Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The road north was heavy in evening traffic. Carolyn pounded on the steering wheel and cursed silently. Why did people who worked in Santa Fe live in Albuquerque, and people who worked in Albuquerque live in Santa Fe? So many people making so many excruciating journeys. Clogging the arteries. Being … people!

  “Where shall I drop you off?” she asked when they entered Santa Fe.

  “The Eldorado,” Faye replied with a significant glance at her coconspirators.

  Carolyn dropped them at the Eldorado, with less fuss than she had expected. Even Lolly went off with them, without a backward glance. As for Carolyn herself, she couldn’t remember ever being so tired or so frightened. What if the people she had called couldn’t do what they thought they could?

  What if she herself couldn’t do what she thought she could? She imagined blood and torture, carnage and death. She saw Stace dying, Hal dying. She bit her tongue and was silent.

  She checked the time and saw it was a little earlier than planned. She stopped at a fast-food place for a quick cup of coffee, something warm to thaw the frozen pit of her stomach, not noticing the other car that pulled in and then just sat there. All Carolyn was aware of was that her stomach hurt, that she was frantic.

  “You’re a coward,” she told herself. “A poor, pathetic, cowardly old woman.” A ewe sheep. Fatalistic as nature itself. Scared to death, but live or die, this lamb is mine!

  Twenty minutes later she turned off the highway into the narrower road leading past her house. She thumbed the button that controlled the right-hand window.

  “There’s a truck,” she murmured to herself. “Right where it’s supposed to be.”

  It was a blocky, wide vehicle, with cardboard taped across the front door, hiding its designation. She had to pull around it, and as she did so, something came plopping through the window into the front seat: a two-way radio, already turned on.

  The radio said, “We’re in place.”

  She wasn’t sure whose voice it was. “Thank you.”

  The gate was closed across the driveway. She leaned from the car window to use the key, fumbling with the lock with her left hand. The gate rolled to the side.…

  Something buffeted her face, like a sudden gust of wind. There was a smell of sage and flowers, and an echo in the car, as though it had become a much larger vehicle.

  “Sophy?” she whispered. Her eyes slid sideways. Nothing. Nothing there. Outside the car the trees bent in a flurry of leaves. It had been the wind, only the wind. She left the car window open, took a deep breath, and let the car trundle slowly down the drive, trying to look in all directions at once.

  The dogs were in the pen—all the dogs, including Leonegro. She cleared her throat. “The dogs are in the pen,” she said aloud to whoever was listening on the radio. “The dog dishes are in there. That means they were fed this morning, but Hal never picked up the dishes. He usually picks them up around nine, nine-thirty, when he lets the dogs out. Or Carlos does. There’s no car in front of the old house. If Fidel and Arturo were home, their car would be there. They leave around eight in the morning. I called Hal around eight-thirty. I’d say whoever’s here came soon after that and has been here since.”

  There was no reply from the radio. She didn’t expect one. If the plan had been put into action, there were people waiting outside the back of Fidel and Arturo’s house. Of course, Fidel and Arturo could be dead and their car disposed of. In which case the whole plan was down the toilet. Assume it wasn’t. Assume Fidel and Arturo had gone this morning. Assume the plan would work.

  She let the car slide to a stop in front of the house and shoved the radio under the seat. She got out and stretched, leaving the car door open. The dogs barked from the pen, then quieted when she went over and spoke to them at length, rumpling each one. A dusty old car came down the drive; the driver leaned out to wave at her. “Hi, Fidel,” she croaked from a dry throat. She had to do better than that. She swallowed, moistened her mouth, said loudly, “Buenas tardes, Arturo.”

  It wasn’t Fidel, of course. Or Arturo. Still, they drove to the house Fidel and Arturo occupied, parked, and got out of the car. They would go in the front; their cohorts would come in the back. If there was anyone in there …

  Her head came up at the sound of crunching gravel. Another car came down the drive, this one driven by Faye. All of them were in it, six of them, even Lolly. All of them, coming like lambs to the slaughter. They pulled to a stop and got out, stretching. They chatted, they laughed, all but Aggie, who regarded Carolyn from deep-set, fatalistic eyes. So the DFC had rigged a sideshow of its own, trusting that Carolyn couldn’t make a fuss. Not now. Not here. And Aggie had come along because she hadn’t known what else to do. Or because she thought she was already damned and it didn’t matter what she did.

