Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  “For Walter?”

  “For me. I’ll mail him the other half of the ones he’s got.”

  Peter picked up a pair of baby shoes, the laces tied together. He could have worn them on his thumbs. “First shoes?”

  “They look like little cartoon shoes, don’t they? Like mice would wear. Check out this bib with the duck on it. He used to bring this to me when he wanted to eat. He’d just walk up and hand me the bib.” She laughed softly and shook her head. “Don’t ask me why I save all this stuff. Just nostalgia. Even Bobby thinks it’s silly.”

  “I don’t think any of it’s silly,” he said.

  “I guess it is a little like a treasure chest or something.”

  “Remember the end of ‘Pandora’s Box’? When she lifts the lid and all the evil spirits fly out into the world, and she just sort of takes it in stride because at least she got all of them out of her house? ‘Now our house harbors only hope,’ she says, and that’s the end of the story. I wrote that on a piece of paper once and carried it around with me. Finally lost it somewhere. Turned out not to be true in my situation anyway.”

  “I always thought ‘Pandora’s Box’ had an unhappy ending.

  He shook his head. “It looks that way, but then she manages to hold on to the good thing and let go of the rest.”

  “She was lucky. With me, all this stuff is more like The Velveteen Rabbit. That’s a story I can believe in. I think that all these baby trinkets have a kind of magic power because they belonged to Bobby. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “No. It’s not crazy at all. You’re right.” He watched her stack the boxes and set the lid on top, and at that moment he realized that he loved her. Whatever indecision he’d been muddling through during the last couple of days and weeks vanished. He sat looking at her, as if he were just now seeing her clearly.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, seeing his face. “You look goggle-eyed all of a sudden.”

  “I love you.”

  She blinked at him. Saying nothing, she turned toward the dresser, moving the box carefully so as to position it to precisely cover the dust-free square of mahogany where it had sat ten minutes ago.

  He was suddenly sobered. She had no humor at all in her eyes, just a sudden thoughtfulness, as if she’d been reminded of some long-forgotten regret.

  “You’d better say just what you mean,” she said after a moment.

  “I just did.”

  “You’ve been a little doubtful over the last couple of days.”

  “I had the right to be.”

  “Probably so. But what happened to all the doubts? Where did they go? Out the window with the bad spirits? Now there’s only hope left?”

  He shrugged, suddenly not trusting himself to speak. “I figured out what I want—what you told me to do yesterday morning, remember?”

  Abruptly she smiled. “Did I advise that?”

  He nodded.

  “And so this is like the first day of the rest of your life?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Yours, too. Look how it started—sleeping late, waking up to doughnuts and coffee. Not a bad life.”

  “That’s what you’ve got planned? You sleep in while I go out for the doughnuts and brew the coffee?”

  He picked up the doughnut box and held it open in front of her. “Now this box harbors only leftovers,” he said.

  She took it out of his hands and set it on the dresser. Then, shaking her hair back out of her face, she pushed him over backward onto the bedspread.

  4

  THERE WAS SOMETHING RESTFUL ABOUT THE CANYON—the blue sky rising above the gray ridge, the north-facing wall dark green with fern and oak. On a Monday morning the place was empty. It struck him for the first time that he wouldn’t mind having a little cabin back in here himself, maybe along Holy Jim Creek, although if the park deal went through and the cabin owners had to clear out, then the whole idea would be bust anyway. And if the park deal didn’t go through, well…

  He almost wished it wouldn’t now. He could hardly face the months of dealing with the scheme as it got more and more top-heavy. And as for Pomeroy, he had to be … dealt with somehow, once and for all.

  He put the idea out of his mind and waved at a bearded man working next to a rusty gate that blocked a road into a little side canyon. The man nodded to him, taking off his cap and wiping his face with his arm, and Klein shouted, “Must be Miller time!” at him, hearing the man yell some kind of affirming comment back as the truck rounded the bend. Klein waved once more out the window, passing the rusted, beat-up hulks of a half dozen abandoned cars and refrigerators and rusting debris that you couldn’t quite recognize anymore.

