Ash Wednesday (2 page)

The nightmare hadn't stopped there. It had continued even when the sheets were dry, the few hairs were found and flushed away, the glasses were washed and rinsed. It plagued him when the lights were out, when his eyes were closed, when dreams shredded his waking veil of forgetfulness.

The passage of months had not helped, nor did the total and unexpected success of his
pulpish
plot. Accidental death had been the ruling, had made him at least physically free. But he was still chained by the nightmares, and now he lay there, replaying them involuntarily on the dark ceiling. The pressure of his bladder temporarily took his mind off them and onto his tiring prostate. He rose and padded into the bathroom.

~*~

He had just finished when the dogs began to bark. Damn mutts, he thought. Four in the morning. . . never sleep now. He had just hit the flush lever when he heard Dotty scream.

The sound froze him, and the first thought that entered his mind was insane, irrational, and totally correct.
She knows
. He shivered, and thought again,
She knows
.

As he entered the bedroom, the blue glow was brighter than the clock radio had ever been, bright enough for him to see his wife huddled on the floor in the corner, staring and screaming at the slightly transparent corpse of Sheila
Sommers
lying on the bed in the same position in which she had died. Her eyes were still open and, like her entire accusing body, shone with a pale blue light.

Up to that moment, Martin Sanders had never thought that a man could scream more loudly than a woman.

A transgression, a crime, entering a man's existence, eats it up like a malignant growth, consumes it like a fever.

—Joseph Conrad,
Nostromo

Merridale had had its last sleep for a time. It seemed a village made for sleep, designed for a permanent, contented somnolence. From Interstate 79 it was already said to look like a town of the dead. But this image followed the actual event, the result of journalistic second-guessing, one of a slew of rapidly devised images for a poetry-hungry public.

For only in the poetry of image, metaphor, even parable, could the phenomenon of Merridale be dealt with by the ignorant, which included the entire human race in terms of truly understanding what had happened and how. Why was beyond even the wisest and greatest of the mystical. Poetry triumphed because prose was too stark, too frighteningly clear in the pictures it drew. So Merridale, from afar, was "a town of the dead, nestled among the hills of Pennsylvania like a curled and sleeping giant."

But Merridale had not been as the press later described it. Instead, it had been a bustling little village of 8,000 inhabitants that showed few signs of growth, but fewer still of deterioration. As it did not welcome strangers, neither did it shun them. But one had to have a
reason
to live there, either ancestral or occupational. No one, thought the townspeople, should live in Merridale who did not either work there or grow up there or have a job nearby, nearby generally defined as within a fifteen-mile radius of the town. It was a town where people worked hard, went to church, seldom cheated on their mates, drank moderately, took only prescribed drugs, and nursed their frustrations without giving them reign. It was strongly Republican, overwhelmingly Protestant, universally white. It was no different from half a hundred other towns in the area—no better or worse, no more tolerant or bigoted.

Merridale sat at the base of a glacial ridge. From the town below, the ridge, denuded of trees and pocked with small ranch houses, looked like the spine of some great beast lying face down just beneath the earth's surface, arching its back as it had for years in an effort to break through the rocky soil and free itself. This stark mound was called the mount, and the town at the bottom, the dale, though why the trappers who had settled the area in the early eighteenth century had called it merry was a secret lost in time.

Like the legs of
Ozymandias
, the spine above Merridale was the only break in the surrounding landscape for many miles. A rolling hill lay on the other side of the town, but its height was only half that of the ridge, although it enabled the town to be described as lying in a quiet valley, the only valley for as far as the eye could see. All about was the unrelieved flatness of farms, broken by occasional towns and cities, the largest of which was Lansford, fifteen miles southeast, to which a good portion of Merridale residents drove daily to work, or boarded the first or second Amtrak train of the day, depending on whether their collars were blue or white, whether they bore paper bags or briefcases.

The farms were everywhere, rich with the bounty of dark soil. Unlike the withering earth of the plains states, leached out by chemicals and weakened by corporate interests that strove to make the land produce as much in as short a time as possible, most of the farms were still in private hands, many run by members of Amish or Mennonite sects who farmed the way their fathers and grandfathers had before them, caring for the land with a near-religious devotion, almost worshiping it, as further removed ancestors had adored the sun and rain that nurtured that same soil.

Because of the farms, Merridale could easily have been self-supporting had the need
arisen
. There were hogs, sheep, a few stringy herd of beef cattle, as well as all the vegetation necessary to life, even tobacco, which grew in great fields of flat green. Dozens of chicken farms and egg ranches completed the menu. But Merridale was not and never would be self-sufficient. It was too much a part of its county, its state, its country, to become a separate unit, though before too long county, state, and country alike would wish it out of existence.

~*~

The thought of his town and its people was far from Bradley Meyers's mind when the dogs woke him from a sound sleep. All he knew was that he was mad. It generally took hours for him to drift into a repose as solid as the one that had just been shattered, and his first response was rage. The alarm clock read just past four, and he knew any sleep he could grab until he had to get up at six would be ragged, unsatisfying, pierced with consciousness. He muttered a curse and kicked his feet out over the side of the bed. The covers slipped off Christine's shoulders and he pulled them back up over her roughly, wishing that he could sleep through anything, as she did.

