A Widow's Curse (25 page)

He slowly began to cut the reed-colored cloth that held the sticks together. He was mumbling something—so low, I could barely make out the sounds, but they weren't English.

As he cut, the cross lost its structural integrity and began to fall apart. I realized as I watched, transfixed, that the process somehow mimicked the gradual ruination of the mansion on the hill above us.

A final cord was cut and the crosspiece fell, rolling into the water.

Dan pulled the other piece back out of its rocky cradle and tossed it into the water as well, along with the cloth.

“Let the water have what's left,” he said, a benediction like a burial at sea. “The water will eventually absorb the wood and the cloth, and everything will be washed clean. It'll take a little time, but the water will run clear someday.”

He nodded, a button on his pronouncement.

“Now,” he said, leaning over, “help me pull out these stones. I think we'll take them up there to that graveyard and put them onto some of the graves. Seems right.”

I didn't quite know how it seemed right, but I knelt on the bank beside Dan and began to help him pry out the stones.

The moon was out again, and a kind of Latesummer Night's Dream seemed to wash over the landscape. Night doves called out, calming the air around us; a black lace sound of crickets patterned the wind.

I have no idea how both of us failed to hear footsteps in the dead leaves behind us.

I saw the cricket bat, blond lightning, out of the corner of my eye just as it connected with Dan's skull. The cracking sound made every cell in my body sick. Dan went down face-first into the water, oozing thick burgundy blood from his head.

I turned just in time to see the bat coming my way. I twisted right, my muscles flexed automatically, and the bat hit my forearm. I was certain I felt the bone crack.

One of the rocks we'd been working to pull loose was in my hand, and I threw it toward the drooling, vacant-eyed face above me. It struck a glancing blow, enough for me to push myself backward into the water, clutching a fistful of Dan Battle's shirt collar.

The pool was deeper than I had imagined, nearly up to my shoulders. I struggled to turn Dan over onto his back and drag him across the water to the opposite bank.

The maniac with the bat recovered quickly but did not pursue me into the black liquid. He moved instead with great staring deliberation onto the wooden walkway, not six feet away from me, and watched to see what I was going to do. He would simply wait for me to come to land, move to that spot more quickly than I could through water, and finish me.

Dan's eyes were closed. I couldn't tell if he was breathing. My feet struggled with the slimy bottom of the well pond; the water was cold.

Without thinking, I began to yell. Surely the woman I had seen in the ruins or a security guard would hear me. I bellowed.

“Help!”

The man with the bat gargled several inarticulate words but did not move.

I knew I couldn't stay in the water with Dan long. I had to get him to a place where he would, at the very least, not drown.

I began dragging him away from the man, toward the reedy shallows that were the likely source of the spring.

The man with the bat moved slowly, apparently wary that I might be deceiving him and feigning one direction, moving another. I used his doubt to my advantage, remembering something Hek had told me when I was a boy: “Dealing with a liar, trick him with the truth.”

A man who uses subterfuge will sometimes mistake the truth for a trap.

I headed directly for the spot I wanted, doing my best to keep the murderer in my sight but not look at him directly.

The water got shallower fast, but I stayed low, shoulders below the surface, so as not to give that fact away. I could feel reeds snapping my back.

The murderer determined, at last, that I was going through them to the far shallows, and he headed around the walkway. He was perhaps twelve feet away at that moment.

I got my feet under me and my hands in the middle of Dan's back.

As the murderer stepped off the walkway and onto the bank, coming toward me, I took in a monstrous breath. Without warning, I roared, stood straight up, and shoved Dan's body as hard as I could toward the mossy bank opposite the one where the killer stood. I was in water only to my thighs, and Dan's head and shoulders were securely on something like dry land. It happened in a single move, in a single second.

The murderer was startled, and the sound that had come from my lungs had even frightened me—not human, filled with rage.

He stood frozen for an instant longer, enough for me to slush through the water to the bank where I'd thrown Dan. I had it in mind to drag Dan up onto the land more securely, but the murderer had recovered and was loping my way, back across the walkway, bat cocked over his shoulder.

I scrambled across the moss, slipping and desperate, toward the pine straw–thick edge of the wood. I jumped, and got a more solid footing, grabbing hold of a smaller pine tree, the bark scraping the palms of my hands.

I could hear the murderer behind me, his animal breathing. His footfalls on the dock were heavy and staggering.

