Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  “I’ m not spying. There was some kind of trouble, but I guess they worked it out.” The sound of wild voices rose again from next door.

  “I guess so,” Bobby said. “Sounds like it. Did you find the alien?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not out back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you look? You went out there.”

  “I looked. I didn’t find it.” Suddenly she wanted to get moving, to talk to Peter, maybe to Mr. Ackroyd. She wondered if Klein was wild enough to hurt Lorna, but the idea of calling the police now didn’t seem to be a good one.

  Bobby opened the back door and went out. Beth went looking for her purse. She checked the locks on the doors and windows. She had given Klein the key that morning so that he could get in to work on the locks. Outside, Bobby had found a tomato stake and was sword fighting with a tree limb.

  “Hop in the car,” Beth said to him.

  “We can’t,” Bobby said. “I haven’t found the alien yet.”

  “Hop in the car. You can do without it, and you weren’t looking very hard anyway.” All her patience had drained away.

  “No, wait,” Bobby said, starting to explain his thinking on the matter.

  “Get in the car,” Beth said evenly.

  Then, as with the shoe, Bobby remembered where the alien was. They found it in the sandbox, buried up to its neck. That was what pirates did to their enemies, Bobby said. They buried them up to their necks on the beach and then waited for the tide to come in and drown them.

  “Sometimes I feel that same way,” Beth said, rinsing the alien off with the hose. But her voice shook, and it wasn’t as funny as it should have been.

  8

  INSTEAD OF ROLLING ON UP THE HILL TOWARD THE CONDO, Pomeroy turned left up Trabuco Canyon Road for the second time that morning. He touched his lip and winced. It was tender, maybe a little swollen where Klein had hit him. He’d regret that before they were through. Probably he already did. Klein didn’t know which way to jump, and it was getting to him bad. The Trooper bounced along through the arroyo, past two dead cars and an overturned refrigerator, all of them rusted and shot up. The dried-out husks of yucca and sumac jittered in the wind, and the sun was nearly blinding through the dusty windshield.

  Even with the windows rolled up he could smell dust and vegetation mixed with the stale-cigarette odor of the inside of the Trooper. There was the faint smell of something else, too, like old lettuce, coming from the inside of the cardboard carton on the passenger-side floor. He had made the rental agency wash out the ashtrays and hose the upholstery down with some kind of scented spray, but that had done nothing except add a sickening miasma of roses to the car’s interior. Probably he wouldn’t keep the car beyond a couple of days anyway. Still, he was going to talk to the manager about it. That was no way to run a business, renting a car like that to a non-smoker.

  He braked carefully, grabbing the camera on the seat beside him and easing the Trooper across a wash, past a swinging gate made of rusty steel poles and old barbed wire. There was a crudely drawn skull on the No Trespassing sign that hung from the gate, and the word trespassing was missing an s. The bushes around the gatepost looked like a graveyard for broken Budweiser bottles, and it wasn’t until the Trooper had bellied up out of the wash that Pomeroy noticed a man kneeling in the brush near the gate, jerking on the rope of a chain saw. He wore a dirty baseball cap and a beard and there was some kind of tattoo on his bicep. They locked eyes for a moment, and the man spit into the weeds without turning his head. Pomeroy looked away, washed with a sudden abject fear. It was as if the man had seen straight into him, and made a judgment.

  For a moment he was almost nauseated by the confrontation. It was a direct insult, the spitting into the weeds. He knew that with all his heart. He was sensitive in that way, almost psychic. He got it from grocery store checkers and waiters and people on the street. It was some kind of jealousy in people of a lower station; you could see it, plain as day, in their eyes and in what they said.

  He shivered violently. Ignorant, damned white trash … The man hated him. His spitting told the whole story. For all he knew Pomeroy was the Angel of Mercy, but the man loathed him anyway. What was it? The new car? The fact that Pomeroy’s hair was cut and combed? That Pomeroy knew how to spell and wasn’t some kind of illiterate Okie beer-drinking … What did a man like that want, aside from more liquor?

