He went to reload. Images and memories flickered like frames of film in his mind: he couldn’t remember his name but he could remember the girl’s eyes, the serpent motionless below the screened lid, the way the crimped ends of the shotgun shells felt. The air smelled like cordite. A blue haze of smoke shifted dreamily beneath the hall ceiling.
She was heading for the steps, bloody from the wound, a hand held out to him. Daddy, she said. There was a petulant whine to her voice that he couldn’t stand anymore. He shot her off the top step and turned the gun on himself, leaning down and taking the smooth, cold steel of the barrel into his mouth. He could see her white body against the black grass, limbs flung out and twisted as if she had fallen from some enormous height.
In his last attempt at coherent reasoning, Swaw figured he could fire the gun with his toe, and for once he was right.
Beale Station, 1982
He called Pauline from a payphone outside the 7-Eleven.
How much have you got?
Fifteen or twenty thousand words.
First draft or edited?
I don’t know yet how much work I’ll have to do on it.
And you’re living down there, leased this place? Jesus, David. Can you afford that?
Well, I’m doing it. It’s a gamble, I guess.
And it seems to me a wholly unnecessary one. Why did you have to live there to write a book about the place? Christ, you could have flown down and looked the place over, spent the night there if you had to. This living there, leasing or buying, it just seems…overkill, so unnecessary. I hope you never write a book about the Taj Mahal. I don’t think that’s for sale.
He felt inadequate, and he knew she was right. He could feel cold sweat along his sides, the beginnings of a headache, and for the first time a worm of doubt wriggled into his consciousness. He could see Corrie through the glass front of the market, and he wondered how long it would be until she was asking the same questions.
The book’s coming along great. Anyway, I work better with my back against the wall. I get complacent if I’m not on the edge.
You’d know more about that than I would. But we’re not talking about Moby-Dick here, or Remembrance of Things Past. All I suggested was a little thriller you could knock off to tide you over until you could get back to work on your novel.
I know that.
When can you send something along?
I’ll try to get you three or four chapters and an outline in a week or so.
Whenever you can. If it’s good enough maybe we can go for a quick paperback sale.
Pauline?
Yes?
I want you to find me a book. There’s no way I can do it here, and New York City is the best place in the world to find an out-of-print book.
There was a pause, he guessed she was getting a pen and scratchpad.
Okay, what is it? Let’s have it.
I don’t know the title. The author’s name sounds something like Sunderson, and he’s a doctor of something. Probably a psychiatrist. The book is about the Beale haunting, and it’ll probably have reference to that in the title.
If you need it, I’ll do my damnedest. Do you know who published it, or when?
Or that it was, he thought to himself. No, he told her. It would have been about nineteen forty-four or forty-five.
All right. I’ll try.
Thanks a lot.
He rang off and came out of the phone booth wringing wet with sweat into a day not much better. He hurried into the air-conditioned market.
You about ready?
More than. What did Pauline say?
She wants my typescript. She thinks she might sell it from an outline.
He got a six-pack of beer from the cooler, a Playboy and Esquire from the magazine rack, a tin of aspirin at the counter.
She drove, and he opened his shirt to the breeze, felt the wind drying the sweat to a glaze of salt, drank one of the beers ice cold and took three aspirin. They must have helped, for by the time they wound up the chert road home his headache was gone and he was thinking about the book again, blocking out the first scenes and planning what to begin typing.
She turned from putting away the groceries. You didn’t say anything about my hair.
In fact he hadn’t noticed it, but he said, I was just teasing you. It’s very becoming. I like it.
Did you know that they actually have dances around here? Just a few miles down the road?
I didn’t know that.
In a country schoolhouse that was closed when the county schools were consolidated. The Sinking Creek School. I’ll bet it’s real old. There’s a band and everything, a fiddle player. A caller for the square dances.
In the living room Stephie had turned on the television set, put a videocassette of Winnie the Pooh into Binder’s VCR. It sounds very nice, he told Corrie noncommittally.
I don’t suppose you’d want to go, would you?
Tonight?
Well, yes, she said, knowing already that he wouldn’t but not really disappointed, not really expecting it. After all, he was working, not sitting in a bar in Chicago drinking beer. The bills had to be paid. She was thinking about the videocassette recorder, too: one of David’s seven-hundred-dollar toys. Where the money went.
I need to work tonight, Corrie. I have to do it when I can do it. I can’t explain it to you. But I promise you I’ll take you this summer. Do they have them every weekend?
I believe so. They were talking about it in the beauty shop. Will you really go?
Sure I’ll go. It might be interesting. Binder hated dances but privately he thought he might be able to use it for the book, and if not this one for another. When he was working he always felt hypersensitive to stimuli, to things he ordinarily wouldn’t even notice, and later in his manuscripts he would come across things that brought back moments of remembering, bits of conversation he had overheard, or simply the way someone had looked.
David?
He looked at her.
When we moved here, did you know that a man had murdered his family here and then killed himself?
No, I didn’t. All I knew was the Beale legend. I heard about it in town today, but God’s sake, Corrie, it was fifty years ago. What difference could it make?
None I guess, now. We’re already here.
I’ll tell you what I will do today. I’ll take you swimming.
A real big spender, she said, smiling again.
With the remainder of the Cokes and a picnic basket of sandwiches, the three of them went down a footpath west of the house, came out on an old wagon road cut deeply into the earth, grown over with the lowering branches of enormous beech and sycamore, the road itself faint and vestigial, the ghost of a road. Off to the right was an area clear of underbrush, the earth mossy and damp, dark with shade broken by columns of light falling through the cathedrallike trees, the ground dappled with points of sun like strewn coins.
The haunted dell, he said.
What? She had dropped his hand.
Virginia Beale was called the Fairy Queen of the Haunted Dell. I think this is it.
She smiled at him, but a brief smile and one abruptly taken back.
You’re always on, aren’t you?
He shrugged. When I’m working, he said. Sorry. I always make the mistake of assuming the rest of the world is as interested as I am in what I’m working on.
You have a positively grotesque ego.
They came out of the bowered wood where the creek widened and deepened and a shelf of limestone rose out of the water, a table of rock fifteen or twenty feet long, the creek deep and bluelooking near the stone.