by Muriel Gray
“You okay in there, big truck? Come on?”
The CB was talking to him again. A double trailer this time. He sat up and took a deep breath, but his hand was still shaky as he lifted the handset and pressed.
“Eh, sure. Thanks there, doubler. Had to pull over. Thought I’d lost a back axle there.”
“Shoot, buddy. That bad dream come true?”
Josh’s throat tightened again. Bad dream. Oh Lord, what now? His eyes were frozen on the retreating trailer as he pressed “talk,” praying that there would be no more insanity. He spoke in a hoarse half whisper.
“Come again?”
He closed his eyes, dreading what might come from the speakers mounted on the dash. He waited, and as he did the passing seconds seemed like minutes. When the driver came back, Josh held his breath.
“The axle? Had it left for Texas?”
Josh laughed then. Just bowed his head to his chest, let his breath go and laughed. He smiled up at the traffic. “Naw. False alarm, buddy. ‘Preciate the concern.”
“No sweat. Have a good one.”
Josh kept hold of his smile. It felt good. He rubbed his face and reached for the gear stick. He was good at working things out. It was only a matter of time before he would work out what was going on here, and then he would look back at how spooked he’d got and blush to his navel. Maybe he should just drive and let the facts work themselves out slowly in the part of his brain he didn’t seem able to use right now.
Back north. Despite everything, the thought made him feel warm. Sure, he was going back to what he had left and that would still be a mess. Nothing had changed. And worse, he was carrying home two new kinds of guilty baggage. One he could discuss and one he couldn’t. But Jesus, the thought of home suddenly seemed the cure for the world’s ills.
And as contribution to those ills, Jezebel deftly knocked out two traffic barrels with her tail end as she pulled back onto the highway, almost like she meant to.
23
He’d thought it had been enough when Samuel died. Thus far and no farther. He’d mouthed those very words under his breath when the body had been carefully wrapped and carried to the funeral parlour as though Sam had died innocently in his sleep. He remembered watching limply, impotent like some prurient bystander at a street shooting.
But he had gone farther, hadn’t he? He’d gone all the way with it until now. After all, Samuel had had his throat cut open like a gutted fish exactly twenty-one years ago, and that was a pretty long time to still be making up your mind. Three opportunities since then to stop taking part in this madness, and every one rejected. And for what? Security? Money? New homes for both his mother and Rachel’s parents in North Carolina? Or was it the secret hope and prayer that it was somehow right, somehow good?
John Pace opened the top of a set of four office drawers with a small silver key and, lifting some papers aside, slid out a postcard. He expelled a breath he’d held too long, and held up the card to look at the picture.
It was a glossy black-and-white gallery postcard, a detail from an engraving from a Dutch museum.
His eye roamed over the picture, then he placed it gently on the desktop, running a finger around its edges as though trying to define its shape.
The typed caption was on the plain side of the postcard, printed discreetly along the top left-hand corner, leaving space for the purchaser’s message. But John Pace didn’t need to turn the card over to remind himself of that. He knew it well enough. It would tell him it was by a fifteenth-century German engraver called Israel van Meckenem, and the subject matter was the temptation of Saint Anthony.
The picture showed the saint being borne into the air by a collection of terrifying demons, monstrosities that defied nature with their grotesquely deformed bodies, their gaping, fang-filled mouths screaming as they tore and clawed at the weary man caught in their talons.
Pace’s finger lightly traced a demon’s hooked beak and spined head before he turned the card over and looked at the elegant handwriting on the back.
It was addressed to him at the sheriff’s office, where a lot of eyes could read it before it ended up on his desk, and it had been sent seven years ago. The last time he had doubts. The time he thought those government men shouldn’t have died. Not the way they did. He closed his eyes briefly, as he remembered their screams, then swallowed as he looked again, turning the card to read the words he’d read a hundred times before.
“John,” it began in a cheerful open hand of blue ink. “Knowing your interest in such things I thought you might find this fascinating. The extraordinary thing is I become more and more convinced that van Meckenem, like Brueghel the Elder and Bosch after him, was such a master draughtsman he can only have been drawing from life. What do you think?”
The signature was a scrawl, but its familiarity was such he would have recognized it had only a tiny portion of its flourish been visible. Truth was, such a message left no need for a signature at all.
He turned the card back over and continued to look at the picture until a subconscious registering of absence of movement through the glass door to the outer office made him aware he was being watched.
Archie Cameron was looking at him. Sheriff Pace held his deputy’s stare until the younger man broke it off and bowed his head to his computer keyboard; then, as gently as he had fetched it, he put the card back in the drawer and got on with the work he was paid to do.
She had calmed him and taken him back to his part of the house. But despite his assurances that he was perfectly fine now, Sim’s bizarre attack had unnerved Elizabeth. She’d never seen the old man like that before. He’d gone completely crazy and now she looked at him sitting uncomfortably in his upright, high-backed chair, and wondered when it might happen again.
“You sure you don’t need me? I can stay and fix something to eat.”
