We look like a family, Alan thinks.
He wishes they were.
Sundown.
Mayor Warner stands beside his living-room window and scans the street. He feels anxious, without knowing why. He is waiting for Ballew Jefferson to drop by for a drink, maybe to talk a little business, certainly to commiserate about the precarious state of the town. He is ahead of the game, for he sips already at a tumbler with a healthy knock of bourbon in it. He feels old, sad. All the deaths in town lately. Damn it, anyway.
What were they thinking of when they died off like that? Didn’t people realize how hard it was to attract businesses to a place like Gaither?
His wife pauses in the doorway. “Dinner about eight, then?”
“I guess,” he says.
“Well, if Ballew is only staying for drinks — ”
“That’s what he said.”
“I’ll be upstairs.”
Mayor Warner nods curtly, takes another sip of bourbon. It tastes awful, and he grins, trying not to make a face. He thinks how crazy it is that Frye is a dry county, and he wonders if there will ever come a time when liquor is legal here. Or beer and wine, anyway.
He begins to tote up, in his imagination, all the business that might come to the county if alcohol were legal.
Sundown.
Dr. Gordon reads over the note he has just written. His handwriting, like the old joke, is wretched, but this note is readable, neatly lettered in black ink on cream-white stationery. His wife is still fussing about upstairs. Well, let her fuss. Take her a while to get used to the idea, that was all.
Dr. Gordon reads the note:
Dear Sam,
I’m sorry to break the news to you this way, but I am leaving town for a while. I have had it. I’ve told Dr. Franklin about it — he thinks I have an ailing relative that I have to visit. He will sub for me until I get back, if I come back. Evelyn and I are going to Florida for the next month.
I would urge you to leave, too, though I know you won’t. There is something wrong in this town, Sam, and you know it as well as I do.
The doctor sighs, starts to sign the note, and then, on impulse, lowers the gold tip of his fountain pen to scratch one additional line onto the paper before he does: “For God’s sake, at least be careful.” Then he signs his name, folds the note, puts it in an envelope, and addresses it to Sam Quarles. His hands shake.
Sundown.
Jack Harwell comes in and slings his empty newspaper pouch in the corner of the living room. His mother, off in the kitchen, says, “Put that thing up.”
“All right already,” Jack says in Jack Benny’s voice. But he picks up the pouch and takes it to his own room. Then he goes to the bathroom and scrubs his hands. The Lava soap is gritty against his palms. The bubbles are gray from a good layer of newsprint ink. The water swirling down the drain is streaked with it. He rinses twice before using the towel.
His dad, mother, and sisters wait for him at the table. He slides into place, bows his head as his father gives thanks, and then reaches for the pot roast.
“Make him give me some, Mama,” Katie says.
Jack serves her. No one comments. His dad asks, “Everything go all right on the route today?”
Jack shrugs. “All right.”
“Because you were a little late.”
“I shoulda toined left at Albuquerque,” he says in Bugs Bunny’s voice.
“You look a little flushed,” his mother says. “Do you feel all right?”
Jack looks at her. “I feel fine,” he says. Perhaps because he says it in his own voice, not Fred Allen’s or Jimmy Durante’s or Groucho Marx’s, his mother immediately rises and puts her hand on his forehead.
“No fever,” she says. “If you start feeling sick, you tell us. There’s this awful flu going around.”
Jack nods, adjusts his glasses, and helps himself to green beans. He feels fine, he thinks to himself. A little funny, but fine. And naked women turning into dead deputies turning into a man who owes you seven dollars and twenty cents — well, that isn’t Jack’s idea of ideal suppertime conversation.
Sundown.
Sam Quarles, stretched out on a cot in his office, wakes suddenly, feels tears wet on his face. He gets up, goes to the lavatory, splashes water onto his face. Ilona. God, he misses her. But he doesn’t dare let her come back home. And the last time she called, she was talking about divorce. Of course, as soon as she mentioned the word, she added a tight little laugh to show she really wasn’t serious.
