Savage Bride

Chapter Nine

Again a startled awakening. Again the receding tide of fear, the casting aside of the encumbering net. Again the velvet pall of the room. Everything the same, except that this was another night.

His eyes, piercing the gloom, sought her first on the balcony, in remembrance of the time before. She wasn’t out there. The spidery little wrought-iron chair she had sat on stood empty. This time she was gone completely.

He crossed to the rail of the balcony and looked down. There was nothing there below, no one. Dark lanes running through a patchwork of tiled roofs interspersed with patio foliage; an entombed light or two here and there, standing guard in the silent watches of the night.

She couldn’t possibly be down there. What would she do down there at this Godforsaken hour? But then, there were no other places for her to be but up here or down there. And up here she wasn’t.

Turning from the rail, he trod on something soft and white he had not noticed lying there before. Her handkerchief, dropped on the balcony. So she had stood there by the rail a little earlier, as he was doing now.

He plunged back into the room, found the cumbrous light switch, and the uncertain electricity went on. Her nightdress clung to the rim of the bed, dripping down toward the floor, as though thrown from a distance and in a hurry. One slab of the ponderous wardrobe teetered open, and her dress was gone, the only one she had, the one she’d happened to have on that unlucky day she’d stepped off the boat.

The light only confirmed what the darkness had already told him. She’d gone out of this room. She’d dressed and gone out of here, into the night-bound town, while he lay asleep.

In a moment he had his trousers on, was out in the silent, shadowed hall, and then down the stairs to the ground floor. He knew the answer and he was afraid to admit it to himself. The mountain.

He punched the bell on the untended desk with the whole side of his tightly fisted hand, and it exploded with a jangle in the stillness. A chair scraped somewhere out of sight, and the clerk came waveringly sleepily forward.

“Did my wife go by here? Mi señora?” He swept his hand along.

The clerk nodded. “Sí, señor. I saw her go by a little while ago.”

“Did she speak to you? Say anything?”

“No, señor. I bowed; she didn’t seem to see me. I said something to her; she didn’t seem to hear me. She was just looking out that way intently.” He shrugged expressively. “Salió.”

Jones floundered out into the darkness of the street. He looked up and down it. He didn’t even know which way to go. He chose a direction at random, and jogged along on the double. There was no one in sight around him. There was no sound but the scuff his own hurrying footfalls made. Then a low-hanging palm frond drooping over a wall got in his way, and he sliced it aside. It gave a venomous reptilian hiss, as though a raging boa constrictor had been looped over his head. He shivered and went on.

Something kept swelling inside his breast, and it had nothing to do with shortness of breath or the exertion of his run. Some sort of fright. Fear in the night. Fear of the night. Fear of strangeness. Fear of things that are not to be named.

After the first couple of blocks he couldn’t hold it in any more. It burst from him between cupped hands, a hoarse cry of sheer, undiluted terror: “Mitty!” and went reverberating down the street, shocking the somnolent night.

That was no way for a grown man to call anyone, he knew; berserk, half crazed like that. He tried not to do it again.

It came again before he could stop himself.

“Mitty!”

He flung up his forearm, and that stifled it the third time.

A figure materialized from some doorway, approached, raising hand to headgear. This man wasn’t like the police up north, snarling a challenge to noisemakers. He was deferent to the light-skinned outlander.

Jones veered and hurried to meet him, almost slobbering in his gratitude.

“A woman. An American woman. Have you seen her? Did she come this way?”

“Sí, señor. A woman by herself. She passed by here a little while ago. I stood and looked after her a long time. It was the first time I ever saw anything like that. I knew she must be an americana, for our women do not walk alone at night like that.”

“Help me try to find her. I don’t know my way around here.”

“Servicio, señor.” He touched his cap again, and they started out together.

Sweat that wasn’t just the sweat of hurrying or of heat was all over Jorges’s face, like pearls of agony.

He knew that it wasn’t the mere fear of something happening to her, some bodily harm befalling her, that was wrenching at his vitals so. It was the strangeness of her doing it that had him so short-breathedly terrified.

They wavered there for a moment, in uncertainty.

“Where does this go? How far does it go?”

