The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (39 page)

They brought him the teapot three days later: Russell had no next of kin with a greater claim. Edward thanked them and left the teapot in a corner of his bag, and did not take it out again. Many men he knew had died, comrades in arms, friends; but Russell lying on the spiked and poisoned ground, breath seared and blood draining, hurt the worse for seeming wrong.

Edward dreamed of sitting with Russell: the dead man’s skin clammy gray, blood streaking the earthenware where his fingers cupped it, where his lips touched the rim, and floating over the surface of the tea. “Well, and I was safe, like I said,” Russell said. Edward shuddered out of the dream, and washed his face in the cold water in his jug; there were flakes of ice on the surface.

He went forward himself, twice, and was not killed; he shot several men, and sent others to die. There was a commendation at one point. He accepted it without any sense of pride. In the evenings, he played at cards with a handful of other officers, where they talked desultorily of plans, and the weather, and a few of the more crude of conquests either real or hoped-for in the French villages behind the lines. His letters to Beatrice grew shorter. His supply of words seemed to have leached away into the dirt.

His own teapot was on his small burner to keep warm when the air-raid sounded; an hour later after the all-clear it was a smoking cinder, the smell so very much like the acrid bite of gas that he flung it as far up over the edge of the trench as he could manage, to get it away, and took out the other teapot to make a fresh cup and wash away the taste.

And it was only a teapot: squat and unlovely except for the smooth pearlescent lump inside, some accident of its casting. He put in the leaves and poured the water from the kettle. He was no longer angry with himself for believing, only distantly amused, remembering; and sorry with that same distance for Russell, who had swallowed illusions for comfort.

He poured his cup and raised it and drank without stopping to inhale the scent or to think of home; and the pain startled him for being so vivid. He worked his mouth as though he had only burned his tongue and not some unprepared and numbed corner of his self. He found himself staring blindly at the small friendly blue flame beneath the teapot. The color was the same as a flower that grew only on the slopes of a valley on the other side of the world where no man had ever walked, which a bird with white feathers picked to line its nest, so the young when they were born were soft gray and tinted blue, with pale yellow beaks held wide to call for food in voices that chimed like bells.

The ringing in his ears from the sirens went quiet. He understood Russell then finally; and wept a little, without putting down the cup. He held it between his hands while the heat but not the scent faded, and sipped peace as long as it lasted.

He was always excited on days the days he saw it—unhealthily excited, he was sure—but terrified of the phenomenon only once. A single time he was deeply terrified, and fled as if devils were after him . . .

The Dune
Stephen King

As the judge climbs into the kayak beneath a bright morning sky, a slow and clumsy process that takes him almost five minutes, he reflects that an old man’s body is nothing but a sack filled with aches and indignities. Eighty years ago, when he was ten, he jumped into a wooden canoe and cast off, with no bulky life jacket, no worries, and certainly with no pee dribbling into his underwear. Every trip out to the little unnamed island began with a great and uneasy excitement. Now there is only unease. And pain that seems centered deep in his guts and radiates everywhere. But he still makes the trip. Many things have lost their allure in these shadowy later years—most things, really—but not the dune on the far side of the island. Never the dune.

In the early days of his exploration, he expected the dune to be gone after every big storm, and following the 1944 hurricane that sank the USS
Raleigh
off Siesta Key, he was sure it would be. But when the skies cleared, the island was still there. So was the dune, although the hundred-mile-an-hour winds should have blown all the sand away, leaving only the bare rocks. Over the years he has debated back and forth about whether the magic is in him or in the dune. Perhaps it’s both, but surely most of it is in the dune.

Since 1932, he has crossed this short stretch of water thousands of times. Usually there’s nothing but rocks and bushes and sand; sometimes there is something else.

Settled in the kayak at last, he paddles slowly from the beach to the island, his frizz of white hair blowing around his mostly bald skull. A few turkey buzzards wheel overhead, making their ugly conversation. Once he was the son of the richest man on the Florida Gulf coast, then he was a lawyer, then he was a judge on the Pinellas County Circuit, then he was appointed to the State Supreme Court. There was talk, during the Reagan years, of a nomination to the United States Supreme Court, but that never happened, and a week after the idiot Clinton became president, Judge Harvey Beecher—just Judge to his many acquaintances (he has no real friends) in Sarasota, Osprey, Nokomis, and Venice—retired. Hell, he never liked Tallahassee, anyway. It’s cold up there.

