[Oxrun Station] The Last Call of Mourning

by Charles L. Grant

  He was dressed as he had been when she had first met him, from blazer to white shoes, but there was a new cast now that startled and warned her—the soft edges to his face, the puffs at his cheeks had hardened and sharpened, his shoulders more squared, his stride a bit longer, even some height to add to the illusion.

  No, she thought; it was not illusion. On the outside, past the house and the trees was where the pretense began. That was the illusion. Here was the unmistakable air of immense authority. Here, no matter the outward signs, was a man who was used to absolute control.

  She waited a few minutes, debating whether or not to run for her car, decided that as long as she had made it this far there would be no sense in leaving without learning something. With the tire iron, then, still firmly in hand she crept back around the side of the house and peered in the window, wishing suddenly there were some means of overhearing what was said.

  Kraylin, beyond the strong tinged glow of the lamp, was standing by one of the gurneys. Carefully, as though he were peeling back skin, he pulled one of the sheets off from left to right and let it hang to the floor. He leaned over, whispered , something, straightened and held out his hand. Cyd held her breath, released it in a sigh of knowledge unwanted when Myrtle swung her legs over the side and allowed Kraylin to assist her in standing. They spoke, and as they did, Cyd tried to locate any signs of medical equipment, found none and was only a little surprised. Waited to see if the other two would move, scowled when the doctor led her mother away from the wall and toward the lamp, gesturing as he did so to whoever was still standing in the shadows at the room's far right.

  Cyd decided as she ducked back away from the window that to continue to watch the mime would be something less than useless. She needed words, not gesticulations, reasons for her mother submitting as she had—and as had the rest of her family, she had no doubt, though which of them remained on the gurneys was still unsolved. She also wanted a reason for her own curious involvement, and to learn this she needed words. Voices.

  But there were no windows as she made her way swiftly, quietly, around to the front. And there was no door, no windows facing the path. She swung the tire iron impatiently, ignoring the small stings when it struck the back of her leg. She had to get in somehow, she thought, and when she reached the house's far side she was confident enough to step boldly around the corner, expecting that this wall would be the same as the others.

  It was.

  But there was also a smaller building fifty yards toward the woods. A garage with doors opened. And in it she could see the face of the Greybeast.

  The tire iron fell from her grip, clattering on a stone with a cannon-shot explosion. She snatched it up again, held it tightly like a shield against demons.

  She gaped at the limousine, unable to move until somewhere beyond her shock she heard the creak of a door being opened. She turned quickly, saw a shadow push out from the wall, and she ran.

  Back across the lawn, dodging the unnatural flowerbeds, gasping at the ice-air that sharpened blades in her lungs. The moon darkened, a turbulence of clouds speeding over its face, and Cyd found herself ducking in and out of thickets trying to find the path. Looking back over her shoulder for those who would chase her. Finally locating the break and, not caring now if she were seen, more worried about her footing, snatching out her flashlight to show her the way.

  Shadows. And things.

  She had seen it often enough in films and had never quite believed it—that branches and rocks and weeds and twigs could reach out to trip her, snag her, entrap her. That the ruts in the path could widen and swallow. That the air itself could thicken to slow her down while the tears of her racing could blind her enough to send her stumbling into bushes, careening off boles, lose the path entirely and send her thrashing through the shrubs. She cried out when the clouds had done their veiling, and the moonlight created chasms where burrows had been. She leapt over nothings, felt her legs lacerated by whips, heard in the silence the clap of her footsteps, and the hissing of her breath.

  Behind her . .. there was nothing.

  She tripped, fell, rolled, righted. The flashlight smashed out, but she knew she was on the pike, spun to her right and raced for the car. Flung open the door and threw herself in, wanting desperately to lie on the front seat panting, shivering, waiting for sunrise to show her the world. But she dared not hesitate, gave in to her own goading and fumbled the keys out of her pocket. The ignition did not fire the first two tries—three times the charmer, she whispered silently to herself. Grinned when it was. Grinned wider when the car showered gravel behind it, fishtailed and straightened when it bit into the tarmac.

  A car passing in the other direction flicked its lights at her. She almost panicked before realizing she had not turned on her own.

  When she turned on the radio there was nothing but static.

  Abe. She would head directly for the police station as she should have done from the start and lay it all on Stockton's desk and force him into action. It would be simple enough: there's a doctor on the Pike, Abe, who lives about a mile or so off the road in this house that is supposed to be a clinic, but hardly anyone has ever heard of it and he's doing something to my parents because I saw my mother there tonight and . . . well, yes, she looked all right to me, but I'll bet you a million dollars he's got them drugged or something and can make them do whatever he wants, and that's why there's no money. And poor old Angus probably knew about it and was just hoping for ... oh, how the hell should I know? He's dead now, Abe, and you can't ask him anymore. But you've got to get out there because they want me to do something and I don't know what it is except that they tried to run me down with a limousine and set fire to my shop and—

  No. Not if she didn't want to be locked away before she finished.

