Final Reckonings (15 page)
He had to shut it out, he had to talk over it, talk against it. And all at once he was talking, fast and shrill.
“She did it, Dolores, I know she did it. Belle. She’s here now, in the tunnel. All winter long I felt her, saw her, heard her in my dreams. Calling to me. Calling to me to come back. She said I’d never be rid of her, you’d never have me, nobody and nothing could take me away from her. And I was a fool—I came back, I let you come with me. Now we’re here and she’s here. Can’t you feel it?”
“Darling.” She clung to him in the dark. “You’re not well, are you? Because there’s nobody here. You understand that, don’t you? Belle ran away, remember, you told me yourself. She’s not here.”
“Oh yes she is!” Marco panted. “She’s here, she’s been here all along, ever since last season. She died in this tunnel.”
Dolores wasn’t clinging to him any more. She drew away. The boat rocked and bumped the channel sides. He couldn’t see anything in the perfumed blackness, and he had to get her arms around him again. So he talked faster.
“She died here. The night we took a ride together after I closed the concession. The night I told her I was going to marry you, that it was all over between her and me. She jumped out of the boat and tried to take me with her. I guess I fought her.
“Belle was hysterical, you must understand that. She kept saying it over and over again, that I couldn’t leave her, that she’d never give me up, never. I tried to pull her back into the boat and she choked me and then she—drowned.”
“You killed her!”
“I didn’t. It was an accident, suicide, really. I didn’t mean to hold her so tight but she was fighting me—it was just suicide. I knew it looked like murder, I knew what would happen if anyone found out. So I buried her, walled her up behind the cutout. And now she’s coming back, she won’t let me go, what shall I do, Dolores, what can I do?”
“You . . .”
Dolores screamed.
Marco tried to put his arms around her. She moved away, shrieking. The echo shattered the darkness. He lunged at her. The boat rocked and tipped. There was a splash.
“Come back, you fool!” Marco stood up, groping in darkness. Somewhere Dolores was wailing and gurgling. The gondola was empty now. The blackness was spinning round and round, sucking Marco down into it. He felt a bump, knew the boat had stopped. He jumped out into the water. The treadles were slippery with slime. Cold waves lapped about his waist. He tried to find Dolores in the darkness, in the water. No wailing now, no gurgles.
“Dolores!”
No answer. No sound at all. The bumping and the lapping ceased.
“Dolores!”
She hadn’t run away. There was nowhere to run to, and he would have heard the splashing. Then she was . . .
His hands found flesh. Wet flesh, floating flesh. She had fallen against the side of the boat, bumped her head. But only a few seconds had passed. Nobody drowns in a few seconds. She had passed out, poor kid.
He dragged her into the boat. Now it moved away, moved through the darkness as he propped her on the seat beside him and put his arm around the clammy, soggy wetness of her dress. Her head lolled on his shoulder as he chafed her wrists.
“There, now. It’s all right. Don’t you see, darling, it’s all right now? I’m not afraid any more. Belle isn’t here. There’s nothing to worry about. Everything will be all right.”
The more he said it, the more he knew it was true. What had he done, frightening the girl half to death? Marco cursed the slowness of the treadles as the boat bumped its way out of the tunnel. The mechanism wasn’t working properly. But there was no time to bother about that. He had to bring Dolores around.
He kissed her hair. He kissed her ear. She was still cold. “Come on, honey,” he whispered. “Brace up. This is the Tunnel of Love, remember?”
The boat bumped out into the daylight. Marco stared ahead. They were safe now. Safe from the tunnel, safe from Belle. He and Dolores . . .
Dolores
.
Marco peered at the prow of the bumping gondola as it creaked over the treadles. He peered at the obstruction floating in its path; floating face upward in the water as if tied to the boat with a red string running from its gashed forehead.
Dolores!
She had fallen in the water when she jumped out of the gondola, fallen and struck her head the way Belle had struck her head. It was Dolores’s body that bumped against the front of the boat and retarded its progress. She was dead.
