Kirby shook his head. “Sorry, Sam. Not a word.”
Quarles sighed. “It’s homicide now. Too damn many in this little town already, and now it’s one more.”
Kirby said, “Do you have a feeling that there’s something wrong with the town, Sheriff?”
“Oh, yeah,” Quarles said. “Oh, yeah. Like vampires, you mean.” Kirby started, and Quarles grinned at him. “Or ghosts. Or something else that ain’t real, ain’t supposed to be real, that if I mentioned ’em to the commissioners would get me fired quick as you please, or stuck in a rubber room down in Milledgeville. Yeah, something’s wrong with this little town, all right.”
Kirby wet his lips. “What if I told you I thought I knew something about it?”
“Is it vampires or ghouls or some damn thing?”
Kirby nodded.
Quarles got up, the bed keeping its impression of his narrow buttocks, and went over to look out the window. Kirby could see new glints of white in the other man’s iron-gray hair, could see dried lines of blood where the sheriff had nicked himself shaving. Without looking at him, Quarles said, “You think you can end it?”
“I think maybe so. Can you help?”
Quarles finally looked at him, anger and bafflement in his eyes. “Well, that’s the question, ain’t it? Can I help? No, I guess not, not in the way you mean. I can’t give you firepower or assistance or my permission to — to do whatever it is you think you got to do. So no, I can’t give you any official help.” He pulled his nose. “But if you can end this thing, end it any old how you can, I can promise that nobody’s gonna ask too many questions.”
“The law — ” Kirby began.
“I’m the law, Mr. Kirby. I know I’m not supposed to be, and I know it’s a bad thing, but that’s the way it is in Frye County, sir. Sam Quarles is the law. He’s the one who decides that Banker Jefferson gets a mite of a break for speeding, but Rufus Pruitt don’t. See, people in this county ain’t too keen on the law being something written in a book somewhere. They want law they can touch, smell, argue with. And I’m it. I’ve tried to be square with everybody, much as I can, and to give everybody a fair shake; and maybe the next sheriff the county elects won’t try, and that’s bad, too. But people in this county want to be taken care of, Kirby, and they’ve told me to do it. So — all I can say to you is do what you can. Do what you have to. The law won’t notice you.”
John Kirby stood up and held out his hand. “All right.”
The sheriff shook his hand, perfunctorily. “It’s eased a little bit,” he said. “It was strong early this week, like a craziness just about to bust loose, but it’s not that bad now. What have you done to it?”
Kirby shook his head. “Not me. But I have the feeling that the preacher might have something to do with it.”
“God rest his soul, then,” Quarles said.
“Amen,” Kirby said.
4
On Monday a judge who owed Sheriff Quarles a favor or two declared that Odum Tate had died intestate and indigent. He granted John Kirby’s petition for the body and the personal effects of the deceased, pending location of kin.
The Benton Brothers, who had a nephew in insurance, let John know of the small life policy all their employees were required to take out. Tate had first named a Sarah Roberts Tate, current address unknown, as beneficiary, but only recently, at the end of the previous week, in fact, he had changed the policy to benefit Alan Kirby. Alan asked his father to take care of it for him. Alan’s father told him that the policy would almost, but not quite, pay the hospital expenses and the burial expenses. He himself made up the difference of seventy-two dollars.
The funeral, taken care of by Detterley’s Funeral Home, was on Tuesday, at the Methodist church. Aside from Dr. Alman, whose eulogy was brief and strained, only Ann Lewis, John Kirby, Alan Kirby, and Mrs. Hudson, Tate’s landlady, attended.
Tate was laid to rest in the Kirby family plot in Municipal Cemetery. The hospital released his torn clothing and his huge old Bible to John Kirby. Mrs. Hudson turned over to John the money, clothing, and other possessions Tate had left behind in his room. John paid Tate’s outstanding rent from the cash.
After his interment there were no more complaints about noises from the cemetery.
Those who had disturbed the silence there seemed to have gone elsewhere.
