The deathstone, p.12
The Deathstone, page 12
She hesitated. “I just finished cleaning the jailhouse.”
“That’s nice.”
“I caught Martin looking at the papers on your desk again. I know you don’t like him prying.”
“What difference does it make? He can’t read, now can he?”
“Not enough to count, I guess.”
Nash’s expression had changed to one of utter amusement. His features jovial. “You—you should know by now that Martin is a ‘Good Old Darky.’ And they’re hard to find these days.” He chewed thoughtfully on his cigar for a moment, then turned to Ron. “How do you feel about it, Ron? You feel them niggers have been treated badly all these years? I mean, do you feel there’s a need for change?” He rubbed his jaw. “No, let me put it another way. If you discovered tomorrow you were black, would you feel a need for a change?”
Cynthia laughed. “Well, now, he’s not all of a sudden going to turn black.”
Nash had edged forward, perspiration glistening from his forehead. “Not all black. But maybe just part. Like a fifth. He discovers some deep part is black as coal all of a sudden. Would things still be right with you, Ron?”
Ron sat silent, petrified by the hatred that dripped from the sheriff’s crooked mouth. He could feel the gooseflesh on his arms, and the chill that ran down his spine. Overwhelmed, he slumped back and said nothing.
“That’s sure something to think about, isn’t it?” Cynthia seemed entranced by the prospect.
Nash gestured toward the exit. “All right, Cindy. On your way. There’s plenty to do outside without you hanging around the beer tent.”
She shrugged. “Not really. The usual. Always the usual. Why do we do it?” she asked. Ron could see she did not expect an answer, other than her own. “I guess...”
“Cynthia!” the sheriff barked.
“I’m going. I’m going.”
She stirred, slowly made her way across the tent—a sea of eyes parted to accommodate her crossing—until she reached the exit, where she called out, “Tyler, leave that goddamn dog in peace!”
Then she was gone.
Instantly Ron felt Nash’s collector’s eyes bore into his soul. “Pretty girl,” he said and Ron said, “Yes, she is.”
Nash pushed another glass of beer across the table. “She’s not Rachel Powers, but then who is? Her father is the schoolteacher here in Brackston. Came to us about three years ago. Right after he lost his wife. An accident or something outside of Kansas. Some say Lou was driving the car when it happened. They don’t talk about it much. Then a little more than a year ago,” Nash went on, “Cynthia came here to live with him. A mistake, I think.”
“Why’s that?”
Nash grinned broadly. “Because this isn’t her home. She wasn’t born here. Lou, he was born and raised here. We expected him to come home some day. Never expected her though.” He chuckled, “It was quite a surprise, I’ll tell you.” He paused to chew on his cigar, then added: “So, what do you think of our carnival?”
Ron shifted uneasily on the bench. “To be perfectly honest with you, I find it a little too high spirited for my taste.”
“Well, sure! That’s the whole point. You’ve got to give the young ones a chance to get rid of all that tension. Nothing much to do around these parts. It’s when nothing’s provided for them they cause trouble. If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Talon, I somehow get the impression you’re not altogether happy with our community.”
“Not at all,” Ron said. “We just have a different idea about how to have a good time.”
“We want some life in the town. New life. Nothing wrong with that.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
Nash’s bravado had begun to fade. “It’s not good having people thinking the worst of their neighbors.”
“I’m not your neighbor.”
“No, I guess you aren’t.”
Ron had begun to lose himself in a reflective thought. Yesterday at this time he had been looking forward to the days ahead. He tried now to recall what it had been like yesterday, or this morning for that matter, what he felt, thought about, but he was unable to think of anything. Yes, he did remember, he recalled exactly his conversation with Chandal, their plans to drive on to San Francisco. We’ll drive west, he had said. No, south, Chandal had insisted. Much more scenic. Then we’ll drive west. But now it was as though the conversation had nothing to do with him.
Now he viewed himself with detachment. Some of it, he guessed, was due to the heat, and some of it to the strain of the trip. Then again, he and the sheriff had made a spectacular dent in the sheriff’s bottle of bourbon, and he knew fuzzily that he’d done more than his fair share.
