by Dale Bailey
“And there was no tomorrow.”
“That’s right.”
Henry stood. He paced to the window and gazed out, past the ghostly reflection of his face, into the night. “This isn’t some kind of sick joke?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
“And that’s it? That’s all he said?”
“Not quite.”
Henry turned around. “What else?”
Ben shook another cigarette out of the pack and placed it between his lips. He smiled grimly. “He said he had to go, and I told him I wouldn’t meet him, not unless he could give me an idea what the story was. I lied, but your father believed me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘You want to know what the story is, take a look at the history of this town.’ ‘What about the town?’ I asked him. ‘Take a look at how people die,’ he said, and then he wouldn’t say any more, no matter how much I. pushed him. He wouldn’t say another word. He got off the phone.”
“So did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Take a look at the way people die here?”
Benjamin Strange picked up the brass lighter, leaned back on his stool, and propped his knee comfortably against the edge of the bar. Snapping up the flame, he set the cigarette alight and dragged deeply. He smiled broadly through the cloud of smoke when he exhaled. He didn’t even cough.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, spreading his hands, “I did.”
Chapter 10
It was midnight, the witching hour.
At the end of the hall, just outside the study where Henry’s father had—
—been killed—
—committed suicide, the grandfather clock was banging out the hours.
Benjamin Strange let his hands drop.
“What did you find?”
Strange leaned forward, his eyes glinting. “The thing is, I didn’t find a damn thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“We installed a computer system at the Observer a few years back,” he said, “so the first five years or so were a breeze. Subject searches turned up exactly what you would expect in a place like Sauls Run: cancer, black lung, heart attacks, the occasional accident. Car accidents mostly, but a tractor overturned on a fellow in Kopperston a year or two back, and four years ago they had a slate fall up in Copperhead. And of course, there were the other deaths, not many, but a few.”
“What other deaths?”
“Killings. A spectacular killing over in Beckley a few years ago, when a kid took a baseball bat to his whole family—that one made the AP—but they were mostly just the kinds of killings you see every day in the newspaper business. Coupla friends come to blows over a card game. A fellow kills his old lady because she burned the toast. I looked back seven years on the computer files and it was all the same stuff. Cancer. Pneumonia. A barroom murder now and then.”
“So you didn’t find anything?”
Ben waved his hand impatiently. Gray smoke trailed away from the cigarette smoldering between his thick fingers. “Nothing that jumped out at me. I spent the day on this thing. What the hell? We’re a weekly, right? When the computer files panned out, I went back into the morgue and started looking through the papers themselves. Two years I went through week by week, and then I searched back another twenty-five years by looking at every third or fourth issue.” He coughed and stubbed out his cigarette. “It beat the hell out of me, Henry.”
“They were all normal deaths.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you look for a pattern within those deaths?”
“What do you mean?”
Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. Like Love Canal or something. An unusual incidence of some rare disease, like the water was contaminated or people were living too close to a landfill.”
“That’s exactly what I thought. So I went back and did it again—first the five years on the computer, then twenty-five more in the morgue.”
“And?”
Ben lifted his hands. “Nada. Nary a thing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Not anymore. But at the time I didn’t have a lot of doubt. I mean, I didn’t think I would miss anything if it was there. I didn’t compare the Run to any actuarial tables or anything like that—not then, anyway—but I’ve been in the newspaper business for three decades. The people in Sauls Run didn’t seem to be dying of anything unusual, or at any especially high rate. I was tapped for ideas.”
“So what did you do?”
“Went back another twenty-five years. Still nothing.”
“And then?”
“And then I started thinking about your father—a small-town minister.” He turned his glass thoughtfully and gazed off at Aquinas, sitting alertly at the end of the bar, his tail coiled primly about his paws. Ben glanced up to meet Henry’s eyes. “I mean, how could a man like him stumble on some grand conspiracy, after all?”
“So you decided he was a crackpot?”
“Wouldn’t be the first—”
“He wasn’t, you know.”
Benjamin Strange leaned forward. “Oh?”
“He wasn’t your typical small-town minister either.”
“How do you mean?”
Henry stood. He paced to the end of the bar and began to stroke the cat. “He didn’t necessarily believe the things his congregation believed.”
“You mean he didn’t believe in God?”
“No, he believed in God, just not the same God or the same kind of God others here believe in.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you grew up here. People in the Run—a lot of them anyway—believe in the Bible literally. I’m talking the wrathful Old Testament God, virgin birth, the resurrection of the body. Fundamentalism, you understand?”
“Your dad wasn’t that kind of man?”
“Not at all. I don’t doubt he believed in God, but only as some kind of impersonal, creative force, unimaginably far distant in time. Some kind of … I don’t know. Something that could be conceived in scientific terms as easily as theological ones.” Henry walked back to his stool and swiveled, thinking. “He was an intellectual. I think he saw Jesus as a great moral and philosophical thinker, and all the supernatural accretions to the historical reality didn’t bother him. As far as he was concerned, they were enabling devices that made the ethical aspects of Christianity available to people. In fact, that was one of his real passions—the links between pagan myth and Christianity. He spent his life studying them. If he had turned the same habits to analyzing the history of Sauls Run, he probably would have looked at it in a different way than you or I would. And I don’t doubt that he saw something that he believed to be important.”
