Blameless in Abaddon (2 page)

It was through his vocation that, at age forty-nine, Martin met the beguiling and eccentric Corinne Rosewood. One agreeable April afternoon the township's blustery constable, Hugh Steadman, hauled Corinne into Martin's little courtroom, having arrested her on a charge of disturbing the peace. According to Steadman, for the past three years Corinne had given the backyard of her Chestnut Grove bungalow over to the cultivation of
Nepeta cataria
: catnip. Each evening, right after sunset, the addicts would arrive—tabbies, calicoes, tortoiseshells, Siamese—mewing and hissing as they pressed their spines to the ground and rolled around on the leaves. Not only were Corinne's neighbors forced to endure the din of this nightly bacchanal, the cat owners among them were commonly subjected to pets so stoned that, prancing home at four
A.M.
, they totally forgot what a litter box was, blithely relieving themselves on the floor.

There she stood, a zaftig woman with hair the color of buttered toast, dressed in a checked flannel shirt, faded jeans, and red vinyl cowboy boots, rocking back and forth on her heels and grinning unrepentantly as Constable Steadman charged her with corrupting the township's cats. Her face was round and dimpled, barred from true beauty only by a nose resembling a baby turnip. Martin was smitten. Throughout the arraignment his heart pounded like a moonstruck adolescent's. Corinne's majestic form and unorthodox features appealed to his aesthetic sense, her crime to his fondness for audacity. The central image enchanted him: hundreds of ecstatic cats hallucinating in the moonlight, singing to the stars, gamboling through Corinne's garden of feline delights.

At her hearing ten days later she pleaded innocent. Martin weighed the evidence, found her guilty, and fined her two hundred and fifty dollars.

“I think I'm in love with you,” he said, whipping off his bifocals and staring directly at the defendant. “Will you marry me?”

Assuming the judge was being facetious, Corinne replied that of course she would marry him, provided he dropped the fine.

“I won't drop the fine, but I'll reduce it to two hundred.”

“One hundred fifty?”

“Two hundred.”

“All right.”

“Does a June wedding sound okay to you?”

Constable Steadman blinked incredulously. The bailiff issued an astonished cough.

“Are you crazy?” said Corinne, absently fingering the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania flag beside Martin's bench, opposite the Stars and Stripes. “I don't even know you.”

“How about dinner instead? Dinner and a show.”

“That's a possibility.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight I'm holding up a gas station in Glendale. Friday night would work.”

“It's a deal.”

On Friday night Martin and Corinne attended a revival of Agatha Christie's
Witness for the Prosecution
at Philadelphia's Theater of the Living Arts, and six months later they were indeed married, in a civil ceremony conducted by Kevin McKendrick, the JP of Cheltenham Township, the jurisdiction immediately to the east.

A most peculiar pair, these two. Martin: the lifelong Protestant monotheist and centrist Republican, the only son of Siobhan O'Leary, a receptionist in a travel bureau, and Walter Candle, a teetotal bartender who sought to counter the intrinsic secularity of his career by teaching Presbyterian Sunday school. Corinne: the free-spirited pagan and former Peace Corps volunteer, progeny of the first woman ever to run for governor of Maryland on the Socialist ticket and a failed Marxist playwright turned successful sporting-goods salesman. And yet they were happy . . . not only happy but obstreperously happy—happy to a degree that would have been insufferable in a couple less blameless and upright.

Four months after their wedding they secured a mortgage on a ramshackle farmhouse and adjoining barn at 22 Flour Mill Road in Chestnut Grove. Located three miles north of Abaddon Marsh, the couple's estate comprised over six acres, more than enough for furtively growing
Nepeta cataria.
That April they sowed the seeds together, pausing periodically to make love in the apple orchard, and by June the crop was in bloom, introducing dozens of local felines to a level of self-indulgence that seemed excessive even by the standards of a cat.

