Gibbon's Decline and Fall (71 page)

“Don't pretend you're surprised, Ms. Crespin. After that ridiculous farrago in court, surely you expected to see me. Did you think I'd let it go?” He glared in Lolly's direction. “And here's the little murderess herself. Well, courtrooms have one set of rules. Here we have another. We've been waiting for you, my friends and I. We came looking for you yesterday, as a matter of fact. In a helicopter.”

From a dry mouth she said, “Looking for me? You mean, before? I heard a helicopter, but …”

“Come into the other room. Just you, not them. Keepe, make sure they stay put.” His eyes swept across them, weighing and rejecting them. “Your daughter's in the den. And your spouse.” His voice made a crude joke of the word.

The others stayed where they were, mere statues, standing, staring after Carolyn as she turned and followed Jagger, Luce at her side. Their faces held both fear and a sudden awareness. They had worked themselves up to being high on loyalty and only now realized what they were up against. Well. She had tried to tell them.

Stace was sitting white-faced and blind-eyed in a chair, with another man seated behind her, his handgun pointed in her direction. Hal was on the couch, blood on his forehead. Carolyn fastened her eyes on his chest, seeing slow movement there. Unconscious, then. Not dead. Luce fell into the chair next to Stace, like a dropped marionette.

She started toward Hal, but Jagger pushed her into a chair, and she sat.

“I don't understand,” she said. “What do you want with me?”

“In this house, a week or so ago, you said that one of your group had been responsible for this current emergency. This sexual matter.”

She thought for a moment. “I can't imagine how you … well, Agnes did say that, yes. She got us all in a panic over it. It turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. We should have had better sense.…”

“In what way?”

“We shouldn't have gotten so hysterical over it—”

“I
mean
, madam, in what way did it turn out to be a tempest in a teapot?” His voice came like steam, a hot cloud obscuring everything but his fury.

Carolyn stared bemusedly at the other man, desperately trying to concentrate. The other one hadn't said anything. He hadn't done anything at all but just sit there, and only the arm holding the gun looked alive, quivering with tension, obviously ready to commit violence. This must be Martin, the man who had probably killed Swinter.

Struggling to get the words out, she said, “It was a tempest in a teapot, Mr. Jagger, because Sophy didn't do anything with the stuff. Aggie misinterpreted what she saw. Jessamine should have realized it as soon as Aggie said it, because the bottle hadn't been opened when she returned it to the lab.”

“I don't believe you.”

Carolyn shuddered inwardly. His voice was like a twisting knife blade. She let her mouth drop open, breathed in around the pain, made herself speak. “I can't help that, Jagger. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to tell me what the hell you're doing here. Never mind. I'll bet I know. The FBI put you up to this, didn't they? Vince Harmston mentioned something about the FBI, about Albert Crespin's little friends. You tell Albert that just because I told him almost forty years ago that I would not marry him is no reason to continue this stupid harassment! If you have something to charge me with, or my daughter or son-in-law, then do so, but please don't make these vague accusations and—”

“Mr. Jagger,” said Martin. “If you want me to, I can make her tell us.”

For the first time Carolyn noticed the bruises on Stace's face, the dark trickle of blood emerging from her hair. She felt the icy cold of her belly spread to her chest, her heart. Stubbornly,
she opened her mouth to continue her complaint when a surprised shout came from the kitchen.

“Go see what Keepe wants,” Jagger said to Martin, who got up and went without a word.

“It's probably my hired man,” said Carolyn plaintively.

“It isn't. We sent him home this morning. As for the two who live in that other house, they'll never even know we're here.”

“You have no right—”

He laughed. “Such a cliché. Rights! My rights. Your rights!” He breathed deeply. “The way I see it, I have the right to do whatever I can do. I suppose you have the right to try to stop me until you learn you can't. You're like all women. You have to be taught to obey.”

“Mr. Jagger!” A strangled voice from the kitchen. “You'd better come here.”

Jagger glared at Stace and Luce. “The two of you stay where you are. Don't move. If you move, I'll kill her, then him.” He gestured toward Hal's recumbent form as he grasped Carolyn's shoulder and thrust her before him into the hallway.

