Valley of lights

by Stephen Gallagher

  I was turning from the highway onto the dirt drive when she did it, impulsively and without any warning; she grabbed at the wheel and gave it a hard wrench so that it spun out of my hands, and the pickup suddenly veered over to the right. I could see the mailbox coming, but I couldn't correct in time; the front of the truck simply smashed the post from under it as if it was so much matchwood, while the box bounced once on the hood and came straight up through the windshield and into the cab. I lost it completely then, because Angela had thrown herself over against me and the truck was onto the rugged ground beyond the shoulder, but I could see the mailbox behind her jammed into the cab at an angle like an unexploded rocket. Then we must have hit an even deeper rut, because the nose of the pickup dropped violently and I felt myself being pitched forward; and that was all that I knew for a while, until Angela was shaking me awake and I opened my eyes to that fierce and painful desert sky.

  I was out of the truck, and flat on my back. I struggled up onto my elbows and said, 'Where did he go?'

  'He's a mess, Alex,' Angela said. Her face was marked with little flecks of blood, probably flying cuts from the imploding windshield. 'His head's all messed up, he won't get far.'

  'Which way?' I said.

  'Up toward the house.' She tried to hold me down, 'What are you doing?'

  'Got to finish it,' I said.

  'Alex!' she insisted, as I managed to get on the move, seeing the house an impossible distance away across the field before me, 'For God's sake, let's go and get some help! The little girl's safe in my car!'

  'Nobody's safe,' I said as I stumbled onto the dirt road that we'd left, but I don't think she heard.

  About twenty yards further on I found my gun, lying where he'd dropped it. There was a gory smear on the ground close by, so perhaps he'd fallen. He had to be in quite a state, because he'd been right in the path of the mailbox. But thank God it hadn't quite killed him. I picked up the Colt and, with my other hand, wiped my eyes. I was feeling better, or I was kidding myself that I did; either way, I now felt more able to go on.

  'Alex,' Angela said from beside me, 'you hardly know what you're doing. I'm coming in with you.'

  'Whatever you like,' I said. 'But don't interfere.'

  And she didn't; she stayed just behind my shoulder as we walked up to the front of the house and stopped under its blind, shuttered gaze. It must have looked good at one time, almost colonial, but someone had been letting it go for at least ten years, possibly more. The shape of the Colt was now feeling strange in my hand, as if it had been charged with the lives that it had taken and was hungry for more. How many, now? I'd actually lost count… but in a way it was none of my business, it was something between the gun and the ghoul, and I was simply a hapless intermediary who happened to have walked off the street and into the Paradise at the wrong time.

  The main door of the house was now half-open, and I had a definite memory of pulling it closed behind me so that Angela wouldn't see the bodies inside. Well, she was going to see them now.

  'Holy Jesus Christ on a bicycle,' I heard her say from the threshold behind me as I stood in the middle of the twilit hall and looked around.

  'There's plenty more where they came from,' I said, waving her toward the sitting room as I tried to work out which way he'd gone from here. Not up the stairs, because the stuff of Georgie's that I'd dropped off at the bottom was undisturbed. Angela picked her way past me, stepping over the stick-legs of the outstretched dead like someone crossing subway rails, and put her head into the sitting-room. There was no arguing with it, she had nerve. I heard her breathe some expression of shock, but didn't make out what it was.

  My guess was that he was making for the inert body of Michaels, his last refuge, but I couldn't think where he might have been keeping it. I'd searched the house pretty thoroughly, all the rooms and the cupboards and the closets, and if there had been any evidence of a cellar I'd have searched that, too.

  'You already knew about this,' Angela said. 'And you didn't tell me!'

  'I was saving the best for the last,' I said. I'd seen a bloody smudge just by the handle of the door which led through into the kitchen, so now I went over and, with the Colt at the ready, gave it a gentle push. It swung open onto a shaft of daylight, bumping on something behind. The far door of the kitchen, which gave out onto the back of the house, had been thrown wide. The heads of the four small bodies which lay under the table were only just into the light.

