Soulstorm. Part 15

"Nothing. It was like a tomb. Not a sound. Absolutely nothing. "

But the next day he'd gone back. And now today. "Why?" Sterne had asked as Monckton plucked the Jeep keys from the peg on the wall. "You expect to hear something or what?"

"No, I don't expect to hear anything. At least not with my ears." He opened the door. "I'll be back soon."

But this morning, the third day of his vigil, Whitey Monckton did hear something. He'd followed the same procedure as on the first two days, parking the Jeep by the garage, and walking around the house, working from the back patio around to the west wing and on from there. He was, as he'd told Sterne, not listening with his ears alone. He let all his senses open, not knowing how the ent.i.ty he thought of as The Pines might choose to approach him.

In the few days he'd spent with Sterne in the two-room cabin near the mountain's base, he'd come to conclusions that had changed the way he looked at the world. Between what he had seen and what he had heard in The Pines, he had become a firm believer in the existence of life after death. Monckton had seen things, and he was not one to doubt the evidence of his own senses. At first he had tried, like Scrooge, to blame the manifestations on "an undigested bit of beef, a fragment of an underdone potato." But Monckton had a cast-iron stomach and a const.i.tution to match. He had seen, he had heard, and therefore whatever it was, was real. And though he had experienced nothing since coming down from the mountaintop, still he was haunted by the house, its mystery crept into his thoughts and dreams until he could think of nothing else.

So now he stood, head poised, at the west wing door, not listening as much as sensing. He stood there for nearly ten minutes, then turned and walked toward the front of the house, his shoes crunching the dry brown and rust leaves that carpeted the lawn and walkway. Even though no trees stood within the triangles the wings of the house formed, they'd blown over in profusion from the tree line until they were piled knee-deep against the western side of the south wing that housed the Great Hall.

Wind from the west, Monckton observed, and s.h.i.+vered as a chilly gust tore through his light jacket and swirled dead bits about his ankles. He stopped at the huge front door. The leaves skittering dryly across the jagged flagstones drowned out all other sounds, but as he stood waiting, the wind receded until the rat-scrabbling of the leaves had stopped and Monckton found himself in a total silence, like the eye of a psychic storm.

And then he heard it, high up in the air. At first he thought it might be the air circulation system in the attic, but remembered that it could barely be heard in the house, let alone outside. But the sound had the suggestion of machinery in it, of some great engine that was cranking into life after a sleep of decades, of millions upon millions of cogs and gears and wheels that had never before worked in unison now all at once coming together in some disharmonious hymn of power. And as he listened, each fragment of sound seemed a voice that whispered in rhythm, an insignificant voice that, when combined with uncounted others, formed a strength, a single note like the hiss of a billion leaves scratching stone. The sound grew louder and louder, becoming from its myriad parts one giant engine that throbbed with a universal heartbeat, roared like all the seas and skies of earth roaring in one storm, one cataclysmic symphony composed to split the planet's crust and litter the cosmos with its leavings.

Under the sunny October sky, Whitey Monckton pressed his palms over his ears only to learn that the song he was hearing was not heard with his ears, but with his skin, heart, brain, soul, with every part of him, and he listened for a long time, until it died away to a low dull pulse and the wind returned once more, lifting the leaves and making them dance to its own comparatively uninspired tune.

Chapter Ten.

George McNeely awoke to a face hanging over his bed.

At first he thought it was Kelly Wickstrom, peering in to make certain he was all right, but immediately realized his error.

The eyes were slanted like an Oriental's, and narrowed dangerously. The teeth were bared, their whiteness almost startling. The long black hair hung in matted clumps made damp by something red. It was an instantaneous picture, since the face vanished in less than a second after McNeely's eyes opened; but it hung there a moment longer, implanted on his pupils.

Dream, he told himself, and no wonder. It was surprising that he hadn't awoke to an entire platoon of gooks staring through the bars of the Vietnamese rat cage. Or worse yet, he might have seen David Neville's face-if you could call it that-floating luminously over his head.

