couch beside a young girl who was crying. The girl looked about eleven or twelve. The woman was patting the little girl and whispering to her. A young boy sat on her other side, with his arms folded, rolling his eyes and staring at the ceiling with an air of mortification. Good heavens, what could be wrong with the little girl? Reuben started to make his way towards her but a couple of people interrupted with questions and thanks. Someone was telling him a long story about an old house remembered from childhood. He’d been turned around. Where was the woman with the little girl? She was gone.
Several old high school friends approached him, including an old girlfriend, Charlotte, who had been his first love. She already had two children. He found himself studying the fat-cheeked baby in her arms, a writhing mass of lively pink flesh that kept pushing and stretching and kicking to escape his mother’s patient arms as she took it in stride, her older girl, now three years old, clinging to her dress and staring up at Reuben in glum wonder.
And my son is coming, Reuben thought, and he’ll be like this, made of pink bubble gum with eyes like big opals. And he will grow up in this house, under this roof, wandering through this world and inevitably taking it for granted, and that will be a wonderful thing.
He couldn’t find his old high school love at all in Charlotte. But a song was nudging at him, what was it? Yes, that strange unearthly song “Take Me As I Am,” by the October Project. Mingled suddenly with memories of Charlotte were memories of that song seeping out of Marchent’s room from a spectral radio.
Again, he made his way to the eastern window, this time in the library, and though the window seat was occupied from end to end, he managed to look out again on the sparkling forest. Surely people were watching him, wondering about the Man Wolf, wanting to ask questions. He heard a faint whisper of those words behind him, and “right through that window.”
The music had become noise, as the sounds from the dining room met with the great swell from the pavilion, and he felt that old familiar drowsiness come over him that so often did when he was at busy and crowded events.
But the forest did look fantastical.
The crowds were thicker than ever, even though a light rain was falling. And gradually Reuben realized there were people high in the trees everywhere. There were shaggy-haired men and women and pale lean little children in the trees, many of them smiling down on the people below and some of them talking to the people below, and these mysterious beings all, of course, wore the familiar soft chamois leather. And the guests, the innocent guests, thought them to be part of the tableau. For as far as he could see, the Forest Gentry were there, dusty, bedraggled with leaves, and even here and there clothed in ivy, sitting or standing on the heavy gray branches. The more he looked, the more detailed and bizarre and vivid they became. The myriad lights twinkled in the falling rain and he could almost hear the mingled laughter and voices as he looked out on them.
He shook himself all over and stared again. Why was he dizzy? Why was there a roaring in his ears? Nothing had changed in the scene. He did not see Elthram. He did not see Marchent. But he could see a constant shifting and reshuffling amongst the Forest Gentry because innumerable members of the tribe were disappearing and others appearing right before his dazzled eyes. He became fascinated with it, trying to catch this or that lean and feline figure as it vanished or burst into visible color, but he was making himself even more dizzy. He had to break the spell. This had to stop.
He turned and began to drift through the party as he’d drifted through the village fair. The music surged. Real voices played on his ears. Laughter, smiles. The sense of the bizarre, the horror of the bizarre, left him. Everywhere, he saw people in animated conversation, infused with the excitement of the party, and unusual meetings of locals with friends he knew. More than once he studied Celeste from afar and noted how much fun she was having, how often she laughed.
And again and again he marveled at the Distinguished Gentlemen and how they helped the party along. Sergei was introducing people to one another, and directing the orchestra musicians to the dining table, and answering questions and even accompanying people to the stairs.
Thibault and Frank were always in conversation and motion, with or without their women companions, and even Lisa, who was busy with the management of the feast on every level, took time to talk to the boy choristers and point out things to them about the house.
A young man approached her, whispering in her ear, to which she answered, “I do not know. No one told me where the woman died!” and she turned her back to the man.
How many were asking that very question, Reuben thought. Surely they were wondering. Where had Marchent fallen when she’d been stabbed? Where had Reuben been discovered after the attack?
A constant parade moved up the oak stairs to the upper floors. Standing at the foot Reuben could hear the young docents describing the William Morris wallpaper and the nineteenth-century Grand Rapids furnishings, and even such things as the kind of oak used in the floorboards and how it had been dried before construction, things Reuben knew nothing about himself. He caught a female voice saying, “Marchent Nideck, yes. This room.”
People smiled at Reuben as they made their way up.
“Yes, please, do go up,” he said earnestly.
And behind it all was the mastermind, the ever-charming Felix, who moved so rapidly that he seemed to be in two places at one time. Ever smiling, ever responding, he was on fire with goodwill.
At some point, Reuben realized, slowly realized, that the Forest Gentry were in the house as well. It was the children he noticed first of all, pale, thin little creatures in the same dusty leaf-strewn rustic dress as their elders, darting through the crowds this way and that as if they were playing some kind of personal game. Such hungry faces, dirt-streaked faces, urchin faces! It sent a stab into his heart. And then he saw the occasional man and woman, eyes aflame yet secretive, drifting about as he had been drifting about, studying the human guests as if they were the curious ones, indifferent to those who eyed them.
It unnerved him that these small emaciated children might be the earthbound dead. It positively made his heart quiver. It made him faintly sick. He couldn’t stand the thought of it suddenly that these towheaded boys laughing and smiling and dodging amongst the guests here and there were ghosts. Ghosts. He could not imagine what it signified, being this size and this shape forever. He couldn’t grasp how this could be desirable or inevitable. And all that he didn’t know about the new world around him frightened him. But it also tantalized him. He caught a glimpse of one of those unusual women, those strangely alluring women, bejeweled and sequined and passing through the crowd slowly with long lingering glances to her right and left. She seemed a goddess in some brutal yet indefinable way.
His anxieties suddenly collected around him, crowding him, dimming the radiance of the party, and making him aware of how sharp and unusual the emotions and experiences of his new life actually were. What had he ever known of worry before? What had the Sunshine Boy ever known of dread?
But all he had to do, he thought, was not look at the Forest Gentry. Not look at that strange woman. Not speculate. Look instead at the very real and substantial people of this world who were everywhere having such a remarkably good time. He was desperate suddenly to do that, to not see the unearthly guests.
But he was doing something else. He was searching. He was searching now from left to right and straight ahead for the one figure he most dreaded in all the world, the figure of Marchent.
Did someone behind him just say, “Yes, in the kitchen, that’s where they found her”?
He moved past the giant Christmas tree towards the open doors of the conservatory, which was as crowded as every other room. Under countless Christmas bulbs and golden floods the huge masses of tropical foliage here looked almost grotesque; guests were everywhere among the trellises and pots, but where was she?
There was a slender woman near the round marble-top table before the fountain where Reuben and Laura had so often taken their meals. His skin was pringling and singing as he moved towards this slim blond-haired figure, this delicate figure, but quite suddenly as he stood beneath the arching branches of the orchid trees, the woman turned and smiled at him, flesh and blood like countless others, another nameless happy guest.
“Such a beautiful house,” she said. “You’d never think anything terrible happened here.”
“Yes, you’re right,” he said.
So many words seemed on the tip of her tongue, but she said only it was a great joy to be here, and she moved on.
Lifting his eyes, he looked up into the purple blossoms of the trees. The noise pressed in around him, but he felt remote and alone. He was hearing Marchent’s voice when they’d talked of orchid trees, beautiful orchid trees, and it was Marchent who’d ordered these trees for this house and for him. These trees had been brought over hundreds and hundreds of miles on account of the living Marchent, and they were alive now and bent low with
