would turn her back to him and slip into real sleep the only way she knew how, on her side, legs up, clasping a pillow to her. It never failed to touch him to see her thus, such a brave and secure young woman giving in to such vulnerability at night.
Easing himself out of bed, Becker glanced at the red numerals of the digital clock. It was 2:45. He wondered when Tee slept, if he was still cruising by at this hour. Perhaps when Becker himself did-when he could no longer put it off, when it came on him with a rush and swept him away without a chance to fight or care what lay in store for him in his dreams.
Standing at the window, naked but for his shorts, Becker stared into the unusual silent stillness of the night. The normal night sounds were stifled and the sky was unyieldingly black. Becker had a sense of dark clouds roiling atop each other, gathering strength and violence, but he could not see them.
Tee’s cruiser came back down the road, completing its swing of dutiful vigilance. Becker stepped back from the window. He did not want Tee to see him watching Tee watching him. There seemed no need to complicate the game. As the headlights hit the window, Becker turned to see Cindi’s body glowing palely in the illumination dimly reflected from the walls and ceiling.
She was completely naked and her shape seemed to meld into the white pillowcase at her breast as fine distinctions faded in the brief and feeble light. When the headlights were gone, Cindi’s image continued to shine on Becker’s retina.
He waited a moment for his eyes to adjust and when they did Cindi seemed nearly to have disappeared. Becker could make out the brighter whiteness of the sheets and pillows, but Cindi’s flesh, pale though it was, had all but vanished in the gloom.
Becker closed the bathroom door and turned on the light. He searched until he found a container of baby powder. Turning the ventilated lid, he sprinkled some on his hands and rubbed, feeling the silky smoothness of corn starch. The scent reminded him of Cindi, of certain hollows and depressions where the odor lingered long after application.
He smiled wryly at his reflection in the mirror. “You’re going to have a fine time explaining this in the morning,” he thought.
Leaving the bathroom door open a crack for the light, Becker returned to the bed and gently dusted Cindi’s legs with the powder, then her buttocks and her back. She moaned happily as he rubbed it delicately on her body with his palm. But when she turned her head, half awake, for his kiss, Becker eased her back into position. He kissed her softly on the cheek, then slipped away from the bed as she smiled and settled back into sleep.
Becker closed the bathroom door entirely. A line-thin ray of light shone through over the sill and seemed to die, exhausted, a few feet into the room. Becker paced away from the bed, six steps to the corner, as far away as he could get from the bed. Dyce’s chair had been twenty feet from the makeshift table or altar. With his back against the wall, Becker sat in the corner and looked at Cindi’s body on the bed.
She was now as white as the sheets, a peculiar, unnatural, spectral pale in the dun light. After a few minutes, as he continued to stare at her, his eyes began to rebel against the conditions, and the body appeared to rise slightly above the bed and to float in position all on its own.
A ghost, thought Becker. The optics necessary to create a ghost. Is this what you were looking for, friend Dyce? When you covered yourself in talcum powder and looked in the mirror, what did you want to see? A spook? Something as silly as that, children in bedsheets, Halloween tricks? And when you sat and stared at your victims, did you see the same thing? In Helen’s bathroom, dusting yourself in the dark, were you trying to create the same vision in yourself you sought in the men you killed? But not just ghosts; it had to be something more than that, something profound enough to kill for.
Cindi’s leg jerked and she groaned in her dreaming. Becker watched as her breathing became more even again, slowly subsiding to a rhythmic rise and fall. It wasn’t just optics that made her appear ghostlike, he realized. It was the slight motion caused by her breathing that gave her the sensation of hovering. Ghosts moved, they quivered, they shook.
But you didn’t want them to move, did you, Dyce? The drug you gave them, PMBL, is a hypnotic; it reduces men to a coma-like state. Metabolism is reduced, bodily functions slow, and that means breathing, too. They were scarcely alive. You sat and watched them. In the dark? In the gloom. That room was sealed off from sunlight like a cavern. You sat like this, watching the men who were laid out flat, men who could not twitch and toss and turn to spoil your illusion, men who barely moved. Did your eyes play tricks on you, too? Did you see these men as ghosts-or did you see them as something real? Something from your own experience, friend Dyce? All of our perversions come from something real in the beginning; they don’t just arrive from nowhere. Men lying flat, barely breathing, pale as talcum powder, pale as ghosts. Pale as death. Ghosts move, dead men don’t. You wanted them dead, didn’t you, Dyce?
