by Gene Lazuta
And then they were at the cemetery and she spoke to him for the first time…
And that was weird.
Before that instant he hadn’t noticed her silence. But when she finally did say words, he realized that it was the first time he’d heard her voice in any other way than a snarl or a moan. She had a strange, moody tone, imbued with a rich, reverberating timbre that seemed to radiate up more from a tunnel than a throat. It was such a soothing sound for him to hear that immediately his attention fixed on it, and he felt as if she had found some special frequency that matched perfectly with that one, sober area of his brain that was not too confused by dope to function.
“I don’t know how it will be done,” she said, assuming the form of the girl in white again as they got out of his Pinto at the graveyard. Before the overhead light came on she had been more reptilian than human—a lizard-like silhouette in the dark, sending over a skilled tongue at least three feet long that had unzipped the fly on his jeans and done things to him that had kept his mind off the screaming he had heard when she had left him in the car to go inside the jail for a few minutes.
“But whatever you do, know that it will be correct,” she continued, taking his hand and leading him to the grave side. “For the Master has decreed that thou shalt lift the curse of thine father. And so it shall be done. So it must be done, and quickly, for they have a Dog here—a very powerful Dog. And without moving the bones, the Blood Prince will never make his rise.”
And we certainly can’t have that, Woodie thought humorlessly, swaying on his feet.
The rest of the people from the Institute were there, lined on either side of his father’s grave. He hadn’t seen some of them in a couple of days and he wanted to stop and say hello, but a strange sensation suddenly overtook him, starting as a tiny hum in his head and blossoming into a real sound that…
He froze, his eyes wide and staring at the ground.
He could see right through the dirt!
He could see into his father’s coffin!
And what he saw infuriated him.
There he was—his father—lying in his box. He’d been in the ground for twenty-five years, but he hadn’t changed all that much from the way Woodie remembered him. His eyes were still brown, his hair was still curly. And he was wearing that same blue, pin-striped suit that he had kept in a plastic zipper bag in the cedar closet for when someone got married or died. He was looking up as if he could see Woodie, and his lips were forming the words, “Help me! Help me!” over and over again, weakly, and with trembling effort.
Which wasn’t surprising, because his head was lying between his knees.
A flash that came from the corner of his eye obscured Woodie’s vision for an instant, and then he lifted his arms and said, “Dig!” in a big, commanding voice that was confident and sober.
“But, sire,” one of the people standing close responded formally. This ground is sealed against our touch. We can disturb it not.”
And Woodie spun, fired out one hand and grabbed the speaker by the front of his robe. With terrible force he hurled the man to the ground and pointed saying, “Dig!” as the first movements of the dirt began.
The man, on his hands and knees, looked down in surprise. Beneath him, snow-dusted grass churned, swaying as if it were responding to some swirling current before rocks rolled themselves over and disturbed worms twisted their dismay. From deep inside the moving dirt, flickers of something bright flashed, glancing up as cracks formed in the ground and a rumble vibrated below.
The man looked up.
And Woodie told him to dig again.
He needed no further prompting.
In moments there were three big men with shovels scraping frantically at the glowing dirt, and, with the very first gouges they produced, the light burst forth.
It hit Woodie in the eye and blinded him, filling his skull and drowning his thoughts with a brilliant silver glow that obliterated everything for what seemed like only a second and then…
A hand touched his and the Lady of the Night said, “Hail. It is done.”
And he blinked.
The light was gone, and the grave was violated. His knees felt liquid when he saw the empty coffin, the horse’s head, and the body. They almost gave way when he looked up and found the girl dangling at the end of her chain. But when he looked down at the object he was holding in his right hand, his revulsion was complete.
He was going to drop it, but his fingers didn’t want to move. It was a long bone, white and heavy. A thighbone, most likely, belonging to a man—to his father.
He tried to drop it again, but I seemed to adhere to his palm.
In his mind, his father’s desperately pleading face, which Woodie had so recently seen in its coffin, ceased its begging and looked him calmly in the eye.
Free, it seemed to say. At last my son has come to end my shame. Take it as a gift. From a father to a son. Take it, and use it well.
Woodie looked at the bone again, and suddenly something about its cold hardness in his hand made him reconsider. He bounced it, admiring its weight. He swung it before him a couple of times and it cut the air with a satisfying ssswwish! He tapped its end on his father’s tombstone, and it produced a solidly ominous thunk!
His father’s face smiled benevolently in his mind.
And Woodie decided that he’d just wait and see before he threw the bone away because, who knew, maybe it would come in handy sometime.
* * *
And Norris turned from the memory and faced the window of his brother’s eyes socket again, just as the Pinto pulled off to one side of the road and a figure, fuzzy in the blowing snow, came trotting up to the driver’s side window.
The thighbone was lying across Woodie’s lap, telling Norris that this event was happening after the cemetery. The woman was speaking as Woodie rolled down his window.
“The final stage,” she was saying, but Woodie didn’t seem to care. “He will be your key.”
