Horrible Imaginings

THE GHOST LIGHT

Afterwards Wolf and Terri couldn’t decide whether little Tommy’s slightly off-beat request about the green and blue night light (that later came to be called the ghost light) had come before or after the first dinner table talk about ghosts with the white-haired old man (Wolf’s widowed professor emeritus father, Cassius Kruger, a four-years reformed alcoholic) in the living room of the latter’s dark, too big, rather spooky house on the steep wooded hillside of canyon-narrow Goodland Valley up in Marin County just north of San Francisco that was subject to mud slides during seasons of heavy rain.

For one thing, there’d been more than one such conversation, scattered over several evenings. And they’d been quite low key and unscary, at least at first, more about memorable literary ghost stories than real or purported ghosts, so that neither Terri nor Wolf had been particularly worried about Tommy being disturbed by them.

Little Tommy Kruger was a solemn, precocious four-year-old whose rather adult speech patterns hadn’t yet been corrupted by school and the chatter of other kids. Although not particularly subject to night terrors, he’d always slept with a tiny light of some sort in the room, more his mother’s idea than his. In his bedroom at his grandfather’s this was a small, weak bulb plugged in at floor level and cased in tiny panes of dark green and deep blue glass set in tin edges crafted in Mexico.

When in the course of the putting-to-bed ritual on the second or third (or maybe fourth) night of their visit Wolf knelt to switch on the thing, Tommy said, “Don’t do that, Pa. I don’t want it tonight.”

Wolf looked up at his tucked-in son questioningly.

Terri had a thought based on her own unspoken feeling about the light. “Don’t you like the colors, Tommy?” she asked. “Wolf, there’s a plug-in fixture like this one, only with milky white glass, under that strange old painting of your mother in the living room. I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind if we changed—”

“No, don’t do that,” Tommy interrupted. “I don’t mind these colors at all, Ma, really. I just don’t want a light tonight.”

“Should I take this one away?” Wolf asked.

“No, don’t do that, Pa, please. Leave it there, but don’t turn it on. But leave the door to the hall open a little.”

“Right,” his father affirmed vigorously.

When good-night kisses were done and they were safely beyond Tommy’s hearing, Wolf said, “I guess Tom’s decided he’s too grown up to need a light to sleep by.”

“Maybe. Yes, I guess so,” Terri agreed somewhat reluctantly. “But I’m glad it’s off, anyhow. Loni said it gave the room a corpse look, and I thought so too.” Loni Mills was Terri Kruger’s attractive younger sister. She’d come with them on their visit to meet Wolf’s father, but had decided the day before that she needed to get back to campus a couple of days before winter vacation ended at the Oregon college where she was a sophomore.

Terri added, frowning, “But why did he make a thing of your not taking the fixture away?”

“Obvious.” Wolf grinned. “Little guy’s keeping his options open. So if he should get scared, it’s there to turn on. Good thinking. Also shows the colors don’t bother him. Why’d Loni think of blue and green as corpse colors, I wonder?”

“You’ve seen a fresh drowned person, haven’t you?” Terri responded lightly. “But why don’t you ask Cassius that one? It’s the sort of question gets him talking.”

“Right,” Wolf agreed without rancor. “Maybe I will.”

And true enough, there’d been a couple of times during the visit (though not as many as Wolf had feared) when conversation had languished and they’d been grateful for any topic that would get it going again, such as oddities of psychology, Cassius’ academic field, or ghost stories, in which they all seemed to share an interest. Matter of fact, the visit was for Wolf one of ultimate reconciliation with his father after a near-separation from both parents for a period of twenty years or so, while Terri was meeting her father-in-law, and Tommy his grandfather, for the first time.

The background for this was simply that the marriage of Wolf’s father and mother, Cassius Kruger and Helen Hostelford, had progressively become, after Wolf’s early childhood, a more and more unhappy, desperately quarrelsome, and alcoholic one, full of long, cold estrangements and fleeting reconciliations, yet neither partner had had the gumption to break it off and try something else. At the earliest teen age possible, Wolf (it was short for Wolfram, a fancy of his father) had wisely separated himself from them and largely gone it on his own, getting a degree in biology and working up a career in veterinary medicine and animal management, feeling his way through an unsuccessful early marriage and several living arrangements, until he’d met Terri. His mother’s death several years back from a mixture of alcohol and barbiturate sleeping pills hadn’t improved his relationship with his father—the opposite, rather, since he’d been somewhat closer to Helen and inclined to side with her in the unutterably wearisome marriage war—but then the old man, whom he’d expected to go downhill fast once he was alone, had surprised him by pulling out of his alcoholism (which had again and again threatened to end his academic career, another wearisomely repetitive series of crises) by the expedient of quitting drinking entirely and slowly rebuilding the wreckage of his body into at least a fairly good semblance of health.

Wolf had been able to keep tabs on his father’s progress through letters he got from an old crony of his mother, a gossipy and humorous theatrical widow named Matilda “Tilly” Hoyt, who was also a Marin resident not far from Goodland Valley and kept in touch with the old man after Helen’s death; and from infrequent, cold-bloodedly short hello-good-bye solo visits he paid Cassius to check up on him that came from a dim unwilling feeling of responsibility and from an incredulous and almost equally unwilling feeling of hope.

After several years, his father’s repeated good showings, his own reawakening good memories from early childhood before the marriage war had started, the old man’s seemingly sincere, even enthusiastic, interest in Wolf’s profession and all his son’s life, for that matter, plus some encouragement from Terri, worked a perhaps inevitable change in Wolf. He talked more with Cassius on his solo visits and found it good, and he began to think seriously of accepting the old man’s repeated invitation to bring the new family to visit.

He talked it over first with Tilly Hoyt, though, calling on her at her sunny cottage nearer the beach and the thundering, chill, swift-currented Pacific than the treacherous brown hills which rains could rumble.

“Oh, yes, he’s changed, all right,” she assured Wolf, “and as far as the liquor goes, I don’t think he’s had a drop since two or three months after Helen died. He’s got some guilt there, I think, which showed in odd ways after she died, like his bringing down from the attic that weird painting of her by that crazy French-Canadian—or was it Spanish-Mexican?—painter they used to have around.” She searched Wolf’s eyes unhappily, saying, “Cassius was pretty rough with Helen when he got very drunk, but I guess you know about that.”

Wolf nodded darkly.

She went on, “God knows I got my share of black eyes from Pat when he was still around, the bum.” She grimaced. “But I gave as good as I got, I sincerely hope, and somehow though we were fighting all the time, we were always making up a little more of the time. But with Helen and Cassius anything like that seemed to cut deeper, down to the bone, take longer to heal, they were both such nice, idealistic, goofy, perfectionist people in their ways, couldn’t accept the violence that was in them. And the fault wasn’t always on Cassius’ side. Your mother wasn’t the easiest person to get on with; she had a bitter streak, a cold-as-death witch thing, but I guess you know that too. Anyway, now Cassius is, well, what you might call… chastened.” She curled her lip in humorous distaste at the word and went on briskly, “I know he wants to meet your new family, Wolf. Whenever I see him he talks a lot about Tommy—he’s proud as anything to be a grandfather, and about Terri too, even Loni—he’s always showing me their pictures—and he positively makes a hero of you.”

So Wolf had accepted his father’s invitation for himself and Terri and Tom and Loni, and everything had seemed to work out fine from the start. The days were spent in outings around the Bay, both north and south of the Golden Gate and east into the Napa wine country and Berkeley-Oakland, outings in which Cassius rarely joined and Wolf enjoyed playing tour guide, the evenings in talking about them and catching up on the lost years and comfortably growing a little closer. The old man had spread himself and not only had his cavernous place cleaned up but also had the Latino couple, the Martinezes, who looked after it part time, stay extra hours and cook dinners. In addition he had a couple of neighbors over from time to time, while Tilly was an almost constant dinner guest, and he insisted on serving liquor while not partaking of it himself, though he did nothing to call attention to the latter. This so touched Wolf that he hadn’t the heart to say anything about his father’s almost constant cigarette smoking, though the old man’s occasional emphysemic coughing fits worried him. But the other old people smoked too, Tilly especially, and on the whole everything went so well that neither Loni’s premature departure nor the occasional silences that fell on their host cast much of a damper.

The talk about ghost stories had started just after dinner at the big table in the living room with the masklike painting of Wolf’s mother Helen with the little white light below it, looking down on them from the mantelpiece on which there also stood the half dozen bottles of sherry, Scotch, and other liquors Cassius kept for his guests. The conversation had begun with the mention of haunted paintings when Wolf brought up Montague Rhodes James’ story, “The Mezzotint.”

“That’s the one, isn’t it,” Terri had said helpfully, “where an old engraving changes over a couple of days when several different people look at it at different times, and then they compare notes and realize they’ve been witnessing the re-enactment of some horror that happened long ago, just before or just after the print was engraved?”

“You know, that’s so goddam complicated,” Tilly objected, but “Yes, indeed!” Cassius took up enthusiastically. “At first the ghost is seen from the rear and you don’t know it’s one; it’s just a figure in a black hood and robe crawling across the moonlit lawn toward a big house.”

