Dagger Key and Other Stories

She held out her hand and he drew back, both a fearful rejection and one of embittered practicality. If she was a ghost—and what else could she be?—he was not relating to her as such, but rather as he might to a woman with a problem he did not want to get involved in. Like a girlfriend with a drug habit. Fear nibbled at the edges of his awareness, an old Catholic reflex serving to remind him that she was an abomination, a foulness, a scrap of metaphysics. But he could not turn away.

“Why’d you think I’d kill Avery?” he asked.

“I knew things about you from the first moment. It was so weird. I knew who you were. Not your name or anything, but I had a sense of your character. I could tell you’d done violent things.”

“My name’s Roy Shellane.”

She repeated it. “I didn’t think you looked like a Michael.”

The wind came again, and she hugged herself.

“I feel alive,” she said wonderingly. “Ever since you got here, it’s like I’m back in the world. I’ve never felt so alive.”

He studied her face, trying to discern some taint of death, and she asked what was wrong.

“I keep expecting things to be different now I know,” he said. “That you’ll turn sideways and vanish. Something like that.”

“Maybe I will.”

“And I keep thinking I’m going to be afraid.”

“Are you?”

“Just that you’ll vanish,” he said. “And I guess it frightens me that I’m not more afraid.”

The way she was looking at him, he knew she wanted him to reassure her. With only the slightest hesitancy, he stepped forward, half-expecting his arms to pass through her, but she nestled against him, warm and vivid in her reality. He felt a stirring in his groin, the beginnings of arousal, and this caused him to question himself again, to speculate about what he had become.

“Roy,” she said, as if the name were a comfort.

He rested his chin on the top of her head and gazed out over the lake, at the heavy chop, the foot-high waves trundling toward shore, and felt a sudden brilliant carelessness regarding all his old compulsions.

“I know you can’t stay,” she said. “But a little while…maybe that would be all right.”

During the days that followed, it occurred to Shellane that theirs was a pure romance, free of biological imperatives, divorced from all natural considerations, and yet it seemed natural in all its particulars. They made love, they slept, they talked, they were at peace. Even knowing their time together would be brief, that was not so different from the sadness of more conventional lovers whose term of intimacy had been prescribed. Yet Grace’s abrupt departures continued to trouble him. For one thing, he was never certain she would return, and for another, he could not think where she went or into what condition she might have been reduced. If he asked, he believed she would tell him—if she herself knew—but he was afraid to hear the answer, imagining some horrid dissolution. Sometimes when he left her sleeping and was busy at his laptop or puttering in the kitchen, he would have the feeling that in his absence she ceased to exist and sprang back into being whenever he peeked in at her. But these were minor discords in the music of those days. The most difficult thing for Shellane was an increasingly acute feeling that his ability to interact with her hinted at either madness or the imminence of some black onrushing fate. The similarity of his youthful behavior to that of Broillard seemed to tilt the scales of possibility toward the latter, to hint at a karmic synchronicity. Yet he was not prepared to give her up. Whenever he considered leaving, this thought would be pushed aside by more immediate concerns, and though he realized he would soon have to leave, he was unable to confront the fact.

Two days after he had learned the truth about her, while she lay sleeping, Broillard knocked at the door. He was in bad shape. Bloodshot eyes; disheveled; coked up, his sinuses mapped by hectic blotches. Like a vampire beginning to decompose in the strong sun. He wiped his nose and twitched, yet attempted to present a manly appearance by speaking in a stern voice and holding his shoulders square.

“You’n me need to work shit out,” he said.

“Not a good time,” Shellane told him. “I’m occupied.”

“Yeah? Me, too. I’m occupied in figuring out why I shouldn’t call the cops on your ass.”

“Perhaps what stays your hand is the thought that you don’t want them sniffing around your place, looking for drugs.”

“You think I won’t go to the cops? I’ll call ’em right now.”

“I’ll wait inside, shall I? We’ll have a chat when they get here.”

Shellane started to close the door, but Broillard shouldered it open. Abandoning the tactics of machismo, he said with unvarnished desperation, “C’mon! I need to talk to you!”

“It’ll have to be another time.”

“If you’re fucking with me, that’s cool. I don’t care. I just wanna know!”

“I’m not fucking with you,” said Shellane. “Grace is with me now.”

Broillard stood on tiptoes, trying to see past Shellane into the cabin. “Where is she?”