Brainfire Page 24

  John Rayner. John Rayner could do nothing. He was hardly worth considering now. He was something to be relegated to a quiet corner of the brain, something to forget.

  He stared morosely at an unopened pack of peppermint Life Savers and wondered if the old woman had picked up on the lie about a telephone call to Israel. It didn’t much matter now anyhow. She was under control, firmly so, and that was a good feeling. A very good feeling.

  3

  1.

  It took them hours to reach the place where Isobel thought they would be safe. A safe house—a phrase Rayner had always found faintly absurd, as if its opposite, an unsafe house, were a bad joke concerning gas leaks in basements, rotting timbers in attics, a bomb ticking away in a concealed closet. It took them hours of turning this way and that, going from beach to alleys among hotels, wandering hotel lobbies, dimly lit cocktail bars. If you had drawn a graph of their movements, Rayner thought, it would have looked like a crazed series of loops forged in string by an insane Boy Scout. The house, set back from the road behind a glade of trees, had a rear lawn that ran down to a narrow inlet of water where willows skimmed the quiet, glassy surface. It was a dark and cool place of long corridors and stained-glass windows; once it must have belonged to a family of some wealth but now it was run-down and flaking, occupied by a man Isobel introduced simply as Fox and his teen-age daughter, Fiona. A space duo, Rayner thought. Fox with his thick-lensed spectacles, eyes unblinking and distant; the girl, shy and indifferent, with that sullen quality that you sometimes find in adolescents. But there were no questions asked.

  Isobel led him upstairs to a small room with a single bed and a dresser with a rusted mirror. He lay down, exhausted, trying not to think of Chip Alexander and his young friend, trying to forget the man with the stainless-steel pistol. Trying, instead, to make sense of things. It was like listening to a series of echoes in reverse order; a guessing game in which you were to find the original word. A crossword puzzle in which you hoped simple repetition of an elusive clue would somehow unconsciously release the answer you wanted. The flash of insight, he thought. The penny that must one day drop. The soccer team. The soccer team. And why had Andreyev come to London in the first place?

  Isobel was standing at the window. A thin muslin drapery was drawn halfway across the glass. From outside, a distant streetlight illuminated her face. He sat up, tired, barely managing to keep his eyes open. Holding the drapery in her hand, bunching it, she turned to look at him and asked, “Why did they want to harm you?”

  Harm, he thought. A curious word, its sound somehow soft and whispered and harmless. “I think what they wanted was to put me on ice, in a manner of speaking.”

  “You have to hand it to me, Rayner,” she said. “I must have a knack of being in all the wrong places at the right times.”

  He massaged his face softly for a time. He swung his legs off the bed; he could imagine lying in a Jacuzzi. “Lucky for me,” he said, wondering if luck was any part of it, if perhaps Chip Alexander had momentarily relented, given him the time he had begged for. Time, he thought. Tempus fuckit. Time for what? Time—to do what with? He watched Isobel for a moment. Suddenly, throughout the house, there was the sound of a harp being played to the accompaniment of a flute. It was an odd rippling sequence of sounds—and visual rather than auditory, as if he were watching a school of silver-skinned fish just beneath the surface of black water.

  “Fox and his daughter,” she said. “They’re heavily into their music. I think it sounds good.”

  “Where did you find them?” he asked.

  “Are you worried about trusting them?”

  He stared through the darkness at the outline of the closed door. Trust? Who could he trust now anyhow except for her?

  “Don’t worry about them,” she said. Even though he could not clearly see her face, he had the feeling that she was smiling. “They don’t know about your world, John. And even if they did, they wouldn’t understand it. All they want is to play their music.”

  The sweet life, Rayner thought. A little innocence. You cut yourself adrift on a raft of ignorance and you just floated, mindlessly, away. “How did you meet them?”

  “We have some common interests,” she answered. “I met them at this group I sometimes go to. You’d find it funny, I’m sure.”

  “Funny? Like how?”

