Cold moon over Babylon

by McDowell, Michael

  “Have they gone to the Larkins yet?”

  Nathan shook his head. “No,” said Nathan: “I put ’em off that. I told ’em I was the Larkins’ investment counselor and that I would approach ’em. They called back a couple of times, called me, and I told ’em I had spoken to old Evelyn Larkin and that she wasn’t interested in even talking about selling until the berry season was over.”

  “They really believe that?”

  “I guess so. ’Cause they haven’t been down here yet. But they’re working their way west from Jay and south from Atmore and it looks like they’re gone be here any minute. Now,” said Nathan, and leaned forward across the table, littered with plates of half-eaten catfish, plastic baskets of white rolls, and dishes of creamed corn: “I don’t think that you and I ought to let ’em get out of this cheap—the oil companies, I mean.”

  “No-siree-bob,” said Darrish earnestly: “I don’t think we had ought to let ’em do that!”

  “Evelyn Larkin is gone lose that farm right soon, if not this summer, then next, or sometime in between. I want to make sure it comes to the bank, and if we can manage —you and I that is-—” He smiled expansively. “Then I want that land to come to me.”

  Darrish nodded, but the smile on his face had fled.

  Nathan paused, then said: “I’m not smart enough to do all this on my own. I got to have somebody to advise me, somebody to help me. It’s the kind of thing that’s got to be done careful and done right. I’ve handled it all right up till now, but I was thinking that maybe you and I could go into a partnership on this land, we’d buy it from the bank, put it in a dummy corporation or something. Maybe that could be arranged through somebody you know in Pensacola—

  “No,” said Darrish—and Nathan knew that he had the lawyer, “Somebody in Mobile. Have the corporation set up in Mobile, it’s best to have it all out of Florida. Not as easy for them to check.”

  “Mobile then,” agreed Nathan: “Mobile would be just fine. You think that can be done?”

  Darrish nodded confidently: “But I’d better get on it soon, just so that it will all be ready when we are, when...” He twisted his head inquiringly, but it was not possible for Nathan to read his narrowed gaze.

  “I’m getting on this new. I’ve been pushing 'em a little on the loan, and why not? They’re behind, they’re well behind, and that storm we had last week—I heard Jerry say that storm did them in.”

  “Jerry told you that?”

  “He told Ted Hale. Ted told me.”

  “Margaret Larkin died during that storm,” said Darrish. “Well,” said Nathan after a pause, “that’s all the more reason for them to want to be out of that place.”

  “You know,” said Darrish carefully: “Evelyn Larkin is coming to see me this afternoon, and try and get me to prosecute you for that murder. I—”

  “I know,” said Nathan quickly: “Hale told me that too. Now listen, because that’s why we’ve got to be double careful. She’s got it in for me, and we cain’t let her know that I—the bank, I should say—is after the land. I mean, I don’t take it personal that she’s saying I killed that girl, because I realize that she is under strain. She’s not responsible, and that’s all the more reason to get her out of the house. They have no business there. The girl died within sight of the house, and that farm is no good any more. I don’t know why they would want to stay around anyway. Nobody’s gone be real surprised when she loses the farm on top of everything else. A hysterical woman ought not be worried with a blueberry farm, and everybody in town knows it. I’ve heard people say they wonder why she didn’t sell out long time ago, when Jim and JoAnn died. I just want to give ’em a little push to be on their way far away from Babylon, where they’ll be a lot happier.”

  “A little push,” echoed Darrish without expression.

  Chapter 25

  Nathan Redfield was genuinely disturbed by Charles Darrish’s phone call late Wednesday afternoon, telling him of Evelyn Larkin’s resolve to visit the lawyer in Pensacola. Charles had assured him over lunch that there would be no difficulty in putting Evelyn off when she came by the office, but neither of them had expected that she would be so energetic in prosecuting her strange belief. Also, they didn’t like the idea that she was going out of town to find someone to represent her. The man might smell green blood around Nathan’s banker carcass, and come up to make trouble.

