She didn’t look a day older. She wore the dress she had worn when they got married, white and full. Light from behind poured around her, a brilliant radiance, the light of saints.
She smiled at him. She was not beautiful, but she had a beautiful smile, the smile of an angel.
“Mary — ?”
“Yes, John.”
He almost dropped the thing he carried at his side, almost rushed forward to sweep her up, to hold her, to test his reality. Almost but not quite.
“I’ve missed you,” she said.
“You’re not here,” he croaked, the words bitter bile in his mouth. “This is some trick of his.”
But Mary tilted her head to one side just as she always had and smiled her funny crooked smile, the same little dimple showing up at the right corner of her mouth. “Is it?”
“How?” he asked.
“No questions. Come to me. I want you with me, John.”
He stepped into her light. She was so close, so close. He could put forth a hand and touch her, caress her cheek. He saw her through tears. “I’m sorry.”
“You wanted another baby,” she said, with no hint of reproach in her voice. Still, her words struck ice into his heart.
“Mary, I — ”
“It doesn’t matter. We all die anyway.”
He could not reply.
“Some of us never see our children grow up. Some of us never hear our husbands’ farewells. We all die. Nothing matters in the end. It’s all the same, love or hate, youth or age.”
“Mary, I — ”
“Hush. You said you were sorry. Oh, John, you never even knew me and you loved me. What a fool you were then.”
“I love you.”
“But did you ever wonder if I loved you? It doesn’t matter now, but I was unfaithful to you. Oh, yes. You gone in the army and I was left at home. How many times? Nine dozen? Two different men. They all knew, my father and my mother and all the people in town. I was shameless.”
He looked at her in stunned horror. She smiled on, showing her dimple. “Yes, they knew. They laughed at you, John. They laughed at the good soldier boy coming home, taking a job with Daddy-in-law, never knowing, never suspecting. I got rid of one baby, did you know that? I ditched one. There I was home and alone and pregnant, and what was I to tell you? It was a dark little basement I went to in Atlanta, and a dark little man cut and cut and it came out, but oh he hurt me and that’s why your baby killed me, John, that’s why.” She laughed at him, laughed in a coarse bray. “You fool.”
He had a knife in his hand
“Yes, you should have killed me. You should have done it then, as soon as you saw me again. But with a gun or a knife, not with a baby. Yes, you should have killed me, you fool. I never loved you. Never. You hog, you — ”
He raised the knife.
“That’s right. Do it. Do it now. Do it right, do it with a knife, John.” She raised her hands and ripped open the bodice of her wedding gown, exposing the full swell of her breasts. “Now! Do it!”
I’ll be cutting out my own heart
The knife plunged down
She tilted her head back, eyes closed, ecstatic, a woman awaiting orgasm
John lunged past her, swept her aside
The knife tore not into her but through the solid light behind her
The world went crazy.
Colored light washed over them, the three of them, stumbling and thrashing against each other: a ragged rip grew as John Kirby dragged the knife down the screen. He had plunged the knife through a good two and a half feet over his head; now he had torn a gash nearly ten feet long, a smiling mouth, a great reversed sickle of darkness ripped into the jangle of light. But she was gone — Alan, tears streaming, grasped the heavy fabric of the screen and pulled, tearing the gap even more. Sandpapery, silvery, the screen ripped, a horizontal line at first and then curving up to the upper right corner —
Ann Lewis had fallen to the floor. She got to her knees and stabbed the screen, her blond hair plastered in sweatsoaked tendrils to her forehead, her breath coming in grunts of fury and effort as she stabbed again and again, her knife making pocking sounds in the taut fabric —
As abruptly as a movie, their shared fury ended. They panted, then fell together in an embrace. “Oh, God,” Ann said. “I imagined — ”
“It was like the movie I saw,” Alan said.
They broke apart. John Kirby looked up at the ruined screen. “The son-of-a-bitch. The damned yellow coward. He left us a little present. Mr. Badon ran away, but he left us something behind.”
“We have to find him,” Ann Lewis said.
Alan kicked the curtain. It billowed, and in the dim light from the house silver particles sifted down. “He’s scared of us,” Alan said. “He’s hiding.”
“Where?”
“We have to find out,” Alan said.
