by Muriel Gray
She paused, her voice becoming thoughtful, as though she’d forgotten Josh’s presence. “Imagine having the Philosopher’s Stone in their grasp. And all they could do was to make gold. A bottomless well of servitude, every unwilling recruit from the dark legion at your disposal.”
She turned to him, very much aware of his presence, to emphasize her point like a lecturer.
“Part of the price paid by those unpleasant little creatures, the price for choosing the wrong side, you know, falling from grace with the rebel angel.” She turned back to the painting. “And all they could do was to make gold.”
Josh wondered at that moment why he shouldn’t kill her. She was a slight woman. He could jump the table and be on her in seconds. And if he was to die anyway, why not have the satisfaction of taking the mad bitch with him, ensuring that no more junior Furnace citizens rolled under trucks? Josh looked down at his feet. He was no murderer. The baby’s death still stuck to his soul like an acid poultice. But as he looked up at the back of her head, watched the set of her slim shoulders beneath her gown, he had an almost palpable sensation of it, and her voice, full of expectation and warning, made it worse.
“And the second thing?”
Josh took a breath and wrestled physical violence from his mind, although the urge to hurt her was almost stronger than his urge to breathe.
“When you killed Alice Nevin’s baby. Why’d you dress up like an old whore at a pimp’s funeral?”
Nelly McFarlane stayed facing the wall for a second, then without warning spun around and brought the spurtle down so hard against the edge of the table that Josh jumped. Whatever game of civilized torment she had been playing, she had abandoned it. Josh took a step back from the creature crouching slightly over the table, now pointing the ludicrous wooden stick at him as though it were a wand. Her teeth were bared and her eyes had turned a deeper shade of green, glittering like mica in a boulder. The voice that came from her curled lips was not one he would ever care to hear again.
“You have no idea who you’re talking to, do you, you little cunt lick?”
Josh drew enough breath to force a phoney laugh. “Cunt lick? That’s Deuteronomy. Right? Chapter three, verse four?”
Her hand on the table was like a claw, and she continued to look at him along the shaft of her wooden stick, her chest rising and falling as she fought to control herself. It took her a moment, but she succeeded. Before his eyes, the feral predator who crouched ready to strike slowly changed back to smug suburban housewife. But it did so with a struggle. She straightened up and took a breath through flared nostrils.
“At this time in May, the sun rises here at five-fourteen precisely. The next few hours are not going to be pleasant for you.”
Josh felt his heart reach for his throat. Nelly put down the ridiculous porridge stirrer and slid her hand into the pocket of her gown. She pulled out a small plastic container and threw it across the table at him. It rattled as he intercepted it and he looked down at the catch. A bottle of painkillers.
“If I were you I’d take at least eighty and pray they work before the first rays hit you.”
“Where’s Pace?”
She ignored him, walked to the door and opened it. “It’s nearly come through now. I can feel it on you. Try and find some human company for the last dark hours ahead.”
Josh wiped his mouth and walked towards the open door. As he passed by an etching McFarlane held out a finger. “There, Mr. Spiller. You asked why I… dressed for the occasion of sacrifice?”
Josh turned to what she indicated. A tiny etching he hadn’t noticed before. It showed a man and a woman in what looked like heavy mayoral robes, both standing by the long dark lake, the man holding an orb in his hands, the woman holding a struggling naked infant upside down by one ankle.
“You see, ceremony is everything. They dressed as they felt most powerful in their mortal roles. It enhances the potency of the Great Work.”
He looked away and continued towards the door. As he passed without glancing her way and reentered the hall, she spoke again.
“I, of course, do the same. Which, to answer your insolent question, is why I dressed as I do when I instruct our financial people. I’m sorry if it’s not to the liking of a truck driver. It’s Versace. Perhaps it goes down rather better in the boardrooms of Europe than in the diners of Pittsburgh. Not much polyester content.”
He looked back at her once with disgust, then as a child began to cry from somewhere far distant in the house, he started to cross the hall.
“She told you about the runes, didn’t she?”
Josh froze in his tracks.
“Griffin.”
There was a smile in her voice, as she enjoyed saying the word, enjoyed seeing the effect it had on Josh’s retreating shoulder blades.
He turned, and his face contorted with hatred. He lifted a finger and pointed at her.
“She’s long gone, you sick bitch.”
Nelly McFarlane smiled.
“For her sake, I hope you’re right. I really do.”
She closed the door and climbed the stairs towards the cries of the child.
He knew Archie Cameron was watching him, but John Pace didn’t hurry, walking slowly around Jezebel’s cab, checking it out like a kid at a truck show. He slid Josh’s logbook into his pocket, zipped up the front of his jacket and took his time crossing the street and entering the office.
Deputy Cameron was sitting at his desk, but Pace knew he’d only just left the window.
“Took your time, Sheriff.”
Pace opened the door in the glass partition and walked in.
“Take as long as I damned well please.”
Cameron absorbed the irritation of his senior without comment, then sat back in his chair and clasped his hands in front of him.
“He went to the councillor’s house.”
Pace sat down on Lena’s empty desk. His deputy was looking smug, as though passing this information had somehow raised his status.
