by Muriel Gray
Nelly McFarlane stood erect and admired her work. She felt the prickle of tiny invisible claws on her left shoulder and smiled at the obscene, excited whispering in her ear. In the periphery of her vision, at an upper window in the large house to her right, a drape twitched.
She spun towards it and stared, her scalpel held out away from the side of her body in the manner of a knife-fighter.
The light came on and a figure pulled back the drape, stood where it could be seen and raised an arm limply in greeting.
They knew better in Furnace. Better to declare your presence than to be caught snooping. McFarlane did not acknowledge the wave, but watched unmoving until the figure retreated and switched the light off.
She turned back slowly to the clumsily folded body of John Pace at her feet, regarding his blood-saturated jacket as she moved its slick material with her foot.
“Don’t worry, John. It’ll clean up real nice for Ethan.”
37
He knew it was useless trying the CB until he got out from these cursed hills. So Josh Spiller just drove. He drove like a stoned stuntman at a truck show. Jezebel’s tyres screamed as she was forced around bends at speeds that required more rubber than she had to give. The trailer pitched and swayed, always nearly on the edge of losing its relationship with the tractor, but then Josh would ease off just enough to let the tortured block of metal hang on.
Five fucking dollars.
He clenched his back teeth, remembering the playacted integrity with which she’d insisted he take it. The thought of her sleeping with him, touching him, caressing him, knowing that she’d condemned him to death…
“I’m comin’, you bitch. You hear? I’m comin’.”
She had been going north. He’d get on the interstate in about fifteen minutes and then sit on that radio until someone, anyone, could remember where she’d been seen last. His lights swung crazily on the road ahead, speeding beneath the windshield, but over the tops of the shrubby oaks, though his mind was trying its best to ignore it, there was an unmistakable luminosity to the sky. The sun was coming.
At the side of the road, the fallout of Jezebel’s headlights made the shadows dance behind the tree trunks, flickering like a penny peepshow. And amongst those moving black lines was a more regular shadow.
Blacker and more substantial than the thin vertical stripes made by the trees, Josh glimpsed its rapid sprinting shape running behind the line of trunks. It was keeping pace effortlessly with the speeding truck with a fluidity that was horrific in its strength rather than graceful.
“Jesus Christ,” he hissed, and stepped on the gas, though there was little more Jezebel could give.
On account of the increased speed, when he rounded the corner and saw the police car parked sideways across the narrow road, the three hundred yards’ braking distance was cutting it close.
Josh straightened his right leg and slammed on the brakes. He felt the trailer slew, aching to jackknife, and gripped the wheel, adjusting it in turn by enormous and tiny increments, using all his years of feel to halt its lurching, impending disaster. Jezebel screeched and bucked and came to a halt. The trailer joined the tractor unit in its bouncing stop, coming to rest at an ugly angle, thwarted, but not entirely dissuaded from its rebellious path.
The police car was still, lights flashing silently, lighting the tunnel of trees with colour like an office Christmas party disco behind blinds. Josh ran his tongue across dry lips. He would have been a fool to have expected a clear exit from Furnace, but this seemed too easy. No bear with a full complement of grey matter would try to stop an eighteen-wheeler with a saloon car. If they were relying on his conscience, the fear he might kill the occupants by ramming it, then they’d chosen the wrong guy, the wrong day, the wrong situation.
He waited, and still nothing happened. In those pregnant seconds, he scanned the area ahead, a curious calm keeping his eyes narrow and his pulse steady. There was only one vehicle, sure, but beyond it the road curved sharply again, and between the trees, caught by the flashing lights, Josh thought he could glimpse the reflective glint of more metal.
He pondered that for a moment, then turned his attention back to the silent car in his way. It was their move, but in case they needed a reminder he was here, he revved hard, a deep, growling boom that made him proud to be sitting in Jezebel’s guts.
The lights on the car cut off, confirming that it was occupied. Without its gaudy, blinking show, the vehicle looked as insubstantial as a child’s cutout, made two-dimensional by the harsh glare of the truck’s lights. But with the police car’s flashers and headlights out, Josh could just make out a silhouetted, moving figure inside. There was a beat, a fraction of a pause, and then an echoing voice wavered above the engine noise.
