The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “Do I look dead?” the voice asked, and almost against his will, Crawford felt himself turning in the seat.

  He stared into his own face across a gulf of years.

  If Delbert Grubb was dead, he didn’t look it. Through the lattice of the cage, he looked vigorous and unchanged and alive, his big face square and grinning under a cap of close-cropped hair. In the glare of the dome light, his eyes glittered like shards of glass, cold and unafraid of cutting. Crawford saw himself in those eyes—and knew suddenly that no matter how far he ran, no matter how fast, Delbert Grubb would always be there, waiting patiently inside him, biding his time. Delbert Grubb owned a piece of his soul. It was more than Crawford could bear, and to save himself the agony of staring it in the face, he swung shut the door, plunging the car into darkness. He twisted the key savagely and goosed the cruiser onto the twisting two-lane macadam.

  Down through the Run they rode, skirting the edge of Stoney Gap Lake and slipping past the municipal lot where Crawford had spent his first night in the Run all those years ago. And that brought it all back.

  “Glad to see me, Harold?” Delbert Grubb whispered close at his ear. Crawford could feel his breath, warm against the back of his neck.

  “I never wanted to be like you.”

  “You never had a choice. You and I, we’re one and the same, and I won’t be denied, old friend. Not tonight.” Delbert Grubb rattled the mesh, and when Crawford glanced in the rearview mirror, he grinned. “You can’t keep me caged up any longer.”

  “I never wanted to cage you up. I wanted to kill you. I wanted to burn you out of me.”

  “Well, something kept me caged up, something in this shit-pot little town. You ever wonder about that, Harold? You ever wonder what it was?”

  Crawford said nothing.

  “I know you have. Because I’ve wondered, and what I wonder, you wonder. We’re two peas in a pod, old friend.”

  “Shut up,” Crawford said

  The tires sang a different note as the car crossed the Stone Bridge. On the other side, Crawford headed north, searching the shadows out of habit.

  “You’ll never find him, Harold.”

  “Find who?”

  “The man you’re looking for. The rapist.”

  “I’ll find him.”

  “When? After he’s done another one? After he’s done ten? After he’s started cutting them? You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Harold?” Grubb pressed his face to the cage. “Ooooh, help me, help me. I got a demon inside me!” He laughed. “You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? But you can’t quite place it. You know why?”

  Crawford said nothing.

  “Because you don’t want to, that’s why. You like it. You like what he’s doing.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Is it? What about the dog, then? What about Boy?”

  “You shut up about that.”

  “Make me.”

  The cage rattled in its frame. Glancing into the mirror, Crawford saw that Grubb had wormed his fingers through the grid and dragged his face so close that the mesh tattooed his cheek. He whimpered, doglike, fearful, one moist eye rolling. “You remember this, Harold? Huh? You remember this?” He twisted his features into a mask of tongue-lolling desperation, and time slipped, plunging Crawford into killing heat. The dog scrambled away, gray coils of intestines unspooling at its guts. Excitement welled up within him, pressure building at his groin.

  “What about Boy?” Grubb was whispering. “You—”

  Crawford’s foot came down hard on the gas. “Shut up, I said—”

  “—liked the way it felt—

  “—shut up, shut up, shut—”

  “—didn’t you? You got off on it. You came in your fucking uniform like a boy and you liked it!”

  Crawford slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel hard left. The road whirled around him, streaks of darkness and light. The car shuddered to a stop, the engine stalling.

  Crawford drew a deep breath.

  Silence.

  “Even if you find him, Harold, even if you stop him, it won’t bring them back. Not the girl and not LeMarius Oxford, either. You can’t save them.”

  Crawford felt tears slipping down his cheeks.

  “Please,” he said. “Please—”

  “Let’s take a little ride,” Grubb said.

  Crawford plucked the guy out of an otherwise empty rest stop on I-77 at just after one that morning. Delbert Grubb told him how to do it: Just turn on the blue lights, he said, just step out of the car and take him.