5
Reese Donalds and Jack Harwell were both over the flu, although now both their families were sick. So together, not knowing that the theater was closed, they decided to go to the shock show. Jack, having started to collect the monthly paper bills, was flush enough to treat them. They rode their bikes through the gathering cold of evening, close enough to talk to each other.
“Doddamn,” Reese said, picking up a conversation they had broken in his yard. “So you stopped leavin’ him a paper, huh?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Jeez, it’s cold.” He wore a heavy coat and bent over his handlebars so far that his nose nearly touched the yoke. “Think I’m goin’ nuts or something?”
Reese, on his old white hand-painted bike, said, “I dunno. There’s been a shitload of stuff happenin’, people dyin’ and all. Man, you know who you should tell about old man Jefferson’s spook house?”
They turned onto Oglethorpe Street, hurtled beneath lighted street lamps, headed toward the Square. “Who?”
“Old Alan Kirby, that’s who. He’s all the time readin’ all them damn books.”
“Vampires,” Jack agreed in a Bela Lugosi voice. “Blood.”
The two boys flew their bikes past Belk’s and toward the theater. Under a sky like a dead winter’s ceiling, downtown lay grim, gray, emptier even than on a normal Saturday evening. Reese hit the curb in front of the jewelry store, bounded over it, and shot out into Bridge Street again without even looking. They crossed the street and pulled up in front of the theater, under the dead marquee.
“Well, shit,” Reese said, staring at the sign that hung on the theater door.
“Closed,” Jack read. He looked at the lurid Frankenstein poster with longing. “Foot! Wonder why it’s closed.”
Reese sat his bike, his left foot thrust out to take his weight and balance him. He rolled the bike forward and back a few inches. “Doddamn flu, probably. Shit.”
“What you want to do?” Jack asked, pushing his thick spectacles back into place on the bridge of his nose. “Go to your house?”
“Nah. My old lady’s sick as a damn dog, man. How about your place?”
Jack shook his head. “Everybody’s sick there.”
Reese sniffed the air. “Damn, feels like it’s gonna snow.”
“Not in October.”
“Nah.” Reese perked up. “Look here,” he said. A patrol car was coming down the street toward them. “That’s the sheriff and who’s the woman?”
Jack squinted in the darkness. The woman beside Quarles in the front seat had sort of light-colored hair. He did not recognize her. “Dunno.”
The car stopped at the curb and Quarles climbed out. He glanced at the CLOSED sign and then at the two boys. “I’m lookin’ for Andy McCory,” he said.
Reese spat into the gutter. “Shit, try Miz Bertha’s.”
Despite his shock, Jack got the giggles. Miz Bertha was the madam of the whorehouse down on River Road south of town. Quarles did not laugh. “Son, it’s not a joke. It’s a family emergency.”
Reese shrugged. Quarles walked over to the theater door and tried it. It swung o
pen easily and the lawman disappeared inside. Reese looked at Jack, grinned, and hopped off his bike, letting it fall with a clatter to the pavement. He followed Quarles inside. “Reese,” protested Jack, but the other boy was already gone. Jack gave the woman in the car a quick glance (She looks so sad, he thought), kicked down the stand of his bike, and went in after Reese.
The red-haired boy stood in the auditorium doorway. “Shit, would ya look at that,” he said. Jack came up and got on tiptoe to look over his shoulder. The screen of the ShadowShow was a hanging ruin, gashed, slashed, ribboned. “Man,” Reese said. “Somebody done a job on that. Won’t be no movies for a while, that’s for doddamn sure.”
Behind them Sheriff Quarles clumped downstairs. “You boys shouldn’t be in here,” he said.
Reese let the auditorium door swing to as he turned. “Was Andy McCory upstairs, Sheriff?”
“No. Get on out, now.”
They went back out under the overhang of the marquee. Quarles climbed back into the patrol car, spoke briefly to the woman, and then drove away. Reese immediately turned back to the theater door. Jack caught his arm. “What’re you up to?”
“Come on.” Reese went back in, and Jack trailed him. This time Reese didn’t go toward the auditorium; he made a line straight for the concession stand. He clambered up and over the counter and tried the door of the glass display case. “It’s open! What you want, man?” His hands scrabbled in among Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, licorice whips, Pompoms, Goobers, Jordan Almonds, Junior Mints.
