The Axman Cometh (24 page)

The elevator, when Don hits the floor below, seems to go into free fall. Don rolls over twice, holding the toy sword, until he comes up against a wall. He is still screaming like an
unblooded
soldier thrust into battle, adrenaline a bombshell in the brain, a fiery tonic for the survival instinct. He expects the worst—an ax blade flashing swiftly out of the dark, beheading stroke—but is not paralyzed by his expectations. He thrashes everywhere around him with the silly toy in his hand (yet there is weight and a graceful balance to it he has not been aware of before), until Papa comes thumping down in oilskins to join him.

"Watch it, Carnes! You almost took my arm off."

"With this?" Don says incredulously. He lowers the sword, breathing deeply, eyes big as doorknobs as he strains to see. The elevator, picking up more speed, is rumbling
hellbent
in the shaft, and that's not the worst thing Don is aware of in these moments of developing calamity.

"Shan!
Shannon!
Oh God! Papa—she isn't here!"

"I know that."

"We're going to crash!"

"That also is
a
matter that has not escaped my attention," Papa says, picking himself up off the floor and dusting his knees.

"You don't have to worry! You can go back to wherever the hell it is you came from! But what's going to happen to
me?"

"You've handled yourself pretty well up to now. You'll be able to handle that too."

The elevator is buffeted as it falls, there is a high keening sound and some metallic
snappings
and
poppings
as if tough cable is parting. A wild, nasty screech of metal wheels on rails. Don senses demolition, jagged edges of shattered floor thrust smoking through all the vital organs of his body; he cups one hand over his testicles, forlornly, and closes his eyes.

As if from a sudden change of direction, an almost right-angle turn at an unbelievable speed, he is lifted from his feet and thrown weightlessly but violently from one side of the elevator to the other. His forehead smacks the wall, and as he rebounds with a hard grunt of pain all motion ceases except for a gentle rocking that nevertheless upsets his equilibrium and makes him nauseous.

"Papa," he mutters thickly, "what happened?" His feet cross and he falls.

Lying there face-up and gagging a little on the bitterness in his throat, he feels the elevator picking up speed again, and he is almost dead certain they are now going sideways. He is also too weak and shocked to lift a finger. He has broken out in a cold sweat. Their speed is tremendous, but Don hears few sounds: the light
creakings
of the floor beneath him and, more distantly, far beyond the elevator walls, a surging wind or, perhaps, surf toiling endlessly on a beach. Pleasant. He feels no fear. He cannot remember what fear is like. Is death so uncomplicated? Some warmth creeps up from his feet as if he is a saint at a stake. He closes his eyes. He is not aware of the moment when the elevator comes to a full stop.

But the opening of the doors jolts him; he sits upright in a flood of daylight.

"My God! Where—?"

Someone crosses between him and the light. That familiar burly figure, the turtleneck sweater and white beard shapely as a petrel's breast.

"It
ain't
Grover's Corners."

"Papa!"

The elevator shudders delicately, like a great box kite.

"Better get out of here. We're running late. Probably missed the wedding."

Don rises slowly. Momentary dizziness. The wedding again? Something heavy in his right hand. He looks at it in the welcome flood of light. It's only the toy sword with the chewed blade. But different, somehow. Certainly a lot heavier. He feels good, holding it. Capable and almost confident.

"Where's Shannon?"

"Suppose we find that out."

Shielding his sensitive eyes with the other hand, Don walks out of the elevator onto solid ground. He assumes. He can't see all the way to his feet. There's a wind blowing, hard; he is buffeted. The, air around him seems made up equally of light and fog. Zero visibility. And the barometer must be low, wherever this is: he can feel storm pressure on his skin.

"What—uh, which way—?" Papa, a few feet from him, has already lost dimension, is dissolving. This is hard on Don's new-found confidence.

"Just keep up."

The wind soughs in Don's ears; but if there's such a strong wind, how can there be fog? He pauses, bends down, touches—hmm, clipped grass. That's reassuring. He plucks
a
piece and tastes it.
Jujcy
greenness. Papa is a shadow ahead of him. Don hurries.

Now there is a shape that he can recognize in the paleness: the trunk of a tree. Papa pauses beside it. The fog is thinning. The wind's velocity lessens. They can see more trees, shrubs, a fence, a garden plot enclosed by
chickenwire
. Gopher traps outside the
chickenwire
.

Gopher traps?

"Papa, this is—"

"Kansas, bub."

He sees the house. He has been here before, on a melancholy quest.

"Shannon's house!"

"This is where it all happened."

"I know! My God. What time is it?
When
is it?"

"You can't expect me to know everything," Papa grumbles. "Maybe it's just the right time. The wedding's over, but the guests are still here ..."

"What are you talking about? There's nobody—" Don finds he must shout. There's less fog but the wind is roaring, leaves are flying through the air against a sky green as pond scum. Air pressure hurts his eardrums. He sees a light in the house, moving like a will o' the wisp. Brighter than
starshine
, fainter than the sun. The clotheslines are hung with flapping sheets.

"That includes the guest of honor! At the groom's request!"

"Axman!"

Papa nods. "He's inside!" They are both shouting now. The sheets on the line crack like pistol shots.

"Let's go!"

"I'll never make it! Up to you to save your Beauty, Carnes!"

"You've got to come with me!"

