Dagger Key and Other Stories

He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that he would not have foregone the experience of being with her. But though he believed this to be true, he no longer was certain of it. That he could accept her to the point that he could dismiss, even dote upon, the symptoms of her strangeness—this fact had, almost without his notice, so shredded the fabric of his emotions, it had grown difficult for him to separate hope from desire.

After she had gone into the bedroom, to become whatever she became without him, he dressed and sat at the table, studying his lists. They revealed no pattern, no truth other than the nonsensical and menacing truth that he was in love with a dead woman. In love, also, with her deathly condition, with her odd glow and the curious behavior of water on her skin. It was a splendid absurdity worthy of an Irish ballad. The trouble with such tunes, though, they tended to neglect the ordinary heart of things, things such as the commonplace mutuality that had developed between them, and that was the matter truly worth commemorating in song. Nobody sat around scratching their ass or discussing the character of an ex-husband in an Irish ballad. They were all grand sadness and exquisite pain. Of course, sadness and pain were likely headed his way, and he had little doubt they would be grand and exquisite. As if anticipation were itself an affliction, his thoughts spun out of control, images and fragments of emotions whirling up and away, prelude to a despair so profound it left him hunched over the table, eyes fixed on the lists, like a troll turned to stone by an enchantment he had been tricked into reading.

The last of the gray light blended with the mist forming above the lake. Shellane stirred himself, went to the stove and heated a can of soup. He leaned against the counter, watching steam rise from the saucepan, remembering an interview he’d seen with a man who had directed a horror movie—the man said his film was optimistic because, though its view of the afterlife was gruesome, that it lent any credence whatsoever to the afterlife was hopeful. Shellane supposed this would be a healthy attitude for him to adopt. But the prospect was so completely daft…It had been a long while since his Catholic schooldays, and the concepts associated with religion—virgin birth, the Assumption, the hierarchies of angels, and so forth—had lost their hold on him. Now he was being forced to confront a concept even less logical, one concerning which his knowledge was so fragmentary, any conjecture he made about it had the feeling of wild speculation.

Once his soup was hot, he went on the Internet, accessed a Roman Catholic dictionary, and looked up Limbo. According to doctrine, Limbo referred to a place in which unbaptized children, souls born before the advent of Christ, and prudent virgins awaited the Second Coming, at which point they would be assumed into Heaven. Grace did not appear to fit any of these categories; thus it followed that the Church was a bit off-base in its comprehension of the afterlife. No surprise there. Yet the idea of a halfway house, an interim place where souls were parked for the duration, for some term pertinent to their lives—this accorded with what Grace had told him. The black house, however, seemed to incorporate an element of punishment, to be less a limbo than a state of purgatory. A kind of boutique hell targeting a select clientele? “Fuck,” he said, switching off the laptop, and stared at his uneaten soup.

Grace, fully dressed, came out of the bedroom. “I have to go,” she said absently as she crossed the room. He watched her leave, sat a moment longer, then once again said, “Fuck,” heaved up to his feet, grabbed his jacket off the peg beside the porch door, and followed.

He moved cautiously through the fog, listening, peering ahead, and thus he noticed the point at which he crossed over from the lakeshore into whatever plane it was that Grace had made her home. The wind suddenly died, the sounds of the spruce boughs swaying were sheared away, and his anxiety spiked. Despite the cold, a drop of sweat trickled down his back; he felt a pulse in his neck. Each step he took seemed the step of a condemned criminal walking toward the death chamber. Legs weak, mind bright with fear. When he came in sight of the black house, its gabled second story lifting from the murk, he did not think he could go on. Even without the motive force of the wind, the fog boiled around him, as if alive, and the notion that it might be a form of ectoplasmic life, tendrils and feelers plucking at his clothes, trailing across his skin, wanting to touch him…that got him moving again.