FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  “Josh.”

  He said nothing and she hesitated. Her words when they came were no longer tearful, but confident and unhurried.

  “Someone has passed you the runes.”

  “The runes.”

  Josh’s tone qualified the sentence rather than questioned it, but the edge in his voice was fear, not sarcasm.

  “It’s a parchment. The marks are runic symbols. It…” She faltered again, but only momentarily. “It calls something.”

  “What do you mean, ‘calls’?”

  “When you took it, something started to come… from somewhere else. It grows. Well, not really. Shit. How to say this? It gets here, gets to the last carrier of the parchment, when the time is up on the runes.”

  Josh kept his gaze fixed firmly on hers, and in those earnest eyes he could see no trace of deception or mockery. If this was insanity, then they were insane together.

  “What’s comin’, Griffin?” he croaked.

  She broke his gaze to look at her lap and think, then as quickly met it again. “Have you felt either very cold or very hot in the last two days? Like at strange times.”

  He thought about the trailer at the weigh station. The gust of air in the motel corridor.

  “Hot. Sick and hot.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Shit, Josh. You must have pissed them off bad.”

  “Stop talkin’ to me like a child.”

  Griffin looked him in the eye and there was a hardness there. Whether it was indignation at the bark of his rebuke, or merely a defence to what she was about to say, Josh couldn’t divine. He noted it and it chilled him. But not as much as her words.

  “It’s a hot elemental.”

  “Talk sense.”

  His irritation didn’t sound convincing and it did nothing to soften her voice.

  “Okay. If you want to use the language of Dark Age ignorance. It’s a fire demon.”

  He paused a second, mouth open, then let out a snort. Inside, some part of him was screaming. But the part he liked to think of as Josh Spiller, trucker, was seeing himself in this damp cab, listening to some kid talking a heap of bullshit big enough to bury Jezebel.

  It was plainly ridiculous, and with an effort he tried to pull himself back to the land of reality: the place where fear was a jackknife in the fast lane, where mystery was how you fitted the fax roll, and where nightmares were dreams that truck stops started charging to crap in the john. He turned from her and rubbed at his chin as he stared out front.

  “Yeah? That so? Well, you know, I figured it was something like that. Soon as I found that paper I thought, this is either a fancy receipt for them jockey shorts I bought in a factory outlet, or else it’s a parchment calling up a fire demon. Shoot. Never can tell one from the other.”

  “Have you seen it yet?”

  It was as though he hadn’t spoken.

  Josh closed his eyes and gave in. He shook his head and then, hesitating, made an uncertain shrug.

  “But you’ve felt it?”

  A nod.

  “Listen to me, Josh. Did anyone give you anything in Furnace? Anything at all?”

  He swallowed and wiped his mouth, eyes still closed.

  “Try to think.”

  He screwed up his face, doing as he was told. “No. Yes. Well, bits of stuff. Nothing really.”

  “What stuff? Come on, Josh.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her, his face a maze of emotion. “What does it matter, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Because you have one day left. Don’t you understand? You can still pass them back if you can find out who passed them to you.” Griffin’s voice was shrill, excited and exasperated. She watched him sinking deeper and then sighed. “No. Of course you don’t understand. I’m not making much sense, am I?”

  He wished she was making less sense, but didn’t say so. Griffin sat farther forward, as though she could advance his understanding by proximity.

  “I’m going to explain what I know and I want you to listen real careful. Even if you think I’m a screwball I want to know you listened. That’s important to me right now. You hear?”

  Josh nodded dumbly, incredulous that the tables should be turned in forty-eight hours, in which this novice pupil of life had suddenly become his teacher.

  “Whatever happened to you in Furnace, and believe me, I don’t want to know any more than I do, is something they don’t want anybody else hearing about.”

  Josh held up a weak hand. “Who’s ‘they’?”

  It was Griffin’s turn to snort. “Whoever you goddamn met. Whoever you spoke to, bought from, touched, passed in the street.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t. Just listen.”

  He winced.

  “Somehow they passed the runes. They could have been in anything. A parking ticket, a rolled-up newspaper, a book, anything. You have to get back there before your time is up, find out who gave them to you and give them back. But this is important.”

  She made upturned claws of her hands to stress the point.

  “You have to give them back the same way. Understand? They have to take them willingly and unknowingly.”

  Her face was a picture of intensity. She held that expression of pleading instruction as Josh tried to assimilate the bizarre information, at the same time as a bubble of hysterical laughter threatened to erupt from his throat.

  “I nearly lost them.”

  That hardness again in her face. “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Lucky. Whoever cast them must have rushed it. They don’t usually survive to give you the chance to return them.”

  “What would happen if they’d gone?”

  Griffin relaxed her body and slumped a little. “Then you’d have had two choices.” Her eyes started to well again. “I’d take the first,” she whispered.

  “Which is?”

  “Suicide.”

  Josh tried to sound amused. “Nice choice. And the other one?”

  She looked at him and let a bulbous tear split through her lashes. “Wait. And greet your guest.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then his laughter won. He held the side of his head and guffawed, tears of his own forming as his stomach muscles contracted with the spasm. “Aw, shit. This is fuckin’ rich. What are we talking about here?”