  He suddenly imagined Beth walking through the canyon alone. How would she deal with a man like that? It was unspeakable, first his eyes on her, then his hands, touching her … She’d be struggling, trying to jerk free, maybe pleading with him as he drags her out of sight of the road. One of the man’s dirty hands is tangled now in her hair. She claws at his face, hurting him. Then suddenly the man stops, standing stock-still like a light-blinded animal. A dark hole has opened in his forehead, and a single line of blood trickles into his eye. He falls face first into the dirt as Beth jerks away, into Pomeroy’s arms. She’s crying, but it’s over now. It’s all right. He’s come for her.

  He straightened the steering wheel, bringing the car back onto the road. Reaching down, he flipped back the flaps of the cardboard carton on the floor. Inside lay a pellet gun. He’d had it forever, bought it at a hobby shop something like twenty years ago. The only living thing he’d ever shot with it was a parakeet. Next to the gun was a piece of twine, neatly looped, the loops tied with a bow. There was a can of tuna fish, too, packed in oil, and a can opener and a paper plate.

  He wondered suddenly how much Beth had learned when she was spying at the fence. Klein, if he knew anything about last night, would have been a fool to tell her. His mind played through the conversation this morning. It couldn’t have made any sense to her. Maybe she hadn’t heard anything. He couldn’t imagine that she was a snoop.

  He suddenly realized that he hated it out there in the hills, and it wasn’t only the trash dumped on the roadside or the crappy little trailers back in the scrub without decent plumbing and full of subhumans. As the Trooper rounded the long bend out of the open arroyo and into the green shadows of the high-ridged canyon, he knew that he hated the trees and the dark fern-covered hillsides even more. He hated the wind and the flying leaves and the goddamn broken-up road that went straight to hell no matter what was done to flatten it out. There was no order to anything, just a wild, threatening chaos, like in the filthy mind of the beerswilling man with the chain saw, if “man” was the word he wanted.

  He probed his lip with his tongue again, tasting blood now. Damn it! He slammed the edge of his hand against the steering wheel. Klein had made a big mistake, just like Larry Collier had made a mistake, too, all those years ago. And it would have been so easy to avoid, if only they could see who it was in their lives that was really important. Like the man just now by the roadside, they were too ignorant to believe that Bernard Pomeroy was a player, and look what it had cost Collier: his wife, his family, his life, for God’s sake. That was the sad result of jealousy and ignorance.

  That’s what people had to learn. “Take this seriously,” he wanted to say to men like Klein and Collier, like a father would say to a son. You couldn’t always explain things— like for instance what it means that a stove is hot. A child learns respect fast when he touches the damned stove. After a while he doesn’t ask why. If Pomeroy had a son he would go ahead and let him touch the stove, and get it right the first damned time. What he develops is trust. That’s what Klein didn’t have—trust. Collier hadn’t had any, either. He hadn’t trusted Bernard Pomeroy to come through. That was the modern world. For men like Klein and Collier, their own word on things apparently didn’t mean anything binding, and so they didn’t know that a man like Pomeroy meant what he said.

  “Damn it,” Pomeroy said out loud, slamming the steering wheel again, “if I say the stove is hot, and that somebody’s going to get burned, then somebody’s going to damn well get burned!”

  The wind blew sand against the front end
of the Trooper with a pinging sound. He passed a couple of empty cars parked at the creek crossing, and he could see two men fishing back down the creek despite the wind. Early this morning he had driven out to the airport and turned in the Cherokee at the Hertz lot, throwing the trash bags full of clothes and shoes into a trash bin behind a supermarket, which is where he had gotten the cardboard carton. He had only later realized that there might have been some identifying thing—thrown-out junk mail, say—along with the trash and clothes in the bags. He was getting sloppy. The whole episode last night was sloppy. He bit down on his lip, concentrating on the suddenly lancing pain.

  He could see Ackroyd’s place through the trees now. The driveway was empty. The old man had gone off to church. He swung the Trooper into the turnout across the road and cut the engine. Luck was with him. The Siamese cat lay sleeping in the sun, curled up on the cushion of a redwood lawn chair beyond the house. “Opportunity knocks,” Pomeroy said out loud, and he opened the car door carefully, leaving it open. The road was empty in either direction. Despite the wind, he could hear the sound of a car engine in the distance, but that was a chance he’d have to take, even though it might be Ackroyd himself, coming home from church or from a run up to the general store.