Also, it’s too far from the island, and its peculiar dune. On these early-morning kayak trips, paddling the short distance on smooth water, he’s willing to admit that he’s addicted to it. But who wouldn’t be addicted to a thing like this?

On the rocky east side, a gnarled bush juts from the split in a guano-splattered rock. This is where he ties up, and he’s always careful with the knot. It wouldn’t do to be stranded out here. His father’s estate (that’s how he still thinks of it, although the elder Beecher has been gone for forty years now) covers almost two miles of prime Gulf-front property, the main house is far inland, on the Sarasota Bayside, and there would be no one to hear him yelling. Tommy Curtis, the caretaker, might notice him gone and come looking; more likely, he would just assume the judge was locked up in his study, where he often spends whole days, supposedly working on his memoirs.

Once upon a time Mrs. Riley might have become nervous if he didn’t come out of the study for lunch, but now he hardly ever eats at noon (she calls him “nothing but a stuffed string,” but never to his face). There’s no other staff, and both Curtis and Riley know he can be cross when he’s interrupted. Not that there’s really much to interrupt; he hasn’t added so much as a line to the memoirs in two years, and in his heart he knows they will never be finished. The unfinished recollections of a Florida judge? No great loss there. The one story he could write is the one he never will. The judge wants no talk at his funeral about how, in his last years, a previously fine intellect was corrupted by senility.

He’s even slower getting out of the kayak than he was getting in, and turns turtle once, wetting his shirt and trousers in the little waves that run up the gravelly shingle. Beecher is not discommoded. It isn’t the first time he’s fallen, and there’s no one to see him. He supposes it’s unwise to continue these trips at his age, even though the island is so close to the mainland, but stopping isn’t an option. An addict is an addict is an addict.

Beecher struggles to his feet and clutches his belly until the last of the pain subsides. He brushes sand and shells from his trousers, double-checks his mooring rope, then spots one of the turkey buzzards perched on the island’s largest rock, peering down at him.

“Hi!” he shouts in the voice he now hates—cracked and wavering, the voice of a fishwife. “Hi, you bugger! Get on about your business.”

After a brief rustle of its raggedy wings, the turkey buzzard sits right where it is. Its beady eyes seem to say,
But, Judge—today you are my business.

Beecher stoops, picks up a larger shell and shies it at the bird. This time it does fly away, the sound of its wings like rippling cloth. It soars across the short stretch of water and lands on his dock.
Still,
the judge thinks,
a bad omen.
He remembers a fellow on the Florida State Patrol telling him once that turkey buzzards didn’t just know where carrion was; they also knew where carrion would be.

“I can’t tell you,” the patrolman said, “how many times I’ve seen those ugly bastards circling a spot on the Tamiami where there’s a fatal wreck a day or two later. Sounds crazy, I know, but just about any Florida road cop will tell you the same.”

There are almost always turkey buzzards out here on the little no-name island. He supposes it smells like death to them, and why not? What else?

The judge sets off on the little path he has beaten over the years. He will check the dune on the other side, where the sand is beach-fine instead of stony and shelly, and then he will return to the kayak and drink his little jug of cold tea. He may doze awhile in the morning sun (he dozes often these days, supposes most nonagenarians do), and when he wakes (if he wakes), he’ll make the return trip. He tells himself that the dune will be just a smooth blank upslope of sand, as it is most days, but he knows better.

That damned buzzard knew better, too.

He spends a long time on the sandy side, with his age-warped fingers clasped in a knot behind him. His back aches, his shoulders ache, his hips ache, his knees ache; most of all, his gut aches. But he pays these things no mind. Perhaps later, but not now.

He looks at the dune, and what is written there.

