by Ivan Blake
The air above them crackled and popped. They were bathed in a pale blue light. At first it seemed the air itself had suddenly exploded, but then Chris realized he was on fire. He leapt to his feet and held his arms out in front of him. They were engulfed in flames! Curiously, he felt nothing. Even though his sleeves were almost burned away, his arms were untouched. Why wasn’t he burned? And why no pain? Shock? Perhaps his agony was just seconds away. He couldn’t wait to find out. He had to extinguish the blaze before his flesh blackened. He ran to the ditch at the side of the lane and threw himself into the icy meltwater. For the second time in a week, he choked down mouthful after mouthful of the most disgusting mud and slime. In the final instant before his head disappeared beneath the stream, he glimpsed the maelstrom that was Mallory, descending in full fury onto her wretched brother.
Chapter 12
Wednesday, March 11
“Christopher! Christopher Chandler! Wake up!”
He slowly opened his eyes, and saw, what, a brown haze? Suddenly someone poured water in his face. He sputtered, shook his head, and coughed up the foulest-tasting crap imaginable. Then he rolled onto his side, gagged several times and vomited a thin stream of gray liquid onto the floor. His guts hurt like the blazes.
On his back again, as his vision cleared, he discovered Rose DuCalice and Geraldine Paget standing over him.
“Did you just throw water in my face?” he spluttered.
“We had to get the last of the mud out of your eyes and mouth,” Rose said.
“The last of the mud?”
“Yes, you’ve been vomiting for more than an hour. Your color looks a lot better now.”
“Way better than when we found you,” Geraldine added.
He tried to sit up, only to fall back again. “Where am I,” he asked, feeling nauseous and bleary-eyed.
“In your bed. Maybe you should wait a bit before you try getting up.”
“How did I get here?”
The ladies explained they’d been driving to the cottage and came across Chris and the other fellow unconscious in the middle of the lane. They’d managed to load both men into Rose’s car and bring them to the cottage. The two women had somehow carried Chris upstairs and done their best to tend to his injuries. As for the other guy, they had no idea what to do. He was a mess, and as far as they could tell, pretty well a goner.
And why had they been coming to the cottage? Because around two in the morning, Geraldine had managed to slip out of the theater and make her way to Rose’s apartment where she’d explained what had happened at the graveyard and what Gilbert was planning to do with the stolen bones.
“What’s that?” Chris asked.
“He sells them! He’s sold hundreds of bones all over the country. It’s how he’s been financing the theater,” Geraldine explained. “And he needs to sell a lot more remains or the theater is going to fail.” Geraldine was dressed in a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, a far cry from the widow’s weeds and corset she’d been wearing the last time Chris had seen her.
“Has he sold the bones from the graveyard?” Chris asked.
“I don’t think so, not yet anyway.”
“We’ve got to get them back, right away,” Rose said. “That’s why we came.”
Then Chris remembered Rudy Dahlman. “So where’s Rudy, the other guy?” he asked, and Rose explained that they’d left him unconscious on the mudroom floor at the back door.
“You know, he had a gun. And he doused you in gasoline,” Geraldine said.
“Yeah, and he’s Mallory’s brother. Is he all right?”
“No,” replied Rose. “His ribs have been crushed, his lung punctured, and the left side of his head has been caved in. That’s why we left him on the floor.”
Chris tried once more to sit up. “Then we have to get him to a hospital right away.”
“Chris, think! If you drive up to Emergency with the boy in his state, you’re going to prison so fast. And it won’t be detention this time,” Rose said. “And in prison you’ll be no help to me at all.”
“We can’t just let him die.”
“He tried to set you on fire!” Geraldine said. “So...self-defence, right?”
“Not if we could have saved him.”
“Okay,” Rose said, “we’ll take him somewhere, leave him where the police can find him, maybe even make his injuries look like an accident.”
“But he might die before we drop him off. And he has to be in a lot of pain.”