  Nathan cursed Warren Perry for having told Evelyn Larkin about his mama’s cousin Henry Harp.

  After Darrish called, Nathan lay disconsolately in a chaise by the side of the pool. His father was a dozen feet away, in the shade of some ornamental pines, watching Belinda and Ben in the swimming pool. James Redfield spoke only to Belinda, and addressed not a word to either of his sons.

  Sipping at a scotch, because there was no more bourbon, Nathan tried to reassure himself that all would go well, that it was only necessary to wait things out. In another month, two at the most, Evelyn Larkin and Jerry would have gone off wherever it was that homeless impoverished persons went; he would, by proxy, own the blueberry farm, and would be in close expectation of large sums of money rolling in from oil exploration leases.

  By five o’clock Nathan was drunk, and dozing with hot amorphous nightmares in the chaise. Awakened by Ben a couple of hours later, Nathan was disconcerted to find that it was nearly dark. His father had been taken back to his room, and Belinda had gone home.

  “Nina made supper, Nathan, it’s already on the table. Come on inside now.”

  Nathan wouldn’t speak during the meal. He was angry with himself for sleeping in the middle of the day, when he ought to have been working on the best way to get Evelyn Larkin and her grandson out of Babylon.

  There was something beyond this, however; another fear, less defined but just as strong, and one moreover that Nathan didn’t dare admit to himself. He had awakened frightened on the chaise. The atmosphere around the familiar pool, when he opened his eyes, was threatening—identical in texture and color and smell to the forest north of the Styx River. He smelled, heard, and tasted the fear he had experienced with Belinda in Monday afternoon’s dusk. The quality of the air was the same, the light altered: to just such a point in the gathering evening. When he craned his head upward, the pines about the house were identical to those in the forest northward. He stared around the pool and looked into the black corners of shrubbery. But fearful of seeing something there that had not been present when he fell asleep, he hurried into the house after Ben, ashamed of his own skittishness.

  When they finished supper, Ben piled the dishes in the sink for Nina to wash the next morning, and then went into the den to watch television. Nathan sat with him through the national news, but did not respond to any of his comments.

  “Ben,” he said, “why don’t you go turn on the patio lights. It’s so dark out there, I don’t like it.”

  Surprised, Ben got up and flicked the switches next to the glass doors to the patio. Bright mercury lights suddenly broke against the night.

  “Nathan,” said Ben timorously: “Liquor store closes at nine. You want me to go? ’Cause you just finished off the scotch and there’s no more bourbon.”

  Nathan at first made no reply. Then he rose with sudden resolution. “No,” he said: “I ought to go. I want to get out for a few minutes anyway.”

  Ben pulled open the glass door for his brother.

  Nathan walked quickly across the patio, nervously glancing over the shrubbery. The interior of the garage was brightly lighted, but the floodlamps reached only a few feet into the expansive driveway behind. Beyond was uninterrupted blackness.

  Nathan climbed into the Continental, and turned the key in the ignition. As he put the car into reverse, he automatically glanced into the rearview mirror. There, just outside the perimeter of light on the driveway, stood a young girl, dressed in a colorless textured shift. Her face, its features obscured by shadow, was as grainy and dim as her garment. Only the mouth, widening slowly as if in careful speech or
a labored scream, could Nathan make out: a perfect expanding black circle.

  The sudden apparition in the mirror frightened Nathan, but he immediately assumed that it was Belinda, inexplicably in a nightgown, and appearing strangely small. He thrust his head out the window to yell at her for startling Mm so, but when he looked back, no one was there. The blackness beyond the reach of the flood- lamps was solid and undisturbed. He had the distinct feeling that the girl behind the car had not fled either to the left or to the right, had not retreated into the black forest, but rather had simply vanished.

