“What’d you do that for?” Jasper said. “That was a perfectly good bottle.”
“Aw, shut up, you little scold!”
Upstairs in the one room that was dry, Billy claimed his corner and Jasper defaulted to one diagonally across. Jasper put on his extra sweater, his wool hat, and a second pair of socks and wrapped himself up in his blanket like a mummy, keeping his eyes on Billy across the room. Billy kicked off his boots and unbuckled his belt, took off his bush knife, and planted his automatic pistol on the floor right beside it. Weaving on his feet from the effects of the brandy, and belching, Billy unbuttoned the front of his striped trousers and took out an impressive appendage that seemed to Jasper like an alien being with a life of its own, bobbing this way and that way as though searching some indeterminate horizon for prospects.
“This here’s what the ladies like best about Billy—the bone that made him famous. Big ’un, wouldn’t you say?”
Jasper lay frozen in vivid revulsion.
Billy addressed his organ with a kind of ceremonial tenderness, squeezing, patting, and shaking it.
“Do you have to do that?” Jasper said.
“Just thinking about those girls up north makes me crazy with the itch. Tomorrow at this time, I’ll be swimming in their sweet flesh. Titties and thighs. Wet lips. I’m gonna have each and every one of them in size order.”
“At least blow out the candle—”
“Shut up, you might learn something.”
“Learn to be disgusting—”
“Watch now. Here it comes.…”
He picked up the pace of his self-attentions, pumping and stroking with fierce animal commitment. Then he let out a howl as his back arched and he sent a few jets of his generative fluids against the wall of his corner. Afterward, he stood slumped and weaving in place with his shoulders hunched while his gasps reverted to simple breathing. Then, with a conclusive grunt, he shook out a few remaining drops and replaced the organ inside his striped trousers.
“Helps me sleep,” he mumbled as he sank to his knees, wrapped himself in his leather coat like a bat in its wings, and pulled a thin blanket from his bag. “God, I’m tired.”
He blew out the candle and within a minute he was snoring. Jasper closed his eyes, but his brain blazed with light. He thought of home and family and friends and town. But these thoughts only led to a recognition of how much trouble he was in and the impossibility of returning. He couldn’t help worrying about the woman tied up in the farmhouse and whether she’d managed to free herself or was locked in an upstairs closet, desperate with thirst, praying for help. He also wondered whether her father, the old man Billy had coldcocked with his gun, was still lying where he fell on the kitchen floor. He even stole downstairs with the idea of possibly going back to the house to rescue the two of them, but when he looked outside the rain was pouring off the roof in a sheet. The night couldn’t have been blacker, and he calculated that his chance of finding his way back to their house was close to zero, so he returned to the upstairs room and took refuge in his blanket again.
His thoughts now turned to the future, to his new life in Glens Falls. He determined to shake himself loose of Billy Bones as soon as possible once they arrived and to seek out opportunities to make himself useful in a doctoring way, perhaps attaching himself to a local physician, someone like his father, whom he might assist in exchange for a place to sleep and meals. In time, he thought, he would be able to set up on his own. These agitations finally subsided and he sank into a fervid sleep. He was dreaming about Willie when the lucid awareness that the pup was no longer alive provoked him back to waking. He had no idea what time it was. The rain had ceased and a big waxing moon shone through the skylight, illuminating the room more than the candle had. He sat up panting with fright and despair as the starkness of his situation came back into focus. It took a mighty effort to control his panic. He told himself that his chances of finding Glens Falls were better tagging along with the odious Billy Bones than striking out on his own in the dead of night. Anyway, this was possibly the only night he’d have to spend in Billy’s company, and it was probably not long until morning, when they would be on their way.
The bandit snored musically across the room. Jasper’s eyes fixed on the automatic pistol that lay on the floor beside him. He carefully untangled himself from his blanket and crept across the room to Billy’s corner. Billy continued to snore. Jasper reached out for the pistol. He had handled rifles before. His father let him shoot the Weatherby .240 that he hunted with, but ammunition was hard to come by, even for a man in Dr. Copeland’s position, who traded services for anything and everything. Ammunition in the county depended mostly on reloads these days, and the doctor was down to nine usable brass casings of the odd .240 caliber. His father also kept a Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter automatic in a drawer in his office. More than once, when he knew his father was off on a call around the county, Jasper took it out of its hiding place and handled it, though he’d never fired it. In fact, his father never showed it to him; he’d discovered it by accident below the counter where the autoclave sat, in a low drawer full of medical odds and ends. Billy Bones’s pistol, a Springfield .45, was impressively heavy. Jasper hefted it, aimed through the sights, and was examining its many complicated parts, levers, and stops, when he happened to notice that the butt of the pistol was empty. There was no magazine. He wondered if Billy Bones kept it hidden somewhere or if he just didn’t have one.
Billy stirred and groaned. Jasper froze, while his heart skittered. The bandit coughed, snorted, and flopped over onto his stomach. Jasper remained frozen just long enough to feel sure that Billy Bones had gone back to sleep. Then he replaced the pistol on the floor and stole back to his own corner, where sleep continued to elude him for hours while the moon sank out of view and the fetid room filled with daylight.
