Bloodstone (8 page)

He thought about a feeling that had come to him earlier as they left the inn, that he and Angel were being slowly transformed, becoming something much larger and more pure than themselves. Like being magnetized by a larger and more powerful magnet. He closed his eyes, and let himself begin to float, clearing the cobwebs away, all the trash he had accumulated over thirty-one years, going back slowly in time. Angel on the beach in Miami. A fight he had witnessed in the prison laundry. The accident and the scream of tearing metal. The first girl he ever kissed. His adopted mother’s pinched face and calloused hands. The hideout he had built in the apple tree behind their house. His childhood bedroom. He pictured a simple white dot of light in the center of his mind, a dot that grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared and everything was dark.

And then he reached.
Angel
.

For a moment, there was something. A feeling of her presence entered his mind and then fluttered away again and was gone. He caught a mixture of details; a feeling of surprise, a taste like candy apples, the color blue, the feel of a bird fluttering its wings against his skin. He tried to reach out and pull them back, but could not find them again. And as he reached he felt something else on the edge of this great black plain, something huge and viscid, open its eyes and turn to look his way.

The river ran through the dark below his window, pooling itself against the high dam, spilling over it, tumbling down through fissures of rock and spending itself over the drop of the falls. He could see the ribbon of black as it slipped silently past the long, flat fields, eddying and pooling and swirling again on its way to the pond. He was floating, riding it through the dark, coming to rest upon the slimy bank. The clearing bared itself to him like an open wound, the shack a festering sore upon its lips, and at the
window of the shack some dead stinking thing crouched among the shadows.

He sat up in bed, heart hammering in his chest, and stared at the wall until the feeling began to pass. He dared not move, even to turn on the light. He sat in the darkness of the bedroom and it was hours before sleep finally took him.

And when He stepped out on the land, there met Him a certain man from the city who had demons for a long time. And he wore no clothes, nor did he live in a house but in the tombs…Jesus asked him, saying, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion…”

—
Luke 8: 27–30

October 3, 1726

Early Sunday morning the compressor for the only cooler in White Falls suitable for bodies, located at the clinic on Route 27, sputtered, coughed, wheezed another minute, and finally died. Over the course of the day the temperature rose to over sixty-five in the small room, before dropping again that evening to forty degrees. Nobody was in the clinic on Sundays; Dr. Harry Stowe was available at his home for emergencies only.

When the doctor arrived at seven-thirty Monday morning for work, he fixed himself a cup of instant coffee and sat down with the paper, and didn’t actually notice that the conditioner was down until almost nine. By that time the temperature in the small room had gone up another ten degrees and was rising fast. The sun had been up for over two hours and the outside temperature was already at seventy. Reverend Hall had been in the heat for over a day. He had gone from blue to gray, and the doctor thought that if they waited much longer he might just get up and walk out on his own.

Dr. Stowe got Sheriff Pepper on the phone and told him to come down right away, and that maybe he ought to call the reverend’s sister, Susan. When they arrived the doctor pulled Pepper aside and took him into the cold storage room. “Only in my town,” Sheriff Pepper muttered.
“Jesus almighty, this heat. What the hell are we going to do with him?”

“The funeral’s Wednesday?”

“That’s right. And we can’t move it up. Some relatives are coming up from Boston tomorrow night. Oh, Christ.” Pepper wiped a sleeve across his sweaty forehead. “He won’t keep in here until then?”

“I wouldn’t risk it.”

“I guess I better tell Sue.” He went out into the other room, and Dr. Stowe could hear him talking quietly for a moment before Sue Hall cried out and blew her nose loudly, twice in succession. The sound was as loud as a foghorn in the quiet building.

They discussed moving a portable air conditioner into the cold storage room and setting it on high, but they didn’t know if they could find a big enough one, and besides, the doctor said, it might not be cold enough to do much good. Changing the funeral plans didn’t seem to be possible. They wondered aloud whether they could bring the body to the Old Mill Inn and keep the reverend in the walk-in freezer.

Finally the doctor suggested that Sue might as well go home, that they could handle things alone from now on and would call her before making any final decision. She agreed, and seemed relieved to get back into her car and drive away, still honking on her soggy handkerchief. Pepper and Stowe went back into the storage room and stood in front of the reverend, as if staring at him might jump-start their imaginations.

“Jesus,” Pepper said. “I mean, excuse me, Reverend, if you’re listening. But couldn’t you have at least covered him up, Doc?”

“I had him covered last night, but I want to watch his color.”

“Watch his color.” The sheriff grunted sarcastically. “You afraid he’s going to get heat stroke or something?”

I’m afraid he’s going to start to stink
, Stowe thought, but kept his mouth shut.

