The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  “That may be,” she said, “but it was not my fault and is not my responsibility. You were Walter’s guests, not mine. I didn’t invite you here.”

  “Hell of a way to run a tavern,” Arlen said. “Real sense of hospitality.”

  Paul shifted uneasily, touched Arlen’s arm, and said, “It isn’t any of her doing. Let’s just find our own way.”

  Arlen turned and waved his arm at the wide window facing the beach, where rain drummed off the sea and wisps of pale fog hung over the water.

  “Find our own way through that? It’s many miles of walking, Paul. She’s got a truck. She could—”

  “She could do a lot of things,” Rebecca Cady said, pulling her shoulders back and tightening one slender hand back around the hammer, “but she won’t. Your bags are behind the bar. Take them and go.”

  She and Arlen stood and stared at each other with naked dislike, but she kept her head high and those blue eyes firm on his. Hell with it, he thought, no use arguing with the likes of her. We’ll have ourselves a wet walk, but it’ll take us away from here, and that’s the only thing I want right now. That, and a drink.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let it never be said that you’re lacking in generosity, Miss Cady.”

  She didn’t answer, and he walked around the bar to find their bags. They were stacked back by the swinging door that led into the tiny kitchen. Arlen sorted out his and saw immediately that the contents had been disrupted.

  “Sheriff and his deputy did that,” she said.

  “They never touched our belongings. Didn’t set a foot inside the door.”

  “They came back. After you were in the jail, they came back. To talk to me.” She gave him a long look, enough pause to let him imagine what Tolliver might have been like with her, and then said, “They tore through all your things and left them on my floor. I put them back as well as I could.”

  “Thank you,” Paul said, joining Arlen behind the bar. Arlen just grunted, fingers searching through his shirts and under his jacket for the canteen. It was there. He withdrew it, unscrewed the cap, and tilted it.

  There was no familiar rustle of paper. He shook it, feeling a cold rope tighten around his throat, and then turned it all the way upside down and reached inside with his index finger, slid it in all directions.

  Nothing.

  He stood there with the canteen in his hand as Paul shuffled around beside him. At length the boy went still, too, and then spoke in a soft voice.

  “Arlen… my money’s gone. All I had.”

  “Yes.”

  Paul looked up. “You, too? They took—”

  “Yes,” he said, and turned to look back at Rebecca Cady. “Someone did. Someone stole every dime we had.”

  She held her palms up. “I didn’t touch your money.”

  “Did you see them steal it?”

  “No.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “The sheriff talked to me while the deputy went through your things.”

  “Easy story for you to tell,” Arlen said.

  She smiled. It was the first time he’d ever seen her smile, and even though this one was anything but an expression of pleasure, it stung him. She was something beyond beautiful.

  “You want to see how much money I have,” she said, “you’re more than welcome to search the place.”

  Arlen didn’t answer. He dropped the canteen down on top of his bag and leaned on the bar and stared out the windows into the building storm. He’d been worried enough about getting to a train station. Now they had no means of obtaining tickets once they got there. Outside the rain fell relentlessly and the wind had already begun to rise. It was miles just to get back to High Town, and what waited there for them? A sheriff who’d shown little interest in legality the first time he’d locked them up.

  Almost four hundred dollars, he thought. Nearly two years of saving, with no goal in mind but to keep this dark damned world at bay. Gone, gone, gone.

  “Arlen,” Paul said. “What are we going to do?”

  The row of liquor bottles stood before him, glittering. He found a bottle of whiskey and took it off the shelf and located a glass and poured.

  Paul said, “Arlen?”

  He took a long drink, closing his eyes when he felt the wet heat spread through his chest.

  “We’ll take advantage of Miss Cady’s hospitality.”

  Rebecca Cady didn’t say a word.

  “What do you mean?” Paul said.

  “We’ll wait here for the rain to break. Then we’ll start walking.”

  “Could be a long wait.”

  “Yes,” Arlen said, topping the glass off. “It could.”