THIRTY
The last thing Stephen Bullock did before bedtime, in his capacity as town magistrate, was to sign a warrant directing Dr. Jeremy Copeland to exhume and examine the body of Shawn Watling and report his findings, the costs of which, labor included, were to be billed to the town of Union Grove, repayable in up to four dollars’ silver coin. He gave the folded and sealed document to his chore boy, Roger Lippy, for delivery in person the following day. Then Stephen Bullock retired to the bedroom upstairs in the large manor house that was the beating heart of his four-thousand-acre holdings.
The spacious, cheerful bedroom was wallpapered in a motif that featured pink cabbage roses, with a flowery chintz-upholstered wing chair in one corner. His wife Sophie’s dressing table stood between two large light-gathering windows, with curtains that matched the wallpaper. Two nineteenth-century landscapes of the upper Hudson Valley by the painter Hastings Lembert (1824–93), an ancestor, hung on the wall above a fine early Meiji (1871) tansu chest of drawers in kiri wood and chestnut. Bullock had picked it up forty years ago during his postcollege sojourn in Kyoto teaching English.
Sophie sat in bed reading by the light of her bedside electric lamp. Bullock’s farm was the only establishment in the vicinity of Union Grove that still enjoyed electricity. It was thanks to a small hydroelectric generator where the Battenkill made one final ten-foot leap before it flowed into the Hudson River. It put out fifty kilowatts of power, enough to light the main house, the barns, the workshops, and the cottages his “employees” had constructed for themselves on his property. Finding replacement lightbulbs was a problem now that trade had fallen off so sharply. He’d laid in as many as possible during the hoarding times that followed the bombings in Washington and Los Angeles and the fall of the government, but his supply had run down so severely that he’d had to stop giving new ones to his cottagers—they were going back to candles—and lightbulbs were not the kind of thing he was equipped to manufacture on the farm, though his workshops did turn out many useful items from glassware to harnesses.
“You look very handsome tonight,” Bullock remarked to his wife as he pulled off his blousy line
n shirt and unbuttoned his riding trousers. She looked up over her reading glasses with a sly smile. She wore a silk nightgown that merely pretended to contain her abundant bosom. Bullock was observant enough to know that she tended to wear that particular article of clothing when she wanted his attention.
“Are you proposing to entertain me?” she asked.
“I’d be honored.”
She put down her book, Them, by Joyce Carol Oates, a novel of mid-twentieth-century family depravity, and threw back the covers on her husband’s side of the bed, patting the mattress to welcome him. He slipped between the cool, clean sheets until he was pressed warmly against the wife he adored. Soon he was kissing the little hollow below her ear where the wisps of silvery hair met her perfumed neck, as familiar a place to him as the wooded glens of his dreams, where he was forever young and on the hunt. She reached and turned out the light. His left hand ranged over the deeply contoured geography of her torso—as perpetually beautiful and interesting to him as the terrain of his own great farm—and she opened herself to him. Their ceremony was well practiced but no less pleasurable for its countless repetitions over the years. If anything, their comfort with each other only added to the pleasure they took together, along with their mutual wonder that they remained avid well into age. When their ceremony was complete, they lay panting, giggling, and whispering to each other in delight.
“Sleepy, now?” he asked.
“You know how I am,” she said. Indeed, the transports of love acted on Sophie Bullock as the most potent soporific. It was a joke between them. Bullock himself always claimed to be reenergized by lovemaking, as if he had taken a shot of espresso.
“Would you like me to read a bit to you?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “What have you got, darling?”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving.”
She let out a delighted little yelp.
“Halloween’s almost here,” he said.
“You love holidays, don’t you?”
“They’re more important now than in the old days, when there were more distractions.”
“Well, you go right ahead, but don’t mind me if I slip off to dreamland.”
Bullock kissed her damp forehead, reached for the lamp on his night table, and put on his reading glasses.
“In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson,” he began reading aloud, “at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town—”
Bullock stopped reading at the apprehension of strange noises emanating from somewhere in the house, something banging, a dull thud, a squeak. The old house was alive in its own way, always heaving and groaning with the weather and the seasons. And there were the two servants who lived in the house, Lilah the cook and Jenny the housekeeper, who sometimes moved about downstairs late at night, getting something from the kitchen or the library.
But then Bullock heard a commotion on the stairs. He flung his book aside just as three figures crashed through the bedroom door and stopped in their tracks, apparently dazzled by the electric light. Bullock knew at once what they were. The three figures—bearded, bundled in close-fitting clothing, like soldiers, with trousers tucked into the boot tops, yet not in any discernable uniform—gaped in awe at what they had discovered and not just at the finery of the room. Sophie Bullock, shocked into waking, had been prepared for a moment like this by her husband and by her own intelligence. She sat up in bed beside her husband and drew the bedclothes above her bosom. The Bullocks and the intruders stared squarely at one another in steely resolve during that interminable instant before one of them spoke.
“I’ve been expecting something like you for a long time,” Bullock said.
