Glynis woke Merle up at midnight. He came up out of a nightmare with a snap that almost broke his neck. He was in his attic room, lying on top of the sheets, sweating with the heat. Outside his window the moon was gliding through a field of stars. Cicadas were humming in the pines and the generator was muttering away beyond the barn. Glynis was naked, poised at the foot of his bed. “It’s time,” she said.
Merle reached for her, and she came softly into his arms. Afterwards, in the peace and stillness of that moment, she turned to him and asked him if he would do what he was going to do at dawn under another name. He looked at her, stroked her cheek.
“Yes. If you want it. What name?”
“When you reach him, if you reach him, will you say your name is John?”
“John? Your husband?”
“Yes. His name was John. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” he said, drawing her in again.
In the early morning they dressed in silence, and shared cigarettes and a cup of her cowboy coffee in the kitchen, and she walked him to the Belfair Pike gate, where they watched Jupiter for a while, out in the field of dewy grass, cantering, his hoofbeats shaking the earth under their feet.
The Blue Bird bus was already there, idling by the gate, the old black man leaning on the door and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
Glynis handed Merle the canvas bag, heavy with the Colt and the spare magazines, kissed him, this time with heat, broke away and buried her face in his neck. And then she turned and walked back down the lane to the farmhouse.
Jupiter trumpeted from the far end of the fields, tossing his huge head. Halfway along the path Glynis turned to wave, but he was already climbing up the Blue Bird steps and he didn’t see her. By the time he was seated, she was gone into the shadow of the live oaks.
“Niceville?” said the old man, putting the bus in gear.
“No. Not that way. You go by Sallytown?”
The old man nodded towards the house.
“Mrs. Ruelle hired us for the whole day, me and the Blue Bird. Take you all the way down to New Orleans, you want. How about that? Have us a real Houlihan and we can come back in a Black Maria.”
Merle smiled.
“Wish I could. Maybe next week. Right now I’m going to Sallytown.”
“Any particular place in Sallytown?”
“Gates of Gilead Palliative Care Center. You know it?”
“Oh yes. I know it,” said the old man, more to himself than to Merle, and he didn’t speak again for several miles. After a while the Belfair Pike broke out of the old forest and uncurled into the rolling grasslands that spread out to the north of the Belfair Range.
The rising sun was a sliver of bright red fire above the eastern hills when the old man spoke again.
“I don’t believe I know your name, sir?”
“My name is John Ruelle.”
“The lady’s husband?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good you came back, Mr. Ruelle. Mrs. Ruelle, back there, she is a very fine lady. That plantation is cruel hard work, and her running it all alone since Mr. Ethan got shot by the Haggard man … well, folks have all admired her for her courage. She’s like that Penelope lady whose husband had to go off and lay siege to Troy. Been alone for a long time. Since the war. I’m glad to see you safely home.”
“Thank you.”
The driver shook his head.
“My son got killed over there.”
“Did he? I’m very sorry.”
“Damn fool war. No offense, sir.”
“None taken.”
“My son was conscripted.”
Since he was reasonably sure the draft had been ended by Congress in 1973, Merle decided to change the subject.
“I didn’t catch your name, sir?”
“My name is Albert Lee, like in the general, not like in the Minnesota,” he said, with a grin, obviously repeating an old line.
“Mr. Lee. Good to meet you,” said Merle.
“Please. Call me Albert.”
“If you’ll call me John.”
A polite pause.
“Would you be a drinking man, sir?’
“Well, I do enjoy a bourbon from time to time.”
Albert Lee’s cheek pulled back and his teeth glinted in a shaft of the rising sun.
“I just happen to have a flask of Napoleon with me. I’d be honored if you would join me?”
He took a hand off the wheel, reached up into an overhead compartment and brought down a fat silver flask. Merle got up from his seat, took one next to the driver’s side. Albert Lee took a sip, handed the flask back to Merle, who took one too. The cognac went down like a ribbon of blue silk soaked in liquid fire.
It warmed him to his boot heels.
He handed the flask back.
“That, Albert, is a very fine cognac.”
“I do admire my liquor, although I would never drink such on a normal driving day. But today does have sort of a different feel to it, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” said Merle.
They shared the flask back and forth for a while in friendly silence. Merle offered the man a cigarette, which he accepted, twirling it in his arthritic hands, his palms shining in the golden light, his eyes bright with humor and intelligence.