  11

  IT WAS AN AFTERNOON of pouring—for the rain, and Arlen. He sat at a table beside the cold, empty fireplace and drank whiskey and didn’t speak. After a few glasses the gentle burn turned to a pleasant, protective fog, and he put his feet up on the table and lifted his glass to the storm in a toast. Come on in, you big bitch. Let’s see what you can do. No worse than what’s already been done to me. Think I’m scared of some wind and rain? Then you weren’t in the Wood, friend. You weren’t there when the gas went off and the men too slow with their masks ended up choking on their own insides, spitting and sneezing out pieces of pink and gray while I watched it all with a gun in my hands. No, I’m not scared of some wind and rain.

  Paul had wandered off somewhere. He and Rebecca Cady both. Hell with her. Arlen still wasn’t certain she hadn’t stolen the money herself, but she damn sure wouldn’t be telling him to leave until this storm was past. He wasn’t about to go walking down that dirt road in the rain without so much as a nickel in his pocket, turned into just another beggar in a country full of them, no better off than the migrant pickers or hoboes in search of a breadline.

  Three hundred sixty-seven dollars. Three hundred sixty-seven…

  It was his own fault. Hid his money in a canteen, like a child saving coins for the candy store. Back at Flagg Mountain, though, it had been safe enough. Safer than the banks, where your only question was what would happen first: Would the bank fail or get robbed? Either way, you lost. His canteen had looked more secure.

  In a small room on the other side of the bar, something shook and rattled. The generator, probably. He’d not paused to think about it until now, but the place was lit with electric lights, there’d been an icebox in the kitchen behind the bar, and a fan hummed and pushed warm air around the room. There were no electric lines out here, so the Cypress House had to have one of those kerosene generators. They cost some dollars, though, and this place didn’t seem to be thriving. So where’d the cash come from?

  He sat with his head against the stone that surrounded the fireplace and closed his eyes, trying to focus on the feeling of the liquor in his belly. Outside, the wind had pulled something loose and was banging it against the house. An incessant hammering. He scowled and snapped his eyes open, wishing Paul were here so he could tell him to find the source of that damn noise and make it stop. That was when he saw that his view of the ocean had been cut in half and understood the hammering sound was truly hammering. Paul was out there with Rebecca Cady, out in the rain, nailing sheets of plywood over the windows. She was holding the boards in place while he drove the nails, and even under the overhang of the porch the rain had found her and drenched her. That dark blond hair hung in wet tangles along her neck and shoulders, and the pale blue dress she wore was pressed tight to her body, her breasts pushing back against the wet fabric. Arlen stared at her for a moment and felt a stirring, then frowned and looked away and took another sip of the whiskey.

  Beautiful, yes. The sort of gorgeous that haunted men, chased them over oceans and never left their minds, not even when they wanted a respite. But was she trustworthy? No. Arlen was sure of that. Whatever had led her out here was nothing honest. Whatever paid for the electric generator and the icebox and the liquor behind the bar, whatever brought someone like Walt Sorenson on a long drive to see
her, it wasn’t on the level.

  Shadows deepened around the room, all but the last window on the ocean side boarded up now. Arlen cast one more glance that way, and when he did he saw Rebecca Cady staring in at him as water dripped out of her hair and ran along her cheekbones, tracing her jaw. She looked him full in the eyes.

  Go out there and help.

  The thought flicked through his mind, and he shook it off. Be damned if he’d help this woman who’d shown no inclination to help them, who may well have stolen from them, who’d stood in silence as the sheriff put them in handcuffs. Let her work in the rain. He’d stay inside with the whiskey.

  By late afternoon Arlen’s head was beginning to pound, that pleasant fog turning into something with teeth, and he went in search of a privy. He’d seen no outhouse; seemed this place had indoor plumbing to complement its lights.

  He found the bathroom upstairs, full of white tile and a ceramic toilet and a large claw-foot tub. He’d relieved himself and turned to the sink before he caught a glimpse in the mirror and stopped short.

