by Gideon, John
Carl tore his gaze from the clump of cedars—
—and it landed on Lindsay, who stood under the barbecue shelter where she shepherded well-wishers up to the long tables on which was spread a staggering array of casseroles, salads, home-baked breads and desserts, steaming coffee urns, and jugs of punch, all contributed by Lorna’s legion of grieving friends. Since this was neither a funeral nor a memorial service but merely a simple coming together for an outdoor lunch on a Tuesday, Lindsay wore no mournful black but rather a green classic blazer over a white blouse and a green windowpane-plaid skirt.
For a blinding fraction of a second, Carl saw her cold-reddened cheeks as Lorna’s, her grain-colored hair as Lorna’s. The easy movement of her lithe frame, the way she tossed her head to banish stray hair from her eyes, the way she crossed her arms—all were Lorna’s. Carl felt his face grow warm with new guilt. Even after the fraction of a second was gone, the tickling in his groin remained, and he knew that he was craving the body of his dead wife’s sister.
Jeremy sat at a picnic table apart from the crowd, alone in the shadowy lee of the bandstand, dignified and somber in the dark suit that Carl had bought him earlier that morning in Bremerton. With his legs crossed and his arms folded, he looked very adult, very much in control of himself.
Carl experienced a minor flash of anger toward the milling crowd, simply because no one was taking any notice of Jeremy, the human being whom Lorna had loved above all others, the one who would miss her most. Why weren’t people thronging around him, laying comforting hands on his shoulders and hugging him with shared grief, as they were doing for Lindsay and Nora Moreland, as they had done for Carl himself? He suspected that many citizens of Greely’s Cove still considered Jeremy something of a freak, the product of an unknowable miracle, or at the very least a stranger whose beautiful hazel eyes seemed full of secrets. This was perhaps understandable. Best to leave the unknown alone, went the common wisdom.
Carl wanted his son’s company and was about to move in the direction of the bandstand when Stu and Judy Bromton approached him. He had always thought them an odd-looking couple: Stu a mountain of rock-hard muscle and Judy a tattered sparrow of a woman. Their marriage had produced a daughter who was large and heavily muscled like Stu and a son who was tiny and mousy like Judy, exactly the reverse of what they had expected and wanted. More odd, however, was the mix of personalities: Stu was gregarious and fun-loving, ever ready for a good laugh; while his wife was quiet and retiring, always on the verge, seemingly, of taking refuge behind Stu’s protective bulk. Judy and the Beast, Carl had always called them.
They all shook hands, hugged and traded the kind of smiles seen at funerals. They talked about how the weather was cooperating, the great turnout and the wonderful array of food. Close on the heels of the Bromtons were Stu’s in-laws, Mayor Chester Klundt and his wife, Millie, handsomely attired in their most expensive Sunday clothes, in stark contrast to Stu’s shabby suit and Judy’s plain wool dress.
Carl soon tired of the small talk. The Klundts, who were born-again evangelicals, kept trying to steer the conversation to things Christian, which made Carl uneasy. He found himself moving backward, one step at a time, retreating. Before drifting away completely, he caught Stu’s eye and winked, hoping to convey gratitude to his old friend for having interrupted the search for Teri Zolten in order to attend this gathering. Stu nodded and smiled a little, as though to confirm that he and Carl should get together again soon for some serious talk.
Carl found himself talking to Ken and Sandy Zolten, who—despite the burden of sorrow and fear they carried for their missing Teri—had come out to celebrate the memory of Lorna, their friend. Carl was moved. He fought hard to hold back tears, for their faces were slack with exhaustion, their eyes baggy and red. He astounded himself by hugging them both.
He made several circuits through the crowd, talking with old acquaintances from his youth and thanking Lorna’s friends for taking time to show their love. The gathering began to thin as people headed for their cars, having dedicated a lunch hour to the memory of Lorna Trosper.
