On the other side of the Paramount River, inside the county, a sign:
Colony, West Virginia.
"The Friendly Place on the River
Home of the World Famous Colony Rockers"
Population, 1,700.
Someone had spray-painted across the lower edge of the sign:
Welcome To Colony. Now, go home. And yer little dog, too.
You take the train down from Harper's Ferry to get there, or you can fly in to the airport in Charleston, rent a car, and drive southeast almost to the Virginia border, to Stone Valley, say, and then wind your way through the Malabar Hills, another forty minutes to Colony from the top. If you know the back roads, you get there with greater difficulty, but with an appreciation for the beauty of the area, the clear sky, the trees still resplendent with red and orange and yellow leaves, the wind, brisk but invigorating. A river winding on its outer edges made it look like a vast and fertile quarry, surrounded by monoliths. Was it beautiful? No one who lived there thought so, but it was; it was beautiful, as were all American towns that had seen their heydays at the time when the railroads ruled, when coal was king, when honor was a commodity that was valued above life, and when a certain degree of patrilineal inbreeding was considered genteel. It had the look of a tired county seat and yet Stone Valley, modern and stupid, held that honor. Colony was town on the inside, country on the out; a deer or possum might cross the old roads, like Lone Duck Road or Paramount Road or the one called simply the Old Road. There might be the smell of smoke in the air, from a cabin set back in the woods—the fireplace lit when the chill of early evening sets in. The taste in your mouth is like leaf mold and river ice, an acquired taste if you're not used to the country, a taste of memory wine if you've been here before, in your youth, in the days of green and summer and light that never faded.
Joe Gardner stood beside his Buick. Aaron needed to pee and had been too embarrassed to get out at the paved road, so here they were, pulled over to the side of yet another dirt road. Aaron shivered a little as he peed. Joe noticed that Hillary was sound asleep in the back. Jenny took a hike over to the river's edge to stretch her legs. She was looking a little ragged; they all were. They'd been driving five hours, and after stalling on the bridge like that (Joe now assumed the car had stalled, he told himself over and over again, it had stalled—it wasn't that he himself had stalled, that his body had stalled, that his mind had stalled, but that the car was having its usual round of mechanical problems), Joe wanted to let the Skylark cool down a little. Aaron finished peeing, and turned around without zipping his fly up. Sometimes Joe thought his son was quite possibly the smartest, most handsome little boy on the face of the earth.
And then there were those times when Aaron left his fly unzipped.
"X-Y-Z," Joe told his son.
Aaron glanced down and saw his own shirttail sticking out from his fly. He pressed it in, zipped up. "Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"Why is it that the pee keeps coming even after I think I'm done?" He had a deceptively sweet Vienna Boys' Choir sort of voice, vaguely cherubic, which he tried to disguise by lowering it an octave to sound more mannish. This was a very serious question, Joe could tell by the tone of voice.
"It's like plumbing. Must be you need a new washer."
"I don't think so. I think maybe I need a new dryer." Aaron laughed. Then, looking up at his father's face, "I can't wait 'til I get to shave."
Joe reached up and felt the day's growth around his chin. "You think it's a treat, do you?"
"No," Aaron said, "Only we saw this movie in school where it says that when you get to shave, girls start liking you."
"It's not exactly like that. You want girls to like you?" This was a new twist; Joe hadn't expected to worry about Aaron and girls for another few years.
Aaron shrugged. "I guess... I guess I want everyone to like me."
"It's more important that you like yourself, Bean," Joe used the affectionate nickname that Aaron was quickly outgrowing.
"Oh," his son said thoughtfully. "Well, in that case, I only like parts of me."
"Which parts?"
Aaron scrunched his face up a bit. "The parts that work. Like my hands and my brain and my feet when I run. The basics." Aaron was one of the most wonderful and strange kids that Joe knew; sometimes he made Joe believe in reincarnation, because the kid seemed preternaturally intelligent, as if he'd been around from another time. Joe had read books where people talked about old souls and young souls, and if there were such a thing, Joe thought he was probably a young soul, while his son was the old kind. Aaron whispered, almost under his breath, "And Mom says she wishes not all your parts worked quite so well."
It stung, that comment. Joe didn't need to ask Aaron to repeat it. He didn't even want Aaron to know that it was an important comment, something Aaron shouldn't be repeating. Nobody's perfect. It was his litany at this point, his rosary, his private prayer. Nobody's perfect. We all make mistakes. What's past is past.
Aaron might've figured it out, but recalling his own childhood, Joe knew you didn't figure it out until you were older, maybe in your late teens, when you saw something die between your parents, when you wanted to prove that your own kind of love was stronger than theirs, that it would last into eternity, not just break apart at the first pretty face. He didn't blame Jenny for having made those kinds of comments. I wish your father's parts didn't work so well. Jenny shouldn't have said it in front of Aaron, but when you got to the state that she'd been in, you probably didn't notice what you were letting slip.
All right, so I cheated. Once.
I will write that I won't cheat ever again in my entire life if it makes you happy. I will be your slave and never ever look again at another woman if it will mean that every now and then you look at me tenderly again, without getting that hurt look on your face. Okay?
