Ben leapt up and pulled them to. At the same time he flicked the switch that killed the lights around the patio.
“No!” cried Nathan: “Those you leave on! Leave those lights on!”
Ben shrugged fearfully, not daring to ask the cause of his brother’s anxiety.
Nathan sat, commanded that the television be turned off, and then he drank swiftly, not taking his eyes from the sheer white curtains. The mercury lights outside cast strong black shadows on the drapes, shadows of the frames of the sliding doors, of the plants in pots that stood in the corners, even of the pine straw that occasionally blew against the glass. Nathan waited, watching for Margaret Larkin to appear, outlined in black across the white material.
Nathan’s single hope was that he had destroyed her, that the ghost—was there any other word?—had sacrificed itself in the attempt to make him wreck the Lincoln. He concentrated on this comforting thought.
“Nathan...” said Ben tentatively. His brother didn’t answer.
“Nathan, what happened? Why don’t—why don’t you let me turn the TV back on?”
“No!”
Nathan glanced above the brick fireplace at the portrait of his great-grandfather, an old decrepit man with senile eyes, dressed in a Civil War uniform. He had been a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army, in charge of the defense of Fort Pickens, at the western tip of Santa Rosa Island. The star-shaped fortification had never been attacked, and the soldier’s sword never saw action. This fine weapon hung now beneath the portrait; at James Redfield’s direction, it was kept polished and sharp by Nina.
“Ben,” said Nathan in a low voice.
“What?”
Nathan covered his eyes with his hand, and bowed his head. ‘Turn out the lights on the patio. Lock the doors. Go check on Daddy too. Make sure his patio door is closed and locked.”
Nathan didn’t raise his head until Ben had returned.
“Daddy was already asleep but I snuck in and pulled the door to. Everything else was already locked.”
“Listen, Ben,” said Nathan quietly; “You gone help me do something?”
“What is it?” said Ben reluctantly. The way that Nathan glanced toward the glass doors every few seconds made Mm uneasy. “Is somebody out there?” He got up and made his way to the curtains, reaching out to pull them back.
“No!” cried Nathan with fear greater than his anger; “Don’t touch ’em!”
“Somebody’s out there then!” cried Ben nervously.
“No,” shouted Nathan: “there’s nobody out there! You got to help me—” He broke off, then resumed calmly: “We’re gone put a little scare into Evelyn Larkin and Jerry tonight.”
“A scare?”
“You know,” said Nathan evenly: “Scare ’em a little. That’s all.”
“Why?” said Ben.
“Cain’t you think of five reasons while you’re just standing there? They’re behind on their payments, so we’re just gone scare ’em into making their payments, that’s all”
“Nathan,” said Ben carefully: “That don’t make much sense to me. How is scaring ’em gone make ’em pay up on a loan? And why are we supposed to care about it anyway?”
“All right,” said Nathan with a wave of his hand: “The truth is, I want ’em to leave Babylon. I want ’em both out of town. I have gotten fed up with Evelyn Larkin riding down the street and yelling out the passenger window that I was the one that killed Margaret. I want her to stop it. She is in Pensacola this very minute talking to a lawyer about how to get me in jail, and when she comes back I want to scare her a little, that’s all. So she'll shut up.”
“How will scaring her make her shut up? Won’t that just make her all the worse?”
“Look Ben, I’m gone go out to the river, and I’m gone scare her, right now, tonight, I’m going out there and wait by the bridge, until they come back from Pensacola, and then I'm gone scare ’em a little. You don’t have to do a goddamn thing. I just want you out there, to drive me out there in the Scout, and keep me company while I’m waiting, that’s all. I don’t want to be out there by myself, I might fall asleep or something, and miss ’em. That’s all. You don’t have to do a thing.”
He lurched drunkenly out of the chair, staggered over to the mantel, and pulled his great-grandfather’s sword from its scabbard. He drew the blade between his fingers. The dim light of the single lamp in the room glinted dully on the metal.
“Is that what you gone scare ’em with?” said Ben doubtfully.
