‘Bird,’ she whispers.
fading away, moving deeper and deeper,
‘I’m pregnant.’
down, down into the depths of this honeycomb world.
Acknowledgments
The following books proved invaluable in the course of writing this novel:
Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War by James Risen and Judy L. Thomas (Basic Books, 1998); Eagle Lake by James C. Ouellette (Harpswell Press, 1980); The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice (Allen Lane, 1998); The Book of the Spider by Paul Hillyard (Hutchinson, 1994); The Bone Lady by Mary H. Manheim (Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Maine Lighthouses by Courtney Thompson (CatNap Publications, 1996); Apocalypses by Eugen Weber (Hutchinson, 1999); The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, edited by Francis Carey (British Museum Press, 1999); and The Devil’s Party by Colin Wilson (Virgin, 2000). In addition, Simpson’s Forensic Medicine by Bernard Knight (Arnold, 1997) and Introduction to Forensic Sciences, second edition, edited by William G. Eckert (CRC Press, 1997) rarely left my desk.
Much of the material relating to religious movements in Maine came from Elizabeth Ring’s Introduction to her Directory of Churches & Religious Organizations in Maine, 1940 (Maine Historical Records Survey Project); ‘Till Shiloh Come’ by Jason Stone (Down East magazine, March 1990); and ‘The Promised Land’ by Earl M. Benson. (Down East magazine, September 1953).
As each novel progresses, the depths of my ignorance become more and more apparent. I have relied on the knowledge and kindness of a great many people in researching this book, among them James Ferland and the staff of the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office, Augusta; Officer Joe Giacomantonio, Scarborough Police Department; Captain Russell J. Gauvin, City of Portland Police Department; Sergeant Dennis R. Appleton, CID III, Maine State Police; Sergeant Hugh J. Turner, Maine State Police; L. Dean Paisley, my excellent guide to Eagle Lake; Rita Staudig, historian of the St. John Valley; Phineas Sprague Jr. of Portland Yacht Services; Bob and Babs Malkin and Jim Block, who helped me with Jewish New York; Big Apple Greeters; Phil Procter, theater manager of the Wang Center in Boston; Beth Olsen at the Boston Ballet; the staff of the Center for Maine History in Portland, Maine; Chuck Antony; and many others. To all of them I owe a drink, and probably an apology for all the mistakes I’ve made.
Finally, I wish to thank my agent, Darley Anderson, and his assistants, Elizabeth and Carrie; my foreign rights agent Kerith Biggs; my editor, Sue Fletcher; and everyone at Hodder & Stoughton for putting up with me.
THE WHITE ROAD
John Connolly
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © 2002 by John Connolly
The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN 978 1 84456 839 0
Book ISBN 978 1 444 7 0471 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For Darley Anderson
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following copyrighted works:
Extract from ‘The Waste Land’ reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd, 3 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AU
Pinetop Seven: lines from ‘Mission District’ (lyrics: Darren Richard) from Bringing Home the Last Great Strike (Self-Help/Truckstop Records, 2000). © Darren Richard, re printed by permission of Darren Richard and Truckstop Audio Recording Company.
www.pinetopseven.com
PART ONE
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
– But who is that on the other side of you?
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’
PROLOGUE
They are coming.
They are coming in their trucks and their cars, plumes of blue smoke following them through the clear night air like stains upon the soul. They are coming with their wives and their children, with their lovers and their sweethearts, talking of crops and animals and journeys they will make; of church bells and Sunday schools; of wedding dresses and the names of children yet unborn; of who said this and who said that, things small and great, the lifeblood of a thousand small towns no different from their own.
They are coming with food and drink, and the smell of fried chicken and fresh-baked pies makes their mouths water. They are coming with dirt beneath their nails and beer on their breath. They are coming in pressed shirts and patterned dresses, hair combed and hair wild. They are coming with joy in their hearts and vengeance on their minds and excitement curling like a snake in the hollow of their bellies.
They are coming to see the burning man.
The two men stopped at Cebert Yaken’s gas station, ‘The Friendliest Little Gas Station in the South,’ close by the banks of the Ogeechee River on the road to Caina. Cebert had painted the sign himself in 1968 in bright yellows and reds, and every year since then he had climbed onto the flat roof on the first day of April to freshen the colors, so that the sun would never take its toll upon the sign and cause the welcome to fade. Each day, the sign cast its shadow on the clean lot, on the flowers in their boxes, on the shining gas pumps, and on the buckets filled with water so that drivers could wipe the remains of bugs from their windshields. Beyond lay untilled fields, and in the early September heat the shimmer rising from the road made the sassafras dance in the still air. The butterflies mixed with the falling leaves, sleepy oranges and checkered whites and eastern tailed blues bouncing upward in the wake of passing vehicles like the sails of brightly colored ships tossing on a wild sea.
From his stool by the window, Cebert would look out on the arriving cars, checking for out-of-state tags so that he could prepare a good old Southern welcome, maybe sell some coffee and doughnuts or shift some of the tourist maps, the yellowing of their covers in the sunlight signaling the approaching end of their usefulness.
