He registered the car down by the road only as one he ought to know but didn’t, perhaps because his emotions were still clouded by the nightmare; and then, with suddenly changing emotion—half guilty discomfort, half delight and surprise—he saw Lawler. Mickelsson smiled and drew the door open farther. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “Professor Lawler! Come in!”
Edward Lawler smiled shyly, not quite meeting Mickelsson’s eyes but clearly pleased to see him, perhaps timidly congratulating himself on having driven all this way and found the place. He stood a little to the right of the door, his leather-gloved hands folded in front of him, his many-chinned head bowed, eager to give no offense. He wore a fur hat but with the flaps up, nothing on his ears, a white silk scarf wrapped twice around his neck and tied in front, and a formal, no doubt once-expensive black coat that considerably increased his already prodigious bulk. He looked more impressive than comic—a graying Russian prince on a formal visit. In the coat he seemed almost literally as wide as he was high; the top of his hat came to the middle of Peter Mickelsson’s chest. “Buon giorno,” he said, and moved his left hand in the faintest possible suggestion of a wave.
“Come in,” Mickelsson said, and laughed at the buon giorno, hardly knowing why. In all this time, he’d never gotten a clearer image of Lawler as brilliant, frightened fat boy, ready to turn at the slightest hint of scorn or danger and flee. His galoshes were so perfectly buckled, below the flaring, tucked-in pantlegs, it looked as if his mother had done them.
“I hope you’re not in the middle of something,” Lawler said. His voice had such refinement you almost didn’t notice. Years ago he’d studied in Cambridge, in the days of Russell.
“Heavens no, do come in!” Mickelsson said. He reached out, took Lawler’s left hand, and drew him a little toward the door, nodding encouragement. “What a pleasant surprise!”
Lawler smiled like a fat girl unexpectedly complimented, started through the door, then remembered his galoshes and, looking horrified by what he’d almost done, stopped to bend over and take them off. It was difficult work, on account of all that bulk, and in the end, sheepishly grinning, he straightened up again and unbuckled one of his galoshes with the heel of the other—at which point Mickelsson at last overcame his fear of offending and bent down with a laugh, saying, “Here, let me help you with that.” Lawler accepted his assistance gratefully, breathing “Thank you, thank you!” slightly winded by his efforts. Then Mickelsson led him into the house and took his coat, hat, scarf, and gloves. As he carried them to the closet, Lawler stood beaming, admiring the wallpaper in the livingroom—it was through the livingroom door that he’d entered—or perhaps gazing through the wallpaper, lost in ironic thought.
Mickelsson asked, dusting his hands as he returned, “What brings you way out to Susquehanna, Edward?” and then added, before Lawler could answer, “Can I get you something? Coffee? Glass of wine?”
“No, no. No thank you,” Lawler said with a laugh and a wave, then apologetically patted his belly. “I’m afraid my stomach’s all acid, today.”
“Let me offer you a Di-Gel, then,” Mickelsson said, and reached into his pocket. “I eat them like candy, myself. Acid stomach all the time. I suppose it’s the gin.”
“Gin will do that, alas,” Lawler said, and nodded, as if distressed to find Mickelsson a fellow sufferer. “I never touch it anymore.” He held out his small, plump hand, cupped to receive the Di-Gel, looked at it for a moment as if uncertain what to do with it, then popped it, as if greedily, into his mouth. He looked admiringly at the Christmas tree Mickelsson had not yet taken down, then for a place to sit, half his mind elsewhere; at last it came to Mickelsson that the man was afraid none of the furniture would bear his weight.
“Here, have a seat,” he said, crossing to Lawler and indicating the couch. “Sit here by the fire, where it’s warm.”
“Good, thank you,” Lawler said, his face lighting up with exaggerated relief. He moved obediently to the couch, turned around, taking several steps in place—like a hippopotamus, Mickelsson thought—then carefully lowered himself, his left hand on the arm of the couch. “There!” he said, and beamed like an Oriental. He folded his small hands in his lap. Mickelsson drew up a chair and sat, then got out his pipe.
“So,” Lawler said, as if something were now resolved. “I’m glad to see you’re well.” When Mickelsson raised his eyebrows, Lawler explained, rather bashfully, almost prissily, evading Mickelsson’s eyes, “You weren’t in school, you see, and considering everything that’s been … in the papers, all the trouble in the world—well, I’m a nervous man anyway, as I’m sure you know. When your phone didn’t seem to be working I just … thought I’d come out.”
“How good of you!” Mickelsson said, slightly puzzled. “I thank you for your concern.” He grinned, shaking his head. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way for nothing.” He poked tobacco into his pipe.
Beaming, eyes closed, Lawler slowly passed his right hand through an arc in front of his chest—a little like the blessing of a Buddha. “Don’t mention it! I must say, it’s a pleasure to see your arrangements.”
The cat appeared at the kitchen door, wide head tipped, then decided to come and settle, sulky, not far from Mickelsson, between him and the fire.
“I’ve been putting too much time into it,” Mickelsson said, “but it’s refreshing, working with your hands now and then.”
“You did all this?” Lawler asked, tilting his head. For an instant something like panic showed in his eyes, no doubt the book man’s horror before the mysteries of artisanry.
“The painting and wallpapering, yes, and the sanding and staining of the floors,” Mickelsson said, as modestly as he could manage. “Did that for the whole house. You should’ve seen the place when I moved in! The diningroom was the worst“—he pointed toward the closed diningroom door—”I had to tear out the walls in there, put up sheetrock.”
“My goodness,” Lawler said. He shook his head, looking around.the room with interest, running his eyes along the moleboard, the window casements, the moulding that framed the ceiling. “Goodness,” he said again, shaking his head, tapping his fingertips together on his belly. “I take it it must not bother you, then, living way out here. Well, I’m a coward, of course, myself. I read about fires, murders, mysterious goings-on. … But I suppose it’s no safer in Binghamton—that chemistry man you mentioned, murdered right there in his Ziiingroom. …” He got out a large white handkerchief and patted his forehead.
“Yes. Professor Warren,” Mickelsson said. For some reason he added, perhaps with unconscious sadism, given Lawler’s timidity—or with that same evil luck that turns conversation repeatedly to noses in the presence of a man with a long nose—“It’s an odd coincidence. Professor Warren was investigating something involving this very house at the time he was murdered.”
If it was sadism, Mickelsson couldn’t have hoped for a better reaction. Lawler jumped a foot and, with the quick, cunning look of a rabbit, glanced left and right. “This house?” he exclaimed. “What was he looking into?”
“I’m not sure,” Mickelsson said, putting on an expression of unconcern. To heighten the effect of safe domesticity, he smiled fondly at the stray cat he had in fact not yet dared touch. “Some legend, I think.”
“Legend?” Lawler echoed. His eyebrows were raised as if permanently above his spectacle-rims.
“It’s said the house has ghosts,” Mickelsson said, and chuckled. “I suppose it was that that Professor Warren was looking into. I must say, I’ve thought of consulting a chemist myself, now and then. Sometimes the house gets a strange cooking smell.” He chuckled again.
Lawler’s mind was elsewhere, his hands busy laying out the white handkerchief like a napkin in his lap. “It can’t have been the ghosts he was interested in,” he said. “I talked with our student”—he glanced at the floor, then continued—“our late student Michael Nugent, about this Warren. The man was an atheist, or claimed to be.” The mention of Nugent made Mickelsson suddenly awkward; even so, he registered with distant amusement Lawler’s use of the word atheist as opposed to non-theist. The man was, of course, a medievalist.
