Catacombs

by John Farris

  Gibby glanced at Jade and wanted to say something graceful, to muster a tribute But he was more than a year late. Instead he tried to divine the effect which Nell's terrible fate continued to have on Jade's suspect psyche; how damaging, in the long run, it might prove to be. Outwardly Jade hadn't changed.

  He was terse, pragmatic, and observant. And preternaturally quick, a sleight-of-hand artist with gun or knife. Though Jade was only average in size, there was about him an epic quality: He threw the shadow of a king. One expected from him deeds, dynasties, legends.

  The legends existed, all right, but the times had changed. In the pursuit of the bloodstones there could be no margin for error. Was Matthew Jade slower, softer than he had been? If he was faced with a difficult choice in a crisis, and made the wrong decision, then they would all know. Too late.

  "There's one thing about the whole case that keeps coming back to me," Jade said, after another long silence.

  "What's that?"

  "Andrew Harkness' grandfather and father died of an identical form of cancer. His father was only 41 years old."

  "So what?"

  "I just said it keeps coming back to me. I don't know why."

  Raun's stomach was hurting so bad that by the time she reported to the dispensary, she thought she was going to throw up.

  The charge nurse, whose name was Madsden, looked sympathetically at her.

  "Not the flu again?"

  "I don't know. Cramps," Raun complained; she was unable to straighten up.

  Madsden glanced at the clock in her brightly lit, glass-front cubicle. The time was twenty minutes to ten.

  "Dr. Murtaugh's running late this morning, but I expect her just any minute. And there aren't too many ahead of you."

  Raun glanced to her right, into the fluorescent-green waiting room of the dispensary. She saw two black women wearing the institutional denim jumpers. They sat on opposite sides of the big room. One was tall and gnarled and twisted, like a tree rooted on a windy hillside. She leaned forward tensely on her cushioned bench staring at Sesame Street on the black-and-white TV. The other, who was short and plump, with a hairdo like Nancy in the funny papers, held a handkerchief to her face, sniffling disconsolately. Her eyes, like the eyes of a soft animal in a burrow, stared at Raun.

  Raun turned back to the nurse.

  "I'm really nauseated."

  Madsden got up briskly from her creaking swivel chair and pressed a buzzer releasing the door to the treatment area. It sprang open a couple of inches.

  "Come right on back with me, dear."

  Raun followed her, past cubbyhole offices, unoccupied, on the right, rows of gray metal file cabinets on the left. They made a couple of turns, Madsden pausing before the doors of rooms which she then rejected for undisclosed reasons. Finally she put Raun at the very back of the warren, in a tight room with a single misted window from the over-productive radiator. The window, like all others in the prison, was covered with a grid of heavy wire the thickness of a chain-link fence.

  "Ought to be warm enough for you here," she said cheerfully. "Just strip and put the gown on, and if you feel like you're going to faint or anything, buzz me. I'll send the doctor as soon as she comes."

  "Thank you," Raun whispered, as she was hit by another cramp.

  She leaned against the treatment table until it passed. The door closed behind Madsden. Raun sat down and wearily unbuttoned the straps of her jumper, took off the blue-checkered shirt. A hard rain rattled against the window. After taking off her underwear, she fumbled with the ties of the coarse cotton gown, knotted one of them and crept onto the table. She lay on her side, drawing her knees up. This afforded some relief. She'd had very little for breakfast: coffee, grapefruit juice, a few bites of toast, she didn't know what could have hit her so hard. Maybe it was all in her head. Maybe she was just unlucky. She felt very tired. She had begun to perspire in the hot room.

  The lights went out.

  Power failures happened frequently in this lonely prison. Usually the lights began to glow again after only a few seconds. Raun lay listening to the perk of steam in the radiator and wondered if a drink of water would ease her discomfort. After a while she sat up on the edge of the padded table. Through the foggy window she could make out lights in another wing of the prison.

