The Scribe

by Matthew Guinn

  Canby looked back and saw that Billingsley was grinning, his mouth bloody and studded with cracked teeth. He spit out blood and Canby could hear the broken teeth clattering across the puncheon floor.

  Then the laughter resumed, cascaded and pealed through Spot 12, and echoed through the entirety of the tower itself, it seemed.

  “Mine, Canby!” Billingsley screamed. “Canby! You are mine!”

  THE WALK from Spot 12 to the gallows in the prison courtyard was not a long one, but the procession made it at a funereal pace. Szabó led them, a lantern held aloft in one hand and the execution order in the other, reading it as they went. In his broken English he pronounced the court’s sentence haltingly.

  The bishop, ashen-faced, walked beside his old friend, speaking to him in a murmuring voice too low for Canby to hear the words. Whether he was administering the last rites or beseeching his friend for the whereabouts of his son, Canby could not determine. But he heard in the voice great sorrow.

  Henry Grady stood by the gallows, his pencil and notebook held in hands that hung at his sides. For once, his bow tie was unknotted, hanging loose down the front of his shirt. His face was composed in an expression of public solemnity, but beneath it Canby thought he saw embarrassment, perhaps even a bit of shame.

  Vernon watched Szabó and the deputies walk Billingsley up the gallows steps and loop the noose around his neck, then checked his pocket watch.

  “Once more, Billingsley,” he said. “Where is the boy?”

  Billingsley smiled down at him with his broken teeth, but said nothing. Vernon pulled a cigar from his vest and cut it. Still Billingsley did not speak. Vernon put the cigar in his mouth and shrugged his shoulders.

  “We’re early, boys, but no cause to wait,” he said as he lit his cigar. He nodded to the jailer and the deputy. “Just be sure you drop him gently.”

  They draped the pillowcase over Billingsley’s head and asked for last words. “Ah, darkness,” he said.

  Then he dropped.

  November 14

  CANBY SAT IN THE WHITE ELECTRIC LIGHT OF Billingsley’s study with the calfskin-bound ledger spread open before him. Next to it on the desk was the bottle of fine whiskey, the unknown vintage, from which he poured himself a dram at intervals, when the reading required it of him. Most of the day gone now and he had been over the bulk of the ledger twice, excepting the passages wherein Billingsley detailed what he had done to the girl at Mamie O’Donnell’s and, worse, what had been done to Mary Flanagan. Though Canby could weather the obscenities and blasphemies that riddled the account as he combed through it again, he had only been able to read about the outrages committed on the girls once.

  He lingered several minutes over the page on which the names of the victims had been written. MALTHUS was spelled out in a descending line on the left-hand side of the page, the victims’ names or occupations listed in a corresponding column on the right. Billingsley hadn’t bothered with Anse’s name, or the prostitute’s; they were listed as “pig” and “whore.” But Mary Flanagan’s name seemed to Canby to be burned onto the paper like an indictment next to the H. Across the page from the U, Billingsley had written, “Drew”; across from the S, “W. T. Sherman.” Canby smiled mirthlessly at the entry for General Sherman. Too late for that, you son of a bitch, he thought. But he could not dismiss the entry for the Drew boy. He felt a bone-deep certainty that in the coming days they would find the boy’s mutilated body, in someone’s well or a back alley. He could not gauge whether that conviction aroused in him more dread or more futility, could only be certain that the world was a far sight better off with Billingsley dispatched from it.

  He turned one of the heavy pages and read:

  The plantation was the apotheosis of the order the High Father had lost, restored here on earth. The peasants lackeys yankees trash envied it. Hated us for it and I reveled in their hatred until at last they won out. Improbably, impossibly, they won out. But for a long while there we had it. Had achieved it: the planter at the top the center the apex of it all. Judge and executioner to the rest, sovereign of all I surveyed. The big white house at the center. White! I wore white in the daytime and moved naked through darkness.

