The Brownstone, page 22
In the bedroom, Chandal listened to their voices and knew that they were talking about her. She really wasn’t interested.
Her mother’s voice was full of tears. “What could have caused her to go down there? What?”
“I don’t know,” said Justin in a monotone.
“Oh, God—she’s getting so helpless—to fall down the basement stairs like that!”
Chandal knew she hadn’t fallen down the basement stairs—it was the attic stairs. But who would believe her? She turned over onto her side and went to sleep. She was part of her own dream now and couldn’t hear her mother’s weeping. She found herself in a room with Elizabeth and Magdalen. It was a tiny room with wallpaper that represented an ancient stag hunt. The burning logs were intense, white-hot, and furious.
Elizabeth sat near the chaise longue and pretended to polish her nails. Magdalen walked back and forth near the window. She looked different than Chandal had remembered her. Her hair was drawn back over her ears; a pretty necklace, a new face, a tailored skirt and blouse of beige. On her finger—two rings. The exact type of ring that Justin had given to Chandal.
“Sit down, please,” Magdalen ordered. “I’m afraid that I must be frank with you. I’m not one of those women who pretend. Justin doesn’t want...”—she stressed this—“...He doesn’t want you for his wife any longer.”
Elizabeth broke into a wild scream of laughter. Magdalen ordered her to be silent.
“You’re still angry, aren’t you, Magdalen? Because I told her about him. What you two are up to.” She pointed her thin finger at her sister.
“You whore! You miserable whore!” Magdalen slapped Elizabeth savagely.
“No! Please stop! Please!” Chandal pleaded.
“Hey, honey, wake up. Del, wake up.” Justin sat on the bed next to her.
But she pretended to be asleep. She didn’t want to talk with Justin. Not just yet. She felt him leave her, heard him go into the living room. She lay there. She dozed off again. She was at the park with Justin. Everyone was happy. She laughed; he kissed her. It was a perfect day. She was awakened. She heard her mother go to bed. It was morning.
Chandal wept, partly because her baby was dead, and partly because she had all but forgotten she was pregnant the past few weeks and felt now as if she had been responsible for the baby’s dying!
Her face became slightly distorted as she tried to stop herself from crying. Her brain became a small planet, isolated, alone and turned in on itself. For a moment, tiny images flooded her mind, a soft little face, hands, feet, holding the child to her breast, letting it suck the heart-warmed milk, loving it, caring for it—oh, God! She yearned to put her arms around her child, to comfort it as it cried, as it struggled with gawky arms and legs to discover the world around it.
Chandal’s muscles tensed beneath the covers. She strained to sleep, to let the images remove themselves from her mind. Strained as if trudging uphill, a long hill, to peace.
Days and nights passed. There were the quiet, safe times when she was alone, free of thought. Then there were the terrors, the seconds of panic, when she imagined the young man standing beside her bed, beckoning to her, trying to reach out to her.
And then it happened. Deep into the fourth night. Chandal’s eyes flickered rapidly. She was asleep and yet very conscious of her physical body. Almost as if she had risen out of her body and now floated a level above it, looking down. She saw her sprawling limbs—her arm hanging over the side of the bed to the floor, her one leg outside the covers. Her hair tousled over the pillow. Her body was deeply asleep. She hovered over it protectively, waiting.
Suddenly a pale light filtered over her sleeping body.
Steam hissed gently. An unseen hand smoothed her hair, loving the silkiness of the fiber, brushing it away from her face. A long sigh released itself. Impatient arms seized her thin sleeping body and turned it face up.
Chandal dropped lower to the bed, feeling weak. Her vitality had lessened dangerously. She had been suspended in a realm where time had ceased to have measure and, while thus suspended, she had stayed outside her body too long. She had to get back, quickly.
A long triumphant hiss came from the lips of the sleeping girl.
Chandal knew what had happened. An alien presence had gained entrance. Filled with dread, she sank lower, hung weakly over the bed, and then dropped. She began to absorb herself back into physicality.
