Midnight (8 page)

17

George Valdoski sat at the formica-topped kitchen table. Though his work-scarred hands were clasped tightly around a glass of whiskey, he could not prevent them from trembling; the surface of the amber bourbon shivered constantly.

When Loman Watkins entered and closed the door behind him, George didn’t even look up. Eddie had been his only child.

George was tall, solid in the chest and shoulders. Thanks to deeply and closely set eyes, a thin-lipped mouth, and sharp features, he had a hard, mean look in spite of his general handsomeness. His forbidding appearance was deceptive, however, for he was a sensitive man, soft-spoken and kind.

“How you doin’?” Loman asked.

George bit his lower lip and nodded as if to say that he would get through this nightmare, but he did not meet Loman’s eyes.

“I’ll look in on Nella,” Loman said.

This time George didn’t even nod.

As Loman crossed the too-bright kitchen, his hard-soled shoes squeaked on the linoleum floor. He paused at the doorway to the small dining room and looked back at his friend.

“We’ll find the bastard, George. I swear we will.”

At last George looked up from the whiskey. Tears shimmered in his eyes, but he would not let them flow. He was a proud, hardheaded Pole, determined to be strong. He said, “Eddie was playin’ in the backyard toward dusk, just right out there in the backyard, where you could see him if you looked out any window, right in his own yard. When Nelia called him for supper just after dark, when he didn’t come or answer, we thought he’d gone to one of the neighbors’ to play with some other kids, without asking like he should’ve.” He had related all of this before, more than once, but he seemed to need to go over it again and again, as if repetition would wear down the ugly reality and thereby change it as surely as ten thousand playings of a tape cassette would eventually scrape away the music and leave a hiss of white noise.

“We started looking’ for him, couldn’t find him, wasn’t scared at first; in fact we were a little angry with him; but then we got worried and then scared, and I was just about to call you for help when we found him there in the ditch, sweet Jesus, all torn up in the ditch.” He took a deep breath and another, and the pent-up tears glistened brightly in his eyes.

“What kind of monster would do that to a child, take him away somewhere and do that, and
then
be cruel enough to bring him back here and drop him where we’d find him?
Had
to’ve been that way, ‘cause we’d have heard … heard the screaming if the bastard had done all that to Eddie right here somewheres. Had to’ve taken him away, done all that, then brought him back so we’d find him. What kind of man, Loman? For God’s sake, what kind of man?”

“Psychotic,” Loman said, as he had said before, and that much was true. The regressives were psychotic. Shaddack had coined a term for their condition metamorphic-related psychosis.

“Probably on drugs,” he added, and he was lying now. Drugs—at least the conventional illegal pharmacopoeia—had nothing to do with Eddie’s death. Loman was still surprised at how easy it was for him to lie to a close friend, something that he had once been unable to do. The immorality of lying was a concept more suited to the Old People and their turbulently emotional world. Old-fashioned concepts of what was immoral might ultimately have no meaning to the New People, for if they changed as Shaddack believed they would, efficiency and expediency and maximum performance would be the only moral absolutes.

“The country’s rotten with drug freaks these days. Burnt-out brains. No morals, no goals but cheap thrills. They’re our inheritance from the recent Age of Do Your Own Thing. This guy was a drug-disoriented freak, George, and I swear we’ll get him.”

George looked down at his whiskey again. He drank some.

Then to himself more than to Loman, he said, “Eddie was playin’ in the backyard toward dusk, just right out there in the backyard, where you could see him if you looked out any window………” His voice trailed away.

Reluctantly Loman went upstairs to the master bedroom to see how Nella was coping.

She was lying on the bed, propped up a bit with pillows, and Dr. Jim Worthy was sitting in a chair that he had moved to her side, He was the youngest of Moonlight Cove’s three doctors, thirty-eight, an earnest man with a neatly trimmed mustache, wire-rimmed glasses, and a proclivity for bow ties.

The physician’s bag was on the floor at his feet. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He was filling an unusually large syringe from a six-ounce bottle of golden fluid.

Worthy turned to look at Loman, and their eyes met, and they did not need to say anything.

Either having heard Loman’s soft footsteps or having sensed him by some subtler means, Nella Valdoski opened her eyes, which were red and swollen from crying. She was still a lovely woman with flaxen hair and features that seemed too delicate to be the work of nature, more like the finely honed art of a master sculptor. Her mouth softened and trembled when she spoke his name “Oh, Loman.”

He went around the bed, to the side opposite Dr. Worthy, and took hold of the hand that Nella held out to him. It was clammy, cold, and trembling.

“I’m giving her a tranquilizer,” Worthy said.

