by Farris, John
The scream was building; he heard it in his head even as he clutched his throat, forcing it back, so that Edie and the lurkers wouldn’t be alerted. He sat panting on the mattress he had long ago stained with his sap in a different thrall, thinking, They are all whores and they all laugh at me. Only Roberta had been faithful all these years, despite his barrenness.
He left the mattress and went haltingly down the stairs, right eye tearing badly, wiping away the saliva from his lips. When he opened the door Edie, barefoot but wearing her terry robe, was emerging from the bathroom. Her face was flushed, her hands were full of brushes and lotions for her body.
“Uncle John.” Edie smiled. “What were you doing up there?”
“Looking for—tax records.” Her face blurred, but not before he saw her swift look of concern.
“What’s the matter with your eye?”
He could smell her, so sweet from her bath. He longed for the touch of her moist skin. He cried harder. “It’s the dust,” he said. “The attic dust always bothers me.” He smiled then, knowing it wag a bad smile, a dreadful smile like some strange fleshy thing suddenly growing in the middle of his face.
“Oh—well, good night, Uncle John.”
“Good night, Edie.” Won't you come and kiss me, kiss me, bitch-child? (As soon as one is dead, there’s another.)
Edie came halfway down the hall toward Stone, but she hadn’t come to kiss him. She had, in her innocence, misread what was torturing him.
“Uncle John, you’ve had such a terrible day! Why don’t you try to get some rest? In the morning I want you to come to church with me. We’ll pray together for her soul.”
He couldn’t answer; he was afraid of the sounds he would make, bearing no resemblance to human speech. Or else she would hear the vilest profanity, and run away in terror. He nodded, surreptitiously wiping his wet lips and chin, hiding his face from Edie, hiding the evil he knew burned in his eyes.
“I’ll just look in on Aunt Roberta before I go to bed,”
Edie told him, and she was off down the hall, stopping at the door of what had been the master bedroom in happier times. Now the room was Roberta’s, night and day, and she no longer left her bed. She had taken her last steps nearly three years ago. Stiff as a board, probably weighing no more than eighty pounds, she lingered on, while Stone slept in a small bedroom next to the attic stairs.
He went into his room now, closing the door. He didn’t want a light. He sat on the edge of the bed, still salivating. Wipe it away, and it would start again. He gasped and panted. His painful eye was only a slit, and watering too. It felt as if the eye were growing bigger and bigger in his face, bright as a supernova. An all-seeing eye, scanning many things that had previously been beyond his ken.
The door to the room opened slowly. He stared at it, distracted, tantalized, wondering which of the lurkers was about to put in an appearance. But he wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
It was Roberta. She stood in the doorway in her flannel nightgown, all skin and bone and pressed-down gray hair on her yellowed skull, eyes fiercely bright as she pointed accusingly at him. He scrambled up on the bed and crouched there on all fours, shaking his head at her: no, no—
No, lovey, it’s Taryn’s fault!
But how could he say that when Roberta had found him nakedly astride the ten-year-old girl, a hand on the back of her head, pushing her face into the pillow to keep her from shrieking while he—
“But it was Taryn,” he protested to the form of his wife. “From the moment she came into this house, she tempted me!”
Roberta wasn’t buying it; she never had. Her face burned coldly, like the moon on a winter’s night. Her pointing finger did not waver.
Stone covered his face with a pillow, unable to bear the sight. He shook with sobs and then, at last, he screamed. The sounds were muffled by the pillow. He screamed until the bones of his chest were tender, his lungs exhausted of air, his stomach muscles in an iron cramp. And fell weightlessly off the bed.
The spectre of Roberta had vanished, his door was closed. He lay clear-headed on the floor, emotionless but in agony.
He became convinced that he was not yet alone. One of the lurkers he had anticipated was in the room.
Stone looked up. Light from the street painted shadows on one wall. The window was open, the night warm. He was wringing wet in his clothes. He got up clutching his stomach, his throat so raw he couldn’t swallow. At least the horrid salivating had stopped.