“And the next time someone sees the picture,” Wolf said, picking up the account, “the figure is gone, but one of the first-floor windows of the house is shown as being open, so that someone looking at the picture then observes, ‘He must have got in.’“

“And then the next to last time they look at the picture and it’s changed,” Terri continued, “the figure’s back and striding away from the house, only you can’t see much of its face because of the hood, except that it’s fearfully thin, and cradled in its arms it’s got this baby it’s kidnapped…” She broke off abruptly and a little uncertainly, noticing that Tommy was listening intently.

“And then what, Ma?” he asked.

“The last time the picture changes,” his father answered for her, his voice tranquil, “the figure’s gone and whatever it might have been carrying. There’s just the house in the moonlight, and the moon.”

Tommy nodded and said, “The ghost stayed inside the picture really, just like a movie. Suppose he could come out, sort of off the picture, I mean?”

Cassius frowned, lighting a cigarette. “Ambrose Bierce got hold of that same idea, Tommy, and he wrote a story, a shorter one, about a picture that changed, only as in the James story no one ever saw it at the moment it changed. The picture was mostly calm ocean with the edge of a beach in the foreground. Out in the distance was a little boat with someone in it rowing toward shore. As it got closer you could see that the rower was a Chinaman with long snaky moustaches—”

“Chinaperson,” Loni corrected and bit her lip.

“Chinaperson,” Cassius repeated with a nod and a lingering smile at her. “Anyhow as he beached the boat and came toward the front of the picture you could see he had a long knife. Next time someone looked at it, the picture was empty except for the boat in the edge of the wavelets. But the time after that the Chinaperson was back in the boat and rowing away. Only now lying in the stern of the boat was the corpse of the… person he’d killed. Now I suppose you could say he got out of the picture for a while.”

Shaking his head a little, Tommy said, ‘That’s good, but I don’t mean that way ‘zactly, Grandpa. I mean if you saw him step or float out of the picture, come off the picture like, same size and everything as in the picture.”

“That would be something,” Wolf said, catching his son’s idea. “Mickey Mouse, say, mouse life-size—no, comic book size—waltzing around on the coffee table. That tiny, his squeak might be too high to hear.”

“But Mickey Mouse isn’t a ghost, Pa,” Tommy objected.

“No,” his grandfather agreed, “though I remember an early animation where he challenged a castle run by ghosts and fought a duel with a six-legged spider. But that surely is an interesting idea of yours, Tommy,” he went on, his gaze roving around the room and coming to rest on the large reproduction of Picasso’s “Guernica” that dominated one wall, “except that for some pictures,” he said, “it wouldn’t be so good if their figures came out of the frames and walked, or floated.”

“I guess so,” Tommy agreed, wrinkling his nose at the looming bull man and the other mad faces and somber patterns in Picasso’s masterpiece.

Terri started to say something to him; then her eyes shifted to Cassius. Wolf was watching her.

Loni yielded to the natural impulse to look around at the other pictures, gauging their suitability for animation. She hesitated at the dark backgrounded one which showed the head only, all by itself like a Benda mask, of a rather young Helen Kruger with strange though striking flesh tones. She started to make a remark, but caught herself.

But Tommy had been watching her and, remembering something he’d overheard before dinner, guessed what she might have been going to say and popped out with, “I bet Grandma Helen would make a pretty green ghost if she came out of her frame.”

‘Tommy…” Terry began, while, “I didn’t—” Loni started involuntarily to protest, when Cassius, whose eyes had flashed rekindling interest rather than hurt at Tommy’s observation, cut in lightly and rapidly, yet with a strange joking or mocking intensity (hard to tell which) that soon had them all staring at him, “Yes, she would, wouldn’t she? Tiny flakes of pink and green paint come crackling off the canvas without losing their configuration as a face…. Esteban always put a lot of, some said too much, green in his flesh—he said it gave it life…. Yes, a whole flight, or flock, or fester, or flutter, or flurry, yes flurry of greenish flakes floating off and round about in formation, swooping this way and that through the air, as though affixed to an invisible balloon responding to faintest air currents, a witches-sabbath swirling and swarming…. And then, who knows? Perhaps, their ghost venture done, settling rustlingly back onto the canvas so perfectly into their original position that not the slightest crack or faintest irregularity would be evidence of—”

He broke off suddenly as an inhalation changed into a coughing fit that bent him over, but before anyone had time to voice a remark or move to assist him, he had mastered it, and his strangely intent eyes searched them and he began to speak again, but in an altogether different voice and much more slowly.

“Excuse me, my dears. I let my imagination run away with me. You might call it the intoxication of the grotesque? I encouraged Tommy to indulge in it too, and I ask your pardons.” He lit another cigarette as he went on speaking measuredly. “But let me say in extenuation of our behavior that Esteban Bernadorre was a very strange man and had some very strange ideas about color and light and pigments, strange even for a painter. Surely you must remember him, Wolf, though you weren’t much older than Tommy here when that painting of Helen was executed.”

“I remember Esteban,” Wolf said, still studying his father uneasily and revolving in his mind the words the old man had poured out with such compulsive rapidity and then so calculatedly, as if reciting a speech, “though not so much about his being a painter as that he was able to fix a toy robot I’d broke, and that he rode a motorcycle, oh yes, and that I thought he must be terribly old because he had a few grey hairs.”

Cassius chuckled. “That’s right, Esteban had that mechanical knack so strange in an artist and always had some invention or other he was working on. In his spare time he panned for gold—oh, he was up to every sort of thing that might make him money—the gold-panning was partly what the motorcycle was for, to take him up into the little canyons where the little goldiferous streams are. I remember he talked about vibrations—vibes—before anyone else did. He used to say that all vibrations were one and that all colors were alive, only that red and yellow were the full life colors—blood and sunlight—while blue was the death, no, life-in-death color, the blue of empty sky, the indigo of outer space….” He chuckled again, reflectively. “You know,” he said, “Esteban wasn’t really much of a draftsman; he couldn’t draw hardly anything worth a damn except faces; that’s why he worked out that portrait technique of making faces like hanging Benda masks; that way he never got involved in hands or ears or other body parts he was apt to botch.”

“That’s strange,” said Wolf, “because the only other one of his pictures I seem to remember now from those days—I think now that it had some influence on my life, my choice of profession—was one of a leopard.”

Cassius’ sudden laugh was excited. “You know, Wolf,” he said, “I believe I’ve got that very picture up in the attic! Along with some other stuff Esteban asked me if he could store there. He was going to send for them or come back for them but he never did. In fact it was the last time I ever saw him, or heard from him for that matter. It’s not a good picture, he never could sell it, the anatomy’s all wrong and somehow a lot of green got into it that shouldn’t have. I’ll take you up and show it to you, Wolf, if you’d like. But tomorrow. It’s too late tonight.”

‘That’s right,” Terri echoed somewhat eagerly. “Time for bed, Tommy. Time for bed long ago.”

And later, when she and Wolf were alone in their bedroom, she confided in him, “You know, your father gave me a turn tonight. It was when he was talking about those dry flakes of green paint vibrating in the air in the shape of a face. He dwelt on them so! I think imagining them brought on his coughing fit.”

“It could have,” Wolf agreed thoughtfully.

The third-floor attic was as long as the house. Its front window seemed too high above the descending hillside, its rear one too close to it, shutting off the morning sunlight. Cassius piloted Wolf through the debris of an academic lifetime to where a half dozen canvases, some of them wrapped in brown paper, were stacked against the wall behind a kitchen chair on which rested a dust-filmed chunky black cylindrical object about the size and shape of a sealed-in electric generator.

“What’s that?” Wolf asked.

“One of Esteban’s crazy inventions,” his father answered offhandedly, as he tipped the canvases forward one by one and peered down between them, hunting for the leopard painting, “some sort of ultrasonic generator that was supposed to pulverize crushed ore or, no, maybe agitate it when it was suspended in water and get the heavier gold flakes out that way, a mechanical catalyst for panning or placering, yes, that was it!” He paused in his peering search to look up at Wolf. “Esteban was much impressed by a wild claim of the aged Tesla (you know, Edison’s rival, the inventor of alternating current) that he could build a small, portable device that could shake buildings to pieces, maybe set off local earthquakes, by sympathetic vibrations. That ultrasonic generator there, or whatever he called it, was Esteban’s attempt in the same general direction, though with more modest aims—which is a sort of wonder in itself considering Esteban’s temperament. Of course it never worked; none of Esteban’s great inventions did.” He shrugged.

“He fixed my robot,” Wolf mused. Then, somewhat incredulously, his voice rising, “You mean he left it here with you, and the other stuff, and actually never came back for it, even wrote? And you didn’t do anything about it either, write him at least?”

Cassius shrugged more broadly. “He was that sort of person. As for me, I think I tried to write him once or twice, but the letters came back. Or weren’t answered.” He smiled unhappily and said softly, “Alcohol’s a great forgettery, you know, a great eraser, or at least blurrer, softener….” With a small gesture he indicated the shelves of books, the piled boxes of old files and papers between them and the ladder to the second floor. “Alcohol’s washed through everything up here—the university, Helen, Esteban, all my past—and greyed it all. That’s alcohol dust on the books.” He chuckled and his voice briskened. “And now to things of today. Here’s the picture I promised you.”

He straightened himself, drew a canvas on which he’d been keeping his hand out of the stack with a flourish, wiped it off on his sleeve, and faced it to Wolf.