The rest slept quietly.
5
Lee McCory was awake late Tuesday night when her husband returned from work. “Andy,” she said, “Danny’s real sick.” From her lap the little boy raised red-rimmed eyes to his father’s face.
“He’s all right,” Andy said, shucking off his jacket. The nights were turning chilly and damp, rain building up overhead.
“He’s burnin’ up,” she told him.
Danny coughed.
“Take him to the doctor tomorrow,” Andy said, shaking a Camel out of its packet. He lit it with his gold lighter.
“I need some money.”
Andy dug his wallet out of his back pocket, threw it at her. It slapped the side of Lee’s face hard, fell to the floor. Danny screamed hoarsely, gagged, and coughed, his voice sounding like old rags tearing. “Hush,” Lee said, holding him close and rocking back and forth. “Hush, Danny. Daddy didn’t mean it.”
Andy stomped through the house to the bathroom. Danny, burning hot in Lee’s embrace, shivered. She rocked him and wept. She would sit awake all night long, rocking him. The next morning she would dress him as warmly as she could and would take a taxi to the doctor’s office. Dr. Fortner would take one look at Danny and slap him into the hospital.
There Danny McCory would die, of influenza complicated by pneumonia, on the dismal morning of October 26.
At three, he is not even the youngest victim of the epidemic in Gaither. Four other infants will not recover. His brief life is summed up in the health reports for Frye County for the year of our Lord 1957, child mortality tables. For October, he is the only one in the category of Ages Three to Five. Such is his monument.
By the time he dies, Lee McCory will have no feeling left for her husband at all. For by then Andy will be completely rapt, held in the grip of something greater than himself, will have lost himself, in fact, altogether in a greater darkness.
And by then his wife will feel no love for him, no desire; and yet she will feel no hatred, either.
If her emotion must have a name, call it despair.
6
Alan went to school only one day that week, Wednesday. Classes were strange, more than half empty: Reese Donalds was out sick, and Jack Harwell, and sixteen others, from Alan’s room alone. Miss Ulrich was ill, and Mrs. Canup, who substituted for her, was old and deaf. The remaining students were subdued, strained. They sensed that school would not long continue in this condition.
Alan had a chance at lunch to speak to Diane England. She had come back, he thought, at least partway; but still she was not the same as she had been before their date, before Man of a Thousand Faces and its aftermath.
Alan sat beside her and for a few minutes pretended to eat. Then he spoke to her quietly: “We’re going to get him.”
Diane looked at him. Tears brimmed in her eyes.
“We’re going to get him good.”
“It’s no use,” she said.
“Yes. We’ll make things all right again.”
“You can’t. Not like they were before.”
Alan pushed his tray back. “It was all lies, Diane. I don’t know what it was you saw, but it was all lies.”
She shuddered. “No. And you can’t put things back the way they were before. I know you can’t.”
“We’re going to try.” Alan looked down at his half-eaten lunch. “You want to help?”
“No.”
“Diane — ”
She got up and walked away, carrying her tray to the lunchroom counter. Something whispered in Alan’s ear: Do you want her?
No.
Live forever, live forever....
&nb
sp; He got up and carried his own tray across.
The next day the school board canceled classes for the rest of that week and all the next, hoping that by that time the Asian flu would have run its course. Alan, dressed for school, heard the news on the radio. It did not elate him as it might have under other circumstances.
Gaither was a very sick town.
Here is how sick Gaither was: Ann Lewis moved into John Kirby’s house, and no one said anything about it.
Of course, this occurred on Wednesday, October 16, the day school let out; and of course, on the Tuesday before that Frank Lessup had left town yet again, but this time fleeing to the warmer and presumably healthier clime of Florida, and this time taking Aunt Betty with him.
Still, for no one to raise comment, to cluck a tongue at least — well, the town was very sick. Mrs. Maddons, Ann’s landlady, lay in the hospital herself, and her son, who lived out of town, was just as grateful that the house was empty and that he didn’t have to worry about taking care of any tenant his mother might have. He didn’t feel so well himself. He feared that he, like the town, was becoming very, very sick.
