Yeah. The goddamned Jefferson place. Where he had started for when that thing distracted him by coming for his wife.
“I got it.” He hung up and shook Ilona. “You listen to me, now,” he said. “You just be quiet and listen to me.”
“His arms,” she wailed. “All blood and bone — ”
“Damn it, Ilona, he wasn’t real! He just went to pieces when I touched him. He wasn’t real! Now you listen to me. I’m takin’ you next door to the Edges’. I want you to stay inside with them. Don’t open the door unless it’s me. I gotta go, Ilona — ”
“No!”
“I wanted you to stay out of town! Damn it, woman, I have to go. Come on.”
Broken hand and all, he dragged his wife next door and frightened the Huey Edge family into accepting her.
9
The hands had flown from Alan’s shoulders as the old man hissed in frustration. The world wavered: for a moment the figure in front of him was not human at all, was a distended parody of a human, bulging-headed, long slobbery tube of a tongue, thin-bodied, belly swelling like that of a praying mantis: and then he was an old man, smiling still, but with uneasiness lurking in those deep-pooled eyes.
“No,” Alan said.
“I must insist.” the quiet voice murmured.
“You’re almost dead,” Alan said. “You can barely hold things together. He nearly beat you, didn’t he? Mr. Tate just nearly beat you!”
The head twitched in angry negation. “A sheep of a man! A weak, sniveling sheep of a man — ”
“You need our belief,” Alan said. “You have a sort of hold on that body, but you can’t do anything unless we believe in you. That’s it. And you lie, you throw shadows at us. You can’t give eternal life — you can only work dead bodies like puppets, play the shadows over and over, like your movies — ”
“Andy!” The old voice was sharp, high-pitched, edged with — was it fear? Could it be?
The door opened. The man standing in the doorway was redder of hair than even Reese Donalds, a pale man, lank. A cigarette hung from his lip. “You made her go away,” he said.
“I need you. This young man. He has to be — treated.”
“Hell with that.”
This one’s real, Alan thought. Looking at the two of them together, he could see the difference: the old man was wrong, somehow, nearly translucent, a dimestore Halloween costume, a doughface thing with nobody inside. But Andy McCory was real. And dangerous.
“Andy!” The voice a lash now.
Outside the sound of brakes squealing. The old man clenched his hands on the armrests of the chair, half rose. “No!”
Alan shook the knife from its nesting place in the sleeve of his jacket.
Andy McCory took an uncertain half step forward, the cigarette falling from his mouth.
The door blasted open behind Alan.
Badon’s face writhed, dissolving into an inhuman mask of hate.
And Alan sprang.
He wielded the knife with both hands, swung it back over his head in an arc of silver, brought it slicing down as his knee drove Badon back into the chair. The blade impaled him
no, no, you
and pinned him to the high carved chair back, pinned him like an insect through a thin and narrow thorax
no
as he writhed, melted, screamed, pulled almost free
you will die you will die
but other hands pressed him back now, John Kirby’s hands, Ann Lewis’s hands, Michael Estes’s hands as the inhuman mouth gaped, closed, gaped, pursed, and spat out something, a black insect the size of a hornet, spreading its wings, buzzing in anger
stop I command it help me
Andy McCory opened his mouth and the black hornet-thing flew right in between his lips and his eyes opened and he choked and a river of blood gushed out, poured out, leaped out
help me my children
they loomed now, all of the dead, clawed hands reaching, impotent, all of them groaning, nearly solid but not solid enough
help...me...
it was not Badon now or anything that could pass for human. The long tubelike tongue sprang out of the mouth, a horrible jack-in-the-box, snake-in-the-box, and it lashed, wrapped itself around the neck of Andy McCory (his eyes wide, turned down, on the flow of bright arterial blood gargling from his open mouth), struck like a snake right into his mouth
aiee... grsgrlxx... agharra
the body quivered, quivered, and the shadows fell away, dissolved. The tongue let go its hold on McCory’s throat.
Andy McCory toppled forward onto his face.