  “A bunch of psychic freaks. Remember I told you I had seen the ESP cards done consistently? The girl you met. Fiona. She’s the one I saw do it.”

  Rayner closed his eyes. The music stopped. Then, when it started again, it was different, rather dark and frenetic and atonal. An unhappy music, bleak and dismal, rising upward through the house like a scythe awkwardly angled. It was beginning to irk him. He sat with the palms of his hands pressed to the sides of his head, the classical disposition of the thinker, except he was thinking of nothing. His head was a stalled engine. What have I got? he wondered. Exactly what have I got stuffed into my own burnt-out computer?

  A man defects. Okay. He usually has something to sell. What did Andreyev know that was so goddam important he had to be stopped? Why did Ernest … Isobel came and sat on the mattress beside him and was silent for a time, as if she was listening to the music.

  “What makes you so dangerous?” she asked. “What do you know, John Rayner, that makes you such a menace?”

  What do I know?

  He reached out and held her hands and heard the mattress creak as she shifted her weight around. Her skin was chill. Desire, he thought—was there ever a more incongruous moment for it? And then he was thinking of his brother again: the unavoidable presence of the ghost. Blood relations. Even the grave didn’t put them out of your mind.

  “What do you know?” she asked again.

  He shrugged. She had moved her hands away. Too soon—wasn’t that what she had said? Too bloody soon. He gazed at the darkened outline of her face for a time.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” he said.

  He heard her sigh. “That last night with Richard?”

  “That last night.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve asked myself a hundred times about that damn night? Don’t you think I’ve gone through all kinds of shit trying to understand it?” She rose, wandered to the window, looked out into the dark. “He said he had a headache. Then he lost it. Whatever makes you work as a human being just … snapped in him. He lost it totally. He looked at me. The way he looked—it was like he had never seen me before. What’s the word? Emptiness would be close. But it wouldn’t be good enough. It wouldn’t be strong enough. He didn’t know me.”

  “Then what?”

  “You want blood, John,” she said. He could hear a slight friction as she rubbed the palms of her hands together. “I’ll give you blood. He wasn’t Richard any longer. That’s how it was. It wasn’t Richard. It wasn’t my husband, your brother. He wasn’t anybody we knew. And then he … The rest you can read about in the official report, right?”

  Rayner went toward her. Lightly he touched the nape of her neck. Comfort, he thought. Comfort, ease.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said.

  But it wasn’t. It wasn’t okay. It didn’t make any more sense to him than it had before. He was aware now that the music had stopped, that somebody was coming up the stairs. He turned quickly to look at the door and he thought: A gun. I don’t even have a gun. There was a knock on the door. It opened and the girl, Fiona, stood there, her hands thrust into the pockets of her blue jeans. She didn’t speak for a moment. Rayner had the feeling that she was staring at him in the way one might scrutinize a textbook problem in algebra. He was uneasy. She can do the cards, he thought. Why would that unsettle him? Was it that world of darkness and poltergeists that broke bone china and trumpets that floated in midair—the remnant of some childhood fear, the shapes that became manifest on drawn curtains and the sound of the wind and the flickering night-light plugged into the wall? It was Richard, he thought. Richard had loved ghost stories.
Richard had loved to scare him with indescribable monsters that lay, hungry and fanged and waiting, in the shrubbery beneath the bedroom window. I’d forgotten all that, he thought. Time slips.

  The girl suddenly asked, “You guys want to eat?”

  Food, Rayner thought. The flood of the ordinary, the return to earth.

  “It’s ready,” the child said. “If you’d like some.”

  2.

  A vegetarian stew, but Rayner was hungry anyway and ate two portions. When he was through he thought how it would be the simplest thing in the world to imagine only a pristine domesticity—sitting in this kitchen with its curtains drawn against the darkness outside. But it was the darkness that kept coming back at him, the idea of people moving out there, the hunters, the haunters, those who needed his silence.

