Tate leaned forward. “We think you may be in some trouble, Mr. Cox.”
Cox’s shoulders tossed as he coughed a laugh. “Me? Hell, ’scuse me, ma’am, I ain’t never in trouble. I cause trouble, I don’t have it.”
“This time it may be different. Mr. Cox, do you remember a man named Jim Bascom?”
Cox crushed his hardly smoked cigarette out in an ashtray, got out his pack and lit a second one. “Yeah,” he said. “Seems to me I remember something about a man named Bascom.” He squinted through a fresh cloud of smoke. “You’re that preacher man, ain’t you?”
Tate nodded, introduced himself and Ann. “We talked to somebody tonight who remembered when Bascom was hung,” he said.
Cox licked that bloated lower lip. “I remember it, too. Nigger burnt down a man’s livelihood. What we done to him, he deserved it.”
“You admit it?” Ann asked, surprised.
Cox’s eyes shifted toward her. “Hell, yes, ’scuse me, ma’am, I admit it. We give him justice, plain and simple.”
“They tell us,” Tate said, “he walked out of the fire when you tried to burn the body.”
Cox crushed out his second cigarette, reached for a third, and changed his mind. “I don’t know who you all have been talkin’ to. First, I never thowed him on no fire. That was Morgan’s doin.’ He figgered since Bascom had set fire to his barn, he might as well set fire to Bascom. Second, he never done no such of a thing. He was dead when he hit that fire. What happened, the wood at the bottom burnt quick, and it give way, the wood on that side of the pile, and the body rolled off. That’s all. Some of the others run away, but they just didn’t want to be seen in the light. I stood by Morgan the whole time. Wasn’t no finer man alive than Morgan Simmons.”
“The person we talked to said Jim Bascom’s come out of his grave,” Tate said.
Ann caught her breath. She thought she was ready for any reaction: fury, guilt, denial. She wasn’t ready for what happened.
For a long moment, Cox looked Tate in the face. Then, like a child, he began to cry.
6
Mrs. Woodley fired right through the door. This time the gun had no opportunity to kick her: she was half lying against the wall, and the gun butt was braced on the baseboard. Her ears sang after the blast, but even in the dark she could see the hole, a palm’s breadth across, the splinters at its edges white and sharp in the light filtering in from the porch. The scratching had stopped again, or at least if it continued, she could not hear it for the ringing in her ears.
She had fired only one barrel, but she broke the gun and stuck another round in the breech. She crawled a few more feet, swept the small telephone stand with the gun barrel, and the telephone clattered to the floor, its bell dinging once.
Mrs. Woodley scrabbled for the receiver, held it to her ear. She heard emptiness. She found the base, jiggled the button. The line was dead. She dropped the receiver, rolled to her back, almost screaming from the grating pain. Daylight, she thought. If I can hold out till daylight, they won’t get me.
But the pain in her hip threatened to get into her head and make her pass out. She ground her teeth together and fought it. It wasn’t somebody playing a trick at all, she thought. It was him. It was some kind of booger.
Her daddy had been a great one for telling booger tales, away back when the century measured its age in years ending with single digits. He told her, her brothers and sisters, many and many a story. She told them to herself now, finding them not frightening but nostalgic, because they made her think of the old house with the fireplace so big a half-grown girl could stand upright in it in the summertime, and look up at the distant blue rectangle of sky at the top of the chimney. Her daddy had told her she could see stars even in the daytime looking up a chimney, but she never did.
He told his sons and daughters about the woman who wanted a buggy ride one night about this time of year, before Halloween. It must have been ‘08 or ‘09, she thought, because Carrie had died of diphtheria in ‘10, and she remembered holding Carrie on her lap as she heard the tale.
There was this man, her father began, coming home from meeting late one Sunday night. And the wind went whoo-oo-oo in the trees. He was in his buggy, and he just had two little old kerosene lamps to light the way. Seems like he was about halfway home when he sees something white up ahead yonder. Wind was going whoo-oo-oo in the trees. He keeps looking and moving his head like this, trying to see what could it be away off yonder so white.