I pushed myself off from the tree and dug the soles of my shoes into the upward incline. My own breath sounded panicked and rasping. I thought if I could make it to the top of the hill, I would have an advantage. It occurred to me, deliriously, that I was only replaying a moment from half an hour before, running up the same hill, with the same thoughts in mind, away from Dan.

Giddy, burning flashes of the Eternal Return burst like sweat from my forehead. Despite the fact that I was dripping wet in cool air, I felt my temperature rise, and my forearm was beginning to swell where it had been bashed.

In the spirit of repeating everything, I realized that the shovel at the top of the hill was my goal—the third time that night I would use such an implement as a weapon instead of a tool.

The pine straw skidded under my feet, and the trees were small but thick, a younger growth of pines. I was moving fast and breathing hard and my vision wasn't clear. I knew only if I kept moving upward, I would eventually hit the plateau close to the path that opened on the cemetery.

A thick wall of rhododendrons lay just ahead, threatening to block my progress. I leaned forward, got my body as low to the ground as I could, covered my face with my forearms, and plowed through the branches.

I tried to protect my sore arm, but everything seemed intent on slamming against it. The pain was oddly focusing. I had nothing in my mind at that moment except making it through the tall shrubs and into the opening at the top of the hill.

I had no idea where my attacker was.

After an endless sequence of moments in the verdant crowd of leaves—it could have been ten seconds or it could have been a quarter of an hour—I fell through the hedge and onto a grassy spot. I landed on my bad arm.

Wincing and rolling, I managed to get to my feet and turn around to see if the man had followed me through the shrubs.

There was no one.

I turned a wild eye toward the graveyard, trying to locate the shovel. I couldn't remember where I'd been when I dropped it. I thought it must be near the gate, but the light was too dim to see it, even in the clearing.

I rushed toward the tombstones, heart exploding in my chest, constantly checking the woods for the man with the bat.

As I stepped onto the smoother path, I thought I heard him bashing through the pines. I squinted, trying not to give my position away by breathing too hard, and saw the shovel lying where I'd dropped it.

Thrashing sounds were coming up the path, getting closer.

I sprinted giant leaping steps to the shovel and had it in my hand when I heard his low growling close by.

There, at the mouth of the path, he stood hunched, bat dragging the ground, a shudder of dark sounds in a blacker night.

“Ah,” I said loudly, shaking the shovel in his direction, trying to steady my breath. “Glad you're here. I hadn't quite finished taking your head off back at my place….” Then my breath gave out, and my bravado seemed lost on him. I considered that he might be deaf, and that the noises he made were an attempt at speech.

He did notice the shovel. I had the idea that it kept him from lurching right for me.

I had a sudden notion, the kind of idea that can only be born of terror. I backed away from him slowly, eyes steady in his direction, and worked my way past the low open gate and into the graveyard.

He watched but made no move.

I found myself in the cemetery between two larger headstones, towers really, with half-size statues and ornate designs.

I took one more step back and suddenly began to slam the shovel back and forth between the low part of the grave markers, like the clapper of a bell, cast iron on granite. It made an ungodly noise, flat, scraping—a sound of the dead.

The man was at a loss.

Another lesson from childhood: When dealing with a lunatic, see how much crazier you can be. Unfortunately I'd applied that theory so frequently in my life—under the suspicion that everyone was a lunatic—it had become more a general character trait than an individual ploy. Crazy came naturally—especially out of fear—and it seemed to be working at that moment. The man stayed where he was.

My hands and arms began to ache from the impact of the shovel on the stone, and I knew I couldn't keep up the clamor indefinitely. So I stopped abruptly and started digging. I plunged the tip of the shovel hard into the ground between the two graves. I tossed the dirt in the man's direction.

“To save us a little time,” I managed to call out, “I'm digging your grave here. It won't be quite deep enough, but then, you won't be quite dead when I put you in it, so it all evens out.”

I didn't know whose voice I was using—it was one I'd never heard before. I realized I hadn't slept much in days and was probably on the verge of genuine mental trauma.

The killer seemed to rally, almost reading my mind, realizing I was near the breaking point. Or was that my own paranoia? Perhaps his face hadn't changed at all. Maybe he wasn't inching toward me through the scars of moonlight that separated us.

“I'm ready,” I whispered.

He hunched lower, took a clear step my way.

