The Secret History

My heartbeat trembled in my fingertips. Outside the black panes, past my ghost in the glass (Why so pale and wan, fond lover?) I heard the wind in the trees, felt the hills crowding around me in the dark.

I wished I could stop myself from thinking. But all sorts of things had begun to occur to me. For instance: why had Henry let me in on this, only two months (it seemed years, a lifetime) before? Because it was obvious, now, that his decision to tell me was a calculated move. He had appealed to my vanity, allowing me to think I'd figured it out by myself (good for you, he'd said, leaning back in his chair; I could still remember the look on his face as he'd said it, good for you, you're just as smart as I'd thought you were); and I had congratulated myself in the glow of his praise, when in fact – I saw this now, I'd been too vain to see it then – he'd led me right to it, coaxing and flattering all the way. Perhaps – the thought crawled over me like a cold sweat – perhaps even my preliminary, accidental discovery had been engineered. The lexicon that had been misplaced, for instance: had Henry stolen it, knowing I'd come back for it? And the messy apartment I was sure to walk into; the flight numbers and so forth left deliberately, so it now seemed, by the phone; both were oversights unworthy of Henry. Maybe he'd wanted me to find out. Maybe he'd divined in me – correctly – this cowardice, this hideous pack instinct which would enable me to fall into step without question.

And it wasn't just a question of having kept my mouth shut, I thought, staring with a sick feeling at my blurred reflection in the windowpane. Because they couldn't have done it without me. Bu

'You were the alarm bell, Richard,' Henry had said. 'I knew if he told anybody, he'd tell you first. And now that he has, I feel that we're in for an extremely rapid progression of events.'

An extremely rapid progression of events. My flesh crawled, remembering the ironic, almost humorous twist he'd put on the last words – oh, God, I thought, my God, how could I have listened to him? He was right, too, about the rapid part at least.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Bu

I was still trying to force back the blackest thought of all; the merest suggestion of it sent the rat's feet of panic skittering up my spine. Had Henry intended to make me the patsy if his plan had fallen through? If so, I wasn't quite sure how he'd meant to manage it, but if he'd felt like doing it, there was no doubt in my mind he would have been able to. So much of what I knew was only secondhand, so much of it was only what he'd told me; there was an awful lot, when you got right down to it, that I didn't even know. And – though the immediate danger was apparently gone – there was no guarantee that it wouldn't surface again a year, twenty years, fifty years from now. I knew, from television, that there was no statute of limitations on murder.

New evidence discovered. The case reopened. You read about these things all the time.

It was still dark. Birds were chirping in the eaves. I pulled out my desk drawer and counted the rest of the sleeping pills: candy-colored pretties, bright on a sheet of typing paper. There were still quite a lot of them, plenty for my purposes. (Would Mrs Corcoran feel better if she knew this twist: that her stolen pills had killed her son's killer?) So easy, to feel them go down my throat: but blinking in the glare of my desk lamp, I was struck with a wave of revulsion so strong it was almost nausea. Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bu

I lay on my bed. I felt my heart limping in my chest, and was revolted by it, a pitiful muscle, sick and bloody, pulsing against 55i my ribs. Rain streamed down the windowpanes. The lawn out «side was sodden, swampy. When the sun came up, I saw, in the ™ small, cold light of dawn, that the flagstones outside were covered with earthworms: delicate, nasty, hundreds of them, twisting blind and helpless on the rain-dark sheets of slate.

In class on Tuesday, Julian mentioned he'd spoken to Charles on the telephone. 'You're right,' he murmured. 'He doesn't sound well. Very groggy and confused, don't you think? I suppose they have him under sedation?' He smiled, sifting through his papers.

'Poor Charles. I asked where Camilla was – I wanted to get her on the line, I couldn't make any sense of what he was trying to tell me – and he said' – (here his voice changed slightly, in imitation of Charles, a stranger might assume; but it was really Julian's own voice, cultured and purring, only raised slightly in tone, as if he could not bear, even in mimicry, to substantively alter its own melodious cadence) – 'he said, in the most melancholy voice, "She's hiding from me." He was dreaming, of course.

I thought it was rather sweet. So, to humor him, I said, "Well, then. You must hide your eyes and count to ten and she'll come back."'

He laughed. 'But he got angry at me. It was really rather charming of him. "No," he said, "no she won't."

"But you're dreaming," I said to him. "No," he said, "no I'm not. It's not a dream. It's real."'

The doctors couldn't figure out quite what was wrong with Charles. They'd tried two antibiotics over the course of the week, but the infection – whatever it was – didn't respond. The third try was more successful. Francis, who went to see him Wednesday and Thursday, was told that Charles was improving, and that if everything went well he could come home over the weekend.

About ten o'clock on Friday, after another sleepless night, I walked over to Francis's. It was a hot, overcast morning, trees shimmering in the heat. I felt haggard and exhausted. The warm air vibrated with the thrum of wasps and the drone of lawn mowers. Swifts chased and chittered, in fluttering pairs, through the sky.

My head hurt. I wished I had a pair of sunglasses. I wasn't supposed to meet Francis until eleven-thirty but my room was a wreck, I hadn't done laundry in weeks; it was too hot to do anything more taxing than lie on my tangled bed, and sweat, and try to ignore the bass of my neighbor's stereo thumping through the wall. Jud and Frank were building some enormous, ramshackle, modernistic structure out on Commons lawn, and the hammers and the power drills had started early in the morning.

I didn't know what it was – I had heard, variously, that it was a stage set, a sculpture, a Stonehenge-type monument to the Grateful Dead – but the first time I had looked out my window, dazed with Fiorinal, and seen the upright support posts rising stark from the lawn, I was flooded with black, irrational terror: gibbets, I thought, they're putting up gibbets, they're having a hanging on Commons lawn… The hallucination was over in a moment, but in a strange way it had persisted, manifesting itself in different lights like one of those pictures on the cover of horror paperbacks in the supermarket: turned one way, a smiling blond-haired child; turned the other, a skull in flames. Sometimes the structure was mundane, silly, perfectly harmless; though early in the morning, say, or around twilight, the world would drop away and there loomed a gallows, medieval and black, birds wheeling low in the skies overhead. At night, it cast its long shadow over what fitful sleep I was able to get.