He imagines rain falling in his head. He imagines a cloud gathering under the bones of his skull, growing pregnant and blue-black-purple, then bursting with a thunderclap. He imagines water falling into his thoughts and starting to flow through those arid riverbeds, at first a trickle and then a fast, gurgling stream.
All it does is make him thirstier. It also makes him hate Lynn, briefly, with a bright and almost sexual intensity. This is not because he suspects her of collusion in his abduction—he’s decided Hunter likely needed no such assistance—simply because he knows that right now she will be lying in her bed, asleep and with a full belly, without a care in the world. They are often not in contact for weeks at a time, and so she won’t realize he’s missing. Would she even care? Up until recently he would have said yes, of course. But now he’s not so sure. They had fun, and she dug hanging out (discreetly) with a man of his wealth. But was he also just a thing she found herself unable to stop doing? Might his passing actually occasion her relief?
He abruptly decides that visualization just ain’t working for him. He opens his eyes instead, and sees a girl sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor.
He closes his eyes, opens them.
The girl is still there. She is wearing old, torn jeans and a vest in a pale color. It is not Lynn. Lynn has short hair. This girl’s hair is long, styled out of fashion. Her arms are hooked around her knees and she is looking to the side. The moonlight picks out features that are soft and pretty. Features he knows.
“Katy?”
She doesn’t move, or even acknowledge him. In a way this is no surprise, as he knows that Katy is dead and has been for some time. But she’s there now. He can see her. And so he says her name again, more loudly.
She stands, slowly. She is still not looking in his direction, however. As she stands a faint odor is unfurled. He can’t put a name to it. He senses he doesn’t want to, either. It is not strong. But it is not good.
It takes too long for her to reach an upright position. Finally she turns her head to look at him. The entirety of her irises is black. The skin of her face is pale and slack. She has no fingernails.
She speaks:
“Do you remember that time when you said you had an idea in a dream and it was that people would be able to see all the people they’d ever met or hung out with and see if they’d thought you were hot or if they wanted to have sex with you and it was like a 3D graph or something, and all these people would be standing around you in circles, and the closer they were to you meant the more often they’d thought about it or the more dirty they’d done it with you in their heads?”
Her voice is the soft, one-note drawl of the stoned or exhausted. The movement of her lips is slightly out of sync with the words, and continues for perhaps three seconds after the sound has stopped.
“I don’t remember that,” he says.
“You don’t remember anything you don’t want to.”
“Maybe I did say it.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
She walks toward him, her left leg dragging behind. She walks past on his right-hand side, over the edge, but she does not fall. She is still at the same level when she disappears out of sight.
He sits in the chair, his hands gripping the arms. A quantity of urine he would not have believed he still possessed has leaked out into his pants. He knows that he cannot just have seen her, but . . . is she going to return?
She does not.
But he doesn’t sleep again, either.
Back in the here and now, he gives up on finding a smart reply and instead asks the question in his head.
“What did you do to Hazel?”
Hunter looks a little sour. This doesn’t seem like gamesmanship. He evidently does not want to talk about it. So Hazel is probably dead. Warner can remember what she was like twenty-some years ago, when he first met her. The wife of one of the big wheels of the local set he was sliding his way into. A good-looking older woman. Someone who he more than once thought had been looking at him in a certain way, though probably not—she and her husband had been very tight. That whole group had been, long before he joined, and you don’t mess with that kind of bond for the sake of random couplings.
“I remember Wilkins,” Hunter says. “He seemed like an okay guy. Was he really a part of it?”
“A part of what?”
“You know.”
The man in the chair summons his strength. “I do. But I think that you still don’t get it.”
“You care to enlighten me?”
“Nope.”
“I guessed not. So I’m going to leave you to it for another while. I got work to do now. Cleanup. And that’s your fault. Another dumb game you played, right?”
The man in the chair looks at him.
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “She talked.”
As Hunter levers himself up from the wall and prepares to go, the man in the chair feels panic.
“I have friends, you asshole. Other friends, not the old folks’ club here. Friends without limits. I pay my dues to them. They owe me. They’ll bury you and set fire to your grave.”
“Been there,” Hunter says. “Being buried is no big thing. Pour as much earth as you want over people, they have a way of climbing back out.”
“And so what if they do? You’ll always be trash. And I’ll always be who I am.”
“That’s true, my friend, and it must be a source of great comfort to you right now.”
Hunter walks over and looks down at the man in the chair, and Warner is confused and disconcerted to see something in his eyes that looks like compassion.
“You’re old school. But even people like that learn new tricks once in a while.”
He picks the water bottle off Warner’s lap, twists the cap. He takes a drink from it and the man in the chair thinks yes, of course—that was only ever going to be about another way of taunting me. But Hunter holds the bottle down at about the level of Warner’s mouth.
Fearing—knowing—that this is just going to be a trick, but too desperate to resist, Warner leans his head forward hungrily. Hunter holds the bottle to his lips, gently tilts it. A slow, steady stream of water courses into his mouth. He can feel it as it travels down his esophagus and finally into his stomach. Hunter keeps the bottle in position, gradually changing the angle to keep the water coming, until it is completely empty.
Then he scrunches it up and puts it in his pocket. He heads over to the portion of the ledge where he climbed up the day before.
“You have a good night, David.”
Fighting a feeling of nausea, Warner looks round at him. “She gave you someone else, didn’t she.”
Hunter smiles. “I’ll be back.”
He sits down on the edge and is about to drop over it, but then stops, as if struck by a thought. “One thing, though,” he adds. “Driving down Longboat, I saw something. Don’t know what it’s about, but you might. Seems like the cops are taking an interest in your house. Saw four or five cars. Plus a CSI wagon or two. Seems like a lot of hardware for some guy who’s gone missing, no matter how rich he is.”
He winks, and then he’s gone.
The water has made a difference. His thoughts have clarified. Warner knows the effect is temporary, and for some reason the image that comes into his mind is that of a faithful dog, locked into a house with its old, dead owner, lapping at the body’s blood, biting a hole, snuffling and chewing at what’s inside. Great, in the short term. A meat bonanza. But when it’s gone, it’s gone.
He feels okay. His thoughts are more able to restrict themselves to the positive, to the golden hours and days. His thoughts are like strong hands, lifting moments up in front of his mind. He can hold them there, turn them, look at the past from every angle. In the past this would have been associated with pinpricks of guilt and doubt. But now? There’s no need, no space, and no time. He can be who he is and has always been.