Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'Can I have a cigarette now?'

Henry didn't answer. 'What are you doing here?' he said in a very annoyed tone of voice.

'There's a party today.'

'What?'

'A party. He's there now.' I paused. 'He's not going to come.'

'See, I told you,' said Francis, aggrieved, stepping gingerly from the brush and wiping his hands. Characteristically, he was not dressed for the occasion and had on sort of a nice suit.

'Nobody listens to me. I said we should have left an hour ago.'

'How do you know he's at the party?' said Henry.

'He left a note. In the library.'

'Let's go home,' said Charles, wiping a muddy smudge off his cheek with the heel of his hand.

Henry wasn't paying any attention to him. 'Damn,' he said, and shook his head quickly, like a dog shaking off water. 'I'd so hoped we'd be able to get it over with.'

There was a long pause.

'I'm hungry,' said Charles.

'Starving,' Camilla said absently, and then her eyes widened.

'Oh, no.'

'What is it?' said everyone at once.

'Dinner. Tonight's Sunday. He's coming to our house for dinner tonight.'

There was a gloomy silence.

'I never thought about it,' Charles said. 'Not once.'

'I didn't either,' said Camilla. 'And we don't have a thing to eat at home.'

'We'll have to stop at the grocery store on the way back.'

'What can we get?'

'I don't know. Something quick.'

'I can't believe you two,' Henry said crossly. 'I reminded you of this last night.'

'But we forgot,' said the twins, in simultaneous despair.

'How could you?'

'Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner.'

'Asparagus is in season,' said Francis helpfully.

'Yes, but do they have it at the Food King?'

Henry sighed and started off towards the woods.

'Where are you going?' Charles said in alarm.

'I'm going to dig up a couple of ferns. Then we can leave.'

'Oh, let's just forget about it,' said Francis, lighting a cigarette and tossing away the match. 'Nobody's going to see us.'

Henry turned around. 'Somebody might. If they do, I certainly want to have an excuse for having been here. And pick up that match,' he said sourly to Francis, who blew out a cloud of smoke and glared at him.

It was getting darker by the minute and cold, too. I buttoned my jacket and sat on a damp rock that overlooked the ravine, staring at the muddy, leaf-clogged rill that trickled below and half-listening to the twins argue about what they were going to make for dinner. Francis leaned against a tree, smoking. After a while he put out the cigarette on the sole of his shoe and came over to sit beside me.

Minutes passed. The sky was so overcast it was almost purple.

A wind swayed through a luminous clump of birches on the opposite bank, and I shivered. The twins were arguing monotonously.

Whenever they were in moods like this – disturbed, upset – they tended to sound like Heckle and Jeckle.

All of a sudden Henry emerged from the woods in a flurry of underbrush, wiping his dirt-caked hands on his trousers. 'Somebody's coming,' he said quietly.

The twins stopped talking and blinked at him.

'What?' said Charles.

'Around the back way. Listen.'

We were quiet, looking at each other. A chilly breeze rustled through the woods and a gust of white dogwood petals blew into the clearing.

'I don't hear anything,' Francis said.

Henry put a finger to his lips. The five of us stood poised, waiting, for a moment longer. I took a breath, and was about to speak when all of a sudden I did hear something.

Footsteps, the crackle of branches. We looked at one another.

Henry bit his lip and glanced quickly around. The ravine was bare, no place to hide, no way for the rest of us to run across the clearing and into the woods without making a lot of noise. He was about to say something when all of a sudden there was a crash of bushes, very near, and he stepped out of the clearing between two trees, like someone ducking into a doorway on a city street.

The rest of us, stranded in the open, looked at each other and then at Henry – thirty feet away, safe at the shady margin of the wood. He waved at us impatiently. I heard the sudden crunch of footsteps on gravel and, hardly aware of what I was doing, turned away spasmodically and pretended to inspect the trunk of a nearby tree.

The footsteps approached. Prickles rising on the nape of my neck, I bent to scrutinize the tree trunk more closely: silvery bark, cool to the touch, ants marching out of a fissure in a glittering black thread.

Then – almost before I noticed it – the footsteps stopped, very near my back.

I glanced up and saw Charles. He was staring straight ahead with a ghastly expression on his face and I was on the verge of asking him what was the matter when, with a sick, incredulous rush of disbelief, I heard Bunny's voice directly behind me.

'Well, I'll be damned,' he said briskly. 'What's this? Meeting of the Nature Club?'

I turned. It was Bunny, all right, all six-foot-three of him, looming up behind me in a tremendous yellow rain slicker that came almost to his ankles.

There was an awful silence.

'Hi, Bun,' said Camilla faintly.

'Hi yourself.' He had a bottle of beer – a Rolling Rock, funny I remember that – and he turned it up and took a long, gurgling pull. 'Phew,' he said. 'You people sure do a lot of sneaking around in the woods these days. You know,' he said, poking me in the ribs, 'I've been trying to get ahold of you.'

The abrupt, booming immediacy of his presence was too much for me to take. I stared at him, dazed, as he drank again, as he lowered the bottle, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he was standing so close I could feel the heaviness of his rich, beery breaths.

'Aaah,' he said, raking the hair back from his eyes, and belched.

'So what's the story, deerslayers? You all just felt like coming out here to study the vegetation?'

There was a rustle and a slight, deprecating cough from the direction of the woods.

'Well, not exactly,' said a cool voice.

Bunny turned, startled -1 did, too – just in time to see Henry step out of the shadows.

He came forward and regarded Bunny pleasantly. He was holding a garden trowel and his hands were black with mud.

'Hello,' he said. 'This is quite a surprise.'

Bunny gave him a long, hard look. 'Jesus,' he said. 'What you doing, burying the dead?'

Henry smiled. 'Actually, it's very lucky you happened by.'

'This some kind of convention?'

'Why, yes,' said Henry agreeably, after a pause. 'I suppose one might call it that.'

'One might,' said Bunny mockingly.

Henry bit his lower lip. 'Yes,' he said, in all seriousness. 'One might. Though it's not the term I would use myself Everything was very still. From somewhere far away, in the woods, I heard the faint, inane laughter of a woodpecker.

'Tell me,' Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note, of suspicion. 'Just what the Sam Hill arc you guys doing out here anyway?'

The woods were silent, not a sound.

Henry smiled. 'Why, looking for new ferns,' he said, and took a step towards him.

Dionysus [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship's plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world's not.

– E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational

Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. 'Basically I am a very good person.' This from the latest serial killer – destined for the chair, they say – who, with incarnadine axe, recently dispatched half a dozen registered nurses in Texas. I have followed his case with interest in the papers.