“Uh — yessir.” Alan stacked the boxes on the desk — it was bare except for the telephone and telephone book and a green-shaded desk lamp.
Mr. Badon opened one of the boxes and looked at a sheet of paper. “Very good, very nice work. I approve of your father’s choice of design. Please tell him that.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
Mr. Badon turned on him so suddenly that he jumped. “And do you like the movies?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve only been once so far, but, yes, I like them.”
“Good. I am doing well in this little town. It is very kind to me. Let me see. I gave you passes once already, did I not?”
“Yes, sir. I’m using two of them this evening. I’m bringing a girl.”
“I would have thought you young for that.”
Alan blushed, not knowing what to say. “She goes to school with me.”
“Ah. Childhood friends.” Mr. Badon smiled, but the smile was there and gone very quickly, more a quirk of his features than an expression. “I hope you will enjoy the show. Mr. Cagney gives a good interpretation of Lon Chaney, I think. A fine actor, Lon Chaney.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you are too young to have seen any of his work. I forget sometimes. He was truly gifted. Did you know his parents were deaf? That, I think, made him a great artist in pantomime. And he endured discomfort, even physical pain, to transform his features. The man of a thousand faces.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, since I have given you passes already, I shall have to think of some other reward this time.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Badon. Oh. I picked up some pieces of film.” He took them from his pocket.
“I see.” Badon lifted an indifferent shoulder. “You are welcome to them. When a print breaks we sometimes have to cut out the bad part and splice it together again. That’s nothing.”
Alan, sliding the frames back into his pocket, suddenly jerked his finger away. “Ow!”
“What happened?”
“I cut my finger.”
“Ah. Film can be sharp. Like paper.”
“Not bad,” Alan said. A thin beaded line of blood showed on the side of his right index finger, just below the nail.
Mr. Badon seemed to sway slightly behind the desk.
“Well, thanks,” Alan said. He turned to go. “Good-bye, sir.”
“Au revoir,” said Mr. Badon.
5
Dr. Lloyd Gordon had been trying to see Sheriff Quarles since Tuesday, when the lawman had taken the day off. They finally got together for lunch on Saturday, in the rearmost booth of the Busy Bee. The restaurant, belying its name, was doing very little business. Leonora, the waitress, took their orders and went back to the kitchen.
“Now,” Quarles said, leaning forward, his arms on the table, a toothpick twiddling between thumb and forefingers of his right hand, “what is it you have to talk about?”
“Postmortems,” Gordon said. “And blood.”
Quarles made a face. “And I had to order liver and onions,” he groaned. “You’ve turned in your reports. What you got to add to them?”
Leonora brought over two heavy glasses with thick bottoms and poured them full of iced tea. The doctor waited until she had gone up front before he took a sip of tea and said, “Three cases. Elanor Williams. The engineer, Roy Cobb. The service-station man, Glenn Hutchins.”
Quarles took a long drink of tea. It wasn’t sweet enough for his taste, and he upended the sugar container, dribbling sugar into it. “This never works,” he said. “It’s too cold for the stuff to dissolve, and it just sets in the bottom of the glass.” He stirred the sugar, and, as he predicted, it snowed back to the bottom after its momentum died. “Yeah,” he said. “All of them cut. What about it?”
“Where’s the blood?” Gordon asked.
With an exhalation that bubbled in his cheeks and lips like a horse’s whinny, Quarles said, “Saw enough of it around when we picked up the bodies.”
“Superficial. Less than a pint in each case.”
“Listen, in the Williams house, the walls were dripping — ”
“Looked like a lot, but wasn’t,” Gordon said. “Amazing how far a little blood can go once it gets out of the body. But really there wasn’t anywhere near enough blood in the remains or around them. Just like the Avery case last month.”
“Well?”
“I thought you ought to know. It’s in the report, but I didn’t make a big thing of it there.”
“So you think there wasn’t enough blood in four cases. We got eighteen people dead in all, and four are missing some blood.”
