She stumbled from the house. When she got to her car, she looked back. The boy was watching her.
She sat on her stepsister’s inexpensive couch. Books and papers littered the coffee table. Her stepsister, divorced, had a fellowship and was teaching a writing class in the evening to help support herself and her children.
One of the children approached Dana shyly with a riddle. “How can you tell if a glass is half full or half empty?”
She shook her head.
“It depends,” he said importantly, “on if you’re filling or emptying the glass. If you’re filling it, it’s half full. If you’re emptying it, it’s half empty—”
“The optimist,” his mother pointed out, eager to impart a precept, “would say it was half full, the pessimist, half empty.”
The child, suddenly bored, darted away.
“He was almost hostile,” Dana said, resuming the conversation the child had interrupted.
“Geoffrey, you mean?” Jane lit a cigarette and waved the smoke away. “Well, the rumor had him head over heels in love with Keller, and more than a little jealous. That probably explains it.”
For a moment she wondered if Keller had reciprocated the boy’s feelings, shared the attachment. She supposed he had. The boy did live with him.
“I met Keller the day of the fire up at the cabin, and I’m certain I saw those books there. Why weren’t they burned in the fire?”
“Immortal works, right?” Her stepsister chuckled. “Okay, obviously they were taken from the cabin after you saw them but before the fire started. He must have taken them back to the house after you had gone, although that really doesn’t make much sense. Whenever Keller moved, he always took the gems of the collection with him. Everybody knew that.”
There wasn’t time for him to take them back to town and then come back to die, Dana thought, but did not say so to Jane.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” she agreed.
Later that day, at the university, again without warning — she was sure she had not been thinking of him — Dana thought she saw Keller in the parking lot. She only caught a glimpse of a tall thin man, but she had the breathless certainty that it was he. By the time she could make herself follow him, he had vanished in the jumble of cars. The incident left her perplexed and uneasy. She was afraid that her grasp on reality, ever tenuous, was weakening.
She drove with her usual care up the steep mountain road, but in her eagerness to put the blackened ruin of Keller’s cabin behind her, she took the curve beyond it too quickly. When she tried to slow down, the brake pedal went all the way to the floor without any effect. As the car started to skid across the road, she panicked and turned the steering wheel hard away from the steep drop. The rear end broke free, spinning the car around, and slamming it into the side of the mountain.
She was unhurt. She had not been going very fast. She sat with her forehead against the steering wheel and tried to catch her breath and slow the beating of her heart. She got shakily out of the car to survey the damage. The left rear fender had been badly dented by the impact. The familiar self-loathing seized her. Now she had wrecked the car.
She left the car facing the wrong way, crumpled against the road-cut, and walked the distance remaining to her cabin, where she found that the telephone book was five years old, and partly as a consequence, she had to make four calls before she got someone to agree to tow the car to town. She then went back to the car to wait for the tow truck. While she waited, she wondered what would have happened if the brakes had quit on her way down the mountain.
After a long forty minutes, the man from the garage arrived with a tow truck, crawled under her car, said her brake line was damaged as well as the rear fender, and he didn’t know what else. He said he would have their mechanic call her with an estimate in the morning.
As she watched the car being towed away from her down the mountain and the shadows deepening along the road, she felt herself begin that mindless slide into the anxiety she wanted so to control. The mundane activities of contacting the garage and dealing with the tow truck operator had preoccupied her, but now she was alone again and unable to stop the conviction that was growing within her: He had tried to kill her.
Jane would now be teaching her evening class, but she had to tell someone. It occurred to her that she knew almost no one in the town. She needed to talk to someone who had known Keller. Either the dental records were wrong and he was still alive, or there was some thing that was stalking her.
“I think I saw Keller today,” she said into the telephone.
There was a silence at the other end.
“Why are you doing this?” Geoffrey asked.
She could hear the anger in the student’s voice.
“I think he must still be alive. There must have been some mistake in identifying his body. I think I have seen him twice, and he’s trying to kill me. He tampered with the brakes of my car.”
Her voice sounded high pitched and unconvincing even to her.
“There couldn’t have been any mistake. Jerry’s dead,” the boy said. “You think you’ve seen him?”
“I’ve seen someone — something — that looks like Keller. I’m not making this up. Someone did try to kill me — just now.”
She knew she was losing his willingness to believe in what she was telling him — however much he might want Keller to be alive. And what if he wasn’t alive?
“Can you come up here?” she pleaded. “I’m in the cabin just up from his, the one with the green roof. I’m afraid he’s coming after me.” She was unable to keep from adding, “What if he thinks I should have died with him in the fire?”
“Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Please,” she said. She did not want to be alone after dark. “I’m frightened of him — of whatever it is. You were his friend—”
“I have a cousin in the sheriff’s office. He can stop you from harassing me—”
The police. She knew with a chilling certitude that they would think her mad. But she had hoped the boy, because he loved Keller, might listen to her. And perhaps he could stop whatever it was from killing her.
“Please,” she repeated. “Please come up here. See him for yourself—”
The line was dead in her hand, but he had not hung up. Something was wrong with the telephone. She stared at it in frustration. She had to make the boy understand. He had to understand. There wasn’t anybody else.
She went to the window, turning off the light so that she could better see out into the night to where the road ran beneath the pale moon. There was no wind, and it was very still. She could hear none of the sounds that had become so familiar to her during her sleepless nights. She thought the quiet unnatural as she watched the shadows mass along the road.
She made herself concentrate. Now she was afraid of those pills in her pocket. She had to think clearly. The compromises she was making between her perceptions and those of others were breaking down. The gulf between what was real to her and what was real to others seemed to her to be widening.
Still, real things, measurable events, were occurring and would continue to occur outside her mind, regardless of her perception of them. The brakes had been damaged. That was fact: objective, verifiable reality. She had run over nothing in the car that she could remember, no curb or stone. She could think of no way the brakes could have been damaged by accident.
Had she really seen Keller? She thought she had, but that was not a fact. Suppose she hadn’t seen Keller but had seen someone who looked very much like him. But why would this someone try to kill her?
She tried to calm herself to stop the awful pounding of her heart. She really did not believe in phantoms except those of her own making, her own imagination. What she had told the boy she knew was nonsense born of her desperation. She had seen no perturbed spirit. This was a creature capable of physical acts. A man then. A man who must have a very practical reason for wanting her dead.