“Was wrong. I know that. We made a terrible error, and I’ll regret it forever. But we did it because we thought we had to.”
“And how did your precious community treat you when they realized you’d screwed up? Like pariahs, right?” The other man said nothing. “So much for the community,” Erwin said.
They did not speak again until they reached the gates of Potter’s Cemetery, when Dolan said, “Do you know who Hubert Nordhoff is?”
“Didn’t his family own the mill?”
“A lot more than the mill. He was a great man hereabouts, for fifty years.”
“So what about him?”
“He holds court on the last Friday of every month.”
“Here?” Erwin said, peering through the ironwork gate into the cemetery. There was a thin veil of clouds covering the moon, but it was light enough to see the graves laid out ahead. Here and there a carved angel or an urn marked the resting place of a family with money to waste, but most of the tombs were simple stones.
“Yes, here,” said Erwin, and led him inside.
There was an ancient, moss-covered oak at the far end of the cemetery, and there, under its titanic branches, was an assembly of six men and a woman. Some lounged on stones; one—a fellow who looked sickly even for a dead soul—sitting on the lowest of the branches. And standing close to the trunk of the tree, presently addressing the group, was a man in his seventies, his dress, his spectacles, and his somewhat formal manner suggesting he had lived and died in an earlier age. Erwin did not need Dolan whispering in his ear to know that this was the aforementioned Hubert Nordhoff. He was presently in full and rhetorical flight.
“Are we unloved? My friends, we are. Are we forgotten? By all but a few, I’m afraid so. And do we care? My friends, do we care?” He let his sharp blue gaze rest on every one of his congregation before he answered, “Oh my Lord, yes. To the bottom of our broken hearts, we care.” He stopped here, looking past his audience towards Dolan and Erwin. He inclined his head.
“Mr. Dolan,” he said.
“Mr. Nordhoff.” Dolan turned towards Erwin. “This is the guy I was telling you about earlier. His name’s—”
“Toothaker,” Erwin said, determined not to enter this circle as Dolan’s catch, but as a free-willed individual. “Erwin Toothaker.”
“We’re pleased to see you, Mr. Toothaker,” the old man said, “I’m Hubert Nordhoff. And this . . . ” he took Erwin round the group, introducing them all. Three of the names were familiar to Erwin. They were the members of families still prominent in Everville (one was a Gilholly; another the father of a former mayor). The others were new to him, though it was apparent by their postmortem finery that none had been disenfranchised in life. Like Hubert, these were men who’d had some significant place in the community. There was only one surprise: that the single female in this group was not a woman at all, but one Cornelius Floyd, who had apparently been delivered into the afterlife in rather dowdy drag, and seemed quite happy with his lot. His features were too broad and his jaw too square to be called feminine, but he effected a light, breathy tone when telling Erwin that though his name was indeed Cornelius, everybody called him Connie.
With the introductions over, Hubert got down to business. “We heard what happened to you,” he said. “You were murdered, we understand, in your own house.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“We’re of course appalled.” There were suitably sympathetic murmurs all around the circle. “But I regret to say not terribly surprised. This is increasingly the way of the world.”
“It wasn’t a normal murder,” Erwin pointed out, “if any murder’s normal.”
“Dolan mentioned something about vampires,” Gilholly the Elder said.
“His word, not mine,” Erwin pointed out. “I got the life sucked out of me, but there was none of that neck-biting nonsense.”
“Did you know the killer?” asked a portly fellow called Dickerson, who was presently recumbent on the top of a tomb.
“Not exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“I met him down by Unger’s Creek. His name was Fletcher. I think he fancies himself some kind of messiah.”
“That’s all we need,” said the scrawny guy in the tree.
“What do we do about this, Nordhoff?” Gilholly wanted to know.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Erwin said.
“Don’t be defeatist,” Nordhoff snapped. “We have responsibilities.”
“It’s true,” said Connie. “If we don’t act, who will?”
“Act to do what?” said Erwin.
