did not let myself look after a glance or two.

It was a fever, I told myself, a sick dream.

She gestured, inviting me to sit. The chair absorbed my weight, welcomed it, seemed to pleasure in it with a quiet groan. The leather breathed under me, around me. Some being held me lightly, taking its pleasure.

I stared into the fire. Don't look to the left, I told myself, or to the right. I should have been furious. An assault had been made against my emotions. And yet, there was something about her, that sense that I knew her from long ago, that stilled me from being completely angry. I was mystified, but I could feel no hatred toward her.

She spoke. “You're ready.”

I took a deep breath. I experimented with an incredulous laugh, something to buy time. Use your wits, I reminded myself. Stay steady. She had chosen a conversational tone, like a woman who had stopped by for a cup or two of Earl Grey. I kept my tone equally light. “Perhaps I should be grateful.”

She did not answer. I knew how a grandmaster must feel, considering openings in an international tournament, the eyes of a crowd upon his hand.

“But I'm not.” I turned to gaze at her. “What are you?”

She looked me up and down, mocking, seductive. “Surely you know.”

The words thrilled me.

I had always known the truth was like this. I had always, in the back of my mind, understood that behind all good fortune was some ultimate power. I felt used, battered, and yet all I wanted for the moment was to stop having to experience the wash of such strong emotions. But that is how they—whatever They were—would want me to feel.

“Names are essential in such matters,” I said. Names, I did not add, were the key element in conjuring. The ancient scribes of Judah would stop copying and undergo ritual cleansing every time the name of the Lord appeared in the sacred text.

She spoke after awhile, as though my speech had to be translated for her. “Names are important to human beings. We are not so interested in them.”

I leaned toward her. “Where do you come from?”

“I am not here for conversation,” she said.

“Where?” I repeated.

There was another silence. I began to understand. Speech was crude, a debased communication. “What do I seem to you?” she said.

On the surface this was mere conversation. This was a late-night visit, two people sharing thoughts. I felt, however, the formal quality of the transaction as an undercurrent. This was not chat—this was a deposition, a gentle but inexorable form of interrogation. Something like a system of law had been engaged. I did not know what judges with what sensibilities might weigh my words.

I would have to choose my words with care. “My father—my real father—would not want me to trade my soul for power.”

She laughed, gently.

I continued, uttering words I could not have anticipated. “I won't do it.”

She laughed again. She soothed the cloth over her breast, a voluptuous gesture that aroused me.

“Did you kill DeVere?”

She waited before answering, as though remembering her response from long ago. “We watched you from birth, and marked you as a friend.”

“I don't believe it.” But I sounded stolid, sullen, even petulant, staring ahead into the fire, able only to overshadow my thoughts with a fistlike skepticism. “And I don't want to enter into any contract.”