Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  By God he would, too, if it came to that, if Pomeroy forced him to. But of course it wouldn’t come to that.

  He put the bag of door and window hardware on the kitchen table. It had cost him nearly sixty bucks, but he would let that slide. He could afford to chip in that much in recompense for bringing Pomeroy into the neighborhood. Except if Beth brought it up, which she would, it would be tough to explain not taking her money. He pulled out a dozen cardboard-backed sets of window latches and started peeling off the stiff plastic fronts. He’d have to go back into the garage for a couple of drill bits and a hole saw before he could install the dead bolts, and when he did, then he’d set things straight with Lorna. One thing about her, she usually didn’t bear a grudge. She got mad quickly enough, but her anger evaporated in a few hours. All she needed was time.

  The screw holes in the new window latches matched the old holes perfectly. Klein anchored them with slightly oversized screws, then closed the window he’d left unlatched and tried it. It was solid, no movement at all. It would be easier for a burglar to break the glass than to jimmy the thing open. Short of installing bars over the windows, that was the best he could do.

  He shoved the little table back into place before replacing the hardware on the second window. Then he moved on to the service porch and the kitchen, working quickly and methodically. He missed this part of the business—the handwork, the craft. Your eyes and hands developed their own brains if you worked at it long enough, and you could tell the size of a screw at a glance or cut a square edge with a handsaw or feel whether a tabletop was planed smooth.

  That was the way it was—the things worth knowing were the things you couldn’t be told how to do; you had to put years into them. And when you finally had them right, you hired a bunch of other guys to work for you and you moved on to the desk work, doing crap that any kind of idiot could do, half your time spent in the car, running around from job to job, sweet-talking city inspectors and aggravating your ulcer and your wife.

  He nearly laughed out loud, sinking the last screw in the kitchen window. For ten cents he’d be a carpenter again, where he’d started—except there goes the house and the pool and Lorna’s Jag. But hell, they were on the line anyway if Pomeroy screwed up the canyon deal. He’d probably lose the whole nine yards and Lorna into the bargain. There was some kind of poetic justice in life—karma, whatever you called it—and he’d just come face-to-face with the ugly bastard, sneaking around the backside of the barn.

  He pushed open the door to Beth’s bedroom and very nearly shut it again. The bed was littered with underclothes. He stood at the threshold for a moment, as if the things on the bed might explode at any moment into a whirlwind of lace and elastic. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he knew what it all was. He hated walking through lingerie sections in department stores. Most men did, if they weren’t deviants of some kind, although Lorna could never understand that. Women had a different attitude about it—obviously they had, or else Beth wouldn’t have left it strewn all over the bed. Damn it, she knew he was coming over to fix the doors and windows….

  Then the thought crossed his mind that she wanted him to see the stuff, but he quickly brushed it aside. That was crazy. He wouldn’t let himself think like that. Moving into the room, he glanced at the bed again. Clearly she’d been particular in picking things out to wear, laying them out like a man might lay out shirts and ties. And hell, there was nothing wrong in that. It was what women were supposed to do; although maybe men weren’t supposed to see it. She was a grown woman, with a kid, for God’s sake, and she had a boyfriend who seemed like a hell of a nice guy. If she treated him right, more power to them both….

  “Lance!”

  Klein leaped forward at the sound of the voice, a strangled sound gasping out of his throat. Throwing out his hands to catch himself, he pitched the screw gun into the wall, and it bounced back onto the bed. He scrambled around, flailing through the undergarments and bedclothes, grappling for the fallen screw gun. He clamped his hand around it, waving it in front of him like a weapon as he staggered to his feet, stupidly pulling the trigger so that the gun made a little whirring sound. The closet door opened and Pomeroy stepped out, grinning like a cartoon pervert.

  “Put the gun down, Lance,” he said, holding both of his hands in front of him and shaking his head theatrically. “Calm yourself a little bit. Look at the mess you’ve made out of Beth’s things.” He looked like hell, his hair blown straight toward the ceiling and his face streaked with sweat and dirt. The knees of his pants were soiled, and one was torn, a little triangle of material flapping open to expose a patch of hairy, pale skin. One of his hands was wrapped in dirty gauze that was streaked with dried blood.

