Gibbon's Decline and Fall

  With this new man he felt as he had once in California when an earthquake had happened. Everything moving, and no way of knowing when it was going to stop or whether he’d be alive when it did. It wasn’t Keepe so much as it was this Webster guy he worked for. Keepe … he was just some kind of shadow. All he’d done was sort of sit there and quiver. But Webster! When he spoke to you, it was like being a hooked fish. You could feel the barbs in there, hanging on. Then, after he left, it was as if the hook were still there and the line still attached. You could feel the pulling. As if he could reel you in anytime he wanted to.

  Martin laughed at himself mockingly. Too much late-night stuff on TV. He took a long pull at the bottle and let it settle warmingly. Way too many horror movies on late-night TV.

  The DFC was ready to go by eleven. The Land Rover had been serviced and all its fluids topped up, so said Hal. The spare had been checked, and all the parts to the jack were present and accounted for. Agnes, after a few cross words with Faye, had been convinced to change into blue jeans and shirt, and Bettiann had been nagged into sensible shoes.

  They settled themselves inside the blocky vehicle, at first tentatively, shifting about, then with those small dispositions of belongings that mark temporary human territories. Carolyn’s maps and thermos and sack of apples; Ophy’s medical journals. Behind them, Agnes had her knitting and Bettiann her camera, while Faye spread her sketchbook and colored pencils in the backseat next to Jessamine’s field glasses and bird book. Sleeping bags and personal things were in the roof carrier; coats went into the cargo space behind the backseat, with Lolly nesting among them, cushioned among pillows and blankets.

  They were ready to leave when a FedEx truck came down the drive in a cloud of dust to deliver a packet addressed to Carolyn. The return address was innocuous. Winter Mercantile, Baltimore, Maryland. Mike Winter lived in Baltimore.

  Carolyn signed for the packet and shoved it under the maps beside her, leaving the car window open to let in the morning air. Hal leaned in and kissed her. “Stay in touch,” he said.

  “I will,” she promised, starting the car.

  “We don’t know if there’s anything where we’re going,” said Agnes, almost angrily.

  Carolyn responded. “That’s right, Aggie. We don’t. We’re playing hide-and-seek, just the way we did when we were kids, out in the dusk with the night coming, everything dark, ominous shadows all around, rather scary, as I remember. You’ve told us we’ve been hiding our eyes, refusing to see. Well, now they’re open and all the counting is over. Ready or not, here we come.”

  Agnes pinched her lips and subsided. Before they left Vermont, she had called the abbey, explaining that there was an emergency and asking Sister Honore Philip to take care of things in the interim. Conscience told her she should go back, leave this investigation to others. Conscience told her it was her investigation as much as theirs. Conscience told her she had made this quagmire for herself, and anything she did might be wrong. Truth was, conscience was no damned help. She was merely going along, letting the others take her where they would. She did not believe they would find Sophy, but if they did, she was sure Sophy would prove to be something terrible. All those years of religious education, all the times she had read how demons had tempted the saints, how the devil had tempted witches into his service, and she had never realized that she herself was being tempted by a demon. She had not felt important enough to be singled out for temptation. When she became Reverend Mother, she should have realized that she was important enough. And Sophy had probably known she would be abbess, known it years ago. Foreseen it. Devils could foresee things.

  Beside her, Bettiann was wondering, as she had every now and then since the previous Sunday, whether William would want to stay married—assuming this current condition of mankind went on, as it seemed likely it would. William had phoned Bettiann last night, but during their conversation they’d been careful to say nothing to one another. Of course, William had never said very much to her. He talked to her about as much as he talked to the Mercedes, or to the cook he’d hired away from the Morrisons. He talked more with the chauffeur than he did with her. Guy talk. Would he ever talk to her? If so, what would he say?

