The Captive Condition (25 page)

By this time Mrs. Kingsley's voice had taken on the rhythms and cadences peculiar to this small town, and I noted the unsettling way her body language had changed. From a distance, because of that turquoise dress she wore, she looked like Emily Ryan, and as I listened with growing excitement to her bracingly weird words, I became convinced Emily was speaking directly to me, telling me what I must do and where I must go.

“The dark dungeon,” I murmured. “The treacherous descent.”

The people standing beside me inched away as they might from a lunatic on the street corner.

“And so what has Colette Collins dragged up into the daylight? What subterranean goodies will she show us now? Well past the age when most artists experience a decline in their creative output, Ms. Collins continues to labor intensely at her craft and has given us, I'm sure you'll agree, her most ambitious work thus far.” Marianne gestured to the giant clay sculpture towering above the guests in the back of the bistro. “For this particular commission, she was obligated to name the sculpture after the dear founder of Normandy College, Nathaniel Wakefield, but under ordinary circumstances she doesn't call her sculptures anything. Rather, they call her. They create themselves, name themselves, force her to do their bidding. And if you listen closely you can hear the thing whisper its terrible truth.”

Mrs. Kingsley looked down at the pieces of pink stationery, and as she read from them her voice took on notes of alternating intensity. “College is an intellectual garbage dump; students are free spirits, a term that best describes the dispirited, the enslaved, the unenlightened; enlightenment is a religious euphemism for death; death is a consistent and universal truth, the afterlife only a speculation; God is a mask used by weak individuals to disguise their own powerless egos; the ego is an hallucination with no clear foundation, no ultimate reality.” Her scratchy voice had now reached manic levels, and she drummed the lectern with a tight fist. “And marriage? Why, marriage is a
long, brutal winter
!”

From the safety of the shadows, Martin Kingsley listened with growing alarm to his wife's wild imprecations and felt the heat and pressure of her serious stare as she leaned over the podium and glowered at him. He inched toward the bar, his throat clutched tight with terror. He loosened his tie and wiped a bead of cold sweat from his forehead. It was almost midnight, but something was wrong with these traitorous clocks. The seconds stretched out, surreal, displaced, misaligned, and he believed the New Year might never come. Most of the guests, unable to follow the thread of this strange speech, grew agitated and restless. There were whispers of confusion and disapproval, groans and sighs, a general stamping of feet against the floor. Hoping to get some badly needed laughs, Kingsley cupped his hands around his mouth and gave a loud boo.

“Where the hell is that bartender?” he said, topping off his cup with the dregs from the bottom of the punch bowl.

Colette Collins watched him with amusement. “Haven't you had enough?”

He bristled at her question. “I've had enough of my wife's sanctimonious rhetoric.”

“You'll excuse my saying so, Professor, but you look like death.”

“Do I? I certainly
feel
like death.”

“It's a terrible thing for a man to die before he has a chance to become old.” She spoke with the amiable harmlessness of a potential madwoman. “Well, maybe you
are
dead. Maybe we both are. At my age, each day is a reprieve from the grave. It could be that we've crossed over and are in hell right now. That would explain a great many things, wouldn't it? For instance, why are the walls slowly converging? And why are all of the faces melting?”

The levity vanished from Kingsley's eyes. He looked more intensely at the guests and began to tremble. “My God, I think you're right. Everything seems to be
dripping.
” He touched his cheeks, his nose, his chin. He lowered his head and gasped. “I think I'm going to be sick. Yes, I'm definitely going to be sick.”

Colette Collins clapped a hand on his wrist. “You'd better come with me!”

They made for an incongruous pair, an old woman leading a young man through this witches' sabbath where the monstrous crowd gamboled and clamored and cavorted. Kingsley gasped and panted, and as he weaved his way toward the restroom, he saw his former pupil leaning against the clay sculpture, his arms crossed, a triumphant smile stretched across his swollen and infected face, a peacock feather dangling from the lapel of his sport coat.

“A magnificent work of art, isn't it, Professor?” I said with a smile of purest complicity.

Morgan Fey returned to the kitchen, her vision obscured by antic clouds of hot steam swirling massively from a big pot of boiling water. Like poisonous vapors from a cauldron, the long tentacles caressed her skin and scattered the fluorescent light. Infuriated by Xavier's incompetence, she turned off the gas and swept her consternated gaze around the empty kitchen. If he didn't lay off the booze, or at least cut down from two gallons a day to one, he would burn the place to the ground.

“Hey, genius! You left the burners on again.”

She wiped the condensation from the round window of the swinging door and scanned the dining room but didn't see the chef waddling around that buzzing hive of earnest faces. Maybe, she thought, he'd already left the bistro for the night to see about his latest business venture. Turning away from the window, she fixed her eyes on the stairway with its bare boards, its tacks, its splinters. A faint yellow light burned inside Xavier's quarters. She hesitated, knowing the second floor was strictly off-limits to her, to everyone.

