Some are Born to sweet delight, Some are Born to sweet delight, Some are Born to Endless Night.
Through cramped and shabby rooms, down a hallway whose walls seemed to pulse and throb like living, membranous things, and at the end of it the arch of bone and vines was waiting for him, guarding the cellar door.
“Deacon! Where the fuck are you?” Vincent Hammond roared from somewhere nearby and still very far away, somewhere inconsequential, and the three skulls leered down at Deacon from their hollow, eyeless sockets. “Here!” he shouted back. “I’m over here,” but the air around him turning thick and sour as clotted milk to muffle his words, to slip down his throat and slither up his nostrils. And when Deacon reached for the cellar door, the knob felt soft and warm.
“Land of Dreams,” he whispered. “Land of Dreams,” reading the words painted on the door aloud; the voice in his head flinched and shuddered, and the air around him was only air again.
She saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous roots of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists…
The doorknob, cold and hard as any doorknob, turned oil-smooth in his hand, and Deacon stared down the crooked wooden stairs at the darkness below. The musty stink of dust and mildew and tiny white mushrooms flowed from the open doorway, and he reached for the light cord, pulled it, and a single bulb flickered and burned dimly from its socket on the cellar wall. He could hardly hear Hammond and the others anymore, their voices and footsteps faded like a passing train, and Deacon stepped through the arch.
A land of sorrow and of tears…
“Jessica?” he called out, but nobody answered, no one and nothing but the lunatic ranting in his brain. The stairs creaked beneath his feet, and Deacon wondered if they would take his weight, if maybe it weren’t only a trap after all, and in a moment he would be lying broken and bleeding in the dark, broken and maybe dead. The whole damned thing too easy, too urgent, his mad dash from the car, the unlocked doors, and he retreated a step backwards into the hallway.
Past the weak glare of the bulb, an insectile snick-snick-snick, metal against metal, steel drawn repeatedly across steel or a whetstone, and “Jessica!” he yelled, louder than before. Around him, the house seemed to mutter to itself, smug, satisfied, triumphant, and the hurricane voice in his head paused for an instant, the meanest instant of silence, and then O, what Land is the Land of Dreams? it asked him again.
Deacon descended the cellar stairs as quickly as he dared. He kept his right hand pressed against the wall, fingertips to brush mold and cobwebs, to tell him when the pine boards changed to bare earth, and the stairs led him down and down and down, much deeper than he would have imagined the cellar to have been dug. The soft earth changing, finally, to rough-hewn stone, bedrock, and the light at the top of the stairs had grown as faint and distant as a star. There was no sign of Hammond or anyone else back there, and he began to wonder if they’d ever been there at all, if his entire life had not been spent on these stairs.
Art thou a Worm? image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?
There was surprise when he found the bottom, surprise but not relief, and more surprise when he realized that it wasn’t dark anymore. The woman holding the kerosene lantern stared back at him with dewy eyes the color of moss. She wasn’t old, but the lines in her face and the streaks of gray in her tangled black hair there to say that she’d seen and heard enough in her time that she might as well be a hundred. Her tattered yellow dress draped slackly over skin and bones, her bare feet, and she gripped a straight razor in her other hand.
“Is this a Worm?” she asked, and the voice in his head was only her voice now, had never been anything more or less. “I see thee lay helpless and naked, weeping, and none to answer.”
“Where is she?” Deacon demanded, and the woman smiled softly for him and held the razor up so it glinted in the lantern light.
“And none to answer,” she replied. “None to cherish thee with mother’s smiles.”
“I’m not alone. There are police coming.”
“Yes,” she said and looked at the razor, her smile melting away to something like regret. “There are.”
“Give me the girl, and I promise no one will hurt you.”
“You can’t make promises for other men,” she whispered.
Deacon glanced quickly from the razor in her hand to the gloom behind her and back again. “Is she here?”
