He stepped across the soaked lawn and in among the intertwined tomato vines in the garden. In the early dawn the vines looked black-green, dense with shadow, more lush than they had appeared to be yesterday afternoon. There was no sign of the tin box. It had sunk, probably, in the soft soil. Pulling up a tomato stake, he poked around in the dirt, wishing he had more light. Yesterday he really hadn’t paid any attention to where he was planting the damned thing; he’d been in too much of a rush.
He bent down and parted the vines, soaking the sleeves of his sweater. His elbow bumped one of the two leftover tomatoes, which was heavy, nearly the size of his fist. He hadn’t remembered them being as healthy as that, but then he hadn’t really looked closely at them, either. Forgetting about the bluebird of happiness for a moment, he found the other tomato, which hung beside a cluster of about half a dozen green ones, unseasonably late. The green ones would never ripen, not this time of year. He picked the pair of ripe ones, realizing suddenly why he couldn’t find the tin—a tangle of vines covered the ground over it now: the rain or something must have weighted them down, and they’d fallen across the mud.
He pushed them out of the way and scrabbled around with his fingers. There it was—the lid of the box, nearly sunk beneath the mire. He wiggled it free and stood up, stepping past the herb garden toward the lawn again, carrying the tin and the two tomatoes. Then he paused for a moment, surprised at what he saw: the herbs looked bad this morning, wilted and pale. The sage and the rosemary had collapsed like old mushrooms, and in the dim moonlight they were white, as if blighted with some kind of fungus. The basil was just a couple of wet brown sticks now. Two weeks of nearly constant rain must finally have rotted the roots….
He carried the tin back to the garage, suddenly unsure what to do with it. It was still dark enough outside to run it over to Argyle’s, where he could simply push it under the railing and come home again. Argyle could think anything he wanted to think.
He closed the garage doors before turning on the lights, then washed the tin in the sink and dried it off with paper towels. He set it on the bench and put the coffee on, then opened the tin and looked again at the bird, which floated in its slightly milky bath. The jar had leaked, and it smelled of gin, the whole thing reminding him suddenly of the worm in the bottom of a mescal bottle. The bird wasn’t quite as badly decomposed as he remembered.
What on earth did Argyle want with such a thing? That was the twenty-five-cent question. Anything good? Walt couldn’t imagine what. If it was for resale, then the man should be ashamed of himself, trafficking in rubbish. Walt had half a mind to show it to Ivy, just to illustrate what sort of a monster she was having business dealings with. But clearly he couldn’t, unless he made up some kind of elaborate lie to explain what he was doing with the tin in the first place.
The two tomatoes sat on the bench, as nice as any he’d picked last summer. The rain was hell on the herb garden, but the tomatoes apparently loved it …
… which was nonsense, of course. It rained every winter, but it had never made any difference at all to his tomatoes. There was no explaining them away so easily. But making a wish on a dead bird—wasn’t that about twice as loony? He wouldn’t allow himself to believe it.
What if Argyle believed it? How badly would he want the thing back? The thought stunned him, and the tin looked suddenly different to him, perhaps more repulsive than it had, but mysterious at the same time, attractive in some dark and primitive way.
He looked out through the door. There was a light on in the motor home, and the day was brightening. Whatever he meant to do, he should simply do it, before Henry figured out he was awake and wanted to talk about Dr. Hefernin and the pamphlets.
Abruptly deciding against returning the tin, he put it inside a drawer in the bench, then almost at once took it out and looked around for a better hiding place, just in case Argyle sent someone after it again. Climbing up onto the stepladder, he pushed aside the dusty junk piled in the rafters on a couple of sheets of plywood. He spotted his tackle box, opened the lid, and put the tin in the bottom, in among jars of salmon eggs and cheese bait and bobbers. Then he shut the box and wedged it in between his lashed-together fishing poles and a clothes-drying rack made out of wooden dowels.