“To save our heritage,” Nordhoff replied. “We’re the men who made this city. We poured our sweat into taming this wilderness and our geniuses into building a decent place to raise our families. Now it’s all coming apart. We’ve suspected it for months now. Seen little signs of it everywhere. And now you come along, murdered by something unnatural, and the Lundy boy, raped in Dolan’s store by something else, equally unnatural—”
“Don’t forget the bees,” Dickerson put in.
“What bees?” Erwin said.
“Do you know Frank Tibbit?” Dickerson said, “Lives off Moon Lane?”
“No, I can’t say—”
“He keeps bees. Or rather he did. They all took off ten days ago.”
“Is that significant?” Erwin said.
“Not if it were a solitary case,” Nordhoff said. “But it isn’t. We watch, you see, and we listen. It’s our business to preserve what we made, even if we’ve been forgotten. So we hear everything that goes on, sooner or later. And there are dozens of examples—”
“Hundreds,” said Connie.
“Many dozens, certainly,” Nordhoff said, “many dozens of examples of strange goings-on, none of them of any greater scale than Tibbit’s bees—”
“Barring your murder,” Dickerson put in.
“Is it possible I could finish a sentence without being interrupted?” Nordhoff said.
“Maybe if you weren’t so long-winded about it,” said Melvin Pollock, who looked to be at least Nordhoff’s age, and had the long, drawn dour mouth of one who’d died an unrepentant curmudgeon. “What he’s trying to say is this: We invested our lives in Everville. The signs tell us we’re about to lose that investment forever.”
“And when it’s gone—” Dickerson said.
“We go with it,” Pollock said. “Into oblivion.”
“Just because we’re dead,” Nordhoff said, “it doesn’t mean we have to take this lying down.”
Dickerson chuckled. “Not bad, Hubert. We’ll make a comedian of you yet.”
“This isn’t a laughing matter,” Nordhoff said.
“Oh but it is,” Dickerson said, heaving his bulk into a sitting position. “Here we are, the great and the good of Everville, a banker”—he nodded in Pollock’s direction. “A real-estate broker.” At Connie now. “A mill owner.” Nordhoff, of course. “And the rest of us all movers and shakers. Here we are, holding on to our dignity as best we can, and thinking we’ve got a hope in hell of influencing what goes on out there”—he pointed through the gate, into the world of the living—“when it’s perfectly obvious to anyone with eyes in his head that it’s over.”
“What’s over?” said Connie.
“Our time. Everville’s time. Maybe . . . ” He paused, frowned. “Maybe humanity’s time,” he murmured.
There was silence now, even from Nordhoff. Somewhere in the streets outside the cemetery, a dog barked, but even that most familiar of sounds carried no comfort.
At last, Erwin said, “Fletcher knows.”
“Knows what?” said Nordhoff.
“What’s going on. Maybe he’s even the reason for it. Maybe if we could find some way to kill him—”
“It’s a thought,” said Connie.
“And even if it doesn’t save the city,” Dickerson said, clearly heartened by this prospect, “we’d have the sport of it.”
“For God’s sa
ke, we can’t even make people hear us,” Dolan pointed out, “how the hell do we kill somebody?”
“He’s not somebody,” Erwin said. “He’s a thing. He’s not human.”
“You sound very certain of that,” Nordhoff said.
“Don’t take my word for it,” Erwin replied. “Come see for yourself.”
ELEVEN
I
Tesla had bought her first gun in Florida, four years ago, after narrowly escaping assault or worse at the hands of two drunken louts outside a bar in Fort Lauderdale, who’d decided they simply didn’t like the look of her. Never again, she’d sworn, would she be without some means of self-defense. She’d bought a modest little .45, and had even taken a couple of lessons so she’d be able to handle it properly.
It was not the last of the armaments she came by, however. Six months later, during her first trip to Louisiana, she’d found a gun lying in the middle of an empty highway, and despite Raul’s warnings that it had surely been discarded for a reason, and she’d be a damn fool to pick it up, she’d done so. It was older and heavier than her purchase, the barrel and butt nicked and scratched, but she liked the heft of it; liked too the sense of mystery that surrounded it.