When he next looked up the sheriff was gone and he had the feeling he’d been gone for a long time. This seemed to be the night for losing track of people. The beer tent was by this time nearly empty.
He staggered to his feet and made his way precariously toward the exit. Throwing back the flap, he walked off into the night and veered toward the pavilion. He could barely see his way. Most of the lights were out now, and most of the grounds empty.
He walked like a drunk for the first few paces, but as he reached the pavilion he hastened his steps. Where the hell was everyone? All at once he caught the sound of footsteps behind him. He turned as the footsteps approached quickly, one by one, gathering in momentum, hurrying toward him. He squinted into the dull night lit only by the moon. There was no one there. Not even a shadow and yet the footsteps continued.
Trembling, he tried to call out but the words would not come. The steps were on top of him, loud crashing thuds that shook the ground. He caught his breath and felt a sudden gust of warm air. The footsteps passed him and were gone.
“Lose something?” a feminine voice asked, then laughed.
Ron turned and peered down at the heavily made-up oval of the upturned face and recognized Cynthia Harris. She took hold of his arm. “For a minute there I thought you were running away from me,” she said.
“I was looking for my, ah... wife and daughter. I—I don’t suppose you’ve seen them?”
Ron felt his body relax as he waited for the girl to speak. Her hand upon his arm had a calming effect, almost as though she had been sent into this world for the express purpose of calming men’s souls. He made no effort to disguise his feelings, the night was too dark, and he was too drunk to do otherwise. For a long time, an eternity, he allowed her warming presence to wash over him. At the same time his sluggish brain tried to grasp the moment, tried to express his gratefulness, but his gut instinct told him to go with it, drift with it, and not think at all. He had been doing too much thinking lately.
Cynthia pointed into the darkness. “Back there,” she said. “They are back there.” She smiled and took hold of Ron’s hand to help him along. They began to wander zigzag into a small area behind the pavilion. Shadows deepened as they passed under an archway and moved along the wall toward a small door at the farthest edge of the building.
For an instant a glimmer of understanding flashed into his mind, images flickered, and then they were gone. Something odd... But he could not focus on the significance of the images.
“Not far now,” Cynthia told him. “Not far at all,” she said, her voice not her normal tone, but a low gutteral drone. She opened the door slowly and they entered a room with arched ceiling and blue velvet curtains covering the walls. There were old chairs, a cabinet, and a chaise lounge.
Ron’s eyes fixed on a narrow shaft of light that filtered in from a circular window and followed its beam across the room to where it stopped abruptly in the far corner.
“Nobody’s here,” he breathed.
Cynthia had begun uttering something, but Ron could not understand what she was saying. He strained, listening, trying to make out her words.
“Cynthia, where are we?”
“Don’t you know?” she whispered and moved closer.
Ron glanced desperately around the room but couldn’t keep anything in focus long enough to identify it. “I’m drunk,” he murmured and felt himself sinking.
“Yes, drunk,” she said, touching his cheek with her warm fingertips. Seductively, she ran her tongue over his lips.
“What—what are you doing?” he whimpered, the liquor slushing around in his brain.
“Hush.” Her mouth fell upon his, and the hands that had been pressed against his shoulders moved down, crept between his legs, then over the smooth roll and coil of his warm thigh muscles. She was all over him now, clinging to him, forcing her body against his. And slowly, as he swayed in slow rhythm back and forth, as she began to undo her dress, he sensed the danger of what was happening to him. He tried to fight against the odd dissolving of substance that had begun to take place within his body and simultaneously he had the strange sensation that he was going to sleep, that his eyes and mind were drifting away into the darkness.
“The stone around which moving is done,” someone whispered.
Then the clandestine sobbing. A soft sound—nothing tangible, yet it seemed the weeping of many. The dream, that was it. That’s what he had seen—the images in his dream.