  Crawford did it as the guy came down the walk from the rest rooms. The guy was slim and neat, with close-cropped blond hair, maybe thirty-five. Worried about a ticket, you could tell.

  “Is there a problem, officer?” he said.

  Crawford just stood there, silent, a titanic battle raging within him. He could sense Delbert Grubb watching him from the cruiser, could feel deep at his core that tidal pull of rage and desire.

  The guy took a step forward, his wedding band glinting in the orange glare of the halogen streetlamps. Looking at it, Crawford felt a sick wave of vertigo crash over him, as though he had fallen free of the spinning planet. Out on the highway a truck downshifted for a grade. Grubb’s voice—

  —let’s take a little ride—

  —rang inside his head, and the world rocked down around him once again. He felt abruptly stronger, settled and sure.

  “Are you al—” the guy started, but Crawford lifted his flashlight.

  “Problem with your car, sir. You check these tires?”

  “There’s something wrong with my tires?”

  Crawford waved the flashlight. “See there?”

  The guy stepped closer to his car, a Pontiac Sunbird, Florida plates, and Crawford knew suddenly how it was going to happen, knew it to the core of his being, knew it in his sinew and his bones. His senses sharpened, his surroundings snapped into razor-edged focus. He caught a hint of the guy’s cologne, his nostrils flaring. The pavement shimmered in a wash of molten orange. The air tasted of highway, of diesel and iron.

  “What?” The guy leaned forward to take a closer look, and with one smooth motion Crawford reversed the flashlight in his hand and brought it crashing down.

  The guy never said a word, just folded over and settled, sighing, to the pavement. Two minutes later, Crawford was back in the cruiser, pushing hard for home.

  In the end, they were together, he and Delbert Grubb, there in the barn with the big doors flung open to a deluge of gossamer moonlight.

  “Scream,” Delbert Grubb whispered, and the guy screamed. He screamed for mercy and for God and for Mommy, screamed his hatred and his fear and sorrow, screamed to twenty-six acres of nothing—of fallow farm and woodland and unblinking stars.

  “No,” Crawford whispered. “No—”

  But when Grubb leaned forward and handed him the knife—

  —you always liked the wet work, Harold—

  —Crawford bent to the task at hand, feeling the throb of a big engine waking up inside him and knowing that it was this he had been longing for in silence for so long.

  Afterward, he was alone.

  Alone as he dug the grave. Alone beneath a dawning sky as he wrestled the meat into the hole. Alone as he shoveled black November earth into the dead man’s face.

  And then he heard a stirring in the leaves behind him.

  Delbert Grubb grinned.

  “One more thing, Harold,” he said. “The line you’ve been trying to remember? The bit about the demons?”

  Crawford dropped the shovel and straightened up, his hands blistered and aching at his thighs.

  “You talked to the guy eight or nine years ago. A child abuse case. It never went to trial. Remember?”

  And Crawford did. He remembered it all: the Crook’s Hollow trailer park where it had happened; the girl; and the guy himself, her common-law stepfather, lean and grizzled and sobbing as he blamed the demon inside him. In the end, the girl had ch
anged her story, the sex suddenly consensual despite her stepfather’s confession. Crawford remembered the magpie gleam in her mother’s eyes when she came to tell him, like a crow toying with a shiny piece of foil. He even remembered the guy’s name.

  “Kimball,” he said. “Earl Kimball.”

  “That’s right, Harold. And that’s the way we’ll work it. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. But remember this: It’s never going to bring them back, not the girl and not LeMarius Oxford, not our poor friend there in the dirt.”

  “Maybe not,” Crawford said. “But it’s a start.”

  Somewhere in the ridges above him, the creature writhed in agony as the pain built to a crescendo and slowly died away.

  Crawford turned to his work. When he looked up again, Delbert Grubb was gone. He would be back, though. Crawford understood that now.

