That was the moment I was convinced something of the human was still left inside the blasted body of Hiram Frazier.
“Yes,” I sighed.
“Two girls,” he mumbled, eyes still closed. “The one driving was laughing, fishing around in her purse, looking for money for me. The other was laughing too, with little earmuffs on. Nobody heard the train.”
“You remember now.” The earmuffs were Rory’s headphones.
“I do,” he answered, his voice quavering.
His eyes flashed open.
“Why you to make me recall that?” he growled. “What are you?”
“You remember taking their keys?” I demanded.
He blinked hard, squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment. In the meantime his hand rummaged in a torn coat pocket.
Seconds later he produced a set of three keys. They were held together by a key ring with a silver VW on it.
“You didn’t mean for it to happen,” I said softly. “You didn’t mean for them to be hit by the train.”
“It was not my doing,” he said, still holding out the keys. “God brought the train.”
“But you took the keys,” I insisted.
“God brought the train,” he said, slipping back into incoherence.
“You have to go with me,” I told him firmly. “You have to come back to Pine City.”
“What?” His eyes had gone blurry again, and he searched around my head, trying to pinpoint my face. “Go where?”
I took a quick step in his direction. The confidence I’d gained from my recent meeting with Eppie, not to mention the age differential between Frazier and me, made me bold.
“I have to take you with me,” I said sternly, “back to Pine City where it happened, to the sheriff. You’ll explain what you did, it was an accident.”
“No,” he whined, “I’m going home to Pistol Creek.”
“Not tonight,” I insisted, reaching for his arm.
He staggered sideways, about to topple.
“Why’d I have to go with you?” His words were so run together they were barely comprehensible.
“Because you were responsible for the deaths of two people!” I told him, my voice booming.
“God brought a train!” he shouted back, spitting.
Without warning, Frazier swung his arm like an opening door and it connected with my shoulder.
I staggered sideways, stunned; instantly pumped with adrenaline.
Frazier reached down and grabbed the iron bar he’d dropped, cocked it back like a baseball bat, and took a swing at my head.
I blew out a breath and snapped my head back. The bar only missed me by inches. I looked around for anything to use against him, moving away from Frazier and pumping my lungs.
He was growling, a low sound that leaked from his head. His face was lowered and his dead eyes glared at me from the tops of their sockets. A weak strand of drool soiled his lower lip, and I could see how many of his teeth were missing. There was nothing in that body but the desecrated passion for preservation, an insect compulsion.
I took a few more steps backward and planted myself, readying for an attack.
He stood staring.
“Hiram,” I began, hoping to rouse the human being inside the husk.
“God!” he exploded. “How do you know my name?”
He swung the iron bar back and forth in front of him like a scythe, coming at me. He was moving faster than I would have imagined he could.
Without thinking, I did what I’d seen my friend Andrews do a dozen times in rugby matches: I dove toward Frazier’s legs; toppled him like a bowling pin.
He went down hard, pounding the ground with an organ-churning thud.
“Hellfire!” he howled.
I leapt to my feet, panic breath forcing strangled sounds from my throat. I pulled a solid brick from the crumbling wall beside me, the only weapon I could think of.
Frazier was on his feet, unsteady but filled with a power past exhaustion. He started toward me again and I threw the brick with all my strength, underhanded, hoping to catch his chin. Instead the brick hit the arm holding the rod and he dropped it once more.
Without skipping a beat he ignored his fallen weapon; charged me.
I sidestepped easily, but I could feel a slow terror growing in the pit of my stomach. I had no idea how to stop this man, and he would never stop himself.
Frazier stumbled past me, but he swung his hand backward, grabbing my leg. I fell onto my back, instantly kicking and flailing my arms, hoping to fend him off that way.
But Frazier was on top of me instantly, his thumbs pressed into my Adam’s apple, his palms tight on my jugular. Within seconds I could feel myself blacking out.
Eyes wide, I pounded both sides of his head over and over, battering his ears, his temples, to no avail. My fists were wind.
In absolute desperation I shot my thumbs into his eyes, ground them into his sockets. I imagined his eyeballs bursting like grapes.
They did not.
But Frazier roared and pulled back long enough for me to kick my way out from under him. I skittered backward, crab walking, until I was several feet away from where he lay on his side, cursing, words I could not understand, hands over his eyes.
I scoured the dark weeds around me and found the iron bar.
I hefted it and had every intention of bashing Frazier’s skull. I moved slowly his way, the bar in both hands, slightly over my right shoulder.
He heard me coming, lowered his hands. Through his red, dimmed eyes he could see me and began to moan.
“Stop. Stop!” His voice rose like a train whistle in the distance.
I was still light-headed; the red imprint of his vise grip still lingered in burning on my neck.
“I’ll go,” he whimpered. “Take me where you want. I’ll go along quiet.”
He rocked a little, back and forth in the wet grass and muddy ground. I raised the iron bar above my head, already seeing his skull cave in.
“What are you doing?” he whimpered.
I froze. What was I doing?
