CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

1

REVEREND SIMON JULIAN strode methodically about the inner sanctuary of his church, extinguishing the candles. He didn’t touch them, heavens no, but blew their wicks from a safe distance into smoldering cinder with pursed, wrinkled lips. Some might have found it strange, this, how Julian chose to surround himself with the very things most portentous to him—silver and fire—well, some of his kind would find it strange, assured. Those of his own unique ilk. But the temerity of it never failed to amuse him, even though he did keep his distance.

The man named William Salt, still guarding the doors, watched him as he made his way around the perimeter to the four corner alcove tables, each coated in brick-dust residue. He murmured something as he did this, something so soft that the Indian could not make it out, even with his well-honed ears. Salt did hear the last part of it, however, the Reverend’s final utterances.

“Relinquish,” whispered Simon Julian, standing now before the last tapered candle. Instead of bending and blowing it out, he blew quietly this time into his own closed fist and, from a good three to four feet back, opened his hand toward the candlestick with a flourish, as if releasing dandelion wishes upon the wind. Or a thrown, post-coital kiss. “Relinquish,” he repeated, his voice a raspy hiss. The candle flame wavered and abruptly winked out more than a yard away.

Something trembled in the black church then, seemed to sigh almost, and a cold draft made its way through the darkness, scrabbling up the brickwork and over pews, twisting and convulsing up the aisle toward the doors. William Salt felt it pass but did not move; he remained stock-still with his arms crossed before him. Outside, the great lightning-struck oak rustled uneasily. An airborne crow, caught in the unnatural current, flopped and cawed until it was finally able to fly clear, glossy feathers ruffled but otherwise intact—this same crow would later peck out the eyes of its own young and leave the nest a scene of blood, torn black tufts, and carnage before soaring off in pursuit of interests unknown.

Across town a young couple sitting on their front porch felt a chill and shivered, the eerie sensation vexing their good spirits and reducing them to ash in one fell swoop. The recently wed couple, with the name Putnam on their welcome mat, had been relaxing and drinking sweet tea outside for a while. They had also, quite coincidentally, witnessed the arrival of a dark green Chevrolet Blazer into their Blackwater Valley midst not long before. Now though, feeling this sudden unseen cold, something sputtered out and died inside them like . . . well, like the snuffing of a flame.

The two stood up and went into their cozy bungalow, came out again a minute later with an infant; their fourteen-week-old son blinked repeatedly in the angled sunlight, just wakened from his late nap. They fussed over him, carrying the bundle with care up the paved driveway to the open garage. They went in, and together they climbed inside their Ford Focus and shut the doors, the wife on the passenger side holding the tiny baby still wrapped in its blue blanket, her husband behind the wheel. The man started the car and they both let their windows down. After a bit the woman began to rock, cradling her son, her gaze fixed straight ahead. Soon she began to sob, her mouth working wretchedly, tears spilling down her cheeks. The husband shushed her, stroked her hair. He turned on some music to help comfort her and left the radio on low. The remote control was not working, so he had to get back out of the car and drag down the stubborn garage door. Then the man returned to the running vehicle to sit with his wife and newly born child in the choking, amassing fumes. To sit and to wait for some awful, unspoken covenant, as yet unfulfilled.

No one noticed them at all.

Behind the bolted, storm-beaten doors of the Nain Lutheran Church, Reverend Julian tilted his head back and applied some eyedrops into his rheumy eyes. He squeezed them shut, grimacing in the murk. He looked up and winked mockingly at the Christ statue, whose sorrowful face seemed to sadden even more in the shadows. Julian smoothed his loose, wispy strands of snow-white hair into place and switched on the old church’s electric lights without warning. His Native American associate didn’t flinch, did not even blink. Wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, the Reverend turned to look upon the man at the doors. “I’m disappointed, Prarsheen,” he said. “I thought that you, above all, would’ve known they had arrived.”

“I knew,” the huge Indian replied, his voice like the stone grate of a mausoleum’s crypt.

Simon Julian raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Tapping the side of his nose with the stub of one severed forefinger, William Salt said: “They smelled like skunk.”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” The Reverend nodded, and the two smiled dutifully at one another. Pocketing his eyedrops and handkerchief, he turned back toward the church pulpit with a covetous, enduring light coming to life somewhere in him, somewhere within his ancientness. He rubbed his palms together. “Well, time to get cracking, yes?”

2

Waiting for someone to answer the door after he’d knocked, Richard didn’t think he would be able to make it. He ran a hand through his prematurely thinning hair, eyes shifting all around and eventually finding the outdoor thermometer gauge, which hovered at the 72-degree mark, no less. And as his stomach did a lazy, nauseous somersault that threatened to send his cottage cheese out two possible exits at once, a dozen thoughts whizzed through his weary mind.

What am I doing here? I must be insane. What am I going to say to them? Jesus, what can I say? ‘I’m sorry.’? God almighty, this is bad. Real bad. I must really be losing it, that’s the only explanation. Why did we even come here? I know what—go back to the motel. Right now. Go to the motel. We don’t have to see them. They’ll never even know we were—

“Daddy, you’re hurting me.”

