The White Road

by John Connolly

  In the seconds before he pressed Receive, it might have struck him that the phone was a little heavier than he remembered, and that the fall to the floor had maybe scuffed it some.

  He hit the green button and put the phone to his ear, just in time for the explosion to tear the side of his head off.

  Cyrus Nairn stood in front of the house, clutching a map and looking puzzled. Cyrus wasn’t much of an actor, but he figured that he didn’t have to be. There was no movement from the house. He walked to the screen door and stared into the hallway beyond. The door was well oiled, and opened silently. He moved slowly inside, checking the rooms as he went, ensuring that each one was empty, wary of the dog, until at last he reached the kitchen.

  The big man stood at the kitchen table, drinking soy milk from a carton. He wore a T-shirt that read “Klan Killer.” He looked at Cyrus in surprise. His hand was already moving to the gun on the table when Cyrus fired and the carton exploded in a shower of milk and blood and the big man tumbled backward, breaking a chair as he fell. Cyrus stood over him and watched as the emptiness entered his eyes.

  From behind the house, he heard the barking of a dog. It was young and stupid, and Cyrus’s only concern about it was that, in the house, its barking might have given the woman warning. Carefully, he glanced out of the kitchen window and saw the woman strolling in her yard close by the edge of the marsh, the dog beside her. He walked to the back door and slipped out as soon as he was certain that the woman was out of sight. Then, skirting the side of the house and staying close to the walls, he found her once again. She was in the long grass, moving away from the house, picking wildflowers. He could see the swelling at her belly, and some of his desire cooled. Cyrus liked to play with them before he finished them off. He had never tried playing with a pregnant woman before and something told him that he wouldn’t enjoy it, but Cyrus was always open to new experiences. The woman rose and stretched, holding her hand to her back, and Cyrus retreated back into the shadows. She was pretty, he thought, her face very pale, accentuated by her red hair. He drew a breath and tried to calm himself. When he looked again, she was strolling farther into the long grass and the evening shimmering of the waters, the dog racing ahead of her. Cyrus debated waiting for her to return to the house but he was afraid that somebody might come up that curving road and see his car, and then he would be trapped. No, there was cover out there, trees and long grass, and the rushes would hide him when he took her.

  Cyrus unsheathed the knife at his waist and, holding it close to his thigh, moved after the woman.

  The Cessna banked, then made a slow descent toward the Ambajejus Lake. It bounced a little on the water when it landed before drawing to a gradual halt, its wings tilting slightly as it approached the old jetty. The man at the controls of the Cessna was called Gerry Szelog and the only thing he had been paid for this flight was fuel money. That was okay, though, because Gerry was a believer, and believers did as they were asked and wanted nothing in return. In the past Szelog’s Cessna had transported guns, fugitives, and in one case, the body of a woman reporter who had poked her nose where she had no business poking it and who now lay at the bottom of the Carolina Shoals. Szelog had scouted out the lake a couple of days earlier by taking a flight with the Katahdin Air Service that operated out of Spencer Cove. He’d also checked their hours to ensure that the pilots from Katahdin would not be around to ask questions when he came in to land.

  The Cessna stopped and a man appeared from behind one of the trees on the shore. Szelog could see that he wore blue overalls that billowed slightly as he ran toward the plane. This would be Farren, the man responsible for the arrangements at this end. Szelog climbed out of the little cockpit, then hopped down onto the jetty to meet the advancing man.

  “Right on schedule,” said Szelog, removing his shades.

  He stopped.

  The man standing before him wasn’t Farren, because Farren was supposed to be white. This man was black. He also had a gun in his hand.

  “Yeah,” said the man. “You could say you’re dead on time.”