As he watched them go, he thought of what Stu Bromton had said Sunday night at Liquid Larry’s: that a darkness had settled in Greely’s Cove, hanging just beyond the limits of human vision, a kind of sickness that twisted and distorted the normal life processes of the community. He could not deny that there was something evil in Greely’s Cove; one needed only to gaze into the ravaged faces of Ken and Sandy Zolten to become aware of it. Some maniac was abducting innocent people and doing God-knows-what to them. The community as a whole was sick from the “darkness,” including Carl himself, even though he had only recently returned to the town. Stu’s story about visitors in the night, along with the vagaries supplied by Lorna’s suicide note, had momentarily sickened Carl’s own mind, to the extent that he had imagined all kinds of unmentionable evil in the presence of Dr. Hadrian Craslowe, the man who had delivered his only son from a life of screaming insanity.
There was indeed something evil in Greely’s Cove, but not the kind of creeping evil that Stu and possibly others imagined. There was a criminal here—a demented kidnapper who was, in all likelihood, a murderer to boot. His capture would cure the sickness, once and for all. Greely’s Cove would return to normalcy, as would its people.
Having told himself this, Carl began to feel good again. He felt even better when his gaze alighted on a solitary figure who stood on the beach, clad in rumpled khaki trousers and a weathered aviator jacket—a slim man of his own age but slightly shorter, topped with a thick mop of coal-black hair that fanned in the brisk breeze. The man turned from the rowdy water to glance up the gentle hill toward Carl, and Carl’s mouth dropped open.
Renzy! Carl raised his hand to wave, felt a flood of childhood joy, then raced frantically down the hill. Renzy Dawkins waved back and threw his arms open wide.
PART
II
Buried in every human mind is a remnant of the ancient time,
when the race was young—
a shadowy memory of the Old Truth in all its grand blackness.
—Shaun Richard Thompson
11
The Grand Island Courier
August 10, 1985
GRAND ISLAND, NEBRASKA (AP)—A psychic led police Friday to the shallow grave of Carolyn Hudsten, 30, the Grand Island housewife and mother who had been missing for nearly nine months.
Robinson Sparhawk of El Paso, Texas, directed officers of the Nebraska Highway Patrol and the Hall County Sheriff’s Department to a wooded area near the Platte River south of Grand Island, where investigators found the body in a shallow hole covered with brush. The exact cause of death is uncertain, but Sparhawk has told police that Hudsten was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat or similar weapon.
“I don’t doubt that’s what happened,” said Lt. Joe R. Roberts of the Sheriff’s Department. “I’m sure the coroner’s office will confirm everything he’s said.”
Sparhawk would not comment to reporters, but others close to the Hudsten investigation say that the psychic visited the missing woman’s home, where he received “impressions” from items that had belonged to her.
“I don’t know how he does it,” Roberts said of Sparhawk, “but I know that he’s earned every cent we’ve paid him....”
The Battle Creek Daily Journal
March 15, 1983
BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN (AP)—The search for Danny Markins, 10, ended Wednesday morning in an abandoned barn near Penfield, where state police and Calhoun County deputies found the body of the boy, who had been missing since New Year’s Day.
Police won’t say exactly how they knew where to find the body, but the boy’s father, Andrew Markins, 36, told the Daily Journal that a psychic from El Paso, Texas, assisted with the case. As late as March 10, a state police spokesman had characterized the case as “verging on insoluble.”...
The Atlantic City Herald-Dispatch
September 9, 1980
PORT REPUBLIC, NJ (AP)—The nine-week search for Tracy and Twyla Langfeldt, the twin 14-year-old girls missing from this small, suburban community since early July, ended Sunday, when investigators found their decomposing bodies in the basement of a west-side Atlantic City house.
Kidnapping and homicide charges have been filed against the owner of the house, James P. Walterheimer, who surrendered quietly to police at the scene.
Sergeant Harold Klemp of the New Jersey State Police said that investigators retained the services of Robinson Sparhawk of El Paso, Texas, a self-proclaimed “forensic psychic” who is well-known in police circles. After examining objects that the Langfeldt twins had owned, Sparhawk directed police to the Atlantic City neighborhood where Walterheimer lives and eventually to the suspect’s house.
