Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,17
Get it all out of your system! You’ve really had a tough break or two, but we can work it out now, can’t we? Here now—think about this instead!”
She slithered onto his lap and captured his lips in a long kiss. Somewhere in the kiss Gerry opened his eyes. With a gasp he started from his chair. No one was there, of course.
God! What a dream! His lips felt bruised, unnaturally cold—even her kiss had felt real. Got to go easy on the bottle. Still, if this was DTs, it was pleasant enough. God! Had he ever carried on! That psychiatrist would have had a picnic. He reached for the Scotch. Empty. Had he had that much to drink? No wonder the dream.
Was it a dream? Gerry looked about him suspiciously The chair beside him seemed maybe closer, although he really hadn’t noticed it earlier. An empty glass on the floor—but maybe he’d left it there before. That peculiar scent of jasmine again—wonder what perfume Renee had worn? Absurd—it was mountain flowers. He touched his lips and there was blood on his fingers.
•VIII•
“I’m going out for a walk,” he told Janet after breakfast.
“Can’t you stay around here today for a change?” she asked wistfully. “Or let’s go someplace together. You’ve been off so much lately, I hardly get to see you. And it’s so lonely here without anyone around.”
“Without a phone to gossip with all the bitches in your bridge club,” he snapped. “Well, I’m not sitting on my ass all afternoon watching television. If you want company, then walk along with me!”
“Gerry,” she began shakily. “You know I can’t...”
“No, I don’t know! The doctors say you can walk whenever you want to! You’re just so content playing the invalid, you won’t even try to walk again!”
Her eyes clouded. “Gerry! That was cruel!”
“The truth though, wasn’t it!” he exploded. “Well, damn it, snap out of it! I’m getting disgusted with waiting on you hand and foot—tying myself down to someone who can’t stop feeling sorry for herself long enough to...”
“Gerry!” Janet clenched her fists. “Stop it! What’s happening to us! For the last several days you’ve been getting ever sharper with me! You shun me—avoid my company like you hated me! For God’s sake, Gerry, what is the matter!”
He turned from her in wordless contempt and strode off into the pine forest. She called after him until he was beyond earshot.
The pines! How restful they were after her miserable whimpering! The dense shade, the deep carpet of fallen needles choked out undergrowth. The dark, straight trunks stabbed toward the sunlight above, leaving a rough shaft branchless for dozens of feet. It was so pleasant to walk among them. The needles were a resilient carpet that deadened all sound. The trunks were myriad pillars to support a vaulted ceiling of swaying green boughs.
It was eerie here in the pines. So unlike a hardwood forest, alive with crackling leaves and a wild variety of trees and underbrush. The pines were so awesome, so ancient, so desolate. The incredible loneliness of this twilight wilderness assailed Gerry—and strangely soothed the turmoil of his emotions.
The restless wind moved the branches above him in ceaseless song. Sighing, whispering pines. Here was the very sound of loneliness. Again Gerry recalled the old mountain folk tune:
The longest train I ever saw,
Was a hundred coaches long,
And the only girl I ever loved,
Was on that train and gone.
In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun never shines,
And I shiver when the wind blows cold.
What was happening to him? A year ago he would have laughed at the absurd idea of ghosts or haunted houses. Had he changed so much since then—since the accident?
No, this couldn’t actually be happening to him. He must try to examine all the facts with the same clear, down-to-earth attitude he formerly would have taken. He had come here with his nerves in bad shape—on the verge of a breakdown, the doctors had implied. Then he’d found an unusual painting and read through the diary of a deranged artist. Nerves and too much Scotch had got the best of his disordered imagination, and he had assumed the same delusions as poor Pittman. Add to that the stories of the place he had gleaned from the locals, and his newborn romantic streak had run wild—to the point he was sharing Pittman’s own mad hallucinations. Similarities were not surprising; the circumstances that induced the delusions were the same, and he had Pittman’s notes to direct him.