The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  ****

  “Brains before beauty,” Ginger said as they played their lights up the stairs. “Go on, I got a fuckin’ rock in my shoe.” She bent down to take care of it.

  Pearly started up. The risers were spongy underfoot. He wanted to get this done and rub lake mud in the faces of those damn brats, for all this trouble. He would remember this moment, with all the muck on his shoes, when he was lying on the beach in Mexico with a hundred and seven thousand, five hundred dollars in a box under the bed in his house up on the hill…or, at least, however much money he had left after he bought the house. Then he would be set, and never again would he hear shit like Mama, don’t give this man no—

  It happened very fast.

  He’d been stretching to get over a missing step, and when he put his foot down the next riser seemed to melt away, his weight shifted and he dropped his lantern to grab for the railing and the riser he had his other foot on broke loose like a rotten tooth and he fell through, just like that.

  He landed hard on a chunk of debris, broken boards, glass and the tree stump that had been there at the lake’s edge since the Boar’s Head marina was cobbled together. He had an instant of realizing that a section of the floor inside the place had collapsed and slid into a muddy pocket below the stairs, and then the pain in his right knee seared through his leg and he nearly bit his tongue all the way through.

  “Mercy,” he heard Ginger say. “I was kinda thinkin’ those stairs wouldn’t take much weight.”

  His lantern was still lit and was lying somewhere off to his left. It was shining in his face. He tried to sit up and a nail went through the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. The bull’s-eye lantern’s beam left his face; she had leaned down to pick it up.

  “Shit!” he said, through the blood in his mouth. “Hurt my fuckin’ knee.”

  “Ouch,” she answered.

  “I think I can crawl outta here. Damn, that hurts!”

  “Well,” she told him, “just lie there a minute and catch your breath.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We got those kids trapped now.”

  “Trapped,” Ginger said. “Yep. Sure are.”

  He heard the easy lilt of her voice and he didn’t like it. There was something terribly cold about it, and it reminded him of the way she’d spoken to Doc Honeycutt there in the woods outside Stonefield, just before—

  “Help me outta here,” he told her. “Come on, gimme a hand.” He tried to start crawling on his own, and the pain shot through his knee on a path down to his foot. When he put his hand there where the pain was the worst, he found what he guessed was four inches of sharp-edged wood sticking out of the cloth of his trouser leg. It had gone in behind his knee like a knife’s blade. He brought his hand back up and looked numbly at the blood on his fingers, which Ginger was also looking at by the lantern’s beam.

  “That’s not good, is it?” she asked.

  “I can walk, once I stand up. You gonna help me, or not?”

  “Well…you probably couldn’t make it back to the car, could you?”

  “Hell yes, I could!” Did he hear himself whine? He did, and it shamed him.

  “Come on, then. If you can crawl out on your own you ought to be able to walk.”

  He tried again, furiously, by pushing both legs against the tangle he was caught in, but the pain was so bad he broke into a cold sweat and he feared his knee must be broken as well as pierced by the wooden dagger. “Shit!” he said, both terrified and enraged. “All right, stop fuckin’ around and help me!”

  “Hm,” she answered. “Pearly,” she said after a few seconds of silence, “you don’t know Ginger too well, do you?”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Ginger always, always, always…helps Ginger. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

  “What shit are you spewin’?”

  “You can’t make it back to the car. Oh, I guess I could half-carry you, but who’s gonna keep the kid from runnin’ off again?”

  “The kid? Huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I only need one. The other one I’m gonna take care of soon as I get myself in there…and thank you for lettin’ me know how weak those steps are. Figure I’m gonna have to find another way in.”

  “Are you crazy?” he asked, and instantly regretted it. “You need me! You can’t just leave me here!”

  “True,” she said.

  Pearly heard the click of the .45’s hammer going back. His hand started to go for his shoulder holster but he knew he couldn’t get the pistol out in time and she would shoot him dead as soon as he moved.

