Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (33 page)

The impulse had become an idea, which had in turn metamorphosed into a situation and finally developed into a story. She still didn’t know the ending, an extraordinary position to be in after having written over two hundred pages. She didn’t particularly care. She clawed her way out of a dazed, drugged sleep each day to virtually fling herself at the laptop, filled with exhilaration and passion. She turned off the computer each evening, worn, drained, and terrified that she had finally depleted her reserves in this last, brief burst of glory and would now wander through the empty days and hollow years with an unfinished book clutched in her arms like a dead child.

She kept the Racinet print near the table she worked at, studying it every time she lost her train of thought. Though they were separated by time and death, she and the artist shared a vision, for this was the thing that haunted her dreams with increasing clarity. This was the creature that filled her nights with a hot twist of erotic rapture and dark horror. And this thing was both hero and villain in the novel she worked on feverishly day after day. The Hound Lover. This was his story as surely as if he whispered it to her with his cold lips during the nightly rape of her unconscious mind. She didn’t know how; she only knew it was happening.

Shaking with fatigue, she poured a large glass of orange juice and took it out onto the back porch as twilight enclosed the yard and filled the woods with the shapes and shadows of another world. She hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since she had started writing again, though her throat was raw from smoking one cigarette after another.

Jo hadn’t come up last weekend, but she’d be here again on Saturday. Grace sighed and let her mind turn to mundane matters. She supposed she’d better tidy up the house, get some groceries, and do a couple of loads of laundry. She’d been wearing the same clothes, right down to her underwear, for three days. It wouldn’t be smart to let Jo think she was cracking up just when she was finally getting her life back on track.

She had learned to expect the howling to come soon after dusk, so it didn’t surprise her tonight. She had never caught more than the faintest glimpse of Racinet’s dog—for surely that’s what it was— nor did the poor thing ever eat any of the food she put out for it. She had ceased to worry about its lurking in the woods, though. Hadn’t the black hound brought Racinet good fortune, turning her from an unknown painter into a famous artist?

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles notwithstanding, mysterious black hounds weren’t necessarily evil. There were numerous stories of black dogs in folklore, tales of ghostly hounds who protected children, haunted battle grounds, and guarded sacred sites against the Devil. There were legends about shapeshifters, too: werehounds, canine demons, and men who turned themselves into black dogs to woo maidens, wreak mischief on local communities, and avenge wrongs.

Well, if that thing in the woods was a creature from the Other Side, she could only welcome its presence in her life. Haunting and possession were a pleasure after the hell she had been through these past three years.

Jo knew her too well to interfere with her work. Nothing else had ever mattered to Grace—which was why she had few friends, no hobbies, and one ex-husband who was now happily re-married to a normal person. Jo was openly happy about Grace’s breakthrough, a little surprised by her refusal to let her friend look at the manuscript, and plainly worried about the way Grace was driving herself.

“Now, I’ve never tried to tell you how to run your life . . . ” Jo began as they sat on the porch one evening.

“Bullshit.”

“But I think you’d be well-advised to pace yourself. Isn’t this exactly the way this whole burn-out thing began? You were working too hard, never exercising, never eating anything but junk food, never relaxing or socializing or taking time off.”

“This is different.”

“How?”

“This isn’t like work. This book just flows, as if someone were telling me the story. I’m just writing it down.”

“All the same—“

“And I’m much more relaxed than I used to be. For the first time since I was twelve, I’m not having any trouble with insomnia. I’m asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and sleeping hard for about ten hours a night.”

“And talking and crying out in your sleep,” Jo added.

“Really?” Grace frowned.

“And when I come into your room, you’re impossible to wake.”

“I was probably just having a nightmare.”

“It happened last time I was here, too.”

“Well, I’m . . . ” The howling came.

“You’re what?” Jo challenged.

“Shhh. That’s him.”

“What’s him?” Jo blinked at her.

It grew louder. “That howling.”

“What howling?”

It seemed to reverberate all around them, making Grace tremble.

“It grows louder every night.”

“What does?”

Grace stared at her. “Can’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Hear him calling?” She closed her eyes and felt the physical pull. It was both a summons and a promise.

“Grace? Grace.” Jo’s hands on her shoulders startled her into dropping her glass of juice. “I don’t hear anything. What do you hear?”

“That dog.” She didn’t like the way Jo was looking at her.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re the one who’s half deaf. That’s it, I’m going to bed.”

“It’s barely ten o’clock.”

“I’m tired. I’ve been working all day. Goodnight, Jo.”

Upstairs in her room, she undressed, turned out the light, and started to climb into bed. She heard the hound’s cry again, at once sinister and beckoning. She went to the window and looked out at the moon-streaked landscape. The night was filled with magic and mystery, with the scent of ripening summer. One shadow separated itself from the others and came toward the house.

He stood beneath her window, and she saw him, full and strong in the moonlight, for the first time. The silvery light shone on the straight, dark length of his back. His chest was broad and deep, his legs long and gracefully swift. He raised his proud face to hers and met her gaze, deliberately and intently. Held frozen in her position at the window, Grace looked into those strange, intelligent eyes and knew why he never ate the food she put out for him, why he never left footprints in the woods, and why no one else had ever seen Louise Racinet’s dog. She felt his glowing amber gaze move over her face, her hair, her body, and she knew.

Only she would ever hear his voice in the woods. Only she would ever see him take shape in the shadows and glide through the night to call upon his chosen one. And in her heart, she had known it long before this moment.

Obediently, she turned to the bed and waited for him.

The book was finished a month later. Grace delivered it personally to an astonished editor, then returned quickly to Jo’s house in the woods. She didn’t like to be away at all, and especially not at night. The erotic, inspiring whirlpool of her nights was manna to her now.