Lawler was saying, “Warren would hardly be interested in ghosts for their own sake, and I doubt very much that he’d be interested in folklore either. That just doesn’t seem to fit.” He sank into thought, then raised his right hand, pointing upward. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument—” He was squinting now, compressing his lips. His pudgy hands smoothed the hankie in his lap. Mickelsson smiled, then puffed at his pipe and waited. “Suppose the legend was created as a cloak for something—to keep people away from the house. But what? That’s the question. What were people not to find out?”
“I don’t know,” Mickelsson said, keeping his tone deferential. “Who’d be kept away from a house by stories that it was haunted?”
“Perhaps not nowadays,” Lawler admitted, “though I’m told this is rather odd country, full of superstitions, even covens of—witches? At any rate, such a thing might once have worked—twenty years ago, say. Something must lie behind these ghost stories.”
“Maybe the house really is haunted,” Mickelsson suggested.
Lawler laughed, a sudden chortle that made his feet jump, and seemed not even to consider the possibility that the remark might be in earnest. He sat forward a little, so that the couch cushion sagged beneath him, ready to topple and drop him to the floor. For the first time he met Mickelsson’s eyes squarely. Lawler was excited, engaged, like a child playing cops and robbers. “What do you know about the house, Pete?”
Mickelsson shrugged, but thoughtfully. It struck him that, though probably nothing would come of it, it might be a good idea, in fact, to run through the whole thing with Lawler. Who knew? Perhaps the man’s famous intelligence might throw light on the whole strange business. “Not much,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can.” He pulled at the pipe, considering where to start, then began, “I know the house was owned, before I bought it, by a woman doctor named Bauer, and I know that for years she had a feud of sorts with a man named Thomas Sprague. He was a relative of the Spragues who lived here before the doctor; in fact he claimed he was their heir. I think it’s the Spragues who lived here who are supposed to be the ghosts.” He glanced at Lawler. “The feud between the doctor and Thomas Sprague flared up in earnest when Sprague’s daughter died in an operation performed by Dr. Bauer—something about an anesthesia reaction. The feud went on—malpractice suit and so on—until Sprague himself died a little while ago … two weeks, maybe; I’ve completely lost track.” He looked down, suddenly troubled about something, but he couldn’t identify it. He gave up the search and told Lawler about the fire and how Sprague had not been in it, how the walls had been torn up, according to Owen Thomas, and how Sprague had been found days later (or weeks?) in a snowbank, cuts all over his body, one of them the cause of death. Lawler listened with his eyes closed, his large, squat body tilted forward, motionless except for his breathing. “I also know,” Mickelsson said, “that there’s a legend—I don’t know if it’s true—that the house was once owned, long ago, by Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism.”
Lawler’s eyes opened wide. “Interesting!” he said. “Warren was a Mormon apostate. I assume you knew that?”
“No,” Mickelsson said. His scalp prickled.
Lawler nodded, closing his eyes again. “Interesting. I don’t suppose … going over the house as you’ve done … you found anything?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I’m not sure myself, of course,” Lawler said. “But it might be a ‘lead,’ as they say. If there were something here that the Mormons would not want the world at large to be aware of—”
“I see what you mean.” Odd that he hadn’t thought of it himself. But of course he’d been thrown off by the fact that the ghosts were real—if they were, if they were not more tricks of a diseased mind. He backed off from the thought, then leaned forward, frowning hard, resting his elbows on his knees, and told Lawler of the night visitors, the people who’d torn his house apart, thrown out the cigarettes and liquor. “They could have been Mormons,” he said, “though on the other hand—”
Lawler sat tapping his fingertips together. “Suppose it was something like this,” he said, nodding thoughtfully to himself. “Suppose Warren was on to something. Suppose, for example, he was close to discovering clear proof of the fraudulence of the Mormons’ sacred texts.” He chuckled rather grimly.
“They must have found whatever it was, then,” Mickelsson said. “Anyway, I haven’t found it.”
“Mmm,” Lawler said, nodding, closing his eyes again. “The trouble with that is the fire up at the Thomas Sprague house. If I haven’t misunderstood you, that took place after the search of your house.”
“I don’t follow,” Mickelsson said.
Lawler remained motionless except that his arms went out to the sides in a gesture of something like impatience. “It may have been just a coincidence, that’s possible,” he said. “But first your house is searched, and then, it seems, this Thomas Sprague’s house is searched: searched so thoroughly—torn apart, as you say—that it had to be burned, presumably in the hope that the evidence of its having been torn apart would be destroyed. Or perhaps burned to hide evidence that the old woman had been murdered, as no doubt Sprague himself was murdered—possibly tortured first—before or afterward.”
Mickelsson shuddered.
Lawler too seemed uneasy, shifting restlessly, furtively scratching himself, as if mere thought might bring the murderers nearer. “What it suggests would seem to be this,” he said, grimacing, closing his eyes again. “They could find nothing here, when they searched your house, and it occurred to them that whatever it was they were looking for—whatever Professor Warren had been looking for, in his attempt to discredit the religion he’d turned against—might have been found by the Spragues who lived here before the doctor and given by them to the man who was supposed to be their heir, the man whose house burned.” He opened his eyes part way to judge Mickelsson’s reaction.
Mickelsson shook his head, thinking of the two humble Mormons who’d come to his house, then of the horde of gentle, horse-faced people he’d seen baptized in the river. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem—”
Lawler tilted slightly forward. “Then why was Thomas Sprague’s house burned? Who cut his throat?”
Mickelsson started, his blood turning to ice. “Wait a minute!” he said. He stood up, needing to pace. “Michael Nugent was found with his throat cut.” He shot a look at Lawler. “Does anyone know it was suicide? Was there a note? I don’t think I heard of one.” His next words came more quickly, and he paced again, pushing his hands down into his pockets, the pipe in his right fist. “He was a friend of Professor Warren’s. If whoever killed Warren got the idea that Warren had talked with Nugent … And listen to this.” His strides became longer, more purposeful. “Nugent’s friend Randy was run into on his bike, almost killed.” He felt a tingling sensation, a faint dizziness like rising fear as he told Lawler about the black kids at the house where Randy Wilson lived, or had once lived. If Nugent had in fact been murdered, no wonder they hadn’t been eager to tell Mickelsson where he’d find Randy.
Suddenly Mickelsson stopped in his tracks, his stomach knotting, acid filling it as if poured from a bottle. He remembered the old car in his vision of the bicycle accident, the same well-kept old car he’d seen parked in front of Donnie’s the night he’d killed the fat man—the same car now parked in front of Mickelsson’s house. He stood perfectly still, heart slamming. That was why the fat man had been there in his apartment when it seemed he couldn’t be; it was another fat man he’d looked down on from Donnie’s window and seen getting out of the car that night—another fat man whom Warren, as his wife had heard him say on the phone, was afraid of. Mickelsson’s mind shied back and he looked again at Lawler, childlike in his black suit, his eyes closed to slits. There could be no doubt. He himself had told Lawler that Nugent was Warren’s friend. He himself, he saw in increasing horror, had guided Lawler to Randy Wilson.