“Xavier? Are you up there?”

For some reason the flat sound of her own voice made her tremble. No doubt the steam had created a slight alteration in the air. She desperately craved a tall glass of the Red Death to steel her sorry body and fortify her weak nerves. When no one answered her call, she climbed the staircase. Each creaking step sounded like a thunderclap, and on the landing the smell of slow corruption struck her with visceral force. The place needed to be fumigated. In the hallway outside his bedroom door, through a dirty pane of glass, she could see the black maw of night, the stars gleaming like fierce diamonds above a fringe of pine trees crusted with snow. She glimpsed the moon shining on the frozen river, its pale fire swallowed up by a passing cloud. Great whistling funnels of snow sprang up around the polluted embankment, and for a moment she believed the flakes had found their way into the hallway and were now blanketing her shoulders. On the street a truck thundered by, shaking the building's foundation and shattering the lethal icicles hanging like fangs from the eaves.

With all of the fear drained out of her, she approached his room and pushed open the door. Glossy brochures of a tropical island lay scattered on the floor, and on the opposite wall the Toulouse-Lautrec poster that had once concealed the safe now leaned against the unmade bed. Morgan didn't move, didn't take another step. She scratched violently at her arms, leaving angry red trails on her skin. She wondered if she would have enough time to retrieve her toolbox from behind the dumpster. It might take thirty minutes or more to break into the safe, and even then she couldn't carry away so much cash in her pockets. She turned her eyes to a wooden wine crate engraved with Gothic script:
Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
There was something almost eerie about it, the way it resembled a miniature sarcophagus, a pauper's pine box, a baby basin from a demented nursery.

She reached for the phone on the nightstand and dialed the number.

“It's me. Are you ready to go? Right, meet me at the bistro as soon as you can. And bring our bags.”

She placed the phone back on the receiver. Lorelei and Morgan had been living together now for several weeks, but to stay the night in the row house would have been too risky, maybe even suicidal. After emptying the safe, they planned to swipe the keys to Sadie's new truck and then skip town as quickly as possible.

From downstairs in the dining room there came a horrific crash, wild screams. Terror crawled down the back of her neck and rested at the base of her skull.

“It must be midnight,” she assured herself. “Only midnight.”

The previous summer had been an exceptionally wet one, and all through the valley the frozen bogs were deep and dark and bottomed with an acidic black silt that reeked of corruption. Just above the treetops, hovering low in the bat-infested sky, an enormous moon drifted across the horizon cloaked in the sulfurous gases rising green and ghostlike from a narrow stream warmed by peat and decaying vegetation.

The Gonk turned off the headlights and brought Sadie's pickup to a stop at the edge of a small ridge overlooking the wetlands. He put the truck in neutral, got out, and walked to the back of the vehicle. A cold wind came in fierce blasts. Pulling the collar of his coat close to his neck, he felt like a conscript marching unwillingly to the eastern front in the middle of a Russian winter. Fallen branches snapped behind him. He stopped, reared his shaggy head back against the sky, and sniffed suspiciously. Dozens of flaming eyes stared at him from the safety of the sturdy, pitch-black pines. Impelled by some sort of fascination, yapping and dancing and sniffing out the madness wafting from his sweaty flesh, a pack of coyotes emerged from the woods and watched him.

The Gonk smiled in solidarity. With his hands pressed against the rear bumper, he gave the truck a forceful shove down the slope. Now the seasons would become his clock and calendar, and in the coming months, when spring arrived and the ice melted, he would derive enormous satisfaction as he watched first the cab and then the bed fill with water and disappear under long tendrils of carnivorous pink sundews. Last of all to go would be those truck nuts that were sure to float white and swollen on the surface before the powerful suction swallowed them whole.

Pleased with this vision, he crammed a wad of tobacco into his left cheek and hiked up his jeans. It was a fair distance to the cottage. Across hillocks of snow the coyotes followed the new caretaker in an unnatural procession to the cemetery, where a lavish midnight feast awaited them. Through a scattering of naked winter willows, the Gonk could already hear Xavier's needling voice calling to him.

“That you? Hey, what the hell? Been waiting ten minutes now. Don't you have electricity out here? I can't see a damn thing.”

To conceal the scratches on his face, the Gonk wore his baseball cap so low that he could barely see above its bent and ragged brim. He lit the kerosene lamp and held it aloft to observe his nemesis, the proud and swaggering “stunt cock” who night after night climbed on top of his wife and emptied himself into her like rancid bouillabaisse from an overturned creamer.

Taken aback by the amount of weight Xavier'd put on since opening the bistro, the Gonk playfully tapped Xavier's stomach and said, “Must enjoy your own cooking, huh? Compensation for your sexual aberrations, maybe?”

