The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  Perry Holland turned to face him.

  “They’re full of light,” he said. “My dreams are full of light.”

  The entrance hall was empty.

  Coatless, Henry let himself out into cutting wind and snow, the town barely visible below the escarpment, a paltry sprinkle of stars. He was opening the door of the Volaré when the old woman appeared out of the shadows.

  “I brought your coat,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, pulling it around him. “That was kind of you.”

  He reached for the door handle, but the woman didn’t turn back to the house.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I was listening.”

  He stepped toward her. In the swimming, snow-whipped light from the library, her sharp face was still and serious; her bright eyes did not move away from his.

  “I’m afraid for him,” she said. “Please help him.”

  “He’ll have to let me. You’ll have to convince him to talk to me. Can you do that?”

  “I can try.”

  “Soon,” he said. “Do it soon. Have him call me.”

  Another thought struck him, an image: Harold Crawford looming up behind the desk, clutching the stapler like an old stone savage armed. He touched her hand, leaned closer. “If something should happen to me, there’s a reporter named Benjamin Strange. He’s been looking into this. He lives in town, over the newspaper office. You could try him.”

  Nodding, a bare inclination of her head, she started back to the house.

  “Mrs. Holland,” he called after her.

  She glanced back at him.

  “What’s your name?”

  He thought she might have smiled. “Willa,” she said, and then she went on toward the house. Henry watched through dark and whirling snow until the door had shut behind her.

  Chapter 19

  Henry braked at the bottom of the hill and sat for a moment, watching snow drift endlessly out of the night sky. It steamed off the hood in smoky curls and melted on the windshield, leaving ghostly smudges of water on the glass. He adjusted the heat, basking in the rush of warmth across his hands and face.

  He studied the strip of pavement winding past into town. By midnight, the roads would begin to freeze, but it was early still. They might remain passable for hours. A left would take him down Mill Creek Road to High Street, across town, home. A right would lead him into the mountains, to Asa Cade’s house. He thought of Asa—Asa with his mystery investments in Holland Coal, Asa with his dreams—and another disembodied phrase came back to him, another voice: Cindy and I, you were the child we never had. She couldn’t take it if something happened to you. As if Asa had feared something would happen unless Henry were careful. Something dreadful. Something like the thing that had happened to his father.

  Sell the house, Asa had told him. Go.

  It wasn’t hard to read his insistence as a warning.

  Asa had seen what had been done to Quincy Sleep—what Crawford had done, Henry thought, feeling the certainty of it in his bones—and he was afraid.

  He was afraid.

  Henry felt his groin tighten, his testicles draw close against his body. He touched the gas, easing the Volaré into the street, toward the mountains, where Asa Cade awaited him.

  The snow had picked up by the time he reached the house, a seventies-era brick rancher blazing warmly through a screen of pines. He got out of the car and trudged toward the house through an inch and a half of powder, his breath a plume of gray vapor. Wind-driven grains of snow stung his cheeks.

  He pushed the doorbell and listened as it chimed dimly beyond the door. Thinking of Cindy’s words—

  —he’s stone drunk more often than he’s sober—

  —he pulled back his sleeve to glance at his watch, hoping he had gotten here before Asa crawled too deep into the bottle.

  Six forty. Early yet.

  He pushed the doorbell again. Crossing his arms, he stamped his feet and gazed back at the car, its nose pointed down the long, twisting driveway. Blackness pooled under the trees.

  He rang the doorbell again, then leaned over to peek through the narrow vertical window by the door. Through the sheer drapes, he could see the bright hallway, a corner of the dining room. Nothing moved within. His heart picked up a beat. A vein pulsed at his temple.

  “Shit,” he said quietly.

  Lights blazed in almost every window. Surely they were home.

  Still …

  He went down the stairs and across the yard to the carport. Both vehicles were there, Cindy Cade’s chocolate Mercedes and Asa’s F-150, their rear ends dusted with snow.

  He stepped closer, peering into the shadowy interior.

  Nothing.