"I'm with you! For now! But the cyclone's coming! Get in the house!"

"Can't hear you!"

Papa pushes him, hard. Don stumbles into the midst of the billowing sheets. They look as if they haven't been washed. Then he sees that each one contains a charcoal drawing. Portraits. Friends, neighbors, of the Hills of Emerson, Kansas. Shannon's work. Men wearing their Sunday coats and ties, women in spring finery. And a few who look as if they dwell in niches of the New York subways, bundled up like Eskimos in an arctic night. Bizarre guests at a postnuptial lawn party. They press in on him, one thick smothering layer after another. There is a babble in his head, small talk, mildly off-color jokes suitable for Rotarian lunches and occasions such as this. He can't breathe, he's perspiring heavily. Then he realizes it isn't perspiration. Some of the sheets are wet. Wet with sopped-up blood from unimaginable butchering-beds.

Horrified, he fights his way clear of the embracing sheets; sticky and smeared with blood like a warrior on his last legs, he steadies himself in the fierce wind. Looking back, he gestures with the sword in his hand for Papa, who doesn't move. Old
Hummingbuffer's
grinning, but stressfully, something seems to be wrong. Suddenly he begins to shrink in a peculiar, sideways, crumpled manner, as if he is no more than a drawing himself, on a piece of paper someone has decided to dispose of.

The last thing Don sees is the crinkled ball of that indomitable head, the lasting grin; then, all but weightless, Papa goes skimming off in the high wind until he is no more than a spot, a steadily dwindling black hole in the freakish, ominous sky.

If it could happen to Papa, then—

The light he has seen, flashing here, flashing there in the forbidding house, is steadier now; Don feels it focused on him, throwing his shadow four ways at once against the flapping, wailing, ghostlike sheets on the backyard lines. His breath is trying to escape his lungs like a panicky little bird. He feels mercilessly scrutinized, mocked by a devil. There is a lightness to his bones, no familiarity of flesh within his clothes. The wind is sucking him right out of his shoes. Like Papa, he begins to crease and fold, trivially to crumble.

He holds up the sword—or, perhaps, the sword holds his hand up, Don isn't sure— which repeats the light like a metallic mirror until the light withdraws inside the dark, tight house. Don no longer feeling flimsy as the paperboy, and once again secure in his shoes. Holding out the sword also shuts down the wind between him and the house, where the dark turns to a red as mournful as dawn in hell and then to dark again; and a face appears in one window, like a ghost in iodine. The face of a rival, an enemy. He can't make it out very well. But he's not afraid of what he sees. With the lull in the wind he enjoys a calm space around his heart. Shannon, after all, is his through investiture, the giving and receiving of love. The Axman,
malhechor
,
claims solely by terror. The little toy sword he disdained is vibrating like a tuning fork from a secret vigor, energy pouring off it and causing the tip of his nose to tingle. "Made in Taiwan" is stamped on the blade, which is still some kind of inexpensive vinyl and wouldn't cut through a stick of butter. He knows this. He has no wind and can't fight, never did learn how. Logically, he has no chance. He knows this too. But he could not be crumpled, blown away like Papa, the tiniest of bangs in the universe. According to up-to-date insights provided by computer mathematics, much of the universe cannot be accounted for. It is simply missing. Toy swords made in Taiwan do not stop the wind. This is bad mathematics. Obviously the Taiwanese knew something when they made this particular sword, something they have not let on to the world at large. Just as obvious, it has served him as an entry to one of those islands of the missing universe, like a complicated musical code or the pattern of blood vessels in an eye. Don chuckles. He is calm. The windows of the house, the doors, are opening. He hears stentorian music. Martial, Wagnerian, but nothing he is familiar with. His heart starts up from a swoon like a prodded steer.
Let's go,
he says to himself.

He is walking up to the back porch. Behind him the cyclone rages, shedding light in artillery bursts. It is Emerson, Kansas, and it is not.

In Shannon's house they are all dead, or else they never were.

He goes from room to room looking for corpses, finding nothing but neatly made beds and hand-embroidered for-show pillows. Home-sweet-homilies. Invocations.

There is nothing to see in the bride's bedroom but her white shoes, and red teardrops on each shoe.

"Shannon?"

The music plays like someone's rage.

"Shannon, answer me!"

The toy sword is sulking in his hand.

Down dusty back steps to the kitchen, where no one has made coffee in ages, and the roast on the silver plate on the table is too old and dry for mice to eat.

The house shakes as if from a bomb. It trembles in sorrow.

More steps, down.

Petals on the steps from the bride's bouquet: forget-me-nots.

Her small footprints luminous as snail tracks.

"Shannon, I love you."

For lack of anything else to say.

She's there in the cellar.

Barefoot, a little careworn, but alive.

He
is there too, debonair in cutaway and silk cravat, leaning on the cheated ax as if waiting for an audience.

The music is as powerful, as stifling as the depths of a river.

Shannon is seated on the edge of a large and curving petit-point chair, precariously, as might be imagined, in a wedding gown full as a flowering tree. Her arms are extended to the low curved back of a similar chair, her head forward like a swan's and resting on her arms, baring all of her lovely neck. She doesn't look, to Don, to be a day over sixteen.

The love inside him is a great blundering thing, like an ape on a chain.

Axman is as youthful as Don imagined him to be, although there were never any clues: fresh, highly colored by the infection of homicide.