“So?”
Archie sat back up, irritated. “So he was askin’ where you lived.”
Pace looked away, as if bored. He picked up a few scribbled messages from Lena’s desk and flicked through them. Archie Cameron pulled at his collar.
“She wants you to drive over there.”
“I gather.”
“You want me to come too?”
Pace shook his head casually, still looking at the bits of paper in his hand as though they were important. If he wanted to take his deputy to boiling point, he was doing all the right things. Cameron’s tone changed from snippy informer to spiteful child. “Can’t help wonderin’ why she needs to see you this time of the mornin’, Sheriff? Maybe she didn’t expect that dumb trucker to come strollin’ back in here like he did. Maybe she thought she did her bit, and keepin’ him away was yours. Huh?”
“Archie?”
His deputy’s face was twisted with scorn. “Yeah?”
“You figure you’ll be sheriff one day, don’t you?”
The man held Pace’s stare without flinching.
“You got sons. Everyone knows what that means.”
“But if they didn’t want the job. If something happened to me? A new family was needed to take over, you’d like it if it was you?”
“Guess it’d be okay.”
Pace got up off his desk and walked to Archie’s. He stood in front of the man and leaned forward, his straight arms taking his upper-body weight.
“Are you never afraid, Archie?”
The younger man grinned moronically. “I believe in the Lord.”
“And the things that do Nelly McFarlane’s bidding? Do you believe in them?”
“I heard talk.”
The man’s grin had faded.
“Listen to me, Archie. You get nothin’ for nothin’. You understand?”
Cameron looked back earnestly at his chief. “I know that. We all know what the councellor gives.”
Pace stood upright.
“Do we? And what about us? What do we give for the few scraps she throws us? Huh?”
Cameron shrugged. “We just believe.”
Pace bowed his head to his chest, dismissed the reply with a shake. “No. We live in fear. That’s what we pay.”
The deputy stared back at him for a moment, before gesticulating a dismissal into the air. “Yeah? And who don’t live in fear? Huh? Think they’ll lose their jobs. Think their kids’ll take drugs. Think the gang at the end of the street’ll break in and kill ‘em. Bein’ scared’s part of life.”
Pace nodded, then looked up and replied gently, almost sadly, “Then I guess you will make a good Furnace sheriff, Deputy Cameron. ‘Cos when the somethin’ we can’t even think about comes creepin’ up on you in the night, knowin’ your thoughts, feelin’ your breath, an’ waitin’ until it can rip at you and turn you inside out, the somethin’ that’s worse than any nightmare you ever had or any bogeyman a child with a fever hollered at in the dark, then I guess you goin’ to shrug and treat it like a big electric bill came through the mail.”
He held the man’s gaze a few more moments, then turned and walked towards the door. Cameron called after him.
“You just talkin’ like this ‘cos it’s you who’s afraid.”
Pace hesitated, looking at the door.
“Yeah. I am.”
He left quietly. Archie Cameron watched him go, cleared his throat, shuffled some paper, then glanced towards the empty office adjoining his, a doorway of dark and stillness. He ran a finger around his collar, got up and put the striplights on.
34
Nineteen minutes past two. He looked at his watch and he knew that at that precise moment, he had decided to die. It had taken him twenty minutes to walk back the long way around to the truck from McFarlane’s house, avoiding the corner though he knew in his heart there would be no ice cream sign there now, and it had been twenty of the darkest minutes in his life.
He could feel the beast constantly, keeping pace with him, moving without sound but never hurrying. Sometimes he caught a maddening glimpse of something running low over a porch, or disappearing with spidery agility into a crawl space, and his stomach walls touched.
The worst had been only yards from Jezebel. He had tried so hard not to run, and then the sound came again. The unearthly rasping attempt at his name, followed this time by something that approximated a thin laugh.
His body had acted for him, bolting forward towards the distant and false security of Jezebel, but leaving him short of breath, having to stagger against a tree, back up against the trunk to gulp in air. His hands had gripped the rough wood behind his hips and moved against it as he stared back up the street towards the source of the sound. That was when his fingers had touched something rougher than bark. It took only seconds, but the information he processed through the tips of his fingers seemed to take an age to reach his brain. In that time, his skin registered a substance that felt like wet leather pitted with thick, coarse hairs, hot and stinging to the touch and leaving a residue like mild acid on Josh’s fingers. He pulled his hand away with a shout, only to look down and see two long fingers of a clawed hand slide from view around the wide bole of the tree. He launched away as though expelled by electricity and ran at the truck, gulping back the vomit that nestled at the base of his throat. It was only on reaching the door and falling gratefully against it that he remembered the movements in the sleeper, that writhing beneath his comforter.
Nineteen minutes past two in the morning, and the stark realization that sobered his fright rather than fuelled it was that if Jezebel wasn’t safe, then nowhere was. The tape in the machine labelled Josh Spiller had come to the end and there was no automatic rewind. The only choice left now was how he was to die.
Josh stood up and fought to catch a breath.
Promise me, Griffin had said, you’ll think about the first option.
