The Secret History - Donna Tartt [134]
The rest of us, stranded in the open, looked at each other and then at Henry—thirty feet away, safe at the shady margin of the wood. He waved at us impatiently. I heard the sudden crunch of footsteps on gravel and, hardly aware of what I was doing, turned away spasmodically and pretended to inspect the trunk of a nearby tree.
The footsteps approached. Prickles rising on the nape of my neck, I bent to scrutinize the tree trunk more closely: silvery bark, cool to the touch, ants marching out of a fissure in a glittering black thread.
Then—almost before I noticed it—they stopped, very near my back.
I glanced up and saw Charles. He was staring straight ahead with a ghastly expression on his face and I was on the verge of asking him what was the matter when, with a sick, incredulous rush of disbelief, I heard Bunny’s voice directly behind me.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said briskly. “What’s this? Meeting of the Nature Club?”
I turned. It was Bunny, all right, all six-foot-three of him, looming up behind me in a tremendous yellow rain slicker that came almost to his ankles.
There was an awful silence.
“Hi, Bun,” said Camilla faintly.
“Hi yourself.” He had a bottle of beer—a Rolling Rock, funny I remember that—and he turned it up and took a long, gurgling pull. “Phew,” he said. “You people sure do a lot of sneaking around in the woods these days. You know,” he said, poking me in the ribs, “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”
The abrupt, booming immediacy of his presence was too much for me to take. I stared at him, dazed, as he drank again, as he lowered the bottle, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he was standing so close I could feel the heaviness of his rich, beery breaths.
“Aaah,” he said, raking the hair back from his eyes, and belched. “So what’s the story, deerslayers? You all just felt like coming out here to study the vegetation?”
There was a rustle and a slight, deprecating cough from the direction of the woods.
“Well, not exactly,” said a cool voice.
Bunny turned, startled—I did, too—just in time to see Henry step out of the shadows.
He came forward and regarded Bunny pleasantly. He was holding a garden trowel and his hands were black with mud. “Hello,” he said. “This is quite a surprise.”
Bunny gave him a long, hard look. “Jesus,” he said. “What you doing, burying the dead?”
Henry smiled. “Actually, it’s very lucky you happened by.”
“This some kind of convention?”
“Why, yes,” said Henry agreeably, after a pause. “I suppose one might call it that.”
“One might,” said Bunny mockingly.
Henry bit his lower lip. “Yes,” he said, in all seriousness. “One might. Though it’s not the term I would use myself.”
Everything was very still. From somewhere far away, in the woods, I heard the faint, inane laughter of a woodpecker.
“Tell me,” Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note of suspicion. “Just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?”
The woods were silent, not a sound.
Henry smiled. “Why, looking for new ferns,” he said, and took a step towards him.
BOOK II
Dionysus [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship’s plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world’s not.
—E. R. DODDS,
The Greeks and the Irrational
CHAPTER
6
JUST FOR THE record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!). Whenever I read about murders in the news I am struck by the dogged, almost touching assurance with which interstate stranglers, needle-happy pediatricians, the depraved and guilty of all descriptions fail to recognize the evil in themselves; feel compelled, even, to assert a kind of spurious decency. “Basically I am a very good person.” This from the latest serial killer—destined for the chair, they say