All The Bells on Earth (15 page)

Uncle Henry stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the rain come down, lost in thought. “We work the western angle,” he said at long last, nodding at Walt.

Walt waited, wondering what this meant: “the western angle.”

“Pope-along Cassidy,” Henry said. “On a horse.”

T
HE RUINS OF THE
house that had belonged to Murray LeRoy sat a hundred feet off the cul-de-sac at the end of Water Street. It was a two-acre lot that occupied most of the street front and stretched north nearly to Chapman Avenue, where it was separated from the offices of lawyers and chiropractors and real estate agents by a brush-tangled wire fence and a row of immense eucalyptus trees.

The Reverend Bentley parked a block away, left his car beneath a streetlamp, and set out carrying an umbrella and a flashlight. A car rolled past, its tires throwing a sheet of water over the curb, and Bentley skipped back out of the way. He shook his umbrella at the driver. “Damned pretzel-head,” he said under his breath. There was a light on in the office of St. Anthony’s Church up the street, but otherwise the night was lonesome and empty; rush hour was long over.

LeRoy’s acreage had once been a walnut grove but was overgrown now with old grape arbors and unpruned fruit trees and fenced by an ancient windbreak built of weathered timbers and age-darkened redwood lath, all of it tangled with rusted chicken wire and vines. The blackened remains of the burned-down farmhouse lay deep within the grove, and during its ninety years it had been more visible at night than in the day, its curtained windows glowing through the wild shrubbery and the heavy trunks of the walnut trees. Now there was nothing but darkness through the trees, and Bentley couldn’t see that there was a house there at all.

LeRoy had bought the two acres years ago, after a successful career in real estate and insurance sales. It was an R-4 zone, a prime spot for apartments or condominiums, but LeRoy hadn’t ever sold it or built on it. He had lived there alone in the old house like a vampire, rarely seen, only rarely going out into the neighborhood—at least during the day.

Bentley angled across the cul-de-sac, took a quick look around, and slipped in through a garden gate in the fence, picking his way along a litter-covered path that led to the house. There was just enough moonlight to see by, and he had no intention of switching on his flashlight if he could help it, not until he was out of sight of the street. He didn’t know quite what he was after, but he was certain that he would know it when he saw it, whatever it was. Somebody had sabotaged the bells at St. Anthony’s. Probably it was Murray LeRoy, who had obviously gone stark raving crazy there at the end. But maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was someone else.

The remains of the house sat crooked on its foundation, pushed apart by the partially collapsed roof. The windows were broken out, the doors smashed open. There was the smell of burnt, water-soaked wood in the air, and something that stank—a broken sewer line, perhaps. He wondered if someone had set the place on fire—to cover something up?—or whether the house had simply caught on fire spontaneously, with no earthly help, just as LeRoy himself had.

Bentley looked around guardedly, trying to see into the dense shadows cast by the vines and brush and broken down outbuildings that sat behind the house, an old chicken coop and garden shed. Everything was deathly still. He could hear water dripping somewhere close by and the sound of small animals rustling through the dark carpet of leaves beneath the walnut trees. The wind moved through the palms out on the avenue, and from somewhere in the west there was the lonesome sound of a train whistle. The house and the overgrown grove seemed to generate its own atmosphere, something oppressive and dusky that curtained the acreage off from the cheerful old neighborhoods that surrounded it. Bentley was filled with the uncanny certainty that evil things had come to pass here, and the darkness of the nearly leafless, deserted grove was vaguely repellent to him.

He stopped himself from simply turning around and going back. This was nonsense, he told himself. It was the shadows that did it, the nighttime, the heavy vegetation, the terrible smell of the burnt, water-soaked wood. He closed his eyes for a moment to summon strength, then opened them again. He would see this through. He had no choice in the matter.

The front door was a blackened slab that lay on the boards of the porch, its twisted hinges still screwed to the jamb. Charred curtains hung in the empty windows, and inside sat the dark hulks of furniture. The beam over the door had fallen, and hung at an angle across the opening, as if to bar the door. Bentley walked around to the rear of the house, where a wide section of roof had caved in around the chimney. The rear door stood open, its white paint streaked with black. He shone his light inside, illuminating an outmoded old refrigerator and a green-enameled stove and oven that stood on legs.