“Sorry, babe,” Richard apologized, relaxing his grip on Katie’s tiny hand. He swallowed, felt his heart thudding hard, and for a second he considered it. Seriously considered turning and fleeing. Before he had a chance to make good on that alluring (if somewhat cowardly) alternative, something happened. He glanced up Brazier Drive, and saw their mural on the side wall of the Lawrie Theater in the distance. Then it hit him like an invisible punch to his lungs. His vision swam and his knees nearly buckled, causing him to turn and set himself right down on the stoop, light-headed.

“Hoo, sit for a minute with me, Katie-Smatie,” he told his daughter, trying not to raise any alarm, and she sat beside him on the porch steps. No one was coming to the door, but then Richard hadn’t knocked with any real conviction, either. Just gave the screen door a light, half-hearted rapping. But looking from this viewpoint now, here upon the Deadmonds’ front porch, he saw a different panorama suddenly. Like squinting through a prism, back into another distorted place and time. With this newfound sight something had come at him from the past and had almost taken the legs out from under him—a missing piece of the puzzle, recalled and placed back where it belonged. He remembered, oh yes.

It had been a week or so after the mural was started. They’d only done the background stuff, the forest and the mountain, and were just beginning in on the clouds. Richard did most of the main cloudburst himself, with rays of colored sunshine slashing and slanting through it from behind, while Michelle created bits of cotton fluff adrift in the blue. It was about that time a stranger had begun coming around.

He came just before dark, every night, and would stand and stare at their wall for increasingly longer and longer stretches. Neither of them knew his name, but Michelle had heard the man was disabled, or had some kind of congenital disease which affected his mental state. Something of that nature. Whatever the case, they’d sat together in the shadows of Michelle’s front porch—this very porch—and had watched him as each night he approached, studied what new images they’d added that day, and then went on his way. After a while Richard started calling him Sallow Man, and anyone that ever saw him would’ve understood why. He was tall and thin, could not have weighed much over one hundred and forty-five pounds, in fact. His clothes were too big for him, shirt and trousers bagging up and hanging off his frame like burlap sacks. He also wore a bucket hat upon his head without fail, not unlike the Scarecrow’s hat in The Wizard of Oz. But odder yet was his skin tone, what they could see of it. He appeared pale, almost bloodless in his face and hands. ‘Pasty-faced’ was how they had described him to Michelle’s mother, Glee, after catching their first glimpse of his ghostly visage in the darkness up the street.

Suspicious of this creepy, unknown night-caller, but fearful of telling him to get lost in an up-close confrontation, the two of them had decided to try and discourage his nocturnal visits. One evening, they strung fishing line to keep this Sallow Man out of the theater’s side lot, but, overprotective of their unfinished baby, they had gotten carried away. Gathering all of the empty soda cans and beer bottles they could find, Richard and Michelle had attached them and strung them together, crisscrossing the lines and running them in and out, around the nearby trees and telephone pole, creating what turned out to be an intricate maze of fishline. Then they had quickly left the darkening area and retreated to Michelle’s porch, as a brief summer shower commenced, and they had waited.

They did not have to wait long.

As dusk and the rain fell simultaneously, the two young lovers huddled in the shadows with Mr. Deadmond’s binoculars, keeping close watch. Soon, pretty much on schedule, the Sallow Man had showed. In the last twilight glow of day they saw him start into the vacant lot, approaching their painting. Michelle gawked through her father’s binoculars, while Richard had to squint to see. They watched the tall, gaunt raggedy man as he walked toward the wall and right into the outermost circle of invisible shin-high string. Noise came as he spun and began to entangle himself; empty cans clattered, and Richard was sure he heard some of the bottles breaking. It was then that he realized the whole thing had been a grave mistake. Because instead of moving away, which had been the original intent, the Sallow Man staggered farther into the lot, twisting and turning, his broomstick legs becoming hopelessly tangled in the spiderweb of fishing line. More soda cans rattled and clanged, and the tinkle of shattering glass came again—though Michelle later swore up and down it had only been the sound of the rain. They saw him spin and whirl, prancing hideously in his confusion and panic. Next, he fell, sprawling right in the midst of the knotted line, and the bottles and cans.

Then came the wail.

The pallid giant laid on his back and screamed, and Richard bit down on his own tongue so hard it bled. The Sallow Man wailed, a long miserable cry of fear and anger, maybe pain, which seemed to go on and on, shredding off dismally at the end. What happened after that had shocked Richard even more.

Michelle Deadmond, love of his life, had never exactly been rocket scientist material. This he always knew, as he’d known the same of himself. She was no slouch, either. Sometimes though, caught up in the heat of the moment, she could do and say some goofy things. Like the time back home in Maine, when the clothes dryer had blown a belt and started smoking down in their cellar. Richard would never forget how Michelle, when the attending firemen rushed in and asked her where the basement was, had clutched on to little baby Katelyn and replied in wild-eyed hysteria, “It’s downstairs!” Richard had still been on the kitchen floor laughing twenty minutes later, after the small fire was out and the engines had left. Laughing so hard with a mixture of hilarity and relief, while his wife stewed and glowered angrily at him from their sunny breakfast nook, that he could barely breathe.

