The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  The room stank.

  He turned away, went into his bedroom, changed into dry clothes. For the longest time, he stared out the window at the rain falling through the leaves of the great oak at the back of the house, puddling on the deck, swelling the stream that ran along the edge of the yard. He heard someone on the steps.

  “Quincy?” Asa said. “We need to call the funeral home.”

  His father mumbled something; he couldn’t make it out.

  Asa said, “You can’t just let her lie there like that.”

  “I won’t have anyone see her like this, Asa. Tomorrow is plenty soon enough.”

  “Quincy—”

  “I’m going to clean her up first. Tomorrow.”

  “All right then.”

  He heard Asa on the stairs once more. Presently, the front door opened and shut. A car started in the driveway.

  He stood there and watched the rain.

  That night, Henry had listened from his bed as his father worked in the sickroom.

  How must that have been? he thought now. How would it feel to strip the soiled clothes from the body? To wash the slime and shit from the flesh you had known in passion?

  Henry closed his eyes as another memory spoke.

  That night, for the first night in his life, he had dreamed of the labyrinth, his relentless pursuer.

  In the ashen light of dawn, Henry crossed the hall.

  His mother lay on her back, her best Sunday dress loose around her shrunken frame. Yet a measure of beauty had returned through his father’s ministrations; her porcelain flesh seemed clear and depthless, her expression composed. Her mutilated hair had been washed and combed into something like order. Crazy hope surged within him; he could not quell it. He reached out with trembling fingers—

  Her flesh was cold.

  When he lifted the blinds, it was still raining.

  The inundation had continued throughout that night. Swollen streams gushed out of the hills and into the valley below. By midnight, Mill Creek had overflowed and Cinder Bottom had become a river, sweeping everything—trees and power lines and panicked cattle—into a black torrent. By three in the morning, Stoney Gap Lake had begun to lap over its banks, and before dawn, Harold Crawford and his fellow deputies had begun evacuating sleepy townsfolk to higher ground. At one end of Sauls Run, the courthouse stood well above the waters. At the other, Holland House brooded atop its rocky promontory. Between them stretched a flat brown ocean from which buildings, telephone poles, the high arc of the Stone Bridge emerged like the drowned playthings of some Brobdingnagian child.

  On Widow’s Ridge, Henry found his father deeply asleep in the bedroom he had shared with Henry’s mother. The room reeked of alcohol.

  Downstairs, he fixed himself a sandwich and watched television until three, when the power went out. Somehow that seemed significant to him, the picture shrinking to a white hot point, until finally it snapped out of existence, leaving nothing behind at all.

  “The whole damn town is flooded,” Bill Richardson said. “I don’t know how you’re gonna take her there.”

  Quincy Sleep folded his hands into fists. “Well, she can’t stay here, can she?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I guess not. So we’re going to have to move her.”

  “I just don’t like to leave Sarah and Willie alone in this storm, that’s all.”

  “Sarah and Willie are going to be fine, Bill,” said Sarah Richardson from the doorway. “It’s only raining.”

  It was four thirty. Henry’s father had been awake for maybe half an hour, most of which he had spent on the phone, first with Asa, then with Bill Richardson. Henry had not supposed that Sarah Richardson would accompany her husband when he came, yet here she was, her plain face tight.

  “Get the station wagon, Bill,” she said now.

  Bill Richardson sighed and disappeared into the rain.

  “I’m sorry Bill’s such a twit,” Sarah said.

  Quincy Sleep made a dismissive gesture.

  “Henry, would you like to come over and visit Willie while your father is gone?”

  “No, thanks.” He stood beside his father, looking out into the sullen July afternoon. The Richardsons’ station wagon turned into the drive. Bill got out, opened the hatch, and trudged up the porch stairs. Rain streamed from his hair and clung in droplets to his eyebrows and nostrils. His eyes narrowed into angry points.

  “All right then.” He shrugged through the doorway and started upstairs, Henry’s father at his heels.

  “Henry, why don’t you come into the kitchen with me?”

  “No, thanks.”

