Riders in the Sky - [Millennium Quartet 04]

by Charles L. Grant

  The crackling sound of gunfire.

  Someone screaming; someone singing.

  A quick desperate look—

  Reed and Cora clubbing white horse and Rider, Moonbow and Starshine dodging the hooves of the green Rider’s horse, Beatrice swinging her club, and it’s all gone again as—

  Casey winces at the fire-pain he feels growing in his knee, sees the great black upon him and swings wildly, desperately, catching it across the chest with the flat of his makeshift club. The black stumbles and nearly throws the Rider, rear legs slipping, spreading, casting fire, casting sparks, until it settles and prances in agitated place, and the Rider looks at him, and at the sky, leans over, and says, “Too late,” and smiles and rides away.

  Here.

  And gone.

  Casey starts to run; it’s the only thing he can think to do. Tossing the club aside, he prays for speed and sprints. Watching the Rider, watching the horse, slow and arrogant in their leaving. Tail snapping, mane bouncing, steam and sparks, flat green eyes.

  When the Rider turns and sees him, he lifts his head and laughs, turns away and lifts his hat, a scornful mocking good-bye.

  Casey runs; it’s the only thing he can do.

  And when the wave curls out of the darkness, the great black shies and turns aside, turns in a nervous circle while the water crashes on the road, turns spray to rain, and shakes the roadway.

  Casey runs, and reaches out, grabs the Rider’s leg and, startled, the Rider kicks out and kicks him aside. Glares and snaps, and puts his spurs to the great black’s sides.

  The horse leaps and gallops.

  Casey leaps and snares the stirrup, runs helplessly a few feet before he reaches up and grabs the Rider’s waist. And as soon as he realizes he won’t be able to drag him off, he uses the horseman as counterweight, and swings up behind him on the saddle.

  The Rider laughs, and gallops on.

  scarlet fire

  Casey looks up.

  emerald sparks

  The second wave is high, much higher than the first, and he thinks, I have to jump, until the Rider laughs again, and Casey wraps both arms around him, checks the wave, and holds him close until it falls.

  * * * *

  8

  Beatrice on the ground, blood in her eye, right arm broken, sees the wave and the Rider and Casey on the great black’s back.

  “No,” she says softly, and, “No,” again when the road is clear, the water ebbs ... and Casey’s gone.

  For what? she thinks as she struggles to her hands and knees, cries out and holds her injured arm against her chest; dear Lord, for what?

  “You okay, Lady Beatrice?” Moonbow asks as she kneels beside her. “Hey, you’re hurt. Momma, she’s hurt, Lady Beatrice’s hurt real bad.”

  Beatrice brushes away, the offer of a helping hand. Her head’s too heavy and she lets it hang; her arm throbs and stabs, her legs can barely hold her.

  She feels Moonbow poking at her good wrist, can’t slap the hand away without falling on her face, and leans back, sits back, lifts her head to the wind and rain, and allows the child to take her hand.

  And then she knows.

  She looks, and Moonbow nods. And grins. And says, “I think we won.”

  Beatrice smiles, weak and pained, but when Moonbow leaves to fetch her mother, she sags, and says, “For what?”

  “For him,” Lisse tells her, kneeling down, taking her hand.

  Beatrice shakes her head, and Lisse smiles and holds out a fist, gestures until Beatrice turns her hand around. Then Lisse covers the hand with hers, and when she pulls it away, Casey’s small cross and chain lies in Beatrice’s palm.

  “Oh, dear,” is all she can say, and gasps a little pain when Lisse helps her to her feet.

  “You know,” she says, “this is the time when the sun’s supposed to shine. Battle over, victory ours. I want the sun, Miss Montgomery. I’m sick of all this rain, I truly want the sun.”

  Lisse doesn’t answer, and after a moment she knows why.

