Desmond Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
1958
Well, he certainly isn't as beautiful as he'd used to be. Not as strong or masculine or really much of anything, any more. Just a gimp in a chair. And yet Carolyne Thomas has always found there to be something interesting about Desmond Roberts, something that has drawn her to him like a moth to the flame. She had always assumed it was his basic manliness, all that testosterone and crackling intelligence packed into one being... But even now that all of that is gone, there still seems to be something about him that brings Carolyne to find herself standing at her front window, a glass of red wine in her hand, watching the Roberts home across the street.
It's a modest building, the Robert's. Just a one story bungalow with a single car garage, small backyard. No more than a half acre of real estate, all told. The back and east side gets a lot of sun, but the west side facing those new neighbours (what were their names?) with that God awful fence of theirs, well... Back when he'd been healthy, Desmond had called it their “starter home”. She'd liked the sound of that, but had also felt some trepidation at the thought, because that meant that at some point they would be moving on. And then she wouldn't have Desmond around anymore.
Well it doesn't look like the Roberts are going anywhere any time soon. And although Carolyne is no longer spending any time over there any more – oh, of course she had gone over after they had returned from the accident, to offer her support, such as it was, but since then she had quite naturally kept her distance – even so, it feels somehow reassuring to her now, to know that her Desmond will be staying, after all.
Of course, she feels kind of silly, standing here like this, staring across at their front windows with the shades drawn. Those shades are always drawn nowadays, it seems. And yet she keeps watching, as if by the mere act of watching she might will someone to move forward from within the house across the street. Move forward and draw back the shades and then -
What was it Mitch had said to her once? Something about the quality of a thing being changed by the mere fact of it's being observed. It had sounded pretty mumbo jumbo to her, and beside which, what did he know, really. Just something he picked up from the science boys at the base. But still, standing here right now, watching the Robert's home, she wonders if it might not be true. Was she changing the nature of the house, of their front window, just by looking at it? Was she changing Desmond? Change back, she thinks... Back to who you used to be.
Carolyne shakes her head and takes a drink of wine. Silly. Such silly thoughts for a grown woman to be having. She looks down at the glass in her hand. Almost empty. Mitch will be angry with her again for drinking too much. But what else is there for her to do around here?
Carolyne smiles to herself. Maybe he'll get really angry... Maybe that veneer of noble strength will slip away and the high and mighty Mitch Thomas will finally lose control. Maybe he will yell loud enough for the neighbours to hear, maybe he'll break something, smash a fist through the wall. Maybe he'll even hit her...
A delicious warmth grows in the pit of Carolyne's stomach, mixing with the wine. But it isn't just the buzz of alcohol, oh no. This is something else indeed.
This is the thing that had drawn her to Mitch in the first place, the reason that she had married him, for that matter. What she had used to see him in. That ability...
She imagines him, with his gun, in Korea or some other one of those countries in South Asia, standing in front of a group of villagers and just... doing it.
The warmth in Carolyne's stomach grows to a bright flame. Maybe... Maybe she should stop.
Stop what? Stop thinking – it's just a thought. It's so boring here. She's just daydreaming, what's the harm? No harm in a little daydream.
...Her husband Mitch standing amidst the flames of a destroyed village that reeks of burnt wood and spilled blood, buzzing with flies so abundant that they create a droning hum, a frequency of madness and raw splayed open agony and quivering acid fear. He is standing, her husband, amidst a line of men, all soldiers, all with the same look on their faces, that look she had seen when she first met him and he had levelled his gaze upon her, that look of determination. The look that says: this is going to happen.
The villagers cringe and cry, some shouting their defiance, some staring at the ground, sullenly accepting their fate. And Mitch's eyes say it all. Her husband and his stone cold eyes, narrowing into hot slits over his raised gun, his gun that wants so badly to eat them, to bite and tear and eat them all to death...
This. Is going. To.
Happen.
