by Farris, John
Halfway up the breastworks, Joe had to stop and rest. The glowworms in the void had begun to knit together in a filigree pattern. He didn't know if that was good news, or bad.
Turning his head as lightning pulsed through the flailing trees, he saw Mr. Phipps coming, the gleam of a nickel-plated revolver in one hand. His glasses were awry on his face. He was going from tree to tree, staggered by the maddening, shrieking wind, holding on to branches to keep from being bowled head over heels. It was not possible to tell, from Joe's impaired perspective, just how far away Mr. Phipps was or if, as he turned his head quickly side to side in the glare, he knew where Joe had gone.
Nevertheless Joe thought it was a good bet that if Mr. Phipps did find him, he intended to kill him.
There was an overturned camper truck in the middle of the intersection of Fox Creek and Pitt's Landing roads just past the causeway to Chicora Island, and the tow-truck operator was having trouble deciding how to clear it out of the way. The overhead traffic signal had fallen. Two Highway Patrol cars, blue lights flashing in the windy torrent, and a line of traffic coming off the island made more of a mess of the intersection.
Walter Lee, driving Frosty's yellow minivan, was met by a trooper in a Crayola-orange rain suit. Inexplicably, he also wore sunglasses with amber lenses.
"You're going the wrong way!"
"There's people at the Barony I need to look after!" Walter Lee said, blinking furiously as the rain streamed in through the two-inch gap of the rolled-down window. "Let me go through, please."
"Well, we can't stop you! All we can do is advise that some of the roads are probably impassable already."
"I'll get there! If you'll just move that one car which is blocking me."
"Up to you!" the trooper said, and he plodded, haltingly, like a boxer into a welter of body-blows, toward the parked cruiser. Walter Lee rolled the window up. The windshield wipers were going at maximum speed, sweeping waves of water off the glass, but still it was hard to see more than five car lengths past the intersection.
He heard Frosty say, as clearly as if she were seated beside him and not in a polished box back at the funeral parlor, "Daddy, they will put you in jail the rest of your natural life."
"I ain't afraid of that." He was afraid to look, though, to see if she really was there in the yellow minivan. He knew that wouldn't be good news. If he saw her, then it would mean he had gone crazy. And a crazy man was not a purposeful man.
He hunched his shoulders, shivering, and risked a peek. his right. Frosty was still yery much aliye in bis memory, but her ghost was not occupying the other seat in the front of the van. Still, he had heard her voice, and the shock of it continuedtingkhis icic bones.
The only other time he'd heard a plain-as-day, out-of-the-blue voice had been at a particularly strenuous though uplifting tent revival, and it had been Jesus speaking. Jesus had said to him, "Walter Lee, I need that twenty-five cents in your pocket you were going to spend on chocolate bars." And then, after he'd dug up the quarter he'd been trying to forget was buried in a deep pocket of his overalls and tossed it into the collection bucket, Jesus spoke again: "And I don't want you looking at those sinful magazines with naked women in 'em no more."
The sheriff's car was backed onto the shoulder of the road, and Walter Lee proceeded.
He had been faithful to Jesus since that hight at the revival, true to those he loved and charitable to many who didn't deserve it, only to have his life come to this. Frosty was right. It would mean jail, or worse. Nothing had really changed in the last forty years. Colored still didn't stand much of a chance in the courts. No matter that Dr. Luke was an evil man; he was a white man who had powerful friends.
Walter Lee risked taking a hand off the wheel, and pressed his palm against the revolver in his suit pocket. The feel of it was no comfort to him; he had never liked guns of any kind. He'd never fired a shot in anger, even in wartime. He was a fisherman, not a hunter.
Trembling from grief, Walter Lee drove on, and came to the starving dog.
The sides of the dog had sunk down to staves; its lips were clenched in a grimace of hunger, or fear. Unable to control the momentum of walking, the yellow dog was in the middle of the road, floundering sideways, haunches sinking. And, as Walter Lee slowed, the dog wound up the way it had come: puzzled, vacant; powerless, or unwilling, to go there again.
