Niceville (43 page)

Albert stepped past him and walked farther into the hall. At the far end, there was a sparkle of blue fire and then several popping cracks. A slug snapped past Merle’s cheek. Albert grunted, slumped sideways and went down on a knee, raising his revolver. Merle and Albert both fired at the same time, the solid boom of the Colt and the lighter crack of the .38 blending together, the muzzle flares lighting up a crouching figure at the far end of the hall, a figure in dark blue.

Albert’s rounds struck the terrazzo floor and went wild and then he was out of ammunition and had to stop to reload. The figure down at the end of the hall was still firing at them, visible only by the tiny blue flash of his gun muzzle.

Merle reloaded the .45, racked the slide, stepped past Albert, and walked farther down the hall with slugs plucking at his shirt and hair.

He steadied his hand and put three heavy rounds into the man, aiming by his own muzzle flash. He saw the rounds hit, saw the guard falling back.

The hallway was full of gun smoke and the reek of cordite. His right ear was ringing like a bell.

“See if there’s a light,” said Albert, still on his knee, holding his belly with his left hand, the revolver in his right. Merle felt around the entrance, flicked a switch: nothing happened.

Albert sighed, pulled his hand away, looked at his bloody palm.
Merle realized he was still standing in the pale light from outside, a perfect target. He knelt down, got a grip on Albert’s coat, and pulled him along a few yards, getting their backs up against the brick wall.

Nothing moved.

There was no sound at all.

The place was black and silent.

Albert was having trouble breathing.

Merle could smell blood on him.

“I have to go on down,” he said to Albert. “Will you be all right?”

“You go on down,” said Albert. “I’ll be fine.”

Merle checked his magazine, changed it out for his third—and last—magazine, racked the slide again. He patted Albert on the shoulder, stood up, keeping his back off the wall, remembering from somewhere that slugs fired in a hallway tended to ride the surface of the wall, if they hit, so if you stood out a few inches, the slug would zip by you. Merle hoped this was true.

He made his way down the long narrow hallway, past a series of doors that reminded him of the doors he had passed on his way to Rainey Teague’s room at Lady Grace. He got all the way down the hall and felt his boot stepping on something soft.

He knelt down and felt a hand, a man’s hand, cold and limp, and wet. He lifted his hand and smelled cold copper on his fingers.

The man on the floor moved and now he could hear his breathing, short and ragged. He touched the floor around him, found a small semi-auto pistol. He knelt there for a few minutes, listening to the man die, trying to see into the darkness.

“Albert?”

His reply came back, faint, hoarse, echoing.

“I’m here, John.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’ll do. How are you?”

“I think there’s nobody left. I’m going to go look around. Stay there. Reload.”

“I already reloaded. You take care.”

“I will.”

Merle stood up, moved forward to the end of the hall, reached a flat brick wall. The place had no windows. No glass inside either. No mirrors.
It really was a kind of blockhouse. From outside, you could see the building was in the shape of a T.

He reached the end of the main hall.

The T went right and left, although he couldn’t see a thing and might as well have been blind. Whoever lived here didn’t like bright lights, didn’t like windows, didn’t like glass. He looked into the dark on his left, saw nothing, looked around to his right and saw a thin sliver of flickering light at the far end of the passage.

A doorway, closed, with something beyond it, flickering. A familiar flickering blue light.

A television.

They may have cut the power out here, but it was still on in that room. He reached up and felt his left temple, touched raw flesh and warm wet liquid. He flexed his cheek and regretted it.

He touched his left ear, or tried to.

He didn’t have one anymore.

But he was still on his feet and still moving.

Sliding his hand along the wall, stepping carefully, he counted off a hundred paces down to the closed door at the other end of the hall.

There was more light down here, coming from under the door, and as his eyes adjusted he saw that he was coming up on a gurney, parked outside a room. Something was lying on the gurney, covered by a sheet. He reached it, keeping the Colt on the shape, put out a hand, and lifted the cover.