  It was midmorning by the time he made his way upstairs to bed, his shoulders aching, his hands blistered from the shovel. He lay awake for a long time, and when he fell at last into a thin, uneasy sleep, he dreamed once again that he was walking along that broken shore. The black figure heaved in the distant tide, and as Crawford drew closer, he found himself possessed once again by the wild hope that he might yet save the drowning man, that everything might yet be forgiven. He plunged into the surf, the dark water rising around him. With trembling fingers he touched the figure at last. Bloated and noxious—long past any hope of salvation—the corpse turned its ravaged features to the sky. Crawford found himself staring down at his own decaying visage, into the blasted face of all his hopes and dreams.

  Prelude to a Storm

  The Present

  Chapter 14

  He woke to darkness, in the grip of dread: a thunder of wings, the old familiar rush of fear and guilt.

  Perry, he thought, Perry—

  “Henry?”

  Hands touched his shoulders and face. Henry thrashed, blind with terror, and then the sound of the voice erupted like a flare inside his mind, illumination, her voice and the scent of her body, the taste of it against his tongue. The hours just past came flooding back to him. Frustrated and exhausted from a day of sorting and re-sorting papers—his father must have kept everything—Henry had arrived at the Tipple late. He’d wanted a nightcap, that’s all—a nightcap and maybe an hour of company. But Emily, flushed and harried from running drunks, had brightened when she saw him, and Henry felt an answering shift, a tectonic realignment along some hidden emotional fault line. He had come back to the Run because of his father, he realized suddenly, but Emily was one of the central reasons—maybe the reason—he had elected to stay.

  The insight rendered Henry nervous and overdirect. After the bar had emptied, he’d simply blurted the words out, like the proposition of some overeager hustler on the make. Come home with me, he’d said, wincing at his own clumsiness, and forestalling her reply—

  —not yet, it’s too soon—

  —with an upraised hand.

  Just think about it, he said.

  She had slipped a Gene Ammons disc into the stereo and turned away. Muscling cases of beer out of the store-room, Henry had kept his eye on her, trying to read her answer in the set of her shoulders. She was wiping down the bar when he finished rotating the fresh beer into the coolers.

  Emily, he had said.

  I can’t.

  I’ll go, then, he said. He embraced her, but she held herself apart, her spine rigid under his hands.

  Outside, the air was frigid, the sky starless, pregnant with snow. He sat in the Volaré for a moment, waiting for the heater to melt the frost riming the windshield. When he wheeled the car around toward the street, she was standing in the doorway.

  He rolled down the window, and she bent to peer in at him, her breath fogging the chill air.

  Can I trust you not to hurt me this time? she had said.

  You can trust me to try not to.

  She stared in at him for a long moment, and then she nodded, almost imperceptibly. All right, then. I’ll follow you.

  And now she was here, coaxing him into this embrace—

  “Shhh, it’s just a dream, shhh—”

  —and everything got tangled up somehow, the flutter of her pulse beneath his lips and the nightmare world inside his head, the black corridors of dream.

  Then she was warm beneath him and none of that mattered anymore.

  Henry closed his eyes.

  The first time had been awkward, a tangle of knees and elbows, old lovers getting reacquainted. This second time was sweeter, and in the moment of release, Henry slipped the traces of nightmare. Afterward, he felt the pull of sleep like gravity, dreamless and deep.

  “You said a name.”

  The words jarred him awake.

  “What?”

  “In your dream. You said Perry Holland’s name.”

  He lay still for a moment, thinking of that long-ago July, the sky boiling with storm, Perry’s dark hair slick across his skull. He recalled kneeling to push his way into the wormhole, dust motes whirling in the wavering glare of the flashlight, and … and—

  Nothing.

  He could sense the memory, embryonic, almost formed, waiting to be born.

  “What is it, Henry?”

  She had rolled to look at him, her face earnest in the shadows.

  “Just a nightmare.”

  “You have a lot of nightmares?”

