FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  Feeding a random number of stolen coins into the slot, Josh stabbed out their number. As the machine processed his instruction, he sucked in a breath and held it, staring ahead, absolutely still. There was a sudden heat growing on the skin on the back of his neck, and the Perspex backing to the phone booth ticked as it bulged slightly outwards, becoming subtly more concave in the increasing temperature. The curving reflections of the streetlights on its surface shifted with the change of shape and Josh watched as those lights were obscured by something dark. Something moving with nervy, fluid movements behind him in the street and, by its growing size in the telltale Perspex, coming closer. And then the telephone clicked through its last chirruping computations, and he heard the familiar sound of his own telephone ringing in the sweet haven that was Pittsburgh.

  With that connection, a stillness came over the hot air wafting at Josh’s face, a halting of movement that echoed his own alert and immobile stance, almost as though whatever had been moving towards him was waiting with him.

  The long tone sounded four times, and in each silent interlude, Josh’s hand tightened on the handset, pumping the ungiving plastic like a Nautilus device.

  It was answered. He let his breath go. The line exploded into static. He screwed his eyes shut and made a fist at the back of his hot neck with his free hand.

  “Baby! It’s me! For God’s sake don’t hang up!”

  He was yelling against the storm of white noise, an impotent rage temporarily usurping his fear. But it was a brief respite. He opened his eyes to the knowledge that the dark shape behind him was on the move again.

  Its reflected form was unfolding from a crouch in the wavy plane of the Perspex booth, and although his survival instinct was to turn and face whatever yeas approaching, with its attendant sounds of claws scraping on asphalt and its sickening wet hiss like a low fire, his failing nerve would not allow him to do so. Maybe it had read his suicidal thoughts. Maybe it didn’t like being cheated out of a bargain. Maybe it would show its hand before he could use his own to end the waiting. Whatever the thing’s intention, he had to hear her one more time. Had to tell her that she was the only precious, remarkable thing in his, until now, unremarkable life.

  “Elizabeth! Can you hear me?”

  His voice was nearly a sob. But the mockery of the voice that tried to rasp his name behind him was nearly a retch.

  “Chooaash!”

  The disgusting, phlegm-filled word was accompanied by a sound that can only have been a thin laugh. Josh’s shoulders hunched in horror and he closed his eyes again, a little boy in bed who thinks that his eyelids will protect him from the dangers of the darkened nursery.

  And then suddenly there was another voice. A voice in his ear, coming from the chaos that filled the phone. It was faint and tiny, but he heard it nevertheless. It was calling his name, and it cut through the savage crackling mess by virtue of its sweetness.

  “… love you. Josh… hear me? I love you.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  He hesitated in his elation, since he knew that although he heard it, there had been no voice in reality.

  The sizzling of the line was no less crazed; in fact, if anything, it had increased its pitch. But the voice that he knew was hers reached into his head. It came again, and he cocked his head like a bird.

  It was broken, fragmented, but he filled the gaps with his own desperation to believe what he heard.

  “I don’t know… you… hear me, Josh. But you… to know something. Please listen… love you. I love you… I’m… have our baby.”

  Josh Spiller started to cry, unable to speak, fit only to listen and pray this was no trick of his crazed brain. Elizabeth’s tiny, distant, tinkling voice spoke again.

  “… you can hear me… anything’s possible. You understand? Anything… fact… going to concentrate… and… might hear someone else… crazy… listen.”

  He kept crying and cocked his head some more as though the angle would somehow assist the message that was being generated in that space in the skull where only personal stereos can reach. There was nothing for a moment. Only the roaring of the phoneline’s tempest.