  Hence Malthus, Canby thought, at least in Billingsley’s version. The white man was ascendant, but there was no paternalism in it, no trace of noblesse oblige, not even feigned. What the philosopher Thomas Malthus saw as anarchy stayed by order, chaos held at bay, Billingsley saw as purely the exertion of power. He took another sip of the whiskey and turned the page.

  That order was not to be recovered. Pissed shat vomited away by rabble. Unable even to rule themselves. The niggers bad enough but those yankee crusaders even worse. We had the carpetbaggers gone soon as we could. But then Grady and the others began to sound just like them. Not just capitulating to the new order but celebrating it! New men with no lineage all around us—one day stepping off the train and a year later stepping into the mayor’s office. Grady’s “editorials” singing the vapid minstrelry of his New South. A “new” South! There is nothing new under the sun.

  They think money is the final currency. Not at all. Their cotton exposition set up like a debutante ball for this new South they laud. Intolerable. As if being forced not only to attend one’s own funeral but to dance a jig on the grave.

  Canby riffled the pages, scanning lines of Victor Hugo’s that Billingsley had transcribed into his book. All of them from a poem about Satan that the Frenchman had apparently been working on over several years of correspondence with Billingsley. The devil Hugo described reminded Canby of his readings in Milton, yet this fallen angel was somehow both more sinister and beguiling than the character Milton had traced. Canby flipped the pages until they went to blank paper, then turned back to the last page on which Billingsley had written. Read:

  Does it seem pedantic to quote my French friend once more, Canby? Victor catches the spirit of it precisely, I believe: “‘So,” cried Satan, ‘so be it! still I can see! He shall have the blue sky, the black sky is mine.’”

  The black sky is mine, Canby. I will see you in it.

  SSS—MALTHUS

  Canby shut the book slowly, then drained the dregs of his glass. For a moment he studied the crystal decanter from which he had poured, from which the black butler had poured him and Billingsley drinks in this room, those bloodied weeks ago. Billingsley gone now—could Canby summon belief in its existence—to that very Hell whose praises he had sung. The black butler gone, too, no one knew where. When Vernon and the others had come to this house they had found the front door unlocked as though in anticipation of their arrival. And the back door still standing ajar, as though the black man had departed in such haste as to leave the door still swinging behind him.

  Canby grabbed the decanter by its neck and was rising to leave with it when he heard a sound, furtive, beneath him. He paused stock-still and waited until he heard it again. The slightest of noises coming up through the floorboards, a faint grinding sound. Very slowly, he set the decanter on the desk and sat back down in the chair, mindful to ease his weight into it so as not to make the wood or the chair’s heavy spring creak beneath him. One at a time, he pulled off his boots, then rose in stockinged feet and drew the .32 Bulldog from his chest holster as he crossed the room.

  He found the cellar door at the end of a back hallway and eased it open. He studied the electric switch beside the doorframe for a long moment as he heard the sound come from below him again, trying to assess the risk of going down the stairs in full light, announced. He moved past the switch and began to descend the steps in a crouch, eyes wide to acclimate himself to the darkness.

  It was no cellar, he saw as his ducked head came clear of the first story’s flooring, but a full basement, bricked foursquare along the house’s foundation and eight feet down to the red Georgia clay. Spaced at intervals on the four walls were wrought-iron casements through which the afternoon’s waning light drifted in. He saw that the household’s foodstuffs were stored here,
arrayed against the walls. As his eyes adjusted to the weak light, he saw sacks of coffee beans and canned fruits, a metal tin of raisins. All of it neatly ordered, down to the fifty-pound sacks of rice and shucked corn that were set atop wooden-staved barrels on the floor. Some of the barrels’ sides marked with the stencil of Morris Rich’s store, others branded from locales more exotic. Fish in brine from a San Francisco merchant, two barrels of chowder from Boston, five-gallon kegs of syrup from Vermont. Bricks and loaves of cheeses from abroad stored on high shelves.

