Cold moon over Babylon
Evelyn shook her head bewildered.
“Well, I don’t have time to figure that now. Let me see: for yesterday, it says: 'A journey postponed.'”
The two women looked at each other.
“You suppose that means she was on her way back here and she got delayed somewhere?” said Evelyn energetically.
“I don't see what else it could mean!” cried Ginny triumphantly.
“What does it say for today?” said Evelyn anxiously.
Ginny turned a page: “ 'Time to settle old scores.’ ” She shrugged. “I don’t know what that means. I cain’t imagine that a fourteen-year-old girl has many old scores to settle.” She raised her blue-penciled eyebrows in puzzlement,
She remained in the room until Evelyn had fallen asleep. Jerry had given his grandmother a sedative, telling her it was a new kind of aspirin.
“You call me if you need anything,” Ginny said to Jerry when she came downstairs, “and I'll come right back out. Or call Warren, and he’ll be glad to do whatever he can, won’t you, Warren?”
Warren nodded solemnly. “I’m gone call my mama up in Atmore and tell her I’m not coming home this weekend. I’m gone stay in Babylon in case you need me. “Jerry,” the schoolteacher said: “If there’s anything I can do to help, please just give me a call, because I’m just gone be sitting there on top of the garage, hoping that Margaret is all right.”
“Now I don’t want you to leave this house,” said Ginny to Jerry: “Don’t you leave your grandmama. She’s not well now—”
Jerry knocked his wrists together violently: She’s not
gone get well, either, till somebody finds Margaret.”
It was five o’clock when Ginny Darrish and Warren Perry crossed the Styx River bridge on their way back to Babylon.
Jerry looked in again on his grandmother, and was relieved to find that she slept without stirring, He went down to the front porch with a bag of potato chips, and rocked in the swing, unconsciously keeping count of the vehicles that passed on the Babylon road, But these were so few that he took to numbering the fireflies that flittered among the pines in the yard instead.
It was dark at eight o’clock. No more cars passed, but the fireflies were multitudinous. Jerry walked to the highway to catch sight of the waning pale moon that had just risen, and then returned to the house to watch television.
Upstairs in her room, Evelyn Larkin slept badly, troubled by dreams of her granddaughter. Her gray hair matted against her brow, and the flowered pillowcase beneath her head was damp with cold perspiration.
Directly below, Jerry hunkered on a tattered ottoman, only a few feet in front of the television set. The volume was turned so low, for fear of disturbing his grandmother, that though he leaned crazily forward, he could barely make out the sound.
All around the house the pines swayed softly in the black night. Clouds had swirled up from the Gulf again, covering the moon. Beneath the high canopy of evergreen boughs, there was only the masked violet light of the television, and the erratic electricity of the fireflies.
A few dozen yards away, the Styx River moved muddy and silent beneath the black rotting bridge. Crayfish broke the surface of the shallow waiter between the sandbars and the banks, but otherwise there was no apparent movement in the river. Small animals skittered through the dense underbrush that skirted the Styx, Night birds called fitfully in the thick forest.
In all that long evening, a single automobile passed over the Styx River bridge, a beat-up green Rambler. Warren Perry was driving from Babylon to Atmore to explain in person to his mother why he would not be staying the weekend with her—she had refused to listen to his excuses over the telephone.
He slowed as he went across the bridge, and paused at the entrance to the Larkin driveway. Through the front window he could just make out the sterile glow of the television, and wondered if he shouldn’t stop; but thinking that the sound of an approaching car would vainly raise Evelyn's hopes, he drove quickly on.
After the harsh flat glow of the Rambler’s headlights breaking across all the vegetation around the Styx River bridge had faded and disappeared, and after the noise of its troubled motor was lost in the distance, the black waters of the Styx, in a place a little downstream of the bridge, began to churn in a way that could not have been caused by crayfish or bream.