  The fire has died down, but it hasn’t died, and in the light of its flames she can see Reed sitting in the parking lot, Cora’s head in his lap as she squirms and twists, lifts a leg, and drops it; she can see John Bannock lying facedown on the road across the way, a toy gun lying beside him; she can see the way Lisse limps away, a hand pressed against her hip, that lovely auburn hair dark and hanging in the rain; she can see Jude and the children huddled in the store’s doorway; and in the middle of the road, near the fall of pale white light, a long and old white Continental, its tires flat, no ornament at all.

  Dear God, she thinks; dear Lord.

  Thunder, and white lightning.

  She can’t stand; she starts to fall.

  An arm slips around her waist to catch her, and a deep voice says, “It’s Casper. My middle name is Casper.”

  * * * *

  EPILOGUE

  * * * *

  1

  M

  oonbow loves living at the beach. It’s only been a few weeks, but she knows she’s never going to leave here; this is her home now, and she’ll clobber anybody who tries to take it away.

  Their house is the one that Reverend Chisholm used to live in, and Momma makes it more like a real home every day. New furniture, new beds, new everything in the kitchen; pictures on the wall, carpets on the floor. When spring comes they’re going to paint it, and they’re going to take down that awful hedge with all those awful stabbing thorns.

  She sits on the porch now, in a rocking chair she’s claimed just for herself, wrapped in a warm coat, swinging her legs, watching the road.

  Starshine paces up and down the shoulder, too nervous to sit.

  They’re waiting for Momma.

  That morning, Momma promised them a final Christmas present, even though Christmas has already gone. But first, she told them, she had to go into town and get a few things for dinner. Laughing at the protests. Playfully swatting their behinds when they got too close.

  Moonbow can hardly stand it.

  But she won’t give Star the satisfaction of doing some pacing too.

  “Hey,” her sister calls, and waves, and Moonbow is up and off the porch before she remembers why she stayed there, and the two of them do the pacing, and stare down the road.

  “You see the postcard from John?” Star asks, picking up a pebble and tossing it into the yard.

  “Yeah. Where’s Alaska?”

  “You know, dope. Up by the North Pole.”

  “But it’s cold up there all the time.”

  “Bow, come on, use your head, I think that’s the point.”

  Moonbow thinks about it and shrugs. If Mr. Bannock wants to freeze all year round, that’s his problem. It must be hard moving through all that snow in a wheelchair, and she hopes he’s okay. Lisse is with him, but still... that’s a long way to go just to get away from all the heat.

  They haven’t heard from Reed at all, not since Reverend Baylor buried Cora behind the church.

  There were a lot of funerals for a really long time. She’s glad they’re all over. They really depressed her, even when Momma took them to funerals for people they didn’t know.

  “They were friends of Casey’s,” she’d say, “and we owe them that much.”

  They pace and wait, pace and wait.

  “Star?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You think Reverend Chisholm’s ever coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I, uh, kind of miss him.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Do you think he’s still with Lady—I mean, Beatrice?”

  Star grins at her. “What do you think?”

  She grins back. “Okay, that was a silly question.”

  Pace and wait, pace and wait.

  Actually, Moonbow thinks, it hasn’t been all bad since that night. There’s the house, and they went to a wedding for that lady, Ronnie, and her boyfriend they found nearly frozen to death on the Hook. And they were
there when the sheriff found that drunk guy sitting in a tree, too scared to climb down and yelling about birds trying to peck him to death, and it turned out to be this monster parrot named Pegleg, who’d gotten out of his cage when the tidal wave or whatever came through Camoret. And John learned that he might not be paralyzed all his life. And the school was okay. And Momma got a job working for that lady, Ronnie, putting some newspaper thing back together.

  So it wasn’t all bad.

  She stops and looks down the road.

  Not yet, anyway; not yet.

  ‘‘Come on, Momma,” she whispers. “Come on, hurry up.”

  And suddenly, there it is, there’s the car, and Star starts jumping in place, not acting like a teenager at all, and Moonbow giggles at her, and before she knows it they’re trying to pinch each other’s arms, and Momma’s out of the car, her hands on her hips. Staring at them until they stop.

