Cold moon over Babylon

by McDowell, Michael

  Ben rose on his haunches to make sure his cramped legs were sufficiently limber for what he had to do. He gazed down the road, waiting for the automobile to appear. But Ben lost all sense of where he was and what his brother expected of him, when the lights of the Larkin station wagon turning in the bend picked out the quivering gray figure of a young girl, pressed against the truck of a tree at the edge of the forest. Ben was shocked immobile by her face—grave and unshadowed and the color of the cold moon above them.

  Chapter 28

  Henry Harp, the cousin of Warren Perry’s mother, listened politely to Evelyn Larkin and even with some interest, since her story came new to him. He was a thin, rich, white-haired widower who had suffered a heart attack at his wife’s funeral. Since that unhappy day, two years before, he had never gone to bed at night with the full expectation of waking in the morning. He had shown Evelyn and Jerry to the back of the house, a dense fragrant garden of camellias and azaleas and oleander, where they sat in the warm early evening on wooden lawn furniture beneath the pale moon.

  He told Evelyn afterward, quietly, that there did not appear to be much of a case against this young banker, but that he would be happy to drive up to Babylon and talk to the sheriff for a few minutes and see what he had to say about it all.

  “Don’t bother doing that,” said Evelyn.

  “Why not?” asked the lawyer.

  “Because Ted Hale has been in on this from the beginning.”

  “Is that right?” said Henry Harp tonelessly. “I tell you what then: You think it through tonight, and you talk it over with Warren tomorrow. If you’re still interested in making some sort of formal accusation, you give me a call. I'll drive up, and well see what’s what. I might come up day after tomorrow. I’m free that afternoon. I don’t think I’ve been to Babylon in fifteen years. Babylon’s out of the way. I could even visit a little with Warren. I haven’t seen that boy since his daddy’s funeral.”

  Evelyn and Jerry thanked, the lawyer, and accepted his escort back to the front of the house. They drove off toward Babylon, with the station wagon considerably lightened now that all the blueberries had been delivered to the wholesale market down by the old cemetery.

  “I feel so much better,” said Evelyn, as they drove out of town. She gazed out the side windows at the moonlit waters of Pensacola Bay, silver-blue and calm.

  “I’m glad of that,” said Jerry shortly.

  “What’s the matter now!” Evelyn demanded, for she sensed the grudging disbelief in her grandson’s voice. “That man is coming up on Friday afternoon, and maybe then something’ll start to be done about all of this.” “Grandma, Mr. Harp was real nice, but there’s nothing he can do, just like there was nothing that Charles Darrish could do. There’s no clues, and there’s nobody in town that thinks Nathan Redfield killed Margaret except you. Even if it’s true, and I still don’t see much reason to believe it is, there’s no way in this world to prove it. There’s no way in this world to get back at him for it.” “Jerry,” said Evelyn sternly, “Mr. Harp wouldn’t have said he would come up to see us if he didn’t think he could do something.”

  “He’s doing it as a favor to Warren Perry, or Warren’s mama, and that’s all. Or he'll come up, look around for ten minutes, talk to the sheriff, talk to Charles Darrish, and then go away and mail us a bill for seventy-five dollars that we cain’t even begin to pay.”

  “He didn't say anything about money!”

  “Well, Grandma, you didn’t really think he would come up from Pensacola to Babylon for free?” “But Warren talked to him...”

  “Did Warren talk to him about money?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Evelyn reluctantly. “Maybe not.”

  “Grandma,” said Jerry in a low sad voice, “even if there was a possibility of Mr. Harp finding out something on Nathan Redfield, where would we get the money to prosecute? If Nathan Redfield saw something coming, he would foreclose on us faster than it takes to roll down the stairs. We’d have no money, no place to go.” “Jerry—” his grandmother protested weakly, and turned to stare out the window at the gently rolling pine forest, black beneath the night sky. The road from Pensacola to Babylon was forty-five miles long, but with perhaps no more than two dozen houses along it. Half of these were unlighted even as early as ten o’clock. Absurdly, this little-traveled road was four lanes wide, a pork-barrel project initiated by the Florida congressional representative for the benefit of a contractor who made large contributions to his campaign funds. The pine forest closely encroached on the two Mack ribbons of asphalt, and the median strip had grown over in thick scrub. The station wagon rattled along this deserted unlighted highway, its headlights fading and shaky because of the battery that wanted replacing, with the desperately unhappy old woman and young man inside.