  “Listen,” he said, and his voice trembled. “Please. We’ve been through a lot together. I did everythin’ you asked. I took care of things. I did things right, Ginger. Without me, you couldn’t have pulled this off. You know that’s the truth! Listen…I’m gonna crawl out of here on my own…I’ll stand up, I’ll make myself walk…we’ll get the kid…whichever one you want…and we’ll be on the way to Mexico. Hear me?” As he spoke, his left leg pushed at the debris but the right one had gone dead. He felt tears burn at the corners of his eyes, and he thought—and feared to think—that she’d been patiently waiting for a chance to kill him just as she’d been waiting to finish off the old doc. You fit the bill and the time was right, she’d said to him what seemed a very long time ago.

  Now he realized he no longer fit, and his time had run out.

  “Mexico, Ginger!” he whined desperately. “That’s where we’re goin’, with all the money anybody could dream of! Mexico…out of all this shit, that’s where we’re goin’!”

  “Here’s your Mexico,” she said quietly, and she pulled the trigger.

  Pearly saw the flame leap from the .45’s muzzle. In the instant before the brains were blown out of the back of his skull by the bullet that entered his forehead he smelled not the tang of gunpowder, but the sad odor of rotten peaches.

  The woman he had known as Ginger LaFrance spent a moment crawling in under the broken stairs and retrieving the .38 from the dead man’s shoulder holster. Her face with its champagne-colored eyes was without expression. She tossed the .45 away, since it was out of bullets and would just be extra weight. Then she crawled back out, stood up and with the bull’s-eye lantern regarded the treacherous stairs. There was a huge hole nearly in the middle of it where the recently deceased had fallen through. She decided there must be another way in, and she backed away from the stairs and went to the left up over more timbers and sheets of tin roof that had blown off, heading around to the other side.

  She had to climb up a small rise. At the top her light found a cleared-off dirt area that must’ve been a parking lot, but here the ground was level with the marina building. A large section of the roof had slid down nearly to the ground and hung half-suspended over the building where another door ought to be. There were two rectangular windows up toward the roofline, on either side of where the door would be, and both were glassless but too narrow for even the bodies of children to climb through. The light picked out an Enjoy Coca-Cola sign on the wall that had survived the blow, along with a mounted thermometer that showed the painted picture of a hooked fish jumping, and from the few dozen bullet holes it was a popular place for target practice.

  She pulled aside the tin roofing, careful it didn’t come sliding down on her head, and exposed an opening where a door had been. She shone the light within and saw the room was mostly still held together though the floor and walls were all buckled, black with mildew, and dripping wet from the rain that had slammed through the space where the roof used to be. Her light couldn’t find the children, but she was sure they were still in the building somewhere. She imagined she could smell their fear, like the pungency of bitter wine.

  Her eyes glinted above the lantern’s beam. When she stepped into the room she felt the weakened and diseased boards give beneath her weight. She held her gun down at her side, but ready when she needed it.

  “All right, kiddies,” she said, with a tight half-s
mile. “Come to mama.”

  Twenty-Five.

  “Nilla,” Little Jack whispered, “there’s somethin’ crawlin’ on my neck!”

  She shushed him. Whatever it was, it could not be any worse than what had just crawled into that other room and said to come to mama.

  They were hiding in a bathroom the size of a broom closet at their house. They had found the door to it when they’d carefully followed their hands along the walls of that first room they’d entered off the porch and realized that half the floor had collapsed, leaving a rim of broken planks. Part of the bathroom’s ceiling had been torn open to expose the night sky and the floor was sloppy with standing water.

  The door was warped but Nilla had been able to close it using the strength of her shoulder. With the tips of her fingers she had pushed the latch into its socket. Then she’d told Little Jack to sit down on the floor under the sink and she had taken a position with her back against the toilet and both feet up against the door with her knees bent.

  They’d heard a single gunshot. What that meant they didn’t know…but they knew the woman was in the building with them, and that was bad enough.

  Nilla thought the woman must be able to hear her heartbeat, it was so loud in her own ears.