A hot, forceful gush flew at her, denying her entrance to the body, pushing her viciously into the atmosphere. Chandal was trapped. She looked down, feeling her spiritual power fading, becoming nothing. The force was covering the body with a field of energy. It was oozing over the girl like slime, cutting her away from Chandal.
Chandal tried to gather her power for one last try, before she ceased to be. She was scattering in all directions now like smoke. It was so hard to stay in focus.
“I’ll help you,” said an urgent, silent voice. “Follow me.”
Chandal drifted vaguely toward the voice. Below her was a vicious battlefield. Two spirits fighting over her body. A slash of red went across her cheek. Blood trickled down in a fine line.
Invisible fingers plucked at the slime. Electricity sparked off the sleeping body.
“You bitch!” screamed a voice.
Rapidly the slime unwound from the girl. Pure ugly energy reshaped itself into a funnel, poised at the nostrils of the girl.
“Now!” cried the voice.
Chandal dived rapidly, fighting through electrical currents, hardly able to maintain a center. She knew the body so much better than did the alien force. It was her only weapon.
A shriek went through the air.
She rapidly gained control of her body. Felt her body coming back to life. The force slithered in after her, slithering down her throat. She gagged, trying to throw it up.
Get out, she said. Get out.
The force was down in her.
Get out, she said, weakly, tears slipping from her eyes.
Angry, vicious fingers reached deep into her gut and wound themselves around the force and pulled.
Blackness.
At four A.M., her eyes opened slowly. The sheet was wet with sweat. Weakly, she let her body go limp and surrendered herself to deep, almost drugged sleep. She never noticed the gash on her right cheek.
The next two days passed quickly. She barely stirred from the bed. She let herself be carried along like some mysterious object caught in the current of a river. Unclaimed.
Unnoticed, the separation grew between Chandal and her mother. Chandal requested privacy, shutting her mother out from the room with no explanation. Once her mother tried to embrace her and Chandal freed herself from the entwining arms without a word. Finally, her mother, neglected and frightened, decided to leave. No one stopped her. Early the next morning, in a state of exhaustion, she went to her room, packed, and left the brownstone.
Convalescence was long. Chandal had no reason to stir from her room. After a week, she still refused to leave the house for any reason. Things dragged on—soiled linens, combs, and hair curlers lying about, and everywhere piles of dirty dishes. Justin hadn’t complained of the untidiness. He hadn’t noticed it. He saw only through the eyes of Magdalen. Magdalen, who had consumed him. Magdalen was his world now, and his love for Chandal was barely a remembrance.
At the end of the second week, Chandal began receiving bad news from her mother. Each phone call brought with it a new horror: the latest, that her mother had to return to the hospital; the doctor felt that it was serious. Chandal felt no affection for her now and started refusing to speak with her.
Since Chandal had stopped working, she had let her nails grow out and, not knowing what to do with her hands, she began picking at her face. Her body began to look flabby and unattractive. She started wearing wigs to cover up her unkempt hair. Theatrical wigs. Wigs that had lain in boxes for years.
It was the morning of February 12 when she realized how dreadful looking she had become. Justin had just gone off to his first day of rehearsal on the new play. He had assembled an all-star cast. Billie Richards was not among the players.
Sporting a fully grown mustache and an extra-short haircut, Justin left the house in good spirits. His only comment to Chandal as he left was an offhand remark that his home was not a hospital!
Justin had a new vitality. He walked faster, the kind of stride that comes with being proud. Proud of what? wondered Chandal. He really hated the new play; she was sure of that. He hadn’t much money left in the bank, the brownstone was a mess, and his wife had just lost his child. What the hell did he have to be proud of? Did he ever want the child? She sank into the black leather chair in the living room. Was that it? Was Billy right—that all Justin really wanted was his freedom?
She sat back and asked herself the question that most people are afraid of. And yet it was the only question left worth asking. Why should she go on living? Why not just end it?