Anthony Wayland arrives at Belcher’s Pelican Point estate bang on 7:00 p.m., just as promised. One thing the Judge has always appreciated—both in the courtroom and out of it—is punctuality, and the boy is punctual. He reminds himself never to call Wayland
boy
to his face (although, this being the South,
son
is okay). Wayland wouldn’t understand that, when you’re ninety, any fellow under the age of forty looks like a boy.

“Thank you for coming,” the judge says, ushering Wayland into his study. It’s just the two of them; Curtis and Mrs. Riley have long since gone to their homes in Nokomis Village. “You brought the necessary document?”

“Yes, indeed, Judge,” Wayland says. He opens his attorney’s briefcase and removes a thick document bound by a large steel clip. The pages aren’t vellum, as they would have been in the old days, but they are rich and heavy just the same. At the top of the first, in forbidding Gothic type (what the judge has always thought of as graveyard type), are the words Last Will and Testament of Harvey L. Beecher.

“You know, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t draft this document yourself. You’ve probably forgotten more Florida probate law than I’ve ever learned.”

“That might be true,” the judge says in his driest tone. “At my age, folks tend to forget a great deal.”

Wayland flushes to the roots of his hair. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you mean, son,” the judge says. “No offense taken. Not a mite. But since you ask . . . you know that old saying about how a man who serves as his own lawyer has a fool for a client?”

Wayland grins. “Heard it and used it plenty of times when I’m wearing my public defender hat and some sad-sack wife-abuser or hit-and-runner tells me he’s going to go the DIY route in court.”

“I’m sure you have, but here’s the other half: a lawyer who serves as his own lawyer has a
great
fool for a client. Goes for criminal, civil, and probate law. So, shall we get down to business? Time is short.” This is something he means in more ways than one.

They get down to business. Mrs. Riley has left decaf coffee, which Wayland rejects in favor of a Co’-Cola. He makes copious notes as the Judge dictates the changes in his dry courtroom voice, adjusting old bequests and adding new ones. The major new one—four million dollars—is to the Sarasota County Beach and Wildlife Preservation Society. In order to qualify, they must successfully petition the State Legislature to have a certain island just off the coast of Pelican Point declared forever wild.

“They won’t have a problem getting that done,” the Judge says. “You can handle the legal for them yourself. I’d prefer pro bono, but of course that’s up to you. One trip to Tallahassee should do it. It’s a little spit of a thing, nothing growing there but a few bushes. Governor Scott and his Tea Party cronies will be delighted.”

“Why’s that, Judge?”

“Because the next time Beach and Preservation comes to them, begging money, they can say, ‘Didn’t old Judge Beecher just give you four million? Get out of here, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out!’ ”

Wayland agrees that this is probably just how it will go—Scott and his friends are all for giving if they’re not the ones doing it—and the two men move on to the smaller bequests.

“Once I get a clean draft, we’ll need two witnesses and a notary,” Wayland says when they’ve finished.

“I’ll get all that done with this draft here, just to be safe,” the Judge says. “If anything happens to me in the interim, it should stand up. There’s no one to contest it; I’ve outlived them all.”

“A wise precaution, judge. It would be good to take care of it tonight. I don’t suppose your caretaker and housekeeper—”

“Won’t be back until eight tomorrow,” Beecher says. “But I’ll make it the first order of business. Harry Staines on Vamo Road’s a notary and he’ll be glad to come over before he goes in to his office. He owes me a favor or six. You give that document to me, son. I’ll lock it in my safe.”

“I ought to at least make a . . . ” Wayland looks at the gnarled, outstretched hand and trails off. When a State Supreme Court judge (even a retired one) holds out his hand, demurrals must cease. What the hell, it’s only an annotated draft, anyway, soon to be replaced by a clean version. He passes the unsigned will over and watches as Beecher rises (painfully) and swings a picture of the Florida Everglades out on a hidden hinge. The judge enters the correct combination, making no attempt to hide the touchpad from view, and deposits the will on top of what looks to Wayland like a large and untidy heap of cash. Yikes.

“There!” Beecher says. “All done and buttoned up! Except for the signing part, that is. How about a drink to celebrate? I have some fine single malt Scotch.”