Not based on the little evidence we’ve gathered so far.” He paused, waiting for arguments; but none came. “I’ll check in the basement for a shovel,” Mr. Moore went on. “We’ll do the job tonight.”
Miss Howard, Cyrus, and I looked at one another in a little shock; but the Doctor summed up all our deeper feelings by saying, “Moore’s right. It’s the only way we can be sure.”
All five of our heads started nodding slowly; but much as we may have agreed that Mr. Moore’s plan was the only way to both get what we needed and look out for Mr. Picton’s and the detective sergeants’ legal and ethical positions, that didn’t change the fact that we were contemplating a grisly, frightening, and illegal action, one what had gotten many people hanged—or worse—over the centuries. It took, you might say, a little adjusting to.
Mr. Moore did manage to find a shovel in the basement, along with a couple of lengths of strong rope, and he put them all outside the kitchen door while the rest of us were in the living room. Then we all went in to dinner, the prospect of what wewere about to undertake keeping most of us pretty quiet through the better part of the meal. Mr. Picton, fortunately, filled up the silence with a stream of talk about the case she’d been studying; then it was back into the living room for a little more of the music what Cyrus had been playing the day before. Finally, the time came to head upstairs. We’d have to wait for Mr. Picton and the detective sergeants to go to bed, at which point the rest of us would leave the house separately, to meet up around the corneron Ballston Avenue. From there we’d head down to the cemetery.
CHAPTER 34
The house finally grew completely quiet at just past one o’clock. I left my room carefully and got outside, almost running headlong into Mr. Moore on the front lawn as he made his way around from the kitchen with his shovel and rope. We didn’t see any sign of the rest of our fellow ghouls until we arrived at the appointed meeting spot around the corner. The Doctor and Miss Howard were sharing a cigarette, with Cyrus peering anxiously around at the darkened houses on either side of the street. He could’ve saved himself some sweat, the way I saw it, even given what we were up to: Ballston Spa was obviously the kind of town what shut down early and stayed shut down, even on a Saturday night.
“All right, now, remember,” the Doctor murmured, as Mr. Moore and I reached them. “What we are about to undertake is a serious criminal offense. Moore and I will therefore be the only ones to actually participate. Stevie, you’ll stand watch at this end of the street. Cyrus, you’ll go an equal distance in the opposite direction. Sara will be our last line of defense—she’ll guard the cemetery gate.”
“With the artillery,” she said, producing the weapon what she used on really special occasions: a .45-caliber Colt revolver of her own, one with a short barrel and pearl grips. She checked its chamber with the quick moves of an expert as the Doctor went on:
“If you encounter anyone, any of you, you must claim complete ignorance. You’re a guest of Mr. Picton’s, and you’re out taking the air on a lovely night. Understood? Very well, then …”
Mr. Moore started to move farther up the block with Miss Howard and Cyrus. “Why don’t you stay here with Stevie until I’ve got the hole dug, Kreizler? The fewer people inside at one time the better, and it’s not like—” Mr. Moore cut himself off quickly, though he’d already glanced at the Doctor’s bad left arm.
“Yes,” the Doctor said, following Mr. Moore’s eyes down to his slightly withered limb. “I take your point, Moore—I wouldn’t be much use to you in the digging. Very well. Signal when you’re ready.”
Nodding and looking a bit sorry for what he’d said, even though he’d clearly meant no offense, Mr. Moore hustled off with the other two.
The Doctor and I just stood there for a few minutes, myself not knowing exactly what to say to break the awkward moment brought on by the subject of his arm. But he soon made that job unnecessary by himself glancing down at the thing again, and then laughing once, quietly.
“It’s strange,” he whispered, “I never thought it might actually serve some purpose …”
“Hunh?” was all I could say.
“My arm,” the Doctor whispered back. “I’ve been so used to seeing it as a source of pain and a reminder of the past that I never imagined it could be anything else.”
