The Light at the End (4 page)

Joseph Hunter. In the thin beam of light. Hesitating, once again. Listening. Fighting the impulse to run, to leave her, to find some land of freedom from the burden and the pain of it. Shuddering. And stepping forward.

Into the room.

In the bed
…

She lay. Shivering, under her pile of blankets. Scrawny, pale, prominently veined and horrible: a shadow of herself, stark as a solitary detail in the light from the bedroom lamp. Fear in the eyes: modulating, as recognition struck, into a kind of relief.

Not an enemy
, he could almost hear her think as she closed her eyes.
My son
, as she rolled over, sighing as a full human might.
Not one of them
. Then still. Very still.

In the doorway…

Joseph Hunter. Not moving. Barely breathing. Knowing what he knew, full well. And unable to touch her. Unable to comfort her. Unable to find it in him.

Standing. Watching. Waiting.

Until she was asleep. Lingering, even then, until I was sure that she would stay that way.

Wishing she would stay that way forever.

And then moving back into the darkness.

Alone.

Upstairs, a phone was ringing. Josalyn Horne paused in the front doorway and winced; there was no doubt in her mind that it was hers. There was also little doubt as to who it was. “Oh, no,” she muttered, slamming the door and starting to run up the stairs.

An automatic response. Less than ten steps of the way up, she stopped, catching her reflection in the stairwell window: an attractive young woman, with fashionably short dark hair and finely chiseled features, looking more distraught than she liked to or deserved.

Josalyn smiled ruefully, her eyes flicking upward toward the sound. “Drop dead,” she said, taking a moment to readjust the weight of her backpack. Then she started back up again, taking her good old time about it.

The phone continued to ring. She tried to ignite it. She tried to think about the desk she’d be sitting in front of for the next five hours or so. She tried to concentrate… absurdly, as she’d be the first to admit, on how tired her legs were as they hauled her up the stairs at a deliberate snail’s pace.

The phone continued to ring. She gritted her teeth against the sound. It rang again. She got to the second floor landing and stopped, leaning against the rail and wiping moisture from her forehead.
I’m not going to hurry
, she told herself sternly.
I’m not going to…

The phone rang again. She let out a little scream and rushed to the second flight of stairs, rounding the corner and climbing again. The phone continued to ring, louder and louder as she got closer and closer to the apartment door, fumbling with her keys and cursing under her breath.

Josalyn tripped on the last step and almost fell flat on her face. Her keys dropped to the floor. She picked them up angrily and hastened to the door, unlocking it in one swift motion and throwing it open.

The phone rang again, unquestionably hers now. She threw on the lights and made for the kitchen. Her white cat, Nigel, gave her one wide-eyed glance from his place in the middle of the floor and skedaddled. She nearly tripped over him, yelled, “Oh, Nigel!” and reached for the receiver…

Just as it cut, in mid-ring, to silence.

“Sonofabitch!” she hollered, lifting the receiver and putting it to her ear. A dial tone. She slammed the receiver back down and leaned against the refrigerator, fighting back tears.

Nigel watched her for a moment in silence, then made his way cautiously over to her feet. He rubbed himself against one nylon-stockinged ankle, a calculated gesture of friendliness. She didn’t nudge him away. He took this as a good sign, repeated the performance; then, glancing quickly up her skirt, he turned for another pass and quietly mewled.

“Oh, Nigel,” she cooed, gently dropping to her knees beside him. He purred, a sound like a tiny fur-coven outboard motor. She scooped him up and held him to her breasts, softly squeezing. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m just not in a very good mood.”

Nigel struggled a little, looked her in the eyes, and mewled again. She understood. “Hypocrite,” she said, setting him down and then standing with a tired, motherly grin. “You just want something to eat, don’cha?” He meowed, loudly this time, and circled her feet as she moved to the cupboard.

Josalyn withdrew a can of 9 Lives Western Menu from the shelf, set it down on the counter, and started rooting a drawer for the can opener. “This is going to be tremendously exciting,” she informed him. He meowed in agreement. She laughed, feeling better already. “John Wayne used to eat this stuff by the case.”

Nigel reacted indifferently to this piece of information. It occurred to her that he didn’t know John Wayne from a hole in the wall, and that, in essence, she was just talking to herself. She shrugged, equally indifferent, and continued to dig until she found the opener, while Nigel meowed ever more loudly and began to pace at her feet.