The black water spiraled first in one direction, then in the other, but slowly, without agitation, methodically and calmly changing flow. At last the alteration ceased; in a slow deliberate fashion, the water swirled in a single direction, gradually forming a small downspout, a singular depression in the untroubled surface of the river. This black hole in the black shadow of the bridge reflected nothing at all.
But then there came a lightening of the spout, a dimness that wasn’t black any longer, though it wasn’t color either, but a rare gray paleness that was not so much illumination as simply a decreasing of the darkness, like the dawning of a day that will be broken by tornadoes.
That negative striated darkness turned also; it became larger, congealed in the center of the spout, and took on the form of a pale livid sphere, swimming with black impurities. As it turned, the sphere evolved lumps and creases and shadows that allowed it a grotesque resemblance to a human head.
The creases became fine and lengthy and swung part free from the sphere, whipping ropelike in the spout. The soft lumps resolved haltingly into the features of a child’s face. A second mouth moved slowly around the sphere, traveling like the eye of a flounder, and was transformed into an ear beneath the coils of rope. A gradual unhesitating refinement of the features on the water-born head reproduced the visage of Margaret Larkin, ashen and faintly luminous.
The small head fell back into the water. The Styx carefully parted the long fine colorless hair, and revealed a thin gray neck. The head and neck rose from the water, still turning softly in the same unvarying rhythm as before, but swaying gently now, as if in drug-induced reverie.
Higher still, to display a garment that was as livid and pale as the neck and head and hair: all without color, a liquid, phosphorescent grayish-white. But while the hairs of the head could have been counted one by one, the garment was indistinct, of no particular cut, with hesitant suggestions of sleeves and gatherings and fastenings, shimmering and variable.
The slow spin, gentle sway, and smooth inexorable rise continued until the delicate bare feet skimmed the water. Gradually, then, the revolutions subsided and the figure hovered lightly on the surface of the river. It turned deliberately toward the Larkin farmhouse on the northern bank of the Styx. The eyes opened, but behind the gray lids was a flat infinite blackness, blacker far than the muddy Styx in the shadow of the rotting bridge. Those terrible eyes were without surface; the lids opened directly onto noisome void and nonentity, and the black holes were fixed on the darkened window of Evelyn Larkin’s bedroom.
Later, when Warren Perry’s green Rambler was driving back from Atmore, the headlamps flashed over that section of black water that earlier had swirled with such strange purpose; but there was nothing to differentiate it from any other place in the entire length of the river.
Part III
The Thing in the Tree
Chapter 14
Early Saturday morning, when Jerry brought his grandmother coffee, he found her sitting in a chair pulled up to the window that looked out over the Styx. She explained to him with a weak smile that she didn’t want to miss seeing Margaret when she came sailing over the bridge on her wheel. Jerry made no reply to this, said only that he had to deliver a photograph of Margaret to Ted Hale, and that he would be back as soon as he could.
When he returned half an hour later, he found that his grandmother had not moved. When she saw him, she raised the cup of coffee to her lips, and tasted it for the first time.
Evelyn drank a little soup about noon, but remained at the window in her room, half the time staring intently at the bridge and starting up whenever a car came across it, but past as often re
maining distracted and not even noticing when Jerry stood beneath her window and gazed up at her.
About three o’clock, Ed Geiger pulled his car off the side of the road, on the far side of the river, and Evelyn watched him make his way down to the river’s edge. He waved to her hesitantly, and she waved back.
Ed Geiger had a favorite spot, as was common with many fishermen. A small sandbar that ran near the southern bank of the Styx, and underneath the bridge, terminated in a sharp spit. Just downstream from this gray tongue of sand and pebbles, the water went abruptly deep, and in this chasm Geiger was accustomed to dropping his line, He didn’t catch as many fish here as he might have farther up or down the river, but since he gave away all that he caught any way, the size of his catch didn’t matter to him. The bank was grassy at that point and. soft, and a large stand of pine was situated between him and the hot afternoon sun, so that he could move in and out of the shade without expending much energy. From this place too he could see who passed along the Babylon road, and was able to watch, in season, the work on the blueberry patch across the river. Today, knowing that Margaret Larkin had not returned home since Thursday, Geiger paid particular attention to the farm on the opposite bank. He was made a little uneasy by the old woman sitting motionless in her bedroom window.
