Badon shuddered, his features melting back into human semblance. “She is yours,” he said.
“She’s dead.”
“She is.”
“What the hell good is she to me?” His voice traveled out over the empty water to the other side, and an echo mocked back, me, me.
Badon’s eyes, two points of feral light in the darkness of his face, glowed. “Look at her.”
McCory looked down at his feet. He was splashed with her blood, could feel it sticky and crusted on his hands, could see it across the front of his shirt. Below him, the wounds began to heal. Flesh met flesh again, silently, sealed, intestines crept and slithered and crawled back into the ripped abdomen, and behind them the skin closed without fuss or scar.
“She ain’t real,” McCory said.
“Of course she is,” Badon said. “It’s you who are not real. You’re still alive. She’s dead. She’s more real than you are. She will never change now.”
Her eyes opened, horribly empty, two silver dimes. Her mouth stretched in the imitation of a smile.
“I am strong tonight,” Badon crooned. “Oh, they will know me tonight, they will have a hint of my desires.”
“She’s dead.”
The corpse’s tongue licked its lips, leaving them gleaming a pale purple. “Andy,” it said, holding up its arms. “Come to me. Come to Kay-Kay.”
“No...”
“Go ahead,” Badon told him.
“But she — she ain’t really — she — ”
“She will welcome your embraces now. She will let you do anything now.”
“Honey,” said a voice from the ground.
10
Sam Quarles had seen things in the cemetery.
He had seen nothing he could arrest or even shoot at, but things — movements glimpsed from the corner of his eye, stealthy scuttling somethings half seen darting between distant gravestones, things that might have been rabbits or owls (he knew they were not) or, for all he could tell, demons from hell.
Nothing stirred around the pile of coffins.
He heard traffic sounds, the chirps and cries of insects, the high-pitched twitter of bats overhead; and then he heard the crump of a distant explosion.
“Damn,” he muttered, rising from his impious seat on the stone commemorating the existence of Purdy Lee Fowler, 1879–1939. He had left the car — his own Pontiac, not a sheriff’s car — in the driveway of a house an eighth of a mile from the cemetery entrance, with the homeowner’s permission. The family was sleeping over with relatives tonight, though the man of the house refused to say whether the cemetery had anything to do with the visit.
Quarles walked to the car, gravel crunching under his boots. He wished for the hundredth time that year that the county would spring for radios. It would make his life a lot easier, he thought, if he could just have a walkie-talkie with him on nights like this, or at least two-way radios in the patrol cars. On impulse, he walked to the front door of the white bungalow and tried it. It swung open. Quarles sighed. Damned idiot deserved to be robbed.
“Anybody home?” he yelled into the house. No one answered. He turned on the living-room light and saw down a hall to the kitchen beyond. Quarles walked through the house to the kitchen, and sure enough the telephone squatted on the counter there like a hunkered black toad. He picked it up and dialed the number of the Sheriff’s Office.
He got a busy signal. Scowling, he dialed another number, one not given out to the public. It rang ten times before he crashed the phone back into the cradle. After frowning at the wall clock — 12:39 — he called the police department and identified himself. “I heard somethin’ go up,” Quarles said. “What was it?”
“Wreck, looks like,” the policeman told him. “Up Rainey Hill way. Ambulance, I think.”
“Shit,” Quarles said. “Anybody checkin’ it out?”
“It’s your baby,” the policeman said.
“Shit.” Technically, Rainey Hill was in the county, though the residents there got city water, paid some city taxes, and sent their kids to city schools. Quarles hung up, tried the Sheriff’s Office again, got nothing, and went back out to his car, vengefully slamming the house door behind him. He took out his keys, unlocked his car, and slid behind the wheel. The engine caught right away, and he backed out, turned toward town, and made the tires screech on the asphalt.
He had to go north to Bridge Street, then turn left to get to Rainey Hill. He had just made the turn when he smelled something sweet, something familiar.
The aroma of spearmint gum.