Just a joke. Ha, ha.
Like this damn town was getting to be a joke. Like this building, empty except for him and two deputies, was a great big joke. Like moving the switchboard all the way into the main office was a joke. Like the splash of blood on the front wall was a joke.
Ha, ha.
He stares at his eyes in the mirror. They are red-rimmed, bloodshot, exhausted, haunted.
Oh, God, that smell of gum in the patrol car.
Harmon Presley grinning at him.
Empty graves.
Sam Quarles gets the shakes. He is afraid of the coming night. Of what it might bring.
Of what might be in it.
Sundown.
The coffins have been removed from sight, stacked: the graves yawn empty. So do the houses across the road from the cemetery, all of them. The owners and inhabitants have found other places to be. A brown dog trots along beside the cemetery fence, pauses at the gate, looks in. It throws back its head and howls, a sound of grieving.
Then it hurries on, looking back over its shoulder, furtively, now and again.
Beyond the fence something moves.
Sundown.
Mrs. Dilcey Venner, who had asked her daughter Beebee’s advice about her new boarder, hears a sharp noise from upstairs. She looks across the dinner table to her husband, but he just goes on eating, his jaws working, his gray head tilted slightly as he listens to the news over WSB radio.
Mrs. Venner sighs, pushes away from the table, and goes upstairs herself, taking each stair slowly, her knees popping. The rented room is on the left at the head of the stair. It used to be Beebee’s brother’s room, but Clyde is off in the air force now, stationed over there in Germany. Mrs. Venner makes a fist, taps on the door with her knuckles. “Mr. Cox? Mr. Cox, I have supper on the table.”
Already that day he has refused to come downstairs for lunch. He does not answer her knock.
Mrs. Venner pauses, her hand on the door. Then she sets her mouth into a straight line. It is her house, after all. She turns the knob.
At first she thinks he is changing a light bulb, standing on a chair.
Then he turns slowly, and she sees the rope tied to the light fixture. It’s a wonder it holds his weight at all, but it does.
The chair he kicked away made the noise she heard.
She watches, fascinated, as the purple face, the popping eyes, the bulging tongue turn her way. She smells the fecal odor of death by hanging.
I’m glad he paid in advance, she thinks inconsequentially. Then she screams.
Sundown.
Andy McCory starts as a hand touches his shoulder. The big projector spins on, casting its colored shadows down on the screen. Mr. Badon says, “I may need you tonight.”
“I want her again,” Andy says.
“And you shall have her. But I may need you tonight. There is a man outside. He wishes me ill.”
“I want her right now.”
“Do you. I will deal with him myself, I think: but there are things I cannot do. You understand.”
“Can I — ”
“Later,” Mr. Badon says. His tone snaps the lid shut on the conversation. It is over. Andy, his face red in the dim light of the projection booth, thinks of the black-haired woman.
Sundown.
Lee McCory stands over the gas stove, cooking supper for her children. The gas burns clear and blue and strong: the man came only that afternoon to refill the white propane tank in the backyard, the tank
that sometimes is a spaceship for the children, sometimes a submarine. Lee tells herself she is lucky, that things are better. But as she slices the chicken, she might as well be cutting her own heart.
Rolling the chicken pieces in flour, dropping them into hot grease, she whispers a half-remembered prayer from childhood. She wishes she knew why she feels so bad. Why she is so frightened.
Sundown.
Mr. Tate sees the door of the ShadowShow open, sees a thin man stand there briefly, then swing the door to. He rises, the weight of his Bible ponderous beneath his arm. He is afraid. He speaks to himself: “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world ....”
He squares his shoulders and walks toward the darkness.