His face, he knew, had gone ashen. Lawler studied him, then sighed and, with evident reluctance—the hands moving slowly, like an underwater movement—drew something from his pocket. It was Mickelsson’s watch, his gift to the boy in the hospital. Lawler dropped it gently on the glass-topped table and, in answer to the shocked question on Mickelsson’s face, just perceptibly nodded, like Brahman when he grants a request. Mickelsson looked at the shotgun beside the door, but too late. In his right hand, as if he’d had it there all along—no doubt he’d slipped it from under the handkerchief—Edward Lawler held a snub-nosed pistol.
“End of preliminary inquisition,” Lawler said gently, faintly smiling. “Yes, your surmise is correct. I am a Son of Dan.”
“You son of a bitch!” Mickelsson whispered. A blush shot up into his face and adrenaline made his brain crackle. His lips felt puffy. He almost rushed the man, indifferent to the toy-like gun, but confusion checked him, a bundle of stupid doubts and questions that stopped him more effectively than a bullet could have done. He doubted that all this was real: he’d had psychotic episodes, he occasionally saw ghosts; so perhaps in fact he was imagining all this, or twisting actuality signals into something surreal; fantastic gloss. He had other questions too, dozens, but one stood out: he could not remember for sure whether or not it was the case that a Son of Dan was what he’d thought at first, a member of the old assassination squad of the Mormons. It was a ridiculous question, he saw when his mind cleared—of course they were—but by then the confusion had stopped his initial impulse. If he were to rush Lawler now, he would have to do it by courage, and that was not so easy. As if on its own, independent of his will, his brain began to calculate odds, seek out the ways of cunning. He remembered the lesson of a hundred cheap movies. Stall, let the murderer in his monstrous pride tell his story, and at the last minute, with a sudden blast of stereo trumpets and frenetic violins, some rescuer would come crashing through the window, pistols blazing, karate-boots flying. He knew it was absurd, no rescuer would come, but his wisdom ran behind his brain: he was already stalling.
His chief emotion, strange to say—and even as he felt it he recognized its strangeness—was not fear for his life or horror at life’s bleakness or even disgust that a man could so completely seem one thing and in fact be another, could to that degree despise all other people’s values—but sorrow at the waste. Michael Nugent’s fine, eager mind had been thrown away like a thing of no worth, a dead mouse from a trap; and then gentle, strikingly beautiful Randy Wilson. (He remembered how the boy would fade back, looking at walls and doors, giving Nugent and Mickelsson privacy; he remembered the shine of tears in the black boy’s eyes when Mickelsson had seen him at Binghamton General.) And before that, Professor Warren had been wasted—a man Mickelsson had never known, but surely a creature of some worth in the world, a chemist who’d been bright enough and earnest enough to get Nugent’s attention, and newly married to a woman who had evidently loved him. How could one do such things? Mickelsson checked himself, drawing his elbows in like a man rebuked. He himself was perhaps no different, really, from the fat black adder on the couch. What did he know of the ex-thief he’d killed, some mother’s son, anyway, his head crammed with the same two billion neurons (or whatever it was) as anybody else’s. So he told himself, but Nugent’s face rose before him and Mickelsson’s stomach jerked. He clenched his teeth and fists.
“Keep your hand out of your pocket!” Lawler said sharply.
“I was just getting a Di-Gel,” Mickelsson said. He had trouble with his voice. His lips were dry and thick.
Lawler meditated, eyes narrowed more, then nodded. He watched carefully as Mickelsson reached in and drew out the package. “You smoke too much,” Lawler said, “and drink too much. You’re as much a killer as I am.” He faintly smiled.
“If that comforts you, good,” Mickelsson whispered. He changed his mind about the Di-Gels and dropped them back into his pocket.
With his left hand Lawler reached for the couch-arm, preparing to help himself stand up. “We won’t discuss it,” he said. “As you know, we have work to do.”
A little stupidly, Mickelsson echoed, “Work?”
“We have a search to make,” Lawler said. Now he leaned his left hand onto the glass-topped table, balancing himself as he straightened up. “I’m afraid we have to tear your lovely house apart.”
“You’re crazy!” Mickelsson said. His slow-wittedness astounded him. How could he not have known that this was coming? The same instant, as Lawler’s hand rose from the table, Mickelsson saw—snapping into focus like some object in one of his son’s photographs—the old box with its few remaining keys. Instantly the color of the room changed, as if he were gazing through a curtain of blood. The box, of course! The Mormons hadn’t known what they were looking for, if it was Mormons who’d searched his house; Lawler himself had suggested that, and it made sense. They had known only, as perhaps some roving gang of kids knew, too, and as no doubt Professor Warren had known, that the house contained something. He remembered now, dimly, that someone had spoken to him—the U.P.S. man—of a legend concerning buried treasure. Mickelsson almost laughed; in fact he was in the act of raising his hand to point at the box when he understood the rest. The box of keys was worthless, that was obvious enough; the Mormons’ secret was perfectly safe, if it had ever been safe. But if Lawler were to learn that that mouldy black box was the object of his quest, his work here would be finished, along with Peter Mickelsson’s usefulness. Almost before the thought was clear in his head, Mickelsson had looked away from the box, careful not to lead Lawler’s eyes to it.
Lawler was saying, “We can leave your new diningroom. You already tore out the walls in there, and if you’d found anything I believe you’d have let me know.” He smiled. “Let’s start up in the bedrooms. Human beings have a natural tendency to hide things near the bed. I suppose it’s in some way sexual.” He gave the pistol a little wave, suggesting that Mickelsson get moving. “You have tools?”
Mickelsson nodded, still faint with the realization of how close he’d come to speaking of the box, and, with Lawler following, the gun trained on his back, went to get the pick, the wreckingbar, and a claw-hammer. He pushed the hammer-head down into his trouser pocket, crowded in with his pipe. He was only now beginning to register that he must actually tear the house apart, not only undo all he had done but reduce the house to less than it had been when he began. He thought of mentioning to Lawler the horror of that, then kept silent. Probably no one, not even a decent, life-loving man, would really understand. Psychological symbolism; shadows out of childhood. But ah, how powerful such symbolism was! In the hallway, moving ahead of Lawler toward the stairs, he ran his fingers along the new wallpaper. It occurred to him that if, by some miracle, he should get power over Lawler, he would certainly kill him. He felt remorse for the scorn he’d felt toward the well-kept old houses of Montrose, green-shuttered, white palaces, neat broad lawns. He’d disliked the people who owned them, he thought. People too gullibly pious, too proud and conservative; his own people, as much so as the people of Susquehanna.
The cat darted past Mickelsson’s right leg, running toward the foot of the stairs, where, abruptly, it paused, tinted by the light coming in through the stained-glass windows. The newel post and bannister glowed as if from within. With his right foot raised to the first step, his left hand on the bannister, Mickelsson stopped. He turned, and Lawler looked at him, fat rolls forming on his neck as he leaned his head. The cat moved up three steps.
Mickelsson’s fist tightened on the wreckingbar and pick. Lawler was maybe four feet away, within easy reach if Mickelsson were to raise the tools and strike; his left hand, on the bannister, would give him leverage. Lawler gestured with the gun. Light flashed on the lenses of his glasses.