Nathan nodded. “See? You’re scared, aren’t you? Well then, it’ll probably scare that old woman too, won’t it? And Jerry? Jerry doesn’t look much like the type to run up against somebody with a sword, does he? We’ll just scare ’em!” Nathan laughed.
“How are you gone do it though?” cried Ben, “I mean, they’re gone know it’s you, and then tomorrow they’ll go running right to Ted Hale.”
Nathan laughed again, brutally, “They're not gone know it’s me, that’s how. You wait here, I'll be right back.”
Nathan dropped the sword onto the couch, and hurried out of the room. Ben made a couple of steps toward the gleaming blade, but stopped and turned his back. For several seconds he stared unseeing at the cypress-paneled wall that was covered with the annual photographs of the employees of the CP&M bank.
Behind the curtains drawn across the patio windows, there was a sudden soft tap, an unrepeated muffled slap against the glass. Ben whirled around, and automatically moved forward. It could have been pine straw falling against the window, it could have been only his imagination, or it could have been whatever it was that had so frightened Nathan.
Ben was fearful, but didn’t dare call out. Because he had turned out the patio lights, he could see nothing outside, but whoever was out by the pool would be able to see his shadow inside, if he moved between the lamp and the drapes. He reached over, and carefully switched out the lamp. The room became dark, but no shadows from outside appeared against the folded drapes. The moon, a waxing crescent, cast but feeble light.
He moved cautiously around the sofa, glancing down at the sword, so disturbingly out of place, and edged up to the light panel. He flicked on all three switches that controlled the outside lights. The mercury lamps tore on after a half-second hesitation, and densely pallid light flooded through the drapes into the room.
Out of the corner of his eye, looking sideways along the bank of curtained windows, he glimpsed an amorphous but definitely upright shadow. It retreated without sound.
Ben pulled aside one comer of the curtains, peered out but saw nothing, no one fleeing toward the garage, no one frying to scale the outside wall. He let the curtain drop, and then was startled by a soft splash in the pool.
Courageously, Ben snapped open the curtains, went to the door, and stepped out onto the patio. He moved cautiously up to the edge of the pool, not knowing what to expect. No person certainly: The splash had not been loud enough, and it wasn’t the sound made by anyone easing into the water either—it was the sound, oddly, of someone pouring a bucket of some dense liquid into the pooh
He glanced over the edge and looked all around in the pool. Nothing appeared to have fallen into the water. The lights shone so brightly that he could have seen a half- dollar on the bottom. He suddenly became nervous that he was being watched, that someone crouched behind the dense black shrubbery and peered out at him. He turned quickly—but in so turning, he saw a little movement in the shadow of the diving board, on the surface of the water.
He stared a few seconds, and realized that it was the shadow itself—something was wrong about it. It wasn’t as sharp as it should have been; it was unequal in intensity. As he gazed, it shifted slightly, though the light above did not flicker, though the water was motionless.
He balled his hand into a fist and knocked it against his tight-shut mouth. He moved a little, to catch the shadow from a different angle, and to his horror, the shadow turned, slowly, with a certain deliberate grace, and floated o
ut toward the middle of the pool. It was in the form of a human figure, a loose black form, with its legs together, but the arms gently waving close at its side. Sometimes it had fingers, sometimes those fingers melted into the water. Hair floated indistinctly about the very darkly shadowed head, the most intense pan of the figure, almost black. Certainly the eyes were pitch, perfectly formed and unambiguous—though entirely too large—in the gently shaped face.
Ben knew it wasn’t his imagination, for the shadow possessed a shadow of its own on the bottom of the pool, gray and quivering. He turned back to flee to the house. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the figure had moved around, ninety degrees, and was floating toward the side of the pool, in his direction. He stopped, stared wildly about, and ran toward the small flower bed set at the inside corner of the house. He dislodged one of the large white stones that formed the border of the bed, and turned with it. He could see the black silhouette already at the near edge of the pool. One of the arms had crept out of the water, but not as a shadow. A glistening fat hand, liquid but substantial, clawed at the tiles. The same substance that formed the shadow in the pool swam over the surface of the hand and wrist, like the impurities in a soap bubble.
