First Interlude Gwen, Underfoot #3
is nothing more than horrible fantasy born of a lurid imagination. This will come as no surprise to you. You have seen my
Cabinet of Curiosities. You must forget whatever I say and never repeat it to anyone. I wouldn’t want anyone to think less
of me. To hear how I raved, or what peculiar ideas I held at the end.” But he said all this in a light tone that approached
glee.
She scraped the spoon around the inside of the bowl and put it to his lips, and he ate.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Thank you.”
But it came back up twenty minutes later. He twisted on his side, suddenly, as if he had been gut-shot, and vomited into her
lap.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, no. Oh, Gwen. I’m so sorry.” He was trying not to cry.
“Never you mind,” she said, rising to her feet. She had a cloth, much like one of the rags she used to burp Jett, and began
to clean it up.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said.
“Of course you didn’t. You weren’t even awake. It came up on you while you were drifting. I’ll change the sheets.”
He vomited again.
“Get it all out,” she said, his puke beginning to dry on her jeans. “Get it out and you can start to feel better.”
“I don’t think there is better,” he said, panting heavily. “Not from here on. Only worse. I had endurance training in the
army. Before the war and after. In one . . . test . . . of our stamina . . . we would stand in foxholes filled with icy water.
To see how long we could take it. I could take it longer than just about anyone. I’m going to last a long time, Gwen. I’m
going to rot right off my bones while I’m still alive.” He gave her a glaucous look. “You must change those jeans right away.”
“First your sheets, then my jeans.”
When he stopped shaking, she helped him into the wheelchair and made his bed with fresh sheets.
She had spare clothes in her gym bag, and she took them into his palatial bathroom to change. She left the door open between
them. If he wasn’t half-blind by then, he could’ve watched her undress. Maybe he would’ve enjoyed it! Homosexual or not, she
thought, Llewellyn had a cheerfully lascivious streak and relished a good naked body of any gender. He had been married for
years and had a child himself, so he had got it up at least once for a bit of female tail. She had seen some of the dirty
books of hardcover fetish photography on his shelves, the Mapplethorpe, the Helmut Newton. And then there was his novel, an
unpublished pulp soldier-of-fortune thing Llewellyn had written in the late sixties, full of sadism and submission and unlikely
couplings, both hetero- and homosexual in nature. He kept a copy of the manuscript in the library. She had started reading
it, usually with her eyebrows raised as high as they would go, in a mixture of admiring horror and bemused shock. Maybe she
would try to finish it one of these days.
“I wanted to see the spring. Sit out back in the wheelchair with the sun on my face and smell the dogwoods. Maybe if I was
having a good day, you’d let me have a cigar and a whiskey.”
“Not only would I get you a cigar and a whiskey, I’d drink one with you.”
“I’d like that.” His voice was soft in the dark. “I’m glad you spent so much of your childhood in this house, Gwen. It did
me good to have your sturdy kindness in my life. My son, Colin’s father, was a terrible person. He was good at everything
he put his hand to—polo, sailing, selling, modeling—but couldn’t bear to work at anything. He only ever did one honorable
thing: he died—took his mouse of a wife with him—before he could ruin Colin. And that’s how I got a second chance to be a
father. I must not have done so badly this time around. Colin has good friends. He has you.”
She eased him back into bed. He found her hand.
“But if I have a choice,” he said, “if I can have anyone beside me at the end, I want you there instead of him, Gwen. I know
how selfish that is. But I know you’d . . . help me through the hard bits. I never imagined dying could be such hard work.”
“What makes you so sure you’ll go first?” Gwen said. “You’ll probably talk me to death, you ol’ bastard.”
He didn’t just laugh at that. He roared.
8.
When Jayne Nighswander unloaded her daddy’s shotgun into her own TV set, she had peppered the wall behind it with shot, and
in the new year, Gwen resolved to replaster and repaint so Tana didn’t raise her boy in a place that had bullet holes in the
walls. Gwen left Jett cooing and frog-kicking in his crib and wandered into the kitchen to see if there were pliers in the
junk drawer. She could start tonight by picking the iron pellets out of the wall.
There were no pliers amid the mess of acid-caked old batteries, rusting screwdrivers, and rubber bands.
She gave up and closed the drawer—Jett was beginning to make grizzling sounds, he was going to want a bottle soon—and then slid it open again for another look.
Gwen felt she had spied something important; seen it without knowing she had seen it.
