The Dark Descent, page 82
“Dear, dear! Oh, sweet! Oh thank you! Don’t be afraid. He isn’t after you.”
“I hope not,” says the bosom friend.
“Oh no, he told me. It’s me he’s after.”
“How awful,” says Charlotte, sincerely.
“Yes,” says Emily. “Look.” And she pulls down the collar of her dress to show the ugly marks, white dots unnaturally healed up, like the pockmarks of a drug addict.
“Don’t!” chokes Charlotte.
Emily smiles mournfully. “We really ought to put the lights out,” she says.
“Out!”
“Yes, you can see him better that way. If the lights are on, he could sneak in without being seen; he doesn’t mind lights, you know.”
“I don’t know, dear—”
“I do.” (Emily is dropping the dock leaves into the washstand, under cover of her skirt.) “I’m afraid. Please.”
“Well—”
“Oh, you must!” And leaping to her feet, she turns down the gas to a dim glow; Charlotte’s face fades into the obscurity of the deepening shadows.
“So. The lights are out,” says Emily quietly.
“I’ll ask Will—” Charlotte begins . . .
“No, dear.”
“But, Emily—”
“He’s coming, dear.”
“You mean Will is coming.”
“No, not Will.”
“Emily, you’re a—”
“I’m a sneak,” says Emily, chuckling. “Sssssh!” And, while her friend sits paralyzed, one of the windows swings open in the night breeze, a lead-paned window that opens on a hinge, for the Reverend is fond of culture and old architecture. Charlotte lets out a little noise in her throat; and then—with the smash of a pistol shot—the gaslight shatters and the flame goes out. Gas hisses into the air, quietly, insinuatingly, as if explaining the same thing over and over. Charlotte screams with her whole heart. In the dark a hand clamps like a vise on Emily’s wrist. A moment passes.
“Charlotte?” she whispers.
“Dead,” says Guevara.
Emily has spent most of the day asleep in the rubble, with his coat rolled under her head where he threw it the moment before sunrise, the moment before he staggered to his place and plunged into sleep. She has watched the dawn come up behind the rusty barred gate, and then drifted into sleep herself with his face before her closed eyes—his face burning with a rigid, constricted, unwasting vitality. Now she wakes aching and bruised, with the sun of late afternoon in her face. Sitting against the stone wall, she sneezes twice and tries, ineffectually, to shake the dust from her silk skirt.
Oh, how—she thinks vaguely—how messy. She gets to her feet. There’s something I have to do. The iron gate swings open at a touch. Trees and gravestones tilted every which way. What did he say? Nothing would disturb it but a Historical Society.
Having tidied herself as best she can, with his coat over her arm and the address of his tailor in her pocket, she trudges among the erupted stones, which tilt crazily to all sides as if in an earthquake. Blood (Charlotte’s, whom she does not think about) has spread thinly on to her hair and the hem of her dress, but her hair is done up with fine feeling, despite the absence of a mirror, and her dress is dark gray; the spot looks like a spot of dusk. She folds the coat into a neat package and uses it to wipe the dust off her shoes, then lightens her step past the cemetery entrance, trying to look healthy and respectable. She aches all over from sleeping on the ground.
Once in town and having ascertained from a shop window that she will pass muster in a crowd, Emily trudges up hills and down hills to the tailor, the evidence over her arm. She stops at other windows, to look or to admire herself; thinks smugly of her improved coloring; shifts the parcel on her arm to show off her waist. In one window there is a display of religious objects—beads and crosses, books with fringed gilt bookmarks, a colored chromo of Madonna and Child. In this window Emily admires herself.
“It’s Emily, dear!”
A Mrs. L— appears in the window beside her, with Constantia, Mrs. L—’s twelve-year-old offspring.
“Why, dear, whatever happened to you?” says Mrs. L—, noticing no hat, no gloves, and no veil.
“Nothing; whatever happened to you?” says Emily cockily. Constantia’s eyes grow wide with astonishment at the fine, free audacity of it.