Well, he gets closer and closer, and it’s a girl. It’s a girl about your age, Marietta, all dressed in white. She waves him down. It’s a cold night, and she’s not wearing a coat, just that white ball gown, like someone coming home from a frolic. Well, he pulls up the horse, and she asks him can she ride with him a ways. He says yes, and she climbs up. “Ain’t you cold?” he asks, looking at her bare arms in the light from the kerosene lamps. She says she is, a little, and he gets up and takes off his duster and gives it to her. She thanks him and puts it over her shoulders.
Well, he starts on again, the girl there beside him, quiet. He asks her what her name is, and she says, “Bonnie Elizabeth Walker.” And he asks her what she’s doing out that late at night, and she says, “I’m trying to get home.” And he asks her where she lives, and she says, “About three mile down this road.”
The man can tell she doesn’t want to talk too much, so he stops asking her questions and just looks off into the dark. And he goes about three miles, and starts looking for a house, but there’s nothing but an old country church with a graveyard beside it. And he turns to ask her where her house is, and she’s gone.
He knows she didn’t climb down, because he would have felt it. But out of the corner of his eye, he seems to see something white going off through the graveyard. He gets a lantern and starts after her, because she still has his duster. And as he’s going through the graveyard, he sees the duster folded up on the ground. He goes over to pick it up, and it’s layin' on a grave. And when he holds up the lantern to look at the tombstone, it says, BONNIE ELIZABETH WALKER, 1870–1887. And the wind goes whoo-oo-ooooo....
Marietta Woodley heard it all again, lying there against the wall. She saw her father leaning over her, ready to take the baby and send her up to bed. It was so real that her eyes filled with tears. “Papa,” she said.
But then she saw what was leaning over her. It wasn’t Papa at all. The dead boy had come right in.
Her heart simply stopped. She gasped twice for air, drummed her feet on the floor, and died.
No wind moaned outside her house.
7
The howl of sirens brought them both out of bed, John Kirby and his son. Alan was steadier now, though he still trembled after the least exertion, and his father was almost well again. They stood in the kitchen, looking out the back window down at the town, speckled with streetlights.
“Fire?” Alan guessed.
“Sounds more like police sirens and ambulances,” John said. His mousy auburn hair was disheveled, standing up, framing his high bald spot with spikes. They could see no sign of the cars or ambulances from here on the hill.
Alan sat down at the kitchen table and groaned. “I don’t feel well.”
His father put his hand on Alan’s shoulder. “It takes a while to get over, son.”
“It’s not just the flu,” Alan said. “It’s something else.”
“I know.”
Alan looked up in surprise. “You do?”
His father’s mild eyes were steady behind the spectacles. He pulled a chair out and sat at the head of the table. “I know something’s been bothering you all fall. You haven’t been yourself.”
“I — I’m worried,” Alan said.
“You’re too young to worry.”
Alan shook his head. “Daddy, are there — do you think people just die, or do they go on?”
“On to heaven you mean? Or to hell?”
Alan nodded.
John Kirby smoothed his hair down. I
t ruffled right back up again. “Well, son, I think some part of a human being’s eternal. I guess it’s the part we call the soul. Now, just what that part is, or what it’s like, I couldn’t tell you. To tell you the honest truth, I just don’t know what happens when we die. I sort of doubt we’ll go to a place where the streets are paved with gold. What heaven is, or hell — well, I think they’re different from anything we can possibly imagine here on earth. But I think something must go there.”
“How about ghosts?”
His father laced his fingers together. The kitchen light gleamed sharp on his wedding band. “I don’t know. In the light of day, I don’t believe in them, but being up at” — he glanced at his watch — “half-past midnight on a fall evening, I’m less certain about them. This the result of all your reading?”
“Daddy, there’s strange things going on in town.”
“I think so, too.”
“It’s the theater. It’s all tied in to the ShadowShow.”
“I don’t see how.”
