There was a dirty sheet wadded on the floor. The place stank of something like rancid grease. A votive candle stood in the center of the mess.
There was hatred here that seemed beyond the capacity of a human being. She realized that this was no children’s place.
Only an adult mind had the patience to create this. A tortured, confused mind. Profoundly insane.
No wonder Kate had taken her children and run.
Mandy shrank back, closed the door to the ugly secret, then returned quickly to the mudroom. Her cat wasn’t in the basement. She wished she did not know what was. She dropped the trapdoor, went back to the kitchen, turned on a light. She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, feeling the secret of the house like a festering, rotting sore on her own body.
How odd the Girl’s life looks—
Behind this soft Eclipse—
She whispered the words into the yellow Formica tabletop. Emily Dickinson knew secrets of women. So perfect to call me predicament a soft eclipse. Emily… you knew so much, wise Emily. And you hid on your little farmstead, far from life, far from the madness of men. I wish I were there with you right now.
Behind this soft eclipse…
To George, womankind, it seemed, was a cat. Kitten Kate.
So sick. So sad. So dangerous. She must leave here at once.
She stood up, thinking to go and gather her things. But there was movement outside. As footsteps ran up the front walk, her flesh crawled.
“Mandy!” The voice was high, shredded like that of a desperate woman.
“Mandy, let me in!”
“George?”
“Yes!” He howled out the word, rattling the knob as he did so. His voice was literally squeaking with rage: Miserably frightened, feeling trapped, Mandy unbolted the door.
He swarmed past her, muttering, stalking as dangerously as a spider through the shadowy house.
“Sonofabitch! Son of a fucking bitch!”
He disappeared into the bedroom. At once thuds and crashes started. “George!” She found him hunting through the bottom drawer of the dresser. Scattered around him on the floor were shirts and belts and about a dozen fat bullets. “George, what are you doing?”
“That sonofabitching Jesus freak killed my rhesus! My rhesus!” He produced a large black target pistol with a long barrel, began scrambling for the bullets.
“George, what’s got into you? Put that stupid thing down!”
“I’m gonna blow that bastard away! I was right next door in the lab and somehow or other he got in and killed my monkeys with a knitting needle.” He stopped, every muscle in his body tensing, his eyes screwed closed, his lips twisted back from his teeth. He clutched the gun in white, trembling fingers. “He stabbed them!” A huge, terrible sob tore through him, more a bellow than a cry—
He got up.
“Give me the gun, George.” He laughed, started for the door. Had she thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have dared to stop him. But her instincts were stronger than reason: she grabbed his elbow and spun him around. “You don’t even have any proof.”
“I don’t need proof! There’s nobody in the world who hates me like he hates me.”
“His whole congregation. You said yourself he preached against you. It could have been any one of them.”
“He may not be personally guilty, but—”
“You aren’t a court of law. You have no right to take his life. Go talk to him, threaten him, even spit on him if that makes you feel better, because, George, I am sure he is a bastard. But you give that gun to me.” She fought down her terror. He was so crazy. She couldn’t let him destroy himself and another human being, too. She must not fail to get the weapon.
He swayed, then bowed his head. “You’re right, of course. I really can’t afford to be put in jail.”
“Of course not. Give it to me, George.”
Suspicion flashed through his eyes, to be replaced by an expression too mixed to come into a sane face: it was made of cruelty and love and something that might have been laughter.
He gave her the pistol, which she returned to its place at the back of the drawer.
“George, I want you to try and calm yourself down. You need rest, and I think you could use a doctor, too.”
“I need to frighten that maniac into leaving me alone. And I think I know how to do it.”
“Now, look, George.”
“I’ll go mad if I don’t confront him! I’ve got to do what I can for myself, don’t you see that?”
There was no way out of this. The man was going to have his battle. “Come on, then,” she said. “If you insist on going, I suppose I can’t object. At least let me drive you.”
“You don’t need to get involved.”
“I said I’ll drive you. I don’t want you getting into trouble.”
“He ruined me!”
“You’ll keep working! You’ll find a way.”
She had hoped that he would calm down riding around in the Volks. Then they would stop somewhere, have a drink, and she would take him home. When he was asleep, she would leave for a motel.
Tomorrow she would deal with the issue of the Collier estate and the job.
He looked all in, shivering, huddled in his seat. “My only alternative now is to go to a human test and hope the Stohlmeyer people overlook the sloppy pretesting. That’s all I can do to save the project.”
“A human test?”
“It’ll be safe enough. Hey, you took a wrong turn. The Tabernacle’s at the comer of North and Willow.”
Too bad he had noticed that. She took a right onto Taylor from Bridge Street, still trying to engage him in a diversionary conversation. “I met the great Constance Collier. If was quite an experience.”
He couldn’t have been less interested. “I’ll bet.”
Dull pain returned as she recalled her own tragedy, but she said nothing about it now. “Her estate is perfectly beautiful, And she seems rather good-hearted, actually. Despite all I’ve been told.”