  :I’m comin’,: Curtis suddenly sent to her. :Mizz Ripp says we’ll be there in ’bout five minutes.:

  :Who?:

  :Mizz Ripp was goin’ out to catch turtles. I’m in her boat. We’re ’bout five minutes away,: he repeated, if she hadn’t understood that the first time.

  :The woman’s in here,: Nilla said. :We’re hiding in a bathroom. I don’t know where Mister Parr is. They’ve got guns, Curtis.:

  :All right. Stay where you are, don’t move.:

  :Did you hear me? They’ve got guns.:

  :I heard,: he answered.

  Her focus on speaking to Curtis was interrupted when a wash of light sneaked under the door. Then it was gone; then it back came again, searching.

  Nilla heard her brother catch and hold his breath, as if that would do any good.

  The light went away.

  “Where might a couple’a little mice be hidin’?” they heard the woman say. “I think, maybe…here.”

  The bathroom’s door gave a quiet creak. Nilla felt the slight tremor in her feet and figured the woman had placed a hand against the wood. The light returned, aimed at the crooked crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.

  “Sign on this door here says ‘Rest Room’,” she told them. “You restin’ in there?” By the light’s glow Nilla saw the doorknob slowly turn from left to right and back again. The door creaked again, a little louder; Nilla could feel the woman pushing on it. “Oh, now,” she said softly, “you locked yourselves in? That’s not gonna do you a whole hell of a lot of good. Kiddies, you’re gonna make me mad, havin’ to go through all this. And when Ginger gets mad,” she said, her voice still easy, “Ginger stops actin’ like a lady. You hearin’ me, Nilla honey?”

  Beside Nilla, Little Jack shifted and tried to rub the back of his neck on the underside of the sink. He bumped his head on a pipe and from beneath the sink came a hollow-sounding thrummmm.

  “Must be ghosts in there,” Ginger said.

  Nilla and Little Jack heard the skreek of her fingernails being drawn slowly down the wood, and maybe she was getting splinters under them or in her fingers but they didn’t think she cared about that…or really, cared about much of anything except pulling them out of that bathroom.

  There followed a silence in which Nilla’s heartbeat was deafening.

  Then Ginger threw herself against the door with a scream of rage.

  It was so raw, so primal and so animalistic that it made Little Jack cry out with a bleat of terror and jam himself further under the sink. Nilla let loose her own shrill scream with the effort of keeping her feet up against the door as it bowed inward and the wood gave off the pops of pistol shots.

  Ginger hit the door again, the violence of the blow shuddering up through Nilla’s knees and legs. Nilla gritted her teeth…the next blow was sure to break the latch and then the woman would be on them.

  But it did not come.

  “Shit,” they heard the woman mutter.

  Then they heard what she must have: the distant noise of an outboard motor, coming closer.

  ****

  Fay Ripp slowed the boat and cut the motor. The craft drifted toward shore. “Can’t get much further in,” she told Curtis, who sat at the front. “Pilin’s where the wharf used to be could tear the hull open. You’ll have to get out here, if you’re goin’.”

  He nodded in the beam of the flashlight that rested on the plank seat beside his captain.

  With an effort he was able to croak, “’lice.”

  “I’ll fetch ’em. Take me some time, though. You sure you want out?”

  Once more a nod affirmed his decision.

  “Damn,” she said. “Must be awful important.” She looked toward the ruin of the Boar’s Head marina. Was there the glimmer of a light somewhere up there in the wreckage? She picked up the flashlight and offered it to him. “Whatever it is you’ve got to do, this might help.”

  Curtis took the light. They’ve got guns, Nilla had said. Never in his life had he used a weapon or held anything in his hand that might cause injury to someone, but now…he needed something, though it wouldn’t be much use against guns. He leaned forward and put his hand on the sharpened lance that Fay Ripp used to prod alligators away from her turtle catch. Then he looked at her, waiting for her to answer.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Go on and take it.”

  With the flashlight in one hand and the lance in the other, Curtis eased himself over the side into chest-deep water.