6
Alan Kirby always remembered the drive home as if it had been only a part of his sickness. He remembered lying in the backseat, exhausted, the day outside turning into night. He lay there, the upholstery prickly against his cheek, and heard the radio announcer talking about the World Series, about the Braves and the Yankees, about Burdette’s inspired pitching. Music then, a string of tunes: Debbie Reynolds singing “Tammy,” Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are,” Paul Anka singing “Diana.” Buddy Holly with “That’ll Be the Day.” The lyrics made him feel a deep ache of fear. Death was on his mind at the moment, and the day when he, Alan Kirby, would die.
Above the music he heard his father and Miss Lewis talking calmly about fantastic things, incredible things: crucifixes and garlic, stakes and silver bullets. Miss Lewis had a crucifix that had come from Rome. His dad had a shotgun and a set of sterling silverware that had never been used. “I suppose it would be easy enough to take a hacksaw to the forks. Cut the tines to short pieces, pack a couple of shells with them. That should do as well as a silver bullet, don’t you think?”
But when you do, Alan thought, you’ll find some knives are missing. Calm voices, crazy talk. Alan thought he knew what his father had meant when he told him about Dachau, about the pit of corpses. Alan felt himself that he had feasted on death, had gorged on it, and was sick of it. And now this discussion straight out of a horror movie rammed more of it right down his throat.
“I don’t know if the Catholic church will let us have holy water,” Ann was saying, “or a consecrated Host. But I’ll talk to Father Haliburton about it.”
“He can’t afford to lose any more parishioners,” John said.
The Catholic church, St. Michael’s, was very small. Most people in Gaither were Baptists or Methodists, with a leavening of other denominations; Holiness, Church of Christ, Nazarenes, a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a small Episcopal congregation, even some Seventh-Day Adventists: but of all the congregations in Gaither, the Catholic was one of the smallest. Father Haliburton ministered to no more than two dozen families in the little church to the north of town. Three of the families had lost loved ones in the past six weeks.
Alan thought there was at least a chance the priest would listen.
“But what do we do?” his father asked, and Alan realized he had dozed. He sat up in the backseat, looked out into the darkness.
“I think we have to find out, that’s all,” Ann Lewis was saying. The radio was playing Don Rondo’s “White Silver Sands” under her voice. “We have to confront him. Somehow I don’t think he can hide his nature, not from us.”
“But if he does? I can’t see myself whipping out a cross, or worse yet, filling him full of Mary’s grandmother’s dinner service.”
“We’ll know,” Alan said, his voice sluggish from sleep.
“Among the living again, are you?” his father asked.
“We’ll know,” Alan said again. “I feel it. Miss Lewis is right. He can’t hide from us, not when we know about him.”
There was a long silence before John Kirby answered. “We’ll see.” He sighed. “I don’t know what will happen, but I’m afraid things will never be the same after this is over.”
“And I’ll talk to Mrs. Estes,” Ann said, carrying on the conversation, Alan guessed, from the time when he had been sleeping. “I think she may have a suggestion or two. And her grandson Michael wants us to keep him posted, too. “
“Where are we?” Alan asked.
“About five miles out of town,” his father said. “Go back to sleep.”
Alan couldn’t, of course, no more than he could shake the feeling of doom that gripped him. No more than he could get the tune of “Tammy” out of his head. It circled and circled inside his mind in an idiot whirl, meaningless at last, and empty as the night outside the car.
7
The dead walked in Gaither that night.
Odum Tate felt them, felt the weight of their deaths, felt the pressure of their mockery of life. Standing in the peppermint-scented lobby of the ShadowShow, he felt them out there, beginning to stir. The young lady behind the concession stand glanced at him whenever he looked away from her. She had told him that the manager was not in, and she insisted that no one had opened the door. But, yes, Mr. Badon might come in later. The preacher had determined to wait inside. The girl was a little afraid of him, he thought, and found himself smiling a bitter smile at the notion. She worked for the monster, and she feared him.
