Cloud

EPILOGUE

Everything might have ended, as endings go, on that relatively pleasing note.

I say “relatively,” for though my curiosity about the mystery of The Obsidian Cloud had been satisfied, along with it came the awful news of how Macbane had died. Likewise, though I now understood Miriam’s reason for having rejected me, I’d always regret having missed so many years of my new-found daughter’s life.

Ah well. I consoled myself with the thought that, outside of romantic fiction, completely happy endings are scarce, no matter how much one might wish for them.

I’d no idea something disturbing was still in store for me.

A YEAR PASSED before Sarah and her fiancé were finally able to come over to Canada to meet Frank. They had such busy work schedules that they could arrange to be away for only five days in July. They stayed at the Walner for the duration of their visit. Frank and I were able to show them the sights of Camberloo and the surrounding countryside at its summer best, and take them to several of our favourite restaurants. And we talked, talked, talked.

I’d dearly hoped Sarah and Frank would hit it off, though I’d been a little uneasy. After all, who knows how people will get along? Even our own minds can be quite a mystery to us, so I certainly couldn’t take it for granted that two siblings who’d never met — never even known about each other’s existence— would instantly find in the other some quality they were drawn to. On the other hand, surely it wasn’t quite as improbable as, for instance, the appearance of a huge black mirror hovering over the Uplands sky.

As it turned out, my worries were needless. They did get along tremendously well together right from the start. I think they were both determined to like each other. She seemed to find everything about him quite charming, especially after a visit to the Emporium, which she obviously thought revealed a lot about him. Probably because of her profession, she wasn’t at all shy about asking him the kinds of questions I’d never have dreamt of asking. For example, what did he think was the driving force behind his mania for collecting? Was he some kind of weird historical adventurer who needed, for some reason, to make physical contact with the past through these outlandish artifacts? And so on.

Frank answered that he just enjoyed building around himself a private world that interested him. Wasn’t that what everyone did in their own way? Mightn’t it be spoiled by overanalyzing the motivations behind it?

They both laughed. I could see that Frank already had complete faith in her. Like me, he enjoyed her earnestness, her aura of being in command of herself, though not in any forbidding way. Quite unconsciously, she took on the big sisterly role and he loved her for it, as though it was something he’d always needed.

Not only was I happy at that, but there was a spinoff for me, too. Sarah was obviously very fond of me because she’d found her real father. And that rubbed off noticeably on Frank. It was one of those incremental things. Seeing me through the eyes of someone he liked, who liked me, seemed to make him like me all the more, too.

As for Sarah’s fiancé, he made a good impression on us. He was a tall, quiet man, a lawyer from Edinburgh, with a dry sense of humour. At one point, for instance, I was updating Sarah on the curator’s latest discoveries about The Obsidian Cloud. Her fiancé was especially interested in the legal aspects of the trial of Macbane’s wife. When I got to the part about the Chief Justice’s regret over the abolition of gibbeting, he nodded his head.

“Even today in Edinburgh, a public gibbeting would be guaranteed to draw a big crowd,” he said.

We all laughed at that. If Sarah had needed our approval of him, she could see she had it.

OVER THE WEEKEND, Dupont’s name came up several times in our conversations.

Sarah remembered I’d mentioned him at Eildon House and asked more about his work. I was evasive — I wouldn’t like to say too much about it, for it was top secret. Of course, I would have invited him to meet her, but there was no way of contacting him. I’d tried the phone directory but was told that, if such an institute existed, its number must be unlisted.

From the way she looked at me, I’m not sure she was convinced by that excuse. But she left it at that, saying only that she was sorry Dupont didn’t live nearer Camberloo — she’d have loved to talk to him. I amused myself thinking of the two of them engrossed in their own private debate on which would be the better way of modifying a damaged psyche — talk therapy, or an ice pick through the forehead? Sarah would assume that my old friend’s passionate advocacy of the surgical route must only be for the sake of argument.

The truth was, I was glad I hadn’t made any attempt to invite Dupont. With her astuteness, she might have got him talking about Griffin, and even about my own involvement with her, too.

JUST LAST NIGHT, this all-too-brief visit by Sarah and her fiancé came to an end. Frank drove us all to the airport. Before they left us at the security check, Sarah invited us to come to Edinburgh for their wedding, in the fall. We said we’d be delighted. In the meantime, we’d all miss one another.