  Then, a note rather than a voice. But an undulating note like sweet birdsong. In its rising and falling, even though it was as faint as porch chimes from a mile, Josh could feel, rather than merely hear, emotions. They overwhelmed him with their intensity and he gasped. He could hear, feel a kind of unformed love, a simple longing to be, that he somehow knew in a deep velvety part of him would turn into a longing to be with him. And there was a clean, deep curiosity in the love he divined in that singing note, a desire for everything there was. For every smell, taste, sight, touch that could be experienced on earth. A desire untainted by knowledge, but a desire that was stronger than any he had ever felt himself or witnessed in any other being.

  Josh knew then, without understanding why or how, that he was being spoken to by his unborn child.

  His knees gave way beneath him and he slumped down in the booth, the phone falling from his hand and swinging from its cable. He rested his hot head against the metal leg of the booth and found no relief from its equally hot surface. Josh turned his head slowly and looked over his shoulder.

  The sidewalk was still smoking from the presence of the nightmare, but the air was cooling around him. It had gone.

  Josh Spiller wiped a hand over his face and slowly straightened himself to stand. He stood still for an age, knowing that he was decided. Firm in his resolve.

  There was to be no suicide. If he was going to die, he would die fighting. Fighting in a rage because, even if it was only in his sick and battered mind, he now believed he had something to fight for. A woman and child.

  He looked at the smouldering asphalt with an expression that had been absent from his face, not just for these last days of hell, but for years.

  It was the challenge of an aggressive male, and his voice in the still night air had a quiet menace that reinforced the stare.

  “Know what, you fuckin’ char-grill? The hunted just turned hunter.”

  He had two hours. Leaving the phone hanging from its cable, he went to find Pace.

  God, she felt dumb. But she was crying all the same. Elizabeth leaned forward, catching the phone with an elbow, and let it fall from the bedside table as she cradled her belly and wept. How could he possibly hear her when she hadn’t even spoken? And had it been him at all? It was just a call in the middle of the night that could have been a wrong number from a mobile going through a no-service area.

  But she knew different in her heart. She knew it was Josh. Sure because she so badly wanted to believe it was him. What she couldn’t believe was that she had followed Sim’s loony advice, and thought her conversation at the phone as she held it, even tried, for Christ’s sake, to get her foetus to talk to him. She had gone as crazy as her old Korean neighbour.

  “Josh,” she croaked in a tiny voice and allowed her head to fall forward onto her knees.

  Yes. So good. So good and delicious. To have made contact with its carrier. To have spoken. To have known that the carrier knew. It writhed again and stretched its growing limbs in the thick, syrupy darkness.

  Not long. Not long at all. It slept and dreamt of things to come and the end to this darkness. An escape into the light that would be red with blood.

  36

  Someone was in the truck. In the driver’s seat. Josh saw a slight movement in the long rectangle of mirror buttressed from the door like a banner, and he stopped immediately and crouched low. Taking the considerable weight of his body on his thighs, he crept slowly along the side of the cab, doubled up as though winded. As he drew level with the back of the sleeper, Josh huddled lower and hung on to the aluminum running board below the door.

  With his newfound purpose, he seemed to have developed the keener senses of the hunter, and the cool air around his face told him that his dawn executioner was not the current and uninvited occupant of his cab. He suspected it was human.
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br />   Slowly he lifted his right hand to the long bar at the back of the door, and when he had a sure grip, pulled himself up, caught his fingers under the door handle and wrenched it open in one fluid movement.

  Sheriff John Pace didn’t flinch. Nor, as Josh filled the door frame threateningly, did he turn his gaze from the dash in front of him, which he studied like a prospective buyer. He inclined his head to the instrument panel.

  “How much gas this thing swallow?”

  Josh stood, feet apart for balance on the running board, weighing the threat. This was the man he had, only moments ago, decided to devote the last few precious hours of his life to tracking down and tricking into replacing Josh’s death with his own. No need. He had come willingly, and Josh needed quickly to fathom why.

  “Depends.”

  “Yeah? On what?”

  “The load.”

  Pace nodded politely at the wheel as though that was more than sufficient answer to a dumb question at three in the morning.

  “Need your chair back?”