  It took a few moments for Cyrus to figure out why the woman appeared to be in a world of her own, otherwise she would surely have heard the gunshot. She paused at the edge of a stream and reached into a small pouch at her waist, withdrawing the Discman and forwarding through the tracks. When she found the tune she was looking for, she replaced the device and continued on her way, skirting the trees, the dog racing ahead of her. The dog had paused once or twice and looked back toward Cyrus as he made his way, hunched, through the long grass, but Cyrus was moving slowly and the young dog’s eyesight was not good enough to pick him out from the swaying grass. Cyrus’s feet, and the ends of his jeans, were soaking wet. It felt uncomfortable to him but then he thought of the prison, and the stale stench of his cell, and decided that being wet wasn’t so bad after all. The woman rounded the edge of the copse and almost disappeared from sight, but Cyrus could still see her pale blue dress moving between the trunks and the low branches. The trees would provide him with the cover he needed.

  Close now, thought Cyrus.

  Almost time.

  And Leonard’s voice echoed his words.

  Almost time.

  The only traffic encountered by Faulkner’s small convoy as it headed up Golden Road was a big container truck that was signaling right from the Ambajejus Parkway. The man behind the wheel lifted three fingers in greeting as they passed, then began to make his turn onto the road. He checked his rearview mirror and watched as the vans turned onto Fire Road 17 and headed for the lake.

  He stopped his turn and started to reverse.

  Cyrus moved faster, his short legs struggling to eat up the distance as he tried to draw closer to the woman. He could see her clearly now. She had left the shelter of the trees and moved into the open, her head low, the long grass parting as she went then reforming itself behind her. The dog, he noticed, was now on its leash. It didn’t matter much to Cyrus either way. The dog was unlikely to respond quickly to the threat posed by Cyrus, if he responded at all. The blade on Cyrus’s knife was five inches long. It would cut the dog’s throat as easily as it would cut the woman’s.

  Cyrus left the shade of the trees and entered the marsh.

  The fire road was strewn with brown and yellow leaves. Huge rocks lined its edges, and the trees grew thickly beyond them. Faulkner’s people were within sight of the lakeshore when the driver’s side window of the lead van disintegrated in a shower of glass and plastic, the impact of the bullets throwing the driver sideways and sending the van hurtling toward the trees. The woman beside him tried to wrench the wheel to the right but more shots came, tearing a ribbon of holes across the windshield and through the sides of the van. The rear door opened as the others inside tried to run for cover, but they were dead before they hit the road.

  The driver of the second van responded quickly. He kept his head low and put his foot down hard, screeching around the disabled lead vehicle in a cloud of leaves and sending the front wheels and hood of the van straight into one of the rocks by the side of the road. Dazed, he reached beneath the dashboard, released the sawed-off, and rose up in time to take Louis’s first bullet in his chest. The shotgun fell from his hands and he slumped forward.

  Meanwhile, the woman was in the back of the van and preparing to respond. She took Faulkner by the arm and told him to start running for the lake as soon as she opened the doors. In her hands she held an H amp;K G11 automatic rifle set to fire bursts of three rounds, each round a special caseless cartridge that was simply a block of explosive with a bullet buried at its center. She counted down from three, then hit the release handle on the door and began firing. In front of her, a small fat man was punched backward by the impact of the rounds and lay twitching on the road. Behind the woman, Faulkner began to run for the trees and the waters beyond as she sprayed bursts toward the roadside and then turned to follow him. She was almost level with the old man when she felt the impact at her left thigh, f
elling her instantly. She turned on her back, flipped the catch to fully automatic, and kept firing toward the approaching men as they dived for cover. When the gun locked empty, she tossed it to one side and drew her pistol. She had almost raised it when a hand touched her arm gently. Her head turned, her arm moving milliseconds slower. She barely had time to register the gaping hole of the gun leveled at her face before her life ended.

  Mary Mason heard the sirens and the raised voices of her neighbors. She reached out her hand to let the big man know, and felt his stillness.

  She began to cry.

  Out on the road, the truck had reversed down and had already reached the scene of the trap. Its rear doors were opened, and a ramp was lowered to enable the two disabled vans to be pushed into its interior. The bodies of the dead were placed inside, while two men with back-mounted vacuums scoured the blood and broken glass from the road.

