The Sea Came in at Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

she imagined, or some mysterious thwarted effort. The Occupant’s behavior was more possessed than anything: Kristin noted, for instance, that he always moved in a clockwise direction. His furious pacing was always clockwise; if there was a light switch to his right just beyond his reach, he would get up and circle the room to the left to turn it off, like his life going down a drain.
    The terrible sounds that sometimes came from the secret room, the crashing and thrashing like a trapped animal, were always left behind, locked away, when he emerged. When he emerged, all he brought with him was the look in his eyes, anguish invaded by fury; she could anticipate when he would come for her, always after he had been in the secret room a particularly long and sullen time, or when he had been passed out and would wake wanting her. After a while she stopped being afraid of what he might do. Once she woke in the middle of the night to hear him pacing in the dark, no doubt in clockwise circles, at the foot of her bed; for fifteen minutes she lay there holding her breath, but he just went on circling and finally she fell back to sleep. When she woke he was gone, nothing having happened between them. Once, in his bed after he had finished with her, he pulled her to his chest and held her, absently caressing her hair, until he suddenly realized he was verging on a moment of actual feeling and fled from the room in terror. Later, when she finally got up the nerve to go looking for him, she found him back upstairs in the living room, sleeping on the sofa.
    When he had no interest in her, or when he left the house, she would halfheartedly search for a clue to who he was, reading her way through his library on the lookout for an old forgotten letter or maybe a memo tucked among the pages of a book. From the windows of the house all she could tell was that she was somewhere in the hills of a city that was strange to her; as part of the first generation of human beings to have been born with an actual photographic knowledge of what the Earth looks like from outer space, for a while she found something psychically reassuring, even profoundly secure, about living her life entirely within the walls of a space she had never seen from the outside. She relished the times the house was empty. She liked walking up and down the stairs from room to room and staring out the large drapeless windows at the panorama of little houses and little trees, and little cars driving up and down the winding streetlit roads that seemed to drop off in midair, and white satellite dishes erupting from the hillsides like monstrous mushrooms in the rain.
    Sometimes she noticed the satellite dishes had been painted black in the night. Sometimes at night she could even see them vanish one by one, and the dark form of a clandestine figure fleeing the scene of the crime. The morning always brought a truck of huge new dishes; it was driven by a young Japanese boy who regularly replaced the vandalized black dishes with pristine white ones. Once, having just finished unloading a dish for the next-door neighbor and installing it on the hillside, he turned to see Kristin naked in the window, watching him.
    There was a time, not so long before, she might have stepped back from view. Now she just ate a plum and watched him back.

I T WAS AN OLD HOUSE for L.A., dating back to the Thirties, with the main floor at the top, at street level. There, perched with the library and kitchen, was the living room, shaped like a large half-moon, walled in white brick with a wooden floor and fireplace and a small empty piano in the corner, circled by the large bare windows with window seats.
    On the level below were his bedroom, with a window facing east, and hers, with a window facing west. The locked room was down on the third floor below that. After a week or so, she began taking liberties with her room, putting away in the closet the bassinet that so unsettled her, anticipating a furious