The auditorium doors were closed, but through them came a drift of sound, voices raised in argument or music thrumming an encouragement to imagination. Tate did not want to see the movie. He made no move toward the auditorium doors. He merely stood there, slightly behind the box office, ten steps in front of the concession counter, hearing but not hearing the sounds of the movie as he prayed silently.
The whole armor of God.
And yet he knew, God help him, of all the chinks in his own armor, weak places rusted away by the corrosions of sin and unbelief. He would need more than any earthly armor, he thought, to protect him.
But there was more, somehow: a power. He had sensed it before, sensed it at times while preaching when it seemed to him his words flowed of their own accord, took flight like doves winging to heaven, when he was possessed by something not of him but greater than him: rare times. He had felt the power on maybe half a dozen occasions. For the rest, he was a man doing what a man could do, fallible, weak, but trying.
The power did not possess him now. Still, he sensed it, felt it. It was like the charged air beneath high-tension wires, electric, full, overflowing, there to be used if he could tap it. Despite the tug of his Bible beneath his arm, Tate sensed, too, that it was a power that did not live between the covers of that or any book, that it was universal, reaching to and beyond the stars, and immutable. He had the awful impression that the truths he tried to preach were reflections of this power, but not the power itself; that the truth behind the reflections was more terrible and more wonderful than his mind, or the mind of any man or woman, could grasp.
Laughter clattered through the closed doors of the auditorium. Tate closed his eyes. In his mind he saw the dead, their beings the same and yet altered somehow, the spirit animating the flesh no longer theirs but his, Badon’s. The dead man outside Cox’s house, there but not real, and not himself, stirred again in recollection. He had other mental visions, of people he did not know but about whom he had dreamed: the dead woman with the ruined stomach moved in his mind’s gaze; another black man, with arms ripped and dripping, waited there; a heavyset policeman with bullet wounds grinned at him, dead jaws working on a wad of gum. A child. . . .
Tate shook himself and opened his eyes. Andy McCory was there, looking at him with jittery eyes, frightened eyes. “You want to see him,” McCory said.
Tate nodded.
“Come on.”
The woman behind the counter bawled, “Where you goin’? Who’s gonna watch the projectors?”
“I’ll be back,” Andy said, his voice shaking. He turned away and Tate followed him up the stair. He expected they would turn toward t
he office at the top, as Alan had described it, but instead they turned to the left, toward the rest rooms. “This way,” Andy muttered, pulling a bunch of keys from his pocket.
Andy paused in front of a door just beyond the room, jangled his keys, and finally produced one that opened the lock. He pulled the door open. “Come on.”
It was a passage, raw and unfinished. Outside the walls of the theater were covered with wallpaper: here the right wall was brick, the outer wall of the theater actually, not meant to be seen and dripping with hardened clumps and clods of mortar. Brown Pan-pipe tubes clung to it, too, the nests of dirt-dauber wasps. The wall to the left was age-darkened wood, unfinished, sprouting pipes that came from the men’s room. The floor they walked on was wood, too, similarly unfinished and littered with dust, grit, and loose pieces of mortar. Three sixty-watt bulbs threw it all into dim illumination. Andy walked purposefully ahead, and Tate followed, aware that they were walking the length of the theater, over the heads of the patrons. At the far end Andy stood in an alcove. A spiral led down into the darkness. “He’s down there,” Andy said.
“Are you going first?”
Andy shook his head. “I got to get back.” But he waited.
“All right,” Tate said. He started down the spiral stair, his hand tight on the rail. “All right.” His head dropped to the level of Andy’s knees, then his feet.
Andy grinned down at him. “’Bye, preacher man.” He turned and strode back the way they had come.
Tate swallowed and stepped down again, feeling his way, his feet tentative. At first it was very dark, and then it was silvery light: looking up, Tate realized he was behind and to one side of the screen. He saw the dim reversed images of giants, two giants kissing. He followed the stair down to stage level.
There he stepped away from the foot of the stair and took a deep breath. The brick walls towered up over him, and the stage stretched narrow and long in front. He was alone.
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