Cul-de-Sac (3 page)

“What’s wrong?” She chastised herself for asking it again, he obviously wasn’t ready to talk yet. “I’ll go take a shower.” Annie stepped into the light from the bathroom doorway and turned, made sure Paul was watching, then slowly raised her dress. Once in a rare moment of sexual candor he had told her that the image of a woman slowly raising a hem and eventually revealing she was wearing no underpants … he found it powerfully arousing. Annie had used this information to great success on several occasions.

But now Paul watched her blankly. When he finally understood what she was doing he looked away in embarrassment. Annie felt ashamed of herself. She went into the bathroom and closed the door, realizing only later that she’d left Paul in the dark.

After showering quickly Annie wrapped herself in a towel and came into the bedroom to find that Paul had turned on the little lamp by the mattress … he’d also torn off a six-foot length of
shade and had taped it to the window as far up as he could reach.

Before she could speak he pointed to the exposed upper portion of window and said, “See, you can still have the morning sun.”

She smiled but also wondered what was out there he didn’t want looking in. Cul-De-Sac had no neighbors within sight.

A section of water-stained window shade was still on the floor, Annie holding Paul by the arm and telling him the shade was an ancient map scroll, brown and rusty-red stains forming islands and isthmus-connected continents on a yellowing fabric sea.

Usually enchanted by Annie’s fanciful stories he listened now with dull expression.

She kept talking, hoping to lighten his mood. Encouraging him to his knees she took her husband by finger on circumnavigations that led to encounters with parrot-feathered natives, escapes from nose-boned cannibals, to islands where the women were beautiful and bare-breasted and the men wore only the briefest of loin cloths.

He began softly crying.

She wrapped him in her arms. “Is it the money?”

He didn’t answer.

Early in their marriage she withdrew everything she’d saved over the years to invest in Paul’s dream of buying old buildings, renovating them, then reselling at a profit … the dream failing on that crucial third point. Creditors had shut them down in North Carolina and Annie still wasn’t sure where Paul came up with the down payment for Cul-De-Sac, this decaying former hotel-hospital-asylum, this sixty-room monstrosity in the Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C.… but when he left North Carolina a month ago to start the renovations he promised that this time he’d make them rich.

“If we have to,” Annie said, “we’ll declare bankruptcy, I’ll go back to work, we’ll start over again.”

Paul had stopped crying but wasn’t replying to anything she said.

“Nothing matters as long as we stay together.” After Annie’s father died, her mother married and divorced three times, each
marriage more hateful, each divorce more acrimonious … Annie pledging herself not to repeat the pattern. She was with Paul for life.

He apologized.

She went over and opened a suitcase, bringing out a bottle of white white. “It’s not champagne …” Annie produced two plastic glasses that had an unnerving tendency to lose their stems. “And these aren’t crystal but—”

“Our anniversary,” Paul said, closing his eyes and looking as if he might start crying again.

“Three years tomorrow … and another reason I pulled this silly stunt of coming here to surprise you.”

“It wasn’t silly.” He sat next to her on the mattress.

“I even brought a corkscrew,” she said, bending to search through the suitcase.

Paul touched her dark red hair and quoted from the Bible, “You are my refuge and my fortress … you cover me with your feathers and under your wings I find trust.”

He had been a theology student, they’d met at graduate school and Paul sometimes joked that he gave up God for Annie. He was still a religious man and had remained active in what he called lay ministries, working with drug addicts and prison inmates.

As Annie looked into his soft and battered face she thought it telling that Paul had cast her as his refuge, his fortress, his winged comforter … instead of the other way around. She was the emotionally stronger of the two and also older, thirty-five to Paul’s thirty. Strange that she should have married a younger man considering that since the age of ten Annie had been in love with someone fifteen years her senior.

When she came up with the corkscrew Paul said, “I’ll go take a shower then we’ll have the wine … I mean the champagne.” He stood and took a few steps toward the bathroom before turning back to Annie. “I haven’t … kept myself very clean.”

She nodded.

“I feel … 
vulnerable
when I’m in the shower.”

“This is a big spooky place, being here alone at night I can see how you might—”

“I’m not alone.”

“You’re not?”

He came over and knelt next to her. Annie saw that one of those fat black flies had lodged in his hair, buzzing there, and while she tried to brush it loose Paul whispered to her, “Satan lives in Cul-De-Sac.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“Sometimes I open a door and he’s
just standing there
.”

“Oh Paul …”

“I first saw Satan floating in a bathtub.”

“Paul don’t …”

“Last time I fell asleep, when I woke up his face was
right there next to me
 … do you know what’s hanging out of his mouth—”

“Please stop, you’re scaring me.”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“Paul … how long have you been like this?”

His eyes were large with a kind of terrified wonder, his whispering becoming even softer. “Sometimes he plays a piano, I can hear Satan playing the piano … but then I go looking and I can never find the piano. And he’s always scratching at the walls, scratch, scratch, scratch … can you hear it, he’s scratching now, you probably think it’s mice but it’s not, it’s—”

She put a hand over his swollen lips.

