7 Dark Roses - Free Audio ebooks

John Jaffrey

The doctor, whose party it had been, woke out of a troubled sleep just at the time when Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James were beginning their walk across a field in the direction of what appeared to be several piles of dirty laundry. Moaning, Jaffrey looked around the bedroom. Everything appeared to be subtly altered, subtly wrong. Even the bare shoulder of Milly Sheehan, who slept on beside him, was somehow wrong—Milly’s round shoulder looked insubstantial, like pink smoke floating in the air. This was true of the bedroom as a whole. The fading wallpaper (blue stripes and bluer roses), the table bearing neat piles of coins, a library book (The Making of a Surgeon) and a lamp, the doors and handles of the tall white cupboard opposite, his yesterday’s gray striped suit and last evening’s dinner jacket draped carelessly over a chair: it all seemed drained of several shades of color, wispy as the interior of a cloud. In this room, at once familiar and unreal, he could not stay.

Jesus she moved, his own words, coiled and died in the washed-out air as if he had just spoken them. Pursued by them, he quickly got out of bed.

Jesus she moved, and this time he heard it spoken. The voice was level, without shading or vibrato, not his own. He had to get out of the house. Of his dreams, he could remember only the last startling image: before that there had been the usual business of lying paralyzed in a bare bedroom, no bedroom he’d ever seen in his life, and the coming of a threatening beast which resolved into dead Sears and dead Lewis: he had assumed they’d all been having this dream. But the image which propelled him across the room was this: the face, streaked with blood and distorted with bruises, of a young woman—a woman as dead as Sears and Lewis in the familiar dream—staring at him with glowing eyes and grinning mouth. It was more real than anything about him, more real than himself. (Jesus she moved she can’t she’s dead)

But she moved, all right. She sat up and grinned.

It was coming to an end for him at last, as it had for Edward, and with part of his mind he knew it And was grateful. A little surprised that his hands did not melt through the brass handles of the dresser drawer, Jaffrey pulled, out socks and underwear. Unearthly rose light pervaded the bedroom. He quickly dressed in random articles of clothing, selecting them blindly, and left the bedroom to go down the stairs to the ground floor. There, obeying an impulse stamped into him by ten years’ habit, he let himself into a small rear office, opened a cabinet and took out two vials and two disposable hypodermics. He sat on a revolving typing chair, rolled up his left sleeve, took the syringes from their wrappers and put one on the metal-topped table beside him.

The girl sat up on the blood-smeared car seat and grinned at him through the window. She said, Hurry up, John. He pushed the first needle through the rubber cap over the insulin compound, pulled back the barrel and socked the needle into his arm. When the hypodermic was empty, he retracted it and tossed it into the wastebasket beneath the table; then he put the other syringe into the second vial, which contained a compound of morphine; this went into the same arm.

Hurry up, John.

None of his friends knew he was a diabetic, and had been since his early sixties; neither did they know of the morphine addiction which had gained on him since the same period, when he had begun administering the drug to himself: they had only seen the effects of the doctor’s morning ritual gradually eating into him.

With both syringes at the bottom of the wastebasket, Dr. Jaffrey came out into his entrance hall and waiting room. Empty chairs stood in rows against the walls; on one of these appeared a girl in torn clothing, red smears across her face, redness leaking from her mouth when she said Hurry up, John.

He reached into a closet for his overcoat and was surprised that his hand, extended there at the end of his arm, was such a whole, functioning thing. Someone behind him seemed to be helping him get his arms through the sleeves of the coat. Blindly he grabbed a hat from the shelf above the coathooks. He stumbled through his front door.

The face was smiling down at him from an upstairs window in Eva Galli’s old house. Get along, now. Moving a little oddly, as if drunk, he went down the walk, his feet in carpet slippers not registering the cold, and turned in the direction of town. Until he reached the corner, he could feel that house across the street as a presence behind him; when he managed to get as far as the corner, his open coat flapping about the trousers to the gray suit and the dinner jacket, he suddenly saw in his mind that the house was blazing, all of it blanketed in a transparent flame that was even now warming his back. But when he turned around to look it was not burning, there were no transparent flames, nothing had happened.

* * * * *

Thus, when Ricky Hawthorne and Sears James were seated with Walt Hardesty in a farm kitchen drinking coffee, Dr. Jaffrey, a thin figure in a fishing hat, an unbuttoned coat, the trousers to one suit, the jacket to another and carpet slippers, was moving past the front of the Archer Hotel. He was as little aware of it as he was of the wind which whipped his coat back and snapped it behind him. Eleanor Hardie, vacuuming the carpet in the hotel’s lobby, saw him go by, holding down his fishing hat, and thought: poor Dr. Jaffrey, he has to go out to see a patient in this weather. The bottom of the window excluded the carpet slippers from her view of the doctor. She would have been confused to see him hesitate at the corner and turn down the left side of the square—in effect going back the way he had come.

