THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  Glandier went to the door and opened it. He peered at the dog through the aluminum screen of the outer door.

  Awkwardly, because of its short legs, the dog bounded up the three brick steps and deposited a small yellow wad of paper before the door. Then it backed away from the door, sat down, and looked up expectantly at Glandier.

  Glandier opened the screen door and stooped to pick up the saliva-sodden paper. When he’d managed to smooth it out, the letterhead of the Lady Luck Motor Lodge was still legible, and enough of the message that he could appreciate its import.

  Glandier stood back from the door while holding it wide open, and the white terrier bounded up the steps with an appreciative yap and entered the house. Its hair was matted and discolored. The flesh, where it showed through the matted hair, seemed inflamed. It trotted into the kitchen and plunked down in front of the gas stove, quite as though it had read Glandier’s mind and knew just what he intended to do with the note from the Lady Luck Motor Lodge.

  Glandier turned on the burner and held the note over the blue flame. It did not burn easily or all at once, but when it had finally been consumed to the last yellow scrap, the dog let loose a celebratory chorus of yaps.

  Glandier smiled and got down on his haunches and patted the dog on its head. “Hey, little fella,” he said, “what’s your name?” The dog shook its head, and he saw the brass tag attached to his collar. The tag read:

  Hi! My name is SUGAR!

  If I get lost, please call

  my home: 690-3631.

  The number was the one Glandier had looked up and dialed only a few moments ago, the number of Alice Hoffman.

  CHAPTER 41

  For a moment, waking in her old bedroom, Giselle forgot she was dead. She wondered why she had been sleeping on the floor. Her back hurt, and she was naked. Then, as she rolled to her side, the pain of the unhealed incision acted as synopsis, recalling the events of the night, renewing fear. But she was alone, the house was quiet, and the wound in her side seemed almost healed. There was an ache within, like a distant echo of the convulsive cramping pains she’d suffered in the night, and a soreness about the dark lips of the wound. But she was not disabled. When she stood, and when she walked, there was no bleeding and no sharper pain.

  She saw the pants suit spread across the bedspread and, thinking of her nakedness, stooped to gather the silken folds of orange cotton-polyester in her hand. Without the ring she might as well have tried to charm the paper from the walls, the paint from the frame of the bed. She had entrusted the ring to Berryman, and, as she had feared, he had made off with it. Where to, there was no imagining.

  She could see, out the window, a police car parked along the Carver side of Alice Hoffman’s house. Guilt wrenched at her spirit, for she knew whatever events had brought a police car there, the root of the blame was hers. She had been wrong, as a spirit, to intrude on the lives of the living, to be vengeful, to haunt. Revenge would only compound the original evil and give it larger scope. Poor Mr. Berryman—as though his own miseries had not been large enough! Now… But imagination balked before the possibility of his further, deeper pain. She must find him and—

  Repossess the ring? Wasn’t that, and not charity, at the root of her impulse? Nothing she could do, no choice she could make, seemed free of the flaw of selfishness and the hunger to see her husband suffer. Each day she spent outside the grave that hunger grew, as the child had grown within her womb. Starved of his suffering, the hunger fed on hers, on anyone’s. It was a cancer eating at her soul, and she was helpless against it. Indeed, she held it to her breast and bade it feast.

  Was there nothing she could do that would not lead her deeper into misery, brooding over, breeding horror? Then she would do nothing. She would lie in the bed of her childhood and sleep away the time. She would will her wound to heal. She would fix her thoughts on absence and enter the void behind her closed eyes and die, if she could, a second and completer death, beyond awakening.

  CHAPTER 42

  This must be, Berryman thought, waking, a lesson in poetry. I have entered the company of the illustrious blind. Homer and Milton stand at my side.

  O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

  Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

  Without all hope of day!

  As though the shifting volutes of the waves on which he lay were living Braille, the lines appeared before him whole, his memory miraculously restored:

  To live a life half dead, a living death,

  And buried; but, O yet more miserable!

  Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave,

  Buried, yet not exempt

  By privilege of death and burial

  From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs,

  But made hereby obnoxious more

  To all the miseries of life,

  Life in captivity

  Among inhuman foes.

  Milton, we both should be living at this hour! If I had tears.

  But possibly he did. He lifted his fingers to his cheeks and felt the blood that still, in a ghostly, sourceless profusion, streamed down his face. What an example, what an inspiration, what a warning if his dear readers could have seen him now. He would hang a pathetically ill-lettered sign from his neck:

  Here stands One

  Who refused the Gift of Light.

  Now for his Sin of Suicide

  He’s plunged into Eternal Night!

  What heart would not break to see him here supine, rattling a tin cup? What passions of mourning might he not provoke, were he but visible? What pity, what waste, that none could know how abject, how fallen, how more wretched than other men or poets was John Berryman!

  “John,” said a familiar and somewhat peremptory voice from the all-enveloping void, “whatever do you think you’re doing, lying there on your back?”

  He sat up, at once gratified to have an audience and dismayed to recognize the voice of Adah Menken. He tried to speak, to ask her the needless (but, because he was blind, so pathetic) question, “Who’s there?” But he was mute. Only blood issued from the wound at his throat. He was blind, he was mute, and he couldn’t even write messages in his own blood in the manner of Shakespeare’s Titus, for he was dyslexic as well.