And the weather was sick, too: low gray skies sprinkled a cold, gelid rain down, swelling Moccasin Creek and Cherokee Creek to overflowing (the whorehouse at the confluence of the two streams had to be evacuated late that week, but with both the girls and their clientele down with the flu, no one noticed that very much, either), filling the streets with turbid, white-capped streams of brown muddy water. This in the arid month of October! This in a month when in Georgia leaves hang brown or yellow or flaming red, but all of them crisp as potato chips, dry, desiccated. But this year the rain bore and beat down the autumn leaves, then swept them away, or in flat areas piled them into thick mats. The leaden skies looked wrong, looked like another symptom of the illness that gripped the whole town.
Life was interrupted. The library closed temporarily, its whole staff laid up with aches, nausea, and fever. Sam Quarles found himself short-handed, with only one deputy on duty at night, the others racked with the flu. The Advocate, its staff ailing, combined two editions into one and took a hiatus that week. John Kirby went into town each day to open the store, but on his best day he had few customers. The paperboy (not Jack Harwell, who had a route on the other side of town and in part of New Haven, but another boy) fell ill, and his father had to deliver the papers, creeping his turtle-backed Hudson through the flooded streets, flinging the Constitution at porches with an arm grown too old for accuracy, too stiff with arthritis and the wet for strength.
The weather kept Alan and Ann inside, in separate rooms, reading, or together, talking. The talk was gloomy and the news no more cheerful than the talk. It didn’t matter to Alan now that the Braves had taken the World Series in the final game, or that the Brooklyn Dodgers had announced that they were moving to Los Angeles; nor, in the coming days, did other news stories matter to him, stories about the Georgia Bulldogs’ loss to Navy (after a win over Tulane the week before) or about the State Department rejecting a Russian summit, or a school-bus accident in neighboring Jackson County, or about Bing Crosby’s marriage to Cathy Grant.
He noted these things in a dull sort of way, but he, his father, and Ann Lewis devoted their thoughts and their conversations to the ShadowShow and to Mr. Badon. John had called the theater several times, asking to speak to the man, only to be told that he was unavailable.
At night they held councils from time to time, ghoulish discussions that seemed to come right out of Alan’s collection of dog-eared paperbacks. “Seven times seven hundred and seventy-seven,” his father had murmured once. “A good long time, if we can chase him away that long.”
“And I don’t think he comes back often to the same place,” Ann said. “He did here. He was here in 1922, I think, posing as Mr. Apollyon, and somehow or other the death of Jim Bascom didn’t work out as he planned — ”
“The burning,” Alan said.
“ — so, if that book is right, he moved to Atlanta then. If that was Badon. But for some reason, he came back.”
“Unfinished business,” Alan’s father said.
They had begun dimly to see Athaniel Badon as he must really be: a hungering force, masked as human but unable to maintain that mask for too long at a time. He struck, fed, and moved again: and when his victims were whores or derelicts in huge cities, people hardly noticed. But in a town like Gaither — well. He could kill the town. And this time, this visitation, he seemed to be strong, to drag in his wake spirits of the dead, or something very like them. Perhaps his goal this time was to have the town.
Once Alan, late at night, murmured, “He eats people.” He could not explain what he meant, beyond a vague impression that Badon somehow was what he was because he took in, incorporated, something of the people he killed: and that something was more than blood, different from blood. Not the soul, exactly, but something, some animating passion, certainly flowed from those who died into Badon, and now he had feasted exceptionally well, was bloated, fat with shadows.
But as days went by without sign or word of Athaniel Badon, the three of them began to wonder. On another night, later, during a second week of rain, Ann voiced the hope that Badon had been destroyed, that Tate had somehow done it.
But Alan shook his head. “He’s not dead. If he was, I’d feel it. He’s waiting for something. I don’t know what.”
“Should we try?” Ann asked him.