  He put his fork down on his empty plate. Fox, who wore an old-fashioned pinstriped vest over a collarless shirt, was watching him. The large unblinking eyes, magnified by the glasses, embarrassed him in some way. It was as if he felt the need to converse with Fox but understood that there wasn’t a point where their levels of language would coincide. And the child—she was worse somehow, staring down at her plate secretively, pushing back and forth a piece of zucchini she hadn’t eaten. Maybe, Rayner thought, she has come to some understanding with that particular piece of vegetable matter, a truce of sorts. I should be thankful for sanctuary, but where did Isobel dig these people up? He watched her a moment, wondering at how relaxed she appeared to be: a certain tranquillity of expression. Perhaps it had gotten through to her finally—a retreat from the physical world to the psychic, a change of her elements. Run down one battery, he thought, replace it with an altogether different kind. Why the hell not? He wasn’t Richard any longer. If the physical world was so shifting, so treacherous, so damnably unstable, where would you go for consistency?

  “I liked the food,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Fox stared at him, saying nothing. The girl looked up from her plate a moment. Dear Christ, he thought. They have this way of doing you over, kicking at the foundations of your politeness. Be grateful, Rayner. Thank whatever lies in your stars.

  “Isobel says you can do the ESP cards,” he said to the girl.

  “Yeah. Sometimes.” She picked up the zucchini and let it flop around in her fingers. “Like when I’m in the mood.”

  “Don’t be so modest,” Isobel said. She smiled at the girl, then looked at Rayner. “They tested her at Duke. She blew their minds away.”

  Rayner looked suitably impressed. The girl gazed at him and he had the distinct feeling she was, in a fashion, deriding him for his own obvious lack of extrasensory perception. Fox got up from the table and brought a bottle of elderberry wine from a cabinet. It’s the whole trip around here, Rayner thought. The weird music, the vegetarian bit, the homemade wines, the voices from the ether. He sipped some of the wine, but it was bitter and vinegary.

  Fox said, “You don’t believe, do you?”

  “Believe in what?”

  “In other modes of perception?”

  “I try to keep an open mind,” Rayner said.

  “Ah. The skeptic. I was like you once. But you can’t fight it.” Fox smiled, an odd rubbery expression, as if he had no full control of his lips. “Take the narrow view of reality, and what have you got? Is that a glass of wine in your hands?”

  Perplexed, more than a little irritated, Rayner wondered about perpetual trees falling in forests and whether anybody could hear them fall. Sally’s unanswerable questions.

  Fox said, “It isn’t a glass of wine. If you had another view, if you weren’t such a limited man, Mr. Rayner, you would understand that you hold only the illusion of wine there. From the viewpoint of eternity, you’re holding something that is already decaying and disintegrating—only you don’t see it. Fixed, you think. Substantial. But no.”

  Isobel, dear Isobel, Rayner thought, how did these people grab you? How did they take hold of you? He watched her now as she nodded her head up and down seriously. The man’s gobbledygook enthralled her, you could see.

  “My daughter’s gifts,” Fox said, staring at Rayner as if he meant to blind him with his large eyes, “my daughter’s gifts have taught me to open up my head.”

  Let it all hang out, Rayner thought.

  The child groaned, as if this praise of her father’s annoyed her. What is she but some typical teen-ager? he wondered. A child tired of whatever prodigal talents had been ascribed to her? She got up from the table, scraping her chair, and went to the kitchen window, where she pulled back the curtain and looked out. From somewhere, perhaps from a pocket of his vest, Fox had produced a pack of ESP cards and was shuffling them quickly. He slid them down the table to Rayner, who stared at them, wondering what was expected of him.

  “Go ahead,” Fox said. “Cut them. Shuffle them. Then take one off the top without letting Fiona see.”

  By the window, the child moaned. “I don’t think I’m up to this,” she said.

  “Do it,” Fox said. “Just do it.”

  Rayner cut the deck. He raised the top card: a star.

