Soulstorm. Part 7

"A little. What books did you choose for your subject matter?"

"The astronomical notebooks David mentioned to you. The binding is exquisite, a dark blue crushed morocco with a rich chestnut spine. Gold stamping in Latin. And huge. Double quarto size. I put them with a s.e.xtant and celestial globe for the grouping."

"What media?"

"Oils. I'm afraid I'm a traditionalist. I'm doing some sketches first to get the lighting."

"I'd love to see them."

"I'd like to show them to you, Mr. McNeely."

"George, please. But never fear, I'll still call you Mrs. Neville."

She laughed gaily. "That's not necessary."

"What then? Gaby?"

"Gaby?" she cried. "I've never been called that in my life!"

McNeely laughed. "I'm afraid that must be an American nickname. Gabrielle?"

"Perfect," she said.

"Well, I won't disturb you anymore." McNeely stood up. "Perhaps I'll stop by the playroom sometime to see if you're in, all right?"

"I'll look forward to it, George."

He smiled and left the room, unaware, for all his self-professed knowledge of his fellow man, of the true nature of Gabrielle Neville's feelings toward him.

The soldier, she thought. This one is the soldier.

A soldier who knows art, who knows books . . . who knows women as well. She could tell by the eyes. They were a lover's eyes, a courtier's eyes. Yes, that was it, a courtier. A n.o.ble soldier of the Renaissance with his graying beard and hair, and his cool cool gray eyes. That straight sharp nose-Roman of course. And even his mouth. It would be so grim in its thinness in battle, but soft and gentle with a woman. A renaissance man.

David had been like that once.

It had all been so easy then. Though they'd both been twenty years old, they'd really been children. Her father had told her often that the children of the rich stay children forever, that it was both their blessing and their curse. And so she and David had been, even years into their marriage, the bright shining children of money, untouched by falls of fortune. Nothing less than the total collapse of the world's economy could have brought the wolf to their gilded door. So they had lived in their private world like Gatsby and Daisy, had they lived happily ever after. Gatsby was her favorite book, except for the ending. "They should've been together," she'd said to David. "It should have worked for them," and then she would go back and reread the book with wary fascination, like a hypochondriac looking for the next symptom that could shorten her life.

The first trial had come when she wanted a baby. After a year of trying, both had taken tests, the results of which showed that David had an impossibly low sperm count. Fertilization in utero was attempted, but proved unsuccessful. And then David started having his "problems." It was only on rare occasions that he was able to produce an erection, and even then he could not sustain it for more than a minute or so. Though they still slept together, the two of them had not made love in over a year, and any hope Gabrielle had had of bearing David's child was gone.

The difficulties had first appeared a few years before David's illness had been diagnosed, and the doctors a.s.sured them that it was psychological rather than physical, stemming from David's connection between sperm count and masculinity. But Gabrielle knew how much deeper it went. He had told her one night after an unsatisfying attempt at lovemaking.

"Sometimes," he had said, "I don't feel like a man at all. But like a boy. A little boy."

That was all. He had gotten up then and left the room. But as she lay there and thought about it, she had realized that his manhood was in question in his own mind because he had never done anything to win it. And at last she knew what curse was upon the children of the rich.

From that night on she had tried to bolster his ego, to praise his slightest accomplishment, but he saw all too easily what she was trying to do, and he resented it. Finally she ceased her efforts and treated him as she had previously.

When, much later, he'd suggested the experiment in The Pines, he had seemed quite honest about his motivations. "Two reasons, Gabrielle," he had said to her. "The first is to find if life can exist after death. The second ... is to prove something to myself by facing . . . whatever's there."

"Prove what?" she'd asked.

"I have never," he had answered sadly, "never in my whole life done a thing that any other man couldn't have done with my background and my money."

"The tennis tournaments," she had offered feebly, "the sailing, the . . ."

He laughed bitterly. "With my teachers, an ape could've done as well."

It was the approach of death, she knew, that had wrought this final change in him. She had hoped that here, in The Pines, he might see that there was no conflict in which he was expected to take up arms, that nine out of ten people spend their whole lives without once being called upon to prove themselves. To Gabrielle, it was not a world of high drama, but a world in which people should live as finely as possible and find as much happiness as they could before life ended.

But the instant that voice had come booming out of the silence, as soon as David's eyes had shone with that fanatical light, she knew she had lost him. He would sit in the living room of their suite, staring for hours on end at the logs snapping and flaring in the fireplace. When she asked him if he wanted to join her for a meal, he would decline, saying he wasn't hungry, and when she came back he would be gone. Twice she had gone looking for him, and had found him once in the study, where he brusquely asked what she wanted, and another time she had not been able to find him at all.

She knew that he would die here. He was half dead already.

Dead from the waist down.

She bit her lip at the cruelty of the thought, and looked up in surprise, as if someone else in the room had spoken such vicious slander. But the room was empty.

You b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Where was the voice coming from?

David, you self-righteous, self-pitying b.a.s.t.a.r.d ...

It was hers, though she was not speaking. Yet so perfect was the mimicry that she pressed her hands to her mouth to make certain her lips were not open, her tongue was not forming the words that she heard her own voice speak.

Never a thought for me in all your brow-beating.

Never a thought about my needs.

A woman's needs.

Or maybe b.a.s.t.a.r.d's the wrong word.

Maybe it's fairy.

Yes, fairy, f.a.ggot, gay, c.o.c.ksucker.

You deserved what I did to you.