  “What you doin’ here?”

  Pace turned to look at him for the first time. Even in the weak parallelograms of streetlight that provided the only illumination in the cab, Josh could see that the man’s face was haggard, crumpled.

  “Like to talk to you.”

  Josh’s mind raced. The runes were still safely tucked in his inside breast pocket folded neatly and surreptitiously before visiting McFarlane between the paper of a spearmint gum strip. He nodded, and as Pace made a clumsy movement to get up and move to the passenger seat, Josh raised his chin.

  “It’s okay.”

  He stepped down and closed the door, realizing that his breathing was growing faster. Was this to be his only chance? He walked slowly around Jezebel’s shiny nose, using the time to think. It wasn’t enough. He reached the passenger door long before he reached any decision. But he opened it up anyway and climbed in.

  Pace looked across. “Guess you don’t sit there too often, huh?”

  Josh returned the thickset man’s gaze in silence. His confusion was total. The life-affirming plan to find Pace and return the deadly paper to him had crumbled. Why would he be here if his proximity put him in such peril?

  John Pace watched with practiced impassivity as Josh’s confusion travelled across his honest face, and he came straight to the point. “You got around two hours left, Josh. I reckon you know that already.”

  Josh looked out front, saying nothing. Pace studied the side of Josh’s face for a moment, then followed his gaze to the empty street in front of the truck.

  “Yeah. I guess you do.”

  Josh spoke to the windshield, the pair of them sitting like sulky lovers fighting in a parked car. “I asked before. What you want?”

  The sheriff ran a hand over his forehead, back across the top of his head, and laughed. The jollity of the guffaw made Josh stare at him.

  “What do I want?” repeated Pace.

  He laughed again, this time with an edge of hysteria, then stopped.

  “Salvation.”

  There was so little drama in his intonation, only a chilling weariness, that Josh knew instantly this was no trick, knew that Pace was sincere. It could mean only one thing.

  But if so, the only explanation Josh could summon from the mire was that Pace wanted an end to his own life. That he wanted Josh to give him back the bomb he’d planted and let it blow him away with the sun. Why else? What would make a murderer draw back the knife at the last instant and offer it to his victim? But if that was the truth, then the question still remained. Why? He decided there was no time to ask it.

  Slowly Josh reached into his breast pocket and took out the pack of gum. He stared down at it for a moment, then extended the strip from the packet, betrayed by the way it was fattened by the runes, and held out his hand to the man behind his steering wheel.

  “Want one?”

  Pace looked down at the gum and then back up at Josh’s stern face, something approaching disappointment showing in his tired eyes.

  “Like I said. You got two hours. Best keep that real safe.”

  Josh lowered the gum, then slid it back into his pocket. “How’d you do it? In the statement copy? The ticket? Huh?”

  Pace sighed and looked away. “You need to do some listenin’. I’m gonna tell you this stuff not for you or anyone else.” He looked around at Josh again, and fire was replacing defeat in Pace’s eyes. “I’m tellin’ it for me. You understand? I ain’t no saint. I don’t know you, mister. I got nothin’ against you, but this thing I’m doin’ here? It ain’t for you.”

  “Like I fuckin’ care what you think.”

  Pace nodded sagely. “Yeah. No reason you should hear me out. I done wrong but only on account of thinkin’ I was doin’ right by those I love.”

  The truck bounced as though boarded, but only very lightly. It was enough to make Josh hold up a hand to silence the bleating of his companion. Both men sat in silence, waiting. Nothing moved. False alarm. Josh lowered his hand and looked with hatred at Pace.

  “No heat. No smell. It ain’t our pal Joey.”

  “You seen it?”

  Josh’s answer was silent, a look that would have withered a lesser man. Pace held the stare and broke it, making Josh look away.

  “Just gimme your crap, man. I got two hours to make you take this strip of shit back.”

  The two men sat quietly for an age. So much so that Josh started to believe that John Pace had changed his mind.