“I’ve got medicine. I can relieve the pain and buy time, maybe six or seven hours. Chris, you drive him somewhere in his car. Geraldine, you follow in my car and bring Chris back. I’ll be waiting at the cemetery.”
Chris thought for a moment. It wasn’t like he had many options. “I guess,” he said.
“Great,” Geraldine exclaimed and gave Rose a huge hug. Rose frowned.
“Get back here as fast as you can,” Rose said. “This is all a distraction. All I care about is getting back the bones.”
“We will, Rose, I promise,” Chris said.
Rudy was a mess. With every labored breath, blood bubbled from his mouth. The massive amount of blood and other matter around the huge dent in the side of his head had already congealed and cemented his hair to the hood of his coat.
Chris lifted Rudy from the mudroom floor and carried him out to Rose’s car. Geraldine had spread garbage bags across the upholstery to contain the mess. They’d transfer Rudy to his own car once they got to the gate.
Rose came running from the house carrying a plastic shopping bag. “Put these clothes in his car.”
“Why?”
“They’re the clothes I stripped from you your first day here.”
“You kept them?”
“They were stained, probably blood stains from your friend up in Maine, the one you said beat his son to death.”
“Did you keep them to help me...or convict me?”
“I knew nothing about you. I thought I’d wait and see,” Rose said with a straight face.
“So, when the police find the clothes in Rudy’s car, they’ll find Balzer’s blood type on them and connect Rudy to Balzer’s death. God, Rose, you’re amazing.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
At the gate they transferred Rudy to his own car, then their little convoy headed north on Powerline Road toward the Canadian border, Chris driving Rudy’s car in the lead and Geraldine behind in Rose’s.
“You were one sick kid, Rudy, but I still hate doing this to you,” Chris muttered as he drove. “Wish there was another way.”
At Great Averill Pond they turned east onto Highway 114, and skirting the Canadian border, drove through Canaan and Bleecher Falls until they were somewhere between Pittsburg and Happy Corners. With the first blush of dawn in the east, Chris pulled off the main road and onto a logging track. He drove a hundred yards or so up the trail and parked the car at the edge of a steep drop off, then ran back to the road to stop Geraldine following him onto the track. No point leaving two sets of tire tracks in the dirt. He then ran back to Rudy’s car, pulled the boy into the driver’s seat and rolled the car over the edge of the trail. It picked up speed down the grade and slammed into a tree. Chris ran back to Geraldine and they headed home. In Pittsburg, they stopped at a payphone and called the state police.
He and his buddy, Chris explained in the best Maine drawl he could manage, “They was a haulin’ logs from Happy Corners, and as they come round a bend somewhere near the hydro tower at Mile 83, they heard this Godawful crash and they seen these lights and smoke somewhere north of the main road.” Why hadn’t they stopped to investigate, the trooper asked? Because they had a deadline, Chris replied, and besides, investigating was police business, not theirs, and he hung up.
On the road again, with the Eagles—the only tape they’d found in Rose’s car—playing softly, Chris asked, “Geraldine, you and Rose are friends, right?”
“I wouldn’t say friends exactly. She puts up with me,
and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life. So...”
“Okay, but you know stuff about her.”
“You mean, like she’s not as rich as people think, or barely sleeps an hour each night, or believes she’s eight hundred years old? Stuff like that?”
“She told you she’s eight hundred years old?”
“No, not really, but for as long as I’ve known her, she’s been writing this history about the Cathars who escaped from their castle and how their descendants ended up in Lewis—that’s why she’s got books spread everywhere in her parlor—and I’ve read bits of her history, and she’s sort of talked to me about it, and she says these really crazy things sometimes, like she was the one who booked passage for the Cathars from Saint Malo, or she had dinner with Henry James at the Paris Exposition in 1889.”
“So you don’t believe her?”
