Boundaries (17 page)

This is a bright, early summer morning, and shafts of yellow sunlight filter in through the tall windows. There’s a lot of fine dust in the air. Maude notes it. She remembers reading that most house dust is made up of bits of human skin.

The dust diffuses the sunlight.

She fancies, then, that she sees something dark and (she strains to see and understand) . . . tense moving in the far half of the empty room, through the diffuse sunlight. She smiles uneasily. Dark and
tense
? No. Dark and
graceful
. That would be Anne. That would be the spirit of Anne Case.

But then the thing is gone suddenly and she stops smiling. "Anne?" she whispers. "Are you still here, Anne?" There is no sound. The room is quiet and empty and the sunlight is diffuse and nothing moves.

When she leaves the room a quarter of an hour later, she locks the door behind her. She’s not sure why. She believes that Anne’s spirit is gentle and nonaggressive. She believes that she would welcome it, speak with it, if it showed itself. But she’s not sure what, exactly, she saw in the third floor ballroom. Something tall, stocky, mannish, her memory tells her, but she rejects that image out of hand. She does not want a spirit that is tall, stocky, and mannish moving about in her house. That would be the stuff that nightmares are made of. Better a lithe and gentle spirit. The spirit of Anne Case.

~ * ~

"I saw her today," she tells her husband later.

"Who? Our spook?" he says.

"Please don’t refer to her that way. It’s . . . disrespectful."

Peter chuckles a bit; then, upon a scornful look from Maude, says, "I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. ‘Spook’ is a very acceptable word."

"No. Not to me. It’s . . . ungentle, uncaring. Doesn’t it . . . move you, Peter, that some poor woman was
murdered
here? Think of the agony she must have suffered."

"I would say that any murder victim probably feels agony, Maude."

"Yes, but not just
any
murder victim’s spirit walks about in our house."

There’s silence for a moment. Then Peter says, "You’re really quite sure of that, aren’t you?”

“Yes."

"That simple?"

"For God’s sake, Peter, I’ve
seen
her."

"Have you? I mean, have you
really
? Enough that if you were to see her photograph you could say, ‘Yes, the spook I saw in my house is this woman’?"

Silence.

"Maude?" Peter coaxes.

"I’ve seen her photograph. I went to the newspaper and looked in their morgue—that’s what they call their library of old newspapers, you know. A morgue. Makes me shudder. And, yes, the spirit I’ve seen here is definitely Anne. I have no doubt of it."

"Same eyes? Same nose, same mouth? Everything matches?"

"Oh, dammit, Peter! Not everything in life can be . . . quantified."

"Quantified?"

"You know what I mean. Not everything is black or white, hot or cold, up or down." She pauses. "No, if I have to be entirely truthful, I have
not
seen the woman in the photograph. There, do you feel better? Does that make you feel superior, Peter?"

"No reason to get angry." He’s concerned. She’s making much more of the whole thing than he thinks is healthy. "I just can’t say that I’m as . . . caught up in this—"

"But I
know
it’s Anne as surely as I know anything. Didn’t I tell you I saw her today? Didn’t I tell you that?"

"What exactly
did
you see?"

"Her, dammit!
Anne Case!
Upstairs, in that big room on the third floor. She was there, and I saw her." A quick pause, then Maude hurries on, "Not her face, if that’s what you’re wondering, not her eyes, or her mouth. I don’t need to see any of that, Peter, because I
sensed
her."

"Anne Case?" Peter says resignedly.

"Yes. Anne Case." The image of the tall, stocky, mannish figure in the third floor ballroom has all but receded into her subconscious. She recalls it only briefly, pushes it back. "Anne Case," she says again, with feeling.

~ * ~

David sat rigidly on the edge of his bed in his cottage on Oneida Lake. He was apprehensive. A strange sense of elation filled him and it made him fearful, uncertain: How well did he know himself, after all? This well? He focused on the four blue capsules—A2d-40—in his open right hand. Did he know himself well enough to trust that he was going back for all the right reasons?

To find Anne?

To confront her killer? (If Brian Fisher had indeed been her killer; David wasn’t sure, and he didn’t know why he wasn’t sure.)

To assure himself that death had brought peace to her, at last?

Or was he going back because something very deep inside him intended to stay? Because something inside him needed the peace that that place seemed to offer?

If he had asked himself the same questions three weeks earlier—before Anne’s death—he thought that his answer would have been a quick laugh.

His gaze drifted slightly. It took in his fingers, which were long and pale; the third finger curved slightly outward, toward the little finger. An accident thirty years before had caused that curvature. Occasionally the finger ached dully, as if there were something growing inside it. He had wondered often if, as he aged, the finger would give him more constant pain. He thought now,
The strange links we have with our past and our future
.

And then he raised his hand and put first one, then another of the blue capsules of A2d-40 into his mouth. There was a tall glass half-filled with water on a table next to the bed. He drank all the water.

