The Secret History (29 page)

“We’d worked on it so long, though, and it seemed senseless, in light of our revelation, not to try once more before the weather turned. Everything got serious all of a sudden. We fasted for three days, longer than we ever had before. A messenger came to me in a dream. Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I’d never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn’t understand, towards an end I did not know.” He reached for his drink again. “The only problem was Bunny. He didn’t grasp, in
some fundamental way, that things had changed significantly. We were closer than we’d ever been, and every day counted; already it was terribly cold, and if it snowed, which it might have any day, we’d have had to wait till spring. I couldn’t bear the thought that, after everything we’d done, he’d ruin it at the last minute. And I knew he would. At the crucial moment he’d start to tell some asinine joke and ruin everything. By the second day I was having my doubts, and then, on the afternoon of the night itself, Charles saw him in Commons having a grilled cheese sandwich and a milk shake. That did it. We decided to slip away without him. To go out on the weekends was too risky, since you’d almost caught us several times already, so we’d been driving out late on Thursday and getting back about three or four the next morning. Except this time we left early, before dinner, and didn’t say a word to him about it.”

He lit a cigarette. There was a long pause.

“So?” I said. “What happened?”

He laughed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it worked.”

“It
worked?
”

“Absolutely.”

“But how could—?”

“It worked.”

“I don’t think I understand what you mean when you say ‘it worked.’ ”

“I mean it in the most literal sense.”

“But how?”

“It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know.… I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it’s not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no “I,” and yet it’s not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It’s more as if the universe expands to
fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. It was like being a baby. I couldn’t remember my name. The soles of my feet were cut to pieces and I couldn’t even feel it.”

“But these are fundamentally
sex
rituals, aren’t they?”

It came out not as a question but as a statement. He didn’t blink, but sat waiting for me to continue.

“Well? Aren’t they?”

He leaned over to rest his cigarette in the ashtray. “Of course,” he said agreeably, cool as a priest in his dark suit and ascetic spectacles. “You know that as well as I do.”

We sat looking at each other for a moment.

“What exactly did you do?” I said.

“Well, really, I think we needn’t go into that now,” he said smoothly. “There was a certain carnal element to the proceedings but the phenomenon was basically spiritual in nature.”

“You saw Dionysus, I suppose?”

I had not meant this at all seriously, and I was startled when he nodded as casually as if I’d asked him if he’d done his homework.

“You saw him
corporeally?
Goatskin? Thyrsus?”

“How do
you
know what Dionysus is?” said Henry, a bit sharply. “What do you think it was we saw? A cartoon? A drawing from the side of a vase?”

“I just can’t believe you’re telling me you
actually saw—
”

“What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture—blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don’t know what Dionysus looks like. We’re talking about God here. God is serious business.” He leaned back in his chair and scrutinized me. “You don’t have to take my word for any of this, you know,” he said. “There were four of us. Charles had a bloody bite-mark on his arm that he had no idea how he’d got, but it wasn’t a human bite. Too big. And strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she’d believed she was a deer; and that was odd, too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed. Actually, it
was
miles. I know that for a fact. Apparently we ran and ran and ran, because when we came to ourselves we had no idea where we were. Later we figured out that we had got over at least four barbed-wire fences, though
how I don’t know, and were well off Francis’s property, seven or eight miles into the country. This is where I come to the rather unfortunate part of my story.

“I have only the vaguest memory of this. I heard something behind me, or someone, and I wheeled around, almost losing my balance, and swung at whatever it was—a large, indistinct, yellow thing—with my closed fist, my left, which is not my good one. I felt a terrible pain in my knuckles and then, almost instantly, something knocked the breath right out of me. It was dark, you understand; I couldn’t really see. I swung out again with my right, hard as I could and with all my weight behind it, and this time I heard a loud crack and a scream.

“We’re not too clear on what happened after that. Camilla was a good deal ahead, but Charles and Francis were fairly close behind and had soon caught up with me.
I
have a distinct recollection of being on my feet and seeing the two of them crash through the bushes—God. I can see them now. Their hair was tangled with leaves and mud and their clothes virtually in shreds. They stood there, panting, glassy-eyed and hostile—I didn’t recognize either of them, and I think we might have started to fight had not the moon come from behind a cloud. We stared at each other. Things started to come back. I looked down at my hand and saw it was covered with blood, and worse than blood. Then Charles stepped forward and knelt at something at my feet, and I bent down, too, and saw that it was a man. He was dead. He was about forty years old and he had on a yellow plaid shirt—you know those woolen shirts they wear up here—and his neck was broken, and, unpleasant to say, his brains were all over his face. Really, I do not know how that happened. There was a dreadful mess. I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses.

“Charles tells a different story. He remembers seeing me by the body. But he says he also has a memory of struggling with something, pulling as hard as he could, and all of a sudden becoming aware that what he was pulling at was a man’s arm, with his foot braced in the armpit. Francis—well, I can’t say. Every time you talk to him, he remembers something different.”