“A filter tip. We don’t see much of those here in the Belfair Range. Down in Niceville, maybe, but not up here. Used to buy them at the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery, put them on the ticket, but they stopped giving out credit last year, on account of the economy.”
Merle was privately thinking that they probably stopped giving credit at the Belfair Pike General Store and Saddlery because Charlie Danziger had burned the place to the ground late Friday afternoon. However, in keeping with his don’t rock the boat policy and his growing suspicion that Albert Lee, although amiable, was another one of those slightly crazed Belfair Range locals, he declined to point this out.
Instead he lit up Albert’s cigarette, and then one of his own, and they both watched the countryside roll towards them, a morning mist rising up out of the fields and all the trees a hazy blue, the dim black shapes of cattle in the golden fields of canola moving in slow motion through a soft, shimmering light.
They both saw the silvery spire of a church as the sun glinted off it, a needle-sharp nick in the far horizon, and Albert, pointing with the stub of his cigarette, told Merle that was the steeple of Saint Margaret’s Church in Sallytown.
At the name, Merle’s belly tightened and he sat back, watching the church spire as if it were the tip of a knife.
Albert sensed the change.
“Don’t want to push myself in on a private affair, but could you use some help, when we get to Sallytown?”
“What sort of help?”
“Well, pretty much everybody knows you going up there to call out Mr. Abel Teague.”
“They do?” said Merle, surprised but not shocked. It would be damn unnatural if the word hadn’t gotten around.
“Yes, they do,” said Albert Lee, looking over his shoulder at him. “And many think it’s been a time coming, too. Mrs. Ruelle knows, I suspect.”
“Yes. She does.”
“I thought she looked long at you, like she was afraid she might not see you again. Were you going to follow the Irish rules?”
“He had his chance.”
A silence.
“The lady said there might be two others coming along, relatives of hers who owed the Ruelles a debt, a Mr. Haggard and a Mr. Walker, but you are here alone, so I guess there won’t be what we used to call seconds, and anyway, Mr. Teague, he has been asked to stand before, and refused.”
“So I hear.”
They were rolling in past the edge of town, a tiny cluster of Victorian houses, still in the shadows, neat redbrick homes with narrow windows, white-painted porches, sheltering under tree-shaded avenues. They bumped and chugged along the single main street, all the stores shuttered and closed at this early hour. Merle’s heart was racing and he was making an effort to slow it down.
“The hospital is set apart from town, over on Eufaula Lane, inside an old park there, about two block up and we take a right. You never said if you wanted some help, John? I always keep something in the bus against bad men who might get on.”
He leaned to his left, reached down beside his seat, and pulled out a medium-framed revolver, stainless-steel, angular, brute-ugly but so clean it shimmered in the light.
“It’s a Forehand and Wadsworth I had from my daddy who went to the South African War. It fires a .38-caliber bullet. Not good for long-range work, but it will do pretty good for in close. I would take it as a personal favor if you were to allow me to walk along with you.”
He wheeled the bus around the corner and pulled it to a stop about a hundred feet down from the gates of a single-story flat-roofed structure made of pale yellow brick, looking very much like a blockhouse instead of a palliative care center.
The neighborhood around it was shady and old-fashioned, a few warm yellow lights showing in the windows here and there, porch lamps glimmering in the early-morning light. A dog started to bark in the distance, and from somewhere else came the sound of music. Swifts and swallows and mourning doves were calling in the leafy canopy over the street.
The palliative care center was fenced off by wrought-iron spikes eight feet tall, with a single open gate in front of the entrance. The clinic sat in the middle of a large green park studded with willows and live oaks draped in shaggy tendrils of moss, still shrouded in a heavy morning mist. The clinic had few windows, some of which were showing a cool institutional light. They could see only one set of doors, two broad wooden slabs under a wide stone archway, in front of a circular drive.
There was a small metal sign, blue, with gilt letters, mounted on the fence near the open gate.
GATES OF GILEAD
PALLIATIVE CARE CENTER
PRIVATE NO VISITORS
Two white men in blue shirts and black trousers were sitting under the shelter of the archway, tilting back in wooden chairs, smoking cigarettes, and by the set of their heads, watching the Blue Bird as it sat there, idling, its engine wheezing and chuffing.
“I think we are expected,” said Albert, looking at the men under the arch. “What would you like to do, John?”