“She needs to relax, even sleep if she can.”

“I don’t want to sleep,” Nella said. “I
can’t
sleep. Not after … not after this … not ever again after this.”

“Easy,” Loman said, gently rubbing her hand. He sat on the edge of the bed.

“Just let Dr. Worthy take care of you. This is for the best, Nella.”

For half his life, Loman had loved this woman, his best friend’s wife, though he had never acted upon his feelings. He had always told himself that it was a strictly platonic attraction. Looking at her now, however, he knew passion had been a part of it.

The disturbing thing was … well, though he knew what he had felt for her all these years, though he remembered it, he could not feel it any longer. His love, his passion, his pleasant yet melancholy longing had faded as had most of his other emotional responses; he was still aware of his previous feelings for her, but they were like another aspect of him that had split off and drifted away like a ghost departing a corpse.

Worthy set the filled syringe on the nightstand. He unbuttoned and pushed up the loose sleeve on Nelia’s blouse, then tied a length of rubber tubing around her arm, tight enough to make a vein more evident.

As the physician swabbed Nella’s arm with an alcohol-soaked cottonball, she said, “Loman, what are we going to do?”

“Everything will be fine,” he said, stroking her hand.

“No. How can you say that? Eddie’s dead. He was so sweet, so small and sweet, and now he’s gone. Nothing will be fine again.”

“Very soon you’ll feel better,” Loman assured her. “Before you know it the hurt will be gone. It won’t matter as much as it does now. I promise it won’t.”

She blinked and stared at him as if he were talking nonsense, but then she did not know what was about to happen to her. Worthy slipped the needle into her arm.

She twitched.

The golden fluid flowed out of the syringe, into her bloodstream.

She closed her eyes and began to cry softly again, not at the pain of the needle but at the loss of her son.

Maybe it is better not to care so much, not to love so much, Loman thought.

The syringe was empty.

Worthy withdrew the needle from her vein.

Again Loman met the doctor’s gaze.

Nella shuddered.

The Change would require two more injections, and someone would have to stay with Nella for the next four or five hours, not only to administer the drugs but to make sure that she did not hurt herself during the conversion. Becoming a New Person was not a painless process.

Nella shuddered again.

Worthy tilted his head, and the lamplight struck his wirerimmed glasses at a new angle, transforming the lenses into mirrors that for a moment hid his eyes, giving him an uncharacteristically menacing appearance.

Shudders, more violent and protracted this time, swept through Nella.

From the doorway George Valdoski said, “What’s going on here?”

Loman had been so focused on Nella that he had not heard George coming. He got up at once and let go of Nella’s hand. “The doctor thought she needed—”

“What’s that horse needle for?” George said, referring to the huge syringe. The needle itself was no larger than an ordinary hypodermic.

“Tranquilizer,” Dr. Worthy said. “She needs to—”

“Tranquilizer?” George interrupted. “Looks like you gave her enough to knock down a bull.”

Loman said, “Now, George, the doctor knows what he’s—”

On the bed Nella fell under the thrall of the injection. Her body suddenly stiffened, her hands curled into tight fists, her teeth clenched, and her jaw muscles bulged. In her throat and temples, the arteries swelled and throbbed visibly as her heartbeat drastically accelerated. Her eyes glazed over, and she passed into the peculiar twilight that was the Change, neither conscious nor unconscious.

“What’s wrong with her?” George demanded.

Between clenched teeth, lips peeled back in a grimace of pain, Nella let out a strange, low groan. She arched her back until only her shoulders and heels were in contact with the bed. She appeared to be full of violent energy, as if she were a boiler straining with excess steam pressure, and for a moment she seemed about to explode. Then she collapsed back onto the mattress, shuddered more violently than ever, and broke out in a copious sweat.

George looked at Worthy, at Loman. He clearly realized that something was very wrong, though he could not begin to understand the nature of that wrongness.

“Stop.” Loman drew his revolver as George stepped backward toward the second-floor hall.

“Come all the way in here, George, and lie down on the bed beside Nella.”

In the doorway George Valdoski froze, staring in disbelief and dismay at the revolver.

“If you try to leave,” Loman said, “I’ll have to shoot you, and I don’t really want to do that.”

“You wouldn’t,” George said, counting on decades of friendship to protect him.

“Yes, I would,” Loman said coldly.

“I’d kill you if I had to, and we’d cover it with a story you wouldn’t like. We’d say that we caught you in a contradiction, that we found some evidence that you were the one who killed Eddie, killed your own boy, some twisted sex thing, and that when we confronted you with the proof, you grabbed my revolver out of my holster. There was a struggle. You were shot. Case closed.”