  The night was brighter than he would have thought. The snow seemed to possess an internal radiance, a reflection of the lights from the house maybe. A silvery gleam infused the scene, making the interior dark of the carport blacker still by contrast.

  Henry sighed, feeling that vein pulse at his temple.

  He stepped between the cars, skating his hands along the chill metal sides to guide him. As his eyes adjusted, the vehicles assumed a shadowy solidity, their noses snug against the back wall of the carport. When he slid his hands along their hoods he found them cold.

  He glanced at the gray square of the carport’s mouth. The wind hurled a billowing white sheet across the yard.

  He should go, before the roads started to freeze.

  He had started edging back between the parked vehicles, when something else caught his attention, an odor rising up through the carport’s layered scent of gasoline and exhaust fumes. Something burning.

  His guts twisted.

  Sucking in his breath, he sidled through the foot or so of space between the hood of the Mercedes and the carport wall. As he came around the far end of the car, searching the gloom for the concrete stairs to the side door, his foot snagged a rake propped carelessly in the corner.

  It crashed to the floor. He jumped back, banging his leg against the side of the car. In the ensuing silence, the panicked drumbeat of his heart sounded like a cannonade.

  Elsewhere there was no sound. No rush of footsteps in the silent house, no voices raised in challenge.

  No one snapped on the carport lights.

  Wind whispered across the roof of the carport.

  He dragged in a lungful of frigid air.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Stepping over the rake, he felt for the first step with his foot and climbed quickly to the door. He was certain that it would be locked, but the knob turned in his palm and he eased it open, wincing as the hinges emitted a low-pitched whine.

  A wedge of light fell into the carport and the acrid stench of something burning grew stronger. Narrowing his eyes against the brightness, he stepped into the kitchen and shut the door behind him. He surveyed the room swiftly and then crossed to the range, where a saucepan of soupy cheese sauce had boiled over onto a hot burner. The smell was awful, and the pot itself had begun to blacken. He switched the burner off and dropped the saucepan in the sink, wincing as the handle singed his palm. He wanted to curse, but he gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut instead, for now he knew that something had gone dreadfully wrong here.

  Sweat trickled down the narrow valley of his spine, and a metallic taste filled his mouth, the taste of dread and fear, his own black foreboding. Icy panic rose into his throat, and he swallowed deliberately, forcing himself to remain calm.

  Focused.

  He crossed the room and peeked into the dining room. The table had been set for two—roast beef and vegetables congealing untouched upon a platter, a bowl of steamed broccoli.

  He stood there for a moment thinking of Cindy Cade—plump, dimpled, pleasant Cindy Cade—scuttling between the kitchen and the dining room with these items. Worried—he knew she had been worried—but determined to go on as normally as possible, though her husband had begun a slow degeneration into drunkenness, haunted by dre
ams he dared not share with her.

  Henry folded his hands into fists and unfolded them once again. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t happened long ago.

  Was he alone here?

  Panic hammered at him. He slipped through the dining room, pausing in the foyer to peer out into the snowy night where the Volaré awaited him. Then a quick glance into the living room, also empty, and down the hallway into the rear of the house. A bathroom, a glare of white fluorescent, his own startled face surfacing in a silver sheen of mirror. He snapped off the light, kept moving. A spare bedroom, also empty, and beyond that two doorways: to his left, Asa’s office, the door slightly ajar; to his right the door into the darkened master bedroom, standing open. He paused here as a series of frenzied thoughts detonated in his mind.

  The lady or the tiger?

  He squeezed his eyes shut and drew a breath. A faraway voice was chanting hysterically in his mind—What will it be now, door number one or door number two, door number one or door—and he recognized that he had stopped thinking in any rational way when he stepped into the kitchen and smelled the flat, unpleasant odor of blackened cheese.

  Yet a dread imperative urged him on.

  He felt tears, hot against his cheeks, and it occurred to him in some distant corner of his mind, far removed from the hysterical babble—

  —door number one or—

  —that filled his conscious thoughts, to wonder how long he had been crying.