The telephone call came only three days later. “Grace! My God! This is incredible!” her editor raved.

“Oh, good. Glad you like it.”

“Like it? I love it. I devoured it, I couldn’t put it down, I . . . I . . . Oh, wow, this is the most exciting thing I’ve read in ages! It’s erotic and lyrical and surprising and suspenseful . . . Grace, this is extraordinary work! The sky’s the limit for this book.”

“Oh, good. Look, I’m trying to work right now. Could you just send me the rest of the advance money, and we’ll talk more next week?”

There was a slight pause. “Sure. Of course. Look, are you okay? I mean, I think you should take some time off, Grace. You’ve earned it. Why don’t—“

“Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.” Grace hung up.

At twilight she heard him. His cry came from deep in the heart of the woods. He hadn’t come to her since her return from the city. And he didn’t come tonight, either.

“I want you to leave,” Jo told her.

“I can’t.” She hadn’t written a word in two months. Not since summer’s end. Not since finishing The Hound Lover.

“I don’t think this place is good for you anymore. Quite the opposite,” Jo said.

“He’ll come back. I know he’ll come back.”

“Who?” Jo stared at her. “Grace, were you having an affair?”

Grace drew in a sharp breath and tried to pull herself together. She hadn’t mentioned the howling in the woods—or anything remotely connected to it—since the night she had realized the nature of the Hound Lover. Jo would certainly force her to leave— and probably go back into treatment—if she mentioned it now. “I meant it,” Grace said. “It will come back.”

“The writing? Of course it will,” Jo said instantly. “It did once already, didn’t it? But it’s time for a change of scenery.”

“No. I like it here. Am I in your way?”

“You know that’s not the problem.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“Jesus, look at yourself. You’re smoking three packs a day. You’re drinking again. You never eat. You never see people or go out or do anything but stare at your laptop all day. Then you sit alone on the porch like a zombie at night, just staring off into space.” Jo shook her head. “You’re acting even stranger than before you wrote that book.”

“And I haven’t written a word—“

“Can’t you give yourself a break? You just finished writing a book after three years of thinking you’d never write again. You’ve done it, for God’s sake!”

“For God’s sake?” Grace tilted her head back and blew out a wreath of smoke. “No, I don’t think it was written for His sake at all.”

“What? No, never mind. Look, I don’t want to fight about this. But will you at least think about moving out of here?”

After Jo left the room, Grace murmured, “Where in hell would I go?”

The torment was unbearable. She could hear him, faintly, so faintly, from very far away, but she never saw him. Each night was an eternity of yearning unfulfilled. Each day was an endless, dismal hell. It was a tremendous effort to endure Jo’s visits. Grace knew she was thinner than ever, with dark circles under her eyes, a hacking cough from too many cigarettes, and a faintly unpleasant odor when she forgot to bathe.

Autumn ended with an early frost, and the cold, bleak landscape suited Grace’s mood. At Jo’s insistence, she started seeing a local psychiatrist. He prescribed something to help her sleep, but her prosaic dreams frustrated her even more than her insomnia and she quit taking the pills. She was afraid that if she told the psychiatrist the truth, he’d have her removed from the house, so her sessions with him were vague and pointless.

I will never write again. It’s over.

Grace sat staring at the words she had written.

The cursor blinked, its staccato rhythm urging her to write more, but she ignored it. She saw the truth before her. She had just written the last words she would ever write. Her life had been about writing. Without that, what was left?

She took a deep breath and looked out the window into the dark night. He answered her for the first time in days. Faint and far away, but unmistakably an answer.

Had Louise Racinet known what that thing out there was before she gave herself to it in the final embrace? Grace still wasn’t sure she knew. The dark, secret places of the forest were his domain, and had been for centuries. His story, his image, was both a lure and a warning, for the untamed, bestial power he had sought had eventually engulfed and enslaved him. The paintings were symbolic and disturbing. The book was a dark fantasy. Both were products of tormented hearts. But neither Grace nor the artist were insane. The Hound Lover existed; not alive, not of this world, but unmistakably real. And he had used their gifts for his own ends.

Grace turned off the kitchen light and went to the door, staring sightlessly into the dark as the voice in the woods continued to beckon her forth.

He had found a willing vessel in her; talent without inspiration, imagination without direction, genius without hope. In the silence of dark nights and bleak days, he had offered her a bargain she could never have refused, even if she had fully understood its implications. He had paid in full, and so had she. And now that it was over, she was nothing but a drained, empty husk, ready to embrace for all eternity the sweet oblivion of the night.

She pushed open the back door. The night was bitterly cold. It didn’t matter. He would take her long before the cold killed her, just as he had taken Louise Racinet. And as with Louise, they would find her empty body and never know why she had gone with him.

How could they know? How could they possibly know?

Jo met the new tenant of the old Hamilton house the following summer. “That place on the other side of the woods, right?”

“That’s right,” the woman answered. She was young, Jo noticed, twenty-five at the most. “I’m renting for the whole summer. I came to get away from all the distractions in the city.”

“It’s great up here, isn’t it? I’ve got to come up more often.” Her visits had been infrequent since Grace’s death. The message left on the laptop had said it all: I’ll never write again. It’s over. Rationally, she knew Grace had rejected all help; but guilt was never rational. It had taken a long time to recover from the site of Grace’s body lying in the woods. Jo had berated herself for ever telling her about how Louise Racinet had died; clearly that story had planted the seed in Grace’s fertile imagination. Trying not to think about it anymore, Jo asked, “What have you been doing since you arrived?”