Carolyne spills a little wine on her dress, then abruptly quaffs the rest of the glass. She'd been holding it up next to her face, while she was daydreaming there. And she had – stumbled? Or was it a shudder?
Carolyne sets her wine glass on the ledge of the front window and inspects her dress. The wine stain has spread across her shoulder and soaked into the material, looking for all intents and purposes like a bloodstain. Somebody stabbed me... She knows she should take it off immediately, get some vinegar. It's going to set in.
When the Roberts had first moved in, she had gone out to meet them. Desmond had been helping the movers with the furniture, and she had chatted awhile with Wendy on the front lawn, who had seemed friendly enough in a sort of nervous and insecure way. They both had watched Desmond lifting and moving, and for not the first time she had marvelled that such a man was a scientist, he certainly didn't fit the picture she'd had in mind. If anything it was Wendy who seemed the somewhat nebbish type. After a few minutes, Wendy had invited Carolyne inside to help make lemonade for the men, and they entered the little home and weaved their way through the boxes to the kitchen. Of course, Carolyne didn't really help much with the lemonade, just kept Wendy company while she worked, talking about herself and Mitch and how they'd met. Wendy had seemed impressed that she was neighbours with a military couple, said it made her feel more secure, almost as good as living next to a police officer. Maybe even better. Carolyne had barely managed to not laugh out loud at this.
And then Desmond had walked in to the kitchen, taking the glass of lemonade from his wife and turning to Carolyne to introduce himself. Up close and facing her, he was even more impressive... Tall, with broad shoulders and strong arms, a thick shock of black hair brushed back from his forehead that glistened with a light sheen of sweat. His glasses did nothing to hide his magnetism, in fact they seemed to amplify it. He took her hand firmly in his own and smiled with bright white teeth and it was all she could do to picture her husband at that moment.
Mitch. He'd seemed so dangerous and alluring to her when they had first met. But later, after getting married, she'd come to see that most of that was just a put on, a facade that he had cultivated as part of his job. And his job? Well, by this point in his career he seemed to be more that of a bureaucrat than anything else. Sure, he still did some the physical stuff that kept him in shape, kept the weight of the years at bay... But as with any job, the higher you went the less time you spent in the trenches. Literally, in his case. It's not a matter of her not feeling safe with him – she knows that he is more than capable of protecting her if ever necessary.
Thing is, it's looking more and more like it never will be necessary. And as she had stood there in the Robert's kitchen shaking Desmond's hand she'd realized that she didn't want to feel safe. She had been feeling safe and secure her whole life, everyone had always protected her – first her parents, then every boyfriend she'd ever had, and now finally Mitch, and the truth was that it was all so very boring that she almost felt like it she just couldn't take it anymore. Like she might just – split open or something.
Outside, the daylight is waning. Carolyne leans against the windowsill and stares for a while more at the front bay window of the Robert's modest little one story home, their starter home that was now most likely their ending home, as well. And as she remembers that day that she had first met Desmond Roberts a chill runs through her, bringing goosebumps over her arms and causing her to close her eyes. His eyes. It was what she'd seen in his eyes, those ice blue eyes as he looked at her; they had seemed warm and friendly, the flesh crinkling around them in a way that denoted a compassion and spirit of humanity... But deep within, perhaps even behind his eyes, Carolyne had seen it. It was what she'd thought she'd seen in her husband, but this time she was certain it was for real, all the more for the fact that, unlike with Mitch, this was not something on display for effect. Oh no.
This was something that was hidden, deep inside of the man whose home she had found herself standing in, standing before him as his wife carried the tray of lemonade out to the workers and it was just the two of them now, for just a moment they were alone in the kitchen together and like a kindred spirit he'd shown it to her. His eyes.
The eyes of a killer.
As Wendy does the laundry she tries not to look through the doorway into the rest of the basement. The door is open now, gone actually, removed from it's hinges for investigative purposes, and the space beyond is just a yawning chasm of still and empty shadow.
