Always Leave ’Em Dying

by Richard S. Prather

  Then he took his hands away. The man raised his eyes to Trammel's face, then slowly turned toward the crowd. For what seemed a long time he stared out toward us, then suddenly he cried aloud, "I can see! Oh, God, I can see!"

  He turned, fell to the floor at Trammel's feet, and hugged the All-High's legs, sobbing and crying. The crowd went nuts. There were more amens and hallelujahs than Trammel had got throughout his entire speech. After that remarkable demonstration, all but one of the last four afflicted seemed to show definite improvement.

  Finally, the All-High theme came on again and Trammel closed with a few words about the next message soon to be heard in the Truth Room; any who cared for more of the basic truths might attend. This would be followed by confession in the Healing Room.

  Then, to the strains of organ music, Trammel left the stage. The lights outside, which had been out for this past hour, now came on again, and Trammel was in plain sight as he walked away, even while skirting the roped-off area before the still incomplete Eternal House. Nobody left his seat until Trammel was inside the Truth Room. Then the exodus began.

  Men and women went out arm in arm, faces flushed; teen-age kids elbowed through the crowd in a hurry. In the rush and confusion, I followed several couples to the Truth Room and inside. The light was dim, and it seemed unlikely that I'd be spotted, though it appeared I was the only unaccompanied person here. Soon thirty or forty people were present.

  There weren't any chairs or benches, just a carpet over the floor, and everybody sat cross-legged or sprawled on the carpet. I looked around, checking the room against Olive's and Randy's description of it. All the walls were draped with black cloth, but on the right were half a dozen wooden chairs by a door leading to the Healing Room. Up front was a small wooden rostrum, or speaker's stand; Trammel would speak from there.

  About five minutes after I sat down on the carpet the basket was passed, and then Trammel came from somewhere in the rear and walked to the speaker's stand. He started to talk through a microphone on the stand, but speaking more quietly this time, and informed us that the message would occupy one hour, after which he would lead us in a Trammelite prayer before the lights came on again. As he spoke, the lights dimmed until darkness was complete. Rheostatically controlled, I thought, probably from Trammel's rostrum.

  Trammel continued, saying that tonight he would deliver a sermon on the moral danger of filth in literature. I grinned in the darkness as he quietly launched into an attack on Henry Miller. Henry Miller had to go, that was all there was to it, said Trammel, in much more mellifluous and specific words than those. I grinned again as he began reading, to prove his point that Miller had to go, a passage that I recalled first enjoying in "Tropic of Cancer." Either Trammel was reading from a Braille edition, or he'd memorized it.

  I'd heard enough, and moved toward the entrance. Nobody stopped me as I went outside, and that seemed logical, because probably on several occasions people had left the Truth Room before the sermon had ended, having received enough truth to fix them good. I walked alongside the building toward Trammel's house, digging from my coat pocket a small flashlight Hunt had given me.

  As I walked close to the building's wall, I could hear Trammel's voice, faint but still hot stuff; then it faded behind me as I reached his house. In half a minute, I'd got the door open and stepped inside. I heard a noise from somewhere ahead of me in the house. Moving quietly, I crossed the room to a closed door, which opened into a darkened hallway; at its end, a thin slice of light spilled from another room, and from inside it came the sounds.

  I walked forward slowly, as quietly as I could, hearing a man's voice, but unable to distinguish the words. The door was open about six inches, and when I reached it and leaned against the wall, by looking through the crack I could see into the room.

  And there, mumbling to himself, was Arthur Trammel.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I sprang away from the wall as if the old buzzard had spat tobacco juice in my eye. For a moment, I stood rigid in the hall's dimness, but then I eased my eye into position once more and took a good look.

  One thing about Trammel was sure: Nobody else in this world, or the next one, looked like him. Anybody who even remotely resembled him had to be Arthur Trammel. And this mumbling egg in there had the squashed head, chummy eyeballs, bushy brows, and lascivious lips of the Leader. It was Arthur for sure.

