A board creaked in the house, and he jerked in a spasm of fright. It was too early for her! It wasn’t yet noon!
And yet she was encroaching on time even as she had encroached on space. At first only a few fleeting night-time visits in his bedroom. Then, after that movie, he began seeing her in the daytime, standing watching him, naked, eyes calm and damnably level. She would be standing in the next room, shadowed but real.
He did not dare approach her. He knew in his soul that the moment he touched her, she would dissolve into ruin and ghastliness, a corpse falling into dissolution under his fingertips. But even after he slammed the door against her he felt her there.
And the man, the man with the ruined hands. Lightning had awakened Jefferson, that time, a night or two nights after that awful film, and going to close the window, he had looked out into the yard. A flash revealed him standing there, leaves whipping around him, but his own clothes not disturbed, a black man holding his arms up as if beseeching mercy, but the hands were tattered bloody claws, and rags of flesh and strings of artery dangled from the ripped forearms. The banker had slammed the window and pulled the curtains to.
But the next day Jefferson had the feeling that he had gotten into the house as well.
He gave up space to them. He surrendered the bedroom early; and then, during the time he was sleeping on the living-room sofa, he started to hear them. They moved about, in the beginning mostly at night, steps at first overhead and then coming down the stair. He gave them the front of the house and withdrew to the kitchen. Now he had only the kitchen and the hallway for his own. He dared not go into the rest of the house even in full daylight, for recently the sounds had pushed into the forenoon hours, and they began before sunset.
On his last expedition he had fetched back a hammer and nails. The door from the kitchen to the dining room was now nailed firmly shut, and all the kitchen chairs except one were jammed tight against it, secured by more nails.
Ballew Jefferson wanted help more than anything he had wanted in his life. But each time he put his hand on the telephone, he thought of that motion picture — how had they photographed it? — and of the people in the town seeing him stripped naked, caught in his lust and his sin, a goatish, rutting creature, scarcely human. And with a nigger woman, too. Of course, that in itself wasn’t so bad, most men could forgive that, but the women of the town — his own sister — they would never forget, never forgive, not until he was dead, and not really then.
And he trusted no one. Not Ludie, who still came every day to pick up her bribe (how much did she know?); and not his sister, who had called him twice before he insulted her enough to convince her that he wasn’t sick, he was just plain stubborn. Either of them might expose him.
Worse, either of them might be her in disguise.
Even Miss Wayly might not be herself.
Better to do it this way, he thought. They can’t stay in my house forever. Sooner or later they’ll get tired and leave, or they’ll evaporate, as ghosts are supposed to do. Better to wait them out.
He sat at the table, his feet (insulated by three pairs of socks, but almost numb with cold nonetheless) on the nest beneath. He had spent days alone. He had listened to the radio until he lost his ability to endure it. Then he needed something to occupy himself.
He had it now. He had taken the biggest butcher knife in the house from its holder. He had a whetstone, oil, and a knife sharpener.
Every day, for hours, he worked on the edge of the knife, making it thinner, brighter, keener.
He had a feeling — he could not explain it, but there it was — that the knife was almost ready now.
But with stolid determination, he swept the blade slowly over the stone again and again, in preparation.
9
They found him Friday afternoon, after school, on one of the benches on the Square. Alan approached him tentatively. “Mr. Tate?”
The preacher looked around. His face was much too thin, the eyes too deeply set in their sockets, the nose too much like a beak. In his rusty black suit he was like a dark bird of prey. Or like a scavenger, a buzzard, alert for death.
“Mr. Kirby.” Said that way, gravely and seriously, with no mocking intent, the “Mr.” made Alan feel strange, not grown-up but burdened with years all the same. The preacher stood and looked behind Alan. “Ma’am.”
“My name is Ann Lewis, Mr. Tate,” the woman said, stepping forward. “Alan told me about you.”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” Tate said in a voice sorrowful with apology.