I knew what he was talking about with that “reminder of the past” business: when he was only eight, the Doctor’s left arm had been smashed by his own father during the worst of their many fights. The older man had then kicked his son clear down a flight of stairs, aggravating the injury and making sure that the arm would never heal properly. The recurring pain in the scarred bones and muscle, along with the underdeveloped state of the arm, served to keep the trials what the Doctor’d been through during his childhood pretty constantly in his mind. But as for what he meant by the arm “serving some purpose,” I couldn’t tell, and I said so.
“I was referring to Clara Hatch,” he said, taking his eyes off the arm and glancing up and down the street. “From our first meeting, I naturally felt some empathy with her having lost the use of her right arm, quite probably because of an attack by her own mother.”
We both turned when we started to hear the quiet sounds of a shovel digging into dirt; but it’d been a wet summer, and as the shovel reached deeper, softer ground, the sound died away altogether. The Doctor continued his story:
“Today I decided to use the coincidence of our injuries in my effort to make her feel safe enough in my presence to start to allow images of what happened to reenter her thoughts.”
“Images?” I asked. “You mean, she doesn’t remember the whole story?”
“A part of her mind does,” the Doctor answered. “But the greater portion of her mental activity is directed at avoiding and erasing such memories. You must understand, Stevie, that she is emotionally hobbled by the fact that her experience makes no apparent sense—how could her mother, who should have been the source of all safety and succor, possibly turn into a mortal threat? Then, too, she knows that Libby is still alive and could return to strike again. But the combination, today, of the set of colored pencils I gave her and the story I told her about my father and my injury seemed to at least plant the idea in her mind that she might begin to confront such confusions and fears, and perhaps even share them with another person.”
I smiled. “She really went for the pencils, hunh?”
The Doctor shrugged. “You’ve seen such things at the Institute. It’s remarkable, what seemingly mundane objects can achieve in such situations. A toy, a game—a colored pencil. Not surprisingly, the first one she reached for was red.”
“Blood?” I asked quietly, figuring that, in her position, I probably would’ve made the same choice.
“Yes,” the Doctor answered, shaking his head and hissing. “Imagine the savagery of that scene, Stevie…. It’s no wonder she can’t speak of it, that even its memory has been exiled to the farthest corners of her conscious mind. And yet from that corner it presses—it cries—for release, but only if that release will be safe for her.” The Doctor paused, thinking the matter over. “A red stream … you remember the picture of the Westons’ house that she showed Cyrus? There’s a brook that runs behind it, and she added that brook to the picture today. But she drew in red—gushing torrents of red. And beside the stream she drew a dead tree, a tree whose roots reached down into the red water.” The Doctor shook his head, then held up his left hand, clenching it into a fist. “I tell you, Stevie, if we do no more while we are here than help to mend that poor girl’s mind, the trip shall not have been wasted.”
I thought about that for a few minutes, and then asked, “How long do you figure it’ll take before she can start to communicate with you about it?”
“Actually, I’m fairly optimistic, based on her behavior this afternoon. It should only be a matter of days before we can discuss the incident through pictures and simple questions. But as for getting her to speak—for that I will have to com
e up with some new strategies.”
We didn’t say much more, for a while. I guess I was just absorbing the idea of little Clara living out there on that farm, among people who’d once been strangers, trying desperately day and night not to think about why she should have to live with them, but at the same time wanting so badly to understand why. How could her brain operate, when it was given two sets of orders that were so opposite and so urgent? How could she ever get a moment’s sleep, or even peace, with all those voices screaming inside her skull, telling her to do different things? It was a miserable thought; and I began to be grateful, standing there on that street corner, that when I’d been a young boy in New York I’d at least been clear about who my enemies were, and what it would take for me to survive. Badly as she’d behaved, I didn’t think my mother’d ever wanted me actually, literally dead; and for the first time I saw that as, if not a blessing, at least one of the better on a long list of bad choices.
Suddenly there came the sound of approaching footsteps. The Doctor and I withdrew into the shadow of an elm tree and waited: but it was only Miss Howard, come to tell us that Mr. Moore was ready for the Doctor.