“The thing is,” Ben said, “I did doubt. And what’s more I went about the thing completely wrongheaded. I was thinking like you. Lead in the water, industrial waste, you name it. I was sure that he had uncovered some messy thing like that.” He extended a long finger. “That was the first problem.”
He took a long breath, gazed longingly at the cigarettes for a moment, and then raised another finger. “The second was in the sample itself. I was getting a false signal.”
“What do you mean?”
“The newspaper,” he said. “It covers the entire county, sometimes even state news, right?”
“So?”
“So your Dad didn’t tell me to look at how people died in the county. He told me to look at how people die in this town.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Ben leaned back, gloating a little, obviously enjoying himself. Now he did tug a cigarette out of the pack, but he didn’t light it. “It makes perfect sense when you realize something else.”
“What else?”
“I don’t think your Dad noticed what was happening in Sauls Run. I think he noticed what wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well.” Ben tucked the cigarette behind one ear. “Finally I
did decide your Dad was a crank—there’re thousands of them—and I didn’t think much about it until he turned up dead the next morning. And then I decided to take another look.”
He pounded a fist against the bar.
“Goddamn it, Henry, it was so obvious once I spotted it.”
“What?”
“It’s not the way people die here your Dad was worried about. It’s the way they don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I had to throw out all the deaths that didn’t occur in the immediate vicinity of the Run—everything from Copperhead and Coal Mountain and that crazy thing in Beckley. All of it. And when I did, I found a couple things. The thing your father noticed, Henry, was not the way people die in Sauls Run, but the way they fail to.”
The grandfather clock in the hall uttered a single abrupt chime. Aquinas leaped off the counter and stalked away, his claws clicking against the linoleum in the silence that followed.
Ben reached for the cigarette angled behind his ear and shoved it back in the pack. “Goddamn coughing. If I can just keep myself from smoking, it’s not so bad.”
Henry leaned forward, clasping his hands. Far down in the bowels of the house, the furnace cycled on. “What do you mean, people don’t die here?”
“It’s crazy. I keep thinking it’s got to be wrong, Henry, but it’s not. People die here—I wish to God they didn’t, I could use a little help—but they tend to die only of old age or the occasional accident.”
“Those are the same things people die of everywhere.”
“Sure. But what’s missing, Henry?”
Henry stood. He walked to the window and gazed out for a moment, seeing nothing but his own narrow-featured face. In the basement, the furnace shut off with a click, and in the silence, the house seemed utterly empty of life or animation. Only the regular ticking of the clock in the hall came to him. This was the silence his father must have lived in for ten years or more, he thought.
Behind him, Ben stirred. His gravelly voice broke the silence. “Henry?”
Henry had lifted a hand to touch the glass. It felt icy against his fingertips, good and free, beckoning him out of this room, this labyrinth. He dropped his hand and turned to face Ben, and in the space of that single movement it came to him, the thing his father had seen at last, though how or why it had come to him after all the years he had lived in the town, Henry could not begin to guess.
“Violence,” he said. “No deaths by violence. Is that right?”
“That’s right. How did you know?”
“I can’t remember a single murder,” Henry said. “Not in the Run itself, not in all the time I was growing up. But you didn’t notice, did you, because the paper covered the occasional killings in nearby towns?”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s not so unusual, is it? It’s a small town. Most people are friendly—”
“It’s a small town, Henry, and like all small towns it’s full of gossip and deceit and even hatred.”
Henry walked back to the bar and slumped on his stool. “But surely you hear about such things. Small towns go years sometimes without a single murder.”
“Years, Henry, yes. But I looked as far back as the Observer would take me—over a hundred years, though there are gaps in places—and I couldn’t find any record of single killing. There’s no way. Not that long, not a century or more.”
“But … why?”
“Who knows? Maybe something is in the water. But I think your father figured it out, and—here’s the irony of it—I think someone killed him to keep him from telling anyone else.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent. “And that leads me to the second thing.”
“What’s that?”
“In the last few days, I’ve done some more research. Not only are deaths by violence practically unknown, but crime of just about any kind is extremely rare. Same with disease. It occurs, but measured against the norms for a population of this size, it’s so low as to be statistically insignificant. People here routinely live into their nineties, even to be a hundred or more. They don’t so much die, as just wear out—”
“That’s not true,” Henry said. “My mother. My mother died of cancer. She died of cancer when she was thirty-four years old. I saw it. I was there.”
