Gothic, page 17
Anton tries to place her accent. At first, based solely on appearance, he thinks she might be Greek. Then figures her for Italian. Hearing her speak, he ends up at French, but with an accent he’s never heard before. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he says, “and please accept my apologies if this is horribly rude, but… your eyes…”
Diana tilts her head, then brushes her hair back from her face in a startling gesture. “It’s called aniridia. Or a form of it anyway,” she says apathetically, as if describing the provenance of a particularly rare objet d’art. “It’s a genetic condition. Simply put, I was born without an iris in either eye, at least visibly. I inherited it from my grandmother, who also had it, and eventually went completely blind.” She shrugs. “That may be my lot as well, but there’s nothing to be done about it, I’m afraid. So, now that you know such a personal secret, how about you share one with me? Where did you get the desk?”
Anton laughs lightly, not wanting to hurt her feelings but beyond impressed with her manner of dealing with both her condition, and her powers of negotiation. “Fascinating,” he says under his breath, then drops his feet and leans forward, switching his posture back to business. “Well, as I’ve said, that’s all classified. There’s nothing more I can tell you. I’m sorry you wasted a trip.” He gives her his best salesman smile, the one that closed a thousand deals with thousands of wealthy men, wealthier women, widowers and widows, desperate husbands and bored housewives. “However, may I suggest we continue the conversation over dinner?”
Diana returns his smile with one of her own, and Anton finds himself smitten. By God, she’s beautiful, he thinks. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
As she peers deeply into his eyes, he feels himself falling in love. Her eyes are glistening like pools of ink, and he finds himself staring into them. It’s almost as if he’s drifting closer, straight for those beautiful dark windows into the soul; they’re so large… so perfectly spherical, and… expanding. Growing like black holes that he floats toward and falls into, as if he were a naked astronaut floating through space, pulled in by her gravity, slipping delightfully through cosmic clouds of luscious daydreams where their future together flashes in his mind as memories—long trips and handsome children, mad adventures, and peaceful old age. He badly wants to sleep with her, to feel every inch of her skin, kiss every part of her body.
He barely registers her speaking.
I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest, Anton. I already know who has the desk, but confirmation from your own lips would have been helpful. Sadly, I still need to know who you acquired the desk from. I’ll have to make sure those accounts are settled, you see. I suppose you could say it’s personal. Quite personal.
And still he falls, and falls, and falls into his strange, romantic thoughts. It is a feeling not unlike sinking, but wholly pleasant.
I’ll also need you to confirm the price, please. My detective, though thorough, was not able to acquire that bit of information, and it would be most helpful for my own negotiation.
Part of Anton—a distant, uncaring part—knows that he’s answering, divulging information he has no right to share… but it’s as if he’s left his body and is now somewhere far away, embraced in the warm, pink ether of true love.
She asks her questions, and he answers them gladly, his body pulsing with lust, overflowing with a deep love he’s never felt for anyone. Soon, he is swallowed whole by his own thoughts, his bizarre fantasies, and everything melts into a blissful, nurturing darkness that he hopes to never return from.
****
Later, when he comes back to himself, he assumes he’d simply dozed off.
There is no sign of his mysterious visitor.
He laughs about it. It’s quite unlike him to lose his reason in flights of romantic fancy, and even more strange to fall asleep in the middle of the day—in his own office, no less.
I must be getting narcoleptic in my old age.
His cheer fades somewhat when he looks at his watch to find the day nearly over; to realize he’d so badly lost track of time.
Nearly four hours have passed since he and Diana first sat down in his office, and while he should be alarmed, the only emotion he feels is disappointment.
He’d forgotten to ask for her number.
Thirty-six
Worried about Sarah and, to a large (albeit unspoken) degree, her father, Violet decides to extend her stay in the city for an additional week. She notifies the school of a family emergency and lets her professors know she will be missing the first few classes of the new semester. Her decision pleases Tyson immensely (despite his weak protestations to the contrary), both because it means he can spend more time with her and, less selfishly, because it will help keep Sarah’s spirits up.