She wondered if she were capable of answering the question. No. Yes—she guessed it was really quite simple. You just go on doing what was expected of you. You eat the next meal, open the next letter, go to work the next day, come home, have dinner, answer the telephone...
Yes, the phone was ringing.
She picked up the receiver. It was a woman from the museum.
The voice on the other end spoke hesitantly at first, then told her almost in a whisper that Sheila Marsh was dead. They had discovered her body at the bottom of a canyon. She had apparently fallen to her death while skiing. “It’s such a regrettable accident, a tragedy, really....” The voice continued pouring into Chandal’s ear and she could see Sheila falling, her body bouncing off the snow-covered rocks, the blood sprinkling the snow with tiny drops of red.
“They tried for days to find her, but the storm caught them by surprise. They were shut in for days....”
No, Chandal thought. Not rocks, not mountains. The room in the museum—that’s where she died. In that room, down that airshaft—that’s where Chandal had seen Sheila fall.
“We’re really all still in a state of shock.”
“Yes. I understand,” Chandal said, the tears streaming down her face.
“Please, I’m sorry. I must hang up.” She pressed her finger down on the disconnect button, paused. She ran the seer’s phone number across her brain. Lifted her finger, dialed, waited. The flat, mechanical voice on the other end informed her that the number had been disconnected.
She hung up, searched in her pocketbook, found the small slip of paper Sheila had given her. She had dialed the right number. She would try again. Same voice, same information—the number had been disconnected. She hung up.
Suddenly Chandal felt a kind of shattering inside her and wondered if she wasn’t going to crack, right here, right now—have a breakdown. She began to cry again in jerky, nervous spasms. “What do you want from me?” she screamed. “What!”
It was a relief, to finally scream out like that. It was like removing a tumor from her soul. She stood, uncertain at first. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do. Who to turn to, where to go. She had only herself to rely on now.
She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, tears rolling out of her eyes, stinging as they ran onto the irritated skin on her face. Awkwardly, she pulled off the short auburn wig and met her own eyes in the glass. The room in the museum. Was it really there? Had she only imagined it? She had to know.
Quickly, she soaked her skin in cream, applied a light layer of natural makeup and lipstick, putting a Kleenex to her mouth to blot the color. She brushed her hair, brought it to rest on the top of her head. She slipped into a loose green dress made of soft material, put on her fur-lined jacket, and left the brownstone.
She hurried to her bank and inquired the amount of her balance. It was a fraction over $400. After stopping long enough to cash a check for $50, she moved across the street to the drugstore—bought a pack of cigarettes. The awkward little man with the intelligent face behind the counter handed her the change.
She stepped to the far comer of the store, feverishly tore open the pack of cigarettes. Her hands were shaking.
She nervously reached for a cigarette and lit it. She hadn’t had a cigarette in years. She’d tried to smoke right after her father had died. It seemed her way of being an adult for her mother. Her mother had told her that she was her little girl, after all, and preferred that she didn’t. Chandal had insisted, smoked two packs a day, until her throat felt like sandpaper and had finally given it up as a lost cause four weeks later.
The green-and-white-tile floor moved under her feet now, as she paced back and forth in front of the stamp machine. She gave herself ten good reasons why the whole thing was impossible. She tried to explain away the young couple in the brownstone. Sheila’s sudden death, her mother’s unexplainable illness. She had trouble filling in all the details. She heard herself speaking and thought: crazy, crazy—silly—crazy!
She exhaled, dropped the cigarette to the floor-crushed it. Lit another, and became aware that she was being observed. Silently, the two faces behind the counter stared at her, tracked her movement. The little man politely apologized silently for inconveniencing her, disappeared behind the counter for a moment, and returned with an ashtray. “Forgive me, but would you mind—”
Cigarette still in her mouth, Chandal left the store and headed for the museum.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“YES?”