“Things are pretty quiet up there,” she said, indicating the cemetery. “So he had Cyrus give him a hand lifting the coffin out of the ground. Not that it’s all that heavy …”
The Doctor gave her a grim nod, then turned to me. “All right, Stevie,” he said. “You’ll be on your own for a few minutes. Stay alert.”
The two of them moved back down Ballston Avenue, and I stayed under the elm tree, staring at the shadows that were being thrown by the moon. A warm wind soon began to kick up, and that played hell with my vision—and my imagination. All those shadows what surrounded me were turned into ghostly, man-shaped silhouettes, the whole collection of which was moving and dancing and, I became more and more convinced, gettingready to pounce on me. Oh, sure, I told myself it was the wind, and that I didn’t have anything to worry about; they were all tricks of the light and my eyes, just alot of—
Then I noticed something: one of those manlike silhouettes—a small one underneath a tree across the street—wasn’t moving. Not only wasn’t it moving, but it wasn’t where it should’ve been, given the position of the moon. There were a couple of twinkling spots, too, right at about eye level—
And for a shadow, it was doing something that was awfully close to smiling at me.
I froze up tight, scared and bewildered. The more I stared at the thing, the more I grew convinced that “it” was an actual person; but at the same time, all that staring had started to make my vision go slightly crazy. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to figure anything out unless I could find a way to make the thing come out from under its tree and into the moonlight; but that might wind up being a very dangerous proposition. Whoever or whatever it was that I was watching, though, didn’t seem to be sending up any alarm or making any hostile move; so I figured I’d be okay if I just took a few steps out from under my own tree and tried to get a better look.
I started to walk. Then I shivered once, mightily, when the shadowy thing across the street mirrored the move. As soon as we were clear of all the shadows, I could see plainly who it was:
El Niño, Señor Linares’s little Filipino aborigine. He was dressed in those same clothes what were four sizes too big for him—and for whatever reason, he was, in fact, smiling at me. Slowly lifting an arm, he seemed to try to signal to me in some way, and for a minute I grew less fearful. The attempt at communication and the smile combined with his appealing round features to make him look something other than threatening. But then he made a different sort of move: lifting his head, he reached up with one hand and ran a finger around his neck. Now, in most parts of the world what I know of, that only means one thing; but he was still smiling, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt for another few seconds, on the off-chance that I was reading him wrong. But what came next was in no way reassuring: still grinning, he put his hand around his throat in a kind of choke hold, as if he meant to strangle someone—in this case, pretty apparently, yours truly.
Shivering violently again, I turned and bolted up the street toward the cemetery, fully believing that the little man who I figured for some kind of assassin was going to follow me and that I was in a race for my life. I didn’t look back—I’d seen how quick El Niño was, and I didn’t want to slow down for even a second. When I hit the northern edge of the fenced-in cemetery, I got within sight of Miss Howard, who had her back to me. Not wanting to scream for help, I just picked up my pace, hoping that she’d catch the sound of my feet. She soon did, and when I was about thirty feet from her and she could see the look on my face, she pulled out her revolver, holding and aiming it with practiced skill at the area behind me. Much relieved, I kept on running toward her; but then, when I saw her face go blank and her arms drop to her sides in confusion, I slowed down. She just looked at me and shrugged, and I stopped altogether, gasping for air and finally glancing behind me.
The little aborigine was nowhere to be seen.
Miss Howard walked quickly over to join me as I leaned down, hands on my knees, to take in some big gulps of air and spit into the street.
“Stevie,” she said quietly, “what’s happened?”
“That servant of Señor Linares’s,” I answered. “El Niño—he was down there!”
In a flash Miss Howard brought her pistol up again, though only as far as her hip this time. “What was he doing?”
“Just—watching me,” I answered, finally getting my breathing under control. “And he made a sign with his hands—Miss Howard, I think he meant to kill me. But it was strange—he was smiling, too, the whole time.”
