by Muriel Gray
Josh barked out a laugh. “So that’s the whole story? I die because I wouldn’t sign a fuckin’ statement sayin’ it was accidental?”
“No. You’ll die because you didn’t believe it was accidental. You see how important faith can be?”
“Then I guess I’ll use my time to go and try to convince someone else.”
She smiled a reptilian smile. “Be my guest. Do you think I want to be around you come sunrise? I only wish I could be there to hear you tell your tale to some case-hardened city policeman.”
She lowered her jaw to her chest in imitation of Josh, and what she did next chilled his blood against his bones. The imitation he’d anticipated, a woman lowering her voice to affect a man’s tone, never happened. Instead, she opened her mouth, and from her lips came Josh’s voice. Not an imitation, but the real thing. Its depth and timbre coming from the face of Nelly McFarlane was horrible to watch.
“Eh, officer? You see, there’s this demon following me and this woman in Furnace, yeah, that’s Furnace, Virginia, you see, like, she actually killed this baby I ran over…”
He slid back into the sofa, his mouth agape at the horror of her conjuring trick. She smiled, as though she had been applauded.
“You see? I doubt if that would be a very good use of your last six hours on earth. Do you?”
Josh licked his dry lips, pressing farther into the back of the sofa as though he might escape through it.
“Do you know what would be?”
Josh shook his head so subtly it was barely a motion at all. But Nelly McFarlane smiled with approval at his attention.
“Understanding the Lord a little better.” Josh swallowed and his fingers slowly curled, making two fistfuls of cushion, while he watched the face of his insane hostess, whose unsettling trick suggested she had others.
“Will you at least let me try, Mr. Spiller?”
He looked at her and said nothing.
She stood up and extended a hand towards another door in the large room, the one her husband had left through. “There are so many ways to serve Christ. And serving Him truly can bring great rewards. I just want to sleep easy knowing I’ve explained our way.”
Josh felt his saliva turn acid again with dread, but as he looked at her a warning in her green eyes told him he was being ordered, not invited. Maybe it was mounting hysteria, maybe just the lunacy of the whole damned thing. But Josh began to laugh. He closed his eyes and put his hands on his big knees and let the laughter gurgle in the back of his throat. Nelly McFarlane watched him silently.
“Shit, man,” said Josh, wiping at an eye when he’d done. “This is too much. I guess you’re goin’ to do the Bond movie thing now. Am I right? You know. Like, you say, ‘Ah, Mr. Bond. Since you’re going to die, why don’t I show you what my plans for world domination really are.’ Fuckin’ far out.”
McFarlane looked at her feet, but it was not to conceal an emotion. It was as though she were growing tired of the conversation. Her voice was weary, but to Josh’s ears it still held an immense threat, and unless he was mistaken there was an undercurrent of anger. For some reason, that heartened him.
“I am a philosopher. You don’t even know what that means, do you? If I dedicated the rest of my entire life to you, Mr. Spiller, painstakingly trying to explain even the first rudiments of the Secret Doctrine, you would know as much as lichen knows on its rock. I have no intention of explaining anything to you, any more than I would read poetry to a brick. I was simply going to extend you the courtesy of knowing a little more about my family, and hope that in understanding why they came here, how much they loved Christ, yet were rejected by people who called themselves Christians, that you too might think about why you’ve let Jesus slip from your life.”
“He never returned my calls.”
She looked at him coldly. “Before it’s too late.”
Josh closed his eyes and put a hand to his mouth. It was already too late. She wasn’t the one. She hadn’t passed him the runes. So why was he here when there were still at least six precious hours left to breathe? Because only she could tell him where Pace was, that was why.
When he breathed in hard to stem his panic and opened his eyes again, she was standing by the door, still extending that elegant hand like a polite hostess at a dinner party.
What the fuck. He was as crazy as she was. But he was curious. He stood up and walked towards the door.