It was a medium-size oil painting, wider than high, of a golden leopard with black spots like tiny footprints, stretched out on a branch in a sea, a flood, of green leaves. You knew it was high in the tree because the branch was thin and the green sunlight the leaves transmitted was bright, so all-suffusingly bright that it gave a greenish cast to the leopard’s sleek fur, Cassius had been right about that. And also about the bad anatomy too, for Wolf at once noted errors of muscle placement and underlying bony structure.

But the face! Or muzzle or mask, rather, that was as magnificent as memory had kept it for him, a wonderfully savage sensitive visage, watchful and wild, the quintessence of the feline….

Cassius was saying, “You can see he’s even got the eyes wrong, giving them circular pupils instead of slits.”

“In that one point he happens to be right,” Wolf said, happy to get in a word for the man who, he was beginning to remember, had been something of a childhood hero to him. “The leopard does not have slit eyes like a house cat, but pupils exactly like ours. It’s that detail which gives him a human look.”

“Ah so,” Cassius conceded. “I didn’t know that. Live and learn. He should have painted just that, used the mask trick he did with his pictures of people.”

Wolf’s gaze and mind returned to the black object. He looked it over more closely without handling it, except to brush off dust here and there. “How the devil was it supposed to be powered? I can’t see any place for plugging in wires, just the one switch on top, which indicates it was run by electricity.”

“Batteries, I think he told me,” the old man said, and, bolder or less cautious than his son, reached over and pushed the switch.

It was, at first, to Wolf holding it, as if a very distant unsuspected ponderous beast had roused and begun to tramp toward them across unimagined miles or light years. Under his hands the black cylinder shook a little, then began to vibrate faster and faster, while in his ears a faint buzzing became a humming and then a higher and higher pitched whine.

The unexpectedness of it paralyzed Wolf for a moment, yet it was he rather than his father who thrust back the switch and turned off the thing.

Cassius was looking at it in mild surprise and with what seemed to be a shade of reproach. “Well, fancy that!” he said lightly. “Esteban returning to us through his works. I never dreamed—This seems to be my morning for misjudging things.”

“Batteries that last twenty or more years—?” Wolf uttered incredulously and then didn’t know how to go on.

His father shrugged, which was not the answer Wolf was looking for, and said, “Look, I’m going to take this picture downstairs. I agree it has possibilities. Could you carry that… er… thing? I know it’s too heavy for me, but perhaps we should have a look at it later. Or something…” he trailed off vaguely.

Wolf nodded curtly, thinking, Yes, and shut it away safely where neither Tommy nor anyone else can get their eager little unthinking hands on it. He found himself strangely annoyed by his father’s irresponsibility, or over-casualness, or whatever it was. Up to now the old man had seemed to him such a normal sort of reformed or arrested alcoholic. But now—? He hefted the black cylinder. It was heavy.

He found himself wondering, as he followed the slow-moving Cassius to the front of the attic, what other time bombs there might be, in the old man’s mind as well as the house, waiting to be detonated.

But his thoughts were somewhat diverted when he glanced out the front attic window. A short way down the hillside and to the side of the house amongst the nearest trees and further fenced by tall shrubs was a grassy bower that was bathed in sunlight and into which he could look down from his vantage point. Sprawled supine at its center on a long black beach towel was Loni clad in black wraparound sunglasses, a quite splendid sight which somehow reminded Wolf of a certain wariness Terri had had of her then thirteen-year-old sister during their courtship and also reminded him perhaps to tell the girl a cautionary tale or two about the Trailside Murderer who had terrified Marin County some years back.

When he got the black cylinder downstairs he set it, at Cassius’ direction, on the high mantelpiece, which would at least put it out of Tommy’s reach, and as an extra precaution taped the switch in the off position with two short lengths of friction adhesive. The old man had propped the painting on a straight-backed chair standing against the wall nearby.

Wolf’s speculations about Cassius and the house were further driven from his mind, or to its shadowy outer reaches at any rate, by the day’s activities when he drove Terri and Tommy up into Sonoma County through the Valley of the Moon to the Jack London Museum and led them through the big trees to the fire-darkened gaunt stone ruins of London’s Wolf House. (Tommy made a solemn joke of calling it “Pa House,” while Wolf promised to show him some real wolves at Golden Gate Park tomorrow.)

That must have been the day, Wolf figured out later, of Loni’s impulsive departure for her Oregon college, for she wasn’t there the next morning to hear Cassius’ dream of the giant spider and Esteban (though Tilly was, who’d come over early to share their late breakfast). It was also the day when Weather confirmed that the big storm front building up in the North Pacific had veered south and was headed for San Francisco.

Cassius prefaced his account of the night’s somnial pageantry with some nervous and veering verbal flamboyancies. He seemed a bit hollow-eyed and overwrought, as if sleep hadn’t rested him and he were clowning around and gallumphing to hide the fact, and for the first time Wolf found himself wondering whether their visit hadn’t begun to tire the old man.

“Never dream these days,” Cassius grumbled, “just feelings and flashes, as I think I’ve told you, Terri, but last night I sure had a doozie. You brought it on me, Wolf, by making me go up to the attic and look at that old stuff of Esteban’s I’d forgotten was there.” He nodded toward the black cylinder and green-flooded leopard painting. “Yes, sir, Tommy, your Pa gave me one doozie of a dream.” He paused, wrinkled his nose, and looked comically sideways at Wolf. “No, that isn’t true at all, is it? I was the one who told you about it and led you up there. I brought it all on myself! See, Tommy, never trust what your Grandpa says, his mind’s slipping.

“Anyhow,” he launched out, “I was standing in the front attic window, which had become French windows nine feet tall with yellow silk drapes, and I was working away on a big kirschwasser highball. I sometimes drink in my dreams,” he explained to Terri. “It’s one of my few surviving pleasures. Sometimes wake up dream-drunk for a blessed moment or two.

“Around me in my dream the whole house was jumping, first floor, second floor, attic turned ballroom. People, lights, music, the tintinnabulation of alcoholic crystal. Benighted Goodland Valley resounded with the racket from stem to stern. Even the darkness jumped. I realized that your Grandma, Tommy, was giving one of her huge parties, to which she invited everyone and which generally bored me stiff.” He looked surprised and tapped himself on his mouth. “That’s another lie,” he said. “I enjoyed those parties more than she did. She gave them just to please me. Keep remembering what I told you about trusting your Grandpa, Tommy.

“Anyway,” he went on, “there I was carousing on the edge of nothing, leaning against the friendly dark outside, for the French windows were pure ha-ha.” He explained to Tommy, “That’s a place in a British fancy garden where there should be a flight of steps, but isn’t. You start down it and—boomp. Hence ha-ha. Very funny. The British have a wonderfully subtle sense of humor.

“But in my dream I was gifted with an exquisite sense of balance. I could easily have walked a tightwire from where I was to the opposite crest of the valley, balancing myself with sips of kirsch and soda, if my dream had only provided one. But just then I felt something tug at my trousers, trying to topple me forward.

“I looked down at my leg, and there was a naked baby no higher than my knee, a beautiful cherub straight out of Tiepolo or Titian, but with a nasty look on her cute little face, yanking ineffectually at my pant leg with both hands. I looked straight down the outside of the house and saw, just below me way down there, a new cellar door of the slanting flat kind thrown wide open, revealing a short flight of steps leading down into the basement, from which light was pouring, as if the party were going on there too.

“But a green tinge in that light telegraphed ‘Danger!’ to my brain, and that was no lie for suddenly there was rearing out of the cellar up toward me a huge green and yellow spider with eight glaring jet black eyes and terribly long legs, the first pair so super long, like the two tentacular arms of a squid, that they could reach the attic.

“At that moment I felt something that made me look back at my leg, and I saw that the cherub had let go of my pants and was starting to overbalance and fall (she had no wings as a proper cherub should).

“With one hand I steadied the baby-skinned creature and with the back of the other (oh, my balance was positively miraculous) I knocked aside the spider leg that was about to touch the cherub.

“At the same instant I saw that the monster was only a large pillow toy made of lustrous stuffed velvet, the eyes circles of black sequins, and that the whole business was a put-on, a party joke on me.”

Cassius took a swallow of cold coffee and lit another cigarette. “Well, that ended that part of the dream,” he said, “and the next I knew I was standing on the dark hillside beside the house, the party still going on, and calculating how many inches the hill had shifted down and forward during the last rain (it never has, you know, not an iota) and wondering what the next rain was going to do to it—guess I was anticipating today’s weather forecast—when I heard someone call my name softly.

“I looked down the hillside to the road and saw a small closed car, one of those early Austins or maybe a Hillman Minx, drawing up to park there. And, this is a funny part, although it was black night, I could see the driver silhouetted inside, as if by an impossibly belated sunset afterglow, and although he was wearing a big white motorcycle crash helmet I identified him at once—something about his posture, the way he held himself—as Esteban Bernadorre, whom I haven’t seen for almost a quarter of a century.

“‘Esteban?’ I called hoarsely, and from the tiny car came the quiet, clipped, clearly enunciated response, ‘Certainly, I will be happy to coffee with you, Cassius.’

“Next thing I knew I was walking uphill toward the house with Esteban close beside me. As we approached the open door, which was filled with a knot of animatedly conversing drinkers—a sort of overflow from the hubbub inside—I realized Esteban was still wearing his crash helmet, oversize gauntlets too, and that I still hadn’t greeted him properly.