Ron felt himself fall backward, felt hands seize him, manipulate his body until he was stretched out on a cold slab of marble. A sharp light was suddenly turned on him. Through it he could see shadowy figures in a susurrant cluster. Then fanning out, they moved toward him from the outer edges. Hands reached out to fondle him, dark seductive creatures sucked at his tongue, bit his lip, caressed his penis.
“No, no, NO!” he cried out. His arms flailed the air in front of him. Still they kept coming, forcing their breasts against his mouth, the crimson nipples as pointed as steel spikes. “No,” he whimpered, his eyes flooded with tears.
Cynthia was kneeling astride him now, her thighs jerking convulsively, while the taut muscles of her vagina pulled and ripped at his penis. Through a thin yellowing haze he saw her death’s-face smile leering at him, mocking him, the unbridled pleasure of the moment contorting her face like some wild beast whose readied orgasm was about to consume her.
Then something clicked, a distant shutter behind his eyes flew open, and he felt the increased tempo of his heart, and felt, anew, a sickening despair. He screamed, the sound of his voice raising from the depths of memory, starting as an agitated murmur then building slowly and steadily on a current of thin air into a crescendo of pain, horror, and something else. Something beyond all description.
Yet, as the night turned in upon him like a velvet cape, he knew what that something was. Physical spiritual longing and lust.
“Lust,” he murmured and felt his soul fly to the whispered summoning of a great dark god.
A violent shaking now as he was swept into a maelstrom, his breath cut off, and then the thin slivers of moon-glow and consciousness of life were abruptly extinguished.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE STONECUTTER THRUST HIS COPPER CHISEL INTO THE SLAB OF granite laid out before him. Sweat dripped from his sullen face in a steady stream. His eyes ached of a sudden glare as he raised his mallet. He marveled at the power which had been bestowed upon him. His heart beat faster as he brought down the mallet.
Shadows suddenly shifted, the moon dipped behind the mountains, and the town of Brackston sank into complete darkness. Below, in the black corridors, the halls beneath the stone, there were also crepitations of darkness, ferments, chemical nightmares of pitch blackness.
It was only the glare in the old man’s eyes and the flame of a single squat candle that kept the blackness alive. And the old man knew this to be so. He knew that with each meticulous blow of his mallet—the night belonged to him. He was night. Eternally.
Now in the flickering light, his gaunt, wrinkled face flashed arrogancy, pride, and seemed the incarnation of Death. His long thin fingers loosened their grip on the chisel for a moment, and his eyes slowly, imperceptibly, became glazed with intense concentration.
He willed himself to recall the memories of torment he had suffered and the faces of his tormentors. He willed himself never to forget his father’s face, a ghostly haze, hanging from the lowest bow of the highest tree. His body ached with a thousand wounds as he recalled his mother’s body broken and beaten, her flesh covered with scabs of vile treatment. He himself had helped to put them there. Let me carve all this, he told himself, into the stone. Let me carve the names of those departed with the names of those among the living. Let suffering beget suffering. Let the future belong to us. Let this stone be our salvation. He paused to let the ghosts of his words sink deeper into his tortured, yet unrepentant, soul.
Without warning, he heard the clicking of footsteps. He turned swiftly around on his heels looking outward, his eyes staring wildly into the darkness.
In the flickering half-light he could make out his wife’s face. The oil lamp shook in her trembling hand.
“May I enter?” asked his wife.
“Not yet,” answered the stonecutter. “I have not finished.”
His wife muttered to herself and, like a phantom, disappeared into the darkness beyond. Faint footsteps growing fainter, then silence. Total silence.
He nodded his farewell and smiled, the passageway ahead dimming as he looked away. He felt painfully alone, yet a smile hovered on his lips nonetheless.
Once again his eyes fixed upon the slab of stone before him. From the very bowels of the earth there came a distant sound. It was the sound of voices, human, not yet, but growing in numbers and strength. His energy had begun to wane badly. It frightened him. He wept.
With tears in his eyes, he raised his mallet high over his head, then brought it down hard. As his chisel cut deep into the stone, his head rolled from side to side, shaking in time with a mystic chant known only to himself. Intense joy magnified through tears shone on his face with each new thud of his mallet.