  In the backseat Jessamine was trying unsuccessfully to think of nothing. Ever since Saturday morning she’d been unable to get the 1997 DFC meeting out of her mind. She kept going over and over it, all the details, all the things they’d done. She couldn’t believe what Agnes had said about Sophy and the vial. The seal had been intact when she’d taken it back to the lab. Stupid and ridiculous of her to have taken it home to show the others, yes, she’d admit that. She could just as well have taken a dummy vial, but she’d been so excited about the stuff itself! A genetic key to behavior. A way to understand people better! Why hadn’t she just described the stuff? God knows! But the seal had been intact. Intact. She’d broken the seal when she’d used the carrier to spray the bonobos.

  Agnes could be right. The human race was certainly acting as though they’d been infected with something. Human lifestyles were changing remarkably. Daily motivations were changing. And there was that sign Lily had made, again and again, that circling sign. We! That’s what the sign was. We! Not we bonobos. We, you and me, Jessamine. Jessamine and Lily … we females. We women! What about we women? Sophy was a woman. Sophy cared about women. Jessamine shut her eyes and shook her head slowly, side to side. Stop thinking. Thinking didn’t help!

  Beside Jessamine, Faye was sketching the line of Ophy’s head and shoulder, wanting that particular line for the dryad in the fountain. The whole concept was coming together. She knew now it would be great! If the consortium honored their contract. If she could solve the problem of the central figure. If she had time to finish it.

  Staring through the windshield, Ophy was thinking of Simon, wishing he were there with her. Only that. Nothing else.

  Beside her, Carolyn, who had firmly resolved to stop thinking of anything unpleasant, found herself thinking of nothing else. Aggie had become a stranger who regarded them all with suspicion. As though they’d been contaminated … by Sophy, probably. The feeling of menace was still with her, also: an itch at the back of her neck, a pricking of her scalp, a formless troubling in some corner of her mind, a ghost that wouldn’t rest and wouldn’t identify itself. What was she afraid of? Being killed by Jagger or by his minion? Surely he wouldn’t try that unless she was alone, certainly not when there were seven of them. What else? Maybe she was afraid they’d find Sophy and learn that Aggie was right and Sophy had done something … weird. Was something … weird. But Sophy wouldn’t have done anything evil. She just wouldn’t have.

  Was she worried about Hal? Leaving him alone this way? That was ridiculous. He wouldn’t be alone. Stace and Luce had promised to look in on him tonight, and again tomorrow. Or was she responding to some more global troubling? Something bigger than, worse than, more terrible than …

  She made a wordless exclamation, and Ophy looked at her curiously.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Oph. Goose walking on my grave, that’s all.” She gritted her teeth. When she got back, she’d arrange for an exorcism! Until then … “Begone,” she muttered silently to the dark lurker inside her head. “Get away. Avaunt thee.” She pictured the lurker fleeing, departing, then concentrated on driving, creating a litany out of the dashboard indicators: oil pressure, mileage, temperature, rpm’s, reading them over to herself, subvocalizing, then starting over to read them again.

  Behind the backseat, curled into a nest of pillows, Lolly thought about going somewhere. She couldn’t remember going anywhere ever before. Nobody was hitting her. Nobody was wanting her to do sex. Nobody was wanting anything from her. Here she was, like an egg. The thought came fuzzily, then settled. She’d made one once, in school, for Mrs. Gallegos. She’d made it out of construction paper and crayons. A nest made of scruffled-up pieces of brown paper with a blue egg in it. Waiting for some bird to come sit on her, hatch her into somethin
g.

  It was an interesting thought. The first she could remember ever having.

  AS JAGGER DROVE ACROSS THE tarmac toward his little chopper, he saw Martin waiting beside it. Jagger frowned, felt the frown collapse into a grimace, then attempted a smile, achieving only a weak and effortful result. Martin wasn’t alone.

  Should he go on? Or go back? He couldn’t go back. They’d seen him. Keepe and Webster both.

  He parked the car, making himself look pleased and surprised at their presence.

  “This is wonderful,” he said, managing a grin. “Are you here to meet me, or are you headed somewhere?”

  There was a pause before Keepe answered, as though suddenly energized. “Both. Mr. Webster feels you may need help.”

  “Help? Well,” he allowed himself to look abashed. “I suppose it’s possible. I didn’t want to bother anybody, though, not until I know whether there’s anything to this … this rumor.”

