Charles and Ginny were not more than ten minutes late, and Ginny apologized with wreathing pink smiles, and carefully explained that none of the clocks in the house worked on the nights around the full moon, and that she was certain that it all had something to do with the intensity of the moonshine on the gears and springs.
Ginny had particular smiles for Nathan that evening, and through their first two drinks did not even allude to the trouble that had been between them for more than fifteen years; but after they had all pondered the menu as if they did not know it by heart, and ordered what each of them always ordered at the White Horse, Ginny turned and laid her soft powdered hand atop Ben’s. “You know, I am so ashamed of myself, I just lie awake in the bed at night, thinking how I’ve neglected you, Ben.”
Ben laughed nervously, but it was clear to Nathan and Charles that Ginny was not talking at all about Ben, but about Nathan. It was easier and less embarrassing for them all if Ginny directed her remarks to the younger simpler man, the man with whom she had not been warring.
Ben, who had some idea that this was all a sham, at least on his brother’s part, was afraid that Ginny’s attentions to him would bring down Nathan’s wrath, and he tried to draw back. But Nathan, directly across the table, signaled for Ben to allow Ginny’s hand to remain, and so he suffered himself to be apologized to.
“Ben,” said Ginny: “I just don’t know what we’re going to do with you. You’re a grown man, and you don’t do a thing in this world. Nathan and I are just going to have to put our heads together and find something that you’re good at.”
“All we need,” laughed Nathan, “is somebody to pay him for lying around in the sun, ’cause he’s awful good at that.”
Charles and Ginny laughed too, and Ben blushed.
And so the evening continued, much talk being expended on Ben and his general incompetence at anything productive, about the felicities of the condominium at Navarre (which Ginny admitted she coveted), about how big and busy Atlanta had become. At the broaching of the last subject, Charles nodded deftly to Nathan. Nathan interpreted this nod as a signal that ail had gone well with their plans for the acquisition of the Larkin blueberry property. Two subjects were not brought up: Ginny and Nathan’s past differences, and Warren Perry in jail for the deaths of the Larkins. Each had his reasons for avoiding the latter topic.
In relief that the evening was going well, and buoyed by Charles’s indication that their project had prospered in Atlanta, Nathan had ignored his own injunction against hard liquor, and with Ginny and Charles switched to vodka martinis before dinner, and continued with the same to accompany his deep-fried seafood platter. The whole table was merry and voluble by the time their plates were taken away, and they had requested the memorized menus again, so that they might determine dessert.
The quartet, suddenly silent among the other diners in the place, stared at the menus before them but Nathan, for drunkenness, wasn’t at first able to concentrate on the list of pies and shortcakes and ice creams. His back was to the rest of the room, and he faced Ben, seated deep in the bay window. John McAndrew stood behind Nathan, his pad raised and his pencil poised, silently urging the table on, for he had other customers. Ginny had spoken, and Nathan heard the young man scribbling across the pad. Ben spoke then, and Nathan was just at the point of deciding whether to go with the McAndrew’s Special Strawberry Shortcake or McAndrew’s Supreme Apple Pie a la Mode, when a drop of liquid splashed on his menu. It was thin watery blood, quickly blotted into the porous paper.
He looked quickly up, in the process overturning his water glass. At his side, and bending forward slowly from the waist, stood Jerry Larkin. Discolored blood dripped unrhythmically from a clumsily sutured gash across his neck. Jerry grinned. His mouth welled with black water that seeped out over his chin. His battered face was a colorless gray, and one cheek was smeared with graveyard soil. He was dressed in an ill-fitting brown suit with a white shirt beneath, stained and damp at the collar with blood. Jerry’s bare feet, black with mire, were fixed in a spreading dark puddle of black water and blood on the red carpet.
While the others fussed with the overturned water, Nathan gripped the edges of his chair and told himself over and over that this was an apparition. Jerry Larkin’s corpse, with the head sewed badly on by the undertaker, was only the accustomed waiter, John McAndrew, impatient for his order. John McAndrew’s hands were not stained with blood and black water. The overwhelming damp stench that radiated from the upright corpse was only another trick of Nathan’s senses. He tried to will Jerry away, and return John McAndrew to his place.
