Interlude 4 Gwen, Under Attack #3
“That’s none of your business.”
His face appalled her. It sagged like a loose rubber mask now . . . especially around his gray eyes. There was something dull
and weary and ancient in those eyes.
“No, it isn’t!” he agreed. “’Tisn’t Schrodinger’s business at all, is it? But isn’t it interestin’ how many go costumed in
this world? You cloak yourself in the garment of womanhood, and it suits you, no doubt. You might ask yourself who else goes
cloaked and in what garb. Maybe our ownself! Maybe others. There is a cat with our name, a wery famous cat, what is somehow
alive but also dead at the same time. What a peculiar world, with cats that are alive but also dead, people on the innernet
who are men but also trolls, videos that are as viral as plague, women who tweet more than birds, hawks pretending to be wrens,
snakes pretending to be kings . . . and you standing there holding our twenty quid as if it’s still your twenty quid.”
His tongue fell from his mouth and licked his lips, and when it withdrew she had a glimpse of his teeth. They didn’t quite
fit in his mouth anymore. Two of his canine teeth were enormous and hooked upward, curling almost over his upper lip. Boars
had teeth like that.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” Robin said, “please don’t do it.” She tried to keep the tremor out of her voice and failed.
She took a step to the left, thinking it was time to go, but the ground gave way and she wobbled, went down on one knee. Her
hand was still stuck in her purse. She couldn’t seem to get it free.
“Glen Schrodinger doesn’t think,” he hissed, the flesh of that false face drooping horribly off whatever was beneath. “Glen Schrodinger does. We has that in common with Stuart Finger, who did not need to think a minute about leading your Arthur Oakes deep into the
earth to see him slaughtered by that slick cove who was with him. Oakes wanted to find a knife and he did—when his friend
Mr. Colin pushed one right through his black guts.”
“Stay back,” Robin said. He was out from under the bridge now, coming at her across the mud on all fours, apelike, knuckles in the muck. His mask of skin hung so loose, she could now see the real face behind it, lumpish and obscene. “Stay back, man.”
“I think we both knows by now,” said Schrodinger, “ain’t neither of us truly men.”
He lunged, his mouth yawning wide, wide enough to swallow a watermelon in one gulp, and it was him, it was the thing from the video, and it was also Stu Finger, she knew that now, could see it in his eyes. As he bounded
from under the bridge and across the embankment, he seemed to get bigger, to bulge and deform, his shoulders splitting the
seams of his coat. She fumbled in her purse—it took a moment to get a firm grip on the shaft of the Cree hi-thrower. For one
terrible moment, the lens caught on the edge of her purse and she couldn’t pull it out. Then it came free. It was a long,
stainless steel light, and she meant to smash it in Glen Schrodinger’s melting, grotesque face. But her thumb found the switch
instead and punched it on, straight to the highest setting, which was, after all, what Arthur had told her to do, should she
ever find herself in danger here by the bridge. In that moment, Arthur might almost have been behind her, his hand over hers,
his thumb pushing hers down to light up the Cree.
Schrodinger was one leap from her when he threw himself into the beam. His mouth was open in a scream of lunatic hunger and
joy when his face turned to a gray mask. Instantly it split and fissured, hairline cracks running through an ill-sculpted
stone bust. His hair—every fine strand of it—stiffened into a thread of what looked like concrete. He made a last whistling
sound as he petrified in the sunbeam of the Cree hi-thrower, a sound like gases escaping as someone removed the stone lid
on an ancient tomb.
His momentum carried him on, up off the ground and into the air, but by then he was already falling to his left.
The hands sticking out of his sleeves were the gaunt, bent claws of an old man, but Robin swung the beam around to follow him as he tumbled, and the light passed over those too.
By the time Glen Schrodinger—or whatever Glen Schrodinger was—hit the River Camel, those hands were bent claws of stone.
He was a crouched and leering granite gargoyle, like something fallen off the side of a Gothic church, when he struck the water and tumbled away in the roar and froth of the flood.
2.
A little after seven, Gwen’s laptop began to chime with the FaceTime alert. When she saw who was calling, she hesitated, doing
the math in her head. It had to be almost one in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time. Robin Fellows had never rung her so late,
not in all the years they had known each other. Gwen settled in front of her computer and clicked the green button to accept
the call.
