Everville (29 page)

He did not go entirely ignored. At the corner of Apple Street he encountered Bill and Maisie Waits, out walking their two chocolate labradors. As they approached Erwin the dogs seemed to sense his presence. Did they smell him or see him? He couldn't be sure. But they responded with raised hackles and growls, the bitch standing her ground, the male dashing away down Apple Street, trailing his leash. Billwho was in his fifties and far from fit-went after him, yelling.

The animal's response distressed Erwin, He'd never owned a dog, but by and large he liked the species. was being a phantom so profoundly unnatural a state that the nearest whiff of him was enough to make the beasts crazy?

He went down on his haunches, and softly called to the bitch.

"It's okay... it's okay... " he said, extending his hand, "I'm not going to hurt anybody-" The animal barked on ferociously, while Maisie watched her husband pursue the other dog. Erwin crept a little closer,' still murmuring words of reassurance, and the bitch showed signs of hearing him. She cocked her head, and her barking became more sporadic.

"That's it," Erwin said, "that's it. See, that's not so bad, now is it?" His open hand was now maybe two feet from her nose. Her din had lost all its ferocity, and was now reduced to little more than an occasional bark. Erwin reached a little further, and touched her head.

She stopped barking entirely now, and lay down, rolling onto her back to have her stomach scratched.

Maisie Waits looked down at her. "Katy, what on earth are you doing?" she said. "Get up." She lugged on the leash, to raise the animal, but Katy was enjoying Erwin's attentions too much. She made a little growl as though vaguely remembering that her stroker had frightened her a minute or two before, and then gave up even on that.

"Katy," Maisie Waits said, exasperated now, then, to her husband, "Did you find him?"

"Does it look like I found him?" Bill gasped. "He's headed off down towards the creek. He'll find his way home."

"But the traffic-"

"There is no traffic," Bill said. "Well, hardly any. And he's got lost before, for God's sake." Bill had reached the corner of the street now, and he stared at the recumbent Katy. "Look at you, you soft old thing," he said fondly, and went down on his haunches beside the dog. "I don't know what spooked him that way."

"Me," Erwin said, stroking the bitch's belly along with Bill. The dog heard. She pricked her ears and looked at Erwin. Bill, of course, heard nothing. Erwin kept talking anyway, the words tumbling out. "Listen, will you, Waits? If a mutt can hear me you damn well can. Just listen. I'm Erwin Toothaker-"

"As long as you're sure," Maisie was saying.

"Erwin Toothaker." "I'm sure," Bill replied. "He'll probably be home before He patted Katy's solid belly, and got to his feet. "Come us. on, old girl," he said. Then, with a sly glance at his wife: "You too, Katy."

Maisie Waits nudged him in the ribs. "William Waits," she said in a tone of mock outrage.

Bill leaned a little closer to her. "Want to fool around some?" he said to her.

"It's late-"

"It's Saturday tomorrow," Bill said, slipping his arm around his wife's waist. "It's either that or I ravish you in your sleep."

Maisie giggled, and with one quick jerk on the leash got Katy to her feet. Bill kissed Maisie's cheek, and then whispered something into his wife's ear. Erwin wasn't close enough to hear everything, but he caught pillow and like always. Whatever he said, Maisie returned his kiss, and they headed off down the street, with Katy casting a wistful glance back at her phantom admirer.

"Were you ever married, Erwin?"

It was Dolan. He was sitting in the doorway of Lively's Lighting and Furniture Store, picking his nose.

"No, I wasn't."

"Mine went off to Seattle after I passed over. Took her seven weeks and two days to uproot and go. Sold the house, sold most of the furniture, let the lease go on the store. I was so mad. I howled around this damn town for a month, weeping and wailing. I even tried to go after her."

.'And?"

Dolan shook his head. "I don't advise it. The further I went from Everville the more... vague... I became." "Any idea why?"

"Just guessing, but I suppose me and this place must be connected, after all these years. Maybe I can't imagine myself in any other place.

Anyhow, I don't weep and wail any more. I know where I belong." He looked at Erwin. "Speaking of which, I came looking for you for a reason."