“I won’t do it,” Mickelsson said. Though he spoke with seeming conviction, the hand holding the tools did not move, still calculating on its own. The swing was too awkward; he should drop the pick, use just the bar. That instant the hallway rang out with a terrific explosion that made his heart leap, his knees turn to water, his vision go dim. Lawler had outthought him. The cat lay dead on the steps—still jerking but dead, the side of its head blown off, and Mickelsson’s muscles were so weak he could hardly hold on to the tools and railing.
“Up,” Lawler said.
After a moment, with one brief glance at the cat, Mickelsson turned, a taste of vomit in his mouth, and continued up the steps.
“We’ll begin,” Lawler said calmly, “by tearing off the mopboards, then we’ll move to where the lath butts up against the doors and windows. If one wishes to hide things, those are the easiest places to open up and then put back as they were.”
“Yes,” Mickelsson said.
He swung the wreckingbar hard, cutting deep, as if by proving himself a willing worker he might escape being shot. Nietzsche’s “slave” in bold cartoon. He knew the hope was futile, in fact moronic, and knew, too, that if he worked this way for very long in his present condition, he’d be too weak to do what was demanded of him. Nevertheless he swung hard a second time, then pried away an eight-foot length of moleboard—“mop-board,” Lawler had called it. For some reason the difference between their languages was chilling. There was nothing behind it, whatever it was called, but broken bits of plaster. He stabbed in behind a second length of moleboard. Moles, he thought, and again felt cold along his spine. He calmed himself. Lawler seated himself on the bed, the gun still on Mickelsson.
“What’s all this really about, Edward?” Mickelsson asked as the second length creaked out a ways, then cracked. “There are no Sons of Dan. You know that.”
“Don’t be stupid!” He scowled, barely containing his disgust at such ignorance.
Mickelsson swung again, then pried. “I’ve seen these Mormons,” he said, already breathing heavily. “One may not like them much, but any fool can see they’re a gentle people. Docile as cows. If there really were this assassin squad you claim to be part of, people like that would get out of the Mormon Church so fast you’d think you’d walked in on a stampede.”
“You’re mistaken.” Lawler had to raise his voice to be heard above the wreckingbar. He seemed glad to do it. “First, of course, most of them don’t know about us—at least not for sure. Nearly all of them, I imagine, have heard about the massacre at Mountain Meadows, back in the early days, and most of them have heard enough rumors of things more recent to keep them uneasy, when they think about it, which for the most part they don’t do.” He tapped his forehead, tilting his head forward and rolling his eyes up like a medieval saint in a painting. “Most of them have heard how the Angels of Death”—he modestly closed his eyes—“the Danites, Sons of Dan—how we shot Governor Boggs of Missouri as he sat at his window.” Lawler watched Mickelsson sadly from under half-closed eyelids, as if to admit the assassination attempt had been perhaps a little stupid. “These gentle Saints you speak about would never admit to an outsider, I imagine, how much they suspect or, in some cases, know. But take my word for it, they’re not altogether unaware of our existence.”
“Mountain Meadows?” Mickelsson asked, and kept working. It was not Mountain Meadows he cared about, of course. Nobody’s “early days” were all that glorious.
Lawler’s voice, behind him now, had a kind of shrug in it, but no real apology. Maybe, in fact, he was enjoying himself. “Rich wagon-train from Arkansas, back in 1857, passing through Utah on its way West. At the time we were in undeclared war with the United States government. It’s a long story, but briefly, this: some Ute Indians—or mostly Ute Indians; they may have been supported by white men in Indian dress—swept down on the wagon-train. The train formed a defensive circle, and fought back. As the attackers soon learned, the train had sharp-shooters—the best Indian-fighters money could buy—so the ‘Indians’ were ineffective. That, however, was not the end. The Saints arrived and persuaded the train to surrender into Mormon protection. This the train did, giving up its weapons, and the Mormons systematically shot every man, woman, and child above the age of eight. Interesting? Hey? Think what discipline it took! How many people do you know capable of shooting unarmed women and children? Children under the age of eight, I should mention, were loaded into wagons and carried away to be adopted into Mormon families. This is the touching part: while they were leaving in the wagons, riding up the trail out of Mountain Meadows, the young children saw the whole thing. Most of them didn’t remember it in later years, of course.”
Mickelsson turned briefly to glance at him. Lawler was neither smiling nor frowning. He sat motionless, the bed sagging under his weight, the pistol still trained on Mickelsson. “And you’re telling me the Danites did this? Your people? And the heads of the church knew it? Ordered it?”
“Come, come,” Lawler said, giving him a little wave, “no childish righteousness. Nobody’s boasting about that sordid affair. But use your head, Professor. It was an act of war. The Saints had been driven from Missouri by brute force, and the U.S. Cavalry was amassing for an attack. The rules of war were not the same in those days as we like to believe they are now. It was a rich train—one of the richest that ever travelled West—and rich in arms as well as gold. In eighteen fifty-seven massacre was a standard wartime practice. It took stomach, but our forebears had a good deal more stomach than we do.” He looked down at his own vast tumescence glumly, as if noticing he’d perhaps made a joke. “A few years later, when times had changed, the church itself turned on the general in command of the operation—a cousin of Robert E. Lee.”
“Terrific,” Mickelsson said. He put down the wreckingbar to move his dresser and trunk out of the way. They’d be scratched beyond repair when this was over, he thought—then went clammy, remembering it wouldn’t matter; he’d have no use for trunks and dressers. “Terrific,” he said again, with still greater disgust.
Gently, wearily, Lawler asked in his fussily good English, “Does irony comfort you? I am not responsible for the cruelty of life at that time. You’re a descendant of Vikings, if I’m not mistaken. Are you responsible for the sack of Paris?”
Mickelsson worked on, clenching his dust-gritty teeth, saying nothing.
“But to return to your earlier, more interesting point,” Lawler said, “I think it is the case that most Latter-Day Saints, if you ask them about the Danites, will tell you that there certainly are none. But we’re adults, you and I. We know about people.
“Look at the matter philosophically. I think we’re in agreement, you and I, that people ought to act as individuals, with individual thought and will. How else can we have a democracy? The trouble is, they don’t. People are lazy, if not stupid—and I do not honestly believe the problem is stupidity. They don’t want to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera. Given that fact, one has two apparent choices: to try with all one’s might to teach them to think and to value thinking—and we both know, as teachers, how seldom that works—or to control their thinking, de-fuse them, so to speak—intellectually castrate them, you may prefer to say—and we both know how frequently, even in the university classroom, we do that.”
Abruptly, Lawler leaned forward from the side of the bed and stood up, darkly frowning, and backed, on tiptoe, with graceful, almost princely movements, to the bathroom door, which he threw open suddenly, as if he thought there might be someone behind it. The bathroom was empty, like the rest of the house. He closed the door and looked hard at Mickelsson. “Did you hear something? Is there someone here in the house with you?”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
Lawler seemed to ponder it, tapping his chin with two fingers, his lips sucked in. Then he seemed to dismiss it. “All right,” he said. “Very well, where were we?” He nodded. “Ah. Controlling people’s minds. Yes, exactly!” His expression became solemn again. “Has it ever crossed your mind, Professor, that we’re in the process of wiping out physical illness? Fifty per cent of all cancer we can stop; we’re close to winning out over heart disease; we’re on the threshold of discovering the secret of aging. Do you know what that means? Soon the one great enemy—the only one remaining—will be mental illness. Imagine it! A whole planet of everlasting mad zombies! Freedom, civility, repression, frustration … increasing crowding, increasing indignity and an interminable life for suffering it all … Your kind of dream is finished, you see, your admirable but deadly liberalism. Life must defend itself against the mad raging horde. It’s right at the door, believe me!