  “I think I’ll take door number two, Bob,” he whispered to himself. “Let’s hope it’s the vacation getaway.”

  He stepped into the darkened bedroom and turned on the light.

  Cindy Cade lay on her back just inside the door, three neat holes in her chest, like bloody mouths. There was more blood than he would have imagined. The room stank of shit and urine and an odor like burned rope that he thought might be cordite. Dead, he knew she was dead, she had to be dead, yet he found himself kneeling beside her—he thought he owed it to her—fumbling for a pulse and God God God her flesh was still warm—

  He moaned softly, unconsciously, that question—

  —was he alone here was he—

  —blazing through his mind.

  He gasped, letting her wrist slide limply to the floor.

  Asa was on the far side of the bed. He did not crouch beside him, did not touch his flesh. Asa had been shot in the face, the impact fanning blood and hair and chunks of bone over the comforter, the headboard, the wall beyond. The nightstand had overturned, spilling change and matchbooks, magazines, an ashtray, a twisted pair of Asa’s half-rim spectacles. And something else: a revolver and a box of bullets, just visible inside a broken drawer.

  Unbidden, his mind dished up a grim little movie, Asa diving for the pistol as the intruder—

  —Crawford—

  —stepped over Cindy’s body—

  Henry felt his gorge rise. He stepped around the body, stumbled into the bathroom, and vomited into the toilet. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, flushed the mess away, splashed cold water on his cheeks.

  Back in the bedroom, he fumbled numbly with the gun. Sooner or later, he couldn’t say how long, he figured out how to open the cylinder. He shoved bullets into the chambers with trembling fingers, spilling three or four to the carpet. Sliding the box into a coat pocket, he returned to the hallway, the pistol clutched in his right hand.

  He did not bother to shut off the lights behind him. Somewhere between the hall and the front door events became very confused. He seemed to slide away into a black abyss.

  The whole thing might have happened to some other man.

  He came back to himself behind the wheel of the Volaré. A narrow span of snow-obscured pavement snaked off through overhanging trees. Snow blew furiously out of the dark, catching fire in the twin funnels of his high beams. The road dipped and twisted hard left before him.

  Even as he realized that he was going too fast, the rear end of the Volaré slid out to the right behind him. He wrenched at the steering wheel, trying to recall whether he was supposed to brake or steer into the slide, but Asa Cade’s shattered face kept swimming out of the snow before him.

  Then it was too late.

  Henry caught glimpses of sky and snow and barren wind-tossed limbs as the car spun across the icy road in eerie stillness. The silence erupted as it jolted through the underbrush and plunged downhill. Branches cracked and whipped the chassis, metal shrieked, a rear window shattered in a rain of glass. The car slammed against an up-looming tree with a teeth-rattling crash. Henry flew forward, smashing his head against the steering wheel. A beacon flared inside his skull and faded into darkness. He slumped against the cracked vinyl of the front seat.

  Outside, snow continued to fall.

  Chapter 20

  Cold woke him.

  Consciousness came back in shards—a numbed awareness of his fingers and toes, a trickle of moisture at his mouth, a faraway throb in his back and shoulders, like a toothache in his bones. Henry opened his eyes. Through a spiderweb of windshield cracks, a stark monochrome world took shape: the black boles of trees, like sentinel giants, a chill radiance of snow. He flexed his fingers, fat and clumsy as sausages.

  Then a wash of bloody memory—

  —Asa, Cindy—

  —sent bright panic jolting through his system.

  He moved suddenly, too suddenly, and the toothache in his bones flared into a root canal, sans anesthetic.

  Slowly, then. Slowly, trying to ignore the white-water current of his thoughts—

  —you’re going to freeze to death—

  —he took stock of himself. He rolled his head on his shoulders and gritted his teeth against the buffeting tides of nausea. He curled his fingers and toes, grimacing as a thousand needles pierced them. He wiped away the moisture at the corner of his mouth: blood, black on his sleeve.

