A History of the Future (8 page)

“I realized something tonight,” Robert said. Britney turned to look at him through her eyelashes with her chin down, thinking she was going to be criticized about her opposition to getting a horse. “It was at music practice. Bonnie Sweetland sang a solo verse on ‘Away in a Manger.’ Not having microphones has changed everything about music. People sing differently now.”

“Why do I get the feeling that there’s something else on your mind tonight?” she said.

After an awkward moment of hesitation he told her what had happened in Mill Hollow that evening.

N
INE

When Andrew Pendergast returned from the exhilarating and exhausting Christmas practice, and the subsequent march to the murder scene in Mill Hollow, he noticed that his front door was not quite closed. It gave way inward, creaking on its hinges, as he made to turn the knob. The spice of his balsam Christmas tree carried another note on its broad raft of fragrance, a sweet-rotten odor like a dead squirrel in the ancient walls. He had been careful every summer to patch all the spots under the eaves where they had invaded in decades past. The heavy front door closed behind him with the solid, definitive thunk of well-fitted latches. The darkness and silence of an unelectrified house closed in on him. He reached with assurance toward a mahogany stand beside the door for the candle holder that lived there and one of the matches that lived beside it in an antique glass tumbler, which, in daylight, was a very subtle shade of violet. He struck the match on a piece of slate placed there for that purpose and lighted the candle. The nimbus of light blinded him for a moment, and in that moment someone across his living room began to sing in a reedy voice “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” Andrew pressed backward against the front door, felt for the handle, and considered running out into the street. His heart fluttered. The songster knew only one verse of the song and repeated it. Andrew calculated where various defensive utensils lay close at hand about the house. There was an antique Berber sword in the umbrella stand about ten feet away. The crudely made weapon, which had belonged to his favorite uncle, a CIA spook in the previous century, was encased in a leather and ivory sheath and it would take some doing to draw it. There was a cast-iron poker with a brass spear point next to the woodstove roughly halfway between where he stood and where the voice seemed to be coming from across the room. Andrew advanced into the living room with the candle held aloft. He seized the fireplace poker and squinted the remaining fifteen feet to the far wall, where the man who earlier had accosted him on the street and pissed on his overcoat now sat in a reproduction Louis XV armchair upholstered in red silk damask. Even in the dim light the grime showed on his patched goose-down jacket.

“Do you need a friend?” Jack Harron said.

“I have plenty of friends.”

“You can’t have too many.”

“First you piss on my coat and then you invade my home,” Andrew said. “How is that friendly?”

“I’m a ghost,” Harron said.

“No you’re not.”

“I might as well be. I pass invisible among you.”

“You’re making yourself very visible to me.”

“I watch the life going on all around. Meanwhile this world is killing me. It wants me gone just like you want me gone. Is that fair?”

Andrew shifted his weight. A wide pine plank floorboard squeaked.

“What’s fair about life?” he said.

“Exactly. Want to hear my sob story?” Harron said.

“If it’ll inspire you to leave.”

“I don’t want to leave. I like it here.”

“Sooner or later you’ll have to leave and I’d prefer that it’s sooner.”

“Wait.”

An antique clock ticked loudly on the mantelpiece behind the woodstove that occupied the old hearth before the fireplace. The beehive clock was one of the last made by the great Seth Thomas of Connecticut in 1858.

“I’m waiting,” Andrew said.

“Be patient. This is not what you think.”

“Did you have anything to do with that business in Mill Hollow?” Andrew said.

“What happened in Mill Hollow?”

“There’s two people dead down there.”

“That’s sad.”

“It’s more than sad. It’s horrifying. There could be a killer on the loose. You could be the killer.”

“Well, I’m not. Who were they that got killed?”

“A man and his baby son.”

“What’s this world coming to?”

“That’s what everybody wants to know. Why did you piss on my coat?”

“I was trying to get your attention.”

“That’s a pretty crude way to go about it.”

“I was a little drunk.”

“Are you still?”

“No. That was hours ago. I apologize.”

“Okay, now you’ve got my attention. What’s your story?”

“I have nothing.”

Andrew waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t. Andrew put the candleholder on the woodstove. He was tired of holding it up. “Is there more to it?”

“It’s a short story. I have nothing. I’m a broken man.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. How did you get that way?”

“Like so many others. These times,” Harron said. “All I have left is my will.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“You fix things,” Harron said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Fix me.”

“I can’t fix humans.”

“Did you ever try?”

Andrew paused to consider this. Indeed, he had tried to get people in his life to behave differently, to change, to be other than what they were, to be what he wanted them to be. It never worked.

“Maybe you should talk to the doctor,” Andrew said.

“I’m not broken that way,” Harron said.

“Don’t you have some place to live? There are empty houses everywhere.”

“That’s it. They’re empty.”

“There’s free furniture everywhere.”

“That’s not the kind of empty I mean.”

“Look,” Andrew said. “It’s cold in here. I’d like to make a fire. If I put this poker down, do you promise to behave yourself?”

“Yes. What were you going to do with it anyway?”

“Defend myself. Thrash you, if necessary.”

“Hasn’t there been enough killing around here for one day?” Harron said.

Andrew put the poker back in its stand beside the woodstove.

Harron said, “I’ll make the fire. If you let me.”

