Over her shoulder as she walked, Our Heroine noticed that a big black car had begun to follow a ways behind, moving too slowly to be going anywhere on its own. Not that she really thought anyone would be following her. It probably just had no chains on its tires. She turned up the nearest corner, regardless. She’d just take the long way to her house.
A sigh escaped her mouth as the car rolled straight through the intersection without pause. She couldn’t see the driver through the tinted windows, but she supposed that was irrelevant since he wasn’t following her. And who would be following her, anyways? Unless this was about Shirley, in which case the murderer might—
Never mind. The car wasn’t following her, and that wasn’t what she should be thinking about right now, anyway. She didn’t need to solve anything; this wasn’t one of her mother’s mysteries. As she almost slipped in the snow, Our Heroine reminded herself that, in regard to Shirley, she was only concerned with the tragedy of someone who would never return. She was not concerned with finding some person who’d created a corpse.
But crossing then at the next corner, something big and black moved into her peripheral vision. To her left, crawling along the street immediately parallel, was the same car. Visions of Shirley’s punctured eyeball popped into Our Heroine’s mind, and she suddenly froze where she was; she crouched down, curling herself up in a ball of coldness in the center of the street. She did not want this.
But only for a moment. Then she raised herself to her feet—one must maintain composure—and walked on. Neck stiff, eyes straight, she proceeded on toward her home. Even when threatened with the extraordinary, one should never abandon the semblance of normality. Or, at least, so went one of her mother’s favorite aphorisms.
By the time she arrived at her house, the big black car was nowhere to be seen.
Her front door opened without need of the key, though Our Heroine was sure that she’d set both locks. She turned and gazed at the street behind her. There was no one in sight, however, and nothing sounded amiss from within. So she stepped inside. And still nothing. Silence. No toenails tapped across the tile; Garm was gone, she realized. Or dead.
“Garm, I’m home! I have meat-truffles!”
She walked to the kitchen but found only his empty food bowl.
“Damnation!”
Water sat on the white tile. She hoped it was water, but she hadn’t been there last night to let him out. The window was open. She noticed now the snow drifting in, only a few specks, but enough to account for the floor water over the course of the morning. Maybe he’d woken up and had to go and—an extraordinarily smart dog—figured out how to open the window. She shut it. No. He would have figured out how to open the door.
The door had been unlocked.
“Damn it. Garm!”
No response. Her home appeared otherwise in order, if a bit messy. But no indication of Garm anywhere. What could she do? Reason it calmly.
First she should make sure there were no intruders. Which would offer a more likely explanation for her open window and door. And perhaps they just had Garm with them in a closet somewhere. She closed her eyes and listened.
No noise apart from the usual sounds of the house. Quiet, but not too quiet. Not preternaturally quiet. Whoever it was must have left by now, if there had been anyone at all. And if not… She grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and carried it up the stairs.
No one greeted her at the top, so she proceeded into her bedroom.
“Garm?” she called. She knew this was the moment at which he should have bitten the hand of whosoever held him, or at least emitted a little whimper from within his captor’s hiding hole. But nothing. She threw open her closet door, just in case, but was faced solely with shoes on the floor and a jumble of hanging clothes. Downstairs, then, into the study, and up the other staircase. But all was apparently well.
Enough of this. She was alone.
So.
She’d take a bath, then. Soak and figure it all out; formulate a plan to find him.
The shower curtain was already pulled fully toward the faucet-side, just as she’d left it, thus saving her the trouble of yanking it quickly open with one hand, steak knife ready in the other. She shut the bathroom door behind herself, locked it, and then she stripped and started water into the toothwhite tub.
Her recently heavy doses of alcohol were beginning to exert some influence over her womanly form. Twisting her torso and pinching wherever possible, she perused her body in the bathroom’s mirror, to make certain she was abreast of all the recent shifts in topography. Though unwelcome to her stomach and thighs, her recent gains in weight had made generous contributions to certain previously less-than-ample portions of her anatomy.
“At least two good things have come out of all this,” she muttered as she stepped into the tub.
A game she used to play with Prescott: hiding in the steam, no light except the verdant phosphorescence of the ormolu lichen that subsisted on the sides of their secret subterranean reyklaug.[9] He always had the advantage; his nose more accustomed to excluding the smell of sulphur, he could sniff her out by the oils of her hair or the sweet excretions beading on the effusive flesh of her underarms. His own skin was nigh-albino from a life of so little sun, somehow blending with the ripple of the water—probably a trick he learned from the Refurserkir—and she could never find him by sight. Sometimes, though, on instinct alone, following some immanent clew of desire, her mouth, unsensed, would alight on his, startling lips apart with the sudden tongue she slipped between them.
She let herself go limp, now, reclined. Knife within easy reach… Her hair darkened and floating around her chin, kneepeaks angled up and out untouched by the warmth of the water that refracted the rest of her body, distorted it. Elongated torso, flattened. Her body border-straddling—real above, myth below. Just look. Black hairs that struck her as flylike marked starkly the otherwise fish-white of her shins and inner thighs. Tally marks on a page that numbered the days since she cared about shaving; she fumbled for tweezers on the shelf beside her then dug them in to remove the one or two that had tunneled pinkly beneath.
From another room the telephone rang. The dog-ransomers? A second ring. Someone in the house, with a cell-phone, trying to lure her out of the bathroom? She groaned out of the tub, grabbed the steak knife—as well as a towel from off the rack, which she wrapped around herself—and billowed out to search for the phone, which rang a third time. Not on the cradle, of course. The fourth ring came from a vaguely kitchenesque direction. The dining room? No. The answering machine had it now anyway. From the living room she heard her voice.
“As you hear this, I probably either don’t know where the phone is, or I’m ignoring it, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you when my ignorance has ended.”
“Hey, this is Hugh. I really need your help with something. I don’t want to say too much on the machine, but, um… Come see me. I’m at the home away from home, you know? Think about Shirley. Anyway, I’ll be waiting for you, so I’d appreciate it if you could get here as soon as you can. Thanks. Sorry about last night, by the way. See you soon, I hope.”
Our Heroine plucked the phone from the refrigerator’s top and—setting the knife down on the stove—she dialed Hubert’s number.