Night Relics

by James P. Blaylock

  At the game trail Klein didn’t hesitate, but hauled Pomeroy through the brush, jerking him along, unmindful of broken branches. Hell, there was no way to be tidy, to hide his trail. When he came to a stop, finally, Pomeroy’s shirt was shoved up under his armpits, and Klein reached down and yanked it over the white, hairless belly. He rolled the corpse over, turning away at the sight of the back of Pomeroy’s head, scraped clean of hair after being dragged up the path. He noticed then that there were already vultures overhead, circling in long, declining loops. Pulling and dragging the corpse deeper into the greasewood and sage, the flies swarming around now, he managed finally to wedge it beneath a clump of heavy brush, shoving the shoes in with it. He considered searching out sticks or pulling up plants in order to hide the body even more thoroughly, but then abruptly gave up.

  “That’s it,” he said out loud, stepping out toward the trail. The thought occurred to him then that taking Pomeroy’s clothes off would hurry the process of decay, make things easier for the flies and for the carrion eaters that would find their way down off the ridges. But the idea was too ghoulish, and he set out again, the stiff chaparral plants springing into place behind him, dense enough so that unless someone happened to stray off the trail and wander into the scrub, the body might never be found. He headed down the ridge trail, back toward the cars, aware that the wind was rising, the dense vegetation shifting around him like the surface of the sea.

  6

  HE DROVE POMEROY’S CAR INTO THE CREEK AND LEFT IT there, the keys in the ignition, and walked the half mile back up the canyon to the truck. Within a few days the Isuzu would be stripped, shot full of holes, turned into another rusting hulk. Six months from now the county would haul a crane and a flatbed truck up the canyon clearing out wrecks at the taxpayers’ expense.

  When they got around to it, they’d trace the car to Pomeroy. But so what? That was inevitable. There was nothing in the wrecked car to indicate there’d been any violence, nothing in it of any value. What it looked like was a typical car theft—joy riders ripping off a new four-wheel-drive vehicle and driving through the canyon like maniacs, abandoning the car after they’d wrecked it. There was nothing in it to suggest that Pomeroy was dead, that his body lay decomposing beyond the top of Falls Canyon….

  He unlocked the truck and slid into the driver’s seat, taking a look at Pomeroy’s wallet and at the little notebook. Inside the notebook, after the several pages of names and phone numbers and figures, there were half a dozen blank pages and then another page containing a couple of sentences written in very careful handwriting, full of flourishes and curlicues and loops. “I might compare thee to the flowers,” the first line read, but then the word thee had been crossed out and replaced with you. The sentence was repeated, the you replaced with the words my Darling. The rest of the page was filled with doodles of flowers and lightning bolts and question marks trailing off into nothing.

  “Poetry,” Klein said out loud, shaking his head. It was unbelievable, Pomeroy trying to write this kind of trash. It didn’t jive with the Pomeroy that Klein knew. He dropped the notebook on the seat and sorted through the stuff in the wallet. There were a dozen credit cards and an assortment of business cards. Tucked in among the credit cards was a library card issued by the city of Irvine and a couple of membership cards to video stores. There was nearly eighty dollars in cash along with a couple of store receipts, including a computer-printed receipt for a two-dollar video rental—Way Out West, the old Laurel and Hardy movie.

  Klein was dumbstruck. One of his own favorites! Somehow, of all the excesses in Pomeroy’s personality, this was the most incongruous, even stranger than the damned poetry—the notion of him sitting around alone, drinking cold milk and laughing at Laurel and Hardy. There was something depressingly pathetic about it. Suddenly he was sorry he’d paid any attention.

  He closed the wallet. The less he knew about Pomeroy the better. For God’s sake, he hadn’t killed the poor creep. He started the engine and moved slowly out onto the road, leaving Pomeroy’s stuff beside him on the seat. Almost at once he saw the bees swarming around the oak tree again, and on impulse he stepped on the brake and slid the transmission into park. He got out, leaving the door open and carrying the wallet, address book, and ring. Calmly and slowly, he walked in among the bees, which hummed in and out of the hollow trunk, disappearing down into the shadows. It was impossible to say how deep the hollow was, but the interior of the tree was dark as night, and he couldn’t see the bottom.

  Abruptly making up his mind, he pitched all three objects into the yawning mouth of the hollow tree, turning at the same instant and sprinting toward the truck. He threw himself in through the open door and slammed it behind him, half expecting a swarm of angry bees to bang into the closed window. There was a dense cloud of them buzzing around the dark hollow, darting in and out, their attention captured by the objects that had landed in the middle of their hive. He shifted into forward, hooking the truck around and edging slowly into the mass of swarming bees until, through the window, he could see into the depths of the hollow tree. There was no sign of the stuff he’d tossed in—no sign of the ring, no sunlight glinting off the polished leather of Pomeroy’s wallet or off the slick black cover of the little notebook. There was nothing but a million bees and the dark hole that had swallowed what was left of Pomeroy’s life.

