Crawford came down the path, the shovels braced over his shoulders like a pair of rifles. “We gonna — ”
Quarles took a shovel from him. “Let’s do the boy’s,” he said. “Won’t take as long. I want that gravel kept clean.”
It was backbreaking labor, reminding Quarles of foxholes he had dug into the sandy soils of Pacific islands. Under the gravel, the loose red clay had been cemented and compacted by the unusual fall rains. It came out in muddy clumps the size of a man’s head. When they got down to shoulder depth, they took turns, one man in the grave, another resting above, leaning on his shovel.
Crawford was in the hole when they hit bottom. “That’s it,” he said. “Here’s the vault.”
They got the dirt off the concrete vault. The lid just sat in place, but it was heavy, and there was little room to maneuver it in the grave. Finally, though, with a pry bar that Crawford had to go back to the toolshed to get, they upended the lid.
The vault was empty.
“Hell,” Quarles said.
They dropped the lid back into place and shoveled the clay back on top. It took them less time to fill the grave than it had to dig it out, but still it was twilight when the last shovelful of gravel had been spread on top. The soil, loosened by the digging, was mounded again, but the gravel on Johnny Williams’s grave, unlike that on the other two, had been stained red from the clay and mixed with clods of dirt. It had obviously been disturbed. The other two looked pristine by contrast.
“Damn,” Crawford said. “Blisters all over my hands.”
“Mine, too.”
“How the hell did he do it, Sam?”
Quarles shook his head.
“Where do you think the bodies are?”
“I don’t know. You think we ought to stay here tonight and see if he comes back?”
“Me and you? By ourselves?”
“Yeah. We could just wait by the coffins and see who comes to collect them. Or who comes to dig up some more.”
“Stakeout, huh?” said Crawford, but his voice was thin.
“Yeah. You want to take the first watch?” Quarles looked at him hard. Then he put a blistered hand on Crawford’s shoulder. “I’m kiddin’ you, Dick. Let’s get out of here.”
“I knew that,” Crawford said.
On the way back to the station, Quarles said, “You got a list of all the names?”
“Right here.”
“But Roy Cobb and Glenn Hutchins ain’t buried here.”
“No. Roy’s buried in the Grace Holiness Church graveyard, and Hutchins I think was buried up at Rocky Falls, with his mama and daddy.” After a moment, Crawford said, “Hey. There was fourteen people died that weekend while back — it’s them. It’s all of them.”
Pulling the patrol car into its parking slot, Sam Quarles said, “Dick, one day you may be a policeman.”
9
Six o’clock. Karen Yates stepped out of the shower and grabbed a soft towel. She loved to towel herself dry, loved the soft caress of the terry cloth. She dried herself carefully, slowly. She had brought her underwear into the bathroom: what she called her “naughties.” She stepped into the black lacy panties and pulled them up, slipping a finger around the waistband to make sure it wasn’t twisted. Then she slipped into the black brassiere, reached behind, and hooked herself in.
It took only a second. She wondered how long it might take Tom Davies to undo it. Men were so clumsy with brassieres. You’d think they’d get practiced at it after a while, but so far every man who had opened hers (How many? Five, six, seven. Well, seven. But six, really, because one of them didn’t count. He was in high school with her, and he was so scared that he barely touched her after he had finally wrestled it loose), every one of them, had had to fumble and twist and tug.
She touched her curlers, heating on their electric foundation, and found them warm. Her permanent was about shot now, but she could do a quick touch-up. She began to roll the curlers into her black hair, humming under her breath as she did it. From time to time she glanced over at the bed. Her pale blue skirt and pink-and-blue plaid blouse were there, laid out ready for her. She liked the way the skirt showed her legs. Well, she thought, shoot, maybe I’m not in fashion, but I like to look like a girl, not some dumpy old sack of potatoes.
That was what they were calling the new dresses this year, sack dresses, tacky old things that made women look pregnant and dumpy, even when they weren’t, even when they had a nice figure, like Karen’s. Sack dresses made you look like you didn’t even have a waist, phooey on that. Karen decided there was only one kind of sack she was interested in getting into, and it wasn’t a dress. She giggled, wondering how she could work the conversation around to fashion that evening. She’d say to Tom, “Well, there’s only one kind of sack I want to get into” — provocative pause — “and it isn’t a dress.” She rehearsed the line as she finished with her hair.
She got into her stockings, blouse, and skirt. She decided to wear her flats — have to walk around beside the lake down at Sullivan’s Cove, not much of a place for heels — and slipped into them. She checked her Timex: it was nearly seven already.
Tom had told her not to bother with eating, but, shoot, she was hungry, and anyhow she didn’t want to eat like an old pig on the boat. She went into her kitchenette and opened the freezer. She had a stack of TV dinners there for evenings when she was too busy to cook, and she popped one — turkey with peas and mashed potatoes — into the oven. It would take twenty-five minutes to heat, then maybe another fifteen to eat. By then it would be about seven-thirty, time to head out to the boat.
She hummed to herself again as she laid the table. Oh, she was looking forward to tonight.