Walter Lee stopped and sat for a few seconds, looking at the waterlogged cur in his headlights. Then he took off his suit coat, folded it on the seat beside him. He got out of the minivan, an arm up to shield his face, and, staying low, inched his way to where the dog was lying helpless. There were stinging, pinhead-size pieces of hail mixed with the rain. Each flare of light-fling was as green as granny apples. Walter Lee stooped with his back to the gale, picked the shuddering dog up in his arms, carried it back to the van and laid it on the floor behind the driver's seat. Too far gone to live, Walter Lee thought. But he reached for his suit coat, took the revolver out of the wallet pocket and wrapped the dog snugly in his coat.
The dog looked up at him; its dying eyes were unexpectedly serene.
Walter Lee felt something like the tap of a hammer at the base of his spine; relief and awe jetted through him as fresh as childhood blood, and his aching head felt miraculously cleared. For the first time in more than forty years, Jesus spoke to him, words that came not from heaven and with a pealing of heavenly chords, but from the belly of the yellow dog.
"If you put him in the ground. Walter Lee, how can his soul come to me?"
Flooded roads, flooded bridges, as he drove toward the violent middle of the storm, the minivan in two feet of water part of the time. But it didn't quit on him. "Don't you go quittin' neither," Walter Lee said, more than once, to the dog behind him. By the time he reached the gates of the Barony, he knew what he must do to put Frosty's soul at rest, and satisfy the Lord as well.
Lillian had gone from room to room on the first floor at the back of the house, retaping seams around window- and doorframes where the wind came through minute cracks with the hiss of a steam kettle, wringing out wet towels jammed under the French doors from the dining room to the veranda.
"Did you find her?" Lucas Thomason asked Lillian, his mouth close to her ear. "Is she hiding upstairs, like I said she'd do?"
Lillian pushed a dry towel under one of the doors. "No time to see."
Thomason put his FedEx package down and combed his fingers through his sparse wet hair. His ears were ringing from the pressure of the fulminating storm. In spite of Lillian's efforts, there was a mist in the room. "Well, that's where she is," he said again. "Maybe I'll go have a look for Charlene myself, later."
Lillian looked at him as lightning flashed, wordless but not without comment.
He blotted his face with a handkerchief. "Any damage so far?"
"No"
"I'll be upstairs in Abby's room! I could use a sandwich when you have time, Lillian!"
"Yes, sir."
Thomason carried the package into his infirmary and broke it open. He took out the ampule from the Swiss lab, opened a cabinet drawer and found a syringe of the appropriate gauge. The lights in the room winked at a particularly violent gust from the hurricane; Honey was all over the house now, clawing like a huge, forgotten cat trying to get in. He turned off the lights, thinking that he would have to refuel the generators soon to keep electricity on inside. The public utility lines to the house had been disconnectecL earlier to prevent back-feeding, adding to the risk of a disastrous fire if things didn't go as well as he hoped they would.
He walked toward the front of the house, swallowing to reduce the pressure on his eardrums. The chandelier in the gallery was trembling; the green marble floor was a mosaic of watery shadows.
"Luke!" Abby called. "Look at me!"
Glancing up, he saw her, standing—standing!—in the second-floor hall twenty feet above him, gripping the railing around the stairwell tightly. Lizzie was behind her.
"Something'
s happened, Luke! I have feeling! I can—"
Mainly with the strength of her arms, Abby propelled herself a little farther along the railing in a mood of stubborn good cheer, her face streaming perspiration, each breath an exclamation of achievement.
Thomason felt his gut muscles cramping from shock. "Now, Abby—don't overexert yourself! And don't depend on that railing to hold you up, it's none too strong—"
Even before he finished speaking he saw the railing buckle as the bolts that held it to the wall pulled loose, saw Abby's look of shock and fear as she moved erratically sideways with the railing, losing what tenuous balance she had been able to maintain.