With her free hand she grabbed my right arm and pulled me toward the cemetery gate. “Come on,” she said. “The Doctor’ll want to know about this.”
I’ve never counted myself a religious man, really; but when we got to the gate I looked inside the graveyard and saw a scene what struck me as so unholy that I stopped dead in my tracks. The area directly ahead of us was lit partly by the moon, but also by the faint glow of a pair of arc streetlamps what stood just outside the back fence of the cemetery. Together, these sources of light made it pretty impossible to mistake what was going on: the Doctor was crouched over a small coffin, his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. The lid of the coffin lay to one side, along with a pile of dirt from a nearby open grave. In the Doctor’s gloved hands were a scalpel and a pair of steel forceps: he was working quickly but carefully, like a man carving a turkey at a table full of hungry people. Mr. Moore was standing to one side and looking away, a handkerchief over his mouth. It was pretty apparent that he’d been sick in the last few minutes.
“Wait,” was all I could say as Miss Howard started into the cemetery. “It ain’t—it ain’t worth interrupting him. We can tell him when he comes out.”
Miss Howard gave me the once-over in a way what said she completely understood my reluctance. “You stay here and keep watch,” she said. “But I’ve got to tell him—the aborigine may not have been alone. Do you want my revolver?”
I looked down at the thing, but just shook my head in reply; like I’ve said, guns were never my style. Miss Howard walked quickly in to Mr. Moore and the Doctor, and though I couldn’t hear what they said, I could see looks of extreme alarm register on both their faces. But we’d come too far to break the thing off now, even I knew that; so the two men just sent Miss Howard back to the gate, and then the Doctor returned to his work with even more energy. I looked farther down Ballston Avenue and saw Cyrus, who was peering back toward us, obviously wanting to know what the hell was going on.
I thought to run up and tell him; but then I heard a satisfied sound—one what was maybe just a little too loud, given the situation—come from the Doctor’s direction. Turning, I saw him holding something up between his gloved fingers: it had to be the bullet. Mr. Moore looked at the thing and patted the Doctor’s back with a smile of relief. Then they quickl
y started to get the lid back onto the coffin. Looking over to me and Miss Howard, Mr. Moore hissed, “Stevie!” as loud as he felt it was safe to do; and, with the part of my stomach what hadn’t gone into my throat at the sight of El Niño now starting to rise and join the rest, I ran inside to them.
The smell of dirt and decay hit me from about ten yards away, though thankfully, by the time I got to the grave site, they’d refastened the lid of the little coffin. Then it was up to me and Mr. Moore, using the lengths of rope, to maneuver the thing back into the hole he’d dug, which we managed to do without too much trouble. This task kept me busy enough to avoid really taking in where I was—along with what I was doing—but once the coffin was down and we’d started to first refill the grave with dirt and then re-cover it with large sections of sod what Mr. Moore’d carefully cut away, I had a chance to glance around at all the headstones and monuments what were surrounding me.
With a start I suddenly realized that I was actually standing on little Thomas Hatch’s grave. Moving quickly to do my job from another angle, I glanced at Thomas’s and Matthew’s headstones. The pair of them were identical, except for the words what were carved into each. In the upper portions they displayed the boys’ names and years of life, and under each name was the phrase “Loving Son of Daniel and Elspeth.” But under these words were two different quotes. Thomas’s read, “A lamb gone too soon to the Lamb,” while Matthew’s said, “He that believeth in Me shall not Die.” At the bottom of each stone, in lettering what was less stodgy and more flowing than the rest, was a message: “Love always, from Mama.”
Maybe I was just looking for something to fix my mind on as a way of calming down, but it occurred to me to ask, “How come they’re buried here, and not at the Hatch place? There’s a cemetery out there, behind the house.”
“Many cities and towns now require burial in a designated public cemetery,” the Doctor answered, holding the small object he’d found up above his head and studying it. “For reasons of public health. I’m sure Mrs. Hatch didn’t object—she must have realized that the chances of anyone attempting just what we’re doing now were far more remote in a public graveyard.”