“Daddy,” Alan cried, embracing his father.
They stepped back from the being pinned to the chair. It did not stir. Reese Donalds, holding his left arm in his right, came through the front door. “You killed him,” he said.
A thin siren wail cut the night. “I think there’s somebody in there,” Alan said, nodding toward the door from which Andy McCory had come. “I heard something.”
“Let’s go see,” his father said. “Together.”
The hallway led to the kitchen.
The kitchen was a charnel house.
They were all there, even the blackened bones that were all that remained of Tuxedo. Every body was there, piled in putrescent confusion: entrails spilled, bellies bloated, nakedness piled on shroud. A little girl lay on the fat belly of a middle-aged man; Billy Resaca’s ruined arms embraced the ruined body of Mollie Avery; blood slimed the floor. Looking above the pile, which lay jumbled on him, like a man sitting up to his neck in water, was banker Jefferson, his eyes dead and dry and silver, his mouth open, his purple tongue lolling. The blackened, heat-blasted kitchen was a den of death and decomposition. Alan gagged on the stench of it.
Michael Estes drew a deep breath. “Granny-Ma says the fire purifies,” he said.
“Alan, Ann,” Mr. Kirby said. “Go on outside.”
Reese had waited for them by the front door. Sam Quarles came up the steps just as they reached the porch. “It’s over,” Alan told him.
A moment later Michael Estes and John Kirby joined him. “I wouldn’t go in,” John said.
“Mr. Kirby, I reckon I have to.”
But the sheriff was inside for only a moment or two. He came out looking staggered. “Was that the devil that had a hold of the town?” he asked.
John nodded.
Reese Donalds sniffed the air. “Somethin’s burnin’.”
Sam Quarles had a handkerchief wrapped tight around his right hand. He was pulling it even tighter when Reese made the remark. Quarles himself sniffed, look quickly at John Kirby (He knows, Alan thought), and then said, “We better pull the cars back a ways.”
The flames took the house from the rear, screaming up into the cold night, into the black. If neighbors had been awake and alert, the fire department would have come long before they did, just at midnight, when the house was already gone. But Gaither had been a very sick town, and the people were resting, recovering. No neighbor was awake to call the firemen. Not until a motorist just passing through town happened to look up and see there on the distant ridge a flaming beacon did anyone notify the fire department.
The three boys and the four grown-ups stood in a tight knot out on the edge of the lawn, watching the windows blaze, watching the black smoke roll. The whole house was a huge torch when, at midnight, the piercing cries of the coming fire truck distracted them. “They’re too late,” Quarles said.
“Oh, my God!” It was Ann Lewis. She pressed her hands against her mouth.
Alan looked and felt his heart fly into his throat.
A car was coming down the drive.
A new-old black car.
And behind the wheel was the blood-spattered corpse of Andy McCory.
10
The black sedan left the drive to avoid the cars parked there, threaded between two poplars, bounced across the lawn, lurched over the sidewalk and curb, screeched in a tight turn, and headed down Ransom Ridge.
“God,” Quarles said. “He was dead. I made sure he was dead when I went in — ”
“It isn’t McCory,” John snapped. “It’s him, Badon, the thing.” Quarles cursed again, clambered into his patrol car, and spun out. “Get in the car, son,” John Kirby said. “We have to see it through.” He turned to Ann. “Get the rest of them out of this. Get them to our house. Go!”
The others piled into the Rambler as John started the Studebaker. Alan fumbled with the door, barely getting it slammed closed in time. Ahead he saw the flashing red lights of the fire trucks and vanishing taillights of the patrol car. The car squealed in the turn. Alan looked up the ridge to his left. The fire lit the sky there, turned the draggling bellies of cloud a dull crimson. In the glare he saw Miss Lewis’s car following them down the hill. They made the corner and he lost sight of the Rambler.
“Where?” his dad asked.
“There he is,” Alan said. “He turned toward New Haven.”
They made a hard right. The Studebaker flashed through streets of sleeping mill houses, always managing to keep on the trail of the patrol car somehow, even when it disappeared for long stretches.
