"Talk," said Mike, moving so that his back was against the wall of the house near the lighted window. The cornfield was like a black wall across the road. A few fireflies were visible in the garden behind the porch swing and trellis.
Father C.-it isn't Father C.I-made a gesture with pale hands. Mike had never noticed how long the priest's fingers were. "Very well, Michael… I come to offer you and your little friends a… what shall we call it? A truce."
"What kind of truce?" said Mike. He felt as if his tongue had been given a shot of Novocaine.
It was dark enough now that the priest's black garb blended with the night, allowing only his hands, face, and the white circle of his collar to reflect the light. "A truce that will allow you to live," he said flatly. "Perhaps."
Mike made a noise that he'd meant as a laugh. "Why should we make a truce? You saw what happened to your buddy Van Syke today."
The face above the swing opened its mouth and laughter emerged… if one could call a sound like the rattling of stones in an old gourd laughter. "Michael, Michael," he said softly,"your actions today had no significance whatsoever. Our buddy, as you call him, was scheduled to be… ah… retired tonight anyway.”
Mike's fists clenched. "Like you retired C. J. Congden's old man?"
"Precisely," came the voice from deep inside the thing in priest's garb. "His usefulness was effectively at an end. He had other… ah… services to offer." Mike leaned forward. "Who in hell are you?" Again the rattle of stones. "Michael, Michael… all the explanations in the world could not begin to make you understand the complexity of the situation you have stumbled into. Trying to explain would be like teaching catechism to a cat or dog."
"Go ahead," whispered Mike. "Try me." "No," snapped the white face. There was no illusion of small talk in the dead voice now. "Suffice it to say that if you and your friends accept our offer of a truce, you may live to see the autumn."
Mike felt his heart lurch in his chest. His legs were suddenly weak as he leaned against the wall in what he thought was a relaxed, almost casual manner. Once, during a High Mass with Father Harrison years before, just after he'd become an altar boy, Mike had fainted after twenty-five minutes of kneeling. He felt a similar rushing in his ears now. No, no, hold on, pay attention.
"Who's this 'we' you keep talking about," said Mike, amazed to hear his own voice sounding so strong,"a bunch of corpses and a bell?"
The white face moved back and forth. "Michael, Michael…" The priest stood, took a step toward him.
Mike glanced furtively to his left, saw something the size of the Soldier step out of the field across the road and begin gliding toward the lawn near Memo's window.
"Call him off!" cried Mike. He pulled out the water pistol.
The face of Father Cavanaugh smiled. He snapped his fingers and the Soldier glided to a stop under the linden tree thirty feet away. Father C."s smile continued to broaden, pulling back to show his back teeth, broadening further until it seemed the man's face would snap in half as if on a hinge. That impossible mouth opened wide and Mike saw more teeth-rows and rows of teeth, endless lines of white that seemed to recede down the thing's gullet.
The Cavanaugh-thing made no pretense of moving its mouth or jaw as the voice came up from its belly. "You surrender now, you motherfucking little worm, or we shall rip your fucking heart from your chest… we shall chew your balls off and serve them to our minions… tear your fucking eyes out of their sockets the way we did that putrid friend's of yours…"
"Duane," whispered Mike, feeling his breathing stop, lurch, and start again, although reluctantly. His neck and belly ached from tension. In the shadows of the lawn, the Soldier began gliding toward Memo's window once again.
"Ah, yesssssss," hissed Father Cavanaugh, taking another step toward Mike. His long fingers were rising. His face was… melting, it looked to Mike… flesh flowing under skin, cartilage and bone rearranging itself, the long nose and chin moving together to form the snout that Mike had seen on the Soldier in the cemetery. When they killed Father C.
He could not see the slugs yet, but the priest's face was becoming more of a funnel than a face. The thing took another step closer, hands coming up.
"Fuck you!" shouted Mike, pulling the squirt gun from his waistband and squeezing the trigger.
The Father Cavanaugh-thing seemed startled a second, then stepped back, then laughed, making a sound like teeth biting into slate. Behind Mike, the Soldier glided out of sight beyond the edge of the house.
