The house was all in darkness, except for two lighted windows flanking the pillared porch, tall pointed win dows I must have noticed without being aware of it on Christmas Day, for I remembered them now. It was, of course, Carla’s home to which I’d been brought, as if by a will quite separate from my own. As I looked at it, the curtain of one of these windows was pulled aside, and with a kind of inevitability Carla herself appeared and stood looking out with an expectant air.
I was startled, for she seemed to be looking straight at me, and I hurriedly stepped aside, into a bank at the edge of the drive, up which I scrambled. Safely out of sight at the top, I could still see her peering out, as though she knew I was there somewhere in the darkness but with an odd uncertainty most unlike her usual steady gaze. For a second I couldn’t focus the memory it recalled; and then my mother’s image appeared so vividly that I could almost hear my own unkind boy’s laughter mocking her superstition, and caught an instantaneous glimpse of similar resentful motives for my recent bad conduct. This backward flash over, I found myself thinking, even in my muddled state, that since Carla presumably was the person I’d been chasing with such urgency, I should have attracted her notice instead of avoiding it. But I had no real comprehension of my own acts or of anything else. And now her face was no longer clear. I couldn’t even be sure that I’d really seen her at the window. This uncertainty, I realized, was entirely down to mental confusion. Something seemed to be wrong with my eyes, which I was continually rubbing as if wiping away tears, and it came back to me that for some time as I hurried along I’d been trying to clear my vision in this way.
Looking up now, I was astonished to see a great flock of small white birds descending on me, filling the air, gliding and hovering all about me, so close their cold wing-tips brushed my cheeks and forehead. I waved my arms to scare them away. But they came at me still more thickly, hiding the window and diving and darting right into my face as if to peck out my eyes and blind me altogether. When I saw that they weren’t birds at all but great snowflakes I watched them, fascinated, as I’d always been in my childhood, by their ceaseless falling and turning, a palely glistening cur tain that drifted down without end or beginning, lightly shaken from time to time by some wandering air current as it changed direction and sent small eddies scurrying to and fro.
Suddenly, startlingly, two level beams came swinging around from the street, drove purposefully through the glimmering stuff and pointed straight at the house, lighting it up, though I myself was passed over and left to merge indistinguishably with the anonymous dark. In that setting, where all was vague, fluctuating and tenuous, these twin beams seemed, to my equally vague state of mind, to show an almost concrete definition and purpose, driving right to the heart of the situation, which was my rejection, while brightly illuminating what was forbidden to me.
I saw that they came from the headlights of a big car that had silently stopped just below me. And, instantly, I was transported to quite another time and place, gazing down with a child’s awed astonishment at the great black beetle filling the width of the lane; then, aware of the weight of my rifle, watching the miraculous-seeming arrival at the foot of the school boundary wall.
These backward excursions confused my already un certain identity even more. How could I be sure who I really was? To make the confusion worse, another picture now came before me, perhaps the memory of a dream, perhaps originating in some actual scene from the past, but transposed into a different dimension, where the face of apparent reality seemed about to drop, like a mask, to reveal the unimaginable strangeness behind. I was walking along the water’s edge on an interminable beach of pale sand, following someone’s footprints, which the small colourless waves were forever obliterating, though not so thoroughly that I ever lost sight of them ahead between the smooth, untrodden ellipses left by the water. Except for myself, the beach was absolutely forsaken, the sea on one side, and on the other walled in by high unscalable dunes. It seemed to have no end, and there was no escape from it, under the pale, tight-fitting lid of sky.
Though the powerful beams of the headlights recalled me instantly from this vision, it interfered for a moment with my view of the car and the snowstorm and Carla, standing in the porch, so asserting its uncomprehended significance. But before I could even ask myself what it meant, the sequence of events it had interrupted was once more restored. History seemed to be repeating itself when Spector emerged from the car into the white whirling dance of the snowflakes, which the light, spreading up, thickened into a falling fabric over his head, a faintly shimmering canopy.
Reverting to those two occasions my memory had retained so distinctly, I now felt the same shock, his presence seemed to assert itself with the same stark vividness, in the same abruptly portentous fashion. I only saw his face for a second before he turned to the girl, turning his back on me as if to confirm my rejection, so that I saw him as I had on Christmas Day and knew I’d recognized him even then.
So acutely was I conscious of him that when he took Carla’s arm to lead her back indoors I felt his dominant possessiveness and his insistent will, as though it were my arm he was holding. My eyes confused by the shifting pattern of snowflakes, and my mind by the weirdly shifting flux of personalities and unstable time, I couldn’t locate myself anywhere in my life. I couldn’t understand the strange blend of nostalgia and resentment that filled me until, for the second time, my mother’s image appeared, and I wanted to rush to Carla and pull her back, out of the tranquillity of her daydreaming face, because of my dream of the past, which ended so catastrophically.
My own dream was already ended, and that I was to have no part in hers was made clear by the way she and her companion were briefly outlined against the bright oblong of the open door, so closely joined by their linked arms that they might have been one. Despairing loneliness overwhelmed me as the door closed behind this composite figure of my two loves, now mysteriously become one and the same, excluding me with such decisive finality that I could only submit, as to a sentence passed on me long ago.
The lights went out. I felt at the same time a shift in my situation and that I’d been delivered into the power of my past. For a moment that seemed eternal I stood there, balanced precariously, high up in the darkness, bewildered by the unstable pallor forever falling out of a black sky, coldly, ghostlily, touching me and dissolving and touching again.
Somehow my surroundings were changing. I was afraid. It was dangerous for me to stay here, yet I dared not stir, pits of nothingness opening on every side. The world was dissolving in darkness and danger. Nothing was solid or safe any more in this high, unstable place, where a wan paleness wavered and fell like light through dense wind-shaken foliage. The very foundations of reality had begun to dissolve. I didn’t know where I was, either in space or in my existence. Lost in the deepest possible sense, I’d lost even the reality of my life in the world. My real self was dissolving, falling away from me. To my horror I felt myself some small, despised, abject thing — some kind of vermin — without teeth or claws or any means of protection, the most defenceless creature alive, hated and hunted by all the rest. My destruction was their common duty, an easy task, accomplished by one weak blow.
Utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of the whole world, I was waiting alone in this high, rocking insecurity — from which I already seemed to have watched myself deserted by all I had once trusted — for the vengeance racing towards me out of the past. In full cry, the past was hunting me down, and I knew myself now eternally doomed and hated, a criminal, outcast, isolated by guilt from all other living things, rejected by life itself. There could be no expiation and no escape, except by the door into senseless blackness through which I had once sent –