  Martin shifted uncomfortably.

  Webster spoke smoothly, calmly, as though they were discussing the weather. “More than a rumor, wouldn’t you say? Your colleague here, your … associate says these women may know something … everything about what’s happened.”

  “It’s remotely possible,” agreed Jagger, concentrating on keeping his voice even and agreeable. “That’s why I was going to follow them.”

  “Follow them where?”

  “Wherever they’re going. They’re looking for the missing one, Sophy, the one who’s supposed to know what happened. I thought it might be useful to find her.…”

  “It’s a place called Piedras Lagartonas,” Martin said stiffly.

  “Piedras what?” Jagger asked.

  Martin replied, “That’s what I picked up before they left. The Crespin woman said it was down in the southwest corner of the state. If it’s there, it’s not on any of my maps. They left about half an hour ago.”

  “And how were you going to follow them?” Webster asked.

  Jagger swallowed, attempted a boyish smile. “Martin … was going to put some kind of beeper on their car. When they stopped for gas. With a receiver in my bird.”

  “I sent someone else to do it,” said Martin. “And the receiver’s in that red chopper over there.”

  “You’re … going yourselves,” said Jagger. There was a lump in his chest. Webster was watching him unblinkingly, and under the force of that gaze the hard lump in his chest swelled and throbbed, pressing on his heart, shutting off his breath.

  “Is there some reason we shouldn’t?” Webster asked mildly.

  “No. No sir. Not if you want to. I was just trying to save you trouble.”

  “Oh, I shan’t trouble. I’ll leave the trouble to you and Martin, and to Keepe. I’m sure the three of you can manage such a very simple thing. Particularly as I have … other things to attend to just now.”

  “I see,” murmured Jagger, who did not see.

  Webster smiled at him quite terribly before turning that searchlight smile on the others as well. “You’ll follow the women until they find this Sophy. If they find her, you’ll let me know. If they don’t find her, you’ll let me know and I’ll decide what to do about that. There’s no hurry to take off, is there, Martin?”

  The man shook his head, swallowed, struggled to get enough saliva in his mouth that he could speak. “No, sir. We’ll go a lot faster than they can.”

  “Then we have time.”

  Webster’s face remained fixed in its dreadful smile as he took Jagger by the arm. Jagger staggered beside him, suddenly aware of pain. Heat radiated upward from the arm Webster held, up and across Jake’s shoulders and chest, a burning sensation, an incapacitating agony, a horrid intimacy that moved toward his belly and groin, an inward violation, like being impaled on a fiery spear.

  Webster said, “Sit here, on this bench. Let’s have a little talk.”

  Martin and Keepe remained where they were, turned slightly away, as though not wishing to observe whatever was taking place. Martin did this sensibly, as a man accustomed to not seeing too much, or hearing too much. Keepe did it involuntarily but with a horrible conviction that he had already seen and heard too much. His mind had not been his own since that terrible phone call. He seemed incapable of independent thought except at some remote, deep level that was unconnected to his body. His body wasn’t his own. He wanted to walk away from this place, and he couldn’t make his body do it. Instead, it twitched and jerked as though someone were pulling his strings. Unable to do anything of his own volition, he stood beside Martin, staring across the airport at the distant mountains, trying desperately to be unaware.

  Behind them, across the tarmac, Webster and Jake were seated side by side.

  “Now,” Webster said to Jake. “Tell me all about these women.”

  Jake’s mouth opened and words, came out, without plan, without thought. Jagger found himself telling about the aborted trial, quoting swatches of testimony, describing Carolyn as he had encountered her before, saying things he did not know he knew, making conclusions he did not know he had made.

  “Excellent,” said Webster. “Very good, Jagger. What a very good candidate you would have made.…”

  The words cut through to the self inside. “Would,” he gasped. “Would have made?”

  Webster patted him on the shoulder. “Would have made. Not now. You were disobedient, Jagger. Emmet Swinter wasn’t supposed to die, Jagger. You were supposed to do exactly, precisely as you were told.”

