AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD (14 page)

“There he goes. He used to hypnotize himself every winter night in front of the fire when we were growing up. It would scare William to death. He’d go into a kind of trance, and have trouble waking up. I think he’s psychic. I bet he could channel spirits if he wanted to.”

Bernard glanced around at the darkened cabin. Their shadows were leaping monstrously on the far walls. “Don’t mention spirits, Maya. Not here. Not at night.”

“Oh,
Bernard.
”

“I mean it.”

“Bernard lived in a haunted house when he was little,” Maya explained to Sarah. “The spirit of his great-aunt went wailing up and down the stairs. And there was another one
in the kitchen who used to rattle the pots and pans. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

Bernard said sourly, “Yes.”

“Tell Sarah about it. It’s fascinating.”

“No. It’s nothing.”

“Oh, please tell,” said Sarah, sitting up and linking her arms around her knees. “Please.”

“No.”

“It was his great-aunt Sadie,” Maya said. “She left her house to Bernard’s father, who was her favorite nephew. Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Bernard lived in it while he was growing up. It was a big old rambling place, with the wind blowing in through the cracks, and on winter nights like tonight his father used to tell his mother that he could hear his aunt Sadie roaming up and down the stairs. Bernard’s parents would laugh about it, but poor Bernard would be frightened to death. He was only a little boy at the time. Sometimes his father would say that he could hear Sadie’s mother—that was his grandmother—in the kitchen, cooking up a storm, the way she used to when she was alive. Poor Bernard would lie in bed night after night, listening to the stairs creak and thinking he heard the pots and pans rattling in the kitchen.”

“I hated that house,” said Bernard grimly. “When I was ten, my parents sold it and moved to a modern development. It was the happiest day of my life. I never had any trouble sleeping after that. For all I know, Aunt Sadie and her mother are still in the old house, cooking and walking the stairs.”

“That’s a poignant story, Bernard,” said Snooky, sitting up.

Maya gave him an amused look. “So you’re awake now, Snooks? Any psychic dreams this time? Can you read our fortunes?”

“Nothing psychic this time, My. Just images. Fire lizards, eagles, things like that.” He fell silent, brooding.

“William used to hate when you did that.”

“William hated when I did anything.”

“William is afraid of anything he doesn’t understand,” said Maya. “The supernatural. Trances. Ghosts. Snooky.”

“William has a very limited imagination. The only thing he truly understands is money. How to handle it, what to do with it, how to make lots of it.”

“You never learned that last bit,” said Maya.

“No. I never did.”

The wind roared outside, and the windows rattled. Bernard glanced about uneasily. “I’m going to bed, Maya. Wake me when the storm is over.”

“Good night, darling.”

“Good night.”

Much later, in the small hours of the night, Bernard awoke with a creeping feeling of fear. He lay unmoving, straining his ears to listen, his eyes open and staring in the darkness, his nerves on fire. There was something that had awakened him … a bumping noise of some kind … 
somewhere in the cabin!

Visions of his great-aunt Sadie as he had imagined her in his childhood, her image drawn from a small black-and-white Victorian photograph that his father had kept lovingly enshrined in the family album, floated in front of his mind’s eye. Her stubborn jaw, pug nose, protuberant eyes and graying hair, which was parted in the middle and swept unforgivingly backwards to an unseen locus on the back of her head—all the features that used to haunt his nights when he was small—came back to him vividly. The fact that her eye was kindly and her face, however ugly, had a gentle look to it, had not made an impression on his boyhood mind at all. To him she was the monster of his dreams, sweeping up and down the stairs, bumping into the furniture, wailing his name through the night: “
Bernard … Bernard, come to me … Bernard!
” And her nightmare mother, cooking up a storm in the kitchen—to Bernard’s childhood mind, this inadvertent phrase of his father’s meant that his great-grandmother was cooking up a real storm, busily mixing up thunderclouds, stirring the
cauldron with lightning bolts, boiling up rain. He always saw her with her white head surrounded by black rumbling clouds and mist, cackling wildly as she mixed up a hell’s brew of a storm, stirring the broth with broken tree trunks, adding a touch of fog and mist, seasoning it all with thunderclaps. To this day, a fierce thunderstorm evoked images in his mind of his great-grandmother bent over a black kettle that raged and boiled as the lightning bolts crackled their eerie path to the ground.

