The Well

by Jack Cady

John, still in his early twenties, was killed two years later. A group of men loading logs on a barge stacked the load too high and a man was pinned by a sudden shift. Heideger rushed forward. Both were crushed when the load tumbled. John Heideger, like Justice Tracker, showed that when some Trackers die, it is not always without purpose.

  Consciousness, a feeble ebb, touched him, departed, returned. Tracker tried first to flex his freezing fingers. Though cold, it was not as cold in the tower, so that he found himself lying in water and not on ice.

  Slowly he remembered where he was, and what he had seen. It was incredible, perverse, and because it was, Tracker knew that it was the work of Theophilus — the furious closing statement that transcended the endless halls and rooms of the house of the Trackers.

  No doubt his nemesis was certain this sight would assure his destruction as well. He clutched with stiff, trembling hands and found that he was clawing up sodden handfuls of money. In truth, he lay face down on a carpet of money. Slowly he scrabbled an area of the floor clear so that his hands could get purchase, and came to a kneeling posture and looked about before raising his head. Money lay like a sacrifice around the room, a circular room not more than fifteen feet across. The shaft rose in the center, and at its base was a great stack of cash. It was too much to simply pick up and count. Impossible to step without wading in cash, kicking it like sodden, rotting leaves. It was scattered, tumbled, stacked, piled — green and gray and gold and silver. Water festered at the bottom of the piles, covered the floors, plastered the bills against each other.

  Blowers from refrigeration machinery were spaced along otherwise smooth walls of stainless steel that gleamed dull in the moonlight. It was the silent blower units that told Tracker he was in the middle of an enormous freezer; a freezer that cut when the generators died. It explained the water, the refrigerator smell. The walls were otherwise round and smooth, and moonlight filtered through sets of heavy, double-paned and vacuum-sealed glass. Far above, a variable, cloud-scudding light fell softly along the base of the thick wooden shaft.

  The shaft was a cross upon which Justice Tracker hung. The feet were lashed to the wood six feet above the floor, and money was piled to an inch beneath the toes. The naked body was cinched to the shaft by a rope tied around its middle. The arms were spread and bound, and one was disjointed where Theophilus had broken it in order to attain the position. The head slumped slightly forward, but it did not fall as far as a dead man’s head should fall. John crawled across the money, looked up, was not surprised to find that the head was wired with a padeye that entered the wood; another padeye was screwed into the skull.

  John tried to rise, slipped and fell. He hooked his hands in the grating of a blower and pulled himself to his feet. Strength was returning to his legs, his heart was thumping like a sledge on set-stakes. Slowly he walked the perimeter of the room, kicked sodden cash before him as he walked.

  He thought of Theophilus, staggering, after he had opened the sanctuary and drawn forth the corpse. He thought of the long walk as Theophilus bore his son’s body to this tower, of Theophilus returning to whatever treasury he owned, bearing load after load of wealth in hopes of further appeasing the destroyer that had taken him over.

  Tracker kicked wet cash before him as he walked, at last stopped to stand in front of his dead father. Where the weight fell against the rope that cinched the middle, flesh rolled and puffed. A nail secured one hand. The other hand was not nailed and dangled from the lashed arm. Light from high windows touched the fingertips and turned them lifelike. Perhaps an hour of sunlight had warmed the upper air of the shaft, and the partly thawed body of Justice Tracker was colored in moving streaks of white and gray and ash in the flooding winter moonlight.

  The face looked dry, the hair slack but dry and still retaining the thick mat and curl around the ears. There was a light beard.

  Tracker stood looking at his father, a portrait more masterful, in its terrible way, than the one in stained glass at the front of the house. With a difference. The face of Justice Tracker now was calm. There was no dying despair from belated wisdom. The face was at peace. Above it the tower reached twenty feet higher into the scudding mist, and the gray and ashen light shifted gently across the face, again suggesting life.

