Occultation (25 page)

“You’re deluded. Frankly, I can’t believe you dare to threaten my husband. Mr. Prettyman will—”

“I know you,” Mr. Lang said. “I check all the guests. That’s
my
hobby.”

She breathed heavily, her lungs thick as wet cotton. “You’re a peeping Tom, too.” 

“You were in the papers. The Associated Press. You’re kind of famous, Mrs. R.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“With me? With me, you ask.” He chuckled, a soft wheeze that originated from the depths of him. “They let you walk. We’re so sympathetic these days. Throw your baby off a bridge and everybody gives you a hug and sends get well cards. So, Kat. Are you well? Those doctors fix your poor brain? Do those plainclothes detectives still follow you around, watching to see what ‘that crazy Reynolds woman’ is going to do next?”

She gagged on her tongue, choked when she tried to speak.

“Okay, darling. I’m not completely heartless. A cool grand, I forget to mention your hubby’s hijinks to the good sheriff. Hell, bring it over personally and I’ll take half in trade.”

 Her arm swung wide, as if connected to someone else, and her fist crashed into his mouth. He slumped, arms hanging slack, as she stumbled backward. Blood dribbled over his chin. His sides shook and that wheezing laughter followed her as she lifted her skirt and fled.

Katherine made it to the suite. She leaned over the toilet and dry heaved. Her knuckles bled where she’d sliced them against Mr. Lang’s teeth. Numbly, she washed her hand and pressed a washcloth against the cuts until the bleeding stopped.
Christ, what now? What am I going to tell Sonny?
Who knew what Sonny would do. He’d probably accuse her of leading the bastard on. Not that he’d say it aloud. His disgusted expression would do the talking. She was the millstone around his neck.
Why, oh why don’t you just leave? Why not fuck your secretary, why not run away with one of those nubile coeds who are eager to throw themselves at you? Surely you could knock up one of those bitches and solve all of our problems.

A better question might be: If she must stay, why not have an affair of her own? Mr. Lang’s bloody grin flickered in her mind and she realized her left hand had drifted to her inner thigh, that her fingers stroked softly, almost imperceptibly. “Oh, my God,” she said, and jerked her hand away. Her face burned. 

She collapsed into a chair near the window. The light shifted to orange. A breeze swirled the leaves of the magnolias. What she saw then, with pitiless clarity, was an overpass, a woman carrying a pink bundle above a stream of headlights. The woman’s face was blank and cold as plaster. The woman opened her arms.  “Yes. I think I did it on purpose,” she said to the empty room, and wished she had a gun to put against her head.

11.

Sonny stumbled in well after dark. He’d been clambering through hill and dale by the look of him—his hair was mussed, pine needles and leaves clung to his jacket, gathered in the cuffs of his muddy pants. He said hello and began to undress. Katherine still sat in the oversized chair in the gloom. She turned on the lamp so they could see one another. He glanced at her hand without comment and tossed his clothes in a pile near the foot of the bed. 

“Sonny?”

“Yeah?” He regarded himself in the mirror. “Did you do anything today?”

“I walked around. Read a bit.” They’d been sharing a couple of the amusing potboilers from the reading shelves in the lodge’s den. Sonny
had
been pleased to discover titles by Machen and Le Fanu among the dreck. 

“That’s nice.”

“Find anything?”

He shook his head. He rubbed his arm where a bruise flowered, dark and angry. “It’s like a jungle. Thorns everywhere. I could spend a whole summer in there with a chainsaw and not find anything. Sheesh.”

“Oh?”

He smiled briefly and took off his watch and set it on the dresser.

“Sonny.”

“Hmm?”

“You’re being careful.” When he didn’t answer, she cleared her throat. “No one’s following you, or anything. You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m just taking pictures.”

“Okay,” she said.

He walked into the bathroom and the shower started.

12. 

Sonny had tried to summon the Devil once. He’d drawn a complicated pentagram in the basement, lit some candles and slaughtered a stray cat with a ceremonial dagger. Satan was lord of all flesh; pay Him some blood and maybe He’d give them the means to make a child. It was the kind of stunt dumb, oversexed teenagers pulled to impress their friends and scare themselves. Sonny admitted such rituals were essentially powerless; on the other hand, mind over matter—spiritual placebo—was another beast entirely. She’d almost left him then. Only her numb guilt, her essential apathy kept her yoked to him. Later, she stayed because at its worst, their relationship made her a flagellant, made her a worthy penitent.

