Gothic, page 8
And yes, it does his heart good to see his baby girl, but to see her in the kitchen chatting with some of the “fresh faces” in the field makes Tyson feel simultaneously old and youthful. He can’t help viewing the young bucks as competition, even if they haven’t accomplished a smidgen of what he has, even if they would kill to have the career of Tyson Parks. He decides to let go of any nascent resentment of these new faces, of their youth, their theoretically bright futures still so vast and unmarred by error. Life’s too short, and besides, the horror must go on, right?
Tyson finishes his drink, grimaces, and makes the conscious decision to stop worrying and just enjoy his party, let all his petty thoughts go by the wayside for now, for just one night.
Feeling proud of himself—downright magnanimous, actually—he’s just starting for the bar and a fresh drink when Sarah tugs at his elbow. He spins to look at her and is mildly surprised when the room continues around another quarter-turn before snapping back to Sarah’s beaming face.
“Whoa,” he says, a bit unsteadily. “This might have been my last drink tonight.”
“You having fun?” she says, a wry smile on her face.
“Oh hell yes, you bet. This is amazing. You’re amazing!” he says, slightly garbled and a little too loud.
“Are you ready for present number two?” she asks, giggling and taking his hand.
Tyson carefully sets his empty glass on a side table. “I am,” he says, then hugs her roughly, his hand finding the slope of her breast, and whispers into her ear. “But please don’t tell me it’s another daughter!”
She laughs, removes his hand from her chest and kisses him. “No, but that would be quite the surprise. Honey, let me get you a bottle of water, then I want to show you, okay?”
“Yes to water, yes to the lingerie show,” he says.
A passerby he doesn’t recognize pats his shoulder, says Happy Birthday and shakes Tyson’s hand before moving on into the mingling crowd. By the time Sarah comes back holding a chilled bottle of Evian, he’s already forgotten what it is they’re supposed to be doing.
****
She leads him through the partygoers—the bulk of which have begun to thin out as the party presses on past midnight—toward his office. “I was going to wait until everyone left,” she says over her shoulder, “but frankly I’ve been terrified all night that you might walk in here with one of your writer buddies, wanting to show off your book collection.”
“Wait for what?” Tyson says, intrigued. “And why do I get the feeling it’s not a book this year?”
Sarah can’t figure out, given Tyson’s drunken state, if he’s disappointed or merely curious. She squeezes his hand and opens the door to his office. It’s far enough down the hall from the main room that conversation and music are muffled, the office itself dark and quiet as a freshly-dug grave. She leads him inside and closes the door behind them.
“Hey, wait a second,” he murmurs, breath hot on her ear, “I think I know what the gift is…”
Sarah laughs and slaps at his hands as he gropes her ass and hips, runs his palms up the inside of her cashmere sweater, fingertips slipping beneath the silk cups of her bra. “Wrong!” she says, and steps quickly away, leaving him alone and untethered in the dark. “Although, maybe we’ll call that present number three. But that’s for later…”
Tyson tries to follow her voice as it drifts through the unlit room. He’s become slightly disoriented, and suddenly can’t figure out which way he is facing. Is the door that way? he wonders, and feels sweat break out on his forehead. He squeezes the cold, perspiring water bottle, takes a long sip.
“Sarah?” he says, and thinks his voice sounds shaky. There’s a tremor in his throat he doesn’t much care for. “God, honey? It’s so damned dark in here… I, uh…”
“Just hold on,” she says, so close that he jerks back a little. But when her familiar hand slips into his, all the pressure leaves his chest, and he feels anchored once more. He exhales gratefully. A horror writer afraid of the dark. That’s a good one, all right.
Sarah pulls him a few feet forward, momentarily lets him go, then slides both hands gently onto his face, her skin cool and soft against his stubbled cheeks. She tilts his head down to look at her, but all he can see is emptiness.
“Don’t move,” she whispers, and her hands fall away.