  Remembrance. Words that for half his lifetime had been discounted. The voice of his father…“I hope you’ll understand this, but please remember until you do understand.” “I’ll remember,” John had said. “But, I’ve got homework, and I have to clean my room.” “A minute more. Stay just a minute more and give me your attention. It wanders.” “Yes, sir.” “Hope you’ll care enough to remember this. Those who have the most owe the most, and it can’t be paid with money.”

  “We have a lot, sir.”

  “Of everything. You’ll understand that later. You’ve got your mother’s eye, her hands, her feeling for the form and shape of things. Maybe that’s part of what you owe.”

  He had not, of course, understood, nor had he tried to remember. But now he stood looking at the face of his father, felt the returning movement of his own fingers, felt strength pouring into his arms, his legs. Now, for him, was the time to search, to discover, even to feel grief He gazed at the face of his dead father, felt his own life reach out.

  His voice choked, turned against him, and his mind faltered as he searched for a statement. “Goodbye, sir,” he said.

  Tracker turned, pushed open the door which had been so carefully left ajar. He stepped onto the windswept turret, felt for the presence and knew it was there, hovering like a question. He looked at the river and the scudding clouds. He saw his old planting of trees. He turned back to the stairs and descended into darkness. Grief for his father was mixed with a celebration for his father’s success. He held the feelings closely, felt their warmth but disclosed no emotion.

  The traps were real. The presence hovered about him, questioning if it had won. When it answered its question he would have to be careful. He wound down circling stairs and saved his dying batteries for moments when only light could assure his decision.

  The mind of Theophilus, the mind of Vera, of Johan; the mind of the entire Tracker past was in these halls and rooms and darkness. It was a mechanical, and at the same time, superstitious mind. Tracker could respect it, he could no longer fear it. He could, he must, face it and control it.

  The mind of the past had sense and form, it had control and structure, and it was bankrupt. In his mind were the firm tones of his father.

  “…who have the most owe the most…”

  Tracker did not know precisely what he had, so he could not know precisely what he owed. That was in the future. It had to be pursued, its full nature discovered. He did, though, know what he owed Justice Tracker. First, right now, it was to outstride this house. Later, it might be that what he owed would kill him, as Justice’s search and understanding had killed him. But for now he had a single purpose, and he believed he had the strength for it.

  Evil was weakened once one understood its corrupt premise, but it was like a trapped animal…it could rend and tear and kill in the throes of its own extinction.

  He did not know how long it took him to go down to the first floor. It made no difference. Only his actions counted. He entered the old part of the house, turned off feeble electric lights as he moved. He walked through the kitchens with the kind of deliberation of a man about to say goodbye to this house. He felt a kind of tranquility in his obligation to Justice. He walked to his father’s room, entered the sanctuary, went to the desk, flipped through the pages of the summary, then laid the book down. He turned back, leaned against the great doors to close them, then turned and walked toward the kitchens. He rattled his flashlight. The orange beacon of his flashlight was even dimmer now as Tracker deliberately began to make his way to the center of the house, to the pit — to the well.

  As he started downward the he
at was like a blow as he entered the subcellar. He smelled oil. He walked forward to the well, to the huge slab of ornamented black marble, slick with oil at this lowest spot in the house. His shoes seemed to suck up the oil. The brooding figure of Theophilus hung in that midnight path that ran between the machines of destruction.

  He found what he wanted. Dry fragile timbers from the press designed to break bodies came apart and splintered with a single kick. He picked up a timber, then another, and he returned to the well. He felt the presence, questioning.

  He laid the timbers beside the well, and they absorbed oil like sponges. Kneeling, he lit a match.

  Thus, he thought in a biblical fashion that was at once alien and yet natural, once blazed the torches of Gideon.

  Held upright, the torch burned in a black-smoking flame from the top. It would burn downward like a candle as it was held upright. He lit both of them and threw one. He pressed the second torch into the face of blackness. Once again he heard the scream of Theophilus that had torn the house, and out of the well the dessicated corpse of Vera rose and turned to flame.

  But these were merely artifacts of the house. Already destroyed. He had a larger purpose. Now. He pressed forward, pushing the torch in front of him, and entered the passageway. Behind him there was flame.