He lay still, breathing loudly and nervously. All at once there was a tremendous
thump
against the wall of his bedroom. The walls shuddered and creaked. Bernard gasped. From somewhere in the cabin came a faint groan. Bernard broke out in a cold sweat. He put out a trembling hand and touched Maya’s shoulder, partly to make sure she was still alive, partly to awaken her.

“Maya?” he breathed.

She rolled over in her sleep. “Mmmmpththmph?”

“Maya, wake up.
Wake up.
”

“Mmmhththktph?”

“Wake up!”

She opened a drowsy eye. “Whatsit? Whatsmatter?”

“Maya … 
do you hear that?
”

Suddenly the
thump
came again, louder than before. There was a faint, strangled cry from somewhere else in the cabin. The walls shuddered, then were still.

“Maya,” Bernard said, barely breathing, “Maya … 
what is that?
”

To his astonishment, his wife began to laugh quietly. She rolled over and drew the coverlet up to her chin. “Bernard, sometimes you amaze me,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Darling,” she said drowsily, “please go back to sleep. It’s nothing. It’ll stop soon.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m psychic, like my brother. I guarantee it’ll stop. Now go back to sleep, sweetheart. It’s—” she sleepily checked the alarm clock, which glowed faintly in the darkness,
“it’s four o’clock in the morning. Snooky will have us up at eight for breakfast. Go to sleep.”

“
Maya
,” whispered Bernard in agony, but she had already dozed off. He lay still, his body lathered in sweat, his ears straining for the slightest sound. There was another crash, and an eerie cry. He shuddered down to his bones. What if it wasn’t the ghost of Aunt Sadie … what if it was an intruder, slitting Snooky and Sarah’s throats, all as mere practice before he came after Maya and himself? How could Maya be so calm?

There was a muffled
thump
against the wall, followed by a stifled groan. Bernard lay still for a moment, then threw off the covers and padded nervously over to the wall, mincing across the room on cold feet. The wall shook as two bodies hurtled into it from the other side. There was the sound of muffled laughter, a few giggles and whispers, and then everything was still.

Bernard felt very, very grim. He padded back to bed, examined the clockface, its phosphorescent hands telling him it was 4:10
A.M.
, and switched on the reading lamp.

“Maya,” he said.

“Yes?”

“It’s four-ten in the morning.”

She rolled over and smiled at him sleepily. “I can’t help that, Bernard. They’re young and energetic. We were like that once, too. Remember? Now turn off the light, darling, and try to get some sleep. You’re going to be cranky all day tomorrow otherwise.”

“I’m going to be cranky, all right. I have something to be cranky about.”

There was a crash, and more muffled laughter from the other bedroom.

“Maya.”

“Yes, darling?”

“I want to go home.
Now.
”

There was more laughter, and now they could hear Sarah’s voice clearly, raised in a kind of gasp. “Oh, Snooky … honestly … I don’t think that’s possible—!” It
ended in a gasp of laughter, and the muffled sound of his voice.

“I don’t think we can go home now, Bernard. It’s so early in the morning. I wouldn’t trust you to drive in the state you’re in.”

“What are they doing in there, Maya? Inhaling laughing gas?”

“Please go back to sleep.”

“I think they’re doing something illegal.” Bernard switched off the light and hunched down underneath the covers. Misty, in bed between the two of them, snored pleasantly, her sleep undisturbed by Snooky’s nocturnal activities. “I’m going to have a little talk with Snooky in the morning.”

“They’re young and in love, Bernard. Leave them alone. We’ve stayed up all night, too.”

“Not where someone could
hear
us.”

“I’m sure they don’t know. Good night, darling.”

“Good night.”

Bernard stayed up, plotting his revenge, until he finally dozed off around five.

Bernard, inventive as he was, and with all the time in the world to think about it, solved the problem neatly by the following evening. He got into bed, kissed his wife a loving good-night, turned out the lights and waited. Maya drifted off immediately, her hands tucked underneath the pillow, on her face the gentle, dreamy expression that Bernard loved. A shaft of moonlight slanted in through the curtains and picked out her features, making her look very pale and ethereal, the sharp bones in her cheeks heightened by shadows, her face as narrow and mysterious in sleep as an elf’s. Bernard waited. At last his patience was rewarded. There was a crash against the wall, and quiet snorts of laughter. Bernard threw off the covers, sat up in bed, and said at the top of his lungs,

“WHAT’S THAT, MAYA? WHAT’S THAT? DO YOU HEAR SOMETHING?”

