Dagger Key and Other Stories

Grace trailed her fingers across his neck, and Broillard broke off, stared at Shellane. “What just happened? She do something to me?”

“Did you feel something?”

“What’d she do? I got all cold and shit.”

Grace appeared to have lost interest in Broillard. She was weeping again, her shoulders hunched and shaking, and Shellane recalled how she had acted the afternoon when he had come to her house. Silent; tearful; unmindful of him. He wondered why her fingers never left him cold. “She touched you,” he said.

Broillard scraped back his chair and stood, hands braced on the table. He seemed poised to run, but unable to take the first step. His eyes were bugged, and he breathed through his mouth.

“I don’t think she liked your song,” said Shellane mildly.

“Is she close? Where the fuck is she?”

“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” said Shellane, though Grace had wandered back toward the refrigerator. “You’ll bump into her.”

He took Broillard by the elbow. “Let’s go.” He opened the door to the porch, admitting a glare of the lowering sun, and guided him through it. “You wouldn’t want to piss her off. She gets pissed off, she does all that Exorcist shit.”

Broillard shook free of Shellane’s grasp. “You’re fucking with me, man. You got my imagination playing tricks, but I know you’re fucking with me. I’m calling the cops.”

He started for the outer door, but stopped dead. The door stood open, and framed there, barely visible against the light, a glowing silhouette had materialized. It was as if an invisible presence were drawing the light in order to shape a rippling golden figure with the swelling hips and breasts of a woman, limned by a paler corona that crumbled and reformed like superheated plasma. The figure was so faint, it seemed a trick of the light, similar to an eddy on the surface of a pond that briefly resembles a face. But it brightened, acquiring the wavering substantiality of a mirage, and Shellane saw that the light within the outline was flowing outward in all directions, a brisk tide radiating from some central source.

Broillard made a squeaky noise in his throat.

“Grace?” Shellane said.

With a womanly shriek, Broillard sprang for the door and burst through the figure, briefly absorbed by its golden surface. He went sprawling over the bottom step, rolled up to his knees, and ran. The figure, its brightness diminishing, billowed like a curtain belling in a breeze, then winked out.

Shaken, unable to relate this apparition to what he knew of Grace, Shellane went back inside. The sheets of paper on which Broillard had scribbled his song lay on the floor. He picked them up and stood at the table, unable to think or even to choose a direction for thought. Finally he crossed to the bedroom door and opened it. Grace was still asleep, lying on her side, one pale shoulder exposed. He touched her hip and was so relieved by her solidity, he felt light-headed and sat down on the edge of the bed. She turned to face him, reached out with her eyes closed, groping until her fingers brushed his thigh.

“Grace?”

“I’m here,” she said muzzily.

“Avery’s gone.”

“Avery?”

“Don’t you remember? He was here…a minute ago.”

“I’m glad you didn’t wake me.” She stretched, twisted onto her back, and looked up at him. “What did he want?”

“He wrote you a song.”

“Oh, God!”

“It really sucked.” Shellane crumpled the pages in his hand. “You don’t remember him being here?”

“I was asleep.” Her brow furrowed. “What’s the matter?”

He told her how she’d acted with Avery, how she acted the afternoon he had come inside her house—another occasion she did not recall—and about the apparition. She listened without speaking, sitting with her knees drawn up, and when he had done she rested her head on her knees, so he could not see her face, and asked him if he loved her; then, before he could answer, she said, “I realize that’s a difficult question, since it’s not altogether clear what I am.”

“It’s not a difficult question,” he said.

“Then why don’t you answer it?”

“Every minute I stay here, I know I’m in danger. You probably don’t understand that…”

“I do!”

“Not all of it, you don’t. The fact remains I’m in danger and yet I feel at home. Easy with this place and with you. That frightens me. You frighten me. What you might mean frightens me.”

Her injured expression hardened, but she continued to look at him.

“There’s an old Catholic taint in me wants to deny it,” he said. “It’s telling me this is unnatural. Against God. But I love you. I just don’t know what’s to come of it.”

She said nothing, fingering an imperfection in the blanket.

“And you?” he asked.

She shrugged, as if it were trivial. “Of course. But I wonder if I’d love you if you weren’t my only option.”

His face tightened as he parsed meaning from the words.

“See how we hurt each other,” she said. “We must be in love.”

The light dimmed, clouds moving in from the south to shadow the lake. They started to speak at the same time. Shellane gestured for her to go on, but she said, “No…you.”