Corinne's love for animals went far beyond catnip farming. She was a devout vegetarian whose Ford Ranger sported bumper stickers proclaiming
MEAT IS MURDER
and
I'D RATHER GO NAKED THAN WEAR FUR.
For her livelihood she managed All Creatures Great and Small, a Perkinsville establishment specializing in gourmet food for dogs, cats, and—most profitably—the horses owned by the adolescent girls of Abaddon Township's wealthiest settlement, the posh and sylvan community of Deer Haven. Corinne's own taste in pets ran decidedly toward the outre. The creatures with whom Martin was forced to compete for his wife's affections included not only an iguana named Sedgewick but also a tarantula named Hairy Truman and an armadillo called Shirley—a misanthropic beast whose entire behavioral repertoire consisted of eating, sleeping, and, every day at two
P.M.
, creeping from one corner of the basement to the other, depositing a pile of ordure as she passed.

On the evening of their first anniversary, Corinne looked Martin squarely in the eye, raised her second glass of Cook's champagne to her lips, and said, softly, “It was the lobsters.”

“The lobsters?”

“From Super Fresh.”

The case to which Corinne was evidently alluding had appeared on Martin's docket early in their courtship. Shortly after eleven
P.M.
on September 19, 1996, a young woman named Nancy Strossen had broken into a Super Fresh grocery store in Fox Run and transferred all the live lobsters from their display case to a holding tank. Later that night Strossen drove the tank across New Jersey, parked on a deserted Cape May beach, and released each and every lobster into the North Atlantic. Presented with the facts of Strossen's escapade, Martin had sentenced her to two days in jail, but he declined to make her pay any damages. Instead, he told the Super Fresh management their lobster trade was manifestly inhumane, and they would do well to abandon this business of torturing crustaceans.

“It was the lobsters that won me over,” Corinne continued. “You let the defendant off with a slap on the wrist, and I said to myself, ‘Look no further, dear.'”

“Lovely lobsters,” said Martin woozily, finishing his third glass of champagne. “Lovely, lovely lobsters.”

Eighteen months into the marriage Corinne got the idea of setting up the canine equivalent of the celebrated Make-A-Wish Foundation. She solicited contributions through
Dog Fancy
magazine, rented a one-room office in downtown Kingsley, and hired her dim-witted but saintly cousin Franny as chief administrator. Within half a year the Kennel of Joy had become a going concern, sustained through a mixture of charitable donations and Corinne's take-home pay. Thanks to the Kennel of Joy, a dying Manhattan dachshund finally got to chase a Wisconsin rabbit into its warren; a diabetic bloodhound from Newark joined three other dogs in finding a child lost in the Great Smokies; and a leukemic golden retriever born and bred in the parched Texas town of Tahoka spent the last weeks of her life swimming in the Rio Grande.

Had Martin not been crazy about Corinne, he would have regarded the Kennel of Joy as a dreadful waste of money, and the organization would probably have occasioned screaming matches of the sort that had characterized the terminal phases of his previous relationships. But love does strange things to a man's sense of proportion, which is why—contrary to rumor—it is by no means the Devil's least favorite emotion.

 

Me again. Yours truly. Let's get something straight right now. This is not Old Nick here. This is not Mr. Scratch, Beelzebub, Gentleman Jack, or any other cozy and domesticated edition of myself. This is the Devil. This is hardball.

This is a two-month-old Bulgarian baby tossed into the air and caught on a Turkish bayonet in front of its hysterical mother. This is an Ustashe commandant splitting open a Serb's ass with an ax, so that the Serb begs the commandant,
begs
him, to shoot him in the head, and the commandant simply laughs. A thirty-year-old melanoma victim slipping his head into a plastic bag and cinching it with the string of his son's Batman kite. The Yangtze River overflowing its banks in 1931, flooding every acre from Nanking to Hankow and drowning 3.5 million peasants. The great Iranian earthquake of 1990, rippling through the country's northern provinces, flattening a hundred towns, and leaving fifty thousand dead.