He knew the spasm would pass; he had made it through his crisis, he would endure. He took a couple of steps toward the door, needing to go to the bathroom. Then he stopped, unnerved, fascinated. He had glimpses of a reflection in the mirror over the dresser, but the angle was wrong and it was not himself he was seeing.
He saw, instead, the bearded face of Hieronymus Flynn.
Stone lunged at the dresser and drove a fist into the mirror, shattering it. He turned quickly but saw no one in the small bedroom with him, only an odd, unexpected blue light that flickered for a moment by the open window.
He had no further capacity for surprise; there was no fear in him. Only a dull resolve.
You can’t tell on me. I’ll kill you first.
• 10 •
Dr. Dove
Hero was catching up on his sleep when the Sheriff came to visit him, at six-thirty Sunday morning.
A Negro deputy, as tall as Stone but a yard wider, let Stone into the cell and stood by. He was an albino, ugly as an oyster, with rusty red hair and eyes that looked like little pink bullets. He wore a hearing aid.
“Good morning, Sheriff,” Hero said, before he even opened his eyes. “I hope you had pleasant dreams.”
Stone told him to stand up. Stone’s right eye was a monster. He looked as if he hadn’t slept, let alone dreamed.
As soon as Hero was on his feet, Stone dropped him with a billy to the side of the neck.
“I don’t know,” he said softly to the writhing Hero, “how it is you did what you did last night. But it don’t matter. You better believe I’ll personally take real good care of you now.” Stone looked at the deputy and pointed to Hero on the cell floor. “Cuff him, Horace, and let’s get a move on.” The black deputy came in with shambling lopsided gait and reached down to lock Hero’s hands behind his back. Hero was puking. When he finished, Horace lifted him easily, inserted a long ebony club between his back and his elbows, and maneuvered him toward the door with it. Stone stood by pensively, fingering his swollen eye.
“Where ... taking me?” Hero gasped.
“Son, you need medical attention. You’re about to get it.”
“No! I demand ... speak to a barrister! My right. You must allow—”
Horace chuckled softly, trotting Hero along in front of him with little adroit manipulations of the club.
“Deputy! Listen to me! The Sheriff ... murdered ... Taryn Melwood! He knows ... I know, that’s why he—”
“Save your breath,” Stone said. “Horace has his hearing aid turned off. But it wouldn’t make no nevermind to him anyway. I own him, body and soul.”
Beauregard the jailhouse dog stood shivering outside the alley door. He sniffed at Hero as Hero was loaded into a cruiser. Thick wire mesh separated him from the front seat.
“I demand to know—where we’re going,” Hero said. He could barely speak above a whisper, his voice affected by fear and the blow to the neck, which had raised a throbbing goose egg.
Stone shut his dog up in the jail and got in beside Horace, who drove through empty streets.
“You can’t do this! You’re trying to shut me up, but it won’t work!” Hero began to throw himself against one of the doors, from which the handle had been removed. He tried to scream, but even if he’d had the voice for it, no one was around this early to pay attention to him. Stone stoked his pipe and lit up.
West of Carverstown they took narrow country roads through sparsely populated hill country. The white belfry of a ramshackle church g
lowed in sunlight. At a touch on the shoulder from Stone, Horace roared off the blacktop and drove toward the rising sun past a nearly dry pond that revealed the metallic hulks of discards half-buried around the shore. They were even more isolated here. Parched fields that simmered even in the early morning were bisected by the dirt road, now not much more than a wagon track. Horace pulled off into a straggly clump of loblolly and the Sheriff looked back at Hero in a thin cloud of smoke, his abused eye smarting. Hero was rigid with disbelief and horror.
“Why ... are we here?”
“Pee break,” Stone said. He tapped Horace on the shoulder again.
Horace got out and opened the back door. When Hero dug in his heels and wouldn’t be moved, Horace exerted a minimum amount of force and removed him from the seat as easily as if Hero were a week-old kitten. Horace was smiling peaceably. Stone looked at Hero with the stem of his pipe clenched between his teeth. Sunlight kicked off the nickeled steel of the service revolver in his shoulder holster.
