Last Summer at Mars Hill (14 page)

But she couldn’t stay like that. And she couldn’t leave, not with Linette up there somewhere; even if that horrible figure was waiting for her. It was crazy: through her mind raced all the movies she had ever seen that were just like this, some idiot kid going up a dark stairway or into the basement where the killer waited, and the audience shrieking
No!;
but still she couldn’t go back.

The hardest part was stepping over the corpse, trying not to actually
touch
it. She had to stretch across three steps, and then she almost fell but scrabbled frantically at the wall until she caught her balance. After that she ran the rest of the way until she reached the top.

Before her stretched the hallway. It seemed to be lit by some kind of moving light, like a strobe or mirror ball; but then she realized that was because of all the moths bashing against the myriad lamps strung across the ceiling. She took a step, her heart thudding so hard she thought she might faint. There was the doorway to Lie Vagal’s bedroom; there all the open windows, and beside them the paintings.

She walked on tiptoe, her sneakers melting into the thick carpeting. At the open doorway she stopped, her breath catching in her throat. But when she looked inside there was no one there. A cigarette burned in an ashtray next to the bed. By the door Lie Vagal’s stereo blinked with tiny red and green lights. The music went on, a ringing music like a calliope or glass harp. She continued down the hall.

She passed the first window, then a painting; then another window and another painting. She didn’t know what made her stop to look at this one; but when she did her hands grew icy despite the cloying heat.

The picture was empty. A little brass plate at the bottom of the frame read
The Snow Queen;
but the soft wash of watercolors showed only pale blue ice, a sickle moon like a tear on the heavy paper. Stumbling, she turned to look at the frame behind her.
La Belle et La Bête,
it read: an old photograph, a film still, but where two figures had stood beneath an ornate candelabra there was only a whitish blur, as though the negative had been damaged.

She went to the next picture, and the next. They were all the same. Each landscape was empty, as though waiting for the artist to carefully place the principals between glass mountain and glass coffin, silver slippers and seven-league boots. From one to the other Haley paced, never stopping except to pause momentarily before those skeletal frames.

And now she saw that she was coming to the end of the corridor. There on the right was the window where she had seen that ghastly figure; and there beneath it, crouched on the floor like some immense animal or fallen beam, was a hulking shadow. Its head and shoulders were bent as though it fed upon something. She could hear it, a sound like a kitten lapping, but so loud that it drowned out even the muted wail of Lie Vagal’s music.

She stopped, one hand touching the windowsill beside her. A few yards ahead of her the creature grunted and hissed; and now she could see that there was something pinned beneath it. At first she thought it was the kinkajou. She was stepping backwards, starting to turn to run, when very slowly the great creature lifted its head to gaze at her.

It was the same tallowy face she had glimpsed in the window. Its mouth was open so that she could see its teeth, pointed and dulled like a dog’s, and the damp smear across its chin. It seemed to have no eyes, only huge ruined holes where they once had been; and above them stretched an unbroken ridge of black where its eyebrows grew straight and thick as quills. As she stared it moved its hands, huge clumsy hands like a clutch of rotting fruit. Beneath it she could glimpse a white face, and dark hair like a scarf fluttering above where her throat had been torn out.

“Linette!”

Haley heard her own voice screaming. Even much later after the ambulances came she could still hear her friend’s name; and another sound that drowned out the sirens: a man singing, wailing almost, crying for his daughter.

Haley started school several weeks late. Her parents decided not to send her to Fox Lane after all, but to a parochial school in Goldens Bridge. She didn’t know anyone there and at first didn’t care to, but her status as a sort-of celebrity was hard to shake. Her parents had refused to allow Haley to appear on television, but Aurora Dawn had shown up nightly for a good three weeks, pathetically eager to talk about, her daughter’s murder and Lie Vagal’s apparent suicide. She mentioned Haley’s name every time.