  So the failure was confined to her area–the dispensary and hospital ward next door. It was well into the morning, there was nothing to worry about. But this day, like so many of them lately, seemed to have been born dead. Her nipples puckered hard beneath the gown.

  To amuse herself while waiting, and give her nerves a break, Raun conjured a familiar scene: a south Pacific beach, enormous warp of sun through the slats of palm trees, trade winds. The sea on a reef, booming distantly. She placed herself there, bare browned feet toeing out just above the surge line, where the sand was firm but wet enough to accept and hold, for minutes at a time, sculpted footprints.

  She made a lot of aimless footprints, fine tuning her sense impressions to include the tang of oiled heated skin, the feel of her hair whiplashing across her face, the slight grit of sand between her thighs as she strolled along. It was seductive, absorbing; and the part of her mind that remained like a mushroom in the darkness of her prison sentence reacted with alarm. Because she was getting too good at these excursions, removing herself from the horrors of tedium. Raun realized that once she achieved her beach and full stature in that pleasant dream country, she might spend an entire day, then a week, perfecting just one footprint. Turning slowly, thoughtlessly, like a goddess on a spit of sun. There she could be immortal . . . while the imprisoned self burst and perished, drooling away intelligence.

  Raun slid painfully off the table, clutching her belly, and farted, which helped a little. She had another, doleful inspiration: She was developing colitis.

  She was about to take a drink from the sink when she heard voices outside. She paused to listen. The voices stopped. Raun couldn't be sure, but she didn't think it was Madsden. Or Dr. Murtaugh, whose broguean English was instantly recognizable.

  If the lights had been on she wouldn't have been uneasy. But she'd been waiting in the stuffy room for, she couldn't tell, maybe twenty minutes. Sick as she was, Raun craved human contact.

  She opened the door. The hall outside was darker than she had anticipated. It gave her pause.

  The voices again. Just whispers this time. Raun thought she heard another door opening, closing.

  In an office at the front of the dispensary a phone began to ring.

  Between rings Raun discerned the faint squeaks of nurse Madsden's swivel chair. The phone rang seven, eight, nine times. But Madsden didn't pick up. Why? Her chair was agitated, it bumped against something. A desk, a wall. For no good reason the nape of Raun's neck crawled like a caterpillar.

  Looking cautiously out, she saw at the other end of the hall a faint light from a window on the yard as another treatment-room door was opened.

  Opened slowly, by someone standing at arm's length in the hall.

  Raun had an impression of a very long, almost emaciated arm, of hunchback tallness, a watchful face illuminated in profile, like a rind of a Stygian moon. Of an upraised hand with something pearly, or silver, lethally angled in it. She remembered the black woman who had been so enthralled by Sesame Street in the dispensary's waiting room. And the other one, staring at Raun, a touch of fever in the round and childlike eyes.

  The phone stopped ringing. Its persistence had been comforting, its absence inspired terror. The chair continued to squeak. Raun stepped back and closed the door silently, not allowing the latch to click into place. Her heart was trying to break through the bones of her chest.

  Someone, she thought, was going to be killed. It was a grim aspect of prison life she'd only heard about. Who were they looking for, and what could she do? Raun forced herself to open the door again. She had to know where the women were. She strained to hear them.

  "That the dentist office, fool. Thought you said you k
nowed where you was."

  "She back here someplace, that all we need to know. Just you look around and keep shut."

  "Fool! Shoulda made that nurse tell us."

  A soft giggle.

  "Why don't you go ask her now, see if you can lip-read. Ha!"

  Their words became indistinct, as if they'd teamed up and were now whispering with their heads together. Raun fought a strong cramp, and tried to remember how to get from the treatment room she now occupied to the front of the dispensary. A few steps down the hall, right turn into the next hall, right, no, left at the file cabinets to

  "Raun Hardie!"

  She was shocked to hear her name spoken. With no doubt remaining of the intended victim's identity, her impulse was to run, screaming, for help. Now she knew it was no accident that she'd become so sick right after breakfast, that the only lights to go off were in the dispensary.

