Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “So”—it’s all beginning to fit together, and it’s too delicious to believe—“you were spying on Bates too?”

  “Well, of course,” she says, eyes narrowing. “I have decided not to turn Lara. She is, therefore, mortal with a mortal’s inescapable fragility. Bates and his kennel of mangy followers threaten to take her from me. I intend, to use the pious warthog’s phrase, to pluck them out.” In the darkness her fangs glint as she smiles at the thought of such pleasure. “One by one. And I thought you might relish giving me a hand.”

  By now we’re stretching out side by side on a narrow ledge of sandstone, talking in the dark. A shooting star arcs over and disappears. A cold wind curls over the summit of this great stegosaur-back of stone. I try to imagine spending the coming winter in Mount Storm without Matt.

  “Cynthia, did you hear about the . . .”

  “Oh, yes. Rats can be useful, though they leave a bit of a mess. Prefer cats myself. Bobcats, actually. I have two in particular I’m fond of. Delphi and Astraea. A rapist down in Beckley, well, that’s a story for another time. Do go on.”

  “Yes. Though I have a sexy little friend who fudges police papers occasionally or drops embarrassing evidence down the sewer, I’d like to avoid a murder investigation or another well-publicized and inexplicable rodent buffet. And we mustn’t make the reverend a martyr, as much as I would love to shove my claymore through him . . .”

  “Oh, yes. Scotland. Lovely country.”

  “. . . and watch him wriggle. So what do you suggest?”

  Cynthia stretches, then tucks her hands behind her head. “We certainly must concentrate on Bates first. Lara compares organizations like his to the multiflora rose. Not an entirely appropriate metaphor, since the blossoms have a lovely scent, and, having spied on Bates for the last several nights, I’ve become more than acquainted with his stink, especially when he’s up there sweating behind the pulpit. Lara says you can’t just lop off the thorny tentacles. The only way to eradicate such a spreading pest is to cut up the root. And that’s going to be easier than you might imagine.”

  I can hear her licking her lips.

  “And why is that, Mizz Cynthia?”

  “Oh, Bates has such a nasty secret. Remember how I said I love a well-read vampire? You should recognize this reference. Derek, my dear, Bates is a Humbert Humbert.”

  By the next service, the dedicated congregation of the Belle Apostolic, Etc. Church has managed to rustle up some plywood to replace their broken windows. “Devil’s work,” they are muttering from pew to pew, comparing notes on the glass-shattering terrors that assailed them the previous evening.

  And now Bates waddles up to the pulpit. He begins ranting about the dark things of the night sent to frighten good Christians from their holy purpose. By the time an odd mist behind the last pew, thoroughly bored, begins to disperse, the preacher has started on the God-sent blessings of mountaintop removal, the foul errors of environmentalists, and the many murders committed by abortion clinics. A widely ranging sermon, to be sure, punctuated by the staccato gasps peculiar to his ilk. “And the Lard has tole me—hah!—we must rise up—hah!—an’ stop the baby-killin’ monsters—hah!”

  His pet’s a square-framed pit bull, as I’d suspected the previous night. A vicious dog for a vicious man. As soon as I take human form in Bates’s backyard, the baying animal is on me. I could command it to stop, but instead I slam my forearm between its jaws, poke out its eyes with my free forefinger, then toss its yelping body into the mud. Caution forbids me to eviscerate the master, but I have no such compunction concerning the dog. Its belly parts neatly beneath my fingers. Its agony makes me smile. I hang it by its own intestines from the plastic antlers of Bates’s yard-art deer, and the darkness of the soil beneath it deepens with blood.

  The back door is nothing. Its cheap hinges snap instantly. I would invest in more formidable locks, had I a secret as dangerous as his. Well, of course I do, and my secret room at Mount Storm is not only well-hidden but bolted with steel. Inside Bates’s saintly shack are overheated air, cheap paneling, a few framed and no-doubt-mail-order degrees, a ratty armchair, and other furnishings I have no time to notice. The howls of the dying dog—I simply couldn’t resist, I hate the brutes—might attract notice, so I work fast.

