The Stalker

7

When Jim Conradin had been a senior in high school, he had read as part of an advanced English Literature course Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Toward the end of that richly symbolic novella, a German exploiter named Kurtz lies dying in the pilot room of a steamer in the atavistic jungles of the Congo. Maddened, but still capable of moments of rational lucidity, Kurtz cries out to the narrator of the story, Marlow, with perhaps his final breath: “The horror! The horror!”

Which meant what? Conradin’s instructor had asked in an essay assignment. The horror of death? Of the primordial wilderness and what it can do to a man? Or of something else, as suggested by the events of the story? Conradin had written that “the horror,” Kurtz’s and every man’s, was the sight of his own soul, stripped bare before his eyes to reveal it for what it could and had become. The “heart of darkness,” then, he had said, was not the Congo of the late eighteen hundreds—but the very essence of man.

As he paced cat-nervous from one room to another in the big white house on the northern flat of Bodega Bay, Conradin was oddly reminded of that story, and of his perception at age eighteen. He took short, quick sips from a tumbler half filled with sour mash bourbon as he paced—sitting room, kitchen, upstairs hall, cellar workshop, bedroom, storage porch—stopping for a moment to stare out at the black wall of fog enshrouding the house, moving once more, thinking: The horror! The horror!

He was in the sitting room again when Trina came in from the hallway, her face mirroring concern, confusion—the same fright which had seized her the day before. She was kneading a floral-bordered dish towel between her hands as if it were biscuit dough. “Supper’s ready, Jim,” she said quietly.

“I’m not hungry, Trin.”

“You haven’t eaten anything all day. It’s after seven.”

“I’m just not hungry.”

She walked up close to him and stood staring into his eyes, trying to read them, and failing. She said, “Jim, what is it? What’s troubling you? What happened last night?”

“Nothing happened last night.”

“Please, dear. You’ve been acting so ... strangely since you came home from San Francisco.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “You go ahead and eat now.”

“Not without you.”

“Do I have to be there for you to eat?”

“No, of course not, but—”

“Well, then?” Conradin finished the dark liquid in the tumbler and moved to the tray of liquor set on an oval table near one wall. He lifted a black-labeled bottle. The bottle, unopened that morning, was now less than a quarter full.

Behind him, Trina said, “I wish you wouldn’t drink any more.”

“Trin, please go eat your supper.” He filled the tumbler, replaced the bottle on the tray, and turned. “Can’t you see I want to be left alone?”

“Yes, I can see that,” she said. “But why? Why are you shutting me out this way?”

“I’m not shutting your out.”

“Yes you are. You won’t tell me anything about this mysterious San Francisco trip, you won’t talk to me at all. The only things you’ve done today are drink and pace like some caged animal. I’m frightened, Jim. I really am. I’m frightened because I can’t understand what’s happening to you.”

Conradin moistened his lips. “Honey, there’s nothing to understand. Nothing’s happening to me. I’m just feeling out of sorts today, that’s all. You know how I hate the winter.”

“You didn’t used to hate anything.”

“People change,” Conradin said. “People . . . change.”

“Yes, they change. They change and they become strangers. You’re a stranger to me now.”

“Trin . . .”

“I’m your wife,” she said. “Don’t you think I know when something’s wrong? Tell me what it is, Jim. Confide in me—you can do that, can’t you?”

“No. No, I can’t do that.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t.”

Abruptly, tears began to form in Trina’s eyes. “I . . .” she began, but then the tears came in a rush and she fled the room. Conradin stood there, looking into the hallway after her. He drank the contents of the tumbler in a single convulsive swallow, put the glass down carefully on the eagle’s-claw stand in the hallway, and crossed to the winding staircase which led to the second floor. In his and Trina’s bedroom, he took his sheepskin jacket from the closet and put it on and scraped his car keys off the dresser. He descended the stairs again.

Trina was waiting for him, her eyes tinged in red, but she had dried the tears in the downstairs bathroom and was standing very straight and rigid. She said, “Where are you going, Jim?”

