The Architecture of Fear (12 page)

She waited another week, until she could see in the mirror that she was ready and she was sure he would accept, before inviting him back to the apartment to spend the night.

***

When he rushed off the next morning, trying to get back to his own apartment in time to change and look fresh for his eight o'clock class, she could still sense something of him there in the nook, like a faint trace of some scent that was uniquely his, and when she looked at herself, at all her selves, in the mirror she could glimpse the beginning of a new man-shaped cloudiness there, like a vague hint of condensation on the plastic surface.

Isobel's image was clearly visible. Her eyes were open now, but she still looked like a sleepwalker, unaware of her surroundings or of the others crowded around her. Tracy could clearly sense her presence in the whole apartment now, almost as strongly as she could sense Carlos and Dagmar and Jean-Luc.

***

A few weeks later she came back from sketching Tibetan Tonkas at the Musee Guimet to find Liz sitting at the top of the stairs, wearing mirror sunglasses and smoking nervously. She looked so much younger and more vulnerable than Tracy remembered that for a moment Tracy didn't recognize her.

"Hi, Tracy."

"Hi, Liz. You're back early. Where's Isobel?"

"Still down in Lisbon. She sneaks into the graveyard at night and knocks the crosses off the graves—not just his grave but other graves too, so they won't figure out which one she's interested in. They've got guards posted now, trying to catch her. She's been able to avoid them so far, but they're going to catch her pretty soon. I couldn't believe it, it's like some sort of stupid Keystone Kops movie. She's crazy."

"You just figured that out now?" Tracy unlocked the door. "Come on in."

"She never used to be that crazy. The way she's going now, she's probably going to end up killing herself like Carlos." Liz studied Tracy. "You look different. Like you've grown up a lot. And you've lost a lot of weight."

"I know. I've been on a diet."

"You look good. Maybe I should go on a diet too. I was eating a lot of potatoes and grease down there, and it's going to be hard to keep myself away from the pastries now that I'm back here."

Liz moved a stack of watercolors Tracy had done off the couch without looking at them, sat down. "Do you have anything to drink?"

"Some white wine open in the refrigerator and some orange juice. And water, of course."

"Give me a glass of white wine. And I need an ashtray." She looked around the apartment critically. "You know, you've got it looking like when Isobel first moved in here last year. Except she had Carlos's paintings on that wall, not those beetles. I liked the paintings better. Not much, but better than the beetles."

Tracy handed her a saucer and the glass of wine.

"You're not drinking any yourself?"

"No. When did you get back?"

"Last night." She hesitated. "Look, I'm sorry... about not being here to meet you and everything, but Isobel needed me; she said she had to get away from here and she couldn't go alone. I thought you'd be all right—Marcelo could help you if you needed anything. Isobel said you were upset, but I couldn't talk about it in a letter. I tried a couple of times, but it didn't come out right. You're not mad at me any more, are you?"

"No. I was really angry for a while, but I'm starting to like it here now. How's Marcelo?"

"Okay, I guess." She stubbed out her cigarette, took a sip of her wine. "No, actually he's not okay. I let myself in with my key, and he was in bed with someone else. One of my friends, at least I thought she was my friend."

"So what happened?"

"She left. He apologized, said that he would never have slept with her there if he'd known I was coming back."

"What's that mean?"

"It means he would have slept with her somewhere else. So I'm moving out." She lit another cigarette, took a long drag on it. "I was planning to move out anyway, as soon as you got here. I've been saving the money Mother's been sending us all along so we could get a really nice place together, but that was part of why I didn't write, I didn't want to tell you about Marcelo in a letter. I wanted to see you first. Only this whole thing with Isobel just made it that much harder. Do you understand?"

"Sure."

"Good." Liz took another sip of her wine, glanced around nervously. "Can you open the window? It's too stuffy in here; it makes me feel claustrophobic. Like the walls are closing in on me. Let's get some fresh air."

Tracy walked over to the stained-glass window. Fleshy, almost transparent, pinkish-purple worms, the color of swollen veins beneath a baby's skin, were crawling languidly over the roses inside the glass. She opened the window, glanced at the wasps' nest outside just as a wasp landed on it, clutching a paralyzed caterpillar much larger around than the wasp itself.