What had been unthinkable for thirty-two years now seemed not only plausible, but desirable. Josh didn’t want to die, but unlike the demented cowardice that suicide had always suggested to him, to cheat the creeping darkness at his heels by taking his own life suddenly seemed almost honourable.
He’d known only one person in his life who’d committed suicide. Tan Levinson had been a company driver who sometimes drove the same route as he and Eddie, and ended up swallowing midnight breakfasts in the same stops or unloading aluminum in the same docks. He’d been a quiet man, had a wife and one son in Detroit, but nothing had ever made either of them think he was ready to pull the rip chord.
Eddie used to call him Springsteen, on account of Levinson always leaving one unused work glove hanging from the back pocket of his jeans, but any jokes at his expense were waved away amicably with a limp hand as he smiled from behind a veil of cigarette smoke.
And then one January, he’d pulled into the TA at Tuscaloosa, parked between a tanker and a Schneider doubler, taken a handgun from his overnight bag and spread his brains over the padded walls of his sleeper. No one knew if there was a reason. Everyone said there had been none. But Josh remembered once, late at night in a stop in South Carolina, that Levinson had stared out the window into the blackness and said something to Josh, apropos of nothing, that had stuck with him:
“If you don’t outrun it, it runs over you.”
Josh had cast Eddie a glance, hoping for a laugh, but he’d grunted and carried on reading a truck-trading newspaper.
“Yeah, Tan. What’s that?”
“Life, you dumb fuck. What you think?”
Josh had played with his coffee cup, slightly embarrassed without the jocular support of his partner. “Uh-huh? So how you outrun it, then?”
Levinson had turned and looked at him with tired eyes. “Get to the finish line first.”
Josh put his head against Jezebel’s door, his own name flourished above his bowed skull like graffiti, and wept.
“I thought it best if this weren’t found in the truck.”
Nelly took the logbook from Pace’s hand and raised an eyebrow at it. She looked back up at him and smiled, then cradled it in her lap like an opera programme. “You have a policeman’s attention to detail.”
He looked at her impassively. “How long’s he got?”
She crossed her legs under a black wool dress and tipped her head to one side. “Now, come on, John. How many times have you helped summon this particular servant?”
“The same one,” he said in a whisper, ignoring the question.
She rubbed a finger and thumb together absently. “As far as your understanding stretches, yes. The simplest way I can paint it is it’s the same species. But that’s not quite right either. Lord, I’m not in the mood anymore tonight for instructing the ignorant.”
Pace swallowed, and she waited a moment before smiling cruelly.
“You saw it, didn’t you?”
He said nothing and she continued as though she hadn’t expected a reply. “And that’s good. Because to know is always better than to not know.” Her voice hardened. “I want you to come into the laboratory.”
Pace shook his head. “It wasn’t a request, Sheriff.”
She stood up and led the way out of the room. After looking at his feet, alone in her study for a few moments, his legs found the strength to follow.
He walked slowly across the polished hall floor, through the Scottish Room to the far wall, where the concealed door stood a few inches ajar.
John Pace pushed the door open and paused. He had been here only once, ten years ago, and although the sacrifice had been nearly consumed by then, even the cloudy memory of its remains nauseated him. It would be worse now. A fresh sacrifice. A fresh horror.
But soon it would be over, and he dug deep to summon the strength to face his destiny. His jaw moved as his back teeth clenched involuntarily, and Pace walked forward, descending the narrow wooden steps with difficulty, burdened by his thick frame. There were fourteen steps without the benefit of a handrail, ending in a small square landing and doo
r lit by a single naked bulb. He went down holding on to the brick-lined wall for support, and wiped a film of sweat from his upper lip. The whispering had been audible from the top of the stairs, surrounding him and growing in strength as he descended. But now, standing before the half-open door, it was almost loud enough to make out isolated words. Pace clenched his teeth harder and knew that would be fruitless. He had nearly bolted last time, afraid for his life. Afraid that whatever belonged to the ugly, rasping little voices, lisping those whispers, would appear to fulfil the plans they were hatching.
The words they were speaking were in a language he didn’t care to comprehend, and his fists opened and closed against the horror of syllables that he knew no human mouth could form. He lifted his head higher, put a hand out and pushed the door open.
The whispering stopped abruptly as though a tape had been cut, and while he still had the courage he stepped through the doorway and into Nelly McFarlane’s lab.
He was right. It was much worse. The last time, he remembered, his entrance had been like breaking a spider’s web. Not in the literal sense.
There had been nothing to feel. It was a subtle internal sensation alerting unused senses to an unidentifiable threat. This time as he crossed her diabolical threshold the invisible threat was not subtle. It wrapped him like chainmail. Pace drew in a faltering lungful of air, and across the small room Nelly McFarlane watched him without expression.
“Close the door.”
He fought for breath. The smell in the room was complex and heady, so thick with elements other than oxygen that it made him wonder if it was breathable. He closed his eyes briefly, and as his hand pushed the door shut behind him he concentrated on calming his panic and breathing normally.
She held up Josh Spiller’s logbook, then threw it down contemptuously in front of a buzzing, illuminated computer screen.
“He wasn’t supposed to come back here.”