“Why, you look as if you’d been—”
“Picknicking,” says Emily, promptly. “One of the gentlemen spilled beer on his coat.” And she’s in the shop now and hanging over the counter, flushed, counting the coral and amber beads strung around a crucifix.
Mrs. L— knocks doubtfully on the window-glass.
Emily waves and smiles.
Your father—form Mrs. L—’s lips in the glass.
Emily nods and waves cheerfully.
They do go away, finally.
“A fine gentleman,” says the tailor earnestly, “a very fine man.” He lisps a little.
“Oh very fine,” agrees Emily, sitting on a stool and kicking the rungs with her feet. “Monstrous fine.”
“But very careless,” says the tailor fretfully, pulling Martin’s coat nearer the window so he can see it, for the shop is a hole-in-the-wall and dark. “He shouldn’t send a lady to this part of the town.”
“I was a lady once,” says Emily.
“Mmmmm.”
“It’s fruit stains—something awful, don’t you think?”
“I cannot have this ready by tonight,” looking up.
“Well, you must, that’s all,” says Emily calmly. “You always have and he has a lot of confidence in you, you know. He’d be awfully angry if he found out.”
“Found out?” sharply.
“That you can’t have it ready by tonight.”
The tailor ponders.
“I’ll positively stay in the shop while you work,” says Emily flatteringly.
“Why, Reverend, I saw her on King Street as dirty as a gypsy, with her hair loose and the wildest eyes and I tried to talk to her, but she dashed into a shop—”
The sun goes down in a broad belt of gold, goes down over the ocean, over the hills and the beaches, makes shadows lengthen in the street near the quays where a lisping tailor smooths and alters, working against the sun (and very uncomfortable he is, too), watched by a pair of unwinking eyes that glitter a little in the dusk inside the stuffy shop. (I think I’ve changed, meditates Emily.)
He finishes, finally, with relief, and sits with an ouf! handing her the coat, the new and beautiful coat that will be worn as soon as the eccentric gentleman comes out to take the evening air. The eccentric gentleman, says Emily incautiously, will do so in an hour by the Mansion House when the last traces of light have faded from the sky.
“Then, my dear Miss,” says the tailor unctuously, “I think a little matter of pay—”
“You don’t think,” says Emily softly, “or you wouldn’t have gotten yourself into such a mess as to be this eccentric gentleman’s tailor.” And out she goes.
Now nobody can see the stains on Emily’s skirt or in her hair; street lamps are being lit, there are no more carriages, and the number of people in the streets grows—San Francisco making the most of the short summer nights. It is perhaps fifteen minutes back to the fashionable part of the town where Emily’s hatless, shawlless state will be looked on with disdain; here nobody notices. Emily dawdles through the streets, fingering her throat, yawning, looking at the sky, thinking: I love, I love, I love—
She has fasted for the day but she feels fine; she feels busy, busy inside as if the life inside her is flowering and bestirring itself, populated as the streets. She remembers—
I love you. I hate you. You enchantment, you degrading necessity, you foul and filthy life, you promise of endless love and endless time . . .
What words to say with Charlotte sleeping in the same room, no, the same bed, with her hands folded under her face! Innocent sweetheart, whose state must now be rather different.
Up the hills she goes, where the view becomes wider and wider, and the lights spread out like sparkles on a cake, out of the section which is too dangerous, too low, and too furtive to bother with a lady (or is it something in her eyes?), into the broader by-streets where shore-leave sailors try to make her acquaintance by falling into step and seizing her elbow; she snakes away with unbounded strength, darts into shadows, laughs in their faces: “I’ve got what I want!”
“Not like me!”
“Better!”
This is the Barbary Coast, only beginning to become a tourist attraction; there are barkers outside the restaurants advertising pretty waiter girls, dance halls, spangled posters twice the height of a man, crowds upon crowds of people, one or two guides with tickets in their hats, and Emily—who keeps to the shadows. She nearly chokes with laughter: What a field of ripe wheat! One of the barkers hoists her by the waist onto his platform.