“You’re all alike, you know it? Men are all alike. I don’t care what species they are.” Nigel, unfazed, continued to whine. “See? It’s just ‘gimme gimme gimme.’ You don’t care about my needs. You don’t care about my problems. All you want to do is sleep with me and eat my food.”

The can came open. Josalyn wrinkled her nose, but Nigel seemed to find it quite stimulating. “Mmmmmm, boy,” she said, trying to conceal her distaste. He started to go wild on the floor; this time she
did
knock him aside with one foot. “Hold your horses, asshole. Don’t get so uppity. When was the last time you made me dinner?”

She smiled, slightly; it faded. This whole happy encounter had been, she knew, just a diversion. In the end, it had brought her right back to where she started: with the phone, and the man on the other end.

No, scratch that
, she amended.
Make that the
child
on the other end
. She smiled again, ruefully. Just then, Nigel reasserted himself at her feet. “Oh, yeah,” she mumbled, absently picking up the cat bowl from the floor, filling it up with Western Menu, and putting it back down again. The cat let out one last meow of anticipation and set upon the food in earnest.

Josalyn watched him chow down, his back to her as if to say you’re dismissed. It reminded her of the look on Rudy’s face after one of his selfish sexual performances. After a halfhearted premature ejaculation (his standard offering), he would slide out from between her legs and roll away from her; in that moment, she would catch a glimpse of his eyes… just a flash, before he pulled away.

Only on their last occasion in bed had she figured out what his eyes were saying.

They were saying
I got mine, bitch. Get out of my face.

It made her furious, just thinking about it Furious with Rudy, but that was the least of it. Mostly she was furious with herself for ever having let that soft-headed, brainless prick through the door in the first place.

She turned to stare at the phone, practically daring it to ring. It hung there: silent, white, innocent as a baby’s first tooth. She shook her head, tried to clear it. When that didn’t work, she moved to the living room and stood foggily in front of the stereo.

Dan Fogelberg was gathering dust on the turntable. She’d put him on last night, after the big to-do with Rudy. It harkened back to happier days… less complicated ones, anyway… and helped her to get the tears out of her system.

She slapped him on again, cueing the needle by hand. She was not very good at it… it always made her nervous… and the involuntary shaking of her hands didn’t help.

When the phone rang, she almost ripped the tone arm from its socket.

“DAMN IT!” she screamed. The needle dropped to the middle of the first song. She went to fix it, trembled in a mad sort of paralysis, and then just let it go. The phone rang again. A cacophony of voices howled through her brain like a tornado, and she wrestled with them. The phone rang again. And again. And again.

Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she moved back to the kitchen and brought the receiver to her ear.

“Hello?” she said, painfully aware of the weakness in her voice. It misrepresented her position. It didn’t belong. It made her angrier still.

“Josalyn?” She jumped at the sound; it was not the voice she expected to hear. “I don’t believe it! Do you know that I’ve been calling all day?”

“Uh…” she droned, mentally off-balance. “Who is this?”

“It’s Stephen!”

“Oh.” Her thoughts snapped back into place with a nearly audible click. “Hi,” she said, thinking
so this is how you try to get back into Josalyn’s good graces. So we’re still in kindergarten, after all. You bastard.

“Hi,” Stephen said. “Uh… listen. Is Rudy there?”

What?
she thought. It took her a second to answer. “No,” she said finally, “he isn’t, and…”

“Well, have you seen him? Talked to him? Anything?” There was something desperate in his voice. Josalyn wondered briefly what Rudy had told him, what kind of story he got, and the anger flared up like a Roman candle inside her.

“Listen,” she said. “Rudy is a very bad subject for me right now. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to think about him. If I never see or hear him again, I’ll still have seen and heard too much. Now, if you don’t mind…”

“But you don’t understand!” Stephen cried, his voice stripped of veneer. “Rudy has disappeared! I can’t find him anywhere!” And then, seeming to realize that he’d begun to sound melodramatic, “I think that… something might have happened to him.”

“Stephen,
you
don’t understand.” Her voice was cold; she felt it was a definite improvement. “I don’t care what happens to Rudy. Rudy can jump off the nearest bridge, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a pig, and I hate him, and that’s all there is to it. If you want to find him so badly, you can call almost any other number in New York and have a better chance of it. Because he’s not going to be here. Never again. Do you understand me now?”