He forced himself to go inside, stepping carefully up the wooden stoop, covering his nose and mouth with his jacket. The kitchen reeked of burned things, and the floor was heaped with blackened plaster, the ceiling crossed with charred lath, old wire hanging through it with the insulation burned off. There was something hellish about it—about the smell, about the waiting silence…. Five minutes, he thought, then he would leave.

He moved into what had been the living room, shining the flashlight across the sofa and chairs. A wooden bookcase had fallen over, and the floor was strewn with burned books, swollen with water. He kicked through them, trying to make out titles, but there was nothing that signified. Among the books lay fallen pictures, their frames half consumed by the fire, glass broken. He pointed the flashlight at one of them—a painting of a man and a woman in a bedroom nearly empty of furniture. There was something off-key about the scene, peculiar….

The woman sat in a wooden chair, and the man’s hand was entangled in her dark hair, as if he were removing the white ribbon that tied it back. Her eyes were haunted with shame and defeat; his burned with an almost lunatic brilliance that Bentley realized was meant to be lust. The bed in the painting was disheveled, and on the wall behind the bed hung a painting identical in miniature to the larger one, and even in this tiny painting within a painting, the look in the man’s eyes was unmistakable. Meticulous care had gone into painting that face.

Bentley very calmly leaned his umbrella against the wall, then bent down and picked up a shard of window glass. Using the edge of the glass like a cabinet scraper, he eradicated both renderings of the man’s face, rasping through the paint and then through the canvas itself, bearing down with more and more force until he realized that he was scraping a hole in the wooden floor. He stood up and shivered from a sudden chill, dropping the piece of glass. It dawned on him then that if the house hadn’t been already burned, he would set it on fire himself.

There were two bedrooms at the rear of the house, one of them so choked with fallen roof timbers that he couldn’t get through the door. The other was clear of debris, utterly bare, not even a carpet on the floor. He started toward the door, but at the threshold he was seized with a terror so profound that he stepped backward, bumping into the wall behind him.

Cautiously, he played his light around the empty room, trying to make out what it was that had affected him. The plaster walls were streaked with soot that rose flamelike toward the ceiling, and the wooden floor was broken open, as if firemen had pried it to pieces in order to get at the subfloor. He saw then that there were two eye hooks screwed into the back wall about a foot from the top—heavy hooks, the iron shafts nearly the circumference of his little finger. There were two more in the ceiling; one had a couple of inches of burned rope shoved through it. He stared at them, his mind flitting around them, wondering what they might be, what uses they might have been put to….

He turned away, glancing quickly into the bathroom, which was a wreck of broken tiles, the toilet torn away from the wall and hammered to pieces, the old claw-foot tub choked with plaster and glass and roof shingles, the wooden medicine cabinet yanked down. It seemed utterly unlikely to him that the fire would have made such a wreck of the place. The firemen, perhaps, had—what?—torn out the medicine cabinet and broken the toilet to pieces in order to put out the fire?

Still, there was nothing apparent, no single piece of evidence that told him anything certain. Convinced of that, he went out through the kitchen and down the stoop, into the clean night air. It had started to rain again, and he hoisted his umbrella, walking down toward the shed and the chicken coop. He spit into the weeds to clear the burned taste from his mouth. There were a couple of rusted old tools in the garden shed, but nothing else. It was just a lean-to shell sitting on the dirt. A wire fence ran out from the corner of it, caging the chicken coop, its roosts long ago fallen apart. The place had clearly been used as a dump for years, and was a litter of broken bottles and rusted cans, old eggshells and rotted garbage. Bentley stood beneath his umbrella and shoved at the debris with his foot, shining his flashlight on it.

He had the uncanny feeling that he had suddenly drawn closer to something, or as if something unnameable had suddenly drawn closer to him. Beneath the sound of the rain and the night wind there was a slow whispering, almost a breathing, that slipped into his consciousness as if through an open window. He looked up sharply, abruptly certain that he wasn’t alone, that someone, something, stood close by, observing him. He saw that something was painted on the wooden slats directly in front of him. The paint was faded, obscured by darkness and weather. He shined his light on it, illuminating what appeared to be two crosses, except that the horizontal member was too low. He realized abruptly that they were upside-down crosses, and that beneath them was painted a five-pointed star, the points connected in a pentagram, all of it enclosed in a circle.