But if that was Dolores out there in the water, then what . . .
Marco turned his head, ever so slowly. For the first time he glanced down at the seat beside him, at what lay cradled in his arms.
For the first time Marco saw what he had been kissing . . .
. . . the boat glided back into the Tunnel of Love.
Not far thence is the secret garden in which grow like strange flowers the kinds of sleep, so different one from the other by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of belladonna, of opium, of valerian; flowers whose petals remain shut until the day when the predestined visitor shall come and, touching them, bid them open, and for long hours inhale the aroma of their peculiar dreams into a marveling and bewildered being
.
Proust
: R
EMEMBRANCE
O
F
T
HINGS
P
AST
A
VIS KNEW SHE WASN’T REALLY
as sick as Doctor Clegg had said. She was merely bored with living. The death impulse perhaps; then again, it might have been nothing more than her distaste for clever young men who persisted in addressing her as “
O rara Avis
.”
She felt better now, though. The fever had settled until it was no more than one of the white blankets which covered her—something she could toss aside with a gesture, if it weren’t so pleasant just to burrow into it, to snuggle deeply within its confining warmth.
Avis smiled as she realized the truth; monotony was the one thing that didn’t bore her. The sterility of excitement was the really jading routine, after all. This quiet, uneventful feeling of restfulness seemed rich and fertile by comparison. Rich and fertile—creative—womb.
The words linked. Back to the womb. Dark room, warm bed, lying doubled up in the restful, nourishing lethargy of fever . . .
It wasn’t the womb, exactly; she hadn’t gone back that far, she knew. But it did remind her of the days when she was a little girl. Just a little girl with big round eyes, mirroring the curiosity that lay behind them. Just a little girl, living all alone in a huge old house, like a fairy princess in an enchanted castle.
Of course her aunt and uncle had lived here too, and it wasn’t a really truly castle, and nobody else knew that she was a princess. Except Marvin Mason, that is.
Marvin had lived next door and sometimes he’d come over and play with her. They would come up to her room and look out of the high window—the little round window that bordered on the sky.
Marvin knew that she was a sure-enough princess, and he knew that her room was an ivory tower. The window was an enchanted window, and when they stood on a chair and peeked out they could see the world behind the sky.
Sometimes she wasn’t quite sure if Marvin Mason honest and truly saw the world beyond the window; maybe he just said he did because he was fond of her.
But he listened very quietly while she told him stories about that world. Sometimes she told him stories she had read in books, and other times she made them up out of her very own head. It was only later that the dreams came, and she told him
those
stories, too.
That is, she always started to, but somehow the words would go wrong. She didn’t always know the words for what she saw in those dreams. They were very special dreams; they came only on those nights when Aunt May left the window open, and there was no moon. She would lie in the bed, all curled up in a little ball, and wait for the wind to come through the high, round window. It came quietly, and she would feel it on her forehead and neck, like fingers stroking. Cool, soft fingers, stroking her face; soothing fingers that made her uncurl and stretch out so that the shadows could cover her body.
Even then she slept in the big bed, and the shadows would pour down from the window in a path. She wasn’t asleep when the shadows came, so she knew they were real. They came on the breeze, from the window, and covered her up. Maybe it was the shadows that were cool and not the wind; maybe the shadows stroked her hair until she fell asleep.
But she would sleep then, and the dreams always came. They followed the same path as the wind and the shadows; they poured down from the sky, through the window. There were voices she heard but could not understand; colors she saw but could not name; shapes she glimpsed but which never seemed to resemble any figures she found in picture books.
Sometimes the same voices and colors and shapes came again and again, until she learned to recognize them, in a way. There was the deep, buzzing voice that seemed to come from right inside her own head, although she knew it really issued from the black, shiny pyramid thing that had the arms with eyes in it. It didn’t look slimy or nasty, and there was nothing to be afraid of—Avis could never understand why Marvin Mason made her shut up when she started telling about those dreams.
