Ariel

Twenty-three

The next day was a Saturday. Roberta slept later than usual, waking up groggy with a Valium hangover. She had awakened during the night in spite of the pills she’d taken before retiring, then took more pills to get back to sleep. As a result the Valium blurred the memory of the brief interval when she had been awake. She knew she had seen the ghost for the third successive night, but that was about as much as she could recall.

When she got downstairs, David showed her the morning paper.

She had trouble taking it all in. But the paper screamed out its news and David kept filling in the blanks for her, telling her what he had learned from the radio news. Some twelve hours previously, Jeffrey Channing had shot his wife and his two young daughters to death. Then he had attempted to set fire to their house, but the fire had evidently gone out of its own accord. After lighting the fire he had gone to his car, where he had placed the barrel of his gun in his mouth and fired a single shot into his brain. Death, according to reports, had been instantaneous.

That afternoon Ariel sat in her room trying to read a novel about a teenage girl’s struggle to overcome compulsive overeating. She couldn’t seem to focus on the story. She put the book down and switched on Erskine’s tape recorder to listen to the duet tape.

She turned the volume high, and for a while she was able to lose herself in her own music, but then the volume made the music sound wild and out of control and it bothered her. Once she had adjusted the controls she found herself unable to get back into the music.

She let it play, got out her diary, uncapped her green pen.

Why do I keep thinking he was my father?

I know better. He was Greta and Debbie’s father and they’re dead now. He killed them. I wonder if they knew what was happening. It said they were found in their beds, but were they asleep when he did it? Maybe he killed them first and put them in their beds.

I wonder if they saw the gun first and thought it was a toy.

It’s not my fault!

He would have killed me. He followed me and he made me get in the car and he had the gun along and he meant to kill me. He even pointed the gun at me.

Then he put it in his mouth. That’s how he killed himself finally, with the gun in his mouth.

How could he do that?

It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything but save myself.

I am all alone in the house now. David was up first and then when I got up I heard him telling Roberta. I was on the stairs. They didn’t even know I was there. He went out and then I thought she was on the phone or something because I was in my room and I heard her talking. I went halfway down the stairs again and discovered she was talking to herself. About David and me and about him and about wasting her life.

I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying. It’s really weird, hearing a person talk to herself. It’s like they’re a character in a play. You don’t expect anybody to do that in real life.

A lot of things happen that you don’t expect.

I wanted to get something to eat but I didn’t want to see her, so I came back up here and waited until she left the house. When her car pulled away I went down and had breakfast.

She even left the dishes in the sink. Something she never does. I washed them and put them away. Don’t ask me why. She’ll never notice anyway.

Last night I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid of what I would dream. But all that happened was I had a wonderful dream of music. I dreamed a whole piece of music from beginning to end, and I remember part of me knowing I was dreaming and knowing that when I woke up I would be able to play the entire piece.

Then when I did wake up I didn’t even remember the dream, and then I did, but I couldn’t remember anything about how the music went. Maybe I’ll dream it again and it’ll stay with me.

I didn’t tell Erskine what happened. I called him this morning to tell him that Channing killed his family and himself, but he told me instead. He read the paper. I thought of telling him about being in the car with him but not what happened, but instead I decided not to say anything. What is the point of telling anybody?

Erskine is with his parents today. An old aunt of his mother’s is sick and they are all three of them driving up to visit her. Erskine just about had a fit when he found out that was how he would be spending the day. First of all he hates his aunt. She is ugly and terrible and tends to pinch him, which he detests. Plus she lives in the country outside of Georgetown and there are always bugs and crawly things in her house. I said there wouldn’t be bugs this time of year but he says in her house it makes no difference and they are there year round.

Plus we were going to check out flutes today in the pawnshops on Commercial Street that he knows about. We want to see if I can play a regular flute and if I like it, because with multiple tracks and all it might be interesting to use different flutes. We want to see if I like another flute as well as I like my flute and we want to find out how much they cost.

Either we’ll go after school during the week or wind up waiting until next Saturday.

It helped to keep moving. Roberta had discovered that as soon as she left the house. The Valium took the edge off things, making them easier to bear, and activity kept her body busy so that she didn’t live so completely in her mind.

The marketing had to be done, and today she threw herself into it with a vengeance, getting caught up in the deliberate mindless routine of pushing a shopping cart up one aisle and down the next. She liked having to make simple meaningless choices, accepting this brand-name item and rejecting that one, saying yes to this soap powder and no to that liquid bleach. It all had a calming influence j upon her, suggesting that there was indeed order in the universe, that life flowed upon certain predictable currents.

If there was order, surely there was also chaos. What could be more chaotic than what Jeff had done? She could see now, although she had not seen it at the time, that he had been acting strangely, that he had been under severe mental and emotional strain. But murder and suicide, slaughtering his family and then taking his own life—

She loaded the groceries into her car, drove to the beauty parlor. It was the routine things that kept you going, she thought. The shopping, the hair appointment, the household chores. Getting dinner on the table, getting the beds made. She hadn’t made her bed this morning, hadn’t even done up the breakfast dishes.

