Джеффри Дивер - Nothing Good Happens After Midnight - A Suspense Magazine Anthology

The venue was an old monastery on the edge of their small town, Westfield, Connecticut. The place had been renovated but maintained much of the gothic atmosphere it would have had when it housed a functioning religious order. Much of the chill, too; the November cold seeped in through a dozen crevices. Beth supposed that the music she and Robert were about to listen to had echoed around these stone walls long, long ago; the Salem Chamber Players, out of Massachusetts, would be playing music from the 18th and 19th centuries tonight.

The half dozen musicians were dressed in dark slacks or skirts and white shirts, and were led by a lean, balding conductor in a black suit. The concert began at eight and they worked through some pieces that were vaguely familiar and some that were not. Having had a glass of wine before they left, and another at intermission, she struggled to stay awake. (Robert made the wise choice of going with coffee.)

But there was no risk of nodding off during the last piece on the program.

The Midnight Sonatina , the notes reported, was rarely performed, the Salem Players being perhaps the only group in the country that had the piece in its repertoire.

Beth was curious why.

She soon learned.

The conductor gestured to the lead violinist, an attractive young woman with a tangle of red hair, which sported a distinctive white streak. She rose and, with understated accompaniment from the others, launched into the lightning fast piece. It was wildly complicated, richly melodic at times, eerily discordant at others. Beth, Robert — the whole audience — sat frozen in place, mesmerized during the five or six minute performance.

“My,” she found herself whispering. Robert’s handsome face was frozen, his mouth agape. No wonder it wasn’t played much; few would have the technical skill to master it.

When they finished, the sultry violinist, her narrow face dotted with sweat, strands of hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks, stood with her eyes closed, breathing hard from the effort.

The audience rose to their feet and applauded hard and cheered and fired off dozens of “Bravas!”

As they drove home, on the dark hilly country roads, twice their Acura sedan strayed onto the shoulder. The night was windy but that didn’t seem to be the problem for the low-slung vehicle. The third time the car lurched to the side Beth glanced at her husband. He seemed lost in thought.

“Honey?” she asked.

At first he didn’t appear to hear her. He kept staring straight ahead, at the wisps of ghostly fog which the car sped through.

Beth repeated, “Honey? Something wrong?”

He blinked. “Fine. Maybe a little tired is all.” Robert’s firm was miles from their home and he had to be awake at 5:30 or so to beat rush-hour traffic.

“I’ll drive.”

“No, I’m fine. Really.”

But farther down the road he nearly missed a turn.

“Robert!”

He blinked, gasped and skidded the car to a stop. They’d narrowly missed slamming into a road sign.

“What happened?” she asked urgently. “You fall asleep?”

“I... No... I don’t know. It’s too foggy. And... I zoned out, or something.”

“Zoned out?”

He shrugged, nodded at the wheel. “Maybe you better.”

They swapped places and in twenty uneventful minutes they were home.

Beth parked in the driveway and they walked into the house. Robert almost seemed to be sleepwalking.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

He looked at her with a blank expression.

“Robert. Are you sick?”

“I’m going to bed.”

He didn’t shower or brush his teeth. He just changed into his pajamas and lay down on the bed, not even climbing under the blankets. He stared at the ceiling. His body, Beth noted, didn’t seem relaxed.

“The flu?” she asked.

“What?”

“You have a bug or something?” She felt his forehead. He was chill to the touch.

But then suddenly he grew relaxed. He squinted and seemed to notice his wife sitting on the bedside. “Weird dream,” he said, then smiled, rolled over and fell asleep in seconds.

Dream? Beth thought. Hadn’t he been wide awake?

At three a.m. Beth was startled awake. What? A noise, a motion?

She looked over at Robert’s side of the bed. He wasn’t there.

Alarmed, thinking about his odd behavior, she rose, pulled on her bathrobe and walked into the hallway. There she paused and listened. A faint humming was coming from downstairs. She continued to the first floor and there she found her husband, in the living room, staring out the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the neighbors’ house, the Altman’s place, fifty feet away. They were the neighbors from hell; Robert and Fred had been feuding for years over petty but irritating things. Beth tried to remain above it, but she joined the fray occasionally. Sandra could be an utter bitch.

Robert was staring at the glaring yellow clapboard (the color being one of the sources of dispute; Robert was sure they’d picked the hue just to spite the Tollners). Robert was humming. The sound was very quiet. Four notes over and over again. If they were from a tune, she didn’t know what it might be.

Was he asleep?

What was that rule? Never wake somebody up when they are sleepwalking?

But she was alarmed. “Robert? Honey?”

No response.

“Honey? Is that a song? What is it?”

Maybe from an ad? From a movie? If so, and she could learn the name, maybe she could get through to him.

She got her phone and ran her name-that-tune app. It returned no titles, other than the pitch of the notes: A-D-D-E.

“Robert?”

Eventually the humming stopped but he kept staring out the window. She walked up to him and put her arm around his shoulder. His muscles were hard as a bag of concrete, his skin still chill. She pulled her hand away, alarmed.

The humming resumed.

At six a.m. she called the ambulance.

“He’s responsive now. Vitals are good. MRI and CT are normal. To be honest, we have no diagnosis at this point.” The psychiatrist told her this as he sat across from Beth in the Westfield Hospital waiting room.

A slow-speaking man, with a faintly Southern accent, he continued, “Robert was in some kind of a fugue state. Like he was hypnotized.” The lean doctor, in a well-worn light blue jacket, consulted a chart. “I was just speaking to him earlier and he said he hasn’t been taking any drugs. Nothing showed up in the preliminary bloodwork but we’ve sent samples to New Haven for some other tests. I wanted to ask you.”

“No, nothing,” she said, her voice ragged — from exhaustion.

“Has he ever taken any psychedelics?”

“Lord, no.” Neither of them had done anything more than smoke a little pot and not for a year or so.

He jotted a note then looked up. “Anything unusual happen last night, prior to the event? Traumatic?”

“We went to a concert.” She told the doctor about the drive home. How he “zoned out.”

Another look at the chart. “And no occurrences in the past like this?”

She shook her head.

“Has he ever seen a psychiatrist before?”

Her pause got the man’s attention and he cocked his head.

“We’ve been to a counselor, the two of us. He has... Robert has some anger issues. We worked it out. But, no, he’s never seen a doctor for anything like this.”

She thought he’d leap on that fact but he wasn’t interested. Anger was boring maybe, compared with Robert’s bizarre fugue state.

“Do you have any idea what the humming was about?” he asked.

“No.”

Since Robert was not considered a danger to himself or anyone else and seemed fully cognizant, the doctor said he could go home. If anything troubling was revealed in the new bloodwork someone would call.