As he worked, the stonecutter remembered the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen, which contained some of the rarest of stone carvings. He brought the mallet down again. From this ancient art of stonecutting, his people had learned how to survive. Just like the great pharaohs of Egypt, they would, within hollowed walls of stone, live on for all eternity.
The stonecutter paused, looked with satisfaction upon his work. Now that the name had been engraved, nothing— absolutely nothing—could change it.
THREE
MARDI GRAS
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Father, the root of this little red flower
Among the stones has the taste of blood.
But I have something more strange to tell.
So leave the reptiles, Father dear, and Listen.
But do not run away, because...
RON AWOKE TO SEE FRAGMENTS OF WHITE FLUFF; EVANESCENT distillations. Gradually he realized they were the soft folds of the canopy that dwarfed his bed. He tried to move and it sent his head spinning. He lay still and waited; he was too heavy laden with sleep to do more.
There was not a sound to be heard anywhere in the house. Apparently there was no human astir. He made these notes indifferently, a bedridden ghost, a phantom of a man lying between reality and fantasy.
He relapsed into a doze. The air was fragrant with lilac and drowsy with the hum of bees. In the distance the sound of bells. Church bells. The booming voice of the Holy Ghost. He rolled over on his side, envisioning himself a vainglorious cock with a variegated harem of hens at his spurs sauntering through debris. Cynthia Harris was part of the harem.
Suddenly his sleeping world sprang wide awake.
The tall antique clock on the stair-landing struck the hour. Instantly he heard stealthy footsteps scurrying in the hallway, followed by a low exchange of voices. Confused, Ron expected Chandal to enter the room, bearing a cup of coffee and a mild reprimand. He waited. The footsteps moved away and began to descend the stairs.
“Del, is that you?” Ron called out. He pushed back the covers and lurched from the bed. His feet smacked the floor at the same instant the hammer crashed down inside his head. He staggered back and reached for the bedpost. Christ, what a hangover.
The front door closed with a sharp thud.
“Chandal?” he called out and staggered to the window. Beyond the lace curtains everything appeared to droop. In the distance solid-looking mountains reflected the blazing fire of the sun, its harsh red glare scorching the earth. Nothing was visible except the land. No stock, no dwellings, no man.
But in a moment, something was visible. Just below the balcony to his left. Three raggedly dressed children dashing for the trees. Ron watched as a small shapeless bundle was passed from one child to another, after which they all scattered in different directions; the boy now carrying the bundle running the fastest for the garden wall. He cleared the stone in one leap and disappeared. “It’s them,” Ron breathed. The same children he’d seen running in the hills yesterday. The thought stirred him fully awake and alert.
“Chandal!” he boomed and spun around to face the door. Where was she? “Kristy?”
He wrenched the door open with a grunt of pain.
Out of the green and brown wallpaper images materialized. Blurred. He had only managed a few steps before he stumbled clumsily back to the bed. A young girl’s face was staring at him through the mist of fever, and his hand clenched the bedpost to steady himself.
For a while he did not move. He stared straight ahead, studying the odd floral pattern covering the walls like a jungle. Prehistoric. Lush. There was a ringing in his ears and he realized that it had been there all along, only he hadn’t been aware of it.
It took him a few minutes before he could look back and remember with any continuity all that had happened last night. But certain things remained fixed in his memory. The sheriff’s lustful eyes peering at him across the table, the hideous puppet show—dancing, he had been dancing, and... Oh, Christ—he hesitated before allowing himself to say the words—Cynthia Harris.
He knew that he had been with her. He remembered that much. He took another conscious-raising step forward. He had consumed more than his habitual amount of bourbon; this in addition to four, maybe five steins of beer. Furthermore, he had left the beer tent alone. Suddenly, out of the darkness, he had found Cynthia Harris standing there. A room. They had gone to a small room behind the pavilion looking for Chandal, hadn’t they? What then? The dream—it had come to him again with predictable nauseating results.