  But the old man was still running hard, despite the briers that pulled at his feet and the branches of the trees that tugged at his clothes. He slipped on the damp leaves and sensed movement to either side of him as he struggled to rise, a gun clutched in his right hand. He got to his feet just as one of the figures detached itself from the trees and moved to intercept him. He tried to turn, to make for a gap in the woods to the north, but a second figure appeared, and the old man stopped.

  Faulkner’s face wrinkled in recognition.

  “Remember me?” asked Angel. He had a gun in his hand, hanging loosely by his side.

  To Faulkner’s right, Louis walked slowly across the earth and stone. He too carried a gun by his side. Faulkner tried to back away, then turned to see my face. He raised his gun. It swung first toward me, then Angel, and finally Louis.

  “Go ahead, Reverend,” said Louis. His gun was now pointing at Faulkner, one eye closed as he sighted down the barrel. “You choose.”

  “They’ll know,” said Faulkner. “You’ll make me a martyr.”

  “They ain’t never gonna find you, Reverend,” said Louis. “Far as people gonna know, you just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  I lifted my gun. So did Angel.

  “But we’ll know,” Angel said. “We’ll always know.”

  Faulkner tried to turn his gun on himself as the three shots came simultaneously and the old man bucked and fell. He lay on his back, looking at the sky. Thin streams of blood trailed from the corners of his mouth, then the sky disappeared as we stared down upon him. His mouth opened and closed as he tried to say something. He swallowed, and licked at the blood with his tongue. The fingers of his right hand moved feebly as he looked at me.

  Slowly, carefully, I knelt down.

  “Your bitch is dead,” he whispered, as his eyes closed for the last time.

  And when I looked up, the trees were filled with ravens.

  * * *

  Cyrus’s mouth was dry. He was so close to her now, thirty, maybe thirty-five feet away. He ran his finger along the blade and watched the dog tugging at the leash, straining to get ahead of its mistress, its attention distracted by the presence of the birds and small rodents it could hear moving through the grass. Cyrus couldn’t understand why she had leashed the dog. Let it run, he thought. The hell harm can it do?

  Twenty feet now. Just a few more steps. The woman stepped into a copse of trees above a small pool of water, an outpost of the larger forest that shadowed the marsh to the north, and was suddenly out of his sight. Ahead of him, Cyrus heard the ringing of a cell phone. He ran, his legs aching as he reached the trees. The first thing he saw was the dog. It was tied by its leash to the rotting trunk of a fallen tree. It looked at Cyrus in puzzlement, then yapped happily at what it saw behind.

  Cyrus turned and the log caught him full in the face, breaking his nose and sending him stumbling backward out of the trees. He tried to raise his knife and was hit again in the same spot, the pain blinding him. He felt empty space beneath his heels and lifted his arms to try to stop himself from falling even as he tumbled and landed with a splash in the water. He broke back to the surface and began to struggle toward the bank, but Cyrus was not built for swimming. In fact, he could barely swim a stroke and panic had almost immediately set in as he sensed the depth of the water. Water levels in the Scarborough marshes were usually six to eight feet, but the monthly flood had raised them to fourteen and sixteen feet in places. Cyrus couldn’t touch the bottom with his feet.

  And then there was another impact on his skull and he felt something break in his head. The energy seemed to leach from his body, his hands and legs refusing to move. Slowly, he began to sink, descending until his lower body was surrounded by weeds and fallen branches, his feet deep in the mud. Air bubbled from his lips and the sight of it seemed to force one final effort from him. His whole body jerked and his hands and arms began to beat at the water, the surface drawing closer as he started to rise.

  Cyrus’s ascent was arrested as something pulled at his feet. He looked down but could see only weeds and grass. He tried kicking, but his feet were held fast in the murk and vegetation below, the branches like fingers wrapped around his ankles.

  Hands. There were hands upon him. The voices in his head were shrieking, sending out contradictory messages as his air supply dwindled.

  Hands.