You sat in the dark and saw them dead, wished them dead, and ultimately made them dead. Like in the graveyard, you were communing with the dead, weren’t you, you son of a bitch.
On the bed, Cindi rolled toward the center, tossing the pillow aside so it fell on the floor. She reached out an arm for Becker’s body but her eyes did not open. Becker rose and slid into bed beside her. The light from the bathroom made the door above it appear as dark as the entrance to a cave.
Lying under the eaves, Dyce could hear the rain on the roof, which seemed Just inches above his face. It was a comforting sound, one of many in the old house. Dyce loved the sounds of the insects in the country night, he loved the way the wind moved across the open flatland and made the house whistle when it blew hard. He even loved the groan of floorboards, the squeak of doors that age had tilted slightly off the square. None of the sounds frightened him, no matter how dark it was or how late-and it got so very dark in the country on a cloudy night. When his grandfather went to bed for the night, all lights in the house were off and it was as if the old man had pulled the switch on the universe. Even that did not frighten Dyce. He felt safe and protected in his grandfather’s house; he knew the presence of the old man would ward off evil. If there were any spirits hovering in the dark, they were from Christ, attracted by grandfather’s goodness.
Dyce tried to concentrate on the rhythm of the rain this night, to let the gentle patter lull him into sleep- but the voices kept intruding. Try as he might, he could not shut off his hearing and blank them out. They were louder tonight than usual, angrier. Although he could not make out the words, he could distinguish the voices-his father’s tone, high, on a rising pitch, alternately whining and yelling, then slipping occasionally lower, as he uttered imprecations in what he thought were asides to himself but could be clearly heard by anyone in the room. And his grandfather’s voice, much lower than his father’s, slower and more measured-the voice of God, Dyce sometimes thought-not Jesus who he thought would speak in a gentle tenor, but God the Father, strong but compassionate. This night even grandfather’s great patience was being tried and he, too, was angry.
Dyce slipped out of bed and opened his dormer window. Light from the parlor below his bedroom spilled out into the night, swallowed immediately by the rain. And the rain kept him from hearing, too. The voices were louder this way but still masked by the constant tapping on the roof. Dyce did not really need to hear them to understand. The two men had this same argument every time, and in his mind Dyce could see them as he had seen them several times before when he crept from his bedroom and stole halfway down the stairs to peek into the parlor. His father would be pacing, jabbing at the air with his fists, snarling sometimes as he faced the old man. All pretense at sobriety would be long gone by now after repeated visits to the bottle under the car seat. The bottle itself was probably gone and the knowledge that he would have nothing more to drink until midday when the Minnot liquor store opened would be enough to drive Dysen into desperation.
Nate Cohen would be seated in his highbacked chair, the arms worn shiny by use. From his angle on the stairs, Dyce could just see part of the side and back of his head as he leaned forward slightly. The old man sat ramrod straight whenever he was talking to his son-in-law, never allowing his back to ease into the chair as if that would be a sign of weakness before the devil. Dyce knew that grandfather thought his father was the devil. Sometimes Dyce believed that, too. That was often the only way to explain his behavior. He could see the wave in grandfather’s silver hair, curving as gently as a furrow in the field, over and past the ear. In the background, behind his father, was the heavy brass candlestick with its eight candles that grandfather used for his devotionals. Grandfather did all of his worshipping at home; there was no church that did it right, he had explained to Dyce.
They would be arguing about money, Dyce knew. His father would be demanding more, alternately cursing and wheedling, frustrated in his powerlessness. Grandfather would be demanding changes in Dysen’s behavior, some of them about the drinking, some about his treatment of Dyce. Sometimes he would insist that Dysen give