"What?" "I was talking to a few friends of mine. Telling them about you and what happened outside my old store, and they wanted to see you."

"This is more-"

"Go on. You can say it." "Ghosts?"

"We prefer revenants. But yeah, ghosts'll do it." "Why do they want to see me?" Dolan got up. "What the hell does it matter to you?" he hollered, suddenly exasperated, "got something better to be doing?"

"No," Erwin said after a moment.

"So are you coming or not? Makes no odds to me."

"I'm coming."

Buddenbaum woke up in a white room, with a splitting headache. There was a sallow young man standing at the bottom of the bed, watching him.

"There you are," the young man said.

Clearly the youth knew him. But Buddenbaum couldn't put a name to his face. His puzzlement was apparently plain, because the kid said, "Owen? It's me. It's Seth." "Seth." The name made a dozen images flicker in Buddenbaum's head, like single frames of film, each from a different scene, strung together on a loop. Round and round they went, ten, twenty times. He glimpsed bare skin, a raging face, sky, more faces, now looking down at him. "I fell."

"Yes.

Buddenbaum ran his palms over his chest, neck, and stomach. "I'm intact."

"You broke some ribs, and cracked some vertebrae and fractured the base of your skull."

"I did?" Buddenbaum's hands went to his head. It was heavily bandaged.

"How long have I been unconscious?"

"Coming up to eight hours." "Eight hours?" He sat up in bed. "Oh my Lord."

"You have to lie down."

"No time. I've got things to do. Important things." He put his hand to his brow. "There's people coming. I've got to be... got to be... Jesus, it's gone out of my head." He looked up at Seth, with desperation on his face. "This is bad," he said, "this is very bad." He grabbed hold of Seth, and drew him closer. "There was some liaison, yes?" Seth didn't know the word. "You and 1, we were coupling-"

"Oh. That. Yes. Yes, we were going' at it, and this gu Bosley, he's a real Christian-"

"Never mind the Christians." Buddenbaum snarled. "Do you trust me?"

"Of course I trust you," Seth said, putting his hand to Buddenbaum's face. "You told me what's going to happen."

"I did, did I? And what did I say?"

"You said there's avatars coming." Seth pronounced the word haltingly.

"They're more than angels, you said." Comprehension replaced the despair on Buddenbaum's face. "The avatars," he said. "Of course." He started to swing his legs off the bed.

"You can't get up," Seth said, "you're hurt."

"I've survived worse than this, believe me," Buddenbaum said. "Now where are my clothes?" He stood up, and made for the small dresser in the corner of the room. "Are we still in Everville?"

"No, we're in Silverton."

"How far's that?" "T'hirty-five miles."

"So how did you get here?" "I borrowed my mother's car. But Owen, you're not well-"

"fhere's more at risk here than a cracked skull," Buddenbaum replied, opening the dresser, and taking out his clothes. "A lot more."

"Like what?"

"It's too complicated-"

"I catch on quickly," Seth replied. "You know I do. You said I do."

"Help me dress." "Is that all I'm good for?" Seth protested. "I'm not just some idiot kid you picked up."

"Then stop acting like one!" Buddenbaum snapped.

Seth immediately withdrew. "Well I guess that's plain enough," he said.

"I didn't mean it that way."

"You want somebody to dress you, ask the nurse. You want a ride back home, hire a cab."

"Seth@'

It was too late. The boy was already out of the door, slamming it behind him. Owen didn't try to go after him. This was no time to waste energy arguing. The boy would come round, given time. And if he didn't, he didn't. In a few hours he would not need the aid-or the affection@f Seth or any other selfwilled youth. He would be free of every frailty, including love; free to live out of time, out of place, out of every particular. He would be unmade, the way divinities were unmade, because divinities were without beginning and without end: a rare and wonderful condition.

As he was halfway through dressing, the doctor-a whey-faced young man with wispy blond hair-appeared. "Mr. Buddenbaum, what are you doing?" he asked.

"I would have thought that perfectly obvious," Owen replied.

"You can't leave."

"On the contrary. I can't stay. I have work to do."

"I'm amazed you're even standing," the doctor said. "I insist you get back into bed." He crossed to Owen, who raised his arms. "Leave me be," he said. "If you want to make yourself useful, call me a cab."