After an initial eight-hour delay in the hospital waiting room, they’d finally been able to see Sarah, who, after what was being deemed a successful surgery, was admitted for overnight observation.
Tyson recoiled at the sight of her.
She was pale as a ghost, drawn and skeletal in appearance. Black bags sagged beneath sleeping eyes and her left arm was covered in a blue cast, fingertips to elbow, and two large steel pins jutted out of the plaster covering the hand. The arm was attached to a bedside pulley that kept it elevated and away from her body while she slept.
He and Violet had stayed until midnight, during which time Sarah became alert only once. Groggy and bleary-eyed, she had looked at Tyson, frowned, and turned her head away.
The doctor told them to come back in the morning.
Now home, Violet helps Tyson tape heavy plastic over the window the police smashed for entry, then vacuum the glass off the carpet and nearby furniture. They clean the smeared blood off the tiles of the kitchen floor, the stains on the countertop and on the cell phone, from which she’d managed to call for help. They consider scrubbing out the drips of blood dried into the hallway carpet like red-spattered breadcrumbs, the staggered path of which led from the edge of the tiled kitchen floor to the closed door of Tyson’s office.
“Why would she go to your office?” Violet asks.
Tyson shrugs. “No idea. Anyway, we’ll deal with it tomorrow, or I’ll have a service come,” he says, and Violet, exhausted, doesn’t argue. That final decision of the evening made, she wearily kisses her father on the cheek and goes straight to bed.
****
As 2 a.m. approaches, Tyson feels neither fatigued nor complacent. He makes a drink and paces the living room. He wishes he had remodeled the roof when he’d had the means; sitting in the cool night and watching the stars on a sleepless night would have suited him fine.
After his second drink, he pours a third and, after a momentary hesitation, finally musters the courage to follow the pattern of dripping blood to the office, deathly afraid of what he will find there.
Once inside, he flips the switch by the door, which turns on a rarely used overhead light. The blood is less obvious in here, blending with the dark hardwood and deep reds of the rugs. He follows the spotted trail to the desk.
And finds… nothing.
It’s as if she’d walked to the desk and vanished. There’s no blood on the desktop, nothing on the floor. He wipes a thumb across a few red specks on his laptop and sees a fine mist of scarlet on the top page of his manuscript, but those things are easily taken care of. He sticks his thumb in his mouth, sucks the flesh clean, the tang of blood on his tongue quickly swallowed away. He crumples the top page from the stack of papers, the only one that appears to have been soiled, into a scrunched ball and throws it into the waste basket.
After checking it for blood, he settles into his chair, runs his fingers along the wood lip of the desk. He inspects everything closely and pauses only when he comes to the top-left drawer, which is not fully closed.
Frowning, he pulls it open, not surprised that it slides out smoothly and easily, as if it were greased. Along the edges of the rectangular cutout where the drawer meets the desk, he notices filaments of pale pink skin; tiny pieces stuck along the edge of the wood, a few no bigger than a flake of dandruff, and none bigger than a fingernail.
Speaking of fingernails, he thinks, and gently removes one (slightly mangled) rose-colored fingernail from the bottom of the open drawer. He thinks it looks like a pinky nail, but it’s hard to tell. All her fingers are fairly small.
Humming an old Ramones tune he can’t recall the name of, Tyson cleans away the skin fragments with a tissue and tosses it into the lined trashcan, where it falls alongside the crumpled, blood-sprayed page.
“What happened to the blood?” he says, and waits, as if the desk might reply. Then he lies his head flat against the cool surface of the stone desktop. The voices whisper again, except this time he has no problem understanding exactly what they are saying.
“Uh-huh,” he says, and chuckles like a schoolboy whose feet are being gently tickled. “That makes sense, all right. And yes, I like it. I really do.”