Lying naked on the mattress, listening to the shower running in the next room, Annie got her mind in a twist wondering if Paul’s mental breakdown was so severe he might kill himself … or even try to hurt
her
. He could come back in here, see Annie on the mattress, think she was Satan and try to kill her. It’s terrible to be afraid of someone you love. Jesus.

Annie would’ve bet a million dollars she’d never fall asleep, too worried and frightened, but obviously she
had
slept because suddenly
she was awakening to a dark room, the lamp by the bed out, no illumination from the windows, just a slit of light showing under the door to the bathroom … and a figure standing, looming, at the foot of the mattress.

“Paul?”

The figure made a sound, like a pig’s grunt.

It was then she realized the shower was still running, Paul still in the bathroom … Annie shouting for him.

The intruder came down onto the mattress with her, Annie scrambling away but getting caught by the foot, being dragged close … he was incredibly strong and kept grunting, other animal sounds too, Annie thinking of what Paul had said about Satan, she wanted to call again for her husband but was too occupied trying to get away from—

He started laughing. “Who in the hell are you anyway?”

Annie kicked until he let go then she brought up the sheet to cover her nakedness before finding the lamp and turning it on.

He grimaced as if the light hurt. He had a long narrow face and large dark eyes, his black hair combed straight back. Wearing black slacks with a dark red shirt and heavy work boots, he was roughly Annie’s age, average height and weight … could’ve been considered handsome, nose very straight and jawline strong.

“What are you doing here!” she demanded.

He stretched out, elbow on the mattress, head resting casually on one hand. “I asked first.”

“I’m Paul’s wife.”

“St. Paul
married
?” He seemed amused but then his face darkened. “You see this is exactly what I was worried about, a man who keeps secrets from his partner.”

“What do you mean … partner?”

“Where’s the elephant?”

“
What?
” She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.

“The elephant, Mrs. St. Paul, the goddamn elephant.”

“How do you know Paul?”

He abruptly yanked on the sheet pulling it from Annie’s hands and exposing her breasts.

“Small tits but nice buttons.”

She tried to get the sheet back, then crossed her arms over her breasts.

“How’d you like having them chewed on?” he asked, drawing back his lips to reveal teeth that were clean and straight but grotesquely large … like something out of a bad monster movie. He slipped a hand under the sheet. “You ever take it up the ass?”

“Paul!”

“I have.”

“
Paul!
”

“St. Paul!” he shouted, mocking her. Then he stood on the mattress and started unbuckling his belt. “I’ll show you something you ain’t never seen.”

“Please.”

“Everybody begging for Old Scratch.”

They both heard the shower shut off. He took his time looking over at the bathroom door and down at Annie before stepping from the mattress. “You tell St. Paul if he’s double-crossed me on the elephant I will
personally
deliver his soul to hell.” He went up on his toes and left the room like something on hooves.

Annie reached the bathroom door just as Paul opened it, one towel around his waist, drying his hair with a second towel. “Boy that really felt good.” He looked almost normal again.

“There was a man here!”

Paul’s haunted expression returned.

“We have to get out of here!” Annie had already put her dress back on, wishing she had time to go through a suitcase for something more substantial to wear, for underpants and jeans and a heavy shirt.

“What’d he say?”

“He called you St. Paul, said something about an elephant—”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No but—”

“Did he show you what’s in Satan’s mouth?”

“What? Come on, we have to get out of here!” She was holding her purse, waiting impatiently for Paul to slip on his filthy pants and stained shirt. Annie kept an eye on the door to the hall … the intruder obviously had a key. How long had he been in the room before Annie awoke? What’d he mean about being Paul’s partner?… She couldn’t worry about any of that now, all she wanted was to be out of this awful place.

Paul took Annie’s hand and led her from the bedroom, along the second-floor hallway-balcony. Although he flipped on light circuits at another panel box it was like trying to illuminate a pyramid’s tomb with candles, the bulbs creating more shadows than light as the vast interior of Cul-De-Sac hungrily absorbed that light, wanting more. Annie was trembling, palms wet and mouth dry as she and Paul raced down the stairs, through the central hallway, to the front doors which Paul unlocked, then finally outside.

The relief jellied her knees, Annie breathing so deeply through her mouth that certain teeth were forced to acknowledge the cold night air.

As they hurried around toward the side of the building Annie turned and looked at the three levels of moonlit front porches supported by wooden columns and running the full length of Cul-De-Sac. When first driving up here with the Corwoods she’d thought the porches were charming but they looked sinister now … places for goons and vampires to heckle from the railings.

Reaching the old pickup truck Paul slid a key off the ring and gave it to Annie. She got in and started the engine. He closed the driver’s door but then just stood there. “Go around and get in!” she told him.

“You find a motel, I’ll—”

“Paul, get in this truck
right now
.”

“You go on, I’ll be fine,” he said with a calmness that, considering the situation, struck Annie as totally demented.

“Please get in, we’ll drive right to the police—”

A panicked expression broke his serenity. “Don’t go to the police, don’t call them … promise me you will
not
contact the police
 … if you love me, if you’ve ever trusted me, you have to promise you won’t—”

“
There he is!
” Over Paul’s shoulder Annie watched horrified as the intruder walked around the corner of the building.