Dark Advent (13 page)

He watched the steady trek of time across that dream-Caleb’s face, who held a forked ash stick loose in his hands. He knew that he was probably the best of them all, the pinnacle of that long line of Enright men, who’d had the knack for dowsing. He was the best because he was the last, all the generations of talent narrowed down to one reservoir. And with that came an awesome responsibility.

For one day before he died, perhaps on the very day itself, he felt sure he’d be held accountable. To pay back the earth for all the secrets he’d lifted from her.

* *

When he finally awoke, it took a while to realize where he was. He stared up at the barn roof, then slowly sat up, rubbed his eyes, massaged a knee and shoulder that ached from his fall.

Then he remembered everything else, and that took center stage.

“I wished you dead once, Emmy,” he said, voice breaking. “So help me, I did it, but I’m sorry. Been sorry for it ever since.”

Caleb stepped into the sunshine of that final July day, staring at their home, a warehouse of memories. And the ghosts of the young people they’d once been. It would be so achingly lonely from this day on.

“And I don’t think I’ve been any sorrier than I am right now.” He sat down again, in grass this time, resting his calloused hands across his knees. The tears came easily this time, and he welcomed them. In tears came relief. Not much, but it helped. He bowed his head, let the tears fall soft and silent into the earth.

He lifted his eyes to the sky, an inverted sea holding an armada of clouds, white ships sailing over whispering fields of corn. The sun had recently crossed into the western half of the sky, so it wasn’t much after noon. Plenty of time before dark.

He found a shovel hanging on a wall in the barn, and carried it back toward the treeline behind their house. Caleb stopped a few yards this side of it, then thrust the shovel blade into the earth and leaned on it for a long moment.

He thought it was illegal to bury your own
on
your own, but from what he knew, there wasn’t much of anyone left to complain, not in New Holland. Besides, even the undertaker had been found dead in his workshop. That’s what Halsey Bascomb had said last week, when Caleb had sauntered down for a visit. The two of them had sat on Halsey’s porch, smoking roll-your-owns and hitting from a jug of homemade wine Caleb had brought, a gift from a grateful homebuilder down in Ross County. Halsey’s border collie Shep sat between them, though he’d always taken more of a liking to Caleb than his own master. Caleb scratched the dog’s ears the whole time.

Halsey was dead now too. Like the rest.

And so Caleb planted the notch of one boot heel against the ass-end of the shovel blade, and thrust it deeper into the earth to overturn the first spadeful. Much later, the hole finished, he returned to the house. Ascended the stairs. Wrinkled his nose at the odor pervading the second floor. He gathered Emily up in his arms, the sheet loosely wrapped about her. How long had it been since he’d carried her anywhere? Decades, maybe.

He carried her out through the back door, the grimmest of all the chores he’d ever been called to do. He paused beside a trellis crawling with morning glories, heart-shaped leaves and the trumpetlike flowers open to the day. Such a lovely shade of lavender. He plucked one of the flowers, taking plenty of stem, and tucked it in her loosely swaying hair, just over one ear. Once upon a time she had often worn flowers in her hair…even to bed. How he’d loved that, looking up at her as she sat naked and astride him, raven hair caught in the moonlight and intertwined with flowers.

The grave he’d dug was four feet deep. He’d not had it in him to go any farther. After resting her within, he stood at its edge to mutter a few words of prayer, wiping away stray tears and streaking dirt across his cheeks. At last he began returning the upturned earth to the hole, and at first he averted his eyes. In no way could he bear the sight of cool, moist soil covering her. Legs, abdomen, arms, face. It was like covering the biggest chunk of himself as well.

His task was completed when the sun first kissed the western horizon. He fashioned a crude cross to mark the grave, using two short planks of wood lashed together with an ancient strip of leather.

He bade farewell to Emily, for the time being, and started on the path back to the house. It looked bigger than ever now. Ugly, even, and twice as empty as before. He looked up into the sky, noticing for the first time that the earlier cottony clouds had been chased away by darker cousins. Fat and sullen, they hung low overhead. Indifferent.