Mike raised the squirt gun with a steady arm and fired another stream of holy water into the thing's face. It doesn't work… he doesn't believe.
Once their fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Shrives, had meant to do an experiment where she took a few drops of hydrochloric acid from a beaker and used an eyedropper to drip it onto a fresh orange. Instead, the old lady had accidentally overturned the beaker, drenching the orange and the thick felt cloth the beaker had been on.
That same sizzling, hissing noise now emanated from Father Cavanaugh's face and clothing. Mike saw the white flesh of the snout shrivel and curl, as if the skin itself were being eaten away by the holy water. The man's left eyelid hissed and was gone, the eyeball sizzling as it stared at Mike through raised fingers. Great holes were appearing in the black coat and Roman collar, allowing a stench of dead flesh to escape from the interior.
Father Cavanaugh screamed like Cordie's dog had several hours earlier, lowered its misshapen head, and rushed the boy.
Mike jumped aside, squirting more holy water on the thing and seeing fumes rise thicker from its hissing, burning back. Peg, Bonnie and Kathleen were shouting from inside the house. His mother's voice came weakly from her back bedroom.
"Stay in your rooms!" he screamed and jumped onto the lawn.
The Soldier had wrestled the screen out of its frame and was leaning into the lighted window, his fingers scrabbling on wood.
Mike ran forward and squirted the last of the holy water onto the back of its neck.
The thing did not scream. A smell worse than the burning Rendering Truck rose from it and it flung itself into the loose soil of the flower bed under the window, scrabbling and kicking its way through the shrubbery into the darkness.
Mike turned just as the Father Cavanaugh figure leapt from the porch and reached for him. Mike ducked under the long arms, dropped the empty squirt gun into the bushes, and reached for Memo's small jewel case on the sill.
Peg was visible through the billowing curtains, standing by the doorway of Memo's room, hands to her mouth." "Mike, what…"
Father Cavanaugh's long fingers closed on Mike's shoulders and jerked him back out of the light, into the darkness under the linden tree. The tall priest-form hugged Mike closer.
Mike smelled the stench in his face, saw the face cracked now with acid-chewed scars, sensed things writhing under that flesh and in the long tunnel of the proboscis, and then Father C. leaned forward, the cartilage of its snout pulsating above Mike's face.
He had no time to look. Mike opened the case, lifted the large piece of consecrated Host out, and thrust it against the obscene opening in the thing's face just as the pressure of the slugs inside it threatened to burst forth.
Mike had watched once as C. J. Congden had fired a 12-gauge shotgun at a full watermelon on a post only eight feet away…
This was worse.
The Father Cavanaugh-thing's snout and face seemed to explode sideways with chunks of pasty white flesh bouncing off the house and pattering on the linden leaves. There was a scream, audibly from the figure's belly this time, and Mike dropped the Host as the thing staggered backward, fingers to what was left of its face now.
Mike jumped back as he saw six-inch brown slugs curling and writhing in the grass as the Host seemed to glow from some blue-green radiance of its own. Fragments of Father Cavanaugh's flesh hissed and deliquesced like snails caught out of their shells in a rain of salt.
Peg was screaming from the bedroom. Mike staggered to the porch, saw his mothe
r come to the door-her eyes racked with the pain of the migraine and the washcloth still raised to her temples-and both of them watched as the shadow of Father Cavanaugh staggered onto First Avenue, hands still over its ruined face, a terrible noise like a boiler rushing toward explosion rising out of it.
"Mike, what…" his mother said through her pain, blinking to see clearly, just as the headlights caught the figure staggering out from under the linden tree.
The cars barely slowed when they came into town on First Avenue, despite the sign a hundred feet up the road that posted the speed limit at thirty-five. Most of the cars continued at forty-five or fifty miles per hour until they reached the Hard Road three blocks south. This pickup must have been doing sixty, perhaps more.
Father C. staggered directly into its path, the tall figure bent almost double in pain, hands over its face. It removed its hands in the last second of squealing brakes.
The grille of the pickup caught the priest full in the face, the body disappeared under the truck but was dragged another hundred and thirty feet, Peg screamed from inside the house, and Mike's mother put her arms around her son as if protecting him from the sight.