Cebert dressed the part: he wore blue overalls with his name sewn on the left breast, and a Co-Op Beef Feeds cap sat way back on his head like an afterthought. His hair was white and he had a long mustache that curled exotically over his upper lip, the two ends almost meeting on his chin. Behind his back folks said that it made Cebert look like a bird had just flown up his nose, but they didn’t mean nothing by it. Cebert’s family had lived in these parts for generations and Cebert was one of their own. He advertised bake sales and picnics in the windows of his gas station and donated to every good cause that came his way. If dressing and acting like Grandpa Walton helped him sell a little more gas and a couple of extra candy bars, then good luck to Cebert.
Above the wooden counter, behind which Cebert sat day in, day out, seven days each week, sharing the duties with his wife and his boy, was a bulletin board headed: ‘Look Who Dropped By!’ Pinned to it were hundreds of business cards. There were more cards on the walls and the window frames, and on the door that led into Cebert’s little back office. Thousa
nds of Abe B. Normals or Bob R. Averages, passing through Georgia on their way to sell more photocopy ink or hair-care products, had handed old Cebert their cards so that they could leave a reminder of their visit to the Friendliest Little Gas Station in the South. Cebert never took them down, so that card had piled upon card in a process of accretion, layering like rock. True, some had fallen over the years, or slipped behind the coolers, but for the most part if the Abe B.’s or Bob R.’s passed through again in years to come, with a little Abe or Bob in tow, there was a pretty good chance that they would find their cards buried beneath a hundred others, like a relic of the lives that they had once enjoyed and of the men that they had once been.
But the two men who paid for a full tank and put water in the steaming engine of their piece-of-shit Taurus just before five that afternoon weren’t the kind who left their business cards. Cebert saw that straight off, felt it as something gave in his belly when they glanced at him. They carried themselves in a way that suggested barely suppressed menace and a potential for lethality that was as definite as a cocked gun or an unsheathed blade. Cebert barely nodded at them when they entered and he sure as hell didn’t ask them for a card. These men didn’t want to be remembered, and if, like Cebert, you were smart, then you’d pretty much do your best to forget them as soon as they’d paid for their gas (in cash, of course) and the last dust from their car had settled back on the ground.
Because if at some later date you did decide to remember them, maybe when the cops came asking and flashing descriptions, then, well, they might hear about it and decide to remember you too. And the next time someone dropped by to see old Cebert they’d be carrying flowers and old Cebert wouldn’t get to shoot the breeze or sell them a fading tourist map because old Cebert would be dead and long past worrying about yellowing stock and peeling paint.
So Cebert took their money and watched as the shorter one, the little white guy who had topped up the water when they pulled into the gas station, flicked through the cheap CDs and the small stock of paperbacks that Cebert kept on a rack by the door. The other man, the tall black one with the black shirt and the designer jeans, was looking casually at the corners of the ceiling and the shelves behind the counter loaded high with cigarettes. When he was satisfied that there was no camera, he removed his wallet and, using leather-gloved fingers, counted out two tens to pay for the gas and two sodas, then waited quietly while Cebert made change. Their car was the only one at the pumps. It had New York plates and both the plates and the car were kind of dirty, so Cebert couldn’t see much except for the make and the color and Miss Liberty peering through the murk.
‘You need a map?’ asked Cebert, hopefully. ‘Tourist guide, maybe?’
‘No, thank you,’ said the black man.
Cebert fumbled in the register. For some reason, his hands had started to shake. Nervous, he found himself making just the kind of inane conversation that he had vowed to avoid. He seemed to be standing outside himself, watching while an old fool with a drooping mustache talked himself into an early grave.
‘You staying around here?’
‘No.’
‘Guess we won’t be seeing you again, then.’
‘Maybe you won’t.’
There was a tone in the man’s voice that made Cebert look up from the register. Cebert’s palms were sweating. He flicked a quarter up with his index finger and felt it slide around in a loop in the hollow of his right hand before rattling back into the register drawer. The black man was still standing relaxed on the other side of the counter but there was a tightness around Cebert’s throat that he could not explain. It was as if the visitor were two people, one in black jeans and a black shirt with a soft Southern twang to his voice and the other an unseen presence that had found its way behind the counter and was now slowly constricting Cebert’s airways.
‘Or maybe we might pass through again, sometime,’ he continued. ‘You still be here?’
‘I hope so,’ croaked Cebert.
‘You think you’ll remember us?’
The question was spoken lightly, with what might have been the hint of a smile, but there was no mistaking its meaning.
Cebert swallowed. ‘Mister,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten you already.’
With that, the black man nodded and he and his companion left, and Cebert didn’t release his breath until their car was gone from sight and the shadow of the sign cast itself, once again, on an empty lot.