But he was only a little boy, and he got scared and ran to his Mommy. Avis didn’t have any Mommy, only Aunt May; but she would never tell Aunt May such things. Besides, why should she? The dreams didn’t frighten her, and they were so very real and interesting. Sometimes, on grey, rainy days when there was nothing to do but play with dolls or cut out pictures to paste in her album, she wished that night would hurry up and come; then she could dream and make everything real again.
She got so she liked to stay in bed, and would pretend to have a cold so she didn’t have to go to school. Avis would look up at the window and wait for the dreams to come—but they never came in the daytime; only at night.
Often she wondered what it was like
up there
.
The dreams must come from the sky; she knew that. The voices and shapes
lived
way up, somewhere beyond the window. Aunt May said that dreams came from tummyaches, but she knew that wasn’t so.
Aunt May was always worried about tummyaches, and she scolded Avis for not going outside to play; she said she was getting pale and puny.
But Avis felt fine, and she had her secret to think of. Now she scarcely ever saw Marvin Mason any more, and she didn’t bother to read. It wasn’t much fun to pretend she was a princess, either. Because the dreams were ever so much more real, and she could talk to the voices and ask them to take her with them when they went away.
She got so she could almost understand what they were saying. The shiny thing that just hung through the window now—the one that looked like it had so much more to it she couldn’t see—it made music inside her head that she recognized. Not a real tune; more like words in a rhyme. In her dreams she asked it to take her away. She would crawl up on its back and let it fly with her up over the stars. That was funny, asking it to fly; but she knew that the part beyond the window had wings. Wings as big as the world.
She begged and pleaded, but the voices made her understand that they couldn’t take little girls back with them. That is, not entirely. Because it was too cold and too far, and something would change her.
She said she didn’t care how she changed; she wanted to go. She would let them do anything they wanted if only they would take her. It would be nice to be able to talk to them all the time and feel that cool softness; to dream forever.
One night they came to her and there were more things than she had ever seen before. They hung through the window and in the air all over the room—they were so funny, some of them; you could see through them and sometimes one was partly inside another. She knew she giggled in her sleep, but she couldn’t help it. Then she was quiet and listening to them.
They told her it was all right. They would carry her away. Only she mustn’t tell anyone and she mustn’t be frightened; they would come for her soon. They couldn’t take her as she was, and she must be willing to change.
Avis said yes, and they all hummed a sort of music together and went away.
The next morning Avis was really and truly sick and didn’t want to get up. She could hardly breathe, she was so warm—and when Aunt May brought in a tray she wouldn’t eat a bite.
That night she didn’t dream. Her head ached, and she tossed all night long. But there was a moon out, so the dreams couldn’t get through anyway. She knew they would come back when the moon was gone again, so she waited. Besides, she hurt so that she really didn’t care. She had to feel better before she was ready to go anywhere.
The next day Doctor Clegg came to see her. Doctor Clegg was a good friend of Aunt May’s and he was always visiting her because he was her guardian.
Doctor Clegg held her hand and asked her what seemed to be the matter with his young lady today.
Avis was too smart to say anything, and besides, there was a shiny thing in her mouth. Doctor Clegg took it out and looked at it and shook his head. After a while he went away and then Aunt May and Uncle Roscoe came in. They made her swallow some medicine that tasted just awful.
By that time it was getting dark and there was a storm coming outside. Avis wasn’t able to talk much, and when they shut the round window she couldn’t ask them to please leave it open tonight because there was no moon and they were coming for her.
But everything kept going round and round, and when Aunt May walked past the bed she seemed to flatten out like a shadow, or one of the things, only she made a loud noise which was really the thunder outside and now she was sleeping really and truly even though she heard the thunder but the thunder wasn’t real nothing was real except the things, that was it nothing was real any more but the things.