Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  Nothing moved.

  There was no sound at all.

  The place was black and silent.

  Albert was having trouble breathing.

  Merle could smell blood on him.

  “I have to go on down,” he said to Albert. “Will you be all right?”

  “You go on down,” said Albert. “I’ll be fine.”

  Merle checked his magazine, changed it out for his third—and last—magazine, racked the slide again. He patted Albert on the shoulder, stood up, keeping his back off the wall, remembering from somewhere that slugs fired in a hallway tended to ride the surface of the wall, if they hit, so if you stood out a few inches, the slug would zip by you. Merle hoped this was true.

  He made his way down the long narrow hallway, past a series of doors that reminded him of the doors he had passed on his way to Rainey Teague’s room at Lady Grace. He got all the way down the hall and felt his boot stepping on something soft.

  He knelt down and felt a hand, a man’s hand, cold and limp, and wet. He lifted his hand and smelled cold copper on his fingers.

  The man on the floor moved and now he could hear his breathing, short and ragged. He touched the floor around him, found a small semi-auto pistol. He knelt there for a few minutes, listening to the man die, trying to see into the darkness.

  “Albert?”

  His reply came back, faint, hoarse, echoing.

  “I’m here, John.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’ll do. How are you?”

  “I think there’s nobody left. I’m going to go look around. Stay there. Reload.”

  “I already reloaded. You take care.”

  “I will.”

  Merle stood up, moved forward to the end of the hall, reached a flat brick wall. The place had no windows. No glass inside either. No mirrors. It really was a kind of blockhouse. From outside, you could see the building was in the shape of a T.

  He reached the end of the main hall.

  The T went right and left, although he couldn’t see a thing and might as well have been blind. Whoever lived here didn’t like bright lights, didn’t like windows, didn’t like glass. He looked into the dark on his left, saw nothing, looked around to his right and saw a thin sliver of flickering light at the far end of the passage.

  A doorway, closed, with something beyond it, flickering. A familiar flickering blue light.

  A television.

  They may have cut the power out here, but it was still on in that room. He reached up and felt his left temple, touched raw flesh and warm wet liquid. He flexed his cheek and regretted it.

  He touched his left ear, or tried to.

  He didn’t have one anymore.

  But he was still on his feet and still moving.

  Sliding his hand along the wall, stepping carefully, he counted off a hundred paces down to the closed door at the other end of the hall.

  There was more light down here, coming from under the door, and as his eyes adjusted he saw that he was coming up on a gurney, parked outside a room. Something was lying on the gurney, covered by a sheet. He reached it, keeping the Colt on the shape, put out a hand, and lifted the cover.

  A dough-faced old man, cheeks blown out, eyes wide open, glazed in death. He reached down, felt for the wrist, and lifted it into the light coming from under the door, read the wristband:

  Zabriskie, Gunther (Plug) DEMENTIA—DNR

  Not Abel Teague, anyway.

  They had emptied out the whole place, except for the dead. He let the wrist fall, which it did slowly, rigor setting in, covered the old man again, and came to stand in front of the last door. He could hear voices, tinny and brittle, clearly coming from the television.

  He reached out, tried the handle.

  The door wasn’t locked.

  He steadied the Colt and used his left foot to ease the door open. A dark cell-like room, completely windowless, four tiled walls, the room about fifteen by twenty, almost completely empty, tile floors, a flat painted ceiling.

  There were only a few pieces of furniture in the room, a small flat-screen television set sitting on a card table, its glow lighting up the room, tuned to a cable news station, a large green leather armchair placed in front of the television, its back to the door.

  Over the top of the chair back Merle could see a dome of age-spotted skin surrounded by a halo of light from the television. On the television, two very blond females were having a heated argument over something to do with Israel.

  Merle came forward into the room, looking around carefully, stepped around the chair, and looked down at the man in the chair. A very old man, but not a ruin, still erect, completely bald, his skin spotted and withered, his cheeks sagging down in folds, his eyes nearly shut, glinting in the light from the television. The man was wearing an ornate silk bathrobe over blue silk pajamas. He had leather slippers on his feet, lined with lamb’s wool. His large bony hands were resting on his lap, one hand holding a television remote, the other a heavy glass with something pale in it, the liquid also luminous with the light from the television.

  A crystal decanter full of a clear liquid was sitting on the card table beside the television, next to a silver bucket full of ice.

  The man lifted the remote, turned off the sound, looked up at Merle, his wide-set gray eyes empty and cold. His thin blue lips moved.

  “I heard shooting,” he said. “I guess you’ve shot all my people, or we wouldn’t be talking.”

  “I guess I did.”

  Abel Teague studied him.

  “You could see them?”

  “I shot them, didn’t I?”

  He blinked at Merle.

  “If you could see them, son, and they could see you, then you’re in more trouble than I am. You’re more than halfway gone already.”

  “What were they?”

  The man shrugged, waved a bony hand in dismissal, took a sip of his drink, smiled up at Merle. His teeth were strong and white.

  “My people. I found out how to call them. Like she figured out how to call you, I guess.”

  “And now here I am. Get up.”