  First, I wash my hands in the kitchen sink. No need to sully the precious souvenir. And the manila folder is precisely where Cynthia predicted it would be: hidden in what passes for a study, behind a bookcase full of broken-backed religious tomes. Grinning, I check the folder’s contents, then slip it into the inside pocket of my black duster. On the refrigerator I leave a note—“Thanks for the photographs!”—then leave the way I came.

  The dog is silent now. No lights on in the surrounding trailers—they must all be wedged into the church pews down the street. Orion is straddling the ridge across the river. There’s a pin oak in the adjoining yard, and for a minute or two I listen to wind hissing through the tree’s stubbornly remaining leaves before taking to the air with my prize.

  When I rise tonight, I find a big fire burning in the living room’s sandstone hearth. Cold nights come early in altitudes as high as Mount Storm’s. Carly Simon’s singing, “Do the walls come down when you think of me? Do you let me in?” Bob and Kurt are in the kitchen crimping pie dough and baking butternut squash. I join them for a glass of pinot noir before strolling out into the darkness.

  The earth is mustering its last efforts: winter squash, kale, mustard greens, turnips, and pumpkins. The corn is cut and shocked. The leaves of chestnut oak and sugar maple are raked and spread onto the fallow plots. On the field’s edges, purple asters and goldenrod gather, shuddering in the cold breeze. Soon it will be Samhain, Feast of the Final Harvest.

  A week has passed since I stole the folder from Bates’s hovel, a folder since safely tucked away in my coffin. Angus’s killers got off too easily. Young and enraged as I was, I killed them quickly. But several centuries have taught me how to extend my pleasures in the realms of both love and hate. For a week Bates has been living with the knowledge that someone knows his worst secret. He has been hoist on his own guts, so to speak, not unlike his late hound.

  Cynthia, that consummate spy, has come by Mount Storm a couple of times to report on his condition. He’s cancelled his sermons, pleading illness, pacing his study till the wee hours. Cast into the outer darkness, where there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. She has also reported that Matt’s been released from the hospital.

  I run my fingers along a sharp-edged brown leaf which flutters like a flag from a twine-bound shock of corn. They’ve rolled him and tied him by the way, / Serving him most barbarously. I wrap my arms around the shock and bury my face in the brittle stalks. They smell like old paper, not flesh. I want to press my lips to his wounds. For once I want to be the healer, not the pestilence.

  “Derek?”

  She’s come. I look up to see her standing beside me, her brow creased with bemusement.

  A trifle embarrassed, I leave off my embrace and straighten up. “We’re having a Halloween celebration next week, Cynthia. Will you come? Bring Lara.”

  “Certainly. That would be lovely. Are you ready?”

  “Not quite. I need to fetch my kilt and claymore. And the pictures.”

  “He will come back to you,” Cynthia whispers. “Meanwhile, other pleasures await.”

  I break into a broad smile, half hope and half malice, then lope off toward the house.

  “Oh, Reverend,” Cynthia’s gushing into the stolen cell phone. “Ah jus’ cain’t tell you mah name. Jus’ call me Cindy Lou. But Ah have this envelope. Ah think it’s yours. Some bad men stole it from you, but by the Lawd’s grace, Ah’ve recovered it. Yes, Ah’m a membah of your church. No, no, no thanks are needed. Ah jus’ thank Gawd Ah could hep you in your time a’ need.”

  She’s really laying it on thick. Blanche Dubois with canines. Bates is probably desperately searching his musty memory, trying to recall when a Mi
ssissippi belle ever attended his services. All she needs is an ink-black hoop skirt.

  “Well, yais, th’ pitchers are a little odd. Ah did look at ’em. What sort of preevert did you wrest ’em from? Yais, yais, Ah understand. Oh, Lawd, no! I dint show ’em to anybody else! Ah haven’t tole a soul! Well, why don’t you meet me and fetch ’em? No, no, thas too public. Why don’t you meet me here? Ah live near Ansted. As a mattah of fact, les us meet at Hawk’s Nest. Up here on Gauley Mountain? How ’bout the ovahlook? How long will it take you?”

  I can tell by the smirk on her face that she’s about to explode, and she’s barely hung up before she bursts into laughter.