It all started innocently enough.

In high school and college Katherine had played with tarot cards and Ouija boards—the weird roommate with the weirder off-campus-friends syndrome. Drink a bit of wine, take a few hits and the next thing she knew she’d be having an unexpected quasi-lesbian experience, or would find herself smack in the middle of an amateur thaumaturgy session, or, on one infamous Halloween night, a botched séance. When she’d first dated Sonny it came as no surprise he dabbled in native rituals; this
was
his area of expertise. One didn’t keep a stack of books on the nightstand such as the ubiquitous
The Golden Bough
,
The Key of Solomon,
and treatises by Agrippa, Bruno, and Mathers among a host of others, without dipping one’s toe in on occasion. They practiced feng shui after a half-assed fashion; it was all the rage with their post-college associates like so many Westerners’ fleeting dalliances with Buddhism and Kabala. Nothing serious; more a casual pastime akin to some couples’ weekend canasta games. And if Sonny happened to study what he called “hoodoo” to a great degree, that was because his job depended on the research.

Then the accident. Matters had become bizarre. Kafka and William Burroughs type bizarre. At least Sonny hadn’t tried to blast a glass off her head. He’d done other things, however. A quiet, festering resentment bubbled to the surface in a glance, a smile, the subtle tightening of his grip on her wrist, the way he hurt her in bed, though never beyond the pale, just enough to let her feel his animosity. She feared that’s what they’d gradually become—a pair of mated animals who snapped and snarled at one another, who remained together due to instinct, to pure expediency.

His sophomoric attempt to raise hell, as it were, signaled a sharp descent.

Mind over matter,
he said when first introducing her to the ebon figurine of some dead tribe’s fertility god, a trinket he acquired during his travels abroad; he clutched the fetish in his left hand whenever they fucked—and, oh, hadn’t sex become a choreographed event. He tried to put the fetish in her until she slapped him hard enough to leave a mark.
Mind over matter,
he said the next time from behind a Celtic mask while painting her with red ochre, and the time after that when feeding her peyote buttons while shaking voodoo rattles in her face. Once, they’d visited the wreckage of a church sunk beneath the projects in Detroit, and a priest in black robes killed a chicken and anointed her in blood as a circle of bare-breasted acolytes howled. The unholy congregation melted away and Sonny mounted her, his expression twisted, a mirror of her own insides, and after, neither could look the other in the eye. Riding the empty late-night bus back to their hotel, they huddled near the rear, she wrapped in a blanket, staring at her reflection, staring into and past her own dead eyes at block after block of urban blight; there were no streetlights, no blue flickering television screens or reading lamps, only the blackness. 

No baby was forthcoming, either.

13.

The next morning, after Sonny slipped away, she took a long hot shower and was drying her hair when she heard a door shut in the other room.

Someone left an envelope addressed to her on the table. Her name was printed in a loose, sloppy hand. The envelope contained two dozen photographs. Several were shots of Sonny digging up artifacts. Ten or so were close-ups of arrowheads, pottery, figurines and the like. All were quite damning in their clarity. An itemized list documented various pieces, where they’d been acquired and who purchased them. Some of the photos were fifteen or more years old, dating back to Sonny’s graduate days. Katherine knew about his compulsive theft, but she’d not allowed herself to dwell upon how long he’d engaged in his habits. 

The list was signed:
Meet me, tonight. Witching Hour.
Mr. Lang was indeed wily, leaving her to infer his identity and where to rendezvous. Her hands shook as she tossed the envelope and its contents into the fireplace. She hugged herself and watched the packet curl and burn. Only much later, after she’d called Ms. Fabini to cancel their luncheon plans and burrowed under the covers to hibernate, did she recall that there were no ashes from the impromptu fire, only a fine tracing of soot that swirled and disappeared into the chimney.