  A moment later, Bill appeared at the landing, backing down the stairs. Henry’s father followed. They lugged the sheet-wrapped corpse between them.

  “Henry,” Sarah said from the kitchen, “come here now!”

  He ignored her as the men descended, breathing heavily, now and again pausing when one of them began to lose his grip. He followed them through the foyer, across the porch, down to the car, and stood at the base of the steps, watching through the shifting veil of rain as they loaded their burden into the back of the station wagon. Bill slammed the hatch.

  “We’ll be back in a little while,” Henry’s father said.

  “I want to come,” Henry said.

  Sarah spoke from the shelter of the porch. “Honey, you’re going to stay here with me.”

  Only the rain moved, a shimmering curtain. Henry could smell the fecund bouquet of the drowned soil. He could feel the weight of his father’s gaze upon him.

  “I really don’t think—” Sarah said, but Henry’s father interrupted her.

  “Come on, then,” he said.

  They drove in silence. Henry sat between the two men, watching the storm whip the trees into frenzy. Debris-choked torrents churned in the ditches. In low places, pools had overspread the pavement, forcing Bill to slow the station wagon to a crawl.

  Henry fidgeted, the last words he’d spoken to her—

  —go ahead, I wish you’d die—

  —reverberating in his mind. He whimpered softly, half expecting a rustle of sheets from the backseat, a cold hand dropping heavily upon his shoulder.

  Bill turned onto the courthouse square, slipping past the Grand Hotel. At the apex of High Street, the wipers slapped back a curtain of water, unveiling the valley. Holland House loomed on the far ridge, ghostly as a ruined castle on a storm-racked coast. Everything else had been submerged, streetlights and roofs thrusting like wreckage through the depths. Water lapped across the lower reaches of the Stone Bridge.

  “There we go,” Bill said, pointing at a knot of men gathered by a rowboat bobbing at the water’s edge. They coasted down the rain-suck street. Just short of the water, Bill swung the wagon around and parked.

  Men materialized like apparitions as they got out into the driving rain. “I’m awful sorry, Quincy,” someone said.

  “Let’s go,” Bill said from the back of the wagon.

  “Shouldn’t the boy wait in the car?”

  A tall man in a rain slicker hunkered down before Henry. Asa’s craggy face peered from beneath the yellow hood. “You okay, Henry?”

  Henry swallowed, nodding.

  Asa squeezed his shoulder and stood. “The boy’s fine.” He glanced down the street, where the water lapped at the pavement. “You holding that boat?”

  “I got it.”

  “We’ll take her from here, Quincy,” someone said gently, but Quincy Sleep shook his head.

  “I’m going to do it myself. You and me, Asa.”

  “That ain’t necess—”

  “He can do it if he wants to,” Asa said.

  Together, he and Henry’s father leaned into the station wagon and tugged forth the corpse. Henry gasped as the rain quickened, molding the sheet to his mother’s features.

  “Easy now,” someone said as they shuffled across the rain-blackened pavement, and Henry saw that it was the man who waited with the boat, a heavyse
t figure standing thigh-deep in water and clinging to the gunwale with one gnarled hand. “It’s slicker than owl shit down here.”

  Quincy Sleep moaned. “I can’t do it.”

  “We’re just going to take her across town to the funeral home, Quincy,” Asa said. “It’s nice and dry there. We’re going to take good care of her.”

  Henry’s father sobbed convulsively as they waded into the flood. Muddy water sloshed around their ankles. The big man stepped forward. “Easy now, I’m telling you that asphalt is slick.” He swung the boat around. “Just lift her in nice and easy. We’ll make her real comfortable.”

  The water had risen to their thighs. They lifted the body to place it in the boat, and Asa disappeared abruptly, as though a bottom-dwelling carnivore had dragged him under; Henry’s father went down after him, the body slipping away. Henry cried aloud. He stumbled back from the water’s edge.

  “No!” he screamed. “No, Mommy, no! I’m sorry! I didn’t want you to die. I swear I didn’t!”