  “Ah have always depended on the genitals of strangahs!” she manages before the Dixie act evaporates and the Polish lilt returns. “He’ll be here soon. A normal driver would take almost an hour to get here from Belle, but he sounds fairly agitated, and I suspect he’ll be risking several speeding tickets. My, that was fun. I always wanted to act.”

  Striding to the stone wall edging the precipice, she drops the phone. We listen to it bounce several times on rocks jutting from the cliff face before it shatters into pieces a long ways down. The tinny echo reverberates and dies. Now there is no sound but the New River shushing over stones many hundreds of feet below, the wind rustling the last oak leaves above our heads. Before us, beneath the newly waning Blood Moon, the black Alleghenies unscroll beneath autumn’s constellations, our distant and patient witnesses.

  Waiting in the moonlight, I try to imagine the two men, the one I love and the one I hate.

  Matt’s asleep. It’s late, and the painkillers knocked him out hours ago. His arm’s still in a cast. He’s slumped across his bed in a pair of boxer briefs. Yellow-brown bruises scatter his body, an afghan entwines him. His cats sleep on either side of him. Now a nightmare shakes him awake, a menace he fled from. Was it the Leviticus Locusts he dreamed of, or was it me?

  Bates is driving fast down Route 60. The dead ash-gray vines of kudzu spill over the roadside slopes. Coal cars rumble along the railroad tracks, lights gleam from the factory windows of Alloy. He’s sweating, despite the cold October night. My guess is he has a gun, so as to insure that his holy reputation remains intact. He no doubt intends to pray for her soul when he sends that treacle-tongued belle to her Maker.

  DO NOT THROW OBJECTS OVER OVERLOOK says the posted sign. Those Civilian Conservation Corps men were fine workers in stone, building a walled semicircle atop the rock, giving future generations this sweeping view of the river and wooded mountains.

  It is a view Reverend Rodney Bates is in no state of mind to appreciate, however, as he bursts from the forest edge and stumbles down the flight of stone stairs leading to the overlook. The park’s officially closed at ten p.m., but rules never deter the desperate.

  What does he see? Nothing at first. Edging the precipice, a stone wall, topped with a rail of short iron spikes. Several pay-for-a-better-view binoculars, mounted on posts. The wind’s died down for the moment, and there’s nothing to hear but the distant New River, second oldest in the world, white water’s eternal song.

  “Cindy Lou? Honey, where are you?” he calls shakily. Suddenly he’s in a panic, afraid that she and the incriminating evidence won’t show up.

  From the woods behind him a screech owl starts up, the auditory equivalent of an icicle sliding down his spine, bumping each vertebra as it goes. He turns toward the sound, and there she is.

  Not at all the vacuous, pastel-frocked blonde he’s expected. No woman who’s attended his services has ever worn her hair so short, has ever worn black pants and a leather jacket which dully gleams with moonlight. In the darkness her eyes seem to emit a faint greenish glow. She’s sitting on a stone bench built into the wall behind him, and the coveted and crucial manila envelope is lying on the bench beside her.

  “Are you Cindy Lou?” Bates stammers, disbelieving, backing up, fumbling in his shapeless raincoat’s pocket. As massive as he is, he suddenly feels threatened by this small woman who rises from the bench and faces him.

  “Ah, Reverend, at last you’ve come. I am indeed Cindy Lou. Or, rather, Cynthia. I’ve come to discuss literature with you. And politics.”

  “Listen, missy, I don’t know who you are,” Bates mutters, clearly confused. “You ain’t one of my parishioners. But you’ve got to give me that folder.”

  “Well, no, Reverend. Actually, these will be going to The Charleston Gazette. Now, in the novel Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov paints a convincing portrait of . . .”

  “Shut up!” Bates demands, and—yes, as I expected—pulls out a pistol. Anyone ruthless enough to encourage the Leviticus Locusts isn’t above using a little God-sanctioned violence to save his pious public image. “That’s right, little lady,” he threatens. “We still got the right to bear arms in this country. Now hand over the folder.” With jowls so Jell-o-jiggly, it must be hard to muster a threatening appearance, but Bates is doing the best he can. After all, she’s a mere woman—clearly fallen, from her unfeminine outfit—and he’s the right hand of God.

