Mickelsson's Ghosts (103 page)

“It's not that surprising,” she said, musing. “We always think romantically when we hear the word
witch.
But why shouldn't they be ordinary people—nice people, even? Interesting, though. Tim went to college—didn't you tell me that?”

“I think he once mentioned it. I guess I may have told you.”

“And he was a paramedic in Vietnam, wasn't he?” She laughed. “I wonder what they thought when he put on the tourniquet and then did some backwards-Latin spell!”

Mickelsson smiled.

“I should come out,” she said suddenly. “I have a feeling it's not solved yet. This whole witchcraft business—”

“No, don't!” he said quickly. Then, to soften it: “Please.”

She was silent.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “We'll talk about it.”

There was a long pause.

“Are you all right, Pete?”

“I'm fine.”

“I ask that a lot, don't I.”

“I provoke it.”

“Well, if you need me—” She was quiet for a moment.

Paramedic,
he thought.
Half scientist, half witch. A little engineering.

“I'll call,” he said. He added, hastily, before he could think better of it, “I have some … terrible things to confess.”

“Who doesn't?” she said irritably.

He said nothing, his mind snagged on the oddity of their having been able to say such things; the strange assumption—or faith, rather—that even quite terrible evils, betrayals, mistakes might be forgiven. Then his mind wandered. He was seeing the holes cut into the moleboards from the inside, rat or insect work. Maybe.

“You said Tim ‘did' something, or ‘gave you' something. What was wrong?”

“I'm fine,” he said as heartily as he could. “I have to go now. You've helped a lot.”

After he'd hung up, he made his way, like an old man, down the cellar steps, his left shoulder bumping against the damp, discolored wall. He found what he was looking for almost at once. In a mould spot in one of the cellar beams someone had gouged out a small patch, maybe two inches long, one inch deep. The notch was recent.

He found himself parking the Jeep outside the Montrose jail—it was late, very dark, especially dark in the parking lot in the shadow of the large brick building with its black iron bars. Though he had no memory of driving here, he remembered why he'd come.

The young, blond beast at the desk seemed to know who he was and raised no objection to his going in to talk with Lawler. The officer went into the cellblock with him and stayed, beautifying his nails with silver nail-clippers. The cells were empty except for one man sleeping off a drunk—a fat, bearded man in a lumberjack shirt—and Lawler himself, who sat motionless on his pallet like a satiated spider, still in his dusty suit but wearing no belt or tie, no spectacles. “They think I might try to commit suicide,” Lawler said, emotionless. His cheeks showed that he'd been crying. He gazed with distaste at the guard, then back up at the ceiling.

There was a light over Mickelsson's head, another beyond the last of the cells, so that the whole area was marked by the shadows or bars, part of the area crisscrossed like graph-paper. The bars were of gleaming steel, the concrete and stone walls glossy battleship-gray, the color of the walls in the locker-room of Mickelsson's college-football days. Lawler sat with his chin raised, maculate fat hanging down toward his open collar. He wore an offended, long-suffering look.

Mickelsson folded his sore, still-bandaged hands, closed his eyes, fighting down revulsion, and said, “Those bruises on your neck, they're from my fingers. Sorry I gave out, old man. Maybe another time.”

Lawler shook his head, just an inch to the left, an inch to the right, and chose not to speak. Even here, for all his clownish fat, the old man had a sort of monstrous dignity, or so Mickelsson thought. Like an antique voodoo-doll. A kind of dream came into his head—Lawler as one of those mechanical figures one saw in the Heidelberg museum, dancing, playing the piano, conducting an orchestra of fixedly grinning, decaying automata. Mickelsson shook himself free of it.

“You were wrong about Professor Warren,” he said. He put his bandaged hands around two of the bars, feeling unsteady on his feet. “I want you to know that every bit of the shit you did was unnecessary.”

Lawler did not look at him.

“It may be true, as you say, that he was a former Mormon; but he'd given all that up long ago. He was interested in my house only as a chemist. Because it's poison.”

The old man didn't move.

