Night Visions (18 page)

JANUARY 4, 1999
11:06 A.M.

Years ago, silence brought Veronica to the library. It made her want to learn more, talk less, and wear sexy clothing. For those who come only to check out and return books, the library is nothing more than a storage facility—a stuffy place where dust gathers on the things—books—we can live without. But for anyone who stays, passions burn in these uncomfortable chairs and temperature-controlled rooms. Surreptitious glances, the faint smell of perfume and sweat, skintight clothing, and the way someone's hand catches the light as he turns a page. Perhaps it's being in a place devoted to quiet concentration that ignites so much desire. Veronica isn't sure, but she knows one thing—coming to a library is never simply about the books.

For almost a year, the churchlike silence of the Durham Public Library has tormented her. Monday mornings are particularly bad. It's always slow, and the empty stillness gives her too much time to think. She can't remember when she last slept for
more than a few hours, and every time she closes her eyes, violent images return—the kind that would make most people avoid horror movies and ice hockey.

She yawns and rubs her eyes. As if she's suddenly turning a corner and running into something, another vision flashes before her.

 

A dark man in ragged clothing waits quietly on a wooden bridge. Slowly, out of the dark, a figure steps into the faint light of a hook-shaped street lamp. Her eyes are a deep, piercing blue, and her face is flushed—not from the cold, but from crying. The man spins suddenly on one foot, like a dancer, and slashes into her stomach with a knife. She screams, reaching for his hand, but he quickly pulls the blade away. It cuts deeply into her palm.

The sound of an approaching train grows like a tremor, rumbling through the boards beneath her feet and up her body. Before he can take another step, she shoves him into the railing. He yells, dropping the knife, but the baritone of the train's horn mutes his cry. A jagged iron rod from the railing has lanced his lower side. She moves forward tentatively, then helps him pull free. She presses her hands on the bleeding wound, and he says something she can't hear. His eyes express an odd mixture of sorrow and gratitude, and this frightens her more than the pain. The train is practically beneath them.

He hurls himself over the ledge.

 

With a start, Veronica sits up. The screen saver shows a colorful fish swimming in circles; several yellow sticky notes surround the screen, and her book has fallen to the floor.

“I'm not closing my eyes anymore,” she mutters to herself.

“Good; we're not paying you to sleep on the job.” Mildred scowls a bit as she straightens a pile of “Story Time at the Library” pamphlets and walks toward the newspaper racks.

“Technically, you're not paying me at all,” Veronica snaps after her.

Mildred has been assistant librarian for twenty-one years and acts as if she owns the place. For almost the same amount of time, she has been next in line for head librarian, but Caroline won't retire. At seventy-nine, she has the energy of someone half her age, and assures Mildred every day that she doesn't plan to die or step down anytime soon. So on Mondays, Caroline's day off, Mildred takes the opportunity to walk around the stacks like a drill sergeant, barking orders and making faces.

Veronica picks up the book and opens to Canto XX.

She's not sure when it started, but a few years ago, she began reading other people's books. Every few months, she picks an attractive man who comes in regularly, keeps track of his account, and reads each return. She likes to imagine what these stories say about him—his boyhood fantasies of being a superhero or crime fighter, the ideal women he wants to love, or at least have sex with, and his dreams for power and influence. But this one is different. He doesn't read what she expects. Tall, athletic, and with dark brown skin, his beauty arrested her from the start. He asked for a library card, and she handed him the form nervously. At the top, in large black letters, he wrote Maxwell Harris, then looked up.

“You can call me Max,” he said with a charming smile, and they shook hands.

“So what brings you to the library, Max?” She couldn't believe she'd said something so stupid. It must have sounded like a bad pickup line, because he chuckled before answering.

“Books.”

“Well, we're a little short on those right now. But we do have a good collection of silent films and country music.”

“What?”

“Just kidding.” Veronica stamped his temporary user card and handed it over. “Welcome to the Durham Public Library.”

He has been her favorite reader ever since, not just because his body looks as if it were chiseled from marble, but because he writes lightly penciled notes in the margins. If Mildred finds out, she will cancel his card, but Veronica won't tell. She reads each note as if it were meant for her. In a few weeks, she has fallen in love with him.

He returned Dante's
Inferno
on Friday:

The handwritten margin notes add:

 

Amphiaraus—a seer and warrior to whom Zeus granted immortality. He predicted the disastrous attempt to restore Polynices to the throne at Thebes.