Merle stood up, reached for the flask on the dashboard, sipped at it, handed it to Albert Lee.
“I accept your offer of walking along with me, if you still feel like it?”
This brought a huge smile.
“Thank you. I could use some excitement.”
He took a sip, twisted the cap on tight, put it away in the compartment, and shut off the bus. He took the keys out and put them in the compartment beside the flask.
“Best to leave the keys here, in case one of us is coming back alone.”
He pushed himself up with a groan, looked at the revolver in his hand, checked to see that he had all six chambers loaded, and then looked at Merle, his eyes calm and clear, watching Merle’s hands as he slid out the magazine, checked the chamber and the magazine, loaded the magazine back in, and racked the slide, a satisfying metallic clank. They shook hands and Merle stepped down out of the bus. The two men in shirtsleeves were on their feet now, and staring hard at them.
And then something happened, almost as soon as his boots hit the sidewalk. Merle was standing there, fighting his adrenaline, taking in the street, the low brick building, the sleepy residential neighborhood, when, in some indefinable but powerful way, the entire street changed.
The comfortable old houses were engulfed in a thickening mist, their porch lights dwindling into yellow sparks and then winking out, the warm yellow windows going black. They were alone in a dense fog with only the Gates of Gilead showing dimly through the haze, a low barrow-like bulk.
The milky light of the early morning turned yellowish and sickly. The scent of spring earth and cut grass and cool morning air changed into a brackish reek, sulfur and ammonia and the stink of dead things half-buried.
The low brick building seemed to dig itself deeper into the green lawn surrounding it, and grow darker, more sealed, more remote from the normal world, like an animal pulling back into a cave. The live oaks sheltering it grew blacker, larger, and their branches creaked like old bones, their leaves rustling as if they were suddenly alive.
A palpable miasma of resentment, of menace, seemed to breathe in the air above them and slip snakelike around their bodies as they stood there in silence. The cool fluorescent light at the windows was now gone, the window slits black and closed.
The calling of birds in the trees stopped abruptly, the dog was no longer barking, there was no distant music on the wind. The morning breeze withered away into a low whispering murmur that seemed to come up from the earth under their boots.
Wherever they’d been a moment ago, they weren’t in that place anymore. Merle walked a way along the lane and turned as Albert came up and stood beside him.
“Did we just see that?”
“We saw it,” said Merle, in a tight voice, swallowing his fear. “Everything changed.”
“I know. But how?”
Merle swallowed again.
“I don’t know.”
Two man-shaped figures with shotguns were walking towards them out of the mist, tall black shadows in the fog.
“More of them,” said Albert Lee. “Maybe we should get back on the bus. This is all wrong.”
“It is,” said Merle. “But we have to finish it anyway. I won’t blame you if you want to get back inside. Just don’t pull away until it’s settled.”
Albert Lee shook his head.
“If you’re staying, I’m staying. Do we have a plan?”
“Not get shot.”
Albert straightened his back, adjusted his jacket, blew out a breath, flashed a wry smile.
“Good plan.”
They walked slowly up the street, lowering their heads as they passed under a hanging willow, keeping a good distance apart, Merle with the Colt in his right hand, down at his side, Albert with his revolver in his left hand, held at an angle. They were looking at four men at least, the two in the street in front of them, and the two waiting by the wooden doors of the hospital.
One of the shirtsleeved men turned around, opened the wooden doors and went inside, leaving the doors open. The other man, older, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and the look of a small-town sheriff, stepped out through the gate when they were twenty feet away, walked out into the middle of the road, blocking the lane, stepping a few feet in front of the other two men. They could see he had a double-barreled 12-gauge hanging down by his right side, held in one rough hand.
“State your business.”
“We’re here to see Abel Teague,” said Merle, still moving forward. He could feel Albert stepping out to his left. Depending on the choke and the shell, a 12-gauge at twenty feet had a cone of fire three feet wide.
The man frowned at them.
“He’s not seeing your kind. He never sees your kind. You read the sign?”
“Our kind?” said Merle. “What’s our kind?”
The man’s eyes flicked from Merle to Albert and back to Merle.
“You know what you are.”
“What are we?”
His face grew less human.
“Bounty men. You’re from her.”
“And who are you from?”
Now he looked confused by the question.
“Abel Teague?”
“Yes. We’re with Mr. Teague.”
“And what are you?”
The man’s eyes grew remote, and a cold light grew there.