  “You know about her?” he asked.

  He had a soft Virginia accent and his voice, although weak, was clear.

  “I know about you.”

  “Do you? I don’t think so. You’d be better off knowing what she really is. Knew I’d be seeing you as soon as that boy down in Niceville woke up and started asking for me. Saw it on my television here. I knew it was her work. She ask you to call yourself John, when you saw me? Just to remind me of my sins against her family?”

  “Yes. I’m here in the name of John Ruelle, and in the name of his brother, Ethan, to settle an old score. Now get up.”

  The old man smiled up at Merle.

  “Why? You can shoot me right here.”

  “She wants you to be on your feet.”

  Teague stared at Merle, looked around the room, and then back at him.

  “She uses windows, you know? She uses glass. She uses the mirrors. I figured her out, after a while. Everybody else in the families, they’re just gone, one after the other. The windows, I said. I told them all, the windows and the mirrors.”

  He sighed.

  “But nobody listened.”

  He seemed to drift on the memory, and then he came back to Merle.

  “So I live in this room, son, no windows, no glass, no mirrors. My window is the television. Takes me everywhere I want to go. You see, with her, young man, the trick is not to open the way.”

  He started to wheeze, and then Merle realized the old man was laughing.

  “You don’t even know the thing that sent you. You think its name is Glynis Ruelle. You think she’s been wronged by me. Clara Mercer was a real fine piece. But I already had her in my bed and there are lots of fine girls in the world. Besides, I didn’t like to be told what to do. And look where it’s got me. A prisoner in this cell. I haven’t left this room in fifty years. Think about that, young man, if you g
et a minute to ponder.”

  He stopped wheezing, gave Merle a sidelong look.

  “But the thing that sent you, my friend, that’s not Glynis Ruelle. Glynis died in ’39. What lives in her now, what keeps her going, what keeps all of this going, that power goes back as far as you can go. I spent a lot of my fifty years here wondering what it really was. All I figured out was, it lives in Crater Sink. It hates Niceville like it hated the Creek and the Cherokee before ever we came here. It hated before there ever was anything to hate, before the world was made, as far as I can tell. And it has to feed. It was riding on Clara Mercer’s angry spirit to help itself feed. Oh yes. I saw those markings on the floors, or in the dirt, or in their beds, where people had been taken. Over the years, almost two hundred souls got eaten alive that way. I knew what I was looking at. But it has rules. It will do some things, and not some others. I found out if you’re real careful, you can get it to do things for you. How I got my helpers, the ones you shot up just now. Maybe how Glynis got you.”

  “Stand up.”

  He looked at Merle more carefully.

  “You’re not listening to me, son. You should. You know how old I am? I am one hundred and twenty-one years old. Look at me. I can still stand up, I can still hold a drink, I can still eat good food, and I piss when I damn well feel like it and not when I don’t. Cost me a fortune to stay alive this long, and stay this healthy, but then I had a damn good reason, didn’t I? I knew she was waiting for me. I know about that field she has down at her plantation and what gets buried in it, what gets dug up, and what poor souls do the digging. They dig each other up, son, the dead do, and then they trade places in the moldy old caskets, and those who were waiting help the dead get out and then they lie down and take their places, and the ones who got dug up do the burying. Over and over again. Year after year. Until the sun falls and all the stars go out. Glynis, she calls it the harvest. She does it because the thing that lives in Crater Sink wills it, although she doesn’t know that. I’ve stayed away from that awful harvest for a long time. And if you’re a reasonable young man, with a taste for unusual pleasures, I can put it off a few more years. What do you say?”

  “I say no. Get up and come with me.”

  Teague considered Merle’s face for a while, saw nothing there that he could appeal to. He sighed heavily, leaned forward, set the glass down on the card table, put both bony hands on the arms of the chair, and straightened slowly up.

  Merle stepped back as the man got to his feet and turned to look at Merle.

  “Here?”

  “Outside,” said Merle.

  “Why not here?”

  “Outside. In the park. Under the trees.”

  He stared hard at Merle.

  “You’re proposing we fight?”

  “I’m here to kill you. Glynis said that if you were willing to stand to the scratch line, I should let you. Are you ready to stand?”

  “I have no one to second me.”

  Merle studied his face.

  “I can find you a second. Will you stand?”

  A flicker of cunning rippled across his face.

  “I will. But I have no weapon.”

  “I brought two.”

  “Swords? Or pistols?”

  “Pistols.”

  The man stood looking at Merle for a full minute, and then he tightened his robe and began to shuffle towards the door.

  Merle followed him out.

  Albert Lee got to his feet when he saw them coming back down the long dark hallway, the tall old man in his bathrobe and slippers.

  Albert stood aside as they got to the door, the old man’s glittering eye studying Albert as he went slowly past. Albert had gone to the Pensacola shore one year, as a boy, and they had a bull shark in a big glass tank, the shark gliding around in there and looking out at the people, his gills working, his eyes like shiny black pebbles in his dead white hide. That was the look in the old man’s eye.

  Albert followed them through the waist-high mist, his feet leaving a dark trail behind him in the dewy grass. There was no one around, not a crow in the sky, no dogs barking in the distance.