Before the anxiety can return, he hears the click of the floor lamp, the one that stands next to his reading chair, and the room snaps into existence around them. Tyson finds himself facing the back of the office, staring at a wall of books that make up a chunk of his most prized possessions, shelves filled by some of the greatest genre writers of the century, their pages inked with inscriptions that could never be replaced.
Sarah steps in front of him. Tyson thinks she looks nervous.
“So?” he says, trying to smile away her tension, and his own. “Now what?”
Sarah pats his chest, firmly grabs his hips, and turns him around.
“Holy Christ,” he gasps, as the water bottle he’s been holding drops to the floor.
Seventeen
What a beautiful monster you are.
Tyson’s old desk is gone, the very same one he’s had since he was a pimply-faced freshman at Suffolk University. I screwed Holly Pages on that desk the day I turned twenty-one, he thinks, a footnote he’s kept from his current partner. There’s a distinct feeling of emptiness at its disappearance, and he can’t help feel a momentary stab of pain in his gut. That old piece of shit went from his dorm room at Suffolk, to a shared apartment at NYU (where he’d first met Billy). Over the last few decades, it had been hauled to three additional apartments all through the Midwest and East Coast as Tyson moved from New York, back to Boston, then to Maine, Detroit (briefly), and then finally back to New York and this office, in this townhouse. My final resting place, he thinks morbidly. But that’s what loss does, he figures: brings on morbid thoughts. Loss, death, the infinite beyond. The end of all things.
And so that is his first thought when Sarah turns him around: the foreignness of not seeing the familiar.
In its place, however, is something even more difficult for his mind to process.
A new desk.
Or is it a table? he thinks, as the beastly thing’s got to measure six-feet-by-four-feet without breaking a sweat. The side facing them is a slab of slick black oak so polished it looks wet, as if freshly oiled. Tyson imagines that if he did touch the surface, he would pull away his fingertips to find them smeared with rich black fluid, as if he had dipped his fingers into an inkwell. As he studies it more closely, he notices the wood is also densely engraved, and he finds himself stepping toward it, as if in a trance, then crouching slowly before it, as one might approach a wild beast, one that’s eyeballing you as a danger (or a hot meal).
Across the top edge are heavily sunken letters forming words carved nearly four inches in height and sprawled horizontally, end-to-end:
DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME
Surrounding the words, woven within a densely layered twisting ivy pattern that runs the entire circumference of the massive desk, are strange symbols—stretched cherubic faces, bizarre images his mind cannot, or will not, translate. He doesn’t think the symbology is religious—or occult—and finally dismisses it as artisan design, something altogether original. He walks slowly around the thing’s substantial bulk, taking in every facet of its unique, complicated design. He’s reminded of the Ray Bradbury story, The Illustrated Man. Every inch of the black wood is covered with intricate patterns, symbols, and beautiful, haunting imagery. The work is so delicate, so smooth, that it seems to almost ripple, as if the intertwined vines of ivy are sliding just below a thin skin, like a dense cluster of snakes roiling beneath the surface of an oil slick.
The top of the desk is made from a solid, polished, charcoal-gray stone. Granite, perhaps? Tyson thinks. But it’s unmarred by any natural veins, and he concludes it must be dark sandstone, or possibly something like basalt. But it’s also smooth as glass, as if diamond-cut, shining like a black pool beneath a pale sky, windless and deathly still. His laptop, the small lamp, and the assorted stacks of papers set on the slick surface seem trivial, lost among its vastness. Tyson notices his chair has been replaced as well, with something newfangled and ergonomic, but he hardly spares it a second glance as he slides it away in order to study the rest of the desk.
It’s dark on this side of the desk, the drawers and cubby space lost in deep shadow, and he reaches for the desk lamp, clicks it on. The drawer faces are wide, and intricately carved. The knobs are not knobs at all, but faces, or masks, with bugged-out eyes and wide-open mouths, snarling and filled with sharp teeth.
Numbly, he pulls the chair towards him and sits down. He spreads his fingers across the cool stone top, feels an unmistakable energy flow from the stone and into his hands, like touching metal that has a weak electric current running through it.