“Constance Collier is a great woman. She means an enormous amount to me. Since your time, Brother Pierce has become her sworn enemy. He came in 1981, after you left. Last year he and his minions tried to get Miss Collier to put her name on something called The Christian Faery, and she responded by suing them for using her characters. He claims she’s a pagan.”
“That’s part of being a witch, isn’t it?”
“To some extent. At any rate, witches certainly aren’t Christian. That’s what’s gotten him so worked up.
Take a right on North Street. We’re almost there.”
The Tabernacle was a low building, obviously a cheaply converted warehouse. Cars were parked helter-skelter in the dusty lot that surrounded it. Light shone from within through windows that had been covered by “stained glass” Con-Tact paper. A wide sign, clean and bright and professionally painted, loomed twenty feet above the roof of the building. I AM THE LIGHT, proclaimed the black letters against the white background. Enormous carbon-arc floods crackled at the four corners of the sign, blasting it with preternatural brightness. From behind the stained-glass windows came a powerful roar of song: “O God, our help in ages past…”
Mandy could tell by the cars that Brother Pierce’s followers were working people, most no doubt unemployed and desperate in this steel and coal country, clinging to his simple answers for support in a hard time. Despite herself she was moved by the power and resolution in their voices.
“I didn’t expect a service,” George snapped. “But I guess the guy’s always got a service going on here nowadays. The whole damn township worships at his alligator-shod feet. The ones who don’t follow Constance, that is.”
“Why don’t we go have a drink? Come back after it’s over.”
George ignored her. Before Mandy could stop him he was through the door. She followed.
The church was not filled to capacity, but there was a very respectable crowd. Mandy had thought that the fundamentalist mov
ement was on the wane—but easily three hundred people were here, and on a weeknight. There were many young people, no doubt students from the college.
“Welcome, brother and sister!” A puffy, sweating usher rolled toward them from his station near the door. He continued over the last bars of the hymn. “I believe you’re new, aren’t you? Praise the Lord who has brought you into his Light.”
“I want to see Brother Pierce!”
The usher’s voice dropped to a whisper as the hymn stopped. “Well, now, he’s the one with the white hair, the tall man right up at the front.” He smiled. “That is Brother Pierce. If you’re here to offer repentance, you’re not too late. He hasn’t called the sinners forth yet.”
“I want to see Brother Pierce!”
“George, keep it down!”
“Brother Pierce! I’m Dr. George Walker of the Biology Department!”
Faces turned, some expressions quizzical, some darkening at his tone. At the front of the church the bright blue eyes framed by the white mane of hair flickered to intense life. It occurred to Mandy that both of these men might be psychotic. And yet there was something very different about them: where George seemed cruel, there was about Brother Pierce something of the terrible kindness of the ignorant—the sort of kindness that used to burn witches to make sure they would go to heaven.
“I want to know why you killed my laboratory animals, Brother Pierce. Why you destroyed my experiment! Was it because it would free people from the fear of death, which is what you use to enslave them?” His voice cracked and trembled, but did not die away.
Now accompanied by three much younger men, the usher rushed up the aisle behind George. Mandy came after them, her mind spinning. George enraged was a human fireball. It took courage to challenge a fanatic in the middle of a crowd of his followers.
“I said I am Dr. George Walker—”
“I know who you are!” Brother Pierce’s right arm came up, his finger pointed. “And I know you cannot help being here. The demon brought you, for you are but his instrument. But I love you in Christ, George, we all do.” He raised his arms, nodded.
The entire congregation responded: “We love you in Christ.” The joy among them, the warmth, was at once overpowering and affecting. Mandy was not sure she would have recoiled had one of them taken her hand.
“You shut up,” George roared, “all of you! You killed my animals and I want restitution. I demand restitution!”
“Good people, we have never done violence to this man, much less to the poor creatures he sees fit to torment in his heathen experiments.”
“You killed my frog, you killed both of my rhesus monkeys!”
“We did nothing of the kind. Satan has closed your eyes to the good of the world. I urge you to kneel and pray with us for the deliverance of your soul.” He turned and knelt to the cross that hung against the back wall.
“You lying bastard!”
“O Lord, we beg you to open your heart to this lost one, that he may be delivered from the spell of the Deceiver!”
“Shut up, you old shit! You shit!”
Two of the young men took George’s shoulders. He shrugged them off, took a menacing step toward Brother Pierce.
Mandy had to act. If she didn’t, these people were going to throw off the patina of loving-kindness and give George the beating of his life. “Leave him alone!” She pushed past the ushers. “I’ll take him home.”
She put her arm around his waist. “Come on, George.”
“Go with her,” Brother Pierce said sweetly. “Go with that unholy harlot!” His blue eyes were glaring at her, lit to shimmering coals by the fire in him. “You pagan.”
George was most definitely not the only madman here. She must have given some sign of her thoughts, because Brother Pierce instantly sensed her dismay and raised his accusing finger. He pointed it directly at her.
“You demon! You dare to bring your filth up from the pit.”