  And the attack came, as he knew it must. His legs weakened. Time shifted as he climbed the passage, and he felt as though he were falling through space against a background of blue stars…

  Somehow he steadied himself. The torch threw shadows and dull light. Smoke lay in his lungs like acid. He moved forward and age crept over him. He turned forward, then back, then forward again, fighting the past and its pain with fire.

  Next to the top of the passage, across the broad plain of the cellar until he found the stairs. The torch flickered. His breathing was shallow. Behind him, in the heart of the house, a murmur sounded, a roar dulled by distance like steam blowing from a drowning vessel. He reached the top of the stairs, and with his last strength threw the torch forward and lay in a near stupor as he watched dusty, dry fabric of drapes and cracked rugs ignite. The room came alive with fire.

  He did not move, could not move, until the house shuddered, the sound like an enormous sigh. Now he began to struggle to his feet. In the distance, the floor raised, the explosion welled and boomed and threw fire into the kitchens. Fire burst through the rooms as fuel and trapped gas lying deep in the well reached into the house.

  The fire surrounded John Tracker. He stood victorious and burning.

  His shoes were aflame, and his hair. He turned and ran, a torch that ran and staggered to the front door, spreading sparks as he rolled across the porch into the snow, face burned, hair gone, feet cooked.

  The snow smothered the fire and saved him. His pain was severe but the snow covered it. He got up on legs that flashed with pain but managed to carry him to the grade, which he clambered like a desperate beast, mindless in flight. When he made the top of the grade he fell in the snow, squirmed around to face the house.

  The light began slowly, flickering from the inner parts of the house. Drafts and crosscurrents in those endless and winding halls were sucking the fire. For a long time in the darkness there was no more than a faint red and yellow glow.

  Tracker lay panting, waiting for control.

  The light moved here and there, shifting, growing, steadily becoming a force in itself. Yet for a long time as he lay in the deep snow there was no visible smoke or flame.

  Then a tendril of smoke appeared as fire sucked up from some unknown shaft. A puff then of smoke through a partly open window. The drafts moved the fire, fanned the fire, spread the fire. Flame was appearing from the depths of the house as a door fell open and the angel took a last walk through the snow of the front porch, presented the upside down cross like a salute, turned mechanically on its tracks and disappeared through a door into the growing flame. Its final exit was complete, no trick.

  Now the fire took firm hold as windows on the second floor heated and shattered, the winter air pouring in, feeding the growing combustion.

  On the third floor an explosion threw phosphorus to break windows and bring a draft. A fiery trap, the house was broken.

  Sounds of the fire swirled, crackling and popping. The stained glass window on the front of the house came alive, illuminated by fire. Flame burst from the window on the fourth floor, danced through the skylights. Reflected brilliance sparkled against clouds of dark smoke. Fire reached now toward the tower of Justice. Fire bloomed now above the construction of Theophilus, broadcasting its brilliant color into the night sky. John saw headlights in the distance and knew that he would soon be joined by men from the towns, the streets. He turned to look at the country road, and then at the empty expanse of freeway. The night winds moved about him. It must be nearly dawn.

  The tower where Justice hung was now aflame, the fire high and dancing in the winter wind. Tracker turned back to the house to see the pyre of Justice burning like a beacon.

  The fire searched. It was finished in the bowels of the house, stretching out and transmitting heat along pipes, telegraphing itself. The front rooms were in rapid destruction, and as John looked at the melting stained glass, the figure of the sorrowful face began to move forward, smoking, disintegrating as the melting lead lost form and it crashed forward. A spray of flame followed, reached across the snow toward the dead spruce, which ignited slowly at first, and then the fire climbed quickly among the brown needles, and Tracker recoiled as the dead tree turned into a monument of flame.

  A sound of collapsing timbers as part of the second floor caved in, and it was then that the screams began. They would live with him as long as there was time. They seemed to rise with the smoke, sounding through the night like souls battering to get to the sanctuary of an ancient church.