  The body bobbed up like a dry cork, half wrapped in the sodden sheet. One arm had slipped free. A porcelain hand rode the surface, fingers drifting languidly in the current.

  Asa Cade exploded out of the water, coughing, followed an instant later by Henry’s father. They stumbled, grappling with the body.

  Henry screamed again, lurching away.

  That was when one of the men at his back—he would never learn who it was—swept him into a swift embrace. The last thing he saw before the stranger dragged him to his breast was his mother’s face as they heaved her into the boat. Her flesh looked bruised in the gray light and her mouth fell slackly open. But the thing he would remember always—the thing that would haunt him in the moments before he slept—was her eyes. Her dead and staring, her vacant and accusing eyes.

  Of the next hours, Henry remembered only snatches—Asa’s hands on his face, a moving car, a glimpse of wind-lashed trees. Only the most tenuous thread of awareness tethered him to his body. A little while later he woke to the gentle ministrations of a woman—her cooing voice, her sure hands as she stripped away his wet clothes and dressed him in dry pajamas. For a moment, that fuzzy sense of separation departed, driven away by the swift certainty that he had been dreaming. His mother lived; it had all been a bad dream. Then recognition dawned: The voice wasn’t his mother’s; it was Sarah Richardson’s. The vision of his mother’s face as he had seen it last—

  —those eyes, those dead and staring eyes—

  —exploded into his mind.

  He cried out, tried to claw his way out of the woman’s—

  —his mother’s—

  —arms, but she dragged him back into her chill embrace.

  Sarah Richardson’s voice again, low and soothing.

  Then darkness.

  He woke to the stillness of deep morning. Rain pattered at the roof and window sashes, and Bach played downstairs—a stream of crystal notes, almost visible in the gloom. He listened for a while. Nothing frightened him now—not the rain or the dark or the vision of his mother’s corpse bobbing like a cork in the flood waters. That all seemed distant, boyish and unimportant.

  Presently, he got up and walked into the hall, following that trail of notes, lambent against the dark. Down the stairs he went, the night house drifting past as in a dream.

  The study door stood ajar. Henry floated to the door and pushed it open. The room extended immeasurably, a tunnel of books clamoring with strings. At the far end, his father sat in a maroon leather armchair, in the circle of radiance shed by a single stand-alone lamp.

  How long he stood like that, looking at his father, he would never know for certain. But in that time, he perceived with a clarity far beyond his twelve years the broken spirit of the man at the other end of the room. It was not visible in his father’s calm expression, his head tilted against the back of the armchair and his eyes closed as he listened to the music; nor was it visible in his upright posture or his dress, a neat flannel shirt and carefully pressed blue jeans, immaculate even at this hour. Rather he saw it in the entire composition of the scene, the juxtaposition of the man and the half-lit room in which he sat, the music and the hour. He saw it most of all in the man himself—not bowed or bent, but tired, as if he had been carrying a burden for a thousand miles and had only now laid it aside.

  For the first time, he saw what his father would look like when he was old. And abruptly it all fell into place, the interlocking pieces of a puzzle he had not even known he was working—his mother as she decayed into kindling, Asa as he locked away the shining ampoules of morphine, his mother once again, lunging at him, a sheen of agony in her eyes. Stay close by today, his father had said the morning Lily Sleep had died. Stay close by.

  His father had known. His father had known when she was going to die.

  Henry must have made a sound, a gasp of recognition, for his father looked up.

  “Henry?” he said. And then he must have understood the odd expression on his son’s face, for he said no more.

  For a single dreadful moment, they stared at each other in shocked recognition. Then his father reached out and drew Henry to his breast.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Sauls Run 1987

  Chapter 13

  A monster stalked the Run.

  Fall came fast that year, summer fading overnight into the slap of pads from the high school football field and the brassy clamor of the marching band. Yellow school buses prowled the winding roads, and the ridges burned with color. On a moonless night, the monster put in his first appearance.