Jerry Larkin turned his grinning head slowly. Nathan stared at the straining sutures. Afraid they would break and the head plunge into his lap, he drove his chair back. “Excuse me...” he stammered.
Still sitting, he glanced at the three faces at the table, which stared back at him in immobile alarm. Nathan then remembered something strangely irrelevant: That, since Ginny and Charles had been out of town, they probably had not heard of the assault on Annie-Leigh Hooker.
In that same freezing moment, he wondered if Belinda knew of it, whether his father had found out; tried to imagine what the town was saying now about the attack, and how Ed Geiger had reported it. Nathan decided he wouldn’t go back to work for a while, would take a leave of absence from the bank for a much needed rest. Nathan turned his head and Jerry still grinned at him. The sutured lids, like Evelyn’s, had been torn unevenly apart and loose flaps of flesh, the upper lids, hung attached to the fold of skin beneath the eyes. The corpse’s stare was insolent and horrifying. The water with grainy black impurities continued to spill out of his mouth.
Nathan rose with an inarticulate stammer. The chair fell behind him. He stood unsteadily, staring at Jerry still, trying to think what actions or what words would dissolve the vision.
The pad and pencil Jerry’s corpse held in its bloodless swollen hands dropped to the floor, With slow deliberateness, those hands that stank of earth and corruption rose and cupped the bruised chin beneath the grinning mouth. Dead Jerry Larkin pushed upward with slowly gathered force.
Nathan stared with dismal fascination at the gash that circled the neck. The sutures strained. The thin discolored blood spilled out faster.
One by one the sutures snapped. Others were pulled out as thread is ripped from the hem of a dress.
Jerry’s two upraised hands rocked the severing head back and forth until it was torn free of the trunk. The eyes continued their insolent calm stare, the grainy water spilled out over the protruding black tongue. The corpse raised the head high, as if in triumph; but after a motionless pause, the body collapsed in a heap across Nathan’s vacated chair. The head spilled forward, landed with a loathsome thud on the carpet and rolled beneath an unoccupied table.
Nathan stared wildly around. Eyes in the restaurant turned toward him. He realized tremulously then that no one else was seeing what he saw. He turned back quickly, hoping to find John McAndrew in his accustomed place by the table, but the headless corpse, draining blood and black water from the severed neck onto the carpet, still lay across his chair.
Nathan turned, resolved to get out of the White Horse as quickly as possible. The hostess moved toward him, Mrs. McAndrew in her close-fitting purple dress. He feinted to the right, in hope of reaching the door before she stopped him, and in the corner of his eye, he saw the arms of the purple dress raised in alarm.
The dress was no longer purple but a dingy gray. Nathan looked up: It was Evelyn Larkin advancing toward him, her mouth and eyes opened wide, grinning as Jerry had grinned. Black water poured from her mouth too, and she stained the carpet as she walked.
Nathan threw his hand over his mouth and whirled toward the door. Jean McAndrew had risen from her chair behind the cash register, and blocked his path.
No one in the restaurant saw that he was being pursued by the attenuated corpse of an old woman, who threaded her dripping way among the tables of diners.
It wasn't the cash register girl at all, but Margaret Larkin, with poised gravity, moving slowly and with infinite grace, between him and the door. Under the dim spotlight overhead, Nathan could see now that she was made of water, the same grainy black liquid that poured out of the corpses’ mouths. The impurities whirled over her body and dress alike, and gathered more densely at the extremities, so that her hands and feet were almost black with them, while her head remained pale by comparison.
She opened her mouth wide as Nathan came nearer, as if to draw him inside it. The black minute filings swam more quickly over her body and she shimmered in the weak light.
He raised his hand to strike her, but in the same instant, Margaret’s arm was lifted as well, and Nathan was clutched in a gelatinous vise, clammy and disgusting. He raised his other arm and was similarly stopped.
Margaret’s head pulled back, and for the first time he smelled the noisome breath of the river in her. Her face urged upward to his.