Sim shook his head almost imperceptibly. There was shame etched into his lined face and Elizabeth’s heart grew heavy at the thought of what might be ahead of the sad, lonely man if Sim really was losing the plot.
“Okay, Sim. But I’m just upstairs if you want anything. You hear that? Anything at all.”
She touched the arm of his chair once, almost like a child playing tag, and turned to leave.
“Elizabeth.”
She stopped and turned. His face was crinkled with a mixture of his humiliation and something like the fear she’d watched consume him when that phone had started to ring.
“Yeah?”
“When he call again…” he gulped a mouthful of saliva “… talk to him with your thoughts.”
He tapped the side of his head in case she might have trouble knowing where they might be found. Elizabeth nodded kindly.
“Sure.”
She left the room and Sim listened as she closed his front door, then to her soft footfall as she went back upstairs.
“He just maybe hear you. Just maybe,” he said to the empty room, then let welcome sleep overcome him as his head fell forward onto his thin chest.
The shop. It was worth a tn. Even if she wouldn’t talk, at least he could tell Nesta to report the fault to the phone company. And he could tell her he was coming home. Tell her he’d tried to leave messages on the answering machine but that technology was stopping him.
He took a breath, punched in the card exchange number and from his exposed phone booth looked around the forecourt of the gas station as he waited for the dumb girl’s voice to run through her crap. Maybe this wasn’t the best place in the world to have a reconciliation by phone. It was noisy and public, and rain was starting to sheet down, spiralling in rivulets through the holed canopy over the gas pumps and dripping onto his head and shoulders. But now he’d started, Josh’s heart was already beating faster with the anticipation of hearing her voice.
“Thank you for calling Driveline…”
Josh closed his eyes in irritation. She had all that stuff to get through and then the recorded messages would join up, leaving that ridiculous gap
between her droning “You have…” and then a second later “… twenty dollars left on Driveline” in a completely different voice. Sure, they could put a man on the moon but they couldn’t find a way of stopping telephone recordings sounding like they’d all been done discount at the local loony bin.
“… on the America network. All calls will be…”
“Yeah. Yeah. Get on with it, you dozy fruit.”
“… long distance or local. You have…”
Josh looked in boredom at the rain splashing around his boot while she worked it out.
“… two days alive permitted.”
He continued staring at his boot, his head down and his heart thumping blood in his ear.
She had said it in the same droning voice she’d said all the other stuff. But no mistake. She’d said it. She’d said it and now she was carrying on as though she hadn’t.
“Please dial your number now.”
He croaked softly into the phone, his hand a knot of muscle around the plastic. “Hello?”
It was ridiculous. He was talking to the ether. Her message was on a tape and there was no one there. But she had said those words. She had. There was silence on the line while the computer at Driveline waited for its caller from Virginia to dial his number and get on with the business of making them money.
Instead, the caller slammed the phone back on the hook like it had burned him and backed away from it with wide eyes. He walked backwards like that for nearly ten feet until his body came into contact with the bulk of a fat black guy, filling the tank of a beat-up Maserati.
“Hey, watch it, man.”
Josh stumbled and put his hands out for balance, gripping the big man’s shirtsleeve as he turned. But if the car owner had any ideas about taking his annoyance further as he shook off the stranger’s grip, Josh’s eyes stopped him. The man held up his own hand in silent forgiveness and watched Josh stagger slowly back to his truck, then glanced across at a woman who’d been watching while fuelling up a space cruiser full of kids. He wanted to make that sign with his finger to his head that the trucker was nuts, but she looked away quickly, and when he thought about it, he realized he didn’t much want to look anywhere either, except down at the nozzle pumping gas into that round black hole. He didn’t want to do what would have come naturally, namely to stare insolently and aggressively at the guy’s truck, and he sure as hell didn’t want to look into those eyes again.
As the cab door slammed in the blue Peterbilt, he shifted his weight and leant towards the pay booth, joining everyone else in looking the other way.
Josh fumbled with his wallet on the seat, breathing deeply and trying to keep calm. His hands were shaking so much he couldn’t get the phone card back into any of the empty leather credit card slots, and he clenched his fists for a second, waiting for the trembling to stop.
Rain pelted the windshield, and even though water was splashing in through the passenger window, open by a couple of inches, Josh was unable to muster sufficient willpower to lean across and close it. He sat numbly for a few moments, feeling the splashes on his hands and cheek, until he felt a thread of strength return to his arms.
There was no reasoning away what he just heard, except the explanation that he didn’t really hear it at all. And that, of course, would mean he was mad. He picked up his wallet and phone card, tried to put it away again and failed. In a frenzy of temper Josh closed his fingers over the whole fat, messy contents of his wallet, receipts, crumpled dollar bills, photos and old tickets, and pulled them violently out onto the floor.
The debris scattered around his feet and he clenched his fists again and brought them down hard on the steering wheel.
“Christ.”
He let his head fall forward onto his clenched fists and stayed hunched like a gargoyle for an age until an unfamiliar fluttering noise made him snap his head up and look around. The wind coming through the open window was toying with the mess from his wallet, and flapping around his feet was a thin strip of paper, like a supermarket receipt.