“Preparatory to introducing him to the others, I swung in front of him, offering my hand and trying to discern his face in the cavernous seeming helmet’s depths. He drew off his gauntlet and shook hands. His hand was oversize, as its glove had been, and wet, gritty, and soft all at once. After shaking mine, he lifted his hand and made the motion of wiping the back of it across his eyes, and I saw it was composed of wet grey ashes except where the wiping motion had bared a narrow edge of pink flayed flesh. And at the same time I saw that his eyes were nothing but charred black holes, infinitely deep, and his whole face granular black char wet as the ashes.

“I swiftly turned to check how much, if anything, those in the door had seen, for we were now quite close to them. I saw that the centralmost carouser was Helen, my dear wife, looking very dashing in a silver lame evening dress.

“She said to me, gesturing impatiently with her empty glass, ‘Oh, we’re quite familiar with Esteban’s boundless self-pity and self-dramatizing tricks. You should know him by now. He’s forever parading his little wounds and making a big production of them.’

“At that moment I remembered that Helen was really dead, and that woke me up, as it generally does.”

And with that Cassius blew out his breath in a humorously intended sigh of achievement and looked around for applause. Instead he encountered something close to stony gazes from Terri and Tilly too, Wolf looked both doubtful and slightly embarrassed, while Tommy’s face had lost the excited smile it had had during the cherub-spider part of the dream, and the child avoided his grandfather’s gaze. The four faces, for that matter, were a study in varieties of avoidance.

“Well,” the old man grumbled apologetically after a moment, “I guess I should have realized beforehand that that was an X-rated dream. Not on account of sex or violence, but the horrifies, you might say. I’m sorry, ladies, I got carried away. Tommy, Gramps is not only a liar, he never knows when to stop. I thought my dream was a pretty good show, but I guess it overdid on the unexplained horrifies. They can be tricky, not to everyone’s taste.”

“That’s true enough,” Wolf said with a placating little laugh as Cassius went off into the kitchen to raise mild hell with the Martinezes about something. Wolf was glad to turn his attention to getting the day’s drive to Golden Gate Park under way. That boiled down to plans for Tom and himself, since Terri decided she was tired from yesterday and wanted to gossip with Tilly, maybe drive over to the older woman’s place. This didn’t exactly displease Wolf, as the thought had struck him that Terri might be as tired as his father of their visit, maybe more so, and a day with Tilly Hoyt might set that right, and in any case give him time to rethink his own thoughts.

Tommy was uncommonly silent during the drive down, but a rowboat ride on Stow Lake and a visit to the buffaloes got him cheerful and moderately talkative again. Wolf couldn’t produce any live wolves but at least found the kid a group of stuffed ones at the Academy of Sciences, while both of them enjoyed the speeding, circling dolphins at the Steinhart Aquarium, the only seemingly simplistic Bufano animal sculptures in the court outside, and the even more simplified, positively sketchy food in the cafeteria below.

Emerging in the court again, their attention was captured by the hurrying hungry clouds, which devoured the red skeletal Sutro TV tower as they watched.

“Pa, are clouds alive?” Tommy asked.

“They act that way, don’t they?” Wolf agreed. “But, no, they’re no more alive than, say, the ocean is, or mountains.”

“They’re made of snowflakes, aren’t they?”

“Some of them are, Tom. Mostly high, feathery ones called cirrus. Those’re made of ice flakes, you could say, tiny needles of ice. But these we’re looking at are just water, billions of billions of tiny drops of water that sail through the air together.”

“But drops of water aren’t white, Pa. Milk clouds would be white.”

“That’s true, Tom, but the drops of water are tremendously tiny, droplets you call them, and at a distance they do look white when sunlight or just a lot of sky light hits them.”

“What about small clouds, Pa, are they alive? I mean clouds small enough to be indoors, like smoke clouds or paint clouds, clouds of flakes or paint flakes. Grandpa can blow smoke clouds like He showed me.”

“No, those clouds aren’t alive either, Tom. And you don’t say smoke flakes or paint flakes, though there might be flakes of soot in heavy smoke and you could blow a sort of cloud of droplets—droplets, not flakes—from a spraypaint can, but I wouldn’t advise it.”

“But Grandpa told about a little cloud of paint flakes flying off a picture.”

“That was just in a story, Tom, and an imaginary story at that. Pretend stuff. Come on, Tom, we’ve looked at the sky enough for now.”

But the day, which had started in sunlight, continued to grow more and more lowering until, after their visit to the Japanese Tea Garden, whose miniaturized world appealed to Tom and where he found a little bridge almost steep enough to be a ha-ha, Wolf decided they’d best head for home.

The rain held off until they were halfway across the Golden Gate If Bridge, where it struck in a great squally flurry that drenched and I locked the car, as if it were a wet black beast pouncing. And although they were happily ahead of thick traffic, the rain kept up all the way to Goodland Valley, so that Wolf was relieved to get his Volks into the sturdy garage next to Cassius’ old Buick, and hurry up the pelting slippery hill with Tommy in his arms. During their absence, things had smoothed out at the old man’s place, at least superficially; and mostly by simplification—the Martinezes had both departed early to their home in the Mission after getting dinner into the oven, while Tilly, who’d been going to stay for it, had decided she had to get to her place to see to its storm defenses so there were only the four of them that ate it.

By this time the rain had settled down to a steady beat considerably less violent than its first onset. Wolf could tell from Terri’s manner that she had a lot she wanted to talk to him about, but only when they were alone, so he was glad the Golden Gate Park talk both lasted out the meal and trailed off quickly afterwards (while the black cylinder on the mantelpiece and the green leopard painting under it stood as mute signs of all the things they weren’t talking about), so they could hurry Tommy, who was showing signs of great tiredness, off to bed, still without night light, say good-night to Cassius, who professed himself equally weary, and shut their bedroom door behind them.

Terri whipped off her dress and shoes and paced up and down in her slip.

“Boy, have I got a lot to tell you!” she said, eyeing Wolf excitedly, almost exultantly, somewhat frightenedly, and overall a bit dubiously.

“I take it this is mostly going to be stuff got from Tilly today?” he asked from where he sat half-reclining on the bed. ‘That’s not to put it down. I’ve always trusted what she says, though she sure loves scandal.”

Terri nodded. “Mostly,” she said, “along with an important bit from Loni I’ve been keeping back from you, and some things I just worked out in my head.”

“So tell,” he said with more tranquility than he felt.

“I’ll start with the least important thing,” she said, approaching him and lowering her voice, “because in a way it’s the most pressing, especially now that it’s raining. Wolf, the hill under and back of this house—and all of Goodland Valley for that matter (they really should call it Goodland Canyon, it’s so constricted and overhung!)—isn’t anywhere near as stable as your father thinks it is, or keeps telling us it is. Why, every time a heavy rain keeps on, the residents are phoned warnings to get ready to evacuate, and sometimes the highway police come and make them, or try to. Wolf, there have been mudslides around the Bay that smashed through and buried whole houses, and people caught in them and their bodies never recovered. Right in places like this. There was a slide in Love Canyon, and in other places.”

Wolf nodded earnestly, lips pressed together, eyeing his aroused wife. “That doesn’t altogether surprise me. I’ve known about some of that and I certainly haven’t believed everything Cassius has to say about the stability of this hillside, but there seemed no point in talking about it earlier.”

She went on, “And Tilly says the last times there’ve been warnings, Cassius has gone down and stayed at her place. We’ve never heard a word about that. She says it looks like it might happen again, and we’ll have to be ready to get out too.”

“Of course. But the warnings haven’t come yet and the rain seems to be tapering off. Oh, I guess Cassius is pretty much like the other residents in spots like this. Won’t hear a word against their homes, they’re safe as Gibraltar, anyone who says different is an alarmist from the city or the East or LA, an earthquake nut, but when the rains and warnings come, everything’s different, no matter how quick they forget about it afterwards. Believe me, Terri, I could feel that myself when I drove back this afternoon and rushed up this soggy hill with Tom.” He paused. “So what’s the other stuff?”

She started to pace again, biting her lip, then stopped and eyed him defiantly. “Wolf,” she said, “this is one of those things I can’t talk about without cigarettes. And if you don’t like it, too bad!”

“Go ahead and smoke,” he directed her.

As she dug out a pack, ripped off its top, and lit up, she confessed, “I started smoking Tilly’s when she was telling me things at her place, and when she drove me back here, I picked up a couple of packs on the way; I knew I’d be needing them.

“Well, look, Wolf, before Loni left she told me, after I’d agreed not to tell you, that one of the reasons she was leaving early was that your father had been… well… bothering her.”

“You know, that doesn’t altogether surprise me either,” Wolf responded. “Depending, of course, on how far his bothering went and how she behaved.” And he told Terri about seeing Loni sunbathing yesterday morning and how Cassius could have as easily seen her too, and probably did, finishing with “And, Terri, it was really a most stimulating sight: sweet black-masked nubility sprawled wide open to the wild winds and all that.”

“The little fool!” Terri hissed, quickly supplementing that with, “Though why a woman in this day and age shouldn’t be able to sunbathe where and whenever she wants to, I don’t know. But Loni didn’t, wouldn’t, tell me exactly how far your father tried to go, though I got the impression there was something that really shook her. But she and I have never been terribly close, as I think you know. That’s one reason why it became important what Tilly had to tell me on the subject.”

“Which was?” Wolf prompted.