By the time he and his mother walked out to see what had happened, the Somersets and Millers and Meyerses had already come out of their homes, Barney's rarely used siren was screaming a block or two away and rapidly approaching, and the driver of the pickup was on his knees on the pavement, covering his own face with his hands as he stared under the truck at what was left of the priest and muttering over and over, "I didn't see him… he just rushed out."
Through the cloud of shock and terror that had dulled Mike's senses, he slowly recognized the driver. It was Mr. McBride, Duane's dad. The man was sobbing and leaning on the running board of his pickup.
Mike turned away from the murmuring crowd, walking back toward the house as he bit hard on the fleshy part of his hand below the thumb. He was afraid that if he let up on the pressure he would start to laugh or cry, and he was not sure if he would be able to stop.
THIRTY-FIVE
Saturday the sixteenth of July was as dark a day as there can be in Illinois in midsummer. In Oak Hill, where the streetlights were controlled by photoelectric sensors, the lights went off at five-thirty a.m. and flickered back on at seven-fifteen a.m. The dark clouds seemed to move in above the treetops and hang there. In Elm Haven, the few streetlights were switched on and off by an old electrical timer in the annex next to the bank, and no one thought to turn them back on when the day grew darker rather than lighter.
Mr. Meyers opened his dry goods store on Main Street at precisely nine a.m. and was surprised to find four boys-the Stewart kids, Ken Grumbacher's boy Kevin, and another boy in a sling-waiting to buy squirt guns. Three apiece. The boys deliberated for several minutes, taking care to choose the most reliable guns and the ones with the largest water reservoirs. Mr. Meyers thought it odd… but he thought most things in this brave new world of 1960 odd. Things made more sense when he had opened the store baek in the twenties, when trains came through every day and people knew how to behave like civilized human beings.
The boys were gone by nine-thirty, keeping their newly purchased squirt guns in sacks and riding off with not a word of good-bye. Mr. Meyers shouted at them not to park their bikes on the sidewalk, that it was a hazard to pedestrians and against the city ordinances to boot, but the boys were gone, out of sight up Broad Avenue.
Mr. Meyers went back to taking inventory of dusty things on the high old shelves, occasionally looking out across the street and above the park to frown at the dark clouds. When he took his coffee break at the Parkside an hour later, old-timers in the back booth were talking about tornadoes.
Mike was questioned several times on Saturday: by Barney, by the county sheriff, and even by the Highway Patrol, who sent two troopers in a long brown car.
The sixth grader tried to imagine the puzzle that the sheriff and Barney were trying to assemble-Duane McBride and his uncle dying under mysterious circumstances, Mrs. Moon dying of natural causes but her precious cats being slaughtered, the body of the justice of the peace being found charred almost-but not quite-beyond recognition in the grain elevator, his throat cut according to the county coroner, while the body of Congden's friend Karl Van Syke-charred beyond immediate recognition but identified by his front gold tooth-was pulled out of the cab of the scorched Rendering Truck owned by Van Syke and Congden. The body of an unidentified dog was also discovered in the truck.
Town gossips were already piecing together motives for the murder; Congden and Van Syke sharing ill-gained profits from the justice of the peace's various scams, a falling-out between partners in crime, a brutal murder, then an accident with the gasoline that Van Syke had obviously used to douse the elevator before torching it, the fleeing man too frightened to abandon his burning truck for fear of being caught at the scene, the exploding gas tank…
By noon on Saturday, the locals had explained everything but the dead dog… Van Syke hated dogs, and no one had ever seen him allow one near him, much less in his truck.
Then Mrs. Whittaker at Betty's Beauty Salon on Church Street came up with the obvious deduction-J. P. Congden's large watchdog had disappeared some weeks earlier. Obviously that no-good Karl Van Syke had stolen it, or dognapped it, and the ownership of the dog was part of the dispute that led to the grisly murder.
Elm Haven had not had a real murder for decades. The townsfolk were shocked and delighted-especially delighted now that the obvious culprit behind the slaughter of Mrs. Moon's cats had been found.