Quarles glanced to his right. Harmon Presley sat beside him. “Goin’ to check it out?” Presley asked in his familiar voice
The car swerved off the road, chewed grass on the shoulder, skidded back into the road, straightened its nose, and aimed for the bridge. Quarles felt frozen, the way he had once felt as a boy when he reached to pick up what he thought was a stick, only to have the stick coil at the approach of his hand and buzz its rattles at him.
“Get out!” he barked to his companion.
Presley laughed. “This town will die,” he said, and he was gone.
Quarles managed to stop the car just short of the bridge. He was alone. There was no smell of gum in the air. He tasted blood. He had bitten into his lower lip hard enough to pierce the flesh.
“No,” he said. “You’re not here, Harmon Presley. No, you weren’t.” He started the car again and drove across the bridge, toward the commotion on Rainey Hill.
He saw the crowd before he saw the accident: shoulders and heads outlined black against a strange blue, actinic illumination, swaying almost to a constant thrum and hum. Quarles knew it was bad before he stopped the Pontiac and killed the engine, though he left the headlights burning. The sheriff got out of the car. His knees shook with every step, but he made it to the edge of the crowd.
The red and white ambulance had snapped a power pole clean off. Part of the splintered stub projected from beneath the crumpled bumper, bent forward almost in a V to embrace the blackened, creosoted wood; part of the crosspieces still hung from wires sagging low over the ambulance roof. A broken power line leaped, flashed, and sparked, now resting on the ambulance hood, now writhing on the ground.
The crowd folded Quarles in as he pushed forward. He saw that all Rainey Hill up the slope from the break was dark: men and women from the blacked-out houses, most in bathrobes or hastily donned and mismatched clothing, stood well back from the ambulance and the power line.
Hubert Willis recognized him. “I done called the power company,” Willis bawled in his ear. “They gotta shut the juice off before we can get to ’em.”
“Who was it comin’ for?” Quarles asked.
“Don’t know. It’s the Loveland ambulance. That’d be Mattie Porter drivin’ it. Just come abarrelin’ around the curve doin’ blue ninety, slid right into that pole — ”
The ambulance door creaked open.
“No!” Quarles shouted.
Matthew Porter, his eyes wild behind a red mask of blood that flowed from a gash across his forehead, poised on the edge of the door and then leaped out into the night. He hit and fell forward on his left knee and his outstretched hands, three feet past the sputtering live wire.
Quarles released the breath he had caught.
The wire struck like a live thing.
It lashed across Porter’s back, arching his spine. He stood up for a moment, bent impossibly back, a blackening parenthesis against the flare and flash of electricity. His hands flew stiffly out at sharp angles from his body, windmilled, and his legs did a jittering, involuntary dance. Smoke burst from his form, and a whiff of burning flesh made Quarles retch.
It ended too suddenly to be believed.
The darkness hit with palpable force: the streetlights behind the accident went out, and all the lighted squares of doors and windows. The electrical lightning died simultaneously. For a moment Quarles thought his sight had somehow failed; then he became aware that he could still
see the headlights of the ambulance, burning dim, almost an ember-red against the dark. His own car lights illuminated the crowd, but after the brightness of the broken wire, they were pale, ineffective.
Sounds came to him then: women praying, sobbing, and men, too.
Hubert Willis let out a long, shuddering sigh. “They turned off the power,” he whispered.
There was a longer, plaintive voice above the cacophony. It came from the ambulance. Blinking as his eyes adjusted to the dark, Quarles forced himself to step forward, past the huddled, smoking form of Matthew Porter, to the ambulance. “Help me, somebody,” cawed a hoarse, helpless voice.
The door still hung open. Quarles stepped in. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Lucy Spokes,” croaked the voice. “Oh, Lord a mercy, what happened?”
She was in the back of the ambulance, her thin, veined hands over her face. The dome light, still smoky and uncertain after the white-hot glare outside, highlighted the bones and crackled flesh. Quarles knelt beside her. “You had a wreck,” he said. “What happened, Miz Spokes?”
