When he turned the light on again the table in the center of the kitchen had been shoved aside and a tarpaulin laid over the tiles near the floor drain. Two lumps about a meter long lay under the tarp. As he stared, an unaccountable dread stole over him, causing his hand to tremble and his throat to go dry. He extinguished the light and did not turn it on until he had left the kitchen.
The back stairway would have been a dark climb even if there had been lights. Ted guided himself as best he could, considering that what he saw by ghostlight was not necessarily what actually lay under his feet. Hey, he was in the dark; the flashlight didn’t change that.
At the top of the stairs, he came face to face with the woman, clad in the boots and trousers in which he had first seen her. She stood by the window gripping a crossbow. Ted stopped in his tracks.
Oh, that face would stop any man in his tracks! It wasn’t the glamour we sometimes mistake for beauty. This was no finely chiseled, dainty elegance; no hothouse flower. This was a rounded face with a wide mouth and full, soft lips; with cheeks that looked as if they had pinked in laughter more than once, with a nose that was short and wide and turned up a little at the tip. Her eyebrows were heavy and unplucked, and a dark smudge highlighted her cheek.
But it was her eyes that drew him in. They were hard and black, like coals; set deep, so that, if the light were angled right, they became dark pools. Seen full on, they brimmed with sorrow and resolution. There were no tears, but there once had been.
Still as a falcon, she hovered beside the open window, watching, waiting, sad determination on her face, her eyes fixed with infinite patience on a spot in the outside world, where Ted’s light failed to penetrate. Ted could not have moved had he wanted to. He was rooted to the spot, as still as she was, unaware of the passage of time.
How long did they wait together? Do you measure time in the swings of Foucault’s pendulum? Or do you measure it in heartbeats? It’s the heart-time that matters. That was the clock the woman ran on; that was the tempo Ted felt.
Abruptly, smoothly, the crossbow rose to her cheek and, a heartbeat later, the bolt had sped on its way. The woman watched, smiled, and ducked back from the view of the open window.
People, I would not want to be on the receiving end of that smile! The arrow would be bad enough, but that grin was deadly. It was the falcon’s smile; or perhaps that of a mouse that has just brought down a falcon. There is a difference. The raptor’s smile is almost friendly; but the curl of a mouse’s lips can freeze the blood.
The woman turned and walked right through Ted. Startled, Ted took a step back—which was a mistake because, as you might remember, he was standing at the head of the stairs. He stumbled, slipped, grabbed hold of the rail, and the flashlight tumbled down the stairs. Halfway down, the ghostlight winked out.
That stairwell was dark! High noon and midnight were all the same. Cautiously, Ted went to hands and knees and backed down the stairs one step at a time, rubbing his hands across the runners as he searched. His heart raced. What if it were broken? How could he ever solve the puzzle if he had no more pieces?
His groping hands finally discovered the light in a corner of the landing, where the stairwell doglegged to the kitchen. He snatched it up, fondled the switch, and sank with relief against the wall when he saw the landing bathed in a familiar circle of pale light.
Shortly, two children scampered up the stairs, stuffed with silent laughter, making shushing motions to each other—as if three-year-olds were capable of stealth! They were both dark-featured, like the woman, and dressed nearly alike, one in skirt, one in knee pants. They passed from sight, but Ted just sat there, too drained to follow.
The woman followed softly in the children’s wake.
People, let’s stop calling her “the woman.” She had a name. She deserves a name. Maybe it was Guinevere or maybe it was Janey Sue. We’ll never know. Call her Sweet Betsy from Pike, who did what she had to do when she had it to do. Betsy wasn’t her name; but it will serve.
She was smiling—again or still or already. Who could say, when time was all jackstraws? But it was an indulgent smile, without the knife-edge sheen of the crossbower. This smile glittered like the sun off a gentle pond. She wore another of those peculiar, ornately bordered, ankle-length dresses, and her face and hands this time bore no dark smudges.
Ted turned the light off and sat alone in the dark. Too many jumbled images, no sense to them. He needed time to sort them out.
This’s what scientists do in their spare time: they try to sort things out. Ted lay awake in the canopied bed that second night, gnawing over what he had seen, trying to explain it. He was no linear thinker, but, looking back, you could lay his reasoning out in the semblance of logic. Primus: You can’t see a damn thing without photons. Secundus: He had seen the damnedest things with the ghostlight. Ergo: there was some peculiar form of photon—a paraphoton. (Hey, don’t blame me. Ted made that one up!) These paraphotons leaked over somehow from the universe next door; and the flashlight somehow excited them to visibility.
How did they leak over? How did the light excite them? Details, people. Details. They shouldn’t spoil the grandeur of the theory.
Don’t complain. It was Ted’s theory. Though he only called it a “working hypothesis,” which is the science version of whistling in the dark. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong—but it did explain everything he’d seen.
Don’t be silly. It explained nothing! What had Sweet Betsy shot with so much wicked satisfaction? What were those two lumps under the tarpaulin? Why board up your windows and paint them black? And why had she been crying? Hey, there was a lot more needing explanation than any damn photons could account for!
Maybe Ted knew that. Maybe that was why he awoke in the middle of the night, and, hesitating only a moment, played the ghostlight around the bedroom. Call it intuition; call it dumb luck. Call it leakage from the world abutting—but there she was, lying in bed beside him, with her tears streaming down her face, staining the pillows. Once before, he had seen her weeping and had, in consideration, turned off the intrusive light. This time, he lingered, though the moment was more private still.
Sweet Betsy was as naked as God’s Truth. People, if her face was arresting, her body was hard time pounding rocks! Ted could no more have turned that light off than he could have stopped breathing—though things might have ended happier if he had.
Her body was a heaving sea—lines curving and flowing with the grace of the ocean’s swells. Her breasts crested like billows; her belly was the flat calm of a tropic lagoon. Her hands were mariners, mounting the waves, sliding toward shore, backing away in the undertow before shipwrecking in the secret, seaweed-matted cove between the cliffs of her legs. A storm was building—the rain poured from her eyes, the winds rushed from her mouth. Who knew what name the breezes of her lips whispered? The gusts came faster; the waves mounted higher. Muscles tensed, back arched, hips rolled, legs clamped tight. Her mouth opened in a cry that might have been rage or ecstasy, or both.
Ted had never been unfaithful to Sharon. He had never even seriously considered it. But if Ted did hard time and pounded his rocks, you’ll understand, whether you approve or not. It wasn’t being unfaithful. After all, Betsy was only a phantom, a paraphoton fantasy. What Ted did in the bed beside her was not betrayal.