How could someone who knows the future ever live in the present?

 

Veronica wonders why he asks this. To her, it seems like the wrong question. Dante believed that the past was a much greater burden than the future. And like him, she can understand the endless torment in continually reliving it—knowing history without the outcome and looking back only to see mis
takes, lost loves, and missed chances.
Yes,
Veronica thinks,
this is the wrong question.
Max must not know what it's like to look behind and stumble backwards.

JANUARY 5, 1999
3:02 A.M.

He lies naked with his arms stretched out to his sides and his legs tied together. There is no blood on the bed. The only colors in the room seem to be the whiteness of his buttocks and the ocean blue tattoo on his right shoulder—a modest-sized tear hanging above the initials I. D. The quiet of the room feels charged with anticipation.

His head has been twisted around, and his chin rests on the tattooed shoulder, making the tear look as if it just fell from his open eyes. Veronica reaches for it, but something is wrong. Her arm isn't long enough. She stretches, but so does the room. Her gestures become more frantic, and the gap widens. Somewhere far away, music—almost too soft to hear—plays sorrowfully. She knows it, but can't remember why or from where.

 

Her eyes open, and she recognizes the carpet on her living room floor. She gets up and runs to the bedroom. Nothing.

In the bathroom, she turns on the light and looks at her nightgown. No blood, bruises, or torn clothing. No wounds on her chest or stomach. Too many times she has woken up with evidence that something terrible has happened, but she can't remember what. For the last eight months, she hasn't gone out after work; she just locks herself in the apartment by sunset. She has become terrified of nights like this.

She finds nothing this time—no clue to a mystery she can't solve. In the kitchen, she turns on the overhead light, pours a
glass of water, and opens a bag of oatmeal raisin cookies. She carries the bag with her to the bedroom. On the way, she stubs her toe on the living room table, dropping the bag.

“Crap.”

She starts picking them up. One cookie has rolled partially underneath the couch and sits next to a book. She slides it toward her. The cover is soft and grimy. The upper right-hand corner curls up. She doesn't recognize it in the dark, so she walks back to the kitchen and turns on the light.

It's a Gideon's Bible, but not one from her collection in the closet. She stands there until her feet feel cold from the linoleum and her lower back is moist with sweat. Slowly, she opens the cover, and written in the upper left-hand corner is a name in her handwriting: Ian Dickerson.

She doesn't drop the book or move. She just stands there until she realizes that the stains on the page are from her tears.

A
rtemus Beecher lives in a basement apartment that smells like rotting vegetables and barbecue sauce. Piles of newspapers line the walls, and a hazy yellow light glows from a lamp in the corner of the living room. A jaundiced crucifix hangs on the wood-paneled wall separating the two main rooms. The couch has been knocked over, and parts of the dirty gray carpet stick up like needles on a porcupine's back. At the top of the far wall, a window—the only window—is partially open, and Samantha notices the room reflected in its pane. Two officers move quietly and speak in hushed tones around the circular brown stain on the floor.

Another says to Frank, “Forensics is on the way.”

Samantha walks into the bedroom, which is crowded with more newspapers, a small desk, and an unmade bed. She wonders how Arty found solace in the chaos of so many papers. At the clinic, he sat calmly with those large pages spread out in front of him. Samantha had never considered finding comfort that way. Would reading words that smear and fade with every touch make her feel better? She didn't think so.

Samantha notices a book on the comforter and picks it up. It has countless dog-eared pages and sticky notes:
The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
by Franz Kafka. The first sentence is underlined: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

“Sam?” Frank walks into the room.

She looks up.

“The police are still trying to contact the landlady,” he continues. “But it doesn't look like anyone has been here for a few days.”

“I don't understand,” she says, walking back into the living room.

“What?”

“Assuming that someone was killed here, why move the body?”

“Well, it slows down the investigation. It makes it more difficult to catch the killer.”

“But why worry about that now? There was no attempt to hide anything before. Other than Catherine, it has been about the ritual.”

A uniformed officer enters the living room through the front door and signals to Frank. They communicate in whispers, standing at a distance from everyone else in the room.

Samantha opens the story again, looking for the next underlined passage: “he fell down with a little cry upon all his numerous legs. Hardly was he down when he experienced for the first time this morning a sense of physical comfort; his legs had firm ground under them; they were completely obedient, as he noted with joy; they even strove to carry him forward in whatever direction he chose; and he was inclined to believe that a final relief from all his sufferings was at hand.”