From far away, someone is speaking. But the words are white noise, the chitter of a tree-nuzzled bird, the rumble of distant traffic, or an oncoming storm.
“…over two-hundred years old… if you hate it, we can bring the old one back…”
Slowly, not even fully realizing he’s doing it, he turns his head and lowers it to the desktop. When his ear is about an inch above the black stone, he closes his eyes and audibly gasps, then releases a long breath, one that carries the weight of all his anxiety and doubt and despair away with it, out of his lungs and into the air, where it dissolves, and is no more.
“…not even sure how they got it in here… Tyson, please… speak to me… I’m sorry…”
Tyson ignores the distant voice, because there’s something else coming from the desk’s cold surface… something that demands all of his attention.
Whispers.
For a moment, he wants to laugh, but quickly stifles the idea.
But there’s no doubt now, no doubt at all. As his ear hovers just above the desk’s surface, he can absolutely, undeniably, hear them.
Yeah, sure… he can hear them all right, just fine and dandy.
I’m listening. And yes, yes, I understand…
“Tyson!”
The whispers stop. His meditative, almost fugue state blows apart like a crushed walnut and reality pours in: the room, the smell of his own body—booze and sweat and age—the light, and her. Sarah. She studies him anxiously, hands wringing. Her face is as forlorn as a small child waiting for her parents to return after being left at the side of a deserted road, watching as the speeding car becomes a puff of brown dust in the distance, not yet realizing she’s been forever abandoned.
He notices she’s softly crying, and this realization both surprises and disgusts him.
“I’m so sorry, Ty…” she says. “Do you hate it?”
Tyson presses his fingers to the desktop and stands. He walks around the desk, feeling its presence at his side, his legs. Feeling it hate his leaving.
He puts his hands over Sarah’s own, squeezes them warmly, and looks deep into her anticipative eyes.
“Honey,” he says. “I could kill you.”
Her face goes pale, her lips quiver, and fresh tears spill from her eyes.
“I don’t…” she says, confused and... afraid?
Then he smiles broadly and moves his hands up her arms to her face, gently wipes the tears from her cheeks.
“For spending so much damned money on me!” he says, then bursts out laughing. It’s a young man’s laugh. A joyful, almost unhinged, laugh. “This thing must have cost a fortune!” He pulls her into a tight embrace, smiling wildly toward the ceiling. “Oh my God, Sarah. Oh my God…”
She pushes him away, puts a hand to her forehead, simultaneously incredulous and hopeful. “Wait. You mean you want to keep it? You like it?”
“I do, I do…” he says, and Sarah squeals with delight, hugging him back fiercely, breathing heavy sighs of relief into his chest. “I don’t deserve you,” he says, and kisses the top of her head.
From behind him, something reaches out and tickles the back of his leg.
“I’ve never been so happy.”
Eighteen
That night, after the guests are gone and Tyson’s daughter is fast asleep in her third-floor bedroom, Tyson and Sarah make love amidst slanting bars of moonlight, the bed’s coverings cast away, long-since kicked off, now slumped in jagged heaps on the carpeted floor.
There are moments during sex when he surprises her.
There are other moments—filled with unrecognizable touches, like those from a stranger—where she becomes a little frightened at his tenacity, his almost alarming passion that borders, at times, on violence. But she knows this man, and is able to stay with him, guide him, slow him when necessary.
For the first time in their decade-long relationship she has to tell him No, and that’s all right. That’s okay. Because he listens, and she even enjoys it once he’s calmed down.
Regardless, she’s relieved at his final grunt and gasp, the offering of hot fluid inside her signaling the end of her night’s work.
Afterward, she’s sore but content, fighting away any feelings of being annoyed, or upset.
Or ashamed, a quiet part of her mind says as he snores next to her, where he lies naked and sticky with his own sweat and semen, sprawled like a bear atop a sun-warmed rock.
She wipes a tear away from an eyelid, and smiles to herself.