Empty. Cleaned out completely, after the explosion. Maybe that's what bothers her, the emptiness. She has never set foot into that space ever since that day, even though at least once a week she has stood here, doing laundry, steps away from the open doorway into the basement where her husband had his accident. It has been like this ugly blank spot in her routine, something she avoids without even really thinking of it – she just does her laundry and gets out of there.
But today it seems to require an effort for her to ignore the door behind her; today she is thinking of it. And after all, how easy is it to not notice an open door, anyways? By it's very nature it is meant to draw one's attention. In fact, she is beginning to realize just how much of a strain it is for her to keep her back turned to the doorway like she is doing right now, just how hard it is concentrate on the simple task of washing their clothes, how each separate function seems to erode away in her mind, to give way to one simple thought: Door.
Wendy straightens up and looks out the basement window. That fence. That damn fence, right outside the window, those damn neighbours. Not two weeks after Desmond's accident, she is sure of it. She takes in a long sigh, reaching up to run a hand through her lank hair. She didn't used to be like this. Easily distracted, thoughts all over the place.. There was once a time when she had even thought of herself as a leader. Her friends in school, they had seen her as a leader, the queen bee of their little buzzing hive. And after, at the university, and in her job, she'd had no choice but to be tough, to think for herself and not rely on others too much. She had been focused and clear, almost ruthless in her purpose and intent.
And then came Desmond.
Slowly, Wendy turns around and faces the doorway. The space beyond is pitch black, deepening before her eyes, Beckoning to her. She pushes herself off of the washing machine and approaches the door. The washer reaches the end of it's cycle and becomes still, and in the room there is a temporary absence of sound, like a breath being held.
She pauses at the doorway. The space beyond remains inscrutable. How many hours had she spent down here? And now she was like a stranger approaching an alien territory, cautiously examining it's borders for signs of what lay within. But she already knows what lays within. It's empty-
The washer starts up with a thundering kick. Wendy freezes, her body tense, and when she releases the tension her body jolts in a delayed reaction shudder. Jolts of energy spark off of her fingertips at her sides. She takes a deep breath.
What is she so afraid of? The room is empty, has been for over a year now. In fact, it's getting high time for her to make some plans on how to use the space again. Pointless to let it just sit there and go to waste.
She should just step inside and take a look around, get a feel for the dimensions of the room. It will help her to visualize possible uses for the space. This is her house, after all.
Wendy reaches along the edge of the door, finding the light switch. She flips the switch, only to find the room remaining dark beyond the doorway. Of course, they took everything, even the light bulbs. Briefly the image of her light bulbs sitting in some Government facility, marked with an evidence tag, flashes into Wendy's mind. She wonders just what sort of tests those government scientists were performing on her light bulbs, and then she is laughing to herself, giggling into the dark, echoes bouncing into the empty room.
She steps through the doorway and walks forward into the room. As she moves further inside her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, helped in part by the meagre light filtering in through the small windows near the ceiling. Desmond had covered those windows, back during the days of their working together, down here.
Their time working together. The sounds of circuitry humming, the smells of oil and electricity. She remembers being utterly heightened intellectually as she worked on equations she never would have been able to manage before, and yet the computer programs she was working with had made it seem to come so naturally to her, she had supposed that this was the nature of coding; that it should seem like something she had already known. The pleasure of the experience was an indescribable thing.
But for all of the intellectual stimulation she had experienced, there can be no doubt that she had also fallen into a sort of clouding of her mind, of her self. As though all the bells and whistles had distracted her from questioning what exactly they had gotten involved in. It was a strange sort of dichotomy, this simultaneous heightening and dampening of her thoughts, and it's only in hindsight that she is aware that it had been that way at all...
