The Uncanny, page 7
It was James Arness, the co-star of the film, who introduced the newcomer to the Duke. Out there on location amidst dust and scrub, surrounded by mouse-eared cameras and canvas chairs. Wayne—who was in the middle of a wild, hot-blooded divorce at the time—was standing in his fringed Indian scout outfit with a bunch of sweating men in suits. When Arness called him over, Wayne approached Storm’s father with that patented swagger, thundrous and balletic at the same time. He sent a truly Duke-like gaze off towards the far horizon, then threw himself side-armed into a big handshake, which the newcomer eagerly joined.
“Duke,” said Arness, “this here is Jack Stern.”
Wayne’s gunfighter squint went up and down the younger man. He spoke—and the voice, the twang, the drop-dead Midwestern syncopation all turned out to be genuine.
“Storm,” he drawled slowly, “is the name you want.”
And so he had been Jack Storm in Hondo, in Rio Bravo, and forever after.
And there were many other things—gestures, expressions, phrases—that Storm had inherited from Wayne, through his father, who had imitated them all in developing his persona both onscreen and off. And there was this too, this photograph, that the Duke had presented to Storm personally on his ninth birthday.
Dear Rick, the inscription read, Live right, shoot straight, walk tall—and have a happy birthday. Your friend, John Wayne.
All right, shoot straight—it was a little hard to know exactly what that meant in a modern context. But the other instructions were clear enough, and tonight Storm felt the burden of them. He was pretty sure he had neither lived right nor walked particularly tall in these last few years since his divorce. There had been some drugs, and some women he’d treated shabbily. And a couple of deals that had cost him more than a couple of friends. He had boasted during that time, “I not only swim with the sharks, I sleep with the piranha.” Big man. He wasn’t so proud of that anymore.
Because there had come a Reckoning—that awful September morn. A few nights before, he had been coked, tussling in bed with a femme director who thought he would give her work. He had rolled over, fallen, and cracked his head open on the edge of the VCR. There had followed the short, dreadful stay at Cedars-Sinai. And then he had been released, bandaged, gray and visionary, everything changed. He had driven over to Mann’s National Theater in Westwood. Gotten out of his Jag and stood beneath the titanic marquee of his latest film. Hellfire. With a cutout of Jack Nicholson that must have been two stories tall. A rising billboard of flames. And the words Produced by Richard Storm running maybe six feet across, his name as big as his body. And, for the first time, Storm realized that it would all go away. Not just the poster, the credit, the success. But him, Nicholson, the audience—the theater, Westwood—the whole city, Los Angeles, plunked, rootless, in its smoky basin. The far-flung skyline, the Escher-esque coils of freeway, the villas and the slums: the earthquakes would take them, and the ocean waves. In time, America itself would fall, the millennia would make a ruin of it, like Rome. He saw these things: cockroach archaeologists trying to make sense of the rubble of Disneyland—green cows descended from aphids grazing amid the tattered remnants of the St. Louis arch—Charlton Heston pounding the sand next to the fallen Statue of Liberty—he could imagine it all.
And what then would be left of him? Big man. His mother was gone, his father was gone, his graspy bitch of a wife was gone and his house was gone with her. He had no children, no real friends, no relations whom he’d met. He did not even know a line of poetry by heart. He was utterly alone.
Storm set his coffee mug down. Blinked back tears so as not to shame himself before the Duke. Live right, shoot straight, walk tall, he thought. The time had come. Tomorrow, when he met Sophia Endering, he would remember the words with which Harper Albright had described her to him:
If she has a heart at all, it is held in check with considerable force. And if ever she is deprived of her monumental defenses, my guess is you will find her to be as fragile as bliss—and every bit as precious.
Which only underscored what Storm already knew: that love was off-limits to him. Sex, flirtation, even an excess of tenderness were all off-limits, because he would not be able to shield her from the terrible consequences. He wanted to find out if Sophia had seen the ghost of Belham Abbey? Fine. It was to be a purely metaphysical inquiry, that was it, that was all. It might be hard to restrain himself. He might be tempted. It didn’t matter.