Investigators are now trying to determine whether Walterheimer could be connected to any of the other six disappearances of young girls from the Atlantic City area during the past year...
For the second time in an hour Robinson Sparhawk’s telephone rang, and as was his custom he let his answering machine kick in so that he could screen the call. Few things riled him more than telephone salespeople.
The voice that came through the machine at the sound of the tone was a welcome one, though it sounded nasal to his west-Texan ears. It came long-distance from New York City, sparking a vision of a bubbly woman who had lively dark eyes and a long black ponytail that should have been gray decades ago.
‘Robbie, you old dog, I know you’re there, so just answer the damn phone, okay?”
He answered. “Mona, darlin’, how’s my favorite witch?” This was not an insult, because Mona Kleiman was indeed a witch, one of the few real ones in North America. She was also president of the National Society for the Furtherance of the Occult Sciences, an organization that regularly featured Robinson Sparhawk as a speaker at its annual convention.
Mona was very well, thanks, and how about him, and what was he doing, and did he have time to talk?
“I’m finer than frog fur, darlin’. I’m just sitting here with Katharine in my sixty-foot double-wide, sippin’ a whiskey in front of the picture window, watching the stars come out.”
“Katharine? Who the hell is Katharine? Have you been holding out on me? Don’t tell me you’ve finally taken my advice and gotten yourself a girlfriend!”
“Now don’t go gettin’ jealous on me, darlin’. She’s an old buddy, that’s all, with big pointy ears and four big feet—probably outweighs you by forty pounds.”
“Are we talking about a dog?”
“Prettiest brown eyes you ever saw on a Great Dane, and smart as a whip. Ain’t too many pooches big and smart enough to fetch an old cripple his crutches when he needs ’em, but I swear to God, Katharine can do it.”
“Katharine the Great Dane. I don’t believe it.”
“Man’s best friend—next to woman. Hey, how’s this for a vision, sweet pea? Me and you gazin’ at each other over a pair of candles at Clemenceau in uptown Manhattan, sippin’ somethin’ light and white, pushin’ scallops into our faces and talkin’ high-class shit....”
“I’d love to be having dinner with you at Clemenceau right now, but there’s this small matter of several thousand miles between New York and El Paso, and anyway...”
Anyway, Mona had not called just to chat. She was worried about him. Like all real witches, she had ways of knowing certain things, or at least feeling them, whether through tarot cards or trances or crystal ball-gazing, Robbie could not guess. The ways of witches were beyond him, as strange and confounding as his own gift.
“Are you working on anything right now?” Mona wanted to know.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” he confirmed, stroking Katharine’s massive head while she drooled on the spokes of his wheelchair. “Got a call from a police chief maybe half an hour ago, from some place up in Washington State—what the hell’s it called?” He flipped a page on a legal pad that lay on the cluttered desk before him. “Here it is. Greely’s Cove. Seems they’ve been having a run of disappearances up there, and the local boys are at the end of their rope. They mean to get themselves a psychic.”
“Robbie.” He listened to Mona clearing her throat. “Robbie, please don’t think me crazy, but do an old friend a favor and lay off for a while. Don’t take any new cases just now.”
“Oh, but darlin’,” he said, chuckling, “I do think you’re crazy; always have. That’s what I love about you: You’re crazier than an old sow with a bellyful of month-old apple peelings. Why in the Sam Hill would you want me to sit on my hands when I could be doing something useful? And lucrative?”
Mona explained, or tried to. For the followers of the Old Truth, she said, this was a special time, the ancient Celtic season of Imbolc, which had begun on February 2 at midnight. The Crook of Leo, a millennia-old star symbol, was visible in the heavens, signifying the Golden Sickle used by the Druids to harvest mistletoe, and—
“Now, Mona, you know I don’t hold with all that mumbo jumbo. I’m just a simple country psychic with legs like a pair of link-sausages. If I could handle a real job, I’d have one, like I’ve told you a jillion times. As it is, I’m barely making enough to keep Katharine in kibbles....”
