Mystery

“It’s Lamont von Heilitz, but Sarah, you can’t tell anybody he was here. This is serious. Nobody can know.”

“Do you think I talk about the things you tell me?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said.

Her arms folded around him, and her face tilted toward his—made half of night and darkness. Her face filled his eyes. He kissed her, and it was like kissing the night. Sometimes she did talk about the things he told her, and sometimes he wondered, and to her these were the same, because they were both exciting. Like being engaged to be engaged; you got things both ways.

“Are we going to go into your lodge, or are we just going to stand out here?”

“Let’s go in,” he said.

He led her up the steps, let her in, and locked the door behind them.

He sensed more than saw her turning toward him. “Nobody ever locks their doors up north.”

“Nobody but me.”

“My father isn’t going to come looking for us.”

“It isn’t your father I’m worried about.”

She found his cheek with her hand. “Where are the lights? I can’t even see you in here.”

“We don’t need lights,” he said. “Just follow me.”

“In the dark?”

“I like being in the dark.” He was going to say something else, but saw her teeth flash in the darkness and reached for her. His hand fell on her hip. “I just found out that I’m not who I thought I was.”

“You never were who you thought you were.”

“Maybe nobody was who I thought they were.”

“Maybee-ee,” she half-sang, half-whispered, and stepped closer into his grasp. “Am I following you somewhere?”

He took her hand and led her around the furniture toward the staircase in the dark. “Here,” he said, and put her hand on the bottom of the banister. Then he clamped his arm around her waist, and slowly took the stairs with her. In the deep blackness, it felt like falling in reverse.

She stopped moving at the top of the stairs, and whispered, “The handrail disappeared.”

Tom nudged her to the left, where faint light from the window showed the dark shape of a doorway. They moved together down the shadowy hallway. Tom leaned over the doorknob and noiselessly pulled the door toward him.

There was just enough dim light in the room to reveal the bed and the table. Black leaves flattened against the window. Sarah’s arms were around his neck as soon as he closed the door. He smelled tobacco smoke in her hair.

Certain things she said:

Tom. Oh.

I love this, don’t you love this?

Say you love me.

Yes, that. Do that some more.

I love the way—the way you fill me up.

Bite me. Bite me.

Oh, God.

Harder, yes, yes, yes …

Let’s roll over—

Oh! Oh! Oh!

Sweet baby—

Oh, my God, look at you! Put it, put it … yesss.

Tell me you love me.

—I love you.

Sarah’s head lay heavy on his chest. Whatever this was, it was good enough.

Jeanine Thielman in a dripping white dress rose up from the lake—her face dead and heavy—walking toward him through feathers of smoke—her mouth gaping open like a trap and her white tongue flapping as she struggled to speak. In his sleep Tom heard her scream, and his eyes swam open to an oily blackness. Jeanine Thielman’s drowned body lay across his, and pain muffled his head. His chest was filled with oily rags, and something foul churned in his stomach. A scream? He tried to see his bedroom. The hairs in his nose crisped with heat. All he could see through the blackness was a fuzzy red rectangle—that was a window. A rushing, roaring sound came to him at last. He shook his head, and nearly threw up. He moaned, and slid out from under the body atop his own. The movement brought his hips over the side of the narrow bed, and he tumbled to the floor. He stared at a hand dripping off the bed before his eyes, and realized that the hand belonged to Sarah Spence. The floor warmed his knees.

Tom inhaled, and felt as though he had drawn fire into his nose. “Sarah,” he said, “wake up! Wake up!” He yanked on her arm, and pulled her body toward him. Her eyes were slits. She said, “Whuzza?”

“The lodge is on fire,” he said, uttering something he had not known until it was spoken.

Her eyes rolled back into her head. Tom leaned over the bed and put his hands under her arms and pulled her toward him. She fell on top of him, and flailed out with one hand, hitting the side of his head. Tom fell back. The air was cooler and clearer on the floor. He noticed that he was wearing a shirt. Hadn’t he taken his shirt off? He reached up and pulled a sheet off the bed. Then he slapped Sarah’s face, hard.

“Shit,” she said, distinctly. Her eyes opened again, and she coughed as if she were trying to push her stomach out through her throat. “My head hurts. My chest hurts.”

Tom roughly put the sheet around her, then snatched off the blanket and put it over her like a hood. The bottom sheet lay loose and tangled on the bed, and he reached up and snapped it toward him and tugged it up over his body and began crawling toward the door. He heard Sarah crawling after him, coughing, through the furnace noise of the fire.