“You have no idea, Deacon Silvey. You can’t begin to imagine,” and she pointed at him with the straight razor. “I’m only a conductor here, and this is only a transit station. That God would love a Worm, I knew—”
“Her name is Jessica,” Deacon said and looked again into the shadows crouched behind the woman. There was something back there, something that seemed to hang suspended from the floor of the house a thousand feet overhead.
“But they won’t let her keep that. No, Deacon, but they will let her choose a new name one day, when she’s older and—”
“You need to show me where she is,” Deacon said, and the woman took a couple of steps back from him then and smiled again, this time a haughty, secretive smirk, and she shook her head.
“She’s a Child of the Cuckoo now. Her name has already been written in the book, and you can’t ever have her back.”
“They’re coming to take her back.”
At that the woman hissed and swiped at the air with her razor, cut a long slash in nothing only a few inches from Deacon’s chest. Her thin lips curled back to show rotten teeth and black spaces where teeth should be.
“You better run, boy,” she snarled, “while you still got two good legs under you. You better run straight back up into the light and tell the rest of them folks they better start running, too. That child ain’t theirs no more, not—”
And then Deacon punched the woman in the face, hit her hard and fast, and she dropped the razor, stumbled backwards and almost fell. He snatched the razor from the floor and folded it closed.
“Where is she?” he asked again, but then he could see for himself, the cage and the chain leading up into the darkness, rusted iron bars and the girl lying on her side at the bottom, curled fetal in a filthy bed of hay, her back to him so he couldn’t see if she was alive or dead.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” the woman said, tears in her eyes and running down her cheeks, blood oozing steadily from her nose, getting into her mouth, and she spat on the ground at Deacon’s feet. “What wailing wight calls the watchman of the night? You don’t know what you’ve done, Deacon Silvey.”
The cage was locked, but he found the key ring hanging not far away on a railroad spike driven into the rocky wall, a loop of wire with a dozen keys, and while he searched for the one that would open the cage, he talked to the motionless form of the child.
“Jessica, can you hear me? I’ve come to take you home.”
The woman sat down on the floor, no fight left in her, no effort to escape, and she pulled her knees up underneath her chin and wept and watched Deacon with her mossy, angry eyes.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” she said. “But you will, yes sir, one day, one day they’ll show you what—”
“Just shut the hell up,” he barked at her and came to the very last key on the ring, an antique brass thing with a small crimson gemstone set into the filigreed bow and letters he didn’t recognize carved into the shaft. He slid it into the padlock, and the tumblers rolled and clicked and maybe the red stone on the key sparked and shimmered for a moment, a tiny wink of ruddy light, and maybe that was only his imagination. But the hasp popped open, and the child in the cage made a frightened sound, and far overhead he heard Vincent Hammond shouting his name.
An hour past midnight, and the girl who calls herself Starling Jane finds Deacon alone in a small park at the end of a dead-end street. She stands in the trees for a while, silently watching him where he sits at a picnic table beneath the tar-paper roof of a weathered gazebo. Not far away is a limestone blockhouse set i
nto the mountainside, the gated entrance to a tunnel, and it makes Starling Jane nervous. She thinks about going back to their motel room and telling Scarborough that she couldn’t find Deacon Silvey, or that she found him but he wouldn’t listen to her, whichever lie is most convenient. The old tunnel seems to watch her warily from its two small windows, square and simple holes on either side of the entrance.
“You just mind your own business,” she whispers at the tunnel. “I haven’t got any interest in the likes of you tonight.”
“Who’s there?” Deacon asks, standing up quickly, startled, and she steps out of the shadows beneath the trees so he can see her.
“Me,” she says. “Only me.”
Starling Jane can’t see the expression on his face, too much dark gathered there inside the gazebo, but she can feel his surprise dissolving quickly into anger.
“Oh,” he says and sits back down. “Where’s your little friend? Did he have words with that big fucker’s shotgun?”