“Shut up and listen. It’s a time of good things but also bad things, Robbie. There are forces abroad that can be—well, dangerous.”
Robbie snaked a rum-soaked cheroot from his shirt pocket, which he licked and lighted. “Okay, suppose I swallow all that craziness: What’s it got to do with me?”
“Whether you want to believe it or not, you’re a very special person—”
“That’s true. I’m handsome, urbane, cultured—”
“What matters is that you have the Gift. You’re one of the few who have the natural mental ability to tune in on the spiritual energy of creation. It’s a gift that makes you a very valuable human being, but it can also make you vulnerable, Robbie. Ever since the new moon rose ten days ago, I’ve been getting warnings about you, and I’ve been trying—”
“Warnings? From who?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Just believe me when I say that you could be in danger if you open yourself—” She broke off, hesitating, as though arguing with herself over how much to reveal. “If you expose your sensitive mind to something really evil. Anyway, it’s not forever. The season will pass, and when I get the all-clear, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you, darlin’?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
Her tone became embarrassingly pleading, and Robbie got a vision of the pain in her eyes. This was most unlike Mona Kleiman.
“Okay, I believe you,” he lied, blowing out cigar smoke that made Katharine sneeze explosively. “If you want me to give it a rest for a spell, that’s what I’ll do. But you’ve got to promise to make it up to me, hon.” His lascivious smile was nearly palpable over the telephone line. In far-off Manhattan, an old witch giggled with relief.
They said good-bye, but not until Mona had extracted his promise to put in his customary appearance at the annual NSFOS convention, which was coming up in May.
After hanging up the phone, he swung his wheelchair around to face Katharine, from whose jowls dangled the glistening strings of drool that lovers of Great Danes call “hang daddies.”
“Now, don’t that knock the bung out of your pickle barrel,” he said, massaging the area behind the huge dog’s right ear. “It just goes to show you how a little old white lie can put somebody on top of the world again, right, girl?” Katharine licked her chops and whined as though she understood.
Robinson Sparhawk had no intention of turning down the Greely’s Cove case. Police Chief Stuart Bromton had said on the telephone that the city council had appropriated five thousand dollars in order to retain him, and an ad hoc citizens’ group had raised an additional five thousand as a reward for locating some or all of the missing people. Ten thousand dollars in all—nothing to sneeze at after
the long dry period that he had just suffered.
Not that he needed a lot of money to sustain him. His mobile home was paid for, as was his VW Vanagon, which was outfitted with a power lift for his wheelchair and special controls that let him drive without need of his legs. His portfolio was healthy with mutual fund shares that were growing both in yield and capital value, which meant that his old age was taken care of.
Still, the extra money would be nice, though not as nice as the prospect of ending the boredom that always set in during periods of inactivity. He quit the wheelchair in favor of crutches and set about the task of packing for the long drive to Greely’s Cove, Washington, which he had estimated, from a quick glance at the road atlas, would take three days. Whenever possible, he drove to his jobs, since traveling by air inflicted incredible hassles on a man with crutches and a wheelchair in tow. He detested being the object of the special attention that airline attendants lavished on him with smiling pity in their eyes. Thanks to his useless legs, a simple undertaking like visiting the airborne lavatory was an ordeal, especially when there was turbulence. But the best reason for driving was that Katharine could come with him, which was nigh impossible on airplanes.
While packing, he thought about Mona’s warning and smiled to himself, but he failed to put it entirely out of his mind. She was, after all, more than a crackpot who called herself a pagan and a witch. She was a published scholar on the history of the occult, a sought-after thinker from whom serious historians often begged insights into the influence that followers of the Old Truth have exerted on history. She was as close to “legitimate” as any self-proclaimed witch could be, and a warning from her was not to be taken lightly.