  His beard, always swift-growing, had filled in his face with nearly three days of shadow, the same dark brown shade of his hair and eyes, covering weathered skin turned brown by the sun and wind.

  You look just like him. Look just like the crazy old bastard.

  He braced his hands on the sink and leaned close to the mirror, fascinated by the way a living man’s face could so resemble a dead man’s. He hardly trusted his own eyes in the mirror; were they Arlen Wagner’s or Isaac Wagner’s?

  The sight of the undertaker’s shop came back to him then, the coffins lining the wall, the sound of his father’s chisel working the wood, shaping final homes. And his voice… his conversations. With them. With the dead.

  Arlen shook his head, ran water over his hands and splashed it onto his face, blinking it out of his eyes. He kept his head turned away from the mirror and went downstairs in search of his razor.

  Yes, it was time to shave.

  He was drunk by the time they finished working. Sitting back by the fireplace, talking to himself with his head down on the table. Eventually Paul came over and told Arlen he needed to lie down.

  “Go on, then,” Arlen said, that or something close to it, but evidently the boy had been referring to him, because he got his hands under Arlen’s arms and heaved him to his feet. Arlen didn’t like that, and he tried to shove him away and prove that he could stand on his own two, thank you very much. When he did it, though, he knocked the ladder-back chair over and tripped on its legs, would’ve sprawled right into the fireplace if Paul hadn’t caught him. He stopped struggling then, let the boy wrestle him upright and leaned his weight onto the kid’s side as they moved across the room. Rebecca Cady stood behind the bar in front of the electric fan, drying her hair and dress, and she watched Arlen with knowing eyes. He grinned at her, a wide, mocking smile. It earned no response.

  The stairs were difficult, but Arlen had traversed stairs on unsteady legs before, and this time he had Paul to help. At the top, he stopped and gripped the railing because the building had taken to tilting and swirling around him, and he thought it prudent to hold off on any further steps. Paul kept pushing him ahead, though, down the hallway and past the bathroom, and then he opened one of the closed doors and guided Arlen into a hot, dusty room with a bed. It was stifling, and Arlen growled at the boy to open the window, let some air in.

  “It’s boarded up. They’re all boarded up.”

  That was foolishness; why in the hell would anybody put boards over a window in a place so hellish hot as this? Arlen was ready to raise the question when the boy stepped out from under him and let him tumble down onto the bed, and it was soft, so soft. He forgot his planned remark and pulled himself higher on the bed, using his elbows to move, got his boots kicked off.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  “Not yet,” Paul said.

  “No, I’ll rest, but then… we’re leaving, Paul. Got to leave. Got to.”

  Paul was standing in the doorway, staring at him with a frown. “Those men from the train… they died in the storm, didn’t they, Arlen?”

  Arlen looked into the kid’s eyes and for a moment felt as if he’d stared his way into some small circle of sobriety. The men from the train. Wallace O’Connell and the rest who’d climbed back on board with laughter on their lips… yes, they were dead.

  “You already asked me that,” Arlen mumbled.

  “I know it. And you said you didn’t think they were dead, but honestly you’re sure of it. That night at the station, you were right.”

  The kid had begun to shift in front of Arlen’s eyes, tilting first one way and then the other, and there were three or four versions of him now, each one staring with intense eyes.

  “How did you?” Paul said. “How in the hell did you know?”

  Arlen flopped his head back down on the bed and squeezed his eyes shut. “Go away. Lemme sleep.”

  Paul didn’t say anything. There was no sound from the doorway, and after enough time had passed Arlen was sure he’d left, but then he heard a footstep followed by the thud of the door swinging shut and knew the kid had been standing there the whole time, staring at him.

  How in the hell did you know?

  He just knew, damn it. Wasn’t a thing could be said to explain it; Arlen Wagner saw the dead, knew when the hour tolled and the lives of men both friend and stranger would come to a close.

  They didn’t have to die, he thought. The selfish bastards. All I can do is give a word of warning. The boy believed me simply because he is a boy. Grown men aren’t allowed to believe such tales, even when they must. Even when it’s all that can save them, they won’t allow themselves to believe.