“Do you see this little lady? Do you see this—”
“Let me go, God damn you!” she cries indignantly.
“This angry little lady—” pushing her chin with one sunburned hand to make her face the crowd. “This—” But here Emily hurts him, slashing his palm with her teeth, quite pleased with herself, but surprised, too, for the man was holding his hand cupped and the whole thing seemed to happen of itself. She escapes instantly into the crowd and continues up through the Coast, through the old Tenderloin, drunk with self-confidence, slipping like a shadow through the now genteel streets and arriving at the Mansion House gate having seen no family spies and convinced that none has seen her.
But nobody is there.
Ten by the clock, and no one is there, either; eleven by the clock and still no one. Why didn’t I leave this life when I had the chance! Only one thing consoles Emily, that by some alchemy or nearness to the state she longs for, no one bothers or questions her and even the policemen pass her by as if in her little corner of the gate there is nothing but a shadow. Midnight and no one, half-past and she dozes; perhaps three hours later, perhaps four, she is startled awake by the sound of footsteps. She wakes: nothing. She sleeps again and in her dream hears them for the second time, then she wakes to find herself looking into the face of a lady who wears a veil.
“What!” Emily’s startled whisper.
The lady gestures vaguely, as if trying to speak.
“What is it?”
“Don’t—” and the lady speaks with feeling but, it seems, with difficulty also—“don’t go home.”
“Home?” echoes Emily, stupefied, and the stranger nods, saying:
“In danger.”
“Who?” Emily is horrified.
“He’s in danger.” Behind her veil her face seems almost to emit a faint light of its own.
“You’re one of them,” says Emily. “Aren’t you?” and when the woman nods, adds desperately, “Then you must save him!”
The lady smiles pitifully; that much of her face can be seen as the light breeze plays with her net veil.
“But you must!” exclaims Emily, “You know how; I don’t; you’ve got to!”
“I don’t dare,” very softly. Then the veiled woman turns to go, but Emily—quite hysterical now—seizes her hand, saying:
“Who are you? Who are you?”
The lady gestures vaguely and shakes her head.
“Who are you!” repeats Emily with more energy. “You tell me, do you hear?”
Somberly the lady raises her veil and stares at her friend with a tragic, dignified, pitiful gaze. In the darkness her face burns with unnatural and beautiful color.
It is Charlotte.
Dawn comes with a pellucid quickening, glassy and ghostly. Slowly, shapes emerge from darkness and the blue pours back into the world—twilight turned backwards and the natural order reversed. Destruction, which is simple, logical, and easy, finds a kind of mocking parody in the morning’s creation. Light has no business coming back, but light does.
Emily reaches the cemetery just as the caldron in the east overflows, just as the birds (idiots! she thinks) begin a tentative cheeping and chirping. She sits at the gate for a minute to regain her strength, for the night’s walking and worry have tried her severely. In front of her the stones lie on graves, almost completely hard and real, waiting for the rising of the sun to finish them off and make complete masterpieces of them. Emily rises and trudges up the hill, slower and slower as the ground rises to its topmost swell, where three hundred years of peaceful Guevaras fertilize the grass and do their best to discredit the one wild shoot that lives on, the only disrespectful member of the family. Weeping a little to herself, Emily lags up the hill, raising her skirts to keep them off the weeds, and murderously hating in her heart the increasing light and the happier celebrating of the birds. She rounds the last hillock of ground and raises her eyes to the Guevaras’ eternal mansion, expecting to see nobody again. There is the corner of the building, the low iron gate—
In front of it stands Martin Guevara between her father and sweet sweet Will, captived by both arms, his face pale and beautiful between two gold crosses that are just beginning to sparkle in the light of day.
“We are caught,” says Guevara, seeing her, directing at her his fixed, white smile.
“You let him go,” says Emily—very reasonably.
“You’re safe, my Emily!” cries sweet Will.
“Let him go!” She runs to them, stops, look at them, perplexed to the bottom of her soul.
“Let him go,” she says. “Let him go, let him go!”