And Desmond. What could she even say about her memories of Desmond, during this phantom time they had spent down here, those intense months of grey activity? He had seemed like a human cloud to her, a weather front that would push in to her area of work and pick up her results, carrying them with him to transmogrify into – Something.
Into a doorway to another dimension.
And now she can see the burn marks, scarring the concrete floor at her feet. This was where the transformers had been. Where he had stood, between the two polarities, with their overlapping frequencies that multiplied a thousand times per second, exponentially, the next second a million variations, then a trillion, a quadrillion, and then...
Another dimension. He had been trying to reach another dimension, and she had helped him. Without questioning anything at all, for months. What had she told herself? That it wasn't really going to work, that if she humoured him they would be able to work together on a mutual goal. And what about Armstrong and the Government, providing them with all of that advanced equipment? She doesn't even recall talking to Armstrong after that first night. She had certainly never been sworn to secrecy by anyone in any official capacity.
Of course, she had known not to talk. Even now, with Doctor Alan, she knows not to say too much. And along with that seemed an implicit understanding – that both herself and Armstrong were just humouring Desmond with his crazy dimensional theory, and that along the way some real work was getting done. That the craziness was just a motivator. It seems almost supernatural to her now, the idea that she may have been communicating with Armstrong in such a way. Maybe he had just known that was how she would approach the situation. Maybe that's how telepathy really works – you anticipate what someone will likely think in a given situation, then you create that situation. And then you just let the other person do the rest.
And she had done it, hadn't she? She had convinced herself that nothing would go wrong. An opportunity to play with some amazing toys, whose existence she'd never really questioned. And why would she? It had, after all, been a chance to prove her abilities, to show that she was more than just a wife.
But something did happen. Something had happened and now her husband is damaged beyond repair, and just what is she doing down here now, anyways? Thinking of maybe setting up a sewing space? Or a TV room? After all that has happened, how can this room be anything more than a morgue?
Wendy covers her face and sways in the gloom of her abandoned basement. A morgue. No, not true, he didn't die. He's still alive. He's gone. No.
Not a morgue. A way station. For a moment the question hovers in Wendy's mind – to where?But then the guilt rushes back in on her.
Her abilities. More than just a wife. And now, she wasn't even that, not really. Just a caretaker, doing time. The time for her to have been a wife was-
The sound of a creaking floorboard breaks through the ceiling directly above Wendy. She slowly drops her hands from her face, turning her eyes upward. Was that just the house settling?
She stands perfectly still, neck craned upward, her eyes focused on the ceiling. A spider makes its meandering way across the bottom of one of the beams, skittering along with alien upside down grace. Her eyes begin to water, from the strain of looking upward, and just when she decides to lower her head -
Again. Another creak of floorboards. A bit further from the first one, she thinks. And then another, deeper and lower, ending with a crack like a small whip. Further over still, moving slowly across the floor.
Wendy stands frozen in the middle of the basement room, stretched our like a dancer, standing on the balls of her feet, her arms held straight and slightly away from her hips, the fingers of her hands splayed open and reaching into the still, low air. Her neck is flexed upwards to her straining jaw, angled to the ceiling as she listens -
Another creak. And just like that, Wendy bolts from her position into a run for the stairs. She bursts through the doorway into the laundry room, making an absurd mental note to herself that the wash is almost done, she'll have to remember to come back down and switch over to the dryer after she's done stopping them.
She had to stop them from taking Desmond away from her again!
Wendy reaches the top of the stairs and bursts into the hallway towards the front living room, where she had heard the sounds coming from. As she approaches the entrance to the living room a sudden thought – Ambush! jumps up in her brain, causing her to slow down into a nervous trot that carries her up to the doorway. She hides behind the side of the entrance, then leans slowly around the corner, peering into the muted gloom of the living room.
Desmond is seated in his wheelchair before the front window, facing the closed curtains. His head lolls gently from side to side as he stares at the window, keeping his absurd vigil. Wendy steps cautiously into the room, eyes searching erratically from corner to corner. There is no one else in the room with them.