But this . . . this was something different, and it was Michelle who laughed. Wasn’t it, Richie boy?

You got that right, Richard thought, gazing up the block at the mural and no longer seeing it. It was Michelle, caught up in the moment, who had laughed.

The night-trolling Sallow Man had toppled over and fallen, perhaps into a pile of broken green Heineken bottles and shards, and lay shrieking in the rain. Richard had involuntarily almost bitten off his own tongue. And Michelle, binoculars still in hand, threw her head back and laughed in the darkness, high and loud. Brayed like a loon in a cage, and he’d jumped, blood already gathering in the corners of his mouth. He snatched the binoculars away from her, clamping one hand over her mouth, but not in time. When Richard peered through the lenses toward the deserted Lawrie Theater he came close to pissing his pants.

Richard saw the Sallow Man sitting upright, and looking in their direction. He had heard Michelle’s laughter, there was no doubt of that; Brazier Drive was completely silent except for the patter of falling raindrops, and Michelle’s inopportune schoolgirl peal had stood out like a gun report in a canyon. He’d heard them, all right, and now he was trying to spot them. Richard noticed something else.

In his fall, Sallow Man had lost his bucket hat. And in the dim light from a nearby streetlamp, gaping through Mr. Deadmond’s opera glasses (as the old man referred to them), Richard got a good long look at him. Too long, he would later muse on many an occasion to come, in midnight retrospect. The pale man’s head was huge, too large for his thin body, like his clothing. It was nearly twice the size a normal human head should be—incredibly—and had no visible hair on it at all. It glistened in the rain, looking like an enormous, bleached honeydew melon that was close to exploding.

Squash, anybody? Richard had thought crazily at the time. Get your nice, ripe squash here! Look, no seeds!

Buried deep within that ghastly misshapen skull burned two eyes, searching, blazing out from beneath white fleshy hoods, with no eyebrows or facial hair whatsoever that might have served to break up the unadorned monotony of it. Richard clenched his teeth and grimaced. This was not The Wizard of Oz, oh no, he remembered thinking. Dear God, this was The Hills Have Eyes going on here, or maybe something worse. Then, as a sudden cold began to bloom in his testicles and rise, he saw the felled ghost-white figure lift one bony, livid hand . . . raise it and . . .

He pointed right at them, pointed at them and grinned.

“Get in the house,” Richard had whispered, but Michelle only grunted in refusal and tried to get the binoculars back for another gander. The Sallow Man had gotten off the ground, clumsily but swiftly, and had begun to untangle himself.

“Get in the fucking house,” Richard had croaked this time, his mouth dry as boneyard dirt. He hauled her to her feet and had pushed in through the front door of her house in a panicky sort of terror, almost knocking them both down. But he paused long enough to bring the binoculars to his eyes one final time. Behind the screen, Richard searched and focused until he spotted their Sallow Man again. He saw him coming down Brazier Drive through the rain, lumbering towards the quiet Deadmond home with clattering cans and pieces of broken bottle still dragging behind him, coming on those horrible broomstick legs and with his billowing sack clothes and his monstrous swollen head. Coming for them—

Richard wiped his face with his shirtsleeve, reaching absently for Katie. They had been crouching right here in the summer darkness, with the porch light off, nearly an entire block away. He could not have possibly seen them. But when he came running, the two of them locked themselves up inside the house and had doused every lamp, not daring to venture outdoors again until the following afternoon. Hell, they didn’t even go near the mural for almost a week, until they thought it safe, although they never saw the Sallow Man again. That wasn’t the point.

There was no way he could have seen them, absolutely no way. But he had. He’d pointed.

. . . And he grinned. The bastard grinned at me.

“Christ,” muttered Richard, his skin prickling into gooseflesh, or what Katie sometimes called the ‘frittles’. “This is ridiculous.” He glanced at his daughter, who was looking him over. “Sorry, hon,” he said. “Want to try this again?” Katie nodded, and they both stood up and turned around. Enough of this shit already, he decided, thrusting the nightmarish vestige from his mind. Time to shake it off, leave it in the dust. Cut it the fuck loose, Richie boy, because you’ve got more important things on your plate. He smiled dimly at his only daughter and steadied himself, raising a fist to knock hard on the screen door before him. Yet even so, he could not prevent his gaze from being drawn one last time up the block, to the long mural fading beneath the trees, and to the stout, sturdy worker still on her ladder there. Nor could he block the female tree trimmer’s joking words, which all at once came washing over him in a mad, final rush:

It’s hot, it’s too hot. There’s going to be an accident . . .

There already was an accident, lady, his own thoughts echoed, in a peaceful little town back in New England. Someone ran my wife down in the road. Ran her down one night while she was riding her mountain bike home from the neighborhood library and left her to die, the same way I left that skunk to die out on US 20 today. So how about it, Sydney? I have to deal with this horror show about to begin for real here. You said to holler if we needed anything—how about a little help with that? Where is your big, sweet promise-filled ass now, new friend?

Gritting his teeth, he popped another Rolaids tablet and knocked harder. The sound of movement came to him this time, a shuffling from the inner hallway. The front door opened.