Robin appeared in a room lit only by a desk lamp. Rain slashed across a window behind her. In the last two decades of climbing
in and out of ambulances, Gwen had conservatively treated seven thousand women for assault, and her first thought, in a moment’s
glance, was that Robin was calling to say she had been raped. Robin usually applied her makeup with the greatest of care and
always kept her honey-blond hair carefully sculpted in the style of late-seventies Farrah Fawcett. Now her mascara had run
down her cheeks in crooked black veins, she had an eyelash missing, her hair was a wet tangle. She was wrapped in a blanket,
pulled off the bed behind her. Gwen didn’t FaceTime Robin often enough to know the inside of her flat, but she didn’t think
this was it. It looked like an attic room under the eaves of some grand old house, and Gwen was sure Robin lived in a brick
open-plan place that had been converted from a Victorian warehouse into condos.
“What happened?” Gwen asked.
“Gwen,” Robin said, shaking furiously. She lowered her head, clenched her jaws, couldn’t go on. She was too powerfully overtaken by the shivers.
“You ought to be in an emergency room.”
“Can’t. Can’t go.”
“Were you attacked?”
Robin said, “You could say I went looking for it.”
“Bullshit. No woman goes looking for it. I want you to hang up and call the police. Do it now.”
“But I did go looking. I’m not in London. I’m in Tintagel, at an inn. And I can’t tell the police about any of it.”
No obscenity in the entire language made Gwen quite so ill as the word Tintagel.
“Why are you in Tintagel, Robin?”
“I was looking for Stuart Finger. And I found him. He doesn’t look anything like the Stu Finger I saw nine years ago, but
it was him, the same man, I know it was. Gwen, he didn’t hurt me. I hurt him. I think I killed him. But not before he talked to me. Not before he told me about going underground with Arthur
and Colin. Not before he said what happened.”
Gwen felt as if she stood at the edge of a hole herself, the ground beginning to give way under her feet.
“What . . . what happened?” Gwen asked, and waited while thousands of miles away, the wind screamed and the rain dashed against
the glass.
3.
“It was Colin,” Robin said, and Colin hit the space bar to pause the video playback.
He took the headphones off, got up, and did a lap around the bedroom. He waited to see what he felt. A sense of alarm would’ve been appropriate—alarm that he was found out, that Gwen knew who he was now, what he had done.
But as was so often the case, he could not find it in himself to feel the things he was supposed to feel. Instead of anxiety,
he felt nearly overcome by hilarity. He wanted to laugh. He twitched aside a heavy curtain for a peek at the bright morning.
The trees were lit up in the sunshine, their branches powdered with a half inch of fresh snow. The cold white brilliance of
the grounds corresponded to his own feelings of glinting excitement. To be discovered was, it turned out, a physical thrill,
like leaping into bed with a new lover.
In the dark behind him, Donna groaned and turned over under the sheets.
The video was three days old. Gwen and Robin had sat there whispering, like little girls telling each other ghost stories
at a sleepover, as if somehow Colin might overhear them. And all the while they were videoconferencing with one another on
Gwen’s computer, the one he had given her, the one that recorded every stroke of the keys, every search term, every mail she
sent.
He kept an eye on all their communications with one another: Gwen and Allie and Donna. He had for years. He had always wanted
to read minds, had longed for the power to see into another’s thoughts, to possess their secrets. And now he could and did.
He knew Allie would begin searching for hot girls and lesbian videos after a glass or two of wine—and that the next morning
she would hit the Christian self-help sites hard. He knew Donna searched Donna McBride Sexy and Donna McBride Awesome every day to see what people were saying about her online. He could find out where in the world Gwen Underfoot was at any
one moment because he could geolocate the phone he had given her.
He lowered himself back into his seat at the desk on the far end of the bedroom and composed himself. He was almost too wound
up to sit. Headphones on and he hit play.
But he had to stop again only a minute later, as energized as if he had downed a double shot of espresso.
“I need to think,” Gwen had told Robin, while her hand drifted unconsciously to her throat, to her own collarbone, stroking a spot only inches from the mark that was upon them all.
“This is . . . a lot to take in. And, Robin, it might not be true. It probably isn’t.
This thing. What you saw. It isn’t much interested in what’s true, only what hurts. ”
Robin said, “Sometimes the truth does hurt.”
Gwen nodded, distracted, her fingers moving in little circles near her collarbone. “If it was true, then—”
“Then?”