Chapter Forty-Five
Charlene was hungry, so after a while she got up and went into the kitchen to look around. Earlier she had closed the door Joe had left open in his hurry to get away from the threat of the revolver, which she had aimed carefully and with no intent to do serious damage. But there was nothing she could do about the wind and the rain pissing in through the bullet hole in one of the windows that overlooked the porch. A salty mist had invaded the beach house; everything she touched was slippery.
The electricity had been off for a long time, and her hurricane lamp was running out of fuel. But there was so much lightning she had no trouble finding her way around the shaky beach house. Ice cubes in the freezer were melting into a lump. She put the ice in the sink and chipped off some with a paring knife, and made lemonade with artificial mix she found in the pantry. There was an unopened jar of peanut butter too. She drank lemonade and scooped peanut butter out of the jar with her little finger, having her treat without bread or crackers—the way she'd always liked it. But how long had it been, gosh, twenty years since she'd dared to eat peanut butter. All that fatty semisolid oil.
Tasted so good she wondered if she should pack the rest of the jar with the few things she had found in the bathrooms, the liquor cabinet and Adele's big handbag to take aboard the Mother Ship when it arrived. Adele wasn't going to need her hairbrush or emery boards. Too bad her lipstick was the wrong shade, but Charlene had taken that too, thinking the color might look different in a better light.
She also found a spare battery pack for Adele's camcorder, but not the camcorder itself.
It was getting harder to wait. No television and the low pressure within the hurricane had clogged her sinuses and closed her ears, deafening her. Just as well; the shriek of the wind would have been hard to bear at full volume.
Now and then the house rocked, as if it was about to slide off its foundation, and Charlene cringed. What was keeping them? Any minute now, probably, they would come flickering through the walls, never less than two or more than five, and surround her, glowing like the low flame of a gas-stove jet, eyes slanted and pupilless within their misty auras. She never knew what to say to them—well, face it, the first encounters had so terrified her she was tongue-tied. Until she came to accept the fact they meant no harm. Leaving her in her bed on their first visits, merely touching her all over with appendages that resembled leafy stalks of celery until she was so thoroughly covered with a mucilage-like liquid she'd had difficulty scrubbing it all off in the shower afterward. Twice Luke had slept through these visitations, two feet away from her; but they weren't interested in him.
Charlene walked the floor of the beach house, trying not to be impatient. There were some old decorating seen before, and the light was too poor to read anyway. Almost the middle of the afternoon, but the day had never really dawned. She picked through some seashells on a higher shelf, coral fingers mounted on pedestals, and found Adele's camcorder draped in fishnet, partly hidden behind a big crusty starfish.
Charlene undraped the camcorder and took it down from the shelf. The battery was dead, but she remembered the spare battery in Adele's purse, which was at the head of the couch where her dead body lay under a beach blanket decorated with leaping blue porpoises.
With nothing else to do, Charlene changed batteries and sat on the floor holding the camcorder in both hands, waiting for the tape to rewind. Then the show began. The light had been good. First there was nothing but furniture, including the couch on which Adele was now laid out; then Joe and Adele appeared and began talking. That wasn't interesting because the audio playback was set too low, and Charlene, not all that familiar with camcorders, couldn't remedy it. But soon something happened. Adele's head snapped back, and it was clear on the videotape that she'd been shot, because the back of her head more or less exploded. It was like the president's head in the open car in Dallas the year Charlene was born, the crude frames of film everybody had seen a hundred times. Joe looked back, getting out of his chair. Then a man in a dark blue suit with a gun came into the picture, which wasn't a bad picture at all in spite of the distance, color values were just fine. The man hit Joe and knocked him down. And after that, who should appear but—
Charlene watched the tape until it ran out on a tableau of Joe, drugged and motionless on the floor, and Adele, equally motionless, the two of them like characters in a play that had ended without applause or a descending curtain. When the small rectangular screen went blank, Charlene rewound and watched it all again, this time wondering what had been in the syringe Lucas Thomason emptied or nearly emptied, into Joe's neck. He always liked his needles so much. She had a touch of the flu; he wanted to give her a needle.
