Until two nights earlier, he hadn’t looked at these pictures in years because the sight of her caused him such pain and longing.
And guilt. He should have been with her on that rainy night. He had failed her before the Buick failed her. He had been a knave and a fool. His weakness had cost Emily her life and had cost him all hope of happiness.
The pain and the longing—and even the guilt—were less acute on this occasion, and David knew why. He wanted to believe the world was shapen to a plan, this layered world of infinite mysteries, that by something akin to a miracle, he was being given a precious second chance. Impossibly, inexplicably, a second chance. He needed to believe no less than he needed to breathe. Although Maddison Sutton was wrapped in mystery, though she sailed into his life on a sea of strangeness through which he would have to chart a course, he was convinced that she meant him no harm. When all was understood, all would be well. Perhaps in some way as yet beyond his comprehension, Emily’s fate could be changed.
He sorted through the photographs with solemn tenderness, the past alive again and rising from every image to engulf him. He sat in remembrance for a long while before the familiar fear quickened in him, as it had done in years past when he dared these pictures: the dread that Emily was still alive somewhere, anguished and tormented. She’d never been found. Therefore, it was not beyond possibility that she was alive in some ghastly circumstances, that after a decade, she remained imprisoned and had no surcease from suffering.
This dread became so intolerable that he put away the photos and closed the box.
For the first time since Isaac called, David remembered the pot on the stove. Half the water had boiled away. The linguini was still in the carton.
At the sink, as he refilled the pot, the tapping came again at the shade-covered window before him. The soft, frantic beating of a moth against the glass.
| 26 |
Except for the few sounds David made, the small house stood in absolute silence, as though the world outside its walls had ceased to exist, nothing now beyond its doors but eternal darkness and the end of time.
Over dinner, he read and reread the report from the private investigator in Santa Barbara, Lew Ross.
In addition to Samuel Markham, who had met Patrick Corley’s nonexistent twin, Phelim, on the beach, two years after Corley had died in the supermarket, Ross had found two others who had seen him vividly alive subsequent to his death, the most recent less than a year previously.
On the second reading, he knew that, sooner or later, he would have to talk to the witnesses, face-to-face, and he did not read the report a third time.
After rinsing the dishes and flatware, after putting them in the dishwasher, he sat at the table with a mug of coffee that he did not drink, staring at the box of photographs that he wanted—and did not want—to review again. He put Lew Ross’s report facedown atop the box.
He poured the coffee down the drain. He filled the mug with ice and Scotch and carried it into the bedroom.
He did not desire music, could not tolerate television. He wanted only what he could not have.
Sitting up in bed, he sipped the whisky in the dark until, halfway through the contents of the mug, he thought he heard the moth again—if it had been a moth before—this time in the room with him. The whispery flutter of gossamer wings, the soft thumping of its body against whatever surface it contested. But there was no light to excite the insect, other than the cold glow of the digital alarm clock. In such blackness, if the bug couldn’t fix itself to the small plastic window beyond which the green numbers timed the crawling night, it would settle elsewhere and fold its velvet-dust wings and wait for a brightness to occur. This moth didn’t settle but became increasingly frenzied.
The wheels of David’s well-oiled imagination spun in silent accompaniment to the tap-tap-tapping, and soon it seemed that the moth wasn’t a moth, but a misapprehension, a misinterpretation. The sound wasn’t a winged insect frantically throwing itself against an unyielding barrier, but was instead the feeble rapping of a hand, a wordless plea from some exhausted prisoner casketed and buried alive and near the end of her resources.
This was absurd, of course. No casket stood beside his bed, and no one was buried under the foundation of the house. But already his imagination had raced beyond that image conjured by Poe’s famous story, “The Premature Burial,” which had left an enduring impression on him since he had read it when he was thirteen.
However, neither reason nor the reassurance of Scotch on the rocks could forestall his imagination from proceeding to an even more macabre explanation of the sound. In his mind’s eye, he saw again the crypt in Ronny Jessup’s cellar, the room with radiused corners, the domed ceiling with one white ceramic tile on which someone had painted a single blue eye that once had gazed down on the mummified bodies of nine women. He saw—could not prevent his mind from tormenting him with—a figure standing in that gloom, under the never-blinking eye, costumed in unraveling white cotton bandages, feebly tapping on the locked door, beyond despair, barely still alive or barely alive again. If David listened closely enough, he could hear a sound in addition to the tapping, a faint and half-familiar voice calling his name.