She tried to reply through a dry mouth, but her words were only whispered. “I’m a perfectly decent—”
Brother Pierce’s voice rose in an instant to a spitting, overamplified bellow. “Yea, you are a demon! For I see you as you are. Oh, yes! Yea, ‘they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails.
And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abadon!’ ”
Mandy was too astonished to make a sound, even to move. Why was this man suddenly so enraged, and at her? Why was he attacking her instead of George?
“You are the pagan’s servant! You sit at the feet of the evil that we bear among us!”
Oh. He must know that she was to be working with Constance. Big deal. “Come on, George,” she managed to say despite her fluffy mouth. “These people aren’t worth our time.”
“I’ll get you, Pierce. I’ll see you behind bars!”
“George, forget it. He’s a superstitious fool.”
“I call down the Love of the Lord upon you, I lay your sins in his Light. Lord, Lord, help us to love these poor lost ones, help us to save them!”
Mandy turned away, her temper just barely under control. “We oughta come back and burn this place down,” George murmured as they went together down the aisle—
“I couldn’t agree more,” she hissed.
Back in the car they sat silently for a moment. “Maybe we can have that drink now,” Mandy said as she tried to control her shaking. ‘“Then I’ll take you home and put you to bed.”
George remained quiet until the car was in motion. “I can’t go home now,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got to prepare for the next step.”
There was no need to ask what he meant; she knew. Having delivered his threat to Brother Pierce, he was going to go back to his lab and test his process on a human being.
Should she warn his co-workers of the state he was in? No. That would be pointlessly destructive.
Maybe George kept the true depths of his madness in the basement of his mind as well as the house.
Tonight’s performance was quite understandable even in a sane man. She contented herself with an admonition.
“Be careful, George. Don’t hurt anybody.”
“Just take me back to my lab. I’ve got work to do.”
Chapter 8
Despite its gracious old homes, its broad trees, the elegance of its brick streets, Mandy now realized that in the years since she left town, Maywell had become seriously infected. There was no glib explanation for what had sickened it. The infection was hidden; it lurked behind the glowing windows of evening, drifted like smoke in the soft laughter of the night. Five years ago people had tolerated Constance Collier.
Now, because of the coming of a single man, they were being taught to hate her.
Mandy could not return to George’s house, and now for more than personal reasons. The thought of meeting Brother Pierce’s people prowling the night made her go cold. Between them and the basement room, there was no peace for her in her old home.
After she dropped George off at his lab, Mandy drove for a time, trying to calm down. Once the town’s beauty had also been its truth, but its bleaker comers, the impoverished houses along Bartlett, the run-down trailer park near Brother Pierce’s Tabernacle, seemed its greater reality now. Had the Grimm’s project not been of such importance to her career, she would have left right now, and forever. But as she rolled past Church Row on Main Street, with the town common on one side and the three churches on the other, the white Episcopal with its elegant steeple, the Presbyterian neo-Gothic, and the ancient Friends Meeting House that predated the Revolutionary War, she could almost believe that Maywell was healthy still, and that Brother Pierce’s glaring, buzzing sign was not glowing just beyond the trees.
A black truck charged her lights. She swerved and jammed on her brakes. “Damn.” What was happening to her? She considered herself a steady and deliberate soul, and here she was drifting out of her lane.
But t
here was a reason, for a vivid imagining was sweeping through her. It came like the white wind that sometimes invaded her dreams, so powerfully that she just had time to stop the car before she lost all contact with Maywell.
The road in front of her disappeared, the trees lining it became a high stockade, the air grew thick with the stink of roasting meat and burning hair.
Screams of agony mixed with low merriment. She was no longer sitting in a car, but rather standing against a rough wooden stake. She felt a coarser cloth upon her skin and knew the weight of a thick, sputtering taper in her hands. Chains lashed her body to the stake. She heard the gobbling crackle of a great fire, then saw red glowing in the faggots that were stacked around her feet, almost up to her waist.
She remembered words of consolation from long ago, when someone had said to her, “If you are to be taken to the pyre, never fear. Drugs will reach you, and you will feel naught!”
When was that? Not in this life. She stared helplessly at an impossible, spectral crowd rushing at her, men and women and dirty little weasels of children, all bearing fiery torches and bunches of twigs, which they threw at her feet.
Then a long tongue of fire licked her legs, so hot it felt cold for an instant. Then it was as if somebody were whipping her furiously, as if she were being scraped to death with a red-hot file. With a hiss her hair flared up. She felt her face dissolve like a skin of milk.
Oh, they have ruined me, they have destroyed my beauty. And I was the most beautiful thing they had.
I was their witch.
As abruptly as if a projector had been turned off, Maywell reappeared around her, the lamplit brick street, the dancing shadows of the trees. She sat a moment, too stunned by the hallucination to move.
She slumped at the wheel.
That witch-burning crowd had been real.
She recalled that modem anthropologists now believed that witchcraft was an earlier, pre-Christian religion, nothing more. Christianity had branded them evil and turned their Horned God into the Devil because they were competition. Too reverenced to be branded a demon, their Mother Goddess had become the Blessed Virgin.
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