The policeman said, at Mickelsson's back, “Would you care to sit down, Professor?” Mickelsson turned and saw a dark wooden chair with wide, flat arms, its lines too sharp, dizzying, crossing the shadows of the bars slanting across the floor. He realized only now that he'd been clinging to the bars as if for dear life, no doubt visibly swaying. He sat down. The policeman drifted away. For an instant Mickelsson's mind tricked him: he saw not the policeman but Randy Wilson.

He strained for concentration, struggling against the weirdness in his head and rubbing his chest with one hand. Little by little he told Lawler about the trucks with their headlights off, illegal dumpers from New Jersey or New York; the boy who'd come out dying of radiation sickness from a local cave; the burnt patches on the mountain slope above Mickelsson's house, deadly seepage, tests would show; the cancerous cat and the real or probable cancer of Dr. Bauer, Pearson's wife, maybe Pearson himself, maybe others; the strange cuts and festerings on Thomas Sprague's pigs; the samples someone—probably Tim or one of his friends, the night they'd visited—had taken from the beam in Mickelsson's cellar, livingroom, and bedroom, maybe other places too. That was why Tim smoked Mickelsson's brand of tobacco. It was Mickelsson's, or anyway Mickelsson had introduced him to it. Tim had planned it shrewdly, that midnight raid on the house to find out, without anyone's knowing, what Warren had discovered, the discovery that might possibly have gotten Warren killed and in any case might prove his sale of the house a bad thing, a thing Tim would be ashamed of. It was a good plan. How could he know that Lawler would blunder in? Tim had worked out how to disguise the raid and at the same time check every part of the house; but he was too much the sensualist, and maybe life-affirmer, to throw away that Dunhill tobacco. It was hard to get, even in Binghamton.

“That's what Warren was on to,” Mickelsson said. With one clumsy, bandaged hand, he took from his coatpocket the fact-sheet Charley Snyder had given him, a long list of sources, waste analysis, legal and illegal dumping times and places. He held the paper toward Lawler, but the old man ignored it. At last Mickelsson put it back in his pocket.

Lawler said nothing, sliding his eyes toward Mickelsson, then away.

“It was a dream,” Mickelsson said, “your optimistic hope that Mormonism was behind it—the glorious vision of Joseph Smith and all that. The dark green unornamented car we spoke of: it wasn't Mormons. If we ever find it, we'll probably find it belonged to company men—maybe the Mafia—checking for midnight landfill sites, and making sure no one like me would raise problems.” He sighed, shook his head, glanced for a moment at the policeman still bent over his nails, then returned his gaze to Lawler. “Even
your
religion, if one can call it that, was more than reality would support. Nothing out there—Tinklepaugh's right. Luck. Dead facts. Some of them very strange facts, I grant you—ghosts, prescience, real UFOs for all I know—but still just facts, no different from iron bars, woodchucks, trees. No salvation in them.” He leaned forward. “What baffles me is …” He paused, half closing his eyes and pressing his hand to his chest, waiting for a pain to pass. “What made you do it, all those years, that disguise of gentleness and goodness, generosity? Surely you didn't imagine—no offense, just curiosity—you didn't imagine you were a Danite then. Why the cover? What was behind it?”

Lawler sat as still as a sack of old clothes. At last he spoke, softly, moving only his lips. “Wittgenstein,” he said. “You love to speak of Wittgenstein.” He sighed, still motionless except for the deep, slow intake of breath. “Why should
anything
be behind it? Your friend Wittgenstein has a terrible vision: a man says, ‘No admittance,' a different language game from a
sign
that says ‘No admittance,' though it seems to mean the same thing; which is in turn a different language game from a policeman who holds up his arm to signify ‘No admittance,' and different again from a barbed-wire fence. And then there's the case of an intentionally planted row of trees—another language game that only
possibly
means ‘No admittance.' And finally there's the case of the accidentally grown row of trees. We read it as language, as if Someone were speaking it. That's our great error, your friend points out. Used as we are to language games, we read the world as meaningful. But alas, the world is dead and mute. Final. As is the self.”

“That may be,” Mickelsson said, confused, not yet taking in what he'd heard, waving it away with the side of his hand, “but the
change
in you. How do you explain that?”

