by Dean H Wild
The occurrences of the last few days seemed heavier when he was alone, and he thought about calling Mick Logan, just to touch base. Instead he drained his glass—normally he didn’t touch the wares of his back bar when he was alone, but tonight he made an exception—and stepped up to his narrow front windows.
The view was not much, just a segment of Backbank Street and a pool of light from the streetlamp. But as he watched, two cars drove by: Chastity Mellar Borth’s Lincoln and Axel Vandergalien’s Passat. Axel’s car followed the other so closely its grille was nearly planted on the other vehicle’s bumper. It reminded him of a dog running nose to tail with a companion. The Lincoln swerved as it passed the bar and took out the Carmichaels’s mailbox across the street. The streetlight gleam offered a glimpse of the driver: broad shoulders and the fall of a silver ponytail.
He backed away, contemplating, and poured another scotch.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cy Vandergalien paced around the upstairs mill office, the desk lamp throwing wild shadows across the walls. His mother’s brooch was in his palm, nested in a pocket of painful divots. He checked his watch. It was only a matter of hours now before he’d be on the road to Itasca with his dear Alice at his side and this town long gone in the rearview mirror. Just as well to wait until after the vote. Alice would never leave until the ballots were counted and the matter decided anyway. Goddamn contrary, frustrating, loveable Knoll. Leaving was hard, but necessary. His gut told him as much. So did murder and weird lights and disappearing paint. So did his dead ma. How the hell do you argue with something like that?
The back service door of the mill was downstairs near the larger rollup entrance to the loading bay. He knew every creak and groan of the mill like the caresses of an old dusty lover, and the squeaking hinges of that service door came to him, faraway yet familiar.
His nerves sang like violin strings. No one had business here after dark. No one. He slipped his hand into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out an old revolver. It was his daddy’s. Heavy. Loaded. He crept to the office door and waited at the top of the stairs, listening.
Down below, the back door of the mill slammed loud and clear. Shit.
He jogged down the stairs and let himself in the main bay, then flipped on the lights, his eyes darting over the bulging, dusty feed sacks, the support beams shaggy with webs and chaff. The depths of the main floor seemed too shadowy despite the rows of 100-watt fixtures dangling overhead.
He kept the gun low at his thigh and stood in the middle of the bay floor where trucks dropped their loads into the floor grinder pit and then drove right on through. Or would drop their loads if Axel had not removed the grate segments over the pit and propped them against the wall like abandoned cattle gates during his cleaning efforts.
“Come on out now and I won’t turn you in for trespassing,” Cy shouted.
A form separated from the shadows at the back of the bay and stepped into the light. It was that judge fellow.
“You’re not allowed in here. It’s after hours.” Cy meant it, but it felt like loose rags in his mouth.
Agitated pigeons fluttered in the rafters. He glanced up, and when he looked back, Thekan was closer even though he’d heard no rustle of clothes, no tap of a shoe.
“I go where I must. To clear the way.”
“There’s nothing that needs clearing in my mill, Mister.” Another shape caught his eye, this one mostly hidden behind the vacuum line designed to pull the ground feed out of the belly of the grinder once the augers had their way. His stomach drew down with trepidation. He nudged the gun forward. “You and your friend better get packing.”
Thekan smiled with resigned acceptance. “If only you had let old memories lie. Forgotten and foregone.”
Peripherally, he noticed the other shape lean in. Was that Axel? He wasn’t able to check, his eyes were locked on Thekan, his ears abuzz with Thekan’s words.
“But you are a willful man, Cy Vandergalien. Demonstrative to a fault. In need, perhaps, of a reprimand.”
A third shape staggered into the light from the other side of the bay. Cy’s limbs went numb. What appeared at first to be a walking silhouette revealed itself as a repulsive imitation of life. It wore a black suit with narrow lapels and frayed buttonholes that looked much better in the black and white wedding photos that once sat on the family piano next to his grade school pictures. The hairless head, a strangulated purple so dark it was like a scoop of late twilight, tilted with pleased discovery. “Ahhhh,” it said.
