Lasher

  "Yes, I'm coming, my darling dear," said the dazed Lasher, falling forward, and climbing up, and out over the windowsill onto the roof. "My Antha, wait, don't fall."

  As he rose up to his full height again, he struggled to gain his balance. Michael climbed out on the tarred roof and sprang to his feet. The girl was gone. The night was high and full of the light of the moon. They stood three stories above the flags below. Michael swung the hammer one more time, one last fine blow that caught Lasher on the side of his head and sent him over the edge of the roof.

  The body hurtled downward, no scream escaping from it, the head striking the flags with full force.

  Michael at once climbed over the small railing. He jabbed the hammer into his belt, and, grabbing hold of the iron trellis with both hands, moved down it, half falling, half tumbling through the vines and the thick banana trees, and letting the stalks cushion him as he hit the earth below.

  The thing lay on the garden path, a sprawling body of gangly arms and legs and flowing black hair. It was dead.

  Its blue eyes stared up into the night sky, its mouth agape.

  Michael went down on his knees beside it, and slammed the hammer down again and again on it, this time the hammer end, shattering and pounding the bones of the forehead, the bones of the cheeks, the bones of the jaw, again and again extricating the weapon from the blood and pulp only to strike once more.

  At last there was nothing of the face left. The bones were cartilage, or something perhaps stronger. The thing was collapsed, and twisted and draining like something made from rubber or plastic. Blood seeped out of the battered casing of skin which had once been the face.

  Nevertheless Michael hit it again. He brought the claw end down into the throat of the being, tearing it open. He did this again and again until the head was all but severed from the neck.

  Finally he fell back against the base of the downstairs porch, sitting there, breathless, the bloody hammer in his hand. He felt the pain in his Chest again, but he felt no fear with it. He stared at the dead body; he stared at the dark garden. He stared up at the light coming down from the dark sky. The bananas lay broken and torn under and over the being. Its black hair clung tenaciously to the shapeless bloody pelt of battered nose and broken teeth and bones.

  Michael climbed to his feet. The pain in his chest was now large and hot and almost unbearable. He stepped over the body and up onto the soft green grass of the lawn. He walked out into the middle of it, his eyes ranging slowly over the dark facade of the house next door, in which not a single light glimmered, the windows shrouded with yew and banana and magnolia so that nothing could be seen. His eyes moved over the dark shrubbery along the front fence, to glimpse the deserted street beyond.

  Nothing stirred in the yard. Nothing stirred in the house. Nothing moved out beyond the fence. There had been no witnesses. In the deep soft silence and shadows of the Garden District, death had been done again and no one had noticed; no one would come. No one would call.

  What will you do now? He was shaking all over; his hands were slippery with sweat and with blood. His ankle ached. He'd torn the ligament coming down the trellis, or when he'd fallen the last few feet to the ground. Didn't matter. He could walk, he could move. He could wipe off the hammer. He looked to the back of the dark garden, past the glow of the blue swimming pool, and through the iron gates to the rear yard. He saw the great arms of Deirdre's oak reaching upward, crowding out the pale clouds.

  "Under the oak," he thought. "When I catch my breath. When I...when I..." and he went down on the grass, on his knees, and collapsed to the side.

  Thirty-eight

  FOR A LONG time he lay there. He didn't sleep. The pain came and went. Finally, he drew in his breath and it didn't hurt so much. He sat up, and then the pain started pounding in him, but it seemed small and contained within the chambers or the valves of his heart. He did not know which. He did not care. He rose to his feet, and walked to the flags.

  The house lay in darkness, quiet, still as before. My beloved Rowan. Aaron...But he could not leave this mangled body here.

  It lay as he had left it, only it seemed more flattened somehow, perhaps merely twisted. He didn't know. He reached down and gathered up the torso in his arms. The remains of the head broke loose from it, sticking to the flagstones, the last bit of flesh tearing like chicken fat.

  Well, he would come back for the head. He began to carry the body, letting its feet drag on the ground, back along the flagstone path and up and around the pool and back towards the rear yard.