“Just shut it down, Spiller.”
The loudspeaker was crackly and comical. Josh exercised a crooked smile at the earnest delivery of the announcement, then revved again in defiant response. The police car door opened on its far side and before Josh could identify the driver, Jezebel’s windshield exploded into a thousand tiny, glittering squares. The bullet thudded into the headrest of his seat and Josh cried out, hands instinctively shielding his face against the shrapnel of glass.
Through the football-sized hole in front of him, he saw the dark figure connected to his car by the loudspeaker cable press the mouthpiece against his lips again.
“I said do it, you dumb shit.”
Josh slid down low in the seat, panting. His pulse was no longer still, but his resolve remained steady. He would ram the fucker. Two more shots pounded into the cab in quick succession, one bursting almost directly through its predecessor’s hole in the back of his chair, the other going wide and smashing the cooler at the side of the sleeper in a brittle and complex explosion.
Josh punched the cushion of the passenger seat with a bellow of rage. Slammed his feet down on the pedals and grabbed the gearshift.
“Baby-killing fucks.”
It was as though Jezebel had been waiting to be released: She roared and lurched forward. With so little distance to gain momentum, Josh stamped on the gas and crashed through as many gears as the yards allowed, and as he braved sliding his head level with the hole in the windshield, he saw that it was enough. The figure with the gun bounded away, caught in the headlights like game, and Josh quickly sat upright again to grip the wheel as Jezebel bore down on the car, hungry for the collision.
He had hoped the car would be bulldozed sideways, had imagined it spinning conveniently into the trees and out of his path. But as the windshield filled with the dark undercarriage of the car as it flipped over on impact, and the cab rose steeply to mount the vehicle it was crushing, Josh accepted it was going to be a whole lot messier.
The tractor unit bucked crazily as its speed carried it up and over the diminishing pile of police-liveried metal. Josh’s lips drew back from his teeth in a silent cry at a carnage he had prayed daily throughout his working life he would never encounter, but had now instigated, and he held the wheel tightly, riding the nightmare. The noise was a combination of screaming metal, an engine howling as the wheels it commanded lost contact with the ground, and threading through the cacophony like punctuation, three more gunshots.
But Josh was holding it together. It was happening fast and his speed and power were in his favour.
The crushed car had turned turtle and a third of it was still caught beneath the truck. Although Jezebel’s trailer and tractor were in equal distress riding over the top of it, making a shape like the two sides of a pitched roof, it was the car that was giving in. It shuddered and bounced, then scraped out from under the ten wheels of the tractor, letting the cab slam back down to the road. The back end of the swaying trailer nudged what was left of the wreck as it passed, and with an aching right foot Josh begged Jezebel to give him what she had left.
There was still plenty. She roared away from the tangle of metal and Josh obliged by finding the gears to help her. By the time the truck had st
arted to round the bend, it was too late for caution.
Josh was right on two counts. First, that no fool would put their money on a saloon car stopping an eighteen-wheeler, and second, the sight of metal glinting through the trees had been no illusion.
“Jesus.”
It was all he had time to say before Jezebel’s nose smashed into the barrier of felled oaks blocking the road. At the edge of the great construction the manned logging JCB that had pushed the trees down twitched its hanging arm slightly in response, as though smugly delighted by the result. The front of the truck nosed chaotically through the horizontal wooden puzzle, Josh holding his arm across his face as the tumbling tree trunks pounded the rig. Even as he let go of the wheel to protect his face, Josh could feel the trailer going.
The choreography of large vehicles crashing is nearly always balletic, a macabre elegance created by the anarchy of unchecked momentum. But there was an ugliness in the way Jezebel’s trailer started to part from the rig. The angle of their separation was like a healthy person’s cruel imitation of a spastic. It jackknifed at speed, swinging around the rig like a compass arm until smashing with unexpected fury against the JCB. In the cab of the great yellow logger, a figure at the levers made a star shape with its arms and legs before being crushed into the sandwich of twisted metal, and Josh’s cab lifted as the wheels on the right-hand side left the ground. As it rose, its inevitable aim to turn over and put an end to Josh’s hopes, Jezebel screamed and tore in half.