The third gun had been a gift from a woman called Maria Lourdes Nazareno, whom she’d met on a streetcorner in Mammoth, Arizona. Lourdes, as she’d preferred to be called, had been waiting for Tesla on that corner for several days, or so she’d claimed. She had the sight, she’d said, and had been told in a dream that a woman of power would be passing by. Tesla had protested that she was not the one, but Lourdes had been equally certain she was. She had been waiting with gifts, she said, and would not be content until Tesla had accepted them. One of the gifts had been a clavicle bone, which Lourdes told her belonged to a St. Maxine. Another had been a brass compass— “for the voyage” she’d said. The third had been the gun, which was certainly the prettiest of the three weapons, its handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It had a secret name, Lourdes had told her, but she did not know what that name was. Tesla would discover it, however, when she needed to call it.
That occasion had not come along. She had traveled for a further two years after her encounter with Lourdes, and had never had need of any of the guns.
Until now.
“Which one do I get?” Phoebe said.
They had returned to the Cobb house from the pizza parlor for one purpose only: to arm themselves.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” Tesla asked her.
“I know how to point my finger,” Phoebe said.
“Your finger isn’t going to make a hole in somebody,” Tesla said.
Phoebe picked up Lourdes’ gun, and passed it from palm to palm. “It can’t be that difficult, when you see the men who do it.” She had a point.
“You want that one?” Tesla asked.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling.
“We’re only going to use them if we really have to.”
“If something that looks like a snake and smells like shit comes sniffing around.”
“You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“Does it matter whether I do or I don’t?” Phoebe said.
Tesla thought about this for a moment. “I guess not,” she said. “I just want you to be ready for the worst.”
“I’ve been ready for years,” Phoebe said.
* * *
II
The Toothaker house was in darkness, but they’d come prepared for that eventuality. Phoebe had a large flashlight, Tesla a slightly smaller one.
“Feel anything?” Tesla asked Raul as she and Phoebe headed down the path.
Not so far.
The smell of excrement still lingered in the air, however, and it grew stronger the closer they got to the front door. The temperature had dropped considerably since they’d left the restaurant almost an hour before, but Tesla felt clammy-hot, as though she was developing a bad bout of flu. Weak at the knees, too.
“What do we do?” Phoebe said once they reached the step. “Just knock?”
“It beats trying to break the door down,” Tesla said. She still harbored the hope that this was a wild-goose chase: that the whisper she and Raul had heard outside the diner had been a trick of the wind, and the smell was just a backed-up sewer, as Phoebe had said. She knocked on the door, loudly. They waited. There was no answer. She knocked again, and while she did so asked Raul if he sensed the presence of an occupant. His answer was not the one she wanted.
Yes, he said. I hear somebody.
The beast that had been twitching in Tesla’s belly since they’d set out convulsed. She caught hold of Phoebe’s arm. “I can’t do this,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Phoebe replied. She was reaching for the door handle. “We’ve come this far.” She turned the handle, and to Tesla’s surprise the door opened. A wave of cold, sour air broke over the threshold.
Tesla retreated from the step, tugging on Phoebe’s arm, but Phoebe made a little grunt between her teeth and jerked her arm free.
“I want to see,” she said.
“We’ll see tomorrow,” Tesla replied. “When it’s light.”
“Tomorrow might be too late,” Phoebe said, without glancing back at Tesla. “I want to see now. Right now.” And so saying she stepped into the house. As she did so Tesla heard her murmur, “Where are you?”
Where are you? said Raul.
“Yeah, I heard it too.”
Somebody’s got into her head, Tes.
“Fuck!”
Phoebe had already taken half a dozen strides into the house, and the darkness had almost closed around her.
“Phoebe?” Tesla yelled. “Come out of there.”