“Rose is the smartest, kindest person I’ve ever known...in her own grumpy way of course. But she’s also had a terrible life. Her two sons were killed in wars somewhere, like Vietnam or some other place, and her husband was killed saving a crewmate when his ship blew up. Rose ended up in a mental hospital for a while, and when she returned to Lewis, some people, like my father, treated her very badly, in spite of everything her family had done for this town. So if Rose wants to believe she’s eight hundred years old, what do I care?”
“Right, what do we care?” Chris replied as he touched the small amulet dangling around his neck.
* * * *
Riding into town on an old bike he’d found in a shed, Chris felt nauseous and feverish. With no more than four hours sleep and a gut still filled with mud and slime, he was dreading a day of bloodthirsty theater, but he’d made a promise to Rose to find the bones of her ancestors, and was going to keep his promise this time.
From across the town park, he was surprised to see a mobile broadcast van from WCAX in Burlington parked in front of Bijoux Burgoyne. A couple of tech guys wearing WCAX jackets were carrying lights, mikes, and cameras inside. The last thing Chris wanted was to bump into some journalist who might recognize him. He rode well past the van, left the bike by the lamppost in front of Gerry’s Diner, and walked cautiously back toward the theater.
He hung about on the sidewalk long enough for the techies to finish unloading their gear and then slipped into the theater lobby when no one was looking. The doors from the lobby into the main auditorium were propped open and the crewmembers were setting up for an interview at the top of the center aisle. The interviewer, giving instructions on lighting and camera angles, looked like a kid right out of broadcasting school with acne and baggy pants but with a voice far grander than his emaciated figure would have suggested. Gilbert Burgoyne and a girl, dressed in black with chalky white makeup, waited patiently to one side. Flood lights came on, “Ready,” said the camera man, and the telecast began. The interviewer’s first question was innocuous enough, something about Burgoyne’s vision for his strange new theater.
Gilbert recounted the origins of the Grand Guignol genre, the history of the first such theater in Paris and the intensity of the experience at a Grand Guignol performance. The interviewer then asked what purpose could possibly be served by horrifying an audience to the point of nausea, and Gilbert explained his intent was to take its audience to the edge of madness, to let them see how any normal person might, under certain circumstances, tumble into mayhem and murder. He then described the season of plays he’d planned, beginning with the theater’s opening performance of The Mad Surgeon of Rottingwood Asylum in three weeks’ time. And finally, he described the work his company was doing to transform the old theater into the main stage for the first annual Lewis Goth Festival in July. That’s when things got nasty.
“You mentioned the renovations,” the interviewer said. “I have to tell you, to the untrained eye, this place is still a wreck.”
“No, we’re right on schedule. We’re trying for a certain look. The whole experience of Grand Guignol has to be unsettling, scary. People will love it.”
“Yes, but has this place been inspected? It’s been closed for years. Can you be sure it isn’t going to burn down? I assume you’ve got all the right permits.”
“Look, no one will get hurt in my theater...except maybe the characters in my plays.” Gilbert laughed. He had to have realized what a stupid thing he’d said given recent events, and of course, he got the obvious follow-up question from the interviewer.
“Speaking of people getting hurt, you had a terrible accident here yesterday.”
“We’re not going to dwell on it. Our colleague and friend is in good hands at the Montpelier Hospital.”
“He washed his face in acid. I’m told he may never see again and has lost several fingers and most of his nose.”
“Yes.” Gilbert glanced at his white-faced companion with a look which said, ‘I’m losing it!’
“Have workplace health and safety inspectors investigated the accident?” the interviewer pressed.
Gilbert turned back to the camera. “We...we know exactly what happened. A series of unfortunate mistakes, and we’ve taken precautions to insure they won’t happen again.”
“This wasn’t your first serious accident, was it? Another member of your cast was injured a few weeks ago.”
Gilbert stared at the kid for several seconds without speaking, then growled, “You goddamn little—”
The woman in the chalky white makeup jumped in. “Look, we’re all upset by what happened, but as they say, the show must go on. We have an incredible experience planned for our patrons, so call soon for tickets. Good-bye.” She grabbed Gilbert by the arm and hauled him away.