With a strangled yell, Ben heaved the stone. It fell directly atop the hand, and the thing burst silently. It left a dark puddle by the edge of the pool. The large rock skidded over into the water, smashing through the breast of the shadow. The rock dragged that blackness down with it; below the surface, the form disintegrated, murkily dissipating like fine sand. After only a few seconds nothing was left but the black eyes that drifted down slowly, maintaining their distance apart, and faded only just before they touched bottom.
Ben staggered back into the unlighted living room, and was calling for his brother, when another shadow, its face as black and featureless as whatever had groped to climb from the swimming pool, suddenly leapt in front of him. The sword was in its upraised arms, and it swung the blade in quick circles about its voidous head.
Ben fell to the floor, screaming for Nathan.
His brother laughed loudly.
Ben looked up, and in the light spilling in from the patio, he saw that Nathan had covered his head in a tight-fitting leather mask, seamed and zippered. He wore black pants but his dark, heavily haired chest was bare.
Nathan pulled the zipper over his mouth, choking off his own laugh, leapt to the couch, and swung the sword above his head. His chest heaved in unrhythmic spasms.
“Nathan, Nathan!” pleaded Ben: “Put it down! Put it down!”
Nathan swung the sword more quickly still.
Chapter 27
An hour later the International Scout was parked on a disused logging track north of Babylon, just at the point where the dim trace turned to run parallel to the Styx, The bridge and the Larkin blueberry farm were only several hundred yards downstream, though out of sight around a bend in the river. Ben Redfield was so distressed by his brother’s conduct that, despite his fear, he had not told him what he had seen in the swimming pool. He accompanied Nathan with ill-concealed agitation through the dark forest to the highway. The crescent moon was sometimes visible ahead of them, when the track straightened for a few dozen yards, but otherwise there was no light.
“How we gone arrange this, Nathan? I mean, how you gone know if it’s the Larkins that are coming along, and not somebody else? You don’t want to jump out in front of the wrong car, you know what I mean?”
“Well, first” said Nathan, in a deliberate voice that did a little to calm his brother, “we time it. They’re meeting the lawyer at nine, figure on half an hour, forty-five minutes for that, and then forty-five minutes to get from Pensacola back to Babylon, and you’re putting it at ten- fifteen, ten-thirty. It’s a little after ten now, we're not gone have long to wait. And Ben,” he added, “you’re the one that’s gone be jumping in front of the car.” Ben digested this information with misgiving, but dared not refuse his brother, who swung the sword jauntily at his side.
“Maybe they’re already at home,” Ben suggested with undisguised hopefulness.
“They’d have lights on in the house,” said Nathan, The house is dark, that’s why we drove by.”
“Well, why the bridge? I mean, out here in the open?
Wouldn’t it be better to scare ’em in the house when there’s not likely to be people passing?”
“People don’t pass much on this road at night. At least not after nine when the liquor stores have closed. That’s how we’re gone know it’s them. Besides, you know how much noise that wagon makes. They ought to have dumped it three years ago.”
Ben shrugged unhappily; Nathan had not answered his question.
In the dark, Nathan glanced at his brother, and said slowly: “It’s not the same thing, scaring them in the house. They can feel protected in the house. They’ve got the telephone. They’ve got lights, and for all I know, they’ve got a gun. Out on the road, on this bridge, they’re not expecting anything. There’s no defense.”
“Nathan,” said Ben carefully. “What are you planning on doing?”
“Scare ’em,” smiled Nathan: “That’s all, just scare em.”
They said nothing for a few moments, while they arranged themselves behind a large clump of shrubbery. It was dense enough to conceal them, especially in their black clothing, but of a sufficiently loose texture to allow a view of the road into Babylon that curved off fifty yards down. Nathan once more secured the mask over his head, and then pulled on a pair of blood-stained motoring gloves.
The black night closed in. This was the seventh year for cicadas, and thousands of the insects clicked on the trees around them, so that the slender trunks of the pines jabbered in shrill staccato. Colonies of fireflies flashed in the forest behind them and across the road. Twenty feet away the Styx flowed black and silent beneath the wooden bridge, and only the occasional plop of a fish, a falling branch, or a loose rock tumbling into the water reminded them that the river was there.
