The Bloodstone, page 10
After several minutes she clenched her fists and bit her lip with the effort of forcing herself to listen harder. The den. Yes, she was sure the sound was coming from the den. She turned resolutely to the small door, determined to discover what the sound was. Crying.... A baby crying.
She approached the door. Yet, at the last second, in spite of herself, she averted her hand. A sudden exhaustion overtook her, propelled her downward within as though she had stepped into an elevator and descended into the bowels of the earth. It was a dark place, a place where one forgot certain things such as identity, a place where one lost one’s will. Where one ceased to be.
She sat back on the edge of the bed and watched the candlelight flicker against the sharp features of the old woman’s face. The old woman’s eyes were alive, deep blue and hypnotic, yet the rest of her body appeared dead.
Chandal wondered if she was dreaming. Who was the woman? It was as if she were experiencing double vision. Around the woman, two little faces appeared. Children.
“She’s dead,” one little girl said.
“No, she’s just sleeping.”
“No, Mother said she’s dead. That’s why Father is crying.”
“He loves her?”
“I think.”
Chandal sat riveted. She was in shock. She watched as the two girls played with the woman’s body. Pulled at her. Played with her face and hands.
“Kiss her,” the older of the two girls said.
“No.”
“I said kiss her!” She forced the girl’s face against the lips of the old woman.
“Please,” the girl screamed and began to cry.
“Shut up, Elizabeth. Mother will hear us.”
“I’m going to die now!”
“I said, shut up!” She slapped the little girl.
“I’m going to die,” she moaned.
“No, no, you’re not. You’ll never die. You’ll see. We’ll live forever. I promise.”
“Are you sure?”
The older girl smiled. “Yes, dear sister. I promise.”
The younger girl was thinking of a song. Chandal heard the song in her mind, the refrain running silently with the words:
Sleep, little one, and be good,
The birds are all in the wood;
They fly in the wood
From tree to tree
And soon they will bring
Sweet sleep to thee.
Sleep, little one, and be good.
Chandal let her eyes fall shut.
Deep in a trance, she removed the pendant from around her neck, and then she began to rock at the edge of the bed, as though rocking in a chair, softly thumping time to the rhythm of the words she now chanted.
“May your blood turn to stone. May your bones decay and crumble.”
She knew, without seeing them, that her brothers and sisters had joined her in ceremony. As the chant continued, she pointed the bloodstone westward, and rubbed its surface. She laughed with delight, knowing no medicine on earth could save him now.
CHAPTER NINE
RON TALON SKIPPED THE COCKTAIL PARTY AT MGM in the annex building and had a little taste of his own before heading to the Las Palmas Country Club.
He called it the Bordello Palace.
There were eight tennis courts surrounded by streets with trees, and walls that concealed swimming pools, private sea worlds and houses that might have been built by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
All the courts were occupied, mostly by the local pros, except for one court to the far right, in which some children were racing about, yelling. On the far left, closest to the clubhouse, was Ron himself.
“Deuce again,” he grunted and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He placed his toe on the foul line and prepared to serve. The sun was beginning to set, yet the heat persisted and wrung large beads of moisture from his brow, shoulders and back. Sporting a full day’s growth of beard, he looked like a construction worker.
It was Friday, the 27th of March.
Angrily, Ron flung the ball into the air, and smashed his racket down hard, knocking the ball five feet out of the court.
“Out!”
“Right,” Ron grumbled.
He dug a second ball from his pocket and felt a slight, nagging flutter of heart. What the hell are you so nervous about, he asked himself. The guy has the best backhand in California. It’s only right that he should win. Still, Ron really hadn’t been prepared to lose seven games in a row. He had never lost seven games in a row, and despite his gracefulness on the court, there did not seem to be much of a chance for his making a comeback.
“Just a minute,” Ron said and stepped off the line. With one violent tug he removed his tennis shirt. The heat was really starting to get to him.
“Hey!” the big guy’s voice roared. “No stripping!” Then the voice laughed.
Determinedly Ron strode forward, planted his foot solidly on the line. Up went the ball, down came his racket, out of the court went the ball.
“My ad,” the voice said with a smile.
Ron shook his head and asked, “Can I take it again?”
“No!”
“So that’s how the game is played, is it? Thanks a lot, Paul!” He reached for another ball.
He had just completed the second of two more bad serves when someone hollered, “Ron Talon—telephone!”
In the same instant Paul hollered, “Game!” His racket went whirling up in the air and he caught it neatly as Ron reached for his shirt.
“One more game?” Paul asked.
“Right!” Ron grunted and headed for the pro shop, leaving the big guy hunched on one elbow under a tree, chewing on his gum and smiling.
Ron walked quickly through a row of canopied tables, past a group of tourists sipping vodka gimlets, past the Hollywood studs with unbuttoned shirts and gold medallions hanging on their hairy chests, and two or three gorgeous women with Palm Springs suntans. The women in L.A., Ron mused, tended to make the women in other parts of the country look less... what was the word? Wholesome. That was it exactly.