  He realized that he felt strangely good—clear and sharp. He couldn’t say why, after last night. He seemed to have lost weight or something, gotten rid of baggage. And he had the feeling that he knew something now that he hadn’t known before, something he’d learned from Lorna, maybe even from Pomeroy in a roundabout way. He didn’t feel like that very often, which was probably a character defect. But it was probably a worse defect to think that you didn’t have any defects. Of course it was a defect thinking like that, because you were secretly proud that there was at least one defect you didn’t have.

  He almost laughed, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, the truck dipping across the creek, which ran across the road some six inches deep. There was a sheer drop of three or four feet on the right, where the creek pooled up into a still pond. There was something beautiful about it—the dark water beneath the overhanging oaks and alders, a scattering of leaves floating on it like boats. Probably he was about to be screwed from every conceivable direction, but at least he didn’t have any illusions about it anymore.

  The truck angled up the rise, then swung to the left as he followed the road past the old lower campground. Maybe it was better to let Lorna do the talking—the demanding—whatever it was she wanted. He would tell her straight out what he knew about last night, which wasn’t one damned thing, really. There was a lot he hadn’t told her over the years, but as far as he remembered, he hadn’t made a habit of lying to her, and maybe she’d appreciate that now and take him on faith.

  He caught sight just then of a light blue car fender, and he slowed down, creeping up next to an Isuzu Trooper parked just off the road. Pomeroy. It was a rental, without a doubt the same car he’d been driving yesterday morning. Klein braked to a stop and sat there considering things, the wind suddenly kicking up dust in front of his bumper. Why out here? The lower campground lay a good mile or so below the first cabins. There was no way in hell that Pomeroy would park out here and walk up. He had to be up to something….

  A bee flew in through the open window just then, and Klein noticed that there was a swarm of bees just across the road, buzzing around a hollow tree. He rolled up the window and pulled off onto the turnout, cutting the engine and looking around at the silent woods. There was no sign of him. The air was quiet, just the wind whispering. Across the creek lay the trail that led back into Falls Canyon, its entrance nearly hidden by vegetation. That was really the only place Pomeroy could have gone, unless he was hiding in one of the caves in the hillside….

  Wait him out? Klein got out of the car and walked across to the Isuzu, looking in the windows before opening the passenger-side door. He tripped the glove compartment latch and rooted around inside, pulling out what looked like a toiletries kit. There was all kinds of crap inside the kit, including some kind of face makeup or cover-up or something. Maybe that wasn’t any kind of surprise, given Pomeroy’s antics with the underwear yesterday. He flipped through the few papers, finding nothing but a map and rental car folder containing registration papers and a Triple A pamphlet.

  The rest of the car was clean. He shut the door and leaned against it. If Lorna left Ackroyd’s she’d have to drive right past him to get out, in which case he’d stand in front of her car till she agreed to talk things out. Meanwhile, if Pomeroy showed up …

  He took the .38
out of his pocket, remembering what he’d said to Pomeroy yesterday about dragging him out into the woods and killing him. The hills were rugged, full of dense brush, thick with coyotes and carrion birds. Even now he could see a half dozen vultures circling up over the ridge, high in the sky. Nobody paid a damned bit of attention to that kind of thing out here.

  He let his mind run, calculating how much of his life was about to come down in a smoking heap: his house, his marriage, his financial security. Of course the truth was he’d set himself up for it; all it took was a monster like Pomeroy to knock him down. It occurred to him again that Pomeroy himself was very nearly the perfect victim—secretive, no family, certainly no friends….

  He put away the pistol and let the idea slide away from him. For fifteen minutes he stood by the roadside, leaning against his truck, listening to the sound of the creek and the rustling of leaves. A car went by, but it wasn’t Lorna. The wind gusted a couple of times, and the day grew increasingly lonesome and empty. Klein began to feel fidgety, wondering if he was waiting in vain. Or worse, if he was waiting around while Pomeroy worked more of his creepery on someone.

  What the hell was Pomeroy doing up there? He was the last man on earth to take a damned hike. Had he followed somebody up there? Klein set out toward the creek, in a sudden hurry now that he had decided to move. At the edge of the water he stopped, full of indecision, his hand on the gun in his pocket. He turned around and jogged back to the truck, putting the pistol away in the glove compartment, locking up, and then turning around and heading down the hill again.