As he listens, a thin and exceptionally sharp tendril of wood uncoils near the bottom of one of the desk’s legs. It slips up his pant cuff and gently pierces the skin, inserting itself into the meat of his calf with the expertise of a well-tuned junkie tapping a vein.
Tyson doesn’t notice or, at least, doesn’t mind. What is writing if not the metaphorical giving of one’s blood, after all? Isn’t this just more of the same?
Meanwhile, the voices continue to whisper, frantically telling Tyson everything he needs to know, everything he wants to hear, and he can’t be more thrilled.
And oh, by God!
It’s fascinating stuff…
They’re telling him a new story.
Part Seven
Negotiations
Thirty-seven
Sarah returns home the next day.
Tyson and Violet went to the hospital early and were pleasantly surprised to find her sitting up in bed, eating a full breakfast, and watching the news on a television mounted high on the wall between herself and the patient she shared the room with, a towheaded teenager with a busted leg.
Sarah assures them she’s feeling okay, that the doctor said she could leave when she wanted. She has a prescription for painkillers and a follow-up appointment with the surgeon at his office in mid-town the following week.
What she doesn’t tell them is about the terror she’d felt at nighttime. The horrible dreams, the recurrence of the visions she’d had when attacked. Her inability to quantify what had actually happened. Her fear of having had a psychotic episode, of being broken—that she’s begun the long walk down that dirty, pit-filled road toward mental illness.
“The doctor says I’ll be fairly pain-free in a couple weeks and can get off the harder meds, but until then I need to take it easy. Not do any heavy lifting, obviously.”
Tyson is overwhelmed with joy at seeing her lucid and, seemingly, her old self again. “I think we’ll just have to bring you breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed for a while. Maybe load up your Kindle with a bunch of those John Connolly books you like so much.” He beams at her, practically bursting with happiness and relief, and is only the slightest bit disappointed that her general mood is less than thrilled, distantly unhappy, and certainly not loving. Her smiles toward him are empty, and when she meets his eyes they’re emotionless. Almost vacant.
It’s like she’s putting on some sort of act, he thinks, but dismisses the negative vibes as best he can. The important thing is that she’s alright, and that she’s coming home.
They’re all going home, together, and right away. Immediately, in fact.
After all, he has a lot of work to do.
****
Sarah doesn’t speak to him during the drive, choosing to sit in the rear of the Mercedes with Violet while Tyson drives them through the city like a chauffeur. He catches her eye once or twice in the rearview mirror, but she looks away each time, as if caught.
Or disgusted.
Despite her refusal to discuss what happened, sticking with her story of “falling awkwardly,” a see-through fable so blatant it had more than one nurse giving Tyson the wife-beater stink-eye, he can’t think of what he might have done—at least as it pertained to her injury—that she would hold him in such obvious contempt.
After all, he isn’t the goddamned snoop, is he?
No, he most certainly is not. She’s the one that went into his office, and she was the one who decided to dig through his drawers, through his PRIVATE stuff. Oh, yes, he’d been well-informed of the situation. And yet he’s the one getting the sidelong glances, the distasteful looks, the silent treatment.
As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure they’re BOTH giving me the business, he thinks, eyeballing the rearview mirror when he isn’t avoiding taxicabs or asshole jaywalkers. Look at them. Conspirators. Whispering secrets, making up lies about me, about my WORK.
“You two okay back there?” he calls, trying to sound cheerful, like part of the group. Only Violet offers a half-hearted response, staring out the window as if bored, or upset. You two don’t fool me, he thinks sourly, and wallows in brooding silence for the remainder of the drive.
As they enter the townhouse, the shrill ring of the phone shatters the stillness.
Tyson ignores it, continues holding Sarah’s (good) elbow lightly as they walk down the hall toward the stairwell. “Violet, would you?”