  Branches.

  They’re just branches.

  But he could feel the hands down there. He could feel the fingers pulling at him, dragging him deeper, forcing him to join them; and he knew that they were waiting down there for him. The women from the hollow were waiting for him.

  A shadow fell across him. Blood was flowing freely from the wound in his head and from his ears and nose. He looked up and the woman was staring down at him from the bank, the dog’s head to one side as it peered at the water in puzzlement. The headphones were no longer at the woman’s ears, but lay curled around her neck, and something told Cyrus that they had been silent from the moment she had spotted him and began to draw him deeper into the marsh. He stared up at the woman imploringly and opened his mouth as if to beg her to save him, but instead the last of his air floated away and the water coursed into his body. He raised his hands to the woman, but the only move she made was to take her right hand and rub it slowly and rhythmically against the slight swell of her belly, so that it seemed that she was soothing the child within, that it was aware of what was occurring outside its world and was distressed by the action. The woman’s face was empty. There was no pity, no shame, no guilt, no regret. There was not even anger, just a blankness that was worse than any fury Cyrus had ever seen or felt.

  Cyrus felt a final tug at his legs as he began to drown, the water filling his lungs, the pain in his head growing as he was starved of oxygen, the voices in his mind rising to a last crescendo, then, slowly, fading away, his final vision that of a pale, pitiless woman rubbing gently at her womb, calming her unborn child.

  Epilogue

  THE RIVERS FLOW.

  The tide is receding, the waters returning to the sea. The shorebirds are gathering. The marsh is their resting stop on the way to the Arctic tundras in which they will nest, and the departing tides provide rich pickings for them. They flit over the streams, their shadows like melting ore in the runnels of molten silver.

  It is only now, looking back, that I realize the part that water has played in all that has occurred. The bodies dumped in Louisiana, entombed in oil barrels, mute and undiscovered while the waters flowed around them. A family slain and their remains placed beneath leaves in an empty swimming pool. The Aroostook Baptists, buried by a lake, waiting for decades to be found and released. Addy and Melia Jones, the one slain within earshot of a river, the other twice dead in a polluted pit of foul water.

  And one more: Cassie Blythe, found curled beneath the earth in a hollow by a riverbank, surrounded by the bodies of five others, the bones on her hands marked by the passage of Cyrus Nairn’s blade.

  Water, flowing endlessly to the sea; each of them in their way denied the promise offered by it
, unable to answer the call until, at last, they were brought forth and allowed to follow its course to the final peace that comes to all.

  Cyrus Nairn stood among the long stems of a cattail patch, the road visible before him. All around him they moved, their passage like silk against his skin, their presence felt and sensed as much as seen, a great mass of them descending ever onward to the sea, where at last they were absorbed into its waiting surf, the paleness of them joining with it until they disappeared from view. He remained still, like a bulwark against their flow, for his back was to the sea and it did not call to him as it did to the others that followed the white roads through the marsh and into the ocean. Instead, Cyrus watched the car that idled on the black highway that wound its way toward the coast, its star-shattered windscreen reflecting the night sky above, until the door opened and he knew that it was time.

  He climbed from the marsh, hauling himself upward on rocks and metal, and walked toward the waiting Coupe de Ville, its tinted windows revealing only the barest shadows of the figures that lay within. As he stepped around the hood, the driver’s window rolled slowly down and he saw the man who sat with his hands on the wheel, a bald man with a too-wide mouth, a ragged red hole torn in the front of his filthy raincoat, as if his death had come about through impalement upon some great stake, a death that continued to be visited upon him for eternity, for as Cyrus watched the wound appeared to heal and then erupt forth again, and the man’s eyes rolled in his agony. Yet he smiled at Cyrus, and beckoned him on. Behind him, barely visible, was a child dressed in black. She was singing, and Cyrus thought that her voice was one of the most beautiful sounds that he had ever heard, a gift from God. Then the child shifted and became a woman with a bullet wound in her throat, and the singing stopped.