“I know you didn’t.” Ann Lewis sighed. “My car’s over here. Maybe we should just drive around a bit. We need to talk.” When Tate did not respond, she continued: “Sir, we all three seem to feel that there’s something wrong in this town, something badly wrong. We may be the only ones in town who feel that way. I think we ought to get together on this.”
Tate ducked his head for a moment. Then he looked up. “I reckon you’re right,” he said.
“Come with me.”
The three of them crossed the Square to the slot where Ann had parked her Rambler. They got into the car, she started the engine, and they drove away, under a sky blotched with ragged gray clouds.
Andy McCory, leaning against the ticket booth of the ShadowShow, had watched them the whole time. He looked at his watch — it was almost time for reel three of A Hatful of Rain — and went back inside.
Eight
1
It was ridiculous on the face of it, but there it was: they had nowhere to meet. Mrs. Maddons, Ann’s landlady, would never countenance a lone gentleman caller, let alone two at once — never mind that one was sixteen years younger and the other twenty-six years older than Ann. Tate’s boardinghouse was obviously unsuitable. And although Alan might have invited them to his house, the thought of his aunt, just there across the street, was enough to kill that idea.
So it had to be the school, after all. Fortunately, there was a café and a service station not far from the school, and there were occasional reasons for a teacher to be in the building after dark; they assumed that, what with the traffic around the businesses, no one would pay much attention to Miss Lewis’s car, parked inconspicuously near the corner of the building.
Still, they did not meet in the classroom, where the huge windows could not be draped. Ann let them into the teachers’ workroom, a cubbyhole down beyond the girls’ rest room (I’ve never been this far down the hall, Alan realized as she unlocked the door) which had no windows to worry about. It did have a sofa, a couple of chairs, an antiquated mimeo machine (Alan thought, So that’s where the purple pumpkins and Pilgrims and Santa Clauses and Valentine hearts come from every year), a coffee table, a scatter of memos, stacks of graded papers, and a tin of English tea.
Odum Tate behaved as much like a boy as Alan in these unfamiliar surroundings: all wrists and clumsy elbows, he stood in front of the sofa until Miss Lewis said, “Please sit down,” and then he did all at once, like a marionette whose strings had been released. Alan sat next to him, and Miss Lewis took a chair across the table from them. She smoothed her dark blue skirt over her knees decorously, but she sat so near the edge of the seat that no one could get a glimpse of anything above her calf anyway. “Alan tells me you’re concerned,” she said.
The preacher nodded, his face grave. “I have felt evil before,” he said carefully, in a halting and formal voice. “I see it, you know, sometimes when I preach. A look of hate for me, for the word of God, burning out of somebody’s face. But it has always been — personal, somehow, before. This time it don’t feel that way.”
“Mr. Tate, what do you think is wrong?”
He shook his head. “Ma’am, Miz Lewis, I don’t know. There’s a nasty feel about this town now, like the pit has opened and Satan has been loosed from bondage and is walking the face of the earth. I’m sorry, I know that don’t help, but it’s the way it feels to me. And yet nothin’ has changed, has it?”
“People have died,”
Alan said. “The woman, and that man who they think killed her. And then yesterday the policeman.”
Ann Lewis shook her head, tossing her blond hair lightly. “That happens, Alan.”
“I can’t remember anybody’s bein’ murdered in Gaither before.”
“But sometimes it happens that way. It’s like, oh, I don’t know, it’s like a pressure cooker where the pressure builds up and up until finally something just has to give. Maybe one murder caused the others; maybe the man in the jail killed the woman and then felt remorse, felt sorry, and committed suicide. Maybe the policeman thought he had done a bad job because the man died.”
