The White Road

by John Connolly

  He didn’t answer for so long I thought that he had simply put the phone down and walked away. Then he spoke.

  “You ever feel like you been shadowed all your life, like there’s always someone there with you, someone you can’t see most of the time, but you know, you just know that they’s there?”

  I thought of my wife and my daughter, of their presence in my life even after they had gone, of shapes and shadows glimpsed in darkness.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “The woman, she’s like that. I been seein’ her all my life, so’s I don’t know if I dream her or not, but she’s there. I know she is, even if there ain’t nobody else sees her. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me no more.”

  I changed the subject.

  “You ever have a run-in with Earl Larousse Jr.?”

  “No, never.”

  “Landron Mobley?”

  “I heard he was looking for me, but he didn’t find me.”

  “You know why he was looking for you?”

  “To kick the shit out of me. Why you think Earl Jr.’s dog be lookin’ for me?”

  “Mobley worked for Larousse?”

  “He didn’t work for him, but when they needed they dirty work done for them they went to Mobley. Mobley had friends too, people worse than him.”

  “Like?”

  I heard him swallow.

  “Like that guy on TV,” he said. “The Klan guy. Bowen.”

  That night, far to the north, the preacher Faulkner lay awake in his cell, his hands clasped behind his head, and listened to the night sounds of the prison: the snores, the cries from troubled sleepers, the footsteps of the guards, the sobbing. It no longer kept him awake as it had once done. He had quickly learned how to ignore it, reducing it, at worst, to the level of background noise. He could now sleep at will, but this night his thoughts were elsewhere, as they had been since the release of the man named Cyrus Nairn. And so he lay unmoving on his bunk, and waited.

  “Get them off me! Get them off me!”

  The prison guard Dwight Anson awoke in his bed, kicking and wrenching at the sheets, the pillow beneath his head soaked with sweat. He leaped from the bed and brushed at his bare skin, trying to remove the creatures that he felt crawling across his chest. Beside him, his wife, Aileen, reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.

  “Jeez, Dwight, you’re dreaming again,” she said. “It’s just a dream.”

  Anson swallowed hard and tried to slow down the beating of his heart, but he still found himself shuddering and brushing aimlessly at his hair and arms.

  It was the same dream, for the second night running: a dream of spiders crawling across his skin, biting him while he lay constrained in a filthy bathtub in the center of a forest. As the spiders bit him his skin began to rot, the flesh falling from his body in small clumps that left gray hollows in their wake. And all the time he was being watched from the shadows by a strange, emaciated man with red hair and thin, white fingers. The man was dead, though: Anson could see his ruined skull illuminated by the moonlight, could pick out the blood on his face. Still, his eyes were alive with pleasure as he watched his pets feeding on the trapped man.

  Anson placed his hands on his hips and shook his head.

  “Come back to bed, Dwight,” said his wife, but he didn’t move, and after a few seconds had elapsed, the disappointment showed in her eyes and she turned over and pretended to go back to sleep. Anson almost reached over to touch her, then decided against it. He didn’t want to touch her. The girl he wanted to touch was missing.

  Marie Blair had disappeared on the way home from her job at the Dairy Queen the night before, and had not been seen or heard from since. For a time, Anson half expected the police to come looking for him. Nobody knew about his thing with Marie, or nobody was supposed to know, but there was always the possibility that she had shot off her mouth to one of her dumb-ass friends and that, when the police came calling, they might have mentioned his name. But so far there had been nothing. Anson’s wife had sensed his unease and knew that there was something bothering him, but she hadn’t brought it up and that suited him fine. Still, he was worried for the girl. He wanted her back, as much for his own selfish reasons as for her own sake.

  Anson left his unmoving wife and headed down the stairs to the kitchen. It was only when he opened the door of the refrigerator and reached for the milk that he felt the blast of cool air at his back and heard, almost simultaneously, the banging of the screen door against the frame.