“We are here. We live in this place. We don’t go anywhere else. There isn’t anywhere else. We live in this place and we take care of Mr. Teague. We do his work.”
Albert spoke, in a shaky voice.
“John, I think we need to stop talking to this man.”
The man turned to watch as Albert spoke, his features seeming to shift and shimmer as he did so.
There was a long silence.
“Albert, you still with me?”
“Yes. I am.”
Merle took another step forward, set himself.
“We’re here to see Abel Teague,” he said, his anger welling up. “Step out of the way and let us go by.”
The man stared at Merle for another second, his eyes still changing, and then he lifted the shotgun, the muzzle swinging around, and Merle shot him in the middle of the forehead.
The slug took most of the top of the man’s head off. The sound slammed around in the misty parkland and a huge flock of birds—crows—rose up in a faint cloud in the mist and flew in circles, shrieking and calling.
The man went down onto his knees, the shotgun clattering away, and then he pitched forward, landing on his face with a meaty crunch.
He stayed there.
Albert had his pistol up and the sharp crack of its muzzle blast rang in Merle’s right ear.
One of the men behind the fallen man had a large black hole appear in his face, and he tumbled back and fell. The other man had his weapon raised—there was a deafening crack and a billow of blue fire exploded from the muzzle.
Merle felt hot lead pellets plucking at his neck and his left ear as the shot cloud flew past him. He stood straight up as the figure racked another shell into the chamber and shot the man four times in the head. The skull exploded outwards, black blood and bone chips flying away in a ragged cloud, but the man stayed on his feet for another half second, still fumbling at the shotgun.
Albert stepped in and fired two rounds into the man’s chest and he finally went down. Albert leaned in, tugged the shotgun free, tossed it into the fogbank, where it struck with a muffled clatter.
He looked down at the bodies, then at Merle.
“Well, ghost or man, looks like we can kill them.”
They reloaded, kept walking, stepped past the three dead men, reached the open gate and turned into the walkway. A jet of blue flame erupted from the dark inside the open doors.
Merle felt a stinging lash of fire across the right side of his face. He heard Albert’s .38 snapping at his right shoulder.
Someone inside the doorway fell forward into the light, collapsed onto the walk, still moving, his thick arms trapped under his chest. Merle put a round into the back of the man’s skull, the explosion ringing up and down the darkened hallway.
Albert stepped past him and walked farther into the hall. At the far end, there was a sparkle of blue fire and then several popping cracks. A slug snapped past Merle’s cheek. Albert grunted, slumped sideways and went down on a knee, raising his revolver. Merle and Albert both fired at the same time, the solid boom of the Colt and the lighter crack of the .38 blending together, the muzzle flares lighting up a crouching figure at the far end of the hall, a figure in dark blue.
Albert’s rounds struck the terrazzo floor and went wild and then he was out of ammunition and had to stop to reload. The figure down at the end of the hall was still firing at them, visible only by the tiny blue flash of his gun muzzle.
Merle reloaded the .45, racked the slide, stepped past Albert, and walked farther down the hall with slugs plucking at his shirt and hair.
He steadied his hand and put three heavy rounds into the man, aiming by his own muzzle flash. He saw the rounds hit, saw the guard falling back.
The hallway was full of gun smoke and the reek of cordite. His right ear was ringing like a bell.
“See if there’s a light,” said Albert, still on his knee, holding his belly with his left hand, the revolver in his right. Merle felt around the entrance, flicked a switch: nothing happened.
Albert sighed, pulled his hand away, looked at his bloody palm. Merle realized he was still standing in the pale light from outside, a perfect target. He knelt down, got a grip on Albert’s coat, and pulled him along a few yards, getting their backs up against the brick wall.
Nothing moved.
There was no sound at all.
The place was black and silent.
Albert was having trouble breathing.
Merle could smell blood on him.
“I have to go on down,” he said to Albert. “Will you be all right?”
“You go on down,” said Albert. “I’ll be fine.”
Merle checked his magazine, changed it out for his third—and last—magazine, racked the slide again. He patted Albert on the shoulder, stood up, keeping his back off the wall, remembering from somewhere that slugs fired in a hallway tended to ride the surface of the wall, if they hit, so if you stood out a few inches, the slug would zip by you. Merle hoped this was true.
He made his way down the long narrow hallway, past a series of doors that reminded him of the doors he had passed on his way to Rainey Teague’s room at Lady Grace. He got all the way down the hall and felt his boot stepping on something soft.