  He was about to break the awkward silence when Pace held his hand over his face as though his body was trying to stop the words, and spoke from behind the fleshy mute of his palm.

  “Got kids, Josh?”

  Josh’s heart leapt. He replied in a smaller voice than he would have liked.

  “Nearly.”

  Pace kept his hand at his face, fat fingers toying with a wide nose. “You change when they’re born. The door you came through, the one you been gazin’ at over your shoulder your whole damned life, you know? Like you say, ‘When I was a kid I done this,’ or ‘When I was a teenager I shouldn’t have done that’? Well, that door closes on all your memories. They seem irrelevant, dumb, even. The only thing worth rememberin’ is stuff that hasn’t happened yet. You look forward to rememberin’ the kids on a beach vacation before you’ve gone on the damn thing. Know what I mean? You can see the photos in the album before you took them. You imagine how they goin’ to remember you. And then before you know it, you hear the creak of a new door, the one you’re goin’ out of. It creaks real loud as it starts to swing open.”

  “Christ,” hissed Josh.

  Pace laughed, hollowly this time, and let his hand fall from his face. “I’m just tellin’ it how it is.”

  “Yeah, like I’m beggin’ to hear it.”

  Josh’s sarcasm got through the reverie Pace seemed to have descended into. His tone sharpened and he met Josh’s eye.

  “I didn’t have no kids when I took over my daddy’s job.”

  “So you turned murdering scum ‘cos you had mouths to feed? Fair excuse.”

  Pace lowered his voice and became businesslike.

  “I never could figure why she needed a sheriff in her pocket. My daddy reckoned we was essential. Kept the faith secret. Kept the town respectable. Made the deaths seem plausible. I knew different. She could’ve done all that just by thinkin’ it.”

  “McFarlane?”

  Pace ignored him, taking the question as rhetorical. “The real reason she needed us included in her life was simpler. Know what? She was lonely. Lonely, and sometimes scared.”

  Josh forgot the sarcastic mask that hid the frantic plans he was hatching. He began to be interested.

  “What is she?”

  “A woman. A Philosopher.”

  Josh blinked and Pace came to his rescue, saving him from asking the same question again.

  “An alchemist. You know what that is?”

  “Sure. Guys in tights who tried to
make gold.”

  “She can make gold. She got the Philosopher’s Stone. She can make gold make itself, again and again and again.”

  “Then I guess she watches the Shopping Channel.”

  Pace ignored him again. “Nelly McFarlane may be the single richest person on earth.”

  “Why only maybe?”

  “Could be others. I don’t know. When we left Scotland we wasn’t the only ones in Europe who had the Stone.”

  “We?”

  “My family were there in Furnace, Loch Fyne, with hers.”

  It was Josh’s turn to laugh, and he surprised himself at how the sarcasm and disdain bleeding into his every word from the back of his throat had been replaced with merriment. He was almost amused by this ridiculous scene.

  “So she’s a rich chemist. This ain’t makin’ my flesh creep. They been able to make man-made gold for decades. Read Newsweek more often. You might find you have to kill less people.”

  Pace’s tone had a warning in it. “Like I say, I’m tellin’ this for me. You don’t want to listen, then fuck you.”

  “There’s that Christian talk again.”

  “I am a Christian.”

  “Yeah? Me, I’m a Kentucky Fried Family Bucket.”

  “As good as, in less than two hours, Josh.”

  He looked out front again, away from Pace’s eyes. As he did so he slid his hand into the pocket with the gum pack, ready for the moment when Pace looked away.

  “Go on.”

  “Makin’ gold ain’t the big part. They been doin’ it since man first discovered metal. The Egyptians, even. I reckon she could teach you or me or just about anyone how to do it in a half hour. Shit, it’s almost harder gettin’ the stuff outta the country into them European banks of hers than it is for her to make it. It’s the stuff that comes with that knowledge she been messin’ with I can’t take no more.”