“For a drive.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know,” Conradin said. “Just for a drive.”

“Jim, please don’t go out tonight.”

“Why not?”

“The fog is so heavy . . .”

“The fog is always heavy in the winter.”

“Please don’t go.”

“I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

“You won’t have any more to drink, will you? Promise me you won’t have any more to drink.”

“All right, I won’t have any more to drink.”

“Jim, I . . .”

Conradin stepped forward and brushed his lips across her forehead; then, quickly, he walked to the front door, opened it, and started out.

“Be careful!” Trina called urgently behind him.

“Yes,” he said. He shut the door, bowing his head against the drizzle like chilliness of the fog, his footfalls making soft, brittle sounds on the crushed-shell surface of the drive. He reached the car parked facing out and slid inside and brought the engine to life. He switched on the headlights—a pair of saffron eyes in the vaporous darkness—and then took the car down the inclined drive and onto Shoreline Highway, turning east there toward Highway i.

When he reached Highway i, he swung north, driving rapidly and with full concentration. He followed the winding, two-lane highway for several miles. The night seemed almost completely deserted; once, when headlights flickered briefly in the Dodge’s rear-view mirror, Conradin tensed and his hands gripped the wheel more tightly; but after a short time, the shine of them retreated and then disappeared completely.

A few minutes later, Conradin came in sight of a thin strip of state road, attached to a wide circle of macadam, which wound off to the west. The right forward curve of the circle touched the highway and was designed for cars coming in from the south, or coming out to the north; the left forward curve did likewise, designed for cars coming in from the north, or coming out to the south. In the middle of the circle, imbedded in gravel and cement, was a large redwood sign with gold letters that were almost obliterated by the fog. It read: GOAT ROCK.

Conradin nodded to himself, slowing, putting on his directional signal. He turned into the right curve of the circle and entered the state road. Walled by shale bluffs on the right and steep cut-away cliffs heavily overgrown with anise and thistle and sage and wild strawberry on the left, the road dog-legged and twisted its way seaward; Conradin knew it well, had traversed it hundreds, if not thousands, of times, and he had no trouble negotiating its precarious width, even with the roiling mist shredding in his head lamps like fine gossamer cobwebs.

Exactly one mile from the highway, there was a graveled turn-out area and another redwood and gold-lettered sign; this one read: BLIND BEACH. Conradin brought the Dodge in there, nosing up to one of the black asphalt bumpers at its far edge. He sat there for a moment before darkening the car, and then stepped out into the frigid night.

A numbing sea wind blew in across the turn-out, and Conradin felt it billow his clothing and slap wet fingers across his face. He walked to the seaward edge and stood looking out. On his left, now only a vague outline, a shadow slightly grayer than the fog, was a high flat rock covered with nests and lichen and bird droppings—the home of thousands of seagulls and cormorants; and on his right, perhaps a mile away by the state road, was the huge eroded visage of Goat Rock, with a gaping half-moon cut in its back by man in search of raw materials, and beyond it the village of Jenner, where Russian River empties into the Pacific Ocean. But none of these were discernible from where Conradin stood, not on this night.

He let his eyes drop to the inclined dirt side of the short slope below him. Even though he could not see it, he knew the exact location of the narrow, meandering pebble-and-sand path that led down the face of the cliff to Blind Beach. The beach itself—a circumscribed strip of clean white sand, extending for perhaps a quarter mile—was so named because even on the clearest of summer days, it was hidden from view by the convex proportions of the cliff side.

The path began at the far end of the turn-out, near where Conradin had parked his car and near the twin gray outhouses which served as public rest rooms; but instead of taking that lengthy, if somewhat safer, route, Conradin made his way carefully down the short dirt slope. He intercepted the path some one hundred feet below the turn-out, in a narrow ledge-like area. He paused there, looking down at the growth of sage and tule grass and bleak, clustered stalks that would be wild dandelions and purple lupins in the spring—all clinging to the side of the precipice: amorphous green-black shadows in the fog.