Lighting another cigarette and puffing furiously, Terri said, “When we got to talking over lunch at her place, the conversation somehow got around to your father and sex—I guess maybe I hinted at what Loni told me—and she came right out with (remember how rough she often talks), ‘Cassius? He’s an indefatigable old lecher!’ and when I tactfully asked her if he’d made advances toward her, she whooped and said, ‘Me? My dear, I’m much too ancient for him. Cassius, I’ll have you know, is only turned on by the college freshman and especially high-school junior types.’“

Wolf scowled despondently. Somehow he’d not expected his own lather to be so ordinary, so humdrum, in his psychology. You’d think a recovered alcoholic would have gained some mellowness, some dignity. He shrugged.

Terri went on, “Of course I asked for more. It turned out that Tilly knew a local girl in the latter (I mean, high-school) category. A tough, outspoken girl rather like she’d once been herself, I gather. Well, it seems Cassius’ advances were an old story to this girl and to another of her female classmates too—they’d compared notes. She made a sort of joke out of the old man’s attempts at ‘romance,’ as she called them, though they sounded like more. She told Tilly, ‘Mr. Kruger? First he reads poetry to you and talks about nature and tells you how beautiful and young and fresh you are, maybe offers you a drink. Then he carries on about his dead wife and how terribly lonely he is, life over for him and all that. Then if you’re still listening he begins to hint about how he’s been completely impotent for years and years, and how dreadful that is, but you’re so wonderful and if you’d only deign to touch him, if you’d just be a little bit kind, it would only take the tiniest touch, that’s all an old man needs—a tiny touch below the belt— ell, if you fall for that and begin thinking, “A good deed. Why not?” why, then you’ll find him telling you he has to touch you just the tiniest bit to balance things out, to make them right, at the same time he’s clamping down on you with kisses, cutting off your breath, and before you know it he’s got one hand down your blouse… Now I won’t say that all happened to me, Ms. Hoyt, but it’s sure what Mr. Kruger has in mind when he gets romantic and recites poetry and begs for the slightest touch of your beeyootiful fingers.’“

“Oh God,” Wolf sighed, drawing it out. “To see ourselves as others see us.” He shook his head from side to side. “What else? What next? There is something more?”

“There is,” she confirmed, “and it’s the most important part. But I want to get my mind straightened about it first, and that performance wore me out.” And she did look a bit frazzled. “Oh hell,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and wetting her lips dry with talking, “Let’s screw.”

They did.

Considerably later she sat up in bed, seemed to think for a while, then with a dissatisfied sigh got up, slipped on her robe, lit another cigarette, and came back and sat on the side of the bed smiling at Wolf. The sound of the rain had sunk to a barely audible patter and the wind seemed to have died.

“You know,” she said, “that should have made it easier for me to tell you the rest, but somehow it hasn’t exactly.

“The thing was,” she went on, her voice picking up as she began to reconstruct, “that I’d suddenly realized that repeating to you those things that girl told Tilly that Cassius did to her, or tried to do, was getting me excited, which made me ask myself how much of my indignation at your father was honest. That’s what I wanted to straighten out in my mind, especially when Tilly (and the girl too apparently) seemed to treat it half as a joke, or one quarter at any rate, one of the grotesque indecencies you expect from practically all men, or at least all old men.

“Well, it’s not too clear in my mind yet, the real reasons for my indignation, or at least my being upset. I’ll try to keep it simple. It seems to boil down to two things, and one of them has nothing to do with sex at all. It’s this, I just can’t get out of my mind two or three of the horrible stories your father told in Tommy’s presence. He made them so vivid, he seemed to gloat on them so, as if he were trying to infect that child—and all of us!—with dreads and superstitions. And the way he watched Tommy while he told them. That horrible dream of the burnt-to-ashes Esteban. And especially the way he described your mother’s face coming off the painting and ghosting around the room as a cloud of green paint flakes. I’m sure Tommy’s been thinking about that ever since.”

“You know, that’s true,” Wolf said, sitting up, his face serious. And he told Terri the questions Tommy had asked him at the park about clouds being alive.

“You see,” she said, nodding, as he finished, ‘Tommy’s got flakes on his mind, that horrible vibrating cloud-face of pinky-green flakes. Ugh!” She shivered her revulsion.

“The other thing,” she went on, “is about sex, or at least starts with sex. Now after Tilly told me about that girl, I naturally asked her how soon after your mother’s death Cassius had started to hunt high-school girls, or younger women at any rate. She whooped a little again and told me he’d always been that way, that it sometimes got obvious at those big parties your mother gave, and that she thought Cassius had been attracted to your mother in the first place because she was such a small, slight woman and always stayed somewhat girlish looking. ‘Helen knew about Cassius’ chasing, of course,’ Tilly said. ‘It was one of the things we used to drink about. At first we had both our husbands to rake over the coals. I was the most outspoken, but Helen was more bitter. Then Pat died and there was only Cassius for us to gripe at, mostly for his drunken pawings at parties, his dumb little infatuations with whatever young Muff happened to be handy.’ Wolf, I don’t like to ask you about this, but does that fit at all with your memories of your father’s behavior then?”

He winced but nodded. “Yes, during the last couple of years before I lit out on my own. God, it all seemed to me then so adult-dumb, so infantile and boring, adult garbage you wanted to get shut of.”

Terri continued, ‘Tilly said that after you left, Cassius and Helen made up for a while, but then their battling got still more bitter and more depressing. Twice Helen took too many sleeping pills, or Cassius thought she did, and rushed her the morning after to the hospital to have her stomach pumped out, though Helen didn’t recall overdosing those two times, just that she blacked out. But then there came this Sunday morning when Cassius called up Tilly about ten or so, sounding very small and frightened, but rational-seeming, and begging her to come over, because he thought that Helen was dead, but he wasn’t absolutely sure, and—get this!—he didn’t know either whether he had killed her, or not! Helen’s doctor was coming, he’d already called him, but would Tilly come over?

“She did, of course, and of course got there before the doctor—Sunday mornings!—and found Helen lying peacefully in bed, cold to the touch, and the bedroom a minor mess with unfinished drinks and snacks set around and a couple of empty sleeping pill bottles with their contents, or some of their contents, scattered over the bed and floor, a snowfall of red-and-blue Tuinal capsules. And there was Cassius in bathrobe and slippers softly jittering around like an anxious ghost, keeping himself tranquilized with swallows of beer, and he was telling her over and over this story about how everything had been fine the night before and he’d taken two or three pills, enough with the drinks to knock him out, and then just as he was going under Helen had started this harangue while flourishing a bottle of sleeping pills, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember whether she’d been threatening to commit suicide or just bawling him out, maybe for having taken the pills himself so as not to have to listen to her, and he’d tried to get up and argue with her, stop her from taking the pills if that was what she intended, but the pills he’d taken were too much for him and he simply blacked out.

“Next he remembered, or thought he remembered, waking in the dark in bed and talking and then sleeping with, and then arguing with Helen and shaking her by the shoulders (or maybe strangling her! he wasn’t sure which) and then passing out again. But he wasn’t too sure about any of that, and if there had been talk between them, he couldn’t recall a word of it.

“When he next woke up it was fully light and he felt very tranquil and secure, altogether different. Helen seemed to be sleeping peacefully, and so he slipped out of bed and made himself some coffee and began to tidy up the rest of the house, returning at intervals to check if Helen had woke up yet and wanted coffee. The second time it struck him that she was sleeping too peacefully, he couldn’t see her breathing, she didn’t wake up to being called or shaken, and he tried the mirror and feather tests and they didn’t work, so he’d called her doctor and then Tilly.

“Tilly was sick about Helen and coldly enraged with Cassius, his pussyfooting around so coolly especially infuriated her, but on the other hand she couldn’t see any bruises or signs of strangulation on Helen, or other form of violent death, and there were no signs of a struggle or any particular kind of commotion except for the scattered pills (she picked up some of those and stashed them in her bag with the thought that she might be needing them herself), and after a bit she found herself sympathizing with Cassius while still furious with him—he was being such a dumb ox!—and behaving toward him as she would have to her own husband Pat in a similar fix.

“For instance, she said to him, ‘For God’s sake don’t talk about strangling Helen when the doctor comes unless you’re really sure you did it! Don’t tell him anything you’re not sure of!’ But she couldn’t tell how much of this was really registering on him; he still seemed to be nursing a faint crazy hope that the doctor might be able to revive Helen, and muttering something about stories by Poe and Conan Doyle.”

“‘Premature Burial’ and The Resident Patient,’“ Wolf said absently. “About catalepsy.”

“About then Helen’s doctor came, a very cautious-acting young man (‘My God, another pussyfooter,’ Tilly said to herself) but he pronounced Helen dead quickly enough, and soon after the doctor a couple of policemen arrived, from San Rafael, she thought, whom the doctor had called before starting out.

“Maybe the appearance of the cops threw a scare into Cassius, Tilly said, or at least convinced him of the seriousness of the situation, for there wasn’t any mention of strangling in what he told the three of them, nothing at all about maybe waking in the dark, it all sounded to Tilly more cut and dried, more under control. And when he mentioned the two previous times that Helen had overdosed, the doctor casually confirmed that.

