Bethany's Sin Read online

  “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” Evan said. “Jesus, I’m going to have to start sleeping with a strip of tape over my mouth so you and Laurie can get some decent rest for a change.”

  —what did they call it—

  “I thought I’d left them behind,” he told her, without looking at her. “I thought they were still in LaGrange. Maybe lurking under the bed, or something like that. The last one was about Harlin, and a month after it I’d lost my job at the journal.”

  —second sight?

  “I remember,” Kay said, without bitterness now because, after all, things had worked out well, hadn’t they? Coincidence; all of it was coincidence. “I want to turn out the light,” she said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he told her. “Sure.”

  She reached over, switched it off. Darkness reclaimed the room except for a single shaft of clear moonlight that filtered through the curtains. She lay on her back, her eyelids weighted by weariness, but did not immediately return to sleep. Instead, she listened to his breathing. It reminded her, oddly, of a frightened animal she had watched in a cage at the zoo when she was a little girl. She lifted her hand and touched his shoulder. “Aren’t you going to try to sleep?”

  “In a few minutes,” Evan replied. He wasn’t ready yet. The old fears had resurfaced, laced like scars across white flesh. The whole thing was unreal, like Poe’s dream within the dream. Why won’t they leave me alone? he asked himself. This is a new start. I want everything to be right. I don’t want the dreams anymore! From the distance of time Jernigan’s voice came to him: Old Reid can see! Bastard can fuckin’ see! Said he saw that tripwire stretched across the trail in a dream, saw it glowing blue like it was on fire or somethin’. And Bookman on point found that goddamned thing, stretched tight, smeared with mud, just waitin’ for us, because old Reid told him to watch for it! So Bookman traces it up into the trees and there’s this fuckin’ Claymore, and after everybody’s got his ass hid we yank that wire and there she goes like a Roman candle, boom! When the Cong came in to loot dead men, they caught some lead between their teeth.

  Sure. Evan stared at the blank wall, feeling the darkness and silence of the house like an alien marrow in his bones. This dream he’d had tonight was…very different from any he’d ever had. Shifting shapes, formless things lurking in a dark maelstrom: what were they? What did it mean? Or did it mean anything at all? Like everyone else, he had dreams that were only insensible fragments, sometimes comedic, sometimes chilling. Dreams that were, as Kay had pointed out, brought on by too much mustard or spicy chili or things remembered from midnight television flicks. But through experience Evan had learned to tell the difference. If they—the formless escort things that brought him to the movie in his mind—wanted him to see, then there was a purpose to it. A deadly serious purpose. And he had learned not to dismiss lightly the images they allowed him to see; that sight had saved their lives before, more than once. Of course he knew that Kay turned her back on it; she dismissed those happenings as coincidence because she couldn’t understand, and she feared it as well. He hadn’t told her about it before they were married, because in those days he was still trying to come to grips with it himself, to understand why he was burdened with a strange half-enlightenment, half-affliction. His mother’s voice: a gift. His fathers harder voice: a curse. Yes. Both of those.

  He decided he did want a glass of cold water, so he rose up from the bed, switched on the light in the blue-tiled bathroom, and drew tap water into a plastic cup. In the bathroom mirror his face looked haunted by the things that lived behind it: dark circles beneath the grayish green eyes, lines deepening on his forehead and around his mouth, premature flecks of gray glinting at his temples. On his left cheek, just above the line of the cheekbone, was a small, crooked scar; there was another over his left eyebrow. He had ignored a dream once, in the fatigue of jungle fighting, in the day-to-day hell of survival; in that dream they had shown him a red sky filled with flaming wasps. When the mortar shells had come that morning, he was out in the open, and the shrapnel had pierced his left side, one piece imbedding itself dangerously close to his heart. Remembering that was difficult; it was a jumble of noise and faces and blood smells and hospital smells. How the medic, a young man named Dawes, had kept him from bleeding to death he never knew. He remembered, dimly, whirling copter blades and men shouting. Then there was blackness until a glaring white light shone over his face at a field hospital; he heard someone moaning and, weeks later, realized that it must have been himself. Now, standing before the mirror, he knew that the fine lines of the scars across his chest and ribs would look somewhat like a roadmap underneath his pajama top. Before the war he had slept with Kay in the nude. Now he didn’t, though Kay said she didn’t mind, and he thought she meant it, but that field of crisscrossed flesh made the images well up in his mind like burning drops of blood.

