This sent them into fresh peals of laughter. 'Nothing,' said Francis at last.
'Really, it is nothing,' said Henry, with a bemused little sigh.
'The oddest things make me laugh these days.' He lit another cigarette. 'He was with you that night, early in the evening, anyway. Remember? You went to the movies.'
'The Thirty-Nine Steps,' Francis said.
With something of a start, I did remember: a windy autumn night, full moon obscured by dusty rags of cloud. I'd worked late in the library and hadn't gone to dinner. Walking home, a sandwich from the snack bar in my pocket, and the dry leaves skittering and dancing on the path before me, I'd run into Bunny on his way to the Hitchcock series, which the Film Society was showing in the auditorium.
We were late and there were no seats left so we sat on the carpeted stairs, Bunny leaning back on his elbows with his legs stretched in front of him, cracking pensively with his rear molars at a little Dum-Dum sucker. The high wind rattled the flimsy walls; a door banged open and shut until somebody propped it open with a brick. On the screen, locomotives screaming across a black-and-white nightmare of iron-bridged chasms.
'We had a drink afterwards,' I said. 'Then he went to his room.'
Henry sighed. 'I wish he had,' he said.
'He kept asking if I knew where you were.'
'He knew himself, very well. We'd threatened half a dozen times to leave him at home if he didn't behave.'
'So he got the bright idea of coming around to Henry's to scare him,' said Francis, pouring himself another drink.
'I was so angry about that,' said Henry abruptly. 'Even if nothing had happened, it was a sneaky thing to do. He knew where the spare key was, and he just got it and let himself in.'
'Even so, nothing might have happened. It was just a horrible string of coincidences. If we'd stopped in the country to get rid of our clothes, if we'd come here or to the twins', if Bunny only hadn't fallen asleep 'He was asleep?'
'Yes, or otherwise he would have got discouraged and left,'
Henry said. 'We didn't get back to Hampden until six in the morning. It was a miracle we found our way to the car, over all those fields and things in the dark… Well, it was foolish to drive to North Hampden in those bloody clothes. The police could have pulled us over, we could have had a wreck, anything. But I felt ill, and I wasn't thinking clearly, and I suppose I drove to my own apartment by instinct.'
'He left my room around midnight.'
'Well, then, he was alone in my apartment from about twelve thirty to six a. m. And the coroner reckoned the time of death between one and four. That's one of the few decent cards fate dealt us in the whole hand. Though Bunny wasn't with us, he'd have a hard time proving he wasn't. Unfortunately, that's not a card we can play except in the direst circumstances.' He shrugged.
'If only he'd left the lamp on, anything to tip us off.'
'But that was going to be the big surprise, you see. Jumping out at us from the dark.'
'We walked in and turned on the light, and then it was too late. He woke up instantly. And there we were '
'- all white robes and bloody like something from Edgar Allan Poe,' Francis said gloomily.
'Jesus, what did he do?'
'What do you think? We scared him half to death.'
'It served him right,' said Henry.
'Tell him about the ice cream.'
'Really, this was the last straw,' Henry said crossly. 'He took a quart of ice cream out of my freezer to eat while he waited he couldn't bother to get a bowl of it, you understand, he had to have the whole quart – and when he fell asleep it melted all over him and on my chair and on that nice little Oriental rug I used to have. Well. It was quite a good antique, that rug, but the dry cleaners said there was nothing they could do. It came back in shreds. And my chair.' He reached for a cigarette. 'He screamed like a banshee when he saw us '
'- and he would not shut up,' said Francis. 'Remember, it was six o'clock in the morning, the neighbors sleeping…' He shook his head. 'I remember Charles taking a step towards him, trying to talk to him, and Bunny yelling bloody murder. After a minute or two '
'It was only a few seconds,' Henry said.
'- after a minute, Camilla picked up a glass ashtray and threw it at him and hit him square in the chest.'