  He looked up. The Volaré listed at the angle of the slope, at rest in a cradle of trees—one beyond the smashed hood, the other wedged under the front right quarter-panel. He lay in the corner framed by the seat and the passenger-side door; beyond the driver’s-side window opposite, he could see a distant shoulder of road. Snow fell through the trees, already obscuring the tire tracks and twisted bracken.

  Letting his gaze rove over the interior of the car, he recovered the gun from the leg well on the passenger side and slid it into a coat pocket. He found a knit cap in the glove compartment, a single glove beneath the seat. He spent a moment searching for its mate, then gave it up. The residual ache in his bones had begun to escalate into paralyzing soreness. He had to move while moving was still an option.

  Clawing at the cracked vinyl, he scrambled up the seat and out the driver’s-side door. He slogged uphill toward the road. He fell twice before he gained the pavement. His clothes and shoes were soaked through, and the panicky voice babbling away inside him—the one screaming about frostbite and lost fingers and facial disfigurement—had begun to grate on his nerves.

  Yet he could not silence it.

  For now, standing at the edge of the mountain road, he could see that frostbite and disfigurement—even death—were very real possibilities. Up here the wind had a keen arctic edge that sliced through his heavy coat and whittled his waterlogged pants into brittle columns of ice. Snow drove at him, abrasive as sand. The road was covered, impassable without chains and four-wheel drive. Maybe even then.

  Which left him stranded in the midst of a blizzard, injured, very likely in shock, maybe hunted.

  The word echoed inside his head.

  Hunted.

  He wheeled around, his feet unsteady. Skeletal trees loomed up, a low sky filled with wind-driven snow, the black shoulder of a mountain. To the southwest, just visible through the shifting veils of storm, a faraway twinkle of light.

  The Run.

  Henry turned up his collar, shoved his hands into his pockets, and began to trudge down the mountain toward the dim and beckoning lights.

  At first, he lurched along
in the shelter of the overhanging mountain, his hands in his pockets, his face turned down. Before long, however, the snow had drifted knee-high there, forcing him to the other side of the road, where the bluff fell away into a wooded ravine.

  Even here progress was difficult. His icy clothes clung to him. The wind drove a steady, freezing whiplash of fresh snow into his face. Now and again, he staggered into the trees for a moment’s refuge, but each time an image of his own lifeless body—his flesh blanched, his hair frozen in Medusa coils, his eyelashes blistered with ice—forced him into motion once again.

  All sense of time fled. It seemed as though he had never done anything but walk, that he might walk forever. He didn’t even care, by then. He only continued because he thought he would be warmer walking than lying down in the snow. For now, anyway. If it got too much worse, he could lie down. And the promise of this, of death in the snow, painless and warm, sustained him to walk for a while yet. Eons later, he had forgotten ever dreaming such a death. He walked because he had always walked.

  Once, as he drew close to town—he’d been walking for eternities, by then—a salt truck lumbered by, its chains chewing at the ice. His first impulse was to flag it down. Then a bleak image—

  —Asa’s shattered face—

  —rose up in his mind and he retreated into the trees instead, his heart pounding. Unbidden, his hand had gone to the butt of the pistol tucked inside his pocket. Breathless, he watched the truck’s taillights dwindle in the distance. When even the sound of the engine had faded, he stepped back onto the road, resumed the nightmare journey.

  Eventually, Holland House reared up above him. Henry shrank into the shadows as unwelcome images swarmed out of the night. Cindy Cade, her face frozen in terror, her three wounds like bloody smiles. Asa’s gory face. Last of all his father.

  “You can’t be here,” he whispered when Quincy Sleep came striding out of the snow. “You’re dead.”

  Yet he was. Here. Here, as Henry had so often seen him, clad in washed-out jeans and a flannel shirt.

  Henry felt a touch at his elbow, turning him up High Street, the black expanse of the lake behind them. No lights gleamed in the storefronts or the second-floor apartments; the snow lay alike over everything, trackless and serene, over buildings and cars and shrubs and sidewalks, mere shapes beneath the endless blanket of white. Like a dream world. And here his father, here Quincy Sleep, striding beside him after all this time, and after all this pain, untouched by weather.