  It was not hard for him after the killing. The body didn't weigh that much, and he took things very slowly. He did think once that the proper place to bury it was really under the crape myrtle tree in front. That was where he had first seen "the man" staring at him, smiling, when, as a boy, he had passed the fence.

  But someone might see him from the street. No, the backyard was better. No one could witness the burial under Deirdre's oak. And then there were the other two bodies--Norgan and Stolov. He knew Stolov was dead. He'd known it when he saw him fall backwards. Michael had broken his neck. Norgan was dead. He'd seen that too.

  Stolov was what had slowed Norgan, he figured, trying to resuscitate Stolov. Well, there was time to check on all that. Maybe it was really true what everybody said, that in the Mayfair family, you could kill people, and nobody did a thing.

  The backyard was dark and damp, the banana trees already grown back from the Christmas freeze, and arching out along the high brick wall. He could scarcely see the roots of the oak for the darkness. He laid the body down and folded its arms over it. Like a big slender doll it looked, with its big feet and huge hands, all white like plastic and cold and still.

  He went back to the flagstones beside the porch. He took off his sweater and then his shirt. He put back on the sweater, and then he picked up the head carefully by the hair. He was careful not to get blood on him; he had been spattered enough. He got most of the skin and shattered bone and blood up with the head, but then he had to reach for the remainder in a soft moist bloody handful. And the residue he wiped with his handkerchief and put that in his folded shirt too. A bundle. A bundle of the head.

  He wished he had a jar suddenly. He could put it in the jar. But best it was buried. The house was dark and quiet. He couldn't take all night to do this. Rowan needed him. And Aaron, Aaron might even be hurt. And those other two bodies...all that to be done. People would surely come soon. They always did.

  He carried the head back with him to the foot of the oak. Then he closed and locked the iron gates to the rear yard, just in case one of the cousins came wandering about.

  The shovel was in the back shed. He had never used it. The gardeners here did that sort of work. And now he was going to bury this body in the pitch dark.

  The ground was sodden beneath the tree from all the spring rain, and it wasn't hard for him to dig a fairly deep grave. The roots gave him trouble. He had to go out from the base farther than he intended, but finally he had made a narrow uneven hole, nothing like the rectangular graves of horror films and modern funerals. And he slipped the body down into it. And then the blood-soaked bundle of shirt which contained the head. In the moist heat of the coming summer this thing would rot in no time at all. The rain had already begun.

  Blessed rain. He looked down into the dark hole. He really couldn't see anything of the body but one limp white hand. It didn't look like a person's hand. Fingers too long. Knuckles too big. More like something of wax.

  He looked up into the dark branches of the trees. The rain was coming all right, but only a few drops had broken through the thick canopy above.

  The garden was cold and quiet, and empty. No lights in the back guest house. Not a sound from the neighbors beyond the wall.

  Once again, he looked down into the crumbling shapeless grave. The hand was smaller, thinner. It seemed to have become less substantial, fingers tumbling together and fusing so they lost their distinct shape. Hardly a hand at all. br />
  Something else gleamed in the dark--a tiny firefly of green light.

  He dropped down to his knees. He slipped forward on the uneven edge of the hole, left hand pitched out to the other side of the grave to steady himself, as with his right, he reached down and groped for that green sparkling thing.

  He almost lost his balance, then felt the hard edges of the emerald.

  He yanked the chain loose from the bloody, tangled cloth. Up out of the darkness it came, nestled in the palm of his muddy hand.

  "Got you!" he whispered, staring at it.

  It had been around the creature's neck, inside his clothes.

  He held it, turning it, letting the starlight find it, the jewel of jewels. No great emotion came to him. Nothing. Only a sad, grim satisfaction that he had the Mayfair emerald, that he had snatched it from oblivion, from the covert unmarked grave of the one who had finally lost.

  Lost.

  His vision was blurred. But then it was so divinely dark out here, and so still. He gathered up the gold chain the way you might a rosary, and shoved it--jewel and chain--into the pocket of his pants.