  Carolyn felt eyes watching her from the house. She felt stares from the kitchen window, but she took no notice as she went to Aggie and hugged her, pulling her close. “Thank you, love,” she breathed before turning to the others.

  “You damned idiots,” she muttered at them. “You stupid, silly …! Follow my lead, will you? And don’t say anything unless I say it first.”

  She dropped her house keys at the base of the wall, went to the door, tried it, made a fuss, went through her purse, slow item by slow item.

  At the old house the two men who had just arrived, each carrying a plump grocery sack, were letting themselves in the front door. She waited for a sound, a shot, a yell, counting to herself. A minute went by. Nothing. Which could mean there had been no one in the house but might mean a good many other things as well.

  She went back to the kitchen door to hammer on it and shout, “Stace! Hal! I’ve lost my house keys somewhere. Let me in.”

  Footsteps inside. Not Stace’s. Luce’s.

  He opened the door and stood aside. “Carolyn. You’re later than we expected. Did you lose your keys?” His voice was tense, his eyes unfocused, as though he did not really see her.

  “Looks like it. Probably left them at the gas station. I need a glass of water. I’m absolutely overdosed on coffee.…”

  If he moved too quickly, he’d twang from the tension, she thought, watching him go almost on tiptoe. Stace was somewhere else. Probably being held accountable for his behavior.

  He said in a falsely bright voice, “Well, it’s the whole club. Did you find your friend Sophy?”

  “No, we didn’t,” said Bettiann, all too smoothly. “Come on in, ladies, don’t lollygag. You want some water, Aggie? Ophy? We didn’t find her, Luce. We found an old fellow who knows the family. He told us Sophy died a couple of years ago.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad.”

  Carolyn said, “None of us even knew she was sick. We all spent the trip back grieving over her and kicking ourselves. She should have come to us. Maybe we couldn’t have done anything, but at least she didn’t need to be alone!”

  “Very interesting,” said a voice.

  Carolyn turned toward the doorway. “Who …,” she gasped, truly surprised. She’d gotten so firmly into her role that she’d actually forgotten for the moment. It was Jagger. Of course. She had known it would be. And someone else with him, the rumpled man who had been speaking to Jagger in the courtroom. And they had guns. Of course they did. Men like this always had guns. She had never noticed before how theropsian was Jagger’s smile, how feral his eyes were as they fixed on her, ignoring the others as though they did not exist.

  “Don’t pretend you’re surprised, Ms. Crespin. After that ridiculous farrago in court, surely you expected to see me. Did you think I’d let it go?” He glared in Lolly’s direction. “And here’s the little murderess herself. Well, courtrooms have one set of rules. Here we have another. We’ve been waiting for you, my friends and I. We came looking for you yesterday, as a matter of fact. In a helicopter.”

  From a dry mouth she said, “Looking for me? You mean, before? I heard a helicopter, but …”

  “Come into the other room. Just you, not t
hem. Keepe, make sure they stay put.” His eyes swept across them, weighing and rejecting them. “Your daughter’s in the den. And your spouse.” His voice made a crude joke of the word.

  The others stayed where they were, mere statues, standing, staring after Carolyn as she turned and followed Jagger, Luce at her side. Their faces held both fear and a sudden awareness. They had worked themselves up to being high on loyalty and only now realized what they were up against. Well. She had tried to tell them.

  Stace was sitting white-faced and blind-eyed in a chair, with another man seated behind her, his handgun pointed in her direction. Hal was on the couch, blood on his forehead. Carolyn fastened her eyes on his chest, seeing slow movement there. Unconscious, then. Not dead. Luce fell into the chair next to Stace, like a dropped marionette.

  She started toward Hal, but Jagger pushed her into a chair, and she sat.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “What do you want with me?”

  “In this house, a week or so ago, you said that one of your group had been responsible for this current emergency. This sexual matter.”

  She thought for a moment. “I can’t imagine how you … well, Agnes did say that, yes. She got us all in a panic over it. It turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. We should have had better sense.…”

  “In what way?”