He walks Sarah up the stairs to their bedroom, gets her settled, fluffs her pillows and makes sure she has a glass of water for her pain medicine. He gets her a book and the remote control for the small flatscreen TV they’d recently added to watch late-night shows while snuggled together in bed or have the news on in the mornings when getting dressed. Tyson feels a pang of remorse at the thought, disturbed by how far they’ve drifted from those comfortable days in such a short time.
“Anything else you need?”
She attempts a wan smile and shakes her head. “Just gonna sleep. Still pretty wiped out from everything.”
“Of course.” He takes a few steps toward the door, then stops. He turns back, takes a moment to look at her—to really look at her—his Sarah, his great love, his soulmate. He sees the pain she’s in, a pain made even worse by the distance between them. The emotional partition is almost palpable, a living thing that had snuck into their home in the night and settled into their private, personal spaces, building its nest from strips of pain, broken shards of grief. To Tyson it seems the two of them now live in a bleak house on a distant moor, surrounded by fog, their calls to one another growing more distant every passing day, and as the fog thickens, they drift further and further apart.
“Sarah, honey…” he says, and she looks not at him but the small remote control, as if studying it for defects. “I know… I…”
He takes a quick step toward her, the suddenness of the movement causing her to look at him sharply, and he prays that isn’t fear in her eyes. The words come in a rush then, a whispered, hurried, insistent stream of forbidden truths. It’s as if, for a moment, he has found the will—the freedom—to be himself once more.
“Baby, it’s not me, please understand. This isn’t me.”
She watches him steadily, her eyes slightly lidded, but not with malice. “No?”
He points toward the door, finger trembling with accusation.
Neither of them think it insane when he lowers his voice, as if not wanting to be overheard. “It’s… this sounds crazy, I know, it does, but Sarah… it’s that desk. I think, my God how do I start? It’s making me do things… think things… it’s, I don’t know, affecting me somehow.” He points the accusatory finger at his own chest, stabs himself with it to emphasize his words, his defense. “This isn’t me, Sarah. It’s…”
“The desk.” She speaks the words with such indifference that he wonders for a beat whether the drugs are making her stupid, or if she’s just that fucking cold.
He nods sheepishly, and opens his mouth to continue, but she shakes her head, looks down to her shattered hand. When she speaks, it’s with such softness, such delicacy, that if they’d carried any other conjunction of vowels and consonants than the ones she actually uses, they might have been words of love, or forgiveness.
“It’s not the desk, Tyson,” she says, then raises her heavy eyes, bruised with exhaustion, to look at him directly. “It’s you, Tyson. It’s you, honey. It’s always been you.”
Tyson straightens in affronted surprised, and closes his open mouth. They stare at each other a moment, her words settling down on them both, covering their feelings like an early frost on summer flowers, killing them.
He sees, with a souring stomach and a weakening of his knees, that there is no love in her eyes. Not for him.
Not anymore.
“Dad!” Violet yells from the bottom of the stairs. “It’s Harry. He says it’s mucho important. His words, not mine,” she adds.
Tyson gives Sarah a wide-eyed, questioning look, the mask of a reaction he might have once used when sharing a moment with her. He clears his throat, puts on a weak smile. Deciding, for now, to pretend she hadn’t said those words at all. That the look in her eyes was a lie.
“Well,” he says, his tone light, “it seems I’m needed.” He doubles-down on his parody, making a funny face he knows Sarah loves, the one where he crosses his eyes and pushes out his bottom lip. For a split-second she smiles, as if also wanting to play the game, join him in pretending things are okay. And the moment is enough—enough for him—and he thinks, perhaps, that it isn’t as bad as he thinks. That the wounds to their relationship aren’t fatal, that maybe she’s just tired, and in pain, and…
But then the smile is gone, and her eyes drift away.
A cold rush of loneliness floods his chest and chills him. “Well,” he says awkwardly, “I guess I better go see what old Harry wants. Guy doesn’t answer my calls for months, and now I can’t get rid of him. Agents, right?”
“Mmm.” She turns toward the windows, as if willing him to be gone. To disappear.