  “Not really.” He hesitated. “The same one over and over, actually.”

  “How long has that been going on?”

  “Years. Most of my life, I guess. Two or three times a week.”

  “And you’ve never told me?”

  “I’ve never told anyone.”

  She was silent. Then: “You have nightmares about Perry Holland?”

  He laughed. “I—not exactly. Years ago, when I was twelve, Perry and I were fooling around up at Holland Coal. It was the day my mother died.”

  “The day of the flood?”

  “Yeah, and—it sounds crazy—but something else happened that day. I don’t know what. I just lost several hours somehow, most of the afternoon—just gone. Perry and I, we got caught in the rain. I had found this hole, a shaft into one of the old mines. The last thing I remember is worming my way into that hole. Perry was right in front of me. And then … nothing.” He shrugged. “That night, I had this dream, this nightmare. I’m lost in the mines and something’s after me. I don’t know what. And I’m looking for something, too, and I don’t know what that is either.” He paused. “That’s the dream, more or less. I’ve had it ever since, but it’s worse, a lot worse, when I’m here in the Run.”

  She put her head on his shoulder, let one hand trail across his chest.

  “So you keep running away.”

  “Not only from the dream, I guess. From whatever the dream means.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  He thought about it for a moment, thought about those awkward high school years they had spent together, caught between the Run and Crook’s Hollow, and afterward that single summer and the words she had used to end it: If you leave, don’t come back. Yet he had come back, and she had given him another chance. Don’t blow it, he thought.

  Aloud, he said, “Yeah, I want to tell you everything.”

  But the words were hard to find. Even as they took form in the air around him, irretrievable, he wanted to draw them back. What possessed a kind of crazy logic in his own mind—his father’s death, the dream and its variations, the obscurely sensed but inarticulate connections between them—

  —it’s time, Henry, come home—

  —seemed bizarre when spoken aloud, even in the dark. By daylight, he knew, it would sound stranger still. By daylight, it would sound insane. Yet as the night grew colder and a light snow dusted the mullions, he forced the story out. He didn’t know how long he talked—forty-five minutes, maybe an hour—but when the last word dropped into the dark like a stone, the ripples rolling away into silence, he could feel th
e full strangeness of the tale—ghostly visitations and winged unseen pursuers—bearing down on him. He drew a breath, waited, said, “It’s crazy, I know—”

  “It sounds crazy,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it is crazy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Facts and truth,” she said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Remember what you told me at the church? Facts and truths aren’t necessarily the same thing?”

  His father’s words.

  He remembered all right. How old had he been when his father had said that? Ten? Eleven? They had been sitting on the deck, gazing down through gauzy autumn dark as the lights in the town below began to wink to life. In those days—before his mother died, before his father retreated into silence—they could still talk about the things that troubled him.

  Emily touched his hand. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s not crazy. How does it all connect in your mind?”

  He hesitated.

  “Don’t think about it. Just answer the question.”

  “The mines,” he said, “it all connects with the mines.”

  “Because of what happened to you and Perry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me what you remember about that day.”

  “What I remember?” He punched at his pillow. “I remember everything, everything but those missing hours. I remember how my father told me not to go anywhere and how I went anyway. I remember how angry I was. God, I was angry. I remember the rain and Perry’s face and the way my clothes smelled drying in Harold Crawford’s car, and when we got home I remember thinking it was my fault—”

  “What was your fault?”

  “Everything. I should have been there to say goodbye. I should never have gone to the mines, never have abandoned Perry—”

  “What?”

  Henry paused, the dark room wheeling around him. He said the words again, slowly, the taste of them strange in his mouth: “I should never have abandoned Perry.”

  “Maybe you miss Perry,” she said. “Maybe that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “I wonder what I’m running away from.”

  In the succeeding silence, Aquinas mewed softly. He leaped onto the bed and settled between them, purring—a scrap of shadow pierced by shining eyes, like bright and gleaming holes into another time.