FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

Nelly McFarlane’s voice was light, but Pace could read it better. He looked up and kept his eyes firmly on hers.

  This was not a space he cared to look around. It had the feel of a boiler room; indeed, the louvred slit of a window that ran along the base of the yard wall above them betrayed to the rare inquisitor who might ponder on it from outside only that it contained part of a heating system.

  Two generations of McFarlane children had kicked a ball against that grate in the stone wall, believing that the thin pipe expelling steam from the centre of the metal slats was nothing more than plumbing.

  Or perhaps they believed nothing of the sort. Maybe they could hear sounds coming from that pipe as they bent down to retrieve a ball, or chalk a scored point on the stone. Sounds like malicious whispering voices. Maybe smells that weren’t the smells of radiator steam. Was it really better to know than not to know? John Pace didn’t think so.

  Even with his eyes firmly on her face and not what lay between them, his skin was crawling and he pressed back against the door with what he imagined was a subtle movement. She looked at him with contempt.

  “I’m finding the mortal fear of the unknown increasingly unattractive, John.”

  Pace curled his fingers into the wood of the door and tried to make his reply sound normal. “Ain’t that what we trade on?”

  “We?” She smiled. “I appreciate your solidarity.”

  “Nothin’s changed I know of.”

  She scrutinized his face for a second, an enigmatic expression behind her eyes. But when she spoke it was with the familiarity of a boss to an employee. “You let him come back here. You make sure you clean up.”

  Emboldened by the commonplace nature of her scolding, Pace let his eyes leave McFarlane’s face and, studiously avoiding the horror in the centre of the floor, took in the room’s details.

  The light source was an incongruous fluorescent tube hanging on two chains from the low, open-beamed ceiling, but despite the broad reach of its harsh illumination, the room was alive with shadows.

  A stainless steel counter, like that in the kitchens of a large hotel, ran the full length of the opposite wall. In its centre was a sink and surgical taps, a tray with implements lying at its side. The computer screen that buzzed and clicked as its display changed sat at the end of the counter, a thick stalk of cables snaking from its back into a hole in the rough-hewn brick wall. Apart from the stark modernity of that area, the room was a repugnant temple to McFarlane’s madness.

  Her athanor, the bullet-shaped alchemic furnace that had travelled the Atlantic with her ancestors, was mounted on a block of granite, and he could see a blue flame flickering in its heart as it stood unassumingly in the corner. Both the stone and the wall above the neat metal capsule were furred with a sootlike substance, in which scrawled marks, bizarre childlike writing, had been made with something sharp. Pace swallowed his fear as his instinct told him that Nelly herself had not been responsible for those wild symbols, and he looked away.

  On the stone floor in front of the athanor, a pentagram marked out in dark brown smears was littered inside with droplets of mercury as though a vessel containing the quicksilver had been dropped and smashed. Against the wall four of the familiar metal packing crates were stacked neatly, the ones that would take the plane ride away from here, like they always had, when the dull lead inside had been transmuted into something more useful.

  As he looked he was sure he saw a furtive movement in the shadow behind the pile, the portion of a spidery limb being pulled back into the darkness. He looked away again quickly, desperate to focus on something that filled him with neither revulsion nor fear. But looking away brought his gaze back to the centre of the room. John Pace expelled air through his teeth with an inaudible hiss.

  Nelly McFarlane snapped at him. “Don’t be a child.”

  He licked dry lips and surprised himself by finding he still had a voice and a fool’s courage. “You mean me or her?”

  He had no need to indicate what he referred to. McFarlane looked at him with a curious expression, which made Pace squirm as he interpreted it as a look of anthropological interest.

  Between them was a large flat stone, a soft sandstone lozenge carved around the edge with crude runic symbols. God forgive him, but he had personally arranged for its safe passage from the New York docks after its purchase in Scotland, and now it lay on its back in this room instead of in the field on the edge of Loch Fyne, where it had stood for over three thousand years. But if it needed compensation for that blasphemous wrenching from its site and interruption in purpose, it had it in the form of the carefully dissected remains of Amy Nevin, which were stretched out on it like those of a laboratory rat.

