The kitchen, like the dining room before it, was seemingly devoid of occupants. Dishes were in the sink, however, and we could now hear the slow drip of the tap upon the backside of a frying pan. Someone had cooked an egg breakfast approximately ten hours earlier. No. Correction: Someone had cooked a breakfast of egg-fakes approximately ten hours earlier. The theme of forgery ran strongly within this house.[37]
“Shh,” Mr. Pacheco said. We stood still for a moment. We could also now hear the thrum of the refrigerator. The sound of nothing was now elsewhere.
Mr. Pacheco removed a small magnet in the shape of an Arctic fox from the freezer door. “Perhaps we should leave,” he suggested quietly. “If we are correct in our assessment of the current situation, we will most likely face some difficulty in executing a full search of the house at this time.”
“Perhaps,” Mr. Wible answered. “But there is also the possibility that we are being overly cautious and that delay could cost us the chance of achieving our goal. It is difficult to say with certainty whether the silences that we were noticing truly had the same quality as those which we last encountered over twenty years in the past, or if it is only that our senses are dulling as we approach old age.”
Mr. Pacheco returned the magnet to the freezer door.
“Let us continue our search, then,” he said.
We headed back through the dining room to the foyer.
“Shall we still begin in the bedroom?” Mr. Pacheco asked.
He did not hear the response of Mr. Wible behind him.
“What am I doing?” I asked myself aloud, but I couldn’t think of a good response.
I used my boots to clear away some snow and sat down on the curb of Skellington Road. My cheeks grew instantly cold. I could hear the throb of blood in my temples. I could see the steam falling out of my mouth as I spoke.
“Damnation!”
It was going to get dark soon.
My hands, at least, were warmish in their gloves. I held them palm up in front of me to let some snowflakes collect. The white shapes stood out clear and definite against the glove-black. Stupid Wible and Pacheco connect-the-dots dumbness. Implying that Shirley, Hubert, and I were all dots in the same line.
“I am not a detective.”
I was not.
But things were occurring to me, nonetheless.
When I was younger the world shone brighter and definite. Moments of eidetic clarity and purpose, patches of time more vibrant for their flickering on the edge of death’s black opacity. Like nearly freezing with Prescott in a quasiiglooesque enclosure in glacial Greenland, groping, crowded close to a pile of antiquities we’d barely managed to ignite—my mother would have rather died—biting the frost from each other’s faces and inhaling deeply to capture each calorie that passed between us through breathsteam. The memory so sharp of walls melting down around and smoke choking despite the makeshift chimney. The fire was almost too bright to stare into. When we ran out of what we thought were medieval “pieces of the true cross” (but which were merely 1950s forgeries, we found out later), we threw on clumps of leaves from my teenage diaries. Momentary kindlings, brief semblances of blaze as my adolescent cravings crumpled, blackened, to ash… No passion that burned consistently toward anything, anyway. Then, all that was left, little embers glowing weakly in the center of our translucent ice tomb. Not even enough to cast a shadow. Too many times we almost died, though, together… Tricking us into intimacy. And all the attendant excitement, the suspense of not really knowing whether we’d really pull through this time… Or some other excuse.
Everything around me, now, was white. Even the house across the street. Of course the snow, but I imagined myself as if from above, and I was the only thing of any color in the scene at all. Like Prescott after the avalanche, lying there in imitation of a Pepsi logo. The bright blue of his parka, the white of the snow, the red of his blood…
It was good that he was gone. Connie was right. But that didn’t mean he’d had to go.
Back to Gerd.
I silently prayed that Gerd wasn’t involved in this.
I didn’t mean to make sense of things. My mind just naturally worked that way.
“Where is Garm?” I said aloud in a futile effort to distract myself. I stood up and stretched out and tried to rub my cheeks awake. Sitting had been stupid. I’d just have to go home and wait. I’d never find him, looking. I should have just posted flyers in the first place, but it was getting too late for that now.
Maybe Hubert would call again, though. Maybe he’d explain everything, tell me I was paranoid. Or Nathan. Maybe they already had called. I just hoped Constance hadn’t been the one to answer.
Pausing for a moment to listen, on my way back down the spiral staircase, I could just barely discern the ringing of the telephone. I deduced that it must have been filtering up through some inconspicuous vent that I was unable to locate in the candlelight. If it was Our Heroine, I would just have to tell her when she got home that I’d been unsure whether I should answer it or not, this not being my house and I not being such an inquisitive person that I would stoop to intercepting phone calls obviously not meant for my ears. Or something to that effect.
I halfway hoped it was her, however, since that would indicate that she wasn’t about to burst in and discover me. But I was almost home free, now, anyhow. My prize in one hand, my candle in the other. I wrote the headline in my mind: “Final Manuscript of Shirley MacGuffin, Found in Our Heroine’s Secret Hideout!”[38]
It only struck me when I was about three-quarters of the way down that there should have been more light. I had left the door open, hadn’t I? Of course I had; I didn’t even know how to close it. But reaching the bottom only confirmed my fear. The entrance actually had slid somehow shut behind me.
Trapped! Well, was this to be the end of Constance Lingus, then? Ridiculous. Surely there must be some hidden switch or something, I reasoned. You can’t just go making secret passages that don’t open from the inside. I held the candle up to the seemingly smooth wall in front of me for a closer look. Wax dripped down off of it to the tender spot where thumb meets index, but my fierce tenacity allowed me to keep hold. I now noticed, however, that the candle had burned down to about a quarter-stick. There wouldn’t be much light left. I figured that I’d better just look fast.
Through the window of the staircase landing, I notice that the sun is about to set. I cannot see the sun itself, but the grayish white of the western sky has begun to yield to a darkness that spreads downward from the zenith, descending with the snow.
Electricity is another of the amenities in which the Two-Story House is lacking, and—considering the imminent arrival of night—I realize that I must either conclude my search soon or adjourn it in favor of finding a flashlight. With tired body and tired mind, I continue up the stairs.
The room that exists directly at the staircase top is little more than a wide, empty hallway, dimly lit by a translucent skylight. Three doors—all closed—lead from the room, and each of them is blanketed in Shirley’s sentences. I notice immediately that a further textual complication is introduced on this level of the house; the narrative voices have switched to the first-person. This is encouraging, however, for that is the person of the sentence I seek, from her journals, to find its context: I am a fish.
37
Hubert Jorgen in conversation: “Forgery, I think, is perhaps the pinnacle of self-expression, paradoxical as it sounds. There’s a school of thought that says the more constraints put upon a piece of art—rhyme and meter, say, in the case of poetry, or photo-realism in the case of painting—the more impressive that artwork is if executed successfully. Well, what could be more constraining than forgery? And if you manage yet to express yourself within that rigorous framework, what, then, could be more impressive?”
38
The second of the three semi-significant absences that I noted earlier, I am confounded by the lack of any narrative description of what exactly Constance Lingus found at the top of the stairs. One must suppose that these are the pages on which she eventually based the famous article that made so many tasteless claims against the by-then recently deceased Valison. Which, even if it was based in any sort of fact, doesn’t make it any less tasteless.