A Noise Downstairs(5)

“Why did you think that?”

He shrugged. “She hadn’t come with me to the play. My mind just went there.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway, thank God Charlotte’s there when I have the nightmares, waking me up. The last one, my arms were flailing about in front of me as I tried to escape the plastic.”

“Are you able to get back to sleep after?”

“Sometimes, but I’m afraid to. I figure the nightmare’s just on pause.” He closed his eyes briefly, as though checking to see whether the images that had come to him in the night were still there. When he opened them, he said, “And I guess it was four nights ago, I dreamed I was sitting at the table with them.”

“With?”

“You know. Jill Foster and Catherine Lamb. At Kenneth’s house. We were all taking turns typing our apologies. The women, they had these ghoulish grins, blood draining from the slits in their throats, actually laughing at me because the typewriter was now in front of me and I don’t know what to write and they’re saying, ‘We’re all done! We’re all done!’ And you know how, in a dream, you can’t actually see words clearly? They’re all a-jumble?”

“Yes,” Anna White said.

“So that’s why it’s so frustrating. I know I have to type something or Kenneth, standing there at the end of the table, looking like fucking Nosferatu—excuse me—will kill me. But then, I know he’s going to kill me anyway.” Paul’s hands were starting to shake.

Anna reached across and touched the back of one. “Let’s stop for a second.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“We’ll switch gears for a bit. How are things with Charlotte?”

Paul shrugged. “I guess they’re okay.”

“That doesn’t sound terribly positive.”

“No, really, things are better. She’s been very supportive, although having to watch me go through all this has to get her down at times. You know, before all this happened, things weren’t exactly a hundred percent. I think Charlotte was going through something, almost a kind of reassessment of her life. You know, ten years ago, is this where she would have imagined herself being? Selling real estate in Milford? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you know? I think her dreams were a little different when she was younger. But my nearly getting killed, maybe that had a way of refocusing things. They’re better now.”

“And your son? Josh?”

Paul frowned. “It hit him hard when it happened, of course. Thinking your dad might die, that’s not easy for a nine-year-old kid. But I wasn’t in the hospital long, and while I had some recovering to do—and still am—it was clear I wasn’t going to drop dead right away. And he splits his time between his mom and me. So he’s not necessarily around when I wake up screaming in the night.”

Paul tried to laugh. Anna allowed herself a smile. They were both quiet a moment. Anna sensed that Paul was working up to something, so she waited.

Finally, he said, “I wanted to bounce something off you.”

“Sure.”

“I talked about this with Charlotte, and she thinks maybe it’s a good idea, but she said I should get your input.”

“I’m all ears.”

“It’s pretty obvious that I’m . . . what’s the word? Haunted? I guess I’m haunted by what Kenneth did.”

“I might have used the word traumatized, but yes.”

“I mean, not just because he nearly killed me. That’d be enough. But I knew him. He took me under his wing when I arrived at West Haven. He was my friend. We had drinks together, shared our thoughts, connected, you know? Fellow sci-fi nerds. How could I not have seen that under all that, he was a monster?”

“Monsters can be very good at disguising themselves.”

Paul shook his head. “Then again, there were many times when I wondered whether I knew him at all, even before this. Remember Walter Mitty?”

“From the James Thurber story?”

Paul nodded. “A boring, ordinary man who imagines himself in various heroic roles. Kenneth presented as a drab professor with some secret life as a ladies’ man. Except with him, the secret life wasn’t imaginary. It was for real. He had this underlying charm that women—well, some women—found hard to resist. But he didn’t advertise it to the rest of us. He didn’t brag about his latest sexual conquest.”

“So he never told you about women he was seeing?”

“No, but there was talk. We all knew. Whenever there was a faculty event, and he’d bring his wife, Gabriella, all you could think was, is she the only one in the room who doesn’t know?”

“Did you know his son?”

“Len,” Paul said, nodding. “Kenneth loved that boy. He was kind of—I don’t know the politically correct way to put this—but he was a bit slow. It’s not like he was somewhere on the spectrum or anything, but definitely not future college material. But Kenneth would bring him out on campus so he could hang out for hours in the library looking at art books. Kenneth’d gather a stack of books for Len so he could turn through them page by page. He liked looking at the pictures.”

Paul gave Anna a look of bafflement. “How do I square that with what he did? Killing two women? And the way he did it. Making them apologize to him before slitting their . . . I can’t get my head around it.”