'It wasn't a hard blow,' said Henry thoughtfully, 'but it was quite judiciously timed. Instantly he shut up and stared at her and I said to him, "Bunny, shut up. You'll wake the neighbors.
We've hit a deer in the road on the way home."'
'So then,' said Francis, 'he wiped his brow and rolled his eyes and went through the whole Bunny routine – boy you guys scared me and must've been half-asleep and just on and on and on-'
'And meanwhile,' Henry said, 'the four of us were standing there in the bloody sheets, the lights on, no curtains, in full view of anyone who might happen to drive by. He was talking so loudly, and the lights were so bright, and I felt so faint with exhaustion and shock that I couldn't do much more than stare at him. My God – we were covered with this man's blood, we'd tracked it into the house, the sun was coming up, and here, to top it all off, was Bunny. I couldn't force myself to think what to do. Then Camilla, quite sensibly, flicked off the light and all of a sudden I realized no matter how it looked, no matter who was there, we had to get out of our clothes and wash up without losing another second.'
'I practically had to rip the sheet off,' said Francis. The blood had dried and it was stuck to me. By the time I'd managed that, Henry and the others were in the bathroom. Spray was flying; the water in the bathtub was backed up red; rusty splashes on the tile. It was a nightmare.'
'I can't tell you how unfortunate it was that Bunny happened to be there,' said Henry, shaking his head. 'But for heaven's sake, we couldn't just stand around and wait for him to leave. There was blood everywhere, the neighbors would soon be up, for all I knew the police would be pounding at the door any second 'Well, it was too bad we alarmed him, but then, it wasn't like we thought we were doing this in front of J. Edgar Hoover, either,' said Francis.
'Exactly,' said Henry. 'I don't want to convey the impression that Bunny's presence seemed like a tremendous menace at that point. It was just a nuisance, because I knew he wondered what was going on, but at the moment he was the least of our troubles.
If there'd been time, I would have sat him down and explained things to him the instant we got in. But there wasn't time.'
'Good God,' Francis said, and shuddered. 'I still can't go in Henry's bathroom.
Blood smeared on the porcelain. Henry's straight razor swinging from a peg. We were bruised and scratched to pieces.'
'Charles was the worst by far.'
'Oh, my God. Thorns stuck all over him.'
'And that bite.'
'You've never seen anything like it,' said Francis. 'Four inches around and the teeth marks just gouged in. Remember what Bunny said?'
Henry laughed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Tell him.'
'Well, there we all were, and Charles was turning to get the soap – I didn't even know Bunny was there, I suppose he was looking in the door – when all of a sudden I heard him say, in this weird businesslike way, "Looks like that deer took a plug out of your arm, Charles."'
'He was standing there for part of the time, making comments of various sorts,' said Henry, 'but the next thing I knew he wasn't.
I was disturbed by how suddenly he'd left but glad he was out of the way. We had a great deal to do and not too much time.'
'Weren't you afraid he'd tell somebody?'
Henry looked at me blankly. 'Who?'
The. Marion. Anybody.'
'No. At that point I had no reason to think he'd do anything of the sort. He'd been with us on previous tries, you understand, so our appearance didn't seem as extraordinary to him as it might have to you. The whole thing was deadly secret. He'd been involved in it with us for months. How could he have told anyone without explaining the whole thing and making himself look foolish? Julian knew what we were trying to do, but I was still pretty certain Bunny wouldn't talk to him without checking it with us first. And, as it happened, I was right.'
He paused and lit a cigarette. 'It was almost daybreak, and things were still a dreadful mess – bloody footprints on the porch, the chitons lying where we'd dropped them. The twins put on some old clothes of mine and went out to take care of the porch and the inside of the car. The chitons, I knew, should be burnt, but I didn't want to start a big fire in the back yard; nor did I want to burn them inside and risk setting off the fire alarm. My landlady is constantly warning me not to use the fireplace, but I'd always suspected it worked. I took a chance and as luck would have it, it did.'
'I was no help at all,' said Francis.
'No, you certainly weren't,' said Henry crossly.