Coming from someone who was supposed to be a close and treasured friend, Loman’s threat was so monstrous that at first George was speechless. Then, as he stepped back into the room, he said, “You’d let everyone think … think I did those terrible things to Eddie? Why? What’re you doing, Loman? What the hell are you doing? Who … who are you protecting?”

“Lie down on the bed,” Loman said.

Dr. Worthy was preparing another syringe for George.

On the bed Nella was shivering ceaselessly, twitching, writhing. Sweat trickled down her face; her hair was damp and tangled. Her eyes were open, but she seemed unaware that others were in the room. Maybe she was not even conscious of her whereabouts. She was seeing a place beyond this room or looking within herself; Loman didn’t know which and could remember nothing of his own conversion except that the pain had been excruciating.

Reluctantly approaching the bed, George Valdoski said, “What’s happening, Loman? Christ, what is this? What’s wrong?”

“Everything’ll be fine,” Loman assured him. “It’s for the best, George. It’s really for the best.”

“
What’s
for the best? What in God’s name—”

“Lie down, George. Everything’ll be fine.”

“What’s happening to Nella?”

“Lie down, George. It’s for the best,” Loman said.

“It’s for the best,” Dr. Worthy agreed as he finished filling the syringe from a new bottle of the golden fluid.

“It’s really for the best,” Loman said. “Trust me.” With the revolver he waved George toward the bed and smiled reassuringly.

18

Harry Talbot’s house was Bauhaus-inspired redwood, with a wealth of big windows. It was three blocks south of the heart of Moonlight Cove, on the east side of Conquistador Avenue, a street named for the fact that Spanish conquerors had bivouacked in that area centuries earlier, when accompanying the Catholic clergy along the California coast to establish missions. On rare occasions Harry dreamed of being one of those ancient soldiers, marching northward into unexplored territory, and it was always a nice dream because, in that adventure fantasy, he was never wheelchair-bound.

Most of Moonlight Cove was built on wooded hillsides facing the sea, and Harry’s lot sloped down to Conquistador, providing a perfect perch for a man whose main activity in life was spying on his fellow townsmen. From his third-floor bedroom at the northwest corner of the house, he could see at least portions of all the streets between Conquistador and the cove—Juniper Lane, Serra Street, Roshmore Way, and Cypress Lane—as well as the intersecting streets which ran east-west. To the north, he could glimpse pieces of Ocean Avenue and even beyond. Of course the breadth and depth of his field of vision would have been drastically limited if his house hadn’t been one story higher than most of those around it and if he hadn’t been equipped with a 60mm f/8 refractor telescope and a good pair of binoculars.

At 9:30 Monday night, October 13, Harry was in his custommade stool, between the enormous west and north windows, bent to the eyepiece of the telescope. The high stool had arms and a backrest like a chair, four wide-spread sturdy legs for maximum balance, and a weighted base to prevent it from tipping over easily when he was levering himself into it from the wheelchair. It also had a harness, something like that in an automobile, allowing him to lean forward to the telescope without slipping off the stool and falling to the floor.

Because he had no use whatsoever of his left leg and left arm, because his right leg was too weak to support him, because he could rely only on his right arm—which, thank God, the Viet Cong had spared—even transferring from the battery-powered wheelchair to a custom-made stool was a torturous undertaking. But the effort was worthwhile because every year Harry Talbot lived more through his binoculars and telescope than he had the year before. Perched on his special stool, he sometimes almost forgot his handicaps, for in his own way he was participating in life.

His favorite movie was
Rear Window
with Jimmy Stewart. He had watched it probably a hundred times.

At the moment the telescope was focused on the back of CalIan’s Funeral Home, the only mortuary in Moonlight Cove, on the east side of Juniper Lane, which ran parallel to Conquistador but was one block closer to the sea. He was able to see the place by focusing between two houses on the opposite side of his own street, past the thick trunk of a Big Cone pine, and across the service alley that ran between Juniper and Conquistador. The funeral home backed up to that alley, and Harry had a view that included a corner of the garage in which the hearse was parked, the rear entrance to the house itself, and the entrance to the new wing in which the corpses were embalmed and prepared for viewing, or cremated.

During the past two months he had seen some strange things at Callan’s. Tonight, however, no unusual activity enlivened Harry’s patient watch over the place.

“Moose?”

The dog rose from his resting place in the corner and padded across the unlighted bedroom to Harry’s side. He was a fullgrown black Labrador, virtually invisible in the darkness. He nuzzled Harry’s leg: the right one, in which Harry still had some feeling.