He'd said all that in therapy, which they'd sped through from January to August. He remembered what his father had said, when Joe was fifteen, and had found out about his mother. "Well, women have difficulties with us. She called me an asshole, Joe, and you can't argue with that. When you come down to it, all of us, all men on this planet, are assholes."
Another thought, unbidden, the one that lurked there in his brain at all times, always, even before he had cheated: You're evil.
You're evil just like your mother was evil.
You are possibly the worst human being on the face of the earth, you are lower than low, not just because you cheated on your wife and family, but because the moment when you were cheating, your son was dying.
Joe glanced down at Aaron, scruffed his hair up. Aaron grinned, but was watching the trees, as if expecting to see a bear.
Joe wished it had never happened. It was a year ago now, at a bar in Baltimore, down at Fell's Point. A bar where you could barely see the person sitting next to you, where men and women did things in shadows.
She was there.
She was not nice, not sweet, not even very pretty, certainly not the beauty that Jenny was.
But she had one thing. That one thing.
She looked like her.
(He shivered whenever he thought of the name.)
Like Melissa.
Just in the eyes, really.
And the way she touched him.
Aaron said, "Dad, look!" He pointed across the road.
A flock of birds, dark against the fading sky, burst from nearby laurel bushes and flew up, chattering, coming together as one dark cloud, and then dispersing again.
Your son was dying. Paul Aaron's baby brother. Hillary's baby brother. Something got him in the dark while you were sleeping with someone other than your wife. Something came out of the dark, something called sudden infant death syndrome—maybe—but maybe it was just God saying that if you screw around on your wife, you don't get everything you want, if you cheat your family out of their father, you don't deserve another beautiful little baby.
Maybe it was God. Or maybe it was something more idiotic, more brain dead and arbitrary: Maybe it was fucking life.
Joe lived with these thoughts, side by side with more mundane ones, and managed to function most of the time. Sometimes he just stared into space. He had lived a life where he had let two people he had loved die, and yet, here he was, with his wife and kiddies, watching a flock of birds take off. They were on their way to Gramma's house. Over the river and through the woods, indeed. Aaron watched the birds with wonder. He looked so much like his mother, it was amazing, although Joe saw a little of himself, just a pinch or two, in the eyebrows that were like caterpillars mating, or the way his ears poked out from his hair, or in his incipient height—Aaron had shot up four inches in under six months.
Joe looked from his son to the billowing flock of birds. "They're late. We're going to have an early winter, and those guys are never going to make it to Florida," Joe said.
"Birds are neat." Aaron stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and hitched his shoulders up. "I wish I was a bird sometimes."
"And where would you fly to?"
"I dunno. Maybe China. Where would you fly to?" Aaron asked.
Joe watched the birds go up and over the sloping hill beyond the river, and then, out of sight. "Anywhere but here," he said.
He followed Aaron over to Jenny, who was stepping over the low bushes and moving into the dusky stand of trees along the hillside. She seemed to be looking for something. Jenny had never really been out of the larger cities of the Northeast; in fact, Baltimore was the smallest city she'd ever lived in—she'd only ever been to the country when she needed to get to the beach, or as a rest stop off a major highway.
When Joe approached her, she turned at the sound of his footsteps on twigs. "I saw a deer," she said. "I know I did." She kept her voice whispery and held a hand up for Joe to stop making so much noise with his damn shoes (he could translate this just by the flick of her wrist). She motioned for Aaron to step up beside her, and when he did, she put her arm around his shoulder and leaned into him.
She pointed into the woods.
Joe moved forward as silently as he could.
He looked to where she was pointing.
A small doe stood beside a tree, chewing at its lower branches. It was thin and more shades darker than Joe had remembered deer being. Its eyes didn't seem to register the intruders. It seemed close enough to touch. Even though he'd seen deer before, it had never been with his family. This seemed different, almost sacred. Maybe it was a good sign, after all. Maybe coming here was the right thing to do, and the right timing.
Aaron turned around and said, "Look, Dad, it's Bambi."
Joe smiled. He liked his son, he liked his family, he liked his life.
His father had advised him, before the wedding, "Don't fuck this up, Joe, because once you do, you spend the rest of your life working on the engine without ever driving the fucking car."
My mother's dying, but life is still worth it.
Then a piercing wail came up from somewhere behind him, the doe took off into the woods—it was a child wailing—not just a child, you asshole, it's your child, it's Hillary—like a reflex, he spun around and ran towards the Buick. He had left the door open, damn it, she'd been asleep, but she was only three, what was he thinking? Anything can happen to a three-year-old, his heart raced faster than his feet.
He got to the side of the car. The door was still open.
And Hillary was sitting up screaming bloody murder because she'd awakened from her nap and everyone had left her behind.
Joe imagined the therapist's bill for her, when she was about seventeen, several thousand dollars—all because when she'd been three, they'd left her in the Buick for ten minutes by herself in the middle of nowhere.
He unstrapped her from her harness and took her up in his arms. "Hilly, Hilly," he said, rubbing his nose softly against hers.
Her face was wet with tears. She stopped crying and inhaled deeply. She said nothing. She knew enough words, but she'd gotten really good lately at withholding her thoughts from him as a form of punishment.
She's a fast learner.
He kissed her cheek and hugged her tight; turned and waved to Jenny and Aaron, who were fast approaching. "It's okay," he said.