“That’s nice,” said the tallest one, who wore a leather helmet leaking coyote fur, with an eagle crudely embroidered on a patch at the forehead. “It’ll save us all a lot of bother. Just take us to where the gold is.”
“What makes you think there is any?”
“Oh, come on. How could there not be in a place like this?”
While Bullock sized up the trio, he heard a scream from below and assumed it came from Jenny or Lilah.
“If you harm any of my people, you’ll pay,” he said.
“You’re not calling the shots here just now,” said the apparent leader, who brandished a very large revolver. He used its long barrel as a pointer, gesturing to reinforce his instructions. “Get out of the rack, Mr. Big.”
Bullock threw back the sheets and sprang to the floor with an athleticism that surprised the intruders as much as his state of complete nakedness.
“Check out the missus,” said another of the intruders, shorter and younger than the first. He wielded a sawed-off pump shotgun and sported a head rag that had once been a small American flag. A spray of blond hair leaked out from under it. “Nice-looking for an older gal.”
Sophie Bullock didn’t flinch.
The muffled screams continued from below.
The third member of the trio, black-haired and broadly built, with a tight-cropped beard and no visible weapon, approached the bed and seized the end of the blankets. Sophie resisted, but the burly man succeeded in yanking them off. She threw her arms across her bosom against the inadequacy of her nightgown.
“You come with me,” the leader told Bullock.
“I’m not leaving my wife alone with your gorillas.”
As though to emphasize the obvious, the shorter one unzipped his fly.
“These here boys are gentlemen,” the leader said. “They just need some mothering.”
The screams from downstairs had become sobs.
“Can I put my pants on?” Bullock asked.
“Go ahead.”
The dark-bearded hulk fingered Sophie Bullock’s silk nightgown. She issued a strangled cry of distress, while trying desperately to maintain her composure. The nightgown came away with a ripping sound. Sophie drew up her thigh in a posture of protection. Bullock calmly went to the wing chair in the corner where he had deposited his riding breeches. He pulled them on and fastened the buttons, keeping his eyes on the tall one in the leather helmet with the eagle on it. Then he reached casually beside the curtained window and pulled a braided cord, which set off a blaring electric klaxon on the roof.
“What the hell?” the dark-haired hulk said. The three intruders all shared a troubled glance. In that distracted instant, Bullock reached beside the wing chair into a bronze umbrella stand and withdrew from a sharkskin scabbard the twenty-six-inch-long katana, or samurai sword, that had been another of his acquisitions during his Japanese sojourn. The rigorous training he had undergone in those years returned to him unfailingly. He wheeled around and swung the weapon at the one who had been issuing instructions. The motion was so fluid and exact that for a moment a mere red line appeared between the man’s beard and his shoulders. But then his legs wobbled and his body collapsed in a heap on the rug, while bright arterial blood gushed out of the stump of his neck and his detached head, still in its leather helmet, bounced on the floor and rolled up against the chest of drawers. The young, flag-headed accomplice barely had time to goggle at the spectacle before Bullock delivered a thrust of the sword cleanly through the young man’s sternum, sectioning the heart from top to bottom and separating its owner from his life so efficiently that his brain was able to behold his own death for several seconds before he, too, crashed to the floor. The third one had the presence of mind to lunge for his companion’s sawed-off shotgun, but he also presented the back of his neck so perfectly to Bullock that a minimum of effort was required to remove his head. The eyes could be seen rolling in the head as it became lodged between the legs of the dressing table.
&
nbsp; When all three lay dead on the floor, with just the residual twitching of their shocked nervous systems, Bullock wrested the revolver from the dead leader’s hand, grabbed the sawed-off shotgun from the floor, and hurried out of the room. Sophie remained naked on the bed above the fallen, bleeding intruders, her screams subsumed in the noise of the klaxon, which had succeeded in summoning the men from Bullock’s village up the hill. They now swarmed around the house, barns, and workshops of Bullock’s manor in the rain, rounding up nine other intruders at gunpoint in the electric floodlights which were part of the alarm system that tripped when Bullock had pulled the chord.
Bullock, shirtless and bloody in the stark glare of the floodlights, ordered the captured invaders to be locked in the enormous cold-storage locker that his grandfather had installed in one of the barns in 1965 for preserving his apple crop. Others attended to Jenny Ferris, the housekeeper, on the first floor of the big house, where she lay battered and misused, while Sophie Bullock, now dressed in her gardening denims, supervised the removal of the bodies from her bedroom and the mopping up of the blood that had spilled from their worthless hearts.
THIRTY-ONE
“Who can tell me why we celebrate Halloween?” Jane Ann Holder asked the pupils in the classroom of the Congregational church school. The twenty-seven children in her class ranged from six-year-old Robin Russo to fifteen-year-old James LaBountie. At her question, the teenagers in the room grinned, squirmed, and rolled their eyes to display their embarrassment at the childishness of the subject (despite their residual love for it). But the younger ones became avidly alert at the mention of a festival so close to their hearts. “What’s the purpose of Halloween?”
“To share good things like sweets and cakes,” said Kelly Wheedon, who was ten, “because not everybody is fortunate.”
The Witch of Hebron Page 14