Cy swallowed with a throat made of stone as the shape hurried over and its hand, riddled by rot, reached for him.
“You drew that line real good,” his father’s voice bubbled out of the rotted grin, wet, as if he’d gargled with the rich gasoline once perfuming their family garage. “Just the way I showed you. But still, looks like you screwed the poochie in the end, boy.” Amused delight swirled through eyes deep set and slick. Fingers reached out, stroking the air. “Screwed the poochie.”
“Don’t touch me,” Cy whimpered.
Feet, bony and shaggy with some sort of black growth, clicked on the bay floor. “Come here, son. I gotta lay one up side your head.”
Cy took a long step back. The gun wobbled with hopelessness in his hand. “I’m leaving, Daddy,” he heard himself say. “It won’t matter anymore. Just go back to wherever the hell you came from.”
“Nope. Got a duty, boy.”
His father leaned forward. Without thought, Cy fired the gun. The bullet twanged off of something metallic across the room. What followed was a yowl of pain from behind the vacuum pipe in the corner, and an indignant, “What the fuck?”
The other shadow. Axel.
Daddy cozied up, wrapped in the essence of mold. Under it was a sharp, fruity odor. Cy pulled back. When he spoke, it was a plea. “I’m stayin’ in town, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Daddy said. “You are. Staying for good. Just like me.”
Cold hands clamped over his head the way a clergyman might grip a penitent to shake the wickedness out. Then they pushed.
Cy staggered backward. His landing foot dropped into the open air over the grinder pit and his weight pulled him backward. The fall was a short one. He marveled as he landed on the cruel spiral edge of the grinding auger how sharp it was after all these years.
***
Axel limped over to the wall-mounted grinder controls. Pain blasted outward from the bullet hole just above his knee; it felt as if his whole damn leg was on fire. The green start button pulsed like a bleary reptilian eye. It seemed to ask him, patiently, what he was waiting for.
“Finish it,” Thekan told him from across the bay. He stood alone. The other guy, the thing in the moldy black suit was gone.
Axel let his palm hover over the button. “Why don’t you do it? Same way you start up cars and open doors like some fucking Gary Houdini?”
“Harry. That was Harry Houdini. And to all things there is a purpose, my boy.”
Axel glanced at the edge of the open grinder pit where his uncle’s shoes had scuffed it. He wanted a joint. He wanted to run.
“I do this, and then I can go?”
“You can run as fast as you are able,” Thekan said with a smile.
Axel’s leg throbbed in time with the button. A groan rose from the floor pit, accompanied by subtle stirring sounds. Next on the agenda: cries of pain and calls for help, ramping up to threats and accusations. Goddamned Unky Cy.
He swatted the button, hard. He shouted to drown out the winding roar of the motor but he still heard the laboring of the auger. The lights dimmed as mauling blades did their work. He punched the stop button only ten seconds later with a sob. A red button. As red as the scent that churned the air. He shouted again, this time into ensuing silence.
Thekan stood before him and gently cupped his chin. “Done.”
Run, fucking run. Axel slipped away, his wounded leg screaming. The segments of floor grinder grates were on his left, heavy steel, tough e
nough to withstand the weight of large farm trucks. When one of them swung outward from its resting place and blocked Axel’s path like a section of fence, he fell back hard on his ass with a startled cry. The grate leaned over him as if with evaluation and then it dropped. He scrambled backward, too slow, and heavy steel slammed down on his already wounded leg. He heard the bone snap.
Axel screamed again. Thekan stood over him. “You’re going to be the answer to many questions in this town,” he said and nudged the sole of Axel’s free foot. “Welcomed and wanted. Oh so wanted.”
A nostalgic tightness came across Axel’s toes. New shoes. Just like in grade school. A wallet swelled in his back pocket, and the name Kirkpatrick Evert ignited in his brain with its coming. New shoes, new wallet and his fresh sweaty hand prints on the grinder controls. The equation came together quickly in his head.