His wife grabbed Hillary from him and swung her up. "My big baby."
Things were great between them, right? Really great, only notice how she takes the kids from me when she can, like she's afraid some kind of weakness of character is going to rub off from my hands? Or maybe another one will die because of some karmic debt I've built up. And hell, she may be right.
"She scared the deer off," Aaron sulked.
"There'll be other deer," Joe said,
Hillary put her small fists up to her eyes to wipe them of the leftover tears and said, "Hungee, Mommy, I hungee."
Jenny glanced at Joe. "We're all a little hungee, right?"
Joe said, "There'll be a place in town. We can eat before we see Gramma."
"You mean 'the witch'?" Aaron asked.
Joe glared at Jenny, who glared at Aaron, who said, "What I do?"
Jenny said, "You know what you did."
Aaron shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his jeans and watched the ground as if he could focus his shame in the dirt.
"God," Joe sighed, and then shouted, "I HATE THIS PLACE!"
His voice echoed along the river. The Paramount River flowed, eventually, to the New River, or maybe it was the Kanawha, Joe couldn't remember. His voice would echo down its stony corridors. But he had lied in his pronouncement; it had been his home he hated, a particular house, on River Road, not haunted or ugly or dull. But a house of nightmare, nonetheless.
"You're going to scare her, shouting like that, Joe, Jesus," Jenny said, clutching Hillary ever tighter. "Come on, it's not so bad. We'll only stay a week. You at least owe her that."
Aaron looked up at his father. "I kind of like it here, Daddy," he said. "I want to have another gramma, too. Even if she is a you-know-what."
And she is, Joe thought. A witch. A nightmare in a housecoat. The woman who gives a bad name to bitches. Mommy Fearest. What would she be, now that she was sick? A shriveled, tired, whining creature with claw hands and iron-gray head? Am I going to have to love her and care for her now? What had she said about his first novel in her letter? "It's like being invited to a great restaurant, with wonderful linens and silver and waiters and fine wine, and sitting down at the table, and having the waiter bring over a huge covered silver tray, setting it down in front of me, and as he lifts up the cover, I see that all that's there is a pile of dung. You'll never support yourself, except maybe as a pornographer. Why don't you just go back into the car business?"
And that had actually been one of her finer moments. She had shined at distant relatives' funerals, when she could go up to the family and tell the recent widow what a terrible wife she'd been to the deceased; or with his father, how she'd driven him into the ground practically inch by inch over the years of Joe's youth. Her affairs over the years, her cheapness, her open condemnations of others.
Am I going to have to love her now?
And then, one other thought before he got back behind the driver's seat of the car.
I don't want to feel sorry for her. I want to remember all the bad things she did.
It had taken him nearly seventeen years to make it back to this hellhole, and now he wished he'd done what he intended back when he was eighteen: burn the fucker down.
But still, he drove on up to Colony.
The town itself, beyond the lovely countryside, was not a feast for the eyes; but whether or not it deserved to be burned to the ground was a question best left unanswered. The rows of shops and houses up and down Main Street and Queen Anne Street and its vectors had been built during the Federal period, and then there was the PO and town hall, miniature Greek Revival buildings, gone to gray seed from neglect and lack of funds. Overseeing the business district, you would have an impression of green glass in windows and old hearthstone brick and black shutters. The streets were empty at noon, busy by three or four, and dead again as darkness seeped in. The shops had no defined hours of business; whenever proprietors felt like being there tended to be the hours of operation. Where the flat-topped roofs of the business district ended, the sharp corners of the neighborhoods began. Private houses grew like feeble crops from the center of town outward. People had a degree of wealth, once, along the Paramount River's banks, for every fourth house was enormous and sprawling, now owned by poor relations who would board up broken windows rather than fix them, and wrap tarp over a leaky roof. Now and then, there had been a fire, through lightning or arson, and the blackened foundation and chimney of a hundred-year-old house would stand amidst a peaceful neighborhood; so in its history, whether through an act of God or man, Joe Gardner had not been the first to wish the town would go up in flames.
Dale Chambers, a third-generation Colonian, didn't have anything on his mind as spectacular as burning the town down. He was thinking more along the lines of murder.
Murdering someone, particularly someone you care about, is never a simple matter of planning and then executing. Things go wrong, fate steps in, life tosses in a screw or two. Dale Chambers was finding this out on this fairly chilly day in November when he felt, at the age of forty-eight, that life was still good and that his prime had not passed. These feelings were mainly because of his thing with Lannie.
As affairs went, Lannie Barnes's with Dale Chambers was going pretty well—she had companionship at least three nights out of the week, and he got some nooky that his wife Nelda had been denying him for the past twenty years. It couldn't be said that the affair was a secret, but it also could be maintained that Nelda didn't give a flyer who her husband put it to as long as he didn't come wagging it at her. Dale had always lusted after Lannie, ever since the days he worked at the factory before he'd turned seventeen, long before he switched careers. All those times he had seen her on his drive home, at sixteen, on summer evenings, necking with farm boys out at the river.
That had been years ago, of course, when Lannie was still the tease of the county, and was known for not wearing any underwear underneath her crinolines; later, she earned the title of town tramp; as time went on, she was known as liberated but deadly. She looked a bad forty, and had spun a hundred eighty degrees in the other direction from her bare-assed youth—she ordered silky underwear from the Victoria's Secret catalog just to entice the men. She had reached the stage where she felt to be attractive she had to hide more than she revealed.
