THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Book 1: Shades of Night, Falling

by John J. Miller

  It was the Captain’s voice, Thomas thought. Benjamin Noir’s.

  Geiststadt’s joiner, Karl Hellig, and his teen-aged apprentice were delivering the coffin, one of three they’d stayed up all night making, just as Jon and Constable Pierce arrived at Schmidt’s shop.

  “Gonna bury ’im today?” Karl asked.

  “Gracious, yes,” Constable Pierce said. “He hasn’t been kept on ice, has he?”

  “Nope. Just laid out on one of the tables in his shop.” Hellig paused. “Girl’s been in there all night. No one wants to sit with her.”

  “Can’t say I blame them much,” Pierce said.

  “Not going to want him buried in the cemetery either, I reckon.”

  “That’s outrageous,” Jon said.

  Hellig was a Derlicht man, but he’d help put up Noir [153] Manor over twenty years ago and he’d been paid in gold, not chickens. Benjamin Noir had sent a lot of other business his way over the years, as well. He scuffed the ground, spat.

  “I’m just saying, is all. The people are upset. They think he’s the killer.”

  “Well, now,” Constable Pierce said thoughtfully. “There’s no real evidence of that. Indications, maybe. Nothing conclusive.”

  “You don’t think he did it, then killed himself in remorse?” Jon asked him.

  “Good gracious,” the constable said mildly, “most killers lack remorse, my boy. That’s why they’re killers. The good cooper seemed to have demons, all right. Maybe they eventually drove him to kill himself. But did they drive him to kill others?” Pierce shook his head. “That’s the question. Yes, it is.”

  “People here think he did it because he’s a stranger,” Jon said.

  Pierce looked at him. “You’re all strangers to me, son.”

  Jon nodded thoughtfully. Possibly the constable had depths to him that weren’t readily apparent.

  “Can you give me a few moments with Trudi alone?” he asked.

  Pierce looked at the joiner and his apprentice. “Well ... he’s got to be put in the coffin. Lid has to be nailed down. She might not want to see that. Maybe you should take her somewhere while that’s being done.”

  “All right.”

  He rapped softly on the door. They all waited, long [154] enough for Jon to consider knocking again, but Trudi finally opened the door.

  “Hello,” Jon said.

  She looked at him silently. It was clear that she hadn’t slept. It was clear also that she was being dragged down by a grief that was almost too great for her to bear. Jon’s heart near broke when he saw the sadness on her face, in her red, tear-swollen eyes.

  “Pardon us, miss,” Heller said, touching his forehead. “We have to, to ...”

  “Yes,” she said listlessly. “Go on in.”

  Heller nodded. He and his apprentice carried the coffin inside the shop. Pierce looked at Jon mildly for a moment, nodded, and joined them inside, leaving Jon and Trudi alone in the doorway.

  “Trudi ... I ...” Jon wanted to put his arms around her and hold her, but he remembered Thomas’s words from the night before and they stopped him cold. “I know you’re not feeling well—”

  “My father is dead,” she said in a low voice. “He was my only family. With him gone I have no one. I have no way of making a living ...”

  “Is that why,” Jon asked, “you’re going to marry Thomas?”

  Trudi’s expression changed. Her eyes went distant, her voice hollow, almost as if she were talking to herself.

  “Thomas will take care of me,” she said. There was no passion, hardly any expression of emotion at all in her voice.

  “And you,” Jon asked, “and you love him?”

  “I love him,” she repeated.

  [155] “You don’t even know him,” Jon said, aware of the sudden anguish in his voice. “You just met him yesterday. You don’t know what he can be like.”

  “I love him,” she said again, in a tone as remote and distant as if she were commenting on a dream she’d once had, but mostly forgotten.

  Jon looked at her. There was something wrong—something very wrong in Geiststadt. And it had all started with his brother’s return to the village. It was all, somehow, centered around Thomas Noir.

  Thomas was still in bed when Callie came up to his room to announce breakfast.

  “Time to rise, young master,” she told him. “Everyone else has already breakfasted.”

  “Everyone?” he asked from the sanctuary of his bed. “Even the Captain?”