"That is, if you still want to split an apartment," Liz said behind her. "Marcelo told me you've been seeing Francois a lot."

"He stays here sometimes, but that doesn't mean I want to move in with him." Tracy turned back to Liz. "I came to Paris to be with you. Look, why don't we stay here for a while? Until Isobel gets back. We can always find someplace else later."

Liz shook her head. She looked pink and fleshy, petulant. "I don't like it here anymore. It's too creepy after all that time with Isobel trying to appease her dead brother. Did she tell you how Carlos killed himself?"

"No."

"It was in all the papers down there, with photos and all. He was staying in a hotel there, and he just went and lay down on the bathroom floor and opened up his stomach with a kitchen knife. He didn't just cut a nice clean line across it, either—you know, like the Japanese do when they commit hara-kiri. He sliced a big oval a half inch deep all the way around his stomach. They found him holding on to the oval, like he'd started to peel it away so he could get at something inside, but he died before he could finish. Anyway, Isobel wanted us to stay in the room he did it in, but I said no, so she stayed there and I ended up across the hall."

"He did that down in Portugal, not here," Tracy said. "The only thing wrong with this apartment is I've been so lonely here alone. Besides, you're better off with me than with Marcelo. Just until we can find an apartment of our own, someplace we really like. The longer we live here without paying rent, the more money we can save up to get a place we'll really love."

The wasp dragged the caterpillar down across the gray papier-mache surface, then up in through the hole at the bottom end of the nest. Inside, it would lay its eggs in the caterpillar's paralyzed body, then wall the caterpillar away in a cell where the maggotlike larvae that hatched in its living body could feed on it as they grew slowly toward maturity and metamorphosis. Some of the pupae would be almost ready to complete their transformations and emerge from their cells as full-grown adults, ready to begin reproducing themselves in the bodies of their own paralyzed prey.

Tracy closed the window again. She turned to Liz, smiled beseechingly at her. "Please, Liz. I've been so alone here. I need you here with me."

She could see herself reflected in Liz's sunglasses: a naive, defenseless young girl begging her sophisticated older sister for help, with Isobel and Carlos and all the others crowded in behind her, watching her performance. Francois was there with them, still faceless and blind, unaware, but taking on definition, beginning to come into sharper focus.

Liz hesitated, finally nodded. "All right. But just until we can find a place of our own."

Inside the stained-glass window, the soft, fleshy purple worms crawled over the roses, slowly eating them away from within.

Karl Wagner is the lion of dark fantasy, equally admired for his works in heroic fantasy and for his eloquent, polished horror stories. One of the great unresolved issues of the twentieth century is: Who is to blame for systematic evil? Who is to blame for concentration camps, racism, Viet Nam? Almost as disturbing as the symptoms of evil is the realization that when we look for tidy cause-and-effect relationships between bad people and bad things, we find instead ordinary people doing their jobs. If art is the shining surface which allows us to glimpse impossible evil without turning our souls to stone, Karl Edward Wagner's story "Endless Night" offers us a reflected glimpse of the psychology of systematic evil.

I run to death, and death meets me as fast,

And all my pleasures are like yesterday;

—John Donne,
Holy Sonnet I

The dream landscape always stretched out the same. It had become as familiar as the neighborhood yards of his childhood, as the condo-blighted streets of his middle years. Dreams had to have some basis in reality—or so his therapists had tried to reassure him. If this one did, it was of some unrecognized reality.

They stood upon the edge of the swamp, although somehow he understood that this had once been a river, and then a lake, as all became stagnant and began to sink. The bridge was a relic, stretched out before them to the island—on the far shore—beyond. It was a suspension bridge, from a period which he could not identify with certainty, but suspected was of the early 1930s judging by the Art Deco pylons. It seemed ludicrously narrow and wholly inappropriate for its task. As the waters had risen, or the land mass had sunk, its roadway, ridged and as gap-toothed as a railway trestle, had settled into the water's surface—so that midway across one must slosh through ankle-deep water, feeling beneath the scum for the solid segments of roadway. Spanish moss festooned the fraying cables; green lichens fringed the greener verdigris of bronze faces staring out from rotting concrete pylons. Inscriptions, no doubt explaining their importance, were blurred beyond legibility.