Above, the sharp livid moon shone behind a caul of thin white clouds that overspread the sky. No star shone through.
Ben, on his haunches, grew weary. Ten-fifteen had passed. A vehicle approached at ten-nineteen—Ben first heard it while looking at his watch—and he raised himself in anticipation. Nathan clapped his hand sternly on his brother’s thigh: “That’s not them, you idiot! Listen how that motor runs—too smooth!”
They peered out of the bush, both nervously, but then with relief as a large silver Cadillac passed with Alabama plates.
“Nathan,” said Ben miserably: “Why don’t you just foreclose? Then they’ll have to leave town.”
“They may stay and fight,” said Nathan. He paused: “We couldn’t count on them leaving just because they lost the farm, and I want them out of Babylon. There’s something you don’t know, Ben. There’s probably oil under their land, and there’s probably not any oil under ours. I want this land for us.”
Ben whistled.
Nathan rubbed his sweating hand over the black hair of his belly, and turned the black mask toward his brother. Ben looked away slightly, for in the dark, the mask was inhuman and ghastly. The zipper over Nathan’s mouth grinned like the teeth of a fun-house skull.
“Besides, Ben,” said Nathan slowly. “You remember what happened last time-”
“Last time?” said Ben confused.
“When Jim and JoAnn Larkin died in the river, you’d have thought that Evelyn Larkin, that old bitch, would have packed up with those two children, and moved out then. That’s what you would have thought—but they didn’t. They stayed, and now they’ve made a goddamn nuisance of themselves.”
“Nathan,” whispered Ben, and wished he could stop himself from saying anything more: “Listen, you’re not doing this because it was you and me who threw those snakes in the river that day, is it? I mean, we didn’t mean to, and it was so long ago, and you wouldn’t have done it if you had known what was gone happen, and of course nobody ever found out...”
In July of 1965, a week after Nathan Redfield had been honorably discharged from the Air Force, he had gone with eleven-year-old Benjamin to hunt rattlesnakes for the rodeo on Jim Larkin's blueberry farm. They had in fact been trespassing, but no place near Babylon bred more rattlesnakes than the pine forest surrounding the Larkin property.
Luck had not been with them that day however, and Nathan had managed to catch only five small specimens, which were thrown into the nested croker sacks that Benjamin nervously dragged along. Not wanting to return to Babylon and Sheriff Hale with so poor a showing—fewer than half a dozen snakes and not one of them over eighteen inches long—Nathan insisted that they drown the snakes, and pretend they had never gone out.
Ben had watched with relief as the sack was heaved into the black water of the Styx. It hadn’t sunk at first, but a large stone, accurately tossed, carried it to the bottom. Nathan drove home, and casually explained to his father that he and Benjamin had been out south of town looking at a new litter of bird-dog puppies.
Benjamin Redfield, when he heard of the croker sacks and the drowned rattlesnakes found beneath the Larkins’ overturned boat, had been sick with fear; but beneath Nathan’s threats he had remained silent.
And now, as he crouched behind the shrubbery at the side of the highway that sickening fear came upon him again. He couldn’t remove his gaze from the stupefying reflection of the sickly moon, pale and cold, in each lashless eye behind the sharp leather slits of the black mask that covered his brother’s face. “Is that it?” Ben stammered: “Di... did Evelyn Larkin find out it was you and me that was out there that day, hunting the snakes, and we threw ’em in the water?”
“Shut up, Ben,” said Nathan quietly: “Nobody knows about that. How could Evelyn Larkin find out anything ’bout it after all these years? They cain’t even find out who killed Margaret, and that was just last Thursday night.” “Nathan,” said Ben tremulously: “You never said the other night when I asked you—were you the one who—” “Shhhh!” Nathan cautioned: “Get ready! I hear a car coming, and it’s probably them!” He nodded down the road. A faint troubled engine could be heard in the distance, and quite suddenly, harsh white light broke on a stand of trees a few dozen yards down the road—the car would be coming around the bend any moment.