  “But … but … Father …” The words came out in a quavering bleat, like a sheep, a goat, Baa … baa … Faaather.

  Laughter boomed like thunder, cracking the sky. Across the field Keepe reached out and clung to Martin’s arm, held on to him, his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, not to see, not to look. A tearing sound came from behind them and ran between them, a real rip in the fabric of the earth, a tear that propagated itself across the tarmac, endlessly opening. It widened gapingly, a tongue of shadow licked out, and the rift closed with a noise like a gulp.

  Martin removed Keepe’s hand from his arm and stared blindly at the mountains. He wasn’t here, he told himself. He was somewhere else.

  Webster whispered, “Surely you don’t mean that word, Jagger. I, Jagger? I? Look at you. Did you really think I would beget a son like you?”

  There was a mirror in the air between Jagger and Webster, a consolidation of space, a shining surface in which Jake saw himself, naked, potbellied, and pig-eyed, dribbling urine, dripping saliva, shivering, his hands twitching, stinking of fluids, no better than a woman.…

  “What,” Jagger gulped, the words coming up like knives in his throat. “Who. Who are you?”

  “Oh, my boy,” Webster whispered to him from out of a radiant smoke. “You should have asked that question a long time ago.”

  The drive southwest took the DFC straight through Santa Fe, down the highway to Albuquerque, then south toward Las Cruces, between the Black Mountains and the Jornada del Muerto.

  “Journey of death?” asked Agnes. “Not a good omen.”

  “Not an omen at all,” said Carolyn crisply. “It’s historic comment, Aggie, not fortune-telling. When the Spaniards came through, they found no water and a lot of hostile warriors. A lot of the invaders died out there.”

  “As we may,” said Aggie.

  “Now, Aggie.” She made herself smile. “Come on! Nobody is going to bother us.”

  “You don’t know that. Someone … something could.”

  “Aggie?” Bettiann leaned toward her, putting her hand on the other woman’s arm. “Please. We’re going to be all right.”

  “Sorry.” Agnes shuddered. “I’m scared, and not just for my life.”

  “Well, we’re all scared,” said Jessamine from behind her.

  “You didn’t see what I did. In San Francisco.”

  “No. I didn’t. But I don’t think it was diabolical. I don’t believe Sophy was a devil. Nonetheless, we’re all equally apprehensive about what we’re try
ing to do, so let’s try to keep up our spirits.”

  “If I’m guilty—” Aggie started to say.

  “You don’t have any monopoly on guilt,” Ophy interrupted. “Maybe we’re all guilty, we don’t know. We don’t know where we’re going, or what we’ll find, if and when we get there.”

  “We don’t have to go,” said Carolyn over her shoulder. “We can go back home, forget it.”

  “No,” Aggie grated. “No, we can’t do that.”

  There was silence for a time.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” Bettiann asked, her nose slightly wrinkled. “It doesn’t sound as though we’ll find accommodations where we’re going.”

  Carolyn responded, “If we get near Cloverdale, which probably isn’t there anymore, we’ll sleep on the ground. There are seven sleeping bags in the roof carrier. Ours and the ones Hal borrowed from the neighbors. There are three five-gallon water cans up there and my camp kit as well. I haven’t used it in a while, but I remember how to light the stove.”

  “Food?” asked Ophy.

  “We’ll stock up in Deming. With all the retirees moving down there, it’s become quite a good-size town.”

  “If one of my friends did this, I’d tell them it was a dumb idea. Six … seven women going off alone like this?” Bettiann sighed plaintively.

  “What are you afraid of, Bets? Rape?” Faye laughed, making a hiccupy, burroish sound, ee-yaw, ee-yaw.

  “Not funny,” Bettiann replied.

  “Not really, no,” Faye agreed.

  They fell silent again, all of them convinced they were doing a ridiculously dangerous thing, going off into nothingness like this. Carolyn read their minds. “I ask again, anyone want to go back?”

  Silence. After a long time Faye said, “We can’t. We swore an oath not to decline and fall. Not making this journey would be a fall. Whatever we can do, we must do.”