Skull Session

  SKULL SESSION

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Puppets

  The Babel Effect

  City of Masks: A Cree Black Novel

  Land of Echoes: A Cree Black Novel

  SKULL SESSION

  A NOVEL

  DANIEL HECHT

  BLOOMSBURY

  Copyright © 1998 by Daniel Hecht

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used

  or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written

  permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations

  embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address

  Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable

  products made from wood grown in well-managed forests.

  The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental

  regulations of the country of origin.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-1-58234-496-6

  First published in the United States in 1998 by Viking Penguin

  First paperback edition published in 1999 by Signet/New American Library

  This Bloomsbury paperback edition published in 2005

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  Contents

  Part 1

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Part 2

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  Part 1

  The sinister is always the unintelligible, the impressive, the numinous. Wherever something divine appears, we begin to experience fear.

  . . . Everything that has to do with salvation possesses, among other things, a sinister, unfamiliar character; it always includes the superhuman. It is a specifically human trait to find joy in destruction.

  —ADOLF GUGGENBUHL-CRAIG

  Prologue

  STEVE SWUNG A CAST-IRON SKILLET through the door of a cupboard, spraying the kitchen with broken glass, and Dub ducked back s through the doorway. In the dining room he stood picking splinters of glass off his shirt, trying to sort out the clash of feelings in his chest.

  When they'd come up the hill and Dub hadfirstglimpsed the house, he'd been startled by the sight, momentarily transfixed: the slanting light of late afternoon, the grand forlorn tall chimneys and weathered shingle walls, the September woods all around shot with streaks of bright color. Scary, but beautiful, he thought, puzzled at the paradox of conflicting impressions.

  Steve had just come in and started wrenching doors off the cabinets and throwing them through windows. Earlier he had been talking about how all the shit in your life built up inside, and how trashing the abandoned house would be perfect way to let it out. Watching him now, Dub could easily believe it: Steve's mouth kinked in a weird smile that seemed to have as much pain as happiness in it; and the way his eyes bulged from exertion, he did look like he had some kind of pressure in him.

  A pot bounced off the doorframe and almost hit Dub, so he left the dining room and headed into the huge room at the center of the house. Why thefuck had he even come up here? Partly it had to do with Steve, who talked too much and moved his hands and feet too much and came from a crappy family and bitched about being poor, and inspired in Dub a mix of admiration and pity that added up to a desire not to let him down when he proposed the idea. Partly it had been curiosity, he decided: It might be nice to try throwing things around, let out all the anger and frustration or whatever. Or at least let him know if he had all that stuff inside or not.

  And yet now he couldn't bring himself to smash anything. He was too nervous, too appalled at the damage, almost paralyzed. When they'd firstcome in he thought he'd heard a noise somewhere inside, and he couldn't get rid of the feeling that somebody was in here with them—watching, listening. Plus the house was wrecked so badly, to the point where he didn't think it could be just high school kids like him and Steve, he could almost believe the talk about weird rituals up here, or maybe poltergeists. Now every muscle in his body was drawn too tight, his senses on guard, everything made him jump.

  Horrified and fascinated, he wandered aimlessly in the main room, just looking. The room was as long as a tennis court and two stories tall, and like the rest of the house was several feet deep with a mash of clothes and appliances and broken furniture and smashed paintings and books and stuffed animal heads. The walls had been broken open in places, too, leaving chunks of plaster and broken boards on the floor.

  Dub prodded a stuffed wolf head with his toe, and then jumped as it rolled toward him and seemed to cock its glistening eye at him. He moved away.

  The wolfs frozen snarl brought back a disturbing memory: the time when he was eight and he had climbed a tree out in the woods and after a while a bunch of dogs had come by, a German shepherd and Sue Boardman's collie and a little yellow mutt and Jamie Klein's black Lab. They weren't at all the same friendly pets he'd wrestled with and thrown sticks for—somehow, roaming wild, out of view of their owners, they had changed back into pack hunters. Every movement taut and purposeful, they combed through the woods lookingfor things to kill, ears upright, faces different from their usual sappy expressions. More like that wolf head. As he watched, theyflushed and caught a rabbit, tossing it up in the air and then pulling it to pieces. What would have happened if he'd been on the ground and they'd seen him?

  Now, as he listened to Steve in the other room, the thought occurred to him, Maybe people could change the same way those dogs did. How else could they wreck a house in this totally fucked-up way} An
d what else could they do when they got that different, that dangerous?