I steadied myself, bent my knees, held the shovel in front of me like a broadsword, eyes locked.

He lumbered forward, bat low to the ground, shoulders slumped—a troll. He was a smaller man than I, and older. Other than that, it was impossible to determine anything about him in the relative darkness.

Without any warning, he suddenly flew toward me, as if on springs, thumping directly into my chest. I rocketed backward too suddenly to comprehend completely what had happened.

The next thing I knew, he was sitting on top of me, with the cricket bat raised high over his head. Miraculously, I still felt the shovel in one hand, though he'd somehow managed to pin my arms with his knees. If I bent my elbows just a little, I figured, I might be able to hit him in the back of the head. It wouldn't have much force, but it would prove a distraction, and maybe I could get him off me.

I flailed, hitting nothing, but his head snapped around in the direction of the shovel. Maybe he thought there was someone behind him. I kicked and rolled, and he was tossed off balance, falling to one side. He landed on his shoulder with a good thud, and I scrambled away from him as best I could.

I tried to put one of the tombstones between us and get to my feet, but he moved too quickly. He was up, snarling and swinging his bat.

I jabbed the shovel at his shins. He danced backward, and it looked to me as if he were smiling wildly.

I tried to quell a growing fear that nothing would stop him. Nothing physical, at any rate—but I hit on another, more psychological ploy out of abject desperation.

I jumped up, shovel in front of me, though much less confidently than I had moments before.

“If you kill me,” I rasped, “you'll never find the coin.”

He stopped dead still. He could have been one more of the graveyard statues: no movement, no sound, no life.

“The coin is hidden in my house, where you'll never find it. Even in a century, when my home looks like that one up there on the hill, no one will ever find it—unless I show them where it is. If you kill me, if you threaten me, if you so much as hurt my feelings, you'll never see the coin again.”

I wasn't certain why I'd ended exactly that way, as if he
had
seen the coin at some time in the past.

Alas, I could not leave well enough alone. “Besides, it belongs to my family.”

I don't know what that sentence triggered, but the man exploded in every direction, howling, waving both arms, one holding his bat aloft. It was the cry of an animal caught in a trap.

I was so startled, I staggered backward once more. Red fear pulsed in my burning forearm and I lashed out with the shovel savagely, smashing it into his kneecap with one swing, cracking a rib with another.

I might have kept swinging—I felt at that moment I would be capable of bashing his bones even long after he was dead—but he knocked the shovel from my hands with one casual swipe of his bat.

I tried to keep running backward, but I slammed my thigh into a tombstone and took a tumble, my head thumping hard on the ground.

My mind was swimming, my eyes unfocused. A sudden inexplicable sleepiness swept over me, the kind a drowning man feels, a surrender to black water. My limbs were thick, weighed a thousand pounds. My tongue filled my mouth, blocking the airway. I went deaf—there was no sound anywhere on the planet.

In that moment, I was convinced that a door between worlds lay open, a bright door made of new stars and piercing memories, bits of melody and an intuition of being not quite human. A sensation of serenity washed over me.

And in that same moment I saw quite clearly the golden bat moving infinitely slowly toward my skull.

 

A popping sound, a champagne cork, roused me from my graveyard sleep. It was followed by cheers and some sort of dancing. An odd moment for a celebration, I thought.

“Fever?”

Jolted out of my rapture by a name I barely recognized, I struggled three times to open my eyes before I saw Skidmore's face.

“Hello.” I couldn't think what else to say.

“Thank God.” Skid's eyes closed. “He's okay!”

Andrews appeared.

“Andrews,” I said dreamily, trying to sit up. “What are you doing here?”

I had no idea where
here
was.

“He hit his head,” Andrews said to Skid, as if I weren't there. “Look.”

He pointed to a place behind my ear.

I realized that the spot was wet and cold.

I lost a weight of euphoria suddenly, and struggled up on my elbows in the strange cemetery.

“I hit my head,” I repeated. My voice sounded like thorns. “Where's the man—”

Andrews stepped aside.

The maniac with the golden bat was sitting on the ground, clutching his right shoulder and rocking back and forth. He was also wearing a set of silver handcuffs.

“Skidmore shot him,” Andrews explained.

What was left of my delirium cleared instantly.

“Help me up.” I held out my hand to Andrews.

“Should he be lying down?” Andrews spoke, again, as if I were not present.