Norris was confused by all he had seen—by the events themselves, but, even more, by his brother’s strangely flat, seemingly emotionless response to it all. Since the joining over the bed at the Institute, the people that he was with had been keeping him very drugged, but even that didn’t explain his apathy. Norris sensed that something fundamental had changed in his brother—perhaps had even died—and that such an alteration could never have been performed by an outside source. Whatever had happened to Woodie’s mind, it had been drawn from inside him. It had been there all along, just waiting for the proper circumstances to release it into the world.
And when Woodie spoke to the young man at the side of the road, Norris’ suspicions were confirmed.
“Hey, man!” Woodie said, and remarkably his words did not slur at all. “Wanna ride? You’re gonna freeze walkin’ in this shit.”
When the boy got in, Norris saw that he could be no more than eighteen years old, and suddenly things began falling into place for him. Suddenly he sensed the truth, and in silence, he watched his suspicions bear fruit.
They went to a bar. Norris even recognized which one it was. Woodie kept glancing at his watch every few minutes, and because he did, Norris was able to keep track of the time without hardly trying. He remembered what Cooper had said about Woodie calling him and saying that they should meet at a McDonald’s in Akron at midnight, but judging by the way they were drinking, they weren’t going to make that rendezvous, which Norris already knew they had missed.
I’m watching him spend his last few hours on earth, Norris thought as Woodie bought another round of beers for himself and the guy he had picked up on the road just outside of town. The woman in white wasn’t drinking, but staring silently at her hands, which were folded on the tabletop. And Norris thought, He doesn’t know it, but it’s all winding down to a close, and he’s just sipping away the time, downing beers and doped out of his mind, just like he spent most of the rest of his life.
The kid they picked up was called Raymond. That
’s all he’d say. He was about Woodie’s height, and just as thin. His hair was blond, not as blond as Woodie’s, but a fairly light shade of brown. And he was wearing jeans. But beyond that, any resemblance between the two disappeared. Once he took his coat off, Raymond revealed his arms to be tattooed from wrist to shoulder with a variety of snakes, knives, and flowers, all done in gaudy reds and blacks and connected by strings of words that said things like “Helmet laws suck, and “Longhaired country boy.” Raymond lived in Mist County and was up in Harpersville because Mist County was dry—you couldn’t buy beer. His old Oldsmobile did fine in regular weather, but as soon as it got cold and damp, well, sometimes it didn’t work so good. It had died about a mile from where he had been walking, and, well, “It was awful nice o’ ya ta pick me up ‘cause I was ‘bout to freeze my balls off. What’s with your girlfriend, anyway? Don’t’ she talk?”
And they were quickly becoming friends.
And, “Jesus, man, where you getting’ all this money for beers? Wish there was something I could do to pay you back.”
And of course there was.
Just as Ernie Cray was later to relate, Woodie pulled his Pinto up to the office door of the Lexington Motel at almost exactly midnight. By then it was snowing very hard, Raymond was very drunk, and Woodie was very quiet.
“I ain’t never seen nothing like this,” Raymond was mumbling in the backseat, his head down so that someone looking out of the motel would only see Woodie and his girlfriend, and not him, because then they’d have to pay more and there wasn’t any sense paying extra if you don’t have to.
That made no sense at all, but Raymond didn’t argue because the broad was a fox, and her boyfriend like to watch her do it with other guys, and…
“I ain’t lyin’, man! I only read ‘bout shit like this in them magazines they keep behind the counter at the drugstore so’s you gotta ask for ‘em special and everybody in the place can hear. Never thought it was true…tell you that for free!”
“Just relax,” Woodie said, his voice even as he withdrew his wallet and glanced over at the woman. “It’s not so unusual.”
The look she returned was one of confidence and even pride. Her eyes had taken on their yellowish, reptilian tinge again, and somehow that seemed appropriate because they were Woodie’s favorite. He liked the way the centers opened and closed in response to the light.
“Be back in a minute,” he said, and he was.
The motel room was small, but that was okay. The woman held the door open while Woodie helped Raymond inside. He talked a good game, but when it came to holding his alcohol, he didn’t seem to do it very well.
They dropped him on the bed, and he lay still so long that Norris began to suspect that he’d passed out. Then he roused himself a little, half scooted up toward the headboard, and, with a bleary, anticipatory grin said, “Okay, who’s got the whipped cream?”
As Woodie stood staring down at the young man, the girl made a perfunctory reconnaissance of the room, opening the little bathroom door to his right, and closing the curtains on the window to his left. Over the bed hung a portrait of Jesus: one of those ones where he’s depicted as being a young Caucasian, long-haired type, crowned with bloody thorns and looking mournfully skyward with big soulful eyes. Lamb of God, Woodie thought for some reason, and it made him smile.
“For the others, it happened before they came down here,” the girl said softly into his ear, and Woodie tensed. He’d been so intent on the boy that he hadn’t heard her sidle up beside him. “The first is always the hardest, but it must be so.”
“Just get on with it,” Woodie responded breathlessly, and inside him, Norris sensed more than anticipation. He felt his brother’s excitement. It was a feeling that he had watched evolve from the Institute to the cemetery to the motel, and it had nothing to do with the peyote. Woodie was fully participating in all that happened to him. He was not an unwilling innocent, but a conscious, acting conspirator in his own fate. He wasn’t fighting at all, but rushing headlong into what Norris knew would be his own doom.