The trailer was gone, still moving, finishing its task of crushing the beast that had laid the wooden trap, but severed untidily from its own brains in the form of the tractor unit. Freedom from the broken trailer was the cab’s salvation; aborting its toppling course to disaster it crashed back down, ploughing crazily into the logs.
Grunting. Josh grabbed the wheel again in an automatic gesture of survival and powered down on the throttle. He could feel from the listing rig that he’d lost tyres, but until he found out how many he kept the revs up, gasping as the tractor lurched and smashed at the trees.
It was over in seconds. The dam of logs, strong when united, were diminished when divided, and with one final growl the tractor unit scrambled over the cobbling of the last three rolling trunks to freedom.
Cold air howled through the broken windshield and the sound of gunshots echoed behind him as Josh floored it along the road, calculating by feel as best he could just how many tyres had given up the fight. He figured two, and since he was still driving, it couldn’t be the two fronts. Luck. The first in days. If he still had the main wheels at his command, then he reckoned he might make it with eight. His mind was on fire, hot with a mixture of adrenaline and, for the first time, hope. An area under the truck, directly beneath the passenger seat, was thudding and banging in an alarming fashion, so that Jezebel lurched and steered like a supermarket cart, but he kept his foot down, mindful only of the distance he had to put between himself and the mess on the mountain road behind him. Josh fingered the radio and although he was still in that curiously dead area for the CB, it crackled obligingly to confirm it had survived.
One headlamp was miraculously still operational, albeit without cover of glass, and in the dim and faltering beam he stormed along the winding road towards his impossible task. There had been no time to assess further the futility of that task, the ridiculous notion that he could still find the needle in the haystack. It was just to drive. To get away from Furnace. That was enough.
The luminous veil thickening above the trees confirmed the sun’s growing proximity, and before him Josh could almost see the road without the aid of his wounded headlight. And as if to remind him of the nature of his flight, a hundred yards ahead a shape too big to be a man, too low and humanoid to be a deer, loped across the gloom of the darkened road. The adrenaline was still lava in Josh’s veins, and with a scream of rage he stepped on the gas and aimed for where it had crossed, not caring about the pointlessness of trying to run down something that wasn’t there. Yet.
The crippled shambles that was Jezebel boomed towards the interstate, while the darkness watched from the cover of oaks with something more than eyes.
The refrigerator lit her face as she opened the door. The choice was not impressive: an obscure can of soda Josh must have brought in from the truck, a nearly empty carton of orange juice, the remains thick as syrup, or a small bottle of water. Elizabeth pulled out the water, shut the door and crouched with her back against the fridge.
How could she sleep? She felt elated and terrified at the same time. Even if she’d been talking—correction, thinking—into the ether, the actual act of admitting she was keeping her baby had ignored her.
But it was more than that. Elizabeth genuinely believed that the words she’d spun from her heart had somehow found Josh’s ears, and now she was writhing internally, trying to work out exactly what was making her entertain such a bizarre theory. Her madness in that respect was almost more alarming than her physical predicament.
She lifted the bottle of water to her face, rolling its cold condensation-bloomed plastic over her cheek. There was terror in her breast for Josh, and it was all the more acute for its nameless and irrational nature. The rectangle of kitchen window was lighter than the room, a half-hearted Pittsburgh sunrise on its way, only just starting to bleed through the polluted sky, and she regarded it with melancholy.
Elizabeth lowered the bottle, glancing at the label as she broke the sealed cap with a twist. Highland Spring. Five hundred millilitres of ordinary water that had made it all the way across the Atlantic from Scotland. Briefly, she studied the tiny painting of a Scottish landscape below the water’s grand title, a delicate rendition of snowy mountains fronted by pines and wildflowers, then closed her eyes as she lifted the bottle to her lips.