He rose from his chair, his eyes narrowed to a gunfighter squint. He felt good. He felt strong. He felt prepared for his meeting with Sophia. His meditation had been a success, and he dwelt now within the truth he had been seeking:
A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.
8
Oh, but then she was so beautiful. The moment he saw her again in the scrumptious flesh, he felt all his resolutions weakening. This was the very next afternoon. He’d been hanging around outside the Endering Gallery for more than an hour. Pretending to study the shirts in a recessed storefront across the street. He didn’t know what store it was; he didn’t care which shirts. He was just trying and trying to figure out the best way to approach her.
The logistical problems seemed insurmountable. Should he be direct with her? Casual? Sneaky? With her glance that turned men to sand and her heart packed away under pressure, it sure sounded like she had an impressive arsenal against unwanted intrusions. He didn’t want to make a mistake.
It was already four o’clock. The winter daylight was already failing. The weather was chill and gray, and Storm was cold, his hands clenched in the pockets of his trench coat, holding it closed. And still, he couldn’t make his move.
Then he saw her—her reflection first, in the darkened storefront. Then he turned and saw her in the life, charging through the gallery doors into the deepening indigo of the afternoon. A thrillingly competent stride she had. Swift, unaffected, self-possessed. Marching without hesitation under the bright banners and bay windows of New Bond Street. Despite the cloudy sky, despite the moist wind, she wore only a light cardigan over a blouse unbuttoned at the throat. Her legs were sleek in nylon below the knee and covered with a pleated skirt above that Storm found girlish and adorable. He watched her, thinking, Oh, oh, oh. He had forgotten, until that moment, just how crazy he was about her.
He waited until she’d passed, then broke from his cover and followed. Moving quickly to keep up. Dodging between pairs of sharp-suited shoppers. Squeezing past elephantine American tourists. Struggling all the while to belt his flapping trench coat against the steady breeze. He had never tailed anyone before. It turned out to be kind of a strain on the nerves. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his own image racing over jewelery store windows and he suddenly wondered: What the hell was he doing? What if she saw him, recognized him? What the hell would he say?
Fortunately, the whole thing didn’t last that long. The green and gold flag of Sotheby’s was just ahead. Sophia was already under it. And then, without breaking step, she had straight-armed the door and disappeared inside.
Storm pulled up a moment. Another new experience: he’d never been in an auction house before. The façade of the place looked pretty daunting. A commissaire dressed like a U.S. Marine patrolled before rose marble entry columns. An obstacle course of reception desks was visible through the glass doors. Past that, there was a formidable pair of sphinxes preening on baize mats, guarding the grand staircase in the front hall. All in all, it seemed very formal and forbidding. Storm wished he’d worn a suit and tie instead of his black jeans and pearl-buttoned hoedown shirt.
But he went in. Tried to look comfortable, confident. Tiptoed clumsily over the Persian rugs spread out before the stairs. Passed between the sphinxes, started up the steps. Now, where had Sophia gotten to?
He reached the landing. He moved off into the viewing galleries. Now he was in a labyrinth of off-white partitions all hung with paintings. Fine paintings, it looked like, though he only caught glimpses of them. Waxy flesh. Golden halos. Feathery wings. Eyes turned heavenward in supplication. He could feel the ecclesiastical chill of old art as he moved down one brief corridor after another, rounded one corner after another.
He scanned the people, searching for the girl. There sure was a lot of money in the place, he could tell that right away. Husky, aggressive Americans with metallic eyes. Dark continentals, with big lips and big lapels. Silver-haired Englishmen in pinstripes that seemed to run down through the core of the earth. They all milled quietly around the maze, gliding slowly before the paintings, studying them with a faintly predatory air. Salespeople danced attendance on some of them—crisp young gentlemen or cardiganed sylphs—but no Sophia.
Storm stepped out into a central aisle and came to a stop with a rosy-toned crucifixion on the wall above him. He cursed silently, looking this way and that. He seemed to have lost her.