  The kitchen door was wide open. He supposed that the wind could have blown it open, but he didn’t think it was likely. Aileen had come to bed after him, and she usually made sure that all the doors were locked. It wasn’t like her to forget. He wondered too why they had not heard it banging before now, for even the slightest noise in the house was normally enough to wake him from his sleep. Carefully, he laid down the carton of milk and listened, but he could hear no sound in the house. From out in the yard came the whispering of the wind in the trees, and the sound of distant cars.

  Anson kept a Smith amp; Wesson 60 in his night table. He briefly considered heading back upstairs to retrieve it before deciding against it. Instead, he took the carving knife from its block and padded to the door. He glanced first right, then left, to make sure there was nobody waiting for him outside, then pushed it open. He stood on the porch and looked out on the empty yard. Ahead of him was an expanse of tidy lawn with trees planted at its verge, shielding the house from the road beyond. The moon shone behind him, sending the clean lines of the house racing ahead of him.

  Anson stepped out onto the grass.

  A figure detached itself from where it had lain beneath the porch steps, the sound of its approach masked by the wind, its shape devoured by the black mass of the house’s shade. Anson was not even aware of its presence until something gripped his arm and he felt a pressure across his throat, followed by a surge of pain as he watched the blood shoot up into the night. The knife fell from his grip and he turned, his left hand pressed uselessly against the wound in his neck. His legs weakened and he fell to his knees, the blood coming less freely now as he began to die.

  Anson looked up into the eyes of Cyrus Nairn, and at the ring Nairn was holding in the palm of his hand. It was the garnet ring that Anson had given Marie Blair for her fifteenth birthday. He would have known it anywhere, he thought, even if it hadn’t been circling Marie’s severed forefinger. Then Cyrus Nairn turned away as Anson’s legs began to shake uncontrollably, the moonlight gleaming on the killer’s knife as he made his way to the house, Anson shaking and, at last, dying as Nairn turned his thoughts to the now slumbering Aileen Anson and the place he had prepared for her.

  And in his cell at Thomaston, Faulkner closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  16

  MAGNOLIA CEMETERY LIES at the end of Cunnington Street, east of Meeting. Cunnington Street is a virtual Cemetery Row: here can be found the Old Methodist, the Friendly Union Society, the Brown Fellowship, the Humane and Friendly, the Unity and Friendship. Some are better kept than others but each serves to hold the dead with equal ease; the poor are as well-off as the wealthy, and all make the worms fat.

  The dead lie scattered around Charleston, their remains resting beneath the feet of tourists and revelers. The bodies of slaves are now covered by parking lots and convenience stores, and the junction of Meeting and Water marks the site of the old cemetery where the Carolina pirates were buried after their execution. The place in which they were interred was once the low-water mark in the marsh but the city has expanded since then and the hanged men have long since been forgotten, their bones crushed by the foundations of mansions and the streets that run beside them.

  But in the cemeteries of Cunnington Street the dead are remembered, in however small a way, and the greatest of these cemeteries is Magnolia. Fish jump in the waters of its lake, watched from the rushes by lazy herons and gray white wood storks, and a sign warns of a two-hundred-dollar
fine for feeding the alligators. Flocks of curious geese throng the narrow road to the offices of the Magnolia Cemetery Trust. Evergreens and wax myrtle shade the stones, and laurel oaks dotted with blood-spot lichen hide crying birds.

  The man named Hubert has been coming here for two years. Sometimes, he chooses to sleep among the monuments with rye bread for sustenance and a bottle for comfort. He has learned the ways of the cemetery, the movements of the mourners and the staff. He does not know if his presence is tolerated or merely unnoticed, and he does not care. Hubert keeps to himself and he tries to bother others as little as possible in the hope that his quiet existence may continue undisturbed. There have been one or two scares with gators but nothing worse than that, although the gators were bad enough to be getting along with, if you asked Hubert.