It spilled from Alan then, the whole story, from the moment he woke up to the sound of no night insects away back in August to the terrible afternoon at the movie theater. He cried through part of it, closed his eyes through part, looked out into the night beyond the window through part, but he told it all.
Then he drew a long, deep breath. “Do you reckon I’m crazy?” he asked in a miserable, small voice. “Me, and Miss Lewis, and Mr. Tate?”
His father got up. “Come on in the living room,” he said. Alan followed him in. John Kirby turned on the lamp beside the sofa and picked up the receiver of the telephone. “Look up Miss Lewis’s number, son,” he said.
Alan pulled out the thin telephone directory from its shelf, and in the yellow lamplight he flipped through to the Ls. There it was. He recited, “LAnier 2-0092,” slowly, as his father turned the numbers on the dial.
He waited for a good long minute before hanging up. To Alan, he said, “She’s not home. Any idea where she might have gone tonight?”
“No.”
“Well. We’ll try again later.”
“You’re worried, aren’t you?” When his father grunted and scraped a finger over his unshaven chin, Alan added, “Are you mad at me?”
His face showed his astonishment. “Mad, Alan? Of course not. I’m a little disappointed. I think you should have told me about this before.”
“You believe me?” Alan asked.
Lamplight made the lenses of his father’s glasses opaque. Behind the shining circles, he said, “I guess I have to. I guess I’ve seen too much not to believe in ghosts, or demons, or whatever you’re fighting. We’re fighting, now, I guess.”
Alan put his arms around his father’s neck, felt the older arms holding him close. He could not speak. They embraced for perhaps a quarter of a minute.
Then a siren tore up the street, up their street, past the house, and they broke apart. A second later they heard the sound of the crash, and a second after that the whole house shook from the impact of the explosion.
8
“He’s been here,” Henry Cox sobbed. “God have mercy on me, he’s been here, with a rope around his neck. Comin’ for me.” Cox wept like a child, like a grade-schooler who felt mingled shame, guilt, and fear: and seeing him that way, Ann Lewis was moved to put her arm over his shoulder and rub his back, the way she would do a fourth-grader, a boy in his own mind already too big to cry, or at least too big to cry in front of his friends.
Cox fished a handkerchief out from a pocket and blew his nose. “I seen him in the yard,” he said. “Standin’ there and lookin’ at the house, not sayin’ anything. First time, I thought it was just somebody pullin’ somethin’. I went out on the porch to run him off, and soon as I saw that face I knowed him. Rope around his neck, too. He kind of grinned at me and held out the free end of the rope, like he was offerin’ it to me.” Cox raised his head, his eyes blazing with sudden indignation. “He burnt the livery stable! He done it! And Morgan Simmons lost everything he had in the world. It ain’t right that nigger won’t stay in the ground, not after all these years.” His voice fell silent, and the room filled itself with the slow and heavy ticking of the grandfather clock.
“Maybe you didn’t see anything,” Ann Lewis said into the silence. “Maybe you only thought you did.”
Cox ran his hands back over the sides of his head. “I don’t believe I’m crazy,” he said. “I seen him just as plain as I can see you. And that ain’t the last time. He’s been out there other nights, not speakin’, just standin’ there, and when I see him, I know it’s him, it’s Bascom.” He was quiet for a very long time. Ann found the insistent, unhurried tick-tock of the big clock almost maddening in its impersonality. When Cox spoke again, his voice was so low that it was hard to understand: “He’s a step closer to the house every time I see him.”
“Don’t stay out here by yourself,” Ann said. “There must be somewhere you can go.”
Cox shrugged. “Ain’t nobody in town I’d want to stay with. Anyhow, what would I tell ’em? That I’m bein’ chased by a man who’s been dead more than thirty years?”
Tate had gone to the window, had pulled aside the drapes fractionally. “I see him,” he said.
Ann felt the hair on her arms rise, prickling. Her heart gave a solid thud in her chest. And yet some part of her mind was not afraid, some part was remote and filled with a kind of cold anger, not with fright. She came to the window and looked out through the slit Tate held open.