  He heard the sound again, scraping, and turned to its source at the base of the west wall. There a hogshead had burst open, the grain inside it spilling out through the split staves onto the floor. He saw movement in the grain, the whisking of a hairless tail and the working of a mottled black and gray rump. The rat had pressed its head into the gap, burrowing. As it dug for more purchase on the sifting grain its back and haunches rubbed against the lower of the two iron bands that encircled the barrel.

  “Hanh!” Canby said.

  The rat wagged its way out of the grain, making the rubbing sound again as its back pulled clear of the iron band. It raised its head, quizzical, for a second, until Canby grunted again. Then it darted off the little grain pile, claws scrabbling for purchase, and ran across the floor like a swift-moving shadow to a gap in the bricks through which Canby guessed he could not pass three fingers. It flattened itself against the ground as though boneless and squeezed its way through.

  He holstered the Bulldog and climbed the steps far enough to reach the light switch and flicked it on. He took another look around the basement in the white light and saw the edge of something metal protruding from the grain. He crossed to the hogshead and took hold of it, found that he had to wrench it free from the gap in the barrel, while more of the grain sifted like sand down to the floor.

  Canby held it in his hand and looked at it, thinking that the design of its function was as clearly evident as was the malevolence of its purpose. It was an iron band, three inches wide, hinged at one point of its circumference and with a hasp at the opposite point of the circle, through which a small padlock could be fitted. Its diameter, he noted as he turned it in his hands, crafted to fit a human neck. And stretching out from the band, as if the cardinal points of its compass, were four thin iron rods that tapered at their ends like grotesque parodies of a flower’s stalk. Or rather three of them, for where the fourth would have attached to the collar was left only the bright spot of unrusted metal where that prong had broken cleanly away.

  He studied it, the sinister curvature of the prongs. The weight of it. Thought of how it would feel when locked into place on the neck of the recovered runaway or the malingering slave. How the prongs would have made sleep a torture, the simple act of laying one’s head down for rest a physical impossibility. Its design as purposeful as a horseshoe. The nadir of the blacksmith’s art.

  He set it down on top of the burst hogshead, glad to be rid of contact with it. Billingsley certainly was insane enough to keep it as a memento, but why such a strange site for storing it? Or the need to hide it? On his stockinged feet he made his way back to the stairs, eager to be gone from this house and outside in whatever daylight remained.

  THEY KNELT in the falling light of the quickening dusk, waiting. The only sound above the flickering of the candles was the periodic scraping of the crepe myrtle limbs against the stained glass, the occasional clatter of dried leaves scuttling across brick pavers as the wind pushed them from one corner of the courtyard to the other. Then, the creaking of wood as, one by one, the older ones among the parishioners pushed up from their positions on the kneelers and settled themselves back into the pews, piety yielding to the exigencies of age.

  One of them, the youngest of the ladies’ guild, rose from her place near the back as quietly as she could and slipped out of the nave. The others sat or knelt as she had left them, listening to her footfalls fading as she went down the length of the vestibule, then coming louder as she ascended the stone steps. Faintly they heard her soft knock on the rectory door.

  So they waited, ears cocked for some word on the postponement, of when this day’s vespers would eventually begin.

  They did not wait long. Though none of them heard the heavy door swing open on its oiled hinges, all of them heard the scream that came just afterward. And the screams that followed the first, one after another ringing off the granite, through the courtyard, and out into the gathering night.

  THE LITTLE WOMAN in the vestibule was crouched down on herself, up against the wall like a frightened child or an animal gone to ground, shivering. She raised a bony finger and Canby and Underwood took the steps up to the rectory two at a time and threw open the timbered door.

  The bishop was sprawled back in the chair behind his desk. A bloody U had been carved into his forehead but he was, so far as Canby could tell, otherwise unharmed. He and Underwood paused in their forward momentum, looking, watching the blood seep from the wan brow. Canby moved around the desk and put a hand on the man’s neck.

  The bishop groaned and slowly opened his pale eyes.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said.

  “Shit,” Canby said.

  “He’s alive?” Underwood said.

  “For a while yet,” the bishop said, nodding, the dripping letter made more grotesque by the gesture.