From the airport, Frank dropped me off home around midnight. He then headed for his own apartment beside the park.

The disturbing thing I mentioned was about to happen.

I SAT ON THE DECK for a half hour with a glass of scotch to help me relax, enjoying the warm summer night and the sky full of stars. When I eventually got to bed, I left the bedside lamp on, for I thought I might glance through the latest issue of Pumps International for a while. It was on the nightstand, lying on top of Soulis’s letter, which I’d gone over so many times since the day it arrived I almost had the pages by heart.

I soon gave up trying to read my Pumps International—I just couldn’t concentrate on it. My mind was still full of Sarah’s visit and the fact that she’d got along so well with Frank. I also wondered if I’d tried hard enough to locate Dupont. And that got me to thinking, once more, about the Griffin episode and the frightening words he’d used when he realized she’d shared my bed that night at Institute 77. “She was the most dangerous lover you’ve ever had,” he’d said. I’d congratulated myself on surviving whatever menace he believed her capable of.

But now, lying there in bed thinking about those words, I suddenly began to worry. For some reason, I felt paranoid.

Acting on instinct, I then did something quite bizarre. I got out of bed, went down to the garage, and found my old long-handled chopping axe, quite rusty from lack of use. Glad that no one could see my foolishness, I took it with me to the bedroom and put it beside the nightstand. I climbed back into bed and switched off the light. In the dark room, as I lay there listening, the slow blades of the ceiling fan above me were like the legs of a huge spider circling its web.

SURE ENOUGH, after no more than ten minutes, I thought I heard a peculiar noise coming from the area of the walk-in closet — a rustling, snickering sound. My heart began hammering so fast I could hardly breathe. I’d absolutely no doubt that was the sound I’d heard in the guest room at Institute 77 on the night Griffin paid me a visit.

I tried to calm myself, then reached out cautiously and switched on the little bedside lamp. A quick glance around the room revealed no sign of any intruder. Of course, that was small comfort in the case of someone so hard to detect as Griffin.

So, I lifted the chopping axe from beside the nightstand with my right hand and slithered out of bed. I heard that sound again — it seemed to be coming from behind the half-open door of the closet. I took a deep breath and, reassured by the heft of the axe, began to tiptoe across the floor. My left hand I kept stretched out in front of me, sifting the seemingly empty space with my fingers in case of an unseeable predator.

In this way I arrived outside the closet, the half-open door revealing only its dark and fearsome interior. I took several more deep breaths. Then with my axe held high, I crouched in the attacking position, snatched the door fully ajar, and switched on the closet light.

Nothing. But the garments were swaying ominously, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

I had no intention of retreating. I steeled myself once more, stepped inside the closet, and began moving cautiously along the array of shirts, jackets, and pants. My free left hand probed amongst them, feeling for her almost-human flesh.

Nothing.

I was about to breathe again, to relax. When all at once that sound — a rustling, a snickering — was right behind me.

The hair on the back of my head bristled. There was no room for me to squirm away or turn and lash out with my axe. I hunched over like a rabbit paralyzed with fear, waiting for the predator to strike me down.

Nothing happened.

I waited and I waited. But still no blow came, no predator struck me down. Instead, very soon, what did begin to strike me was the absurdity of what I was doing — a grown man with a rusty chopping axe in his hand looking for a monster in his clothes closet! Of course I couldn’t see Griffin there — because she wasn’t in this closet, she wasn’t anywhere in Camberloo, she wasn’t even in Canada! The sound I’d taken as her mocking laughter must have been the innocent rustling of sports coats and office shirts and striped ties on their hangers, caused by the draft from the ceiling fan on this warm summer night. The clothes had swayed that ominous way only because I’d jerked the closet door open with such force.

In fact, the one genuine thing had been my terror. The rest was just the result of tiredness and an overstimulated imagination. The entire scene had come from that workshop in the mind that begins its operations when the rational part shuts down for the night.

BACK IN MY BED once more, I thought about the significance of what had just happened. It hadn’t been a dream: I’d been wide awake when I tiptoed across the bedroom with a chopping axe at the ready. I really had been standing there in the clothes closet feeling like an idiot. That surely meant that for the very first time, the world of nightmare had intruded into my waking life. Long ago, Gordon Smith had told me he was glad he wasn’t a chronic dreamer because of this very possibility — and I’d laughed at the idea. But now I’d experienced it, and I didn’t like it. In fact, I was so worried by it that I lay there for the longest time, trying to keep myself awake. In the end, I did fall asleep and — of course — I did dream.