  Then I discovered that he wasn't mumbling in his chops, but was talking to another man, because the guy came into the range of my eye. It was the blind man. He was now, oddly enough, wearing glasses.

  In the same way that a man might almost admire the biggest and most gruesome boil in the world, I almost admired Trammel. I tiptoed back to the front door, around to the Truth Room's entrance, and inside. I sort of felt my way through people, getting myself cursed a couple of times in ungodly fashion, but reached the wooden stand where Trammel was still speaking, giving Miller all kinds of hell.

  There I flicked on my flashlight. In the brief moment before I completely shaded its glow—not that anybody was looking up here, anyway—I caught a startling glimpse of one of those creamy-white thighs Trammel had so recently been condemning. Of course, there was no sign of Trammel. If there had been, I'd no doubt have let out a yowl that would have caused a great commotion in the congregation, but all my flash revealed was the slowly unwinding spools of tape on an expensive tape recorder.

  I turned off the flashlight and stood for a moment thinking that Trammel had his pitch honed down to a fine point, and that there were two reasons for dousing the lights. The other one being that for almost an hour, while he addressed these citizens, he could be resting in his house, taking a nap, or writing another speech if he felt like it. Or paying off blind men.

  I meant to change all that, though. I nosed around the Truth Room a little longer, then went back to Trammel's house and waited for him and his hireling to leave, because I couldn't very well afford any hue and cry. The hour must have been almost ended when the front door opened and somebody came out.

  I couldn't tell if it was one of the blind men or their Leader, but I followed him and watched him walk through the wall and into the Truth Room. That was certainly what it looked like; he walked up to the wall and right through it. But when I followed half a minute later I went through it, too, simply by parting one of the black drapes I'd earlier noticed lining the walls.

  Standing inside, I heard another sound, a soft click, and then after the briefest pause Trammel's voice continued on only a slightly higher pitch. He was back; what I'd heard was him switching off the recorder. As he concluded his message and announced the final prayer, I went back through the wall and stood there holding the drape aside until the lights came up and I could definitely see Trammel. Then I walked to his house again.

  It was empty this time. I went through the whole place fast, but in fifteen minutes, I hadn't found anything important to me. The most interesting item was a box in the bedroom closet. It contained spools of tape for the recorder. Each of the spools bore a small sticker on which was written a notation of its message. That was understandable. It would be hell for Trammel to announce that his text for the evening would be "The Evil in Plunging Necklines," and accidentally come on with "Let's Ban People." Several spools were marked with an author's name, some bore titles of books I'd read, a few had subject titles.

  In the room I'd first peeked into, I checked the phone on Trammel's desk just to be sure it bore the Davenport number June had given me. It did. I looked at the phone for a couple of minutes, thinking, then dialed the operator. I went through the routine I'd used with June again, only since I was using Trammel's phone I told the operator I was Arthur Trammel.

  "I think someone has been using my phone for long-distance calls, Operator," I told her. "In my absence. Would you let me know what calls were made from this phone Sunday?"

  She didn't give me any trouble, and in another few minutes I had a list of three calls. The one I was interested in was ther
e; it almost had to be, the way this was shaping up. I dropped the phone onto the hook and headed for confession—only there was going to be a new procedure in the Healing Room tonight. This time Trammel would do the confessing.

  In the dimness of the Truth Room only one solitary figure sat. Shortly after I entered, an old man came out of the door beyond which was the hall leading to the Healing Room. The other person, a woman, went inside. When she came out, a few minutes later, I walked to the door. I would be the last to confess; maybe the last for quite a while.

  The hall was about fifteen feet long, stretching down the right side of the building, and a closed door was at its end. As I took my first steps toward the closed door ahead of me, I glanced around the hall, which was fairly well lighted. An odd note was a strip of mirror about head high, extending the hall's length, and for a moment it looked merely like a peculiar decoration. Then, all of a sudden, I remembered the one-way mirror I'd been using to peek at my neon tetras.