With one great exertion, Nathan pushed sideways and forward, hoping to pin this noxious water-thing against the doorjamb. He succeeded, and through his clothing he felt the mass flabbily deform itself against the wood. He pressed harder; it burst, drenching him and the woodwork with the vile black liquid.
Not looking back, Nathan stiff-armed the door open and fled the restaurant. Standing in the bay window, Ben, Charles, and Ginny watched him rush toward the Lincoln, his figure faintly illumined by the rising golden moon, and listened to his crushing footsteps on the loose gravel.
Part VIII
Full Moon
Chapter 42
Babbling incoherent apologies and explanations to Ginny and Charles Darrish, Ben Redfield hurried out of the White Horse after his brother. The Lincoln strained at the edge of the highway, its horn blowing and its engine revving high. Ben ran across the lot to the car and jumped in. On the reckless drive home, he sat fearful and silent, and did not even dare to tell Nathan that the headlights were not on. The more inexplicable or violent his brother’s conduct, the less Ben was inclined to question it.
Ben followed his brother with amazement through the darkened house as Nathan turned on all the lights, and peered anxiously into the closets; but still Ben said nothing. He did not ask what Nathan expected to find, or why he had nearly frightened poor old Jean McAndrew out of her wits. On any other occasion Ben wouldn’t have followed so close on Nathan’s heels, expecting a sarcastic rebuke and a gruff dismissal, but on this evening when he had lagged behind in another room, Nathan called to him impatiently. At the last Nathan pushed open the door of his father’s room, found the old man sleeping. Nathan walked silently across the carpet, pulled the glass doors shut, and locked them.
The feverish tour completed, Nathan brought Ben into his own room, and motioned him to sit at the foot of the bed. Then, to Ben's continued astonishment, Nathan went into the bathroom, propped the door carefully open, removed all his clothes, and laid himself in a tub of steaming water. The contrast between the temperature of the bath and the frigid air of the house was so great that Nathan began to sneeze.
“Nathan,” Ben ventured to suggest, when his brother had allowed the water to drain out, and began to fill the tub with fresh, “you think you really ought to have it that hot? Steam cain’t be that good for you—”
“I’m tense,” said Nathan, in a small hot sharp voice: “I got to get rid of the tenseness in my joints.”
Ben nodded as if he understood. He grew restless sitting on the edge of the bed, watching his brother lie back in a tub of water. After Nathan’s eyes had closed for a couple of minutes in apparent peace, Ben rose quietly and went to the glass doors that looked out on the forest behind the house. The nearly full moon shone through the sparse branches of a dying pine.
“Ben!” his brother called out excitedly: “Ben! Where’d you go?!”
Ben ran to the bathroom door. “Nowhere!” he cried: “I was looking at the moon, I—”
“What’s wrong with it?” Nathan demanded, and rose out of the bath. His skin was burned a harsh red, and steaming water coursed through the thick black hair of his chest. His features were contorted in fright, and he looked an anguished devil rising naked from hell.
“What?” Ben stammered.
“What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with the moon, that you’re looking at it like that? What's it doing?”
“Nathan,” said Ben, trying to think of the correct reply to this nonsensical question: “It’s just sitting there. It’s not doing a blessed thing!”
Ben slept that night in Nathan’s room, and to his mystification, not on the cot at the foot of the bed, but in the bed itself. Nathan’s hand was clamped on his brother’s forearm the night through. The door had been locked, and a chair set against the knob. The curtains had been drawn against the forest, and a lamp placed on the floor in the corner. It was kept on so that no shadows from outside showed through the material.
In the worried minutes before sleep, Ben tried to think of something to link Nathan’s present fearfulness to the cash register girl at the White Horse. But Ben could imagine no reason why Nathan should be afraid of Jean McAndrew—unless she had somehow found out about Evelyn and Jerry Larkin, and was blackmailing him. But even supposing that to be the unlikely case, he still couldn’t figure out against whom Nathan had barricaded the room.