The other woman didn’t falter however. She just kept walking, until Tesla was in danger of losing sight of her completely.
Get in there—Raul said.
“Shut up!”
Or you’ll lose her completely.
He was right, of course, and she knew it. She pulled the found .45 out of her belt and stepped inside, following Phoebe down the darkened hallway. If she was quick she could maybe catch hold of her and haul her out into the street before—
The door slammed behind her. She spun round, the cold air pressing against her face like a stale, damp washcloth. It was a labor to draw breath, and she didn’t waste air calling after Phoebe again. Plainly whatever had its hooks in her wasn’t going to let go without a fight.
Tesla?
“I’m here.”
She turned right. There’s a door.
She could vaguely make out the door frame, and yes, there was Phoebe stepping through it. Picking up her pace Tesla hurried down the hallway, but she was too late to catch hold of her quarry, who had slipped through the door into the room beyond. There was a little more light there, Tesla was pleased to see; candles perhaps, flickering. Grateful for this small mercy at least, she followed Phoebe through the door. It was not candlelight illuminating the room, it was the remains of a fire, guttering in the grate. A number of blackened branches littered the hearth. The smell in the air was not woody, however, but meaty; almost appetizing after the sourness at the threshold. Somebody had cooked and eaten here, recently, though she could not yet see who. The room was large, and had been comprehensively trashed, the furniture almost all destroyed, the ornaments and bric-a-brac reduced to fragments underfoot. At the far end, fifteen feet or so from where she stood—and half that from Phoebe, who was standing in the middle of the room, her arms slack at her sides—the darkness was denser than elsewhere, and busier. She tried to study the place, certain that somebody was standing there, but when she rested her gaze on the spot her eyes flickered violently back and forth, as though they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make sense of what they were seeing.
“Fletcher?” she said. “Is that you?”
As she spoke Phoebe glanced round at her. “Leave us alone,” she said. “It’s me he wants.”
“Is that right?” Tesla said, approaching her gen
tly. There were tremors and tics around Phoebe’s mouth and eyes, as though she might well weep or shriek at any moment.
“That’s right,” she said.
“And is this person who wants you Fletcher?” Tesla said, trying—and once again failing—to fix her eyes on the shadows.
“It doesn’t matter what his name is,” Phoebe said.
“It matters to me,” Tesla replied. “Maybe you can ask him. Would you do that for me?” Phoebe looked back towards the darkness. She seemed to have no difficulty focusing upon it.
“She wants to know who you are,” she said.
“Is he Fletcher?” Tesla said.
“Are you—?” Phoebe didn’t finish the question, but listened, head slightly cocked.
There was silence, but for the crackle and spit of the fire. Tesla glanced back down at the hearth. There were pools of melted wax or fat around the branches, and in the grate itself a stone or—
“If that’s what you want,” Phoebe said to the darkness.
Tesla looked back at her. She was reaching up to unbutton her blouse.
“What are you doing?” Tesla said.
“He wants to see me,” Phoebe said simply.
Tesla crossed to her and pulled her hands from her blouse.
“No he doesn’t.”
“Yes he does,” Phoebe said fiercely, her hands going back to her buttons. “He says . . . he says—”
“What’s he saying?”
“He says . . . we should fuck for the millennium.”
Tesla had heard the phrase before. Spoken once, and dreamed a thousand times.
Now, at the sound of it, the floor seemed to pitch beneath her, as if to tip her into the darkness at the other end of the room.
It was five years since she’d first heard the words spoken; five years in which she had many times thanked God their speaker was dead. Her gratitude, it seemed, had been premature.
“Kissoon . . . ” she murmured, and leaving her lips the syllables took on a life of their own. Kissss-sssoooon. Kiiisssssoonn. Shimmying around her.
She’d met him in countless nightmares—run from him, succumbed to him, been judged, murdered, raped, and eaten by him—but she’d always woken from those ordeals, even the most terrible, with the comfort that one day the memories of him could recede, and she’d be free.