And then, there she was. All alone in the farthest corner. Motionless before a single painting there. Perfectly placed …
Storm moved up behind her, his hands dangling gawkily at his sides. She’d worn her hair up, and now he saw the downy nape of her neck. And saw that the track lights meant for the paintings brought out a streak of auburn in her black twist. And now he was right up close to her and caught the scent of her and it was like—he didn’t know what—like a garden. Heartbreaking. Forbidden. He wanted to turn before she saw him and get the hell out of there.
But now, as his eyes traveled over her, he noticed something else. The painting she was looking at, the lone painting on the off-white wall. His focus shifted, and he saw it clearly.
“Wow!” he whispered aloud.
Sophia whipped around, looked up at him. Let out a quick breath, surprised.
But Storm kept staring over her shoulder at the picture.
It was the very image of Black Annie.
The resemblance seemed incredible to him. The painting showed night falling over blasted trees, the tortured branches drooping over broken stones, the trunks sinking into a deep brown gloom which seemed to rise from the rough earth to swallow them. And there, in that haunted setting, was the ruined chapel. A wedge of wall. A splintered reticulation of a window gaping on a barren sky. And under it, the cowled figure, profoundly somber, moving over the blighted winter ground. Black Annie.
True, there were two other figures in the background, two other cowled phantoms moving in tandem with the first. Maybe it wasn’t like the story exactly. Still, thought Storm, what were the odds against the two of them meeting over just such a scene?
“It isn’t incredible at all,” Sophia said to him curtly, as they walked back along New Bond Street together. It was full dark now. The bays and storefronts were lighted. Glittering jewels and mellow paintings showed behind the glass, warm against the night. Above them, the shop banners, sinking into shadow, made the street seem narrower, more homely than it was. And still, the pavement was crowded with shoppers and tourists, who jostled the two of them on either side. “German Romantic and English Gothic drank pretty freely from the same well, as it were. It was all a sort of reaction to the Enlightenment, all that logic and science and classicism. The German Romantics wanted to bring back a bit of the mystery and religion of the Middle Ages. That’s where the ruined abbeys and cathedrals come in: a nostalgia for the days of faith. Your ghost story—‘Black Annie,’ was it?—that came later, a sort of cheap, commercial version of the idea in which the spirit world is accepted as real, yah? What Rhinehart was trying to show was that the world as we see it is never a thing-in-itself but is always infused, a la Kant, with our own spiritual consciousness.”
“Uh-huh,” said Storm, whose own spiritual consciousness was infused with the V of creamy flesh beneath the hollow of her throat, and the scent of her on the cold air, and that brittle accent, which absolutely slew him. All the same, he couldn’t help noticing that this lecture of hers was rather brisk and distant, dismissive almost. As if she were waving him away. He wanted to ask her, What about the ghost of Belham Abbey, out by your father’s house? What about the fact you dropped your glass when I read the story? But he sensed that if he did, she would shut him out completely. So he only said, “I don’t know. That painting—it sure looked like Black Annie to me.”
She brushed this aside, offhanded and yet insistent. “ ’Fraid not. It’s Rhinehart’s romantic version of the Magi, that’s all. It’s supposed to be the Three Kings bringing their gifts to the infant Christ. We know that because it was part of a Nativity triptych. One of the other panels shows a very folkloric sort of Madonna in the woods, the other’s just the babe in the manger. I’m afraid it hasn’t anything to do with murdered nuns and that sort of thing.”
“Still, isn’t it kind of a coincidence? Me coming over, you standing there …”
“Not really,” she answered at once, very coolly now. “We’re considering making a bid at the auction next week. I don’t see any sort of coincidence about it.” And with that settled, she busied herself straightening the golden brooch pinned to the breast of her cardigan: a design something like a horseshoe enclosing something like a figure eight.
Storm was afraid to press the point. “That’s nice,” he said, for want of something better. “Nice brooch.”
’Oh, thank you. It was my mother’s.” She went on fussing with it, not even glancing up. “I haven’t worn it since I was a child.”