Caleb retreated into the house, toward a couch that beckoned with the promise of rest, and a few minutes later the earth tasted the first drops of rain.

* *

The storm gathered force outside the house, wind driving the rain furiously before it. Arcs of lightning sheared down from the sky, and thunder rolled like Armageddon. Shortly after eleven, it was even too much for Caleb, who normally slept as soundly as the proverbial log, and he awakened.

Flashes of lightning helped him reorient himself. He couldn’t remember coming in earlier, and his head swam with murk.

Without knowing why, he rose and walked into the kitchen. Its windows looked out over the back yard, all the way to the treeline. Rain pattered away at the panes of glass, pooled on the outer windowsill. Dirty dishes lay piled in the sink beneath him, stinking of decayed food.

Lightning.

The split second of near-daylight revealed a shape out back. Something that didn’t belong.

Darkness.

He waited, holding his breath, hands clenched on the sink’s rim.

Lightning.

Whatever it was, it was moving, swaying. Its progress to the house was slow, inexorable. And he knew exactly what it was.

Caleb returned to the couch, a bundle of jitters and raw nerves. He switched on a lamp beside the couch, balanced atop an end table with one too-short leg braced by an old issue of
TV Guide.
Archie Bunker smirked up from its yellowed cover. The lamp’s light seemed yellow as well, impure in the wake of the lightning.

What’s happening here…to me…?

Caleb heard the back door burst inward; the rain swelled in volume. Sounds came from the linoleum at the back of the house. A swishing sound. Occasionally a soft plop. A slithering. Just beyond the light’s reach, in the shadows, it moved. He waited.

Welcome home, Emily. Welcome.

She stepped forward into the light, her progress slow and plodding. From head to chalky-white foot she was filthy. Much of the mud had washed away in the rain, but not all. It clotted her hair, oozed down her legs, bagged inside her nightgown. She stared ahead at Caleb with none of the warmth that had once been Emily.

“I’m sorry about Rachel,” she said, voice as hollow and empty as a cave.

Caleb found himself longing for his rifle. Not for this thing before him, but for his own skull.
I’m probably crazy, in fact I hope that’s all this is, but either way, if this is what I’m gonna spend the rest of my days seeing, I don’t want no part of it.

“I’m sooo sorry about Rachel,” she repeated. “But we can try again.” She reached toward him, moving ever closer. Gobbets of thick mud pattered onto the rug.

Caleb squeezed his eyes shut, jammed his fists against his head.

“I’m fertile again.”

He opened his eyes in time to see her rip open her already tattered nightgown, exposing smeared and muddy flesh that time and nature and gravity had long ago made sag. A slow, rich torrent of watery earth flowed from within her.

Emily grinned, terrible and cold. “We can try again,” she said, and held up her hand. Clenched there was a long, drooping strand of morning glories. She reached up and clumsily attempted to affix them in the tangles of her mud-caked hair.

Caleb cried out, finally, ready to scream himself hoarse, and indeed he did when she kept coming, kept coming, and sank down upon him with her empty grin and her cold, slick embrace.

* *

By dawn the rain had slacked off. Caleb stirred with the faraway sound of a rooster, discovered he was shivering. His clothes were drenched. Rainwater. What the hell?

From his vantage point he discovered that he was up to his old tricks again, sleeping where he wasn’t meant to. The first sight to greet him was the dining room ceiling, festooned with cobwebs. Sleeping on the dining room floor? Wouldn’t he ever learn?

He started to sit up, clothes squishing and clinging like a cold shroud. He remembered vague nightmares, the worst dreams a man could have. In bracing one hand against the floor to push himself up, he discovered something else that didn’t belong here: his shovel. And it had most definitely been used within recent hours.

When Caleb got all the way up, he saw that he wasn’t alone.