John Pace turned the lock in his study door, although he knew for sure the other three occupants of the house were deeply asleep. Perhaps it wasn’t their intrusion he feared. He walked to the wall and stood in front of the framed woodcut Nelly had given him and Ruth for their wedding anniversary three years ago. He knew it was worth more than his house, but it didn’t make it any more pleasant. King Solomon sat on a tall carved throne, his arm outstretched in anger, and in agony on the marble floor before him, smoke billowing from its repulsive hide, writhed a creature that Pace knew well. The woodcut was dated 1632, but the clarity of its detail and the crispness of its line made it look as if it had been executed yesterday. So good, thought Pace with a bitter internal smile, it was almost as though the artist had been drawing from life.
The sheriff took a breath and put his fingers to the edge of the frame. He pulled and it swung out from the wall on its hinges, revealing the wall safe behind. With trembling fingers he punched in the combination to the tiny, blinking digital keyboard and waited for the heavy door to click open.
He’d wondered if after six months it would still be potent, and in his darker moments wondered if it would even be there at all. But both anxieties were put to rest when the thin and ancient strip of dried skin twitched as though startled by the light. Pace put his hand out hesitantly and grasped the parchment between thumb and forefinger. It fluttered at his touch and made his throat thick with fear.
Did she know he still had it? That thought was almost more nauseating than the power invested in this vile rectangle. But if Nelly had her suspicions, then she hadn’t voiced them. At least not out loud.
He hadn’t been able to do it. Not again. Not after what he’d seen in the woods. He clenched his teeth and gripped the runes more tightly. She’d only been an archaeology student from Scotland, for Christ’s sake, had gotten some research grant from Glasgow University on a paper she was doing called “The Truth About Alchemy.” He remembered her face, sweet and plain, but full of youthful enthusiasm as she sat in his office with a Styrofoam cup in her hand, telling him about the project in that cute accent that left him lost after every third word.
Did he know, she’d asked between slurps, that their twin town of Furnace on Loch Fyne in the west of Scotland had been associated with a group of radical and powerful alchemists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? No? Well, they had really interesting parish records there that named a few of them, in very vague terms, of course.
The villagers then had been frightened of them for some reason, too frightened to name them all, and she didn’t know why yet. Maybe just superstition. Maybe just because they were different. In fact, she’d said with great solemnity, that was what was going to make her dissertation so modern, so relevant, the way it would examine not only the truth and nonsense of alchemy, but the continuing persecution of those with other worldviews. She’d shifted in her seat and said she’d been beside herself with excitement to discover that it looked as if maybe some of the people who left Furnace in Scotland settled here in the Appalachians. It had cost her a lot to get here, nearly the whole grant, but did he know you could get direct flights from Glasgow all the way to Boston now? It was great. And she’d sat beside a really interesting man on the plane who followed icebergs around the world for some oil company. Although she wasn’t sure she believed him. Why would he travel steerage? She’d laughed. Could he believe that?
Was his family originally Scottish? It was? Well, there you are, then. Maybe he was related to the alchemists. She’d laughed a lovely throaty laugh again. She’d let him see he
r dissertation when she finished. Maybe he could end up being able to turn mercury and lead to gold. You could give up your day job, she’d said, and laughed some more.
Anyway, she went in, the really, really exciting thing was finding a tiny settlement up here of the same name—oh, she begged his pardon, not that it was that tiny or anything, obviously it was a very lovely place to live—and discovering that some of the names in the phone book here were the same as in the parish records. That was brilliant. She was going to get a first-class degree for this; she could just feel it. There was nothing written about this anywhere. Absolutely nothing. Wasn’t it exciting that she’d uncovered the connection? If she got a first, then, she said, she might get a job in a big museum in London. There was this boy, you see…
He’d driven her out, as requested, to the foundations of the first building erected in Furnace, and shot her through the back of the head. Her face had exploded onto the drystone wall that remained from the old barn, and he’d watched as her legs slowly buckled and her body crumpled like an exhausted deer.