“Desmond?” Wendy takes a few cautious steps towards Desmond. His head keeps rolling softly like a balloon in a breeze. As she reaches him he looks up in her direction, offering a wandering gape of a smile. Then he turns back to stare at the curtains some more.
Well, he seems to be okay, Wendy thinks, regarding her husband for a moment more. The she turns her attention back to the house.
Somebody is in the house, or had been.
Hadn't they?
Regardless of this, she knows she has to check, and so she moves away from Desmond back into the hall. After a moment's apprehension, Wendy takes a deep breath and proceeds to search the house. She checks the bedroom, both bathrooms, the kitchen, the office den – she even goes back downstairs to look once more, both rooms. The washing machine has finished it's cycle, but she leaves it to check the exits.
Ever since the accident she's been locking the doors, another thing that sets their household apart from the neighbourhood, but she has never really questioned why she started doing this. It has just seemed like the sensible thing to do, under the circumstances.
The doors are indeed locked good and tight, both the front and back. And she can't see any of what the T.V. Shows call 'signs of forced entry', although she's certainly not trained to detect that sort of thing. It looks fine, in any event. She steps out and looks around the back yard – nothing back here but mouldy leaves over an uncut lawn. She really needs to get the mower out, another thing to do, so many things she has to do. She has to check the front of the house. Slowly, Wendy stumbles out into the front yard, gazing around in a numb fog. Her eyes settle on the house across the street. The Thomas's home. Then she turns back to look at her own front window, at the still grey curtains, and the thought comes to her then, an unbidden flash of words: They're looking at each other.
Wendy shakes her head and turns away from the Thomas home. She has more important things to do than revisit that whole episode again. As she begins to make her way back to the house she notices a car approaching from up the street. She recognized it as Mitch Thomas returning home. Returning home to his wife.
As Wendy walks back to the side entrance she shakes her head ruefully. For not the first time she wonders if Mitch had any idea about what had gone on between Desmond and Carolyne. Most likely he'd had an idea, but certainly not enough to act. Which of course, had been all for the best.
Wendy steps through the side entrance and waits for a moment, standing in the small foyer leading into the kitchen. The house lies noiseless and still before her. She takes a deep breath and considers the situation.
So what had happened here? There were two possibilities, it seemed. The first was that someone had broken into the house and wheeled Desmond in his chair over to the window, absconding quickly before she had gotten up the stairs. For a few seconds she considers the possibility of Carolyne Thomas actually doing this. It certainly makes a perverse sort of sense, with the history that she and Desmond had once shared. And Wendy remembers the strange feeling she'd had the first time she had met Carolyne, one that had never quite gone away, not through the months of their “friendship”, or through the pain of the ridiculous drama that had followed. And it hadn't just been her own jealousy, although looking back on it she probably had sensed Carolyne's attentions towards her husband. But what she had directly noticed at the time was that there was something very strange about Carolyne Thomas.
Carolyne, then and now, has always seemed to Wendy like a woman bored by her own beauty, or at least the predictability of everyone's reactions to her. And that boredom had cultivated within her a taste for the bizarre. So it actually seems completely in character for Carolyne to do something like this, to actually sneak into the house, while Wendy's downstairs doing the wash – how would she know when that was? Maybe she had peeked in through the basement windows...
Wendy snaps out of her thoughts by the sound of a car door being slammed shut. Mitch Thomas, across the street. It sounds like he's mad, again. If you only knew, honey, Wendy thinks. Then she blinks her eyes and realizes that she needs to come to her own senses. As weird as Carolyne may be, it was a ridiculous stretch of the imagination to assume such a thing of her. Wendy smiles tightly. For most of her life she had always shown a lack of imagination , preferring the certainty of numbers to the insecurity that fantasy represented to her. Between the two of them it was Desmond who had been the visionary. And here she is now, going off on crazy tangents, rather than face the most obvious and likely truth.