Tate waited until she had finished. “I’m sorry, ma’am, Miz Lewis, but I have to agree with Alan.” He frowned. “It’s hard to tell you what I think. But it’s like there wasn’t three murders at all, but only one. Like all three deaths was part of one big death. I don’t know. I have prayed to God for guidance, and He sent me to Alan. Somehow, some way, the boy and me, and maybe you, ma’am, we’re all part of God’s plan to end this wrongness.” Tate rubbed his hand over his slicked-back black hair. “God called me to preach, ma’am, and that’s all I know to do. There’s a chapter in Revelation, chapter nine, that tells about the last days. It says, ‘I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and unto him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the moon were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ It goes on to say, ‘In those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die and death shall flee from them.’ That’s how I feel about it, Miz Lewis.”
Ann had been looking at him with a frown of concentration. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tate. I try to be as good a Christian as I can, but I don’t see the end of the world coming out of a little place like Gaither. I think we need something more than Bible verses to work with.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Alan said, “But he’s right. That’s the way I feel, too, like something has darkened the world. And so many people out of school — ”
“With bad dreams, yes.” The teacher tugged at a lock of her hair, a habit when she was preoccupied. “And other things have happened, too. I think we need to tell each other about them. Shall I go first?” When the other two were silent, she said, “It was before school, Alan, that day you and two other boys were playing — remember? I’d been working on a bulletin board.” Directly, leaving out only her fantasy about Alan’s father, she told them what had happened, about the grotesque and bloody drawing that had appeared as if by magic on her desk. Alan noticed that her hands clenched with the intensity of the story. “It was a picture of me,” she finished. “But dead. Stabbed. Cut, like that poor woman on the south side of town. And it was such a shock — well. That’s what happened. Alan?”
“The night sounds stopped,” Alan said slowly, “and that woke me up.” He tried to explain how uncanny the feeling had been — ”like suddenly I was the last person alive in the whole world” — and how he had felt death, death almost palpable and stalking toward him, as he looked from his window down at the town.
Tate took up when Alan had finished: “For me it was back in August, too. Just exactly like a dark cloud had settled over everything, all at once. And I went out and prayed in the fields about it, and I have never felt so empty.”
Ann Lewis sighed and shook her head. “But all we have are feelings. I destroyed the drawing. No one else noticed the insects being quiet at night. I don’t know of anybody who shares your feeling, Mr. Tate. We don’t have anything to fight.”
“God will open the way,” Mr. Tate said. Again his voice grew formal and halting: “I have been a sinner. And God in His mercy saved me from my sins. And I have tried to be a servant of the Lord’s. Job says, ‘Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?’ All I know is that God has allowed the evil to come, and He will let us know in His time what it is we have to face.”
“Then what are we to do?”
Alan spoke up, his voice squeaking from an unaccustomed deep tone to treble: “I think we should, well, pledge to be together in this. To protect one another and, well, to — to love one another.” Even as he said it, a part of his mind rebelled: I can’t love this frightening old man! I can’t love my teacher!
But the other two nodded. “I think you may be right. And we have to try to learn what’s wrong, what’s really wrong,” Ann Lewis said. “Well, I’ll make the pledge if you will.” She held out her hand.
They touched hands, solemnly, over a coffee table stacked with next week’s third-grade Weekly Readers. Tate said, in a voice almost apologetic, “May I pray?”
Taking silence for assent, he bowed his head. “Lord,” he said, “Thy servants are in the dark. Give us light, O Lord, to follow Thee. Lead us, Lord, out of the shadows.”
2
Johnny Williams writhed in his father’s grasp, pleading, “No!”
3
On the evening of that Friday the thirteenth, east of town, a tall man, dark, stood under the night sky. He carried no light, and from ten feet away an observer would have been hard put to see him, to make out his black clothes against the black land. The late moon was not yet up, and only the stars pricked the face of heaven. Little Cherokee Creek trickled nearby, soft bubbling sound of water against stone and reed. A sharp scent drifted on the air, burning gasoline and something else.
“Fire,” the dark man said. “Who has done this thing?”
