“I’ll leave you in peace,” said Craven. He stood and, after setting his glass on the mantel, picked up the hunter’s cap discarded there earlier.
“And which room is yours?” Sindt asked, choosing a phrase he hoped was devoid of any literary referent whatsoever.
“My room?” Craven said, and frowned. “Hardly important.”
Once Craven was gone, Sindt finished his drink, then set the glass beside Craven’s own. And then, realizing that Craven’s characters were always leaving drained glasses on fireplace mantels, he carried both glasses into the dining room, then set them on the table. He stayed there looking at them and then picked them up again, carried them into the kitchen.
The kitchen was dark. From under the pantry door he could detect a feeble light. Having set the glasses on the counter, he knocked softly. There was no reply. He knocked again, again heard nothing. When he opened the door, he saw that the room stretched back farther than he had imagined, parsed by tiers of shelves. Near the door was less a pallet than a pile of ragged blankets. He pushed at them with his toe. The chef was nowhere to be seen, perhaps hiding back behind the shelves.
He closed the pantry door and then methodically explored the house. There were six other bedrooms besides his tower, the dining room, the parlor, a library (filled only with multiple copies of Craven’s works), a study. The house was sparsely decorated, the walls scorched in almost every room. Craven was nowhere to be seen.
He climbed the stairs to the tower, undressed. Yet when he turned off the light, he realized there was a glow coming through the center window. He watched light play on the ceiling and then, unable to sleep, got up, looked out. He could see, below, the greenhouse, the light from inside it illuminating the whole of the structure and shining up through the glass roof. Craven was inside, Sindt saw, sitting at a desk with his back to him, and Sindt could see that Craven was crouched over something, his right arm hidden before his body. There was a sheaf of papers to either side of him. Sindt watched, first leaning against the windowsill and then pulling the chair away from his own desk and putting it beside the window. Finally he saw Craven add a piece of paper to the rightmost sheaf, take a sheet from the leftmost sheaf. There is Craven, he thought with a certain amount of hatred, desperately adding another insignificant work to an already insignificant body of work, and with that thought, he found himself able to return to his bed and fall asleep.
He awoke several hours later, anxious. He was in a house, living out situations that seemed carefully constructed by Craven out of fragments of his novels. Where finally did that leave Sindt? He was not one of Craven’s characters, was not a literary referent, had no intention of becoming one if he could help it. But perhaps even now Craven was writing about him. He could still see on the ceiling the wash of light from the greenhouse below, and when he stood, went to the window, could see Craven still hunched over his desk, a sheaf of paper to either side of him. He sat there watching Craven, the papers moving slowly from one sheaf to the other, until dawn broke and the transparent glass of the greenhouse turned sun-flecked and opaque.
He dressed, stumbled downstairs to the dining room. Craven was already at table, bright-eyed, a plate of eggs before him.
“Sleep well?” Craven asked, picking up his fork.
Yes, Sindt said, choosing his words with care, he had slept well, no interruptions, but his back — not his problem, the bed, you see, perhaps he would have to regretfully cut his visit short.
“Nonsense,” said Craven. “We’ll ask a chiropractor in from town.”
As Craven ate, Sindt watched. Craven seemed fully awake, his face unlined, his eyes clear, as if he had slept soundly through the night rather than spending all night at a desk in a greenhouse, writing. Perhaps it had not been Craven, thought Sindt, but no, who else could it be? And even from the back he had been certain who the man was. Yet here Craven was, eager and visible despite everything, and well into his breakfast.
Was there anything planned for the day? Sindt wanted to know.
Planned? said Craven. No, nothing. As for himself, he would enjoy a day in the out-of-doors, wandering through the trees, perhaps climbing a little way up the side of the mountain. Sindt, of course, was welcome to join in.
Sindt declined. In the tower after breakfast, he watched from the window as Craven trudged around the greenhouse and set off through the trees. He spent his own day wandering the house, slept for a while in the tower. He wandered the clearing as well, catching glimpses of Craven from time to time. Approaching the greenhouse, he found it locked. Through the glass he could see rows of emptied clay pots along each wall, a dirt floor, the chair, the desk with sheaves of paper on both sides of it. He tried, by moving along the side of the greenhouse, to catch sight of the words on the top sheet, without success because of the angle of the pages, the waver of the glass. The lock on the door was simple, part of the latch, and he thought if he pushed on the door just right he might be able to spring it, though there was always the risk of the panes of glass breaking or slipping out. And what, in any case, would Craven think if he saw him? He couldn’t have Craven thinking he remained interested in his writing. He certainly didn’t care to give Craven material of that sort to use in constructing the Sindt of his novel.
That night, after a light dinner which again recalled Craven’s work — the poached salmon found in the novella Box of Sky—Sindt climbed the circular staircase to the tower and again saw the light thrown on the ceiling. He can’t stay up all night, he told himself. This time I will watch until he falls asleep. I will watch all night. I will find him out.
He stayed up, seated at the window, resting his arms on the sill, watching Craven’s malfocused back, his slight and minute movements only partly available through the glass. If only I had a pair of binoculars, he thought, and wandered the house in search of those or some sort of spyglass, finding nothing save the thick bottom of a whiskey tumbler, which, while it admittedly magnified things, severely distorted them at the same time. This too, he realized, could have been an object from one of Craven’s books, and though it was in none of the published books, perhaps it would be found in the book Craven was writing in the greenhouse now. When Sindt returned to the tower, Craven was still in the greenhouse, still at his desk, the papers in the pile on one side migrating slowly to the pile of paper on the other side. Sindt sat again at the window and for a time moved the tumbler from eye to eye to eye; through it, the greenhouse became a ghost of light, the light striking rings into the poorly ground glass base. After a while, he set the tumbler down on the floor, leaned again on his elbows. A little while more and his chin slipped onto the sill, and then he was waking up, morning having long arrived, his back sore, his body half-slid from the chair.
It was like that the next night and the next, and Craven each morning as bright and unblemished as if he had been freshly created instead of having spent all night at a desk, writing. Sindt, though, felt increasingly disoriented, hardly able to sleep either at night or during the day. It was as if there were more than one Craven: one who wrote, another who appeared in Tyrolean garb by daylight, perhaps others as well. He asked Craven, or one of the Cravens, if he had a pair of binoculars, and though Craven claimed that yes, he did, and that yes, Sindt could borrow them, he never produced them. Their relations seemed to Sindt to become more strained and he felt they spent their days circling one another, excessively formal (he realized this was a description as well of Jansen and Jensen’s interactions in Craven’s Moody Mouths), as Craven or Cravens waited for evening to come so they could write and Sindt awaited an evening of trying to make things out through glass. How is your writing coming? Sindt finally asked, and was surprised when Craven answered, I’m not writing. I haven’t written a word in weeks. Yet there he was, below, scribbling away, night after night. Though Sindt could not, through the glass roof, make out the words — or even for that matter make out that there were words — he sat, peering out over the sill, trying by force of will to make his eyes see farther and farther. But he could never make out enough: only Craven, only the papers’ slow flight from one sheaf to the other, a few sheets a night. He tried to imagine what was on each sheet, pieced together scenes from an imaginary novel, wondering where, if anywhere, he fit in.