A dough-faced old man, cheeks blown out, eyes wide open, glazed in death. He reached down, felt for the wrist, and lifted it into the light coming from under the door, read the wristband:

Zabriskie, Gunther (Plug) DEMENTIA—DNR

Not Abel Teague, anyway.

They had emptied out the whole place, except for the dead. He let the wrist fall, which it did slowly, rigor setting in, covered the old man again, and came to stand in front of the last door. He could hear voices, tinny and brittle, clearly coming from the television.

He reached out, tried the handle.

The door wasn’t locked.

He steadied the Colt and used his left foot to ease the door open. A dark cell-like room, completely windowless, four tiled walls, the room about fifteen by twenty, almost completely empty, tile floors, a flat painted ceiling.

There were only a few pieces of furniture in the room, a small flat-screen television set sitting on a card table, its glow lighting up the room, tuned to a cable news station, a large green leather armchair placed in front of the television, its back to the door.

Over the top of the chair back Merle could see a dome of age-spotted skin surrounded by a halo of light from the television. On the television, two very blond females were having a heated argument over something to do with Israel.

Merle came forward into the room, looking around carefully, stepped around the chair, and looked down at the man in the chair. A very old man, but not a ruin, still erect, completely bald, his skin spotted and withered, his cheeks sagging down in folds, his eyes nearly shut, glinting in the light from the television. The man was wearing an ornate silk bathrobe over blue silk pajamas. He had leather slippers on his feet, lined with lamb’s wool. His large bony hands were resting on his lap, one hand holding a television remote, the other a heavy glass with something pale in it, the liquid also luminous with the light from the television.

A crystal decanter full of a clear liquid was sitting on the card table beside the television, next to a silver bucket full of ice.

The man lifted the remote, turned off the sound, looked up at Merle, his wide-set gray eyes empty and cold. His thin blue lips moved.

“I heard shooting,” he said. “I guess you’ve shot all my people, or we wouldn’t be talking.”

“I guess I did.”

Abel Teague studied him.

“You could
see
them?”

“I shot them, didn’t I?”

He blinked at Merle.

“If you could see
them
, son, and they could see
you
, then you’re in more trouble than I am. You’re more than halfway gone already.”

“What were they?”

The man shrugged, waved a bony hand in dismissal, took a sip of his drink, smiled up at Merle. His teeth were strong and white.

“My people. I found out how to call them. Like she figured out how to call you, I guess.”

“And now here I am. Get up.”

“You know about her?” he asked.

He had a soft Virginia accent and his voice, although weak, was clear.

“I know about
you
.”

“Do you? I don’t think so. You’d be better off knowing what she really is. Knew I’d be seeing you as soon as that boy down in Niceville woke up and started asking for me. Saw it on my television here. I knew it was her work. She ask you to call yourself John, when you saw me? Just to remind me of my sins against her family?”

“Yes. I’m here in the name of John Ruelle, and in the name of his brother, Ethan, to settle an old score. Now get up.”

The old man smiled up at Merle.

“Why? You can shoot me right here.”

“She wants you to be on your feet.”

Teague stared at Merle, looked around the room, and then back at him.

“She uses windows, you know? She uses glass. She uses the mirrors. I figured her out, after a while. Everybody else in the families, they’re just
gone
, one after the other.
The windows
, I said. I told them all,
the windows and the mirrors
.”

He sighed.

“But nobody listened.”

He seemed to drift on the memory, and then he came back to Merle.

“So I live in this room, son, no windows, no glass, no mirrors. My window is the television. Takes me everywhere I want to go. You see, with her, young man, the trick is not to open the way.”

He started to wheeze, and then Merle realized the old man was laughing.

“You don’t even know the thing that sent you. You think its name is Glynis Ruelle. You think she’s been wronged by me. Clara Mercer was a real fine piece. But I already had her in my bed and there are lots of fine girls in the world. Besides, I didn’t like to be told what to do. And look where it’s got me. A prisoner in this cell. I haven’t left this room in fifty years. Think about that, young man, if you get a minute to ponder.”