  Taking the box out of the car, he rehearsed what he would say if it was Ackroyd—a conversation that had played through his mind a hundred times: the price, the virtue in getting out while the market was good, a little bit of idle chat. Working through the conversation, he slipped open the lid of the box and groped inside, not looking in. Forty thousand dollars? That’s right, probably it was more than the place was worth. A one-bedroom, after all, and on leased land.

  The cat lay sleeping. His hand closed over the pellet pistol, still inside the cardboard box. Six feet, four feet. He stopped, listening to the wind, and conceded a point to Ackroyd. Yes, it was a big living room. And the built-ins were nice. You didn’t find craftsmanship of that quality anymore. These old houses … Pride of workmanship … But of course the kitchen was small, and with all the Forest Service regulations nowadays, you really couldn’t expand the place.

  He pulled the pistol out of the box, aimed it, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger.

  9

  THE WIND PICKED UP SUDDENLY, WITH A SOUND LIKE THE ocean sighing across rocks. It pushed through the chaparral in a wave, bending the stiff shrubs in a rustle of dry leaves, and Peter averted his face from a gust of flying sand.

  In the moment that he shut his eyes, he saw a face in his mind—the face of the woman he had seen last night on the dark road, briefly framed in the rearview mirror. It was as if he glimpsed a snapshot of her, taken in a different time and place. He was suddenly swept with a memory of her, sharp and clear. She was younger, dressed in white, standing on a sunlit lawn, the wind blowing her hair. His life was full of a happiness that nothing could darken….

  Then the image faded. The wind fell and the picture in his mind slipped away, taking the happiness with it. He tried to recall it, but couldn’t. It was simply gone. Whatever he had seen or felt had abandoned him. It was as if some elemental thing had rushed past—something of actual material substance, like a memory built of moving air—and had disappeared into the shadows of the oakwoods that lined the canyon walls below. For a moment he stood there watching the trees in expectation, still possessed with the notion that something had come, or better yet, returned to him out of the past—a cool breath of autumn wind that had left him strangely regretful and empty for its passing.

  He nearly turned back. The open ridge above seemed suddenly solitary and lonesome and strange. From somewhere he heard the solitary cawing of a raven. Far down the canyon the wind still stirred the tree branches, and he could see a dust cloud rising along the empty road. Then, with a premonitory rustling, the wind began to blow along the ridge again, steadily now. Peter started up the trail. To hell with going back down. If relics of old memories haunted the morning air, then maybe it was best to follow them. He leaned forward as the hillside steepened, the trail winding between outcroppings of sandstone. Sage and greasewood, shuddering in the wind, grew out of cracks in the rocks.

  Soon he was out of sight of the canyon, very near the top of the ridge. The trail was almost level, and the shrubbery grew so thickly on either side that it would take a machete to hack through it. He had the disturbing feeling that the wind was almost an animate presence, rushing at his back, and the myriad noises, the rustling and grating of the wind in the dense brush, sounded like the exhalations and utterances of a living thing. Suddenly he was anxious to get out of the thick chaparral and into more open land. He quickened his pace, now and then getting a glimpse of the dense trees below. The top of Falls Canyon lay only a short distance to the southwest.

  Then suddenly, from somewhere in that direction, lonely and distant, came the now-familiar sound of a child’s crying.

  Peter stopped, listening to hear it again, and right then the wind grew suddenly still. In the lingering silence he heard the faint echo of the woman’s voice in return, calling anxiously. Peter hurried upward, breaking into a run. The wind slammed into him, shrieking up the narrow path, pushing him forward as the trail steepened again, rising the last forty or fifty feet toward the ridge.

  He broke out into a clearing—the same one where he’d seen the woman and boy last night—and ran headlong toward where the trail disappeared into the chaparral again, overwhelmed with the certainty that they were just ahead of him. A knot of leaves and twigs swirled up into the air a few feet in front of him, sweeping along in a dusty cloud. The mass of debris rose head high, buoyed up by the wind, seeming almost to expand and contract like a lung. There was the heavy hum of buzzing flies or bees, and the sound of hurried footfalls from ahead of him, unnaturally loud, the feet of the woman and boy scuffing on the rocky path, the woman’s breath sobbing in and out of her throat, the boy wild with fright, crying aloud….