Outside the house, the red sun sank beneath the western horizon. Soon in the east a huge orange moon would rise.
10
The last nail fell, rolled around the spot where its point touched the floor, came to a stop. The floor and the seats of the chairs were littered with nails now. Each one had screeched its way out of the wood, a fingernails-on-blackboard sound that made Jefferson’s teeth ache.
The doorknob turned slowly, first to the right, then to the left. It stopped, then turned again.
“Damn you,” Ballew Jefferson wept. “Come in!”
The doorknob turned slowly to the right, then to the left.
I can stand it if I see it, Jefferson told himself. It’s scaring me now because I can’t see it, but if I can see it, it will be all right, because it can’t be any worse than it will look, but right now it seems worse because I can imagine it.
He was edging around the kitchen (grown frigid, he thought, with a chill deep in his bones), his knife brandished in front of him. The doorknob moved again.
“Come in!” he wailed.
The door swung open, a fraction of an inch at a time. The chairs in front of it skidded over the floor, their legs brushing aside the fallen nails. At last the door was wide open, standing open, the chairs pushed to one side or the other: and in the door —
Darkness. Nothing but darkness.
Jefferson giggled. He could see clear down the hall to the front door, framed by two panels of glass, glowing dim with the twilight outside, and it was empty. He took a step toward the door. Nothing happened. He took another step. His stockinged feet trod on the fallen nails. He shoved the chairs away. There was no one in the hallway, no one at all. He swung the door to, clicked it shut. He took a deep breath.
It was cold in the room, cold. He started to the stove to relight the burners.
The door crashed open, spinning him around.
She was there.
Mollie Avery, naked, walked through the open door, her steps sinuous, one foot coming in, hips swaying, the other foot coming forward and in. She stepped barefoot on the nails and did not seem to notice. Jefferson backed away before her. “Get out of here,” he said.
“You used to want me,” she said.
“I was crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
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“And now you’re sane. You’re talking to a dead woman and you’re sane.”
“You’re not Mollie!”
“I am.”
“You don’t sound — talk like — ”
“But I am.” She was so close he could feel the radiated heat of her body, as if she were a moving fire. In a way he longed to warm himself by it.
“Stay back!” He brandished the knife.
“No. This time I want you. And I will have you.”
He was suffocating. In one moment the room had gone from unbearably cold to sweltering. His back was against the wall. He stopped. She was only a step away, breasts smooth, chin up, eyes level, a smile playing at the corners of her lips. “It won’t matter,” she said. “You’ll see. I can even tell you now, much as I hated you, I liked it when you did those things to me. You’ll see.”
Her hands came to his flannel shirt, undid the first button, the second, all the way down. Then she undid the buttons of the second shirt he wore. Both fell open. “You’ll have to help,” she said.
“You’re so pretty,” Jefferson said, weeping. He shrugged his left shoulder and arm out of the shirts, turning them inside out, releasing a stench of sweat. He passed the knife to his left hand, dropped the shirts. He wore no undershirt.
“You’re thin,” she said. “You’re so thin.”
“Please,” he said.
“Do it,” she told him. “It feels good. Do it to me.”
Rage flooded him then, rage at the weeks he had spent penned like an animal, rage at her, standing there so easy in her nakedness. Hot tears scalded his eyes: she was to blame, she had tempted him, and now she was not even ashamed. He held the knife up, and, brown eyes narrowing, she nodded. He slit her abdomen across. She merely smiled at him, though he felt the warm gush of blood over his hand. Weakness staggered him. Wouldn’t she die? He thrust again, tearing her abdomen from a point below the sternum all the way to the pubic bone. He gasped for breath and felt cold.
She stepped away from him, still smiling, her face triumphant, her belly unmarked.
Jefferson looked down. He had done it to himself.
His knees gave way. He hit on them, then slumped back, his spine against the corner made by the wall and the kitchen cabinets. He could not feel his fingers. The knife clattered to the floor.
“Mollie — ”
But she had melted back through the doorway. All the lights burned, but dimly, like lights in a fog: and the darkness closed in. A shape came through the doorway, a tall man in black.
“Help,” Jefferson said.
The man came forward, and with each step he became more angular, blacker, less human. The body dwindled, the head bulged, insect-like, the torso tilted forward until at last the forearms came forward, too, to support the weight of the lengthening thorax.
The face was still somewhat human, the eyes large, burning, red. The mouth opened and the tongue came out, curled over, made a tube of itself, like an elephant’s trunk.
It dipped into the pool of blood and Jefferson heard it suck, a rattling, liquid sound. The thorax pulsed.
“No,” he whispered. The tongue, a round pink tube, a blind snake, quested across the floor, impossibly long, three feet, more, and its quivering hollow head rose up into the air.
He felt the probing tip enter his torn stomach.
Oh, God, it’s inside me, help me, let me die —
He sighed.
Mollie had been right.
It did feel good.