“For that reason, you see, we have in our church a hierarchy of knowledge and control—much as the Freemasons at one time had. It’s basically what you might call a military structure: those who know, and those who, in descending degrees, obey. Those who obey are persuaded that the church knows best. I know, I know, you scorn that. Who doesn’t? You want everyone to think for himself, starting with propositions in the original Greek.” He shrugged, then shook his head impatiently. “But they won’t, that’s the evident fact of the matter. Believe it or not, most people want to give up all traces of their humanness to some authority that frees them to be comfortable, healthy beasts. If they weren’t Mormons, they’d be union fanatics or Organization men,’ and their children would be Moonies, or scientologists, or members of the Way International. Have you read about that?” Lawler’s eyebrows lifted, his face full of sadness. “Someplace in Ohio—Lima, perhaps? A profoundly dangerous outfit, I’m afraid! Gun-crazy, and rigidly mind-controlled by drugs. We, as you know, do nothing like that. Our use of violence is selective—that’s one reason no one is even sure of the present existence of the Sons of Dan. The membership of Way International, I might mention, grows by leaps and bounds. People, you see, like to be slaves! But no organization in the world—with the possible exception of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—is growing as fast as the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints. We play no tricks, we use no drugs—we forbid escape through drugs. We do not use ‘front organization’ trickery like the Moonies—cheap house-cleaners and babysitters who will poison and steal your child’s mind.” He smiled as if mournfully amused by such childish wickedness. “No, no! We work with human weakness itself, the most powerful drug of all. The universal hunger for security, easy answers, magic, and somebody to blame. The religious thirst, as your friend Nietzsche says, for things which are against reason. That’s the formula, you know. The medieval Church Fathers understood it, especially the mainly political ones, the kind that started crusades. And every modern Holy Roller knows it—fundamentalism, what is it but a secure closing of doors, permission not to think?” Lawler’s eyes closed to slits. “Your friends the Lutherans are not so far from that, my dear Professor. And the Presbyterians—notice how they speak more and more of Jesus within! Not ‘the historical Jesus,’ pride of their tradition—oh no! Too much slippage there! ‘Jesus within!’ Saves all kinds of annoyance, you know. Who needs Hebrew or Greek to read Jesus within? I watch these things with interest, as you see. But we Mormons, we were there ahead of them all. Make no mistake, Professor! We don’t make people weaker than they are. We make them profoundly what they are!”
He stood up and came over to stand near Mickelsson, searching fussily for any sign of the manuscript or book or metal tablet, whatever it was they were looking for. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Nazi Germany encountered one great problem beyond all others; namely, human goodness. Members of the Third Reich’s mass firing squads kept hanging and shooting themselves. It was a devil of a nuisance. For all the propaganda, most Germans—unlike our friends at Mountain Meadows—couldn’t stomach the things the regime required.”
Abruptly he broke off. Mickelsson had torn off the last of the moleboards. There were odd cuts on the inside of the board, as if rats had been chewing it, but chewing very neatly. It did not seem likely that the cuts, or gouges, could be the work of the wreckingbar—but now that he thought of it Mickelsson was uncertain. It was true that he’d been working without thinking, half in a dream. Lawler looked carefully at the space revealed by the tearing away of the moleboard—he dismissed the cuts on the board with just a glance—then pointed, without a word, at the nearest window casement. Mickelsson was sweating rivers. Trembling with weakness, his chest aching, he struck at the wall beside the casement.
Lawler went back, waving away dust with his left hand, and sat down on the bed again. “Shall I continue? Do you like to be entertained while you work?” Mickelsson said nothing. Lawler pondered, sunk in gloom, then at last continued, “German soldiers had trouble killing. What did the authorities do? They took young men, callow youths—the future S.S.—and issued each one a dog, a dog the young man was to train. The young man was to live with the dog, become the dog’s ‘best friend’—and then one day on the field—you guessed it—they commanded the whole company of young men to slaughter their dogs. You see the psychology, the values invoked: discipline, self-sacrifice for the Fatherland, the assuaging power of community and peer-approval; consensualism, lofty-mindedness: ‘Even the death of my beloved dog I will endure in the name of Deutschland!’ Hey? So, little by little, those fiendish masterminds hardened the S.S. to murder—changing human nature. It’s admirable, in a way—the intelligence involved, the singleness of purpose. But listen: the Mormons never did such things—never needed to! Heavens no! The Mormons have worked—have always worked—with human nature as it is. The great mass of humanity wants nothing but security, correct? Safety for themselves, responsibility firmly placed elsewhere. I’m not claiming, of course, that the Mormons are unique in their way of working, though I think you’d have to hunt hard to find anybody better at it. We’ve had since the beginning—since the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, that is—our military structure, our tight chain of command, our ‘godfathers, lieutenants, and soldiers,’ if you will. Not everybody knows what the people at the top know, but almost everyone obeys.”
Mickelsson had by now torn out the plaster and lath around the last of the window casements. He leaned his pick against the wall and looked slowly around the room, then at Lawler. In all the dust, the man’s black form was vague, like some blurred, waiting octopus in its shadow-filled underwater den.
“All right, begin on the walls,” Lawler said. “Then the ceiling.” He glanced at his watch, awkwardly drawing back his cuff with the hand that held the gun and raising his wrist toward his face.
Mickelsson lifted the pick again, held it a moment in his two hands, then swung. More dust poured out into the room, and he coughed, then swung again.
“It’s so stupid,” he said, resting for a moment—his voice, even in his own ears, whiney. “If you really believe in Mormonism, how can you believe we’ll find evidence that the whole thing’s a fraud?” He knew well enough it was an empty argument.
“Keep working,” Lawler said; then, when Mickelsson went back to his increasingly wobbly swinging: “In the first place, assuming it’s not all a fraud, it might nevertheless be the case that something may exist that could throw doubt on perfectly honest claims. We can’t have that, can we?” He puckered his lips, prissily frowning. “And in the second place, if the whole thing is a fraud, well, so what? Show me a religion not grounded in myths of the miraculous! Are we seriously to believe some old-time Jew descended into hell for three days, then rose to sit at the right hand of God? Or that some barren, hook-nosed hag of ninety had a child that fathered a nation?” His eyes flashed anger. “Or that Buddha met a talking tree?” He laughed scornfully, without humor, as if enraged by the whole stream of humanity back to the beginnings. Then, solitary, accepting the burden, he rocked on his buttocks, trying to get comfortable. “All religions are fraudulent at the foundation, my dear Peter, ‘built on sand,’ so to speak.” He coughed, bothered by the dust or by having to shout. “Who wants a God that can’t do magic?” He coughed again, repeatedly and loudly. Glancing at him through the veiling dust, Mickelsson saw that the coughing fit had Lawler shaking, angrily jiggling all over. “What counts,” Lawler said when the jiggling had stopped and he was able to speak again, “is not the foundation but the battlements and towers—you’ll excuse me if I seem to wax poetic; it’s a standard answer.”
“Then why not be honest?” Mickelsson asked, then coughed himself and again rested for a moment. “Admit it’s based on a fiction but argue its present spiritual and moral worth—or whatever the hell it is you argue.”