Slowly, carefully, Conradin began to make his way down the arduous path to the beach. When he reached it, some time later, in a driftwood-choked crescent sheltered by the cliff walls, he turned diagonally to the south and the black line of the sea.

He walked the length of Blind Beach for over an hour, listening to the sonorous lament of the winter wind and the crash of the angry foaming black waves hurtling again and again and again upon the passive white sand, like an ardent lover with a frigid mate, evoking no response except that of infinite tolerance, growing more angry with each thrust, and more frustrated and more determined, all for nothing except to come, and to rest, and to begin again—futilely, eternally.

“I wish I knew what to do,” he said aloud, and the wind swirled loose sand against his body and swirled the words away almost as soon as they left his lips. “I wish to God above I knew what to do.”

But he didn’t know; he knew only that he couldn’t go on this way, being slowly torn apart from within, the guilt growing more unbearable with each passing day, seeing Helgerman’s face just as clearly now as on that day eleven years ago; and now this new fear: Helgerman not only as a ghost but as a real and imminent danger, Helgerman as an insane purveyor of vengeance born of a senseless act he, Conradin, had committed out of fear, Helgerman smiting him down as he had smote Helgerman, an eye for an eye, a blow for a blow . . .

Yes, and Kurtz and what he saw when he looked at his own soul and what Jim Conradin was beginning to see in the examination of his soul.

The alternatives were clear, of course.

He could, somehow, through some means, find peace with himself.

He could very easily end up suffering a complete mental breakdown.

He could commit suicide.

The latter alternative was not a new one to him. The idea of taking his own life had first occurred to him two years ago, during a particularly bad winter—constant rain, too much time for the thinking. But he had rejected it, exactly as he had rejected it this afternoon. It was not that he lacked the courage, that his fear of death was inordinately strong-no, it was because of Trina, of what such an act would do to her; he could not sacrifice her happiness and her well-being for his own jaded salvation. Still, with the pressure building now, building almost intolerably, all hope of ever finding an inner peace gone now, death or madness were the only ultimates which he could look forward to—and death was by far the more preferable of the two.

Long walks along the beach here, where he could smell and taste and feel the sea near him, usually served to calm him; but on this night Conradin felt even more strung out than he had before leaving the house in Bodega Bay. The cold had begun to reach him too, sending prickles of ice moving, slithering, across his shoulders, and he shivered and began to walk rapidly through the damp sand toward the pebbled path. A mug of coffee, laced with a little mash, and the warmth of wool blankets and soft sheets and Trina lying close to him—perhaps he would make love to her tonight, perhaps he would find some degree of quietude after that; he might be satiated, relieved momentarily of some of the tensions, yes, yes.

He reached the path and began the ascent, eyes cast on the surface barely discernible beneath his canvas shoes. He climbed steadily, surely, feeling the wind tug at his body, clinging to rocks and craggy overhangs, breathing deeply through his mouth. Finally he reached the ledge-like area at the foot of the dirt slope; he paused there, his back to the path’s edge and to the gray nothingness, drawing air into his labored lungs, not looking up.

And then out of the ashen swirling vapor comes a stealthy shadowed movement and a face appears as if by some strange necromancy, disembodied, floating, a terrible white face Jim Conradin recognizes almost instantly, but before he can think or speak or act, a hand appears below the face and thrusts itself against his chest, thrusts with such tremendous force that Conradin, who is standing flat-footed and unprepared, flies backward to the rim of the precipice and his canvas shoes slip on the moist vegetation and suddenly he is touching air, touching emptiness, falling, falling, turning in a graceless somersault like a puppet with its strings cut, mouth opening to emit a short piercing scream that lasts for only a second or two, ending abruptly as first his torso and then his head strike a jagged outcropping of rock, splitting his head open like kindling under a woodsman’s axe, killing him instantly, and his body plummets off the convexity of the cliff side into space and falls free, slow motion through the sea of fog, to bury itself half-deep in the cold damp sand of the beach one thousand feet below ...