  The corpse was naked, and most but not all of the skin had been flayed and hung in tidy strips on a grid of steel sail wires that suspended the massive stone from a crossed beam in the ceiling. Remaining patches of milk-white skin adhered only to those parts of the baby that had been most badly crushed, and an incision from breastbone to genitals had been clamped wide open. There was a strange beauty about the red gash of that empty cavity, the way it echoed an exotic orchid, the tiny white ribs like stamens from a bloom. And although the organs that had been laid within the smaller pentagrams around the stone were not in themselves shocking, being livid with the bloom of the healthy child they had come from, the tidy, methodical way in which they had been sorted for different use made Pace nauseous again.

  “It’s rather late to give her advice, John.”

  She was still examining him, eager to see what he would do next, to see if his challenging words would expand to a physical threat. Her expression, a slightly open mouth and lowered brow, suggested that she might relish that. What he did made her eyes glaze over with disappointment.

  John Pace backed against the door and slid down it to a crouch. Something wet scuttled deeper under the stone’s shadow as his view altered to take in more of the floor, and he closed his eyes against the slight trail it had left. He heard her sigh.

  “I want him gone before it’s time. You’ve nearly three hours to persuade him.”

  He wiped his mouth with an arm and blinked up at her. “And Griffin?”

  “I would hazard a guess and say she’s a lot further than three hours away. What do you think?”

  Her voice was so hard, the barked, weary instructions of emperor to slave, that the tenderness in his caught her off-guard.

  “Councillor? How much more killin’?”

  Nelly McFarlane looked over the hanging stone at the rugged man crouched like a frightened child against her door and let her hands fall to her sides. She walked slowly around the fearsome obstacle and knelt in front of him, putting slim hands on knees that stretched his policeman’s slacks to the limit in this unpolicemanly position.

  “John. Amy was mine to give. You know that. That’s why we have power again. Look.” She indicated the room he knew was far from empty.

  “Can’t you feel it?” She laughed like a young girl. “They’re no more willing, and no less eager to deceive and disobey, but, oh, Sheriff, I’m so much stronger.”

  He looked at her hands on his knees, willing them to stop touching him.

  “And the trucker?”

  “Would you mourn him if he was a name in a newspaper paragraph detailing the fatalities in a ten-vehicle pileup?”

  She shook her head.

  “No. Because that’s the random, daily nature of life and death. Just as this is. Just as he might have made the wrong decision on the highway and ended up mince, he just drove into the wrong town. Lord knows you gave him enough chances, but the stupid man simply made the wrong decision over his statement.

  “His death at least will be more interesting than a mundane head injury finishing him off in some county ambulance with poor suspension. At least in the last few days, and certainly in the last few minutes of his ordinary life, he will glimpse that part of the secret and incredible world hidden from the majority of men, that you are privileged t
o witness, and I am privileged to control.”

  Her face was made with an inner ecstasy that Pace had never seen in her mother. But, as Pace had reasoned so recently that it still seemed like a blasphemy to think it, like most of Nelly McFarlane’s relatives who had possessed the power of the Philosopher, Morven McFarlane hadn’t survived long enough to curb that insanity.

  He nodded, eyes down, as though he understood, but she could tell he was lying. Nelly McFarlane could tell a whole lot of things. Especially until the remains of that tiny body were all used up.

  “Do you think we do harm, John?”

  There was no use in pretending. “We kill. We keep on killin’.”

  She shook her head. Not unkindly. “We kill rarely. In comparison to some inner-city juvenile gang, or a despotic government, we’re angels of mercy.”

  “But, Councillor, Jesus said…”

  She cocked her head, waiting, and he knew it was useless. The hands he so badly wanted off his legs tightened their grip on the flesh around his knees.