He stood on the grass, a man as dark as the night, more a shape than a figure, really. “I shot at him,” Cox said from behind Ann. “I hit him more’n once. He just flies to flinders, and then he comes back.”
“It could be anybody,” Ann said.
“Let’s see.” Tate let the drapes fall back together, then turned to Cox. “Have you got a flashlight?”
“In the kitchen drawer.”
“Go and get it, please, sir.”
Cox rose ponderously and left them alone. After a moment they heard him rummaging in another room. “What are we going to do?” Ann asked Tate.
“I want to see what he is,” Tate said.
Something in his voice made Ann glance sharply at him. “You like this,” she said. “You like the chance of seeing a ghost!”
“I have had my doubts, Sister Lewis. I’ve doubted that anything survives the grave. But this — ”
“It’s not him,” Ann said. “It’s a devil, a — ”
“If the devil exists, then God exists,” he said imperturbably. Cox came back in, a long flashlight in his hand. “Here it is. Got new D-cells in her, six of them.” He turned it on. The beam, even indoors, in the light, was startlingly bright.
Tate took it from him and switched it off. “You don’t have to come,” he said to Ann.
“I’m coming,” she said.
They opened the front door to night and darkness. The figure was still there — or was it? In the night it was hard to tell, even with the moon so high and bright, for trees shaded the lawn and the man, if man it was, stood in a deep puddle of shadow. Ann put a hand on Tate’s back as they descended the front steps, felt cold wet grass at her ankles. They were only a matter of a few steps from the figure when Tate snapped the flashlight on.
He looks so sad, Ann thought.
A black man, wearing overalls and frayed blue shirt, a noose around his neck, his face a mask of grief: solid it seemed as the tree behind it, and no less real, and yet there was something unreal about it, too, some whiff of nightmare.
“Who are you?” Tate asked, though Ann knew who it was. They had seen that face earlier tonight, looking out from a yellowed old photograph grasped tight in Ludie Estes’s hand.
The man did not speak, did not even acknowledge their presence. His eyes, dark with anguish, stared blindly ahead.
When Tate spoke again, Ann leaped in her skin at his whiplash voice: “Depart, thou unclean spirit, in the name of Jesus!”
What h
appened next — whether the noose tightened, or whether the figure simply changed, somehow — Ann could never later say. Suddenly the eyes bulged, the whites reddened with shattered capillaries, the mouth gaped, a blackened tongue burst out, the whole frame shuddered — and then it was falling, already a mass of greenish mold, skin and flesh peeling back, eyes glazing and sinking, teeth grinning, clothes falling in on a wasted body, falling lower, the face fleshless now, the hair gone, a skull grinning at them, the clatter of shinbones on the ground, a sideways lurch — and it was gone.
“You did it,” Ann said.
“If anything was done here tonight, the Lord did it,” Tate said. “But somethin’ ain’t right.” His flashlight swept the ground. There was no trace, not the least disturbance of dew in the grass, to mark Jim Bascom’s arrival or passing. “This ain’t right. I don’t think we saw a body.”
“What was it, then?”
“A, what-do-you-call-it, like when you see things that ain’t there — ”
“Hallucination?”
“Yeah, that.”
“But we both saw it.”
“Even so. It didn’t seem like it was there, somehow. Somethin’s buildin’ in this town, but it ain’t finished yet. I think this was just a kind of taste of things to come, somehow. I wonder if somethin’ just wants us away from town tonight?”
“Why?”
“Alan,” Tate said simply.
9
The creature that called itself Athaniel Badon moved back from the body. She’s so flat, Andy McCory thought, so pale in the moon.
She had gasped toward the end of his attentions to her, gasped like a woman carried to the brink of orgasm and beyond, but she had not died. Mr. Badon kept her from dying, somehow, until he could do that thing and drink from her. Now she lay in the moonlight like a torn package, inert, pale blue and purple further below, where the wounds began, where her insides showed.
ShadowShow Page 32