“Well?” She doesn't look up when Frank returns to her side.

“The police haven't found anything yet at Dr. Cooper's place, but Detective Snair just got a call from Saint Mary's Hospital.”

“And?”

“Dr. Cooper was in a car accident.”

“A car accident?” She turns to him.

“Yeah.”

“Is she all right?”

“No. She's dead.”

“No.” Her eyes widen, and her voice sounds tight and dry. “I don't believe it.”

“I'm sorry—”

“Have someone check out the car.”

“The police are investigating—”

“No,” she interrupts. “Someone from the corporation.”

Samantha hurries to the front door and up the stairs without waiting for Frank to respond. The night air feels thin and hard, as if she's standing at five thousand feet. For a moment, she wishes there were more stairs—anything so she could keep moving, so she could climb far away from basement apartments, unanswered questions, and sleepless nights.

 

The church is still on Friday night. No choir sings in preparation for Sunday services. No priest hears confession. Only the candles glow steadily in the dim light. Samantha searches for the words to pray, but without music she can't find a starting tempo. Maybe true prayer is like crying, she thinks. Something that needs to well up inside until it breaks free like water from a cracked dam. She wonders how much longer she will have to wait for the tears of prayer. Her eyes stay dry.

She has always admired actors who can weep on cue, but she can never trust them. Some things shouldn't be easy to control.

Frank coughs, and the sound startles her. The church doesn't feel the same with him beside her. He's there because she insisted they stop. She's there for herself. Neither seems to be the right reason for coming. She knows Frank is impatient to leave, to take her home, then go to Dr. Cooper's, but Samantha wants to sit for a few more minutes. There is nothing like the silence that comes from the smell of faded incense, cold drafts, and uncomfortable wooden benches.

She looks up at the cross, studying the spikes through Christ's palms and feet. The historical inaccuracy never bothered her before. Spikes were driven through Christ's wrists, not palms, because the flesh there would tear too easily. In this sculpture, his writhing hands seem to struggle for freedom, each finger experiencing a separate agony. What is it about hands that makes artists want to paint and sculpt them? Is it the way hands communicate so much pain and tenderness without speaking?

Her body and mind ache. From fear, loneliness, uncertainty. Uncertainty about whether the sadnesses of life will keep her awake forever. Uncertainty about her connection to Endymion's Circle, the count, the crimes themselves. She feels as if she were spinning in the craziness of it all.

God. Fate. A curse.

For Samantha, they all seem to be part of the same desire. The desire to believe in something. To explain pain and suffering. To explain the mark carved into her own writhing body. To make sense out of the chaos of life. Frank thinks it's easier to believe in a curse than to live without answers.
But he's wrong
, she thinks.
It's much harder to believe in something we can't control.

“I'm ready.” Her voice echoes loudly.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Let's go.”

 

Samantha notices the squad car in front of her apartment as they turn the corner on Twenty-first Street. Frank pulls alongside it, and she rolls down her window.

“Hey, Frank,” the officer in the driver's seat calls out pleasantly.

“Sam, this is Officer Chang. He and his partner will be keeping an eye on you.”

“Hi. You can call me Wayland.” He smiles. “Officer Brooks is in the building. He's posted outside your door. If you need anything, just let us know.”

“Thanks.”

“I'll walk you upstairs,” Frank says as he pulls into the driveway.

On the third floor, a uniformed officer sits on a folding chair by her front door. He fills most of the narrow hallway and has to stand to let them pass. He introduces himself clumsily, and his lanky body, pale skin, and dark hair unfashionably parted on one side remind her more of a high school counselor than a cop. Once she unlocks her door, Frank walks ahead of her. To Sam, this extra precaution seems somewhat scripted, like something in a thriller movie.

“After I check out Dr. Cooper's place, I'll come back. Just to see how things are going.”

“You don't need to do that.”

“I want to.” He smiles.

“We're missing something, Frank.”

“I know.”

“The change of pattern doesn't make sense.”

“We'll figure it out.”

As he turns, Samantha places her hand gently on his back. He lingers, and her mind races with reasons and excuses for him to stay. But she can't ask. Not now. Not with so many unanswered questions about the case.

“I'll see you later,” she says, and her words rise in pitch, as if she is asking a question.

He turns and smiles. “Definitely.”

Frank steps into the hallway, closing the door behind him. It leaves a hollow sound, a thud that echoes throughout her empty, lonely apartment.