“You're hysterical.”

The Gonk lowered the lamp. “How'd you manage to get out here without a vehicle?”

“Left my car on the road,” Xavier said. “Hoofed it up your driveway.”

“Just in case you have to make a quick getaway.”

Xavier made several small adjustments to the swampy pit between his legs. “Felt like a mile hike in the snow.”

“Nothing wrong with a little exercise now and then.”

Tufts of black hair sprouted from Xavier's nose, and he buried a finger deep inside one whistling nostril. “Okay, friend, where's Sadie?”

The Gonk shrugged. “The hell should I know? She waited here for you for more than an hour and then she split. Must have gotten your lines crossed. Didn't you call her?”

The question seemed to irritate Xavier, and from his thick lips there came a high-pitched wheeze that may have been contemptuous laughter or a fearful gasp. “You trying to be cute or something? There's no service in this valley. Besides, I left my phone in her truck.”

“Well, you're more than welcome to use my landline. You should give Sadie a ring. Tell her you made it safe and sound to my place. I'm sure she's worried about you. It's getting late.”

“I don't need to check in with Mommy.”

“I insist. Phone is in the kitchen.”

“Screw that. I'd like to hurry this along, okay?”

“Naturally. But first, let me treat you to a sample.”

“This isn't a social call. I'm here to conduct business.”

“Look, we're going to do this thing the right way or not at all.” The Gonk mounted the porch steps and handed him a mason jar. “Shit'll knock you on your ass if you're not careful. Been known to blind some people, kill a few others. Of course it's a hell of an improvement over the junk you've been selling. That
jazar
juice is like heroin, isn't it? People don't do it socially. They don't try it on the weekends just for fun.”

Xavier waved the jar under his nose and inhaled its overpowering bouquet. After puckering his lips and darting his yellow tongue around the rim, he took an experimental sip. He slurped and swished the oily liquid in his mouth. He sucked and gargled and spat.

“Well?” asked the Gonk.

“I'm not convinced it's a hundred proof. I'd say it's more like eighty. You told Sadie it was a hundred proof, didn't you?” He dropped the glass on the porch and watched it roll down the steps into the snow.

The Gonk shrugged. “You're the chemist. Take some home and test it.”

Xavier looked hard at him. “That crazy old woman who lived here, Colette Collins, she just gave you the whole setup?”

“Yeah, she told me it came with the house. As a signing bonus. That and the cemetery over there.”

“The what?”

“When the moon is high, like it is tonight, you can make out the headstones. Didn't you see it as you came up the driveway? That's where I keep the still. Come on. I'll show you.”

Xavier hesitated. No doubt he sensed something very wrong with this scenario, but the
jazar
juice had dulled his instincts, which were never particularly sharp even when he was sober, and the prospect of owning a still to manufacture his own moonshine proved too tempting. He followed the Gonk down the porch steps and into the immense and unremitting darkness that waited for him beyond the circle of feeble light.

The Gonk raised the lamp higher. “I'm just relieved you agreed to take the still off my hands. The feds have been snooping around lately, checking things out. I don't feel comfortable anymore with all of this contraband in my possession. Besides, I don't drink much these days. Not since the divorce anyway. Sadie must have told you, right?”

Xavier sneered. “You never could hold your liquor, limp dick.”

The Gonk roared with laughter. “Life can get pretty dull when you abstain from the bottle, I can attest to that. With so much time on my hands, I've started taking classes at the college. But mostly I've been doing a lot of reading. You might say I'm diseased with the reading bug.”

“Reading what? Girly magazines?”

“Books on the moonshine trade. Do you know a smart distributor, if he doesn't get clipped, can clear six figures every year, all tax free? A good still is worth thousands.”

“I'll be the judge of that, friend. It all depends on the output. For me this is just going to be a side operation. Something to supplement my income, understand? That ex-wife of yours has damn expensive tastes.”

Step by fatal step they marched past the wrought-iron gates and into the cemetery. Beneath their feet the snow crunched and the dead leaves crackled like the shells of bugs.

“I've been reading about other things, too,” said the Gonk. “Books on the history of religion. It amazes me how horrible some religious practices used to be.”

“Religion, too? By God, you've finally cracked, haven't you?”

“Like I told you, it's awfully lonely out here in the woods. I have to find something to occupy my time. This valley is a funny place. A lot of folks have been known to turn into mystics. Anyway, at the college library I found a book of Indian lore.”

“Redskin or towel head?”