“That brings me to the next point—the really scary point. Listen. For the sake of argument, let’s say there’s some kind of damping force in action in Sauls Run, some weird radiation or whatever. Who knows? It’s basically invisible, but it can be detected by its effects on its immediate environment. So what does it do?” He ticked points off on his fingers. “One, it reduces certain kinds of behavior. People in the Run seem to be far less violent than elsewhere, less likely to commit crimes of any sort, in fact. Two, it extends life span. And three, it reduces disease. Two and three are maybe different aspects of the same thing.” He paused. “Now here’s the scary thing: Whatever it is, it’s been weakening for years.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are periodic clusters in the files—intervals when crime flares up, when people die from disease, when people die in general. Each one lasts a couple months, and each time it happens, it’s worse. I picked up on it in the summer of 1978—though it might have started earlier. Anyway, deaths—nonviolent deaths, deaths from disease, old age—nearly doubled that summer. At the same time, the crime rate in the Run surged. It was still well below normal for a town this size, but there was a sharp increase. Both rates jumped up overnight and continued high for the next three months or so. It happens again in the summer of 1980—that’s when your mother died, right?—and again in the fall and winter of 1987. There was a whole cluster of rapes in the Run that fall. They finally caught him, a guy named Earl Kimball. At the trial, he said something like, ‘There was a demon inside me. I kept it caged up for a long time, but it finally got away.’”
“That’s just one guy,” Henry said. “That could happen anywhere.”
“But there’s more. At the same time, the death rate skyrocketed—old people, sure, but a lot of young people. Crime, too: There were a couple robberies at gunpoint, two or three child abuse cases. It made me look back in the files, again. Those things had never been reported in the Run either. In the surrounding areas, sure, but not in town. Not until then.”
“And it follows the same pattern?”
“Exactly. The rates for all those things skyrocket over-night, and drop off almost as fast. And each time it happens, it’s a little bit worse.” Ben shook a cigarette out of his pack, tapped it on the counter, lit it. He placed the lighter on the counter and slid it across to Henry. “Take a look.”
Henry picked up the lighter and read the engraving:
WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN.
“That was what I got when I retired eight years ago,” Ben said. “A lighter, can you believe it?” He laughed. “I worked all my life on papers. It’s all I ever wanted to do. And I wasn’t bad at it, you know? But the lifestyle got me. I spent too much time in bars. I smoked too much. Fifteen years ago, I had a precancerous lesion in my mouth. The doctor took it off right there in his office, didn’t even put me under. But he told me to stop smoking.” He shook his head. “You ever been in a place you don’t want to be and you can’t get out of it? Not because you don’t know how, but because you don’t have the courage? That make sense?”
“It makes plenty of sense,” Henry said.
Ben gave him a long look. “Well, that’s exactly how I felt then,” he said. “I dicked around for another five or six years, tried to quit without really trying too hard, and one day I’m coughing up blood. I’m afraid to go to the doctor, so I dick around a little more, and finally it’s so bad I have to go.”
He smiled grimly. “There’s a shadow on the X rays. Doctor says he can probably get it, but I know better. I know the way you know things, and what that shadow looks like to me is death. It looks like a skull in the center of my chest. So they open me up, a
nd turns out I’m right, there’s nothing they can do. Doctor gives me six months, maybe a year.”
“And that’s when you came here.”
“That’s right. I turned in my notice, collected my lighter, and headed for points south. My family’s gone, but hell, I always liked the Run. I thought, well, let’s see how the old place is holding up. So I roll into town, settle into a hotel room, and lo and behold, before the week’s out, I can breathe a little bit. Another week, I can breathe a little more. So I make an appointment with a doctor, drop my file on his desk, and ask him to take an X ray. Guess what?”
“The tumor’s gone.”
Ben smiled. “It’s smaller, anyway. Doctor has no idea why. He’s been tracking it ever since. It finally reached a point where it was pretty clear I was going to outlive my savings if I didn’t go back to work. So I talked to Emerson MacCauley down at the Observer, and he put me on staff, even rented me the apartment over the office. Which brings us up to date.”
He ground out his cigarette.
“In the last two months, death rates are back up, and maybe illnesses are, too. I called a guy at Ridgeview—the nursing home? He says their statistics are off the chart the last couple months. People who’ve been there for years are suddenly popping off like firecrackers, and they’ve had to start a waiting list for people wanting in. Strokes, heart attacks, you name it. And the violence has escalated, too. This time—for the first time—we’ve got people killing each other. In addition to your father—and the police are calling that a suicide—there have been two other killings in town in the last year. A guy named Boyd Samford shot his wife when he found out she was fooling around, and—this one is worse, maybe—a kid up in Crook’s Hollow killed an old bum—”
“Ian Barre?”
Ben nodded.
“Christ, Ian’s been wandering around the Run as long as I can remember. He’s totally harmless.”
“It was a fourteen-year-old that did it. He ran into Ian up in the woods and shot him with a pellet gun. He shot him twenty or thirty times and just left him there to die. Nobody even knows why.” Ben hesitated. “That’s not all, of course. I guess you’ve figured that out.”