Modern life was weirder than anything Sim could come up with. Two cupfuls of water from another continent soothed her dry throat, while the sweet, clean water from her own faucet lay in the pipes undrunk. Weird, as Nesta often said, was all a matter of degree. She stood up and moved to the window. She had decided that going to bed was futile; she wanted to watch the sun come up. In fact, with the same atavistic, unidentifiable instinct that told her Josh was in trouble, that Josh had been the caller, that Josh had heard her crazy thoughts, she knew she had to watch the sun come up. She put down the water and leaned against the sink, still and calm, watching.
Nine feet below, another figure stood in an identical position, staring from his identical window, and trembled like the leaves of a delicate herb.
She hated him. He was dead, yet his words were having an effect. For that alone, if she could have killed John Pace many times over, she would gladly have done so. But he was beyond her fury now.
You gonna burn, Nelly.
McFarlane made fists and held them rigidly by her sides as she walked. The branches of the shrubby trees clawed at her as she bullied a path through their bulk. But she was impervious to them. She began to berate the dead sheriff as she walked, and such was her distraction that she was oblivious to the fact that she was speaking out loud.
“Think I’ll burn, John? Huh? Think I don’t know the rules of the game? That I deny my own fear?”
She laughed, shaking her head, one hand uncurling from its fist to stab the air in front of her at her imaginary listener. “Fear, you fucking coward, is the currency of this world and theirs. You hear me?”
Her voice was nearly a shout, and its volume reeled her back in from the rant. She stopped momentarily, wiped her face with the palm of a hand, then walked a few more steps to a group of rocks standing free of the tangled undergrowth. This was the right place. Here, she could compose herself as she prepared, and look down into the valley, the sun rising directly behind her.
It was cold. Doubly so for her, since apart from a leather belt around her hips, hung with seven small items, Nelly McFarlane was naked. Today, it was necessary. Just as the Jews strapped their prayers to the skin of their heads to make the sense of
their God’s word more potent, so she needed to have the first rays of sun touch her body without the barrier of material.
Because it was a Calling Day, a day when the hot elemental she had conjured and held would come through to the light. Oh, but they were sly, these low creatures. They had to be watched, to be monitored, and her readiness against insurrection was a habit she had never broken on a Calling Day. The runes bound them to her will only for the time allowed and then, with the dawn, they were released. Maybe one day Asmodeanus, or one of his thousand evil brothers, would foil the return to darkness that followed that release. But for that they needed knowledge, and more. They needed human restraint.
For it was the kill they made that broke their hold on the light and sent them screaming back to the pit. Not because they had been judged. Nothing so moral. Simply that they had touched their carrier, broken the otherworldly laws of physics that repelled the solid from the illusion, and denied them the right to exist in anything other than unclean spirit. One day, perhaps, an elemental would uncover that knowledge, would come through and spare its carrier. Nelly would be ready. She would have to be. That would be the day it would come for her.
Pace’s blood still stained her right arm almost all the way up to the elbow, and she looked at it now as she stepped up onto the cold, flat stone. She caressed the blackened patches gently and spoke again, looking into the distance and nodding at her imaginary listener, this time in a crazy whisper, a sentence that merged almost into one, continuous sound.
“Yes, yes, yes, I can be afraid. John. You see me now? Yes I am, yes I am. I see the bestial abyss of demons’ faces, hear the hunger in their whispers. How they exist to destroy.”
She lifted her head and looked down into the valley, where the lights of vehicles moved slowly along the interstate. But John Pace was not listening. John Pace was dead, and for some ineffable reason, that fact was making Nelly McFarlane uneasy. She was irritated with him, even in death. Irritated that he’d forced her hand, that he’d made it necessary to kill him. Maybe, she thought, if he’d been a woman he would have understood. But men were weak. When would they accept that their sex could never make a lasting pact with the dark world? But still they tried, despite the fact that there were never any powerful male Philosophers. All charlatans, cheats and frauds. Puffers and ineffectual warlocks, but never Philosophers. And why? She put her finger to her lips as if hushing a child and spoke aloud from behind it, telling a secret.