“No,” she replies. “He’s fine.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Scarborough thought I should talk to you alone. He thought—”
“Well he thought wrong, so fuck off,” and he lights a cigarette, his face framed momentarily in the glow from a match.
“I wish I could do that, fuck off,” she says. “I don’t like this place.”
Deacon doesn’t reply, just sits there, staring towards the tunnel and smoking his cigarette. She takes a few steps nearer the gazebo, and her feet make hardly any sound on the concrete path.
“What is that place?” she asks and points towards the tunnel.
“Go away,” Deacon grumbles, and the tip of his cigarette flares orange red.
“It’s some kind of tunnel, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s some kind of tunnel.”
“People should be more careful where they dig holes.”
“I’ll remember that. Now leave me alone.”
Starling Jane takes another step towards Deacon. “I’m sorry we upset you before,” she says. “I know Scarborough can be a real asshole sometimes.”
“Oh, you’ve figured that out, have you?”
Two more steps and she’s standing under the gazebo. She lays the manila envelope on the picnic table in front of him, and Deacon pretends not to have noticed, still watching the blockhouse, the ink-black eyes and mouth of the tunnel.
“I have to make you understand what’s at stake here,” she says. “Can I sit down?”
“Can I fucking stop you?”
“Your life’s in danger, Deacon. And the lives of your wife and unborn child. That’s why she’s here, the woman you’ve seen in your visions.”
Deacon turns his head and stares at her, his hard face slack, expressionless, his eyes hidden in the night. For a moment, she’s almost more afraid of him than of the tunnel.
“And you two are my guardian angels, is that it?”
“No,” Starling Jane says and sits down across from him. “No, we’re not. But we can help you.”
“If I help you first,” Deacon says, and she nods her head. He laughs and slowly grinds his cigarette out on the table-top, flicks the butt away. “What if I say no? Why would I want to get myself mixed up in this shit?”
“That’s what Scarborough was trying to tell you. You’re mixed up in it already. You have been since the day you led those cops out to Mary English’s house. That’s why she’s here, Deacon, the woman you saw, the woman who killed your friend, to find you and your wife.”
“To settle the score, right?” and he laughs again, a weary and hollow laugh like a very old man, someone who’s tired of living, but too afraid to lie down and die. “To teach me not to go poking my nose where it don’t belong. No good deed goes unpunished.”
“It’s complicated, Deacon.”
“So, what’s the score? Is this some sort of Mafioso shit, these people you work for? Some sort of gang?”
“I can’t tell you who they are. Who they are doesn’t matter, not as far as you’re concerned.”
“No, of course it doesn’t.”
A sudden breeze blows through the trees, and the dry leaves still clinging to the branches rattle and scratch loud against each other. Starling Jane shivers and hugs herself, glances nervously over her shoulder at the blockhouse.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks, and she turns to face him again.
“Two days from now, on Sunday, call the detective who took you to see the body. Tell him you need to talk to him again.”
“And what do I need to tell him?”
“That you’ve seen the killer, here, in your mind,” and she puts her left thumb against her temple.
“Look, if I start telling him what I’ve seen, the last thing he’s going to do is believe me.”
“You don’t tell him what you saw. You describe a man, a white man in his mid-forties. A man with a swastika tattooed on his back. There are a few more details in the envelope.”
Deacon picks up the envelope and turns it over in his hands. “You want me to fucking lie to the cops,” he says.
“You’ve lied to them already. You told them you didn’t see anything when you did.”
“Yeah, well. You’ve just got all the answers, don’t you?”
“There’s an address in the envelope. You tell them to go to that address, and they’ll find the evidence to support almost everything you say.”
Deacon puts the envelope down again and scratches at his chin.
“I don’t get it. You say she’s come after me and Chance, and that you’re trying to help us, but now you’re protecting her.”
“We’re not trying to protect her. We’re here to kill her, Deacon. But you have to understand, the cops can’t stop her, and if they get close, she’ll run.”