  He called Belinda’s name a couple of times, and waited for a reply. None came. Watching nervously in the mirror, he shivered with a sense of vulnerability, which prompted him to push the buttons that raised the windows of the car and locked all the doors,

  Nathan wanted to lift the door handle, leap out, and flee into the house, but this trip was being made precisely to show himself there was nothing to fear. He took his foot from the brake, and backed screeching into the driveway. He braced himself for the satisfying thump that shuddered the Lincoln when it ran over a large dog. It did not come. His lights flashed along the black hedges that bordered the drive, but he saw nothing. To his right were the high mercury lights over the swimming pool, masked by a row of planted specimen pines.

  He sped away from the house, trying to convince himself that the figure in the driveway had been a trick of the harsh lights and the scotch he had drunk with dinner. He conjured the figure in his mind, tried to make it grow taller and older, tried to make the features conform to Belinda’s. To some extent he succeeded, and with relief, began to curse the cheerleader for raising such fear in him.

  At the liquor store on the south side of town, he took his time about buying the bourbon and scotch he wanted, talked for a few minutes to the proprietor, and only then headed slowly, cautiously back home.

  At nine o’clock, downtown Babylon was deserted. The convenience stores and fast-food restaurants were all farther to the south, on the roads leading away, while the shops on John Glenn Avenue had closed at six or earlier. Even the two stoplights that regulated traffic during the commercial day had been disconnected for the night. There was not even the usual patrol car in front of town hall, and Nathan supposed the officer on duty must have gone out for an ice cream cone, or a drink. No vehicle moved on the street but the Lincoln.

  Nathan had just passed the bank, going north on John Glenn, when the second traffic light was unexpectedly activated at the intersection just ahead. The red light popped on.

  Nathan stopped the car, smiling wryly at the peculiar circumstance. He was thinking he might twit Hale on the unreliability of his traffic equipment, when he noticed that the sides of the signal were unlighted—they did not show green.

  Imagining then that there was an electrical mishap with the system, he lifted his foot from the brake—but immediately he stamped down again, for just beyond the reach of his headlights, stood the same figure that had appeared in his driveway. It was not Belinda. This girl was younger, not as pretty, with a figure that was more like that of a child than a young woman. He stared harder this time, and inched the car forward a few feet for a better look. The dress, or whatever it was the girl wore, seemed somehow different, though Nathan could not think exactly how—but the singular reflective coarseness of the garment was the same. It appeared that the flesh and the clothing of the girl were of identical substance. She looked like a cheap funerary statue, sandstone flecked with mica, even a tiny figure lurking in the background of an old photograph, grainy and suggestive and unidentifiable.

  The Lincoln crawled forward. The figure retreated gravely, but, astonishingly, preserved the appearance of motionlessness.

  The red stoplight glowed directly above, reflecting off the hood of the car into Nathan’s eyes. It changed color suddenly, to a light metallic blue—the color of no traffic light that Nathan had ever seen. He craned his head but could not glimpse the signal at that angle.

  In the road ahead, the girl was gone. She had fled backward into the darkness, or snapped off to the side of the road. Perhaps she sheltered herself in the darkness of a recessed doorway, or had slipped into the foot passage between two buildings. The Lincoln lurched forward, beyond the stoplight. Nathan stared into the rearview mirror, toying to see what had caused the signal to turn that frigid blue; but behind him the street was obscure. He was certain that when he had passed the bank and town hall, the streetlamps and several neon shop signs had been burning, but downtown Babylon was now as black and lightless as the pine forest at night. In the forest, however, there was the incessant clamor of Insects, animals, birds, and wind-blown foliage, and here all was silent. Nathan heard the blood rushing in his ears.

  He took a sharp left onto the street that half a mile away terminated, in the cul-de-sac by his home. Houses in this part of town were built far back from the road. Streetlamps set equidistant: on alternate sides of the street were gently masked by the thick foliage of oak and pine. Nathan was reassured as he turned onto this familiar course, but that relief deserted Mm when the first street- lamp, ten yards ahead, winked out, as if his approach triggered the darkness.

  He drove on. One by one, the lights failed as he neared. The darkness behind the car was absolute. The road itself seemed longer, straighter than before. He ought to have reached, the cul-de-sac, but two lines of lights stretched before him.