  It was dark night. The moon and stars shone in the sky overhead. Peter felt the wind sweep through him, hastening him along as if suddenly it would lift him above the rocky landscape like a clutch of dried leaves.

  He shouted with a wild desperation, but his voice was hoarse, again as in a nightmare, and the wind swept him across the darkened landscape. He saw them ahead of him, knew that they were running from him, the two of them possessed with a desperate terror. The moon shone on her black dress and pale skin, and illuminated the white of the boy’s shirt. The distance between them shortened, and for a brief moment he thought he might overtake them. He shouted again, reached toward him, the dark shadows of his arms and hands stretching away like the shadows of ragged tree limbs across the gray sagebrush.

  The thicket of alders stood like a dark wall along the rocky streambed. There was a moonlit hole between the wind-lashed trees that led like an open door into the moving shadows. He could hear the rush of water that plunged in a torrent over the clifftop. His breath came in ragged gasps. His hands in the silver moonlight were streaked black with dried blood and dirt, and at the sight of them he was gripped with revulsion.

  The rage that had driven him through the last hour, the jealousy and the loathing, turned to raw fear. In his mind he saw two dark shapes lying dead at the base of a cliff, and he knew absolutely what she meant to do. He had driven her to it, just as surely as if he had led her by the hand to the edge of the precipice.

  He saw the inside of the bunkhouse then—the candles burning, the moving shadows, the flesh of her uncovered flank along the edge of the quilt, the man’s face turning in sudden horror toward the swept-open door, the rush of wind and leaves swirling into the still air of the room, the feel of the weather-roughened handle of the spade in his own upraised hands, the shock of the shovel blade scraping across flesh and bone….

  The dark arch in the trees opened before him, still impossibly distant but seeming at the same time to rush forward as if he were falling into a yawning black pit. Moonlight shone on the hem of her black dress as she slipped into th
e darkness ahead, pulling the boy through with her, glancing back at him with eyes filled with such fear and terror that he groaned and looked away, stumbling and falling to his knees on the rocky path. Over the sound of the wind and water he heard her scream, and then, in the abrupt silence, the moon and the stars were swept as if by a hurricane into the deep void of the night sky.

  Peter stared at the dirt of the path. His hand was pressed into a sharp pebble, and he lifted it to brush the pebble away before looking around him, vaguely surprised at the daylight. Somehow it ought to have been dark. Or maybe not. He remembered her scream, and he had a perfect memory of Amanda’s face, looking back at him out of the darkness of a cave mouth.

  He stood up shakily, his head pounding. It was the first time in his life that he’d fainted—if that’s what had happened. The line of alders stood out against the sky some thirty feet ahead of him, leading back up the ridge along the streambed above Falls Canyon. Somehow he had walked, or run, the last quarter mile along the ridge, but he could barely remember any of it, just ragged images of the moon in the sky confused with a man’s bloodied face against a dark wall, and the dim memory of Amanda running away from him into the darkness.

  He lurched forward, nearly sick, and sat down on the trail again, fighting just to breathe evenly. There in front of him lay the shadowy hollow like an arched door in the thicket of alders. Gray limbs bowed and danced across it as if beckoning him to step through into the shadows. He stood up and walked slowly toward it. The certainty that he had seen Amanda’s face in the darkness there was too crazy to believe. The morning sun shone through the trees, illuminating the stream with glinting diamonds of light. There was nobody among the shadows.

  The miner’s lettuce and nettles and grasses that lined the creek had been smashed down, and there were depressions in the soft dirt on the opposite side of the creek that looked like boot-heel prints—his own, from last night. The creek gurgled along, a clear brown like tea because of the dead leaves on the stream bottom. He stepped carefully out onto the rocks and looked over the edge of the falls, but there was nothing now, no bodies lying broken in the shallow pool. The narrow gorge fell away steeply, choked with dead limbs and leaves that were barely disturbed by the wind, and he could hear the sound of car engines down on the road.