Here goes nothing, he thought. And he was gone.
PART TWO
Everyone’s Invited
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Lady of Situations
Through some miracle of coincidence—he would not have been surprised to learn that The Golden Family was behind it—Jack was able to complete a call to Jule Gardino and leave a message on the answering machine. It had been months since he’d put a call through this easily.
“Julie! It’s Jack. Listen, I need to talk to you, about some business. I mean lawyer-type business. I mean I’d like to talk to you anyway, of course. So call me if and when you can. Oh, and tell Emma hi. Hi, Emma! Bye…”
He set the phone down. He felt exhausted, and experienced a familiar anxiety. Had he taken all his medications that morning? Was it time to begin the next round of his remaining pills and inhalants and herbal tinctures, or had he already missed something? He looked around for a working timepiece, saw only ornate horological confections with hands set at odd hours: twenty past seven, five past noon, or was it midnight? He decided it was time to go back in. He gathered the GFI prospectus and The King in Yellow, thinking morosely how once again he had gotten no work done. Then he returned to the main house.
It was later than he had imagined, well past noon. Mrs. Iverson had made lunch: tinned sardines on stale crispbread with a drizzle of the olive oil left by Leonard at Christmas. Jack ate absently and alone, preoccupied with thoughts of corporate largesse and with the lingering image of Larry Muso’s dark eyes and ivory-colored skin. His grandmother had lain down for a nap. When he finished lunch he did the same, first checking his arsenal of pills to make sure he hadn’t missed any. He squeezed a dropperful of Fusax onto his tongue, placed The Golden Family’s prospectus on his nightstand. He heard the faint tinkling of chimes. He was looking forward to thinking about Larry Muso’s offer, to imagining what three million dollars might buy. Perhaps even some time with Larry Muso himself? But within minutes he was sound asleep.
He woke not knowing how long he had slept, or what time of day it was. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, feeling out of sorts. He stood and recalled his morning in the carriage house, Larry Muso’s sloe eyes and the small triumph of a telephone call successfully placed to Jule. With a yawn he crossed to the window.
Outside the lawn stretched grey beneath a seething sky. Rain-fed streams crisscrossed the matted grass, culminating in a boggy stretch at the bottom of the garden, where a few stolid birch trees rose from the mulch. Earlier that week he had seen figures moving down there, well within the boundaries of the estate. There was a security fence, of course, but it was an electrical fence, useless now. At night he could glimpse fires through the windows of the fallen houses adjoining Lazyland; he tried to take that for a good omen, since it meant the encamped fellahin were content to remain within their own broken homes and leave his alone. He leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the flickering sky.
How long has it been since I’ve seen the stars? One year? Two?
Jack’s breath left a fog on the glass. He rubbed at it, frowning as he touched the bull’s-eye left by the Fusax bottle.
Could you see the stars in Mongolia, or Japan? Was there anyplace left where you could see them at all?
Certainly not here, where the sky had given itself over to a perpetual carnival of night. Fires raging in empty towers, the waters of New York Harbor burning where freighters had released their cargoes, glowing traceries of fuselage left by jets that had failed in transit. Lightning streamed across the sky and lit upon the Palisades, crimson and violet. A wash of corrosive orange swept across the cliffs and was gone. From the darkness came a howl, a dog’s, Jack thought, but then the sound fractured into laughter.
Horror choked him poisonous as the rain gnawing at Lazyland’s ruined lawns. Horror not of the grinning refugees but of what came next, when pestilence and famine claimed them all.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
The awful laughter rose, louder and louder. Wind beat against the house, and the smell of smoke seeped through the walls, thick with the reek of burning plywood, foam insulation, paint fumes. He covered his mouth; the wind gusted and as quickly as it had come the smoke was gone. On the window where his finger had smudged the glass, he saw a darkness like fine fur: some new kind of spore or fungus, already hungrily seizing upon the warmth and dead tissue left by his touch. He felt the pulse of blood inside his veins, and knew it not for his own life but the mindless tremor of nature. He shook his head and realized that he had leaned against the window again, both hands pressed against the smooth surface. When he reared back the imprints of his fingers blackened upon the glass as though charred by an invisible flame. But it was not ash but innumerable threads of living matter: he could smell them, a whiff of foul gas. He stepped back from the window but there was no escaping it, it was all around him, a shroud woven by a tireless army.
He had gone to sleep in one world but woken to the wasteland.
Later he came to, lying on the floor beneath the window. He had been dreaming of Leonard. Leonard’s hand upon his breast, his own hand on Leonard’s cock. He gasped awake, flooded with desire and an aching sorrow as he took in the room around him and remembered: he was forty-two years old, he was ill, Leonard had fled him long ago.
A somber radiance on the eastern horizon made Jack think it must be dawn. But when he found his watch, a Cartier hermetic timepiece with radium numerals, it said 10:15. The little brass carriage clock was chiming two. He stood and gazed at a dark imprint on the window. Nothing horrible there, only the normal amount of dirt and grit and grease. He frowned. The wind blessedly had died away. Even more remarkable, the rain had stopped. It must have been this that woke him, the unaccustomed silence after so many weeks of storm.
But the air felt dank and chill. There was a cloyingness to it, a weirdly palpable sense of vitality. Jack turned and started for his bed.
That was when he heard her. Sobbing, faint but clear from somewhere just below the morning balcony. It made him think of his sister at play long ago, hiding in the hydrangea bush and crying because he was taking too long to find her. He waited, expecting the sound to fall into silence or flame into one of those unnerving screams. Instead it continued no louder or softer than before, frail and piteous.
He rubbed his eyes, walked back to the window, wrenched it open, and leaned outside to scan the garden below. The crying stopped. He could imagine whoever was there looking up and seeing him, a tall wraith commanding this battered ship. The crying began again, as miserable as before. The thought of someone down there gazing frightened, at him, was too much for Jack to bear. He hurried downstairs, pulled on boots and his grandfather’s ancient raincoat, and went outside.
The air was so still that he could hear the thrum of a single car echoing from far away, solid and portentous as the tolling of a church bell. He listened raptly as it drove off; then the sound of weeping stirred him again and he strode down toward the garden.