Within a minute, he felt groggy.

Shortly after that, he was asleep.

A
nne Case’s killer often remembered the moment of her death. And when he did, it was with great regret, because her death had happened with such numbing swiftness.

He had not wanted it to be so quick. It had been like turning out a light. He wanted to enjoy her, her agony and her confusion. He had been entitled—
she
had entitled him. But, as was often said of orgasm, the whole thing had been an anticlimax.

It could not be helped, though. It had been the luck of the draw, the twist of fate—it had happened the way it had happened and nothing would ever change it.

He could take what pleasure he could from what had happened. But what
had
happened was so very unimpressive—life metamorphosing into death over the period of a moment or two. No confusion; No agony.

In his mental replaying of these moments, he sometimes had Anne Case turn and face him and he imagined that her face was twisted with fear. But that was ultimately unsatisfying because he knew that it was a fiction. It was more satisfying to keep her mentally turned away and imagine that her face, hidden from him, had been twisted by fear. Logically, it could have been no other way. If he had been in her shoes, fear would have paralyzed him. He would have had no choice but to surrender to whatever the moment had in store.

But he had
known
her and he knew now that fear simply could not have entangled her the way he had so desperately wanted it to. Fear already wrapped her up and entangled her from within, and had for decades. How could he hope to bring it to her from without? He had been aware of that, he realized now, even as he had watched from inside her closet as she tended to her damned plant.

He had even known it when he had raped her and she had simply
watched
him do it. Christ, he had nearly killed her then. How could she have simply
watched
him? It was unnatural!

But it was too bad that she was dead. She had been a good plaything. She had brought him pleasure. She’d
bouyed
him up and had shown him what a class act he was, had confirmed it for him. Certainly she was a discriminating woman. It was obvious even in the way she furnished her house—with sturdy utilitarian pieces.

She was no one’s fool.

But neither was he.
She
had proven it. She had not made a fool of him.

Except, perhaps, in the way she had died.

But it had not been her choice. It had been the luck of the knife. The slant of her back and the luck of the knife. She was too thin, the knife a centimeter too long. Perhaps if she had not been bending over. Perhaps in bending over she had brought her heart closer to the point of the knife. It was reasonable.

And he was a reasonable man.

~ * ~

David, lying on his back, hands at his sides, his head against the trunk of a fallen tree, was aware that he was naked. It embarrassed him. It reminded him strongly of dreams of being naked; of his vast humiliation, in those dreams, at his own nakedness. But no one but he had ever cared about it in his dreams, and there was no one to care about it here.

He remembered that he had not been naked when he had come here before. This was new. This was different. And he didn’t know what to make of it. His body displeased him, for one thing. It was out of shape, not hairy enough—considering that male bodies should always be hairy around the chest, at least—and his genitals were too obvious against his pale thighs; they were genitals which could not be taken for granted, even amidst general nakedness.

It occurred to him that his nakedness was a symbol—all too real—of his death.

That was a possibility he could not dismiss. Perhaps he really was dead, here, amongst the trees, and the dust hanging in the air, and the cold light.

He wanted clothes, suddenly. He was cold, and naked, and he wanted clothes.

The tree against which his head rested was clearly long dead because moss covered it and he could feel, beneath his skull, that it was fleshy, soft.

He scrambled to his feet, aware of the insects that lived in such trees, that fed on such decay. He stared at the trunk of the tree; he saw that there were insects on it—elongated, gunmetal blue insects which moved fluidly about on the tree trunk, some carrying bits of the rust-red meat of the tree with them.

He swiped at his hair, convinced that some of these insects were moving about in it. But his hand passed over nothing but his hair and his skull, so he was able to calm himself.

He dwelt on his nakedness again. Now he found it vaguely stimulating—as it always had been in his dreams—and he listened closely for voices from within the forest to tell him that he was on the verge of being found.

It came to him suddenly that he did not remember going through a tunnel toward the light. It was what had happened before, both a week ago, and, as well, five years ago, when he had nearly drowned. But he
must
have gone through the tunnel. It was the way
into
this place, after all; it was the entrance, the door. He could not have gotten here otherwise. But he didn’t remember it. Clearly, he had simply forgotten.

But he had forgotten nothing else.

Again he focused on his nakedness. He looked down at himself and thought that he was exposed, vulnerable. It did not stimulate him. He thought of bees and remembered that they were drawn to the smell of sweat. He thought that if there were bees here they would be drawn to him because, he could see now, he was sweating.

And then he saw that there
were
bees. Big fat honeybees that drifted from here to there—from flower to flower; one from a spray of tiny purple flowers near the trunk of the dead tree to what looked like dandelions close by, and then to the clover, which was in abundance. Others flew slowly, their wings straining against the load of pollen they carried. There were a dozen bees, David thought. Two dozen. And he was afraid for himself because of his nakedness.