The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  A derelict church lay before him, its steeple tumbled down, an abortive aspirant to grace. His father’s church. Moonlight danced like teeth along the shards of the stained-glass windows as he crossed the fractured street. A chill, driving rain had begun to fall.

  He stopped by the illuminated brick sign. At the top it read:

  FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH REV. QUINCY SLEEP

  Memory ghosted through him when he glanced at the white placard below, but the innocuous legend he recollected—

  —FELLOWSHIP SUPPER SATURDAY JANUARY 21—

  —had been replaced by a more ominous inscription:

  TO STOP THE DREAMS YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND

  YOURSELF

  YOURSELF

  YOURSELF

  Just then the wind picked up once again, hurling itself at his back in endless waves. He braced himself against it, sought to turn and run—

  —to stop the dreams you have to understand—

  —but the wind held him there—

  —yourself, yourself, yourself—

  —frozen and immobile, as one by one the letters on the white placard tore free, transforming themselves into sharp-eyed ravens, black as scraps of midnight sky.

  They hurtled at his eyes, shrieking in fury, but the wind whirled them away. And then he saw that the backing placard, too, had undergone a transformation: where it had once shone spotless white, it now glimmered oily black, a vertical pane of dark, glossy water.

  The baptismal pool.

  I don’t believe in all that, he had told his father.

  A dozen tiny circles expanded and disappeared in the black pool’s placid surface, ghosts of the wind-whipped spears of rain. If he took a single step closer, he knew what he would see.

  Himself.

  The wind shrieked louder still, hurling him forward. The rain drove a thousand stinging needles into his back.

  Gravity reversed itself.

  He screamed as he plunged headfirst toward the pool. His own distorted face rocketed up to meet him, like the visage of a bottom-dwelling fish. The waters shattered around him with a crash like all the glass in the world breaking at once, and then he was falling, endlessly falling into the heart of an impenetrable darkness, into the heart of the labyrinth.

  She could come, Emily said. She had a neighbor who owned a Ford Explorer—snow tires, chains, four-wheel drive, the works. Even so, it took her a couple hours to get there. The power and the phone had gone out by the time she arrived, so Ben found himself studying her by candlelight. She was smaller than she had looked in the photo, maybe five-four and trim, with a few strands of gray in her dark hair and warm crinkles at the corners of her eyes. But her face was wan and tired.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  He watched her work with Henry, her hands sure and gentle, as if she had done this sort of thing before. Henry came swimming out of sleep still sodden with fever, his eyes glazed and bleary. She managed to get some Tylenol in him, a glass of water, a few spoonfuls of canned soup. At least the gas was working.

  Afterward, he slept more easily.

  They stood in the kitchen, basking in the heat from the oven door, and watched night pour out of the ridges to lap at the islands of candlelight visible in nearby windows.

  “He told me this crazy story,” she said.

  And so he sketched it out for her, watching her face in the flickering radiance of the candles, looking for the disbelief he thought he would see. But her face gave nothing away, as if she had become accustomed to keeping every stray thought and emotion locked inside herself. Surfaces and depths, he thought. And he wondered again how he had managed to get so old and so near death without a wife or children. He thought of them as children suddenly—grown children, her and Henry both—and he wished they could have been his.

  “It sounds crazy,” he said, but she waved her hand.

  “My mother died yesterday, up at Ridgeview. So did two other patients. Three in one day, and the nurse said it had been odd like that just lately, the deaths piling up, a whole generation passing before her eyes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been coming for a long time.” She looked over at him. “But I keep thinking about what Henry said, that maybe he was right. You think I could take a look at those notes?”

  Ben retrieved them. He leaned against the counter while she thumbed through them.

  “The second page?” she said.

  “It doesn’t fit, does it?” He drummed his fingers on the counter. “We thought maybe it was something that got mixed in—”

  “But it’s in the same hand, from the same notebook.”

  “I was going to look into it,” he said. “Just to be sure. I even got some books from the library.”

  “You still have them?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s have a look,” she said.

  The snow began to taper off at midnight. By two, it had stopped altogether. The clouds lifted and the cold reach of heaven smote the mountaintops. The Run shimmered beneath its frosting of immaculate starlight, perfect as a wedding cake.

  Emily dozed in the armchair by Henry’s bed.

  Ben made up a bed on the sofa. He lay still and tried to empty his mind, but sleep was hard to find. He kept thinking about the cancer growing inside him, sealing off the alveoli in his lungs one by one, leaving him less and less to breathe with. He kept thinking about afterward.

  So he circled back to it at last: the thing taking shape in the notes, its implications. What had Quincy Sleep told him that morning on the phone? Imagine a story that changes everything. The phrase mocked him. Everything.

  But this …

  Who could have imagined this? He thought it was madness—and he’d said as much to Emily at the kitchen table.

  “Not now,” she had replied. “We’ll talk about it in the morning. The three of us.”

  “But—”

  “In the morning. Henry deserves to be a part of this.”