  He picked his way across the creek and up through the oaks that led to the mouth of Falls Canyon. The narrow defile was nearly choked with broken alder and sycamore limbs, fallen from trees growing up the canyon walls. Drifts of leaves covered the tangle of brush, and he was forced to clamber partway up the steep cliffside to find the trail again where it rose above the floor of the canyon.

  He picked up his pace when the way was clear, the soft dry dirt rising around him, dusting his arms with grime. Here and there he could see the marks of crepe-soled shoes, the kind Pomeroy wore when he was out here conducting business. He stopped to listen, damned if he was going to let the bastard come upon him unawares. There was nothing but the morning silence, though, barely disturbed now by the wind.

  He wiped his face on his sleeve and continued up the trail, stepping over fallen branches. Soon the trail forked, and he took the upper fork on instinct, knowing that it led to the ridge. The lower fork led to the falls—an unlikely destination for Pomeroy unless he was just out sightseeing, which was nearly unimaginable. Thick brush overgrew the trail, and he pushed through it sideways, climbing into the shade of a granite ledge and resting for a moment, wiping the sweat off his forehead. A big lizard darted across the path just then, running for the shelter of a heap of sticks and leaves and brush, nearly shoulder high, that blocked the trail ahead.

  Klein stepped toward it, wondering whether he’d have to leave the trail and climb around it, and at the same time reaching for the broken end of a branch. He stopped suddenly, then reversed direction and trod backward, shouting inadvertently and bumping up against the cool granite behind him.

  A man’s face, dirty and bruised, eyes and mouth wide open, stared out at him from the interior of the tangled debris. One upturned hand and arm lay parallel to the broken branch Klein had just reached for. A dirty gauze bandage dangled from where it was wrapped around the lifeless hand, and the hand itself, supported by the tangle of brush, clutched a knot of dead leaves.

  5

  IT TOOK KLEIN A FEW MOMENTS TO REALIZE THAT THE dead man was Pomeroy. The skin on his arms was discolored from bruises and dried blood, and his face, visible through the mass of debris and vegetation that nearly covered the corpse, was distorted with terror. His eyes were wide open and seemed almost to bulge, as if he’d been suffocated or strangled. It was the big ring on the finger of his outstretched hand that was unmistakable.

  “Jesus,” Klein said out loud, turning away and looking back down the trail. For a moment he held his breath, and then he let it out slowly. He couldn’t fathom this—who could have done it? There were probably plenty of people in the world who wouldn’t mind seeing Pomeroy dead, but why out here, up on this God-forsaken ridge? What, had he been lured up here?

  Then he knew suddenly that there couldn’t be any such explanation. He looked at Pomeroy again, at the leaves clutched in his hand, stuffed in his half-open mouth. What the corpse reminded him of was himself, last night, crouched in the corner of the poolhouse while the wind pounded at him, choking him with dead things.

  It was the wind that had killed Pomeroy.

  He nearly turned back down the path, full of sudden fear. The breeze only whispered through the chaparral now, vaguely stirring the dirty gauze that hung from Pomeroy’s wrist. Klein closed his eyes for a moment, forcing himself to think clearly. Why did it have to be the wind that had killed Pomeroy? The path leading up to the ridge was steep. Pomeroy had tripped on loose brush, tumbled forty or fifty feet, probably broken his neck. That was all—a stupid accident, bad luck for Pomeroy, but good luck for the rest of the world.

  Klein was free of him. The realization was like the passing of a cloud shadow. He nearly laughed out loud, and for one giddy moment he almost reached out and shook Pomeroy’s limp hand. The corpse’s discolored face sobered him, though, and it dawned on him that whatever had happened to Pomeroy, he couldn’t let the body be found. That much was obvious. They would think Klein had killed him. They would know it. He’d been yelling it out loud for the last couple of days, wandering around the hills with a loaded pistol. He’d screamed it at Lorna. Beth had overheard him say the same thing. And Winters … Christ, he’d called Winters yesterday morning and advertised that Pomeroy was out of control and had to be stopped. Winters would hang him out to dry. And to top it off, his truck had been parked for the last hour alongside Pomeroy’s Isuzu, down at the damned turnout. When push came to shove, there was enough circumstantial evidence to drown him. And when the rest of it came out—the scheming, the blackmail—it would all be over except for the prison sentence.