  “Look around for the knife, Underwood. A letter opener, maybe, something with an edge or a point to it. He’s done it himself. By his own hand.”

  “I have, have I?” the bishop said. He struggled to rise, stood, wavered, and tilted toward Canby. Canby put a hand out against his chest to steady him, pressing against the black fabric of the cassock the bishop wore. The man moaned and collapsed back into his chair. Canby heard the sound of something wet striking the floor. He looked at his palm. It was covered in blood.

  Underwood made a choking sound and Canby looked down at his feet, at the space between them and the bishop. Gray and ropy coils of entrails lay there on the slate, one length of them trailing back underneath the bishop’s robes.

  “He wanted me to deliver a message, don’t you see,” the bishop said. “Leave him be. Let him finish his work and perhaps he’ll have mercy on you.”

  “He was here?”

  “Bullshit, Underwood. Of course he wasn’t.”

  “Indeed he was.”

  “We saw the coffin go into the ground. We saw him dead on the rope.”

  “I saw him rise, Mister Canby.”

  “And how did he do that, Bishop? What sort of magic trick would that entail?”

  “If you knew what he is, you would get yourself on his side.”

  “I’m not here to try God and the devil with you. Where is your son?”

  “I do not know. In God’s name, I swear it.”

  The bishop groaned again and Canby saw a gout of blood begin to spread on the slate floor.

  “Good God, Mister Canby,” Underwood said. “What more proof do you need that he ain’t of this world?”

  “All the proof I see is that madness is catching. See if you can find the blade he did this with.”

  “Poor boy,” the bishop said, looking at Underwood with pity in his eyes. “Do you not miss your old station now? So much less was asked of you then. Now you will know true pain. There is no blade, Detective, because Malthus took it with him. The thousand years are over, and he is released from his prison.”

  “That’s Revelations,” Underwood said.

  “It is. Prophecy. Return to your place, boy, and you may find clemency.” The bishop was now straining to talk. “I tell you, Detective, if you knew what he is, you’d get yourself on his side.”

  Canby shook his head. “Do you know where your son is?”

  “Only that he is safe. Robert has made provision for him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw him. With Robert. With my own eyes. I doubt no more.”

  “You saw him here with Billingsley?”

&n
bsp; “That was the arrangement.”

  “You gave him your son?”

  “Yes, I did. As Abraham did Isaac. But he reneged on our agreement. He would not tell me where my Johnny is going.”

  Canby looked at Underwood. “At least the boy may still be alive.”

  The bishop’s eyelids were drooping shut. “He would only tell me that Johnny will be safe,” he said, “from me, from you.”

  Canby pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped his bloody hand on it. He looked down at the bishop slumped in his chair and slowly ebbing toward the floor, his chest barely rising with breath. He tossed the handkerchief in the clergyman’s bloody lap and turned toward the door.

  “Underwood, we have another visit to pay this evening,” he said.

  Underwood lingered a moment in the room. “What about the bishop?”

  “Him?” Canby said, beginning to shake his head. “Let him bleed.”

  SZABÓ’S WHIMPERING had risen in intensity until now it was nearly a squeal, porcine and desperate as an animal wounded and at bay. Canby stood back and regarded him. His mouth and nose were frothed with blood and mucus, hair matted with sweat. The nose, Canby thought as he rubbed the bleeding knuckles of his right hand, would likely never set right again.

  “Take his keys and put him in the cell, Underwood. If he stays out here where I can get my hands on him, I’ll surely kill him.”

  Underwood half helped, half dragged Szabó into Spot 12. Szabó seemed relieved to have the separation of the bars between himself and Canby. Underwood slammed the cell door and jangled the ring of keys in his hand. “Now search his living quarters?”

  Canby nodded. “Lead the way.”

  At the door to Szabó’s rooms, Underwood worked through the key ring until the fifth key fit and turned the lock’s bolt. He pushed open the door, looked ahead for a moment, then slowly turned his head to Canby. He said, over his shoulder, “Think you’re going to be revising that theory on evil here directly.”