His eyes followed it mutely as it tumbled over itself and rotated towards the passenger side as though being sucked instead of blown, and although it was clearly nothing more than a scrap of paper, Josh felt his mouth drying as he watched its contortions, the way it writhed like a worm on a hook.
He stretched out an arm to catch it as it cartwheeled along the rubber matting on the floor, but as his hand came within an inch of it, a gust of wind lifted the paper high into the cab and sent it slapping flat up against the open passenger window. A glance at his feet told Josh that none of the other contents of the wallet were in any way affected by this freak breeze, and he looked back to the thin strip with dread in his heart as it fluttered and inched its way up the glass towards the two-inch gap at the top that would give it its freedom.
Suddenly, it became important to him that this small piece of paper never reach the outside world, and with a speed that surprised him he leapt towards the window. His fingers closed around the strip just as it rolled once and tipped through the gap, leaving Josh holding it delicately, like a streamer in the wind. The paper fluttered like a captured bird, rattling and burring wildly as Josh pulled it in, and then with his free hand rolled up the window.
Almost instantly, the paper ceased its wild contortions and slumped back into the inanimate thing it had been.
He sat back down and examined his prize. It was no receipt. The paper was thin and brittle, like an ancient piece of map mildewed in the attic. It had a buttery hue and the marks on it were an unpleasant reddish-brown colour. Marks was the only loose description Josh could find to explain what he was looking at. They were neither figures nor letters, but something between the two, and even trying to make sense of them was causing his head to spin. He rubbed at his temple and looked out the windshield.
The rain was lashing straight down on the glass, huge droplets bouncing back up and colliding with those still falling. It was a typical Virginian spring rain. Sheets of water and not a breath of wind. Not even a breeze.
Narrowing his eyes, he smoothed the paper over his leg and bent down to gather up the rest of his wallet’s contents, his hands now surprisingly steady. Josh Spiller had no idea where the paper had come from, but as he folded it twice and stuck it deep and safely into the zipping part of his wallet, he vowed he wasn’t going anywhere else until he found out.
24
Father? Father? There was no concept of either in this warm blackness. Only sometimes, when there was threat, or the opportunity to see and hear, could that which was growing stretch out and almost taste the freedom that the light would bring. It was like a dream. In this dream it could act as it would when the time came to be. It had mobility. It had substance. It had purpose. But it was becoming difficult to separate the dreams from reality. The smell of its host was so strong, so delicious, and yet sometimes the dreams let it stand outside. They let it act as though the time had come and it was born and could greet its host the way only it knew how. The way thousands had greeted their hosts before it in the long history of man’s world.
It felt a dream beginning again, and it shifted and stretched and twitched in its warm cocoon. As it did so, it felt the pain and the fear of its unwilling host. And it was glad.
“Tell you what. Ifin I weren’t drivin’ this company cow with a tachograph that tells my boss when I fart out my breakfast, I’d pick her up for sure and show her some hospitality.”
“Get a life, you sad bastard.”
A woman’s voice. A four-wheeler by the sounds of it. Josh barely registered the crap coming out of the radio, but somewhere in his confused and anxious mind, some brain cells had been assigned to listening.
“Hey, thermos. Where you say this hitcher is?”
“Where you at, come on?”
“Eh, I’m just cruisin’ past them signs for caves an’ stuff, ‘bout a mile from exit 176.”
A new voice.
“You guys talkin’ north- or southbound there?”
It was ignored.
“Okay, ifin you already passed them signs, then she’s standin’ waitin’ on you gettin’ her tasty ass soaked in the rest area three exits on. You got that?”
“Sure do.”
“She got a big backpack and big tits to balance it.”
The listening brain cells sounded an alarm in Josh’s head. He sat up, his heart racing, and thumbed the radio. Someone beat him to it.
“Repeat. That north- or southbound, you shits?”
“Northbound, asswipe. Pay attention or git off the damned radio.”
Josh let his thumb relax. It couldn’t be her, then. Why would Griffin be hitching back north? On his left, through the driving rain, he glimpsed the signs for the mineral caves and he swallowed. But what if she’d given up her adolescent adventure and was heading home? He pressed “talk” again and this time got through.
“How you know so much ‘bout this girl if you didn’t give her a lift there, thermos?”
The woman four-wheeler’s voice again. “How you guys know how to tie your fuckin’ shoelaces?”
Josh tutted with irritation. This was no time for political correctness. He wanted answers. He waited.
“Well, ain’t we all gettin’ interested all of a sudden? Matter of fact, my buddy just dropped her off. Happy?”
“You sure she’s headin’ north?”
“Well, if she ain’t, she’s standin’ on the wrong side of the road.”
Josh hung his handset back on its hook and pressed on the gas. If the other driver only just passed the cave signs, then it was probably that covered wagon three trucks ahead. It was hellish driving through this torrential rain, but if he stepped on it, maybe Josh could get to the rest area first.