  Now, his angular frame wedged into the sofa, Ben found his lips shaping the word once again. Madness. But another voice was speaking inside him, the voice Quincy Sleep must have been listening to in the end. Why not? it asked. Why not? Ben had no ready answer. The truth was, he wanted to believe, wanted to believe the way terminally ill patients want to believe in miracle cures at mysterious clinics in the Caribbean. He laughed softly at the thought, for it came to the same thing in the end, didn’t it, this madness? It was the madness of an old man who was afraid to die. And so he fetched up against the cold immutable fact of his skepticism, like a man running full tilt into a wall.

  But it was that other voice—the one that whispered, Why not?—that chased him down at last into a restless old man’s slumber. And it was that voice that echoed in his head eight hours later, when Henry Sleep awoke him.

  Why not?

  If there was a difference between Harold Crawford and his dark brother, it was this: In his ponderous fashion, Crawford was a thinker. Del Grubb, on the other hand, lived deep in his nerve ends. He acted on impulse, surfing dark breakers of emotion on instinct alone. Those instincts rarely failed him. By noon of the day Henry Sleep awoke, however, Grubb was beginning to think that this time they had.

  Crawford was talking in his head. He wouldn’t shut up.

  The circle is closing, Crawford whispered. You’re running out of time.

  Grubb, patrolling the winter-struck streets, couldn’t seem to shut out that voice, and as much as he didn’t like to admit it, he couldn’t help concluding that his dominion might well be as conditional as Crawford’s had been. Everything was still in flux. Though he had temporarily gained the advantage, the titanic battle raging within him had yet to be decided. So he sat back and drove by instinct, letting his hands take him where they would, and he listened. And what it told him, that voice, was this: The blizzard was your friend. The blackout and the problem with the phones, they were your friends. And now you’re running out of friends, because the snow is over. Ano
ther day or so, the power and the phones will be working. Another day after that the roads will be clear, and you just might find some slick state agent down from Charleston sitting on the other side of your desk. Sleep said he was planning to call the attorney general, and enough strange things have happened around here just lately that some slick hotshot might decide Sleep’s story’s worth a closer look. And a closer look would do it, wouldn’t it, old buddy?

  Grubb grimaced at the mockery in that phrase.

  Crawford laughed. That’s right, he said. A closer look and your little charade would fall to pieces. Nobody’ll worry about the likes of Ray Ostrowski, but they’ll hang you for killing Cade. After all, the voice added, they’re already asking about him down at the hospital, aren’t they?

  And they were.

  Cade hadn’t come in on rounds. Grubb had told them he had checked in with the Cades, the doctor was just down with a touch of flu—but he wouldn’t be able to put them off forever. Sooner or later—probably sooner—some smart-ass with a four-wheel drive was going to head up Cade’s way and take a look. You know what’s going to happen then? Crawford asked him.

  Another voice answered the question—The shit is going to hit the fan, it said—and Grubb actually flinched when he heard it.

  It was his father’s voice, speaking in the tone he liked to use just before he went to work with his fists. That was the one thing Del Grubb and Harold Crawford had always agreed on: They hated their daddy. Hated him with the very breath of life.

  Motoring north into Crook’s Hollow, oversteering with a kind of thoughtless grace when the Blazer spun out in the curves, Del Grubb suddenly felt very much like Job. A great hero of his father’s, old Job, crouched out there on the ash heap while God rained down shit from the heavens. I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes, Job said. It was one of his father’s favorite verses, but frankly, the sentiment made Grubb want to puke. Unlike his father, he couldn’t see much use in a God willing to shower a righteous man with shit just so he could win some cosmic wager. Maybe that was something else he and Harold Crawford could agree on: One should never pass on a chance to deliver a hearty Fuck you to their daddy’s God—and to hell with the consequences, pun very much intended.

  That right, Harold? he inquired, but the little voice had fallen suddenly silent within him.

  Which was fine by Delbert Grubb.

  He steered the Blazer to the curb and cut the engine, curious to see where his instincts had brought him. They hadn’t failed him this time. Getting out of the car, he felt a bottomless certainty spill through him, a conviction that everything would work out as he had planned. He started up the walk to Mose Cavanaugh’s house. It was time to remind Mose that he owed Harold Crawford a favor for keeping his boy out of the penitentiary. Old debts had a way of coming due, Del Grubb thought with satisfaction.

  It was time to check on the progress at the dig.

  Daylight was fading when Grubb emerged from Cavanaugh’s house and climbed into the Blazer. He pulled into the street with one hand loose on the wheel, throwing up plumes of snow as he spun the vehicle south toward the Run. He could see the whole town spread out in the valley below him, and he plotted his course with his eye as he dropped down out of the Hollow.

  It ought to be near dark by the time he got to Perry Holland’s mansion on the hill, and that was just fine by him. Some work was best carried out in the dark. Settling up old scores, for instance—and he had a score to settle with Perry Holland for his little bit of trickery.

  But he’d need a guide first of all, and Perry would do just fine. After all, it had been Perry who led him down there in the first place, Perry who showed him that miracle of his daddy’s God.

  “Oh, it’s open all right,” Mose Cavanaugh had told him when he asked about the mine. “We broke through the night the snow started.”

  That was good news indeed. Even better, Crawford’s nagging voice had died away inside him. Grubb’s instincts had been vindicated once again.