She staggered toward the kitchen door, seeing trousered legs sprawled on the floor. It was Keepe, supine on the floor, face blank, eyes open. In one corner Lolly cowered, her hands over her face. Across the room, before the open door, Josh, Ophy, and Aggie held Martin facedown while Josh thrust at a straining shoulder with a hypodermic. Jagger pushed Carolyn to one side and raised the gun toward Josh. Out of nowhere Faye appeared behind him and grabbed his arm. He turned, throwing her away, only to be seized by Bettiann and Jessamine, who had also erupted from the pantry behind him. Josh disentangled himself from the struggle at the door and stumbled across the room, still bearing the hypodermic, which he applied to Jagger's neck. Jagger bellowed, throwing all three women away from him and raising the gun once more. Carolyn started toward him, but he sagged in that instant, glaring, then folded to the floor.

“I've got Teo's brothers outside,” Josh panted to Carolyn. “You didn't tell me you were bringing a female army. I'll go get the truck.”

He started for the door, leaving the women gasping for breath.

“You really got 'em,” said Lolly, taking her hands from her face. “You really did.”

“All three,” murmured Faye. “Just like that.”

“Stace is in there,” Carolyn murmured, rubbing a wrenched shoulder. “And Hal. I've got to go to Hal.…”

She turned, thought she turned, at least formed the intention of turning to go to Hal, then lost that intention at the approach of something enormous that pressed her to her knees, smothering her. She heard Aggie cry out, heard Faye grunt as though she'd been hit in the stomach. She looked up. Josh had opened the kitchen door and stood with the knob still in his hand, facing out. His face was blue, his free hand paddled the air as he tried to breath. Outside on the doorstep stood … something. Someone. Dark as night, fiery, terrible, smiling with real amusement as he watched Josh dying.

Webster. Webster in a human body, but with his own guise gathered around him. A boiling cloud of darkness, a heaving mass of troubled storm shot through with sullen lightning. A mass, immovable and horrid, man-shaped, man-size, yet looming like a typhoon. His eyes swiveled and came to rest upon Carolyn.

“You,” he muttered in a thunder voice. “You were in my house. You trespassed upon my house.”

Josh gurgled. Carolyn couldn't move. Only her lips, her mouth …

“Sophy!” Carolyn cried from a well of despair. “Oh, Sophy!”

The word left her mouth like a bird, darting across the room to strike Bettiann like a visible thing, like a splash of clear water that coated her face, released her paralysis. Bettiann's mouth opened to echo the cry. “Sophy!” she called, turning to Aggie. “Sophy!”

The name struck Aggie over the heart, and she bent as though stabbed, then threw her head back to croak the name, which flew once more. Jessamine caught it with a lifted hand, raised her eyes, shook herself, grasped Ophy by one arm and cried like a gull. “Sophy!”

“Sophy!” echoed Ophy, crying the name to Faye, who opened her mouth and sang, her voice deep and velvet black, reaching into infinite distances, summoning, “Sophy. Help us, darling! Oh, we need you, Sophy.”

Webster looked back at Josh, then turned again in their direction, his eyes at first arrogant, then wary, then suddenly
surprised. The form that held him seemed to lose its balance. He went down on one knee, shook his head dazedly, then fell all at once.

Josh gasped for breath, his face gradually losing its cyanotic hue. “What? What happened?” Outside, in the driveway, men approached from the other house, carrying burdens. “How'd you do that?”

“Breathe, Josh,” Carolyn commanded. “Just breathe.”

“No time,” he gargled. “No time. Are there more?” Josh stared down the corridor behind Carolyn.

“Only these three and … him, Josh.”

He put his hands to his throat, shaking his head slightly. “I picked up your key all right, got that guy to the door and bushwhacked him, then we got the other one when he came in. Your friends went in the pantry place to grab Jagger from behind. Where'd that other one come from? My God, who is he? I couldn't breathe. That guy, he looked at me, and I felt my heart stop.” He gasped for a moment more, his eyes flicking toward her and away in angry confusion. “Hypnotism, right? Or a kind of gas? Something like that?”

“Something like that, yes.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, so long as he's out of it! We got to get them loaded.”