I suppose I should be grateful he likes the desk. Mission accomplished, right?
She steps out of bed to put on underwear, a comfortable bra, and a thin T-shirt. After a brief hesitation, she pulls on a pair of cotton sweats she hasn’t worn in years.
Dressed, she crawls back into bed. Dragging the comforter up from the floor, she pulls it up to her chin, buries the side of her face in a pillow.
After a while, she sleeps.
****
Sarah doesn’t wake in the middle of the night as Tyson slips out of bed, silently takes boxers, khakis, and a T-shirt from his dresser drawers. Dressed, he moves stealthily out of the bedroom and down the stairs, toward the office.
He’s whimpering as he goes, scolding himself in wet, harsh whispers.
Had Sarah wakened, she might have asked him why he was crawling on all fours.
If so, he would have answered: Because that’s what bad dogs do.
Nineteen
When Sarah enters the kitchen the following morning, it’s already filled with the incredible, heartbreakingly wonderful aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Violet sits at the breakfast table, wearing a Brown University T-shirt and black leggings, reading the Times. She looks up at Sarah, bright-eyed and beautiful. Sarah, tired, hungover, and sore (and most likely looking like hell warmed over), allows herself a moment to hate all twenty-one years of the vibrant, gorgeous young woman, then loves her all over again.
“Coffee?” Violet asks, already moving to the cupboard to pull down a mug.
“Does the pope shit in the woods?” Sarah replies, then sinks into a kitchen chair. “Black, please.”
Violet tops off her own mug and brings a fresh one to Sarah, who smells it first, savoring the rush to come, then sips slowly.
“Oh yeah,” she says. “That’s the stuff.”
Violet laughs and goes back to her paper. Sarah looks behind her, toward the disaster area of the living room. Billy and a few others had helped dispose of the empty bottles, cups, and paper plates lumped with half-eaten cake squares, but the place is still only a high-death-toll shy of a war zone. Plus it stinks like scotch and cigarettes, she thinks. She turns her back on the mess and sips again at the cup of coffee, much stronger than Tyson normally made (this is a college kid’s cup of coffee, she thinks) and relishes the burst of flavor and caffeine, lets it smooth over the most brittle edges of her hangover.
“A cleaning service is coming at ten,” she says absently, and Violet nods from behind the paper, offers a mumbled, Oh good.
It isn’t until her third sip of coffee that Sarah finally realizes what’s off about the morning:
No Tyson.
And then, soft, barely audible, she hears it: the tapping of a keyboard.
My God… I’m sitting here barely able to keep my head elevated and Tyson’s in there… what? Writing a novel?
Sarah leans back so she can look at the office door, just visible from her seat at the kitchen table. Now that she’s heard it, it seems obvious. The clattering tickety-tack-tackety of a writer at work.
And by the sound of it, he’s on quite the roll, she thinks, surprised to feel herself frowning. “How long has he been in there?”
Violet shrugs. “Been at it since before I got up at six for my run. So at least a few hours, I guess.”
Sarah takes a deeper, steadying drink from her mug. “Think I’ll check on him.”
She starts to rise when Violet’s head tilts up, her deep brown eyes wide, and full of warning. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Sarah pauses, then sits back down, astonished. “Why not?”
Violet glances toward her father’s office, as if to make sure he hasn’t snuck out and into earshot of their conversation. He hasn’t, of course (the steady rhythms of tack-tack-tickety-tick a dead giveaway), but she leans in anyway, speaks softly. “I stuck my head in there about an hour ago and nearly got it ripped off. I’m telling you, he’s a man possessed right now. A regular writing machine.”
“Wait, did he actually yell at you?”
Violet shrugs again. “More like a snarl, actually. Like a dog protecting his bone. To be honest, he looks like shit. I mean, he’s never been a morning person, but still.” Violet sets down the paper, clutches Sarah’s hand across the table. “Hey, after the cleaners leave, how about you and me go to the Met? There’s a Hartley exhibit I want to check out.”