  Ed. It would have to be Ed. She would have to waken him from whatever the doctors at the hospital had given him, tell him the latest and find out what he thought she should do now. But that, too, was useless—if he were still in the same mood as he had been that afternoon, then he would urge her more than ever to give it up before she got hurt, that her father would soon enough explain what was going on and she should learn to trust him just a little bit more, that he's known for years what he was doing and there's no good reason to suspect that he did not know now.

  No. Not if she didn't want to kill him before he was finished.

  Something thumped from the back seat onto the floorboards.

  What she was doing, she realized, was trying to find someone to take the burden from her. That finally her confusion had overwhelmed her, and she was praying for someone else to drink from the cup. But it was her decision. It was her move. Until she had something concrete to bring either to Abe or to Ed she would have to continue on alone.

  The rustling of paper.

  There was very little satisfaction, grim or otherwise, in the realization that her first impression of Cal Kraylin had been correct, that she had been wrong in dismissing him simply because he had been obvious. The nose on her face, she thought sardonically; the damned nose on your face.

  Rustling.

  What she would do, then, is return to the house and make a few calls. To Iris, to see if everything went well at the store—and see if she and Paul were at least unharmed; to Sandy, to see if he would work a full day tomorrow and Monday as well, if his parents would let him; to Ed, just to hear the sound of his voice so she would know there was still some sanity in the world, that she was not paranoiac, that she was not simply creating ghosts from the wind that began buffeting the car.

  She pulled into the drive without lowering her speed, paying no attention to the indignant blare of a horn whose car she had cut off when she swung across the road. There was no sense of narrow escape, no sense of guilt, only a—

  Rustling.

  Her foot slipped off the accelerator, her hands dug into the wheel. Slowly, she raised her eyes to the rearview mirror, expecting to see a hand crawling over the seat's back.

/>   Rustling. Paper.

  The car drifted to a stop just inside the oval.

  Cyd refused to turn around. Her arms were too stiff to move, her stomach and chest too tight for her to breathe, and an ache began to make its way coldly across her forehead as her lips worked for a sound that could turn into a scream. She stared at her left hand, willing it, ordering it, saw it stretch away from the wheel to the headlight knob, saw and did not feel her fingers grip it and turn it to switch on the domelight.

  Rustling of paper, and a faint breathing sound.

  The tire iron was on the seat beside her. She grabbed it, lost it, grabbed it again, and in one swift motion, opened the car door and twisted around on the seat, the iron rod lifted to smash what she saw.

  On the floorboard.

  Her arm trembled.

  The crow had been wrapped in a dish towel, had been stuffed into a brown paper bag. But the bag was now writhing, bulging, rustling, as the crow tried to work its way out. The crow that had attacked her . . . the crow that was dead.

  She felt nothing as she raised herself higher on the seat, felt nothing at all as the tire iron smashed down onto the bag—once, twice, a dozen times over.

  "You're dead," she whispered harshly.

  The bag still moved.

  Once, twice, a dozen times over.

  "Damnit, you're dead!"

  And the bag still moved.

  The iron slipped from her grasp and fell out to the ground. She pushed herself out of the car and kicked the door shut, checking numbly the windows to see that they were closed. Then she stumbled backward away from the car, shaking her head, her lips still working though the words would not come. It was impossible, of course, she told herself shrilly, and it was only the light of the moon that made the paper seem to move. But when she looked up at the sky, the moon was gone, the clouds overcoming it in waves of deeper black. She tripped, then, over the raised bricks at the oval, landed on her back and allowed herself to scream.

  And scream.

  And cry. Until she felt pebbles beneath her digging into her spine and she rolled to her knees and stared at the car. Tried to tell herself immediately that she did not see the shadow that darted helplessly inside, slamming against the glass, connecting once with the horn and shattering the air. There was nothing inside. There was nothing at all.

  Only the pain in her knees and the numbness in her arm, and the sandpaper rasping that tore at her throat.

  She rocked back to her heels, looked down at her palms and felt more than saw the dirt and stone there. Something to do; it was something to do, she thought as she rose and walked toward the house; and she fished the handkerchief from her pocket and daubed at her hands, was still working to clean herself when she opened the front door and turned on the foyer light. Winced when she saw the dirt stains on the cloth, was about to stuff it back into the coat when she realized with a frown that the handkerchief wasn't hers.

  The camel's-hair coat. Ed. The night she had found the death certificate in her pocket she had also taken out . . .

  She stumbled across the floor to the staircase, sat heavily and gripped the bannister with her right hand.

  There was dirt on the handkerchief, but there was no blood.

  A single-winged bird had tried to kill her.

  Her father had been dead, and was living again.

  The death certificate had not been some macabre, unpleasant joke; it had been a preparation in case something had failed.

  Angus had told her of a mild heart condition that Kraylin had treated, and had treated well. Now Angus was dead ... or was he dead again?

  Cyd laughed. She leaned back on her elbows and let the stairwell fill with her voice, let her voice fill the house, let the house echo it back by the tens, by the thousands, denying and crying and demanding the dream end.

  "Oh my God," she whispered.

  People die; Yarrows don't.