  Evelyn and Jerry talked little more on the journey home. Evelyn’s hopefulness directly after speaking with Henry Harp had faded beneath Jerry’s weary logic. Jerry was disgusted with himself for having so quickly and sternly drained his grandmother’s temporarily suffused spirit. And there was nothing to say now that had not been said before.

  The route was familiar, even in the dark. A slight rise in the road gave expected way to a familiar depression; a certain bend turned to an aluminum bridge over an unnamed but well-remembered creek. Evelyn and Jerry looked automatically at the brightly lighted parking lot of the Tastee-Freeze on the south side of Babylon, filled with those teenagers who had cars but no curfews. Down- town was deserted except for a man Jerry did not recognize making a night deposit at the CP&M. Jerry did not pause beneath the unlighted traffic signals, and was quickly on the road that led out of town toward the Styx River.

  Here every tree was anticipated, every rusted advertising sign predicted and read out in his mind before the lights of the car flashed over it. Evelyn sighed heavily, thinking, Jerry knew, of Margaret, and her last trip out this road; but the boy said nothing to his grandmother.

  He sighed also just before the last bend in the road, that would bring them within sight of the bridge, and the second story of the house on the other side of the river.

  Evelyn Larkin, miserably depressed and nearly asleep from the silent ride, sat turned slightly, with her chin resting on her hand, gazing out the side window into the black forest. Suddenly, when the car made the turn on that final bend, the headlights, rushing ahead along the fanning circle of trees, caught on a figure, white and unmoving, against the trunk of a diseased pine.

  “Jerry!” she cried: “Margaret's there!”

  He had seen the figure too, but it fell away the moment he set eyes on it, a chalk-white evanescence that had simply lost its solidity and flowed into the black waving grass.

  “No!” he cried desperately: “It’s nothing!” But he was already and instinctively applying the brakes.

  “Stop! It was Margaret! Margaret’s in the woods!”

  Jerry took his foot from the brake, and stamped on the accelerator. Margaret was dead, he had seen nothing—or whatever it was he had seen had been a trick of his eyes, his weariness, the dark night. Sap running on the side of a tree had caught and twisted the light and thrown it back at them in the form of his dead sister.

  “It’s wasn’t anything!” cried Jerry, with determination. “There was nothing there!”

  “Go back!” cried Evelyn, but then she screamed, for another figure, this one as black as the other had been white, reared up in the middle of the road, and waved to long arms wildly.

  Chapter 29

  The figure standing against the tree faded suddenly; Ben was pushed by his brother out into the road. He jumped up and down, as if to flag down the station wagon for assistance. But he felt suddenly frightened, not only of the probable repercussions of Nathan’s strange actions but of the actual possibility of being run down by Jerry, which he had not really considered before. It seemed now an insanity—to run out in front of a moving automobile, dressed in black clothing, on a dark night. He flailed wildly, leaping like
a bizarre jumping jack, and knew that he did not at all appear a man who had suffered trouble with his car.

  The station wagon screeched to a halt thirty feet away. The headlights shone on his pants, but Ben knew that his face was in shadow. Looking through the windshield, he caught Jerry’s face frozen in stupid terror, and Evelyn Larkin pulling back weakly after having been thrust forward with the violent braking.

  “Help!” Ben shouted, at an abnormally high pitch, attempting to disguise his voice: “Please come help me!”

  He then ran toward the side of the road, and stood wavering there for a few moments, out of the range of the headlights.

  The station wagon lurched forward a few feet, and then was jerked to a halt. Ben sensed that it had been thrown into park; and this was confirmed when he heard one of fee car doors open. Behind the headlights he could make out Jerry’s hesitant figure, standing by the front fender. He heard Evelyn Larkin say feebly: “Jerry, what is it? Who is that out there?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Jerry, in a loud worried voice.