Dupont, complete with twin-pointed beard and bells, was showing me Griffin through iron bars. She was quite visible, sitting on her bed, her skin much greyer than before — a deathly grey. In her thin, grey arms, she was cradling a tiny baby and was leaning forward as though to kiss it. Then, not unexpectedly, the crunching sound began: she was devouring its tiny fingers. She held it out towards me, as if to share the hideous feast. Her eyes were silver slits and her face was grey. Her open mouth was a bloody cavern.

“What a tasty meal,” Dupont was saying, his little bells all a-jingle.

NOW, THE MORNING AFTER, I’m sitting here in the kitchen drinking my coffee beneath the photograph of Miriam I retrieved from Duncairn Manor. But neither its presence, nor the faint songs of birds through the window, the distant swish of cars and trucks— these reassuring, mundane sounds — have done much to put me at ease after a night such as I’ve just passed. Even though Griffin didn’t actually visit me, the aura of menace in the bedroom was so real it still makes me shudder. The dream that followed was equally powerful, and its horrific images are still prominent in my mind.

When I think about the two disquieting experiences in broad daylight, in a calm and objective way — as an engineer might consider them — it isn’t hard to figure out a rational explanation. Their genesis is really quite logical. During Sarah’s visit, Dupont’s name and his work at Institute 77 came up several times. Naturally, those conversations led me to think about Griffin. She, in turn, eventually became the centrepiece of my recent terror in the closet as well as in the subsequent dream.

Even that image of her feasting on the baby has a simple explanation. It’s just a skewed version of the incident in my reallife African journey with Dupont — when my fellow travellers ate the little tree monkeys on skewers. That grisly scene had been imprinted on my memory.

The point I’m making is that when I’m being calm and objective, I have no trouble whatsoever finding reasons for the state of mind that made me so susceptible last night. Indeed, I could add to them the fact that I’ve been under some stress — needlessly, as it turns out — over how Frank and Sarah would get along when they met. I could even include the traumatic news about the awful death of Macbane, a man with whom I have a unique connection, a man I’d come to consider, almost, as my closest friend. I suppose I really haven’t got over that yet.

The accumulation of all these things must have made me vulnerable.

SO MUCH FOR when I’m being calm and objective.

But when that state of mind passes, the catalogue of rational explanations appears to me desperate and empty. They’re nothing but self-deception, a way for me to avoid acknowledging the thing I’m really terrified of, so much so that I’m almost afraid to put it into words, in case the words become prophetic.

That dreadful truth is as follows.

I was indeed euphoric over the finding of my daughter, Sarah, and being able to witness her joyous coming together with Frank. But my happiness was moderated by a frightening notion that began lurking in a dark corner of my mind. It emerged from hiding, full-blown, last night.

What I’d been trying not to think about was this: the possibility that Griffin, too, might have had a child by me, as a result of our night together at Institute 77.

If that were the case, her primitive maternal urge to share her child might well drive her to come looking for me, its father. Then I’d have to acknowledge to the world — especially to my own children — my paternity of her baby. After that, would Frank want anything to do with this other half-sibling, with its half-human mother, or with me? And as for Sarah — when she found out what I’d done, would she be left with anything but contempt for the newly-discovered father she’d almost come to love?

On the other hand, there is yet another, simpler reason for my fear. That Griffin has no baby, but is searching for me because she craves me as her lover, one more time. And that afterwards, she will tear me to pieces.

AT THIS POINT, the sensible part of my mind again tries to assert itself.

“Harry Steen,” it says. “All of this is just speculation based on nothing more than an overripe imagination and a bad dream. You torment yourself for nothing.”

If only that were so.

For there is something more, something tangible. The fact is, when I eventually got up this morning, I saw that the curator’s letter wasn’t on the bedside table. Instead, the pages were lying on the floor beside the bed. Now it’s possible that I myself scattered them with all my paranoid exertions, but I can’t assume that.

So, though I fully intended to take the chopping axe back out to the garage today, I’ve decided now to leave it beside my bed, at least for the next few nights — just in case a situation arises. Wouldn’t any rational person do the same thing? Certainly, in view of what happened to him, I think Macbane would agree with my decision.

Not that I’ll be asking anyone for advice. Some things, I always feel, you’re better off keeping to yourself.

End