Some Kind of Fairy Tale (37 page)

“Not bad,” Underwood said.
This hostility is new
, he thought.

“I’ve been watching you watching me.” Tara squinted at him, perhaps in parody of his scrutiny.

“And what did you see me seeing?”

“Oh, you’ve got it all mapped out. You know that everything I say means something else. I’m sure it all fits into some big picture in your mind.”

Underwood nodded at the seat and she took her place by the window. He lit a cigarette and fetched himself a heavy glass ashtray before sitting down. There was a small octagonal table next to one
of the chairs, and on this he placed the ashtray. “You’ve been talking to your brother. Or to his wife, the lovely domestic-goddess-psychologist.”

“Not at all. Pete has refused to discuss anything you’ve said about me. I admit I badgered him about it. But he kept it buttoned. And as for Genevieve, she’s the smartest one, and smart enough to know she doesn’t know much. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter, Tara?”

“Because you’ve got your theory, no doubt. You don’t believe a single word I’ve told you. And your word is more important than mine, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Oh, yes. Look at all these impressive certificates on the wall. Neatly framed. You are old and wise and clever, and you know everything, whereas, well, me”—here Tara made a steeple of her hands and laid her cheek upon them—“I’m just a young girl.” She fluttered her eyelashes for him.

“You’re angry today.”

“A bit.”

“But you’re not a young girl, are you, Tara? Not sixteen, are you?”

“No, I’m not. I’m much older than that. I don’t know what happened. I was away for six months, but I gathered twenty years of experience in that time. My body didn’t age, but my mind did. It matured, anyway. Maybe I gathered more than twenty years of experience in that six months. The difficulty is that some of the people I left behind didn’t grow at all. And sometimes I find them infuriatingly simple. Like my mum and dad. Oh, I love them. Would die for them. But they watch junk television and read junk newspapers and repeat the phrases they got from their junk television and junk newspapers. Do you realize what a nightmare that is to witness?”

“I think I do.”

“I hoped to find them at home,” Tara said bitterly. “But all that I found were shells of what they were. Husks. They’d allowed age to diminish them instead of mature them. And then there’s my brother. Peter. He was like a beautiful animal when he was young. He burned with a flame. Now he’s just a tired dad, hammering
horseshoes every day, bent over an anvil. Where did he go, my brother? And his lovely wife, up to her elbows in cooking and cleaning for her family.”

“It’s called love, Tara,” Underwood said. “It’s what they do because they love their children. As your parents loved you.”

“But do they have to give up their souls? Do they have to?”

“They have to share out their souls, yes, they do. They are none of them in the same place where you left them.”

“Except for Richie. There is still a glimmer of light in Richie. He hasn’t compromised. But he’s dying.”

“Yes. Richie. Peter told me something about that. It’s a bad lot.” Underwood got up and went to his desk. He came back proffering a tissue.

Tara took the tissue and wiped her eye. “Richie, Peter. They were the blossom. They were the blossom on the tree.”

“As were you.”

“As I still am,” she corrected fiercely.

They sat in silence for some minutes. Underwood wanted Tara to feel her anger and hostility and to let it subside before he proposed what he wanted to do. Right then she was overstimulated. So, with a neutral expression, he gazed out the window.

A cloud passed in front of the afternoon sun. The light fell. Something creaked in his study. Almost to prevent himself from drifting to sleep, Underwood spoke. “I have an idea of trying something, with your consent. One last effort to see if we can both get some more information about where you have been all these years. But only with your consent and cooperation.”

“Not going to give me electric-shock therapy, are you?”

“Good lord, no. I’m ashamed to say I was too taken with that in the old days.” His face darkened. “Why would you suggest that?”

Tara dealt him a thin smile. “Just trying to guess what cards you have up your sleeve.”

“Nothing so brutal, I promise you. These days I try to tiptoe into the unconscious mind rather than bludgeon my way in.”

“Tiptoe. Really, I’m prepared to do anything. I’m game for anything.”