He knelt down and felt a hand, a man’s hand, cold and limp, and wet. He lifted his hand and smelled cold copper on his fingers.
The man on the floor moved and now he could hear his breathing, short and ragged. He touched the floor around him, found a small semi-auto pistol. He knelt there for a few minutes, listening to the man die, trying to see into the darkness.
“Albert?”
His reply came back, faint, hoarse, echoing.
“I’m here, John.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’ll do. How are you?”
“I think there’s nobody left. I’m going to go look around. Stay there. Reload.”
“I already reloaded. You take care.”
“I will.”
Merle stood up, moved forward to the end of the hall, reached a flat brick wall. The place had no windows. No glass inside either. No mirrors. It really was a kind of blockhouse. From outside, you could see the building was in the shape of a T.
He reached the end of the main hall.
The T went right and left, although he couldn’t see a thing and might as well have been blind. Whoever lived here didn’t like bright lights, didn’t like windows, didn’t like glass. He looked into the dark on his left, saw nothing, looked around to his right and saw a thin sliver of flickering light at the far end of the passage.
A doorway, closed, with something beyond it, flickering. A familiar flickering blue light.
A television.
They may have cut the power out here, but it was still on in that room. He reached up and felt his left temple, touched raw flesh and warm wet liquid. He flexed his cheek and regretted it.
He touched his left ear, or tried to.
He didn’t have one anymore.
But he was still on his feet and still moving.
Sliding his hand along the wall, stepping carefully, he counted off a hundred paces down to the closed door at the other end of the hall.
There was more light down here, coming from under the door, and as his eyes adjusted he saw that he was coming up on a gurney, parked outside a room. Something was lying on the gurney, covered by a sheet. He reached it, keeping the Colt on the shape, put out a hand, and lifted the cover.
A dough-faced old man, cheeks blown out, eyes wide open, glazed in death. He reached down, felt for the wrist, and lifted it into the light coming from under the door, read the wristband:
Zabriskie, Gunther (Plug) DEMENTIA—DNR
Not Abel Teague, anyway.
They had emptied out the whole place, except for the dead. He let the wrist fall, which it did slowly, rigor setting in, covered the old man again, and came to stand in front of the last door. He could hear voices, tinny and brittle, clearly coming from the television.
He reached out, tried the handle.
The door wasn’t locked.
He steadied the Colt and used his left foot to ease the door open. A dark cell-like room, completely windowless, four tiled walls, the room about fifteen by twenty, almost completely empty, tile floors, a flat painted ceiling.
There were only a few pieces of furniture in the room, a small flat-screen television set sitting on a card table, its glow lighting up the room, tuned to a cable news station, a large green leather armchair placed in front of the television, its back to the door.
Over the top of the chair back Merle could see a dome of age-spotted skin surrounded by a halo of light from the television. On the television, two very blond females were having a heated argument over something to do with Israel.
Merle came forward into the room, looking around carefully, stepped around the chair, and looked down at the man in the chair. A very old man, but not a ruin, still erect, completely bald, his skin spotted and withered, his cheeks sagging down in folds, his eyes nearly shut, glinting in the light from the television. The man was wearing an ornate silk bathrobe over blue silk pajamas. He had leather slippers on his feet, lined with lamb’s wool. His large bony hands were resting on his lap, one hand holding a television remote, the other a heavy glass with something pale in it, the liquid also luminous with the light from the television.
A crystal decanter full of a clear liquid was sitting on the card table beside the television, next to a silver bucket full of ice.
The man lifted the remote, turned off the sound, looked up at Merle, his wide-set gray eyes empty and cold. His thin blue lips moved.
“I heard shooting,” he said. “I guess you’ve shot all my people, or we wouldn’t be talking.”
“I guess I did.”
Abel Teague studied him.
“You could see them?”
“I shot them, didn’t I?”
He blinked at Merle.
“If you could see them, son, and they could see you, then you’re in more trouble than I am. You’re more than halfway gone already.”
“What were they?”
The man shrugged, waved a bony hand in dismissal, took a sip of his drink, smiled up at Merle. His teeth were strong and white.
“My people. I found out how to call them. Like she figured out how to call you, I guess.”
“And now here I am. Get up.”
“You know about her?” he asked.
He had a soft Virginia accent and his voice, although weak, was clear.