  Dub shivered at the thought. That's where he disagreed with Steve, he decided: If there was stuff like that down inside you, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to let it out.

  But despite the tension, despite the twisted, broken mess around him, there was still that other thing he'd felt from the moment he'd first seen the place—a good feeling, he decided, having to do with how beautiful things were, how mysterious. Now the sun had gone down, and through the tall windows he could see the sky, striped purple and peach. And below it the woods had darkened so that it felt like he and Steve were on the edge of another world. They were only a mile or twofrom home and yet they might as well be on a desert island: The heavy forest in the waning light had an ancient, timeless look to it, like the jungle in Jurassic Park, eerily beautiful. And the house was beautiful, too, despite being so fucked up—the fading red light gave the big room a somber, stately quality, like the inside of a church. With the same sad feeling churches had, too, always a poor dead fesus pinned to the wall somewhere.

  Dub picked up a heavy crystal vase and looked through its fluted glass at the fractured remains of sunset, puzzled by his own internal state as much as by the effects of light. Like his vision, his thoughts seemed especially lucid, unfamiliar and exciting. As if your mind changed when you were away from other people, or did something new and forbidden, or maybe when the light changed as night began to fall—

  He jumped involuntarily as out of the corner of his eye he saw something bigfly through the dining room door, hit the near wall, and drop to the floor. It was getting too dark to see well, but hefiguredSteve must have thrown the broken-off back of the antique settee he'd noticed in there—the upholstered, wood-trimmed back would have made that kind o/Tcnock-thump noise when it hit. Although it would have been hard to throw that far.

  Now Steve was really going wild—it almost sounded like two or three guys, or someone much bigger and stronger than Steve. Something in the dining room or kitchen crashed so loud Dub's whole body jerked in response, and then there was a rending noise, like nailed-together boards being pried apart. Dub set the vase down carefully, realizing he'd really rather go home now.

  "fesus, Steve, take it easy," he called. He tried to put a laugh in his voice so Steve wouldn't get pissy about it. Steve didn't answer, but suddenly the noises stopped, everything but a strange, rhythmic sound, like someone sawing.

  "Steve?" Dub squinted across the big room, not able to see clearly into the doorway thirty feet away, realizing that it got dark quickly here when the sun dipped below the trees. A wave of anxiety sent ice into his veins, and he started to walk back toward the door, suddenly shaky. "Hey, man, maybe we ought to get going," he said.

  Halfway to the door he came close to the thing that had been thrown and now lay tumbled and shapeless against the wall, and he saw what it was. It was Steve.

  He turned to the dining room doorway and saw the vehement movement inside, and instantly became empty of thought. Worst of all, the lens of strange beauty was gonefrom his eyes, and all that remained was the ugly, animal light of fear.

  1

  "THE THING ABOUT DANGER," Lia shouted, "is that it simplifies X you. It strips away everything but the essentials. Whatever's left, that's got to be really who you are, right?" She was standing at the open hatch of the Piper Seneca, a wall of chaotic wind at her face, a 15,000-foot drop just below the toes of her boots. Framed against the blue square of sky, even in the baggy khaki jumpsuit, crisscrossed with harness straps and burdened by parachutes, her silhouette got to Paul. An undeniably female shape.

  "Yeah," Paul shouted back. "Absolutely." Aside, he said, "Yeah! Humpty Dumpty!" A rhythmically symmetrical phrase, he thought, but definitely inappropriate right now. Luckily, he was sure she hadn't heard him inside her crash helmet, with the wind noise and the penetrating drone of the engines. Anyway, she was focused inward now, savoring the struggling forces of fear and will inside as she watched the forested hills sliding below. Paul knew this was the part she liked best: just before, when the normal, cautious, day-to-day psyche had to be torn to shreds so the raw impulse or desire could assert itself and take command. Lia had a hungry soul. Danger fed it.

  Paul couldn't repress a gesture, repeatedly raising one arm and snapping his fingers, like an impatient customer summoning a waiter. Lia wasn't a highly experienced sky diver. She'd readily admitted that she had insufficient qualifications for this jump. Plus it was too cold, and the thirteenth of November, an inauspicious date. The plane jittered in the wind, which was broken into erratic puffs and eddies by the Green Mountains. If it weren't for Line they'd never have gotten a plane, and no one else would have let her jump. There didn't seem to be enough control on this particular risk.

  Through the window, Paul could see the gray and dark green November woods below give way to the smooth brown of open land, then the airfield—from three miles up no bigger than a postage stamp. The jump site.