I'm glad I slept with Martin! Yes that's right glad and his c.o.c.k was so hard and it filled me filled me like yours never did never not even when you were Mister Hots.h.i.t at the Sorbonne and we used to get it on in that apartment of yours you were at your best then but you could never touch Martin and I'm sorry I killed his baby it was a man's baby and I hope you see it when you die and I hope you look at it and it opens its mouth and laughs at you and says Martin was my father and Gabrielle my mother and you are NOTHING you limp-d.i.c.k billionaire rotting corpse!

Then she screamed. Screamed at the horror of the words and the intensity with which she'd felt them, as if her throat and stomach had spewed forth bile that had been festering inside her for years.

Chapter Five.

As David Neville stalked the ghosts he thought haunted The Pines, so Seth c.u.mmings stalked David Neville. Maybe Neville was insane, as McNeely had thought, but sane or not, to c.u.mmings he exuded power, and c.u.mmings was drawn to power like a moth to a candle. He could help Neville; he knew he could. He was bright, aggressive-h.e.l.l, hadn't he been in trade for years, and in a company second only to Neville's own? He had a lot to offer, that was for d.a.m.ned sure.

All he needed was the opportunity.

All he needed was to find Neville, and the cellar was the only place he hadn't looked.

Since he'd run into him in the kitchen, two sleeps had pa.s.sed. It had been hard to doze off on that bed where he had seen the man and woman, so he'd slept on the sofa in the suite's living room, and had seen no more manifestations. He hadn't seen Neville either, though he'd looked nearly everywhere. He hadn't really expected to find him in the cellar, so it surprised him when he heard a sound coming from what Neville had called the fire chamber. It was a soft shuffling, and he thought that perhaps Neville was inside checking provisions.

But as he crossed the large central room toward the fire chamber, he noticed that although its door was ajar, there was no light on inside.

The p.r.i.c.k. Heard me coming and turned it off. He won't get away that easy.

"Mr. Neville? h.e.l.lo! You in there?"

The shuffling continued. It was odd. If Neville had wanted to remain unfound, wouldn't he have been quieter? Wouldn't there in fact be no sound at all?

"Mr. Neville?" Scaring me off?

Shuffling. So soft in there in the dark.

"Hey? Who's in there?"

c.u.mmings suddenly wished there was more light in the cellar than that of the sixty-watt bulb that glowed thirty feet behind him, throwing his own small shadow partially on the steel door and partially on the dark wedge where the door was open.

My shadow's in there. The thought was absurd and he recognized it as such, but he moved so that his shadow was now totally on the outside wall.

The shuffling grew louder.

"Wickstrom?"

Was the door moving?

"McNeely?"

Moving further open?

"Hey?"

The only sound was the shuffling. And the pounding of his heart.

"Hey . . ."

The door slammed shut with a crash of metal on metal, and c.u.mmings turned and ran, ran across the stone floor, tripping on the step up into the cold cellar, stumbling up the stairs to the kitchen, once more an eight-year-old boy running home through the dark before the things that lived in the shacks caught him and dragged him behind those worn doors and shattered windows to do what those things always do to little boys, and as he burst into the clean bright fluorescent kitchen, it was as if his mother were there smiling, waiting for his return from the night.

He fell into a chair and sat there panting, but then he turned and saw the cellar door still open. He jumped up and pressed it closed, the sound of the clicking latch like a comforting litany.

Even then he didn't feel safe, so he left the kitchen, looking for company. Anyone would do, even Wickstrom. He found the billiard room empty, and moved on to the den. There was no one there either, and the darkly wooded walls gave him no comfort. The study was next, and there at last he found David Neville, sitting and staring mindlessly at a Hudson River landscape hung near the door.

"I was looking for you," c.u.mmings said with relief. He did not choose his words; they simply came.

Neville jerked his eyes away from the painting. "For what?"

"I ... was in the cellar."

"What the h.e.l.l ..."

"I heard something ... something in the fire chamber."

"What were you doing down there?"

"Looking for you."

"Why, for Christ's sake?"

"I ... I ..." He realized he'd been babbling like a frightened child. But he was in too far now. "I wanted to talk to you."

"About what?" It was not a question. It was a snarl.

c.u.mmings started to answer, then laughed and shrugged. "Business."

"Business."

"I think that ..." This was not right, not the way to do it! Yet he could not stop. It had been bottled up too long. "I think I could ... would be good for you, for your business. I know shipping, I know import-export ..."

Neville gave an astonished laugh, as if c.u.mmings had just told an outrageously funny and filthy joke in church. Though he smiled broadly, his tone was tight, angry. "You a.s.shole. You're asking me for a job? A job?"

"I thought ..."

"You're getting a million dollars, and you want more? I don't even hire people! I don't even hire the people who hire people!" He shook his head in disbelief. "What the f.u.c.k do you want?"

"I ..."

"You stay away from me, c.u.mmings." There was no humor at all now, only bile. "You stay out of this study, and if you see me, you walk the other way, or there's no million for you, boy. You're a s.h.i.t, and I don't like you and I don't like your kind. I know why Stahr fired you and I know what a mean little b.a.s.t.a.r.d you are and that's exactly why-"

"That was a lie!" c.u.mmings exploded. "That was bulls.h.i.t!"

"I've seen the pictures!" yelled Neville. "And don't ever interrupt me! I said that's exactly why I wanted you here-because you're a mean little b.a.s.t.a.r.d and-"

"You don't-"

"And because ghosts won't scare you!"

The words rang in the room like the clanging of the cellar door.