“Fuck him!” one of the Palm Springs goddesses cried. “Let him wait.”
Ron flinched, smiling at his last thought. Then he ducked inside through a huge sliding glass door, where he was immediately smacked in the face with a burst of conditioned air. He gasped, caught his breath and reached for the phone.
“Hello,” he said as he wiped his face with a towel.
“Ronald, it’s Mimi.”
Something was wrong. Mimi never addressed him as Ronald unless something was wrong.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Paramount just called. They’re refusing to sign McCracken’s contract.”
“Did they give you a reason?”
“No. They want to discuss it with you personally.”
“Damn!” He dabbed his forehead again with the towel and then tossed it aside, thinking: That’s what I get for handling a shit-kicker nightclub performer. Circles of black formed in front of his eyes. He blinked them away.
“Anything else?” he asked weakly.
“Wooder wanted to know why there were three hundred dollars’ worth of telephone charges deducted from her last royalty check. She claimed it should have been no more than a hundred.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That she was welcome to look at the slips.”
“And?”
“She threw a fit, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“And you had a call from a doctor—” she stopped herself,—“Let’s see. Oh, here it is. Dr. I. Luther. Returning your call.”
“Oh, Jesus. I’ve been waiting for that call all week. Did you tell him I was here?”
“No. But I told him you could be reached at home around seven. I told him to call collect.”
“Good.” Ron glanced at his watch. 5:05 P.M. “Mimi, I’ve gotta run. And thanks.”
Dr. Luther was the last person Ron had expected to hear from today. He could not hide his perplexity. What dominated his mind, as he returned to the courts, was total comprehension of the void he now felt and the difficulty in sustaining any semblance of his normal life style. His whole body, like his mind, seemed to have been suddenly set adrift.
The big guy’s smile broadened when Ron announced that another game was out of the question. “Oh, well,” he said. “There’s always paddle ball.”
“You know something, Paul?” Ron said. “Even though you’re a prince on the court now, someday all your sneakers are going to have holes in them!”
The big guy didn’t say anything. He merely smiled and sipped his freshly acquired gin and tonic.
Ron bent and scooped up his racket. In the next instant a dizziness assaulted him. He reached for the net post, his head spinning. His legs started to give way as if his limbs had suddenly been amputated.
“Say, buddy—you all right?”
“It’s this fucking heat. I think I must be dehydrated or something.”
“Get yourself some salt tablets.”
“Right,” Ron grunted and straightened up. Fighting back the dizziness, he turned.
“You really should sit down. You don’t look good.”
Ron’s impulse was to move. “See you tomorrow,” he said. Unsteadily he walked down the curving pathway, lost himself in the shadow of the tall trimmed hedges and came to his car. He tossed his racket into the passenger seat and stepped in. Without clear thought, he aimed the Jaguar toward home.
Scrawny flocks of pigeons scattered over the rooftop. Through the gray matter of her brain.
At some time or other in Chandal’s early life, she had become acutely aware of time passing. Perhaps it was a sharp stirring of an autumn breeze at the end of what she had considered an endless hot summer. Time for school, time to buy winter clothes, no more grapes from the vine, they’re gone for another year. “I don’t want to grow up!” She had recognized the futility of her own plea and turned away before her mother had to deal with another unsolvable life issue.
Now today, it was a softer breeze with a stunning hint of balminess that warned her that once again the seasons were about to change, that time waited for no man’s permission, but merely passed. Time passes, Chandal reflected wryly, as she stood by the open window, and I am obsessed.
Today, it was the Billy Deats issue again. On the one hand, forget him. Write him off as an old friend down the drain, who gives a damn anyway. On the other hand, Billy’s good-natured face seemed to swim before her eyes as an old friend she had no right to forget. If she wrote off Billy, it was writing off Justin’s best friend. It was almost like writing off Justin in a way. She concentrated on the image of Billy in her mind. His eyes seemed to darken. His mouth hardened.
Suddenly she had a flash of memory. Someone had been talking about Billy Deats. Billy has been ours for some time, the voice had said. He belongs to us now. Puzzled, Chandal drew her eyebrows together. What sort of sense did that make? She shrugged and let the image go.
“Billy Deats,” repeated Chandal into the telephone receiver. “That’s his professional name, yes. Thank you, I’ll hold.” She paced the length of the room slowly, carrying the white princess phone with her. Her eyes kept returning to the courtyard, where delicious light mist lingered. An evanescent distillation, gentle. The rain had stopped sometime during the morning, and she thought, it’s going to be another beautiful day.
“I’m sorry,” the voice shrilled in her ear. “We don’t have a Billy Deats listed.”
“That’s impossible. He’s starring on Broadway. He has to belong to your union.”
“How is the last name spelled?”
“Deats. D-E-A-T-S.”
“Oh. E-A. I’ve been spelling it E-E. Just a minute.”
Leaning her elbows against the window frame, Chandal let her gaze follow the branches of the tree upward. An image of herself in jeans, book in hand, climbing up to read out loud. To play all the different characters in the story. When had acting become something else? An ego trip, where one only wanted to be good to win compliments. Why now when she pictured herself acting, was the praise spun honey, not the excellence of the work?