“Not some blood. A lot of it.”
Their meals came, and they fell silent while being served. Quarles looked down at his liver and onions. A few minutes before he had been ravenous. Now — with a mental shrug, he picked up knife and fork and began to eat. He had ordered fried okra and creamed potatoes on the side, together with the Busy Bee’s famous homemade bread. Despite of the conversation, Quarles was surprised to find his appetite undiminished once he actually began to eat.
Dr. Gordon had ordered meat loaf, steamed cabbage, and rice. He, too, began to eat, at least until the waitress was again out of earshot. Then he repeated, “A lot of it. Do you know much about blood?”
Quarles munched thoughtfully. “Know it when I see it.”
The doctor swirled his fork in his rice. “Let me tell you a little about it. Wonderful stuff, really. The typical grown human contains about seven quarts of the stuff. That’s an average, of course; more or less blood, depending on your sex, age, and body build. But let’s just say, as an average, seven quarts. Fourteen pints, that is. That travels through a network of arteries, capillaries, and veins to every part of the body but the hair and nails. Blood cleanses the cells of toxins and delivers nutrients and oxygen. You have to have it to live.”
Quarles had been nodding doggedly and chewing at the same time. “Okay.”
“Ordinarily, at any given moment of your life, you have about four pints of blood in your lungs. About a quarter of your total supply, anyway. It’s there to give up carbon dioxide and to absorb oxygen. If it isn’t there, you simply don’t live very long.”
Quarles forked okra into his mouth and chewed. “So? I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
“The four victims didn’t have four pints of blood in their lungs, or anywhere near it. They might have had a few ounces. And there certainly wasn’t enough blood pooled around the bodies.” The doctor raised a hand. “I know that it looked like a lot when you saw the murder sites. Blood will scare you when you see it, that’s a normal reaction. Even losing a few ounces can make people think they’re dying. Get a good scalp wound or mouth wound, and you’d swear the victim would turn white and die in a matter of minutes. But it doesn’t happen. You could theoretically lose half your blood supply and still recover, if you were treated properly and given enough replacement fluid. These people lost nearly all of theirs, but they were left with only about a pint in the body, maybe up to a pint splashed around them. So how did they die?”
“They all bled to death.”
“Couldn’t have bled to death in that way. Lungs weren’t cut in any case, just the abdomen. Major veins and arteries were opened, true, but the victims should have died long before the blood ran out — and you can’t easily pump blood out of a dead body. Certainly not out of dead lungs. Jesus, this is making me sick.” Gordon pushed his plate away.
Quarles cut another piece of liver. “So how did the blood get gone?”
“That’s just what I can’t understand. It’s as if the heart continued to beat for a long time after it couldn’t beat, medically speaking. But if it did, the blood had to leave the body. Where did it go?”
The sheriff tore another piece of bread off and slathered it with butter — real butter at the Busy Bee, not oleomargarine. “Would somebody have taken it?” He bit into the bread.
“What the hell for?” Gordo
n asked. “Good Lord in heaven, man, how can you sit there and eat like that?”
“I’m hungry. Go on. Why wouldn’t somebody take the blood?”
“Because there’s no earthly use for it, that’s why. Blood from gaping wounds like that would be contaminated, bound to be. And you don’t slash a person’s gut open to take blood. You do that with a needle. And where would anybody put it? Anyway, there’s the clotting factor. As soon as it was exposed to air, the blood would beigin to coagulate. It would be useless, medically, within a very short period of time.”
“So it wouldn’t have been taken for anything medical, like a blood transfusion.”
“Not a chance. And the types are all different, too. Well, not all different, Elanor Williams and Glenn Hutchins were both O positive, but that’s the most common type. Anyway, how would you gather such a massive amount of blood? What would you put it in? How would you transport it?”
“You want your rice?”
The doctor pushed the little plate of rice across the table. “Anyway, what it boils down to is that there are approximately fifty pints of blood that I can’t account for. There’s no rational reason for them to be gone, but they’re gone.”