A broad wooden platform sat at the base of the wall, the legs wrapped in rusty chicken wire as if the thing was a cage, and sitting on the ground within the cage was a small iron kettle containing animal bones, as if it had been left behind from a cannibal feast. Beside it stood a rough chalice made out of pewter or some other lead-colored metal. A few feet away, hidden in the deep shadows, sat an open sack of quicklime, the white powder congealed by rain. Bentley stared at the bones in the kettle, suddenly and utterly convinced that whatever the empty room in the house meant, this meant the same thing. And he knew almost instinctively that the wooden platform hung on the wall was meant to be an altar.

He turned and fled, down the path between the white trunks of walnut trees and a long tangle of clumped vines. Rain flew in under the umbrella, and the cold water braced him. He stopped, panting in the middle of the path, realizing that he had panicked badly. The chicken coop and its diabolic scrawls couldn’t harm him. “I shall fear no evil,” he said out loud, but he was full of fear anyway.

Ahead of him, beneath the bare, overhanging boughs of a walnut tree, sat a wooden outhouse, apparently long disused. Ignore it, he thought. Surely there was nothing hidden in the outhouse. He had seen enough—more than enough. How this damned satanic foulness had remained hidden in this couple of acres of downtown land could be explained in only one way: LeRoy was protected. Whatever forces hovered in the air of the abandoned chicken coop somehow conspired to veil what had gone on here.

He stepped toward the outhouse cautiously. He would take a quick look at it and go, making a clean sweep of the place. He grasped the wooden door handle and yanked on it, but the door was jammed shut, and the entire outhouse wobbled on its foundation. He pushed on it to loosen it, then yanked again. Apparently the wooden door had swelled in the wet weather. Rain began to beat down hard now, soaking his shoes and pants, running down the collar of his shirt.

Suddenly filled with anger, with the shame of having been chased by fear from the burned house and then down this muddy path, he stepped back and kicked the door hard with the bottom of his foot, damning it to Hell. The entire outhouse tipped backward, hung there for a moment like the Tower of Pisa, then toppled over, slamming to the ground, the vent pipe breaking off when it hit the trunk of the walnut tree behind it. Bentley stood there breathing hard, half surprised at what he’d done, gaping at the fallen outhouse, at the sawn-out circle in the upended plank seat.

Then he saw that there in the dirt lay a heavy slab of wood, worm-eaten and rotted, lying where there should simply have been a hole dug in the ground. Collapsing his umbrella now, he poked the tip under the edge of the wood, reached under with both hands, and levered the slab over onto its back, revealing a dark rectangular pit in the earth. He hoisted the umbrella again, got the flashlight out of his pocket, and shined it into the hole.

The light reflected off a sheet of painted metal, a dirty ivory white with faded red hearts and curlicues painted on it. The paint was chipped away at the corners, and the metal was rusted and dented. It was the top of an old bread box. Bentley knelt in the mud, trying to keep the rain off with the umbrella while he reached down into the hole. He grabbed the rolled metal handle on top of the box and lifted it out of its shallow grave, clinging lumps of mud falling away into the hole. Whatever was inside clanked together like glass jars.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING UNFAIR
in the dinner arrangements that night, although clearly Walt couldn’t say so, couldn’t let on that he was jealous of the children’s food. Nora and Eddie both had grilled cheese sandwiches that had been fried in margarine, for God’s sake, and the rest of them—the adults, who ought to have more sense, and ought to eat what they damned well pleased—were sharing Jinx’s “sailor’s meatloaf,” a casserole made out of albacore and broccoli and egg whites, stiffened with bran so that it cut like a pâté. Walt salted his plate for the third time and then passed the salt to Henry, who took it without a word. Everyone had boiled beets, too, which was probably unfair to the children, but Jinx hadn’t really known about Nora and Eddie’s arrival either, and the beets had already been boiling on the stove.