  She threw the handkerchief from her, watched it flutter to the floor and assume a vague tent shape. She ran, then, to every room on the first floor, turning on every lamp until the house was afire and the shadows were gone and a wind of false warmth followed in her wake. Dying as soon as she reached the library, dying when she looked in spite of herself at the floor behind the door where the dead crow had landed.

  There was no blood.

  Her coat felt unclean, as though it were leprous and she shed it as she began running again, up the stairs this time and into her room. There was no question now that she had to get to Ed, had to fall into his arms so he could raise his battle shield. It made no difference now that he was afraid; he had been right from the beginning—she should have gotten out. She had no time to pack, however, only time enough to grab a coat from the wardrobe in her bedroom, notice that it was the green one, the one the bird had torn.

  She dropped it where she stood.

  Frowned.

  Knelt, and reached into the pocket, finding there the note she had taken from Rob's desk. Her fingers would not listen to what she commanded, and the paper dropped twice before she could unfold it. In green ink, in a hand precise as it was bold, there was a single message across the center: You'd better be ready. He does not respond. There was no date, but she knew it had to have been the twenty-third of June; there was no signature, but she knew it was Kraylin's writing; and there was no salutation. To whom had it been written, then? Not necessarily to Rob; there'd been dust in the desk when she'd finally prized it open, and anyone could have hidden it there if they knew he scarcely used it.

  Rob. Evan. Mother.

  "I'm crazy," she muttered as she got back to her feet. "I'm crazy and I don't know it. That's the way it always is."

  She wandered out into the hallway and stood at the head of the stairs. The lights notwithstanding, she felt herself poised in the center of a vast well of darkness through which lightning, subdued, flashed on occasion, illuminating nothing but her reflection on the black. There was a core of intelligence in this well that had given her the answers, the thread by which nearly everything could be bound; but she refused to accept it, refused to draw it, could not believe that there were powers within the Station that defied what she had known were consistently immutable. What she had known.

  She had known that birds with one wing could not fly; she had known that once cut with a jagged shard of glass her mother would bleed; she had known that her father had lain dead in his bedroom; and she had known that she had placed a dead crow in a towel, in a bag, and had been forced to beat it with a tire iron in the car. What she had known.

  One step at a time she descended the staircase, her left hand gliding along the bannister without gripping, her right clutching in spasms at the buttons on her blouse. She felt her shoes sink into the carpet, heard the soft press of her heels and the give of the leather. The wind outside was a distant moaning thing, lost among the lights that guided her down, without the power to harm her, to touch her, to blow away sanity and leave her with . . .

  As she grabbed onto the newel-post with both hands and squeezed as though she could crush the polished wood, she decided to rid herself of fantasy before it was too late. To deny everything in the face of what she had seen, what she had found, would only tend to make tornados of her confusions and drive her into cellars of madness and warmth. To flow was the answer, to speculate and refute.

  Assume, then, she told herself, that the bird was indeed dead, that her father was indeed dead, that her mother did not bleed—assume it for the moment without a single scream. Assume that this insanity was engendered by Doctor Kraylin—through hypnosis (don't ask yourself how the dead can be affected) or drugs or a combination of both. Assume further, and rightly, that the family had been in minor financial trouble before she herself had left on her tour of Europe; that was an open secret, there could be no argument there. Then Kraylin had convinced one, two, however many of the Yarrows that whatever he did was worth the price that he asked, the price that included a handful of lives.

  Angus. Wal
lace. Father. Perhaps . . . Mother.

  Her brothers were left, then.

  Unless they were dead, too.

  She grinned without mirth: the stumbling block to belief was not the supernatural. More things, Horatio, and the rest of the misquote— she would believe in anything if it could be proven beyond doubt. The stumbling block lay in the fact of her own life, that for the last three months she had been living with the dead. That she would not tolerate, that she would not accept.

  Consider, however, a part of her whispered— wouldn't that account for the changes you saw? Your father without his blustering; Mother's sudden fear of doctors; the indifference you've wept over since the day you got off the plane; Angus' abrupt turnabout and the hiding of truth; the dismissal of the Lennons and Wallace McLeod?

  And that something you sensed each time you came home?

  Could not it have been the absence of life?

  She shook her head vigorously and rushed into the sitting room, to the far side beyond the second fireplace where she flung open the doors of a walnut cabinet. From it she grabbed a bottle of Bourbon, splashed as much as she dared into a tall crystal glass and drank it before she could imagine the burning. And when it came and she gagged, she drank again, and again. Set the glass down and sagged into a chair.

  Insane, of course.

  The whole idea was gothic: drive the poor little rich girl right out of her mind, settle her portion of the dwindling estate and divide it. Divide it. But division meant partners. Two at least; at the most ... my God!

  "All right, Cyd," she said out loud, "you know damned well there's only one way you're going to convince yourself one way or another."

  But she could not get up to go out to the car.

  And in facing that fear and the possibilities it bore she knew that in spite of the storm in her mind, in spite of the denials that all science had taught her ... in spite of it all, she had accepted it all.

  There was no need to face the dead crow that lived.

  "No," she said, ten minutes later.

  "I don't know."