He got home, locked the door, and lay down gasping like his enemy, feeling nauseous in his belly and pained in his chest, with death’s vomit choked through him like gravel, from deep in his guts right up to his tonsils.
He dreamed that the moon was a round bright pool in the sky which now rapidly increased in size until he fell into it, and he was swimming. Now he perceived that only part of it was bright. There he swam in mellow gold. But the instant he reached the shaded zone, the water or whatever it was became almost stingingly cold, and he seemed to see something like a low stone statue grinning at him.
Awakening into another stifling, nauseous dawn, he opened his eyes and saw the pale blue sky, which was in itself sufficient reason to have lived. He might have slept four hours. His mind was clear. It pleased him to be nearly alone in this new day. Perhaps death might be as fine as this, if he could only guard himself against the thing with the greenish-white face. He had not been afraid until now. Rising, he went out into the day.
Something was moving; something was watching him from behind his back yard hedge. It could have been a woman, or a man. Then he saw it no more. Why should it have been Victoria — and not something worse? Then he seemed to hear something creeping through the branches — well, actually, this is merely a metaphor for what he felt whenever he forced himself to withdraw another of her envelopes from the pile on his father’s desk. Where was that greenish-white entity which seemed so desperately to desire him? What if it came inside the house?
After that, he began to dread reading her letters almost as much as he did returning to the cemetery at night knowing that that dead thing called Victoria awaited him; he had imagined that it was he who summoned her with the green liquid, but now he knew all too well that she whispered and murmured to him from under the ground and inside his desk until he grew helpless to employ the green liquid on anybody but her, or it, or whatever Victoria should rightfully be called. In truth there was probably no Victoria at all, but a nameless entity of unwholesome intentions.
Discovering the thirteen-cent checkerspot butterfly stamp and the thirteen-cent flower-and-mountain Colorado stamp, he felt fondness again and kissed the envelope. But he hesitated to learn whatever the thing in the cemetery might be whispering to him. No, she wasn’t that, not then! Although this was a lengthy letter, she had denied herself the typewriter, in order to think before she said anything; this was sweet, not to mention reassuring. Your longer, rational letter and the shorter, emotional one are in my mind. Your emotional one was what I thought I needed until my mother brought me down hard. How could he imagine anything monstrous about his Victoria? I’m tired of struggling between my guilt (and desire to be realistic) and my urgent inclinations toward fantasy and the unusual. I’m tired of thinking about our relationship. It is clear to me that it will have to be limited to paper for quite awhile; I don’t even know about Christmas. If we survive all that I imagine we’ll have our garden and breakfast in bed. That leaves us absolutely nowhere. Except that I’m rather emotionally involved and in love.
That made him love her. In the dark, hoping that she was there and also that she was not, in which case he could run away with honor, he forced himself to enter the hole in the fence, then tiptoed through the forest of tombstones, sick with fear. All was silent.
Bending over her headstone, Victoria, Victoria! he called in a whisper.
Nobody answered.
Suddenly something pale rushed toward him from the black thicket of crosses farther up the hill. He leaped to his feet, deathly sick with terror. It was the ghoul; he would die now.
Boo! giggled Victoria. The pale blur had been her hair.
You scared me, he muttered.
Victoria laughed and danced. Her insides resembled black water silvered with thistledown.
What was that thing that chased me the other night?
It didn’t chase you. You ran. That was how it noticed you.
Then it tried to attack me. I’m afraid I didn’t kill it.
Of course you didn’t. It’s dead, just like me.
Whose side are you on?
Listen, she said suddenly in a low voice. I think it knows you’re here. You’d better go now. I’ll get in big trouble for telling you this.
I’ll come back tomorrow.
Go now. I love you. Run.
He rushed away as quickly and quietly as he could, not knowing whether he was escaping the thing or approaching it, and fearing above all that it would be waiting for him at the hole in the fence — which of course it was. He saw it before it saw him. He burst out in a sweat. But he was relieved not to have it behind him. Very quietly he backed away, knowing enough not to return to Victoria’s grave; sooner or later it would hunt for him there. First what he longed for was an open mausoleum to hide in. Then even a culvert would have done. Ducking down toward the lake, he soon spied the thing on the low hill he had vacated. Just as during an adagio movement a conductor’s upside-down shadow clings to the podium’s edge, its arms endlessly parting from and rejoining its sides with the same steady determination as a long-distance swimmer’s, so this new graveyard thing stroked the belly of the night, glowing like a jellyfish. Fortunately it did not seem capable of scent-tracking like a hound. His heart pounding, he sidled behind a monument, then quickly ascended a narrow lane between tall dark tombs, realizing that he was nearly or already lost and therefore seeking the landmark of a tall narrow cross-crowned mausoleum which at a certain moment of each cloudless summer evening became as blonde as Victoria’s hair; perhaps its cross would catch the moonlight a bit. But it didn’t, and soon he was definitively lost among the graves. His belly ached. Around him the earth sweated out loathsomeness. He pressed himself in a shallow doorway and stood until the moon declined. It was the hour when frogs screech like birds.
In the almost-darkness, beneath the silhouetted trees, a glowing oval rose up, elongated and began to expand. He realized that it was coming toward him, and from its sureness it must see him. He had never before felt such terror. He tried to console himself by thinking: I ought to treasure this feeling. That means I still want to live, and therefore my life is valuable — in which case I should get away from her. Oh, please let me live, let me escape that thing—
Then Victoria’s ghost rose up before him and said: You can go. It’s all right now. Please; I’m tired—
Thank you, he said a little stiffly. How was he supposed to feel toward her? As he strode back to the hole in the fence, he realized that he didn’t even care anymore whether the ghoul was there, perhaps merely because he believed that it would be gone, as indeed it was.