  “Star,” the child said.

  He raised the second card and looked at it. A square.

  The girl was quiet a moment. “Square. Square, I think. Yeah.”

  Fox, as if something had been confirmed to his great satisfaction, watched Rayner with the expression of a true believer turning a new disciple. The next card was a plus sign, a cross.

  The girl said nothing.

  “Well, Fiona?” Fox asked. “Well?”

  The girl, her back to the room, didn’t move.

  Something all at once was different here, something—at a level Rayner couldn’t absolutely comprehend—had changed. A mood, a certain ambience; he wasn’t sure. He could feel the change as surely as a draft coming through an open door. He felt a pulse of a strange alarm within himself: it was as if, having sat down jokingly to tinker with a ouija board, he had received a message of utter malice. The girl turned around and stared at him.

  “What is it, child?” Fox asked.

  The girl was still staring at Rayner. He couldn’t keep her eyes in focus, couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to see her expression; his hands trembled slightly on the deck. Come on, he thought. Control yourself. She just can’t get it, that’s all. She just can’t see this one, that’s all it is. A flaw, a failure, a breakdown. The girl had moved toward the table. Her mouth opened, as if she was about to speak, but she said nothing. Fox was standing up now, touching his daughter on the shoulder.

  A difference, a change: something unraveling, coming undone. Rayner didn’t want to hold the deck any longer. It felt hot in his hands. He wanted to drop it. A game, he thought. A game of cards.

  “Can’t you see it?” Fox asked.

  The child shook her head.

  “The next card,” Fox said. “Pass to the next card.”

  “No,” the girl said. “No. Don’t pass. Don’t.”

  “Pass,” Fox said, glaring at Rayner.

  “No!” The girl was panicked suddenly. She came closer to Rayner. “I know what it is. I know what it is. Don’t pass to the next one. I know.”

  “Tell us,” Fox said.

  “It’s a frame of wood,” the girl said. “It’s a frame of broken wood.”

  3.

  Koprow, dozing in the armchair by the dying fire in his room, was awakened by the woman touching him lightly on the shoulder, shaking him. For a moment he was uncertain of his surroundings. Katya was looking urgently at him.

  He stirred in the chair, half rising. “Is something wrong?” he asked, wondering if perhaps she had caught him talking in his sleep, an embarrassing prospect altogether. He stared up blearily into her thin face.

  “It’s the old woman,” Katya said. “I think you should change your mind about the medication.”

  “Why? Whatever for?”

  The woman hesitated a moment. “Come and see for yourself.”

  Koprow, irrita
ted, rose. He shuffled after the woman and out into the corridor. His limbs were numb from the position of his sleep; needles and pins, slight aches. He saw the woman hurry ahead of him to the stairs. Climbing, trying not to pant, he reached the upper landing, where Katya was already at the door of the old Jewess’s room, opening it so that a rectangle of light fell through the dark. He went in after her.

  “I think she needs medication now,” Katya said.

  “Do you? Do you indeed?” Koprow went closer to the bed.

  She might, save for the way her head rolled from side to side, her mouth opening and closing silently, she might have been dead: the skin was white, beneath the eyes there were fleshy circles of dark purple—and sweat, everywhere the glossy covering of perspiration. Momentarily Koprow felt an unusual sense of panic: if she were to die, if they were to lose her now … He leaned closer to the old woman, seeing how the eyelids flickered, sometimes barely opening to reveal expanses of white flecked with blood—and he realized that she was not silent at all, but that in a voice that was a whisper she was uttering some kind of gibberish.

  “What’s she saying? What’s she talking about?”

  Katya shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it some kind of Hebrew nonsense?” Koprow asked. “A prayer for the dead, or the dying?”

  “I think she’s in terrible pain,” Katya said. “And withdrawal—the shock.”

  “Yes, yes,” Koprow said impatiently. He stood upright, feeling coming back to his legs. “Very well. Give her her damned dose. Do it now.”