  “The Captain? Of course.”

  “And how was he this fine morning?”

  She looked at him, a deep frown throwing the wrinkled geography of her ancient face into high relief.

  “As always,” she said.

  Thomas nodded. Not for long, he thought.

  “There is much to be done today,” Callie said. “Mr. Irving wishes to see you. He is in the waiting room. The Captain wishes to see you in his study.”

  “Then I’d best get going, hadn’t I?” Thomas asked with a try at his usual grin. From the expression on Callie’s face, it wasn’t a complete success. “Tell Irving I’ll be with him presently. And send McCool to me.”

  “That redheaded devil,” Callie muttered. “He does [156] nothing but slink around the house all day, drinking our tea and eating our food.”

  “He has his uses,” Thomas said. “Now go.”

  Callie looked at him, her expression unreadable.

  “You’re not the master yet,” she said. Though she dared not say it aloud her tone implied that perhaps he never would be.

  “Lucky for you, old woman,” Thomas said with more confidence than he felt.

  “Why is that Master Thomas?” she asked, unafraid. “You’d throw me out of the household, who’s looked after you since that cursed night you were born?”

  “I need no one to look after me now, old woman,” Thomas said. “So what use are you?”

  She nodded at him grimly. “You are your father’s son. You have little of your mother in you, boy. Not like your brother.”

  “Thank God for that,” Thomas said heartily. “Jonathan’s a fool, a soft fool. He’d allow useless old women to sit rocking before the fire all day while he played with the cattle and corn. But not me.” Thomas allowed his anger to show through. “Not me. I have ambition. I have plans.”

  “I’m sure you do, young master,” Callie said, backing out of the room, her ancient face again an unreadable mask of uncountable wrinkles and hard, staring eyes. There was a flintiness about her, Thomas thought, a toughness, that was almost inhuman.

  He threw himself out of bed the moment she shut the door, poured tepid water out of the pitcher sitting on the night stand next to his bed, and splashed his face. No [157] time to wash more thoroughly. No time to take care with his dress. He had to see what that infernal busybody, Irving, wanted. First, though, McCool.

  Thomas’s man entered his bedroom when he was only half-dressed. He wore his usual mock-subservient expression.

  “Yes, son?” he asked laconically.

  “Today,” Thomas said, “as soon as it’s feasible.”

  “Why the rush?” McCool asked.

  Thomas looked troubled. “I think he’s trying to kill me.”

  McCool laughed. “What a lovely family you have, Your Honor.”

  “Shut up,” Thomas said. “You forget your place.”

  “No, sorr. Not me, sorr. Never, sorr.”

  Thomas looked at him. Here was another who had to go, once he had the power. But the smile on McCool’s face was more genuine than mocking. He was a man, Thomas thought, who loved his job.

  “We must kill the Captain.”

  “You mean,” McCool said silkily, “I must”

  “Yes.” Though he had always known that it would come to this, though all his plans had been laid to bring this much-desired outcome to fruition, for the first time Thomas felt as if he were taking an irrevocable step down the road to Hell. But, Thomas thought, it wasn’t his faul
t. He had to do it. The Captain was forcing his hand. Besides, there were no Gods, Christian or Egyptian ruling the universe. There was no right or wrong. There was only survival.

  [158] “You have to kill the Captain, before he kills me.”

  It was the first time Jon had been in church since his sister Sara had wed four years ago.

  It hadn’t changed. It was still darkly claustrophobic, still too crowded with densely packed bodies. The fact that it was a triple funeral instead of a wedding had curiously little effect on the minister who’d come from Brooklyn. He was remarkably phlegmatic in expression, dour in tone. Apparently, it was all one to him whether he was marrying or burying.

  Jon and Seth were the only Noirs in attendance, besides Sara and Emily, who, since their marriages, were no longer Noirs in name. Isaac and the other Noir field hands were there with their families, as well as nearly the entire non-Noir population of Geiststadt. There’d been some ugly whispers when Johann Schmidt’s casket, accompanied only by Trudi, had been carried by Hellig and his apprentice down the aisle and placed with the other coffins near the altar, but the whispers had been silenced when the pastor abruptly began the service as if—as was probably true—he had other places than Geiststadt that he wished to be.