No voice answered. The man turned his face toward the hidden town. “Perhaps I have an enemy, as I sensed at first. Perhaps there is one who knows.”
He searched the distant lights as if for answer, but found none. “I have others who serve,” he said at last. “There are places to hide, and will be more. My appetite only feeds my hunger, and my hunger engenders new appetite.”
He seemed to listen to the night wind, to the gurgle of water, to the frenzied cries of the whippoorwill away beyond the railroad. “I have merely played with you,” he said. “Shall I show you what I can do when I am in earnest?”
After another moment he strode away, steps long and purposeful, undeviating.
The mud beneath his black shoes took no impression of his passing.
4
At ten-thirteen P.M. the three light bulbs in the overhead fixture of Ballew Jefferson’s kitchen blew at once, bringing him scrambling from his cocoon beneath the table. He stood, feeling the layer of heat engulf his head, his chest, and heard the hiss of gas, saw the sulfurous illumination from the burners.
And heard the sounds.
Leaves drifting through the hall overhead: the sounds had that lightness and dryness, the sound of leaves long dead and moved by the memory of wind. He heard graveyards in that whispery sound, with wreaths gone brittle and bitter with the forgetfulness of the living, and he heard a body long dead stirring in its coffin, the silken mutter of the wedding dress she was buried in caressing fleshless arms. It was the sound a snake might make, gliding across the floor near your ankle, blind blue tongue flickering like the lightning of death and feeling you, knowing you, marking you, before you had even registered the sound. It was the sound of all Octobers the world had ever known, the witch-ridden wind playing with dying trees, promising death to all the world, but death without rest or release.
He reached for his knife. His numb lips fumbled a prayer. If only the lights had not gone!
The sounds cascaded down the stairway, like a mist of sound pouring in, flowing, rising to engulf him. They were right outside the door, stealthy, patient.
And Jefferson Ballew remembered. He lunged across the table, nicking his arm with the sharp edge of the blade, and grabbed the handle of the refrigerator door. He jerked it back, jerked it open, and light, yellow living light, not pale blue death light, pushed the shadows back.
Were those two arms that shrank back into the wood of the door, two torn and ragged arms?
>
Breathing hard, Jefferson jammed the one remaining chair against the refrigerator door, holding it open, though he felt the cold air spilling out and over him as a cut keener than the two-inch gash below his left elbow. He went on hands and knees to scrabble beneath the sink. He produced four cartons of Sylvania light bulbs, seventy-five watts. With a groan of relief, he clambered to the top of the table, tried to loosen the set screws that held the light globe to the ceiling, finally in his frustration striking the glass with the butt of the knife, breaking it, shattering it. He cut the back of his hand as he reached in to unscrew the dead bulbs, to toss them across the kitchen toward the garbage pile. Each popped like the distant report of a small gun.
He screwed in three new bulbs, one at a time, their bases chattering against the sockets until he could seat them, start the threads. Each one flared to life. He was weeping.
Grown old of a sudden, he sat on the table and slid off to the floor. He stepped on a semiconical shard of glass that bit into his left instep. Limping, Jefferson jerked the chair away from the refrigerator and slammed the door before he crept beneath the table and pulled the piece of glass out with fingers already slippery from his own blood. He had hurt himself, but not badly. The old machine would heal.
The cruel lights revealed a room far gone in waste and rot. Beginning at the ceiling and coming eighteen inches down the walls was a zone of bubbled and peeling paint, shredded by the layer of intense heat from the stove. The tops of the cabinet doors, dried in the blast of hot air, were splitting and separating. Not one hung true. The floor was a litter of broken glass, empty cans, splashes of drying blood. It would be better, he thought, if he didn’t have to see it all, if he could get along without the light.
But the light...he knew that they were gone for the moment, perhaps for the night, defeated by the bright lights. When they came back, they might think of the refrigerator. He writhed out from under the table, found the telephone and the directory and called Miss Wayly at home.
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