Coral Shores.
Trying on speeches, Dan rings. Well, hi. Nobody comes. He bangs with his fists. He shouts. Nothing.
He circles the house on thick, springy Bermuda grass, dodging hibiscus and gardenias and crunching through Mrs Bellinger’s bougainvillea hedge to get a closer look. Boat trailer’s here, convertible with FSU decal and wife’s coupe gleam in the driveway, no Escalade. The Bellingers are gone.
All right then. Coleman’s. Nobody answers at Coleman’s house, even when he quits knocking and yells. They were just here, he can smell coffee. Now they’re not. The windows stand open behind their ironwork grills. The Von Harten house around the corner is deserted too. His orderly plan disassembles, with parts rolling away in all directions.
Dan tries a dozen other houses, thinking the neighbors will know when his marks will be back, but the Sunday morning streets in Coral Shores are like the decks of a ghost ship. Where is everybody? Why aren’t they firing up the BBQ or sitting over late morning coffee with the Sunday Star? Only the sound of a baby crying tells him that he’s not in some crap movie where the hero wakes up to discover that everybody else on the planet has been wiped out by a neutron bomb.
He calls, ‘Anybody home?’
He gets back the sound of nothing.
‘Where is everybody?’ Dazzled by sunlight bouncing off the white sand that borders the road, the white cement underfoot and bleached pastel houses with flat, white roofs, he whirls under a bleached sky. All his opening lines evaporate, replaced by a crap line from the end-of-the-world movie playing inside his head. ‘Where is everybody anyway?’
Frustration drives him back to his car and on, cross-hatching the deserted city. In the absence of a plan, he circles new and old neighborhoods, searching because for once contingencies elude him, thinking, thinking, until this rises up in front of him like Munch’s screamer and stops him dead:
It’s in the blood.
He is at the Archambault house.
Why here? Dan wonders. Why today? He is also thinking, Why me? but he knows. Shivering, he enters the hundred-degree temperature and makes his way up the stairs and into her bedroom, thinking, What does she want from me, human sacrifice?
He shouts, ‘What do you want from me!’
Dan Carteret, apparently related by blood to the woman who died in this room, folds up on the floor like a contemplative, waiting for the bitch to answer.
It’s time to come to terms with who he is.
Or what he is.
Whether it’s really in the blood. The foot, the chair. Twenty-some years later, and at the visual memory of that newspaper, he still shudders. Everything changed the day he opened Lucy’s jewel box. In a flash she snatched it away: that’s that. As though she could throw away the past and protect him. As if he could forget what he saw. The photo burned into the soft tissue behind his eyes. It brought him here.
Scorched, he gasps.
Behind the curtain of the known, something stirs, signaling the presence of the unknown fury, unless it’s a terrible power.
Which? This is the mystery that keeps Dan Carteret fixed in lotus position in the house he vowed never to come back to. Sitting in Mrs Archambault’s abandoned bedroom that first day in Fort Jude, he comprehended her. Old Lorna occupied him in a way he can’t specify. Rage flickered in his belly and he cried out, unless she did.
Who’s there?
Was the old woman really inhabiting him, squalling and raging inside his head? Did she really scream at him yesterday, when he fled the house? God knows he felt the heat – whether fever dream or hallucination, he can’t say. He’s been running ahead of it ever since. He and the fury that flamed out in this room hang from the same tree. Like armed thugs in a home invasion, Lorna broke into his head and he thinks, asks, wants to know and is afraid to know: Is it something I did?
Fixed in lotus position in the spot where the Barcalounger stood, Dan closes his eyes and summons her. He expects some intimation – insight, shared memory, altered consciousness, something – but nothing happens and nothing comes. Flies buzz. Sweat runs down. Whatever vibe he got in this overheated room is gone. Instead his mind scrambles like a cockroach circling the drain in a summer flood. What did he think: she would come down on a fluffy cloud and explain everything? Resolutely, he occupies the splintered floor like a player in Sartre’s No Exit, unless