“The doctor had another look at Helen and they all poked around a bit. What seemed to bother the doctor most were the scattered sleeping pills, they seemed to offend his sense of propriety, though he didn’t pick them up. And the two cops were quite respectful—your father does have quite a presence, as Tilly says—although the younger one kept being startled by things, as though the like had never happened before, first by Cassius not realizing at once when he got up that Helen was dead, then by Tilly just being there (he gave her a very funny look that made her wonder if that was what being a murder suspect was like), things like that.

“About then the ambulance the doctor had called arrived to take off Helen’s body and he and the cops drove off right afterwards.”

She paused at last. Wolf said earnestly, “Cassius never told me any of that—nothing about his suspicions of himself, I mean, nor about the doctor calling in the police at first. Nor did Tilly tell me—but of course you know that.”

Terri nodded. “She said she didn’t want to rake up things long past just when you were getting reconciled to your father and after he’d managed to quit drinking.”

“But what happened?” Wolf demanded. “I mean at the time? As I think you know, Cassius didn’t write me about my mother’s death until after the funeral, and then only the barest facts.”

“Exactly nothing happened,” Terri said. ‘That’s what made it seem so strange, at least at the time, Tilly told me—as if that weird and frantic morning of Helen’s death had never happened. The autopsy revealed a fatal dose of barbiturate without even figuring in the alcohol, Cassius did call and tell her that much. And she saw him briefly at the funeral. They weren’t in touch again after that for almost a year, by which time he’d been six months sober. Their new friendship was on the basis of ‘Forget the past.’ They never spoke of the morning of Helen’s death again, and in fact not often of Helen. Tilly told me she’d almost forgotten Helen in a sort of way and seldom thought of her, until about six months ago when Cassius brought Esteban’s painting of Helen down from the attic and hung and lighted it—”

“He could have been anticipating our visit,” Wolf said thoughtfully.

Terri nodded and continued, “—and a couple of times since when Tilly came calling and noticed he’d hung a towel over it, as if he didn’t want it watching him, at least for a while—”

At that instant there was a great flash of white light that flooded the room through the window curtains and simultaneously a ripping craaackl of thunder that catapulted Terri across the bed into Wolfs arms. As their hearing returned, it was assaulted by the frying sound of thick rain.

Murmuring reassurances, Wolf disengaged himself, got up, and shouldered hurriedly into his robe. Terri had the same thought: Tommy.

The door opened and Tommy hurtled in, to stop and look back and forth between them desperately. His facewas white, his eyes were huge.

He cried out, losing three years of vocabulary from whatever shock, “Ma take me! No, Pa take me! ‘Fraid Flakesma!’

Wolf scooped him up, submitted to being grappled around the neck, speaking and cuddle-patting reassurances about as he would have to a frightened monkey. Terri started to take him from Wolf or at least add her embraces to his, but restrained herself, uneasily watching the open door.

White lightning washed the room again, followed after a second by another loud but lesser ripping crack!

As if the thunder had asked a question, Tommy drew his head back from Wolfs cheek a little and pronounced rapidly but coherently, regaining some vocabulary but continuing to coin new expressions under the pressure of fear: “I woke up. The ghost light was on! It made Grandma Flakesma come in after me, ceiling to floor! Pa, it brings her! Her green balloon face buzzed, Pa!”

Gathering her courage, which a new-sprouted anger reinforced, Terri moved toward the door. By the time she reached Tommy’s room she was almost running.

The green and blue night light was on, just as Tommy’d said. Its deathly glow revealed a scattered trail of pillows, sheet, and blanket from the abandoned bed to her feet.

Behind her, footsteps competed with the pounding rain.

As she heard Cassius ask, “Where’s Tommy? In Wolf’s bedroom, Terri? Did the thunder scare him?” she stooped and switched off the offending globe with a vicious jab.

Then, as she hurried past the whitely tousle-headed old man mummy-wrapped in a faded long brown bathrobe, she snarled at him, “Your poisonous night light gave Tommy a terrible nightmare!” and rushed downstairs without listening to his stumbling responses.

In the dark living room the portrait of Helen Hostelford Kruger by Esteban Bernadorre was softly spotlighted by the pearly bulb just below its frame. As Terri advanced toward it, moving more slowly and deliberately now, breathing her full-blown anger, its witch face seemed to mock her. She noticed a subtlety that she’d previously missed: the narrowed eyes were very darkly limned, so that they sometimes seemed to be there but sometimes not, as though the portrait itself might be that of a taper-chinned witch mask greenish flesh-pink and waiting for eyes to fill it—and maybe teeth.

After glaring at it for a half dozen pounding heartbeats while thunder crackled in the middle distance, her fists clenching and unclenching, she contented herself with switching off its milky light—poison milk!—with a just audible “Flakesma!” like a curse and hurrying back upstairs.

In the hall there she passed Cassius coming out of “Wolfs bedroom,” as he’d called it. She spared him a glare, but he, agitated looking and seemingly intent on wherever he was heading, hardly appeared to notice.

Wolf had Tommy tucked into the middle of their bed and was sitting close beside him. ‘Tom’s going to spend the rest of the night with us,” he told her. “Big family reunion and all.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said, forcing a smile and bidding anger depart, at least from her features and tumultuous bosom.

“I’ve already invited him and he’s accepted,” Wolf went on, “so I guess you haven’t any say in the matter.”

“But we really want you, Ma,” Tommy assured her anxiously, sitting up a little.

She plopped down on the other side, saying, “And I’m delighted to accept,” as she hugged and kissed him.

Straightening up, she informed Wolf, “I turned that light off,” and Tommy’s face changed a little, and Wolf said lightly, “You mean that ghost light in Tom’s room? A good idea. He and I have been talking about that a bit, and about ghosts and visions of all sorts, and thunderstorms, and flying cabbages and specter kings, and why if the sea were boiling hot we’d have fish stew.”

“And wings for pigs,” Tommy added with a pallid flicker of enthusiasm. “Space Pigs.”

“Incidentally,” Wolf remarked, “we discovered how the ghost light came to be on. No witchcraft at all. Cassius told us. It seems he was passing Tom’s room on his way to bed and saw it was out, and not knowing that Tom had given up sleeping with a night light—”

“I might have known your father’d be the one!” Terri interjected venomously, yet midway through that statement recalled the command she’d given her anger, and managed to mute it somewhat.

“—and thinking to do a good turn he quietly stole in, so as not to wake Tom, and switched it on,” Wolf finished, widening his eyes a little at Terri, warningly. “See? No mystery at all.”

Then Wolf got up, saying, “Look, you guys, I want to check on what that storm’s up to. I’ve been telling Tom how rare such storms are out here, and usually feeble when they do come. While I’m gone, Terri, why don’t you tell Tom about the real humdingers they have in the Midwest that make even this one seem pretty tame? I’ll be back soon.”

Passing Tom’s room he smelled fresh cigarette smoke.

Cassius was kneeling by the night light with his back to the door. He shoved something into his pocket and stood up. He looked haggard and distraught. He started to make an explanation to Wolf, but the latter with a warning nod toward the room where Terri and Tommy were, and not trusting himself to talk, motioned his father in the opposite direction downstairs, and followed him.

The interval gave the old man time to compose his thoughts as well as his features. When they faced each other in the living room, Cassius began, “I was replacing the night light that frightened Tommy with the white one from under Helen’s picture.” He gestured toward where the mask painting hung, now without its own special illumination. “Didn’t want to leave the slightest opportunity for that nightmare, or whatever, to recur.

“But, Wolf,” he immediately went on, his voice deepening, “what I really want to tell you is that I’ve been lying to you in more than one way while you’ve been here, at least lying in the sense of withholding information, though it didn’t seem important to start with and was done, at least in part, with good intentions. Or at least I could make myself believe that, until now.”

Wolf nodded without comment, dark-and suspicious-visaged.

“The littlest lie was that I haven’t been dreaming much lately except for that bitch of a one about Esteban. The truth is that for the past six months or so I’ve been having horrible dreams in which Helen comes back from the dead and hounds and torments me, and especially dreams—green dreams, I call ‘em—in which her face tonics off that picture and buzzes around me whispering and wailing like green-eyed skulls used to when I had nightmares as a boy, and threatening to strangle me—remember that!…

“… for the most obvious reason for these dreams leads us straight hack to my larger lie—again, a lie by withholding information: that ever since Helen’s death I’ve had this half-memory, half-dread, that back in the horrible grey world of alcohol and blackout I contributed more actively to her death than just by not waking and getting her to the hospital in time to be pumped out.

“Sometimes the memory-dread has almost faded away (almost, sometimes, as if it could vanish forever), sometimes it’s been real as a death-sentence—and especially since I’ve started this green-dreaming.” Underlying all that has been the unnerving suspicion or conviction that somewhere in my mind is the memory of what really happened if only I could find a way to get back to it, through past alcoholic mists and blackout, maybe by fasting and exhaustion and sheer deprivation, maybe by drinking my way to it again or taking some stronger drug, maybe by mind-regression or psychoanalysis or some other awareness-broadening pushed to an extreme, maybe even by giving my dreams and dreads to another, to see what he’d find in them— Wolf, it’s the sudden realization that I may have been trying (unknowingly!) to do that to Tommy—and to all of you, for that matter, but especially to Tommy—to use him as a sort of experimental subject, that shattered me tonight.”

By this time Wolf also had had the opportunity to compose his thoughts and feelings somewhat, get over the worst of his anger at Tommy being terrorized, whether accidentally or half intentionally. Nor was he moved to sound off violently when Cassius, lighting another cigarette, had a coughing fit. But he’d also had time to make some decisions with which he knew Terri would concur.