She stepped into the kitchen like a person wading through deep water, laboriously, pantingly. She entered upon a space that was not what it appeared to be; her kitchen, yes, so the details of furnishing and equipment confirmed, but she realized that now the space did not end at the walls or the floor or the ceiling. The putative boundaries were only screens of seeming; the real walls were distant as stars. Even the tiled floor was permeable, herself and the others tenuously poised on a fragile crystalline lattice over an empty universe. Lying on the lattice were four bodies. Her mind labeled them—Keepe, Martin, Jagger, Webster—but she saw them as concretions of shadow, distance, and intent. Three were motionless clots of shadow. Webster was a pour of magma, the substance of him still quivering with heat, momentarily immobilized, but not yet bound. Around the room were presences, six of them, the women, glowing with shifting veils of color, half a dozen rainbow slices, waiting. And herself, likewise, waiting. From the window a jungle thrust its way toward the heavens, great trees breathing a subtle fragrance. Her herb garden. A whole world there, on the sill.

Teo's brothers came in, knelt, and started peeling the jackets off the unconscious men. Josh fished a metal case from his pocket, took out a hypodermic, jabbed it into a lax arm.

His voice came from the far edge of the universe. “The first shot immobilizes 'em so they don't thrash around when you give 'em the second one, ‘cause the second one hurts 'em some. It takes both shots to get them ready for the pods.” His words slipped through a veil as from an echo chamber, resonating with distance. He did not know he was poised in the midst of plunging space, lost among the stars. He thought he was in a kitchen, kneeling on a kitchen floor. He started on the next man while other hands went on peeling the clothes away.

Josh took out another case, bent over Webster's body, thrust down with his hypodermic. “Better do this, even though he's out. What did that to him? I didn't get nowhere near him with the needle. Well, this'll slow him down, and then the second one'll freeze his mind, make it stop thinking.”

The four young men helping Josh were four dream images, haloed in prismed light, glittering, recognizable as men for all their dizzying splendor, though men permeated by the immaterial, the ineffable.

“You're Emilia's sons?” Carolyn asked, her voice coming as from somewhere else, a long time ago. Emilia had promised to send them, and here they were.

They nodded. One replied, “We got the cousins, too. Josh said maybe we need an army.”

The voices were only human, but the effulgence shivered by the sound was more than that. Each word they spoke traced itself in a coruscation of violet light upon the substance that held them. Forces blossomed, energy became concrete, a presence moved upon them, something larger than the room it occupied.

Josh patted his pockets, started for the door. “I'll go get the truck. You get the clothes off them.”

He went out and Teo's kinsmen finished stripping the lax bodies, piling the clothes to one side, suit coats, shirts, ties, trousers, socks, but, with a glance at the women, leaving the shorts on the bodies. The inane courtesy of it made her want to shout with immense laughter, but she could not. She was as incapable of laughter as she was of movement. Something possessed her, held her, cradled her, leaving only a tiny space around her. If it had not given her that tiny space, she would have been unable to stand, to breathe, to keep her own heart
beating. If it had not allowed her that space, she would have been compressed into nothingness.

The truck came into the driveway, swerved, and backed toward the kitchen door. One of Emilia's sons opened the door, and through it Carolyn could see Josh raising the back of the truck to disclose the racks there: eight pods, racked two high, four against each wall.

Josh beckoned to Teo's brothers, who leaped up beside him. “Open the four bottom ones,” he said. “I started the cycle before I left. They should be awake, or almost. Drag 'em out of there if they're not.”

Two were awake. Two were not. One of the awake ones was Teo, though he looked like a dishrag. All four were lifted out and gently carried toward Fidel and Arturo's house.

“That's Teo,” said Josh unnecessarily. “And some other guys didn't belong in there.”

Aggie said, from the far side of the universe, “They don't have any clothes.”

“Clothes in the grocery sacks the boys brought,” he said. “The boys'll get 'em dressed.”

Two of the young men came back to help Josh carry bodies to the truck, strip off the shorts, and lift them in. Naked and unconscious, they didn't look like devils. They looked like men. That was the trouble with devils, Carolyn thought. Too often they looked like men.