  I ran toward that closed door and threw it open. The room was in darkness, but light spilled in behind me and I could see that the room was empty. Another door stood open on my left. I jumped through it in time to hear the sound of running feet and a man's voice shouting somewhere outside. Beyond the door, paralleling the hall down which I'd just walked and extending its length, ran another narrow hallway; light spilled in through the "mirror." I heard another shout.

  The only way out of here that I was sure didn't wind up in a dead end was the way I'd come in. I sprinted back that way, down the hall, and into the Truth Room, made one big jump toward the exit, and stopped, skidding. Arthur Trammel came flying through the door and yelled, "There he is!" and two guys materialized beside him, and one of them yanked up a gun and there was a deafening noise as he pulled the trigger.

  There were a lot of reflexes inside me almost simultaneously. A slug snapped past my head and I ducked, my hand automatically going to my armpit, where there was nothing but armpit. I realized that I was not carrying a gun, that both the other guys were because now I could see two guns, that they both wore police uniforms, and that I was sunk. There was no way for me to get out of here except by running past the cops and off into the hills with ten or twelve bullets in me.

  That whole swarm of impressions took about a tenth of a second, and then I was spinning around to run. I guess I thought I'd just run until I banged into a wall somewhere, but then came inspiration, and it was Trammel who had given it to me—when he'd walked through the wall. I was already running, so all I had to do was to keep going and aim a couple of yards to the left, where I hoped nothing but drape was, and run faster. I hit the cloth and went literally ripping through it and outside as a few more wild shots cracked behind me.

  I swung left and sprinted toward the revival tent, in dim light from the building behind me for a few seconds and then in darkness, but there was one hell of a lot of shouting by now, not just from the men I'd seen, but from what sounded like a small army. Feet were slapping all over the place as people ran toward the spot where those shots had been fired, and light blazed in my face moments before a man's deep voice yelled something and he and the light plunged toward me. I dropped my legs from under me and went down toward where I hoped his knees were, angling sideways with my shoulder thrusting forward, like a halfback taking out the enemy end, and his knees were there.

  He went over me roaring. I scraped up a lot of dirt with my left shoulder and the side of my face, but I didn't go back to kick the guy, just rolled over and onto my feet and kept running. All I could hear was yelling, and feet traveling over the ground, but nobody was shooting. I reached the tent and ran inside and up to the edge of the stage, with my flashlight on and sweeping around till I spotted Trammel's chest mike. I grabbed it and the coil of cord and sprinted back outside, hoping the wire didn't catch on anything and hoping most of all that this damn mike worked when I pressed the button.

  I let the cord run out behind me until I figured I'd used most of it, then I flopped onto the ground in darkness. Even this far from Trammel's tent, there were a couple of guys with flashlights roaming around. Lying quietly, I could hear a guy behind me running; then he stopped ten yards or so away. He just stood there.

  The two people with flashlights didn't worry me at the moment; they were far enough away. The guy near me might be trouble, though. But I couldn't wait any longer, so I pressed down the switch on the microphone in my hand, put my lips close to it, and said softly, "Hey."

  A hundred feet or more away from me, back inside the tent, where the speakers were, I said, "Hey." Trammel wasn't the only foxy bastard. Knowing the mike was working, I strangled at about half volume into the mike: "Hey! Here he is, here's the bastard—a-a-a-ah-h!"

  It went rolling over the hills like thunder. But it obviously came out of the tent, and I could see lights converging on it, hear a sudden uprush of yells. The guy who had been standing ten yards away came toward me saying, with no originality, "Hey! Hey!" And as he loomed before me, I loomed up off the ground and all over him.

  He got my left hand, knuckles sticking straight out like blunt knives, in his solar plexus, but what really finished him was the microphone on his skull and the edge of my palm in his throat. There was an ugly sound inside the tent, where there had already been so many ugly sounds, and the guy I'd slugged went down.

