The Secret History - Donna Tartt [238]
I dreamed about the stairs again that night. It was a dream I’d had often in the winter but seldom since. Once more, I was on the iron stairs at Leo’s—rusted thin, no railing—except now they stretched down into a dark infinity and the steps were all different sizes: some tall, some short, some as narrow as the width of my shoe. The drop was bottomless on either side. For some reason, I had to hurry, though I was terrified of falling. Down and down. The stairs got more and more precarious, until finally they weren’t even stairs at all; farther down—and for some reason this was always the most terrifying thing of all—a man was going down them, far ahead of me, really fast.…
I woke around four, couldn’t get back to sleep. Too many of Mrs. Corcoran’s tranquilizers: they’d started to backfire in my system, I was taking them in the daytime now, they wouldn’t knock me out anymore. I got out of bed and sat by the window. My heartbeat trembled in my fingertips. Outside the black panes, past my ghost in the glass (Why so pale and wan, fond lover?) I heard the wind in the trees, felt the hills crowding around me in the dark.
I wished I could stop myself from thinking. But all sorts of things had begun to occur to me. For instance: why had Henry let me in on this, only two months (it seemed years, a lifetime) before? Because it was obvious, now, that his decision to tell me was a calculated move. He had appealed to my vanity, allowing me to think I’d figured it out by myself (good for you, he’d said, leaning back in his chair; I could still remember the look on his face as he’d said it, good for you, you’re just as smart as I’d thought you were); and I had congratulated myself in the glow of his praise, when in fact—I saw this now, I’d been too vain to see it then—he’d led me right to it, coaxing and flattering all the way. Perhaps—the thought crawled over me like a cold sweat—perhaps even my preliminary, accidental discovery had been engineered. The lexicon that had been misplaced, for instance: had Henry stolen it, knowing I’d come back for it? And the messy apartment I was sure to walk into; the flight numbers and so forth left deliberately, so it now seemed, by the phone; both were oversights unworthy of Henry. Maybe he’d wanted me to find out. Maybe he’d divined in me—correctly—this cowardice, this hideous pack instinct which would enable me to fall into step without question.
And it wasn’t just a question of having kept my mouth shut, I thought, staring with a sick feeling at my blurred reflection in the windowpane. Because they couldn’t have done it without me. Bunny had come to me, and I had delivered him right into Henry’s hands. And I hadn’t even thought twice about it.
“You were the alarm bell, Richard,” Henry had said. “I knew if he told anybody, he’d tell you first. And now that he has, I feel that we’re in for an extremely rapid progression of events.”
An extremely rapid progression of events. My flesh crawled, remembering the ironic, almost humorous twist he’d put on the last words—oh, God, I thought, my God, how could I have listened to him? He was right, too, about the rapid part at least. Less than twenty-four hours later, Bunny was dead. And though I hadn’t done the actual pushing—which had seemed an essential distinction at the time—now that didn’t matter much