“There a radio in this place?” Raymond was asking as he fumbled with something on the little black TV tray that served as a nightstand. Norris noticed that there were three mallard ducks in flight pained on the thing and that one of its legs was bent.
Without a word, the girl moved toward the bed.
It began in silence, and Norris squirmed inside his brother’s head. At once he winced, and wanted to pull back and avert his attention from this because it made him feel dirty, as if he were contributing to it somehow by being its witness. But there was also that part of him that could do nothing but watch—wide-eyed and clinical—as the girl became suddenly so seductive that, even from where he was seeing things, Norris couldn’t help but respond to her himself.
She apparently could turn it on like an electric light. And that was a good analogy, Norris decided. One minute she was just what she was: a young girl with long blond hair wearing an innocuous white dress/gown type of thing that had turned some heads in the beer joint earlier, more because it was so inappropriate for a cold winter’s night than because it was particularly sexy. And the next minute her whole body seemed to radiate a veritable pulse of prickling, animal power.
She lifted her arms up over hear head, bunching her hair in her hands and letting it fall as she curved her spine and closed her eyes with a sigh that was deep and luxurious in a way that was all acceptance and invitation. Her gown clung to her breasts and stomach, moving as if animated to outline every detail of her form as the one light from the scrawny lamp by the bed seemed to dim and the shadowy triangle between her legs showed every so subtly through the whispering white material.
Raymond became, if not sober, then at least interested, and he followed the girl with his eyes as she moved over onto his left side and began undoing the buttons on his flannel shirt.
Woodie positioned himself behind where Raymond was lying so that the girl stood directly in front of him with the open bathroom door behind her. His breathing was heavy and ragged, and sweat was moistening his forehead and gathering in his eyebrows in quivering, oily beads.
Norris strained to see Woodie’s face in the mirror behind the girl. She blocked his view most of the time, but if she turned just right, he could almost see what Woodie looked like, and for some reason, at that instant it became very important to him that he see his brother’s face because, he realized, at any moment something was going to happen and Woodie was going to die. Either the “stranger” named Raymond was going to do something to him, or the girl was going to do it; but whoever it was, Woodie was not walking out of this room alive. Norris had seen his bloody, dismembered body, a door that was locked from the inside, and the broken widow with its single line of tracks leading away and into the woods. Woodie’s death was imminent, and it was suddenly of the utmost importance to Norris that he see his face at least one more time.
When the women dropped her gown, he got his wish.
And his world turned upside down.
The way they were positioned, Raymond didn’t see it. That was why they had done it that way, Norris knew in a rush. Just as the girl’s dress slid off her shoulders, the boy on the bed said, “Holy Jesus on a bicycle,” and started to turn over toward Woodie. It was a strange reaction: turning away from a naked woman, but he was probably doing it to make sure that Woodie really did want him to go ahead and screw his girlfriend, right here, while he watched. But before he could look over his shoulder, the girl had dropped to her knees, put her hands on his chest, and was kissing him.
When she moved, the view to the mirror was suddenly cleared, and Norris saw his brother’s face…
And was amazed.
“Woodie!” he gasped, unable to think, and feeling something that was very much like a cold breeze blowing through his awareness. “Oh, Jesus! Woodie!”
Woodie’s eyes were wide. His hands were clenched into fists and positioned one on either side of his chest so that his elbows wer
e high behind him. His mouth was open and a long stream of saliva was hanging from his lower lip, dripping with running beads and reaching in a stringy line past where the edge of the mirror ended. It may have touched the floor for all Norris knew. But spit wasn’t his concern. It was his brother’s teeth that held his attention, because, with his lips drawn back as they were, those teeth seemed to grow.
“Oh, my my!” Raymond said as the woman undid his fly. “You do know how to do things.”
His shirt was off, and in a moment his trousers were bunched at his knees. He had his head resting on the palm of his cocked left arm, and he was stroking the girl’s head with his right. In any real sense, he was now alone with her in the room, and the danger hovering behind him could have been on the other side of the sun, for all he knew.
Woodie was looking down, at the back of Raymond’s neck.
Norris was looking at his brother’s face in the mirror.
And the woman looked up as her face…
Changed.
The sounds that followed happened so close together that they may as well have been simultaneous. As Woodie bit him, Raymond shouted, and when Raymond shouted, Woodie growled. It was almost funny, really. Or at least it would have been if Norris didn’t know that this had been the moment of truth, the act that led directly to his brother’s murder.
And even though he thought that he’d look away when the time came, he didn’t. He kept right on watching, as Woodie stood up, and his face came into view in the mirror.
It had been the look in the girl’s eyes that had made Woodie move. She had looked up, and her eyes had gone yellow again, and there had been something in her expression that all but screamed, “Now! Do it now!”
And with a grunt, Woodie had plunged his face down and bitten Raymond’s neck so hard that when he jerked his head back up again, he left a gouge in the boy’s skin that was already filling with blood.
“What the?! Hey….Owwwww!” Raymond yelled, lifting his hand to his neck and rolling…or trying to roll.