I dropped the iron instantly, my senses flooding back. A sudden realization that I had been about to kill a man shocked my body, and I began to tremble. The adrenaline and sweat mixed with November chill, and I was freezing to the bone, unable to stop shivering.
“Where do I have to go?” Frazier said weakly, dead still.
“Pine,” was all I could manage before sucking in painful breath.
“Okay, then,” he said, rolling slowly to a sitting posture.
He put his hands out beside him and tried three times to stand while I stared at him. He rocked in my direction, but could not get up, and I could not help him.
Slowly I became aware of tree frogs and night birds, bats and crickets, grinding pieces of the night sky into black sounds. The moon broke free of its cloud-gray prison long enough to spill milky light on the bricks around me, the dead grass, here and there a sedate spray of wild ageratum, mauve in the moonlight.
My breathing became more regular and my throat seemed to open wider, taking in pins of cold air. I trembled less violently and folded my arms in front of me to keep from an obvious appearance of shaking.
Frazier still sat on the ground, trying to stand.
“You think you beat me,” he sneered, defiant. “You can’t hold back the night. Look around you. Half of every life on this miserable world is spent in nighttime. It’s God’s counterweight. There is much work yet to be done in the world of night. God divided the light from the darkness, He did not put an end to the night. He saw that all nations, all people, must know both. This contrast of opposites is God’s way, and I am the envoy of darkness, the angel of the counterbalance. I bring the deep Black to a world sick with pale eyes. I refresh the night with continual gifts.”
“Right,” I said, my normal voice returned, a little weakened. “You’ll have to get some new material, you know. You’ve said all this to me before.”
“I have?
” He looked up at me suspiciously.
“Get up,” I urged him, sounding exactly as exhausted as I was.
“Your face does not come to me,” he said slowly.
“I gave you a ride yesterday morning, and then, as it happens, you visited my house.”
“How would I visit your house?” he snapped. “Ain’t been inside a human dwelling in ten years.”
“You were just in Preacher Levi’s trailer. Couldn’t have been much more than three or four hours ago.”
“There!” he shouted, leaping to his feet. “How you to know a thing like that? Proof!”
What he meant was a mystery, but what he had done was diabolically ingenious.
Frazier had managed to keep me off guard long enough for him to inch his way toward the iron bar on the ground, grab it, and jump to his feet wielding it.
“Now,” he bellowed, “I smite you back to hell whence you come!”
The bar caught my upper arm at about the biceps, and I thought I could feel the bone crack. White pain shot outward from the blow in every direction. My heart exploded, pumping so hard I thought it might shoot through my ribs and into the night, a red comet.
Too stunned to move, I watched in wonder as he circled me.
“You cannot die,” Frazier muttered, his words a mush in his mouth, “but that body you took can be beat to a pile.”
He swung the bar wildly, barely missing my head.
I lumbered sideways, still dumbfounded by the surprise of his attack.
He readied another blow.
I concentrated hard, balanced my weight, kicked horizontally with my right leg directly into his lower abdomen. I felt the connection; the give in his gut sickened me.
He flew backward, skidding on his backside, but was up and swinging with preternatural agility before I could get my leg back on the ground. I hopped away from him.
Not fast enough.
He flew at me, caught the side of my head with a glancing crash. It shook my teeth, but didn’t connect strongly enough to do the damage it had intended.
I burst, running. I thought to make it over the brick wall next to me, try a desperate dash for the truck.
If I could get in, lock the doors, I might live.
I was vaguely aware of a train whistle knifing white through the black air, but I took it for another sound from Frazier, high whine or a yelp.
I stumbled over the brick edges of the low wall and miraculously managed to retain my footing, kept running. I could hear Frazier behind me, snarling.
The sound brought a sudden image to my mind: a drooling Bruno, Eppie’s junkyard dog. I was propelled faster toward the haven of my truck.
Before I had taken two more leaping steps, I felt Frazier’s first solid blow to my head. I was almost beside the crumbling entrance of the old mill, my truck tantalizingly in sight.
But I went down.
I tried to roll. Before I could, a second pounding thud creased my back between my shoulder blades.
Again a distant whistle sounded, and I thought my eardrums might be bursting from the blood pumping in my skull.
I managed to turn on my side, eyes wild, watching helplessly as Hiram Frazier raised his iron rod high above his head.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” he said, clear as crystal, a voice I had never heard, “the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
He brought the bar flying down toward my head, an arc made silver by the searing moon, the last light I saw.
Eighteen
Struggling up through the darkness, I thought I could see a white star, a comet streaking above my head. My eyes opened, blurred, and closed again before I panicked.
I heard a violent explosion of breath burst from my lungs, tried desperately to sit up, arms crossed in front of my face. I could still see, in my mind’s eye, Hiram Frazier’s iron bar crashing down toward me.
But no impact followed, and I wondered if I might be dead.
I tested my eyes, opened them slowly.
The comet I had seen stood a few feet in front of me: Orvid, his white mane flaring sideways in the cold wind.
“Frazier!” I told him, struggling to get to my feet. “He was here. He was trying to kill me. He’s getting away!”