  Four years before, when he was still inside the barbed wire cocoon of cold terror the war had closed around him, he had tried to grow a beard. He wanted to hide: he didn’t particularly like Evan Reid anymore; he didn’t know the man, wouldn’t have known him if he’d met Evan Reid on the streets of LaGrange. In the war he had killed human beings at first with sick horror and revulsion, later with an empty feeling, as if he were the M-16 itself, hot and smoking. And at the end, after what had been done to him in a Cong prisoner-of-war holding camp, he even found himself hunting them, every impulse and nerve vibrating with the killer instinct. The hardened men, the ones whose eyes looked funny, slitted, and who never liked people to stand behind them, said that after you got the killer instinct you never lost it. He had prayed to God that he would; and perhaps that was why he chose to ignore the dream and freeze in his tracks when he heard the mortar shells screaming in. Because it was time to stop. Or be stopped.

  The beard was gone a week after it was begun because the hair grew ragged around the scar on his jaw, branding him with memories. Another reminder of what he had been and what he had done.

  He drank down the water, drew another half-glass and drank that as well. In the mirror his eyes stared back at him over the rim of the glass. Then he turned off the light and walked into the bedroom, where Kay’s sleeping form lay motionless in the sheets. As he crossed the room the beam of moonlight fell upon him.

  Abruptly, in the distance, a dog began to bark. Perhaps, Evan thought, from a backyard at the far end of McClain Terrace.

  He paused, stepped toward the window, and drew aside the curtains with one hand.

  Evan peered through the glass. Leafy elm branches cut the moon’s pearly luminescence into jagged shards of ice. The dog began to bay. Something moved past the window, the flash of a phantom wraith there and then gone along the street. Evan, craning his neck but unable to see because of the trees, had the split-second impression of something black. And huge. For an instant his flesh had crawled and the hair at the back of his neck had risen. Now he could hear his heart hammering in his chest, and he strained to see through the night, his senses questing for the slightest movement.

  But there was nothing.

  If there had been anything at all.

  Shadows? He glanced quickly up at the sky. A cloud passing briefly over the face of the moon? Possibly, but…if not that, then what? All along McClain the houses were dark; nothing moved, no lights shone, nothing nothing nothing…He felt bitterly cold, and he shivered suddenly. And drew away from the window, letting the curtains fall back. He slipped beneath the sheets, and Kay murmured, moving closer to him. For a long time he could feel his heartbeat as it seemed to strum his body like an off-key guitar. What had that been? he asked himself on the borderline of sleep. What was out there on the night-lit Bethany’s Sin streets?

  And why was he certain he would not have gone outside to see it for any price on earth?

  Falling into the black crater of sleep, he heard that dog bark again.

  Again.

  And again.

  6

  * * *

  Litt
le Fears

  BIRD SONG FILLED the morning air along McClain Terrace, and fingers of sunlight moved in the forest beyond Kay’s kitchen windows as she started breakfast. Laurie wasn’t yet awake, but that was okay because starting next week she’d have to be getting up around seven-thirty to go to the day-care center while Kay drove on to George Ross Junior College, a few miles north of Ebensburg. Evan was showering upstairs, and as Kay put the water on to boil for coffee, she heard the noise of the shower cease.

  When she was getting the cups—white with a dark blue band around the rim—out of the cupboard, her hands suddenly trembled and she dropped one of them onto the linoleum-tiled floor. It cracked, teethlike chips flying out in all directions, and she called herself a stupid ass and put the broken cup into the trash can.