Emily stared off into space from her usual chair at the dining table, jammed into it in a stiff, awkward pose. As if she’d been molded to fit the chair and the pieces just wouldn’t work anymore. Muddy Emily, unseeing, unspeaking, a rain-beaten strand of flowers threaded into her hair. Her coffee mug, stained from decades of use, sat untouched before her, as if placed there in blind hope.

Oh Lord above, I didn’t,
he thought.
Tell me I didn’t go out there last night and DIG HER BACK UP.

But the mud on his hands, on his clothes, on the shovel, was all he had for evidence. And dead women certainly tell no tales.

Crazy from grief? Or from guilt? Didn’t much matter one way or another. But he knew as sure as day was dawning that he couldn’t stay here any longer. Best just to pack a few belongings in his battered old suitcase and seek the open road.

And then where? Good question. But no doubt his rendezvous with a payback to the earth lay out there somewhere. He could go east, or north, or south…but he was a man of the land, and the most land of all lay to the west.

Maybe there was work to be done somewhere. Of what manner, he hadn’t the vaguest of notions. And then again, maybe there wasn’t. But as Grandpap Elmer had once said, you go questioning too
much and you can lose something in the knowing.

SECOND EPOCH

THE FINAL CURTAIN

August 1987

1

He walked the streets of Potosi, alone, and for the time being, wanting it that way. They felt hollow, ringing with the fading echoes of a town that had been stricken, had whimpered mightily, and had finally died. A familiar scenario currently playing out in thousands of other places great and small.

Nearly two millennia before, the apostle Paul wrote that it wasn’t a building that made up a church, but its people. If that was true, and Peter Solomon believed that it was, then consequently Potosi had ceased to be a town. Most of its residents had died, and of those who hadn’t, or hadn’t yet, most had fled, sneaking around the uniformed men enforcing the quarantine before it had been deemed hopeless, or heading out in plain view after there weren’t enough left to stand guard. The people made the town. All else—houses, stores, offices, schools, and yes, even their churches—were props. Like a movie set on a Hollywood back lot.

“And as Potosi goes,” Peter Solomon said to himself with a self-satisfied nod, “so goes the world.”

A sociologist’s dream, a little microcosmic model of society as a whole.

There were stragglers, of course, just as he’d been betting and hoping there would be. A risky gamble, given the nature of the disease that Shaffer had cooked up, but Solomon was a betting man willing to take a chance or two. He didn’t often play poker, but when he did, the stakes were high, and what he enjoyed even more than winning was making the other players sweat.

And so, yes, stragglers. From time to time he would see them furtively ducking between houses, could hear the desultory drones of nearby cars. He could sometimes see and watch them through their windows at home, when the electricity decided to cooperate.

It was browning out at times, seemingly with greater frequency as the days passed. High-tech systems, they were built for reliability. And complex? Oh hell yes, tremendously so. Efficiency always breeds complexity. Missouri belonged to a region where better than eighty percent of its electrical energy needs were met by coal, and the coal gasification process was broken down into eleven steps before the power hit the outlets. But without the good people to feed that fuel and drive those turbines and generators and combustors and operate those transmission and distribution centers, well, those 600,000 or so miles of overhead lines across the country were just so much ugly tinsel.

He knew what the stragglers were thinking, could see it written across their faces. He could tell the pure cowards from those radiant with blind hope for miracles that wouldn’t come. He could tell these from those who’d been culture-shocked into permanent disbelief. Easiest of all to spot were the worthy ones, those reaching deeply into their souls to dig out enough strength and courage to face tomorrow.

What a feat, what an accomplishment, to have been the catalyst to force these misguided folks into a new direction, far far better than the path they’d thought was progress.

Peter Solomon walked on into the night, taking in its sounds, its sights. He smiled, let loose a high-pitched laugh of ecstatic glee, then breathed deeply of the night.

It was even smelling better.

* *

Nights later, he was still wandering the streets of Potosi, no apparent destination in mind. These walks had become the equivalent of a stroll through the Concord woods for Thoreau, ripe with the constant discovery of an excitingly new and better world.

