Mrs. God by Peter Straub Page B

each glass, then replaced the bottle and carried the glasses into the dining room.
    He sat down and drank while staring at the pantry door. The whiskey tasted like some smooth dark meat.
    He finished the whiskey in his glass, picked up the other glass, and tilted all the liquid in it into his mouth and swallowed.
    As he ate, he flipped through drafts of unfamiliar poems. They seemed to make even less sense than was usually the case in Isobel’s poetry. Most of them seemed to consist entirely of randomly selected words: Grub bed picture dog, Hump humph laze sod . He wondered if Isobel had evolved toward or away from outright meaninglessness. He drank some red wine, which he noticed tasted as good as the Esswood whiskey, though in an entirely different way. Perhaps Isobel had written drunk. He revolved the bottle and looked at the label. It was a Pomerol, Chateau Petrus, 1972. And the veal was so good that it was almost worth eating at every meal.
    In fact—
    Standish stopped chewing for a moment.
    In fact, it was like being with Isobel, eating this particular meal at this particular table. It was as if time did not exist in the conventional linear sense at all and she were somewhere just out of sight.
    The P of the title meant Past , Standish realized.
    He closed the folder of poems, pushed it aside, and drew the thick folder of the memoir nearer to his plate. He drank wine, he chewed at his food and drank again. He read.
    An unmarried young woman from Duxbury, Massachusetts, came to a great estate in England. A beautiful woman named E. greeted her. E. led her up the staircase to a long gallery and a suite of rooms that overlooked a playing fountain. The young woman from Massachusetts bathed and rested before going downstairs to meet the other guests, knowing that she was in this place to find her truest self. She experimentally opened a door in her bedroom and discovered a staircase that seemed like a secret known only to her—
    Standish tried to pour wine into his glass and found that the bottle was empty. A few mushrooms lay in congealed gray sauce on his plate. The brightness of the dining room hurt his eyes. Back in time again, he yawned and stretched. Somehow it had gotten to be nearly midnight. Standish stood up and went back to the pantry to pour himself another inch of seventy-year-old whiskey. If his body was tired, his mind was not—he would have trouble sleeping.
    Carrying his folders and glass, he moved through the room to the main entrance, not feeling like struggling up his and Isobel’s “secret” corridor this late at night.
    He mounted the great staircase and took the right wing toward the little anteroom before the Inner Gallery. He knew that the door to the gallery was opposite the door to the staircase. Therefore he felt as if his body had betrayed his mind when he bumped into a large piece of furniture, somehow got turned around in the dark, and could not find the other door.
    He told himself to stay calm. He ceased blundering from one piece of furniture to another. The room seemed even darker than it had when his beloved had led him through it. He forced himself to breathe steadily and slowly. In the darkness he could see the large clumsy shapes of high-backed leather chairs. All four walls seemed covered with a uniformly mottled gray-brown skin that refused to resolve into rows of books. He stepped forward and banged his right leg painfully against a hard surface. He swore under his breath, stepped sideways, and inched forward.
    A space opened up before him, and he moved more confidently toward the hovering plane of the wall. After a single step he tripped over some low piece of furniture, screamed, and fell. The glass flew out of his hand and shattered far off to his left. He landed on his left arm, still clutching Isobel’s papers. Sharp, definite pain shot from his elbow to his shoulder, then settled into a constant throb. Standish began to push himself along the floor