Fish wouldn’t bite before two o’clock; Geiger supposed they had their regular feeding times as well. Today, however, at four o’clock, they weren’t even nibbling at the bait. When he raised his line from the water, the cricket hung on the hook limp and drowned, but otherwise intact. By four-thirty, even Greiger’s well-practiced patience had been tried; he decided to reestablish a few hundred feet downstream.
When he tried to raise his line for the last time, he was surprised to find that it had caught on something, something that resisted as no trout or bream ever had. He supposed the hook had snagged on a ledge of rock at the bottom of the river. He let the line go slack, settle; then reeled in once more. Again caught; he decided that he might as well pull until he snapped the line.
He pulled harder. The rod bowed as much as if he were landing a shark, ten miles out in the Gulf.
Jerry Larkin, at the nearer edge of the patch, watched Geiger’s struggle with interest; nothing that could pull a rod like that had ever been caught in the Styx. Evelyn Larkin too, from her window, stared fixedly at him.
The obstruction gave at last, but the line had not broken. Geiger began to reel in, but with difficulty; whatever heavy thing the hook had caught on was being dragged slowly up to the surface. The line pulled smooth, so the catch was not resisting.
On his feet, Geiger turned the reel slowly, and puffed with the exertion. He stopped momentarily, when a scrap of patterned cloth appeared on the surface of the water and then floated downstream.
“What you got, Mr. Geiger?” called Jerry from across the river.
Geiger shook his head slowly, then called out, as loudly as he could: “You come on over here, Jerry! Right now!”
Neither had heard the other's words, but the sense was amply conveyed.
Jerry, after a single moment s pause, hurried not toward the bridge, but downstream a hundred paces where a small boat was tethered. He hopped in, untied the rope, and rowed quickly upstream to the sandbar that ran beneath the bridge, Geiger was still reeling in slowly, but Jerry could see nothing in the water.
Movement across the river attracted Jerry's attention. His grandmother was hurrying across the lawn, catching at the trunks of trees in her breathlessness. He waved her back, but she continued heedless to the very bank of the river.
The hair of the corpse appeared first, floating like autumn water-weeds on the surface. Suddenly the head flopped back, and the sightless eyes stared directly up into the sun. The hook had caught in the roof of Margaret’s open mouth. Just as the head was free of the water, and Evelyn had begun to scream, the line snapped, and the corpse sank.
Jerry stumbled into the boat and pushed off the dozen or so feet to Margaret. He leaned clumsily over the side and caught his sister by her hair, and tried to pull her up. The weight was greater than he expected, and the boat tipped, spilling him into the river.
He flailed—frigid with the shock of the water and the fright of trying to capture a floating corpse—but with a great effort toward forgetting just what it was he was doing, he caught the body by an arm, and pulled it into the shallower water near the sandbar. Beneath the surface of the Styx, Margaret’s sightless eyes had stared at him through the muddy water; the mouth had gone slack again, reproachfully displaying the baited hook inside.
Jerry scrambled out of the water, shaking, and for the first time saw that the bicycle was caught around Margaret's legs. Weeping, and shouting incoherently at his grandmother to stop screaming, he pulled the corpse onto the sandbar. He untied the rope, and left the bicycle in the muddy water.
Geiger had waded a few steps into the river, caught the boat, and pulled it to shore. He righted it, then dragged it upstream to the sandbar. “I'11 go get Hale,” he said shortly, and hurried to his car.
Jerry knew that he ought to leave Margaret where she was for the sheriff to examine and photograph; but across the river, on her knees, at the very edge of the water, Evelyn Larkin wailed and caught her short breath in sobs.
Jerry cut loose the ropes that held the bicycle and gently lifted his sister’s body. For the first time he saw the ghastly cuts in her skin where the clothes fell away from her; he placed her face downward in the prow of the small boat, then rowed slowly across the river, keeping in the shadow of the bridge.