  “Jerry, please don’t go out there! Jerry, Margaret’s back there, I saw—”

  Ignoring his grandmother, Jerry moved cautiously forward into the light of the headlamps. “Hey, who is it? What’s wrong?” he called.

  Ben backed slowly to the bush that had secreted him before, and whispered: “Nathan! Nathan! Where-”

  He gasped in terror, for Nathan was not behind the shrubbery. He had moved on, in some grotesque joke, leaving Ben to explain to Jerry Larkin why he had jumped out in front of the car. In a slightly louder voice, he began to curse his brother, in a high-pitched unnatural whine: “Nathan, goddamn it, why the hell—

  A man suddenly appeared in the wavering triangle of illumination before the station wagon. He had planted himself six feet in front of Jerry and was swinging something forcefully above his head; whatever it was shone brightly when it came within the range of the lights, and disappeared altogether when it was raised high. Both Jerry and Evelyn in the front seat of the car were mesmerized by his face, a black skull with a silver mouth and gleaming eyes.

  He moved a step closer to Jerry.

  “No, no!” cried Evelyn, fumbling with the handle of the door.

  “Nathan, Nathan!” a voice cried from the side of the road.

  “Nathan...” she whispered, and then called loudly for Jerry, many times over.

  Nathan suddenly moved three steps closer, and brought the sharp edge of the sword down at an angle across Jerry Larkin’s neck. A stream of black liquid shot out in a high arc through the air, but it turned gleaming red when it fell to the pavement in the light of the headlamps.

  Jerry’s body collapsed on the asphalt, neatly between two painted white stripes. Blood poured from the severed neck, and the head lolled at a severe angle from the trunk, as if it were opened on a hinge.

  “Nathan!” cried the voice from the edge of the road.

  Nathan stepped over the body, and thrust the sword in the empty space between the head and the trunk. With some difficulty, he sawed the head loose,

  Evelyn Larkin, screaming without even knowing that she screamed, fell out of the station wagon onto the hard pavement, when the door suddenly opened. She scraped her legs badly, and damaged something along her side, but rose without feeling pain, and staggered to the front of the car, still calling out and crying for Jerry.

  She thrust her hands over her eyes when she saw her grandson's head wobble over the rough asphalt, several feet away from his bloody body. The eyes were still open, and it came to rest on the left cheek, staring down the unlighted road that took you to Babylon.

  The hysterical woman turned to the man in the black mask. “Who—” Her attention was for a second distracted by another figure that stepped out of the darkness at the side of the road. She turned for his help.

  Nathan leveled the sword and ran it through the old woman’s back. She groaned, stiffened, and went limp. She would have fallen but the sword supported her; the sharp edge of the blade was turned up, and began to cut through the flesh of her lower back and abdomen as she sank. Nathan raised one foot, and placed it against Evelyn’s backside; he pushed, and the old woman slid forward off the sword, dropping heavily and face down on the pavement. Her head crushed against the rocks between Ben's feet. He jumped back.

  “Good Christ!” he whispered: “Nathan, I thought we were gone scare ’em.”

  “Yes, well,” said Nathan after he had pulled the zipper across his mouth open, “they were scared all right —I never heard anybody scream like that in my life.”

  “The whole country probably heard it! Why—”

  “Shut up, Ben,” said Nathan, “we got to get rid of ’em.”

  Ben shuddered. Blood oozed and soaked through Evelyn Larkin’s pink print dress, and he didn’t dare look across to the decapitated corpse behind his brother.

  “Throw ’em in the car. Go ’round and open the back. We got to hurry, Ben!” Nathan shouted, when Ben made no move at all: “Hurry! ’Fore somebody comes by!”

  Nathan had turned off the ignition of the station wagon, and extracted the keys. He tossed them through the dark air to his brother. Ben hurried to the back murmuring, “Oh Nathan, why you want to make me do this?” He unlocked the rear and lifted the door with a shaking arm.