Even now she shivered with delight to think of herself giving a brilliant performance and winning the admiration of her peers. More, she wanted more. Her eyes were as vague now as the tenuous wisps of fog that slipped by in gently writhing mutation against a sea of blue sky, dissipating slowly.
“Just—too—much,” she said aloud in a slow, fierce voice. She pressed her finger to the receiver button several times. “Hello! Oh, shit!”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Billy Deats, is he listed?”
“Yes, but there isn’t a phone number.”
“You’re membership, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“How would you reach him if you needed to?”
“We have an address, but I can’t give it to you.”
Chandal paused, feeling in some inner chamber the anger build up to the point of explosion. “Would you,” she ground her teeth, “have given me the telephone number if you had found it?”
“No, I’m sorry. That would have been privileged information.”
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Are you being sarcastic?” inquired the voice sharply.
“No, just amazed!” Just amazed as all hell, she repeated to herself, and slammed down the receiver. But then all human beings amazed her. Including herself. Most of all herself. Like those spurts of crazy energy that had led her around the city these last three days at desperate speed, even after almost sleepless nights. She knew this frenetic energy wasn’t good. It was almost like being on uppers. And yet she couldn’t hold herself down. Shopping sprees, interviews, voice lessons and dance classes.
She remembered one super-charged dance exercise where she was all over the place, jumping higher and further, extending wider, deeper and taller, spinning two for one faster than anyone else in the class. “What do you think?” she’d asked rather uncertainly, seeing the instructor’s eyes on her. “Well,” he’d replied with irony, “you’ll never be in a chorus line.” Meaning that she couldn’t blend into a group, that she was attracting attention to herself by doing everything a little different from everyone else.
In back of all this outward energy was something else. A vague apprehension that somehow she was losing control of her life. There were moments when she was completely herself, and then, immediately afterward, she would discover she’d lost time. That an hour, sometimes more, would have disappeared and no way could she remember what had happened.
Yet there had been images. Images that had started to form a pattern, and then fled. Disquieting images. Images that conflicted, and confused her. As though parts from separate jigsaw puzzles had been scrambled together. One puzzle was hard enough, but two... The look on Billy’s face. Her own indifference about Justin. The children in her dream, who were they? She had seemed to know them so well, as if their childhood were part of her own intimate memory.
Chandal leaned forward now and sat on the window ledge. Tiny puffs of breeze blew against her neck, against the folds at the open throat of her silk blouse, caressing the flesh delicately, stirring her to shiver with a sudden pleasure, and then, in the next instant, fear.
Sooner or later we all turn homeward. Chandal felt the impulse in her blood. As if she were possessed by an instinctive urge to return to the brownstone. To relive the night of the fire. The days and weeks prior to the fire.
Lately the urge had become so great that she seemed to be levitated by her own frenzy. It was as though she were expecting to find absolution among the ruins. A self-deliverance of sorts.
Yet in spite of this awareness and her reasonable efforts to return home, to remember those days, there was also within her an emotional stampede in the opposite direction. A cold, sinking sensation, like a stomach cramp, came over her. And a voice within her that whispered: Stay away, you don’t want to know. Stay away.
Chandal had to remind herself that she had always been a somewhat sedentary person who responded slowly, perhaps belatedly, to change, to big upheavals. Yes, she reassured herself. She had only been in New York eleven days. She needed to give herself time to adjust, that was all. Perhaps in a week or so she would return to the brownstone. Face it. Accept what the confrontation had to offer, and then get on with her life.
Still, the gentle breeze that now caressed her cheeks, felt something akin to the lull before the storm.
“Hey, whatcha doing hanging in the window?” Doreen bobbed into sight from around the corner of the brownstone, her khaki culottes emphasizing legs a bit too thick at the knee, legs that tripped along on dainty narrow feet, as if the feet components had been stolen from a china doll and affixed to a knobby-kneed Raggedy Ann. A bright blouse further emphasized the rag doll quality, and red teased curls completed the image. Doreen’s pale face was, however, intensely human and vulnerable. In it the only bright splash of color was made by her vividly painted, deeply bowed lips.
“It’s a gorgeous day!” cried Chandal.
“It’s the time of year for spring colds.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” mocked Chandal lightly.
“Can I come in?”
“You’ll be doing me a favor if you do, because believe me, there’s something very frightening in here.”
Doreen’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“Come in, come in,” Chandal said uneasily and added, “One look is worth a thousand words!”
Doreen had disappeared from view and had begun to tap at the door before Chandal had finished speaking. Opening the door, Chandal dragged her forward by the crook of her elbow and left her standing in a mound of tissue paper, boxes, packages and a dozen shopping bags which were strewn haphazardly about the carriage house.
“The damn place is a mess, yes?” Chandal stated cheerfully. With a gesture of extravagance, she waved her arm about the room whose customary immaculate order had vanished in the maze of shopping debris.