“Hey,” Jack said. “That’s stealin’, man.”
Reese was stuffing his jacket pocket. “Shit hard luck for whoever left the door open, that’s all. Hell, anybody could take this stuff. Might as well be us, man.”
“Not for me,” Jack said. He left Reese and went outside.
A few seconds later, Reese joined him. “Pussy,” he said.
“We could get arrested, man.”
“Yeah, sure. For stealin’ a Baby Ruth. Gonna send you to Reidsville for stealin’ a damn candy bar, right.”
“Come on.” Jack got on his bike.”
Reese picked up his own. “Where to?”
“Let’s go see what Kirby’s doin’.”
“Okay,” Reese said.
“How much did you get?”
They pushed off together. Reese didn’t answer. Finally, a long way down Bridge Street, he muttered something. Jack dropped back and said, “What?”
“Said I put it all back, fart-face. Didn’t take nothin’.”
For some reason that made Jack feel better. He stood on the pedals and made his bike fly. They raced across the bridge and he won by a front wheel.
6
“You got to go,” Old Ludie said from her bed. She lay there, not really sick anymore but not yet well, either, drifting in and out of light fever and dreams. “You knows you got to go.”
Michael Estes, his back jammed upright in the uncomfortable old wooden ladder-back chair, shook his head. “Granny-Ma, the white folks don’t want me. They don’t need me.”
“They needs the Word.” Ludie sighed. Her mother, dead for forty years, put a cool hand on her forehead. “I restin’ easier, Maw-Maw,” Ludie said politely. “I thank you.”
Michael stirred uneasily in his chair. “Maw-Maw ain’t here, Granny-Ma — ”
“Hush, boy.” Ludie closed her eyes. “You think the dead leaves us. They never leaves. I know. I know all about it. Jim Bascom, he say you got to go.”
“Granny-Ma, I can’t leave you alone. You sent Mama off — ”
“Your mama needed her rest before she gets sick, too. Besides, I ain’t alone, bless your soul, child. And I better already. You know that.”
Michael’s glasses reflected the dim shaded light. “Oh, yeah. Two days back you didn’t know who I was, even. You’re some better. But you’re not well yet, not by a long sight.”
“I ain’t gonna die. Not this time, no way. I seen those gone through the valley before, child, and they told me it ain’t my time yet. But that poor white lady, she got to have help. She and her friends, they lost in the wild woods. Atangled up and hopeless, Lord, not knowin’ which way to turn. You go and tell them. You promise me you’ll go and tell them.”
Michael grunted, feeling himself give in, as he had given in when he drove Ludie to visit Jim Bascom’s grave. “What’m I supposed to say, then?”
Ludie’s eyes opened and closed. “Tell ’em the serpent has gone to his hole. A white old house on a high hill. He got friends there. No, got slaves there. Got slaves. The devil, he got no friends, just slaves that has to serve him, little serpents to help the big one. The others bite, too. They gathered and they gathering. Seem like all the shadows of the world runnin’ to that one place. You tell ’em. They got to be careful. They got to watch that they don’t put they feet the snares and the traps, you tell ’em. I can’t see it all, but the evil, it gone to its nest.”
“Granny-Ma — ”
“Poor old Mr. Jefferson. He one of them now. I didn’t suspect what had ahold of him, and it too late now. He so lost. Poor old man. It his house, Michael. You tell ’em.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Michael said. He sat while his grandmother fell into a doze. She woke fifteen minutes later and chased him out. He paused beside his truck for a few minutes, then went to the next house and pounded on the door. Mrs. Gideon, nearly as old as his grandmother and half deaf, finally opened to him. “Miz Gideon,” he bawled, “I have to run an errand for my Granny-Ma. Would you be so kind as to come set with her?”
“Let me get my shawl.”
It took thirty minutes to get the two old ladies together. By the time Michael left the house and started toward town, Reese Donalds and Jack Harwell had already crossed the bridge. Sam Quarles had not yet found Andy McCory. Lee McCory, numbed by the death of her son, sat mute beside him while the patrol car searched the streets. Overhead the strange sky grew darker and the air grew colder.
In the Jefferson house, things moved.