"If you attempt to leave," the doctor said, "I will not be responsible for the consequences." "Fine by me," Owen replied. "Now will you please leave me to dress in peace?" unusually large number of cemeteries. St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery lay two miles outside the city limits on the ulino road, but the other three, the Pioneer Cemetery (the mallest and most historically significant), the Potter emetery (named for the family who had buried more people in the region than any other), and the plain old Everville Cemetery, were all within the bounds of the city. It was to the Potter Cemetery, which lay on Lambroll Drive, close to the Old Post Office building, that Dolan took Erwin.

He chatted in his lively fashion as they went, mostly about how much the city had changed in the last few years. None of it was for the better, in his opinion. So many of the things that had been part of Everville's history-the family businesses, the older buildings, even the streetlamps-were being uprooted or destroyed.

"I didn't think much about that kind of thin when I was 9 breathing," Dolan remarked. "You don't, do you? You get on with your life as best you can. Hope the taxman doesn't come after you; hope you can still get it up on Saturday night; hope your hair doesn't fall out too quickly.

You don't have time to think about the past, until you're part of it. And then-"

"Then?"

"Then you realize what's gone is gone forever, and that's a damn shame if it was something worth keeping." He pointed over at the Post Office building, which had been left to fall into dereliction since a larger and more centralized facility had opened in Salem. "I mean look at that," he said. "That could have been preserved, right? Turned into something for the community."

"What community?" said Erwin. "There isn't one. There's just a few thousand people who happen to live next door to one another, and hate the sight of each other eighty percent of the time. Believe me, I saw a lot of that in my business. People suing each other 'cause a fence was in the wrong place, or a tree had been cut down. Nice neighbors, you'd say, looking at them: regular folks with good hearts. But let me tell you, if the law allowed it, they'd murder each other at the drop of a hat."

This last remark was out of his mouth before he realized quite what he'd said. "I was just trying to protect the children," Dolan muttered.

"I wasn't talking about you," Erwin replied. "What you did--"

"was wrong. I know that. We made a terrible error, and I'll regret it forever. But we did it because we thought we had to."

"And how did your precious community treat you when they realized you'd screwed up? Like pariahs, right?" The other man said nothing. "So much for the community," Erwin said.

they did not speak again until they reached the gates of Potter's Cemetery, when Dolan said, "Do you know who Hubert Nordhoff is?"

"Didn't his family own the mill?"

"A lot more than the mill. He was a great man hereabouts, for fifty years."

"So what about him?"

"He holds court on the last Friday of every month."

"Here?" Erwin said, peering through the ironwork gate into the cemetery. There was a thin veil of clouds covering the moon, but it was light enough to see the graves laid out ahead. Here and there a carved angel or an um marked the resting place of a family with money to waste, but most of the tombs were simple stones.

"Yes, here," said Erwin, and led him inside.

There was an ancient, moss-covered oak at the far end of the cemetery, and there, under its titanic branches, was an assembly of six men and a woman. Some lounged on stones; one-a fellow who looked sickly even for a dead soul-sitting on the lowest of the branches. And standing close to the trunk of the tree, presently addressing the group, was a man in his seventies, his dress, his spectacles, and his somewhat formal manner suggesting he had lived and died in a earlier age. Erwin did not need Dolan whispering in his ear to know that this was the aforementioned Hubert Nordhoff. He was presently in full and rhetorical flight.

"Are we unloved? My friends, we are. Are we forgotten? By all but a few, I'm afraid so. And do we care? My friends, do we care?" He let his sharp blue gaze rest on every one of his congregation before he answered, "Oh my Lord, ves. to the bottom of our broken hearts, we care." He stopped here, looking past his audience towards Dolan and Erwin. He inclined his head.

"Mr. Dolan," he said. "Mr. Nordhoff." Dolan turned towards Erwin.

"This is the guy I was telling you about earlier. His name's-"

"Toothaker," Erwin said, determined not to enter this circle as Dolan's catch, but as a free-willed individual. "Erwin Toothaker."

