Now, looking into each other’s eyes, they seemed not to know each other…
“It was Drake,” he muttered, unsure of his words, of everything now. Drake had no head. It had to have been Drake she saw. But she wouldn’t know that name…
The hall was lined with more of her photographs. One of these was indeed a burned doll. It had one good eye, and the black empty skull socket showed white larval forms wriggling inside. Another photo, less grim, colored, showed the two of them in Florida. An old woman had snapped the photo for them. Hair blowing, eyes squinted in the sun, arms around each other…
But, reflected in the glass of a photo closer to him, Belfast saw another face. It wasn’t the face in the photograph, the face of Ron Heron. It was the face from the mirror when he had arrived home. It was…another man’s face…
He was thus distracted, thus confused, when Sheila took another photo down from the wall and swung its side against his skull like an ax. Glass broke. Belfast dropped to his knees. Sheila whirled to bolt, shrieking for help. Belfast’s vision began to go black…and he fell forward.
But as he did so, he reached out and caught Sheila’s ankle; held on tight. She fell with him, still screaming, and Belfast felt as though they tumbled together down a deep, black well.
6: A SIEGE OF HERONS
“Stop,” Johnny Belfast murmured, pointing his gun at her with his right hand, still grasping her slim ankle with his left. She was kicking out at his face, as if she hadn’t caused enough damage with the metal picture frame; blood was oozing around the band-aid on his forehead.
She didn’t know the gun was inactive, and obeyed him, her hoarse screams dwindling to ragged gasps and whimpers. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet over her. She remained lying there, drawing her long body into as small a ball as she could, hugging her knees to her chest.
“Sheila,” he began, but he stopped. Yes, he knew her name now because he had heard himself say it, but he didn’t know what she looked like naked. He did not know what she had looked like in her wedding gown. He did know, now, that he was not her husband, any more than this was his home. Any more than Ronald Heron had been a hired killer. Heron had gotten himself into deep, dark waters. He had made a man want to kill him. But it was he, Johnny Belfast, who was the murderer. Somehow, his memories of himself had become tangled with those of the man he had been sent to kill. Their bloods mixed in his mouth, their brain cells blended in his skull by the shot ball which had merged them in some perverse intercourse.
“Sheila,” he started anew, “I…I did kill your husband. Well…I didn’t. My friend did. But I…meant to kill him. But your husband…he got inside me. He’s still inside me…”
“Go away,” the tall woman moaned in a very small voice, a traumatized child. “Please…just go away…”
“Listen. I’m…I’m sorry, what I did. I understand why you hate me. I feel his pain…your husband’s pain. I’m sorry, Sheila.” A stream of blood trickled into his eyebrow. A tear dropped onto his cheek. “I love you,” he husked. “I’m sorry. I love you…”
From behind the door of the darkroom, he heard the cries of the dead. Growing louder, piercing his skull. But no; sirens. The night was alive with them, like harpies.
He knelt by her, timidly touched her leg. She flinched slightly, that was all.
“Sheila…remember in Florida?” he croaked. “In Disney World…in the Haunted Mansion? While we were on the ride, it broke down or something? We were stuck in one place for about fifteen minutes, and the mechanical ghosts kept popping up over and over? Do you remember that?”
“Stop it,” Sheila whispered.
“To save money, we didn’t use the hotels…we pitched a tent on a lot in the Fort Wilderness campground? And every morning we’d get our coffee at that little store, and sit on the back porch and feed those ducks that pant like dogs?”
“Ron told you this. You aren’t Ron. Please don’t…please…”
“He’s here. I’m here. We’re…together…”
A moment, and then: “What did we find near the porch?”
“What did we find? You mean…the nest?” They had found eggs in a nest right against the side of the porch. One of the ducks, too greedy for snacks to lay its eggs in a safer place, away from curious children. One day they had discovered the eggs missing, and had been of the hope that the eggs had been safely moved by some employee.
Sheila raised her head from the floor. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God…Ron…”
“Police! Don’t move!”
Of course, Belfast moved. He spun toward the voice out of sheer surprise. At the end of the hall, a police officer with a gun steadied in both fists. The screaming, someone had heard the screaming, or found Drake’s car close by, and the police had come in unheard, Sheila had left the door unlocked, and the cop saw the gun in Belfast’s fist, and Belfast saw ghosts playing across the visor of the cop’s cap and across the metal of his gun…
“Don’t!” Sheila cried at the officer, even as he opened fire.
He was a better shot than Heron had been. Belfast was kicked backwards, his weight bursting open the door of the darkroom. He fell on his back on its floor.
“No!” he heard Sheila cry. “No!”
Around him, the walls were alive with the dead. They ringed the room, their luminous tatters blowing in the winds of limbo. They reached out their glowing hands to him, elongated claws hooked with hunger. Scores of mouths yawning wide…
But the ceiling, mercifully, was still white. He kept his gaze trained there. And then, Sheila’s face entered his vision, her long hair falling down, touching his face. Somehow, the dead did not dance in the black of her eyes.
“Ron,” she whispered. “I love you.” And she touched the face she didn’t know.
“I love you,” Johnny Belfast said, and then died.
John
It was raining hard on this fall night—but so much the better. In clear weather, his outlandish garb had inspired people to follow and harass him, to lift his long black cape for a look. Tonight, at a distance, he could pass for an old man bundled against the elements, hunched over as he walked with the aid of a cane. But of course, wet weather or no, his great cap would be considered odd…and especially the sack-like veil which hung down from it, a slit cut into the material for him to see through.
“Dear God!” many women had cried, when they saw the face shrouded behind that veil. But he didn’t hear this so much any more. No, not since dear Mr. Treves had rescued him from a pitiable life of exhibiting his terrible condition. No; in his small rooms at the back of the London Hospital, his mantel was overcrowded with portraits sent to him by lovely ladies of good standing. It was two years now since his life had changed so drastically, largely due to the efforts of his friend, the esteemed surgeon Frederick Treves. It was as though he had been reborn into an utterly different realm from that squalid hell he had known for over two decades.