He could just make out that Lawler was sadly turning his head from side to side, his eyes hidden behind the dust on his glasses. “Can’t do it,” he said. “Too many people are fools; they need inspiring fairytales. If you’re out to convert the whole world, or enough of it to give you significant power vis-à-vis the rest, you must recognize people’s weakness and play to it.” The expression of distaste was back. “For their own good.”
“ ‘Good,’ ” Mickelsson scoffed, and once more raised the pick-axe. It crossed his mind that in all this dust he might easily hurl the pick at Lawler and then jump him, all before Lawler could get a good shot off. But he did not act. The dead cat was still too vivid in his mind. What bothered him now was not just the horror of the image, the blown-away side of the head. Lawler had fired from the waist, with deadly accuracy, and small as the gun was it did such damage as one might have expected from a weapon much larger.
Mickelsson said, “I think you’re wrong—your assertion that all religions start as lies.” He swung the pick and grunted. “I think most of them start with authentic mysteries—maybe the discovery of hypnotism, not fully understood even by the priest who uses it; maybe the discovery of drugs that give visions; maybe even some actual confluence of the natural and the supernatural. I think your people are more unique than you imagine. Your religion’s a lie right from the center.”
Lawler waved it off, unmoved. He’d heard it all before, of course. No such religion could have survived this long without defenses. He did not even bother to mention whatever defenses he had. “Believe me, they were clever, those original Mormons,” he said, pleased that the subject had come up. “The way they wove odds and ends together to make The Book of Mormon was the work of true genius. A little from the Campbellites, a little from the Masons, a little from King James, a little from a stupid, stolen novel”—he laughed dully—“a little from popular occult books of the day … And those visions of Smith’s—let me tell you—masterpieces! Smith had an advantage, you see. Other prophets thought it was required that they actually see visions. Not Smith! It could be shown—has been shown—that he pieced together the finest visions to be found in print at the time.” Lawler pointed around at random with one finger. “A shaft of light from here, a couple of robed, mumbling figures from there, a sensation like drowning from another place. Theater, Professor! Torch the poor follower’s imagination!” He leaned forward, suddenly stern, eager to make a point. “Or take Smith’s doctrine on polygamy. It had real daring—not at all like the usual stuff of the day. It even had a sneaky sort of humor in it. ‘Women,’ said Smith—piously nasal, we may imagine—‘have no soul. The only way they can get into Heaven is by marriage to a Saint.’ Obviously the decent, the Christian, thing to do is to marry every woman one can get one’s hands on!” His left hand slapped his mountain of thigh; then he began to cough, nearly gag. He rose from the bed and moved quickly to the hallway door for air. Mickelsson’s hand tightened on the pick-axe handle, but even now, gagging and hacking from whatever he’d swallowed with the too quick gulp of air, Lawler had the pistol aimed straight at Mickelsson’s chest, and Mickelsson reconsidered. No hope anyway. He stood knee-deep in broken lath and plaster, so that he could run neither toward his enemy nor away from him, and his eyes were burning, blurring with tears, from the dust. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he found the hair as stiff as wire. He swung the pick-axe and yanked away the last large swatch of plaster and lath.
“Are you finished? Is that it?” Lawler called through the open doorway.
“That’s it for this room,” Mickelsson said, and threw the pick-axe down hard.
Lawler came in, the white handkerchief tied around his face, and, with one eye on Mickelsson, moved slowly around the room, occasionally bending over to examine something or kicking a large piece of plaster aside. He took his time, making sure he missed nothing, his elevated rear end enormous, his shoes toeing outward. At last he waved his pistol at Mickelsson and said through the handkerchief, “All right, we’ll do the livingroom next.”
“Why not another bedroom?” Mickelsson protested.
“I don’t think so,” Lawler said. He stood musing, only his left-hand fingers moving, fiddling with the lip of a trouser pocket. “No, I think the livingroom.”
Mickelsson could not remember ever in his life, even with Miss Minton, having felt such helpless rage. He picked up his tools and went out, ahead of Lawler, into the hall.
As he began on the moleboard in the livingroom, he asked, “Tell me this, Edward. Who is it you work with? I assume it wasn’t you, or at least not you alone, that came in here and ransacked my house that night.”
“Oh no, I was miles away at the time. The Sons of Dan don’t do ‘light’ work.” He stretched his lips flat, not a smile.
“Underlings, then. I see,” Mickelsson said. “Buck privates in the Army of the Lord.”
“Something like that.”
He dragged the Christmas tree out from the wall, then sucked in breath and swung at another section of moleboard with the wreckingbar. “I assume they drive a plain, dark green car.”
“They may. I suppose they sometimes may.”
“And when they find they can’t handle a thing, they come running to the Sons of Dan?”
“More or less. Not knowingly.” He raised a finger for emphasis. “They know I’m a man of authority, a helpful older advisor, one might say. They provide me with information—much as you do, Professor—but unless they’re a good deal more astute than I think, they have no real idea what my role is.”
“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said, turning, still bent over. Lawler’s face was—like Mickelsson’s own, no doubt—black with dust except for the eyes and eyelids. The handkerchief over his nose and mouth was now gray. “They don’t know you’re a Danite?”
Lawler said nothing. He seemed to stiffen a little.
“Who does know?” Mickelsson asked. “Do they know in Salt Lake City?”
“Keep working,” Lawler commanded, surprisingly gruff. Then he said, “That would amuse you, wouldn’t it—to think that I’m self-appointed. No such luck, my friend. I’m definitely official.”
“But I’ll bet you can’t prove it.”
“Possibly not.” Lawler gave a weary but elegant little wave.
Mickelsson slowly shook his head. “It figures,” he said at last, pausing to wipe sweat from his eyebrows. He swung the wreckingbar with extra violence. “A lone-wolf fanatic. Jesus fucking Christ.” When he pried, his hands slipped off the handle and he almost fell. Lawler jerked his gun in alarm, and Mickelsson understood that he’d nearly gotten his head blown off.
Soothingly, after he’d recomposed himself, Lawler said, “You must be very tired.”
“Sure,” Mickelsson said, and once again seized the wreckingbar, then stabbed in behind the moleboard.
“Well,” Lawler said, “whether I’m really a Danite or just some Latter-Day maniac, here I am, and there you are. The laws governing our behavior seem clear. Isn’t that a comfort?”
“Laws,” Mickelsson breathed. A long stretch of moleboard broke away as he tugged. Like the piece he’d noticed upstairs, this stretch too had gouge-marks. Insect of some kind? he wondered.
“Yes, yes you’re right to mock,” Lawler was saying softly. With his small, plump left hand he wiped at his eyes, then dropped his hand and blinked for a moment, then briefly wiped them again. “It’s an interesting point, the Mormon view of Law. Quite orthodox, really. The early Christians were lawless in a similar way. Christ, they said, brought an end to outer, that is, positive law—the old Jewish food laws, sabbath laws, and so on. ‘Be Christ-like,’ that was the only law. A very good law, in fact—though devilishly tricky, and now long past its viability. Your friend Nietzsche would doubtless have approved of the old idea, if it had been properly explained to him. You are—I’m not mistaken?—a student of Nietzsche?”
“Not lately.”