In her dreams, Sonny called from the recesses of the chimney while she started a fire from his papers and books and a pile of his muddy clothes. She’d collected a sack of his clipped hair and threw it on for kindling. He screamed at her, but she didn’t stop. She ripped off her wedding dress and added it to the blaze. A baby shrieked as it cooked and sizzled. She tossed on pieces of the old crib and watched them burn.

14.

At first, she tried to convince herself this would be about rescuing Sonny from the clutches of crazy, vindictive Mr. Lang. Except, that didn’t fly—there was no way to avoid the reality that Sonny getting caught and jailed for a few years would be a relief from tension and satisfying to boot. Truthfully, his getting nailed for a career of misdeeds appealed to her on several levels.

Regardless of Sonny’s legal hassles or potential financial ruin, it was really his problem alone. Her face hadn’t been photographed. Her name hadn’t appeared on any lists. In any event, no matter how dire the circumstances, she could run home to mama; a girl could always do that. No, there were other deeper, less rational motives for keeping the rendezvous. She just refused to face them directly.

Katherine crumbled sleeping pills and Valium into two consecutive glasses of vodka and watched Sonny gulp them down. He was already a bit drunk, so it was almost like the movies, almost frighteningly easy. For all she knew she’d dealt him an elephant’s dose that might stop his heart. He fell asleep in his chair, snoring gently into his scattered notes. She blew out the candles.

The hour was late.

The moon hung cold and yellow behind a gossamer scrim. Her shoes crunched against the path that wound from the lodge and its attendant structures. Katherine arrived on the doorstep of the Goat’s Head Bungalow at the appointed time and was slightly surprised to find it dark. She rapped on the door and waited. Her left hand dug into her jacket pocket and tightened around the can of mace attached to her keychain. In her right pocket was an envelope stuffed with twenty dollar bills she’d withdrawn from an ATM in Olde Towne earlier that day. The mace was a decade old: Sonny bought it for her after a guy mugged them in Venice. The thug gave her a shiner and a sprained neck in the process of yanking away her camera. Stunned, Sonny had stood there while it happened. That evening in the hotel, he berated her for carrying the camera, for attracting trouble. Later, he apologized by handing her the mace and some flowers. When they returned to the states he enrolled in karate lessons and attended classes religiously until he quietly dropped them in a few weeks.

 No one stirred within the bungalow; it squatted dead and cold as a husk, tenanted by silence so palpable it throbbed in her ears. Clouds slid across the face of the moon, and its yellow light curdled, reddened into the eye of a drunk. The temperature had dipped and her breath streamed from her mouth. She stepped off the porch and surveyed the empty field. Fire briefly shone within the distant oak grove.

She walked the path to the very shadow of the grove, hesitated before the briar arch. A figure barred the way, a black form silhouetted by the dim illumination from coals dying in the pit. “Mr. Lang,” she said, knowing in that instant her mistake, experiencing the sweet, horrific bloom of understanding that accompanies waking to a nightmare within a nightmare. 

He laughed. His laugh was similar to Mr. Lang’s, but deeper, darker. Hearing it was like hearing blood rush over pebbles. Red shadows crawled from the fire pit and enlarged him. His outline flickered, suggestive of manifold possibilities.

“I’m here,” she said. 

“Yes, you are,” he said in a voice that whispered as from a distance. A familiar voice, but clotted with an excess of saliva and eagerness. She thought if some ancient creature of the wood could form words this would be their shape. “Bravery born of damnation isn’t courageous, is it, lovely one?”

“You’re Bill,” she said.

“If you’d like.”

“I brought money.”

“But I don’t want that.”

“Four hundred and sixty dollars. That’s all I could get. Take it… I’ll write you a check when we get back home. I’ll be wanting the negatives.”

“Negatives? Negatives for pictures that never were? I wouldn’t worry about them.”

“Take the money—let’s not play games, okay?”

“Yes, yes. It’s time to quit pretending,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

He laughed again. The coals hissed and his silhouette became a lump of utter darkness. “These woods are very old.”

“And dark; I know,” she said. She could no longer see him. His presence magnified in her mind, it obliterated everything else.

“These woods are dear to me.”

“It’s right here. Please.” She brandished the envelope in defiant supplication. The envelope absorbed the starlight, gleamed like a tooth. “Here. I swear, my husband won’t trespass into the woods again.”