She lowered her hands. Her eighty-year-old eyes, sunk deep into her face, were wide, pale, and dry. “I have the flu,” she said. “It seemed like I couldn’t get my breath, somehow. My son Roland called the ambulance. I told him it wasn’t necessary, I could wait.” Her tongue licked dry lips. “But you know my son. Anyway, the ambulance came and we were going into town when Matthew Porter simply went insane. He began to scream for somebody to get away from him. The next thing I knew, he had turned on the siren and we were squealing around corners and going up and down hills — ” The old hands described a roller coaster in the air. “And then there was this awful crash, and I’ve been strapped in here not able to get loose — ”
“Mama?” The voice was Rollie Spokes’s, and it came from the open door of the ambulance. “Mama? I was trying to follow the ambulance, but he lost me and — ”
“Roland, get me out of this thing.”
“Hold on, Miz Spokes. We’ll get you out.”
It took another ten minutes, but they did finally free her. This time Rollie Spokes insisted on driving his mother to the hospital himself, and Quarles was glad to let him go. Another ambulance had arrived, and a truck from the power company. The crowd had drifted away a bit, coalescing into smaller groups, as crowds will. Quarles asked around, but no one else had seen the accident.
He leaned against his car and rubbed his eyes. Crazy. Mrs. Spokes and her son lived a good five miles out of town, and Rainey Hill was not on the way to the hospital. What had made Matt Porter go nuts enough to chase around that way, siren blaring, tires screeching?
But Quarles, remembering the scent of spearmint gum, thought he knew the answer to that already.
11
“John?”
Alan’s father paused, his right foot raised onto his porch, his right hand pressed against the rail, supporting his weight. He looked behind him into the darkness. “Yes?”
Ann Lewis and a tall, gaunt man materialized from the gloom. “It’s me,” she said. “And this is Mr. Tate. What happened?”
John Kirby’s shoulders sagged. “Bad accident up the hill, about forty-five minutes ago. Power’s been off for half an hour. I’ve got to go in — I left Alan alone. I think you’d better come in with me.”
“We need to talk.”
“I know.”
Streetlights and houselights suddenly flickered back on. John blinked in the light, a warm yellow glow from the porch light, a whiter glare from the street lamps. His hair was disheveled, his glasses shining with reflections. He looked at Ann Lewis for a moment, then at Odum Tate. “I guess,” he said, “we’d better go inside.”
They went into the warmth and light, closing the door on darkness.
Interval 3:
Conflagrations
1
The youngest son, he spoke to the ghost,
Heigh, ho, rattle the bones.
He started to brag and he started to boast.
Rattle the bones and the chains-o!
The youngest son said, “Begone, you fiend,”
Heigh, ho, rattle the bones.
Said, “This night will see the one of us end.”
Rattle the bones and the chains-o!
He had on his side fine steel and fire,
Heigh, ho, rattle the bones.
He had his dear mother sayin’ a prayer.
Rattle the bones and the chains-o!
When the sun showed his face it was fiery and red,
Heigh, ho, rattle the bones.
Ghost was still free and the third son lay dead.
Rattle the bones and the chains-o!
- “The Ghost and the Three Boys” (“Rattle the Bones”), mountain ballad, ca. 1801
2
In a city of Ionia lived a certain man, Aristides, who fancied himself persecuted by a kind of evil spirit. In less than a year all of his household, wife, children, servants, and even animals sickened and died; so that the people of the city believed the house afflicted with plague, and they avoided Aristides, leaving him alone in his misery.
But he believed that a spirit, more terrible than the Furies, had claimed his house, and had feasted on the blood of all his family and servants, and yet was invisible. In his fear and misery, Aristides consulted a priest of Pallas Apollo, who assured him that the evil spirit could be exorcised from the house by ritual and sacrifice.