He threw on his terrycloth bathrobe and stepped into the hall, listening for a second at Wally's door to the thick asthmatic snores that told him the boy was sleeping. Brad sighed and ran his fingers through his long, straggly hair. Might as well make coffee, he thought glumly. Those dogs aren't gonna shut up. He went into the bathroom, drained the remainder of the previous night's beer, and was rinsing night fuzz from his mouth when the sirens started up. It was weird, he thought. It was usually sirens first,
then
the dogs, not the other way around. If there were a fire, it might be nearby. Maybe he could even see it from a window. That would be one way to pass the hours until dawn.

He saw the man in his living room out of the corner of his eye as he was walking to the kitchen. He wasn't sure what he'd expected to see when he turned and looked. Someone with a gun, perhaps, or a knife, someone wearing a look of surprise tinged with aggressiveness, someone who would hiss a warning not to move or he'll shoot. What he did not expect to see was an old naked black man standing half in and half out of the sofa, as though it were quicksand into which he was sinking.

His mind thought, Jesus, but his voice could not even whisper it. Fright had clogged his throat, thickened his lungs, and he could only stand and stare at the softly gleaming figure who looked not at him but at some unnamed spot a few feet to Brad's left. The man was terribly emaciated, and Brad fancied he could see the outline of the backbone pressing against the diaphragm. The arms and thighs were like sticks, and the neck that supported the grizzled head was not much thicker. That head was capped with a gray-white patch of hair and mapped with wrinkles. The genitals were shrunken into insignificance.

The sirens wailed, the dogs howled, and Bradley Meyers stood shaking, waiting for something to happen, for the man to turn, to disappear, to move toward him holding out a pencil-fingered hand. But the man did
not
move, not at all, not even to sway like a leaf in the breeze. He only stood, his lower legs and feet lost in the worn-out sofa, looking languidly at that spot until Brad turned and looked too, trying to keep half an eye on the withered figure.

There was nothing there, just the wall with the big red, black, and white Nazi flag Brad had had there for years. Could he be looking at that?

What the hell does it matter what he's looking at! Brad thought savagely, turning back to the wispy figure. He tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. "Hey," he said softly. "What . . . Are you for real?"

There was no answer, no tremor of understanding in the old man's countenance.

"What
are
you?"

Still no answer. Just the old man standing there, shining weakly, and as Brad's eyes became adjusted to the poor light, he thought he could see the opposite wall through the man's body. A
ghost
, he thought with numbing certainty. A
ghost
.

"Chris," he called, but the bedsprings did not squeak, she was not coming. "Chris!" he barked, and he heard an answering moan from the bedroom. "Come here!" His words did not banish the thing. It still stood silently, as if it too were waiting for Christine.

"What is it?" she called, her speech sleep-dulled.

"Just . . . come
here
." He heard her bare feet on the floor, the rustle of her robe as it left the hook, her footfalls down the hall, a deep yawn in which irritation was evident. "Jeez, Brad, it's four in the—"

"Shut up. Look at that. Do you see that?"

Behind him, she drew in breath for a scream that never left her. She stood, breath locked, over an abyss that reached up with dark hands to catch her, unable to scream, to breathe, to move. Brad turned and saw her chained features, her mouth like a great black "O" in the blackness around her, and knew that she saw it too. Finally her breath blew out in a whistling whimper that held such terror and helplessness that he put his arms around her, blocking her view of the old man.

But she gazed straight into his chest as though she saw it still, then closed her eyes as the first paroxysm of fear shivered out of her. "Oh,
migod
,
migod
,
migod
," she whispered in a rapid litany. "Who is it, who is it?"

And because he did not know he said nothing.

"Who
is
it!" she grated, clawing at his arm. "What's he want? Who
is
he?"

"Let
go
," he said, pushing her away to where she could see the old man once more. She whimpered again, transfixed by the sight, unable to turn her eyes away. Outside the sirens screamed. "It's a ghost," he said over their wail. "What else? It's a ghost."

"Noon . . ."

"Look at it! You can see
through
it." Bradley Meyers felt a strange excitement interwoven with his fear, pushing it down on the loom of his emotions until it faded into the background like a neutral color in a field of vivid red, leaving only that intense
interest
, an overpowering need to
know
. He had seen too much of life to be scared for long by the semblance of death. Now he felt the adrenaline surge within him, and all he could think was "What is it? What is it?"—concerned only with the knowing, not with fear. He moved toward it slowly, with a healthy respect for the unknown, his tongue licking his dry lips.

"Brad . . . don't—"

"Shut up," he hissed. She knew better than to disobey, but the room seemed filled with her hoarse panting. Brad shuffled closer, until he was only a few feet away, then reached out a hand. But something he could not name stopped him from touching the man, and instead he moved to the side, grasping the arm of the couch, which he slowly slid toward himself.

The couch moved easily enough, its worn casters creaking as they rolled over the carpet. But the old man's body did not move, and soon his lower legs and most of his feet were revealed. It seemed to Brad that the bottom half inch of flesh sank into and became part of the carpet.