“You fuck,” he shouted through gritted teeth. “You set me up, you stinking rotten fuck.”
“Rest now.” Thekan’s tone was soothing. He rubbed his fingers together as if sifting herbs into a pot. “Still and quiet and done.”
A lulling primo-weed tranquility crashed over Axel. He barely noticed the pair of spent doobies and how they dropped near him like insects perishing around a porch light. He wanted to pull the wallet out and fling it away, and work out of the stiff pointy shoes, but it suddenly didn’t matter. Nothing mattered because every last particle of him was being swallowed by long, luxurious ribbons of descending sleep. Deep sleep. Still and quiet.
PART FIVE:
DANGEROUS WATERS
CHAPTER ONE
HARLEY PICKED UP MICK at seven am. The morning was bright despite gray clouds stacked on the horizon like battleground sandbags. They traded looks of anticipation as they drove across town.
“Do you trust this?” Harley asked. “Doing the final setup like this? We’ll be in Thekan’s territory. Alone.”
“It’s too close to the actual event to cause a stir,” Mick said. “The most we’ll get out of him today is a speech to the people of Knoll during the proceedings. A nice as pie schmooze.”
“And I wonder what it is he’s going to say. ‘Hey, the scourge is just around the corner. Here’s a gun. Avoid the rush.’”
Harley pulled onto the shoulder of Tier Street. Ahead of them, the Mellar Borth house crouched like a huge beast humiliated by the patriotic bunting pinned to its hide. “Let’s wire us up some lights.”
As they unloaded the truck, a curtain twitched in an upstairs window of the house and Mick did all he could to ignore it, focused on toting the interior lamps and the cables meant to run through the heavy metal backs of the voting booths. When he reached the carrels he stopped, his muscles tightening, his heart picking up in pace.
Harley came up behind him. “What we need is to put big old stickers on these three voting stations telling folks to Vote Mellar’s In. What do you think?”
“I have a better idea,” he said as he set his cargo in the grass. “Do you see what I see?”
Harley’s face grew quiet and calculating. Five plastic wrapped packets of ballots were stacked in the carrel in front of them. Next to the packets were slotted wooden ballot boxes, one for each carrel.
Mick rapped his knuckles on the closest box. “Remind you of anything?”
“If we cut a slot in the LINR box we have it’d be a dead ringer,” Harley said. “But a fourth ballot box won’t do us any good.”
Mick shifted some cables around for effect, in case they were being watched. “It will if we stuff it with Mellar’s In votes and then swap it for one of the others. What do you think our voter turnout will be like today?”
“Three hundred,” Harley said and tinkered with one of the light fixtures. “Give or take.”
“And we’ve got five hundred blank ballots. Thank God for minimum orders at the print shop, is all I can say.” Mick slipped one of the packs of paper off the stack and pressed it tight to his stomach. “I’m going to go back to the truck and call Will. And Nancy Berns, too. I think she’ll want to help us pull this off.”
“Take all the time you need. I got this. I’ll place a box at each station and open up the stacks of ballots. Harder to notice what’s missing if they’re unwrapped.”
“That’s why you’re still the boss,” Mick said and headed toward the truck.
CHAPTER TWO
An hour later Mick hurried across the bar parking lot with Judy right behind. It was going on nine o’clock, which meant the vote would commence in two hours.
“There’s Will,” Judy said and pointed to the front door of the bar.
Will held the entrance like a hotel doorman and followed them inside. “Gang’s all here,” he said.
Nancy Berns stood just inside the door and greeted them with a cautious nod. Harley got up from one of the side tables. Beth Ann remained seated, her eyes downcast, her migraine’s grip as deep as ever. Harley gave Judy an earnest look. “She’s not very comfortable with this ballot-stuffing idea,” he said. “Thinks it’s some kind of sin. Which I suppose it is. But she wanted to come, headache and all, bless her.”
“I’ll sit with her. Nancy, let’s get started on marking up those ballots.”
