Into the Night

“It went off. The shot passed through the window. Are you sure you want to hear this? Are you sure?”

“Don’t torture me.”

“That’s when I met Starr. She was the one the bullet hit. She died in my arms.”

She stopped. There wasn’t any more to tell him.

She wondered if he’d cry, or moan, or what he’d do. She’d think a little less of him if he did — she didn’t like whimpering men — yet what right had she to set a pattern for his grief?

He didn’t move at all for several minutes. Just sat there numbed, dazed.

Then he picked up the brandy snifter. She thought he was going to drain its contents in a gulp.

Instead he stood up, shock-sudden, all six feet of him, and hurled it. The liquor made an amber rainbow of falling drops all across the room and the glass exploded into a hundred pieces against the wall.

“Thanks, Life!” He roared at the top of his voice. “Thanks a load! Thanks a lump!”

And then he balled a fist, and bared his teeth like an animal snarling at a master who had just kicked him, and looked straight up overhead at the ceiling. But she knew he wasn’t seeing the ceiling.

“As for you—!”

She went over to him quickly and sealed his mouth with her hand.

“Don’t,” she cautioned him, almost superstitiously. “Not that. Haven’t you been punished enough? Are you begging for more? Don’t turn on your God because of something you’ve done yourself.”

“He’s not my—”

She quickly put her hand back again. Then he slumped, and all the defiance went out of him. He turned and went back to the sofa, and sagged into it bonelessly, soddenly.

“Something I’ve done myself,” he kept repeating listlessly, the words she’d just used. “Something I’ve done myself.”

“It must have been,” she said finally, in a low, almost inaudible voice. “Why would the girl leave you like that, why send you back your ring defiled? I’ll tell you something else, Vick. She wanted you killed, Starr wanted you killed. If she’d lived, she could have known no peace until you were killed. What was it? What was it you did to her?”

She watched him, studied him. She could see a change coming over his face. A look that hadn’t been there before. Not the pain of loving and losing Starr. Not the grief-rage of hearing of her death. No, something else.

She tried to translate it, and she thought she did.

While the thing he loved was alive yet, in the same world with him yet, even though they were apart, nothing could slake his thirst for her, fever, addiction, use whichever word you want. Nothing else counted, nothing else mattered, nothing else existed. There was no right, there was no wrong, there was no good, there was no bad.

Now she no longer lived, was gone from the world.

The flame that had fed on her body, even though it was only in his mind and nowhere else, now had nothing more to feed on. And when flames have nothing more to feed on, they go down, down, down. A flame can’t stay alive on a memory.

She could see it expiring in him as he was sitting there. Horror was coming on. It was written on his face, and his eyes were big and round and flickering with horror. Now the blazing flame that must have kept things, unspeakable things, at a distance, beyond the pale, like a burning, slowly turning sword, was gone. Now the skeletons and the worms, the maggots and the vermin, all the things that were fearsome and unclean and foul, crept slowly in toward him, ringing him around, closing in, feeding on him, covering him.

And he, in their center, was in a hell such as this world never knew of, nor even the hell that was the hell beyond this world.

She could see it on his face. It was almost too awful to watch. She looked down into her lap, batedly, fearfully.

She could hear her own words still echoing, ringing faintly in the room around her, though it seemed long ago that they’d been spoken. “What was it? What was it you did to her?”

And suddenly he answered, and everything was over.

“Because I was her own brother!”

In the hollow stillness that followed came the sound of faraway voices from the past, drumming in her ears like knells of doom; came the memory of things that had been said, and things that she had read.

She heard Charlotte Bartlett’s voice again, in the distance: “We had a little baby boy first, before Starr. Then we lost him. He just disappeared from the face of the earth. One minute he was playing in front of the door. The next minute there wasn’t a sign of him.”

Starr herself, in a letter to her mother: “...That little-boy look, that husband look. I threw my arms around him and hung from his neck with my feet lifted clear of the ground, and kissed him about eighteen times.”

Dell, baring her heart in reminiscence: “I could tell when he’d been with her. The telltale little signs that give a man away. Tired, all vitality spent. A hollowness in the cheeks and at the temples that was gone again inside twenty-four hours. To come back once more inside forty-eight.”