[Oxrun Station] The Last Call of Mourning

by Charles L. Grant

  It was, she thought, rather like being on a lonely road in an ancient automobile. The motor sounds right, there's no extraneous play in the wheel, yet one senses there is something out of place in the driving and tenses . . . waiting for the tire to go flat, the engine to miss, the electrical system to suddenly flare and burn out.

  Tension.

  She nodded to herself as she swung into the drive. That's what it was. That was what kept her from really enjoying the alien world of her bookshop, the Lennons' wry company, even Ed's hovering protection. A tension created by an entity she had always felt reasonably secure with, always at home with . . . her family.

  The fog spattered in a light spray against the windshield, vanished beyond the reach of the headlights. Twice she thought she saw the quick red eyes of a deer far back in the shrubs and had jerked her head around to find it, could not, and shivered despite her buttoned-to-the-neck coat and the heavy scarf she had wrapped loosely around her throat. A trailing bough drummed on the roof. A stone thumped beneath the left front tire. She began whistling impatiently, tuneless, almost decided to call a halt to this nonsense and blare her horn when she reached the oval to let the others know she had arrived home safely.

  Almost.

  Not quite.

  Instead, she cut the engine before leaving the drive and coasted with a light tire-hiss to the garage door and sat there, waiting for Ed to pull up behind her. Then she slipped out of her seat and waited for him by the trunk, her hands deep in her pockets, her eyes unable to stray from the black monolith she kept telling herself was her home. There were no lights on despite the hour, no way of knowing there was fog in the air except for the moisture that crept upon her face like strands of damp webbing. Somewhere in the darkness water dripped into a puddle, a tinny sound that should have been delicate.

  When Ed touched her arm she almost screamed.

  "Luck," he whispered with a nod toward the house.

  She did not answer. Could not because she wasn't all that sure herself. At his urging then she led him around the side to the veranda, twice stumbling over protruding rocks in the grass, at the corner of the low wall barking her shin when she made the turn too soon. She cursed, rubbed at her leg, and stopped when they reached the library door. It was then that he snapped on his pencil flashlight, and she turned away quickly to keep from being momentarily blinded.

  He grunted.

  She looked up at the house and felt a light stab of regret. Less than two weeks before the holidays and there were no electric candles in the windows, no wreath on the front door, the usual display of colored lights gone from the tall fir in the center of the drive's oval garden. That, she remembered with a guilty stir, had been Wallace McLeod's job . . . and Sandy usually helped him.

  "All right," Ed said brusquely, "let's get inside. I'm done here for the time being."

  When he had met her at the shop after closing, the idea had seemed simple enough: instead of forcing a confrontation with her parents and brothers over the police, they would check first themselves on the nature of the burglary. It did not take much convincing for her to believe that she would receive no satisfactory answers from anyone if she faced them with the lie of contacting Stockton. What had shaken her, what had allowed Ed to maneuver her without much protest, was the inevitable conclusion that her near screaming attack on them that morning had only uncovered a surface conspiracy. There was money involved, to be sure, but evidently it was not the insurance payments they were after or they would not have hesitated to bring in the police. There were more lies beneath the lies, caverns of shadows she needed to be lighted before she could understand, and in understanding, confront.

  "No lights," Ed said when her hand automatically reached for the switch.

  "For heaven's sake," she snapped, "it's my house, isn't it?" But she dropped her hand and followed his dark outline behind the flashlight into the library where he moved immediately to the French doors and bent close to the latch. Then he turned slowly, aiming the thin beam at the stern-faced portrait. He shook his head.

  "Idiots," he muttered as he crossed the room. "Looking behind a thing like that is the first place any pro would head for." He reached up with one hand and tugged at the broad, gilt frame, shifting it on its hinges to expose the face of the safe. He shook his head again. "You'd be surprised how many fools think something like this is safer than a bank. I would have thought your folks would have known better."

  His left hand, encased in a snug brown glove, toyed with the dial for a moment, slapped at it once before he turned around and flashed the light around the room, at the vases dearly gleaned from private auctions, the brass and bronze figurines, the leather, and the skillfully, expensively preserved books on the highest shelves.

  "There's a lot of money in here," she said, her arms folded and resting on the high back of a chair. "What you're saying is, someone knew about the jewelry and didn't waste any time with all this stuff, even though it would probably bring nearly as much."

  "No," he said. He picked up a small brass horse from a square onyx coffee table, brought it to her and held it up to the flash. "Look at it," he said. She stared at him, shrugged, took the boldly fashioned animal and gaped. Blinked. Wondered where the weight was. "What I'm saying is, the thief knew that most of this stuff was for show only. I would guess nine out of ten pieces are worthless. And the way prices are these days, probably less than that."

  She took the flashlight from his hand without speaking, moved numbly around the room and examined all those things she had helped her father purchase. There were only one or two pieces that were still genuine; the rest were forgeries, and not very adept ones at that. Those who were around them every day would not notice because they would not be looking for a change, and so they would not see one; those who understood the value involved, those from the outside, wouldn't grasp the switch because they wouldn't have an opportunity for careful examination. But now that she could follow Ed's drift, she could see it all, and in seeing ignored his warning and hit a wall switch that turned on all but two of the lamps.