  Nathan had picked up Evelyn’s body beneath the arms, and dragged it backward along the side of the car. “Help me lift her, goddamn it,” he hissed, and Ben ran quickly around, and lifted her feet from the pavement.

  Blood poured thickly onto his fingers, and he dropped the burden. In exasperation, Nathan did also: Evelyn’s corpse fell heavily against the pavement. Fragile bones in the thin woman’s arm cracked sickeningly. “Ben,” said Nathan in a low, controlled voice: “Pick her up, because if you don't, I’m gone have to get rid of three bodies, all by myself. Now you understand me?”

  Ben nodded, and lifted the feet, never minding the blood. In another few seconds, they had thrust Evelyn into the back of the car, and shoved her to one side, so that there would be room for Jerry was well.

  “Nathan,” whispered Ben, as he followed his brother to the other side: “Please just don’t make me touch that head.”

  Nathan laughed. He picked up Jerry’s head by the hair, and tossed it through the window. It flew, across the front seat, struck Evelyn’s corpse, and then rolled slowly to rest.

  “Pick up the feet again, fraidy-cat,” said Nathan, and lifted the headless corpse by the arms. More blood spilled out of the severed neck, and splashed over Nathan’s shoes. With his head turned aside, Ben lifted the feet and skipped backward to the rear of the car. They shoved the body inside.

  Nathan slammed the rear door shut; and flew to the driver’s seat. Ben climbed in beside him, trembling, and handed Nathan the keys. Nathan backed the car quickly down the road, and turned it sharply right onto the disused logging track. The weak wavering lights of the station wagon ricocheted from tree to tree nightmarishly as they pushed forward into the forest.

  Ben lowered the window, for he was sickened by the stink of blood and fear. Not wanting to look at his brother, not daring to look into the back, Ben stared only into the black forest. The cicadas clamored deafeningly, over the sound of the troubled engine and the unrhythmic thump of the bodies of the grandmother and her grandson.

  Nathan had passed the Scout, and was following the road as it went upstream along the riverbank, into the uninhabited forest drained by the Styx. About a mile from the Styx bridge, the track rose onto a small bluff, and at the top of this, Nathan halted. He punched out the car lights, and they were in darkness. The moon was masked by the trees.

  “What are we gone do?” demanded Ben. “Nathan. I don’t like any of this. You didn’t tell me—” He almost wept.

  “Get out, Ben, or stay in, I don’t care, but in ten seconds this car goes over the bluff and into the river, whether you’re in it or not.”

  Ben jumped out or the car, and ran to Nathan’s side.


  “Move away, Ben!”

  Ben pulled back a couple of steps. Nathan edged the car up to the edge of the precipice, then jerked on the emergency brake.

  He got out, went to the back of the car, and braced himself against the rear door. “Ben, you release that brake when I tell you to, then come back ’round here, and help me push if off. And lower that front window so it’ll fill up.”

  “All right,” said Ben, “I’m ready.”

  Nathan nodded, and Ben released the brake, slammed the door, and ran to the back. With only two small heaves, they managed to get the front wheel over the edge, but then the automobile collapsed on its chassis, only six feet over the edge.

  “It’s stuck!” cried Ben.

  “Push!” cried Nathan, then: “Wait! We got to get the goddamn sword out!” He ran then to the other side, and gingerly pulled open the front door. It swung free out into the air, thirty feet above the Styx. “Ben, don’t touch that car till I get this damn thing out.” Ben backed away from the car, and went around to stand just behind his brother. Nathan knelt on the crumbling edge of the bluff, and reached inside the car for the sword, which had rolled beneath the front seat.

  “Ben, you come hold onto my feet! I don’t want to go flipping over in the water!”

  Ben knelt and grabbed his brother’s ankles tightly. Nathan leaned farther forward, out over the drop, and into the front seat. He had just grasped the sword, when the car tipped forward. “Goddamn!” he whispered, “Ben, pull me back!”

  Ben jerked heartily. Nathan was drawn out of the car, which was rolling forward. Unaccountably the passenger door swung shut, narrowly missing Nathan’s head, but slamming closed on the sword blade. It snapped, leaving the last foot of bloodied metal inside the automobile,