“Shel? Are you all right?”
“I want a divorce,” she said.
F I F T E E N
DARK PLACE, WARM, SAFE. Sleeping.
Not sleeping anymore. Listening.
What’re those noises? Loud, weird.
Thump. Grunt, slurp, screech, squeal. Thump thump thump.
Something’s out there.
Something … terrible.
I have to find out what it is. But I don’t want to. I’m afraid.
Squeal, howl, slurp. Thump thump thump thump thump.
Oh God, what if it tries to hurt me?
Stay here, don’t move.
No, I can’t, I have to find out what it is …
… And he was through it and out of it, sweating, struggling for air. Disoriented at first—he didn’t know where he was. Not in bed; the surface under him was cold, leathery, and Shelby wasn’t beside him. Moment of panic, and then he was awake enough to remember that he’d sacked out on the living room couch under a blanket. “I don’t want to sleep with you tonight,” she’d said, and he hadn’t argued, let her have the main bedroom. He could have slept in the guest room but it was too cold back there. Cold out here now, too, nothing left of the fire but a collection of ashes and dying embers.
The dream images were still vivid. The same, always the same. And yet there was something just a little different about this one … the creature’s snarling, howling words at the end, that were somehow like whispers so he couldn’t make them out. This time they’d seemed louder, almost but not quite understandable. Ugly, terrifying words he never wanted to hear … except that at a deeper level of perception, he did because he sensed they might explain the nightmare.
He rubbed sweat off his face with a corner of the blanket, listening to the runaway pumping of his heart. It stuttered every few beats and his breathing came short and hot in his chest. One sudden savage burst of pain and it would be all over for him, no more confrontations with his night monster, no more bitter defeats, just blackness and peace. But it didn’t happen. The thudding slowed, the sensation of gripping tightness eased, his respiration gradually slowed to near normal.
They were coming more often now, the nightmare rides. Two in two nights, the first time that had ever happened. Stress-induced. Or maybe there was some sort of physiological link. He had no control over them in any case, no way to put a stop to them. Ironic in a bitter, devilish way. Asleep, in the dream, he was at the mercy of a hideous being that ripped him apart and devoured him; awake, he was at the mercy of other demons beyond his control, real ones like failure and decay, that were in literal ways ripping him apart and devouring him.
A sudden blast of wind shook the cottage, rattled the windows in their frames. It had been storming heavily when he drifted off to sleep, but the storm seemed even worse now—elemental fury out there. The rain was torrential, making a steady jackhammer sound on the roof. Wind drafts in the chimney swirled up ashes and thin sparks and blew them out across the hearth. The night seemed alive with shrieks, whistles, fluttery moans.
The sweat on him had dried and even under the blanket he was shivery cold. When he was sure his legs would support him, he got up slowly and made his way to the draped windows. The baseboard heater under them made ticking sounds when he turned it up full. So the power was still on, something of a surprise given the way the storm was raging. But it would go out sooner or later. Damn well be sure of that.
Back on the couch, huddled under the blanket. And the brief scene from yesterday afternoon, when he’d come back inside with the load of wood, replayed again in his memory.
“I want a divorce.”
“… Jesus, you don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. I can’t live like this anymore.”
“Like what?”
“Like strangers. You keeping things from me, hiding from me. Two people can’t live together without communicating.”
“Swear to God, it’s not intentional. I don’t mean to shut you out—”
“But you do. Sins of omission, Jay.”
“I love you, you know that—”
“It’s not enough! Once, yes, but not anymore. There’s just too much distance between us. And I don’t see any way to bring us back together.”
He’d tried to tell her then, to rip that one glued down page right out of the Macklin book. The words were all there, a huge glob of them in his throat, choking him. He’d hacked up some of them, a disjointed, fumbling few, but it was too late, he’d waited too long. She didn’t want to listen; clapped her hands over her ears and got up and walked out of the room.
If he’d gone after her, tried again … but he hadn’t. Too late. Nothing he said now would change her mind.
She was dead serious about the divorce, the way she’d acted the rest of the day proved that. Avoiding him for the most part—reading in the bedroom or staring out the oceanfront windows or into the fire while Vivaldi or, worse, Saint-Saëns throbbed gloomily out of the boom box, not answering or responding in monosyllables when he spoke to her. Drinking too much, eating nothing. And then saying in a flat, distant voice that she didn’t want to sleep with him and going to bed early, shutting the bedroom door after her, maybe locking it for all he knew.
He kept telling himself to talk to her anyway, get it all said—keeping everything bottled up at a crisis point like this was senseless, self-destructive, an indication of some sort of dementia. Telling himself it might, it just might, make a difference after all. But he didn’t believe it. The feeling of hopelessness was oppressively strong.
Maybe part of it was the environment here, the close confines of the cottage, the nasty weather. Maybe the familiar atmosphere at home would make it easier to talk, give him a chance to change her mind.
He didn’t believe that, either.
He’d already lost her. Just as he’d lost baseball and the ability to have children and Macklin’s Grotto and the Conray job and everything else that mattered in his life. It didn’t make any difference anymore whether or not he got past this lunatic compulsion to keep things locked up inside. Too late. When she’d said, “I want a divorce,” it had been the marriage’s death knell.
Shelby stayed in the bedroom most of the morning—sleeping, or maybe just avoiding him. How did she feel after yesterday? Happy, sad, relieved? Or as depressed as he was?
He drank two cups of strong black coffee, forced himself to swallow half a glass of grapefruit juice and part of a container of yogurt. Washed and dried the dishes. Tidied up the front room, using the fireplace brush to clean ashes and soot and flecks of bark off the hearthstones. You don’t have to be maid as well as cook. The hell he didn’t. What else had he been good for the past six months? What else was he good for now?
Wrapped in his raincoat, he made a couple of struggling trips through the gale to replenish the firewood supply. The storm was already among the worst he’d encountered; the wind gusts must be forty or fifty miles per hour, shaking the cottage like a dog shakes a bone, bending the trees low to the ground and sending twigs and needles and small torn branches skittering across the lawn and side patio. The rain was like a whipping bead curtain, thick strands of it blown inland at an undulant slant that was almost horizontal. Huge waves lashed the shoreline, gouting up clouds of white; the ocean’s surface was like foam-flecked water boiling in a cauldron.