Dennis Etchison: The Dark Country

"Which one," she said, again. She said it that way, not a question, not anything.

"Don't worry. You couldn't see my house if you tried." Don't worry. You couldn't see my house if you tried. I said it, I thought it, I don't know which.

"Will you help me?"

She did not bother to raise her head.

"Which one? Which one of those people?" she continued.

Now I knew we weren't on the same wavelength. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Her eyes were fixed somewhere close to the line of houses. The pier, I gathered. A few tourists were out on the boards, strolling up and back, back and up. They reminded me of shooting gallery targets, rolling along on tracks and wobbling a little in the breeze. Except that I could hear footsteps, even here.

"What about them?" I asked.

"They remind me of mannequins." She stubbed out her cigarette, almost new. "Do mannequins have wheels, do you know?"

I was standing there looking down at her, studying her face. It was an exaggerated triangle, inverted — like the Sub-Mariner, I think, if you remember. Then again, maybe it was only the perspective. "That's a funny thing to say," I said.

"Which one would you kill," she said. Another nonques-tion. "Say you could name your price. Any one you choose."

I thought about it, I don't know why. She was making some kind of point, I guess. I wanted to hear what it was. "You talk like they're not even human," I said.

She raised her face a few degrees. Her chin was really tiny, almost lost below her enormous lower lip, which was puffed out in a perpetual pout. More than anything else, I saw her wide, pallid forehead. She had not arranged her hair to hide it.

"And we are?" she said. "Is that what you mean?"

I leaned on the rail and watched the water bringing sand up to the shoreline. Bringing it up or taking it away. "Say you had to choose."

I pivoted, startled but not surprised. She had come up like a ghost, one of those with sheet trailing and no feet below to sound the boards. I turned back to the rail. The gulls were swooping on the pearled waters, trying to pick up fish that had come too close to shore, into the tide pools between the green rocks where they didn't belong.

I heard her release a long, shuddering breath. With effort, her voice low, she said, "If you won't say it, I'll say it for you. You can't choose because it wouldn't make any difference. You can't tell them apart."

I shut my eyes and held them shut for a while before I opened them. Shadows on the sand. People on the beach. Figures chasing a ball, picking driftwood, unleashing dogs, rolling trouser legs, walking hand in hand. I couldn't see their faces from here. Each time my eyes opened the configuration was different, the figures shuffled, interchanged.

But I was letting myself go. It was easy. Too easy.

I pressed my eyelids shut again, so tight I saw dull light.

Thinking: well all right, why not, maybe this one is different, I pulled myself up. Finding the strength, blinking, I faced her with eyes open. I reached down, steeling myself and relaxing, setting and going with it. Hands on the rail behind, the nails whitened moons, they must have been, I heard myself saying, "What is it you really want?"

I left the lights off.

She wanted me, but not desperately. She gave, but not to lose herself. She took from me — received and did not grasp. The moment did seem to be out of time, but passed to the next moment as easily as the passing of a breath. I began to think of her as beautiful. She might have been anyone. She was familiar somehow; I had never known her like. I passed from her back into myself as easily as a breath is taken and released. I was aware of the wind outside, the lights in the windows of other houses going on and off along the point, the white sound of the waves, the passing and repassing of slapping feet on the beach, drunken laughter beyond the deck. The absence of laughter. The easy silence, and the night.

"Who's out there?"

"What? Nobody, probably. It's late."

"I don't mean the beach. I thought I heard someone walking. Outside, there."

She meant the front of the house. ' "There's nothing out there but the highway. Not even a sidewalk. You know that."

I watched her in the moonlight from the window.

"All right, what is it?"

She shifted to her side, her hair lifting away from the pillow in long black tendrils. "Sometimes there's a man, walking." I reached for my shirt. "Smoke?" "Mm."

But before I could get to my cigarettes, she had one in her mouth. I don't know where she got it. I gave her a light. I saw the twisted end, the way it caught and burned unevenly.

She filled her lungs without blinking and held out the joint.

I hesitated, but only for a second. The last couple of times it had made me remember too much, had made the ache come again. I took it. It tasted like sweet garbage, but it went down easy.

She lay back. Her eyes were staring. I seemed to be seeing her from above: the dark hollows over her collarbone, her breasts, the way they did not flatten when she lay on her back, the way her breath moved below her ribs, the tangle between her thighs, glistening under me.

"How do you know no one is there?" she said.

"Because — " I flopped onto my back, took another lungful, executed a quick sit-up. I crossed the living room, drew open the top half of the door to the sun deck and leaned out. The tide was low, a good fifty feet from the supports, and nothing was moving but a line of sandpipers between the naked rocks. "Because there's nobody. On the beach or anywhere else around here." With irritation. "What's the — " matter with you, I started to say.

"How do you know?" she repeated.

My mouth opened. It stayed open, my jaw scissoring as I came back to the big pillows. I squatted next to her on the rug, almost over her. "I need some more of that, I guess," I said, reaching for the joint,' 'before I can pick up what you're trying to say."

She punched up the pillow.

"We were talking about something, back on the pier," she said. "Remember?"

Though she would not meet my eyes, I stared at her. I thought her mouth began to move, but it was only her chin, receding further.

Get it out, I thought. The rest of it, so that I can know what to think of you, before I let myself think any more of you than I do. "Come on." Or do you want to go back into hiding in that bar, I thought, do you really? Is that all you want? "Damn it," I said, "you're — " spooking me, I thought. Really.

"I'm what?" She rose up on the pillow.

"Nothing."

"That's what I thought," she said, slumping. "Oh God."

"All right," she said. "Only first you have to tell me something."

Let this be good, I thought, and let it be quick. "Just this," she said. "When was the first time you heard the voice?"

I didn't say anything.

"For me," she said, her tone unchanged, 'it was only after I started having the dreams. They got so bad that for a while I was afraid to go to sleep. But then, the first time I heard it, I was finally able to give up the ghost. Just like that. I woke up laughing, and I knew the world was mine."

I got up. I sat down. Then I got up again and went around the bookcase to the kitchen. The water felt good on my face. I tried to make it last.

"Well?" she asked. "Will you do it?"

I lit a cigarette. It was getting cold. I wanted to close a window, but none was open.

"You know you've thought about it. Admit it. It could happen anywhere. In the middle of the night, in a place you've never been before, a place where no one knows you. Glendale, Upland, Paso Robles, it doesn't matter. Anywhere at all."

Her voice rose half an octave, like a violin string tightening, winding up. She took a deep breath.