  Just the drifting mist and the live oaks draped with moss and the willows hanging motionless, no noise but the shuffle of their shoes as they walked out into a wide space set around with benches.

  Merle stopped and Teague, after a moment’s hesitation, walked past him and went on into the park for about twenty paces. He turned around. Straightened up. Put his shoulders back.

  Faced Merle.

  “This about right?”

  “Yes,” said Merle, turning to Albert Lee.

  “Give Mr. Teague your pistol, Albert.”

  “John, he’s not worth that. Just shoot him like the coward he is.”

  “She asked me to try him, see if he’d fight. He says he will. So will you give him your weapon?”

  Albert looked at the old man.

  “He could kill you.”

  “Yes.”

  Albert smiled at him.

  “Worse yet, he’s got my gun, he could turn around and shoot me after he shoots you. What a pair of flats we’d look then.”

  “I won’t shoot you,” said the old man. “Against the rules to shoot the second. Come, let’s do this.”

  Albert checked the cylinder again, walked over to the old man, handed him the pistol, grip first.

  The old man turned it in his hand, studying it.

  “Don’t know this kind. Is it a single-action?”

  “No. It fires with the trigger pull.”

  “You’re bleeding, boy,” he said, looking at Albert’s belly.

  “Yes. I am.”

  “May I try a round or two, just to get the feel?”

  Albert shrugged.

  “He asks can he try a round or two?”

  “Tell him yes.”

  Albert stepped back as the old man lifted the revolver, steadied it with both hands, aimed it at a bench about the same distance away as Merle.

  He squeezed the trigger, the little revolver jumped with a muffled crack and a chunk of wood flew off in the middle of the back rail of the bench. He steadied the weapon, fired again, and the second shot struck less than an inch from the first.

  “All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready.”

  He turned his right side to Merle, narrowing the target he offered, holding the pistol in his right hand, down by the side of his leg.

  Merle stood the same way, his right side turned to the man, his Colt down. There was a silence. Merle could feel his heart beating in his chest.

  He did not want to die, but then he thought, Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get through this and someday somehow I’ll get my old life back. The old man was staring back at him with his flat shark eyes.

  “I’ll call it,” said Albert.

  “Please do,” said Abel Teague.

  “On the count of three. Ready?”

  Teague considered Merle, his expression alive with cold calculation.

  “I don’t want to go to that harvest, son.”

  “You can’t stay here.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Took her eighty years to find someone like you. Someone who could walk between two worlds. Might be eighty years before she finds another. If I can stay alive long enough, maybe my docs will figure out how to cure dying. All I have to do is kill you.”

  “That’s true.”

  There was nothing more to be said.

  After a pause, Albert began to count.

  “One.”

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  Both weapons came up, and they fired at almost the same second, the heavy thump of the Colt, the brittle crack of the .38. The sound died out quickly, muffled by the dense mist. Crows began to caw and chatter in the distance.

  They stood there for a few seconds, staring at each other, and then Merle went down on one knee, the heavy Colt falling to the grass, blood pumping out of a small round hole in his throat, just under the Ad
am’s apple. He had a much larger hole in the back of his neck. Albert ran over to him, bending down, catching him as he fell.

  Abel Teague took a step forward, staggered, took another, went down on one knee.

  He had a large bloody hole in his left cheek, just below the eye. The eye itself had exploded outwards like a shattered egg. The back of his skull was gone, and his brains were scattered all over the lawn behind him.

  Abel Teague fell sideways, rolled over onto his back, looked up at the sky, gasping. He could hear the crows calling and from far away he heard Albert Lee’s voice, fading away. He closed his mind, trying to keep the spark going, thinking that if they could get to him in time the docs could do wonders. When he opened his mind a heartbeat later, he was looking up at Glynis Ruelle, a high blue sky behind her, her green eyes on him, her rich black hair shining in the sunlight.

  “Get up,” said Glynis. “You have work to do.”

  Kate Meets Clara

  Sleep was out of the question, especially since Linus Calder had phoned back on Nick’s cell three times, and now Nick was out in the backyard again, talking the guy through every detail of what had happened at Delia Cotton’s house in The Chase.

  Kate listened with part of her mind to the back and forth, theories about how it might have happened, how to explain these two events without stepping off the edge of the known universe.

  Her father was not in his office or his flat, that much she knew. His car was in its parking space at the VMI lot. Kate had even begun to hope that he was just out for a long walk, or gone on a bender because the idea of driving down to see her and talk about Niceville had freaked him out.

  Which she knew he would never do.

  His car was still there.

  He had never reached it.

  So he was officially missing.

  But Nick was on it, and this detective up in Virginia, Linus Calder, seemed to know what he was doing, and Reed had called her to tell her he was at VMI now and also on the case. And then she had made a call to her sister, Beth, and found out that she was having yet another fight with that man.

  She told Beth what was going on, got the impression that she wasn’t listening very carefully, which was understandable, tried to make it sound as if Dad had just gone on a trip without telling anybody, felt she had half convinced Beth.