She doesn't know how she's been managing to fool the doctors all this time – which upon consideration opens up all sorts of possibilities as to his actual level of awareness – but now that she confronts the likelihood, it definitely explains a number of things. Little things, just at the corner of her awareness, subtle bits of movement. And then the not so subtle, really, like what had happened at the doctor's reception. Or did she think that the receptionist had wheeled him over on that day, as well? That's right, all of these women have been wheeling her husband around when her back is turned, because they all just love him so much. That's how powerful a hold he has on them, oh yeah mister, you've got them all fooled, all right. What's a little vegetative state when you're such a number one hit with the ladies, right?
Wendy squeezes her fists at her sides and begins to shake in the growing shadows of the kitchen. Just when she's thinking he's done making a fool of her, and now this-
She breaks into a forceful stride that propels her through the kitchen and directly into the living room. Desmond is still sitting where she had left him earlier, still staring at the curtains, or rather through the curtains, he is staring through the curtains across the street at the neighbours house. At Carolyne Roberts. Bastard, Wendy thinks as she approaches Desmond. Her husband just got home!
She stops next to Desmond, stares at the side of his face. Now he is perfectly still, every part of him locked into a frozen vigil before the curtains. His eyes seem like slow lenses recording through the window, his head a winding down camera booth playing a private show that she has no ticket to...
“Desmond.” No response from him. He doesn't even seem to breathe. She feels her anger spread out from her chest and dissipate along her arms and legs. In it's place a tremor of uncertainty rolls through, making her clutch her arms and lean back on her heels. But she doesn't look away.
“You've been wheeling yourself around. That much is pretty obvious. But what I want to know is: what else are you able to do?” She unfolds her arms and places her hands on her hips, leans in closer to him. She can smell him now, smell his breath, the toothpaste on his breath. She had brushed his teeth for him not one hour ago, hadn't she? And he had let her.
Wendy leans down suddenly and shouts into Desmond's ear. “Desmond! What else have you been doing?”
He doesn't move. He won't move for her. He just sits there with his eyes plastered through the curtains staring at the lady neighbour across the street, staring at the woman across the street that he fucked, he fucked her, and for his own wife he won't even MOVE-
“DESMOND!” She grips his shoulder, her fingernails digging into the soft pliable flesh. And just like that, in a flash, his eyes snap onto her own. She has time to register his shoulder turning from soft dough to rock hard muscle, and then she is suddenly flying through the air, pinwheeling through space, the world spinning before her eyes, and just as sudden she lands in a heap onto the hardwood floor and slides through the entrance to the dining room, knocking over a chair before sliding to a slow stop with her body half underneath the the dining room table.
Everything goes dark for a while. In fact, to Wendy it seems that she is still blacked out even after she regains consciousness, as it takes her a while to realize that she is staring at the underside of the dining room table. She blinks rapidly and takes a few breaths, shaking her head slowly before rising carefully to her elbows. She cranes her head forward, and through her blurred vision she sees Desmond at the window, still sitting, still facing the same direction as before. It is as though nothing had ever happened.
Wendy reels and lies back, her head spinning. What – what had happened? Did she do this to herself? Was she going mad? The stress... she had been under so much stress...
Slowly Wendy feels herself slipping back into unconsciousness. The soundless black seems to claim her for a while and then the thought that this is not good, she has to wake up – this thought brings her eyes open with her face turned to the side, and then she sees the wheels of Desmond's chair, right next to her, inches from her face. Desmond... The wheels glide soundlessly past her, rolling smoothly out of her sight.
Her eyes flutter closed again, one last time, and against the darkness she sees Desmond, she sees both of his faces. She sees him looking as he did before the accident, and she sees him as he looks after the accident. His faces seem to shift and blend across the stage of her mind, and then the darkness deepens into a heavy black that creeps in on her and swallows her whole.
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