  Oak leaves drifted across the front of the porch where Lorna sat talking to Mr. Ackroyd. Roses bloomed on a trellis behind her shoulder, and she brushed a spray of hair out of her face, letting her hand linger by her temple. Watching her, Klein cut the engine and coasted to a stop across the road, feeling suddenly alone, seeing her there talking to a man he barely knew. The rush of things that he had meant to say to her had vanished, and he realized that in this small way she led a life separate from their marriage, separate from him. He felt suddenly like someone out of her past.

  There was no surprise on her face when she recognized his truck, and certainly no joy, just an indifference. He might have been a deliveryman pulling up with a load of bottled water. He pushed open the door and got out, walking across to the steps. Ackroyd stood up and nodded to him, then stepped forward and shook his hand.

  “I’ll just brew some coffee,” he said, and then turned around and went inside without waiting for a response.

  “I called Joanne….” Klein said, then faltered. Lorna said nothing. “Look,” he continued, folding his arms in front of his chest, “I guess I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “You guess,” Lorna said, still not looking at him.

  “No, I don’t guess. I am sorry.”

  She nodded, rocking slowly, looking out toward the trees.

  Something occurred to Klein just then, in a nasty rush, and he nearly groaned out loud. “Wait a minute!” he yelled through the door, then pulled the screen open and went in.

  The old man stood at the kitchen sink, filling a teakettle with water out of the tap. “Don’t …” Klein started to say. “Do you have any bottled water?”

  “Don’t worry about the water,” the old man said.

  “Why?” Klein asked, surprised. Did he know?

  “It’s spring water. Absolutely pure. Everyone seems to worry about the water out here.” He smiled, putting the kettle on the stove and turning on the flame. Then he got a better look at Klein’s face and asked, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Klein took a deep breath and started in. This was just the first of it. “There’s a man by the name of Adams who’s been hanging around the canyon out here. I think he tried to buy you out, or told you that he represented someone who did.”

  Ackroyd nodded. “He’s a persistent man.”

  “He was,” Klein said. “He’s found a new line of work, actually. Real estate didn’t agree with him.”

  “Well, that’s moderately good news.”

  Klein reached across and picked up the teakettle, pouring it out into the sink. “He put dead rats into your water tank.”

 
Ackroyd widened his eyes and nodded. “Why on earth would a man do that?”

  “It was his idea of a good way to drive you out. You know, make you sick. Make life out here … inconvenient, whatever you want to call it.”

  “And he shot my cat yesterday?”

  Klein closed his eyes. The dirty little geek … “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know that for a fact, but I’d bet he did.”

  Ackroyd merely nodded, and his silence made Klein feel like a treacherous fool. How the hell had he let himself be pushed so far by a creep like Pomeroy? Business is business, he would have said a week ago. Now business looked like something else. “Could you come out onto the porch for a second?” he asked. “I want to tell Lorna about this.”

  He followed the old man out. Lorna sat as ever. Probably she was thinking that once again he’d walked away just when it was vital that he stay. Had he always done that? He pushed the thought aside. “I was just telling Mr. Ackroyd that my business associate tried to poison his water supply.”

  Lorna reacted now, her eyes narrowing with shocked surprise. She shook her head slowly, as if at the betrayals and at the depths to which Klein had sunk.

  “He put two or three dead rats into the tank,” Klein said. “I didn’t know about it till afterward. If I’d known what he was going to do I would have stopped him, but I didn’t know.”

  “When did you know?” Lorna asked.

  Klein suddenly remembered unerringly what he had felt when he’d first heard about the hillside slippage years ago, about the accident that had hurt the boy. He remembered the weeks of rationalizing and the knowledge all along that it wasn’t any good, that words would never efface what had happened, nor would anything else—gifts, tickets to the baseball game, everything else he’d tried. In the years since, his doing nothing about the rats was the worst thing he’d done.

  “You knew yesterday morning,” she said, “when you had the fight with him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t say anything? Why? How long were you going to let it go?”

  “I wasn’t … I was afraid, that’s all.”

  She nodded, not asking for details. He couldn’t think of anything more to say about it, to excuse it. He was willing to reveal all of it to her, but not in front of the old man, and for a dozen reasons, too. There was no use compromising a man like Ackroyd. From what Klein had heard from Lorna, Ackroyd was some kind of a missionary, a moral streak like a stone spine; there was no telling what he’d think he had to do if he knew about all of it—the fraud, the swindles.

  “Well,” Ackroyd said. “You’ve told me about it now, haven’t you?”

  “Believe me; I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner.”

  “I believe you,” Ackroyd said. “I suppose this man hoped to cause some kind of bacterial infection, probably salmonella. That’s most likely. It’s possible it hasn’t had time to incubate yet. The water’s cold. I drank tea this morning, so the water was boiled. Probably there’s no harm done, except that I’ll have to net the rats out and drain the tank.”

  “I’ll pay to have it done,” Klein said, hating the sound of the words even as he said them. “I don’t mean that I think that makes up for anything, I just …”

  Ackroyd waved the idea aside. “I know what you mean,” Ackroyd said. “I’ll take you up on it. I’ve got enough bottled drinking water to last a month. I’ll use it for the coffee.” He nodded and turned back through the door.