  Klein was still gasping so hard for breath that he couldn’t speak. He lowered the screw gun slowly, slipping his whole hand around it so that if he had to he could slam Pomeroy in the forehead. Jesus, he looked screwball as hell, with his mouth slack and half-open and his shirt wrinkled and loose. He stood there gaping, licking his lips, blinking a little too fast and often. It only took Klein a few moments to put it all together.

  “You sick bastard,” he said finally.

  “Why do you say that, Lance?” Pomeroy widened his eyes, as if he sincerely wanted an answer to a simple question.

  Klein waved the screw gun at the disheveled bed. “Did any of it fit?”

  “What are you talking about?” Pomeroy blinked hard a couple of times.

  “The underwear. About your size?”

  Pomeroy’s face fell, and he frowned deeply, narrowing his eyes. “Beth and I have an intimacy that a man like you can’t begin to understand,” he said.

  “You’re damned right I can’t understand it,” Klein said. His heart had slowed down finally, and he managed to keep the edge out of his voice. He wasn’t going to lose it again, not like he had that morning. He waved at the open closet door, at the stuff on the bed. “You’d need a wheelbarrow full of shrinks to make sense out of any of this crap. Does this pass for sex with you, playing with a woman’s underwear?”

  “You know nothing,” Pomeroy said, nearly spitting out the last word. “What were you staring at anyway, the wall? If I’d let you go on another minute there’s no telling what you’d have done with Beth’s things. I couldn’t have you handling them! I want you to stay away from Beth from now on out. Do you hear me? Your hippie in the black dress was lurking around outside your fence an hour ago. Isn’t she enough for you? You’ve got to follow Beth around, too, corrupting her?”

  “Say that again.”

  “You know who I mean. Did you think you could keep something like that hidden from me?” He poked himself solidly in the chest. “What does Lorna think of your hippie friend?”

  Klein stood silently, trying to take this in. How the hell had Pomeroy come up with it? The man was some kind of devil….

  “What?” Pomeroy said. “You’re surprised I know about that? I’ll tell you what. You go about your handyman chores here, but then that’s it. Stay away from Beth from this point on.”

  “Sure, Barney,” Klein said. “Whatever you say.” He smiled and nodded.

  Pomeroy tried to mash his hair down, but it was a failure. “Does Lorna know about your other woman?”

  “Yeah,” Klein said. “That’s the maid’s sister. They rent a little place at the back of Rose Canyon. But, hey, listen to me. I’ve got a hell of an idea. I’m going on over to the house to get a framing hammer. That’s a big one—head weighs a couple of pounds and has waffle ridges cut into it. The claws are just about as long as my first two fingers.” He waggled his fingers in the air to illustrate his point. “You with me so far?”

  Pomeroy was silent.

  “Good,” Klein said, “you’re listening. Here’s the important part: I’ll be gone five minutes, more or less. Why don’t you tidy things up here—put this stuff away, close up the drawers, straighten the bed. When I come back I’d like to see things really neatened up. And I’d like to see you gone.
If you’re still here, then I swear to God I’ll drag you back up into the hills and take you apart with that hammer.”

  Without another word Klein stepped toward the door. Pomeroy glared at him, opening his mouth to speak. Klein feinted toward him as if to hit him right then and there, and Pomeroy stumbled into the half-closed closet door, slamming it shut with his back.

  “Five minutes from now,” Klein said. “Better check your watch. It’d be a hard way to die, Barney.”

  20

  PRETTY SOON THEY WOULD FIND HIM. BOBBY REMINDED himself of that again and glanced once more toward the opposite end of the room, where the cardboard box was a dark shadow on the dirt floor. Strangely, a vague and filmy light shone from within the box, just a faint glow, like a lantern muffled under a blanket. A flashlight left on? Or some kind of glow-in-the-dark toy? Bobby wished he had a flashlight, any kind of light, but he wasn’t ready to look into the box again even if there was something like that in there.