  He closed his eyes. Again, he almost lost his balance, almost slipped into the grave. Then the garden appeared to him, glistening and dim. The hand was no longer visible down there at all. Perhaps the tumbling clods of earth had covered it as they must soon cover all the rest.

  A sound came from somewhere. A gate closing perhaps. Someone in the house?

  But he must hurry, no matter how weary he was and how sluggish and quiet he felt.

  Hurry.

  Slowly, for a quarter of an hour or more, he shoveled the moist earth into the hole.

  Now the rain was whispering around him, lighting up the shiny leaves of the camellias, and the stones of the path.

  He stood over the grave, leaning on the shovel. He said aloud the other verse of Julien's poem:

  Slay the flesh that is not human

  Trust to weapons crude and cruel

  For, dying on the verge of wisdom,

  Tortured souls may seek the light.

  Then he slumped down beside the oak, and closed his eyes. The pain thudded in him, as if it had waited patiently and now it had its moment. He couldn't breathe for a minute, but then he rested, rested with all his limbs and his heart and his soul, and his breathing became regular, easy again.

  He lay there sleeping perhaps, if one can sleep and know everything that one has done. There were dreams ready to come. Indeed it seemed, moment after moment, that he might veer and descend into the blessed darkness where others waited for him, so many others, to question him, to comfort him, to accuse him perhaps. Was the air filled with spirits? Did one but have to sleep to see them face-to-face, or hear their cries?

  He did not know. Old images came back to him, bits and pieces of tales, other dreams. But he would not let himself slip. He would not let himself go all the way down...

  He slept the thin sleep in which he was safe, and in good company with the rain, the sigh of the weightless rain surrounding him but not touching him, in this his garden, beneath the high leafy roof of the mighty tree.

  Suddenly he caught a picture of the ruined white body sleeping beneath him, if one could use for the dead a word as gentle as sleep.

  The living slept as he had been sleeping. What became of the lately dead, or the long dead, or all those inevitably gone from the earth?

  Pale, twisted, defeated once again, after centuries, buried without a marker--

  He awoke with a start. He had almost cried out.

  Thirty-nine

  WHEN HE LOOKED up, he saw through the iron fence that the main house was now full of light. Lights were on all through the upstairs and downstairs. He thought perhaps he saw someone pass a doorway in the upper hall. Seemed it was Eugenia. Poor old soul. She must have heard it. Maybe she saw the bodies. Just a shadow behind the privacy lattice. He wasn't sure. They were much too far away for him to hear them.

  He put the shovel back into the shed, just as the rain came down heavily and with the lovely smell that the rain always brings.

  There was a crack of thunder, and one of those jagged rips of white lightning, and then the big drops began to splash on his head, his face, his hands.

  He unlocked the gate and went to the faucet by the pool. He slipped off his sweater and washed his arms and his face and his chest. The pain was still there, like something biting him, and he noticed he had little feeling in his left hand. He could close it, however. He could grip. Then he looked back at the dark oak. He could make nothing out of the darkness beneath it, the deep dark of the entire yard now beneath the rainy sky.

  The rain washed Lasher's blood from the flags where Lasher had died.

  It fell hard and steady, washing them clean until nothing was left to mark the spot at all.

  He stood there watching, getting soaked and wishing he could smoke a cigarette but knowing the rain would put it out. Through the dining room window, he could see a hazy image of Aaron still sitting at the table, as if he had never moved, and the tall dark figure of Yuri, standing about, almost idly. And then the figure of someone else he did not know.

  All of them in the house. Well, it was bound to happen. Someone was bound to come. Beatrice, Mona, someone...

  Only after all that blood was washed away did he walk over the spot, and go around to the front door of the house.

  There were two police cars parked there, end to end, with their lights flashing, and a gathering of men, including Ryan and young Pierce at the gate. Mona was there in a sweatshirt and jeans. He felt like crying when he saw her.

