But how likely was that?
At any rate, Fanshawe wasn’t convinced it had been murder, missing wallet or not. The Wild Animal Theory seemed much more plausible; then someone coming along afterward (someone disreputable, of course) could easily have taken Karswell’s wallet after the fact.
I don’t know…
The sun was descending, drawing smoldering orange light across the horizon. The vision was spectacular, and he realized then it had been ages since he’d seen such a sunset—just one more of nature’s wonders he’d been deprived of in New York. They’re all back in the Rat Race, but here I am, watching the sun set on Witches Hill… It almost seemed funny.
Sometime later, once darkness had drained into the hills, Fanshawe had turned.
Toward town.
That daze he’d felt earlier only magnified. It was as though the glittering lights of the Haver-Towne had puppeted him, had made him turn, like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. Fanshawe’s guts sunk; he knew what was behind the impulse.
The windows.
Was it this perverse desire that had been brewing in him all day, without his conscious recognition? In the past, too, he could remember times when his obsession had taken him out with seemingly no volition of his own. His eyes locked on the Travelodge, and its neat, enticing rows of picture-glass windows. Useless, he reminded himself. The joke’s on me. Even if he had come up here with the subconscious intent of peeping, he already knew he was too far away to see anything.
Then a noxious question slipped into his mind. Yeah, but what would I do—right now, right this second—if I had a pair of binoculars on me?
His guts sunk further when still another impulse fed his hand into his jacket pocket. In a hushed shock, his fingers touched something, then gripped it.
He grit his teeth, his eyelids reduced to slits, when he withdrew his hand and found it gripping the looking-glass from the inn. He held it as though he were holding a rancid body part. It felt heavier than it should, like a bar of solid metal.
Oh my God, my God, what have I done?
There was only one way to explain the device’s presence in his pocket…
I put it there, without ever realizing it…
After all, he had been looking at it over the past few days. How would I do that and not remember it? Am I that oblivious? Indeed, it seemed that his id had overruled his conscious will and prompted him to steal the instrument. He didn’t have to wonder what for…
His hand shook as he held the looking-glass. I’m not crazy, he convinced himself. I KNOW I’m not crazy. I’m just a little wrung out, that’s all. I’m in a strange place where I don’t know anybody, and now I’m suffering from some delayed-stress thing… His chest felt tight when he raised his hand and stared at the looking-glass.
I WANT to scope some windows, but I’m NOT going to, he determined. What I’m going to do instead is go back to the inn and put this damn glass back in the damn display case.
He turned on his feet, then began to walk back down the grass-lined path which would lead him back to the inn. In twenty minutes I’ll be in my room, he thought, and this ridiculous looking-glass will be back where it belongs.
That’s when his will began to fade. He sensed himself continuing to walk, but was cognizant of nothing else. He heard his feet crunching gravel on the trails, and he sensed some aspect of excitement but he couldn’t grasp that aspect’s nature, save that it seemed very far away.
As the night-sounds of crickets gained dominion over his surroundings, a drone entered his head…
Next thing he knew, his heart was racing, and his right eye felt dry from being open so long. The most delicious images swirled in the back of his mind. No, Fanshawe had not returned to the hotel—
Instead, he’d gained a better vantage point for the intent he’d failed to admit to himself.
He was standing at the highest point of Witches Hill, spying on the town with the looking-glass. The drone in his head amplified. He could not turn away from what he was doing…
In the glass’s viewing circle, he scanned the Travelodge pool, which now wobbled extra-dimensionally blue with its underwater lights. Mostly children waded about but several attractive mothers accompanied them. Fanshawe found that a ring on the glass would zoom the image surprisingly close. Oh, God… One woman’s breasts filled the circle now, water droplets glittering in her cleavage. Through the wet bikini top’s baby-blue fabric, he could see the darkened plugs of her nipples. Fanshawe swerved the glass, to another unknowing mother climbing out of the water. The contrast of this one’s black bikini against the luxuriant white curves of flesh left him breathless. She turned, standing still to talk cheerily to someone in a lounge chair; Fanshawe exploited this as any competent voyeur would, and scanned her entire body from her neck to her toes.
He raised the looking-glass then, to the upper-level windows…
Time turned to a smear along with Fanshawe’s free will. He only vaguely noticed his watch beeping, signaling eleven p.m. From this point on, he floated on a squalid euphoria, as myriad images found their way into his famished psyche; it seemed as though the looking-glass itself were injecting the hot crush of glimpses deep into the substance of his brain, like marinade into the middle of a rump roast: shapely women in underwear or less striding across rooms; a melon-breasted college student stepping out of the shower; a man and woman having rowdy intercourse on their bedroom dresser-top, and a half-dozen more, all commingling into a single, inflamed kaleidoscope that existed solely to stoke Fanshawe’s idiosyncratic lust.
He couldn’t imagine how long he’d stood there sampling so many visual delicacies; time didn’t exist, only the most vivid, lascivious succession of images. When he’d exhausted the Travelodge windows of everything his eye could pilfer, the drone in his head swelled, and he moved the hoary spyglass to the Wraxall Inn.
Silence shrouded him. Had the incessant night-sounds ceased, or had his craving shut them out? Indeed, like last night’s dream, all he could hear were his own heated breaths and the quickened thuds of his heart.
And through the elaborate windows of the inn, Fanshawe’s smorgasbord marched on, a visual feast the likes of which he’d not experienced in over a year. People are naked a lot, his thoughts broke through his fever, when they don’t think anyone can see… He started at the top floor, then slowly moved the glass one window at a time from left to right. The window of the corner suite stood dark—of course, it was his own—but next to it a slightly overweight woman with robust curves and shining blond hair stood nude before her open closet, hunting for the desired nightgown. Eventually she turned, showing all that plush, soft flesh and the exorbitant substance of her bosom, just as Fanshawe zoomed in to scrutinize in every detail. Oh, Christ… On the next floor a window displayed a bed that was empty until a clearly excited male suitor approached with his nude girlfriend or wife—her feet wagging aloft as she silently giggled—dropped her into the middle of the bed, then slid briskly on top of her. The man’s mouth moved from one nipple to the other; evidently, he was biting, for the woman’s back arched, and she clenched, but the look on her tense face was one of pleasure, not discomfort. The man disappeared for a moment, only to return with handcuffs and a blindfold, but after applying these things to his lover, he turned off the lamp, leaving only ghostly television light. More pay-dirt, thought Fanshawe, for deeper along the floor, a shimmering sight slammed into his eye: a svelte woman, nude, on her belly with her legs wishboned. Her skin shined from an obvious application of oil, while another naked woman, just as shapely, straddled her and slowly massaged her back. Fanshawe’s hands shook when he crudely zoomed the glass close between both women’s legs. The motherlode, he thought.