  Up front, Line slapped a thick hand twice on the cabin ceiling. "Any time," he shouted back. He dropped the Piper's airspeed. At the hatch, Lia gripped the walls of the fuselage on each side, her mouth all teeth, a grin or grimace, her eyes hidden beneath shaded goggles. She turned her face briefly toward Paul, and he felt the hot beam of her attention on him despite the goggles. Then the square of the hatch was empty.

  Paul rammed the hatch shut, secured it, scrambled forward. He fell into the seat next to Line just as the plane tilted and began to spiral sharply downward. It took him a moment to find her, a single windblown leaf lost in the big landscape of mountains and sky.

  "Akathisia," Paul said. He said it again, singing it, drawing out the separate syllables: "^4-ka-rfzeee-zha!"

  "What's that mean?" Line said. He was steering the plane in a wide circle with Lia's free-falling body at its center.

  "Shouldn't she be opening her chute by now?" Paul asked. "Christ!"

  "Pretty soon."

  "'Akathisia' means an internal sensation of acute restlessness."

  Line grunted. "Like when you take too many diet pills. I know that one." He wore small sunglasses and a radio headset that covered just his left ear. He had a wide mouth with slack, sensuous lips, and round cheeks covered by stubbly gray-black beard. Despite the cold, his leather jacket was open over his bulging chest and stomach, just a T-shirt underneath. At his feet a collection of beer and pop cans rolled and clattered.

  "So is this really a good idea? Lia jumping today?" Paul was just keeping his mouth moving. His eyes were locked on Lia's rigid form—face down, arms out, legs spread and bent sharply at the knee. He touched his nose, first with his left forefinger, then his right. Line shrugged.

  Paul wondered again whether Line himself wasn't part of Lia's experiment, one of the elements of risk in this scenario. How competent was he to judge a jumper's skills, the weather, the condition of equipment? He didn't exactly inspire confidence. If Lia hadn't befriended the pilot last year, if Line wasn't a slob and a rebel and a loner with the perpetual hots for her, they'd never have gotten aloft today. Line was doing this for love. They certainly couldn't afford to pay anyone for a flight.

  Paul lost sight of her against some deep brown woods, then spotted her again as she came out against the lighter yellow-brown of the fields. Maybe she was too cold. Maybe something was the matter with the chute. "Fuck!" he barked. He raised his arm and snapped his fingers again. "Fuck! Fuck!" he said under his breath.

  Line glanced at Paul's flicking hand. "What's that called again? That thing you've got? Lia was telling me."

  Suddenly there was something in the air above her, a lengthening strand of silver. A long, thin inverted teardrop appeared and opened abruptly into a bright blue-and-white umbrella that seemed to catch on some hook in the air, hovering almost motionless as Lia swung beneath it.

  Paul took a deep breath, only now feeling how tight the muscles of his chest and shoulders had gotten, the ache in his jaw. "Tourette's," he to
ld Line. "Tourette's syndrome."

  Line lazily shoved the half-wheel and the plane dropped further. He nodded. "Where you have to talk dirty? Somebody said maybe Nixon had that—all those expletive deleteds in his tapes."

  "Yeah, coprolalia can be part of it," Paul told him. "But I don't know about Nixon."

  "It gets worse when you're tense or scared?" Line said, not really interested.

  "Seems to." Understatement.

  Neither of them said anything for a while as Line brought the plane down. Then Line yawned. "I guess everybody's got some cross to bear, some fatal flaw, huh? Can't say you haven't gotten lucky in other respects, though." He jutted his double chin toward the approaching field, where Lia was just touching down. She somersaulted, the chute wilted. Then she was up and gathering line quickly as the nylon blossomed again in a random wind.

  Line found a slot between the bucking mountain breezes and brought the plane in for what turned out to be a perfectly smooth landing. As the tension slid away, Paul thought of the look Lia had shot him just before going out the hatch, her mouth straight and serious, no kidding around. She'd been pausing at the edge of the impending jump, inspecting what was left in her when fear stripped away everything superfluous. He smiled. They'd been living together for two years, but it was nice to have these things confirmed: If he read her right, that look said that she'd found some feelings for him among the essentials that remained.

  2

  LIA LEFT FOR DARTMOUTH early on Monday, and Paul spent the entire morning trying to crank out two job applications. A depressing task. How do you account for a checkered employment history, the years you spent being a carpenter and small-time building contractor, a career shift late in life? How do you gussie up your resume so it looks like your life has any internal logic or continuity? How do you write a cover letter that doesn't sound like an apology?