  Angela said, with just a faint trace of shame that she'd probably get over, 'Do you think I can use the phone?'

  'Try it and see,' I said.

  I wasn't entirely unhappy that she was along, providing that she didn't get in the way. Right now her mind was probably racing, taking in this new information and hammering it out into a pattern which would include Bobby Winter and the man in the pickup and which would make more sense to an outsider than anything that I could invent. As for me, I only had one thing on my mind. I crossed the kitchen and went to take a look out the back.

  And there he was.

  He was down in the dust and making about three yards a minute at his current speed. He'd lost the use of his legs now and was scrabbling along like some badly chopped-about worm with a definite destination in mind. Ahead of him lay a big ramshackle barn or garage with a couple of outhouses tacked onto its sides, but he still had a way to go before he got there. In all my career, I don't think I've ever seen anyone so badly injured. A good piece of his head had to be missing.

  I could hear Angela dialling when I stepped back into the house, and knew that she'd be tied up for a few minutes at least. At the foot of the stairs I picked up Georgie's pet-store box and said, 'C'mon, Hector, I've got a little job for you,' and the bird inside scuttled around a little. He didn't have much space in the box, but she'd probably let him out to fly around the room. When I returned to the outside the ghoul had put on a spurt and covered half of the remaining distance to the barn, but the futility of his best efforts must have been apparent to him as I overtook him and, with a show of what must have looked like sadistic courtesy, swung out the barn doors.

  It was then that I saw that he hadn't only been stockpiling bodies, but vehicles as well; there were five cars crammed tightly into the big shed, and foremost amongst them was a white police department St Regis, unmarked.

  Michaels was in the driving seat with his head back against the rest, looking as if he'd dozed off on duty.

  So this was the ghoul's hole card, set up and ready for a getaway. I set the bird-box on its hood and looked in each of the other cars, but this was the only one with an occupant. The others looked as if they'd taken a few bumps and scrapes as he was hiding them away; the dents showed up as new scars except on Winter's Toyota, the one he'd called Joshua, where they simply blended in.

  I turned to the ghoul. He seemed to have given up on the last few feet and had simply rolled over, exhausted, to rest with what was left of his head. propped, against the open barn door. The windshield glass appeared to have flayed most of his face away so that he'd actually come to resemble the image of malleable clay that I'd tried to create in my mind.

  As I was opening the driver's door of the St Regis, I said, 'I suppose you realise that this was a bad move. You should have kept him in another place, another town altogether. But then, I can imagine you being scared out of the idea of another long journey the last time we did this.'

  And then I crouched down and put my arm around Michaels' shoulders, and tipped him forward so that his head bent over the wheel. A few seconds passed, and then I could feel him shudder as he began the final stage of the drawn-out death process.

  The ghoul was watching me with his one, bloody, murderous eye, too weak to interfere and too hurt to make the leap unaided. Only the ending of this body's life could release him, and right now he was like a man at the deck rail of a burning ship, watching the last of the lifeboats pulling away. Michaels was shivering hard now and I kept my arm around him, using his throes to help m
e resist any temptation to pity that I might feel for this broken creature on the ground before me. I had to remind myself that this mutilated shell was no more than a temporary habitation and that within seconds, given the chance, he'd be coming at me in another frame madder than any dog.

  When Michaels was gone I gave his shoulder a final squeeze and then eased him back in the seat. From over by the door I heard a despairing groan, the first sound of any kind that the ghoul had made in the last ten minutes or so. I went and knelt down beside him and he looked at me, his eye a tiny pinpoint of fury that he hadn't the strength to express.

  So here we were, one-to-one, and at last the ghoul lay naked and defenceless.

  I said, 'You've made me do things a man should never have to do. I've seen things that no-one should ever have to see.' And as I spoke I was putting the Colt into his hand, smearing my prints to replace them with his own; and even as I was doing this he was weakly but gamely trying to pull the trigger on me, and the hammer fell on an empty chamber exactly as I'd set it. When I let go of his hand, it fell by his side. He didn't even have the strength to raise it again.