She sorted through the dried-up ballpoint pens and broken clothespins until her gaze settled on a stained
and crumpled napkin from Dunkin’ Donuts. Someone had written on it in jagged cursive. There was a 617 number—that was Boston—followed
by the words Katherine Porter—Moviegoer, Killer Angel. Gwen wondered if Katherine Porter was a friend of Ronnie Volpe’s, one of the strippers he knew and sold drugs to. Killer
Angel might be the name she used when she was grinding the pole. Moviegoer could be Ronnie’s way of saying she also did porno.
Only . . . that didn’t feel right. Why would Ronnie write her whole name out that way, so formally? And a moviegoer wasn’t
in films, they watched films. Gwen didn’t know why the old note bothered her, only that it did.
Jett began to bleat in a goaty sort of way and she had to let it go.
He had all of one bottle and most of a second before he calmed and she was able to rock him into a slumber. Then she left
him in his crib and went onto the back stoop to get a lungful of fresh air and clear her head. She watched a plane rise from
Portland International, red lights blinking on its wingtips. Gwen had never been any farther out of state than Boston. She
and her father attended a single Red Sox game every summer, usually after the home team was out of contention and the seats
were at their cheapest. She wanted to go with Arthur to London someday, see a place where people had dwelt for a thousand
years. She wanted to see Arthur’s London, his cafés, his parks . . . his bookshops.
It hit her then. “They’re book titles. Katherine Porter. Killer Angels. Dammit, they’re books, aren’t they?”
The night offered no opinion on the matter.
Gwen returned to the darkened kitchen, picked the phone off the wall, and dialed the 617 number on the napkin. It rang five times and then there was a click and a thunk and she was listening to the prerecorded message on an answering machine.
“This is Bridget Fleming, and you’ve reached Fleming Antiquarian Books, specializing in signed editions, rare firsts, vintage
erotica, and literary ephemera.” The woman on the machine paused to hack a wet smoker’s cough, then went on in her creaking
North Boston voice. “Our collection is open by appointment only, details available through our mailing list. If you’re looking
for something specific, leave your number after the tone and let me know what you’re looking for. If I don’t have it, I can
find it. Sheldon, do not leave any more messages. You need a therapist. If I see you in front of my apartment again, I’m calling your mother—or the
goddamn cops.” There was a beep. Gwen did not leave a message.
She stood in the stillness and shadows of the empty kitchen, her pulse as quick in her as if she had just run up a flight
of stairs. Bridget Fleming was a dealer, like Ronnie and Jayne. Only they dealt angel dust and Bridget Fleming dealt fairy
dust: old books, old stories, Granddaddy’s sepia-tinted pornography. Had they sold the stolen books to her? Did she still
have them? Did she still have the Enoch Crane journal? Because Enoch Crane had a lot to say about King Sorrow. He had explained
how to invite him into their world and how to keep him fed.
Maybe he had also written something about how to make him go away.
9.
When the hand mirror made its way around to her, Gwen and Arthur were the only ones still sitting at the card table. Colin had seen something in the mirror (only he insisted later it had been a helmet filled with water), got up from the table, and gone to perform some necessary part of the ritual.
Gwen and Arthur held hands and she stared into murdered Maria’s mother-of-pearl inlaid mirror, gripping it in her right hand
so she could see herself and Arthur and Allie playing piano beneath the framed shadow boxes of Llewellyn’s prize butterflies.
The door to one side of the piano gaped wide, looking into an impenetrable darkness. A great pale eye opened slowly in that
darkness, an infected eye with a vertical slit for a pupil, an eye as golden as a harvest moon. Opened . . . and then slowly,
dreamily, shut again and was gone.
Arthur called out in a loud, clear voice, “Your subjects beseech their king for his protection. We call our king down from
the Long Dark.”
In the mirror, Gwen watched the door to the hallway slam shut once more. It crashed shut so loudly, Gwen fumbled, almost dropped
the mirror in her own lap. Curiously, she didn’t think Allie so much as flinched. Allie was bent over the keys, maniacally
banging away at “Puff the Magic Dragon.” She was somewhere else. Deep in the dream of the song.
When Gwen righted the mirror, she had a queer sensation of dislocation, a wooziness that she felt in the spot right between
her eyes. The mirror was splintered into three big shards, split by a Y-shaped crack that ran up the center. In the shard
on her left she saw Arthur, only he wore a black gauze blindfold and he was no longer holding her hand. Instead, he held the