  The service itself seemed interminable, as was the hellfire sermon preached in German to a mostly approving townsfolk. It was not to Jon’s taste. He soon found his attention wandering, but there was nothing in the church for it to fasten upon.

  The pastor seemed to take forever to finish, but finally he thundered his last damnation and the congregation sang their last gloomy hymn and began to file out of the [159] small church. The funeral procession formed immediately as pallbearers brought the coffins out one by one. Jon served as one of Erich’s bearers, along with Isaac and four other Noir workmen. Rolf Derlicht was borne to the horse-drawn funeral carriage by a quartet of stalwart Derlicht retainers. Agatha Derlicht, shaking with her usual incessant tremors, led the way. Rolfs coffin was put in the carriage first, then Erich’s was placed next to it. Jon paused, looking around.

  “Where’s Schmidt’s coffin?” he asked.

  Isaac shrugged. “I didn’t see anyone near it when we were taking up Erich, excepting Miss Trudi.”

  Of course. Trudi had no one to act as pallbearers for her father’s coffin.

  “Come on,” Jon said. Isaac followed him back into the church, along with a couple other Noir field hands Jon gathered. Trudi was standing alone and forlorn by her father’s coffin. Hellig had been scared off by the reception Schmidt had gotten when they’d brought his coffin into the church.

  “Let us take him,” Jon said quietly, and she nodded in silent gratitude. They lifted the coffin and carried it outside, placing it in the wagon atop Erich’s and Rolf Derlicht’s. The black-garbed wagon driver clicked his tongue and flicked the reins, geeing up the two horses who sedately plodded towards the cemetery. Most of the village followed in procession, led by the pastor.

  Jon was near the front rank, near but not next to Trudi, Isaac trudging along at his side. He was desperate to talk to her, to again plead with her about her disastrous decision to marry Thomas, but he knew that this [160] was not the place, nor the time, to bring up such a delicate subject. His only hope, he realized, was to be patient. To wait for some time to pass so that the wounds opened by the tragic and violent loss of her father could heal at least a little.

  “Jon—”

  He heard Isaac say his name in a low, uncertain voice. Felt him tug at his shirtsleeve. He glanced at his friend, who had a worried expression on his face. He was looking around uneasily as the procession trudged slowly up to the graveyard. They were outside of Geiststadt’s loosely defined village limits, not far from the enclosed cemetery grounds. He looked at Isaac inquiringly, wondering what was bothering him.

  “The birds, Jon.”

  Jon Noir frowned. He glanced around and then saw what Isaac was indicating with a slight gesture of his head. The birds.

  Crows. They were a common species around Geiststadt, around any rural agricultural village where they made their living off the fields and garbage dumps of men. But they never acted like this. Hundreds of them were perched, silent and unmoving, on the stone wall that surrounded the burial ground. They were absolutely silent and seemed unnaturally fixated on the approaching procession. They could have been dead and stuffed but for the intent stares of their unblinking eyes and the occasional silent ruffle of feathers as the funeral cortege ground to an uncertain halt before the cemetery gate.

  “What does this mean?” the pastor from Brooklyn wondered out loud.

  [161] Damned if I know, Jon thought to himself, but he contented himself with a shake of his head and a noncommittal shrug. No one else had any answers either. The pastor stood for a long moment, as if in total uncertainty himself, and then finally turned his gaze to Trudi.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what this, this gathering of crows means. Perhaps nothing. But perhaps it is a sign from God that we cannot allow Johann Schmidt’s body to be buried within the cemetery.”

  “Why not?” Trudi asked, astonished.

  “I understand it’s probable that he’s a suicide,” the pastor said stiffly. “If so, he cannot be buried in hallowed ground. I don’t know what else this, this extraordinary omen can mean. It must be a sign from God.”

  “It hasn’t been proven that Johann Schmidt killed himself,” Jon said hotly.

  “He was a suicide and a murderer,” someone said from the mass of townsfolk behind them, and many repeated the ugly words in angry murmurs.

