by Ed Kurtz
Cold, trembling hands went up to the hollow of his neck, absurdly threatening as though they weren’t his own hands, under his complete control. His eyes narrowed to slits and his jaw hung slack; this seemed too much of a challenge, so what of the rest of it? He had a performance to do, a lecture to give. There was the film he was to introduce and then all those pamphlets she told him to sell. And Christ knew if she’d instructed him to cut his own throat before throwing himself into the Arkansas River . . .
. . . well.
With fingers like frozen sausages he fumbled at the knot, digging into the folds and unraveling the tie. Concentrating, he failed to wrap his mind around the concept of retying it. Seeing this, she slid a warm hand between his arm and ribs, gave a gentle squeeze and said, “Let go, Jake. Just let go. Then it’s all smooth, like cream.”
Which it was.
The hymn wound down as the congregation reached their destination, and Shannon realized he’d only been moving his lips without actually singing at all. Through the glass, and despite the blinding burnt orange glare of the setting sun, he could see that the lobby was positively packed with people. He thought, And this is only Thursday.
Their voices sputtering out, Emma Hutchins was the last to belt out the hymn’s closing refrain before immediately launching into a strident announcement. Shannon felt his ears burn, humiliated as he was that she, and not he, led this futile little crusade.
“Sisters and brothers,” she pompously shouted, “friends, we have come to the end of the way.”
Fluffy white heads nodded. The reverend glanced over at Rory Allmond, who appeared to be asleep standing up. Shannon envied him his escape.
“This is not the first time we have gathered here before this wretched temple of sin,” Mrs. Hutchins blathered on, fairly rolling the R in wretched as though she came from upper crust New England stock (which she most certainly did not). “Indeed, I do doubt it will be the last. I believe, however—mark my words, friends and brethren—I believe, from what I know to be true, that we have never been more needed to speak out against Russell Cavanaugh and his wickedness than we are today. We are called to this. Called.
“Our presence should embarrass our neighbours in there,” she continued. “We must shame them back into the fold. We must show them how wrong they are to listen to the Devil’s sweet-sounding song instead of righteous hymns of praise.”
The reverend made a severe face, jutting out his lower lip, though he fought the urge to roll his eyes. Someone said, “Amen,” but he couldn’t tell who it was. Quickly, he nodded in assent and parroted the sentiment: “Amen.”
The second syllable had barely escaped his lips when his eyes lit on the strangely illuminated form of his daughter through the glass fronting the theatre. For a moment, he considered the possibility that it was merely an illusion, a trick of the light. The figure was haloed by the glare of evening sun; it was not unthinkable that he was looking at some other young woman, perhaps a total stranger, who was either made to resemble Margie or who did not look like her at all, but rather his tortured mind was creating the effect.
After all, he reasoned, Margie was safe at home.
And besides, she wouldn’t be caught dead at that appalling picture show, not knowing what it would do to her father, how it would make him look. . . .
The face brightened, eyes wide and mouth agape. The face that looked like Margie’s. That looked like hers because it was.
“Lord,” he whispered.
“Raise up your signs and sing to the heavens,” Mrs. Hutchins bellowed like a pious foghorn. “Fill your lungs and blast this place with your voices.”
And then Margie was gone, melted back into the undulating horde as the glare broke and Emma Hutchins’ chosen hymn returned with a furious vengeance.
“When the last, feeble step has been taken,
and the gates of that city appear,
and the beautiful songs of the angels
float out to my listening ear . . .”
It was a warning, Jim Shannon knew. Through the words of the hymn, Mrs. Hutchins was notifying the patrons of the Palace Theater that the gates of that golden city would not open for them as it would for her—that quite the opposite awaited those who failed to heed and repent. For their listening ears there would come only screams of anguish, among them their own.
The reverend frowned as his breath momentarily hitched in his chest. An unanticipated defensiveness boiled within him, rooted in the notion that this loud, nosy woman at the head of his flock wanted his little Margie to burn in Satan’s lake of fire.
The bitch!
The vile thought rocked his body and he half-convulsed, dropping his sign in the process.
“Reverend Shannon, you all right?”
That from Alice Maxwell, who looked aggrieved to have to ask, or so Shannon judged. He squinted one eye and looked from her face to the ground, where the sign he carried all the way from the church—from his church—screamed up at him: no filth in litchfield.
“Reverend?”
He shook his head and retrieved the sign, as much as he wanted to leave it underfoot.
“I’m fine.”
“Are we just gunna sing, or are we gunna . . . do something?”
For half a minute he regarded her quizzically, and then he turned his attention back to the broad glass window through which he had seen Margie. His daughter had not returned, but in her place stood a stocky little man with a pockmarked face and his hair parted in the middle the way some men did two generations earlier. (All he needed was a jaunty bowtie and garters on his sleeves, and Shannon would have sworn he was looking at an Old West bartender.) The man’s arms hung limp at his sides and his small, black eyes all but burned through the glass at the reverend. All around him the crowd ebbed and flowed, pressing up against one another like slaughterhouse cattle, but somehow avoiding contact with the man altogether.