“Nowhere, señor. It just keeps going, out toward the mountains.”

“Mitty!” was jarred from him again, as though his chest had been dynamited.

They went on again.

The town began to crumble to pieces around them, the bare earth to show through. A dog barked, off across a small patch of cultivated ground, roused by their distant passage, then subsided again.

The policeman touched him on the arm; his darker eyes had pierced farther ahead. “There she is, señor. Sitting on that tumbled wall, resting. See, straight before us?”

Jones came to a dead halt. “Go back now. I’ll go the rest of the way alone. Here.” He took out his wallet.

“No, señor. I haven’t done anything.”

“Here, please.”

He went on toward her. She was like a part of the wall, she was so still. She was sitting there sidesaddle, one leg higher than the other. Always, sitting, walking, resting, she seemed to be looking that way, toward that. Never any other way but that.

“Mitty,” he said quietly from a few yards away.

She turned. Lack of recognition, as on the balcony.

“Mitty, don’t you know me?”

“Oh. Larry, where did you come from?”

“From the hotel. From our bedroom.”

She stayed there, draped on the wall. Then as his hand sought hers, “Why is your hand shaking so? Look, it dances in mine.”

He swallowed, unable to answer.

“Why are you looking at me like that, Larry? Your face is so white.”

He brought his face close to hers, pleadingly. “What is it, Mitty? Tell me, what is it?”

She just looked at him, like a wondering child.

“Mitty, this didn’t begin tonight. It’s been growing more noticeable all the time. I can’t talk like a book. I only know there’s a line dividing strangeness from what isn’t strange. I only know you’re on one side of that line now, and I’m on the other.”

He leaned his head against hers, in a sort of desolation. But the simile still held, for she was looking one way now, he another.

“Help me to help you, Mitty. I don’t care what it is, how strange, or how bad, or how anything it is. But put it into words. I won’t look into your face, if that’ll make it easier for you; I’ll keep my eyes like this, the other way. Talk to me as your husband. No secrets, no reservations, no separate identities between us. Just one of us, here on this wall in the moonlight. Don’t let me stay this way, Mitty. I’m scared now about things I didn’t even know existed before.”

Wonderment, still only wonderment on her face. The wonderment of a child who hears a grownup talking but doesn’t know what he means.

“What brought you out? Where were you going?”

“I don’t know. I just felt drawn. Like when water carries you along.”

“Didn’t you know that every step was taking you farther away from our room, from where I was, from where you belonged? Didn’t you know that shouldn’t be?”

“I... I didn’t think behind me. I only thought forward.”

“But when were you coming back?”

He saw her try desperately to give the answer, and saw that she couldn’t. That supplied it to him without her aid, and it was like a knife through him. She wasn’t. She wouldn’t have. Not if he hadn’t overtaken her.

A tortured cry broke from him. “Oh, why don’t they send that ship to take us out! There’s something around here that’s bad!”

He lifted her bodily in his arms, and turned away from the wall with her.

“I’m heavy, Larry. I can walk.”

“No, I want to make sure of getting you back with me.”

He started on the long return trip with her, walking slowly. The soft crunch of the powdered road dust under his feet was the only sound of their spellbound promenade. In the town ahead a church bell tolled the hour with infinite, age-old melancholy. As it must have tolled it two hundred years ago, on the same sort of night as this.

Down the rutted street he came, walking straight-legged with his burden, and he knew without looking at her that her head was turned, the whole way, to look back over his shoulder at the mountain.

As they passed the cantina its handful of inmates came out to the lighted doorway and stood there watching him go by. They stood there in a curious silence, without laughter or jeering remarks. And somehow he could sense what they were thinking, in a sudden spontaneous flare of kinship that flickered back and forth between him and them, overleaping the barriers of language and of race. Every man has his own penance to perform; this particular one’s was to carry his prowling wife home in his arms, save her from the evil mysteries of the night. He saw some make the sign of the cross, in pitying awe.

They were not wrong, they were not wrong.

And as he turned the last corner with her, he could feel, by the shift of her bodily balance, her neck elongate, to cling to the last lingering view of it, before the walls closed in behind them to shut it out.