He stopped wheezing, gave Merle a sidelong look.

“But the thing that sent
you
, my friend, that’s not Glynis Ruelle. Glynis died in ’39. What lives in her now, what keeps her going, what keeps all of this going, that power goes back as far as you can go. I spent a lot of my fifty years here wondering what it really was. All I figured out was, it lives in Crater Sink. It hates Niceville like it hated the Creek and the Cherokee before ever we came here. It
hated
before there ever was anything to hate, before the world was made, as far as I can tell. And it has to
feed
. It was riding on Clara Mercer’s angry spirit to help itself feed. Oh yes. I saw those markings on the floors, or in the dirt, or in their beds, where people had been
taken
. Over the years, almost two hundred souls got eaten alive that way. I knew what I was looking at. But it has
rules
. It will do some things, and not some others. I found out if you’re real careful, you can get it to do things for you. How I got my helpers, the ones you shot up just now. Maybe how Glynis got you.”

“Stand up.”

He looked at Merle more carefully.

“You’re not
listening
to me, son. You should. You know how old I am? I am one hundred and twenty-one years old. Look at me. I can still stand up, I can still hold a drink, I can still eat good food, and I piss when I damn well feel like it and not when I don’t. Cost me a fortune to stay alive this long, and stay this healthy, but then I had a damn good reason, didn’t I? I knew
she
was waiting for me. I know about that field she has down at her plantation and what gets buried in it, what gets dug up, and what poor souls do the digging. They dig each other up, son, the dead do, and then they trade places in the moldy old caskets, and those who were waiting help the dead get out and then they lie down and take their places, and the ones who got dug up do the burying. Over and over again. Year after year. Until the sun falls and all the stars go out. Glynis, she calls it
the harvest
. She does it because the thing that lives in Crater Sink wills it, although she doesn’t know that. I’ve stayed away from that awful harvest for a long time. And if you’re a reasonable young man, with a taste for unusual pleasures, I can put it off a few more years. What do you say?”

“I say no. Get up and come with me.”

Teague considered Merle’s face for a while, saw nothing there that he could appeal to. He sighed heavily, leaned forward, set the glass
down on the card table, put both bony hands on the arms of the chair, and straightened slowly up.

Merle stepped back as the man got to his feet and turned to look at Merle.

“Here?”

“Outside,” said Merle.

“Why not here?”

“Outside. In the park. Under the trees.”

He stared hard at Merle.

“You’re proposing we fight?”

“I’m here to kill you. Glynis said that if you were willing to stand to the scratch line, I should let you. Are you ready to stand?”

“I have no one to second me.”

Merle studied his face.

“I can find you a second. Will you stand?”

A flicker of cunning rippled across his face.

“I will. But I have no weapon.”

“I brought two.”

“Swords? Or pistols?”

“Pistols.”

The man stood looking at Merle for a full minute, and then he tightened his robe and began to shuffle towards the door.

Merle followed him out.

Albert Lee got to his feet when he saw them coming back down the long dark hallway, the tall old man in his bathrobe and slippers.

Albert stood aside as they got to the door, the old man’s glittering eye studying Albert as he went slowly past. Albert had gone to the Pensacola shore one year, as a boy, and they had a bull shark in a big glass tank, the shark gliding around in there and looking out at the people, his gills working, his eyes like shiny black pebbles in his dead white hide. That was the look in the old man’s eye.

Albert followed them through the waist-high mist, his feet leaving a dark trail behind him in the dewy grass. There was no one around, not a crow in the sky, no dogs barking in the distance.

Just the drifting mist and the live oaks draped with moss and the willows hanging motionless, no noise but the shuffle of their shoes as they walked out into a wide space set around with benches.

Merle stopped and Teague, after a moment’s hesitation, walked past him and went on into the park for about twenty paces. He turned around. Straightened up. Put his shoulders back.

Faced Merle.

“This about right?”

“Yes,” said Merle, turning to Albert Lee.