He sat up in the bed and stretched, luxuriating in the feel of his stiff muscles drawing to their greatest length. Then he pulled on a pair of slacks and a jersey and walked into his living room. He was not alone. Gabrielle Neville was sitting in an easy chair, a book in her long-fingered hands. She smiled at him.

He nodded. "How long have you been here?" he asked as he sat on the sofa.

She shrugged. It was answer enough. "I wanted to be here when you woke up, to thank you. For trying to save David."

"It's what I was supposed to do. I'm only sorry I wasn't better at it.''

"You tried."

"Not hard enough."

"It wasn't your fault. It was fated to happen."

"Fated? You believe that?"

She frowned. "I believe that once David decided to come here, it was inevitable that he would die here."

"What about the rest of us? Are we fated to have something similar happen to us too?"

"I don't know. Some things just seem to happen."

"Jesus, that's profound." He hated himself for saying it, but she irritated him, played on his nerve ends like a five-year-old on a violin. All he'd wanted was to relax for a few hours, to read, have a bite to eat, and then start to figure out how to escape from this tomb. But instead, he had to talk karma with the widow of the man he'd let die. Though he felt he'd slept for hours, he was unaccountably weary.

"I'm sorry if it sounds simplistic," she said, unoffended. "But things happen. When they do, they do, and we're fools to be concerned about them afterward, because we could not ever have done anything differently, because it happened."

"No second chances, huh?"

"No, no second chances at all. Just . . . similarities in the future.

He sighed and lay back on the sofa, throwing his bare feet up on the back. "And I suppose you've never wanted something to happen again, so you could do something differently?"

"I have, but I know when I do that the feeling is pointless. So I try not to think like that."

"No recriminations."

"No recriminations."

"You're one tough broad, Gabrielle." He threw his forearm over his face and closed his eyes. "I've thought most rich women were stupid and happy and pampered."

"Most rich women aren't married to a man like David."

"Neither are you anymore." It was a thought that slipped out, a cruel, involuntary lunge that had taken voice, and he kept his eyes closed so that he couldn't see her face.

"That's true," she said finally. "But you must remember that I've been expecting to be a widow for some time now, so the shock isn't as great as it might be." She paused. "Besides, it hadn't been much of a marriage lately anyway."

Now he looked at her, his eyes narrowing. "Isn't that a bit callous?"

Her face was set. "No, it's not. It's the truth. He'd changed so much through his illness. Not physically, but his mind. He was always self-centered, but in a charming sort of way. He could laugh at himself and his own pretentions so that, although they were still there, they weren't nearly as offensive as they might be otherwise. But once he got cancer, he changed. He lost that sense of humor, which was what kept him from being a prig." She paused. "He changed in other ways, too ... toward me."

She looked at McNeely as if expecting him to say something to make it easier for her, but he remained silent.

"We hadn't made love for over a year," she said harshly, as if throwing down a challenge. McNeely looked away from her. "We couldn't," she went on. "He was impotent. But I still loved him."

"Why are you telling me this?" McNeely asked, watching the ceiling.

She stood and walked over to where he lay on the sofa. "I just want you to ... I want someone to know and understand how I feel, what I've gone through." There was no mistaking the pleading in her voice.

"Why not Kelly? He's got a sympathetic ear."

"I want you to know, George." She reached down and put her hand on his forehead, pus.h.i.+ng his black and silver curls back to reveal a smooth and unscarred brow.

McNeely didn't recoil from her touch; he merely closed his eyes and smiled thinly. "I see," he said. "I think I see. But to post with such dexterity ..."

" ... to incestuous sheets," she finished for him. "I know the quote, and it's not accurate. Not incestuous, not at all. And as for dexterity, I'm not newly widowed. David's been dead for a long time."

"And you've already grieved, is that it?"

She nodded. "A long time ago." She knelt down to kiss him and he let her. Her mouth fit smoothly over his, and their lips parted shyly so that their tongues barely touched. Then she drew back a few inches and looked into his eyes.

"Will you make love to me, George? Now? Right now?" She asked the question as if fearing both possible answers. In response, he cupped her face in his hands and pulled her gently to him for another kiss, deeper, more intense.