“Well, our thanks to the artistic director of Lewis’s new Grand Guignol Theater, Gilbert Burgoyne, and his associate. They certainly have colorful plans for their new theater. I have to say in closing, however—”
“Rehearsal in five minutes,” Gilbert shouted from the stage.
“—I have to say,” the interviewer continued, “sometimes when grandiose ambition runs afoul of people’s safety,” and here, the interviewer looked around the ramshackle theater with a look of obvious disgust, “maybe the play shouldn’t go on.” The camera followed Gilbert as he disappeared through the curtains at the back of the stage. “This is Adrian Godfrey reporting live from the Grand Guignol Theater in Lewis for Vermont Midmorning.”
Chris hid in the lobby washroom as the TV crew cleared out and then went looking for Gilbert and his lady friend. Performers were beginning to gather, dragging themselves onstage like they’d had an even harder night than Chris. As he walked down the side aisle, he overheard the chatter about the previous day’s accident and Geraldine’s disappearance during the night. No one paid Chris the slightest notice, so at the edge of the stage, he called out, “Excuse me, I’m looking for Gilbert.”
“Not a good idea,” replied a tough-looking woman seated on the floor.
“Shut the hell up,” sneered a huge guy shaped like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a purple brush cut and the voice of a child. He turned to Chris and said, “I remember you. You were in here with Crimson. Where’s the slag gone? The ungrateful bitch has upset Gilbert.”
“Don’t know. Sorry,” Chris said. “But Gilbert? Is he here?”
“Upstairs most likely,” the purple-haired giant said. “Through there.” He pointed to the curtains at the back of the stage.
“And when you see him, tell him we’re all waiting,” said a striking woman in skin-tight black leather. “As if he cares,” she added under her breath.
Every eye was on Chris as he climbed onstage and walked past the performers. When he pulled aside the threadbare velour curtains, the dust almost blinded him.
“That’s atmosphere you’re screwing with,” one performer said, and the others laughed.
Chris found the stairs in the back corner of the stage. He was about to head up when a woman shouted, “You idiot! I said, don’t talk about Shadow!”
“You don’t get
it!” Chris recognised Gilbert’s voice. “It’s publicity! Picking a fight with the little shit, everyone will love it. We’ll sell a ton of tickets.”
“This is a goddamn train wreck!” the woman screamed.
“No, Dolli, it’ll work out. You just gotta give me a chance. I’m working my ass off.”
“All those packages, have you even shipped them yet?”
“Monday, I’ll drive over to St. Johnsbury.”
“So why the hell did I rush to get them packed up if you’re not shipping them for another four days? We needed the money like yesterday!” Chris could hear the woman’s footsteps as she angrily paced about the apartment.
“I can’t go yet. It takes a whole goddamn day there and back! The play comes first.”
The woman was getting angrier by the moment. “Not if the electricity’s turned off!”
They were talking about the bones which meant the bones were still in the theater somewhere. And Chris had until Monday to find them. “Terrific,” he muttered.
A hand grabbed Chris by the collar and yanked him from the steps. “What the hell are you doing?” The grip on his coat was immensely strong. His collar was being stretched so tight around his neck and high above his head that he had to stand on his tiptoes to breathe, and yet the voice was squeaky like a small child’s. “Gilbert, come down here!”
The hand didn’t release his collar, so Chris had to twist around on his toes to see his captor–the Pillsbury doughboy with the colorful brush-cut hair, or rather his twin because this pudgy giant had pink hair, rather than purple.
“What is it?” Gilbert asked from the top of the stairs, with his white-faced girlfriend peering over his shoulder.
“This guy was eavesdropping.”
“Ah, Chandler.” Burgoyne walked down the stairs. “What a coincidence. We lose Crimson and you show up again. Only this time, we know who you really are.”
“Who is he?” the doughboy asked.
“His name is Chris Chandler, and he’s in all the papers. He stopped some doctor up in Maine from stealing bodies.”