Twelve
1
Tate’s huge Bible was in Ann’s car, but Ludie’s family Bible was handy, wrapped in a tattered silk scarf in the top drawer of the dresser. Tate spread it open on his knees, turned to almost the end. “It’s Revelation,” he said. “The part about the bottomless pit bein’ opened. Here it is.”
And he read:
6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
7 And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.
8 And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.
9 And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
10 And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men for five months.
11 And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
Tate closed the book and looked up. “Apollyon,” he said.
Ludie, her eyes closed, nodded. “That the name. Apollyon. Don’t know his first name.”
Ann had taken the Bible from Tate. “In the Hebrew tongue Abaddon,” she said. “Mr. Tate, that’s not far from Badon.”
“The angel of the pit,” Tate murmured.
“Jim Bascom, he gone from the grave,” Ludie said.
Michael got up from the kitchen chair. “Now, Granny-Ma — ”
“Hush, Michael. I knows.”
Ann and Tate looked at each other. Ann said, “Mrs. Estes, what do you mean he’s gone?”
Ludie stared straight ahead, not looking at Ann. “We went to speak to his spirit,” she said so softly that Ann had to lean close to hear her. “Went to his grave. He had to be buried away out in the country. I stood by his grave and asked him why he troublin’ my dreams. But he not there. He not in there. Jim Bascom out of the grave. Come through fire, come through flood, come through the grave, Lord.”
Ann gave Tate a helpless glance. Tate said, “Do you think he’s not dead?”
“He dead,” Ludie said with finality. “But his body be awalkin’ the earth. It not his spirit the way I thought. Somebody usin’ that man’s body some way.”
“What did he look like?” Ann asked.
“Think I got a picture of him and his children. Michael, you go to my bedroom and bring me the picture box off of the chifforobe.”
“Yes, Granny-Ma.” Michael got up and went through a curtained door. He was back in a minute with a heavy white cardboard box almost the size of Tate’s Bible. He gave it to Ludie and sat down again in his place.
Ludie’s arthritic fingers eased the top up and off the box. She laid the top upside down on the floor beside her. The box was perhaps half full of snapshots. She began to pick them up, handfuls of memory, and to sort through them. She dropped them with little audible taps into the box top, all the time talking to herself: “Here my husband Zachariah, dressed up in his suit. Here Michael when he a baby. Here the old place down in Clarke County. Here — ”
She droned on for minutes until finally she stopped, holding in her fingers a deckle-edged photograph, once black-and-white, now faded sepia with age. “Here they be. Seelia and Jim Bascom. I be thinkin’ they children with them, but they ain’t. My old mind was fooled.” She passed the photograph over to Tate. He and Ann held it beneath the light and looked at it.
Seelia Bascom was squinting into the light, her face all glistening highlights and pale shadows. Beside her was a man about thirty-five, tall, thin. “He doesn’t look like anybody I know,” Ann said.
“Me, either.”
“He was a dark-complected man,” said Ludie. “Lord, but his eldest daughter, she a bright girl, like her mama. And she marry a man most white his own self, that Avery man. Their daughter was Mollie.”
Ann looked up from the photograph. “Mollie Avery was Jim Bascom’s granddaughter?”
Ludie nodded. “Her folkses died when she wasn’t but seventeen or eighteen. Both of ’em sickened and died. She went on her own then, worked for plenty of people around here. Mollie, she had a nice way about her, a real pleasin’ way. She just as sweet. You never catch her awrinklin’ her nose at you.”
Tate got up.
“Thank you, Mrs. Estes.”
“You a real preacherman?”
“I try to be.”
“Lord be with you.” Ludie sighed. “I went out for my pay to Mr. Jefferson’s. But he don’t seem to want my work no more. I reckon I got to find somebody else to do for now.”
“If I had any money — ”
“No, Lord, I don’t want money. I ain’t about to ask you for money, you a preacher and all. But I pray for you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Estes.”
Ann handed the photograph back to the old black woman. She rocked in her yellow circle of light. “I always remember Seelia that night. She so scared, and her tryin’ not to take on for the children’s sake. This a evil thing, Mr. Tate.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You kill it,” she said. Her twisted fingers closed on the photograph, ripped it across, turned it and ripped it again. “You kill it for Jim Bascom and his Seelia.”
“And for all of us,” Tate said.
In Ann’s Rambler, Tate said, “I think we better go see the sheriff.”
Ann looked at him in surprise. It was already dark out, and she turned on the headlights. “What can we tell him? That the angel of the bottomless pit is loose in Gaither?”
“No. I was thinkin’ of tellin’ him maybe Henry Cox ought to be watched.”
“Henry Cox — one of the men who lynched Jim Bascom?”
“The only one left alive, Ludie says.” Tate stared into the night ahead of the car. “If he’s still alive.”
2
Mrs. Marietta Woodley sat in the dusk and looked out her window. She was sure the little boy would come again. Beside her in the dark was her husband’s old twelve-gauge shotgun, not fired for twenty years now, or cleaned in that time. She had fitted two cartridges into the breech and had cocked the hammers with her thumb. Though she didn’t know it, both cartridges were loaded with 00 buckshot.
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