This is some weird party, Fanshawe thought. Finally, he broke out of the crowd under the bar transom, almost desperate now to flee the sudden tide of raucous drinkers. He turned toward the elevator, but before he could stride away—
“Wha—”
A hand grabbed his arm with some insistence; he turned around to see that Abbie had trotted after him. Her face was beaming as more drunk professors shouted objections behind her. “I’ll be right there!” she yelled to them, then turned back to Fanshawe. “You didn’t give me time to finish before all those old eggheads barged in. Day after tomorrow, I get off at seven. There’s a great Thai place on the next block.”
Fanshawe was subtly rocked. She hadn’t turned him down after all. “That’s great. Seven o’clock it is, day after tomorrow.”
“So it’s a date. Just meet me here.”
“Sure thing, Abbie, but I hope I see you before then.”
“So do I,” she said, then seemed surprised she’d said it so abruptly. “But where are you going now?”
“It’s late; I’m bushed from the long drive. And after four Witch-Blood shooters? I definitely need to go to bed.”
Her grin amplified. “Not going to the graveyard?”
The graveyard… “At night? Are you kidding?”
From the bar, the professors were banging their fists on the bartop, yelling “Barkeep! Barkeep! Barkeep!” in unison.
“You better get back in there,” he advised. “I think the professors are about to riot.”
“Good idea.” Her hand slid down his arm, an inconsequential contact, yet Fanshawe felt electric. “See ya! Oh, and remind me to tell you about the Gazing Ball.”
“The what?”
But Abbie was already bulling her way back into the bar. The professors began to applaud.
I hope she’s got earplugs, Fanshawe regarded. And…what did she say? Gazing Ball? But as he waited at the elevator, he realized he was brimming; she’d agreed to go out with him. The elevator took him up, and he saw his own smile warped in the stainless steel siding.
What’s the big deal about a financial mogul going on a date? he asked himself, but he knew, and he knew what Dr. Tilton might say. The situation was unique because it represented his re-emergence into “the regulated societal stream”—which was her way of referring to the everyday, normal world. For most of his adult life, exceptionally attractive women had made themselves all too available, with sexual implications all too apparent. Fanshawe had never been interested; they did not exist at the other end of a telescope or pair of binoculars; therefore, the were unexciting. Even in the year since his marriage had detonated, he had not been interested. Tilton’s right. Now that I’ve removed myself from the “purveying environment” I WANT to go out with a woman, not lust after her through a window. True, he’d felt the pangs during his walk through town, but since he’d been in Abbie’s presence at the bar, those old demons had barely reared their heads.
Any other time, he’d be itching to go on a “peep.”
Maybe I really am getting cured…
Half-tipsy, he walked down his hall which stood in total silence. The elegant tulip-shaped lamps branched out from the flower-papered walls; they looked a hundred years old, and added to the inn’s rich authenticity. He frowned when he reached into his pocket for his card-key and found a twenty-dollar bill. Unbeknownst to him, Abbie had slipped his tip money back, a pick-pocket in reverse. Classy, he thought.
He went to bed and fell asleep instantly, something that hadn’t happened in a long time.
But it would not be a sound sleep.
— | — | —
CHAPTER FOUR
(I)
The silence stretches like the neck of a decomposing corpse on a gibbet; the darkness brims. And through it, images rise and fall akin to chunks of unclassifiable meat bubbling in a horrific stew. Fanshawe’s dreams whirl slow, putrid: he sees women in windows through the infinity-shaped viewing field, beautiful women, nude, sultry, and, best of all, unknowing. Their sexual features are pinpoint-sharp, focused to a preternatural clarity. One is exercising; one seems to be talking to herself as if in argument, anger coning her nipples. Another lay flushed on a couch, her tight stomach sucks in and out as she masturbates with a peculiarly curved rubber phallus. But then the women clump together, squashed to nauseous misshape, and drain away into a swirl of liquescing breasts, navels, and pubic triangles, to be replaced by more images: faces. The disgusted face of the police officer, the agape stares of residents in lit windows as red and blue lights throb, the vision of pock-cheeked drug addicts, winos, thieves, and, likely, rapists, child-molesters, and murderers. One of them buckles over to vomit, hitching in silence. Some of the vomit splatters noiselessly on Fanshawe’s thousand-dollar shoes, for he sits there with these men in the deplorable holding cell, being appraised by the scum of the earth. A man standing hip-cocked in the cell’s corner looks at him with a smirking grin and mouths You’re MY bitch tonight… Then more faces, a parade of faces: Artie’s face when he bails Fanshawe out, the judge’s face at the arraignment, the faces of the lawyers at the pre-trial conferences…all expressions of blank disgust. But the last face to haunt his dreams is the worst: his wife’s, Laurel’s, a face whose expression radiates heartbreak, outrage, revulsion, and hatred concurrently. She stares as the nightmare stares back. I hate you, her lips speak without sound. You make me siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick, yet after a moment, the face warps as if before heat-waves on asphalt, then mutates and grows, not like a balloon expanding but instead a tumor or cyst in aberrant hyper-development, and just when the throbbing mass seems about to erupt, it collapses into a black void…
Fanshawe cannot close his eyes against the dream’s blackness, which goes on for what seems hours. He hears nothing save for his anguished breaths and thudding heart. Then—
A voice, echoic, as if speaking in a rock-hewn grotto miles deep.
Abbie’s voice.
“Jacob Wraxall, one of the founding members of the town. He lived here with his daughter, Evanore—”
Fanshawe sees what he believes is the great portrait again, until its subjects move. Wraxall and his tantalizing yet somehow obscenely visaged daughter are taking slow steps up a dark, narrow stairwell, the elder in coattails and ruffled bib, his pendant of stars and sickle moons glittering, the sibling with her blood-red hair and plunging bustline, the smooth stark-white flesh nearly luminous in the plunge. They each hold a candle whose flickering light turns their eyes into green-crystal pools. Jacob’s expression is solemn as an undertaker’s, while Evanore’s is one of deep, intractable rapture. They enter a room…
A black fog sweeps over Fanshawe’s vision, thickens, then dissipates, and now— Wraxall stands in a hooded cloak of sackcloth, in a plank-boarded, windowless room. He reads silently from an old book with a cord holding in the folded sheets in place rather than a typical binding. Candlelight wavers, throwing light that seems leprous; smoke rises from the eyeholes of a skull serving as a censer, a baby’s skull.