  “We shouldn’t have gotten so hysterical over it—”

  “I mean, madam, in what way did it turn out to be a tempest in a teapot?” His voice came like steam, a hot cloud obscuring everything but his fury.

  Carolyn stared bemusedly at the other man, desperately trying to concentrate. The other one hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t done anything at all but just sit there, and only the arm holding the gun looked alive, quivering with tension, obviously ready to commit violence. This must be Martin, the man who had probably killed Swinter.

  Struggling to get the words out, she said, “It was a tempest in a teapot, Mr. Jagger, because Sophy didn’t do anything with the stuff. Aggie misinterpreted what she saw. Jessamine should have realized it as soon as Aggie said it, because the bottle hadn’t been opened when she returned it to the lab.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Carolyn shuddered inwardly. His voice was like a twisting knife blade. She let her mouth drop open, breathed in around the pain, made herself speak. “I can’t help that, Jagger. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell me what the hell you’re doing here. Never mind. I’ll bet I know. The FBI put you up to this, didn’t they? Vince Harmston mentioned something about the FBI, about Albert Crespin’s little friends. You tell Albert that just because I told him almost forty years ago that I would not marry him is no reason to continue this stupid harassment! If you have something to charge me with, or my daughter or son-in-law, then do so, but please don’t make these vague accusations and—”

  “Mr. Jagger,” said Martin. “If you want me to, I can make her tell us.”

  For the first time Carolyn noticed the bruises on Stace’s face, the dark trickle of blood emerging from her hair. She felt the icy cold of her belly spread to her chest, her heart. Stubbornly, she opened her mouth to continue her complaint when a surprised shout came from the kitchen.

  “Go see what Keepe wants,” Jagger said to Martin, who got up and went without a word.

  “It’s probably my hired man,” said Carolyn plaintively.

  “It isn’t. We sent him home this morning. As for the two who live in that other house, they’ll never even know we’re here.”

  “You have no right—”

  He laughed. “Such a cliché. Rights! My rights. Your rights!” He breathed deeply. “The way I see it, I have the right to do whatever I can do. I suppose you have the right to try to stop me until you learn you can’t. You’re like all women. You have to be taught to obey.”

  “Mr. Jagger!” A strangled voice from the kitchen. “You’d better come here.”

  Jagger glared at Stace and Luce. “The two of you stay where you are. Don’t move. If you move, I’ll kill her, then him.” He gestured toward Hal’s recumbent form as he grasped Carolyn’s shoulder and thrust her before him into the hallway.

  She staggered toward the kitchen door, seeing trousered legs sprawled on the floor. It was Keepe, supine on the floor, face blank, eyes open. In one corner Lolly cowered, her hands over her face. Across the room, before the open door, Josh, Ophy, and Aggie held Martin facedown while Josh thrust at a straining shoulder with a hypodermic. Jagger pushed Carolyn to one side and raised the gun toward Josh. Out of nowhere Faye appeared behind him and grabbed his arm. He turned, throwing her away, only to be seized by Bettiann and Jessamine, who had also erupted from the pantry behind him. Josh disentangled himself from the struggle at the door and stumbled across the room, still bearing the hypodermic, which he applied to Jagger’s neck. Jagger bellowed, throwing all three women away from him and raising the gun once more. Carolyn started toward him, but he sagged in that instant, glaring, then folded to the floor.

  “I’ve got Teo’s brothers outside,” Josh panted to Carolyn. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing a female army. I’ll go get the truck.”

  He started for the door, leaving the women gasping for breath.

  “You really got ’em,” said Lolly, taking her hands from her face. “You really did.”

  “All three,” murmured Faye. “Just like that.”

  “Stace is in there,” Carolyn murmured, rubbing a wrenched shoulder. “And Hal. I’ve got to go to Hal.…”

  She turned, thought she turned, at least formed the intention of turning to go to Hal, then lost that intention at the approach of something enormous that pressed her to her knees, smothering her. She heard Aggie cry out, heard Faye grunt as though she’d been hit in the stomach. She looked up. Josh had opened the kitchen door and stood with the knob still in his hand, facing out. His face was blue, his free hand paddled the air as he tried to breath. Outside on the doorstep stood … something. Someone. Dark as night, fiery, terrible, smiling with real amusement as he watched Josh dying.