Sixteen
1
Ann Lewis managed a supper of bologna sandwiches and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup for the three boys. Reese Donalds couldn’t get over her presence in Alan’s house. Jack seemed abashed by her, his normally high spirits dampened, his antic impressions stilled. Reese Donalds was a whole different story, though — Alan saw in Reese’s eyes a thousand dancing questions and crude jokes. Ann sensed the awkwardness and after supper she made an excuse to leave, to go “home”; but Alan knew she would be back later.
After the table was cleared and the dishes washed, Alan’s father left the boys in the living room, sprawled in front of the TV. Reese immediately asked, “So they gonna get married, or what?”
“Stop it,” Alan said. “Miss Lewis just came because we’ve been sick. My aunt’s been sorta nursin’ us, but she’s gone to Florida for two weeks.”
“Miz Lewis is nursin’ you, huh? Hey, does she like nursin’ your old man?” Reese asked, snickering. “I could nurse offa them titties myself.” He puckered his mouth and made loud sucking noises.
“Hey, shut up,” Jack said from the sofa. “This is a neat show comin’ on.”
“Oh, man,” groaned Reese. “Is it that beaver show?”
For Jack had gone absolutely ape-shit over a new show called “Leave It to Beaver,” a series about a kid whose worst problem seemed to Alan to be a chronic case of telling people too late things he should have told them right off the bat. But somehow the TV kid’s troubles always wrapped themselves up neatly by the last commercial. The Beaver was lucky. He had a mom and a dad who understood him and an older brother who wasn’t too much of a creep. To Alan real life seemed different from the world of the show.
This time, though, Jack said, “No, stupid, it’s not ‘Beaver.’ This is ‘Perry Mason.’ You won’t like it. Dumb-asses can’t understand it.”
Halfway through the show, Reese, his attention wandering sure enough, said, “Old Jack’s been seein’ spooks, man.�
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“Shut up,” Jack growled again.
“No shit. Tell him about it, Jack.”
Alan felt his face flush. The last thing he wanted right now was more ghost stories. “He doesn’t hafta,” he muttered.
But Jack was primed. “It was a strange and eerie sight,” he said, stealing the voice from someone’s impression of Boris Karloff. “Figures moving behind a window. Shadows of people who never were — ”
“Cut it out, butt-face,” Alan said. “I’m in no mood.”
The redheaded boy squealed with high-pitched laughter. “Buttface,” he said. “Old four-eyed butt-face.” He bounced from the floor up to the sofa beside Jack. “Harwell, if I had a dog as ugly as you, I’d shave his ass and make him walk backward.”
“You’re so cool, Donalds,” Jack said. “You got your guts in your head, and when they work, shit comes out your mouth.”
Reese rolled on the couch, laughing, and despite himself, Alan smiled. “Lay off, you turds. Dad’s gonna come in and kick your asses up between your shoulder blades in a minute.”
Reese sat up and hit Jack hard on the point of his left shoulder. Jack retaliated. They exchanged blows for a minute before Jack grunted. “Ow! Damn, Reese, that hurt.”
“You hollered first! I get to smash ya balls!” Reese crowed, aiming a fist at Jack’s crotch. Jack rolled sideways on the sofa and took the punch on his hip. “Two for flinchin’, man!”
“Shut up!” Alan looked around, but his father did not materialize in the doorway. “I swear you guys act like you’re crazy sometimes.”
“Don’t say that, man,” Jack muttered, rubbing his hip. “I thought I was crazy there when I saw the nekkid woman.”
“Tell him, tell him,” Reese urged, dropping back the couch to the floor and then raising himself up on his knees. “Nekkid nigger woman he saw, just as plain.”
Alan felt a chill. “Where?” he asked, his voice a croak.
“Up on Ransom Ridge. Hey, let’s see the show,” Jack said.
“Tell me.”
Jack looked over at Alan. He shrugged. “Not much to tell. I went to collect for old man Jefferson’s paper and I thought I saw him in his window. But it wasn’t. I don’t know who it was. I thought it was a nekkid woman and I thought it was a deputy sheriff. But I never went to the door. Damn place scared the shit out of me, man, and that’s the truth.” Jack drew up his legs and hugged them, resting his chin on his knees.
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