It was always a breathless relief to reach the upward-sloping paving of the far end, scramble toward the deserted shoreline beyond. His chest would be aching by then, as though the warm, damp air he tried to suck into his lungs were devoid of sustenance. There were ripples in the water, not caused by any current, and while he had never seen anything within the tepid depths, he knew it was essential not to linger in the crossing.

His companion or guide—he sometimes thought of her as his muse—always seemed to know the way, so he followed her. Usually she was blonde. Her bangs obscured her eyes, and he only had an impression of her face in profile—thin, with straight nose and sharp chin. He sensed that her cheekbones would be pronounced, her eyes large and watchful and widely spaced. She was barefoot. Sometimes she tugged up her skirt to hold its hem above the water, more often she was wearing only a long T-shirt over what he assumed was a swimsuit. He realized that he knew her, but he could never remember her name.

He supposed he looked like himself. The waters gave back no reflection.

It—the building—dominated the shoreline beyond. From the other side he often thought of it as an office building, possibly some sort of apartment complex. He was certain that he could see lights shining from its many-tiered windows. It appeared to have been constructed of some salmon-hued brick, or perhaps the color was another illusion of the declining sun. It was squat, as broad as its dozen-or-more storys of height, and so polyhedral as to seem almost round. Its architecture impressed him as featureless—stark walls and windows, Bauhaus utilitarian. Either its creator lacked any imagination or else had sacrificed external form to unguessable function.

The features of the shoreline never impressed themselves upon his memory. There was a rising of land, vague blotches of trees, undergrowth. The road dragged slowly upward toward the building. Trees overhung from either side, reaching toward one another, garlanded with hanging vines and moss—darkening skies a leaden ribbon overhead. The pavement was cracked and broken—calling to mind orphaned segments of a WPA-era two-lane highway, bypassed alongside stretches of the interstate, left to decompose into the wounded earth. Its surface was swept clean. Not disused; rather, seldom used.

Perhaps too frequently used.

If there were other structures near the building, he never noticed them. Perhaps there were none; perhaps they were simply inconsequential in comparison. Sometimes he thought of an immense office building raised out of the wilderness of an industrial park or a vast stadium born of the leveled wasteland of urban renewal, left alone and alien in a region where the
genius loci
ultimately reconquered. A barren space, encroached upon by that which was beyond, surrounded the building—sometimes grass-latticed pavement (parking lot?), sometimes a scorched and eroded barrier of weeds (ground zero?).

Desolation, not wholly dead.

Abandoned, not entirely forgotten.

The lights in the windows, which he was certain he had seen from across the water, never shone as they entered.

There was a wire fence, sometimes: barbed wire leaning from its summit, or maybe insulated balls of brown ceramic nestling high-voltage lines. No matter. All was rusted, corroded, sagging like the skeletal remains that rotted at its base. When there was a fence at all.

If there was a fence, gaps pierced the wire barrier like the rotted lace of a corpse's mantilla. Sometimes the gate lay in wreckage beneath its graffitied arch: Abandon Hope. Joy Through Work. War Is Peace. Ask Not.

My Honor Is Loyalty.

***

One of his dreams is a fantasy of Nazis.

He knows that they are Nazis because they are all wearing jack boots and black uniforms, SS insignia and swastika armbands, monocles and Luger pistols. And there are men in slouch-brim hats and leather overcoats, all wearing thick glasses—Gestapo, they have to be. White-clad surgeons with button-up-the-back surplices, each one resembling Lionel Atwill, suck glowing fluids into improbable hypodermics, send tentative spurts pulsing from their needles.

Monocles and thick-lensed spectacles and glass-hard blue eyes peer downward. Their faces are distorted and hideous—as if he, or they, someone, is viewing this perspective through a magnifying glass. The men in black uniforms are goose-stepping and Heil-Hitlering in geometric patterns behind the grinning misshapen faces of the doctors.