  "It's a fake," she said, not knowing whether to cry or explode. She looked at him for an explanation, but he seemed suddenly weary. His shoulders sagged under the worn Navy peacoat, and his eyes retreated to hollows beneath his brow. "It's a fake," she repeated dully, and tossed the horse onto a chair.

  Finally Ed nodded, unbuttoning his coat and dropping onto the sofa. "So was the robbery."

  "I don't think I want to know about it," she said, but sat anyway, retrieving the horse and holding it tightly in her lap.

  "There's no outside lock on those doors. The glass hasn't been broken, the wood is still solid around the bolt. It fits closely. Any jimmying would show, the stain is too dark. Someone came into the room from the inside, took the jewels from the safe, opened the doors and left them that way. Assuming, then, that your family are the only ones who know the combination and it wasn't written down someplace . . ." He spread his hands wide, half in unnecessary explanation, half in sympathetic apology.

  "I can't believe it," she said. "I mean, I know what it sounds like, but I just can't believe it."

  "If they had called the police, Cyd, it would have been fraud. It's obvious. They did it themselves."

  "I still can't believe it."

  "I'm sorry, but I don't know what else to tell you."

  She waited for the passing of several long breaths before rising slowly, dropping the horse to the floor and walking to the doors. Her hand touched at the curtains, gripped the latch and pulled it to her.

  The night crept in.

  Shaded lampglow slipped ahead of her onto the veranda, and the fog backed off quickly as though an animal wary of fire. Her coat was unbuttoned, her scarf unwound, but she stepped out of the room and walked toward the wall, trying not to think, not to multiply the implications from the first damned one. Yet she could see her way along only a single path in the maze—the morning confession of the selling of the jewels, the firing of t
he staff, artifacts replaced . . . there was no money. Or, considerably less than she had been left to believe. But where had it all gone that the Yarrows avoided official interference? Why had they sacrificed a sure payment from their insurance company simply to keep Stockton from knowing?

  And something else, something more painful, and somehow more threatening: She had been cut off from her parents, from her brothers, as if she were little more than a side-effect not to be considered. If it were true that she was still loved, it was also true that they no longer trusted her. Without giving her a reason, she was not to be trusted.

  Because of business? She wanted desperately to believe it, and could not. In spite of everything else they were a family, and she knew she would have been made even a small part of the fight to keep matters running.

  Something else, then. Something that drained them, and would not let them talk.

  Whispering.

  She cocked her head slightly, a brief frown that vanished.

  Rob and his solemnity was no doubt the most staunch in his belief that whatever was happening would not destroy the family; not even his father could best him in that.

  whispering . . . voices with words like dead leaves without wind . . .

  And Evan. Always the most nervous and therefore the most cautious. She could easily imagine him thrashing about in his bed every night, struggling for a clever way out of what he most likely thought was a one-way tunnel to abject poverty.

  The idea came that perhaps they were being blackmailed.

  . .. the sound of a cat drifting across frost-stiff grass, a breeze across water, the moon behind clouds . .. whispering . . .

  Absently, she reached out a hand to touch the wall, and drew it back sharply. The stone was cold. Too cold. It almost had burned her. She looked at her palm, half-expecting a scar, saw instead trembling beads of moisture she wiped off on her coat.

  Blackmail.

  For a man in her father's position it would be easy. A youthful peccadillo come back in a haunting. Some not-quite-legal banking maneuvers. Her brothers, or one of them, involved with a woman, some indiscretion.

  Blackmail.

  She heard Ed cough behind her in the library, ignored him and was grateful he did not join her.

  She wondered if there was a connection, then, between what was devouring the Yarrows and Doctor Calvin Kraylin. He seemed to have moved into a position of confidant long held, and rightly, by Angus Stone. Yet the lawyer had said nothing to her at all during their months of negotiations for the shop, not even a hint that he was displeased, or worried, or opposed to Kraylin's influence. Assuming, she corrected herself hastily, the influence was as strong as she was tempted to believe. But that was too simple, too much a part of B-movies and potboilers, where sinister doctors in soiled lab coats crept around corners and locked the doors to their offices, rubbing their hands gleefully in pitiful Lorre imitations.

  . . . insistent . . . demanding . . . hovering like a carrion hunter without swooping because the wounds had not yet drained life from the body rapidly dwindling to a corpse . . . waiting . . . whispering . . . the fog stalking through the trees, crouching by the shrubs, sprinting across the back lawn to wait patiently behind the wall. . . .

  The fog.

  My God, she thought, what is it?

  She brushed a hand over her face as she half-turned toward the house ...

  the fog

  . . . and saw the lamps blurred and darkening beyond the white curtains.

  had turned black.

