Savage Bride

Chapter Eight

He reared to a sitting position under the mosquito netting, still in the transition between sleep and awakening, some sort of fear in him; fear that had carried over from sleep into wakefulness. Only now did it begin to ebb away, revealing itself by the traces left behind, as a receding tide leaves bits of shell and dampness on the sand where it was a few moments before.

It hadn’t been a dream. There had been no images just now. Just some sort of formless fear. He pushed his hair back, and his hand came away from his scalp wet.

The net was a gray blur all around him, like vapor. He flung it aside after that moment or two of baffled, threshing confusion that always preceded his accurate locating of the hidden seam that it parted on.

The confines of the room enclosed him like a black velvet pall in the stifling tropic night. He palmed the marble-topped stand between their two beds, turned up an invisible circle against the darkness that showed minute flecks of phosphorescent green, let it He flat again. A quarter of three in the morning.

Then he saw her.

She was seated outside on their balcony in the moonlight. Motionless as a white statue. Staring toward that accursed mountain.

He watched her for a while from where he was. It was unnatural, it was uncanny, to sit that still. Not to move at all. To stare that hard, that long, that all-obliviously. It was more than a stare of fascination, it was a stare that approached a trance.

He got up and placed his bare feet on the tiled floor. She never moved; she was as unaware of the blurred motion behind her as though he had been a thousand miles away.

He lit a cigarette, drew on it once, found it no solace, and put it out again. Even the flicker of the match, which must have been like a yellow star shell bursting in the dark vault of the room behind her, failed to attract her attention, failed to reach her senses.

He drew in his underlip as one who inhales sudden coolness. He was frightened. Something cold was touching him, something unknown. He couldn’t identify it, and so was helpless against it. His hand went to his head again, staved there a moment clutching at his hair in harassed futility.

Then he went slowly out onto the balcony behind her. He stood just at her back for a moment, and still she didn’t see him, didn’t sense his nearness. He let his hand come to rest on her shoulder finally, gently, in order not to startle her.

At once she turned and looked at him, in perfect and continuing possession of her faculties. For a minute he had a terrible sensation that she didn’t recognize him. Then it passed, along with the passing of whatever had caused it; he couldn’t tell what that was. Something in her eyes, most likely.

“Can’t you sleep?” he asked.

“I was asleep, but something woke me up. I don’t know, I just seemed to come out here.” She turned to look forward again, as though she couldn’t refrain from it for very long, even with him at her shoulder.

“Have you been doing this very often at night? Other nights, when I didn’t wake up?” He kept his voice casual, detached.

“I don’t know. I suppose I have. I must have. Something seems to pull me out of my bed, and — and I come out here.”

“I watched you just now, Mitty. You keep staring just at that, at that thing. Not over to the left, not over to the right, not down below us at the rooftops — not anywhere but just at that. Only at that, straight at that.”

“I know,” she said submissively.

“What is it, what does it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you hear anything?”

“No,” she said waveringly. Then she confirmed the uncertainty of it by adding, “Don’t you hear anything?”

His answer was a little flash of shock within himself.

“I guess it’s in my own head,” she quickly qualified it.

His hand tightened a little on her shoulder. “What is?”

“I don’t know now any more. When I try to catch it, it keeps still.”

He crouched down on his haunches beside her chair, like a tame bear. He tipped her face toward him with a finger to her chin. “That fever you once told me about — do you feel all right, Mitty?”

She answered the text of his question, but without doing him any good. “I feel all right.”

He dropped his voice to a forlorn undertone meant for her inner ear alone. “There is something, Mitty. Last night when we were sitting here in the room — remember, when I seemed to be reading that magazine? I wasn’t, I was watching you over the top of it. There was a look on your face as though you were being drawn out that way, in that direction. It wasn’t just that your head was turned. After a while you were actually leaning over that way in your chair, from the waist up. The upper part of you. As though something was tugging at you. I coughed, and you relaxed and sank back against your chair. I could see you didn’t know it yourself. It mayn’t sound like much, but—” His voice shook. “Won’t you tell me what it is, what you feel?”

Her eyes were fixed limpidly on him, wide with helpless inability to succor him. “I can’t tell you any more than I’ve already told you. I don’t know. Larry, I don’t know.”

“But why don’t you look at the sea? There is a sort of fascination in the sea, I could understand that. But why always in there, inland, to the back country? What is there about that? Can’t you put it into words for me? Don’t you love me enough to put it into words for me? I don’t care what words, but just words — to take away this creepy nothingness!”

“I don’t know.” She always came back to the same thing again.

“I don’t know my face is turning that way, until suddenly I find that it already has. I don’t know my eyes are seeking it, until suddenly I find that they’re already on it.”

He straightened up, raised her to her feet. He had to draw her away after him with both arms. “Come inside, Mitty. Don’t stay out here any more.” He led her back into the darkness of their room. Then he stepped over to one side of the window. “Here, let me lower these blinds,” he said tight-lipped.

“We won’t get any air.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want you to see that damned thing any more.”

And as the blinds came rustling down, dismembering the night sky into parallel slivers, he did a strange thing there behind her back. A strange thing for a young husband to do. He shook his fist. Not at another man, trying to take his wife away from him, but at a mountain, crouching out there at the foot of the far-off horizon.