  I thought he had maybe a couple of minutes longer, if he was lucky. It took everything he had to manage at last a faint, hoarse whisper.

  He said ' No, Alex. Not this. Not to me.'

  Perhaps it was the way he used my name, I don't know, but I felt a tug of something inside. Something that I knew I didn't dare pay much attention to. I said, 'I know, you're a strange and wonderful thing. But you never took a step without walking on somebody.'

  ' I didn't hurt the child. '

  'No. But you would have, in the end,'

  The glimmer in his dying eye told me that I'd spoken the truth, and that both of us knew it.

  I leaned closer.

  'I could let it end for you here,' I said. 'But there's something I want you to understand before you go.'

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Angela Price came out a few minutes later, the farm caretaker lay dead with my untraceable Colt Special in his hand. For anybody who wanted to work it out, it would look as if he'd committed mass slaughter in the house and then crawled over here with the notion of escaping in one of the cars. That didn't leave me exactly free and clear, but it took me a lot of the way.

  I looked up from beside him and said to Angela, 'Did you call the sheriff?'

  She looked once at the body beside me, and then looked away again. None of the dead inside the house had been quite as messy as this, and what had been the ghoul was also lying out in full daylight. She said, 'Right after I called the network. There's a news crew on its way down here in a helicopter.'

  Yeah, I could bet on it. I could also bet that she'd spent at least half of the time negotiating a television contract for herself before she'd disclosed the location of the story. Straightening up and dusting myself off, I said, 'Well, I'm going to disappear.'

  Her eyes widened. 'What?' she said. 'You can't!'

  'Only for as long as it takes to get Georgie to her mother. Tell the sheriff I'll be turning around and coming straight back, and then I'll tell him anything he wants to know.'

  'He won't like it.'

  'You're right, he won't.'

  And I probably didn't have much time before he'd get here. I picked up the bird box from the hood of the St Regis and took it around to the Toyota, which was the only other car that could be rolled out of the barn without a lot of manoeuvring. The engine turned over easily and started on the third try. Angela followed me out around the side of the house, and in the rearview mirror I could see her standing at the top of the drive as she watched me go. She probably didn't want to go back into the house alone, and I couldn't blame her. Before I turned out onto the main road I checked in my mirror again, only now she was shading her eyes and watching the sky.

  The bird in its pet store box was on the passenger seat now. I'd held it in place with the seat belt, otherwise it would have slid around every time I hit the brakes. As the outskirts of the town approached, I could hear it tearing at the cardboard from the inside.

  'Either you stop that,' I said, 'or I tape over the airholes.'

  That quietened him for a while.

  Georgie was asleep on the back seat of Angela's car when I got there, but she woke up as I was carrying her over. I'd decided to stick with the Toyota, which seemed to be fine apart from a tendency to jump out of gear on a stop. Georgie sat in the back, yawning and blinking as I drove another two blocks in search of a pay phone; I saw a lot of activity around the county sheriff's compound, in addition to the three cars that had passed me at speed on their way out to the farm. From the phone I called Loretta's number, and left a message on Heilbron's answering machine. His taped message said that he was at the hospital, so that would be where I'd go. When I got back to the car Georgie was leaning forward on the back of the passenger seat so that she could look over at the bird box, and she was frowning. But she didn't say anything, and dropped back as we moved out.

  I took no chances on the way back, no speeding or anything, and just before we reached the city outskirts I turned off down a side road. Once we were out of sight of the rest of the traffic, I stopped. I walked off the track for about two hundred yards, and there after wiping my leather holster I scraped a hole in the dust and buried it. Looking back as I returned to the car, I found that it was already impossible to say where the hole might be.