How Father Cavanaugh's accidental death figured into this was not quite as certain. Mrs. McCafferty told Mrs. Somerset who called Mrs. Sperling with the information that the priest always had been a bit unstable, making fun of his own vocation, even calling the diocese vehicle on loan from Oak Hill Lincoln-Mercury the "Popemobile," according to Mrs. Mee-han, who helped with all the church functions. Mrs. Maher at the Lutheran Ladies' Auxiliary told Mrs. Meehan at the Methodist Bazaar that Father Cavanaugh had a history of insanity in his family-he was Scotch-Irish and everyone knew what that meant, and it had been common knowledge that the young priest had been transferred from a large diocese in Chicago as punishment for some bizarre act there.
Now everyone knew what the bizarre acts included: being a Peeping Tom, trying to break into people's houses, and probably killing cats as some sort of dark Catholic ritual. Mrs. Whittaker told Mrs. Staffney, who confirmed it with Mrs. Taylor that Catholics used dead cats in certain secret rituals. Mrs. Taylor said that her husband had told her that the young priest's face had been 'crushed and peeled," his words, by the sharp grille of Mr. McBride's pickup truck. Mr. Taylor had pronounced Father Cavanaugh as 'perhaps the deadest on arrival dead-on-arrival' that he had had the solemn duty to prepare. The archdiocese bishop called early Saturday morning from St. Mary's in Peoria and told Mr. Taylor not to prepare the body for anything except shipment on Monday to Chicago, where the family would claim it. Mr. Taylor agreed, but added cosmetology to his bill at any rate, since 'the family can't see him like this… it's as if something had exploded outward from his face." Again, Mr. Taylor's words, to quote Mrs. Taylor to Mrs. Whittaker.
One way or the other, however, the people were sure that the mystery had been solved. Mr. Van Syke, whom, it turned out, no one in town had trusted very much, murdering poor old Justice of the Peace Congden over money or a dog. Poor Father Cavanaugh, whom, it turned out, all of the Protestants and not a few of the older Catholics had never considered that stable, had gone out of his mind with a congenital fever and had tried to attack his altar boy Michael O'Rourke before running in front of a truck.
The townspeople clucked and the phone lines hummed-Jenny at the county switchboard hadn't counted so many calls coming out of Elm Haven since the flood in '49-and everyone had a good time solving things while they kept one eye on the dark clouds that continued to build over the cornfields to the south and west.
The sheriff wasn't
so easily convinced that things were solved. After lunch he came back for the third interview with Mike since the night before.
"And Father Cavanaugh spoke to your sister?" "Yessir. She told me that Father C. wanted to talk to me… that it was important." Mike knew that the tall sheriff had spoken to Peg twice before also.
"Did he tell her what he wanted to speak to you about?" "No, sir. I don't think so. You'll have to ask her." "Mmmm," said the sheriff, looking at a small spiral notebook that made Mike think of Duane's notebooks. "Tell me again what he did talk to you about."
"Well, sir, as I said before, I couldn't really understand him. It was like when a person's talking in a fever. There were words and phrases that seemed to make sense, but it didn't all go together."
"Tell me some of the words, son." Mike chewed his lip. Duane McBride had once told him and Dale that most criminals screw up their lies and alibis because they talk too much, feel too much need to embroider facts. Innocent people, said Duane, are usually a lot less articulate. Mike had had to go home and look up the word 'articulate' after that conversation.
"Well, sir," said Mike slowly, "I know he used the word sin several times. He said we'd all sinned and had to be punished. But I had the feeling he wasn't really talking about us… just people in general."
The sheriff nodded and made a note. "And that's when he started shouting?"
"Yessir. About then."
"But your sister says that he heard both of your voices. If you didn't understand what the father was saying, why were you talking?"
Mike resisted the impulse to rub sweat off his upper lip. "I guess I was asking him if he was OK. I mean, the last time I saw Father C. was when Mrs. McCafferty let me in to see him on Tuesday. He was really sick then."
"And did he say he was all right?"
"No, sir, he just started shouting that the Judgment Day was nigh… that was his word, sir, nigh."
"And then he ran off the porch and started attacking your grandmother's window," said the sheriff, checking his notes. "Is that right?"