They were, at the moment Joe Gardner and his wife Jenny and their two children were heading towards the town, in a desperate embrace, tangled in the moth-eaten sheets of the Miner's Lodge. They had a private room upstairs, and had greedily devoured a plate of oysters and cheeses, and had downed a jug of Chianti. Lannie's blue eye shadow had rubbed off on Dale's navel. Dale wore Cherries-In-The-Snow lipstick imprints on some places on his body that even he had never seen. What made this an important coupling for both of them was that Lannie announced her impending pregnancy right at the moment Dale was about to enter her—his spirit wilted as quickly as did his flesh.
"I think I heard you wrong," he said, pulling away from her, the suction of skin slurping as he did so. And then, thoughtlessly, he added, "And you're too old, for God's sake."
She drew back against the pillows and covered her breasts with the sheet. "As it would turn out, Dale, hon, I'm not. I saw Dr. Cobb on Tuesday and it seems there's a little Dale just gettin' his fingers."
This was about the point when Dale decided to kill her. It wasn't the most logical process. He didn't want his wife Nelda to know, of course, that he had gotten the town tramp knocked up; neither did he want to be a father. He had one bastard in town already, and didn't think there was room for more. To top this all off, he was furious with Lannie for letting this happen. She was supposed to be on birth control pills, which Dale felt was the woman's duty, and so she must've wanted to get pregnant—Christ, at her age—as a trap for him.
Well, it wasn't going to work.
Dale had killed someone once before, years ago, and no one had found out. It had been an accident, really. He had only been eight or nine, and it was another little boy who had tried to touch his weenie. That was a no-no as far as the Gump was concerned. So he had taken the kid to one of the old mine shafts that had since been covered over because of just such incidents, and shoved him down it. His intention then was not to really kill the kid, but just to put him someplace where Dale would never have to see him again. Nobody ever looked down the shaft; the boy was gone for good; and Dale's conscience barely gave him a tweak over the incident. Dale Chambers was not quite as smart as he thought, though, because as he got older he would occasionally get the odd letter typed on a cheesy old Royal typewriter (he figured this out later, when he started using the ancient typewriter his wife used to write her pathetic poetry on). The letters said: I saw you. You're naughty. Or, I know you inside and out.
He had been scared of the letters at first. But the letters stopped just a couple of years before, and nothing had happened.
So, the idea of murdering Lannie because of her pregnancy was not that far-fetched. He knew it could be done—he had studied murder cases in his off-hours, and a few on the job, as well. He knew that sometimes people got away with it; and the ones who didn't were stupid or scared or just plain wanted to get caught. Killing Lannie wasn't the problem, not for Dale, it was all the baggage that went along with it: the time, the place, the alibi, the proper technique. He was a particular fan of true crime books, mainly dealing with serial killers, his idols being Ted Bundy and the Zodiac Killer, in particular, although he certainly was an avid reader of anything having to do with Jack the Ripper, too. Jack was amazing—he got away with it, apparently. That Black Dahlia Killer, from the forties, he got away with it, too. It could be done.
He leaned against Lannie, pressing himself closer, and kissed her cheek. She couldn't read his mind, could she?
"You want me to get rid of it, don't you?" she asked, sounding like a whiny kitten. "Well, I'm a good Baptist girl and I ain't gonna do it."
He kissed her sweetly. Like she was already a mother. She had always had baby hunger, hadn't she? She had been spreading her legs since she was twelve, and it wasn't for pleasure or money or acceptance, it was for the basic reason, the most essential reason for having sex. It occurred to him that Lannie Barnes might be the most old-fashioned girl in all of Colony, because she probably had only ever viewed lust's main function as procreation! And after nearly three and a half decades of trying, she had finally gotten the bun in the oven.
"We'll have the baby," Dale Chambers whispered. "But let's keep it secret for a while. You didn't tell Virgil who the father is, did you?"
She shook her head. Tears in her eyes; smile on her face. "Dr. Cobb ain't the type to spread stories, if that's what you mean. But I wanted to tell you first, before I told anybody else. I didn't want it to get back to your wife. Not yet. Not something this special. You love me, don't you, Dale? And you'll love the baby, too, won't you?"
He answered her with kisses.
After a bout of lovemaking where he pummeled her good, Dale Chambers showered, dressed, left the Lodge, and stood out in the early evening shadows, with the streetlamps humming to yellow life. He wondered just how he was going to put Lannie Barnes out of her misery.
He got in his car and leaned out the window to wave to Virgil Cobb, possibly the oldest practicing country doctor in the county, let alone the whole state, who was carrying three sacks of groceries to his old beat-up car. "Well, hey, Doc, how goes the trade?"
Virgil was nearly seventy, but in pretty good shape, "spry" as the young called the old when the latter group could barely bend at the waist to pick up a penny, or manage a smile on a hot day. He was wearing his traditional Scots plaid bow tie, heavily starched white shirt, and tweed jacket; always in khakis, always with the argyle socks, always in penny loafers—Virgil was a walking ad for 1958, which happened to be the year that Virgil's wife had left him and gone off to New York for a bigger life. Virgil set the groceries on the sidewalk and practically trotted over to Dale. The old man leaned into the car window and said, "Hey, Sheriff."
