The Impaler (34 page)

C’est mieux d’oublier….

Rally. He needed to talk to Rally. Perhaps Nergal would speak again through him as he had on the phone with the word “formula.”
All in good time,
Edmund thought. Nergal would reveal everything eventually, but it would be up to Edmund to make sure he read the messages correctly.

After his honorable discharge was finalized, Edmund made it back to Wilson in time for his grandfather’s fu-neral—a small ceremony, complete with a rent-a-preacher at the family plot in Clayton. Edmund, Rally, Rally’s nephew, and about a half-a-dozen others were the only ones in attendance—no extended family to offer their condolences, no close friends to tell Edmund what a wonderful man his grandfather had been.

But Edmund was thankful for that. He would be able to cut things clean from his former life now that Claude Lambert was dead; would be able to begin preparing for the Raging Prince’s return in private, in secret, without having to worry about family members and friends sticking their noses where they didn’t belong.

However, there were still two loose ends that needed tying up before Edmund could begin: Rally, and that pesky little problem about what the police had found in the cellar. The latter resolved itself gradually, but neatly, and began with a brief meeting in the sheriff’s office to answer some questions about how much Edmund knew. Edmund played
dumb, just shook his head and kept saying, “I had no idea,” and “I haven’t lived there since I was eighteen.”

No crime had been committed, the sheriff explained, other than illegal possession of a couple of controlled substances: opium and something called concentrated thujone.

“We had to bring all that over to the state lab in Raleigh,” the sheriff said. He was a tall, portly man with a moustache that Edmund thought made him look like a fat Adolf Hitler. “Looks like your grandfather was cooking up some kind of homemade absinthe. You ever heard of that stuff?”

“No, I haven’t,” Edmund replied.

“I didn’t either until this whole mess got dumped in my lap. Shit is illegal here in the States, but you can still get it in Europe, they tell me. Something you drink by dissolving sugar cubes in it until it looks all cloudy and shit. Christ, Eddie, I’m no expert on any of this—just going by what the lab is telling me. Shit is highly alcoholic—like over a hundred and twenty proof, they’re saying—and made primarily from this stuff called wormwood. Was popular among the French artsy-fartsies in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was thought to have some kind of hallucinogenic effects. But a lot of that’s been proven now to be bullshit. Anyway, I guess there’s a movement going on to legalize absinthe here in this country. Tastes like licorice, they say.”

“That would make sense,” Edmund said. “I remember the smell of licorice in the house when I was a kid. But my grandfather just called it moonshine. I guess the recipe had been in his family for years. The Lamberts originally hailed from New Orleans, and I remember him saying that his great-grandfather or somebody used to own some kind of saloon there.”

“The lab tells me your grandfather’s stuff was different, though. Had opium and that concentrated thujone and some other ingredients that could make it really dangerous if consumed too often.”

Never too much, never too often—be a good boy and carry that rope for me—

“You’re sure you don’t know where he got all that shit?” the sheriff asked.

“I’m sure,” Edmund said. “But I remember him saying a couple of times that he wanted to patent his moonshine and market it someday. This movement you’re telling me about here to legalize—what’s it called again?”

“Absinthe.”

“Absinthe,” Edmund repeated. “Well, maybe the old man had the same thing in mind. Maybe he was ahead of his time.”

“It all looks pretty innocent to me,” the sheriff said, chuckling. “He was making it in such small quantities. Clearly no intent to distribute. Christ, if I went around chasing every redneck cooking up moonshine for private consumption, I ’d be one hell of a lot skinnier, that’s for sure.” Edmund pretended to laugh. “And shit, last thing I need right now are the fucking Staties and the DEA breathing down my neck. Can’t prosecute a dead man last I checked. I only knew your grandfather superficially through Rally’s nephew. Other than this bullshit, he seemed to be an upstanding citizen as far as I can tell. Don’t know about you, but I ’d be happy if all this just went away.”

“Me, too,” Edmund said, smiling.