  Hubert once had a job, and a house, and a wife, until Hubert lost his job and then, in quick succession, lost his house and his wife too. For a time he even lost himself, until he came to in a hospital bed with his legs in plaster casts after a truck sideswiped him out on Route 1 somewhere north of Killian. Since then he has tried to be more careful but he will never return to his former life, despite the efforts of the social workers to establish him in a permanent home. Hubert doesn’t want a permanent home because he is wise enough to understand that there is no such thing as permanency. In the end, Hubert is just waiting, and it doesn’t matter where a man waits as long as he knows what he is waiting for. The thing that is coming for Hubert will find him, wherever he is. It will draw him to itself, and wrap him in its cold, dark blanket, and his name will be added to the roll call of paupers and indigents buried in cheap plots by chain-link fences. That much Hubert knows, and of that alone he is certain.

  When the weather grows cold or wet, Hubert walks to the Men’s Shelter of the Charleston Interfaith Crisis Ministry at 573 Meeting, and if there is a bed available, he fishes in the purse he keeps around his neck and hands over three crumpled dollar bills for a night’s lodging. No one is ever turned away empty-handed from the shelter; at the very least they are given a full supper, toiletries if needed, even clothing. The shelter takes messages and passes on mail, although no one has sent mail to Hubert in a very long time.

  It has been many weeks since Hubert last took a bed in the shelter. There have been wet nights since then, nights when the rain soaked him through and left him sneezing for days, but he has not returned to the beds at 573 Meeting, not since the night that he saw the olive-skinned man with the damaged eyes, the strange light that danced before him, and the shape that it assumed.

  He had noticed him for the first time in the showers. Hubert doesn’t look at the other men in the showers as a rule. That is a way of attracting attention and maybe trouble to himself, and Hubert doesn’t want that. Hubert isn’t very tall or very strong and he has lost possessions in the past to men more violent than he. He has learned to stay out of their way and not to meet their eyes, which is why he always looks down in the shower, and why the other man first came to his notice.

  It was his ankles, and the scarring around them. Hubert had never seen anything like it before. It was as if the man’s feet had been severed from his legs and then crudely reattached, leaving the marks of the stitches as a reminder of what had occurred. It was then that Hubert broke his own rule and glanced up at the man beside him, at his stringy muscles, his frizzy hair, and his strange haunted eyes, semibleached of color and obscured by clouds. He was humming something to himself, and Hubert thought that it might have been a hymn or one of those old Negro spirituals. The words were unclear, but Hubert picked up on some of them.

  Walk with me, brother,

  Come walk with me, sister,

  And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

  On the White Road to-

  The man caught Hubert looking at him and fixed him with a stare.

  “You ready to walk, brother?” he asked.

  And Hubert found himself answering, his voice sounding strange to him as it echoed hollowly from the tiles: “Walk where?”

  “On the White Road. Are you ready to walk on the White Road? She’s waiting for you there, brother. She’s watching you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hubert.

  “Sure you do, Hubert. Sure you do.”

  Hubert turned off the shower and stood back, grabbing his towel from the rail. He didn’t say anything more, even when the man began to laugh and called to him: “Hey, brother, you mind your step, now, y’hear? You don’t go stumbling, you don’t go falling. You don’t want to fall down on the White Road, because they folks waiting for you, waiting for you to fall. And when you fall, they going to take you. They going to take you and they going to tear you apart!”

  And as Hubert hurried from the showers, the song began again:

  Walk with me, brother.

  Come walk with me, sister.

  And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

  On the White Road together.

  That night, Hubert was assigned a cot by the rest rooms. Hubert didn’t mind. His bladder played up sometimes, and he often had to get up two or three times a night to take a leak. But it wasn’t his bladder that caused him to awake that night.

  It was the sound of a female voice, crying.

  Hubert knew that couldn’t be right. The Family Shelter was down at 49 Walnut, and that was where the women and children slept. There was no cause for a woman to be in the men’s shelter, but there were men among the homeless whose ways nobody could know and Hubert didn’t want to think of a woman or, worse, a child being hurt by anybody.