The nuns and lay people who taught at the high school were gentle and understanding. Counselors had coached the other students in how to behave with someone who had undergone a trauma like that, seeing her best friend murdered and horribly mutilated by the man who turned out to be her father. There was the usual talk about satanic influences in rock music, and Lie Vagal’s posthumous career actually was quite promising. Haley herself gradually grew to like her new place in the adolescent scheme of things, half-martyr and half-witch. She even tried out for the school play, and got a small part in it; but that wasn’t until the spring.

With apologies to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Another story set in Kamensic, reflecting my fascination with Andy Warhol’s Factory. Like most of my work, there are numerous real-life touchpoints here, although the Erl-King himself isn’t one of them. It was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and in an odd perambulation, prefigures my novel
Black Light.

The gods always come. They will come down

from their machines, and some they will save,

others they will lift forcibly, abruptly

by the middle; and when they bring some order

they will retire. And then this one will do one thing,

that one another; and in time the others

will do their things. And we will start over again.

—C.P. Cavafy, “Intervention of the Gods”

I
WAS IN A
Holiday Inn halfway between Joy and Sulphur, Oklahoma, when the call came about the mutilations.

“Janet? It’s Pete.” Peter Green, head of features at
OUR
magazine back in New York.

“What’s the matter?” I said wearily. I’d just left Lyman, my photographer, back in the motel bar with a tableful of empty beer bottles and my share of the bill. I was already in bed and had almost not answered the phone. Now it was too late.

“Moira killed the Bradford story.”

I snorted. “The hell she did.”

Clink of ice in a glass: it was an hour later back in New York and two days before the weekly went to press. Pete would be at home, trying desperately to tie up all the loose ends before Moira McCain
(OUR
magazine was
her
magazine) started phoning him with the last-minute changes that had given Pete a heart attack last year, at the age of thirty-eight. “Too much fallout from the White’s piece.”

A month earlier I’d done a story on the mass murderer who’d rampaged through a White’s Cafeteria in Dime Box, singling out women and children as targets for his AK-47. Turned out his estranged wife had tried to get a restraining order against him; she was meeting her mother at the cafeteria for lunch that day. A few weeks afterward there’d been another shooting spree. Same town, different restaurant chain, chillingly similar M.O.—girlfriend dumps guy, guy goes berserk, nine people end up dead. Now all the tabloids and networks were catching flack for over-publicizing the killings. Seven families had filed suit against a tabloid program that had presented the first killer—Jimmie Mac Lasswell, an overweight teenage boy—as a sensitive loner. Unbelievably, eight weeks later both killers were still at large. Not even sighted anywhere, which seemed impossible, given the scope of the publicity the killings had received. “Legal says put any kind of killer feature on hold till we find out how many of those suits are going to trial. That means Bradford. Moira’s already called and canceled your interview.”

“Son of a
bitch.
”

I’d been working on this story for six months, contacting all the principals, writing to Billy Bradford in prison. This was my third visit to Oklahoma: I was finally going to interview him face-to-face. The story was slated to run next week.

“I know, Janet. I’m sorry.” And he was, too. Pete hated Moira more than any of us, and he’d helped arrange any number of my meetings with Bradford’s family and attorneys. Billy Bradford was a forty-two-year-old truck, driver who had sexually abused his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. When she’d threatened to go to her school guidance counselor with the story, he’d killed her. What made the story gruesomely irresistible, though, was the fact that Bradford was an amateur taxidermist who had then stuffed his stepdaughter and hidden her body at his Lake Murray hunting camp.
PSYCHODADDY!
the
New York Post
had called him, and everyone got a lot of mileage out of the Norman Bates connection.

But now the story was dead, and I was furious. “So what the hell am I supposed to do here in Bumfuck?”

A long pause. More ice rattled on Pete’s end of the line. I knew something bad was coming.

“Actually, there’s another story out there Moira wants you to cover.”

“Oh, yeah? What?” I spat. “It’s too early for the high school football championships.”

“It’s, uh—well, it’s sort of a ritual thing. A—well, shit, Janet. It’s a cattle mutilation.”

“A
cattle mutilation?
Are you crazy?”

