John Verdon - Think of a Number

What you took you will give

when you get what you gave .

Now he knew exactly what the words meant, and the meaning was chillingly simple. For the life you took, you will give your life. What you did will be done to you .

He wasn’t sure whether the frisson he felt convinced him he was right or if knowing he was right created the frisson, but either way he had no doubt about it. This did not, however, answer his other questions. It only made them more urgent, and it gave rise to new ones.

Was the threat of murder just a threat, designed only to inflict the pain of apprehension-or was it a declaration of practical intent? To what was the writer referring when he said “I do what I’ve done” in the first line of the third poem? Had he previously done to someone else what he now proposed to do to Mellery? Might Mellery have done something in concert with someone else whom the writer had already dealt with? Gurney made a note to ask Mellery if any friend or associate of his had ever been killed, assaulted, or threatened.

Maybe it was the mood created by the flashes of light beyond the blackening foothills, or the eerie persistence of the low thunder, or his own exhaustion, but the personality behind the messages was emerging from the shadows. The detachment of the voice in those poems, bloody purpose and careful syntax, hatred and calculation-he had seen those qualities combined before to horrible effect. As he stared out the den window, surrounded by the unsettled atmosphere of the approaching storms, he could sense in those messages the iciness of a psychopath. A psychopath who called himself X. Arybdis.

Of course, it was possible that he was off base. It wouldn’t be the first time that a certain mood, particularly in the evening, particularly when he was alone, had generated in him convictions unsupported by the facts.

Still… what was it about that name? In what dusty box of memories was it faintly stirring?

He went to bed early that night, long before Madeleine returned home from her concert, determined that tomorrow he would return the letters to Mellery and insist that he go to the police. The stakes were too high, the danger too palpable. In bed, though, he found it impossible to lay the day to rest. His mind was a racecourse with no exits and no finish line. It was an experience he was familiar with-a price he paid (he’d come to believe) for the intense attention he devoted to certain kinds of challenges. Once his obsessed mind, instead of falling asleep, fell into this circular rut, there were only two options. He could let the process run its course, which could take three or four hours, or he could force himself out of bed and into his clothes.

Minutes later, dressed in jeans and a comfortable old cotton sweater, he was standing outside on the patio. A full moon behind the overcast sky created a faint illumination, making the barn visible. It was in that direction, along the rutted road through the pasture, that he decided to walk.

Past the barn was the pond. Halfway there he stopped and listened to the sound of a car coming up the road from the direction of the village. He estimated it to be about half a mile away. In that quiet corner of the Catskills, where the sporadic howling of coyotes was the loudest nighttime sound, a vehicle could be heard at a great distance.

Soon the headlights of Madeleine’s car swept over the tangle of dying goldenrod that bordered the pasture. She turned toward the barn, stopped on the crunchy gravel, and switched off the headlights. She got out and walked toward him-cautiously, her eyes adjusting to the semidarkness.

“What are you doing?” Her question sounded soft, friendly.

“Couldn’t sleep. Mind racing. Thought I’d take a walk around the pond.”

“Feels like rain.” A rumble in the sky punctuated her observation.

He nodded.

She stood next to him on the path and inhaled deeply.

“Wonderful smell. Come on, let’s walk,” she said, taking his arm.

As they reached the pond, the path broadened into a mowed swath. Somewhere in the woods, an owl screeched-or, more precisely, there was a familiar screech they thought might be an owl when they first heard it that summer, and each time after that they became more certain it was an owl. It was in the nature of Gurney’s intellect to realize that this process of increasing conviction made no logical sense, but he also knew that pointing it out, interesting though this trick of the mind might be to him, would bore and annoy her. So he said nothing, happy that he knew her well enough to know when to be quiet, and they ambled on to the far side of the pond in amiable silence. She was right about the smell-a wonderful sweetness in the air.

They had moments like this from time to time, moments of easy affection and quiet closeness, that reminded him of the early years of their marriage, the years before the accident. “The Accident”-that dense, generic label with which he wrapped the event in his memory to keep its razor-wire details from slicing his heart. The accident-the death-that eclipsed the sun, turning their marriage into a shifting mixture of habit, duty, edgy companionship, and rare moments of hope-rare moments when something bright and clear as a diamond would shoot back and forth between them, reminding him of what once was and might again be possible.

“You always seem to be wrestling with something,” she said, curling her fingers around the inside of his arm, just above his elbow.

Right again.

“How was the concert?” he finally asked.

“First half was baroque, lovely. Second half was twentieth century, not so lovely.”

He was about to chime in with his own low opinion of modern music but thought better of it.

“What kept you awake?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure.”

He sensed her skepticism. She let go of his arm. Something splashed into the pond a few yards ahead of them.

“I couldn’t get the Mellery business out of my mind,” he said.

She didn’t reply.

“Bits and pieces of it kept running around in my head-not getting anywhere-just making me uncomfortable-too tired to think straight.”

Again she offered nothing but a thoughtful silence.

“I kept thinking about that name on the note.”

“X. Arybdis?”

“How did you…? You heard us mention it?”

“I have good hearing.”

“I know, but it always surprises me.”

“It might not really be X. Arybdis, you know,” she said in that offhand way that he knew was anything but offhand.

“What?” he said, stopping.

“It might not be X. Arybdis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was suffering through one of the atonal atrocities in the second half of the concert, thinking that some modern composers must really hate the cello. Why would you force a beautiful instrument to make such painful noises? Horrible scraping and whining.”

“And…?” he said gently, trying to keep his curiosity from sounding edgy.

“And I’d have left at that point, but I couldn’t because I’d given Ellie a ride there.”

“Ellie?”

“Ellie from the bottom of the hill-rather than take two cars? But she seemed to be enjoying it, God knows why.”

“Yes?”

“So I asked myself, what can I do to pass the time and keep from killing the musicians?”

There was another splash in the pond, and she stopped to listen. He half saw, half sensed her smile. Madeleine was fond of frogs.

“And?”

“And I thought to myself I could start figuring out my Christmas card list-it’s practically November-so I took out my pen and on the back of my program, at the top of the page, I wrote ‘Xmas Cards’-not the whole word Christmas but the abbreviation, X-M-A-S,” she said, spelling it out.