They stood there for a moment. “Someplace cool,” Pepper mumbled, and Dr. Stowe could almost see the wheels spinning furiously. In a moment he would be surprised if smoke didn’t come pouring out the sheriff’s ears. “The county morgue is an hour away, and it don’t make sense to cart him out there and then back again for the funeral if we can avoid it.”

“It might be the only thing to do.”

“Nope.” Sheriff Pepper scratched behind one ear. “They probably wouldn’t get rolling until this afternoon, if then. Gotta be a better way. Say, you ever find out what killed him?”

Dr. Stowe would declare death by natural causes. He had been one of the few in town to notice the reverend’s drinking practices and lousy diet, and he figured it was a sure bet the man had died of heart failure—he already knew the Reverend had heart problems. Besides, he knew that Sue Hall’s wishes were for no autopsy. And there was no point in starting up gossip. He did not want people to start debating anything having to do with religion.

“Natural causes,” Stowe said carefully. “God called him home.”

“Hell. You don’t believe that horseshit, do you?”

“I choose to in this case.”

“Well,” Pepper said, “maybe we ought to give the county a ring after all. They could get a medical investigator down here—”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Well.” The sheriff chuckled. “You know what they say. The only difference between God and a doctor is that God don’t think he’s a doctor.”

Stowe didn’t laugh. “Sheriff, are you questioning my professional opinion?”

Pepper paused, looked at him, at the reverend’s pale body. He shook his head. “Course not, Doc. I know you do a good job. But I thought there might be a few other people around here that could have a question or two about it.”

“Are you saying they might think he was murdered?”

Pepper laughed. “No, no. Christ—” He shot a guilty look at the reverend. “Excuse me. It’s been two years since there was a murder around here, and that one only happened because Jack Rice found out his wife was sleeping with that guy who lived up in the trailer park, and went nuts about it. Hit him over the head with a frying pan, wasn’t it? The last real bad one we had, that must of been…hell. The Taylor murder. I was just out of high school back then.”

Dr. Stowe remembered the Taylor case pretty well. He had just finished his internship, and had returned to White Falls that year as the school physician. He had treated Jeb Taylor for shock, and recommended a psychiatrist. The boy had been kept out of school for a few days. The murder was all the kids at the school had talked about for months. He had heard rumors about groups of them going out to the place and looking it over, searching for blood and guts and all the stuff kids loved at that age. “I don’t see what that has to do—”

“Nothing,” Pepper said. He hitched his pants up around his bulging stomach. “I’m just saying that murder ain’t talked about much around here anymore. But I think you ought to have an explanation for the reverend’s death, all the same.”

“It was a heart attack,” Stowe said. “No question. Honestly, with the conditioner breaking down I don’t have the facilities for a proper autopsy. If we call the county coroner we’ll have to wait a week for the results—”

“Sue won’t like that,” Pepper said. “Besides, she wants the funeral on Wednesday. Get him into the ground as soon as possible.”

They finally decided to move the reverend’s body to the
Church basement, which was the coolest and most appropriate place they could come up with at the moment, and load it up with ice. Pepper got on the phone with his two deputies, had them bring a station wagon to the clinic, and they loaded the body into the back. Anyone passing by the church a few minutes later would have glimpsed an odd scene; four men carrying a sheeted body on a stretcher through the front doors in broad daylight. The sheet had slipped a little as they pulled the reverend from the car, and part of a rigid foot peeked out, as devoid of color now as if it had been painted white.

Bucky Tarr, the old maintenance man who mowed the town green and high school playing fields during the summers, was also the town gravedigger. In fact, he was the town gardener, firefighter, painter, sometime plumber, and occasional babysitter. His hands were long and hard and twisted with arthritis like two pieces of driftwood washed up on the beach, and his face was dark and rough as sandpaper.

Bucky had spent his whole life in White Falls. He could remember when the new high school was built (he had helped put on the roof), and when fire had taken the old Baptist church in 1981. The church had burned to the ground, despite Bucky and others’ efforts to save it. That event had led to the establishment of the White Falls volunteer fire department, of which Bucky was a founding member. Bucky prided himself on being a founding member of just about every White Falls group that meant a hill of beans to anybody.

Wednesday morning, the day of the reverend’s funeral, Bucky got himself out of bed early and took a gander out his bedroom window. From his house he could see the church steeple rising up like a bony finger pointing at the sky, and the belly of the river flashed through the trees. A white layer of early morning mist had settled itself like frosting over the lower points of ground. The night had
stayed warm, and he saw clouds gathering on the horizon beyond the steeple. Dark purple storm clouds.
Gonna rain
today
, he thought.
Been around long enough to know rain
clouds when I see them
.