  Dear God, Raun thought, don't let it happen. Don't let this happen to me!

  Her ability to think rationally even under great stress saved her, at least for the moment. If the women stalking her were taking such pains with the job, and had the wit and confidence to call her, expecting her to blunder innocently into their hands, then undoubtedly they had secured the outside doors as well, so no one could get in or out. And one of the doors was electrically controlled, from Madsden's office.

  The phone was ringing again. Stunned, then hopeful, Raun listened to it.

  All she had to do was reach Madsden's phone and get through to the prison administrative offices, then try to stay alive for another ninety seconds or so until the guards came with their shotguns. She could crawl under the desk, or–

  Just get moving!

  Raun stepped out into the hall and the loose gown caught rippingly on the doorknob. She reached behind and undid the single tie that held it in place, stepped away naked. She would, she hoped, be more difficult to make out in the gloom of the dispensary without the white gown. Raun could see very little herself. Her assassins might be behind a door just a few feet away, or about to turn the corner.

  She was so frightened she knew she would be hopelessly clumsy if she tried to hurry. She forced herself to think, to listen, at almost every step.

  The phone quit. She'd been using it as a kind of beacon, a homing device in the dark. Without it Raun felt stranded, miles from safety. But she kept going, trying to keep her breathing under control so she wouldn't break into giveaway sobs.

  The file cabinets. Now she knew where she was. With her fingertips she made light contact with the opposite wall and came to the first of the small doorless offices, used by physicians who did part-time work at the prison. In Madsden's office, barely twenty feet away and on the opposite side of the hall, a cube of red light was glowing: the hold button on the telephone. The small light was powerful enough to illuminate an area of sandwich glass in front of the nurse's desk. From the angle at which she was standing Raun could make out the telephone itself. And the middle drawer of the desk seemed to be hanging open. Except for the hum of a refrigeration unit somewhere, the dispensary was very quiet. It was as if the women searching for her had given up, faded into thin air.

  Raun focused all her attention on the waiting telephone. She moved toward it, more quickly.

  Just as she reached the doorway, the swivel chair, with Madsden bound and dying in it, came shooting out of the darkness from the other side of the hall, striking her painfully.

  Raun screamed. Madsden's hands were tied behind her and her throat was open from ear to ear; there was a considerable pool of blood in her lap. In a panic Raun shoved the chair away. Horrified, she saw it tilt. Madsden's eyes were open; they stayed open even when her head hit the floor and came to rest at almost a ninety-degree angle to the chaired body.

  "There you be."

  One of the assassins was coming at her, following the chair she had thrust into Raun's path. Raun glimpsed something long and sharp in a pudgy hand. Giggle, giggle. She smelled the distinctive peppermint odor of angel dust. Raun backed into Madsden's office, slipped on the bloody floor, banged her naked hip and then her elbow against the sticking-out drawer and fell down, the drawer coming free in her hands. In the feeble red light she glanced at the revolver that had slid forward with all of the junk which Madsden had kept in the back of the drawer, then looked at the black girl filling the doorway of the office, hesitating, incorrigibly giggling.

  From somewhere farther along the hall the gaunt one spoke sharply.

  "Fool! Do her. Provide!"

  The chubby assassin stepped cautiously into the of-flee, quivering with stifled merriment. She raised the knife and reached down to pull the desk drawer off Raun. She hesitated again, not quite believing the small revolver she saw raised up at her in Raun's two hands.

  "Oh shit," the black girl said crossly. "Zola? She–" A little too late she lunged, awkwardly, with the knife.

  As they drove into the prison, John Guy Gibson glanced at the small band of sodden young people huddled beneath umbrellas and pieces of tarp, the legends nearly rain-washed from their hand-painted signs demanding clemency for Raun Hardie.

  He said sourly to Jade, "She does have her admirers.

  Jade was looking elsewhere, at armed guards converging on a long two-story building on the other side of the recreational grounds, playing fields and courts. He ignored the sign pointing the way to the administration building and gunned his Custom Bronco toward the scene of the disturbance.