He got down and looked. The tackle box was perfectly hidden from the ground, and it didn’t seem likely that anyone would pull junk out of the rafters looking for the damned tin anyway. There were a thousand more likely places for it to be hidden—dozens of boxes lying right there on the floor. He’d leave the back door to the garage locked, and the same with the shed doors. The motor home in the driveway, with Henry and Jinx going in and out, would discourage anyone from coming in through the front.
Quietly, he went out through the door and down the drive, past the motor home to the sidewalk. The coffee was ready. All he needed was the newspaper—which, in fact, was nowhere to be seen. Usually it lay near the sidewalk, wrapped in plastic in weather like this. He stooped and looked under the motor home, but the paper wasn’t there, either. Doubtful, he checked the front porch, then looked into the shrubbery. The last thing he wanted to do was call the paperboy on a morning like this, make him come all the way back out here with a single paper….
He saw Henry’s silhouette on the window curtain of the motor home. He was sitting at the table—no doubt reading the paper himself. Walt considered knocking on the door, but he stopped himself. It would look like he was miffed, which he was, but there was no use carrying on like that with Henry, who deserved an early-morning newspaper as much as anybody else. Henry tended to read the hell out of a paper, though, taking it apart like a cadaver so that what was left was a scattering of wrecked parts.
Giving up on the paper, Walt returned to the garage and poured himself a cup of coffee, then idly turned the pages of one of Dr. Hefernin’s pamphlets, trying to memorize a few phrases for Henry’s benefit. But his thoughts wandered to the jar, and it struck him suddenly that he ought to make another test of the thing. He thrust the idea out of his mind. There was something about toying with it that repelled him, that was almost obscene.
Immediately he saw that he was being silly. What harm could it do? And if he wasn’t going to use it—whatever that meant—then there was no point in keeping it, in stirring up a man as potentially dangerous as Argyle. Probably he should haul it down and throw it into the trash bin at the end of the street like he’d threatened to do yesterday.
Very well, then, he would try it:
“Throw the newspaper into the bushes tomorrow morning so that Henry can’t find it,” he said out loud, then immediately regretted it. His own voice sounded unnatural to him, hollow, like a voice out of a machine, and he wondered whom, exactly, he was talking to.
The question was vaguely disturbing, and he focused on the Hefernin pamphlets, chasing all thoughts of the bluebird out of his mind. “Water Seeks Its Own Level,” one of the pamphlets was titled. It was full of advice on “taking the plunge” but not “getting in over your head. Don’t thrash around,” Hefernin warned, and there was actually a sketch of a toothy-looking shark swimming along, the words “insufficient capital” written across its back. Walt skimmed the article, searching for something concrete, something that wasn’t all clichés and ready-made phrases—something that would warrant spending fourteen dollars and would make an intelligent man order another one. But there was nothing, only a few testimonials at the end regarding the huge sums of money that people had made by putting Hefernin’s “philosophy” into practice. The Reverend Bentley’s tracts looked positively useful by comparison. Bentley nearly always promised you something final and discernible, an actual destination. It was generally always Hell, but at least he was decisive about it.
Walt turned the pamphlet over finally and looked at the business address. It took him a moment to make sense out of it, for it to sink in that the address was local—a post office box in Santa Ana. Why that was so startling he couldn’t say; southern California was no doubt
the capital of mail fraud, probably of every sort of fraud.
The door opened and Uncle Henry looked in, carrying the newspaper, which was so completely taken apart that it looked like it had thirty or forty sections to it.
“I stepped out for some air and noticed the light was on in here.”
“Good,” Walt said. “I just put on some coffee. Sleep okay?”
“Well, not badly, anyway. It gets a little cramped in there after a few weeks. And the toilet …” He waved his hand, dismissing the toilet with a gesture. “I see you’ve been reading Dr. Hefernin.” He poured himself a cup of coffee out of the pot, widening his eyes at Walt, who nodded.
“Very interesting material in these pamphlets,” Walt said.
“That there is. We’ve established quite a correspondence, Aaron and I—first-name basis. And I can guarantee you that if you query the man you’ll get a prompt response. That’s another one of Hefernin’s requirements—promptitude.”