  “A death horrible beyond imagining.”

  Josh stopped laughing abruptly and looked at Griffin with anger. His voice was calm and quiet. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Someone who should have taken a different ride out of McNab County.”

  She looked at him with eyes that pleaded before they shifted to her feet, as she added, “A long time ago.”

  The passion of her regret cut the anger from Josh. He put out a hand to her arm but was once again rejected.

  “Griffin. What the hell’s goin’ on in Furnace?”

  Her feet remained her fascination. “I don’t know it all. What I know is bad enough.”

  “Are you trying to tell me it’s like some crummy Twilight Zone thing? Like the mayor dances around with the librarian, naked except for antlers and a satin cape?”

  She flashed him a weaning glare. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Then you’ll forgive me if I choose to dismiss this as hog piss.”

  As if to etch in action what his words had implied, Josh switched on the wipers and let the blades sweep an arc in the opaque mat of water.

  “The baby. The one you killed. Was it an accident?”

  Josh’s mouth dried. “Yes.”

  “But you got sympathy when you called home. Right?”

  Josh’s cheeks were blanching. He turned slowly to her and saw the gleam of righteous anger in her face. “I couldn’t reach anyone.”

  “Because the phones were out, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And somehow people who used to like you don’t want to be around you much?”

  He was light-headed now as his blo
od went somewhere other than his face. “Griffin.”

  “You see, Josh? The runes. They come with some pretty standard witchcraft. You get isolated. You can’t contact anyone. Tricks make you think you’re going mad. They want you to take that easy way out. It’s tidier. A lot less mess. Easier to explain than what’s left behind the other way. And the best way to help you in that task is to isolate you. Make you crazy.”

  He put his hands on the wheel and spoke quietly to its centre. “What can I do?”

  Her voice was adult and serious. Someone in charge solving a problem.

  “How far are we from Furnace?”

  “Bout five hours.”

  “And when did you find the message in the logbook?”

  “The mornin’ after… you know… when you left.”

  Griffin bit her lip again. “Then you’ve got until sunrise.”

  He looked at her again, aware his heart was beating in his ears. “How do you know so much if you’re not part of all this?”

  She shaped a bitter smile that contained neither warmth nor humour. “I know how they play football but I’ve never been a quarterback.”

  “And what kind of game they playin’ in Furnace?”

  She replied in a small and lost voice. “I don’t know, Josh, I just know I don’t want to find out and end up being destroyed by it. Please don’t ask me.”

  The wiper blades, on intermittent, swept across the windshield and squealed. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started, and already the late afternoon sun was pushing from behind the clouds like an understudy actor eager to steal the stage. Josh turned off the wipers and touched his open palms against the sides of the steering wheel, as though measuring a variety of imaginary fish.

  There was no longer any point in questioning this. What Griffin had told him was insane, but in a world that had turned demented for Josh since his eyes had first connected with the woman in Furnace, Griffin’s bizarre instructions seemed almost logical. How else could she know the tortuous details of the last few days?

  He became aware of the silence between them now that the rain had ceased. The heater still blew and the engine grumbled, but over it all Josh could hear Griffin breathing.

  “How will I know who gave me the runes?”

  “You won’t. You have to remember which people gave you what and work it out.”

  “And if I get it wrong? Say I pass them back to someone who didn’t give them to me?”

  “Then it’ll be like you lost them. The runic device stays with you.”

  He stared at her, and she read his need to have that qualified.

  “You’ll be fucked, Josh.”

  His expression told her he believed that part already. She softened her eyes, if not her voice. “It’s not going to be easy. You can’t let the rune caster know what you’re doing. Do you understand? Whoever cast them won’t let you within a mile of them.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “The point is it’s your only hope. Even if it’s a slim one.”

  Josh started to shake his head. He groped for mental balance. This was all wrong. He was going home. Home to Elizabeth and the very real problem of their baby, not back to that smug mountain town where he was sure of nothing. Not even sure what had happened there.

  “Christ, they’ll think I’m crazy if I go back and walk around trying to sneak a concealed strip of paper into strangers’ hands.”

  Griffin looked down. “Oh, no. They won’t think you’re crazy at all.”

  She paused before her next words.

  “They’ll just wonder how you knew.”

  He licked his lower lip. For the first time since they had started this lunatic conversation. Josh realized this involved her too. He looked at her and saw what he had first seen in the restaurant. A young girl, a cocktail of arrogance and innocence, rebellion and a desperation to conform; a beauty that she was both aware of and indifferent to.

  But all those contradictions were common in adolescents. What was uncommon about Griffin was that in under ten minutes she’d convinced a thirty-two-year-old truck driver, who’d seen just about everything life could spit up, that there was another world he hadn’t even guessed existed. And it was a dark world, which through no fault or design of her own, other than a geographical accident of birth, she seemed to know intimately. He realized he cared.

  “What’ll happen to you if they work it out?”

  “I’ll be long gone.”

  “And distance works?”

