“Delayed shock from the funeral,” Goldman said. “My own doctor came. Lathrop. A good man. Said she had a degree of fever and that when she woke up this afternoon, she might not even remember. But I think Rachel should come back. Louis, I am frightened. I think you should come back too.”
Louis did not respond. The eye of God was on the sparrow; so said good King James. Louis, however, was a lesser being, and his eye was on those muddy footprints.
“Louis, Gage is dead,” Goldman was saying. “I know that must be hard to accept—for you and Rachel both—but your daughter is very much alive, and she needs you.”
Yes, I accept that. You may be a stupid old fart, Irwin, but perhaps the nightmare that passed between your two daughters on that April day in 1965 taught you something about sensitivity.
She needs me, but I can’t come, because I’m afraid—so terribly afraid—that my hands are filthy with her mother’s blood.
Louis regarded those hands. Louis regarded the dirt under his nails, which was so like the dirt which comprised those footprints on the kitchen floor.
“All right,” he said, “I understand. We’ll be there as soon as we can, Irwin. By tonight, if that’s possible. Thank you.”
“We did the best we could,” Goldman said. “Maybe we’re too old.
Maybe, Louis, maybe we always were.”
“Did she say anything else?” Louis asked.
Goldman’s reply was like the toll of a funeral bell against the wall of his heart. “A lot, but only one other thing I could make out:
‘Paxcow says it’s too late.”
He hung up the telephone and moved back toward the stove in a daze, apparently meaning to continue on with breakfast or put the things away, he didn’t know which, and about halfway across the kitchen a wave of faintness poured over him, floating gray overcame his sight, and he swooned to the floor—”swoon” was the right word because it seemed to take forever. He fell down and down through cloudy depths; it seemed to him that he turned over and over, looped the loop, did a dipsy doodle or two, slipped an Immelmann. Then he struck on his bad knee and the chromium bolt of pain through his head brought him back with a scream of agony. For a moment he could only crouch, the tears starting from his eyes.
At last he made it back to his feet and stood there, swaying. But his head was clear again. That was something. wasn’t it?
The urge to flee came on him again for the last time, stronger than ever—he actually felt the comforting bulge of his car keys in his pocket. He would get in the Civic and drive to Chicago. He would get Ellie and go on from there. Of course by then Goldman would know something was wrong, that something was dreadfully amiss, but he would get her anyway. . . snatch her, if he had to.
Then his hand fell away from the bulge of the keys. What killed the urge was not a sense of futility, not guilt, not despair or the deep weariness inside him. It was the sight of those muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. In his mind’s eye he could see them tracing a path across the entire country—first to Illinois,
then to Florida—across the entire world, if necessary. What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you.
There would come a day when he would open a door and there would be Gage, a demented parody of his former self, grinning a sunken grin, his clear blue eyes gone yellow and smart-stupid. Or Ellie would open the bathroom door for her morning shower, and there would be Gage in the tub, his body crisscrossed with the faded scars and bulges of his fatal accident, clean but stinking of the grave.
Oh yes, that day would come—he didn’t doubt it a bit.
“How could I have been so stupid?” he said to the empty room, talking to himself again, not caring. “How?”
Grief, not stupidity, Louis. There is a difference. . . small, but vital.
The battery that burying ground survives on. Growing in power, Jud said, and of course he was right—and you’re part of its power now. It has fed on your grief. . . no, more than that. It’s doubled it, cubed it, raised it to the nth power. And it isn’t just grief it feeds on. Sanity. It’s eaten your sanity. The flaw is only the inability to accept, not uncommon. It’s cost you your wife, and it’s almost surely cost you your best friend as well as your son. This is it.
What comes when you’re too slow wishing away the thing that knocks on your door in the middle of the night is simple enough: total darkness.
I would commit suicide now, he thought, and I suppose it’s in the cards, isn’t it? I have the equipment in my bag. It has managed everything, managed it from the first. The burying ground, the Wendigo, whatever it is. It forced our cat into the road, and perhaps it forced Gage into the road as well, it brought Rachel home, but only in its own good time. Surely I’m meant to do that and I want to.
But things have to be put right, don’t they?
Yes. They did.
There was Gage to think about. Gage was still out there.
Somewhere.
He followed the footprints through the dining room and the living room and back up the stairs. They were smudged there because he had walked over them on his way down without seeing them. They led into the bedroom. He was here, Louis thought wonderingly, he was right here, and then he saw that his medical bag was unsnapped.
The contents inside, which he always arranged with careful neatness, were now in jumbled disorder. But it did not take Louis long to see that his scalpel was missing, and he put his hands over his face and sat that way for some time, a faint, despairing noise coming from his throat.
At last he opened the bag again and began to look through it.
Downstairs again.
The sound of the pantry door being opened. The sound of a cupboard being opened, then slammed shut. The busy whine of the can opener. Last the sound of the garage door opening and closing.
And then the house stood empty in the May sunshine, as it had stood empty on that August day the year before, waiting for the new people to arrive . . . as it would wait for other new people to arrive at some future date. A young married couple perhaps, with no children (but with hopes and plans). Bright young marrieds with a taste for Mondavi wine and Löwenbräu beer—he would be in charge of the Northeast Bank’s credit department perhaps, she with a dental hygienist’s credential or maybe three years’ experience as an optometrist’s assistant. He would split half a cord of wood for the fireplace, she would wear high-waisted corduroy pants and walk in Mrs. Vinton’s field, collecting November’s fall grasses for
a table centerpiece, her hair in a ponytail, the brightest thing under the gray skies, totally unaware that an invisible Vulture rode the air currents overhead. They would congratulate themselves on their lack of superstition, on their hardheadedness in snaring the house in spite of its history—they would tell their friends that it had been firesale-priced and joke about the ghost in the attic, and all of them would have another Löwenbräu or another glass of Mondavi, and they would play backgammon or Mile Bourne.
And perhaps they would have a dog.
61
Louis paused on the soft shoulder to let an Orinco truck loaded with chemical fertilizer blast by him, and then he crossed the street to Jud’s house, trailing his shadow to the west behind him. He held an open can of Cab catfood in one hand.
Church saw him coming and sat up, his eyes watchful.
“Hi, Church,” Louis said, surveying the silent house. “Want some grub?”
He put the can of catfood down on the trunk of the Chevette and watched as Church leaped lightly down from its roof and began to eat. Louis put his hand in his jacket pocket. Church looked around at him, tensing, as if reading his mind. Louis smiled and stepped away from the car. Church began to eat again, and Louis took a syringe from his pocket. He stripped the paper covering from it and filled it with 75 milligrams of morphine. He put the multidose vial back in his jacket and walked over to Church, who looked around again mistrustfully. Louis smiled at the cat and said, “Go on, eat up, Church. Hey-ho, let’s go, right?” He stroked the cat, felt its back arch, and when Church went back to his meal again, Louis seized it around its stinking guts and sank the needle deep into its haunch.