They reached the front of her gallery. Stood between two little spruces in cast-iron planters, under the wine-red awning with Endering Gallery written in gold letters, and beside the window in which was displayed a landscape of rocky hills and misty distances in a heavy frame. Sophia paused here with her hand on the door, her face turned up to him, her brown eyes remote. He stood over her with his shoulders low, his own hands pressed deep into his trench coat, his own eyes flooded with longing and sadness.
“Would you like to come in?” she said finally—reluctantly, he thought. “We have plenty of works from the period.”
She held the door open. Storm went into the gallery.
The place was darkly paneled, dimly lit, a long room hung with paintings all the way down the line. A balcony ran along the wall to his left, with another long gallery of paintings above.
There was a pretty blonde seated at a desk just in front. She was only a bit younger than Sophia, but she smiled up at her deferentially. When she held out a few pink message slips, Sophia took them from her with hardly a glance.
“You see? It’s really just the style you’re reacting to,” Sophia said to Storm. “Look around. You’ll find half a dozen paintings in here that remind you of your ghost story.”
Then she turned away from him, leaned on the desk, and the two women conferred in low voices as Storm moved deeper into the room. He pretended to look at the paintings on the wall. The tortuous rocks piercing turbulent skies. The crucifixes shooting up among stark, towering pines. Cathedrals draped with ominous gloamings. And moons dying into misty seas. He took in only a sense of their haze and fervor, image fragments and the seething ambience. He was seething himself meanwhile. Struggling with an agony of regret. All this time wasted. All this blather about paintings and theories and whatnot. And now he was going to walk out of here and never see her again.
“That one hung in Carinhall.” Sophia was standing behind him suddenly. He found her looking past him at the painting before which he’d stopped: a silhouetted castle on a silhouetted hill.
Storm gazed at her blankly. “Carinhall?”
“It belonged to Hermann Goering during the war,” she said. “The Nazis loved this sort of thing. The medieval imagery, all the links to folklore, all the hearkening back to the Holy Roman Empire, it was right up their street. Some people say German Romanticism—the malaise allemand—was responsible for the Third Reich. They say the work is tainted with evil …”
Storm gave a slow shrug. He remembered what Harper had said about the Nazis and her father. He thought maybe he should say something to reassure her. “Well. Those guys are all dead anyway,” he said after a while.
Sophia shifted her attention to him, smiled wryly. “The past is past, you mean.”
“Hey. If the past isn’t past, what is? Right?”
She seemed about to answer, but said nothing, only shook her head, her lips parted. Then, as if confused, she looked away, fussed with her brooch again. “I think nothing ever dies,” she murmured. “It all gets chiseled into the skin of things.”
And then, when she lifted her eyes to his again, to Storm’s astonishment, everything was different. They had a “moment.” That’s what they called it in the movie business: a “moment.” “We need a moment between the hero and the girl here,” Storm would say about a script that wasn’t working. “When they first meet, there’s gotta be a moment.” A “moment” was an exchanged glance, a gesture, a frisson, something where emotion or information passed between two people without words. When Sophia lifted her eyes to his, their distance, their flatness, their coolness had fallen away. Her gaze was wide and deep and desperate and there was a “moment” between them, in which Storm thought, Oh man, she’s in trouble. She’s afraid.
But a moment was all it was. It ended so quickly he wasn’t even sure it had happened. She sniffed disdainfully, brusquely turned her head. Storm didn’t know what to say. He gave a nervous laugh, a nervous gesture.
“Well, I gotta admit, all these paintings all together like this, it does make the place look pretty ghosty,” he said. “Don’t you ever get nervous when you’re here by yourself?”
“Never,” she answered at once, facing him again. And the vehemence of what she said next—all in those crystal tones—astonished him.
“I love it here,” she told him. “This is where I want to die.”
9
A strange feeling came over him now as he wandered home, a thundercloud of foreboding. Nothing felt right to him. Nothing felt good or clear. The sensation rose from the center of him and seeped out into his surroundings. Everything began to seem dead to him and strange.