Reaching down, Harry petted Moose.

“Get me a beer, old fella.”

Moose was a service dog raised and trained by Canine Companions for Independence, and he was always happy to be needed. He hurried to the small refrigerator in the corner, which was designed for under-the-counter use in restaurants and could be opened with a foot pedal.

“None there,” Harry said.

“I forgot to bring a six-pack up from the kitchen this afternoon.”

The dog had already discovered that the bedroom fridge contained no Coors. He padded into the hallway, his claws clicking softly on the polished wood floor. No room had carpets, for the wheelchair rolled more efficiently on hard surfaces. In the hall the dog leaped and hit the elevator button with one paw, and immediately the purr and whine of the lift machinery filled the house.

Harry returned his attention to the telescope and to the rear of Callan’s Funeral Home. Fog drifted through town in waves, some thick and blinding, some wispy. But lights brightened the rear of the mortuary, giving him a clear view; through the telescope, he seemed to be standing between the twin brick pilasters flanking the driveway that served the back of the property. If the night had been fogless, he would have been able to count the rivets in the metal door of the embalmery-crematorium.

Behind him the elevator doors rolled open. He heard Moose enter the lift. Then it started down to the first floor.

Bored with Callan’s, Harry slowly swiveled the scope to the left, moving the field of vision southward to the large vacant lot adjacent to the funeral home. Adjusting the focus, he looked across that empty property and across the street to the Gosdale house on the west side of Juniper, drawing in on the dining room window.

With his good hand, he unscrewed the eyepiece and put it on a high metal table beside his stool, quickly and deftly replacing it with one of several other eyepieces, thus allowing a clearer focus on the Gosdales. Because the fog was at that moment in a thinning phase, he could see into the Gosdale dining room almost as well as if he had been crouched on their porch with his face to the window. Herman and Louise Gosdale were playing pinochle with their neighbors, Dan and Vera Kaiser, as they did every Monday night and on some Fridays.

The elevator reached the ground floor; the motor stopped whining, and silence returned to the house. Moose was now two floors below, hurrying along the hallway to the kitchen.

On an unusually clear night, when Dan Kaiser was sitting with his back to the window and at the correct angle, Harry occasionally could see the man’s pinochle hand. A few times he had been tempted to call Herman Gosdale and describe his adversary’s cards to him, with some advice on how to play out the trick.

But he dared not let people know he spent much of his day in his bedroom—darkened at night to avoid being silhouetted at the window—vicariously participating in their lives. They would not understand. Those whole of limb were uneasy about a handicapped person from the start, for they found it too easy to believe that the crippling twist of legs and arms extended to the mind. They would think he was nosy; worse, they might mark him as a Peeping Tom, a degenerate voyeur.

That was not the case. Harry Talbot had set down strict rules governing his use of the telescope and binoculars, and he faithfully abided by them. For one thing, he would never try to get a glimpse of a woman undressed.

Amelia Scarlatti lived across the street from him and three doors north, and he once discovered, by accident, that she spent some evenings in her bedroom, listening to music or reading in the nude. She turned on only a small bedside lamp, and gauzy sheers hung between the drapes, and she always stayed away from the windows, so she saw no need to draw the drapes on every occasion. In fact she could not be seen by anyone less prepared to see her than Harry was. Amelia was lovely. Even through the sheers and in the dim lamplight, her exquisite body had been revealed to Harry in detail. Astonished by her nakedness, riveted by surprise and by the sensuous concavities and convexities of her full-breasted, long-legged body, he had stared for perhaps a minute. Then, as hot with embarrassment as with desire, he had turned the scope from her. Though Harry had not been with a woman in more than twenty years, he never invaded Amella’s bedroom again. On many mornings he looked at an angle into the side window of her tidy first-floor kitchen and watched her at breakfast, studying her perfect face as she had her juice and muffin or toast and eggs. She was beautiful beyond his abilities of description, and from what he knew of her life, she seemed to be a nice person, as well. In a way he supposed he was in love with her, as a boy could love a teacher who was forever beyond his reach, but he never used unrequited love as an excuse to caress her unclothed body with his gaze.

Likewise, if he caught one of his neighbors in another kind of embarrassing situation, he looked away. He watched them fight with one another, yes, and he watched them laugh together, eat, play cards, cheat on their diets, wash dishes, and perform the countless other acts of daily life, but not because he wanted to get any dirt on them or find reason to feel superior to them. He got no cheap thrill from his observations of them. What he wanted was to be a part of their lives, to reach out to them—even if one-sidedly—and make of them an extended family; he wanted to have reason to
care
about them and, through that caring, to experience a fuller emotional life.

