“It’s nothing special, is it?” Charlie observed.
She was about to disagree, searching for a way to express what she was feeling, when Skin began barking outside. This wasn’t the excited yapping with which he’d announced each new pissing place along the way, but a sound of alarm. She started towards the door, but the hold the chapel had on her slowed her response, and Charlie was out before she’d reached the step, calling to the dog to be quiet. He stopped barking suddenly.
“Charlie?” she said.
There was no reply. With the dog quieted she heard a greater quiet. The birds had stopped singing.
Again she said, “Charlie?” and as she did so somebody stepped into the doorway. It was not Charlie; this man, bearded and heavy, was a stranger. But her system responded to the sight of him with a shock of recognition, as though he was some long lost comrade. She might have thought herself crazy, except that what she felt was echoed on his face. He looked at her with narrowed eyes, turning his head a little to the side.
“You’re Judith?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Oscar Godolphin.”
She let her shallow breaths go, in favor of a deeper draft.
“Oh . . . thank God,’1 she said. “You startled me. I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. Did the dog try and attack you?”
“Forget the dog,” he said, stepping into the chapel. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said. “Where’s Charlie? Is he all right?”
Godolphin continued to approach her, his step steady. “This confuses things,” he said.
“What does?”
“Me . . . knowing you. You being whoever you are. It confuses things.”
“I don’t see why,” she said. “I’d wanted to meet you, and I asked Charlie several times if he’d introduce us, but he always seemed reluctant. . . .” She kept chattering, as much to defend herself from his appraisal as for communication’s sake. She felt if she fell silent she’d forget herself utterly, become his object. “I’m very pleased we finally get to talk.”
He was close enough to touch her now. She put out her hand to shake his.
“It really is a pleasure,” she said.
Outside, the dog began barking again, and this time its din was followed by a shout.
“Oh, God, he’s bitten somebody,” Jude said, and started towards the door.
Oscar took hold of her arm, and the contact, light but proprietorial, checked her. She looked back towards him, and all the laughable cliches of romantic fiction were suddenly real and deadly serious. Her heart was beating in her throat; her cheeks were beacons; the ground seemed uncertain beneath her feet. There was no pleasure in this, only a sickening powerlessness she could do nothing to defend herself against. Her only comfort—and it was small—was the fact that her partner in this dance of desire seemed almost as distressed by their mutual fixation as she.
The dog’s din was abruptly cut short, and she heard Charlie yell her name. Oscar’s glance went to the door, and hers went with it, to see Estabrook, armed with a cudgel of wood, gasping at the threshold. Behind him, an abomination: a half-burned creature, its face caved in (Charlie’s doing, she saw; there were scraps of its blackened flesh on the cudgel) reaching blindly for him.
She cried out at the sight, and he stepped aside as it lurched forward. It lost its balance on the step and fell. One hand, fingers burned to the bone, reached for the door-jamb, but Charlie brought his weapon down on its wounded head. Skull shards flew; silvery blood preceded its head to the step, as its hand missed its purchase and it collapsed on the threshold.
She heard Oscar quietly moan.
“You fuckhead!” Charlie said.
He was panting and sweaty, but there was a gleam of purpose in his eye she’d never seen the like of.
“Let her go,” he said.
She felt Oscar’s grip go from her arm and mourned its departure. What she’d felt for Charlie had been only a prophecy of what she felt now; as if she’d loved him in remembrance of a man she’d never met. And now that she had, now that she’d heard the true voice and not its echo, Estabrook seemed like a poor substitute, for all his tardy heroism.