  “The Antichrist will come, John. I’ve told you this. Often. Make no mistake. And only we will have the financial resources to combat him. And why? Because through the love of Christ we have the Philosopher’s Stone, the means to conjure and control not only the tawdry metal that the world holds so dear, but the very dark forces themselves that would side with the Antichrist. Now, you think our Lord would disapprove of the loss of a few unimportant lives when it’s part of how we’re preparing to defend his return?”

  He spoke in a tiny voice that was almost comic coming from such a large man. “Not one sparrow falls.”

  Mercifully, she removed her hands. Her face was still soft, but her voice had an edge returning to it. “Then Christ’ll know when our trucking sparrow falls at sunrise, and will presumably mourn him.” She stood, smoothing her dress. “Stand up.”

  With the effort of the portly, he obeyed, following her with his eyes as she crossed the room to an aluminum workbench and picked up a small glass bottle next to the sink. She held it cheek high.

  “I have the usual assistance if you require it.”

  Pace swallowed. “I don’t reckon he’s got a gun.”

  “In his heart he believes you passed him the runes, John. When he can’t give them back, who knows what he might do?”

  He could tell there was suspicion growing in her face that he wouldn’t accept the tiny bottle of grey liquid, but his hand trembled at his side at the very thought of the revolting concoction that it contained.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  She looked hard at him.

  “Interesting. You don’t want to take it, John. Yet you know its power. That nothing can harm you for seven hours.”

  He stared back at her, silent. She added with malice, “Nothing human.”

  He ground his back teeth again and held out a shaking hand. Nelly McFarlane crossed the room to him, looked down at his wide palm and held the bottle between her thumb and forefinger. “Make him go to the woods. It’s tidier.”

  Like a bully stealing a child’s playground candy, she closed her fingers around the bottle with a flourish, turned her back, walked to the bench and started to wash her hands under the surgical taps. John Pace looked down at his empty hand, slowly closed his own fingers and turned to go. As he faced the plain door his thoughts became words.

  “You ever afraid, Councillor?”

  When he realized he’d spoken, he turned back to the room. She still had her back to him at the sink, but there was something changing about the atmosphere in the room. Either the light was dimming or his eyes were failing, but the shadows were starting to have their own life, and Nelly McFarlane seemed to be absorbing the dark areas of the room. She turned to him slowly and he pressed back up against the door again as her face was revealed.

  Her green eyes were glittering black pricks of hatred sunk in two deep, round craters. Her mouth was grotesquely wide at the corners, curling up in a clownish leer, and beneath her slightly parted lips, Pace feared he could see considerably more teeth than she’d had called her own only minutes ago. When the deep, rasping voice came from that mouth, John Pace was already fumbling behind him for the door handle, his mouth agape in terror. “Why should I be afraid?”

  He grunted in his passion to escape, but even as he found the handle, slammed it down and stumbled through the doorway, part of his rational mind was thinking about that hideous inhuman face, and the very faint something he had so briefly glimpsed behind its eyes.

  He had nearly puked his guts in his effort to reach the top step, by the time he decided something. It surprised him, horrified and comforted him in equal measures, but he would swear he was right.

  Sometimes, somewhere deep inside her armour, Nelly McFarlane was very afraid indeed.

  “It’s three o’clock.”

  “Yeah?”

  Griffin rubbed at her forehead. “Look. Can’t you just get on that radio thing and ask if someone else can pick me up from here?”

  Eddie looked across at her from behind a magazine he’d selected purposely from the ancient pile behind his seat to offend her, titled Asian Babes. “Hell, I’m sorry. Didn’t ‘preciate you was a payin’ passenger. I kinda thought you was hitchin’. You know? Travellin’ for free? Takin’ other people’s gas and drivin’ time so you can see the country without payin’ jackshit?”

  Griffin folded her arms like a vaudeville wife and looked out her window at the empty parking lot.

  Eddie got back to the centrefold of Sinijta, originally from a village called Kharahyira, who had big naked tits and the bottom half of a sari tied around ample, childbearing hips, but wanted to convince the reader she was interested in in-line skating. He sniffed back some snot in the back of his throat and addressed the magazine rather than his reluctant passenger. “Anyhows. Can’t call out until they calls me. Need to keep on this channel.”