  “What a mess you are,” Adah said in a tone of reprobation and disgust.

  He bowed his head in solemn acceptance of his shame. Who more shameful? None!

  “Well, you’re not wholly to blame,” she conceded. “Things got rather out of hand last night.”

  He shook his head vigorously and beat at his bleeding heart with his fist, a mea maxima culpa to end them all.

  “What a thespian the world lost in you, John. Not James E. Murdoch himself, one of our nation’s greatest tragedians, with whom I had the honor to play Lady Macbeth—an honor, alas, I was too unseasoned to merit—not even he could improve upon you for general tragic carriage.”

  He turned his head aside, as though ashamed, offering his profile.

  “But all that’s by the by. I’ve come to say I’m sorry. Joy-Ann Anker has made me understand how unfair I’ve been to you and Miss Plath (impossible, even now, to think of her as Mrs. Hughes) and that other one. So this morning I promised Joy-Ann I’d release all of you from your terrestrial bonds and let you go to heaven. But first I’ll have to ask you for that ring.”

  Instant as her asking, he smelled a scam. If she were prepared to offer salvation as the price for the ring, then it must be worth a good deal more. He made a fist of his ring hand and with his right hand touched his throat, as who would say, Give me my voice and we will bargain.

  For a long while he received no answer but silence. He thought Adah might have gone away, but even then he was confident she would return. He thought of the Nibelung’s ring and all the wonderful singers who had died for its possessing, or from longing to possess it: Alberich and Mime, Fasolt and Fafner, Siegfried and Brunhilde and even Brunhilde’s horse. Truly, rings could inspire considerable desire.

 
This was another ring, of course, with other and still untested capabilities. But the fact that Adah was willing to pay such a price for it meant that he might ask for virtually whatever he wanted. And today, for a wonder, he knew exactly what he wanted. Love and revenge, in that order.

  He felt Adah Menken’s fingers on the lips of his wound. It was like stepping under a sun lamp. The wound in his throat healed.

  She touched his heart, and that wound healed as well.

  She placed her hands over his eyes. But when she removed her hands, he remained blind.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “That’s all right,” he said, sincerely cheerful (for surely in heaven his sight would be restored, and in the meantime he didn’t half mind belonging to such a noble tradition). “Two out of three isn’t so bad. Now sit down here beside me—” He patted the rippling surface of the Mississippi. “—and tell me what you want this ring for.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Sleep was not in the cards. As well hope for rain from a blue sky, blood from a turnip. How little time ago she’d strained for release from her grave; now she would almost have returned willingly. Oh, for a bottle of Nembutals, her standby on wide-awake nights in Willowville in a dark room filled with the sound of her husband’s snores.

  She rose from her bed and roamed through the house—or through as many of its rooms as she could enter without the help of the ring. Outside it had begun to rain, completing the likeness to the endless hours of early childhood when she’d been imprisoned by bad weather in this same tiresome circuit of empty rooms. Her problem now as then—nothing to do, nowhere to go, a world outside too fearful to be thought of.

  As in the grave, she used her memory to pass the time, mining the house for cues and clues. Grandma Anker’s needlepoint pillow evoked a wearisome chronicle of nights spent sitting beside her on the couch resisting knitting lessons. She remembered the spring the vacuum broke and she’d been delegated to pick the carpet clean of Ginger’s sheddings. And Bing with his nose buried in Valley of the Dolls—it was still there in the bookcase—for the second or maybe the third time through.

  And here in the kitchen, hanging by the magic of their magnets from the side of the icebox, were the three potholders she’d bought from the disturbed redheaded boy on the day she’d taken flight from Willowville and brought here to her mother as a goodbye present. Red, blue, and yellow, the Rainbow Assortment.

  Far off, over the hush of the rain, she could hear… was it the crying of a baby? The sound distressed and attracted in equal measure. Sometimes it seemed less the wailing of an infant than the whining of a dog. But just as she grew certain that what she heard was a dog—probably Alice Hoffman’s Scottie, across the street—the sound would go out of (or come into) focus and she knew it to be an infant’s cry, her own child’s, calling to her, demanding her. Hungry.

  The strangest thing about this sound was not the way it would shift its meaning but the fact that it seemed to be coming not from outside the house, which would have been logical, or even from another room, but from inside one of the potholders hanging on the icebox.

  The red potholder.

  When she touched it, the barking or crying grew louder. The tip of her finger tingled. The sensation spread through her body in waves, and then her body altogether disappeared, and she had entered the space she had so many times before sought to enter and failed: a pattern of crossed lines, an immense red-checked veil that parted now to reveal another veil, identical to itself, toward which she fell as toward a net. But the net parted, or she passed through its interstices, and the pattern was repeated, mindlessly, meaninglessly, again and again, until the white spaces within the red lines gradually darkened, like a twilight that slowly deepens to night. From time to time she would hear the barking of the dog, and then there was a larger darkness and a deeper silence and sleep closed around her like a blanket being tucked into place by a gigantic hand.