So what next?
he wondered.
What do I
do
with my world?

He gave it some thought, but before long fell prey to distraction. He saw a woman, maybe fifty yards ahead. He couldn’t make out much, given the darkness. But she was walking toward him, pushing…a shopping cart?

He held his course. For all she knew, why, he was just another man, same as the rest. And when they drew up to one another, Solomon could see her. Appraise her. The short hair, the wary eyes, the fists tightly clenched on the pushbar of the shopping cart. It was filled with canned food, boxes, more.

“You’re smart,” he said. “Stocking up, I mean.”

Her hand dropped to the revolver resting in the cart’s childseat, lingered there. “That’s right.”

“No more Kroger’s trucks for a while, I think.” And he smiled, first at her, then down at the gun beneath her hand. Would she actually try to use it on him? He didn’t think so. And he
was
a betting man.

“You best not try anything, bud,” she said. “My daddy was a state trooper, and he taught me how to use
this thing.”

Solomon laughed, loud and hearty. He smiled at her, this time more gently. This girl was definitely okay. Tough as shoe leather on the outside, probably marshmallow filling on the inside.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s food enough around, for a while. And I have no desire to hurt you. Not
you.
”

Her hand had been tightening on the gun, and she even went so far as to lift it an inch or two from the cart’s seat. But she stopped. And Solomon continued to smile at her, staring. He
knew
that she wanted to tear her gaze away, pull back from those blue, blue eyes, eyes of polar ice and low-grade flame. And that she just couldn’t. Or didn’t want to as badly as she’d first thought.

“There’s something…” she said, faltering, because her heart wasn’t in it anymore, “…wrong about you.”

He smiled wider still and began to let some of his edges slip, those threads of control that kept her from seeing what he was truly made of, the stuff of deity. He gave her a glimpse inside.

The gun came up.

And his hand was there to pluck it free and send it spinning, spinning into the shadows of night, to clatter on a sidewalk or bounce off a tree or thump into a lawn, he didn’t care which, just as long as it was no longer a barrier between them, a shield to prevent her from experiencing the greatest moment of her life.

Marshmallow filling indeed.

She went down on her knees, both of them still in the middle of the deserted street, modest houses around them as black as tombs on the inside. Trees whispered softly from all sides, and moonlight cast a soft, silvery luster on them both. She was no longer looking at him, not directly. Her gaze fell somewhere off to one side. He noticed that she was shaking, her body rigid, her shoulders quivering.

Peter Solomon, Giver of Life and Comfort, reached down and lightly brushed his hand across the top of her head. A moment later she tilted her head up, caressed his hand.

“Please,” she whispered. “Don’t…”

He nodded. There was nothing at all erotic in her touch—he knew the difference. But the simplicity of it, the sudden unexpectedness of it, the sheer
beauty
of that clasping hand surprised him to no end. Surely it was homage. And worship?

Absolutely.

He was quite sure that arousing him was the farthest thing from her mind. But in taking one look at her—her upturned face, her parted lips, her quickening breath—Solomon knew it was the nearest thing to his.

“Lucky girl,” he whispered, thrusting a finger between those parted, trembling lips. “Lucky, lucky girl.”

And so he moved quickly then, stripping her of her clothes, for she didn’t need them anymore, not in his
presence, and he then hit a new peak in the evolution that these past weeks had brought him, and he became that God of Pain and God of Rapture that he knew was hiding inside his skin all along, and he took her there in the street on a bed of asphalt, in one long wail of agony and ecstasy.

Perhaps there were others like her here in Potosi, those who hungered for what he offered, but there would be a lot more to the northeast. And the needs of the many had to be ranked ahead of the needs of these few. The time had come to seek them out. He fleetingly wondered who needed whom more.

Solomon rose, arranged his own clothing once more, and left her cuddled beside her cart, curled onto her side…

His newfound daughter, the first of many.