  “Mercy, you’re not a literature buff? Well, then, how about Hobbes? You see, Reverend Bates, this,” Cynthia declaims, sweeping her hand in a semicircle to include the woodlands, the edge of the overlook and the moonlit mountains beyond, “this is much like the State of Nature that Hobbes spoke of. Where lives often turn out to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Some, not short enough.” She’s edging toward him now, and he’s backing up, despite his brandished gun. “By the way, Reverend, your beastly thugs attacked my lover. Have you ever heard of Lara Martin?”

  “Or Matthew Taylor?”

  At the sound of another voice, Bates’s head jerks up. What he sees now is meant to be alarmingly incongruous: a dark-bearded man in a black jerkin and kilt standing at the top of the stone steps descending to the overlook. As if the membrane between the centuries had ruptured, and the present were suddenly flooded by images of the past. Threatening images, more to the point, for the kilted man is drawing a sword and descending those steps.

  For such a pulpit verbosity, Bates is speechless. Mesmerized by the approaching moon-glint of such a sharp length of steel, he backs away. The sounds he’s making resemble the sputter of bacon frying in its own fat. By the time I’ve reached the bottom of the stairs and he remembers his gun, Cynthia has yanked it from his grasp.

  The stone wall is nudging his chubby back now, the tip of my claymore is gently prodding one of his myriad chins. The wind picks up; Bates swallows loudly. The moon is enveloped by a brief cloud, ember smothered by ash, then bursts into chalk-white flame again.

  “What did Poe say about revenge, Cynthia?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the porcine preacher’s sweaty face. “This idiot wouldn’t know. He thinks it’s sufficient to read only the Bible.” Bates moans, and I give him just the slightest poke with my sword.

  “Oh, let’s see, you mean in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’? Revenge is perfect when, number one, the swine you punish knows that it is you who are responsible for his destruction, and number two, you destroy him with impunity.”

  “Yes. Thank you.” I nod politely in her direction, then meet my foe’s watery stare.

  “I loved a man once, Bates. A man with big shoulders and a red-gold beard. Men like you killed him. I love a man now, a man with a deep hillbilly baritone and a rich crop of chest hair. Your followers tried to kill him.” With the traumas Bates’s bloated body is about to endure, I can allow myself one tiny slice. Just a snick. I twist my wrist, and beneath the steel sword-tip a small red crescent opens on his neck. He wails, just about the sound his dog made when I uncoiled its guts like baling twine.

  I can’t resist some ritual formality. “I consign you to the forest compost, to the maws of the buzzard, the rat, the shrew and the maggot. Let this bulk you have so patiently accumulated feed the earth whose divinity you have denied.”

  The urge to grasp the hilt with both hands and sweep off his head is maddeningly strong, but Cynthi
a and I have agreed: no investigation, no martyr. Just as Bates is wincing beneath the certainty of a death-blow, I step back, sheathe my sword, and retreat to the right side of the overlook.

  He blinks wildly, slumps back against the wall, and sighs. His mumbled prayers appear to have been answered.

  “Heeeere, kitty, kitty, kitty!” It’s the sound many a housewife bearing a plate of cat food has falsettoed out the back door. “Yes, Derek, you mustn’t sully your steel on vermin blood,” Cynthia adds, stepping to the other side of the overlook, a look of anticipation gleaming on her face.

  All three of us are staring at the steps now, or, rather, at the dark forest at the top of those stairs, where a rustling has begun. Veering closer and closer, the sound of feet bounding through carpets of fallen leaves.

  The Blood Moon is a willing spotlight, glittering off eyes as green as Cynthia’s. They hesitate at the top of the stairs, as if aware of their own fatal magnificence, as if waiting for the proper introduction.

  Cynthia obliges. “This is Delphi, Reverend,” she announces sweetly, “who prophesizes doom for the guilty. And this is Astraea, in whom we behold the Goddess of Justice.”

  One bobcat and then the other screeches—the sound an infant might make before it is devoured. Together, snarling, they bound down the stairs, and together, teeth bared, they circle the fat man with the greasy pompadour.