Underwood got up and went his desk, picking up the heavy, oak-framed, old-style hourglass and setting it on the windowsill.
With his back turned he didn’t see a flash of red as Tara touched her tongue with her finger, and even had he seen he would have thought it only a scarlet-painted fingernail. “In a moment I’m going to set this running. I want you to keep your eyes on it. I’m going to use some relaxation techniques and I’ll ask you some questions. Okay with that?”

“Yes.”

“You feel safe with me?”

“Yes.”

“Here we go, then. Just keep your eyes on the sand.”

He inverted the hourglass, and the fine grains of cinnamon-colored sand started streaming in the curve of the lower glass, billowing slightly like a skirt in a breeze, a tiny light spectrum refracting behind the rivulet of sand as it ran. Tara kept her gaze on the delicate stream, with almost a smile on her lips and a peculiar avidity in her wide-open brown eyes.

Underwood watched her watching.

“In a moment,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to think of a key word but before that I just want you to stay with the sand. There, doesn’t that feel good? By the way, you achieved this relaxation all by yourself. You’re a natural for this. But in a moment I want you to select a key word. It will be your own word and I don’t want you to tell it to me yet.

“Here you go. You can hear my voice. Here you go. That feels nice, again, you just let the tension out of your arms, I saw it go, and that’s good because it means you are happy and you feel good and you feel relaxed and you are changing. And now that your arm is relaxed, your shoulder can relax, too, and so can that tense area around your neck, it can all go. That’s good. I saw that happen, but again, you did that all by yourself.

“Those sounds outside are becoming distant. Those sounds outside are fading away. You might notice that every time you blink it’s harder and harder to keep your eyes open.

“The sand is taking you where you want to be, isn’t it? It’s all right. You can let yourself go there. You can let go of that bad time. We don’t need it, we can let that go. It feels very good to let it go, doesn’t it? Of course it does. I wonder how deeply you can fall into a trance right now.

“I wonder how deeply. I wonder. I wonder what will happen when you let go of that bad time. I wonder. I wonder what will happen.”

Tara now had her eyes closed and her head had slumped forward. Her breathing was shallow. Her arms hung heavily at her sides.

“I wonder what will happen when you let go of that bad time. I wonder.”

Tara moved her head slightly and shaped her mouth to speak. She slurred. “It is likely he will come?”

“Who will come?” Underwood said. “Likely who will come?”

Tara moved her lips, like someone who was parched. “It is likely,” she slurred again, very slowly, “he will come.”

Don’t press it
, Underwood thought.
Back off
.

“I don’t know whether you have completely relaxed yet,” he said gently. “Let’s see if we can go further. Further.”

“Yes. Further.”

“So let’s go further.”

“Further.”

“So let’s go further.”

“Further.”

“So let’s go further.”

Then something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. Underwood felt his own eyelids close. He battled back, opened his eyes, and looked at the slumped form of Tara, uncertain now how many times he had repeated himself. His head was in a foggy place and he could still hear his own words, echoing back at him, but in a slow unfolding wave; elongated, as if the words were elastic and stretching slowly over his tongue; and that sensation was accompanied by a darkness, a fuzzy shadow that had fallen over his study. His eyelids were drooping again. He had to fight the impossible weight of his own eyelids.

At last he forced his eyes open only to see Tara sitting erect now in her chair, her own beautiful, large brown eyes wide open and gazing back at him. She was staring at him, unblinking, but her head was cocked and she was guarded, as if uncertain of some outcome. He knew he was going under again and he couldn’t stop it. He was helpless, unable to resist, as if his own techniques of hypnotism
had flashed back at him. His consciousness was eclipsing; or perhaps he felt a sooty inundation pouring over him like dim waves on the sand of a dark beach. He knew his head had slumped, impossibly weighted, and with Tara staring down at him all he could think was how utterly beautiful were her eyes; and there in the corner of her eyes the liquid sheen of them reflected the light spectrum from the hourglass. He was going under and he couldn’t stop it. His eyelids closed and he surrendered.

When he blinked himself awake he had no idea of how much time had passed. But Tara had gone from the seat next to him. In her place, gazing steadily back at him, was a man. Underwood instinctively but slowly moved his head to steal a glance at the hourglass. The sand was still running.