  My God, why don't they arrest me? he wondered. Why didn't they come out into the yard? God, how long have they been here? How long did it take me to dig the grave?

  All this seemed vague in his mind.

  He noted--there was no ambulance, but that didn't mean anything. Perhaps his wife had died upstairs, and they had already taken her away. Got to go to her, he thought, whatever happens, I'm not being dragged out of here until I kiss her good-bye.

  He walked towards the front steps.

  Ryan started speaking to him the moment he saw him.

  "Michael, thank God you're back. Something really inexcusable happened. It was all a misunderstanding. Happened right after you left. And I promise you, it will not happen again."

  "What is that?" asked Michael.

  Mona stared at him, her face impassive and undeniably beautiful in a lovely youthful way. Her eyes were so green. It was amazing to him. He thought about what Lasher had said--about jewels.

  "A complete mixup with the guards and the nurses," said Ryan. "Everybody, unaccountably, went home. Even Henri was told to go home. Aaron was the only one here and he was asleep."

  Mona made a little negative gesture to him, and lifted one of her soft, babyfied little hands. Pretty Mona.

  "Rowan is all right?" Michael asked. He could not now remember what Ryan had been saying, only that he'd known, by Ryan's manner, that Rowan wasn't dead.

  "Yes, she's fine," said Ryan. "She was apparently alone in the house for a while, however, and the door was unlocked. Someone apparently told the guards they weren't needed anymore. Apparently it was a priest from the parish church, but we haven't been able to find the man. We will. Whatever, the nurses were actually told that Rowan was...was..."

  "But Rowan's OK."

  "The point is nothing was disturbed. Eugenia was in her room the whole time too, lot of good it did. But nothing happened. Mona and Yuri came and they found the place deserted. They woke up Aaron. They called me."

  "I see," said Michael.

  "We didn't know where you were. Then Aaron remembered that you'd gone off for a long walk. I got here as soon as I could. No harm done as far as I can tell. Of course those people have been fired. These are all new people."

  "Yeah, I understand," said Michael with a little nod.

  They went up the steps and into the front hall. Everything looked as it should, the red car
pet going up the stairway. The oriental rug before the door. A few natural scuff marks here and there as always on the waxed wood.

  He looked at Mona, who was standing back away from her uncle. The jeans could not have been any tighter. In fact, the whole history of fashion might have been different in the twentieth century, Michael thought, if denim hadn't been such a tough fabric, if it hadn't had such a capacity to stretch to a woman's little hips like that.

  "Nothing was disturbed," said Ryan. "Nothing was missing. We haven't searched the whole house yet but..."

  "I'll do it," said Michael. "It's OK."

  "I've doubled the guards," said Ryan, "and doubled the shift of nurses. No one leaves this property without express permission of a member of the family. You have to be able to know you can take a walk and come back and Rowan is all right."

  "Yeah," said Michael. "I should go up and see Rowan."

  Rowan wore a fresh gown of white silk. It had long sleeves and narrow cuffs. She was as she had been when he left her--same gentle wondering expression, hands folded before her, on a fresh cover of embroidered linen with a lovely trimming of blue ribbon at the edge. The room smelled clean, and full of the scent of the blessed candles, and a huge vase of yellow flowers that stood on the table where the nurses were accustomed to write.

  "Pretty flowers," said Michael.

  "Yes, Bea got them," said Pierce. "Whenever anything happens, Bea just gets flowers. But I don't think Rowan had the slightest inkling ever that anything was amiss."

  "No, no inkling," said Michael.

  Ryan continued to apologize, continued to aver that this would never happen again. Hamilton Mayfair stepped out of the shadows and gave a little nod of greeting and then vanished as softly and soundlessly as he had appeared.

  Beatrice came into the room with a soft jingling noise, perhaps of bracelets, Michael didn't know. Michael felt her kiss before he saw her, and caught her jasmine perfume. It made him think of the garden in summer. Summer. That wasn't so very far away. The bedroom was shadowy as always with the candles and only one small lamp. Beatrice put her arms around him and held him tight.