Lawler gazed at him with infinite disgust. “I loved truth,” he said at last. “I do not think my vision of the future will prove mistaken.”

Mickelsson leaned farther forward, straining. His vision blurred, focussed, blurred again. “You killed all those people
needlessly,”
he said. “You
know
that. There was never any threat to Mormonism, and even if there had been, the Mormons would be horrified by everything you think. Your vision of the future—good God, man, they'd laugh at you! They're
burghers!”

He waited for Lawler to explain, defend himself. He waited on and on, bent forward, off balance, as motionless as Lawler himself. Lawler sat as if asleep, fallen in on himself, his button chin tipped upward as if bearing his throat to some knife, his eyes tight shut. He looked like peevish royalty, gentle Louis XVI, noble-heartedness misunderstood. It came to Mickelsson that the old man's sooty face had shining channels running down from each eye. Mickelsson sat back in his chair. “Faggot,” Donnie Matthews would say with wonderful childish scorn. Another philosophical error, misleading row of trees. It was partly the coincidence of homosexuality—Professor Warren, Michael Nugent, Randy Wilson, probably not Tim, he thought now—that had thrown Mickelsson off; perhaps it had been, on Mickelsson's part, a fascist wish that homosexuality be somehow at the nasty heart of it all—to Mickelsson an aesthetically unpalatable way of life. Pain—guilt—fanned through his chest, then subsided. His left eyelid hung like a half-drawn shade.

Falteringly, helping himself by gripping the bars in front of him, Mickelsson stood up. He stared at Lawler's lumpy shoes suspended two inches above the floor. At last he said, “Well, sleep peacefully. I'm sure you will.” He looked down at his blistered, wounded hands, his swollen wrists.

Lawler said nothing.

Mickelsson turned slowly and nodded to the policeman working at his fingernails, then moved toward the door.

Behind him Lawler suddenly spoke, theatrical, like one of Ellen's people. “I won't survive this, you know! One never survives these things!”

They were out of the cellblock now. The door clicked shut. Outside on the street the world was still in the rigor-mortis grip of winter.

Tinklepaugh said, “Well, you know, we hear a lot of crank confessions.” He leaned on his fists, his elbows on the desktop, the bags under his eyes as heavy as a basset-hound's. The ceiling above him in the one-room police station Mickelsson had finally located was full of jagged, filthy cracks, a few missing pieces of plaster. The floor was crooked, the windows patched with tape. The file-cabinets were dented and apparently half empty.

“Come off it, Sergeant,” Mickelsson said, raising his head from the leather chairback. He spoke crossly, though his voice was weak and there were tears in his eyes. “You
know
it's the truth.”

“I don't even know there was a murder. My theory is—”

“I've heard your theory. He broke into his own room, even though the chainlatch had been hooked from inside.”

“We don't know for certain
when
that chainlatch was broken, now do we?”

“I
know when it was broken.”

Tinklepaugh gazed at him, his blue eyes dead-looking, purple flecks in the pink of his sagging lower lip. “But
you,
Professor, have a history of mental illness.”

Mickelsson sank back in the chair. “OK,” he said. After a minute: “Just one thing. Tell me
why.
Say it's a hypothetical case—some other murderer you refuse to arrest. What's the point? Does it give you a feeling of significance, arresting some people, letting others go free? Makes you feel like a king? Do you do it as a service to the community—because I'm a homeowner and taxpayer, potentially available for jury duty? Or to save the state the expense of trying me and sending me to prison? Do you do it in the name of Higher Truth, because ‘vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord'? Or to get back at the people who don't pay you enough?”

“You got a bad heart, Professor. Don't get carried away.”

“Why, though?”

Tinklepaugh looked at him. At last he said, “All of that.”

“Is somebody paying you off?” Mickelsson asked suddenly.

Like a dead man, Tinklepaugh laughed. “That'll be the day!”

Mickelsson closed his eyes and breathed lightly, to keep the pain down. The big, drab room was full of sounds. The clock above Tinklepaugh's head, the furnace rumble coming up through the floor, some kind of rhythmical scritching sound he was unable to identify …

“What'll happen to the world,” Mickelsson asked, “if the police let criminals walk away scot-free?”