“He’s stopped!” Alan yelled.
The patrol car was half off the street, in the dirt yard of a mill house. Its headlights shone on the black car. Steam still plumed from the tailpipe.
“There,” John Kirby said. “He’s on the porch.”
Sam Quarles was pistoning his foot against the closed front door of the house. John stopped the car behind the sheriff’s vehicle as the wood splintered and the door crashed open. “Wait!” he yelled, climbing out of the car.
But Quarles had vanished inside. A woman screamed somewhere in the house, and another door banged open. “Out back,” Alan gasped. Father and son ran to the left, downhill.
They saw him then.
Andy McCory, or something that looked like him, was dragging a woman across the yard. They reached the white propane tank just as the back door opened and a beam of light — Quarles’s flashlight — hit McCory in the face.
Alan bit back a scream. The mouth still gaped open, ropy streams of blood still drooling from it to the naked chest, but that wasn’t the worst. The face crawled, trying to be Badon, trying to form the human tongue into the obscene feeding tube: and the hands were ripping at the woman’s throat.
“Don’t let him!” Alan yelled.
The woman hooked her nails into the flesh of his face and tore. An eyeball madly protruded; skin opened.
And closed again, throbbing, trying to alter, to crawl into new features.
It needs blood, Alan thought. It’s almost gone, there’s nothing left but hate and the desire to keep going, to stay in a body, but to do that it needs the blood.
The changing head lowered at the instant that Sam Quarles fired. It was a good shot for a man holding a flashlight in his left hand and operating the pistol with his broken right hand.
The bullet struck McCory’s forehead, went through, spanged into the tank behind.
The head jerked back, caught, began to dip forward again. Brain tissue crawled or was sucked back into a closing wound. The torn flesh mended itself as the head lowered, the tongue lolled.
Alan heard a hiss. The sheriff’s bullet had ruptured the propane tank.
“Fire,” he yelled. “It has to be fire!”
The woman screamed. McCory’s, the thing’s, hands had ripped an opening in her throat. It stooped to suckle a jetting gush of blood. Alan heard it slurp.
The woman may have heard Alan.
Her hand ripped away the right front pocket of McCory’s jeans, clenched hard. Something glittering and gold showed there in the shaking beam of Quarles’s flash.
A gold Ronson lighter.
She screamed something inarticulate and her hand jerked, working the lighter. A spark leaped.
The tank exploded.
Alan saw it in slow motion: a rushing fireball, the two figures at first black against it and then part of it. And before the yellow wave of flame reached him, his father had knocked him back, had covered him.
Alan never heard, or if he heard never remembered, the sound. He felt the wash of heat, and there on his back looking up he saw a rising billow of flame, flame that seemed to claw and writhe like a live thing trying to take some definite shape before the cold air pushed it up, darkened it. Then everything else went black, too.
11
He screamed out of a dream. His father held him. “Easy, son.”
Alan held his father’s arms. “Daddy?”
“You’re all right. Everyone’s all right.”
“The woman — ?”
“She was Mrs. McCory, son. No. I’m sorry.”
He fell back. He was in his room, in his own bed. “I don’t remember anything after the fire.”
“There were two fires.”
“The last one.”
“You got the wind knocked out of you. We saw the doctor at the emergency room. Kept him busy. Your buddy Reese had a busted arm, Jack needed some stitches. You got a sedative. It made you sleep a long time.”
“What time is it?”
“Monday morning, son. Want to see something strange?”
John Kirby rose from the bed and pulled the window shade. It spun up, revealing a world of strange, cold light. Alan couldn’t register what it meant for a moment; then his eyes widened. “It snowed?”
“Three inches. Earliest snow we’ve ever had in north Georgia, they say. A white Halloween, almost.”
Alan sat up. He ached. The fairy-white hill fell away down to a town made magic by the white touch of winter. It looked clean, fresh, pure. “Miss Lewis?”
“She’s back in her apartment. But she’ll be by later today, son.”
Alan lay back and swallowed. “Did we win?”