“Don’t worry any more about the night light,” he began. “Tommy’s sleeping with us. And tomorrow we’ll be taking off, whether the rain forces us to get out (and you too maybe!) or not. It’s been a good visit in a lot of ways, but I think we’ve pushed it too far, maybe all of us have done that. As for your dreams and guilts and worries, what can I say?” A wry note came into his voice for a moment, “After all, you’re the psychologist! I do know there was something damn funny, something strange, about the scare Tommy got tonight, but I don’t see where discussing it could get us anywhere, at least tonight.”

Before Cassius could reply, the phone rang. It was Tilly for Cassius, and for Wolf too before she’d finished, to tell them that the TV said “the authorities” had begun to phone people in several areas including Goodland Valley to tell them to be ready to evacuate to safer places if the weather situation worsened and a second or general order came, and had they been phoned yet? Also to remind them that they were all, not just Cassius, invited down to her place, which was holding out pretty well, although there was a leak in her kitchen and a seepage in her garage.

When she finally got off the line, with messages to Terri and last admonitions to them all, Cassius tried to restart the conversation, but his mind had lost the edge it had had during his brief confession, if you could call it that, and he seemed inclined to ramble. Before he’d gotten anywhere much the phone rang again, this time with the official message Tilly had told them to expect, and there was that to respond to.

That ended their attempts at any more talk. Wolf went upstairs, while Cassius allowed he probably needed some rest too.

Outside the thunderstorm had moved into the far distance, but the rain was keeping up with a moderate pelting.

Wolf found Tom and Terri in bed, her arm around him, and with their eyes closed. She opened hers and signed to Wolf not to talk, she’d just got the boy asleep.

Wolf brought his lips close to her cheek. “We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” he whispered. “Stay somewhere in San Francisco. Okay?”

She nodded and smiled agreement and they softly kissed goodnight and he went around and carefully slid into bed on the other side of Tommy.

That was the ticket, Wolf told himself. Leave tomorrow and let the storm decide how fast they moved, the storm and (he grinned to himself) “the authorities.” Right now the former seemed to be slackening and the latter to have signed off for the night. This lazy thought pleased him and suited his weariness. What had really happened the past few days, anyway? Why, he’d simply pushed his reconciliation with his father too far, involved himself too much in the old man’s ruined life-end, and as a result got Tommy and Terri (and Loni too!) entangled in the dismal wreckage of a marriage (and all its ghosts) which was all Cassius could ever be to anyone. And the solution to this was the same as it had been when Wolf was a youngster: get away from it! Yes, that was the ticket.

His thoughts in the dark grew desultory, he dozed, and after a while slumbered.

Morning revealed the storm still firmly in charge of things. No thunder-and-lightning histrionics, but its rain persistently pelted. TV and radio glumly reported a slowly worsening weather situation.

The Martinezes called in early to say they wouldn’t be making it. They had storm troubles of their own down in the city.

Wolf took that call. Overflowing ashtrays told him Cassius had been up most of the night and he let the old man sleep. He made breakfast for the rest of them and served it in the kitchen. Simpler that way, he told himself, and avoided confrontation of Tommy with a certain painting.

Tilly called with updatings of last night’s news and admonitions. Terri took that call and she and the older woman spun it out.

Packing occupied some more time. Wolf didn’t want to rush things, but it seemed a chore best gotten out of the way.

He gave Terri the job of making them reservations at a San Francisco hotel or motel. She settled down with the phone and big directory.

Taking a rain-armored Tommy with him, he went down to the garage and found, as he’d feared, that the gas tank was a little too near empty for comfort. They drove to the nearest gas station that was open (the first and second weren’t) and filled her up, made all other checks. Wolf noted that the big flashlight he kept in the glove compartment was dim and he bought new batteries for it.

Driving back, he took more note of the rain damage: fallen branches, scatters of rock and gravel, small runs of water crosswise of the road. In the garage he reminded himself to check out Cassius’ Buick somehow before they left.

Terri had managed to make them a reservation at a motel on Lombard after getting “No vacancies” from a half dozen other places.

Cassius was up and on his best best behavior, though rather reserved (chastened? to borrow Tilly’s word) and not inclined to talk much except to grumble half comically that people as usual were making too much of the storm and its dangers, decry the TV and radio reports, and in general put on a crusty-old-man act. However, he seemed quite reconciled to Wolfs departure and the visit’s end, and also, despite his grumbles, to his own going down to Tilly’s to stay out the end of the storm.

Wolf took advantage of this mood of acquiescence to get Cassius to go down to the garage with him and check out the Buick and its gas supply. Once there, and the Buick’s motor starting readily enough, Wolf badgered the old man into backing it out of the garage and then into it again, so the car’d be facing forward for easiest eventual departure. Cassius groused about “having to prove to my own son I can still drive,” but complied in the end, though in no more mood than before for any close conversation.

Back once more in the house, there came at long last the expected phone call with the order, or rather advisement, that all dwellers in it get out of Goodland Valley. Wolf carried their bags and things down to the car, while Cassius, still grumbling a little, prepared an overnight bag and made a call to Tilly, telling her he would be arriving shortly.

“But I’m not going to get out until you’re all on your way,” he gruffly warned his son’s family. “Enough’s enough. If I left at the same time you did, I’d lose completely the feeling—a very good one, let me assure you!—of having been your host in my own house for a most pleasant week.”

Except for that show of warmth, Cassius continued his reserve in his good-bye, contenting himself with silently shaking hands first with Wolf, then Tommy, and giving each a curt nod of approval. Terri saw a tear in his eye and was touched, she felt a sudden swing in her feelings toward him, and impulsively threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. He started to wince away from her, then submitted with some grace and a murmured “M’dear. Thank you, Terri.”

Wolf noted on her face a look of utter surprise and shock, but it was quickly replaced with a smile. It stuck in his mind, though he forgot to ask her about it, mostly because as they were pulling out of the garage, a highway patrol car stopped across the road and hailed them.

“Are you leaving the Kruger residence?” one of the officers asked, consulting a list, and when Wolf affirmed that, continued with, “Anyone else up there?”

“Yes, my father, the owner,” Wolf called back. “He’s leaving shortly, in another car.”

They thanked him, but as he drove off, he saw them get out and start trudging up the hill.

“I’m glad they’re doing that,” he told Terri. “Make sure Cassius is rooted out.”

But the incident left a bad taste in his mouth, because it reminded him of what he’d heard about the two policemen calling there the morning after his mother died.

At the first sizable intersection a roadblock was being set up to stop cars entering Goodland Valley. That didn’t hold them back, but the drive into San Francisco took half again as long as he’d anticipated, what with the rain and slow traffic and a mudslide blocking two lanes of the freeway near Waldo Tunnel just north of the bridge.

Lombard Street, when they reached it just south of the bridge, reminded Wolf and Terri of western towns built along main highways in the days before freeways. Wide, but with stoplights every block and the sides garish with the neon of gas stations, chain restaurants, and motels. They located theirs and checked in with relief. Tommy had been starting to get cranky and the storm was making late afternoon seem like night.

Only Terri didn’t seem to Wolf as relieved as she should be. Tommy was running a bath for himself and his boats. Wolf asked her, “Something bothering you, Hon?”

She was scowling nervously at the floor. “No, I guess I’ve just got to tell you,” she decided reluctantly. “Wolf, when I kissed your father—”

“I know!” he interjected. “I was going to ask you about it, if he’d goosed you, tried to cop some other sort of feel, or what? You looked so strange.”

“Wolf,” she said tragically, “it was simply that his breath was reeking with alcohol. That was why he was making such a point of keeping a distance from us all day.”

“Oh God,” he said despondently, closing his eyes and slumping.

“Wolf,” she went on in a small voice after a moment, “I think we’ve got to call up Tilly to check if he ever got there.”

“Of course,” he said, springing to the phone. “I guess we were going to do that in any case.”

He got through to the Marin lady after some odd delays and found their worry realized: Cassius had not arrived. Wolf cut short Tilly’s counter-questions with “Look, Til, I’ll try to call him at the house, then get back to you right away.”

This time the response was quicker. The number he was trying to reach was out of service due to storm damage.

He tried to call Tilly back and this time, after still more delays, got the same response as when he’d tried to call his father.

“All over Marin County the phones are going out,” he told Terri, trying to put a light face on bad news. “Well, Hon,” he went on, “I don’t think I’m left much choice. I’ve just got to go back up there.”

“Oh no, Wolf,” she said apprehensively, “don’t you think you should try calling the police first, at least? Cassius may still be at the house, I suppose, but then again he may simply have driven off somewhere else, anywhere, maybe to some bar. How can you know?”

He thought a bit, then said, ‘Tell you what, Hon. I’ll go down to the coffee shop and have a couple of cups and a Danish or something; meanwhile you try calling the police. You may be able to find out something, they seem to have pretty good organization on this storm thing.”

When he got back some twenty minutes later, she was on the phone. “Shh, I think I’m finally getting something,” she told him. She listened concentratedly, nodded sharply twice, asked, “About the mudslides?” nodded at the answer she got to that, and finally said, “Yes, I’ve got that. Thank you very much, officer,” and put down the phone.