“Hindu,” the Gonk answered. “It was written a couple hundred years ago by a French Jesuit. The good father ran a mission near the city of Pondicherry, but while he was in the jungle, doing the Lord's work, he witnessed dozens of gruesome rituals.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, according to the priest there was a great swami in a remote village who died after a prolonged illness. The people held a feast to honor him, and during the funeral rites his widow appeared dressed in blue robes and presented herself for burial with her husband's corpse. At first the priest thought the woman had gone mad, that a legion of devils had taken possession of her, but the villagers insisted that this was the most natural thing in the world, a widow's way of showing devotion to her spouse. The people placed the woman inside the coffin and buried her alive. Later, after the celebration was over, the priest claimed he heard her scratching wildly at the lid, like maybe she realized she'd made a horrible mistake, but after a few hours the scratching grew fainter and fainter until it finally stopped. Suffocated probably.”

Xavier's face twitched in an absurd and clownish manner. “That's fucked up.”

“You won't get an argument out of me. But something has been bothering me about the story. During all those years he spent in India, the priest never saw a man come forward to be buried alive with his deceased wife. Or with his fiancée. Not one time.” The Gonk stopped walking and turned to Xavier. “What's your view on these matters? Would you be willing to follow the woman you love to the grave? It's one way of assuring allegiances, isn't it?”

“You trying to be funny?”

The Gonk smiled, his face raddled and drawn. “Oh, yes, funny.”

“What is this place, anyway?”

“I
told
you.” The Gonk sighed and shook his head. “Okay, I confess. I've always been a bit superstitious, and at night I never come alone to the graveyard. That's why I keep the still here. Helps me fight the urge to fix myself a bottomless drink.” He pointed to the hole, hoping the coyotes hadn't made a premature feast of Sadie's remains. “Here, take hold of this rope. Give me a hand pulling 'er up, would you?”

“You've gotta be kidding,” said Xavier with growing apprehension.

“Yes, I'm kidding.”

The Gonk waited, and when he saw the imbecile leaning over to inspect the hole more closely, he grabbed the shovel off the ground and let the blade drop on the crown of Xavier's head, not so hard as to render him unconscious, no, just hard enough to rattle his brains momentarily and make him see more stars than were actually there in that glorious patch of sky unobstructed by trees or dulled by the distant lights of town. He wanted Xavier to know exactly what was happening to him, wanted him to understand the seriousness of his offenses.

For one uncertain moment Xavier teetered back and forth like a man doing a drunken dance, and then with a high-pitched scream he toppled into the wormy hole, landing squarely inside the coffin. His body trembled, his jowls jiggled atrociously, and when he was able to breathe again, he let out a long, tortured groan. “Oh, that hurt,” he croaked. “Oh, I think—yes—I think I'm seriously injured.”

The Gonk didn't hesitate. When he heard those rhapsodic notes of pain, he gathered up the hammer and box of nails and jumped into the hole. Before slamming the lid on his friend's uncomprehending face, he tossed a flashlight in the box and said, “You'll find this useful. Consider yourself the first person in over one hundred years to participate in a most sacred and ancient ritual.”

Time was of the essence. At any moment Xavier might come to his senses and begin to beat at the lid with his fists. Though the flickering light of the kerosene lamp made the work difficult, the Gonk managed to close the lid and seal the corners of the coffin. He then made his way around the perimeter, pounding in the nails two at a time until he was satisfied that there was no possibility of escape. Above him the great limbs of the white oaks groaned as though burdened with the weight of a hanged man, and the dim band of the Milky Way grew ever more brilliant as it arched across the sky and boiled through the black flume of icy space.

He began to heave dirt into the pit, and to his amazement he had the hole halfway filled before he perceived Xavier's feeble and impotent laughter.

“This has to be a joke. Tell me this is a joke.”

Apparently, the poor fool hadn't switched on the flashlight.

“That's right,” said the Gonk. “A joke.”

There was a long and obstinate silence. The Gonk leaned over the hole, thrust the shovel deep into the loose clods of dirt, and rapped three times on the lid.

“Hey, did you run out of oxygen already? Hello?”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!—He! He!—an apology, of course, I should have known—He! He! That's all you want? I'm sorry, then. So terribly sorry. For everything. Now let me out. I'm begging you.”

The Gonk resumed filling the hole. That's when the screams started in earnest, screams so sharp and clear, so powerful and unrelenting in their madness, that not even the earth could soften them, a howl of impossible sonorities, and the Gonk worried that his nemesis might scare off the coyotes waiting patiently beyond the gates to dig up his putrid flesh and scatter his bones.

After an hour he tapped the last shovelful of dirt on the unmarked grave. He turned down the kerosene lamp until the flame sputtered and vanished, and then he marveled at the apparitions hovering through the trembling blue mists of midnight. In the lurid glow he could see dozens of eyes, yellow and black ringed, their pupils small as pinpoints, and he could feel the warmth of the circling coyotes. The deranged moans and screams gradually subsided, and soon the Gonk heard only the constant whispers of the winter wind. He never imagined silence could be so terrible, so absolute.

“Xavier?” he whispered. “Xavier…”