“Sure, kid, but I recall it all as if it were this morn. Drink up.”
“John,” I said, staring into the fire, looking at the hearth where the ashes of the burned paper blew in a great breath. “Does... did... that review really exist?”
“My God, of course, sure, yes. Actually....” Here he paused and gave it great imaginative concern. “The Times knew my love for you, Doug, and asked me to review your book.” John reached his long arm over to refill my glass. “I did it. Under an assumed name, of course, now ain’t that swell of me? But I had to be fair, Doug, had to be fair. So I wrote what I truly felt were the good things, the not-so-good things in your book. Criticized it just the way I would when you hand in a lousy screenplay scene and I make you do it over. Now ain’t that A-one double absolutely square of me? Eh?”
He leaned at me. He put his hand on my chin and lifted it and gazed long and sweetly into my eyes.
“You’re not upset?”
“No,” I said, but my voice broke.
“By God, now, if you aren’t. Sorry. A joke, kid, only a joke.” And here he gave me a friendly punch on the arm.
Slight as it was, it was a sledgehammer striking home.
“I wish you hadn’t made it up, the joke, I wish the article was real,” I said.
“So do I, kid. You look bad. I—”
The wind moved around the house. The windows stirred and whispered.
Quite suddenly I said, for no reason that I knew:
“The banshee. It’s out there.”
“That was a joke, Doug. You got to watch out for me.”
“No,” I said, looking at the window. “It’s there.”
John laughed. “You saw it, did you?”
“It’s a young and lovely woman with a shawl on a cold night. A young woman with long black hair and great green eyes and a complexion like snow and a proud Phoenician prow of a nose. Sound like anyone you ever in your life knew, John?”
“Thousands.” John laughed more quietly now, looking to see the weight of my joke. “Hell—”
“She’s waiting for you,” I said. “Down at the bottom of the drive.”
John glanced, uncertainly, at the window.
“That was the sound we heard,” I said. “She described you or someone like you. Called you Willy, Will, William. But I knew it was you.”
John mused. “Young, you say, and beautiful, and out there right this moment... ?”
“The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Not carrying a knife—?”
“Unarmed.”
John exhaled. “Well, then, I think I should just go out there and have a chat with her, eh, don’t you think?”
“She’s waiting.”
He moved toward the front door.
“Put on your coat, it’s a cold night,” I said.
He was putting on his coat when we heard the sound from outside, very clear, this time. The wail and then the sob and then the wail.