“Nothing specifically on any Kruger,” she told Wolf, “but there arc still holdouts in Goodland Valley, houses that won’t vacate. And, at latest available report, there’s been no major earth movement there, though they’re expecting one at any time, it’s ‘a real and present danger.’ Wolf, I still don’t think you should go, just on the chance he’ll be there.”

She was watching him intently, as was a moist and robed Tommy in the bathroom door.

Grinning sympathetically, he shook his head. “Nope, got to go,” he said. “I’ll be cautious as hell, on the watch every second. Maybe just have to check the garage.”

Outside, thunder rumbled. ‘That’s my cue,” he said and got out of the room as quickly as he could, and by the time he’d got the Volks on the bridge again, its gas tank once more topped off, he was feeling pretty good. Caffeine had done its work, thunderstorms always gave him a high, and now that he had only Cassius to worry about, everything was wonderfully simplified. It was great to be outdoors, alone, the city behind him, space around him, water under him, with lightning to reveal vividly every ten seconds or so the multiple mazy zigzag angles of the marvelous structure the Volks was traversing, and thunder to shake his bones. And himself free on a quixotic errand that had to be carried out but that really didn’t matter all that much when you got down to it, since worry about Cassius was hardly to be compared with worry about Tommy or Terri, say. Oh, this storm was good, though awfully big, much too big for any sentimentalities or worrisome petty human concerns. It washed those away, washed away his own concern about whether he was being, had been, a good son (or husband or father, for that matter) and whether he was being wise to make this trip or not, washed away Terri’s and Tilly’s concern as to what indignities, exactly, Cassius had visited on Loni, washed away Cassius’ own dreadful wondering as to whether or not he’d strangled his wife in a blackout, washed all those away and left only the naked phenomena, the stuff of which it, the storm itself, was composed, and all other storms, from those in teapots and cyclotrons to those out at the ends of the universe, that blustered through whole galaxies and blew out stars.

This almost suspiciously exalted state of mind, this lightning high, stuck with Wolf after the Volks had got across the bridge and come to the first traffic hold-up, the one a little beyond the Waldo tunnel. It was worse this time, tour lanes were blocked, and took longer to get past; they were only letting cars through in one direction at a time. But now that his mind had time to move around, free for seconds and minutes from the task of driving, he found that it was drawn to phenomena and awarenesses rather than worries and concerns. For instance, those so-alike dreams Cassius and Tommy had had (they’d both used the same word “buzz” of the swooping green face), he now found himself simply lost in wonder at the coincidence. Could one person transmit his dreams to another? Could they travel through flesh and skin? And would they look like dreams if you saw them winging through darkness?

And that black sonic generator, or whatever, Esteban was supposed to have invented, how shockingly it had come alive in his hands when Cassius had thrown the switch—that strong and deep vibration! Whatever had made it work after a quarter century of disuse? And why had the puzzle of that slipped completely from his mind? He knew one thing: if he got the chance tonight, he’d certainly glom onto the black cylinder and bring it away with him!

And the color green, the witch green and death blue of Tommy’s ghost light, were colors more than the raiments of awareness, the arbitrary furniture of the mind? Were they outside the mind too: feelings, forces, the raw stuff of life? and could they kill? Wave motions, vibrations, buzzings—vibes, vibes, vibes, vibes.

In such ways and a thousand others his thoughts veered and whirled throughout the trip, while thunder crackled and ripped, lightning made shiny sheets of streets awash, unceasing rain pattered and pelted.

Then, not more than a mile from Goodland Valley, all streetlights, all store lights, all house lights were simultaneously extinguished. He told himself this was to be expected, that power failures were a part of storms. Moreover, the rain did at last seem to be lessening.

Just the same he found it reassuring when the stationary headlights and red lanterns of the roadblock appeared through the rain mist.

He’d been intending to explain about Cassius, but instead he found himself whipping out his veterinary identifications and launching into a story about this family in Goodland Valley that had a pet jaguar and wouldn’t vacate without it and so couldn’t move until he’d arrived and administered an anesthetic shot.

Almost to his chagrin they passed him through with various warnings and well wishings before he’d said much more than the words “pet jaguar.” Evidently exotic pet carnivores were an old story in Marin County.

He wondered fleetingly if he’d been inspired to compose the lie in honor of Esteban Bernadorre, who’d been a mine of equally unlikely anecdotes, some of them doubtless invented only to please an admiring and credulous boy.

He followed his headlights up the slight grade leading into Goodland Valley, thankful the rain continued to slacken though lightning still flared faintly with diminished thunder from time to time, providing additional guidance. After what was beginning to seem too long a time, he caught sight of a few dim house lights in the steep hills close on each side (he’d got out of the area of the power failure, he told himself) and almost immediately afterwards his headlights picked up Cassius’ garage with one door lifted open as he’d left it. Vie nosed the Volks into it until he could see the dark shape of Cassius’ Buick.

On another sudden inspiration he reversed the direction of the Volks as he backed it out, so that it faced downgrade, the way he’d come. He parked it, setting the hand-brake, nearer the narrow road’s center than its side. He took the flashlight from the glove compartment and got out on the side facing the house, leaving the headlights on, the motor idling, and the door open.

A fingering tendril of wind, startlingly chill, made him shiver.

But was the shiver from the wind alone? Staring uphill, straining his eyes at the dim bulk of the house, he saw a small greenish glow moving behind the windows of the second floor, while halfway between him and the house there stood a dark pale-headed figure. White-haired Cassius? Or a white crash helmet?

A flare of lightning brighter than those preceding it showed the swollen hillside empty and the windows blank.

Imagination! he told himself.

Thunder crashed loudly. The storm was getting nearer again, coming back.

He switched on the flashlight and by its reassuringly bright beam rapidly mounted the hill, stamping each step firmly into the soggy ground.

The front door was ajar. He thrust it open and was in the short hall that held the stairs to the second floor and led back to the living room.

As he moved forward between stairs and wall, he became aware of a deep and profound vibration that gave the whole house a heavy tremor; it was in the floor under his feet, the wall his hand groped, even in the thick air he breathed. While his ears were assaulted by a faint thin screaming, as of a sound too shrill to be quite heard, a sound to drive dogs mad and murder bats.

Midway in his short journey the house lurched sharply once, so he was staggered, then held steady. The deep vibration and the shrill whatever-it-was continued unchanging.

He paused in the doorway to the living room. From where he stood he had a clear view of the fireplace midway in the far wall, the mantelpiece above it, the two windows to either side of it that opened on the hill behind the house, a small coffee table in front of the fireplace, and in front of that an easy chair facing away from him. Barely showing above the back of the last was the crown of a white-haired head.

The bottles on the mantelpiece had been transferred to the coffee table, where one of them lay on its side, so that the mantelpiece itself was occupied only by the stubby black cylinder of Esteban’s sonic generator and by his painting of Helen, which seemed strangely to have a pale grey rag plastered closely across it.

Wolf at first saw all these things not so much by the beam of his flashlight, which was directed at the floor from where his hand hung at his side, as by the green and blue glow of the ghost light beneath the oddly obscured painting.

Then the white glare of a lightning flash flooded in briefly from behind him through the open door and a window above the stairs, though strangely no ray of it showed through the windows to either side of the fireplace, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder.

As though that great sound had been a word of command, Wolf strode rapidly toward the fireplace, directing the flashlight ahead of him. With every step forward the deep vibration and the super-shrill whine increased in intensity, almost unbearably.

He stopped by the coffee table and shone his flashlight at Esteban’s invention. Torn-away friction tape dangled from the switch, which had been thrown on.

He shifted the beam to the painting and saw that what he had thought grey rag was the central area of bare canvas from which every last flake of paint had vanished, or rather been shaken by the vibrations from the cylinder beside it. For he could see now that the stripped canvas was quivering rapidly and incessantly like an invisibly beaten drumhead.

But the mantelpiece beneath the painting was bare. It showed no trace of fallen flakes.

As he swung the bright beam around to the easy chair, flashing in his mind on how the slim pinkish-green witch mask had swooped and buzzed through Cassius’ and Tommy’s dreams, it passed slowly across the nearest window, revealing why the lightning flash hadn’t shone through it. Beyond the glass, close against it from top to bottom, was wet dirt packed solid.

The beam moved on to the easy chair. Cassius’ hands gripping its arms and his head, pressed in frozen terror into the angle between back and side, were all purplish, while the whites of his bulging eyes were shot with a lacework of purple.

The reason for his suffocation was not far to seek. Stuffing his nostrils and plastered intrusively across his grimacing lips were tight-packed dry flakes of greenish-pink oil paint.

With a muted high-pitched crackle the two windows gave way to huge dark-faced thrusts of mud.

Wolf took off at speed, his flashlight held before him, raced down the lurching hall, out the open front door, down the splashing hill toward the lights of the Volks, and through its door into the driver’s seat.

Simultaneously releasing the hand-brake, shifting the gear lever, and giving her throttle, he got away in a growling first that soon changed to a roaring second. A last sideways glimpse showed the house rushing down toward him in the grip of a great moving earth-wall in which uprooted trees rode like logs in a breaking-up river jam.

For critical seconds the end of the earth-wave seemed to Wolf’s eye on a collision course with the hurtling Volks, but then rapidly fell behind the escaping car. He’d actually begun to slow down when he started to hear the profound, long-drawn rumbling roar of the hill burying forever Goodland Valley and all its secrets.