Maya turned and murmured something in her sleep. “Leave m’lone. What? Hmmtphph?”

“MAYA, WAKE UP. I THINK YOUR BROTHER IS BEING KILLED. THERE’S A TERRIBLE NOISE FROM HIS ROOM.”

This had the desired effect. There was a sudden, total silence from the other side of the wall. Bernard imagined Snooky and his girlfriend startled from their absorption in each other, lying in bed with their heads up, eyes startled, ears straining to hear.

“MAYA, I THINK I SHOULD GO INVESTIGATE. THERE WAS A TERRIBLE NOISE. IT SOUNDED LIKE SOMEBODY WAS BEING KILLED, OR LIKE A PIG BEING STUCK. DON’T STOP ME. I’M GOING TO GO OVER THERE. SOMEBODY SHOULD WARN SNOOKY.”

Maya pulled the covers up over her head.

Bernard listened. There was a deep, tranquil silence from the other side of the wall; the proverbial silence of the graveyard. He smiled grimly.

“ALL RIGHT, IF YOU THINK I SHOULDN’T, I WON’T, BUT I’M TELLING YOU, THERE WAS SOMETHING. SOME KIND OF STRANGE NOISE. ALL RIGHT. GOOD NIGHT, MAYA.”

Maya giggled sleepily.

“SLEEP WELL. ARE YOU SURE IT WASN’T ANYTHING? ALL RIGHT. GOOD NIGHT.”

Bernard lay down and plumped the pillow up around his head. There was silence from the direction of Snooky’s bedroom. Outside his window, a lone owl hooted eerily. There was the sound of the wind in the trees, the owl, his own and Maya’s breathing, Misty’s snoring, and nothing else. Over the cabin, peace and quiet reigned.

Sarah stayed at the cabin for a few days—during which time Bernard’s sleep was undisturbed—and then thanked them all and left. “I really have to get back,” she explained to Snooky. “Irma still needs me, and God knows what Gertie’s been up to. I know they can’t fend for themselves in that big house.”

“They did fine while you were in college.”

“I know, but it’s different now. Irma still isn’t herself.”

“All right. I’ll drive you back. Are you sure you’re not letting Bernard drive you away?”

“Not at all,” said Sarah. “Bernard is … is a poppet.”

“Sarah says you’re a poppet,” Snooky said later that day.

Bernard looked offended.

“She says she enjoys your company.”

Bernard shrugged.

“Yes,” said Snooky. “I don’t get it either. What are your plans for today?”

“We’re going antiquing,” said Maya.

“Antiquing? What an excellent idea.”

“Want to come along? You might find something interesting.”

“Not me. I don’t have any place to put anything. You know me, Maya.”

Maya nodded. With his succession of rented or borrowed homes, Snooky had learned the difficult lesson of keeping his possessions to a minimum, like a Zen monk. He typically appeared on her front doorstep with a brown paper bag containing his toothbrush, a few items of clothing, and little more. He supplemented any deficiencies in his wardrobe by borrowing freely from Bernard’s.

“There are some good stores around here. The two of you should go take a look. You can’t come to Vermont and not go shopping for antiques, anyway. It’s against the law.”

“Give me the names of some stores we can go to, will you?”

Snooky tilted back his chair. “Let’s see. There’s the Pink Boar in Lyle. You can’t miss it. It’s very distinctive. It’s got this enormous scarlet pig painted on a sign above the door. You go past the main square and turn right on Oak Street. And in Wolfingham, there’s a whole street full of shops. Ask anyone there, they’ll be able to direct you.”

“All right, Snooks. We’ll be back in time for dinner.”

“Somehow,” said Snooky, “I had guessed that.”

“What’s this, Maya?”

Bernard held up a small polished spindle of wood. It had a rounded knob on either end and fit snugly into the palm of his hand.

“I don’t know, darling.”

“There are two of them. Like miniature dumbbells.”

“I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

“Or how about this?” It was a tiny, but unexpectedly heavy, black metal box with the name
SYLVIA
in raised metal letters on the top.

“I have no idea. I can’t imagine what Sylvia used it for.”

Bernard pawed through the pile of clutter in the back of the shop. “This is great, Maya. Look at this.” He showed
her a small white ashtray with a red crown in the middle. Underneath the crown were the gold letters
E II R.
Around the letters was a golden scroll that read,
THE QUEEN’S SILVER JUBILEE
, 1952–1977.