Dale Chambers smiled, and thought: You don't know the real me, old man, I have a secret and nobody in this town knows the inside me, the thing I am inside, the one who gets the letter telling me how naughty I am, the one who's gonna make sure Lannie Barnes never sees too many more sunrises. The Gump is gonna do it, 'cause he's my inside man, my innard self, ho-ho.
After he spoke with Sheriff Chambers, Virgil Cobb picked his groceries back up and took them to his car. He was beginning to notice the change—not just in the temperature, although with this first nightfall of November, it was dropping fast—it might get as low as forty tonight, maybe some snow down here in the lowlands in the next couple of weeks.
But something else, too.
Like a reminder of his youth, he felt it: the town was changing in some way, maybe because half the young people left as soon as they could drive, and the other half took off when they turned legal age. It was a place people didn't want to stay in anymore. He'd only had a handful of patients in the past two years, mainly the ones close to his age who had always been coming to him. These days, most of his patients drove over to Stone Valley to the spanking new HMOs and medical centers—they didn't trust an old man with their ailments. In the winters, which could get harsh, come January, the Malabar Hills cut the town off whenever there was a good storm coming through; the summers had become unbearable with the mosquito population and the excessive humidity. And jobs. There were no jobs. People like Virgil couldn't even afford to retire—he knew it was just a matter of time before he got forced out because of his age, but how were young people to ever keep the lifeblood going in a town where the jobs were so limited, and so coveted? When he had been a boy, he had seen how Vidal Junction, at the pass in the hills, had dried up and become a ghost town, and there were other places, too, small corners of the state that had died when the mining towns had closed or had dried up and blown away because there was nothing solid to keep them in place. Towns had lives just like people did, Virgil knew. You had to feed them, you had to nurture them, you had to keep their lifeblood pumping.
Something his little brother Eugene (rest his soul) had told him once, when Virgil had first studied biology in high school. Hemogoblins. Virgil pricked Eugene's finger to get some blood to test and see what blood type he was, and he tried to explain about blood, about white corpuscles and hemoglobin, but all Eugene had repeated back was, corporals and hemogoblins.
Whenever he thought of poor Eugene, he remembered those silly childhood things.
For a moment, he saw a face through a darkened shop window, and it startled him until he realized it was his own face. Looked like a ghost, he thought, for just a second, thought it was a ghost.
But it was the Virgil Cobb that had grown creaky and cobwebbed and stooped from what had been a rather handsome youth, who had once turned down the advances of a few ladies because of his pursuit of the life of the mind: books and medicine. Loved books too much, maybe. Lived in them most of the time. Escaped into them, you could say. Half his bed at home was taken up with books and papers; he slept on the other half, occasionally feeling the spine of a hardcover as if tucking his wife in.
Tried to die, though, but can't. You can't die when you never really lived, can you? It would be redundant. Virgil drew the collar of his herringbone tweed jacket up around his neck. Getting cold. He knew his thoughts were too depressing; maybe it was just his age. Maybe you live life long enough and you expect the world to die before you do. Maybe you expect all of them to disappear, the candle to extinguish, before yours gets snuffed. Virgil had been over the hill recently to see another doctor—well, not a doctor, who was he fooling?—a psychiatrist, which is a doctor, but not the kind that you could talk about openly in Colony—and the doctor had asked him to describe his symptoms. "Tired, forgetful, worn out. And sometimes I wake up thinking: it's a good day to get in the car and die."
The psychiatrist had asked, "Die?" Virgil had chuckled, "Did I say that? No. I mean, it's a good day to get in the car and drive. Just drive, anywhere."
"Dr. Cobb," the psychiatrist had said, "you said, 'die.'''
And he had.
He knew he had.
Virgil Cobb didn't think he wanted to die, but the concept just crept in there, under the fence.
He put his groceries in the car and locked the doors. Used to be, you didn't have to lock anything in Colony, least of all your car; things had changed. He was going to go for a walk out to the cemetery, see his brother. Hadn't seen him in a long time. It'd be cold, but old Eugene had been out there with no one to check on him since maybe August. Virgil figured he ought to talk with him awhile, get some advice.
Virgil was beginning to wonder if most of his friends and family weren't out there, at Watch Hill, the ten-acre boneyard just bordering the Paramount River, within the town limits. He could name at least nineteen people he knew who were currently (and indefinitely) underground, and might only be able to name another ten to twelve who were above.
There should be a prize for survival, he thought. Old Man Feely, he's almost ninety, he'd get the gold medal. Miss Risa DeLaMare would get the silver, at eighty-four. And Dean Lowell, weighing in at eighty-one, he'd get the bronze.
Darn, he thought (since he had never been given to swearing, even when polite society embraced verbal obscenity), I wouldn't even make it to the Olympics of survival.
Virgil Cobb went to the Watch Hill, now, just a few times a year. His brother, Eugene, hadn't died, at least not officially. There was a stone marker for him, because they figured, given where he'd taken off to, he wouldn't survive too long. But nobody knew for sure, except, perhaps, Virgil himself. Oh, he'd seen something happen to his brother, Virgil had, but what seemed real in an instant at the age of twelve, now, from the distance of an ocean of years, seemed like the paper-thin fragment of a dream. But Virgil had stuck to the official story: his brother Eugene had just disappeared, at fifteen, a runaway, perhaps, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that Eugene had died somewhere in the intervening years.