When she became bored, just after the shooting in the third replay, Charlene shut the camera off and looked at Adele. The house shook and she felt a little dizzy from concentrating on the camcorder screen. She got up and put the camera on the couch with Adele, between an arm that had been stiff but was now softening again and her side. The shriek of the wind pierced Charlene's clogged ears, alerting her. It was a different pitch than she'd become accustomed to. There was a steady barrage of God-knew-what against the front of the house and the nylon screens that protected the windows. Pieces of shell flotsam, coral; even fish, dredged up by the action of the huge rollers rising steadily to the level of the porch.
Several panes of glass had been cracked since she'd last looked out. The heavy screens were laden with kelp. It now seemed as if the house were being picked up, a few inches each time, then slammed back on its foundation. All she could see outside was one huge black cloud rising from the heaving waters like an undersea mountain.
Charlene had never seen anything like this, but there could be no doubt that the world was coming to an end, preceded by moaning and howling in which the body blanched and shrank to a nub of bald, primal fear. The Mother Ship had to come now. At any moment the beams of blue light would shine through the walls, penetrate downward from the roof and coalesce into familiar heady shapes: the Higher Beings. She crept across the sisal floor covering on knees that had begun to bleed again and picked up her travel case. She held it, shivering, against her breast, too drained to move again. Terror was shutting down her vagus nerves. Charlene was like an animal in the jaws of a predator that had pursued her all her life and, inevitably, had at last run her to ground.
Shelter of any kind was preferable to the battering he had to endure in the open, so when Joe reached the Wayfarer he pulled himself aboard and crawled to the Lexan bubble over the midships cockpit, which, fortunately, he hadn't removed while making repairs. The forty-three-foot ketch was trembling on her keel blocks. The roof of the boat shed, heavy-gauge corrugated steel, had already been ripped away by the wind and crumpled around a live oak. Waves rising up from the normally placid inlet of Pandora's Bay broke over the stern. With his right hand he slid back the panel of the moisture-clouded bubble that provided access to the deck when the boat was at sea, and lowered himself inside. He was quick to close the bubble, but in a matter of seconds the cockpit was soaked from the driving rain.
He slumped against the padded backrest, gratefully relieved, for now, of the intolerable burden of the wind. With little visibility and half of his vision missing, he could easily convince himself that he was no longer on land but riding out a force-eleven gale wit
hout mast or helm. He wondered what the anemometer would read, what the seas would look like in a monster storm. He already had the vertigo that would accompany the lift and helpless plunge of a small boat down the backs of hissing, forty-foot waves: His imagination, he thought, wanted him diverted from the reality of a situation even more dangerous. The Wayfarer was dry-docked with a windbreak of cypress and mangrove behind, a woodlot of mixed hardwoods and pines on two sides. He had seen, as he struggled to reach the boat, trees of less than a foot in diameter uprooted like weeds. The Wayfarer had a sturdy hull but a direct hit by the trunk of a large tree like a cypress would smash it to splinters. Never mind what would happen to the Lexan cockpit bubble.
His safety was moment-to-moment, a matter of luck, and the nearness of the hurricane's front wall. How much longer? he wondered. If the full force of the hurricane was just now making landfall, it was inevitable that the Wayfarer would be swept away.
Lightning. And something out there on the tapered foredeck, clinging to it—crooked branches of a tree, he guessed, or a large dark animal of some kind. He turned his head to bring more of it into view, It would have to be a raccoon; they had the capability of climbing and clinging. Whatever it was, it was very nearly helpless in the screaming wind. Yet, as Joe watched, the animal seemed to be moving, inching from handhold to handhold—cleats, stanchions, forward hatch cover—toward the cockpit bubble. Resolving, after a long suspenseful minute, into Mr. Phipps, his suit coat pulled up around his head, arms foreshortened, black leather gloves on his hands, all of which accounted for the humped, misshapen look of him.