“Janet, look, we’ve got to have something—”

“What is this, I’m being punished? I won six fucking awards last year, you tell her that! I’m not dicking around with some UFO bullshit—”

“Janet, listen to me. It’s not like that, it’s—” He sighed. “Look, I don’t know what it is. Apparently Lyman was talking to her earlier today—this is
after
she killed the Bradford piece—and he mentioned hearing something on the radio down there about some cattle mutilations, and since you’re both already out there Moira figured maybe you could get a story out of it. Lyman’s got the details.”

“Lyman’s gonna have more than details,” I snarled; but that was it. The Bradford story was dead. If Legal was worked up about it, Moira would never override their counsel. I could be in a room with Elvis Presley and the Pope and John Hinckley, and Moira would be whining with her lawyers over lunch at La Bernadine and refuse to run the story.

“Call me tomorrow. Lyman knows where this ranch is—” Lyman was from Oklahoma City, by way of a degree in Classics at Yale and a Hollywood apprenticeship—“hell, he’s probably
related
to them—”

“Right. Later.”

I clicked off and flopped back into bed.

Cattle mutilations. I should have switched from beer to tequila.

Lyman did know where the ranch was—a few hours outside of Gene Autry, an hour or so from the Texas border and about sixty miles from where we’d been staying.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said after giving me directions. Already his accent had kicked back in, and he’d resurrected a pair of ancient Tony Lama cowboy boots that he wore beneath his ninety-dollar jeans. “No later than noon, I swear.”

He’d made plans to meet some distant cousin for a late breakfast somewhere on the way—

“Great barbecue, Janet, wish you’d join us—”

But I was too pissed to make small talk with Lyman and Don Ray. Instead I told Lyman I’d drop him off, and Don Ray would drive him down to find me in Gene Autry.

But Lyman was still determined that I salvage something from the trip. “Listen here, Janet, if you go about four miles past Sulphur you can get off the Interstate onto old Route 77. It’ll take you right where we’re going, and it’s a real pretty road. I
know
you never got off the Interstate when you were here before. Route 77 goes through the Arbuckle Mountains and Turner Falls. And right before you hit the Interstate again there’s a place called Val’s Barbecue. Check it out for lunch.”

He squeezed my arm and piled out of the rental car, weighted with cameras—he’d prove to the hick cousin that he was a real New York photographer now. And so I drove off, heading south for Gene Autry.

It took a while for Route 77 to get pretty. There was none of that Dustbowl ambiance I’d been expecting when I’d first come out here to meet with Bradford’s wife. A lot of Oklahoma looked just like everywhere else now: McDonald’s, franchised bars with stupid names, endless lots selling RVs and fancy pickup trucks. But after half an hour or so the landscape changed. The franchises dried up; the tacky ranch houses with over-watered lawns gave way to tiny dogtrot bungalows silvered with age, surrounded by rusting cars and oil wells long since run dry. Behind these stretched what remained of the great prairie—most of it given over to grazing lands now, but oddly empty of cattle or any other signs of cultivation. The sky was pale blue and dizzyingly immense above those endless green-gold plains, though on the southern horizon black clouds stretched as far as I could see, and spikes of lightning played in the distance. I fiddled with the radio till I found George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

“Well, shit,” I said out loud. Maybe cattle mutilations weren’t such a bad thing after all.

After about an hour I saw my first sign for the Arbuckle Mountains. A few miles further and I passed a grimy motel, with a hand-lettered cardboard sign dangling from its neon pilasters,
NOW!
AMERICAN
OWNED
, it read. Another mile and I saw another sign, this one for the local football team. A crude caricature of an Indian in full headdress, his face scarlet and mouth wide open to show white pointed teeth. In one hand he held a tomahawk, in the other a scalp. The sign proclaimed
HOME OF THE SAVAGES
. I began to wish I’d waited to come with Lyman.

A few miles out of town, the road started to climb. It narrowed until it was barely wide enough to let two pickups pass, but then I’d only seen three or four cars all morning. To either side white outcroppings of stone appeared, tufted with long brittle grass. Above me the blue sky had been overtaken by the storm front moving up from the south, and spates of rain slashed across the windshield now and again. I glanced down at the map on the seat beside me and decided to get off at the next exit for the Interstate, Turner Falls or not.