So on an appointed day, the priest came to the house of Aristides and performed the necessary rites, praying that the god would release the man from his terrible sufferings. And it is said that, in the midst of the rites of purification, the evil spirit appeared in a bodily shape that all could see, seeming to form from thin air in the smoke above the altar: and its form was like a blood-drinking mosquito, only many times larger, so that they said an ordinary mosquito was to the monster as a grasshopper is to a man.
Then the priest questioned the apparition, and it spoke in a voice like a man’s. When the priest asked the spirit why it troubled the family, the spirit replied, “I wish to make them free.”
“But you have killed them,” the priest admonished.
“It is the same thing,” the spirit said.
The priest, then knowing the spirit to be one of evil, burned certain leaves and made a sacrifice to Pallas Apollo. When the smoke had cleared, the apparition had gone with it; and Aristides was never again troubled with this so-called evil spirit.
This, Athenians, is what I have heard from a man who was a near neighbor of Aristides. For its truth I will not vouch, for I was not there and did not see it myself; and, as for spirits, my firm belief is that whether they be real or no, there is no need for a living person to trouble with them until they first trouble him.
- Democritus the Lesser, “Of Ghosts and Spirits” (fragment; 4th. Century B.C., translated by Gary Clarence)
3
Beloved, the Devil never brought witchcraft to Salem. Nay, he did not so much as bring one thought of evil here; nor did he need to do so.
For each one of us, each inhabitant of Salem, had evil enough within. That spirits were moved, I have yet no doubt; but they were our own spirits, beloved, and not those of devilish imps. That dark deeds were done, that is certain; but men and women and children did those deeds.
Or if Satan indeed came among us to raise a crop for hell in that time of trouble, did we not give him fallow ground, and all the seed he needed? Did we not tend the crop ourselves? And when the bloody harvest came, did our hands not swing the sickle?
- Reverend Samuel Beverly, of Salem, “Penitential Sermon,” 1720 (MS held in Colonial Collections, Boston Harbor College)
4
Scarce had Tollivant’s manly shoulder burst open the door before I heard from him a cry of terror and grief. “Alas!” he cried. “Too late! Too late! Malvina has fallen prey to the fiend’s terrors!”
Readers! How could I describe that ghastly room to you? Gentle hearts would need grow faint,
should I speak of the wretched ruin that had been, but hours earlier, the sweet Malvina, flushed in the beauteous bloom of first youth. Nor could I tell you of the gore-spattered chamber, its very walls stained with young Malvina’s heart’s blood. Suffice it to say that the inhuman appetites of D’Alsace had been grossly satisfied in that room of horror....
“But, Gaspard!” I cried to the excitable Frenchman as he paced the floor of our apartments. “Think! How could it have been D’Alsace? Did we not exhume his body beneath the moon’s baleful light? And did you not, with your own hands, drive home the stake that would forever affix his thirsting soul to its body? The vampyre is dead, Gaspard, dead!”
“Not a bit of it!” Gaspard exclaimed, his deep-set eyes ablaze with determined courage. “Ah, mon ami, we have allowed ourselves to be led up the path of the garden! I begin to see now, yes, clearly. It is not a true vampyre at all!”
My head whirled. “I do not understand. All that you have told me, all that you believed — ”
“Gaspard was a fool!” my Continental friend cried, striking himself a merciless blow on his head. “An imbecile, an idiot! Alas, for Malvina and for D’Alsace’s other victims! Zut! The being I mistook for a vampyre, Polson, was nothing less than a spirit of destruction!”
“A spirit! Then we have not destroyed him?”
“Not at all. We have desecrated his earthly dwelling, the body of D’Alsace; we have not destroyed him. We cannot destroy him, for a spirit is eternal!”
I slumped into a chair. “Then there is no hope, no end to this ghastly affair!”
Gaspard sprang to his feet with that feline energy I had so often observed. With a wrench he opened the draperies, flooding the room with light. “There is hope, my friend! Alors, prepare yourself to go forth. We cannot destroy the spirit, but we may cast it into darkness. We must find D’Alsace’s body again — he has doubtless hidden well — and bring to it the fire.
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