  Webster. Webster in a human body, but with his own guise gathered around him. A boiling cloud of darkness, a heaving mass of troubled storm shot through with sullen lightning. A mass, immovable and horrid, man-shaped, man-size, yet looming like a typhoon. His eyes swiveled and came to rest upon Carolyn.

  “You,” he muttered in a thunder voice. “You were in my house. You trespassed upon my house.”

  Josh gurgled. Carolyn couldn’t move. Only her lips, her mouth …

  “Sophy!” Carolyn cried from a well of despair. “Oh, Sophy!”

  The word left her mouth like a bird, darting across the room to strike Bettiann like a visible thing, like a splash of clear water that coated her face, released her paralysis. Bettiann’s mouth opened to echo the cry. “Sophy!” she called, turning to Aggie. “Sophy!”

  The name struck Aggie over the heart, and she bent as though stabbed, then threw her head back to croak the name, which flew once more. Jessamine caught it with a lifted hand, raised her eyes, shook herself, grasped Ophy by one arm and cried like a gull. “Sophy!”

  “Sophy!” echoed Ophy, crying the name to Faye, who opened her mouth and sang, her voice deep and velvet black, reaching into infinite distances, summoning, “Sophy. Help us, darling! Oh, we need you, Sophy.”

  Webster looked back at Josh, then turned again in their direction, his eyes at first arrogant, then wary, then suddenly surprised. The form that held him seemed to lose its balance. He went down on one knee, shook his head dazedly, then fell all at once.

  Josh gasped for breath, his face gradually losing its cyanotic hue. “What? What happened?” Outside, in the driveway, men approached from the other house, carrying burdens. “How’d you do that?”

  “Breathe, Josh,” Carolyn commanded. “Just breathe.”

  “No time,” he gargled. “No time. Are there more?” Josh stared down the corridor behind Carolyn.

  “Only these three and … him, Josh.”


  He put his hands to his throat, shaking his head slightly. “I picked up your key all right, got that guy to the door and bushwhacked him, then we got the other one when he came in. Your friends went in the pantry place to grab Jagger from behind. Where’d that other one come from? My God, who is he? I couldn’t breathe. That guy, he looked at me, and I felt my heart stop.” He gasped for a moment more, his eyes flicking toward her and away in angry confusion. “Hypnotism, right? Or a kind of gas? Something like that?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  He took a deep breath. “Well, so long as he’s out of it! We got to get them loaded.”

  She stepped into the kitchen like a person wading through deep water, laboriously, pantingly. She entered upon a space that was not what it appeared to be; her kitchen, yes, so the details of furnishing and equipment confirmed, but she realized that now the space did not end at the walls or the floor or the ceiling. The putative boundaries were only screens of seeming; the real walls were distant as stars. Even the tiled floor was permeable, herself and the others tenuously poised on a fragile crystalline lattice over an empty universe. Lying on the lattice were four bodies. Her mind labeled them—Keepe, Martin, Jagger, Webster—but she saw them as concretions of shadow, distance, and intent. Three were motionless clots of shadow. Webster was a pour of magma, the substance of him still quivering with heat, momentarily immobilized, but not yet bound. Around the room were presences, six of them, the women, glowing with shifting veils of color, half a dozen rainbow slices, waiting. And herself, likewise, waiting. From the window a jungle thrust its way toward the heavens, great trees breathing a subtle fragrance. Her herb garden. A whole world there, on the sill.

  Teo’s brothers came in, knelt, and started peeling the jackets off the unconscious men. Josh fished a metal case from his pocket, took out a hypodermic, jabbed it into a lax arm.

  His voice came from the far edge of the universe. “The first shot immobilizes ’em so they don’t thrash around when you give ’em the second one, ‘cause the second one hurts ’em some. It takes both shots to get them ready for the pods.” His words slipped through a veil as from an echo chamber, resonating with distance. He did not know he was poised in the midst of plunging space, lost among the stars. He thought he was in a kitchen, kneeling on a kitchen floor. He started on the next man while other hands went on peeling the clothes away.