Chandal turned. Standing in the doorway to her right was a little woman of indeterminate age whose worn face, white hair, and general drained appearance proclaimed unmistakably that she had worked hard the better part of her life. Frail and thin, there was definitely an air of nonentity about her. “Can I help you?”
“Oh, I... I work here. Second floor.”
“Public Relations?”
“No, no—just a secretary.”
“I see.” The woman stiffened.
“Hi. I’m Chandal Knight.” She extended her hand.
“Miss Fry.”
From the stairwell, a guard appeared. “Twenty minutes, Rose.”
“Thank you.” Miss Fry smiled, and the guard disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me...” She half-turned and turned back. For a moment she eyed Chandal rather curiously. “Was there something you wanted?” There was the drawl of the South in her voice.
There was a short pause while Chandal collected her thoughts. “I... I came up here because I thought I might be able to see the paintings in that room.” She indicated the huge oak-paneled door just ahead of her.
The woman gave Chandal a peculiar flat look. “Paintings?”
“Yes. There are paintings in that room, aren’t there?”
The woman seemed lost in thought for a moment, then said, “Who told you that?”
“Sheila. Sheila Marsh. She—” Chandal broke off, having a hard time completing her sentence. “She used to work here.”
“You mean that poor girl who was just killed? What was it—skiing?”
“Yes,” Chandal said softly.
Almost to herself, the woman muttered, “How did she know?”
“What?”
“No one was supposed to know about those paintings. Not just yet.” She looked at Chandal again and there was once more that lost expression.
“I don’t mean to cause anyone trouble.” She shrugged. “I heard that they were beautiful. I just wanted to see them.”
The woman shifted her weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “No one is supposed to know they’re here. That’s why I thought you were from Public Relations. It’s been placed entirely in their hands, just how we go about handling the news that we’ve purchased them. Until then, no one is supposed—”
“I won’t tell a soul. I promise.” Chandal mustered a perfectly innocent smile.
“I don’t know.”
“Just one little look.” Her eyes widened. “You know how it is—curiosity.”
In a few seconds the door to the room had been unlocked and both women now stood amidst a rare collection of icon art. The room was exactly as Chandal had remembered it to be: the paintings, the room, the airshaft. It was all the same. Chandal shuddered.
“Isn’t this one beautiful?” The old woman pointed to a three-panel painting of Saint George and the Dragon; his spear plunged into the dragon’s mouth, the tip protruding from the back of its neck.
“Yes, beautiful.” Chandal hadn’t been looking at the painting at all. Something had changed in the room.
“They’re all regarded as sacred and all very old. Of course, it’s not possible to be very sure of their actual date. Sixth century, I’d guess.”
What was different? Chandal wondered.
“Can you imagine the Church forbidding the painting of such beautiful images?”
That was it! The images had changed. The paintings were different, or at least they appeared to be different. “The human skeleton—riding a white horse. Is it here?” Chandal asked.
“Human what?”
“Skeleton. On horseback. I don’t see it.”
The woman looked nervously around the room.
“And the people caught in the flood, and the picture of the coffin. I don’t see any of them.”
“You must have been misinformed. We have no such paintings here.” She flashed a nervous smile. “Well, we must hurry on.”
“That airshaft. What’s it used for?”
“Oh, years ago we stored sculptures up here. They were unloaded into the basement and then raised on pullies up here. The floor is too old now.” She paused, watched Chandal eye the pitch-black hole. “Shall we go?”
“Thank you. You’ve been very kind.”
The woman turned off the light and locked the door.
Outside the Museum, Chandal was immediately swept away by a crowd of youths dressed in dungarees, war-surplus coats, and denim jackets, with a scattering of beards, mustaches, and boots. She took them to be students let loose for the day in the city.
She slowly made her way up Central Park West. The sun made the park look alive and she thought perhaps that she would spend the morning there. It was a mild day. Chilly, but the sun shone brightly, making her world, for a brief moment, seem a little lighter. By the time she reached Eighty-fifth Street, she had changed her mind. If she’d been dreaming, how did she know that the room was there?