"We're pleased to see you, Mr. Toothaker," the old man said, "I'm Hubert Nordhoff. And this... " he took Erwin round the group, introducing them all. Three of the names were familiar to Erwin. they were the members of families still prominent in Everville (one was a Gilholly; another the father of a former mayor). The others were new to him, though it was apparent by their postmortem finery that none had been disenfranchised in life. Like Hubert, these were men who'd had some significant place in the community. There was only one surprise: that the single female in this group was not a woman at all, but one Cornelius Floyd, who had apparently been delivered into the afterlife in rather dowdy drag, and seemed quite happy with his lot. His features were too broad and his jaw too square to be called feminine, but he effected a light, breathy tone when telling Erwin that though his name was indeed Comelius, everybody called him Connie.

With the introductions over, Hubert got down to business. "We heard what happened to you," he said. "You were murdered, we understand, in your own house."

"Yes, that's right."

"We're of course appalled." There were suitably sympathetic murmurs all around the circle. "But I regret to say not terribly surprised. This is increasingly the way of the world."

"It wasn't a normal murder," Erwin pointed out, "if any murder's normal." "Dolan mentioned something about vampires," Gilholly the Elder said.

"His word, not mine," Erwin pointed out. "I got the life sucked out of me, but there was none of that neck-biting nonsense."

"Did you know the killer?" asked a portly fellow called Dickerson, who was presently recumbent on the top of a tomb. "Not exactly." "Meaning?" "I met him down by Unger's Creek. His name was Fletcher. I think he fancies himself some kind of messiah."

"That's all we need," said the scrawny guy in the tree. "What do we do about this, Nordhoff7" Gilholly wanted to know.

"There's nothing we can do," Erwin said.

"Don't be defeatist," Nordhoff snapped. "We have responsibilities."

"It's true," said Connie. "If we don't act, who will?"

"Act to do what?" said Erwin.

"to save our heritage," Nordhoff replied. "We're the men who made this city. We poured our sweat into taining this wilderness and our geniuses into building a decent place to raise our families. Now it's all coming apart. We've suspected it for months now. Seen little signs of it everywhere. And now you come along, murdered by something unnatural, and the Lundy boy, raped in Dolan's store by something else, equally unnatural-"

"Don't forget the bees," Dickerson put in.

"What bees?" Erwin said.

"Do you know Frank Tibbit?" Dickerson said, "Lives off Moon Lane?"

"No, I can't say-"

"He keeps bees. Or rather he did. they all took off ten days ago."

"Is that significant?" Erwin said.

"Not if it were a solitary case," Nordhoff said. "But it isn't. We watch, you see, and we listen. It's our business to preserve what we made, even if we've been forgotten. So we hear everything that goes on, sooner or later. And there are dozens of examples-"

"Hundreds," said Connie.

"Many dozens, certainly," Nordhoff said, "many dozens of examples of strange goings-on, none of them of any -reater scale than Tibbit's bees-"

"Barring your murder," Dickerson put in.

"Is it possible I could finish a sentence without being interrupted?" Nordhoff said.

"Maybe if you weren't so long-winded about it," said Melvin Pollock, who looked to be at least Nordhoff s age, and had the long, drawn dour mouth of one who'd died an unrepentant curmudgeon. "What he's trying to say is this: We invested our lives in Everville. The signs tell us we're about to lose that investment forever."

"And when it's gone-" Dickerson said.

"We go with it," Pollock said. "Into oblivion."

"Just because we're dead," Nordhoff said, "it doesn't mean we have to take this lying down."

Dickerson chuckled. "Not bad, Hubert. We'll make a comedian of you yet."

"This isn't a laughing matter," Nordhoff said.

"Oh but it is," Dickerson said, heaving his bulk into a sitting position. "Here we are, the great and the good of Everville, a banker"-he nodded in Pollock's direction. "A real-estate broker." At Connie now. "A mill owner." Nordhoff, of course. "And the rest of us all movers and shakers. Here we are, holding on to our dignity as best we can, and thinking we've got a hope in hell of influencing what goes on out there"-he pointed through the gate, into the world of the living-"when it's perfectly obvious to anyone with eyes in his head that it's over."