  He pushed himself closer to the stone wall of the cellar. Over his head the vines scraped across the trapdoor, falling silent for a moment and then scraping again, as if they were very slowly trying to claw their way through the old planks. Sunlight shone between two of the boards where the wood had splintered out, the light appearing and disappearing as the vines shifted with the wind.

  He glanced again at the box. He knew whose cat it was, and abruptly he wondered if the kid had killed it or just found it. Maybe he went around killing things, like the deer at school. The deer head was all old and stiff, but that didn’t mean anything. He might have killed it a long time ago and saved it just like he was saving the cat, and now he had locked the cellar door and was saving …

  He pounded on the boards overhead again with the side of his fist, but even he could barely hear it. With all the vines and the wind, they’d never know he was down there. They might never find the door at all under the dead leaves.

  He thought about the glass things he’d seen in the box, whatever they were called, heavy lumps of glass that came from telephone poles. He and Peter had gone out picking up rocks in the arroyo once, and they’d found two of the glass things hidden in the weeds near a telephone pole that had fallen over. One of them was green and the other one was purple because of the sun. Peter said it was worth ten dollars.

  He folded his arms and leaned forward, resting his head and picturing him and Peter walking up the arroyo, picking up rocks and rolling them into the back of the Suburban. They’d found some round white rocks, and Peter said they were dinosaur eggs, and they’d found water that bubbled up out of a sandy place and then soaked back into the ground again. There’d been a garter snake near the water, but Peter couldn’t catch it, and there was a horned toad, too, which you hardly ever found anymore, although there used to be thousands of them and they’d ride around all day in your shirt pocket and look out at people in grocery stores and things. They ate ants.

  He looked up, cocking his head to the side. The vines had quit rustling across the wood, and it sounded for a moment like a voice shouting. He yelled and then right away stopped to listen again. There was silence now, but he was certain more than ever that he’d heard someone, and not the crazy kid’s crazy mother, either. He pounded on the door again, then leaned back and kicked it hard with the toe of his tennis shoe. The wooden planks jumped, and dirt sifted through the cracks between them. He turned his face away, closing his eyes and mouth and kicked again, then put his hands to the narrow sunlit opening and yelled as loud as he could.

  He listened again, to the swishing of vines and the sound of the wind blowing around the frame of the loose-fitting door, sounding almost like a faint and distant music. It couldn’t be the wind; there was a melody to it, but not like a radio song, more like someone whistling, or playing the flute, off in the woods somewhere or inside the house above his head. He recognized the tune, and it slowly dawned on him that it was coming from the inside of the cardboard box. The wind died and the vines fell silent, and the music dwindled away.

  21

  THERE WAS NO SIGN OF BOBBY AT THE FORKS. THE FEW cabins around the fire barn were apparently unoccupied, and the road was empty and blowing dust. Peter followed the course of the creek toward home again, hollering Bobby’s name, although even if he were nearby there was probably no way he’d hear anything above the wind. The alders bowed beneath the onslaught, brown leaves scattering from the branches and rising high into the air. He broke into a run, thinking of Amanda and David. There was something desperate in the wind and in the suddenly empty afternoon, and he was struck with the irrational idea that if he didn’t find Beth and Bobby quickly, he’d never find them again at all. That the wind would take them, too.

  It was a crazy fear, and he knew it, but he didn’t slow down. Leaping over rocks and debris, he ran toward the north wall of the canyon, away from the creek and its more dense vegetation, shouting Beth’s name and looking hard into the silent shadows of the old oaks, where dust and leaves stirred in little swirling circles, protected from the wind. There were no cabins visible now, no people or cars. He shouldn’t have let her go on alone. Never mind that she knew the woods better than he did; he was certain right now that neither one of them knew anything about what was going on here, about what had happened to Amanda and David….