He was like a ghost.
Shannon gawped at him, unsure and curious about everybody else’s reaction to his stoic, cadaverous poise, when Mrs. Hutchins began singing again from the start of the hymn:
“The sands have been washed in the footprints
of the stranger on Galilee’s shore,
and the voice that subdued the rough billows,
will be heard in Judea no more.”
Her voice—not especially melodious to begin with—grew hoarse and deep. Frog-like. Even her eyes seemed to bulge as her jowls trounced up and down, giving the reverend the distinct impression that she might actually be transforming into an enormous frog.
“But the path of that lone Galilean (ribbit),
with joy I will follow today (croak);
and the toils of the road will seem nothing (RIB-BIT),
when I get to the end of the way (crooooak).”
A schoolboy grin played at the corners of his mouth. He caught the short man in the window in his peripheral vision, turned to see him—he too grinned boyishly, and he nodded encouragingly.
Yes, that’s right. Go ahead and laugh. It’s funny, the froggy lady. Froggy lady is funny.
Laugh, Jimmy. Laugh.
He did. It came in short, snorting bursts at first but descended rapidly into a raucous fit of noisy hysterics. Alice Maxwell and John Martin gaped at him. Emma Hutchins’ gravel road voice skidded into a ditch. Her face bruised red with the heat of angry blood, which only made the chortling reverend laugh harder.
“Frog . . . froggy,” he gasped, tears streaming from his eyes and hands tight against his midsection.
“What!” Mrs. Hutchins croaked.
Shannon dropped from the sidewalk to the pavement like a sack of apples, quivering and cackling and sobbing all at once. His left elbow struck the macadam; skin peeled away to reveal raw, pink flesh beading red. Two skeletally thin old widows to the back of the congregation lowered their signs and stepped away like birds,
back the way they came. Jim Shannon screamed with laughter as he watched them go.
Now several theatregoers pressed themselves against the glass to observe the bizarre scene in the street outside. Shannon recognized a few of his own among them, and he laughed at their faces. Heads shook. Others turned away in disgust.
Standing at their nucleus was the pockmarked man, whose brow rose solicitously as he stepped through the glass. The window shattered all around him, falling in a glittering cloudburst to the sidewalk, and as he passed through and away from it, Jim Shannon watched with wild amusement as every shard, both knife-like and microscopic, came back into place in the now unbroken glass. No one seemed to notice—all eyes were on the reverend, and not upon the man. They paid him no attention at all.
“Quite a trick!” Shannon hollered, his lips dripping with froth.
The man smirked and extended his hands, palms up. It was nothing, his gesture seemed to say. Shannon reasoned that it must have been nothing indeed, since no one else batted an eye. At his thought, the man shrugged.
Behind him, through the miraculously unbroken glass, the throng in the theatre lobby milled more anxiously, like a swarm of bees.
They cannot see things as they really are, the man intimated to the trembling reverend on the macadam.
“They can’t?” Shannon asked, still gasping from the stitches in his sides. “Why not?”
I have not shown them.
“How can they see?”
In there.
The man jerked his cratered chin back at the lobby, where the crowd was gradually draining out, into the auditorium, like dirty bathwater down a pipe. Shannon squashed his face into a mask of incredulity and giggled.
“What, the sex film?”
No. Not that. Something else. Later.
“Something else? Something . . . worse?”
Much. You will see. Not now, but you will see. Now I will show you.
“Show me? Show me what?”
Things as they are, of course.
Dean Mortimer felt the crush of the surging crowd and grunted as he was pushed along with it. The muscles in his back tensed and he made fists of both his hands. He gritted his teeth and sucked deep breaths in through his nose. It was all he could do to fight the slowly building anger he harboured at the obstinate crowd and the disgusting film he was about to see and, of course, at Sheriff Rich for making him do this.
It had everything to do with the quartered stiff in that dump hotel, naturally, though neither Rich nor Mortimer expected anything at the Palace to shed much light on the subject. All Ernie Rich wanted was a bit of reconnaissance, for the young deputy to get the lay of the land with regard to these shifty roadshow people in their own element. It might turn up squat, but at the very least the police presence would surely make them sweat a little. On this last count, Mortimer wondered if he should have shown up in uniform, give his attendance a more official—and by proxy threatening—bent. As things stood, hardly anyone paid him any mind at all. Only one person bothered to say hello, and that with patent embarrassment. Practically everyone in town wanted to be there, it seemed, but no one wanted to be seen there. Deputy Mortimer did not blame them for the latter, though he remained largely puzzled by the former.
Didn’t anyone in Litchfield have any common decency anymore?
Ahead, the two ornate doors to the auditorium swung open and outward, each of them attended by a member of the roadshow company. Mortimer studied their faces: he had personally interviewed one of them and eavesdropped on Ernie while he put the clamps on the other. Both cool characters. Barely even knew the cat, the one said—that was what he called the victim, cat. Mortimer grimaced now at the memory. He did not have much of a problem with Negroes, but he could not abide by whites who elected to speak like them. It made no sense to him. But little about these crafty out-of-towners did.