“I don’t ... have to pee,” Hero said, shaking.
Horace slapped him lightly and smiled again. His ebony club was swinging gently from his other hand.
“You will never ... be able to explain this to the satisfaction of my family,” Hero said to Stone. “They will come. And they will not be ... without influence, even in this ... godforsaken place. You are making a fatal mistake, I assure you.” Hero dropped to his knees. “You will have to drag me. Then you will have to shoot me in the back, because I refuse ... to run. Any worthwhile forensic scientist will know ... that it was nothing but murder, plain murder!”
Hero remained on his knees with his head bowed, listening to warblers in the nearby trees, feeling the heat of the sun. He heard Stone walking slowly around the car, and began to tremble. He smelled the sweetly obnoxious pipe tobacco, and gamier odor of the deputy’s old boots. He looked up without flinching, though his cheeks were wet from tears.
“What is it going to be, Sheriff?”
Stone sighed.
“I thought I’d do both of us a favor. Just get it over with. But, no, hell, you don’t want to cooperate. So I reckon it’s time for you to meet Dr. Dove. Son, I’ll guarantee before it’s all over for you you’ll wish you’d opted for a bullet through the heart.”
Stone moved so swiftly then he was a blur to Hero, but he sensed a kick was coming. He couldn’t throw himself to one side fast enough to avoid it. Stone’s boot caught him in the groin and Hero felt nearly impaled; the agony lasted barely two seconds before he passed out.
The jouncing of the Sheriff's car down another bad road brought Hero back to consciousness. He was lying on the back seat with his knees drawn up; the effort to straighten his legs, just a little, was like dragging a white-hot anchor through his groin. Light through trees and the back window of the sedan struck him glancing blows; it was better with his eyes closed. The lower half of his face felt artificially stiff. He couldn’t open his mouth. Taped, he thought groggily. But he was more attentive to each bolt of agony as the squad car jolted along.
Presently they stopped. Stone and his deputy got out and walked away, leaving him alone. Perhaps they’d thought he was still out. It represented a chance, albeit a very small chance, to get away ... but he couldn’t do it. There was too much pain no matter how carefully he tried to move.
He was weeping again, from frustration, when he heard footsteps in gravel again. A back door was opened.
“That him?” a new voice said.
Hero opened his eyes and lifted his head, but he could make out only an indistinct face nearly shrouded in a mustache and beard longer and thicker than his own. The man’s beard was nearly to his waist. His eyes were small as fish eggs, black and with a vaguely oily sheen.
“Why’s he gagged?”
“He bites,” Stone said.
“Take him inside,” the other man said, and abruptly disappeared from the door space.
Horace took the bearded man’s place. Hero bucked in pain as soon as he was touched.
“Reckon his balls still hurtin’,” Horace said, looming over Hero and smiling. “Come on, now, I’ll treat you gentle.”
It surprised Hero that he was true to his word, but still Hero had to walk. Each step redefined his suffering. Horace allowed him to take his time, and Sheriff John Stone was nowhere in sight.
They were parked beside a low concrete-block building with a shingled roof. The walls had once been painted white, but the paint job had faded and peeled in places. It looked like a down-at-heels motel. There were several doors, regularly spaced, some with numbers on them. And all the windows were barred. Hero saw an old rusting ambulance in a field, a clothesline drooping with torn bedsheets. There was a pale face behind a partially lifted shade, staring eyes with no boldness in them. He smelled a sourness in the air, garbage smouldering in a pit, and heard chickens. The gravel drive he crossed with small dragging steps was littered with chickenshit and bottlecaps and discarded cigarette butts.
He was led by the patient Horace into a dank room with bright lights grouped in one corner, over a padded examination table and a rollaway table the top of which was crammed with instrumentation: an EKG machine and a console that resembled a VCR. The smell of garbage was behind him, but now his sensitive nose was treated to the slightly rotten odor of antiseptics. Hero tried to hold back on the threshold, but Horace put pressure on a nerve inside the right elbow.