She braked at a stop sign, ducked ashes from her cigarette. The ghost, she thought, had come to warn her of Jeff’s death. She had first seen it three nights in succession before Caleb died. Then it had not appeared again until it had made another trio of appearances. Perhaps, she thought, there was pattern in everything, order even in chaos.

She wouldn’t have to see the ghost again. It had come three times and Jeff was dead and it would not come again, and soon the house would be sold and she would never have to wake up again to see that damn woman hovering in the corner of the room.

At the beauty parlor she had an impulse to have something wildly different done to her hair. She felt the need for a change. But she decided to give herself until her next appointment to think about it.

There was no rush. And by then they might even have a buyer for the house.

When she turned into Legare Street she wanted to keep right on driving, to zoom past that looming old mausoleum and never set foot in it again. No more creaking stairs, no more sounds in the walls, no more cold damp brick underfoot, no more windowpanes rattling in the wind.

She pulled up in front of the house, killed the engine. Their next house, she thought, would damned well have a driveway.

It took her several trips to empty the car of groceries. She thought of calling Ariel to help but it was easier to do it herself than to shout over the flute music that filled the entire house. When the last bag was stacked on the kitchen counter she sighed heavily and leaned against a cupboard, trying to catch her breath. She listened to the music and shuddered. How could the child get that much volume out of a tinny little flute?

She began putting groceries away, but before she had emptied a bag the kitchen started to oppress her. She decided she needed a cup of coffee and a cigarette and went to the stove to put the kettle on.

And of course the pilot light was out. All three stove-top pilot lights were out, and the oven pilot as well. It seemed to her that the gas smell was heavier than it had ever been and she worried that this time it might be dangerous to light a match.

It took her two matches just to light the oven pilot. The first went out as she probed within the oven, but the second did the job. She closed the heavy oven door gently to avoid extinguishing the pilot again, then lit the pilot lights for each of the three pairs of burners. Then she tried each burner to make sure they all worked properly.

She put the kettle on.

Damned old house. Crazy house, with a stove that turned itself off and on according to its private whims. Crazy old house with music cutting through walls and ceilings like a sword slashing a silk shawl.

She stood at the counter, feeling the damp floor through her shoes, and measured instant coffee into a mug. David’s breakfast dishes were washed and put away, she noticed, and she was sure she had left them undone. Of course a kitchen that could blow out pilot lights of its own accord might wash dishes by itself if it felt like it.

She felt herself smiling at the thought. No, the child must have washed the dishes. Unless the ghost had taken to walking by day.

The ghost...

She could remember more clearly now. She had awakened sometime in the dim middle of the night, waking from a sleep she felt must be too deep for her to have been dreaming. And the woman, wrapped in her shawl, was in her usual position in the corner of the room. Although the drug she’d taken had clouded her mind, she felt her visual perception was good... the woman was more clearly defined than she had been the night before.

Once again, the woman had turned just prior to her departure, turned to show Roberta what she was holding. The night before Roberta had perceived something that flickered. This time she had gotten a better look, and the woman had been holding — what?

A mirror.

Yes, yes, she remembered! The woman had held a mirror, and had extended it toward her for an instant before fading and disappearing. It had flashed and flickered, reflecting light that was not there, and Roberta had recognized it as a mirror because she had looked into it and seen—

And seen herself.

God, she remembered it so clearly now! She breathed deeply, trying to come to terms with the memory, and placed her palms on the kitchen counter for support.

And then she felt it.

That sudden touch of cold air on the nape of her neck. She recognized the sensation immediately but tried to find an explanation for it. Was it a trick of the mind, touched off by her recollection of what she had seen last night? No, it was real enough. Well, could she have left the front door open on her last trip with the groceries? But she distinctly remembered kicking it shut. Of course the latch might not have engaged, and perhaps the wind—

No.

There was something behind her. Something behind her. Ariel, she thought, and as before she could feel those pale little eyes on her, touching her like cold damp hands.

But that was impossible. The music, the horrible wailing of the flute. It was going on, as loud as ever, so loud her skull was pulsing in time to it.

And now the teakettle whistled.

She made herself stand absolutely motionless. With very economical hand motions she inched upon the drawer in front of her. Her right hand slipped inside once the drawer was a couple of inches open, and she groped around until she managed to find one of the long knives and retrieve it very carefully from the drawer.

The child was upstairs playing her hellish music and someone was standing behind her. Not David. David didn’t sneak up on people.

Someone. Or something.

She tightened her grip on the knife. Please, she thought, let it be an overactive imagination. Let it be the house making me crazy, let it be the shock of Jeff’s death, let it be a reaction to too much Valium, too much excitement, too much stress, too much of everything—

The teakettle went on whistling, contending with the music of the flute. She couldn’t just stand there forever. Sooner or later she had to turn around.

She turned.

And Ariel stood framed in the doorway, her little eyes staring, her mouth open.

Roberta screamed. The teakettle whistled, the taped flute played on, and she screamed and screamed.