Orvid didn’t move, and the serenity on his face made me doubt his sanity. Or mine.
“It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “I know where Frazier is. Or I’m assuming the man I’ve got is Hiram Frazier. And he’s not going anywhere. Now let me take a look at your head.”
He stood sideways, let the moonlight spill onto my face.
“How’s your vision?” he asked. “I mean how blurry is it?”
I blinked.
“It feels fine,” I stammered, my voice quavering. “It barely hurts. Isn’t that a sign of severe concussion? Doesn’t that mean I’m about to die?”
“For such a large man,” Orvid said, only a slight smile suggested in his eyes, “you certainly are something of a baby about certain things.”
“I’m not a baby,” I chided, “I’m a hypochondriac.”
I stood unsteadily.
“You’re not slurring your words,” Orvid offered. “You can see.”
“These are the first signs of impending doom,” I insisted. “But the fact is, it’s beginning to hurt, now that I’m up. It hurts a lot. What does it look like?”
He stared up at me, squinting.
“It looks like red confetti stuck to your face,” he answered, “about three inches long over your left eye. But it’s not deep. He’s a drunk old man, and his bones are made of cricket sounds.”
“Am I hearing things, or are you misquoting the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet?”
“I’m trying to be the sort of companion that your friend Andrews would be if he were here.”
I turned to face Orvid directly, hand absently running over the bloody scar on my forehead.
“How would you know about Andrews?” I asked, suspicion edging each syllable like static electricity.
“I told you before, I do my research. I’ve been studying you for years.”
I froze. I was beginning to have a certain suspicion about Orvid’s field of study, and it did not bode well for our hero.
“You’ve been studying me,” I breathed. “That’s right. I remember your saying that. Why?”
“It’s an interesting story,” he said quickly, “but wouldn’t you rather deal with Hiram Frazier first?”
“My God,” I answered, coming to my senses a little, “where is he? He’s not getting away?”
“No.” Orvid started toward the train tracks. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I said weakly, standing my ground.
“Frazier’s down past that thicket of trees,” he said, not turning back to me, “where the tracks bend. He was going to hop the train.”
“The train,” I said slowly. “I heard a whistle, but then I thought it was in my head, or in Frazier’s howling.”
“It was a freight,” Orvid said simply. “I heard it coming. By the time I saw Frazier headed into the clearing down there, the train was almost at a standstill. He had a crowbar in his hand, by the way. The one he hit you with, I’d imagine.”
“Why didn’t he finish the job?” I asked, finally taking the first few steps to follow Orvid.
“The train was coming,” Orvid told me, as if it were obvious. “He didn’t want to miss it. He only had to stop you from following him. He didn’t have time to kill you.”
“But he didn’t get away?” I said, still trying to clear my mind.
“He’s down there in the clearing,” Orvid repeated. “He’s not going anywhere.”
“The train’s gone?”
“Gone.”
“But Frazier’s there?” My voice was a little gravelly.
“Just come on,” Orvid answered impatiently. “And don’t forget your flashlight.”
The night had cleared at last. High clouds still chased past the haloed moon, but t
he rain was gone. Moonlight spread silver wings, and the spirit of the night soared over everything, blessing bare elm branches with pale benevolence. The flashlight was barely visible where I’d dropped it in the grass.
I collected it, not bothering to turn it on, and followed Orvid into the trees, onto the tracks. The rough gravel bed that supported the crossties seemed a white river. High in the trees a night dove called, and a vague promise of morning was suggested even in the dead of night.
The tracks took an abrupt curve to our right and upward. We came to a clearing on our left half the size of a baseball field. It was empty save for a lone, forlorn figure seated on the ground.
“Is that Frazier?” I whispered.
“You tell me,” Orvid said out loud, only a little irritated. “I’ve never met the man, I’m just assuming.”
He picked up his pace. I stumbled behind.
As I got closer, I could see that Frazier was tied with some sort of bands at his wrists and ankles. He was seated uncomfortably on the wet ground, a grimace contorting his face, a mixture of pain and desolation. Despite everything, it was a pitiable sight to my eyes.
“That’s him,” I said, amazed.
“Let me go,” he said weakly, not looking up.
Orvid went to stand behind the figure on the ground, a little to one side of his left shoulder.
I came to a stop a few feet in front of Frazier and stared.
“He charged down the side of the tracks,” Orvid began in answer to the questions in my eyes. “I thought to myself, ‘Who else could this be? He’s got to be Frazier.’ The train was already passing, but it was slow. This guy was running faster than it was moving. He had a rusted crowbar in his hand, as I was saying, and he used it to hook onto a flatcar. He was about to heave himself up onto the train when I hit the backs of his knees with my cane. He didn’t see me. I’d been standing right there, and he didn’t even see me.”
“I saw you,” Frazier insisted, his voice grating the air. “I just didn’t think you were really there.”
“He fell, hit his shoulder, might have cracked or dislocated something,” Orvid went on, ignoring Frazier. “He would have been crushed under the train if I hadn’t pulled his ankles and dragged him away from the tracks.”
A Minister's Ghost: A Fever Devilin Mystery Page 23