“Of course she will. You’re—well, you’re the makeles quene, aren’t you?” He smiled. “You are without blot.”
“Someone back home said she was dead,” I told him uneasily. I still didn’t like that part of the story. Why would Dylan have thought that?
“Huh,” Benny said. “It sounds like the beginning of a ghost story, doesn’t it? Like she’ll bestow her wisdom on you, settle her unfinished business, and vanish into the night.”
“It sounds exactly like that.”
“But maybe you’re lucky, not seeing St. John.”
I asked him what he meant.
“You know. He’s bound to be pretty weird, isn’t he? I mean he’s been writing that stuff for more than forty years now. You can’t keep that close to the darkness without some of it sticking to you.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this before. I was used to getting it myself sometimes at the university. But the horror writers I’d met were among the most well-adjusted people I knew, certainly they were much calmer than the other writers I tended to deal with. Some people said it was because there wasn’t much money in horror writing these days. But I thought it was something else: writers were good at channeling their anxieties into something productive. We all have those nasty thoughts, those worries that maybe we don’t love our partners as much as we should, or maybe they don’t love us. Fears that maybe something awful will happen tomorrow. The phone will ring and it will be the police. An accident somewhere. Or a fight escalated, a button pushed.
“When I studied the Middle Ages,” I told him, “it always seemed like it must have been so difficult for those people. I mean, the Black Death wiped out forty percent of the population. Imagine whole villages lost, your family—everyone you’ve ever met—wiped out.”
“I know,” he said, “I just couldn’t take living like that. I’d, I dunno. I’d go crazy, I guess.”
I wondered if he really would go crazy. Or if he was going crazy right now, waiting for that call about Emmanuel. Waiting for Trump to finally get around to signing a new Executive Order. I had always liked Benny because he had a sense of outrage, a keen abhorrence of injustice. I knew he had marched in those early protests and knew that he wasn’t marching anymore. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Benny was strong but he was adaptable. He was finding ways to survive, to keep marking his art—but doing it so it didn’t hurt Emmanuel.
Luca was the same way. Most nights he didn’t come home until close to midnight. There was always more he felt he could be doing. For a while I’d felt really proud of him. And then when things got bad I’d just felt resentful, angry at him for spending so much time saving other people when what I really wanted was for him to save me.
In the gift shop I chose a postcard for him, a picture of the Flemish tapestry called The Hunt for the Unicorn. It showed five young men in aristocratic clothing with their spears and their dogs. If it weren’t for the title you wouldn’t have been able to tell what they were doing there. I wanted to choose one with the unicorn but all of them looked too violent or depressing. Something about the unicorn in captivity, collared, in a fence that can barely hold her, reminded me of Answering the King, and how the girl had been taken to prison after she shot the president. There had been a coda at the end of the novel, the little girl twenty years later, grown up, in solitary confinement. They had thought she had gone mad because she wouldn’t stop hurting herself.
But St. John showed the real reason. The girl had had another vision, one worse than what she’d stopped all those years ago. But this time there was nothing she could do about it.
I couldn’t get hold of Luca that night. He wasn’t answering his email and when I tried him at home—and then at work—the phone just rang and rang. It wasn’t that unusual. Sometimes there were emergencies, and Luca would become so totally absorbed in them he would forget everything else.
There were emergencies like that, I knew, one every few days it seemed. So eventually I left a message saying I loved him. I tried the TV but got nothing but static. Eventually I settled down to read. It was another story from Strangers and Friends but this one was about a haunted house called “Question the Foundations.” It was a twist on the trope: the houses weren’t haunted by people so much as the people by houses. In St. John’s world each person had a tiny space within them, an impression of the place where they had been born. And it remained there, like a scar, or a memory. And everyone else could see it too, who you were and where you came from. Except there was this young boy who didn’t have a place like that. He had nothing. He had come from nowhere. And because he had nothing he scared people.
I put the book down, confused and unsure of myself. The story bothered me but I didn’t know why. It was different from the others, softer, sadder. There was no real horror in the story. It had been about loneliness. How it felt to be hollow, an outsider. Rootless.
Maybe it was just those constellations of images, emptiness and violence. Luca had told me a story once about how his family used to keep chickens. He had lived in the middle of a wood. One day a fox break into the henhouse and tore open all the chickens. He’d found their bodies, or what was left of them, the next morning. Inside their bodies he had found strings of growing eggs, like pearls.
After he told me that I couldn’t sleep and it was the same feeling now. I didn’t have any regrets. Luca and I had talked, and he had left the decision to me. There had been no pressure, none from him anyway. But I’d been watching the news. And when the first bomb exploded in Paddington Station it had been like a warning sign. Not now. It wasn’t safe. Things would settle down soon, they had to. And then we could try again.
I put the book down and touched my stomach gently, tentatively. Beneath my fingers all I could feel was my own thick flesh.
Three times I passed the cafe before I finally had the courage to meet Lily Argo. I could see her—at least I thought it was her—sitting in the courtyard with her walker folded up beside her. She had long white hair and a red-and-gray printed dress with long sleeves. I knew her because of how tall she was, even a little stooped over. She still had at least six inches on me.
“Ms. Argo?” I asked her and she nodded politely while I pulled up a seat.
“So you’re the one who’s come asking about Barron St. John.”
“That’s right.” I tentatively launched into my pitch: an article on St. John’s early publication history, documenting her involvement in acquiring and editing his first title. She stopped me with a wave of her hand.
“Sure, honey,” she said with a wide, generous smile, “you don’t need to go on like that. I’m happy to talk about those days though I confess they seem a while ago now. You know I got that manuscript by accident, don’t you?”
I nodded and she seemed relieved.
“Good, so we’re not starting from scratch. What you want is the story, I take it, of how Bear—that’s what I always called him—and I got along in those early days? Where the horror came from?” I nodded again and took out my phone but she eyed it warily. “I’ll tell it as best I can and you can make of it whatever you will—but no recordings, okay? You can listen and you can write down what you get from it but you only get to hear it once.”
What was I supposed to say? Already I could feel a kind of strange buzz around her, the magnetic pull of her charisma. I had wanted her story and here she was, ready to give it to me.