Evelyn stumbled among the pebbles along the edge of the water, and called out for Margaret, but Jerry commanded her to get back. The old woman reluctantly climbed the bank up to the lawn, and held tightly to the resinous trunk of a pine while Jerry brought Margaret’s body out of the boat, and laid her tenderly in the grass.
Jerry took off his shirt, and draped it over Margaret’s face, but not before Evelyn had caught sight of the filmed eyes, the gray mottled brow, the livid lacerations made by Ed Geiger’s hook, still with the cricket on it, that was caught in her mouth. She fell back silently, and Jerry drew her away to the house.
The same small green boat in which Jim and JoAnn Larkin had met their deaths had ferried their daughter’s corpse across the Styx.
Chapter 15
Dr. Raymond Everage, who acted as coroner on the rare occasions Babylon needed one, was also the physician who had long taken care of Evelyn Larkin and her family. He rode out to the blueberry farm with the sheriff, took one look at Margaret’s corpse, and then hurried into the house, and attended to the dead girl’s grandmother.
Evelyn twisted, moaning on the bed and convulsively jerked her hand out of Jerry’s grasp. He had tried to comfort her, although he knew there was no comfort to be had. The doctor’s unexpected presence calmed her. She lay still enough to ask, “Is she dead? Is Margaret dead?”
Dr. Everage did not answer. He sat on the side of the bed, held two pills in his hand, and forced Evelyn to swallow them, handing her a glass of water to wash them down.
“Don’t get out of this bed until I tell you to,” he said sternly. “Jerry,” he commanded: “Close the curtains.”
Before Jerry had done so, the doctor was gone. Outside, the sheriff and two of his deputies stood around Margaret’s body, not wanting to look, yet staring at the green-tinged joints, the drawn rubbered flesh, the strangely shredded clothing. Already the sheriff had taken an entire roll of film with a Polaroid camera, and was inwardly distressed that the color had reproduced true.
While Dr. Everage knelt in the grass beside Margaret, Ted Hale and his two deputies stood to one side, staring at the shrunken frail corpse.
I don’t imagine old Ed Geiger is gone be fishing in that spot any longer,” said Jay Neal. The sheriff shook his head ruefully.
Everage looked up: “Those are rope burns on her legs,” he said to Hale.
“She was tied to her bicycle, looks like. Tied, to her bicyc
le and thrown off the bridge. Did she drown?”
“Probably,” said Everage. “These bruises on her head couldn't have killed her. Knocked unconscious maybe and then drowned. Poor Margaret. She wasn’t the prettiest little girl in town, but she didn’t deserve this.”
“Could she have been hit by a car?” asked the other deputy. “Out-of-state hit-and-run?”
Everage shook his head. “Car comes along and hits her in the head, but nowhere else?”
The deputy shrugged.
“These cuts aren’t deep, didn’t even bleed much, cut through her clothes. Why you suppose somebody did that?” asked Everage.
The sheriff shook his head: “None of it makes sense. She was two years younger than Belinda.”
“Who you think did it?” said Everage.
The sheriff shook his head: “No idea, no idea why anybody’d want to kill her. Listen Raymond, can we take her back to Babylon, back to your office now? Evelyn Larkin’s bad enough off without seeing us out here in her side yard standing around Margaret like she was a dead rattler or something.”
Everage nodded and rose from the ground. The two deputies carefully lifted Margaret’s body onto a stretcher, and carried it to the driveway. Passing the house, Hale saw Jerry standing inside at the screen door.
Hale went over to the front steps. “Hey, Jerry, listen,” he said in a low voice, “we ought to put Margaret in the back of your wagon, if you don’t mind. The ambulance was being used to take Roland Phelps down to Pensacola this afternoon, and I think it would be better for your grandmama if we carried Margaret into Babylon right now.”
Dr. Everage interrupted: “Jerry ought to stay here with his grandmother. She’s probably asleep by now, but she ought not wake up in an empty house.”