They walked together to the bedroom, where they undressed each other tenderly and made love on the rumpled bed. There was kindness in their lovemaking, each surrendering completely to the other so that nothing should be taken by force. It was long and warm and beautiful, and they came together in the kind of eternal moment she had always dreamed of and had too infrequently experienced. Then she fell asleep, her arms around McNeely's waist, her head nestled in the hollow between his arm and chest.

But George McNeely did not sleep. He had been full of sleep only an hour before. Now his eyes were wide open, staring at the shadowy walls of the worn, down at the naked woman pressed against him, down at his own body, s.h.i.+ning with the thin sweat of pa.s.sion.

He had made love to her.

The knowledge was blinding, staggering. She had come to him with caresses and desires and he had responded to them and gloried in them, filled with the need for her. He had loved her like a man loves a woman, and his body had satisfied her with its hardness, his touches with their softness.

And she had satisfied him. The things he had felt were unparalleled in his experience, even in the best times with Jeff, his own Jeff, whom he tried now to conjure up in a sense memory, to recall his touch, his tenderness.

The memory came, and left him unmoved. He could recall the acts, the words, but none of the pa.s.sion, none of the love was remembered. He forgot it like a surgery patient eventually forgets his pain. McNeely frowned and swallowed to drive the lump from his throat, but it would not leave. He had a sense of something, a teasing notion in the back of his mind that whispered to him that this was what he'd really wanted all his life-this woman in his arms to love and to hold. It had seemed so natural to him, so overwhelmingly right, as if this were the way it had always been meant to be. In contrast, the mind pictures of himself with Jeff seemed awkward, desperate, almost ugly. They seemed unnatural.

Unnatural.

That was not the worst he had been called. f.a.ggot, c.o.c.ksucker, he knew the pantheon of epithets well, although few people had wielded them within his hearing. Those who had, he had ignored, or simply stared at without expression until, discomfited, they moved grumbling back to their bedroll, or out of the bar. He had never fought for his s.e.xuality, never struck a man for telling the truth as he saw it. He liked to think of it as dignity, but at times he feared it was guilt, the same guilt that had tortured him in high school, that had knotted his stomach as he lay in his bed in the big house he lived in with his parents in Larchmont; the guilt that made him call Tommy Reynolds a fairy when the other guys did, and that made him hate himself for doing it when all the time he knew he was the real fairy-Quarterback and Student Council Vice-President George McNeely the Fairy.

It was that same guilt that had made him enlist after he was graduated from high school. He'd gone to his father's office one morning in mid-June, had sat across the desk from him like some nervous client, and told him that he had decided not to take prelaw at Temple in the fall, but to join the Marines instead. When his father asked why, he told him it was because he was h.o.m.os.e.xual and thought the service could help him, make a man out of him. Then his father began to cry. McNeely had never seen this before, and it frightened him. He told his father that he would talk to him about it later at home. That evening his father would not look at him, and said in a chilly tone that if he wanted to enlist, it might be the best thing. His mother remained stonily silent, her thin lips pressed together so tightly that she could have dried rose petals between them. He had never been close to either of them, and in the three weeks before he went to boot camp, only the absolutely necessary words were exchanged. He boarded the bus with great relief.

The guilt had lingered, but slowly faded out of sight like a scab that leaves only a pale white scar. He soon found others with his preferences, and learned that guilt did not have to be the screaming monkey on the back of a h.o.m.os.e.xual. His liaisons were very infrequent and securely discreet, and when on occasion a perceptive and vocal comrade would make a suggestion that McNeely might have less than totally masculine leanings, he would find McNeely thoroughly imperturbable on the subject, and, receiving no satisfactory bites from his baiting, would reel in his line and shut up. McNeely was so popular among his fellow Marines that nine out of ten of them didn't give a d.a.m.n if he f.u.c.ked donkeys. Even in combat, when tensions were strung as tight as Cong wire traps, McNeely's s.e.xuality was not a point of conflict. He had learned to live with it until he had ceased to think of it as a flaw. It was natural, for him at least. Natural.