“Doc, you’re not telling me there’s a goddamn vampire or anything in town, are you?”
“I’m not crazy, Sheriff. I didn’t say a word about spooks or vampires. But the blood’s gone. And that’s not all.”
Quarles had raked the rice into the gravy remaining in his plate and was stirring it with his fork. “More?”
The doctor nodded. “Something I didn’t put into the report because — well, because it was obscene. It has to do with Harmon and Eula Presley.” The sheriff looked up. “I know he cut her. But he shot her first, and there was enough blood in that bedroom to — ”
“She had all her blood. It isn’t that.”
“What, then?”
The doctor took a long gulp of tea, the ice cubes clinking in the glass. “Something else about the cases of mutilation. There are seven of those in all, ranging from slight, like Eula Presley, to extreme, like Mollie Avery. But in every case there are parts missing.”
“Parts?
“Organs. With Mollie Avery I assumed it was — well, the dogs. They had been at her, and I thought — never mind. But there were other parts missing, too, from the other cases. In Eula Presley’s case it was her spleen.”
“In the stomach.”
“In the abdomen. It’s hard to get to, if you’re a layman looking for it. But that one slash across her abdomen went just deep enough to reveal it, and about three-fourths of her spleen was gone, sliced clean away. The cut was done postmortem, by the way. That’s in the report, too. She was already dead when he did that to her.”
“And?”
“When I did the autopsy on Harmon’s body, I analyzed the stomach contents. What I found — well, I sent a sample to the state crime people, and they confirmed late yesterday afternoon.”
Quarles’s fork froze halfway to his mouth. “You don’t mean to tell me — ”
“He ate the damn spleen raw,” Dr. Gordon said. He smiled, with no mirth in his face whatever, as Quarles dropped his fork. “I thought that might get you,” he said.
6
Ann Lewis called Mr. Tate that Saturday afternoon, but she had to wait for Mr. Benton to get the preacher to the telephone. When Tate picked up, he answered on an extension phone in the sawhouse, and the snarling whine of a circular saw almost drowned out his voice. “Can you hear me?” Ann said as loudly as she dared.
“Miz Lewis? That you?” Tate bawled.
“Yes, Mr. Tate. I called because — ” She broke off at a clattering sound on the line, then realized it was only one of the Bentons hanging up the phone in the front office. “I called because I couldn’t reach Alan.”
“Alan? Somethin’ happened to Alan?”
“No! I called you because I couldn’t reach him. He’s not at home, and his father’s not in the shop today. But I’ll get him later today.” Ann sat on the edge of her bed. Scattered across the coverlet were five books, all of them hefty and printed on slick white paper. “What I called to say is I think I’ve found something.” But she spoke into another barrage of noise from the saw.
“What?”
“I said I think I’ve found something.”
“Just a minute.”
On the other end of the wire, Tate must have taken the receiver around a corner or behind a door, for the sound of the saw diminished sharply. “Now,” he said. “I can hear you better. What was that again?”
Ann explained once more that she could not get in touch with Alan. Then she added, “One of the high school English teachers I know worked in folklore studies in college; she had a comparative literature minor and an education major. Anyway, I sort of brought up the subject with her, and as it turned out, some of her textbooks covered similar topics in other cultures. She let me borrow some of her books. It’s all in the books, Mr. Tate. I think now I know what’s happening in town. Only it — well, it sounds sort of crazy.”
In the background the saw changed pitch, then went back to its original sound as more wood was fed into the blade. Tate asked, “What is it?”
“Not over the telephone. I think the three of us all need to meet,” Ann said. “Could Alan and I see you tomorrow afternoon, after church?”
“Yes, ma’am. Do you want to meet at the school again?”
“I suppose so. I’ll try Alan again tonight. Could we meet at about three o’clock?”
“Anytime.” After a long pause, during which the muted circular saw whined into a higher register as it finished its meal of wood, Tate said. “It’s an evil spirit, ma’am, ain’t it?”