  He rose from his bed and followed the noise. It came from the showers, he thought. He recognized the way the voice echoed, recalling the sound of his own voice and the man’s song earlier in the evening. Hubert padded to the entrance and stood there, transfixed. The olive-skinned man was standing before the silent showers, dressed in cotton shorts and an old black T-shirt, his back to the doorway. There was a light shining before him, bathing his face and body in light, although the showers themselves were dark and the fluorescents were off. Hubert found himself moving to catch a better sight of the light source, sliding softly to his right in his bare feet, his eyes straining.

  There was a pillar of light before the man, maybe five feet in height. It shifted, flickering like a candle flame, and it seemed to Hubert that there was a figure behind or within it, cocooned in its glow.

  It was a little blond girl. Her face was contorted in pain, her head shaking from side to side in a blur of movement, faster than was humanly possible, and he could hear the sound of her cries, a steady nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh filled with fear and agony and rage. Her clothes were shredded and she was naked from the waist down, her body torn and marked where she had been dragged along the road beneath the wheels of the car.

  Hubert knew who she was. Oh yes, Hubert knew. Ruby Blanton, that was her name. Pretty little Ruby Blanton, killed when a guy distracted by his pager hit her as she was crossing the street to her house and dragged her sixty feet beneath the wheels of his car. Hubert recalled her head turning at the last moment, the impact of the hood against her body, the final sight of her eyes before she disappeared under his wheels.

  Oh, Hubert knew who she was. He knew for sure.

  The man standing before her made no attempt to reach for her, or to console her. Instead, he hummed the song that Hubert had heard for the first time that day.

  Walk with me, brother.

  Come walk with me, sister.

  And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk-

  He turned, and something shone behind those blighted eyes as they regarded Hubert.

  “You on the White Road now, brother,” he whispered. “You come see what’s been waiting for you on the White Road.”

  He moved aside, and the light advanced toward Hubert, the girl’s head shaking, her eyes closed and the sound pouring from her lips like the steady drip of water.

  Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.

  Her eyes opened and Hubert s
tared into them, his guilt reflected deep within, and he felt himself falling, falling to the clean tiles, falling toward his own reflection.

  Falling, falling, to the White Road.

  They found him there later, blood pooling from the wound he had opened in his head on impact. A doctor was called, and he asked Hubert about dizzy spells and alcohol consumption and suggested that Hubert should maybe take up the offer of a proper home. Hubert thanked him, then collected his things and left the shelter. The olive-skinned man was already gone and Hubert didn’t see him again, although he found himself looking over his shoulder and, for a time, he didn’t sleep in Magnolia, preferring instead to sleep in streets and alleyways, among the living.

  But now he has returned to the cemetery. It is his place, and the memory of the vision in the showers is almost forgotten, the stain of its recalling papered over with the excuse of alcohol and tiredness and the temperature he had been running since before that night at the shelter.

  Hubert sometimes sleeps close to the Stolle grave, marked by the figure of a woman weeping at the foot of a cross. It is sheltered by trees, and from here he can see the road and the lake. Nearby is a flat granite stone covering the resting place of a man named Bennet Spree, a comparatively recent addition to the old cemetery. The plot had been in the ownership of the Spree family for a very long time but Bennet Spree was the last of his line and he had finally claimed the plot as his own when he died in July 1981.

  There is a shape lying on Bennet Spree’s stone as Hubert approaches. For a moment he almost turns away, not wanting to argue with another wanderer over territory and not trusting a stranger enough to want to sleep beside him in the cemetery, but something about the form draws him closer. As he nears it a light breeze stirs the trees, dappling the figure with moonlight, and Hubert can see that it is naked and that the shadows that lie on the body are unaltered by the movement of the trees.

  There is a ragged wound at the man’s throat, a strange hole, as if something has been inserted into his mouth through the soft flesh beneath his chin. The torso and legs are almost black with blood.