Between the two bits of jewelry, Emily’s life and hope and only pleasure smiles painfully at her, the color drained out of his face, desperate eyes fixed on the east.
“You don’t understand,” says Emily, inventing. “He isn’t dangerous now. If you let him go, he’ll run inside and then you can come back any time during the day and finish him off. I’m sick. You—”
The words die in her throat. All around them, from every tree and hedge, from boughs that have sheltered the graveyard for a hundred years, the birds begin their morning noise. A great hallelujah rises; after all, the birds have nothing to worry about. Numb, with legs like sticks, Emily sees sunlight touch the top of the stone mausoleum, sunlight slide down its face, sunlight reach the level of a standing man—
“I adore you,” says Martin to her. With the slow bending over of a drowning man, he doubles up, like a man stuck with a knife in a dream; he doubles up, falls—
And Emily screams; What a scream! as if her soul were being haled out through her throat; and she is running down the other side of the little hill to regions as yet untouched by the sun, crying inwardly: I need help! help! help!—She knows where she can get it. Three hundred feet down the hill in a valley, a wooded protected valley sunk below the touch of the rising sun, there she runs through the trees, past the fence that separates the old graveyard from the new, expensive, polished granite—Charlotte is her friend, she loves her: Charlotte in her new home will make room for her.
Dennis Etchison
You Can Go Now
Dennis Etchison is an anthologist and writer whose occasional short stories have established a respectable following in the past fifteen years. The title story of his first collection, The Dark Country, won the World Fantasy Award for best short fiction (1982). He is an indefatigable supporter of horror fiction, especially in his anthology series, The Cutting Edge (1987), promoting new and different fiction. “You Can Go Now” is characteristic of his surreal psychological short fiction: intense, shifting, suggestive. What happens, happens offstage . . . the horror is internal, in the central character’s mind at the moment of realization, which is the story. The maltreatment of women by men is a common theme in contemporary horror, nowhere more pointedly represented than in “You Can Go Now.”
1
The receiver purred in his hand.
He glanced around the bedroom, feeling as if he had just awakened from a long, dreamless sleep.
A click, then recorded music. He had been placed on hold.
There was something he was trying to remember. Everything seemed to be ready, but—
“Thank-you-for-waiting-good-afternoon-Pacific-Southwest-Airlines-may-I-help-you?”
He told the voice about his reservation; he was sure he had one. Would she—
Yes. Confirmed.
He thanked her and hung up.
Wait. What was the flight number? He must have written it down—yes. It was probably in his wallet.
He bent over the coat on the bed, feeling for the slim leather billfold. There, in the breast pocket. He fumbled through business cards, odd papers, credit plates.
No.
But no matter. He would find out when he got there.
Still, there was something.
He pulled out the drawer in the nightstand, under the phone, and started poking around, not even sure of what he was looking for.
He found a long, unmarked envelope, near the bottom. He took it and held it tightly as he slipped the coat on, then put it into the inside pocket while he felt with his other hand for the keys. He patted his outer pockets, but they were not there.
Head down, he left the room.
His bags were stacked neatly by the wall of the foyer, but the keys were not there. He paced through the living room, the kitchen, checking the tables.
He went back to the bedroom, eyes down.
There.
By the door. The key ring was wedged by the bottom edge, between the door and the pile of the carpet, as though it had been flung or kicked there.
He picked it up, walked to the front door, lifted his bags, and went out to the car.
It was still early afternoon, so the freeway would be a clear shot most of the way.
He switched off the air conditioning—who had left it on?—and rolled down the window, stretching out. The seat was adjusted wrong again, damn it, so he had to grope for the lever and push with his feet, struggling to seat the runner back another notch.
He connected through to the San Diego Freeway, made the turn and tried to unwind the rest of the way. He sampled the radio, but it was only more of the same: back scratchings about love or the lack of it and the pleasure or the pain it brought or might bring; maybe, could be, possibly, for sure, always, never, too soon, not soon enough, in the wrong rain or the wrong style. Wrong, wrong. He flicked it off.