John Kirby took his son’s hand in his own. “I don’t know if there is any such thing as winning for good, Alan. But this time, here, in this place, yes, we won. It’s gone.”
“I think it is.”
His father sat back down on the bed. “Gaither won’t be the same. Not ever. The Jefferson house is gone, burned to nothing. The McCory house partly burned. The sheriff got the little girl out, though. But there are other things — people are dead. The town has changed. It won’t ever be the same again.”
“No.” Alan twisted in the bed. “Daddy — the room full of dead people. Did it — did it remind you of anything?”
His father nodded. “Yes. But that was a long time ago, and I think I’ve changed, too. I think I can handle it now. What about you?”
After a while, Alan nodded. “Yeah. I think so.” He choked. “I’m gonna miss Mr. Tate.”
“I know, son.”
“Daddy, I love you.”
“I love you, too, Alan.”
And Alan lay back in the cool sheets, the pure white sunlight reflecting off the snow and pouring through the window, and thought he was done forever with darkness.
Seventeen
OCTOBER 1988 — GAITHER, GEORGIA
Alan, his eyes grainy from lack of sleep, sat stroking Long John Silver and wondering where the years had gone. Here he was past forty, writing three books a year; a little bit of a celebrity in Gaither, and known to some small extent in other places, too.
And yet at times he still felt fourteen years old. Like tonight, for instance.
He glanced at the kitchen clock: it was past four already. He explored his feelings, tentatively, as a man with a newly extracted tooth will thrust his tongue into the unfamiliar and painful hole. He still did not know whether it was all starting again or whether this was another flashback, like a half-dozen others he had suffered over the years.
The years. The hungry years. Alan thought of all that had filled them, of all they had consumed. It had seemed so short a time, so brief a space, and yet so much had happened.
The ShadowShow never reopened. People didn’t even wonder very much about it; the town had been very sick that October of 1957, and a
dead theater was the least of the town’s worries as it fought its way back to health. The accidental death of banker Jefferson made for some gossip. Kids at school talked about Reese Donalds’s broken arm, but not about how he had broken it (the story of that night was perhaps the only secret that Jack and Reese together ever successfully kept). The commitment of Mayor Warner to the state hospital for the insane in Milledgeville made for still more gossip. But somehow the really dark things slipped from memory.
Gaither recovered, reeled into the sixties, taking Alan with it. At seventeen he had gone away to college — the University of Georgia, naturally, to fulfill his father’s old dream — and at first he had sat in white classrooms, surrounded by white students. He saw the turmoil when the first blacks came to the campus, was reminded of Gaither’s simmering hatreds, felt sick, and befriended one or two of the new students. On visits home he saw his father and Ann Lewis, sometimes together — but never together in the way he imagined for them, wished for them. Old habits, even those of solitude, are hardest to break.
And the times they were achanging, as somebody said. As soon as Alan left college, he found himself in the Army, never mind his English major and his knack with a typewriter. Alan could never recall much of basic training, and rarely troubled about trying to recall any of the rest: a dripping jungle, an enemy too often unseen, one horrible night on patrol when he was plunged back into the nightmare of the past, as he had temporarily been tonight.
More than times were achanging, friend. When Alan returned to Gaither, in 1969, the whole town was deeply different, radically altered. It had changed more between ‘64 and ‘69, his dad said, than it had from ‘14 to ‘64. Alan, looking around him in the first year of the Nixon presidency, had to believe his father. That was the year John Kirby moved the bookshop to the new mall on the edge of town. That was the year Ludie Estes died, peacefully and surrounded by her family. Alan, Miss Lewis, and his father, the only white people in the congregation, had sat in a hot, crowded church to bid her farewell. When the service was over, a tall, thin black man with a fierce Afro and a bristling mustache came to shake hands with them: Michael Estes, trained as an educator and famous throughout the nation as an uncompromising young civil-rights advocate. He would go on to tame the Afro and lose the mustache and represent the district in the state legislature. Alan had seen him several times since then, though rarely to speak to.
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