  Klein sat down in the empty chair, already feeling battered. Lorna looked done in, like she hadn’t slept worth a damn, and of course she hadn’t. Suddenly he wondered how much he could tell her. How much could she stand? Maybe she’d just go to pieces on him. “I guess the first thing …” he started to say.

  “The first thing is what were you doing last night? I can’t believe you’d do that right there, in our own house, and when I was there, for God’s sake. Don’t you have any shame?” She shook her head slowly at him to illustrate her disbelief. A week ago the gesture would have been infuriating. “When that man called on the phone I thought he was lying, or crazy—anything else but that he was telling the truth.”

  “That bastard has never told the truth about anything,” Klein said.

  “Until last night, apparently,” Lorna said.

  Klein was silenced. “Until last night,” he said finally.

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “She was the girl of my dreams,” Klein said.

  “God.”

  “I don’t mean it like that. I mean the dreams I’ve been having—all of it happened last night, just like I dreamed it. I didn’t even know at first if maybe it was a dream.” He searched for the right words. This was coming out like some kind of idiot’s excuse, like he was saying that the devil made him do it.

  She was silent, staring across the road, where the wind was blowing through the trees again. The side of the house protected them from most of it, but a stray gust shook the roses, and a rain of white petals fell to the porch, a couple of them landing like big snowflakes on Lorna’s sweater.

  “Okay, that’s partly a lie,” Klein said. “I guess I knew it wasn’t any kind of dream. I don’t know what the hell it was.”

  Abruptly she started crying. Klein was lost. He wanted to put his arm around her shoulder but he couldn’t. He couldn’t touch her. She wouldn’t want him to. Or even if she would, he didn’t know how. He never had touched anyone, not like that. He made himself lay his palm on her arm, squeezing just a little. Then he brushed the rose petals from her sleeve. “What can I say?” he whispered. “I didn’t … It wasn’t …” He looked away, breathing deeply.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “What you said about your dreams?” She wiped her eyes with the sides of her hands.

  “Nothing,” he said. Thank God he’d never told her about them in detail. It would just scare the hell out of her now. “It was just a figure of speech. I guess what I meant was that the dreams were guilt. If you really want to know, I met her at … through Winters,” he lied. “You know him from the Spanglers’ party. Big guy, hugs everyone. He was putting together that charity trip down to Mexicali.”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  “Well, she worked for him. Some kind of clerk or something. She came to lunch a couple of times. I ran into her by accident out at the mall once. Then she came by the house one day when you were out at the club, said she just wanted to be friends and all. I just … I don’t know. She wore me down, I guess. The fight we had yesterday and all. I had a couple of glasses of scotch. She showed up last night, late, said she wanted to talk….”

  “And then she forced you to have sex with her.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You know what I mean. No, she didn’t force me to do anything. We didn’t do anything. You know what happened. Everything just went crazy.”

  “What will the two of you do now?”

  “The two of us? What do you think, we’re a couple? She’s gone. It’s over. I made that clear to her.”

  “Who was the man with the shovel?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t even know she had a damned husband. He followed her over or something. What a damned mess that was.”

  “And I nearly shot him,” Lorna said.

  “That’s all over and done. You didn’t shoot him. I don’t know how to say this, how to make it sound right, but whatever happened yesterday or in the past, I want us to forget that. We have to. We don’t have a choice.”

  “Forget it?”

  “What you were saying yesterday, about us being on the same side and all instead of enemies. I never understood that before. I never thought about it. There was a lot I never thought about.”

  “Me too, I guess,” Lorna said.

  Klein wondered if she was talking about herself or about him. He hoped like hell she wasn’t going to bring up the drinking. There was too much to talk about without that. And he was in no
position to be critical of her, not right now. This was his time to unload, and he’d barely even got started. And now that it was happening, now that he was telling the truth at last, it was all coming out lies. Well, it wasn’t the facts that mattered a damn bit. It was what it all meant, and he wasn’t lying about that.

  There was the smell of coffee just then, and Ackroyd came out through the screen with the pot and cups on a tray. “I’ve just got a few things to look after,” he said, and went straight back inside.

  Klein drank his coffee in silence, wishing that Lorna would say something, anything to make it easier on him. He realized suddenly that it was getting on into evening. The sun had disappeared behind the tree line, and the tree shadows were long and dark across the road.

  “I guess I’ll go after we finish the coffee,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “You all right driving back at dusk like this? Visibility’s bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you mean what you said yesterday, about us being on the same side? Has that changed now?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t talk about that now. Give me some time to think.”

  “All right. But I’ve got something more to tell you, and it’s not an easy thing to say. It’s going to be part of what you think about, though, so I have to say it now, before you go. Afterward you can get mad or whatever you want, and I’ll go or stay or …”

  “It’s that man again,” she said to him. There was sudden fear in her voice, and she put her hand to her mouth. He shook his head even though it was true. He was almost happy that she reacted like that. It meant she still had a stake in him and in what he was. “How bad is it?” she asked. “What have you done?”