“I don’t think so.” Alan struggled to express what he only vaguely felt: “It’s like, like, he’s gone away temporarily. Or like he’s in hiding. I don’t think we could even find him right now. Or if we did, I don’t think it would help.”
“But he’s not dead?” his father asked, very seriously.
“I’d feel it,” Alan said again.
And, he thought to himself, I wouldn’t dream at night of immortality. Of living forever. Of being free. For dream he did, dark dreams filled with blood, night, and honeyed poison. So easy — it would be so easy to welcome the dream, to fall into it, to spend forever there.
Resist temptation, the old man had said.
Alan groaned under the burden.
Still, nothing happened, aside from the unseasonable and oppressive rain and the spread of the flu bug. The week wore on toward the end of the month and Halloween with nothing more out of the ordinary than deaths from flu.
On Friday, the twenty-fifth, the school board met again, assessed its constituency, and announced that school would re-open the following Wednesday, October 30. That afternoon the temperature dropped, and the next day it was unseasonably cold.
“It’s getting ready to happen,” Alan said that Saturday evening after supper. “I feel it.” He went back to his room and returned in a few moments. “I made these,” he said, and gave a knife to his father and one to Ann.
They turned them over in surprised appraisal, two wooden-hilted stilettos, thin wicked blades burnished and shining like —
“Silver,” his father said. “You beat me to it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thank you, son.”
Ann looked up, her eyes sick. “We have to go there, don’t we. To the ShadowShow.”
“I’m afraid we do,” John Kirby said. “I’m afraid we do.”
Fifteen
1
On Saturday, October 26, the New Haven mill stood silent. The epidemic of flu, together with unusual accidents, normal absenteeism, and a strange unrest, had closed the plant. The workers stayed home, sick or well, and all worried about paychecks. Jay O’Hara, Hob Zaner, and a dozen other supervisors met that day in the conference room next to O’Hara’s silent office to work out production shifts and to create a new work schedule. Zaner estimated that the mill could open again after a week’s layoff. They planned to try to start up again on November 1, but the faces in the office were grim: a national recession had already bitten into the textile business, and with this now happening — no one mentioned closing down for good, but it was a though
t in many minds.
Beyond the office, the mill stood empty as a cavern. Looms, carders, rovers stood motionless in the dim light filtering in through windows painted over with blue paint. Buster Melton, whose father had once owned a grocery store (it went under in the Depression), and who now was a watchman, walked uneasily through the production rooms. It seemed wrong to him that they were so silent, these rooms usually filled to bursting with sound, sound that you could almost bite down on. He roamed through the mill on his rounds, taking the same route that the dope wagon took when the mill was in operation: from the east end he took the elevator to the top floor, then down the length of the mill; the west elevator down to the fourth, through the weave shop; the east elevator down to the third, through the spinning department; the west elevator down to the second, through roving and carding; and then the east down and through the ground floor, past the loading dock, past offices, into the warehouses, and then back.
Buster wished the dope wagon was running. It operated out of a mill-owned cafeteria on the first floor and was in fact a tiny cafeteria on wheels. It had a hot compartment to store hamburgers and hot dogs, a cold compartment for Coca-Colas (hence the name: the old-timers called Cokes “dopes” to this day), and shelves of snacks, candy bars, potato chips. A kid pushed the wagon along through the mill twice each shift, relieving the workers of the inconvenience of having to stop and go somewhere away from their post to eat a meal. Buster thought he sure could use a cup of coffee. But he was alone in the echoing emptiness of the mill.
He walked faster than usual past the first-floor freight elevator, remembering the accident there. A ton of cloth crashing all the way down from the weave shop.... Buster moved on past.
The meeting of supervisors broke up just as Buster came past the offices. Filing out with glum faces, some of the bosses spoke to him and others didn’t. Jay O’Hara gave him a grim smile. “Take care of her, Buster,” he said. “You’ll be on your own today and tomorrow. We’ll get some sweepers in Monday. Might as well clean up while we’re waiting to reopen.”
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