Edmund signed some papers that allowed the sheriff to retain Claude Lambert’s books indefinitely. He couldn’t tie them directly to the illicit absinthe production, he explained, as the books were mainly about botany and general chemistry. But still, he thought it best that Edmund sign a release in case everything came back to bite him in the ass. He made no mention of Claude Lambert’s notebooks.

Rally must have taken them,
Edmund thought. He assured the sheriff that he would do everything in his power to cooperate with the investigation—even allowed the fat Adolf
Hitler lookalike and a couple of his Gestapo to take one more look in the cellar that evening. And then, much to Edmund’s surprise, in the weeks that followed the whole thing just “went away.”

But then there was the problem of Rally—a problem that resolved itself much more quickly and, for Edmund Lambert, much more satisfactorily.

“I want to talk to you in person,” Edmund said on the telephone the day after the funeral.

“About your meeting with the sheriff?” Rally replied. “You didn’t tell him I was involved, did you Eddie?”

Even though Rally was over eighty, upon his return from Iraq Edmund was surprised to see how frail and skinny he’d become since last he saw him—three years earlier, on a random visit to his boyhood home. And he looked skittish, too; his once bright, smiling eyes all wide and pink and seemingly incapable of holding Edmund’s gaze for long.

“I didn’t tell him anything,” Edmund said. “Don’t worry about that. But I want to talk to you about the General.”

“The who?”

Edmund was silent for a moment, then whispered,
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”

More silence, this time from Rally.

“When you coming by?” the old man asked finally.

“Now.”

“Makes sense,” Rally said, distantly. “I reckon it was only a matter of time.”

Edmund noticed the tension in his voice was gone—he sounded more like the Rally he used to know—but before Edmund could respond, Rally hung up.

Edmund arrived at Rally’s twenty minutes later.

The old man lived alone in a double-wide on what he often bragged added up to ten acres of “primo farmland.”
Most of the land, however, was uncultivated, and the trailer itself was set back about a hundred yards off the road against a thick swath of trees. For as long as Edmund could remember, Rally had said that someday he was going to build his dream house there. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t afford it, Claude Lambert used to say. But for some reason, the old man never seemed in much of a hurry to get out of his trailer. Edmund suspected this was because Rally thought he didn’t need a house when he already had the Lamberts’ to hang around in.

Edmund parked his pickup beside Rally’s, his headlights scattering the more than two dozen cats that the old man allowed to roam free amid the junk that littered his property—old auto parts mostly, including the shell of a beat-up Chevy Nova propped up on cinder blocks. Some of the cats, Edmund knew, were former residents of his grandfather’s tobacco farm; others, most likely their offspring. Rally had often adopted them over the years, more so after Edmund joined the Army and Claude Lambert’s health began to decline.

There were no more cats now on the tobacco farm.

Edmund smiled at the memories of what he used to do to the cats way-back-when before his anointing. How stupid he’d been back then; how blind to the messages that were right there in front of him. And now, the fact that Rally’s cats were gathered out front to greet him when he arrived, well, surely this must be a message from Nergal, too.

Edmund exited his truck and climbed the three rickety steps that led up to Rally’s screen door. The inside door was open a crack, and Edmund could see a light on in the living area. He knocked. No answer.

A pair of cats began meowing and rubbing against his legs.

Edmund knocked again. “Rally?” he called. “Hey, Rally, it’s Edmund.”

No answer.

Edmund kicked the cats away, opened the door, and stepped inside.

He took in everything in less than a second. Nothing much had changed in the years since he last visited Rally’s trailer with his grandfather—the mess, the odor of mildew and burnt frozen dinners and motor oil, the junky sixties-style furniture, the racing pictures on the walls and the model automobiles on the mantel above the propane fireplace.

No, the only thing that was different was Rally himself.

The old man sat slumped in his La-Z-Boy—the shotgun still propped between his legs, his brains blown out all over the wall behind him.

Time suddenly slowed down for Edmund Lambert—his heart pounding, a faint ringing in his ears as the room grew brighter, the colors and outlines of the objects around him more vivid. He felt numb—just stood in the doorway, staring at the grisly tableau for what seemed to him both an eternity and only a matter of seconds.