  I went down with him. The two flashlights were bobbing toward us, and I got my knees under me in case I had to go through this again. But the men went past twenty feet away, close together, and raced toward the tent, where there was now a great deal of commotion. I even heard two closely spaced gunshots, but by then I was going like a rabbit away from everybody.

  With my lungs still aching from that wild race through trees and over hills, because I had run a long time before slowing down, I walked up the last hill.

  At its top, I walked ahead to the clearing where Nurse Dixon was buried. My shovel still was there. I didn't spend any time looking for another grave; in that long walk, I'd remembered something that hadn't impressed me at the time it had happened. When I'd followed Wolfe here, I'd found the grave he'd just filled—found it by stepping in its soft earth, feeling my shoe sink into it; but when I'd seen it for the second time I had seen the smooth and level surface of the grave, with no imprint in it at all, no indentation.

  So now in the light from my flash I merely glanced around the small clearing, then started digging. I pulled the late Miss Dixon from the ground, rolled her a yard away, then dug deeper. When I struck something yielding I threw the shovel from me, scraped dirt away with my hands, then grasped the small, cold shoulders in my fingers and pulled her from the ground.

  And, this time, it was Felicity.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I don't know how long I stayed there with what remained of Felicity Gifford. And an hour later, I wouldn't even know for sure what I'd thought during those first minutes. But I must have remembered everything her friends had said about her in these last two days, remembered what her room had been like, how drab her clothes had been. I know I remembered that she'd been sixteen years old.

  I brushed the dirt from her face, and it was quite a bit like the face in that portrait of her I'd seen. I looked at her for a long time. You can't hurt the dead, I know, by what you say about them or do to what's left of them, so when I'd finished lowering Felicity into the grave again I was suddenly surprised, and a little confused, remembering the exaggerated care with which I'd handled her body.

  I balled up my fist and started to slam it against my other hand, then stopped and walked to Miss Dixon instead, dropped her into the grave, and shoveled dirt in on both of them.

  Only one small bulb burned at the entrance to Greenhaven's parking lot, half a block from the wall around the building itself, and there wasn't an attendant present. I was sweating. Twice I'd had to duck out of sight as police cars passed me on the street, and every time I heard a siren, I shivered.

  Arthur Trammel, now that I'd eyeballed him through h
is one-way mirror and latched onto his mike, would know I was onto his tricks. My charging out of his hidden entrance to the Truth Room would tell him I'd seen him use it and must be aware of his tape-recorded deception. He'd have called all the cops in all the counties, and there'd be even more prowl cars hunting me now.

  A few cars were in the lot and I found an unlocked gray club coupé, a Chrysler convertible with the top up, and the name Lynette Nichols on its registration slip. I climbed in back and waited for her.

  When I saw her walking diagonally across the lot I didn't know it was Lyn at first because she was wearing a tan-colored suit instead of the white uniform. But then I saw her face in the dim light, recognized her, and ducked down out of sight.

  Her feet scraped on gravel and I heard her humming softly, then she got into the car and slammed the door shut. She must have heard me rising up behind her because she started to gasp, but I pressed my right hand over her mouth, left hand gripping her shoulder so that she couldn't get away.

  She lunged against my hand, but I said rapidly, "I'm not going to hurt you. I've got to talk to you, that's all. I won't hurt you."

  She held herself motionless, body tense.

  "This is the only way I could get near you, get to talk with you, and it's important. This is Shell Scott. But I'm not crazy, and I've got to convince you of that first. I had to be sure you couldn't scream or run. Understand?"

  After a few seconds, she relaxed and nodded her head, lips soft against my palm. I said, "I'm going to let you go. Just don't scream." I paused, then added, "I tried to tell you last night that Dr. Wolfe and Nurse Dixon were performing abortions here at Greenhaven. Well, they were, and they killed a girl yesterday."