  But the truth was that a spring had begun winding itself tight within her.

  She envisioned the inside of a pocket watch her grandfather Emory had once shown her, all the tiny gears clicking and turning, the mainspring coiling itself tighter and tighter as he wound it with his age-spotted hand. Won’t it break, Pa-Pa? she’d asked him. And then it won’t be good anymore? But he’d only smiled and wound it as tight as it would wind, and then he’d let her hold it and watch the gears go around, choking in what seemed to her a mechanical frenzy. Perhaps now, she thought, the main spring that controlled her nerves and heartbeat and even the workings of her mind was being wound by an invisible hand. An invisible Pa-Pa. Wound and wound and wound until she could feel the first threatening throb of pain erupt at her temples. She opened a drawer, searched through it for the bottle of Bufferin she’d placed there the day before; she took two with a glass of water. That helped a little bit. But they were tension headaches, stubborn and painful, and very often so bad the Bufferin did nothing against them. She shrugged her shoulders to ease the tight band across her back. The water began to boil on the stove. To her the kettle’s whistle sounded like a shriek. She reached for the pot, feeling the heat on her hand, and lifted it off the glowing eye. At the same time she concentrated on dismissing the nagging fears that seemed to have crept up around her, vaporish things that might have stepped through the woodwork. Things that had followed them from LaGrange and now sat watching her, grinning and chuckling, from perches atop the counter or the cupboards. In the war of nerves they always won.

  In another few minutes she heard Evan coming down the stairs. He came into the kitchen wearing a pale blue short-sleeved shirt and gray slacks, and kissed her on the cheek as she fried bacon. He smelled of soap, and his hair was still damp. “Good morning,” he said.

  “’Morning.” She swept a mental hand across the kitchen, and those little fears scuttled away into nooks and crevices to wait. She smiled and returned his kiss. “Breakfast is almost ready.”

  “Great,” he said, and looked out the windows across the sun-and-shadow-dappled woodland. “It’s going to be a pretty day. Isn’t Laurie awake yet?”

  “No,” Kay said. “There’s no reason for her not to sleep late.”

  Evan nodded. He glanced toward the sky, half-expecting to see looming factory chimneys and a reddish tinge of industrial smoke, but there were only the distant clouds against a soft blue. How many mornings, he wondered, had he stood at the single kitchen window in that LaGrange house and seen that smudge of blood in the sky? Those cramped, low-ceilinged rooms had been like a cage, except the bars were of wood instead of bamboo. And in that dark brick building far beyond the company parking lot the Gentleman waited, except this time the Gentleman had a name and his name was Harlin. Evan’s mind sheered away from all that, and he let the sunlight reflected off the trees warm his face; but in backing away from those thoughts he remembered the nightmare, with its Bethany’s Sin road sign and its shadowy thing emerging from a cloud of dust. Something tightened suddenly at the base of his spine. What could that dream-form have been? he wondered; what evil, twisted thing reaching for him? Only the Shadow knows, he told himself. And even the Shadow can be wrong.

  “Here we are,” Kay said, putting the breakfast dishes on the small circular table in the kitchen.

  Evan sat down, and Kay joined him. They ate in silence for a few minutes; in an elm tree in the backyard a blue jay screeched and then wheeled for the sky. After a while Evan cleared his throat and looked up at her from his plate; he caught her gaze and held it. “I’d like to tell you what my dream was last night…”

  She shook her head. “Please. I don’t want to hear it…”

  “Kay,” he said quietly, “I want to talk about it. I’ve got to get it out in the open where I can see it clearly and try to understand it.”

  He put his fork down and sat silently for a moment. “I know my…dreams frighten you. I know they make you uncomfortable. But they frighten me much, much more, because I have to live with them. I wish to God I didn’t; I wish I could turn my back on them or run away from them or…something, but I can’t. All I’m asking is that you help me understand.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Kay said firmly. “There’s no sense in talking about your dreams with me, because I refuse to see them as you do. For Christ’s sake, Evan, you torture yourself with them!” She leaned slightly over the table toward him, ignoring that haunted, pleading look in his eyes that she had seen so often. “And you insist on trying to torture Laurie and me with them as well! Everyone has dreams, but not everyone believes that their dreams are going to influence their lives somehow! When you start doing that, you”—she searched carefully for the correct words—“make them come true yourself!”