  The wind was still now, and the air had grown hot. In the silence he listened for the sound of footsteps on the trail, for hikers taking an afternoon stroll to the top of the falls. He had to hide the body, and the quicker the better. He pushed against a broken branch that hooked around Pomeroy’s back and neck, digging into the flesh of his cheek. Dead leaves and twigs cascaded to the ground, and Klein jerked his hand away when the body moved and the head abruptly fell sideways and dangled at an unnatural angle.

  Klein steeled himself, grabbing the branch with both hands and yanking it free, throwing it as far into the scrub as he could manage. He hauled away a clot of loose limbs, tumbling the corpse into the brush beside the trail. Methodically he pulled the rest of the debris to pieces, scattering it into the chaparral, scooping up handfuls of twigs and leaves and tossing them into the wind.

  Finally the corpse lay on its back, its face staring at the sky. He crouched next to it, holding his breath while he twisted the ring from Pomeroy’s finger. Then he went through his pockets, pulling out his wallet, car keys and a small address book containing the names and phone numbers of canyon residents.

  “Good,” he said when he saw the book. He sighed heavily, starting to breathe again, and slid all of it into his own pockets before grabbing Pomeroy by his belt and shirt collar. Slowly he began to drag him up toward the ridge, setting his feet, hauling the corpse a yard or so, and then setting his feet again. Down would have been easy, but down was no good; there wasn’t any part of the canyon that wasn’t hiked through by boy scouts or picnickers or somebody. Up on the ridge, though, some distance off the trail…

  Halfway to the top he stopped to rest, thinking suddenly that he could throw the body off the top of the falls, make it look accidental or something. But just as suddenly he abandoned it. What would they make of the stuff in the corpse’s mout
h? How long had he been here? A couple of hours? Any competent coroner would know that he died first, had choked to death, and then been tossed over the top, and they’d be on Klein like a pack of dogs within a couple of days. Getting clever like that would be the worst thing to do.

  He looked toward the top of the trait, another twenty or thirty feet up, then slid the body farther across the scree-covered dirt. Both its shoes came off almost at the same moment. Klein cursed, dropping Pomeroy and hurrying down to retrieve them. He tied them together with the laces and hung them around Pomeroy’s neck before grabbing his wrists and starting again, trying not to look at the bloated face, which lolled back and forth. The loose gauze bandage dangled nearly to the ground, and when Klein finally dragged the corpse onto a level spot, he let it lie, bending over and wrapping the gauze around the wrist again, brushing off the clinging oak leaves.

  He rested his hands on his knees finally, catching his breath. Pomeroy was a little man, thank God. Maybe that had been his problem. Klein remembered then that Pomeroy had described himself to someone at the Spanglers’ as the “Napoleon of car sales.” When the hell was that? Only a few days ago, and here the poor son of a bitch lay dead with one hand flopped across his chest. After a moment he set out up the ridge trail, jogging slowly and looking to both sides for a break in the dense shrubbery. Soon he came to what looked like a kind of deer trail—a narrow opening in the chaparral that led away into the interior, toward where the hills rose again toward an even more elevated ridge. Beyond that lay the Santiago Truck Trail, which traversed the high, wild ridges leading up to Santiago Peak, but between here and there was nothing but a couple of miles of unbroken and untraveled wilderness.

  He made his mind up and jogged back down, hurriedly now. The day was wearing on. It’d been a couple of hours since he’d talked to Joanne, and it all of a sudden was more important than ever that he find Lorna and try to set things straight. Picking up the shoes, he set out again, pulling the corpse by the feet now. Pomeroy’s head bounced on the trail, dust rising around it, his hair gray with the dust. Flies settled on the bruised face, were dislodged almost at once, and then buzzed around and settled again.