  “It hasn’t been proven,” Jon repeated.

  “This sign is good enough for me,” someone said.

  “Because of some inexplicable behavior by a bunch of birds—” Jon began angrily, and Isaac laid a hand warningly on his arm.

  “You can say nothing to change their minds,” Isaac said quietly, so only Jon could hear. “And who knows what will happen if you whip up their anger.”

  Jon nodded. He could see the wisdom in his friend’s words. There was a sudden stirring in the crowd. As Trudi protested willing hands came forward and dragged her father’s coffin from the wagon, setting it none too gently [162] upon the ground. Jon went to her side and put his hand on her arm, but she only stared wordlessly, stiffly, at her father’s coffin as the procession started up again.

  As they crossed the boundary into the graveyard, the flock of crows exploded into the sky as if whatever bonds holding them to the stone wall had simultaneously burst. But unlike all crows Jon had ever observed, these were quiet, their raucous caws unnaturally stilled. They winged in patternless chaos in the sky over the burial ground, then flew off and disappeared among the trees on the higher slopes of HangedMan’s Hill.

  For a moment, standing there in the warmth of a late June afternoon, Jon shivered. He felt the cold touch of death pass by ever so close, then vanish.

  Trudi cried, and there was nothing he could do to comfort her.

  “What will we do?” she asked, disconsolate. “What we will do with my father?”

  Jon and Isaac looked at each other for a long moment, then Isaac looked up towards the old burial ground of Dunkelstad. Jon nodded.

  “There’s always the old cemetery,” he said as gently as he could. “We could bury him there. Isaac and I. If you want.”

  Trudi looked at him. There was nothing but misery and sadness in her eyes.

  “It’s still sacred land, Miss Trudi,” Isaac said. “Once was and always will be.”

  Finally she nodded. Jon and Isaac shouldered the burden of coffin and body. They never could have done it just by themselves, Jon knew, without Isaac’s [163] extraordinary strength. They made their way slowly and carefully up slope, further up the hillside to the abandoned cemetery.

  It was, Jon knew, going to be a long, hot afternoon.

  10.

  Noir Manor was virtually deserted inside and out. Callie was in her usual place rocking
before the fireplace, thinking whatever thoughts occupied her mind nowadays. James was already drunk in his room, thinking whatever thoughts occupied his mind. Everyone else was at the funeral, except, Thomas was sure, the Captain. The Captain didn’t attend rites of passage concerning others, especially if they were held in churches. Thomas wondered if he’d even attended his own wedding.

  Thomas hunted him throughout the house. The first place he checked was, of course, the study. But for a change that room was empty. The Captain had been spending almost all his time there since Thomas had come home from the city, seeking clues to the identity of the murderer. It wasn’t that he was expecting to find something specifically related to the killer in his old manuscripts. Rather, he was looking for a spell or a procedure that might help him uncover a clue. Something that might enable him to open a window into the past to witness the crime. Something that might help him check the psychic residue left at the murder scene. Something that might help him build a picture of the slayer somehow, someway.

  He might, Thomas thought, eventually succeed. The Captain had a brilliant mind, was terrifically [165] knowledgeable about using heka, and had the endurance of a bloodhound once he found a trail.

  Thomas wasn’t going to give him that chance to succeed—but maybe, in a way, he had already. Maybe the old man had somehow uncovered Thomas’s secret plan, which was why he was trying to kill him. That was why the Captain had to die. Now.

  But not in the study. Though that would have been a fine and private place for the killing. Thomas flopped into the Captain’s chair and thought for a moment about where else he might be.

  The cellar work room, possibly. Maybe he was down there mixing a potion or intoning a spell. Thomas’s throat was suddenly dry. He swallowed, carefully inventorying the messages carried from his various senses to his brain. He was relieved to detect nothing out of the ordinary. Everything seemed normal. No one, at the moment, was invading his brain with false images of an unreal reality.

  He rose from the chair and went through the near-deserted house quickly but quietly. He was nearly overcome by a sudden sense of urgency. He wanted to get this done. Done now.