You can’t imagine her rage — our rage, really — because now, after what happened, we were really one. You can’t imagine the sweeping feeling of intense paranoia, the conviction that every hand was now turned against us.
There were two of them. One was a bending shadow in the darkness ahead. The other
was holding a flashlight. He came toward us, his light bobbing like a lurid eye. And there was more than hate. There was fear — fear that it was all going to be snatched away from us at the last moment.
He was yelling, and I cranked down my window.
“You can’t get through here! Go on back by the Bowen Road! We got a live line down here! You can’t — ”
I got out of the car, lifted the shotgun, and gave him both barrels. He was flung back against the orange truck and I staggered back against the cruiser. He slipped down an inch at a time, staring at me incredulously, and then he fell into the snow.
“Are there more shells?” I asked Nona.
“Yes.” She gave them to me. I broke the shotgun, ejected the spent cartridges, and put in new ones.
The guy’s buddy had straightened up and was watching incredulously. He shouted
something at me that was lost in the wind. It sounded like a question but it didn’t matter. I was
going to kill him. I walked toward him and he just stood there, looking at me. He didn’t move, even when I raised the shotgun. I don’t think he had any conception of what was happening. I think he thought it was a dream.
I fired one barrel and was low. A great flurry of snow exploded up, coating him. Then he bellowed a great terrified scream and ran, taking one gigantic bound over the fallen power cable in the road. I fired the other barrel and missed again. Then he was gone into the dark and I could forget him. He wasn’t in our way anymore. I went back to the cruiser.
“We’ll have to walk,” I said.
We walked past the fallen body, stepped over the spitting power line, and walked up the road, following the widely spaced tracks of the fleeing man. Some of the drifts were almost up to her knees, but she was always a little ahead of me. We were both panting.
We came over a hill and descended into a narrow dip. On one side was a leaning,
deserted shed with glassless windows. She stopped and gripped my arm.
“There,” she said, and pointed across to the other side. Her grip was strong and painful even through my coat. Her face was set in a glaring, triumphant rictus. “There. There.”
It was a graveyard.
We slipped and stumbled up the banking and clambered over a snow-covered stone wall.
I had been here too, of course. My real mother had come from Castle Rock, and although she and my father had never lived there, this was where the family plot had been. It was a gift to my mother from her parents, who had lived and died in Castle Rock. During the thing with Betsy I had come here often to read the poems of John Keats and Percy Shelley. I suppose you think that was a silly, sophomoric thing to do, but I don’t. Not even now. I felt close to them, comforted.
After Ace Merrill beat me up I never went there again. Not until Nona led me there.
I slipped and fell in the loose powder, twisting my ankle. I got up and walked on it, using the shotgun as a crutch. The silence was infinite and unbelievable. The snow fell in soft, straight lines, moundihg atop the leaning stones and crosses, burying all but the tips of the corroded flagholders that would only hold flags on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. The silence was unholy in its immensity, and for the first time I felt terror.
She led me toward a stone building set into the rise of the hill at the back of the cemetery.
A vault. A snow-whited sepulcher. She had a key. I knew she would have a key, and she did.