  A dampness spawned in corners of dungeons, shadows of walls, tunnels of worms, rose from the flagstone and snaked about her ankles, climbing her calves to cling to her thighs. She shuffled half a pace forward. A pressure settled on her chest and bent her back at the waist, slightly, gently, but nevertheless back. She tried to lift an arm, but only her shoulder moved; downward to her fingers there was only a dead weight.

  A certainty then: If she dared to turn around, if she dared move her head to look back over her shoulder, the glaring dead eyes of the lurking Greybeast would pin her to the blackening fog as surely as knives piercing her skin. It would grumble softly at her, taunting, teasing, daring, winking at a slim possibility of escape with a slight inclination that would send her scurrying toward the door before it snarled into life.

  And again: The something she had sensed in the house before had returned, or had never left, and she understood now why she had always dismissed it—the other times, however many there had been, she had only been on the periphery of its presence. But now, this time, it was directed right at her.

  It wasn't the Greybeast.

  It was—

  A bright light flashed in her face.

  She leapt back, one hand thrown up to protect her eyes, the other extended behind her to grope wildly for the wall. And through the gap in her fingers she saw something dark, something black, sweep past the spot where her head had been.

  The light dropped to a pool on the library floor, and she heard someone running across the carpet.

  She looked quickly to her left and up, ducked barely in time to avoid being struck. A nightbird. She saw the lightning glint of one eye, the stab of its beak, the reach of its talons before it vanished into the fog.

  "Cyd!"

  Still crouching, not quite kneeling at the base of the wall, she saw Ed framed in the library doors, saw him jabbing at the black with his flashlight, futilely, helplessly, until the bird sprang from his blind side and he reeled back inside. Quickly, then, she was on her feet and running, one hand up in a fist to punch at the air, the other reaching for Ed as he tripped over a footstool and tumbled onto his back.

  The fog moved into the house, and the lights were gone.

  Ed swore as her hand grabbed his and yanked him to his feet, swore again when the bird darted overhead and its talons took a piece of his temple with it.

  "The hall," she shouted, pulling him behind her as she thrashed through the obstacles the furniture threw up before her.

  The bird dove again.

  She felt a tearing at her shoulder and pushed at it angrily, shoved Ed out of the room and slammed the door shut. Leaned against it, panting, perspiration in rivulets dripping from her chin. The scarf somehow wound back around her throat, choking until she yanked it off and tossed it aside.

  A loud thud against the door, the sound of something dropping to the floor.

  Ed switched on the hall lights in their sconces and stared at her, his chest swelling as he fought for the too-warm air, blood seeping along his cheek to gleam on his shoulder.

  "Damn," he said.

  And with the word Cyd realized that during the entire attack, from the moment the nightbird had appeared outside, not one sound had uttered, not a cry had been voiced.

  The whispering . . . stopped.

  She knew that reaction would not be long in coming, fought to delay it by taking Ed's hand and pulling him into the kitchen where she sat him at the table without him protesting. Then she snatched a clean dish towel from one of the cabinet drawers and soaked it in cold water, wrung it out and began to sponge the blood from his face. He shrank away at the first touch, closed his eyes and endured as she swabbed his cheek clean, the hair and flesh around the gashes at his temple. They were less deep than the blood-letting made them appear, and for that she was grateful. She did terrible on the other side of the door, and she opens it anyway because she hasn't got the brains to run the other way. But," and she reached out, took hold of the knob, "I've got to know. And if it's still in there, it can't surprise us anymore."

  "Whatever you say," Ed said. He looked around him for something to grab, then motioned her to wait while he returned to the kitchen and brought back a chair, hefting it by his shoulder like an awkward club.

  He nodded. Once. Sharply.

  With one swift move she flung the door open and leapt back to the wall, Ed stiffening, his eyes automatically raised to the ceiling. But nothing attacked them, nothing flew out, and the black f
og in the library was gone, the lamps burning softly as though the house were normal and December a comfort. Cyd edged into the room then, frowning as she searched the upper reaches of the bookshelves, the tops of the oils, for signs of a shadow, a movement . . . anything. Slowly, she side-stepped across the carpet toward the French doors, took one quick look outside before pulling them to and throwing the latch and the bolt.

  Ed set the chair down at the threshold, moved to his left, looked down and stopped. "Here," he said quietly.

  "Is it dead?"

  "Come see for yourself."

  "I really . . . just wrap it in something. I don't want to see it."

  "You'd better," he insisted.

  "Please. Ed, I've had enough."

  "Cyd, if I tell you about this later, you're not going to believe it. You'd better come over here and see what I see. At least, I think I see it."

  Intrigued, and revolted, she walked cautiously toward him, her eyes not wanting to lower their gaze, lowering it anyway until she saw the huge crow lying against the baseboard. From the angle of its neck she knew it was broken, looked immediately to the back of the door and saw a deep gouge where it had struck there head on; then she looked back down again, spun away to grip the arm of a chair.

  "Impossible," she said.

  "Sure it is. Impossible put this mess on my face and tore a hole in your coat."

  Her hand jumped to her shoulder where she felt the ragged gap.

  "But it couldn't be," she said, without turning around. "Ed, it only has one wing."