But it had been a kindness. His tourist shopping guide to the Shenandoah Valley had remained in his pocket, and between its pages had remained the strip of infant skin. He couldn’t have let that young student die the way those men died. She had been dead the moment she’d arrived in Furnace. All he’d done was to make it quick.
But now those runes remained. Pace was out of his depth. When she’d prepared them, did Nelly know the name of the victim? Were they specially conjured to summon that black and terrible death to a named one and no one else? He bit his lip. No. That couldn’t be so. Nelly had no idea who the student was. It was he, God forgive him, who’d brought the news to her about the girl. She’d let him deal with the whole thing as though it were a minor inconvenience.
He closed his eyes and thought again of his sons. Gently, he clicked the safe door closed, swung the grim print back into place and walked across the room to his desk.
The ghost of Noah’s kiss, which had been planted on his father’s cheek only hours before, for no reason at all, was so real it was almost moist again. With one hand Pace reached up and touched the spot, and with the other he slid the strip of dried flesh into the front pocket of his trousers.
32
“And so you just decided to do a full one hundred and eighty backtrack? All the way back from Kentucky.”
“Hey, lady. It’s my fuckin’ truck. You don’t like it, you can walk.”
Griffin didn’t like it one bit. But her pulse was racing with a mixture of fear and rage as she sat beside this moron, and she was struggling for control. What to do? The parking lot was empty and she couldn’t run onto the interstate and hitch unless she wanted to get killed. How far were they from Furnace? She thought hard about the very few times she’d been driven on the interstate, thought about stopping for a leak before her journey, just after they’d joined the highway. Yes, she could just about picture where this might be. Jesus Christ. That meant they were probably only about two miles from the exit to Furnace and Carris Arm.
She felt light-headed with panic, but she dug her nails deep into her palms and fought for calm. She glanced at the dash. The clock said it was twelve-twenty A.M. She breathed normally and let her heart settle. There were nearly five whole hours left. If this jerk got going like he said he would, they could still be halfway across the next state by then. She tried to keep her voice steady.
“So when exactly can we move?”
Eddie chewed at his moustache. “Like I say. When I hear on the CB that the truck’s comin’.”
She drove her nails deeper into her skin. “What the hell does another truck need you to drive along behind it for?”
“It’s called an escorted load, lady. I don’t know why. I didn’t make up the truckin’ bylaws of the fuckin’ US of A. All I know is, I get the call from my company, I jump to it like a hard-on into a female mud wrestle.”
She tutted and looked away.
“Hell, now come on there, Elizabeth.”
She looked back at him, eyes full of suspicion.
“Well, that’s your name, ain’t it?” He indicated the brooch.
“Yeah. What’s it to you?”
Eddie smiled. “Just makin’ conversation. Eddie’s mine, by the way.”
Griffin glanced contemptuously and with great deliberation towards the dash, suffocated as it was with stickers bought, she imagined, at a variety of truck stops around the country. There was one in the style of the Peterbilt logo, except that the elegant silver type in the oval said “Eddie.” Another, topped with the brand name of a trailer company, proclaimed on two lines, the top being shakier where the purchaser’s name was obviously inserted, “Eddie Shanklin pulls it in public.” There were at least ten others of a similar nature. Griffin looked back at him with heavily lidded eyes and sighed.
“No shit?”
He ignored her sarcasm. “Boyfriend give you the pin?”
She looked down at it and cleared her throat. “No. It was a twenty-first birthday present.”
Eddie nodded again, then looked across at the brooch. “Pretty. Gold, ain’t it?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him more suspiciously, not liking this new tone. “It’s the only decent thing I’ve got on me if you’re thinking of turning mugger.”
Eddie sniggered under his mask of hair. He pulled up his jacket sleeve and showed her the two fat identity chains around his equally fat wrist. “See this, sweetheart? This lets me carry around seven and a half thousand dollars right here on my arm. Twenty-two carats that say I busted my ass up and down these highways haulin’ shit an’ sugar. Reckon I want to punch out a girl for a thousand-dollar pin with someone else’s name on it?”