Then Edmund heard what sounded like a clicking, and felt his legs carrying him forward as if controlled by someone else. He stopped at Rally’s feet.

The blood was still trickling from the old man’s nose, but Edmund knew that trickle would have looked quite different a few minutes ago. He had witnessed a similar suicide in Iraq; an insurgent who, rather than be taken alive, stuck the muzzle of a .45 in his mouth and blew out the back of his skull. The blood from his nostrils had gushed like a pair of fire hoses, his body deflating like a balloon. It had been the same for Rally, Edmund could tell: the lower part of the old man’s face and neck, his chest and the right side of his coveralls all soaked with blood.

But where was that clicking coming from?

Edmund peered around the side of the chair and discovered two large cats lapping up the blood that had run down between the cushions and out from underneath the recliner. The cats didn’t even bother acknowledging him, and Edmund stood there watching them for some time.

Edmund turned back to Rally and caught something out of the corner of his eye—on the end table, under the lamp, on the opposite side of the recliner.

It was his grandfather’s old medicine bottle. He recognized it immediately—M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E the label read, yellowed and peeling up at the corners. The cap was still on, but Edmund could tell by the way the lamplight filtered through the glass that the bottle was empty. It stood atop a stack of old-fashioned, composition-style notebooks. Edmund recognized those as his grandfather’s, too.

Edmund picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed.

Licorice and Pine-Sol.
Absinthe?

But the other batch of that stuff,
Rally said in his mind,
well, let’s just say you could use it for more important reasons other than just drinking it for fun. We’d been close to getting the formula right for a long time.

The formula. E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L

And then Edmund saw it.

The name patch on Rally’s coveralls—on his left pocket, the silver stitching against the dark blue background.

The silver stitching that spelled out
Gene Ralston.

G-E-N-E-R-A-L-S-T-O-N

The first seven letters. G-E-N-E-R-A-L

But how could that be? Rally was not the General!

C’est mieux d’oublier.

His mind suddenly racing, Edmund backed away from the bloody corpse, bumped into a chair, and stood staring at the patch in a daze, his breath coming in little puffs.

Gene Ralston = G-E-N-E-R-A-L?
he asked himself over and over.
No, that couldn’t be it! Rally was not included in the formula! Rally was not part of the equation!

Edmund dropped the notebooks and the bottle on the floor and fell back into a chair—closed his eyes and tried to focus on the image of the silver stitching in his mind.

Gene Ralston.

He could see it hovering there in the darkness, against the blue background, but still he only saw the word
General
—from an angle, out of the corner of his eye, as if it were sneaking up on him from behind. There were the French voices mixed in there, too. And there was something else—no,
someone
else. Someone terrifying.

Nergal
, Edmund thought.
Nergal was there, too!

E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L!

It was Nergal. There could be no doubt about that. Nergal was terrifying. So was Edmund now. And with him Edmund was the General. Together they would—but—

Edmund pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, scrunched his forehead, and tried to remember. He thought he could feel the old gooiness creeping back in, but the image of the silver stitching would not expand, would not stretch out into Gene Ralston or anything else that he could recognize. And then all trace of the gooiness disappeared.

C’est mieux d’oublier.

Edmund opened his eyes and scooped up one of the notebooks from the floor—snatched a pen from amid the mess on the kitchen table and opened the notebook to the first page. His grandfather’s writing, symbols and words that Edmund didn’t understand. Everything appeared to be written in French, but Edmund couldn’t be sure—felt like he couldn’t be sure of
anything
anymore.

There had to be a message in here somewhere. Nergal was speaking to him. Edmund could feel it, could see it in his mind—

E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L!

That was the formula!

Edmund scribbled the letters G-E-N-E-R-A-L-S-T-O-N on the inside cover of the notebook—quickly took out the word NERGAL, and was left with E-S-T-O-N.

The answer came to him immediately.

“Of course!” Edmund said—his mind, his body relaxing at once into the bliss of total understanding. “Move the letter E the end, and you get the word stone.”