“Pity. Well, in any case, I’m by no means the lawless creature you imagine me—quite the obverse! I believe with all my heart and mind in the vision of Joseph Smith Jr., as modified by Young and Pratt and, most important, modern circumstances. A vision, essentially, of man as he is: a small group of brilliant, imaginative thinkers supported in their work by a vast army of obedient, superstitious fools who give us half of all they earn—that’s their tithe—which we ‘invest’ for them.” His eyes crinkled. “The law I follow—”
“You being one of the leaders,” Mickelsson said, and shifted from the wreckingbar to the pick-axe, preparing to smash into the wall beside the ornate walnut and cut-glass front door.
Mickelsson had hit a nerve, it seemed. Lawler said sternly, “Beware of mocking the man with the gun, Professor Mickelsson.” At once Lawler made himself calm again. “There’s something to what you say, of course. In any intelligent organization, one rises by acts worthy of notice. But do not make the mistake of supposing I do what I do for honor or recognition at Salt Lake City. I do not object to honor or recognition. I act, however, for much less selfish reasons—in the name of what is right.”
“Right!” Mickelsson snorted, and again slammed the pick-axe into the wall. “You’re a fool! You know what you are? You’re pitiful.”
“You are mistaken, Professor,” Lawler said quietly. “But there’s no point debating it.”
“That’s crazy,” Mickelsson said, and to his quick indignation heard a whine in his voice; yet he pressed on: “People have been debating right and wrong for thousands of years!”
“Only fools,” Lawler said. He leaned forward as if to spit through the filthy mask.
“Giving up everything—fifty per cent of your income every year—giving up even your brains, your individual will, giving your very life to some tyrannical cult built on violence and fraud—you can sit there and tell me that’s right?”
“Once the machinery’s in place, such questions don’t come up,” Lawler said dully, then waved the pistol, suggesting that Mickelsson get back to work. “Once a man’s in with us—given our various ‘support systems,’ as the mealy-mouths say—there’s not very much he can do, you see. Oh, a few slip through the net, turn against us. We put pressure on, of course. You can see where we’d be if such defections became common. But if the odd fish proves recalcitrant enough, we let him swim away. On the whole, however … On the whole the Saints are pretty much in your situation.” He seemed to smile behind the mask. “Not a prayer except, possibly, prayer.” He closed his eyes, rocking forward and back, then abruptly opened them. “We’ve talked enough,” he said. “Save your strength now, Professor. We have a great deal yet to do.”
“Makes you uneasy, doesn’t it,” Mickelsson said, “the thought that these Mormons you admire may not exist outside your head.”
“They exist,” Lawler snapped. “Now stop talking or I’ll shoot you.”
No prayer but prayer, Mickelsson thought, and almost, in the extremity of his weariness, laughed. The bones of his hands ached; his palms were blistered and bleeding. His eyes stung as if filled with bits of broken glass, and his lungs felt heavy and stiff with dust, as if left too long in the corner of an attic. His legs were unmuscled, and he itched everywhere. God only knew how Sprague—if it was he who’d torn his house apart, under Lawler’s gun—had gotten through it. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps that was the reason Lawler had burned the house: if the secret was up there, and Sprague too weak to tear it out, let the fire get rid of it. If Mickelsson’s strength were to give out, then, the same would happen here. Lawler would shoot him, or perhaps somehow manage to cut his throat with the knife he must be carrying, or he’d set fire to the house and burn up whatever the presumed evidence was. As Mickelsson considered his weakness and the pain in his hands, the realization was a frightening one. The only hope he had was somehow to keep working, keep Lawler at bay with the faint possibility that they might find something. Not that they would. Mickelsson felt his consciousness settling, more and more intensely, on the box of old keys sitting on the glass-topped table. He must get near it as soon as possible, bury it under, say, fallen plaster from the ceiling. Sooner or later Lawler would wake up to it, and the game would be finished. Sooner or later the game would be finished in any case. It was true; he had no prayer but prayer, a thing he no more believed in than he believed in Freddy Rogers’ stone falls, or blood falls, or the Binghamton paper’s UFOs. He glanced out at the road and saw Lawler’s antique gray car. “Christ,” he whispered to himself, “someone come help me!” Again he felt an impulse toward angry, maybe hysterical laughter. He was praying.
He thought: Suppose it were true, crazy as it sounded, that one could send out a sort of mental cry for help and someone, somewhere, might receive it? There were those who believed in such things, even certain scientists, or so he’d read. There were alleged cases of mothers who, though half a world away, heard the cry of their endangered or dying children. There was the alleged case of the Russian rabbit whose heart whammed at the precise moment each of her babies was slain, though they were thousands of miles from her and caged in a submarine. Mickelsson paused to wipe sweat and dust out of his eyes and wipe his blood-slippery hands on his trousers. The psychic cry for help was a futile and stupid hope, he knew. And shameful. Better the nihilistic courage of Dr. Destouches—though that too was shameful enough, obscene and, for all the hoopla, just one more cunning disguise for sentimentality. Psychic cry for help … Even if such things occasionally did happen, he had no power to make it happen for him. How many thousands of people died every year who would have lived if any such magic were available? Perhaps if one had studied with Tibetan monks … if one had taken care to build strong, deep friendships … It crossed his mind that his helplessness now was a judgment on him. But that thought too seemed too tiresome to trace to its end.
His strokes came more and more slowly, but the room was already well on the way to total ruin, the Christmas tree deep in dust. Once or twice, watching the pick end sink, he felt a flash of rage; but he was no longer even considering an attack on Lawler. He could hardly control the slam of the pick into the plaster, much less throw it hard enough and fast enough to beat Lawler’s gun; and his legs were so weak he could barely stand, much less charge the black-suited fat man on the couch. The thought that the house must be torn apart, then burned, made him wretched. It was only a house; but his heart swore otherwise. Tears ran down his cheeks, making his eyes still more gritty, and his breathing came harder and harder. “Dear God, please,” he whispered, and then at once, for the cowardice of his sudden turn to Jesus, felt revulsion so strong that he again tasted vomit. The ugliness of it! He, Mickelsson, whining his Now-I-lay-me—Mickelsson who himself had shown no mercy—crying out now to a God he’d refused to believe in when he hadn’t been in need. That was how they got you, he knew. Need. Impotence is dangerous for the human character.
“Sinful pride,” his grandfather would hiss. Lightning flashed in the old man’s dim eyes.
Now a terrifying sound burst out behind Mickelsson and he whirled, then was thrown into confusion: Lawler sat watching him, startled by his sudden turn but obviously deaf—stone deaf—to the scream filling the room. Lawler’s eyes rolled, alarmed and dangerous. Mickelsson realized now that he’d heard that sound before: it was the scream of the poisoned rat the Spragues’ child, thinking it was dead, had thrown into the stove. He saw the child himself coming into the room now, an image as solid as Lawler. The child had his gloved hands over his ears, and his eyes were frantic. He ran toward the kitchen. Then Mickelsson saw, not in the room with him but in painfully vivid imagination, the fat man he’d killed, eyes slightly bulging, mouth open, his pistol pressed hard against his bursting heart, his whole soul sending out its terrible, hopeless wail.