  Nathan pushed the car up to fifty. His mind had distorted distance, but speed would get him there despite the tricks of his brain. As he drove faster, the lamps went out more quickly, but their number rising out of the darkness ahead did not diminish. And worse, much worse, was that Nathan now saw the pale gray girl standing beneath each lamp, still and stately. Just before he was close enough to see her face, the light was extinguished, and she was at the next, on the opposite side of the street. He increased his speed, trying to overtake the retreating figure, throwing his gaze from one side of the road to the other, his foot ever heavier on the gas pedal.

  The streetlamps all came on at once, with an intensity three or four times greater than normal. He was blinded ahead, and the rearview mirror exploded in light from behind. He closed his eyes in pain, opened them on the figure in the middle of the street. The girl reflected the white light of the lamps and of the headlights, shadowless, like the surface of a pond, with the moon glancing off it at an angle. But the eyes, turned directly on Nathan, opened on a featureless expressionless void. He was going seventy.

  Swerving, but not in time, Nathan hit the girl solidly. She exploded, covering the windshield with a viscous black liquid. It was thick and opaque, and Nathan could see nothing ahead.

  He slammed on the brakes, and ran up over the curb, stopping only half a dozen feet from the massive trunk of a live oak. He turned on the windshield wipers to sweep away the liquid. He grabbed a cloth from the glove compartment and feverishly blotted the filth that oozed through the tight-closed windows at his side. When the windshield was cleared, and the last of the black water was seeping through the vents in the hood, Nathan saw that the streetlamps, before and behind, were all lighted to their accustomed brightness. The road was familiar once more.

  Nathan drove cautiously the remainder of the hundred yards home, but once safely inside the garage, he jumped out of the Lincoln and ran gasping into the house.

  Ben stood out of his chair, amazed. “Nathan—”

  “Ben,” Nathan cried, “go on out to the garage. I left the lights on in the Lincoln, turn ’em off. Close the doors, lock ’em!”

  Ben moved hesitantly, pausing in concern, but Nathan shouted: “Now! Ben, do it now!” Ben hurried off, and Nathan stood at the glass doors, both hands held tight over the lock.

  In a few moments Ben came back in from the garage, swinging the two bottles of liquor Nathan had purchased.

  Nathan cautiously opened the glass doors. “D’you see anything out there?”

  Ben smiled: “Looks like you run through every mud puddle in tow
n, blackest mud I ever saw—”

  Smiling, he held up his finger; it was smudged black with a fine grainy soil.

  Nathan slapped away his brother’s hand.

  “What it looks like,” continued Ben, desperate to reassure his brother, and having no idea in the world how, “is, it looks like they just dragged the Lincoln up from the bottom of the Styx, more like river silt, don’t look like mud at all. What happened?”

  Nathan dropped shakily into his chair: “Some girl on the street... some goddamn girl... she threw something at the car—”

  “Maybe it was a water balloon—maybe that’s what scared you. I bet it was a water balloon that somebody threw at the car, Nathan.”

  Nodding slowly, Nathan turned and stared at the black shadows cast across the drapes by the pale rising sliver of a moon.

  Part V

  Waxing Moon

  Chapter 26

  Nathan Redfield knew it was no water balloon that had burst against the windshield of the Lincoln. Something had just tried to kill him—the same thing that had dripped on Belinda from the branch of the live oak in the forest, had hid among the leaves and the moss while he had lain with the girl, had stared down at them out of those black holes it had instead of eyes. It had whipped along the forest, tree to tree, keeping close beside them, toying and whistling wetly. It had sat in the front seat of Belinda’s Volkswagen. It had pressed its liquid fingers around the handle of the Scout, and tried to get in.

  And what Nathan Redfield also knew, as he shakily poured out bourbon into a tall glass, was that whatever that monstrosity was, if had taken the form and the aspect of Margaret Larkin.

  “Ben,” he said: “Close the curtains.” His voice was so low that Ben did not hear him. Nathan turned savagely: “Close the goddamn curtains, Ben!”