And he could feel them, too. As he dressed, his arthritis acted up so badly he could hardly button his shirt, and he wondered how he would possibly be able to grip the shovel hard enough to get through all that rocky Maine soil. He cursed himself for not finishing the job yesterday, but the truth of it was, he hadn’t been feeling much better then.
You
old coot, Bucky
, he told himself.
You ought to be retired
. It was time to find someone to help him with the difficult jobs, a young body who didn’t mind getting banged up a little.

Bucky left his little three room cottage with the screened-in porch, got in his truck and drove the half mile to the cemetery, parking in the back of the church lot, out of the way. Then he took the little portable radio from its place under his feet, grabbed the old rusty shovel and pickaxe from the bed of the pickup, and trudged back around through the cemetery gates. The new grass ran in long, straight lines between the stones, freshly cut; he had mowed yesterday morning. The smell of it filled the air, along with the damp earthy smell of graves, and told him summer was coming along right soon. To his mind there wasn’t a much better smell than that.

The reverend’s grave had been plotted and the digging was about half completed. It was seven-thirty now; the church service was scheduled for eleven o’clock, the graveside service for twelve. That gave him about three hours to comfortably finish the job, before people started showing up. Funeral-goers did not especially like to see the gravedigger laboring away as they pulled into the church parking lot. It was a little too morbid for them.

Bucky paused long enough to turn on the radio and tune it to the seventies station; a moment later a tinny-sounding number from Gordon Lightfoot was blaring through the little
speaker, loud in the early morning stillness. Bucky grinned to himself. Gordon Lightfoot was one of the good ones. Gordon Lightfoot could really let it
loose
.

Still grinning, he let himself down into the hole and went to work.

An hour later, his shirt was plastered to his chest, his back had begun to complain loudly about the stress it was under, and his hands were like two clubs. A high mound of dirt, clay, and rock rose up above him as he stood shoulder-deep in the grave. A harder rocking number was coming from the radio now, and the gravestones gave the whining guitars an odd, echoing effect, as if they were coming from more than one place at once.

Bucky swung the shovel again, hard, and felt the shock run all the way up his arms and through his shoulders. Sparks flew from the blade. He swore loudly.
Big motherfucking
rock. Need the pickaxe for that one
.

He leaned on the shovel, panting, and looked up at the leaden sky. He was suddenly reminded of a dream that had been bothering him lately, where he was looking up at the stars at night from some odd position. The stars were framed by a black rectangular square. In the dream he reached out and encountered close, clammy walls on either side, and realized he was lying in an open grave. There had been some kind of horrible mistake. He was alive, but he was going to be buried. He could not move; could not cry out; a moment later the first shovelful of dirt had hit him in the face.

Jesus, Bucky. Don’t wet your diapers
. He climbed back up to ground level, glad to get out of that confined space, and looked around. Traffic was light on Route 27, most of the commuters having already left for work. For the first time that morning, it came to him that he was alone in a graveyard. This was an odd thought, considering the fact that he had spent much of his life working among the graves. But the dream had a hold on him, and he could not shake it. The radio still played, but it did not give him any
comfort. Instead the music sounded like it was coming down a long dark tunnel. Or from underground. The voices were ghost images of themselves, pretty sad substitutes for human company.

The ground mist had drifted away by now, but the clouds were heavy, swollen tea bags overhead. The air was saturated; he could feel the moisture beading on his skin. He sighed heavily and went to get the pickaxe, which was leaning up against a nearby gravestone. As he grabbed the handle he happened to glance down into the fresh grave. A glint of metal, out of place among the dirt and dull chunks of rock, caught his eye.

He climbed back down to the bottom of the open grave and crouched near the odd piece of metal. He began to dig around it with his hands, and uncovered the flat side of a hinge, then a bit of splintered wood. It was another minute before he realized he was looking at the remains of an old coffin. One corner of it, actually, sticking up out of the dirt at an awkward, canted angle like a wrecked ship going down into the deep. Bucky swore to himself loudly.
Isn’t this a
bitch?
There wasn’t supposed to be a grave here, for Christ’s sake. This was supposed to be fresh ground.

An old grave, too, by the looks of it. The wood from the coffin was practically crumbling in his hands.

He stood again and climbed back up to ground level. What was he supposed to do now? He couldn’t very well throw the old remains away, but he sure as hell didn’t want to dig another hole six feet deep in this soil.
Face it, you old
fart. You wouldn’t be able to dig another one, not in time for
the burial
. They couldn’t bury the reverend on top of another coffin, could they? That seemed…well, wrong somehow.

A body gets enough crowding when it’s alive
, Bucky thought.
Two people shouldn’t have to occupy the same
space after they’re dead
.