  “In my case, yes.”

  “But your family—”

  “Believe me. They’ll be fine.”

  He put a fist to his forehead. “Then help me, Griffin. I’m dyin’, for Christ’s sake. Gimme a fuckin’ lead here.”

  She sat awkwardly for a moment, touched by his terror, then pulled her knees up to her chest. Then she spoke softly from behind her barrier of limbs.

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  He tried to read her and failed. The answer was yes, but his heart spoke for him. “No. Shit, no. Just tell me where to start lookin’.”

  She bent her head and buried her face in her knees, and when she emerged her eyes were puffy with tears. “I don’t know, Josh. I wish I did. Just retrace your steps. Every one of them.”

  She sniffed, straightened up and reached for the door handle. Outside the truck on the wet asphalt, her pack sat dripping where she’d left it. Griffin looked at it through the window, then turned to Josh, tears filling her eyes. She blinked and let them take their uneven course over her high, sculpted cheeks.

  “If you can’t find that person, if you can’t give them back…” She hesitated, looking down before she met his gaze again. “… promise me you’ll keep the first option in mind.”

  Josh said nothing, but as he watched her face his heart stood still, for he saw in her eyes the pity for a dead man.

  “Sure. Good tip.”

  Griffin closed her eyes in exasperation, took a deep breath and got out. She walked around the front of the truck and rejoined her forlorn, rain-darkened backpack. Josh wound down his window.

  “You be okay?”

  She nodded. “I’m heading west.”

  He let his eyes roam over her once more, then pushed the truck into first.

  “Josh!”

  He braked and looked back down at her.

  “The runes.”

  He waited while she fidgeted for the rest of her sentence.

  “They’re not written on paper.”

  Josh looked at her until she turned from him and walked back down through the puddles of the rest area. He watched her go in the mirror, then signalled and pulled back out onto the highway, his hands automatically and unthinkingly priming the comfort of his cab, turning up the CB and turning down the heater.

  “Yessir! Northbounds! Just passed what looked like a chickadee sniffin’ for cock in that rest area north of 176. Hurry, hurry while stocks last.”

  The guy in Radio Shack who sold Josh the twin Blaupunkt CB speakers didn’t do them justice. Even he couldn’t have predicted the miracle that one of them would withstand a punch from a fist which had the force of primal fury behind it.

  26

  As he walked, Sheriff Pace listened to his shoes squeaking on the shiny linoleum floor of the corridor. Apart from the muffled buzz of machines in side rooms, a telephone warbling behind a desk and the occasional cough from a distant bed, it was the loudest sound in the clinic. Deputy Caroline Spencer had done the deed and Alice Nevin was still under sedation after the visit. He wondered if what she’d been told had even got through the mince they’d made of her brain with those drugs, but something behind her big, dilated pupils when she’d looked up at him from the pillow suggested that it had.

  Now she was more than just one child short. She was one man down.

  John Pace hadn’t liked Bobby Hendry. He was a whole lot of trouble when he drank and the memory Pace had of him would always be of his wide, crumpled face wak
ing up on a bench in the cells after a binge.

  But he’d been a good enough man, and he’d almost been a good father. Then again, “almost” wasn’t enough to save your child. Not in Furnace.

  He thought about that for a moment. What if things had been different? If he’d had daughters instead of two strong sons? Would he have been that good a father? Would he have been any more able than Hendry to do the thing that would keep them safe?

  The metronomic squeaking of his shoes was interrupted by an arrhythmic clicking, and he raised his eyes to the two shiny black patent woman’s shoes coming towards him.

  “John. How is she?”

  Pace straightened up, took off the hat he’d replaced on his head after leaving Alice Nevin’s room and held it in front of his chest. “Not so good, Councillor. They got her on pills for her nerves.”

  Nelly McFarlane tutted and looked past John Pace to the distant open door of the patient’s room. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “I’m no doctor, Sheriff, but it seems to me people ought to have the proper time to grieve. Suffering is what makes us strong. Don’t you agree?”

  Pace looked at the woman’s neatly made-up face, creased with concern and lit with a motherly warmth that illuminated her eyes. He nodded. “I guess. Maybe everyone got a different way of grievin’.”

  The woman smoothed her skirt with an elegant hand and turned back to him as though he hadn’t replied. “And you? How are you and your staff dealing with this tragedy?”

  “We seen worse, Nelly. You know that.”

  She looked into his eyes, searching for something, and if she found it, nothing of its discovery registered in her own face. “Yes. I know that, John. I never envy the job of a policeman.”

  He shrugged politely and she smiled at him with affection. “I hope everyone in this town realizes how lucky we are to have men like you at the helm of our little ship.”

  Pace shifted his weight to another leg and looked down at his hat. “I do my job. Ain’t no call for applause.”

  “Sure there is. You leave it to us folks to tell you when you’re doing swell. There’s been a Sheriff Pace here now for nearly a hundred years, and not one of your family has ever let us down. Your daddy was a fine man, and so was his daddy before him. And I’ll bet either little Noah or Ethan is going to make us proud one day.”