'I couldn't help it. I thought I was going to throw up. I went back to Henry's room and went to sleep.'
'I think we all would have liked to go to sleep but somebody had to clean up,' Henry said. 'The twins came in around seven.
I was still having a terrible time with the bathroom. Charles's back was stuck full of thorns like a pincushion. For a while Camilla and I worked on him with a pair of tweezers; then I went back in the bathroom to finish up. The worst of it was over, but I was so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open. The towels weren't so bad – we'd pretty much avoided using them – but there were stains on some of them so I put them in the washing machine and dumped in some soap. The twins were asleep, on that fold-out bed in the back room, and I shoved Charles over and was out like a light.'
'Fourteen hours,' said Francis. 'I've never slept that long in my life.'
'Nor have I. Like a dead man. No dreams.'
'I can't tell you how disorienting this was,' Francis said. 'The sun was coming up when I went to sleep, and it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes when I opened them again, and it was dark, and a phone was ringing, and I had no idea where I was. It kept ringing and ringing, and finally I got up and found my way into the hall. Somebody said don't answer it but -'
'I've never seen anybody like you for answering a phone,' said Henry. 'Even in somebody else's house.'
'Well, what am I supposed to do? Just let it ring? Anyway, I picked it up, and it was Bunny, cheery as a lark. Boy, the four of us had really been messed up, and were we turning into a bunch of nudists or what, and how about if we all went to the Brasserie.» and had some dinner?' ™ I sat up in my chair. 'Wait,' I said. 'Was that the night?'
Henry nodded. 'You came too,' he said. 'Remember?'
'Of course,' I said, unaccountably excited that the story was at last beginning to dovetail with my own experience. 'Of course. I met Bunny on his way to your place.'
'If you don't mind my saying so, we were all a little surprised when he showed up with you,' said Francis.
'Well, I suppose eventually he wanted to get us alone and find out what happened, but it was nothing that couldn't wait,' said Henry. 'You'll recall that our appearance wouldn't have seemed so odd to him as it might. He'd been with us before, you know, on nights very nearly as – what is the word I'm looking for?'
'- when we'd been sick all over the place,' said Francis, 'and fallen in mud, and didn't get home till dawn. There was the blood – he might have wondered exactly how we'd killed that deer-but still.'
Uncomfortably, I thought of the Bacchae: hooves and bloody ribs, scraps dangling from the fir trees. There was a word for it in Greek: omophagia. Suddenly it came back to me: walking into Henry's apartment, all those tired faces, Bunny's snide greeting of'Khairei, deerslayers!'
They'd been quiet that evening, quiet and pale, though not more than seemed remarkable for people suffering particularly bad hangovers. Only Camilla's laryngitis seemed unusual. They'd been drunk the night before, they told me, drunk as bandicoots; Camilla had left her sweater at home and caught cold on the walk back to North Hampden. Outside, it was dark and raining hard. Henry gave me the car keys and asked me to drive.
It was a Friday night, but the weather was so bad the Brasserie was nearly deserted. We ate Welsh rarebits and listened to the rain beating down in gusts on the roof. Bunny and I drank whiskey and hot water; the others had tea.
'Feeling queasy, bakchoi T said Bunny slyly after the waiter took our drink orders.
Camilla made a face at him.
When we went out to the car after dinner Bunny walked around it, inspected the headlights, kicked at the tires. This the one you were in last night?' he said, blinking in the rain.
'Yes.'
He brushed the damp hair from his eyes and bent to examine the fender. 'German cars,' he said. 'Hate to say it but I think the Krauts have got Detroit metal beat. I don't see a scratch.'
I asked him what he meant.
'Aw, they were driving around drunk. Making a nuisance of themselves on the public road. Hit a deer. Did you kill it?' he asked Henry.
Walking around to the passenger's side, Henry looked up.
'What's that?'
'The deer. Didja kill it?'
Henry opened the door. 'It looked pretty dead to me,' he had said.
There was a long silence.