T
EN

The doctor told Brother Jobe’s men to bring the bodies into the springhouse next to the old carriage barn that served as his office and infirmary. It was a little warmer in there than it was outside, as it was bermed deep into the hillside. When the men left and the doctor was alone with the corpses in the flickering light of a single candle, an overwhelming surge of sadness ran through him at the cruel destiny that had brought these two to the completion of their business on earth, a father and son, arrayed side by side on an old wooden table awaiting the grave. The doctor suppressed the urge to resort to his own medicinal pear brandy, whereupon his eleven-year-old son, Jasper, and wife, Jeanette, entered the springhouse, bringing the doctor back out of himself.

“What happened?” Jeanette asked, surveying the bodies.

“I think the man shook the baby and killed it, and his wife killed him for it. You remember her. She had the meningitis last summer. We treated her. It affected her mind afterward.”

“Yes. I remember. Such a sweet girl. Smart too. She did this?”

“It seems that she did.”

“What will happen to her?”

The doctor shook his head, then turned to his son, who had lately been assisting him in his practice, training to eventually practice medicine in his own right.

“Fetch some more candlesticks, and the instruments, and my rubber apron,” the father said to his son.

E
LEVEN

The brothers and sisters of the New Faith Brotherhood Covenant Church of Jesus had done considerable remodeling of the Union Grove High School, which they’d bought the previous spring. One of the many chambers in it was formerly a teachers’ lounge shoehorned by the architect between the men’s gym locker room and the cafeteria pantry. It had been converted into a small informal chapel. The room was lighted in daytime by a narrow band of clerestory windows along the top of a wall that even a desperate adult could not have squeezed out of. When Brother Jobe and his men returned to the compound that night with Mandy Stokes in custody, they installed her in the chapel, removing the pews and bringing in a bed, a small table, a chair, and a rug. One Brother Shiloh, handy with tools and fittings, installed a deadbolt and a sturdy black locustwood bar on the door to keep the room’s occupant secure.

The first of a rotating set of brothers was posted on a chair outside this detention cell. A team of four sisters attended Mandy inside, helping her out of her rank clothing and into a simple linen frock to sleep in. The process required a lot of forcible assistance as Mandy snarled and scratched and resisted, all the while screaming in strings of unintelligible words. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, seemingly calm, with a wool blanket over her shoulders when Brother Jobe entered the room. He thanked the sisters and dismissed them. Mandy did not acknowledge him. Placing his candle on the table, he dragged the chair to a place about six feet squarely in front of her and sat down. He sat quietly with her for a time until his breathing synchronized with hers.

“I’m going to count to fifty,” he said. “And then you’re going to look right at me.”

He pulled his chair much closer to her and commenced counting slowly in a low, steady voice, calibrated to her intake of breath and exhalations, precisely five numbers for each set of breaths. The building was otherwise dead silent at this hour, with most of the New Faith members asleep in their rooms. When that soothing, expansive recital of the numbers was complete, Mandy lifted her head so that they sat face-to-face in the flickering light, whereupon Brother Jobe raised his right index finger to the zygomatic ridge under his right eye, took possession of her will, and entered her mind.

He was aware right away of what a tumultuous, alien environment it presented, a flashing chiaroscuro of lurid colors and many competing voices at all pitches and tones, variously mocking, accusatory, pleading, giddy, and furious, along with a cacophony of nonvocal noises—clanking machinery, raging wind, and a racket of jungley animal cries. He struggled to survey the dark interior landscape, to see past jagged shapes and crackling dendritic bursts of light to discover the tiny distant kernel of Mandy’s true persona hunched in the boggy, flashing dimness, sobbing. As he searched inside her mind, staring straight into her face, which remained otherwise motionless as if in thrall, tears formed in the corners of both her eyes, grew into droplets, and rolled down her cheeks.

“What happened tonight over there?” he said. “In your home.”

I killed them,
the tiny figure communicated in a message barely discernible above the vivid din.
Please help me
. Then, this hidden Mandy was subsumed in the discord of sound and image that was inside her. As that occurred, Mandy sitting on the bed a few feet from Brother Jobe took in progressively deeper inhalations as her damp eyes widened in terror and finally rolled up into her head. Her body slumped off the edge of the bed to the rug on the floor with a thud.

Brother Jobe was left a bit breathless himself by the experience, a strange and troubling novelty even for one as studied in the advanced practice of hypnosis as he was, and as used to entering the unknown reaches of other people’s minds as an experienced spelunker was familiar with the strangeness of new caverns.

T
WELVE

Brother Boaz, a trim, compact, capable fellow who had managed a La Quinta Motor Inn outside Kingsport, Tennessee, in the old times, and now served as Brother Jobe’s messenger, valet, and all-around factotum, found himself in the novel situation of riding hard through the darkened countryside at a full gallop in lightly falling snow to Stephen Bullock’s plantation, some four miles west of Union Grove. Boaz was well bundled against the cold in a long wool greatcoat and a sheepskin trapper’s hat, with a thick muffler wrapped around his neck and lower face and heavy wool-lined gauntlet gloves.

He had become acquainted with horses only the past several years prior to which, in times that now seemed like ancient history, his personal vehicle of choice, like so many others of his region and class, was the Ford F-110 pickup truck. He reflected, as his rear end slapped against the saddle, that he never would have imagined himself doing this back in the day when he sat in the grandstand at Martinsville in Virginia, watching the NASCAR Kroger 200. But the journey in dim, ambient light that barely revealed the course of State Route 29 excited his senses in a way that driving a motor vehicle never had. He made it to the River Road in twenty minutes. The bodies of the nine men Bullock had hanged Halloween week for invading his property and threatening his life had been taken down after they had attained a state of ripeness that carried clear to town when the wind was right and everyone was sufficiently horrified. But the memory of that odious spectacle of revenge lingered along the River Road.