Byron Cheever was nineteen and home on a presumed break from college. He was a smart boy, they all said it, but he knew different, he knew how he had gotten the high score on his SATs in high school, and why he had graduated second in his class—a little blackmail went a long way in a town like Colony. He had landed at Washington and Lee University over in Lexington, a college which was hallowed in the South, but particularly sacred to Byron's family because he was the seventh Cheever since his great-great-grandfather to attend that university. The problem was, for By (as his friends called him), that he had just been expelled for cheating on his midterms. He was home for a few days, supposedly a fall break, but in reality, he knew he wasn't ever going to be going back to Lexington, Virginia, and he had to somehow tell his mother and father without being expelled by them, too, for reaping dishonor and shame and all those things that they spoke of so highly. It was worse for him, because he might never see his Lambda Chi Alpha brothers again, and for By, social life had been the be-all and end-all.
So he was doing what he always did when he got nervous—trolling the streets of Colony for a girl to ball or a buddy to get plastered with. Driving his daddy's Cadillac convertible, the top down even in the cold; By didn't mind, he thought it was more studly that way. And what, to his wandering eye should appear, but a girl of sixteen dressed in something that looked like it was baby doll and slut combined, standing on the corner of Princess Caroline Street, with a girlfriend about as ugly as any woofer on the planet.
He pulled over, almost jumping the curb, and the dog friend stepped back into darkness.
The Beauty, as he came to think of her, stood still. Smiled.
She looked the fuckingest he'd ever seen a girl look, and he thought: screw college, all I need is a nice tight pussy and a Cadillac and this boy's in hog heaven.
"Hey, Beauty," he said. "How's about a ride with the Beast?"
"Oh," she said, stepping forward. Then, looking back into the shadows, "Mind if I bring my friend, too?"
By glanced at the other girl, shrugged: hell, who knows? Maybe have me a bite of a little sandwich tonight, hot damn.
"Depends," he told Beauty.
"On what?"
"On whether you're gonna worship at my love temple tonight?"
"Oh," she said, not taken aback at all, "I'll do more than that, Beast."
Byron Cheever grinned and got an instant boner. She was one fine piece of flesh, Beauty was. He'd just put a bag over her girlfriend's face, and give them both the thrill of a lifetime. Damn, it's good to be young and hung and studly. He'd have some good stories to tell his buddies, that was for sure.
You could hear the sound of the Cadillac's tires screeching, and the roar of its decrepit, sorry-ass engine as it careened up the street, turning left on Main, running the stop sign. In towns like this, the sound of a car burning rubber was like a cry in the night. Those who were at their windows, closing them against the cold, or locking up shop, listened to it as if it were a banshee's howl.
Main Street seemed to grow at night, with the yellow streetlamps and the feeble lights from storefronts. Everything was shadows and brick between the narrow streets. There were only nine streets in the town proper—Queen Anne Street, Princess Caroline, Main, North and South Angel, and then streets First through Fourth crossing each of these. The buildings were the old Federal style townhouses of the old towns built before the Civil War. Above every store was an apartment, many of them empty, going for the cheap rate of a hundred fifty a month. A smart person could haggle the desperate landlord down to a hundred on a good day. Some of the college students from Stone Valley got places there—it was a forty-minute commute over the hills, but the savings were enormous on rent and utilities.
Minnie Harper, who was seventy-eight, had always lived above Logan's Market—she was a self-described spinster, and spent the early evenings at her window, dressed like a princess in a beaded gown and her hair all done up above her head, four strands of pearls around her neck, just watching the streets as if she owned them from above the market.
Winston Alden was still sitting at his desk behind the glass storefront window of his office. The lettering on the glass read: W.H. Alden, Consultant. Beneath this: Opinions Expressed. He would sit there for another two hours; he had little business these days, but he had fallen into something of a second childhood after having been a preacher when he was younger, then a lawyer, and finally a walking shambles in a three-dollar suit—he spent most of the better part of the day reading old copies of Tales from the Crypt comics. He cherished his back issues of Weird Tales. His old friend, Dr. Cobb, usually showed up by nine for a glass of sherry and a cigar. They would exchange stories about the old days, when they had adventures, and remember the women they loved and the loves they'd lost and sometimes they talked about the not-so-great memories, too.
Across the block from him, Jack LaPree closed his bookshop by six. George and Cally's ValCo Gas stayed open 'til eleven, but you could only get gas before dark, because Cally once had a gun stuck in her face by some out-of-town boy and she swore she'd never open her store's door after dark again. The First Stone Valley Savings and Loan had closed by five, although the automatic teller kept going until midnight. Logan's Market was open until nine. The Fauvier Art Gallery was closed, but Miles Fauvier was still inside finishing up on his accounts. Through the windows, you could see the large canvases with their pastoral landscapes of Virginia and West Virginia, a painting of the New River, and a portrait of a mining family from the old days. Three bars in town didn't start up until about six or seven, and it was in one of these that Becky O'Keefe, formerly Becky Petersen, went to do her shift as waitress-bartender-consoler of lost souls.
