Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

Graves’ eyes shot to the window, the black sweep of the pond, the dark wood that surrounded it. He was there too. Standing in the darkness, a gray rope dangling loosely in his hands.

Graves fixed his gaze on the open suitcase. He stood, breathing slowly, rhythmically, waiting for it to pass. When it had, he glanced toward the window. The pond now lay motionless beyond it. The trees had resumed their earthly shapes. The grounds rested silent, vacant, with nothing to disturb them but Graves’ memory of a vanished man.

“Right on time,” Eleanor said as she opened the door.

Graves walked into the living room, noticed the desk in the far corner, his most recent novel open on a chair beside it.

“I skipped ahead in the series,” Eleanor explained as she closed the door. “To the last one.” She looked as if she expected some mild protest on his part. “I was eager to see how you’d developed as a writer.”

Graves said nothing. His books seemed strangely distant to him now. He could feel himself retreating from them, leaving them behind as he was leaving Eleanor behind. He thought of the rope. The metal bar. The chair he could stand upon. In his mind they shone like lights, beckoning him home.

Eleanor strode into her bedroom and emerged with a bright red shawl. “I saw you head up to the main house after I left you. Did you tell Miss Davies that you couldn’t find a story?”

“Yes.”

“How did she react?”

“She was surprised. She said that I’d forgotten what I’d been asked to do in the first place.”

Eleanor drew the bright shawl over her shoulders. “What did she mean by that?”

“That I was supposed to imagine what happened to Faye the way Slovak does. She said that I’d let the facts get in the way of my imagination.

“But facts are facts,” Eleanor said.

“Yes, they are,” Graves said. “So I told her it was probably a stranger who killed Faye.” He felt Kessler step in out of the night, grasp his bare shoulder. “Someone who came out of the dark.”

Eleanor looked at him oddly. “Except that Faye died in daylight.”

She watched him for a moment, silently, as she had several times before, her gaze intent, concentrated, a searchlight aimed at his secret history, burning it away layer by layer, seeking its undiscovered core. “Well, shall we?” she said a little too brightly, motioning him toward the door.

The restaurant was small and nearly empty. Their table was set off in a corner, a white tablecloth thrown over it, everything neatly arranged, a single red candle burning softly at the center.

Eleanor ordered a scotch. When it came she lifted her glass. “I know you don’t drink, but we can make a toast anyway. To the rest of the summer.”

Graves tapped his water glass to her drink. “To your play.”

“And your books.” She took a sip, then said, “Will there be any more books, Paul?”

He realized that he had no answer for her. He had often thought of his own death. Planned it. Gathered the necessary materials. He had even come to Riverwood in hope of determining if the hour had finally come. But it had never occurred to him that while he lived he would cease to write.

“I mean, books in the series,” Eleanor explained. “After having read the last one, it seems to me that Slovak has gotten awfully tired of his life.”

“It’s the only life he has.”

“Then it’s a miserable one,” Eleanor told him. “So miserable, it’s hard for me to imagine him… continuing. I mean, he’s going down very fast. And there doesn’t appear to be anything that can stop it.”

“Maybe there isn’t.”

“So what are you going to do with him? You’re the writer. You give the orders. What are you planning for Slovak?”

He saw his old companion poised at the brink of the ledge, Kessler staring at him coldly. So far he had kept Kessler silent. Now he gave him a single word, a command hissed to Slovak in the same sharp, commanding tone he used with Sykes, Jump!

“I mean, Slovak has to have a way out of this… darkness,” Eleanor said. “Doesn’t he?” She waited for Graves to answer, but when he didn’t she added, “And Sykes too. There’s a problem with him. In the last book he’s become so deranged by all the things he’s helped Kessler do, he’s almost totally paranoid. Slovak sees that clearly. Remember what he says about him, ‘Sykes is the terror terror makes.’”

Graves felt the impulse sweep over him in a wave of heat so fiery it seemed satanic, so hellish he all but trembled at the part of him from which it had boiled up. “Sometimes I want to kill them all,” he said before he could stop himself. “Kessler. Sykes. Even Slovak. Everyone. Everything. The whole world.”

Her response stunned him with its desperate truth. “It’s loneliness, Paul. Only loneliness can make you feel like that.”

She had said it quietly, as if she’d had a long familiarity with the terrible impulse he described. Watching her as she brought the glass to her lips, her eyes gazing at him questioningly from above its crystal rim, he wondered just how often she’d stood upon her balcony, stared out over the city, and suddenly seen it explode before her, become a ball of flame, the air a stink of smoldering flesh. Had she seen and smelled the final apocalypse in a visionary instant, the end of life, the end of man, and heard her mind pronounce its tragic judgment, Good.

They finished dinner with no more talk either of Graves’ books, the fate he foresaw for the characters who populated them, or of Riverwood. They did not review what they’d learned about Faye Harrison’s death or revisit any aspect of the case. And yet, both Graves’ novels and Riverwood hung in the air around them, trivializing all other subjects, reducing them to the status of evasions.

Nonetheless, the conspiracy held. It was a tacit agreement to keep things at a distance, so that they discussed research methods rather than the deeper objects of their research, the use of language rather than the ideas it conveyed, dramatic tension rather than the one Graves felt physically, the electric charge each time she looked at him or spoke to him, and which he felt as little more than a suggestion of the lightning bolt that would undoubtedly accompany her actual touch.

It was just after nine when they left the restaurant and made their way back to Riverwood. Eleanor was behind the wheel, as usual. Graves sat on the passenger side, trying to hold his eyes on the road, almost wishing that he could simply disappear, not face the dismal moment when he would have to leave her, and in doing so return to that very loneliness she had already identified in him, and which now, for the first time in his life, seemed unbearable.

She slowed as she neared his cottage, then sped forward again, passing it as well as her own, taking the long curve around the pond so that she finally brought the car to a halt in the driveway of the mansion. “It’s a pretty night,” she said. “I thought we might take a final stroll around the grounds.”

They stood together in the darkness, facing the pond, Graves’ mind now suddenly returning to the day of Faye Harrison’s disappearance. Once again he tried to imagine what the workmen at the second cottage had seen that morning, a slim young girl making her way across the lawn. He knew that although Faye had lifted her hand to shield her eyes, it had not been against the sun. For the sun had been behind her. Instead, it now seemed to Graves that Faye had to have been shielding herself, hiding her face from those who might otherwise have seen it. For a brief time he’d considered the possibility that it might have been Mona Flagg behind the uplifted hand, Mona, Edward’s pawn, concealing her identity. But now he knew that it had never been Mona. It had been Faye and only Faye who’d crossed the lawn that morning, not Mona Flagg in Faye’s clothes. Still, she had undoubtedly lifted her hand against a morning light that hadn’t been there. Why had she done that? Why had she not wanted anyone to see her face?