But Ben followed his brother in everything, and Nathan's momentary moods had so strong an effect on him that he quickly gave over trying to reason it all out. Even though he had no idea what troubled Nathan, Ben set about to reassure his brother that all would turn out well.
Early on Friday, Ben telephoned the bank to say that Nathan would not be coming to work that day, but had decided to remain some time longer at Navarre. All that morning, Nathan sat quietly in the den and watched television. He even allowed Ben to leave him for a few minutes now and then, so long as the kitchen door was propped open and he could see Nina moving about inside.
After lunch, Nathan turned the television off, and moved out with Ben to the side of the pool. Here he lay on the chaise beneath the high hot sun, and thought out what had happened the night before. He had worked hard in Navarre to prepare himself for the apparitions and was furious with himself for having failed his first trial so miserably. The only comfort to be gleaned was that no one else had seen the specters. He alone was afflicted. He had wanted to avoid the ghosts, or ignore them when they did appear. He now tried to imagine that they would atrophy and fade. He looked forward to the end of the summer, by which time he would wonder if they had been anything more than vagrant dreams. Evelyn, Jerry, and Margaret Larkin lay dead and rotting in the Babylon graveyard.
His reaction in the White Horse had been inexcusably violent. He had throttled the fat cash register girl, who in his mind had assumed the form of Margaret Larkin. He was known to each of the two dozen witnesses; there was no way of keeping the story quiet.
He considered it best to lie low for a while, to give out that he was suffering a nervous breakdown caused by an overload of work at the bank, the assumption of all his father’s responsibilities at too early an age. Better to have people think he was weak, than for them to imagine him a murderer. The bank would get along well enough without him, and his salary would continue to be paid. It occurred to Nathan that he had not been visited by the spirits of his victims in Navarre, but that all three had presented themselves not two hours after his return. He conjectured hopefully that he would be affected only if he remained in Babylon; out of the town, he might rest untroubled. Then he must simply go away for a while, a few weeks, a few months. James Redfield would probably not object even if he moved away altogether.
That would probably be best, he reckoned, simply to leave Babylon for good. Nothing kept him here except the bank and his father, the bank didn’t need him and his father didn’t want him. Ben would go along, because he might prove useful in case the visions did after all remain, and because it might be dangerous to leave him behind.
&n
bsp; Nathan, reassured by this decision, called Ben out of the pool. Ben padded over.
Nathan shielded his eyes against the sun, and squinted up at his brother: “How’d you like to spend the rest of the summer down at Navarre? Just you and me. I think it’s about time we had a rest—everything that’s happened and all.”
“I think I’d like it,” said Ben cautiously. “What’s Daddy gone say?”
“ ‘Good riddance!’ ” cried Nathan, imitating his father’s strained voice so that Ben laughed. Then he added: “We’ll just get Nina to move in. I don’t know why we haven’t done that before, she lives all by herself anyway, it’s not like she’s giving anything up to come here.”
At that moment, Belinda Hale stepped through the open glass doors onto the patio. “Hey ya’ll. D’y’all just get back?”
Both men greeted her, but Belinda rode over their salutations: “Ben, why don’t you go inside and talk to Nina for about five minutes, while I speak to your big brother?”
“Okay—” said Ben, looking to Nathan for approval.
Nathan nodded, but cautioned: “You let me talk to Nina about what we just said, Ben. Don't you say anything.”
Ben nodded his head and disappeared.
“Nathan Redfield,” said Belinda, as she came to stand by the chaise: “I hear that you have been laying hands on Annie-Leigh Hooker in front of two hundred and forty-seven seeing witnesses while my back was turned, in the middle of the CP&M!” She laughed at her little joke, but was disconcerted that Nathan's reaction was neither embarrassment, nor laughter, nor anger, but a kind of quiet fearfulness. Belinda had learned the afternoon before, from a source three times removed from anyone who had been at the bank that morning, of Nathan’s attack on Annie-Leigh Hooker. However, this tale had been so garbled into a murderous attack that left Annie-Leigh on the floor of the bank bleeding, unconscious, and practically naked, that Belinda had credited very little of it.
Cold moon over Babylon Page 24