“Josalyn…”

“What?” He seemed to be on the brink of tears. She tried not to let it bother her.

“Josalyn… did you hear about the murders last night?”

“
What
murders?”

“On the subway. On the downtown RR train, to be specific: about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Eight people were killed. Horribly. Are you interested now?”

“Not really,” she said, but a little something in her voice betrayed her.

“It’s the train he would have taken. I know it is. He was on his way to my apartment. He called me from the station…”

“What did he tell you?”

“Well…” Stephen hesitated for a moment. “Just that there was a big fight, and that…”

“That I was a cunt, right?” Josalyn could no longer contain her fury. “
Surely
he couldn’t have left out the undeniable feet that I’m a cheap, stupid, naive little farm-girl cunt who thinks that her shit smells like roses!
His words
, Stephen! Do you see why I don’t want to talk about it?”

“But…”

“If Rudy was on a train where eight people were killed, then I’m sorry, but I think he’s probably the one who did it. Why don’t you just call the police?”

“
What?
”

“He’s the only person I know who’s nasty and vicious enough to do anything like that. What were they: Grandmothers? Babies? That sounds just about his style.”

“Josalyn!” Stephen sounded furious now, as well.
That makes two of us
, Josalyn thought with a grim kind of satisfaction. “Do you know anything about this story?”

“No, and I…”

“
One of the people was eaten alive by rats!
” Stephen yelled, and it came through the receiver with such force that Josalyn shuddered despite herself. “
Do you think that Rudy could possibly have done that?
”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said, trying to sound cooler than she felt. “To be perfectly honest with you… and no offense, Stephen… they’re the only kinds of friends he deserves.”

“I don’t believe this!” Stephen was screaming. “Rudy could be dead, and you don’t even care!”

“That’s right. I don’t.” Come to think of it, she actually felt as cold as she sounded. She felt nothing at all.

“You’re every bit as big a bitch as Rudy said you were!”

“If you’re stupid enough to believe that, Stephen, you’re stupid enough to believe anything. How about this one? Rudy is Jesus. Rudy walks on water. Rudy…”

“I don’t believe this!” Stephen yelled for the last time. There was a loud click, followed by silence. Blessed silence. Josalyn felt like spitting on the receiver, decided it was pointless, and hung up with a hand that shuddered in deliberate spite of herself.

“Jesus Christ,” she thought out loud. It was so absurd: even if it were true, the timing was unbelievably, riotously funny.

It’s like Glen
, she thought suddenly. The thought sobered her, and her mind drifted back to her tenth grade year. She had been going with this guy named Glen Burne… another self-styled poet, of course… and finally just decided that she didn’t want to see him any more. He was a nice enough guy; it wasn’t a matter of bastardliness, like Rudy; there weren’t any fights, any bitter points of contention, or anything of the sort.

But he burned like Rudy
. The memory made her shiver, as though she were standing over Glen’s open grave again, a chill wind blowing in her face.
He was so sad, so strange, so obsessed with darkness. He took the whole weight of the world on his shoulders and let it crush him into the ground, a little deeper with every step.

She hadn’t been able to take the constant depression. That’s what it had come down to, finally. She’d had a lot of optimism in those days, a lot of faith, and she didn’t like the way he walked all over it without even trying. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t pass a flower in the field without dragging out the tortured metaphors: it would remind him of innocence lost, martyrs on crosses, butchered babies stacked through the war-torn ages. He would say it all offhandedly, as if those were the things you were
supposed
to be thinking every time you saw a fucking flower in a field.

It had finally become too much for Josalyn, and she had resolved to break off with Glen… gently, of course… on the very next day.

That was on April 26
^th
, 1978. She remembered the night distinctly. That was the night that, at roughly the same time she arrived at her decision, Glen Burne quietly went up to his room and hung himself from the rafters, a seventeen-page suicide poem set neatly on his desk, immaculately printed on his mother’s flowered stationery…

Josalyn pulled herself out of her thoughts forcefully returning to her kitchen in the present. Suddenly, the room seemed too stark, too white, as though she were having an acid flashback on the set of a Stanley Kubrick film. She leaned against the counter dizzily, and a low, husky moan escaped her.

It’s been so long
, she flashed.
So long since I’ve thought about him
. His face lingered on the big screen behind her eyes, larger than life and stronger than the grave. It smiled at her, full of woe, and turned to stare off into space. She shook her head to clear it, and Glen’s face disappeared…