“I know about you.”
“Do you? I don’t think so. You’d be better off knowing what she really is. Knew I’d be seeing you as soon as that boy down in Niceville woke up and started asking for me. Saw it on my television here. I knew it was her work. She ask you to call yourself John, when you saw me? Just to remind me of my sins against her family?”
“Yes. I’m here in the name of John Ruelle, and in the name of his brother, Ethan, to settle an old score. Now get up.”
The old man smiled up at Merle.
“Why? You can shoot me right here.”
“She wants you to be on your feet.”
Teague stared at Merle, looked around the room, and then back at him.
“She uses windows, you know? She uses glass. She uses the mirrors. I figured her out, after a while. Everybody else in the families, they’re just gone, one after the other. The windows, I said. I told them all, the windows and the mirrors.”
He sighed.
“But nobody listened.”
He seemed to drift on the memory, and then he came back to Merle.
“So I live in this room, son, no windows, no glass, no mirrors. My window is the television. Takes me everywhere I want to go. You see, with her, young man, the trick is not to open the way.”
He started to wheeze, and then Merle realized the old man was laughing.
“You don’t even know the thing that sent you. You think its name is Glynis Ruelle. You think she’s been wronged by me. Clara Mercer was a real fine piece. But I already had her in my bed and there are lots of fine girls in the world. Besides, I didn’t like to be told what to do. And look where it’s got me. A prisoner in this cell. I haven’t left this room in fifty years. Think about that, young man, if you get a minute to ponder.”
He stopped wheezing, gave Merle a sidelong look.
“But the thing that sent you, my friend, that’s not Glynis Ruelle. Glynis died in ’39. What lives in her now, what keeps her going, what keeps all of this going, that power goes back as far as you can go. I spent a lot of my fifty years here wondering what it really was. All I figured out was, it lives in Crater Sink. It hates Niceville like it hated the Creek and the Cherokee before ever we came here. It hated before there ever was anything to hate, before the world was made, as far as I can tell. And it has to feed. It was riding on Clara Mercer’s angry spirit to help itself feed. Oh yes. I saw those markings on the floors, or in the dirt, or in their beds, where people had been taken. Over the years, almost two hundred souls got eaten alive that way. I knew what I was looking at. But it has rules. It will do some things, and not some others. I found out if you’re real careful, you can get it to do things for you. How I got my helpers, the ones you shot up just now. Maybe how Glynis got you.”
“Stand up.”
He looked at Merle more carefully.
“You’re not listening to me, son. You should. You know how old I am? I am one hundred and twenty-one years old. Look at me. I can still stand up, I can still hold a drink, I can still eat good food, and I piss when I damn well feel like it and not when I don’t. Cost me a fortune to stay alive this long, and stay this healthy, but then I had a damn good reason, didn’t I? I knew she was waiting for me. I know about that field she has down at her plantation and what gets buried in it, what gets dug up, and what poor souls do the digging. They dig each other up, son, the dead do, and then they trade places in the moldy old caskets, and those who were waiting help the dead get out and then they lie down and take their places, and the ones who got dug up do the burying. Over and over again. Year after year. Until the sun falls and all the stars go out. Glynis, she calls it the harvest. She does it because the thing that lives in Crater Sink wills it, although she doesn’t know that. I’ve stayed away from that awful harvest for a long time. And if you’re a reasonable young man, with a taste for unusual pleasures, I can put it off a few more years. What do you say?”
“I say no. Get up and come with me.”
Teague considered Merle’s face for a while, saw nothing there that he could appeal to. He sighed heavily, leaned forward, set the glass down on the card table, put both bony hands on the arms of the chair, and straightened slowly up.
Merle stepped back as the man got to his feet and turned to look at Merle.
“Here?”
“Outside,” said Merle.
“Why not here?”
“Outside. In the park. Under the trees.”
He stared hard at Merle.
“You’re proposing we fight?”
“I’m here to kill you. Glynis said that if you were willing to stand to the scratch line, I should let you. Are you ready to stand?”
“I have no one to second me.”
Merle studied his face.
“I can find you a second. Will you stand?”
A flicker of cunning rippled across his face.
“I will. But I have no weapon.”
“I brought two.”
“Swords? Or pistols?”
“Pistols.”
The man stood looking at Merle for a full minute, and then he tightened his robe and began to shuffle towards the door.
Merle followed him out.