  Georgie seemed to be holding up pretty well. She certainly wasn't the distressed wreck that I might have expected her to be after a week as a captive and in strange company. When we were moving again, I said, 'How did he treat you?'

  'He was okay,' she said, coming forward to lean on the back of the passenger seat again. She could barely reach to see over. 'He was explaining stuff all the time. Like he'd never had anyone to talk to before.'

  'What kind of things did he say?'

  'Weird stuff,' she said, and when I glanced at her I don't think I'd ever seen a kid looking so thoughtful, and so troubled, I asked her to tell me what kind of weird stuff.

  So she told me about how he never slept if he could help it; how when a body grew tired he'd move to another, even if it was only for a few hours. She'd asked him why and it had emerged that he was terrified by his own dreams. He'd told her about another time when he'd been forced to take refuge in a bedridden soldier who'd been so sick and so feverish that he'd been unable to get out again until almost a year later, when a nurse had come along at four o'clock on a Christmas morning and injected him with a massive dose of morphine, silent tears silvering her face in the moonlight. He'd said that food had no taste for him, but that every life tasted different. He'd said that young life gave him a hit like cocaine. Georgie thought that he'd meant like Space Dust, only stronger, and I didn't try to explain it to her. Apparently she'd quickly begun to recognise him through whatever mask he was wearing when he came up to her loft with some new comic books or a TV Guide or some piece of loot that he'd thought she might like; she'd told him that she always knew him because of his eyes. Whoever he was in, she'd said, his eyes were always sad.

  Then he'd said that he could try to teach her the trick of it, if she wanted; that maybe she could do it if he came along with her and prepared the way, and maybe then they could get around and have some real fun and never have to worry about being caught.

  I looked sideways at her, quickly, she was still leaning forward, staring down at the bird box over the back of the passenger seat. 'What did you say to that?' I asked her.

  'I told him no thanks,' she said, and she stretched over as far as she could and reached down to put her finger to one of the slots in the box. The reaction was instantaneous, a squawking and a fluttering which caused her to pull away so fast that she teetered for a moment before dropping back onto her seat. I glanced in the mirror at her as she added, 'I mean, who'd want to be like him?'

  It was almost five in the afternoon when I pulled onto the parking lot outside the Phoenix Zoo. I told Georgie that I had a quick v
isit to make and that I wouldn't be more than a few minutes, and then I unbelted the bird box.

  As I was lifting it out, Georgie said, 'You trapped him in Hector, didn't you?'

  I stopped, half-in and half-out of the car. I could see from her face that there was no point in me trying to make up some lie, so I said, 'I'm afraid I did. I made it so he had nowhere else he could go.' I didn't want to tell her about how I'd carefully squeezed the life out of the bird to bring it right up to the point of death and no further, or about what I'd had to do to the body of the farm caretaker to drive the ghoul across.

  'Is he going to die?' she said. 'I mean, for real, this time?'

  'Yes,' I said. 'He is.'

  She thought about it for a few moments. Then she nodded.

  'I think it's best,' she said. 'That's what he wants, really.'

  The zoo was about to close and the girl at the turnstile wasn't going to let me in, but I said that I was here to see one of the assistant managers and mentioned Frank's name. She must have phoned ahead, because as I walked towards the Administration block over by Macaw Island I saw him coming out to meet me. He gave me a friendly enough hello, but I could see that he was puzzled at my appearance so late in the day and I also saw his eyes stray to the box under my arm.

  I explained what I wanted, making it sound casual and nothing special. He shrugged, and went over to call something into one of the offices, and then together we walked down the path that would take us out to the eastern spur of the grassland habitat area. Where two paths crossed, we stopped to let the last Safari Train of the day go by.

  I hadn't been consciously trying to think of the last time that I'd been here but the memory was with me all the same, trotting along at my side like some faithful old dog. Frank, who knew nothing of what I'd been through in the past few weeks, was saying, 'You should hear some of the things we get asked. Weird? We had a woman six months ago, wanted to buy some gorilla semen. I don't even like to think about why.'