  CHAPTER 44

  Glandier was on the phone with the police when Sugar, who had been lying down drying off after his shower, suddenly leaped up in a frenzy of barking and scooted into the kitchen. Glandier knew very little more than the police about what had happened at Alice Hoffman’s, but he’d been told that they were looking for her dog, and so he clamped his hand down over the phone’s mouthpiece and made only the quickest and most noncommittal responses until it was safe to excuse himself and hang up. All the while the damned dog had gone on yapping.

  When he went into the kitchen he found Sugar, his front feet up against the icebox, snarling and barking and making lunges at the potholder that clung, by its magnet, to the top of the icebox door.

  Glandier looked at the dog with disgust. “You want the fucking potholder?” He took it off the door and threw it to the floor. “So take the fucking potholder! But for Christ’s sake don’t start in with that kind of noise when I’m on the phone with the police.”

  It seemed insane to be talking to an animal as though it were some damned employee, but this clearly was no ordinary animal. Apparently Sugar had managed to murder Alice Hoffman and done almost as much for Bing Anker. The police said both of them had been severely bitten, in addition to their other injuries. Glandier could fill in the details from his dream.

  What’s more, Sugar seemed to understand him. When he talked, Sugar would listen. When Sugar wanted something, he knew how to get it. Like the way he’d made a beeline for the bathroom and jumped into the tub, demanding a shampoo.

  What the dog wanted with a potholder Glandier couldn’t imagine, but he seemed content now that he had it. He’d taken the potholder back to his mat of newspapers and lain down on top of it with a look, which Glandier didn’t think he was imagining, of considering just what to do next.

  Which (Glandier told himself) was something he too would do well to consider. Whatever had happened at Alice Hoffman’s, it would not look right if her dog were found here: “Well, Officer, I can’t figure it out either.” The police would not consider that an adequate response.

  Sugar seemed to have reached a decision, for he bolted up from the newspapers and, snapping up the potholder, made his way to the far end of the kitchen, where he took up a position of readiness at the side of the door going out to the garage. He whined to be let out.

  Glandier was of two minds whether to let Sugar have his way. He didn’t want the neighbors to see Sugar, but neither did he want Sugar to become upset, given his known capacity for self-assertion. Also, he didn’t want Sugar to piss on the floor, and that in the end was the deciding factor.

  It was already dark. No one would see the dog, and if they did no one would suppose he was Glandier’s. Maybe the little fucker would disappear into the nowhere he’d come from. He could hope.

  The phone rang. The police again? But no, what reason would they have to be calling back? It was his office, probably. Without him there to make decisions, entropy would soon be making major advances at Techno-Controls. In his more confident moments, Glandier actually believed that; at other times, such as now, it was what he longed to be assured of. The problem was that the office wasn’t likely to be calling on a Sunday evening. He picked up the phone on the sixth ring and said, “Yes?”

  “Hullo, who’s this?” said a voice that caused Glandier an instant inward cringe.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” he answered in his most official, prickly tone of voice.

  “Hey, Bob, ole buddy, how ya doin’, fella?” Then, when this elicited no reply: “This is Nils here, Nils Gulbradsen.”

  “I recognized your voice.”

  “Where you been keepin’ yourself, man? Thought we’d see you up here for the ice fishin’. Now that you got yourself your own cabin an’ everything.”

  “Always meant to. Never had the time.”

  “Hey, Bob, you gotta take the time, man. All work and no play, you know the saying. How ‘bout coming up this weekend?”

  “The weekend’s over, Nils.”

  “Hey, man, I thought you was
an executive. Executives’ weekends is over when they say they are. Right? Anyhow, how long a drive is it? Not much more than an hour when the traffic’s light. So pile in your car and come up here and grab yourself a couple northerns before the season starts and they’re all snapped up by ya-hoos from the Twin Cities.” Nils made a hooting sound meant for laughter, and added, “Nothin’ personal intended. I know you’re basically a country boy at heart.”

  Glandier said nothing. He was livid.

  “Thing is, Bob, I thought you and me could maybe have a little business talk while you was up here.”

  “It’ll have to wait a couple months or so, Nils. I’m completely tied up here. Executives don’t always have the kind of freedom you seem to think.”

  “Yeah, well. The thing is, the fishing season starts on May twelfth, and that doesn’t give me a whole lot of time, does it? I mean, there’s not a whole lot I can do without some investment capital. The fucking cooler’s on the blink. Half the fucking boats are rotted through. But I say, Look on the bright side. Think of the situation I got here as an investment opportunity. That’s what I told old Knudsen at Farmer’s National. Know what old Knudsen told me? Go fuck yourself. Not in so many words, but that was the basic message. I’d’ve liked to take his fuckin’ leather desk set and shove it up his fuckin’ ass.”

  Glandier smiled. He had a personal weakness for imbecilic obscenity and often tried to mimic those, like Nils, who had obtained true mastery. But tonight, with the smell of blackmail so strong in the air, he didn’t feel like playing the game by Nils’s rules.

  “I thought,” he said, “you were going to get the resort in shape with the money I gave you for the cabin.”