  “Sorry, Momma,” Starshine says.

  “Sorry,” Moonbow mutters.

  Then they look at each other, and laugh, and run up to their mother and block her way to the house.

  “Girls,” Jude says sternly, a bag of groceries cradled in one arm.

  “Now, Momma,” Starshine insists. “We can’t wait one more second. You promised, so do it now.”

  The promise had been made while they’d waited for the boats to take them off that island. She had told them then what Reverend Chisholm had said and done, but she wouldn’t show them because she’d been afraid to look herself.

  “Time,” she had said. “I promise you, in time.”

  Starshine tries a nasty frown, then, to hurry things along; Moonbow does, too, but it ends up like a pout.

  Jude moves as if she is going to walk through them, then lowers her head in defeat and puts the bag in the car. She tells them, she swears to them that she hasn’t looked herself. She calls herself a coward; she wants to believe, but she’s a coward. She’s afraid.

  “That’s okay, Momma,” Star says, her eyes turning red. “That’s okay.” Her voice softens. “Come on, Momma, come on.”

  Suddenly, Moonbow doesn’t want to look. She doesn’t cover her eyes, but she doesn’t want to look. Instead she stares intently at the ground while Momma kneels in the road in front of them and takes hold of the bottom of the weighted veil she wears.

  Starshine takes a deep breath.

  Moonbow still can’t look.

  But she knows when the veil is off; she doesn’t know how, she just does.

  Momma sounds like a little girl when finally she says, her voice shaking, “Well?”

  Moonbow counts to ten, to twenty, and slowly lifts her head. Looks at her mother, looks at her sister, whose hands cover her gaping mouth.

  “Well?” Jude asks again, sounding terribly afraid.

  And Moonbow says solemnly, “I told you she was an angel.”

  * * * *

  2

  On the slope of a gentle hill in eastern Tennessee there are trees, and soft light, and a small parade of graves.

  Casey kneels by one and brushes leaves and dirt away, leans back on his heels and says, “Hello, Momma, how’re you doing? I’ve brought someone to meet you.”

  A hand on his shoulder he covers with his own;

  “She’s kind of strange, Momma, and she talks a little funny, but you know, I think you two would have gotten along real well.” He bows his head, bites his cheek; this isn’t turning out the way he wanted. “I... I probably won’t be back for a while. We, that is, Bea and I, we have some places we have to visit. Her idea, not mine.”

  The hand boxes his ear lightly, and he ducks his head and grins. And sobers.

  “There’s still fighting, Momma, and there’s still people getting sick, and being hungry. You know what that means, and Bea says we have to go to those places. Find the ones who are special, and... help them.”

  He lifts the cross that hangs on his breast, kisses it, touches a finger to it, and puts the finger on the headstone and makes the sign of the cross.

  “Good-bye, Momma. I love you.”

  And walks away, doesn’t look back, looks instead over the valley that swirls and grows in mist.

  At the middle of the slope he stops, and he stands there for a long time, knowing it’s much too soon, but listens for the birds anyway, listens for the songs he won’t hear for much too long.

  A giant of a man, dressed in black, with a white collar.

  “Beatrice,” he says, and clears his throat and tries again. “Beatrice, you made me a promise. I want you to keep it before we go.”

  At his side she takes his hand in both of hers and lifts it to her lips. A light kiss. A feather kiss. A gentle tugging until he looks down. He doesn’t smile until she does, and when he does, she laughs.

  “You’re just not going to tell me, are you?” he says, deepening his voice, feigning menace, but resigned all the same. When she gives him a teasing smile, a teasing shrug, he gives her in return a massive keening sigh—okay, I surrender, but be warned, not for long. He’ll find out eventually, he knows he will; nevertheless, as he hugs her and holds her and enjoys the valley one last time, he can’t help a whisper:

  “Who are you?”

  One last time.