When he passed the big windows of the Village Pump restaurant, William Webb, the young waiter Stella Hawthorne had intimidated, was setting out napkins and silverware, working his way toward the back of the restaurant where he could take a break and have a cup of coffee. Because he was nearer to Dr. Jaffrey than Eleanor Hardie had been, he took in the details of the doctor’s pale, confused face beneath the fishing hat, the coat unbuttoned to reveal the doctor’s bare neck, the tuxedo jacket over the pajama top. What went through his mind was: the old fool’s got amnesia. On the half-dozen occasions Bill Webb had seen Dr. Jaffrey in the restaurant, the doctor had read a book straight through his meal and left a minute tip. Because Jaffrey had begun to hurry, though the expression on his face suggested that he had no proper idea of where he was going, Webb dropped a handful of silverware on the table and rushed out of the restaurant.

Dr. Jaffrey had begun to flap down the sidewalk. Webb ran after him and caught up with him at the traffic lights a block away: the doctor, running, was an angular bird. Webb touched the sleeve of the black coat. “Dr. Jaffrey, can I help you?”

Dr. Jaffrey.

In front of Webb, about to run across the street without bothering to check the traffic—which, in any case, was nonexistent—Jaffrey turned around, having heard a toneless command. Bill Webb then was given one of the most unsettling experiences of his life. A man with whom he was acquainted, a man who had never looked at him with even polite curiosity, now regarded him with utter terror stamped into his features. Webb, who dropped his hand, had no idea that the doctor saw, instead of his ordinary, slightly froggy face, that of a dead girl grinning redly at him.

“I’m going,” the doctor said, his face still registering horror. “I’m going now.”

“Uh, sure,” said Webb.

The doctor turned and fled, and reached the other side of the street without mishap. He continued his birdlike run down the left side of Main Street, elbows hitching, coat twisting out behind him, and Webb was sufficiently unsettled by the look the doctor had given him to stand staring at him open-mouthed until he realized that he was coatless and a block from the restaurant.

In Dr. Jaffrey’s mind a perfect image had formed, far clearer than the buildings past which he fled. This was of the two-lane steel bridge over the little river into which Sears James had once thrown a blouse wrapped about a large stone. The fishing hat lifted from his head in a buffeting wind, and for a moment that was clear too, sailing handsomely through gray air.

“I’m going now,” he said.

Though on any normal day John Jaffrey could have gone straight to the bridge without even thinking about which streets would take him there, this morning he wandered about Milburn in a growing panic, unable to find it. He could picture the bridge perfectly—he saw even the rivets with their rounded heads, the flat dull face of the metal—but when he tried to picture its location, he saw only fuzz. Buildings? He turned into Market Street, almost expecting to see the bridge lifting up between Burger King and the A&P. Seeing only the bridge, he had forgotten the river.

Trees? A park? The picture the words evoked was so strong that he was surprised, leaving Market Street, to see about him only empty streets, snow heaped at the curbside. Move on, doctor. He stumbled forward, righted himself by leaning against a barber pole, went on.

Trees? Some trees, scattered in a landscape? No. Nor these floating buildings.

As the doctor wandered half-blindly through streets he should have known, tacking from the square to Washington Street on the south, then over to Milgrim Lane and down declining Milgrim Lane past three-room wooden houses set between carwashes and drugstores into the Hollow and real poverty where he would be as close to unknown as he could be and still be in Milburn (here he might have been in trouble if it hadn’t been so cold and if trouble hadn’t become a meaningless concept to apply to him), several people saw him go. The Hollow people who saw him go thought he was just another crazy, doomed and oddly dressed. When he accidentally turned back in the right direction and crossed back into quiet streets where bare trees stood at the ends of long lawns, those who saw him assumed that the doctor’s car was nearby, because he had begun to move in a slow trot and was hatless. A mailman who grabbed his arm and said, “Man, do you need help?” was shocked into helplessness by the same wide-open gaze of terror that had stopped Bill Webb. Eventually Dr. Jaffrey wound back into the business district.

When he had twice circled Benjamin Harrison Oval, both times going right past Bridge Approach Lane, a patient voice in his mind said Go around once more and take the second right turn, doctor.

“Thank you,” he whispered, having heard amusement as well as patience in the voice he’d once heard as inhumanly toneless.

So once more, exhausted and half-frozen, John Jaffrey forced himself to move painfully past the tire-repair outfits and muffler centers of Benjamin Harrison Oval, and lifting his knees like a wornout milkhorse, at last made the turn into Bridge Approach Lane.