  Evan sipped at his coffee and put the cup back in its saucer; there was a tiny chip on the rim. “I don’t dream like a normal person does,” he said. “You must realize that by now. I’ll sleep without dreaming for months at a time, and when they finally come they’re…very strange. And real. Terrible and threatening; different from ordinary dreams. And always they try to tell me something…”

  “Evan!” Kay said sharply, more sharply than she’d intended. Slashed, Evan looked at her and blinked, and she dropped her fork down onto the table. “I don’t care what you say or think,” she told him, trying hard to keep herself under control. Her temples throbbed. Oh, no! she told herself. Damn it damn it here come those headaches! “They are not premonitions. There are no such things as premonitions.” She held his gaze, wouldn’t let him look away. “You make those things come true by your own actions, don’t you see that? Can’t you realize that it’s you?” Bitterness rose in her throat, tasting like an amalgam of salt water, bile and blood. “Or are you too blind to see it?”

  He kept staring at her, his face frozen into the mask he wore when she struck out at him. In the backyard a robin warbled on and on.

  Kay rose and took her plate over to the sink. There was no use in talking to him about this thing; of all the tiny day-to-day thorns that pricked their marriage, this was the largest and the sharpest. This had drawn blood and tears. And what was most terrible, Kay thought, was that it was a hopeless situation: Evan was never going to stop seeing his dreams as a window onto some other world, and she was never going to agree with his often utterly ridiculous “premonitions.” Those things that had come true in the past had come about due only to him, not to anything supernatural. Not to Destiny, nor to Evil, but only to Evan Reid. And the simple truth of the matter was for her the most painful: he had allowed those dreams to shape his own life and, worse, their life together. Middle-class gypsies, she told herself, almost humorously. Carrying our crystal ball with us. Living in fear when the dreams told Evan there was going to be a fire in the apartment building—he’d left the electric heater on one morning, a frayed wire had shot sparks, a lot of smoke but not much damage. His fault again. Living in fear under Eddie Harlin—don’t think about that!—and so many other times.

  And now it’s begun again, she told herself. Only one day here, where there are so many opportunities for all of us, and it’s already started. And why? Yes. Because he’s afraid. Isn’t that what the Vet
erans Administration psychologist, Dr. Gellert, had said years ago? Evan has a problem trusting people, the doctor had told her in one of those terrible sessions. There’s a great deal of stress within Evan, Mrs. Reid; it’s a result of the war, his feelings about himself, his idea that he’s personally responsible for many of the things that happened. It seems to be a complex problem; it goes back to his relationship with his parents and, especially, his older brother, Eric…

  Evan finished his coffee and brought the plates over to the sink. “Okay,” he said. “I know they disturb you; I know they frighten you. So we won’t talk about them anymore.” He waited for her response, and finally she turned toward him.

  “They do scare me,” Kay said. “And you scare me when you believe in them so much. I’m sorry I get upset, Evan; I’m sorry I don’t understand, but…we’ve both got to put those bad things behind us.” She paused for a moment, watching his eyes. “All right?”

  “Yes,” Evan said, nodding. “All right.”

  Kay reached out and took his hand, drawing him toward the windows. “Look at that,” she said. “A whole forest for us to wake up to in the mornings. And that clear, blue sky. Did you ever make cloud-pictures when you were a child? What does that large one over there look like to you?”

  Evan looked at it. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “A face,” Kay said. “Someone smiling. See the eyes and the mouth?”

  To Evan it looked like an archer, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I wonder what the rain looks like through these windows? Or the snow?”

  Evan smiled and put his arm around her. “I doubt if we’ll see very much snow this summer.”