“I read about that,” Walt lied, gesturing toward the bench. “I’m in agreement with the man there.” He shoved the pamphlets back into their envelope. There was the bare chance that if they were out of sight, they’d be out of mind, at least for the moment. “I see you’ve brought the newspaper. Anything earthshaking in the headlines?”
“Local interest story, actually.” Henry laid the paper on the bench. On the front page was a two-column article about the death of Murray LeRoy and the coincidental fire a few hours later that destroyed his house….
“Say,” Henry said, “I’m about starved.”
There was a photo of an alley downtown, nearly flooded with rainwater, people standing around, a man holding out a single white shoe hung with tassels. Walt read it through, hardly able to believe what he saw, remembering the way that Argyle had emphasized the second syllable of LeRoy’s name when he’d stood talking to his cronies on the front porch last night.
Walt looked at Henry, finally making sense out of his words. “Sure,” he said, skimming the rest of the article. LeRoy’s house had burned when a gas leak was ignited by a pilot light. The man had apparently stored kerosene in his cellar, and the whole place had gone up so fast and hot that there’d been no saving it, although the fire department had prevented the nearby houses from burning.
“What about a couple of sinkers?” Henry asked. “After that dinner last night …” He shook his head. “Oh, it was good, mind you. Nothing wrong with it. Jinx is dead right—penny saved, penny earned, as they say. There’s no reason the same thing shouldn’t go for calories, in a way.” He widened his eyes, as if he knew he was lying through his teeth. “I’ve been eating like that for weeks now.”
“Boyd’s All-Niter?” Walt asked, reaching for the lights.
“Just what I was thinking. We’ll spend a few of those calories we saved last night.”
At the last moment Walt decided to leave the lights on, just for safety. If there was going to be another break-in, it would probably come soon. He snapped the padlock shut, and the two of them walked down the drive without speaking, past the now darkened motor home toward where the Suburban sat parked on the street. Just then a car rounded the corner, its headlights swinging around toward Walt as he opened the door and slid in onto the seat. He glanced at the car as it swept past, gunning toward Chapman Avenue.
“Slow down,” Walt said out loud. It was an old red Toyota with a dented fender and bent bumper. The Reverend Bentley sat hunched behind the wheel, looking straight ahead, his face hidden by shadow.
15
IN HIS NIGHTMARE Argyle fled along a stone corridor deep in the earth. The shadows of insects twitched on the walls, and there was a metallic rasping and clicking like beetles in a can. Orange firelight glowed from vast rooms hidden behind half-closed doors, and from all around him there came the sound of moaning and shrieking and knocking, as if from something that had once been human but was human no longer, shrieks cut off sharp only to be taken up again in a monotony of pain.
There came into his mind the terrible certainty that he was running headlong toward something, not away from it now, running, perhaps, to embrace that pain. Soon the shrieks and howls would be his own. Inevitably there hovered before him, far away down the dim corridor, a disembodied head, its mouth working spasmodically, its face half turned away so that its eyes were hidden by an iron-dark shadow. There was the smell of sulphur and the corruption of rotten things, of death and hot metal. The face swiveled slowly toward him, and a voice whispered unintelligibly, like a sand-laden wind off the desert. He held his ears against it.
He woke up trying to scream. He heard his own voice rasp in his throat, and he launched himself forward, scrambling off the end of the bed, falling to the floor, his legs tangled in the sheets, his eyes adjusting to the moonlight in the dim bedroom. There was a slow and steady knocking, like someone beating on the pipes beneath the house, and a creaking sound like loose floorboards. Distantly, like ghost voices over a telephone, there sounded the echo of the shrieking and moaning that he’d heard in his nightmare, and he pressed his hands over his ears as he staggered to his feet, yanking open the top drawer of his dresser.
Inside lay two jars—common pint-size peanut butter jars, seemingly empty. He drew one out and shakily unscrewed the lid, and there was the faint, brief sound of a human cry in the closed air of the room. And at that moment the knocking ceased, the moaning and shrieking evaporated. The air was still heavy with sulphur and the smell of hot metal lingering like smoke, but that, too, was dwindling.
