LITMIR.BIZ

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running around the house were now encrusted with elaborate scroll-like designs, like the ornamented stone casements of a tomb.

      Waving me back, my companion approached the fringes of the garden, his shot-gun raised before him. He darted from tree to tree, pausing for any sign of movement, then crossed the frozen surface of the river with a feline step. High above him, its wings pinioned by the glass canopy, a golden oriole flexed slowly in the afternoon light, liquid ripples of its aura circling outwards like the rays of a miniature sun.

      ‘Marquand!’

      A shot roared into the clearing, its report echoing around the glass trees, and the blond-haired police captain raced towards the summer house, a revolver in his hand. As he fired again the crystal trellises of the spanish moss shattered and frosted, collapsing around me like a house of mirrors. Leaping down from the veranda, the bearded man made off like a hare across the river, bent almost double as he darted over the faults in the surface.

      The rapidity with which all this had happened left me standing helplessly by the edge of the clearing, my ears ringing with the two explosions. I searched the forest for any signs of my companion, and then the police captain, standing on the veranda, gestured me towards him with his pistol.

      ‘Come here!’ When I tentatively approached he came down the steps, scrutinizing me suspiciously. ‘What are you doing around here? Aren’t you one of the visiting party?’

      I explained that I had been trapped after the crash of the helicopter. ‘Can you take me back to the army post? I’ve been wandering around the forest all day.’

      A morose frown twisted his long face. ‘The Army’s a long way off. The forest’s changing all the time.’ He pointed across the river. ‘What about Marquand? Where did you meet him?’

      ‘The bearded man? He was taking shelter in a house near the river. Why did you shoot at him? Is he a criminal?’

      Shelley nodded after a pause. His manner was somehow furtive and shifty. ‘Worse than that. He’s a madman, completely crazy.’ He started to walk up the steps, apparently prepared to let me make my own way into the forest. ‘You’d better be careful, there’s no knowing what the forest is going to do. Keep moving but circle around on yourself, or you’ll get lost.’

      ‘Wait a minute!’ I called after him. ‘Can’t I rest here? I need a map – perhaps you have a spare one?’

      ‘A map? What good’s a map now?’ He hesitated as my arms fell limply to my sides. ‘All right, you can come in for five minutes.’ This concession to humanity was obviously torn from him.

      The summer house consisted of a single circular room and a small kitchen at the rear. Heavy shutters had been placed against the windows, now locked to the casements by the interstitial crystals, and the only light entered through the door.

      Shelley holstered his pistol and turned the door handle gently. Through the frosted panes were the dim outlines of a high four-poster bed, presumably stolen from one of the nearby mansions. Gilded cupids played about the mahogany canopy, pipes to their lips, and four naked caryatids with upraised arms formed the corner posts.

      ‘Mrs Shelley,’ the captain explained in a low voice. ‘She’s not too well.’

      For a moment we gazed down at the occupant of the bed, who lay back on a large satin bolster, a febrile hand on the silk counterpane. At first I thought I was looking at an elderly woman, probably the captain’s mother, and then realized that in fact she was little more than a child, a young woman in her early twenties. Her long platinum hair lay like a white shawl over her shoulders, her thin high-cheeked face raised to the scanty light. Once she might have had a nervous porcelain beauty, but her wasted skin and the fading glow of light in her half-closed eyes gave her the appearance of someone preternaturally aged, reminding me of my own wife in the last minutes before her death.

      ‘Shelley.’ Her voice cracked faintly in the amber gloom. ‘Shelley, it’s getting cold again. Can’t you light a fire?’

      ‘The wood won’t burn, Emerelda. It’s all turned into glass.’ The captain stood at the foot of the bed, his peaked hat held in his hands, peering down solicitously as if he were on duty. He unzipped his leather jacket. ‘I brought you these. They’ll help you.’

      He leaned forwards, hiding something from me, and spilled several handfuls of red and blue gem-stones across the counterpane. Rubies and sapphires of many sizes, they glittered in the thin light with a feverish heat.

      ‘Shelley, thank you …’ The girl’s free hand scuttled across the counterpane to the stones. Her child-like face had become almost vulpine with greed. Seizing a handful, she brought them up to her neck and pressed them tightly against her skin, where the bruises formed like fingerprints. Their contact seemed to revive her and she stirred slowly, several of the jewels slipping to the floor.

      ‘What were you shooting at, Shelley?’ she asked after an interval. ‘There was a gun going off, it gave me a headache.’

      ‘Just an alligator, Emerelda. There are some smart alligators around here, I have to watch them. You get some rest now.’

      ‘But, Shelley, I need more of these, you only brought me a few today …’ Her hand, like a claw, searched the counterpane. Then she turned away from us and seemed to subside into sleep, the jewels lying like scarabs on the white skin of her breast.

      Captain Shelley nudged me and we stepped quietly into the kitchen. The small cubicle was almost empty, a disconnected refrigerator standing on the cold stove. Shelley opened the door and began to empty the remainder of the jewels on to the shelves, where they lay like cherries among the half-dozen cans. A light frost covered the enamel exterior of the refrigerator, as everything else in the kitchen, but the inner walls remained unaffected.

      ‘Who is she?’ I asked as Shelley prised the lid off a can. ‘Shouldn’t you try to get her away from here?’

      Shelley stared at me with his ambiguous expression. He seemed always to be concealing something, his blue eyes fractionally lowered from my own. ‘She’s my wife,’ he said with a curious emphasis, as if unsure of the fact. ‘Emerelda. She’s safer here, as long as I watch out for Marquand.’

      ‘Why should he want to hurt her? He seemed sane enough to me.’

      ‘He’s a maniac!’ Shelley said with sudden force. ‘He spent six months in a strait-jacket. He wants to take Emerelda and live in his crazy house in the middle of the swamp.’ As an afterthought, he added: ‘She was married to Marquand.’

      As we ate, forking the cold meat straight from the can, he told me of the strange melancholy architect, Charles Foster Marquand, who had designed several of the largest hotels in Miami and then two years earlier abruptly abandoned his work in disgust. He had married Emerelda, after bribing her parents, within a few hours of seeing her in an amusement park, and then carried her away to a grotesque folly he had built among the sharks and alligators in the swamp. According to Shelley he never spoke to Emerelda after the marriage ceremony, and prevented her from leaving the house or seeing anyone except a blind negro servant. Apparently he saw his bride in a sort of Pre-Raphaelite dream, caged within his house like the lost spirit of his imagination. When she finally escaped, with Captain Shelley’s assistance, he had gone berserk and spent some time as a voluntary patient at an asylum. Now he had returned with the sole ambition of returning with Emerelda to his house in the swamps, and Shelley was convinced, perhaps sincerely, that his morbid and lunatic presence was responsible for Emerelda’s lingering malaise.

      At dusk I left them, barricaded together in the white sepulchre of the summer house, and set off in the direction of the river which Shelley said was half a mile away, hoping to follow it to Maynard. With luck an army unit would be stationed at the nearest margins of the affected zone, and the soldiers would be able to retrace my steps and rescue the police captain and his dying wife.

      Shelley’s lack of hospitality did not surprise me. In turning me out into the forest he was using me as a decoy, confident that Marquand would immediately try to reach me for news of his former wife.

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