Until that limey in Africa. He'd been a Colonel Blimp type-early fifties, overweight, large gray moustache, bald head that shone like crystal. McNeely couldn't imagine why Briggs had hired him until he saw him shoot. McNeely had seen good marksmen before, but the limey was something special, putting every round of an automatic clip into a body target at fifty yards. When McNeely went to talk with him after their first round of practice fire, the limey had politely but firmly told him that he didn't wish to fraternize with McNeely, that his reputation had preceded him, and that, although he would fight with him and die for him if necessary, he would not be his friend "because I find what you do unnatural." Then he turned and walked away as casually as if he'd told McNeely the time.

Unnatural. The word had shaken him as no gutter slur ever had, and the next day he killed a rebel whom he could as easily have taken prisoner. The power of the word had done that to him. And now it returned in the context of his relations.h.i.+p with the person he loved. Compared to him and Gabrielle, his couplings with Jeff were unnatural. It seemed to him as if he saw and understood for the first time, as if his h.o.m.os.e.xuality had been as perverse as his parents had thought.

So it seemed. So it seemed.

He reached down and pa.s.sed his fingers over the woman's bare shoulders, across her collarbone, and down to cup her breast. His caresses made the nipple harden, and he felt himself swell once more, felt the need for her rise in him until he had kissed her awake and they made love again, no less intently at having lost the novelty of newness. Afterward Gabrielle turned onto her stomach and looked at McNeely through dream-thick eyes.

"What can I say now that wouldn't sound like a cliche?" she asked.

"Not that," he replied.

She laughed deep in her throat. It was a sound of pure pleasure, joy, contentment. She shook her head in disbelief. "Wonderful," she whispered, "perfect. Do you think that making love is better under stress?"

He smiled. "I don't know," he said, then added, "I've never been under stress."

She laughed again and he laughed with her while she kissed his chest and he mock-combed her short hair with his fingers. Her smile shrank, and when she looked at him again, some of the joy had left her violet eyes. "What happens now?"

He kept smiling for her. "You mean now or later?"

"Both."

He slid down farther in the bed so that he was looking at the ceiling. "We stay here. You paint. I read. I shoot pool with you and Kelly. We play cards. And when the end of October comes, we leave."

"Do we sleep together too?"

"I think so. If you want to."

"I do." She turned on her back and they both watched the ceiling. "And when we leave . . . then what?"

He lay silently for a moment. "I don't know. That depends on a lot."

"Like what?"

"Like if we still like sleeping together."

"And if we still like each other," she added.

"Yes."

"And if we're still alive."

"Nice," he said with enough irony to hide the chill he felt. "Beautiful thought."

"It's a possibility, don't you think?"

"That we'll all be dead before Halloween? Sure, it's possible. But I don't think it'll happen."

"Why not?" she asked. "Tell me why not. Rea.s.sure me."

She wanted him to think she was joking, but he could tell how serious she was. He gave a serious answer. "c.u.mmings and David asked for what they got, c.u.mmings more so. He was after power and he got it. Your husband wanted to see if there was really something here, and he found out there was. All we want-you, me, and Kelly-is to just get through the rest of the month. At this point I'm not after a d.a.m.n thing but freedom."

" 'At this point,' you said. Were you after something before?"

He thought for a while before answering. "Yeah, I was. I wanted to see if there was something here myself. And now that I know there is, that's enough. I just want out."

"Do you think there's any way to get out before the thirty-first?"

"We can try. But I wonder if Kelly will want to."

"What do you mean?" she said, leaning on her elbow. "Why wouldn't he?"

He shrugged. "Maybe the money. It's still a million dollars."

"No," she said. "You've earned it, both of you. David's dead. I run things now. The money's yours, stay or go."

"That's generous of you," he said with .a chuckle. "I didn't mean . . ."

"I know what you meant." He sat up. "Look, I'm hungry. Why don't we get dressed and cook something. I'll get Kelly and we'll see if there's some way we can get out of here. If not, well, we'll be d.a.m.ned good card players by the time the month is up."