He was safe. For the moment he was safe.
He pulled himself free and pushed up onto his hands and knees. Although the window was open to the wind and rain, he was sweating hot. This wasn’t the first time that he had fought to wake up from the dream. Each time it was more real, more solid, and even now the walls of his bedroom looked insubstantial to him, barely opaque, as if they were film projections on black basalt. There was a noise like the rustling of insect wings in the depths of his mind, and staticky, disembodied voices muttering obscenities—infantile idiot gibberish.
He picked up the jar and twisted the lid back on tight. What had been in it was used up, and what remained was a useless leathery shaving of human flesh. He dropped the jar and its contents into the trash can next to the dresser, then walked across to the window, where he leaned out into the morning darkness. Soon, it seemed to him, there would come a night when the dream would take him with it, just as some similar tentacle of Hell had reached out to clutch at Murray LeRoy.
Stop it. He squeezed his eyes shut. This was nonsense. He would still beat it.
There weren’t many jars left. He needed something else to offer—more spirit jars. Something. And soon it would demand something more solid than the dying exhalations in the spirit jars. But when? Each night was worse than the last: the shadows more dense, the sounds more anxious, closer. Yesterday morning the bedsheets had burst into flame—spontaneous combustion, just like the five-dollar bill at Watson’s, just like Murray LeRoy.
He noticed suddenly that there were a couple of limbs broken off the hydrangea beneath the window, hanging by strips of bark. The dirt of the flowerbed was stomped down, the outlines of shoe soles in the wet soil clearly visible even in the moonlight. It took a moment to work it out: somebody had been there snooping around. And not the gardener, either; he hadn’t been on the property since Thursday.
Argyle thought suddenly about the parcel he’d found last night on the porch. He hadn’t looked closely at it, at the box itself; he’d been too anxious to get at the contents, and had simply slit the thing open and dumped it out, only to find that the item he wanted, that he had been waiting for, was missing.
It hadn’t occurred to him that it might have been stolen. Now he was certain it had.
Someone had meddled with the address on the box. They’d crossed out the name Dilworth and written in Argyle. Why? Who would have done such a thing? The man in China who gathered these things for him knew him only as Dilworth. The
post office? It didn’t seem likely that they’d mark up the outside of the box like this. They never had before. He switched on the lamp on the dresser and peered closely at it. It was easy to see, now that he looked, that the box had been opened and then re-taped.
He looked closely at the handwriting in the rewritten name—the vertical, elongated letters, the way the G looked like a pulled-apart number eight, the way the A was crossed with a line about twice as long as necessary. It was Walt Stebbins’s handwriting. Stebbins had got hold of the box, opened it, ditched the invoice, and stolen the only thing of real value in it.
How could he have known what it was?
Probably he didn’t; he was just being a meddlesome hick, and this was some kind of pathetic joke.
Of course Stebbins could be compelled to return it. The thought came to him that perhaps he should spare Walt for Ivy’s sake.
Ivy … He stood for a moment, thinking about her, about them, him and Ivy—about the way things had been only a few short years ago—and suddenly he knew he was wrong: Walt Stebbins wasn’t any kind of asset to her, and the world would be a happier place if he fell off the edge of it and disappeared.
He pulled on his bathrobe and walked out of the room, up the hall, and across a broad living room heavy with oak moldings and built-in cabinets. Another narrow hall led off the living room, and he followed it to a locked door at the end, switching on the hallway lamp and taking a key from his pocket. He opened the door and stepped into a room furnished with an easy chair and bookcases. On the floor lay a coffin-sized packing crate, the wooden lid covered with Chinese ideographs. He leaned over and opened the lid, tilting it back on recessed hinges. Within lay a body. It might have been his identical twin. Did it look dead, or merely asleep?
Without the item that Stebbins had taken from the carton, the thing in the box might as well be dead. What if he never recovered it? What if that fool Stebbins had destroyed it out of common stupidity?
All the Bells on Earth Page 8