  He thought of Walt Sorenson leaning close to him at the roadhouse the night they’d met, that story of the fortune-teller who’d seen death in the rain and told him to be aware of travelers in need.

  He might have believed, Arlen thought. He was one of the few who might have believed, and I didn’t see a damn thing before he died. Couldn’t warn him.

  Why couldn’t he? The man had died; Arlen had watched his body burn, had seen his flesh melt from his bones. Why hadn’t Arlen been offered any warning? Why hadn’t he looked into Sorenson’s eyes and seen smoke?

  It’s this place, he thought. There’s something wrong with this place. Death hides here, even from me.

  The Cypress House, it was called. The Cypress House. That brought back memories, too. Not of a highway tavern, though. No, no. The cypress houses of Arlen’s youth had been quite different than that. They’d been houses of

  death

  another sort entirely. The last Pope was in one now. Every Pope who’d passed on was, as far as Arlen knew. Always would be. Cypress wood was required in the sacred burial rites of many faiths in many lands. The branches of the trees themselves were symbols of

  death

  mourning. Arlen’s father had carved them many times. The trees were not an uncommon symbol among German gravestones. The leaves stayed evergreen even after the tree had been felled, and this was believed to be a sign of spiritual immortality, a representation of the insignificance of the body’s passing. It went back to the Romans or the Greeks or some such, went back countless years, this idea of the cypress as an emblem of

  death

  morbid significance. What a terrible name for an inn. The Cypress House. He was edging toward sleep in a cypress house. He was edging toward—

  death a coffin sleep in a cypress house death you are edging toward death

  “We’re leaving soon as we can,” Arlen said, speaking to no one. “Soon as we can, we’re going home.” Then he brought his hands up and dropped them over his face, because keeping his eyes shut in this room with the boarded-up windows still didn’t offer enough darkness.

  12

  HIS SLEEP WAS RESTLESS and oppressive, the tossing-and-turning, half-conscious slumber of a drunk. Dreams blurred with reality, and coherent though
ts spun a tangled dance with dark visions and memories. Men with skeletal faces leered at him, then vanished and turned back into the dark walls of the room before another blink conjured up a rattlesnake coiled on a slab of West Virginia stone and another brought forth a slick of burgundy liquid on soil in France, mustard gas after it had settled to earth.

  He heard Paul’s voice and Rebecca Cady’s and tried to listen to them, but they became his father’s voice and then Edwin Main’s, the man who’d come to kill his father many years ago. Life was rushing past, stacking days upon days, but still some things wouldn’t stay buried. Not Isaac’s face, not his voice.

  You’re all I have in this world, son, that death can’t take. This world isn’t anything but a sojourn, to be sure, but death removes every trace unless you’ve taken pains to leave one behind. You’re my trace, Arlen.

  Isaac Wagner’s bearded face split into a smile of crooked teeth, and he started a laugh that ended in a howl. The howl went on and on, a howl of madness, a howl of… wind.

  The wind was roaring now, pushing at the walls of the Cypress House, the building shuddering in its grasp. Arlen tried to open his eyes, but the lids slid down again. He had to get on his feet, had to get out of here. There was something wrong in this place, terribly wrong, and he’d brought Paul Brickhill here and now was responsible for getting him out. They had to get out. It was time to get on his feet, and then they could hike to a train station… but he had no money. Someone had taken his money. His protection from hard times was gone, taken from him so easily when it had been so hard to build.

  A voice whispered again, and he expected Isaac’s and cried out against it, but this voice was disembodied, distant.

  The seawall may not hold… most of the water has been drawn out of Tampa Bay… the storm will be weaker than when it passed through the Keys, but if the seawall fails…

  A radio. They were listening to a radio. Let them listen; listening wouldn’t change a thing. The storm would do what it would do, and they would be here for it. He had nowhere else to go. He was but another soldier in the trenches again, in a place where the trenches were filled with desperate, lost men.