Lawler twisted his lips, threatening, and waved his gun, not playing now, growing angry, impatient, maybe frightened. “Stop fooling around!” he yelled. Quaking, Mickelsson turned back to his work. Now Mickelsson was whispering, weeping as he whispered, abject and shameless, “Please, someone! Please!” Though he knew it was lunacy, an obscene grovelling before Nothing, he concentrated with all his might on the psychic cry. Maybe Goethe’s line, inspiration to Nietzsche, could be twisted to his use: “He who overcomes himself finds freedom. Befreit der Mensch sich …” Lawler was saying something, his voice wonderfully aristocratic, it seemed to Mickelsson—silvery elocution, at once soothing and distantly ironic, scornful—but Mickelsson refused to hear, pouring all he had into his uncouth purpose, getting that silent cry to some friendly ear. The harder he drove out his cry, the more his mind worked against him, undermining his effort with indignant upbraidings and images of rebuke until finally he couldn’t hear Lawler’s voice at all. Once, swinging the pick, he remembered, more with his body than with his mind, how he’d killed the dog on the sidewalk. Lying still, it turned into the fat man. He got a nightmare image of walking with a crowd at the Binghamton July-fest—colored lights, noises—an old bum coming up to him, suggesting with an oddly lascivious look that Mickelsson give him money. He felt in his left hand how he’d pushed the man away. Please, he whispered, straining so hard the muscles of his neck and shoulders throbbed. It seemed his brain was on fire. He saw a black man on a lawn in Golden Gate Park, his temples bulging with anger as he cursed Ellen’s mime troupe: “Troublemakers! Arrogant idiots!” They too had cried out like the dying fat man, snarling at Mickelsson, snarling at Society, “the Establishment,” demanding justice—but, like Mickelsson himself, the audience couldn’t hear, couldn’t cut through intellect and standard usages to feel what the mime troupe, in its lubberly, holy stupidity was saying. … Mickelsson’s philosopher-mind kicked in. … Could not grasp, Wittgenstein would say, the terms of the “language game”—applied, Gilbert Ryle would say, “the wrong category,” as when one tries to understand music as if it were arguing in Finnish. He struggled against his mind’s angry and embittered denial of his reasonable right to cry out, but his mind raged on like an urchin in a violent tantrum, unwilling to be hushed. He tried to focus all his energy on the cry. His will repeatedly flagged, then rose again, shouting itself hoarse. Sublimation indeed! Very well, he was no superman. More easy to believe in God and the grace of the lady than in the self-saved Übermensch. He thought of his son the protester—now terrorist, for all he knew—and mixed in with the thought of his son and the nukes was the thought of his son’s fear of horses, and how he, Mickelsson, had bullied the boy to courage, in the end even to prize-winning horsemanship. The pride he’d always felt when he thought of it before, the sense that the consequences had justified his action, now evaporated: all he could see was his son’s eyes crying for mercy, darkness inside his mouth. “Monstrous,” he whispered, then remembered that, monstrous or not, if he meant to be saved he must concentrate all his being on the psychic cry, not that it would save him. (He saw the lawyer Finney ducking and running, covering his ears.) But his thoughts roared on, his wife’s voice shouting at him, swearing. He had not won, as he’d thought. His son, his child, the pride of his life, had found a larger, even crueller father to resist. He would be crushed again—as sure as day—Mickelsson could not stop it. He thought of Leslie and her cunning use of French, how she’d seized the Babar he and Ellen had given her to cry out angrily, “Love me! Forgive me! Look at me!” To which he’d responded with a sudden hatred of the French. “My God, my God!” he whispered now, tears streaming, washing dirt into his mouth. He quickly forced his mind back to the cry. Help me! he made himself think. Help me! Please! He controlled an urge to howl at the stupidity and shamefulness of it. Help me! he made himself think. More real, more solid and substantial than Lawler, Nietzsche stood cackling in admirable mad scornful glee. Mickelsson was swinging the pick as if he’d just begun, all his tiredness gone, more aching, thudding power in his legs and arms than he could remember ever having felt before. He was briefly aware of Lawler talking. “Rightness is beauty. How else can we judge it?” Then the voice faded out like a distant radio station late at night. Mickelsson’s whole body thought: Help me! Please! He felt such physical strength he could have lifted a truck. But his soul bellowed on. He thought of his mother’s cry for help—he had not heard—then of Jessie’s cry, then Tillson’s. Jessie, he thought, Jessie! Jessie!
The phone rang, then rang again. He glanced at Lawler. The man shook his head. The room was still full of floating dust, but there was no doubt in Mickelsson’s mind that the ghosts had appeared, the middle-aged woman, the man in brown, and the child. They seemed to be watching him, fully aware of him now, and possibly frightened, as if he were the ghost. The phone went on ringing. Was it possible, he wondered, that the cry was getting through—to the ghosts and to whoever was calling? He couldn’t answer the phone without Lawler’s permission. The ringing went on and on, making Lawler jumpy, his eyes moving faster. Mickelsson concentrated on the psychic cry. Suddenly he was conscious of a headache so fierce he was amazed that he didn’t pass out. Almost the same instant he noticed the headache, it was gone—all bodily sensation was gone. He could have been floating a thousand feet above the earth. Help me, please, he thought, far more clearly than before. He remembered, suddenly, the Marxist he’d met in the theater after the movie. He had a sense, right or wrong, that the man was crying out to him, or anyway shouting for rightness in the world, and at the memory of his own angry smart-aleck put-downs he felt such squalor of soul he involuntarily bent double, moving his head close to the wall he’d been about to tear out. The sheen of the wallpaper startled him, and—his thought elsewhere—he bent closer. The wallpaper brightened more. He felt alarm—terror—though for a moment he couldn’t tell why. He drew his head back. The light on the wallpaper dimmed. Before he knew what he was testing, he moved his head forward again, and the wallpaper brightened as if a candle had come near. He was thinking all this while, Please, please, please!—pouring the thought out as if it were his life. He turned around to look at Lawler. The man’s eyes were wide, astonished, but there was something else on his face, too: terrible despair. Then, as when one’s ears pop on an airplane, Mickelsson heard the real world’s sounds again. Someone was knocking loudly at the door.
Now Lawler was on his feet, fumbling in one of his suitcoat pockets, hurrying to seize the doorknob. He had the dusty handkerchief over his mouth and nose, almost black now, so that he looked like a fat Jesse James. The room was full of hovering dirt, bits of paper; the phone was ringing, and in his left hand, the hand that seized the doorknob, Lawler had a noose of piano wire.
He threw open the door and cried out joyfully, “Come in! Come in!”
The scream was like the scream of the rat in the stove. Lawler froze, the piano wire forgotten in his hand, and the same instant, nothing in his mind, Mickelsson hurled the pick-axe and charged in behind it. Lawler jerked his head around like a man cruelly wronged, and the pick-axe hit him squarely in the forehead, flatside, so that it didn’t cut in. Lawler took a dazed step as if to escape that violent football rush—he’d now forgotten the pistol too—but Mickelsson moved swiftly and, hitting with his head, slammed him against the doorpost so hard that Lawler’s breath went out of him. He was unconscious even before he fell. The scream went on, and Mickelsson would register later that it came from the child in the doorway, Lepatofsky’s daughter. Lepatofsky stood behind her, squarely braced and still. Mickelsson hardly noticed; all he was clearly aware of was his sharply outlined, red-tinted hands around Lawler’s throat, squeezing to get hold of the man’s life. Mickelsson gasped, like Lawler, for breath. Then something happened. He felt no pain, only darkness rushing in at him from every direction. He felt himself falling. It seemed a long fall, and everything was dark, growing darker.