  Griffin looked at him with disgust, then looked back out the window. The long dark band that marked the ridge of the mountains was already visible, by virtue of the lightening sky behind it.

  Her heart tripped over itself in her chest as she imagined that hot, celestial orb hurtling over the Atlantic towards them, and how its arrival, so eagerly anticipated by every kind of man throughout centuries, was dreaded by one today, not more than fifteen miles from here.

  “I need a leak again.”

  Without looking up, Eddie lifted a hand, indicating the door, as though she would have trouble finding it.

  “Don’t go without me.”

  He made a small head movement that could have meant anything, and she climbed out in a sulk. As she crossed the cold lot towards the building, Griffin shivered, squinting hatred at the magnolia sky like a vampire.

  35

  He almost laughed at the things he was thinking. Would she manage to send in all the bills to the dispatcher and get the money due him? Would she know how to fix the cold faucet in the bathroom when it did the weird hissing thing? Would Dean come to his funeral, and if he did, would he wear that Blues Brothers suit of his and embarrass the shit out of Elizabeth?

  Josh sat upright behind Jezebel’s wheel, the bottle of painkillers McFarlane had tossed him lying on the road beneath the truck where he’d ejected it with contempt out the window. He was almost delirious with the decision he’d made, but he had to think straight now. Just because he’d decided he was to die his own way didn’t mean it couldn’t be done properly. An obvious suicide would mean no insurance money, and that was unacceptable. She didn’t know it, but when Josh was on the road Elizabeth was not only on his mind, she was on his policy. Sure, he hadn’t made the commitment of marriage, but he’d made plenty of financial commitments, his own particular way of binding them. Commitments that felt more solid to him than a white dress, some finger food and a bad band for a hundred guests in an overpriced hotel. But they’d never discussed it.

  Too late. All too late.

  At least if he did it the right way, just drove the truck
off the road, it would look like an accident. Then the horrible thought occurred. What if he didn’t die? Plenty of guys had survived blistering accidents. Accidents that saw their rigs tumble down canyons and let them walk away with no more than a cut chin and bruised wallet. He closed his eyes against the thought of lying injured, waiting for that nightmare thing to come and do its worst while he lay helpless. With a grimace, he opened his eyes, looking out the window and fiddling with his earring as if he were thinking about nothing more than buying new mud flaps. And suddenly, with a force that took his breath away, the reality, the awfulness, the sheer gravity and finality of his situation hit him in a wave of grief.

  He was no suicide case. He had no idea what went through the heads of those sad individuals who pulled their own plugs, but he was damned sure it wasn’t the kind of lucid sorting and planning he had been indulging in grotesquely for the last few moments.

  He didn’t want to die. But he was going to. One way or another. And he would never see Elizabeth, his love, his friend, his reason for everything, again. Josh Spiller felt then as though he had died already. His heart shrivelled, and the panic that constricted his chest and throat made him want to rip at his own flesh to relieve it. He let go a whining sound through his teeth and his fists opened and closed impotently. Jezebel’s door fell open against his weight as he pressed down on the handle with a desperate arm, and he tumbled out of the truck and into the night. He wanted to run, as if running could do him some good, but instead he stood on the asphalt panting, in a semi-crouch.

  “Elizabeth!”

  His wail echoed in the empty street and the dimly lit window in the sheriff’s office stared back like an eye with a cataract. Josh gasped at the volume of his voice in the still of the night, then he turned from the truck and ran down the street towards the corner where a lone phone booth stood sentinel outside a shuttered store. Josh fumbled in his pockets for money, for anything that might connect him across the states to his love. They were empty.

  A newspaper vending machine sat at the doorway of the store and with a bouncing run to gain momentum, he went at it and kicked the metal money box open. The noise was tremendous, but if anyone objected, they did so privately. He remained alone to scoop up the dimes, clawing at them like a Calcutta beggar gathering alms.