The elevator motor hummed again. Moose evidently had gone into the kitchen, opened one of the four doors of the under-the-counter refrigerator, and fetched a cold can of Coors. Now he was returning with the brew.

Harry Talbot was a gregarious man, and on coming home from the war with only one useful limb, he was advised to move into a group home for the disabled, where he might have a social life in a caring atmosphere. The counselors warned him that he would not be accepted if he tried to live in the world of the whole and healthy; they said he would encounter unconscious yet hurtful cruelty from most people he met, especially the cruelty of thoughtless exclusion, and would finally fall into the grip of a deep and terrible loneliness. But Harry was as stubbornly independent as he was gregarious, and the prospect of living in a group home, with only the companionship of disabled people and caretakers, seemed worse than no companionship at all. Now he lived alone, but for Moose, with few visitors other than his once-a-week housekeeper, Mrs. Hunsbok (from whom he hid the telescope and binoculars in a bedroom closet). Much of what the counselors warned him about was proved true daily; however, they had not imagined Harry’s ability to find solace and a sufficient sense of family through surreptitious but benign observation of his neighbors.

The elevator reached the third floor. The door slid open, and Moose padded into the bedroom, straight to Harry’s high stool.

The telescope was on a wheeled platform, and Harry pushed it aside. He reached down and patted the dog’s head. He took the cold can from the Labrador’s mouth. Moose had held it by the bottom for maximum cleanliness. Harry put the can between his limp legs, plucked a penlight off the table on the other side of his stool, and directed the beam on the can to be sure it was Coors and not Diet Coke.

Those were the two beverages that the dog had been taught to fetch, and for the most part the good pooch recognized the difference between the words “beer” and “Coke,” and was able to keep the command in mind all the way to the kitchen. On rare occasions he forgot along the way and returned with the wrong drink. Rarer still, he brought odd items that had nothing to do with the command he’d been given: a slipper; a newspaper; twice, an unopened bag of dog biscuits; once, a hardboiled egg, carried so gently that the shell was not cracked between his teeth; strangest of all, a toilet-bowl brush from the housekeeper’s supplies. When he brought the wrong item, Moose always proved successful on second try.

Long ago Harry had decided that the pooch often was not mistaken but only having fun with him. His close association with Moose had convinced him that dogs were gifted with a sense of humor.

This time, neither mistaken nor joking, Moose had brought what he’d been asked to bring. Harry grew thirstier at the sight of the can of Coors.

Switching off the penlight, he said, “Good boy. Good, good, gooood dog.”

Moose whined happily. He sat at attention in the darkness at the foot of the stool, waiting to be sent on another errand.

“Go, Moose. Lie down. That’s a good dog.”

Disappointed, the Lab moseyed into the corner and curled up on the floor, while his master popped the tab on the beer and took a long swallow.

Harry set the Coors aside and pulled the telescope in front of him. He returned to his scrutiny of the night, the neighborhood, and his extended family.

The Gosdales and Kaisers were still playing cards.

Nothing but eddying fog moved at Callan’s Funeral Home.

One block south on Conquistador, at the moment illuminated by the walkway lamps at the Stemback house, Ray Chang, the owner of the town’s only television and electronics store, was coming this way. He was walking his dog, Jack, a golden retriever. They moved at a leisurely pace, as Jack sniffed each tree along the sidewalk, searching for just the right one on which to relieve himself.

The tranquillity and familiarity of those scenes pleased Harry, but the mood was shattered abruptly when he shifted his attention through his north window to the Simpson place. Ella and Denver Simpson lived in a cream-colored, tile-roofed Spanish house on the other side of Conquistador and two blocks north, just beyond the old Catholic cemetery and one block this side of Ocean Avenue. Because nothing in the graveyard—except part of one tree—obstructed Harry’s view of the Simpsons’ property, he was able to get an angled but tight focus on all the windows on two sides of the house. He drew in on the lighted kitchen. Just as the image in the eyepiece resolved from a blur to a sharp-lined picture, he saw Ella Simpson struggling with her husband, who was pressing her against the refrigerator; she was twisting in his grasp, clawing at his face, screaming.

A shiver sputtered the length of Harry’s shrapnel-damaged spine.

He knew at once that what was happening at the Simpsons’ house was connected with other disturbing things he had seen lately. Denver was Moonlight Cove’s postmaster, and Ella operated a successful beauty parlor. They were in their midthirties, one of the few local black couples, and as far as Harry knew, they were happily married. Their physical conflict was so out of character that it had to be related to the recent inexplicable and ominous events that Harry had witnessed.