“Just steer me toward the pencils,” Nancy said.
Harley brought out their ersatz ballot box. The LINR was neatly sanded away and the lid sported a freshly cut slit. “There she is. And I got to tell you, working on this thing felt weird, like I was sending Thekan a signal somehow. We don’t need him barging in here about now, doing whatever weird shit he’s got up his sleeves.”
Will spoke up. “I don’t think he’s able to barge in. Not here, anyway.” He worked at something he kept palmed in his right hand, and it made a faint clicking sound. “You remember how yesterday, at the mercantile, Thekan was in the parking lot, but pretty far away from the building? Weirdly far?” They nodded. “Last night I saw him drive by here, and he swerved as if he needed to put as much distance as he could between himself and my bar. Like he didn’t dare come closer. Or couldn’t.”
“Makes sense, in a way,” Mick said. “Otherwise, if there’s something at the mercantile that he doesn’t like, or feels threatened by, why not take care of it himself?”
“Or get somebody else to do the job,” Harley said. “I know he had me close to walking away against my will yesterday.”
Will raised his eyebrows. “Something about certain places jams his frequencies.”
“Good air, maybe,” Mick said and glanced across to where the women were grimly marking ballots the way they might write out tallies of some dreaded disease. His gaze lingered on Beth Ann, just for a second, and then skipped away. “Or what’s left of it.”
“What we should do is go down to that tunnel right now,” Harley said. “Make sure the double barrel is there in the first place. The way we’re doing it seems ass-backwards, don’t you think?”
“We wait for Cy,” Mick said firmly. “We need him.”
“You should stay out of there,” Beth Ann spoke up. Her crimson eye twitched behind its drooping lid. “Harley told me about it. I think it’s dangerous. Bereft and dangerous.”
An idea circling in Mick’s head finally found correlation. “You may be right,” he said and stepped over to take her hands. “And I want you to think about something. When this church was deconsecrated, a big part of the tunnel’s importance was taken away. Up until then it supplied an essence to the double barrel pump or whatever else is waiting for us in there. Good air. We learned about it yesterday. I think the essence is weak now, nearly gone, and it needs to be strengthened.”
Beth Ann’s face was a mix of trust and terror. “What does that have to do with me?”
“We don’t have a minister of our own, and I doubt we could pull one in to help. But your fervency lately, your passion, makes you the next best thing. You could bless the tunnel for us. Not go in, just do it from the entrance downstairs.”
“Oh, Mick, I don’t know,” she said with a helpless smi
le.
“We need this, Beth Ann. Think about it. Please. But not for too long.”
“I will,” she said and clutched her cross necklace. “A few minutes. Just give me a few minutes.”
Mick took his place next to Harley. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Harley shrugged. “It makes sense, but I don’t see her going for it.”
“Maybe Cy can officiate if we need him to,” Will threw in. “He’s a sort of authority figure, right?” He gave the object in his hand another click.
“What is that thing?” Mick asked him.
Will showed him a metal disc about the size of a stopwatch. Its face was a row of tiny windows, each with a single digit number inside. A plastic tab poked out of the side. “It’s a tally keeper. Push the button and the number goes up by one.” He clicked it to show them. “I use it to track drink tabs when somebody has a party at the bar. I call it my clicker. I thought it would come in handy today.”
“It will.” Mick patted his shoulder. “If you stand watch over a single ballot box, and can tell us when a hundred votes have dropped in, we can make our swap.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Harley made a half-smile. “Damned if we don’t make a fine team of cheaters, the three of us.”
“These are done,” Nancy said from behind them. She held out the stack of ballots, all marked in favor of Mellar’s In. “You boys can fold them and stuff them in.”
Judy piped up from where she sat next to Beth Ann. “And fold them in odd ways so they’re all different from one another.”
“In fact,” Beth Ann added, “don’t fold some at all. We want this to look good.”
“The six of us,” Harley corrected as he parceled out the ballots. “The whole cheating team of six. Now let’s go, a couple at a time, and make this happen.”