“Have him lie down,” the bearded man said. He was somewhere out of Hero’s line of vision. “And keep a good grip on him until I’ve prepared the sedative.”
Apparently Horace had turned his hearing aid back on. Hero looked up at the albino, his eyes wide with apprehension, trying to communicate with him. The pink eyes seemed incapable of reflecting emotion. Hero tried to make coherent sounds behind the plaster of tape over his mouth, then began frantically to shake his head. Horace applied a little more pain, and pushed him inexorably toward the padded table.
“I’m Dr. Dove. That doesn’t mean anything to you, I’m sure. But there it is.”
Hero stared at the man with the mountaineer’s beard and long hair done into a ponytail. He had put on a white jacket. Under the jacket he was wearing only a T-shirt, with the notation I dropped out at Club Med. He had a syringe in one hand. Horace unsnapped the stained jail jumper Hero had on, exposing a bare flank. He held Hero down.
“I understand,” said Dr. Dove, “that you’re acquainted with ECT. Then you know there’s very little to fear. Most of my patients benefit remarkably from the course of treatment.” He showed Hero the syringe. “This is a fast-acting barbiturate; you’ll soon be asleep. Once you’ve gone to sleep I’ll administer another drug that temporarily paralyzes the major muscle groups, including your diaphragm. Then we can take that tape off your mouth, and a machine will do your breathing for you. That’s the electroconvulsive machine you’re looking at now. It will send a current through your brain for less than one second. When you wake up you’ll probably have a headache, some muscle soreness, and, most likely, you’ll experience a period of confusion. Not at all unpleasant, though. EC therapy also tends to eradicate memory—but nothing we can’t do without, I’m sure.”
Hero felt the prick of the needle even before the doctor had finished speaking. A sensation of ice-cold horror ripped through him like a storm wave. They were going to steal his mind!—And all the memories he could do without, including, no doubt, everything he’d seen and heard at Sheriff John Stone’s house the night before. No, you can’t! But it was already happening, the wave of horror dwindling into a kind of warm mist he found too comfortable to resist ... but he must, somehow he had to tell them both about Stone: a deaf albino deputy, and someone else Stone apparently owned body and soul, the bearded dropout Dr. Dove. It almost made him laugh as his vision grew a little cloudy, and the pressure of Horace’s hands felt like a good-night caress.
He saw Taryn then, floating out there in the thickening mist, composed and piquant in death, smiling regretful
ly. Hero had failed her, failed blond Edie, failed all the young girls he now saw laid out in neat burial rows, prepubescent victims of Stone’s ruthless mania.
I won’t close my eyes, he thought. All I have to do is stay
awake,
and
• 11 •
The Mt. Pisgah Cemetery
With no apparent transition no desultory period of restless dreaming, he went from images of the dead to vivid apprehension of the mundane: a dog’s hoarse barking, a distant radio playing a country song. He was indoors, not outdoors, and there wasn’t much light in his dark corner of the world. But he saw streaks of pale sun, in barred patterns, along a corridor. He smelled acrid, over-brewed coffee. Water splashed from a metal pail. Mop-sounds. His stomach was empty.
His head hurt.
He was looking at the bars of a cell, but he had no idea of where he was.
The dog continued to bark.
Hero had random impressions of home, mother, university, a tawny-haired German girl who inspired a wistful pang for a long-extinguished romance—then, abruptly, a startling face, clear in the tiniest detail, filled his mind: scared him. It was a bleak, sunbaked Indian face. Obsidian eyes, only a few teeth to enliven the steady grin. Hero shifted his attention to a high Bolivian village. The air was so thin and sharp it was like breathing ground glass.
But I cant be there; I’m somewhere else.
Oh God where?
He couldn’t remember. The dog was quiet now. He listened patiently to the sounds of mopping until he saw someone backing into view, sliding a galvanized bucket behind him on the concrete floor.
“Hello,” Hero said. He moved then, shifting his weight, trying to raise a hand, but it was stuck fast in something; his entire upper body was immobile. He looked down curiously and saw that he was wearing a dirty buckled sort of— Straitjacket!