“Of course,” he sobbed, seeing it at last, the gray arch of the bridge over the sluggish river. He could trot no further; by now in fact he could barely walk. One of the slippers had fallen off, and the foot it had covered was entirely without sensation. He had a flaming stitch in his left side, his heart thudded, his lungs were one vast ache. The bridge was an answered prayer. He trudged toward it. This was where the bridge belonged, here in this windy area where the old brick buildings gave way to weedy marshland, here where the wind felt like a hand holding him back.

Now, doctor.

He nodded, and as he drew nearer he saw where he could stand. Four big scallops of metal, themselves cross-hatched by girders, formed an undulating line on either side of the bridge. In the middle of the bridge, between the second and third metal curves, a thick steel girder protruded upward.

Jaffrey could not feel the change from the concrete of the road to the steel of the bridge, but he could feel the bridge move beneath him, lifting a little with each particularly strong gust. When he reached the superstructure, he pulled himself along on the rail. After reaching the central girder, he gripped one of the rungs, put his frozen feet on the bottom rung, and tried to climb up to the flat rail.

He could not do it.

For a moment he stood there, hands on one rung and feet on another, like an old man hanging from a rope, breathing so heavily it sounded like sobbing. He managed to lift his slippered foot and put it on the next rung. Then by using what he felt was surely the last of his strength, he pulled his body up onto it. Some flesh from his bare foot adhered to the lower rung. Panting, he stood on the second rung, and saw that he had two more rungs to go before he would be high enough to stand on the flat rail.

One at a time, he transferred his hands to the next highest rung. Then he moved the slippered foot; and with what felt like heroic effort, moved the other.

Pain seared his entire leg, and he clung to the supports, the bare foot lifted into cold wind. For a moment, his foot blazing, he feared that shock would tumble him back down onto the bridge. Once down, he would never be able to climb up again.

Delicately he put the toes of his still-flaming foot on the rung. It was enough to hold him. Again he transferred his numb arms. The slippered foot went up a rung—by itself it seemed. He tried to pull himself up, but his arms merely trembled. It felt as though the muscles in his shoulders were separating. Finally he threw himself up, assisted he thought by a hand pushing upward in the small of his back, his fingers luckily caught the rung, and he was nearly there.

For the first time he noticed his bare foot, bleeding onto the metal. The pain had increased; now his entire left leg seemed to be in flames. He put the foot down onto the flat rail, and held tightly with both exhausted arms while he moved his right foot beside it.

The water glistened feebly beneath him. Wind buffeted his hair, his coat.

Standing before him on a platform of gray wind, dressed in tweed jacket and bow tie, was Ricky Hawthorne. Ricky’s hands were clasped, in a characteristic gesture, before his belt buckle. “Good work, John,” he said in his dry kind voice. The best of them all, the sweetest, cuckolded little Ricky Hawthorne.

“You take too much guff from Sears,” John Jaffrey said, his voice weak and whispery. “You always did.”

“I know.” Ricky smiled. “I’m a natural subaltern. Sears was always a natural general.”

“Wrong,” Jaffrey tried to say. “He’s not, he’s …” The thought died.

“It doesn’t matter,” came the light dry voice. “Just step forward off the bridge, John.”

Dr. Jaffrey was looking down at the gray water. “No, I can’t. I had something different in mind. I was going …” Confusion took it away.

When he looked up again, he gasped. Edward Wanderley, who had been closer to him than any of the others, was standing on the wind instead of Ricky. As on the night of the party, he wore black shoes, a gray flannel suit, a flowered shirt. Black-rimmed spectacles were joined at the bows by a silvery cord. Handsome in his theatrical gray hair and expensive clothes, Edward smiled at him with compassion, concern, warmth. “It’s been a little while,” he said.

Dr. Jaffrey began to weep.

“It’s time to stop messing around,” Edward told him. “All it takes is one step. It’s simple as hell, John.”

Dr. Jaffrey nodded.

“So take the step, John. You’re too tired to do anything else.”

Dr. Jaffrey stepped off the bridge.

Below him, at the level of the water but protected from the wind by a thick steel plate, Omar Norris saw him hit the water. The doctor’s body went under, surfaced a moment later and spun halfway around, face down, before it began to drift downriver with the current. “Shit,” he said: he’d come to the one place he could think of where he could finish off a pint of bourbon without being cornered by lawyers, the sheriff, his wife or someone telling him to get on the snowplow and start clearing the streets. He tilted more bourbon into his mouth, closed his eyes. When he opened them it was still there, lower in the water because the heavy coat had begun to weight the body down. “Shit.” He capped the bottle, stood up and went back out into the wind to see if he could find someone who would know what to do.