  Deputy Harold Crawford took the call, the code—261—striking sparks of recognition from his days with the LAPD. Rape. He had seen such things before, but not in years, and never in the Run. The scene, a decrepit Crook’s Hollow walk-up, shook him more than he liked to admit. He could feel the girl’s haunted eyes upon him as he took her statement in the county ER, and he felt a small shiver of excitement, shot through with shame. It reminded him too much of a certain moonlit warehouse, that nasty little rush.

  As a witness, the girl was useless. The guy had come through an unlocked window; it had been dark; he had been wearing a ski mask. Average height, she said. Average build. He had even worn a condom. She remembered only two things that might prove useful: the knife he had held to her throat as he did it, a six-inch switchblade with a pearl inlay, and something he had said, the only words he had spoken the whole time he labored over her.

  “What’s that?” Crawford asked, his pen poised over his notepad.

  The girl looked up and held his gaze.

  “A demon,” she said. “He asked me to help him. There was a demon inside him.”

  Crawford was wrestling his own demons that fall.

  He dreamed bloody dreams, and more than once he found himself walking that broken strand. The drowning man lay always at the horizon, always just out of reach. The black water beckoned. Delbert Grubb was growing hungry again, and Crawford didn’t think a dog would sate him this time around.

  Crawford’s father had served two masters, the Book and the Fist, and as a boy Crawford had learned to know them both. But the Fist had failed him. The Fist had led him to the girl, to the black alley where LeMarius Oxford writhed in agony; it might lead to worse places yet. So he turned to the Book. Waking swollen with desire from slaughterhouse dreams, Crawford offered up prayers to his father’s God. Fifteen years ago, when he had fled L.A., God had granted him surcease—had brought him to the Run, had dammed that dark tide before it sucked him down, had made him a good man. But now Crawford’s prayers fell on deaf ears. God had retracted His grace and His glory, had turned His face from Crawford in this hour of his need.

  A black seed of anger began to germinate in Crawford’s heart. Still the dreams came.

  Most nights, Crawford fled sleep, cruising the back alleys of the Run, watchful for a demon-haunted man slipping like a wraith among the shadows.

  By mid-October, the monster
had claimed two more victims, leaving nothing but words for Crawford to hunt him down by. The phrase—

  —a demon, he said there was a demon inside him—

  —tolled in Crawford’s mind like a funereal bell, ominous and faintly familiar—and not alone because it reminded him of Delbert Grubb, the past he had tried to forget, his own demons.

  But if twenty years of police work had taught Crawford anything, they had taught him not to stare at facts straight on. Don’t look for the answer, he reminded himself. Let the answer come. Strange shadows flicker at the corner of the eye. The undermind knows things the overmind does not. So he dropped the phrase into the cauldron of memory and turned to other things. It would bubble up soon enough. It always did.

  Meanwhile, the seasons turned. Two weeks of sunshine bright as heartbreak scrubbed the fall sky clean, and then, all at once, the trees dropped their colors. Halloween arrived in a scent of leaf fires. Jack-o’-lanterns leered from darkened windows and grammar school goblins stalked the streets under Harold Crawford’s watchful eye. By midnight the goblins were abed, the jack-o’-lanterns extinguished for another year.

  A taste of winter tainted the air, and the earth itself lurched a night closer to autumnal sleep. High in its alpine fastness, unknown to Harold Crawford, an uneasy sleeper writhed in dreams.

  Below, Crawford kept his watch, pondering demons.

  Delbert Grubb showed up the night of November thirteenth.

  The monster was up to four by then. Crawford gave his days to a frenzied search for leads, his dreams to gore and tears, the girl twisting underneath him, the hungry grin of the blade. Waking in the graveyard of the night, he showered the stench of the abattoir away, dressed in a clean uniform, and sought the streets.

  “I thought you’d never show,” a voice said from the backseat as he slid behind the wheel of the cruiser.

  Crawford felt a spider climb the knuckles of his spine. He squeezed the wheel until his joints turned white. He closed his eyes.

  “Now is that any way to greet an old friend?” said Delbert Grubb.

  “You’re dead. I killed you a long time ago.”