And when the cops came asking about the men a day or two later, Cebert shook his head and told them that he didn’t know nothing about them, couldn’t recall if two guys like them had passed through that week. Hell, lot of people passed through here on the way to 301 or the interstate, kept the place going like a turnstile at Disney World. And anyway, all them black fellers look alike, you know how it is. He gave the cops free coffee and Twinkies and sent them on their way and had to remind himself, for the second time that week, to release his breath.
He looked around at the business cards arrayed on every previously blank stretch of wall, then leaned over and blew some dust from the nearest bunch. The name Edward Boatner was revealed. According to his card, Edward sold machine parts for a company out of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Well, if Edward came through here again, he could take a look at his card. It would still be there, because Edward wanted to be remembered.
But Cebert didn’t remember nobody that didn’t want to be remembered.
He might have been friendly, but he wasn’t dumb.
A black oak stands on a slope at the northern edge of a green field, its branches like bones set against the moonlit sky. It is an old, old tree; its bark is thick and gray, deeply furrowed with regular vertical ridges, a fossilized relic stranded by a long-departed tide. In places, the orange inner bark has been exposed, exuding a bitter, unpleasant scent. The shiny green leaves are thick upon it: ugly leaves, deep and narrow, with bristle-tipped teeth at the ends of the lobes.
But this is not the true smell of the black oak that stands at the edge of Ada’s Field. On warm nights when the world is quieted, hand-on-mouth, and the moonlight shines palely on the scorched earth beneath its crown, the black oak discharges a different odor, alien to its kind yet as much a part of this solitary tree as the leaves on its branches and the roots in its soil. It is the smell of gasoline and burning flesh, of human waste and singeing hair, of rubber melting and cotton igniting. It is the smell of painful death, of fear and despair, of final moments lived in the laughter and jeering of onlookers.
Step closer, and the lower parts of its branches are blackened and charred. Look, see there, on the trunk: a cloven groove deep in the wood, now faded but once bright, where the bark was suddenly, violently breached. The man who made that mark, the final mark he left upon this world, was born Will Embree, and he had a wife and a child and a job in a grocery store that paid him a dollar an hour. His wife was Lila Embree, or Lila Richardson that was, and her husband’s body – after the ending of the final, desperate struggle that caused his booted foot to strike so hard against the trunk of the tree that he tore the bark from it and left a pit deep in its flesh – was never returned to her. Instead his remains were burned and the crowd took souvenirs of the blackened bones from his fingers and toes, then sent her a photograph of her dead husband that Jack Morton of Nashville had printed up in batches of five hundred to be used as postcards, Will Embree’s features twisted and swollen, the figure standing at his feet grinning as the flames from the torch leap toward the legs of the man Lila loved. His corpse was dumped in a swamp and the fish stripped the last of the charred flesh from his bones until they came apart and were scattered across the mud on the bottom. The bark never reclaimed the breach made by Will Embree and it remained exposed for ever after. The illiterate man had left his mark on the sole monument to his passing as surely as if it had been carved in stone.
There are places on this old tree where no leaves ever grow. Butterflies do not rest upon it, and birds do not nest in its branches. When
its acorns fall to the ground, fringed with brown hairy scales, they are left to decay. Even the crows turn their black eyes from the rotting fruit.
Around the trunk, a vine weaves. Its leaves are broad, and from each node springs a cluster of small green flowers. The flowers smell as if they are decomposing, festering, and in daylight they are black with flies drawn by the stench. This is Smilax herbacea, the carrion flower. There is not another one like it for a hundred miles in any direction. Like the black oak itself, it is alone of its kind. Here, in Ada’s Field, the two entities coexist, parasite and saprophyte: the one fueled by the lifeblood of the tree, the other drawing its existence from the lost and the dead.
And the song the wind sings in its branches is one of misery and regret, of pain and passing. It calls over untilled fields and one-room shacks, across acres of corn and mists of cotton. It calls to the living and the dead, and old ghosts linger in its shade.
Now there are lights on the horizon and cars on the road. It is July 17, 1964 and they are coming.
They are coming to see the burning man.
Virgil Gossard stepped into the parking lot beside Little Tom’s Tavern and belched loudly. A cloudless night sky stretched above him, dominated by a yellow killer moon. To the northwest, the tail of the constellation Draco was visible, Ursa Minor below it, Hercules above, but Virgil was not a man to take time to look at the stars, not when he might miss a nickel on the ground in the process, and so the shapes that the stars had taken were lost on him. From the trees and the bushes the last of the field crickets sounded, undisturbed by traffic or people, for this was a quiet stretch of road, with few houses and fewer folk, most having abandoned their homes for more promising surroundings many years before. The cicadas were already gone and soon the woods would prepare for the winter quiet. Virgil would be glad when it came. He didn’t like bugs. Earlier that day, a piece of what looked like greenish lint had moved across his hand while he lay in bed and he had felt the brief sting as the masked hunter, scouring Virgil’s filthy sheets for bedbugs, bit into him. The thing was dead a second later, but the bite was still itching. That was how Virgil was able to tell the cops what time it was when the men came. He had seen the green numerals on his watch glowing as he scratched at the bug bite: 9:15 P.M.
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