  And then he caught up with her near the abandoned cabin. He skirted a stand of willow, and there she was, limping, her tennis shoes and pants legs wet and dirty as if she’d fallen in the stream. “Hey!” he shouted, out of breath, and she turned and shook her head, instantly cutting off his questions. Then she tilted her head and cupped her hand to her ear, listening to the wind, and Peter right then heard the last couple of notes of a pounding sound coming from somewhere nearby, probably from inside the cabin. Leaving Beth to catch up, he jogged through knee-high foxtails toward where the rear door stood partly open.

  Inside, out of the wind, he shouted Bobby’s name, and right away the pounding started up again, suddenly louder, sounding as if it came from inside a closet. There was a short hall, most of its old wallpaper long ago peeled away and holes knocked in the lath and plaster, which littered the dirty wooden floor. At the end of the hall hung a ragged curtain, nailed to the ceiling and making a door across the only bedroom. He shoved the curtain aside and looked in, but there was no closet in the room, only a mere depression in the wall with a single tottering shelf. He ducked back out through the curtain and looked around helplessly. There was literally no place in the house to hide, so he headed back out into the kitchen, listening to the pounding and to Bobby’s voice calling for help.

  “Out here!” Beth hollered, knocking once on the back door, and suddenly it was evident to him that the pounding wasn’t coming from inside the house at all, but from under the floor, from some kind of cellar or crawl space. He ran out again, into the wind, and Beth was just then rounding the corner of the kitchen. He jumped down from the wooden step and followed around to the side of the house where a wooden cellar door, fixed shut with a stick, jumped in its frame as something thudded into it. Beth yanked the stick out and wrenched the door back, flooding the dark room beneath with sunlight and a rush of yellow grape leaves.

  Bobby stood in the light, shading his eyes from the sudden glare. Abruptly he started crying, and Beth limped down into the cellar and scooped him up, hugging him tightly for a moment before leading him back out into the daylight. The three of them went back into the cabin and out of the wind, leaving the back door open.

  “Who locked you in there?” Beth asked, kneeling in front of Bobby. Peter could see that she was furious, and was trying to keep the fear and anger out of her voice, but without much success.

  “It was just a kid,” Bobby said with sudden indifference, “messing around, you know. It’s no big deal.”

  “I’ll show him about messing around,” Beth said. “Who was he? Have you seen him before?”

  Bobby shrugged. “I didn’t ask his name. He was dressed funny, like he came from someplac
e. I think he was the kid who threw the deer head at school yesterday. I heard he was dressed funny then, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Peter asked. “Why do you say he was dressed funny?” But even then he knew what the answer would be—who the kid was—although he didn’t know at all what it signified.

  “He had on this shirt,” Bobby said. “You know, it looked like he was in some kind of old movie. And suspenders, too, and these really ortho-looking black shoes.”

  “Let me guess,” Peter said calmly. “He started crying really loud, and his mother came for him?”

  “Yeah, how did you know? She was really mad, or scared or something.”

  “So you know this kid?” Beth asked Peter.

  Peter nodded. “So do you, in a way. You remember the woman we saw when we were standing on the porch? When the wind really got going?”

  “You said she was ‘the one,’ ” Beth said, nodding. “That one?”

  “This was her son, I think.”

  “And you think they’re the two you told me about? Up in Falls Canyon?”

  He nodded. “I know they are.”

  “Who are they?” Bobby asked. “They’re really geeks or something.”

  “You got it,” Peter said. “They’re a couple of weirdos. Stay away from them. I don’t think they’d hurt you, but stay away from them anyway, like you’d stay away from a snake if you didn’t know what kind it was.”

  “He would,” Bobby said. “He’d hurt someone. He killed a cat. It’s down there, in a box.” He pointed out the door.

  “Oh, no!” Beth said, putting her hand on Peter’s arm.

  Peter stepped outside again, striding around the side of the house and down into the semi-darkness of the cellar. He saw the cardboard carton immediately, and bent over to pull the flaps back, dragging the box into the sunlight through the door. There inside, just as Bobby had said, lay a dead cat. It was a moment before he recognized it—Mr. Ackroyd’s cat, Sheba. If her eyes were shut she would have looked asleep, but her eyes were wide open, staring at the low wooden ceiling.