He looked straight at her, and she wrongly interpreted the stern nature of that gaze as retribution for her mistrust.
She looked away. “I was kidding.”
In his spot mirror, Eddie saw a car pulling into the lot. He’d spent countless nights in this place alone and never seen a vehicle. It was bad luck. He thought fast. “Say, if you’re gettin’ antsy, there’s a car comin’ in. I could check ‘em out an’ see if they can take you on.”
She sat up. “Yeah? Hey, don’t bother. I can ask them.”
Eddie put a hand out. “Uh-uh. This is a mean highway. I ain’t lettin’ you drive off till I know it’s cool.”
Griffin smiled at him. “Okay. Thanks.”
Eddie started to climb out. “You’ll tell them I’m headed west. Yeah?”
“Sure.”
Eddie shut the door and walked across to the car, now pulled alongside the glass section of the building, well aware that Griffin’s eyes were fixed on him.
It was a small Datsun, and inside a nervous-looking woman sat waiting while her male companion fumbled in his jacket for something. Eddie bent down and rapped on the window. The woman looked nervously to the man, who rebuked her and motioned for her to wind down the window.
“Hey, you help me out here?”
The man looked across at Eddie, crouching as he did so, so he could get a view across the woman’s lap. She pinned herself back into the seat as though at the mercy of a leper who might touch her.
“Sure. What’s the problem?”
Eddie gave an exaggerated sniff and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Well, my girlfriend there, she’s gone plum loco. Says she needs to get some shit, an’ get it fast, get my drift? Or she’s gonna blow someone away. Now, I don’t need that to be me. Know what I mean, fella? So if either of you two good folks got anything worth puttin’ in her veins or up her nose, I’d be grateful to the tune of a couple of hundred.”
The woman started shifting about, pressing harder into the back of her seat.
The man spoke again, but with a new tone of warning. “We don’t do stuff like that, mister.”
“Aw, come on, folks. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s just she packs heat an’ I don’t want her flippin’ out on me in the truck, halfway across
the fast lane. Know what I mean? Sure you ain’t even got a Tylenol?”
The man said a quiet “sorry” and wound up the woman’s electric window from a button on his side.
Eddie gave them a cheerful wave through the glass and walked slowly back to the truck. Griffin was already fussing with her pack.
“Am I on?”
Eddie whistled through his teeth. “Can’t say. They sure ain’t dangerous, but I reckon they’re weirder than a seven-dollar bill.”
She looked across at the innocent little car, the woman closing the door as she scuttled into the building to the rest rooms.
“Why? What’s up with them?”
“I don’t know. They don’t seem to approve of hitchers none. Tried everythin’. Even pretended you was with some Christian fellowship or somethin’. Didn’t seem to swallow it.”
Griffin rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Thanks for nothing. Let me try.”
Eddie smiled as he watched her walk across the lot, trying her best to look small and humble. He watched as the man refused to roll down the window. Watched as she knocked on the glass, shouting through it to him politely and gesticulating to the highway. Watched as the woman returned from the restroom and walked the long way around the car to avoid her. And then watched with huge relief as the car revved up and pulled away.
Griffin was shaking her head as she climbed back in.
Eddie looked across at her. “You think they were weird?”
Griffin watched the car pull back onto the interstate and shook her head again for effect. “Off the fuckin’ scale.”
Eddie reached behind the seat and rustled in a sports bag.
“Here. You want a nacho?”
These were the private quarters and they were very different from the cosy affluence of the front of the house. In fact, they were breathtaking. The modest door opened onto a huge circular hall at least forty feet in diameter, its floor a gleaming rink of polished hardwood.
In its centre an ancient rug, also circular, displaying intricate animal patterns woven in muted colours, sat directly beneath an enormous gilded chandelier. Josh stared up in awe at the light. It had seven arms arching from a central ball, each arm taking the shape of a unique writhing dragon, from whose mouth hung an elegant lampshade.