“And Camilla?”

Henry sighed. “I suppose we’ll never know what really happened,” he said. “We didn’t find her until a good bit later. She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except
for her hair. It was dark and clotted, completely soaked. As if she’d tried to dye it red.”

“How could that have happened?”

“We don’t know.” He lit another cigarette. “Anyway, the man was dead. And there we were in the middle of the woods, half-naked and covered with mud with this body on the ground in front of us. We were all in a daze. I was fading in and out, nearly went to sleep; but then Francis went over for a closer look and had a pretty violent attack of the dry heaves. Something about that brought me to my senses. I told Charles to find Camilla and then I knelt down and went through the man’s pockets. There wasn’t much—I found something or other that had his name on it—but of course that wasn’t any help.

“I had no idea what to do. You must remember that it was getting cold, and I hadn’t slept or eaten for a long time, and my mind wasn’t at its clearest. For a few minutes—goodness, how confusing this was—I thought of digging a grave but then I realized that would be madness. We couldn’t linger around all night. We didn’t know where we were, or who might happen along, or even what time it was. Besides, we had nothing to dig a grave with. For a moment I nearly panicked—we couldn’t just leave the body in the open, could we?—but then I realized it was the only thing we could do. My God. We didn’t even know where the car was. I couldn’t picture dragging this corpse over hill and dale for goodness knows how long; and even if we got it to the car, where would we take it?

“So when Charles came back with Camilla, we just left. Which, in retrospect, was the smartest thing we could have done. It’s not as if teams of expert coroners are crawling all over upstate Vermont. It’s a primitive place. People die violent natural deaths all the time. We didn’t even know who the man was; there was nothing to tie us to him. All we had to worry about was finding the car and then making our way home without anyone seeing us.” He leaned over and poured himself some more Scotch. “Which is exactly what we did.”

I poured myself another glass, too, and we sat without speaking for a minute or more.

“Henry,” I said at last. “Good God.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Really, it was more upsetting than you can imagine,” he said. “Once I hit a deer with my car. It was a beautiful creature and to see it struggling, blood everywhere, legs broken … And this was even more distressing but
at least I thought it was over. I never dreamed we’d hear anything else about it.” He took a drink of his Scotch. “Unfortunately, that is not the case,” he said. “Bunny has seen to that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You saw him this morning. He’s driven us half mad over this. I am very nearly at the end of my rope.”

There was the sound of a key being turned in the lock. Henry brought up his glass and drank the rest of his whiskey in a long swallow. “That’ll be Francis,” he said, and turned on the overhead light.

CHAPTER

5

W
HEN THE LIGHTS
came on, and the circle of darkness leaped back into the mundane and familiar boundaries of the living room—cluttered desk; low, lumpy sofa; the dusty and modishly cut draperies that had fallen to Francis after one of his mother’s decorating purges—it was as if I’d switched on the lamp after a long bad dream; blinking, I was relieved to discover that the doors and windows were still where they were supposed to be and that the furniture hadn’t rearranged itself, by diabolical magic, in the dark.

The bolt turned. Francis stepped in from the dark hall. He was breathing hard, pulling with dispirited jerks at the fingertips of a glove.

“Jesus, Henry,” he said. “What a night.”

I was out of his line of vision. Henry glanced at me and cleared his throat discreetly. Francis wheeled around.

I thought I looked back at him casually enough, but evidently I didn’t. It must have been all over my face.

He stared at me for a long time, the glove half on, half off, dangling limply from his hand.

“Oh, no,” he said at last, without moving his eyes away from mine. “Henry. You didn’t.”

“I’m afraid I did,” Henry said.

Francis squeezed his eyes tight shut, then reopened them. He had got very white, his pallor dry and talcumy as a chalk drawing on rough paper. For a moment I wondered if he might faint.

“It’s all right,” said Henry.

Francis didn’t move.

“Really, Francis,” Henry said, a trifle peevishly, “it’s all right. Sit down.”

Breathing hard, he made his way across the room and fell
heavily into an armchair, where he rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette.

“He knew,” said Henry. “I told you so.”

Francis looked up at me, the unlit cigarette trembling in his fingertips. “Did you?”

I didn’t answer. For a moment I found myself wondering if this was all some monstrous practical joke. Francis dragged a hand down the side of his face.

“I suppose everybody knows now,” he said. “I don’t even know why I feel bad about it.”

Henry had stepped into the kitchen for a glass. Now he poured some Scotch in it and handed it to Francis. “
Deprendi miserum est
,” he said.

To my surprise Francis laughed, a humorless little snort.

“Good Lord,” he said, and took a long drink. “What a nightmare. I can’t imagine what you must think of us, Richard.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I said this without thinking, but as soon as I had, I realized, with something of a jolt, that it was true; it really didn’t matter that much, at least not in the preconceived way that one would expect.