The place was called the Angel Wing Pub. Downstairs, it had several small round tables, and upstairs, the bar. Becky didn't love her work, but it was one of the few jobs in town that allowed her to work four nights a week and still bring in enough money to spend time with her son, Tad, during his waking hours.
And as she set up a boilermaker for Jack LaPree, who had his eye on a woman named Alice who, like Jack, came in every night until closing, Becky heard a voice. She looked up, and thought she saw a ghost.
"I know you, don't I?" she asked. "Joe? Joe Gardner?" She wasn't exactly smiling, because you never do when you see what you think is a ghost, you only gasp and hope you're imagining things.
Joe wasn't about to admit this to himself, and maybe nobody was going to say it aloud, but it wasn't like anybody wanted him back in town, in this town called Colony with its long memory of a girl who was voted most likely to succeed and most creative at Colony High, only to die one day while crossing a bridge.
It wasn't so much the girl's death. Nobody blamed Joe; hell, he wasn't even driving that day.
It was what came after. The voices.
When Joe thought he was going nuts after her death.
What he heard, all through town, the sounds of human voices, the secrets, the whispers.
So Becky was briefly praying it was only some creep who looked like Joe Gardner, like in the game she and Hopfrog used to play called facsimiles, where they'd pick out people in a crowd who look like other people, maybe famous people. She hoped this was a facsimile of Joe, not the genuine article.
Because sometimes she thought she'd like to kill him for the way he had mentally tortured her ex-husband, "Hopfrog" Petersen, and set him on a path of obsession which had pretty much ruined their marriage.
Certain routines and rituals were being followed in Colony that night, also.
Romeo Dancer, so named because he had proclaimed himself the greatest tap and toe dancer in three counties and the greatest lover in the world, was sitting on the stoop of his trailer out towards Happy Valley, jawing at his wife, Wilma, and she was jawing right back at him. He wore his black suit and his dancing boots. He was getting ready to go to the Creeker's Roadhouse out on the Post Road, but he wasn't about to take Wilma because, as he told her, "You get jealous too easy and I'm only dancin', darlin'." Wilma owned a pit bull and they lived in separate trailers, side by side, and sometimes, when she was angry, she and the pit bull looked like kin to him.
"You go there tonight," she said, "and you ain't never comin' back, I'm gonna set this house on fire, you old fart, and then we're gonna see who does the dancin' round here!"
Their voices carried on the wind. They had become legends to teenagers making out down at the Paramount River in their father's four-by-fours or in the backseats of old Chevys, who heard the caterwauling as it echoed loud and clear across the water and far banks.
Uptown, near the Lyric movie theater, Miss Athena Cobb, Virgil's niece, who was all of forty-eight and genteel as the day was long (and they were getting short, with winter coming on), was out walking her Doberman, Chelsea, and waiting for Melanie Dahlgren. Melanie was from Sweden and she made her living from her beefy arms—she was a masseuse, the legitimate kind, much to the disappointment of the local lechers. She had recently moved to Colony to paint and get away from cities. Melanie was older than Athena, nearly sixty, and wiser in the ways of the world. She had begun to show Athena a whole new side of life. Miss Dahlgren, as Athena addressed her, even after various intimacies, was usually walking her dachshund at the same hour. Athena didn't want to miss running into her, and if anyone had told her that it was puppy love, Miss Athena Cobb would've probably agreed.
The Lyric theater, itself, once a vaudeville stage, and now the most run-down green velvet curtained movie house that side of the Malabar Hills, was packed to capacity with what appeared to be every high schooler with five bucks in her or his pocket, popcorn butter-grease on chins. It was Horror Week, as the Lyric's banner proudly proclaimed, in honor of Halloween, a twenty-four-hour marathon of The Haunting, Dr. Sardonicus, CandyMan, Carrie, The Fury, The Curse of the Cat People, Misery, Hellraiser Three: Hell on Earth, Halloween, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, C.H.U.D., and the current feature, Scarecrows. On the screen, the face of a scarecrow in a field. Tenley McWhorter turned to her date, Noah Cristman, and whispered, "I hate movies like this. I like movies about real people and real life. This wouldn't ever happen. I don't believe it at all. Wanna go for a drive or something?"
Only the diehards would still be there by midnight, and by dawn, you could fairly predict that the place would still have a couple of pimply faced kids having a blast.
Winston Alden, sitting in his storefront office, with the lights off, lit up a Cuban cigar. He set out two brandy snifters. He filled one and took a sip. Then he reached beneath his desk and withdrew a dog-eared copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He flicked on the desk lamp. He began reading, smoking, and sneaking a sip of Napoleon brandy while he waited for his guest to arrive.
***
Nelda Chambers, Dale's wife, had come across an old typewriter that she hadn't seen in years and decided to resume an old habit. She put a fresh piece of erasable bond in the machine and began typing a letter to her husband:
I know what you did. You naughty, naughty man.
There, she thought, keep the mystery alive, you whore-chaser, see if you have any conscience left in you.
When she had finished typing, she put the typewriter back in the closet, took the letter, sealed it in one of Dale's own envelopes, and set it under the front door. She went back to the kitchen, made some Celestial Seasonings Sleepy Time Tea, and went upstairs to her bedroom to watch television until she could fall asleep.
