I can’t go down. My legs won’t move. It’s as if my body knows something about the house down there that my brain does not. The breeze rises again, chilling gooseflesh out onto my skin, and I
wonder what I have done to get myself all sweaty like this. Have I been running? And if so, what have I been running toward? Or from?
My hair is sweaty, too; it lies on my brow in an unpleasantly heavy clump. I raise my hand to brush it away and see there is a shallow cut, fairly recent, running across the back, just beyond the knuckles. Sometimes this cut is on my right hand, sometimes it’s on the left. I think, If this is a dream, the details are good. Always that same thought: If this is a dream, the details are good. It’s the absolute truth. They are a novelist’s details . . . but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist.
How is one to know?
Now Sara Laughs is only a dark hulk down below, and I realize I don’t want to go down there, anyway. I am a man who has trained his mind to misbehave, and I can imagine too many things waiting for me inside. A rabid raccoon crouched in a corner of the kitchen. Bats in the bath-room
— if disturbed they’ll crowd the air around my cringing face, squeaking and fluttering against my cheeks with their dusty wings. Even one of William Denbrough’s famous Creatures from Beyond the Universe, now hiding under the porch and watching me approach with glittering, pus-rimmed eyes.
‘Well, I can’t stay up here,’ I say, but my legs won’t move, and it seems I will be staying up here, where the driveway meets the lane; that I will be staying up here, like it or not. Now the rustling in the woods behind me sounds not like small animals (most of them would by then be nested or burrowed for the night, anyway) but approaching footsteps. I try to turn and see, but I can’t even do that . . .
. . . and that was where I usually woke up. The first thing I always did was to turn over, establishing my return to reality by demonstrating to myself that my body would once more obey my mind. Sometimes — most times, actually — I would find myself thinking Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley. There was something creepy about this (there’s something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that won’t be dislodged), but I would be lying if I didn’t add that some part of me enjoyed the breathless summer calm in which the dream always wrapped me, and that part also enjoyed the sadness and foreboding I felt when I awoke. There was an exotic strangeness to the dream that was missing from my waking life, now that the road leading out of my imagination was so effectively blocked.
The only time I remember being really frightened (and I must tell I don’t completely trust any of these memories, because for so long they didn’t seem to exist at all) was when I awoke one night speaking clearly into the dark of my bedroom: ‘Something’s behind me, don’t let it get me, something in the woods, please don’t let it get me.’ wasn’t the words themselves that frightened me so much as the tone in which they were spoken. It was the voice of a man on the raw edge of panic, and hardly seemed like my own voice at all.
Two days before Christmas of 1997, I once more drove down to Fidelity where once more the bank manager escorted me to my safe-box in the fluorescent-lit catacombs. As we walked down the stairs he assured me (for the dozenth time, at least) that his wife was a huge fan of my work, she’d read all my books, couldn’t get enough. For the dozenth time (at least) I replied that now I must get him in my clutches. He responded with his usual chuckle. I thought of this oft-repeated exchange as Banker’s Communion.
Mr. Quinlan inserted his key in Slot A and turned it. Then, as discreetly as a pimp who has conveyed a customer to a whore’s crib, he left. I inserted my own key in Slot B, turned it, and opened the drawer. It very vast now. The one remaining manuscript box seemed almost to quail in
the far corner, like an abandoned puppy who somehow knows his sibs have been taken off and gassed. Promise was scrawled across the top in fat black letters. I could barely remember what the goddam story was about.
I snatched that time-traveller from the eighties and slammed the box shut. Nothing left in there now but dust. Give me that, Jo had hissed in my dream — it was the first time I’d thought of that one in years. Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher.
Mr Quinlan, I’m finished,’ I called. My voice sounded rough and unsteady to my own ears, but Quinlan seemed to sense nothing wrong . . . or perhaps he was just being discreet. I can’t have been the only customer after all, who found his or her visits to this financial version of Forest Lawn emotionally distressful.
‘I’m really going to read one of your books,’ he said, dropping an involuntary little glance at the box I was holding (I suppose I could have brought a briefcase to put it in, but on those expeditions I never did). ‘In fact, I think I’ll put it on my list of New Year’s resolutions.’
‘You do that,’ I said. ‘You just do that, Mr. Quinlan.’
‘Mark,’ he said. ‘Please.’ He’d said this before, too.
I had composed two letters, which I slipped into the manuscript box before setting out for Federal Express. Both had been written on my computer, which my body would let me use as long as I chose the Note Pad function. It was only opening Word Six that caused the storms to start. I never tried to compose a novel using the Note Pad function, understanding that if I did, I’d likely lose that option, too . . . not to mention my ability to play Scrabble and do crosswords on the machine. I had tried a couple of times to compose longhand, with spectacular lack of success. The problem wasn’t what I had once heard described as ‘screen shyness’; I had proved that to myself.
One of the notes was to Harold, the other to Debra Weinstock, and both said pretty much the same thing: here’s the new book, Helen’s Promise, hope you like it as much as I do, if it seems a little rough it’s because I had to work a lot of extra hours to finish it this soon, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Erin Go Bragh, trick or treat, hope someone gives you a fucking pony.
I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter-eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low-pressure time — that’s one of the things I love about it), with Helen’s Promise under my left arm and a paperback copy of Nelson DeMille’s The Charm School in my right hand.
I read almost fifty pages before entrusting my final unpublished novel to a harried-looking clerk.
When I wished her a Merry Christmas she shuddered and said nothing.
CHAPTER FOUR
The phone was ringing when I walked in my front door. It was Frank asking me if I’d like to join him for Christmas. Join them, as matter of fact; all of his brothers and their families were coming.
I opened my mouth to say no — the last thing on earth I needed was a Irish Christmas with everybody drinking whiskey and waxing sentimental about Jo while perhaps two dozen snotcaked rugrats crawled around the floor — and heard myself saying I’d come.
Frank sounded as surprised as I felt, but honestly delighted. ‘Fantastic!’ He cried. ‘When can you get here?’
I was in the hall, my galoshes dripping on the tile, and from where I standing I could look through the arch and into the living room. There was no Christmas tree; I hadn’t bothered with one since Jo died. The room looked both ghastly and much too big to me . . . a roller rink furnished in Early American.
‘I’ve been out running errands,’ I said. ‘How about I throw some in a bag, get back into the car, and come south while the still blowing warm air?’
‘Tremendous,’ Frank said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘We can have us a sane bachelor evening before the Sons and Daughters of East Malden start arriving. I’m pouring you a drink as soon as I get off the telephone.’
‘Then I guess I better get rolling,’ I said.
That was hands down the best holiday since Johanna died. The only good holiday, I guess. For four days I was an honorary Arlen. I drank too much, toasted Johanna’s memory too many times . . . and knew, somehow, that she’d be pleased to know I was doing it. Two babies spit up on me, one dog got into bed with me in the middle of the night, and Nicky Arlen’s sister-in-law made a bleary pass at me on the night after Christmas, when she caught me alone in the kitchen making a turkey sandwich. I kissed her because she clearly wanted to be kissed, and an adventurous (or perhaps