Albert Lee got to his feet when he saw them coming back down the long dark hallway, the tall old man in his bathrobe and slippers.
Albert stood aside as they got to the door, the old man’s glittering eye studying Albert as he went slowly past. Albert had gone to the Pensacola shore one year, as a boy, and they had a bull shark in a big glass tank, the shark gliding around in there and looking out at the people, his gills working, his eyes like shiny black pebbles in his dead white hide. That was the look in the old man’s eye.
Albert followed them through the waist-high mist, his feet leaving a dark trail behind him in the dewy grass. There was no one around, not a crow in the sky, no dogs barking in the distance.
Just the drifting mist and the live oaks draped with moss and the willows hanging motionless, no noise but the shuffle of their shoes as they walked out into a wide space set around with benches.
Merle stopped and Teague, after a moment’s hesitation, walked past him and went on into the park for about twenty paces. He turned around. Straightened up. Put his shoulders back.
Faced Merle.
“This about right?”
“Yes,” said Merle, turning to Albert Lee.
“Give Mr. Teague your pistol, Albert.”
“John, he’s not worth that. Just shoot him like the coward he is.”
“She asked me to try him, see if he’d fight. He says he will. So will you give him your weapon?”
Albert looked at the old man.
“He could kill you.”
“Yes.”
Albert smiled at him.
“Worse yet, he’s got my gun, he could turn around and shoot me after he shoots you. What a pair of flats we’d look then.”
“I won’t shoot you,” said the old man. “Against the rules to shoot the second. Come, let’s do this.”
Albert checked the cylinder again, walked over to the old man, handed him the pistol, grip first.
The old man turned it in his hand, studying it.
“Don’t know this kind. Is it a single-action?”
“No. It fires with the trigger pull.”
“You’re bleeding, boy,” he said, looking at Albert’s belly.
“Yes. I am.”
“May I try a round or two, just to get the feel?”
Albert shrugged.
“He asks can he try a round or two?”
“Tell him yes.”
Albert stepped back as the old man lifted the revolver, steadied it with both hands, aimed it at a bench about the same distance away as Merle.
He squeezed the trigger, the little revolver jumped with a muffled crack and a chunk of wood flew off in the middle of the back rail of the bench. He steadied the weapon, fired again, and the second shot struck less than an inch from the first.
“All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready.”
He turned his right side to Merle, narrowing the target he offered, holding the pistol in his right hand, down by the side of his leg.
Merle stood the same way, his right side turned to the man, his Colt down. There was a silence. Merle could feel his heart beating in his chest.
He did not want to die, but then he thought, Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll get through this and someday somehow I’ll get my old life back. The old man was staring back at him with his flat shark eyes.
“I’ll call it,” said Albert.
“Please do,” said Abel Teague.
“On the count of three. Ready?”
Teague considered Merle, his expression alive with cold calculation.
“I don’t want to go to that harvest, son.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Took her eighty years to find someone like you. Someone who could walk between two worlds. Might be eighty years before she finds another. If I can stay alive long enough, maybe my docs will figure out how to cure dying. All I have to do is kill you.”
“That’s true.”
There was nothing more to be said.
After a pause, Albert began to count.
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
Both weapons came up, and they fired at almost the same second, the heavy thump of the Colt, the brittle crack of the .38. The sound died out quickly, muffled by the dense mist. Crows began to caw and chatter in the distance.
They stood there for a few seconds, staring at each other, and then Merle went down on one knee, the heavy Colt falling to the grass, blood pumping out of a small round hole in his throat, just under the Adam’s apple. He had a much larger hole in the back of his neck. Albert ran over to him, bending down, catching him as he fell.
Abel Teague took a step forward, staggered, took another, went down on one knee.
He had a large bloody hole in his left cheek, just below the eye. The eye itself had exploded outwards like a shattered egg. The back of his skull was gone, and his brains were scattered all over the lawn behind him.
Abel Teague fell sideways, rolled over onto his back, looked up at the sky, gasping. He could hear the crows calling and from far away he heard Albert Lee’s voice, fading away. He closed his mind, trying to keep the spark going, thinking that if they could get to him in time the docs could do wonders. When he opened his mind a heartbeat later, he was looking up at Glynis Ruelle, a high blue sky behind her, her green eyes on him, her rich black hair shining in the sunlight.
“Get up,” said Glynis. “You have work to do.”