With great effort Underwood rolled his head again to look back at the figure in the chair. Now the man was glowering. He had a dark aspect, a tanned, weathered complexion. He was in need of a shave and his hair was a mass of dark curls worn down to his collar, a single gold earring glinting in there somewhere. He wore a white shirt without a collar, and a black waistcoat; his baggy black trousers were gathered at the knees and stuffed into riding boots. He exuded an odor of menace: male sweat and gunmetal.

Underwood felt a flush of primal fear. He felt a thrill of cold.

The man leaned forward and the leather of his chair creaked slightly under him. He opened his mouth. “I tried to tell you once before,” he said to Underwood in a quiet but angry voice. It was a voice that dragged in the throat, and the voice was out of sync with the sensuous lips. “But you wouldn’t listen to me.”

Underwood made to get up from his seat, trying to rise against a great weight. “Where is Tara?”

But the man was faster to his feet. “I tried to tell you before,” he said again, and he reached forward to Underwood with his left hand, first and second fingers splayed out wide in a V. Underwood raised a hand up to protect himself but he was too slow: the stranger touched the psychiatrist’s eyelids with his outstretched fingers. Underwood felt a jolt, a voltage, and he sank back into his chair, paralyzed, as everything faded to black.

Moments later he came back to consciousness, and this time the frightening stranger was standing over him, holding aloft the
heavy hourglass, already in the act of bringing it down on Underwood’s head. But the man was motionless, frozen in a menacing instant of tableau. The air was smoky with a smell like ozone and the light was flickering a dangerous nightfall blue.

Underwood tried to grip his chair, looking for purchase that would help him to leap from his seat, but he was powerless to move. Then came a ripping sound, like canvas tearing, and the image before him broke up into a thousand tiny fluttering points of colored light, like bugs suddenly disturbed and reflected in a beam of sunlight. The fragments of light quickly resettled back into a new image, and now Tara was standing before him, one arm aloft and gripping the assailant by the wrist. Neither Tara nor the man were looking at Underwood. Their eyes were locked on each other. It was as if they were in another place, indifferent to the presence of Underwood. There came another horrible rending sound, and this new tableau also fragmented, again into a flurry of brilliant bugs taking to the air; and again, after a moment, it settled into a new form. There was a brand-new tableau in which Tara held the man’s face in her small and elegant white hands, imploring him. The man was weeping. His tears were blue in the polar light. The hourglass, no longer a weapon, had rolled on the floor.

In a final fracturing and resettling of the tableau, Tara was bending over Underwood, her first and second fingers splayed and stroking his eyelids shut.

U
NDERWOOD CAME TO AGAIN
. Tara sat in the adjacent chair, gazing steadily at him, her intimidating brown eyes still unblinking. He looked for the hourglass. It had gone from the windowsill where he had set it running. He glanced down and there it was: it had fallen unbroken to the floor and had come to a stop halfway across his carpeted study.

The psychiatrist scrambled to his feet, like a man suddenly unshackled. He looked around and behind him. Of the dangerous intruder there was now no sign.

“Lost someone?” Tara said.

“Where is that man?”

Tara blinked. A long, supercilious, steady blink.

Underwood stepped over to his desk and looked behind it, as if the intruder might be hiding there. He looked again at Tara. He looked at the hourglass. Spread out on his desk were a number of papers. They were his report on Tara. Some of the psychological phrases he had used about her had been circled or ringed about with the antique pen from the desk stand. One page was blotted violently.

Underwood marched to the study door, grabbed the door handle, and yanked it open. He peered up and down the landing and corridor. Then, abandoning Tara, he closed the door behind him and hurried downstairs.

His elderly secretary was in the act of polishing her desk. She was almost bent double, aerosol spray can in one hand and a cloth in the other. “Mrs. Hargreaves, Mrs. Hargreaves, did you just see a man go out?”

She looked up. “No, Mr. Underwood.”

“You didn’t see anyone come in?”

“No. I would have told you. As you know.”

“Or go out? You saw no one go out.”

“I keep the door locked at all times, Mr. Underwood. As you well know.”

“Indeed, Mrs. Hargreaves. Indeed.”