Ann felt goose bumps start on her arms. “As a matter of fact,” she heard herself tell Tate, “I really think it could be.”
7
That Saturday morning, Diane England had found it necessary to remind her father that he had already given her permission to go on a date with Alan. “I did say it, didn’t I? I reckon you’re growin’ up at that,” her father had told her. Her mother, with an innate and intuitive understanding of how important these days were to her, had offered her help in getting ready, had even given her a little perfume to dab behind her ears. The only fly in the ointment was ten years old and was named Duane.
“I don’t see how come I can’t go with Sissy,” he grumped to their mother.
“You can’t because you can’t,” Mrs. England said, her voice decisive. “When you get old enough to want to go out, you won’t want your sister taggin’ along with you.”
“Would, too. She can come when I start datin’. Please, Mama, please let me go.”
“No, Duane.”
Duane stomped across the living room and flung himself into the armchair, his arms crossed and his bottom lip stuck out. “I never get to do nothin’,” he said.
“Oh, hush,” Diane told him, and from the throw rug in front of the coffee table little Davey looked up, drooled all over himself, and said, “Ush!”
“Shut up, rug rat,” Duane yelled.
“Duane,” his mother said around a mouthful of bobby pins. “Don’t talk like that to your brother.”
“Well, shoot, everybody tells me to shut up. I don’t see why he gets to tell me to shut up and I don’t get to tell him to shut up.”
“He never said shut up,” Mrs. England said, thrusting a bobby pin into Diane’s hair. “Davey tried to say hush, not shut up.”
“Ut up!” Davey yelled, laughing and slapping the rug with the flats of his hands. “Ut up, ut up, ut up!”
“See!” Duane growled. “He’s tellin’ me now.”
“He’s just a baby,” said Mrs. England, securing the last bobby pin. “Now, hon, turn around. You look right nice.” She glanced up at the clock. “When is Alan comin’ for you?”
“Three-thirty. His dad’s drivin’ him.”
“Well, I ain’t seen John Kirby in I don’t know how long. I reckon
it was at Mrs. Eddy Belle Baldwin’s funeral. Alan was a little old thing then.”
“Oh, Mama, you saw him at the school lots of times. He was there at the Song Festival last spring.”
“Well, I didn’t see him to speak to. You be sure to ask him inside, now.” Mrs. England tucked her hair nervously into place and smoothed the front of her housedress. “Honey, you be sure to come straight back home after your show, now.”
“We’re gonna get a sandwich and maybe an ice cream at the drugstore. It won’t be more than half an hour after the movie ends, though.”
“Ice cream!” This from Duane, who grasped the arms of the armchair and began to make it rear and buck in his extreme indignation.
“You stop that right now,” said Mrs. England in a tone of voice that did stop him. She sighed. “Well, I reckon you do feel left out, Duane. Listen, you want to run down to Pike’s and get a treat?”
“What kind of treat?” asked Duane, immediately all suspicion.
“I don’t know,” his mother said, feeling in her pocket. She produced a quarter. “Here, take this and get what you want.”
“Can it be ice cream?”
“If you want.”
“I can get me two ice creams and a Co’cola,” he said. “’Less you want your change back.”
“Get whatever you want,” his mother told him. “You can have the whole quarter to spend.” Duane was off the chair and out the door in a flash, before she could possibly change her mind. She shook her head and went to close the door, which he had left ajar. “Anyhow he won’t be here when Alan comes for you.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
Mrs. England took both Diane’s hands in hers and stepped back to look at her daughter, all feminine and blushing in a blue gingham dress. Davey got up and toddled over to his mother. He stood hanging on to her dress with one hand, cramming the other fist in his mouth, and looking up at Diane with his big blue eyes. “Pooy,” he said around his fist.
“You think your big sister’s pretty?” Mrs. England asked. “I do, too, hon.” To Diane, she said, “You are pretty, honey. You’ve changed so much this year. I already talked to you about boys and girls — ”
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