***
John Feely, also known as Old Man Feely to just about anybody who had lived in Colony more than a few years, was unlocking the door to a very private room in his farmhouse. He had a candle in his hand, and he leaned forward as best he could to light the other candles in the room. When this task was complete, he knelt down and clasped his hands together, looking up at a marble statue stolen long ago from an untended grave. The statue had no face.
Beneath the floorboard, he heard the child kicking at the wall, trying to get out, and John Feely prayed harder and louder and longer to block out the noise.
And even while all this was going on, Cathy Zane, who handled 911 in town, got a frantic call from Wendy Hoskins who said that her son, Billy, had run away from home, "And we thought he'd'a come back before tonight, maybe go to one of his little friends, he's done it before, but, good Lord, nobody's seen him, and I think something's wrong, I think—" but then Wendy had begun sobbing, and her husband, Mike, had taken the phone.
"Get that goddamned sheriff over here right now, you hear me, my boy's disappeared, and you people better damn well find him."
As in any town in America at the end of the twentieth century, there was evil being perpetrated; in this case, in the form of what children often do to each other in their haphazard rites of passage. Although it was nightfall, and the light of the world was extinguishing at the farthest rim of the western hills, two boys were bullying another out at Watch Hill, the cemetery. They had come across the field, pursuing the boy—and he had only come to sit on the ground next to where his grandfather was buried before going home to dinner.
His name was Tad Petersen, and his father had once been known as Hopfrog, his mother had once been known as Becky Petersen, but was now Becky O'Keefe. Since his parents' divorce, he had withdrawn into books and videos and the drawings he sometimes made of a fantasy world—but he knew he was sensible and sane, and that the other kids in town were primarily idiots.
This attitude may have accounted for their treatment of him.
The boys who followed him, Hank and Elvis, were big for their age (twelve), and far too hairy. Their clothes were small, and they were from the Bonchance clan who lived by the river.
And they had it in for Tad, always. No particular reason relating to Tad, other than, given the chance, he was an easy enough target: he kept to himself, he drew weird pictures, he read a lot, and he got too many good grades.
As Tad stood up, next to his grandfather O'Keefe's grave, he saw that Elvis Bonchance had a big old cat-o'-nine-tails in his hand. Tad knew that this was probably Mr. Bonchance's, because Elvis's father tended to be of the old school, and was fairly well thought of as a sadist in Colony.
Hank snickered, "Hey, Peterbutt, what you doing out here? Boneyard's for stiffs. You a stiff?"
Tad, very solemnly, said, "No, but I play one on TV."
Hank glanced at Elvis, who chortled, "Trying to make a joke, is you? Well, you wussy-ass, we think you been bad."
"Yeah," his brother said, "real bad."
"Bad Tad," Elvis laughed, cracking the cat out to the side.
Tad said, "Shut up."
"Your mama's a whore and your daddy's a gimp." Hank took another step closer to him.
"Bite me," Tad said. He started to walk away. There was only one light on at night at Watch Hill, and he was walking towards it when he felt something sting his shoulders. He spun around. Elvis had just brought the whip back. "Look, Elvis, why don't you just admit that your dad beats the hell out of you and you can't take it so you have to pick on kids my size just to feel like you're better than everyone else."
Tad expected that the two brothers would actually redouble their efforts, so he cringed a little, ready for the next blow—knowing he would hightail it out of there if Elvis raised that whip another inch.
Instead, Elvis screeched, "What the hell you talkin'? My daddy don't beat me! I ain't no pussy!" He began shaking; the cat-o'-nine-tails dropped from his hand.
Hank grinned. "You stupid fuckface. We're gonna put you where the sun don't shine for that one."
Tad started to run, but he felt like his feet were stuck in molasses. He moved his feet, but, somehow, Hank and Elvis had managed to catch him fast. They bound him with some twine and carried him over to one of the vaults.
"We'll just see how you like spending the night with the bones, cracker," Hank slobbered.
Tad could not resist. "If anyone's a cracker, you are." For that, he got a whack across the face. When he awoke, he was down at the bottom of a freshly dug grave.
"Guys?" he asked, choking back the fear as best he could. All he could smell was mud. "Hank? Elvis? Guys? I take it back! I am a wussy-ass! You're right about my folks! Guys?"
He could feel his heartbeat.
Above him, it was completely dark, save for the stars.
Tad began crying, knowing it was babyish of him, but he couldn't stop. He knew that he would be stuck all night, that he'd probably die, that he would freeze, or worse... he might be buried alive.
"Hey!" he shouted until he was hoarse. "Hey!"
Not long after, some college girls who claimed they were on a scavenger hunt lifted him out of the grave and untied him, giggling over him and brushing their fingers in his hair like he was a baby; as far as Tad was concerned they were angels.
He brushed as much mud off of himself as he could, and then went directly back to his father's house.
But he didn't tell anyone what he'd heard there, lying in that grave. The voices beneath the ground.
Children's voices, as if they were calling to him to come join them.
He recognized one of the voices, a kid named Billy Hoskins—
It can't be. It was just my imagination. I know it. It was just me being scared and scaring myself.
Billy Hoskins, beneath the grave, had said, "Tad, hey, Tad, hey, Tad, we're coming to get you. All of us. Coming to get you."