“If she runs, she’s not my goddamn problem anymore.”
Another gust and restless, windblown leaves whisper among themselves, murmuring Starling’s name in their wordless autumn language, and she says a silent prayer that Narcissa Snow hasn’t learned to listen to the trees yet.
“She’s not going anywhere until she finishes what she came here to do, Deacon. She believes that her life depends on it. If the cops catch on, she’ll run, but not until after you’re dead and your wife is dead.”
“And that’s all I have to do, this one little lie to the cops, and I’m free and clear?”
“No,” she says. “There will be other things, later on, but that’s the first of it.”
Deacon reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper, slides it across the picnic table to Starling Jane. She looks at it a moment, then looks back to him.
“That symbol,” he says. “She drew it on the wall above Soda’s bed, in his blood. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” she lies, because she’s said everything she was sent to say, because there are too many things she can never tell him, things connected to other things, and she hands the sheet of paper back to Deacon. “We knew it would get your attention, that’s all.”
“What I said back at the bar, I meant it, you know. If either of you fuckers comes anywhere near Chance, I’ll kill you. I wasn’t kidding. She’s the only thing I have left in the world.”
“Then why aren’t you with her, Deacon? Why are you sitting here in the dark by yourself? She needs you.”
“And you promise you’ll leave her out of this?”
“I can only promise I’ll do my best,” she says, and then there’s a scrambling noise back towards the tunnel, and Starling’s heart flutters and misses a beat. The adrenaline burning hot in her veins, hotter than crank or cocaine, and she draws the pistol from the shoulder holster inside her sweater and points it at the tunnel.
“Relax, okay?” Deacon says. “It’s just a raccoon. They’re all over the place up here. They live under the kudzu and come out at night to eat from the garbage cans.”
But Jane doesn’t relax, all the trees still whispering a
mong themselves, the night too full of phantoms or the threat of phantoms, and the gate to the tunnel like a gaping, hungry jaw full of wrought-iron teeth.
“It’s only the old water works tunnel,” Deacon says. “It runs all the way under the mountain to Homewood. Me and Chance and a friend of hers got stoned one night and broke into it, years ago, but Chance chickened out. We didn’t get very far.”
“Raccoons,” Starling Jane says, taking a deep breath and lowering the pistol.
“Yeah, raccoons. Or maybe somebody’s cat. Chill out.”
Starling checks the safety and returns the pistol to its holster. “It’s good that Chance was afraid. People should be more careful where they dig holes.”
“You said that already.”
“I have to go now, Deacon,” she says, standing, stepping out from underneath the gazebo. “But everything you need to know is there in the envelope. And you have the number if you should need to reach us.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Jane,” she tells him. “Just call me Jane. Everyone else does.”
“Don’t fuck me over, Jane,” he says. “You tell Mr. Pentecost I meant what I said at the bar.”
“He knows that. I’ll see you later, Deacon Silvey. You just do what we’ve asked and this will all be over soon.”
And then she turns and walks quickly back down the winding path to the road, wanting to be far away from that haunted tunnel and the tall gossiping trees.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Forests of the Night
The sun comes up slow and cold, heartless blue-white light to worm its way through the trees crowded close about the old house on Cullom Street and find Narcissa still squatting naked on the floor in front of the remains of the dead rat. A deep gouge in the wood from the bullet, and she’s picked the rat apart with her nails, has spread its innards and bones, its fur and teeth, like a deck of tarot cards. A meaning to every drop of blood, unspoken significance in each speck of flesh or tiny vertebra, and she has squatted there for hours teasing understanding from the gore. And finally, their intentions revealed to her in the torn membrane of a kidney, the acute angle of a femur to a rib, their intentions and their names, and, what’s more, that they have gone to the seer. Narcissa grinds her teeth and stares at the morning light, then licks a bit of rat off her thumb and looks back down at the mess on the floor.
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