  Grubb felt a flush of high spirits at the news. And that had been a lucky thing for Mose Cavanaugh, a lucky thing indeed. For Cavanaugh had done something stupid as Grubb stood to leave. He had grabbed Del Grubb’s shoulder—he had actually touched him—and spun him around there in the foyer.

  “Listen,” he had said. “You want to watch yourself.”

  Grubb pried the fingers from his uniform with distaste. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Cavanaugh?”

  That had rocked Cavanaugh a little; Grubb could see it in his eyes. “No, Sheriff,” he said. “Of course not. I just—there’s a couple things you ought to know, that’s all. Those old tunnels aren’t stable. Some places, they’re just shored up with timbers yet—wood that’s been there the better part of a century. We’ll need a week yet to make it safe.”

  “And the other thing?”

  Cavanaugh hesitated then, and to Grubb, who had spent his share of time in interrogation rooms, he had the demeanor of a man about to confess something that shamed him.

  “There’s something down there,” Cavanaugh whispered. “I’ve heard it rustling around. I’ve heard it—” He hesitated. “I heard something moaning down there,” he said.

  Grubb let a hint of doubt creep into his voice. “Moaning?”

  Cavanaugh looked up and met his gaze. “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” Grubb had said, smiling the way you smiled at a crazy man. And then he let himself out.

  Now, cruising slowly over the snowpack, the Blazer’s wheels slipping now and again, he thought once more of his father’s God. Oh, there’d be moaning, he thought. By the time he was done, there’d be more than moaning in those old tunnels.

  The sun had begun to set, turning the snow along the western ridges a smoky red. To Delbert Grubb, it looked as though the mountains had been dipped in blood.

  The Labyrinth

  The Present

  Chapter 22

  “What if,” Emily said, “the second page of notes wasn’t mixed in by accident? What if it was the key to everything else?”

  They sat in a wash of cold afternoon light at a table stacked with books and papers. The streets beyond the kitchen window had the stunned emptiness of a city occupied by enemy troops. Plows the size of tanks rumbled through occasionally, and once a Ford Explorer slipped past—furtive as a rebel in government territory, Henry thought, watching its rear end swing as it cornered the courthouse square.

  The thought didn’t amuse him. His head throbbed, and he felt a bit too much like a guerrilla soldier himself all of a sudden: wounded and hunted. He had filled Ben and Emily in on everything soon after he woke up. Ghosts seemed to throng the kitchen, clamoring for justice as he finished the story, and in the conversation that followed they agreed on calling in state authorities as soon as the phones were back in order. Hoping his luck had turned, Henry even picked up the receiver and rattled the button for a dial tone. A deep and inert silence poured out instead.

  He pounded softly on the table. “I just wish we knew why it was happening.”

  Ben and Emily exchanged a glance.

  “Actually, Ben and I have some ideas on that,” Emily said. That was when she had waved the notes at him—the three yellow sheets covered in Quincy Sleep’s careful hand—and said they thought the second page might be significant. “I got to thinking,” she added. “Your dad’s office at the church was almost pathologically neat. It didn’t strike me as the office of a man likely to mix things up.”

  Henry laughed dryly. “That’s true enough,” he said, reaching for the notes. “Still, the second page is just biblical references.”

  “Well,” Emily said, “he got involved in this for a reason—maybe because of his expertise, not in spite of it. Ben and I got to thinking that maybe the second page is connected to the rest of it somehow, so we spent some time yesterday tracking down the references.”

  “What did you find?”

  Emily reached across the table and turned the notes
so she could read them. Henry watched her finger slide down the narrow-ruled lines. “They all come from the Old Testament. In this column he cites Genesis and Numbers. In the second column, Isiah, Proverbs, Deuteronomy, Joshua. The first thing we did was actually look up the references.”

  “The pattern wasn’t hard to see,” Ben said. “They were all references either to giants or to spirits who inhabit Sheol—the Underworld, the grave, Hell, however you translate it. I guess various readings are plausible.”

  “That leaves us a long way from the Run,” Henry said.

  “Maybe not,” Ben said. “Your dad’s notes deal partly with Hebrew etymology. I’m anything but an expert, but when we started looking into this, some odd things turned up.”

  “Odd in what way?”

  “Odd in that they seem to have connections with what’s happening in the Run,” Ben said.

  “And with your dreams,” Emily said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about those dreams.”

  “So have I,” Henry said. “Turns out I’m not the only one that’s having them.”

  Emily exchanged a glance with Ben. “I guess that shoots down my notion that they were some kind of psychological projection, doesn’t it?” she said wryly, and Henry was struck suddenly by a memory of the context in which she’d first advanced that theory—not just the conversation itself, but an almost tactile recollection of her skin against his skin, the taste of her lips, even her scent. He smiled and dropped his hand over hers, pierced suddenly with an almost physical ache of longing.

  “But it does support our other hypothesis,” Ben said. “Who else has been having the dreams, Henry?”

  “Raymond Ostrowski and Perry Holland, for sure. Maybe Asa. Cindy said he’d been having bad dreams. And Penny Kohler said Dad had been having trouble sleeping, too.”