The doorman on the left smiled on one side of his mouth and Mortimer thought the man winked at him. This was the one he’d interviewed at the hotel the night before. His grimace deepened.
“We picked him up in Missouri,” the man had said. “That was just three weeks ago. Why, I don’t even know the cat’s last name.”
A cool character, all right.
And the accent sounded vaguely uppity, despite the jazzy Negro talk. Northern to be sure, possibly New England. The list of reasons to dislike the man went on. Someone behind the deputy gave him a gentle push in the small of the back.
“Go on,” said a peevish voice. “We’re movin’, pal.”
Mortimer grunted and stepped forward, keeping his eyes on the left side doorman. When they were parallel, the man gave a single, sharp nod and said, “Enjoy the show, deputy.”
Hell.
He was ushered into the soundproof auditorium, the air thick with shouting voices, where he could not hear the scream from the street.
“Hopefully Doc Hornor can see to your ankle before long,” Jojo said.
“How many emergencies can there be at one time?”
“Just one big one I know about. There was a . . . an incident. At my hotel.”
They were just under a mile from where the farm road went abruptly from dirt to pavement, having passed Theodora’s house and the half-rotted grain silo a few hundred yards west of it. In the Thirties it was decided to paint welcome to litchfield on the side of the silo that faced the road; now it only said ome to litch.
Farmer Dunn hadn’t wanted to go into town, it not being a Saturday. He had not been to town on any other day of the week in more than a decade and explained that he saw no reason to bust up a perfectly good tradition now. Accordingly, he turned the rumbling heap over to Jojo and instructed him to take care of it before jamming a corncob pipe between his teeth and sauntering back to the big house.
“An incident?” Theodora asked.
“Somebody died.”
“Oh,” she said, staring dreamily through the windshield. “Was it that bad?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if a dead person is going to take up so much of the doctor’s time that he might not get to see me, I reckon it must be pretty bad.”
Jojo snorted and jerked the gearshift. The road gave way to deep pits and dips that jostled them both to the point of nausea.
“Yeah. It was bad, all right.”
“A killing,” she inferred.
“I don’t know—maybe. Hard to say.” He reached over her lap to pop the glove box, took a quick look and then shut it again. “Sorry. Looking for cigarettes.”
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “I don’t smoke.”
“Story of my life,” he said with a bitter grin. The world jolted underneath them; they’d reached smooth macadam. “Hornor’s essentially the medical examiner for whenever the sheriff’s department needs one, and today they need one. I don’t want to get you upset or anything, but it was a damned gruesome scene.”
Theodora pressed her lips together and sighed through her nose. Her thoughts wandered, but not far: only as far as her own gruesome scene with the doll stuffed with tiny bones. The doll she found in her husband’s coat pocket. Somehow she’d nearly forgotten about it. Now she couldn’t get it out her mind.
“What’s your hotel?” she asked, snatching at anything to change the subject.
“Come again?”
“You said, ‘my hotel.’”
“Oh. I’m a house detective at the Litchfield Valley. It’s not really mine, I just work there.”
“I never could understand why they called it that,” she said. “There aren’t any valleys in Litchfield.”
“There’s not much of anything in Litchfield,” he countered. “I guess they had to call it something, and Litchfield Valley was as good as anything.”
Theodora said, “Hmn,” and resumed staring through the windscreen. A dragonfly exploded against it in the
next second, and she flinched. The insect’s gooey yellow entrails formed a starburst on the dusty glass. It was not, however, quite dead—rather, the dragonfly’s spindly legs and curling green tail twitched against the wind as the life slowly drained out of it. She thought it was a terrible way to die, though she supposed she could imagine worse.
“What happened?” she asked suddenly.
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“The person who died in your hotel,” she explained. “How did he die? Or was it a she?”
“It was a man. I don’t know if you know about these people showing a picture up at the Palace this week. . . .”
“The Palace? My husband owns it.”
Jojo’s eyes widened and he stammered for a moment. “You don’t say.”
“There’s a roadshow company in town,” she added. “I guess Russ is . . . helping them.”
“I see.”
“Was the deceased one of those people?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Was it Barker Davis?”
Again, he was at a loss for words. He shot a glance at her; she was still carefully studying the exploded dragonfly. It was not moving anymore.
“Do you know this Davis fellow?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t, and who’s asking the questions here, anyway?”
“I’m sorry. You asked how he died?”
“That’s right.”
“Truth be told, I don’t really know. But some folks heard the fellow scream, and there was even a witness—a young lady—who claims he just came apart at the joints like horses were pulling him in all directions. Anyone would believe that’s just what happened, too, except it was in a cramped hotel room with no one else in it apart from the girl and the vic.”
“Vic?”
“Victim, sorry.”
“Victim of what, though?”
Jojo shrugged his shoulders. “No one knows. Mayhap Doc Hornor’s got something figured out. All me and anybody with the department knows is that the poor son of a bitch got his arms, legs and head torn clean off, but none of us can figure on how it was done.”