  From deep in the heart of the house the explosion built, gained form in the center of the fire, rose like a grounding wave as a deep pocket of gas in the substrata inflamed, expanded, ignited. The explosion grew and boiled up through the sinking house and collapsing tower. Fire and exploding timbers rose in the air on the heavy sound of thunder as Tracker stumbled down the grade, falling, sliding, past what he thought was the face of Amy, the faces of police, and into the outstretched arms of a black-suited black-cloaked figure.

  Epilogue

  John Tracker’s family faltered in the third and fourth generations. John would understand that Johan, Theophilus, Vera and others of his ancestors may have been hideous, but few of them had any doubt about who they were. That question was reserved for his parents and himself.

  The black loam shone dark and rich in the sunlight as it cascaded from the yellow dump trucks. Behind him the continual rising and falling roar of a D6 Cat was a stacatto across the raw land as it knifed the soil, hit rough grades, a small flame at its stack. The backhoes were already chopping trenches for irrigation pipe.

  Tracker stood on a small rise, in his mind already seeing the sweep of alder. He checked his watch. Her plane was not due yet.

  In a way he still had hope. Amy was coming back from Europe. This man John Tracker who would meet her was not the same man as before. He was pretty sure that Amy was also changed. Her voice on the phone told him part of what she felt and thought. He needed to hear it all.

  He leaned on the new, yellowish cane that he would be using for a while. Intending to think of Amy, he instead thought of other women who had touched his life…his grandmother Vera. His mother Sarah.

  Then he thought of still other women in his experience, women who had sometimes touched him, tried to love him, or who were attracted by his business success. He hoped all was all right with those women. He hoped they had dismissed his failings, but he especially hoped they had forgiven themselves their own. These were new thoughts for him.

  Amy had gone to see that man in Europe, and Tracker un
derstood that she either had to enliven or bury the past. Coming from a hospital bed as he had — and facing the job of liquidating the business — put work in front of some other new feelings that were difficult to handle. If the future presented him a condition that did not include Amy, there would be time enough to feel pain. If the future presented Amy, there would be time enough to feel other emotions. He smiled, shrugged and turned to the small man who approached him in such a hurry.

  “You can see how it will be,” Tracker said, pointing to the curving sweep of grade that would lie graceful as the easily moving river. “It isn’t just the pull-off of the darker color.”

  The architect was well-dressed. He moved efficiently and had an efficient mouth. “It’s your baby,” he said. “I only point out that you’ve doubled your cost on those trees.”

  “It won’t break me.”

  “Like I said, it’s your baby.” The man turned to head for his car, stopped for a moment. It seemed that his eyes were also registering invisible trees, then he shrugged, checked his watch and nearly ran to his car.

  Tracker thought then of the men. His grandfather Theophilus, his father Justice. He thought of men with whom he had done business, and of the auctioneer who had trained him. He hoped those men were all right. Even his grandfather.

  A different river ran low in the background. In Council Bluffs the land rose gradually in a deceptive grade at this point. It was going to require a cut to bedrock. He did not think he’d have to blast, though. From the nearby road a string of dumps were coming on the job. Across the job, machinery moved in a purposeful, intricate counterpoint.

  Amy must surely have questions. Perhaps he could help answer some of them. He could tell her how he had once tried so hard to explain too much of the inexplicable in the house of the Trackers with his grandfather’s tricks and his great grandfather’s constructions against the devil. How his superficial need for rational, worldly explanations had nearly kept him from recognizing the reality of the underlying force that had been loose in the house, the wellspring of all that was time-warping him, and her; indeed, for centuries the world — the deadly, too long transcendent reality of evil incarnate. And shunning sufficient recognition of it for so long, he had very nearly let them both be destroyed by it. Yes, he could try to tell her something of this, and hope she would understand. She had, after all, as he had, been exposed to it, fought it and survived. If she wanted to try, and he did — and he somehow felt they both would — then she could count on him for whatever support one human being could give another. Only, he couldn’t act for her, he couldn’t make her less than thirty…He could guess her terror and exhaustion during that walk into the night and the snow. He could understand how the farm family who picked her up believed she was out of her mind. He knew what kind of argument — and acting — from a hospital bed must have gone into the final persuasion that brought her back with police and a priest.