  "There's a scram," he murmured. "Better get out Your ID, Gibby."

  "All the talk in the world won't do no good now," said the gaunt black woman named Zola.

  She was crouched in the hall of the dispensary a few feet shy of the door to the nurse's office. But she spoke softly, unhurriedly, as if they were neighbors passing a boring summer's day on a front porch somewhere. In her right hand she held a straight razor. Behind her was the body of nurse Madsden, which she ignored. From her position she could see a muddy double image of Raun in the glass above the desk.

  Inside, Raun sat trembling with her back against a wall, bleeding (she didn't know how seriously) from a knife slash low on her right side. The revolver she had used to blow apart the fat assassin's head was still clutched in her two hands. The corpse lay between her and the door. Either there was one bullet left in the revolver or there was none. Neither she nor Zola was sure of that, which was all that had kept her alive this long.

  Zola, by her account, had already resigned from this life; she knew she was a goner no matter what happened in the next five minutes or so. She claimed to be at peace. Her only concern was that Raun might kill her with that single remaining bullet before she had the chance to cleanly cut Raun's throat, and so Provide.

  During the precious minutes she had stood the woman off, and gained hope from the commotion of guards and prison officials outside, and lost hope when they seemed reluctant to shoot their ways in and take a chance on accidentally killing her, Raun had tried to put the two of them on a first-name basis, desperately postponing that inevitable moment when Zola would rush in wildly and try to do the job her companion had bungled.

  "Zola, I still don't understand what you 'Provide' by killing me. Who do you Provide for? How can you sacrifice your own life this way? I guess I'm just confused. I know you don't hate me, I've never done anything to you."

  "Of course not, girl."

  "Raun Hardie? Can you hear me in there? Let me know you're all right."

  Zola sighed, and sounded annoyed when she spoke again to Raun.

  "Fools. Better tell them, Miss Hardie, it come down to just you and me, and no kind of trickery, like that tear gas, make a difference. I'm no big talker. Quiet all my life, just a handmaiden, I just do and Provide, according to the will of the Messengers, the holiest beings ever lived on this earth. To Provide is to be Elect in the coming life. Crucify and testify. Allah-lala-la! I come chaste to my Election, weeping tears of joy. This life stinks of sin. They say to me in this place, Zola, eat the flesh of sw
ine. Fools. Water don't wash away your sins neither. And another thing, this life is filled with beasts who walk and talk like men. Shed blood! Blood is the righteous way to Election. No way do I walk out of here alive. Tell them, Fools. Make it plain."

  "What Messengers? Is this some kind of religious–"

  "Shut them up out there! Or I get too fussed to talk. Wesley, I put up with his drinking ways. His blows and meanness. But the child, the child, don't you see, went under the bus. Three years old. Wesley sprawled out drunk upstairs. I melted down all the brown sugar 'til it was bubbling in the pot. Threw it in his demon's face. Now I told you already, don't want to hear them mens no more!"

  "Okay, I'm okay!" Raun shouted. "Just leave us alone, you're upsetting Zola!"

  "Better," Zola muttered "I truly don't mind to talk with you awhile longer, now I gets to know you. What you should understand, it don't hurt 'specially, not if the razor's plenty sharp and that first cut be deep. No pain to speak of. You just black out in a minute or two, drift off to sleep. Peaceful. 'Stead of you puts up a fight and gets butchered real bad."

  "Zola, Zola, please listen to me! I don't want to die. I don't want to shoot you, either. But I can do it. My father taught me to handle a pistol a long time ago. If you try to come in here then I'll kill you."

  "I don't hold that 'gainst you," Zola said generously. "Course you gone do your best." She pondered their dilemma again. "What it come down to, if you got a little bitty purse-type gun, which it sounded to me, then you needs to be lucky and good, 'cause one shot won't serve to knock me down, 'less it catchin' me smack in the head. Now what I think, it get to be just a little too quiet around here to suit me, and that's bad, so maybe–"