  “Careful where you step, boy,” she told him. She waited for him to move away a safe distance, then she throttled up the motor again and turned the boat in the direction they’d come.

  Curtis waded in over mud, rocks and past several broken wharf pilings that stood just above the surface. When he reached the shore he stood looking at the place he had been called to reach. :Nilla,: he said, :I’m here,: but she didn’t answer.

  He followed the flashlight’s beam a few more feet to a staircase that led up to the remnants of a porch. He saw that the stairs were too broken to be used…and then he saw the body on the ground below them, lying in a mess of debris. The man’s eyes were open, fixed in death, and the face—once handsome, maybe even cherubic—had been distorted by the impact of a bullet to the forehead.

  So, he thought, it was just the woman now. What had Nilla said her name was? He couldn’t remember.

  Whoever she was, she was deadly.

  It came to him that he might fail in this. The odds were so much against him. Coming into this situation—to save his friend and her brother—with a lance might have worked for the knights of old, but against a gun…no. But he wouldn’t be able to shoot anybody, even if he could get a gun; it wasn’t in him to wish harm on anyone, he just wanted to get the kids back.

  He realized he likely wasn’t up to facing the kind of evil that might be inside that wrecked marina…but who else was there to do it?

  Ironheaded. Just like your daddy.

  Yes, he thought. I am.

  He shone his light up the stairs again, and that was when he saw the woman standing on the porch aim her gun at his face.

  ****

  “Now!” Nilla cried out, and she and Little Jack hit the woman from behind an instant before the gun went off. The bullet hissed past Curtis’s head. They had come out of the bathroom even though the lantern had been left on the floor to keep them cowed, but Nilla had heard Curtis say I’m here and had figured the woman—and Mister Parr too?—must’ve gone out to see who was there.

  They all fell from the porch in a tangle, as Nilla had hit Ginger LaFrance high and Little Jack had thrown himself against the backs of her knees. They came down into the mud and the lake’s wavelets only a few feet away from Curtis, who backed away w
ith a strangled noise of alarm. His light showed the three figures thrashing, trying to disentangle, and then the woman struggled up, caught Nilla by the hair and put the pistol’s barrel to her head.

  Her name, Curtis thought frantically. What was—

  “Vesta,” he said, the pain tearing through his throat. “No.”

  It had sounded like the moan of wind through a graveyard.

  The woman’s head swivelled toward him.

  By the light that fell upon her mud-streaked face, she looked stunned. Her mouth worked but made no noise. She shivered, as if a stranger speaking her true name had been the ultimate violation, as if truth itself were her mortal enemy, as if it had reached into her soul with a clawed hand and torn open something that had long been buried, and ought to have been.

  In the next instant her face became a rictus beyond rage. It contorted into a horror that could freeze the blood and cause any man to retreat before its draconic ugliness.

  But the son of Orchid and Ironhead Joe stood his ground.

  She lifted the pistol and fired once, shooting him in the chest. As Curtis staggered back under the bullet’s impact, she walked forward and shot him again, the second bullet striking him in the left side. He lost the light and the lance and he fell. She advanced on him, the hammer clicking back for a third shot to his skull.

  With an anguished cry, Nilla swung a thin piece of board she’d clenched in a deathgrip off the ground and had jammed down as far as she could between her fingertips. The three rusted nails that protruded from its end smacked into the side of Ginger LaFrance’s neck. Nilla wrenched her fingers off the board and it just hung there. The woman gave a gagging sound, and when she turned toward Nilla her eyes held the fires of Hell and blood was streaming from her mouth down over her chin.

  The revolver rose up like a snake’s head.

  A speartip tore through the woman’s chest from behind.

  Curtis’s thrust had had the power of desperation behind it, even though he felt himself fast ebbing. Nilla and Little Jack saw the speartip dripping heart’s blood. The woman looked down at it as if a strange flower had bloomed from her breast. The gun went off, its slug plowing into the mud between the children, and then it fell from her shivering hand.