Please understand, I never asked for this job. It wasn't my idea to be the Prince of Darkness, the Principle of Evil, the Principal of Hate, or anything of the kind. I never requested that God reach into Hell's highest dung heap, grab a glob of primal slime, and mold me as He would later mold Adam from clay. While I am willing to confess my sins before any priest with time enough to listen, the ultimate responsibility for Martin Candle's fate—for all the world's pain—does not lie with me. Yes, I invented the typhoon; true, my hobby is breeding tuberculosis; nolo contendere, I am gravity's mechanic and, by extension, an accessory before the fact of every fatal fall. But just because our Creator subcontracts evil out to me, we mustn't neglect to notice the blood on His hands.

“God dwells in the details,” wrote the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe . . . and so do I. My name is Jonathan Sarkos, I am six foot four, and I weigh two hundred and eighty-five pounds. Like a chameleon's, my complexion varies as a function of my environment, though inversely. On asphalt, I am white. On snow, black. You must cast all cliched accessories from your mind: scepter, forked beard, scholar's cap. I gave up cloven hoofs in the Middle Ages. I haven't worn horns since the Renaissance.

Of all my portrayers, it was a twentieth-century painter named Jerome Witkin who came closest to the truth. Witkin's masterpiece is a 72 × 65-inch oil-on-canvas called
The Devil as a Tailor.
This artist saw it all. My cramped and penumbral shop with its Elias Howe sewing machine and its racks of newly made garments awaiting pickup. My massive frame, balding pate, large, turtlelike head. The one thing he got wrong was my age. While poets commonly produce their best work in their thirties, and mathematicians typically burn out in their twenties, miscreants tend to be late bloomers. Hitler didn't get around to invading Poland until he was fifty. Ceausescu got the hang of atrocity only after turning sixty-four. I am an eternal seventy-two.

My sewing needle boasts an honorable lineage, having been fashioned from the very spike the Roman soldiers drove through Jesus Christ's left wrist.
Flash
, it goes in the light of my whale-oil lamp, stitching together shirts, trousers, coats, blouses, and gowns.
Flash. Flash.
The demand for my goods is great. Authentic evil is rarely committed by the naked; even rapists keep their pants on. Hour after hour, I sit here inside God's decaying brain, hypnotized by my needle's glitter, glancing up occasionally to watch the great cranial artery called the River Hiddekel flow past my private dock on its journey to the pineal gland. I rest only on Sundays. Military uniforms are a specialty. Copes and cassocks, of course. Flags, naturally. White hoods and matching sheets. Business suits. During one of my boom periods, from 1937 through 1945, I produced 4,328,713 yellow stars inscribed with the word
Jude.

I am the Father of Lies. Over the years, my children have done me proud. I shouldn't play favorites, but I am especially pleased with “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Likewise, I shall always retain a soft spot in my heart for “Every cloud has a silver lining.” As for “Time heals all wounds” and “Whenever God closes a door, He opens a window”—they, too, make me gloat unconscionably.

But enough about me. Whatever my shortcomings, vanity is not among them. You came to learn about the awful events that befell the upright magistrate of Abaddon. For the nonce I shall hold my tongue.

 

Given Corinne's worldview, Martin reacted with astonishment when, during a visit to the Chestnut Grove Flea Market, she insisted on buying a moldering pantherskin rug. She was acquiring it, she explained, in homage to an idol of hers, the Italian ballerina Marie Taglioni. According to Corinne, on a moonlit winter's night in 1835 Taglioni's carriage was halted by a Russian highwayman who then commanded her to dance for him, an audience of one, on a panther's pelt spread across the snowy ground. In the years that followed, it became Taglioni's custom to place chunks of ice in her jewel box and watch them melt amid the sparkling gems. Thus did she preserve her memory of that magical encounter: the highwayman, the black pelt, the starspeckled sky glittering above the frozen forest.

At first Martin maintained that forty-five dollars was far too much to have spent on a scruffy hunk of fur. But then one frigid January evening he awoke to realize Corinne no longer lay beside him. Acting on instinct, he went downstairs, donned a ski jacket over his pajamas, and hurried toward the catnip patch. Shimmering in the moonlight, a steady stream of snowflakes floated down, slowly, softly, the sort of generous crystals that, during childhood, he'd loved catching on his tongue. As he opened his mouth that night, he remembered his mother telling him no two snowflakes were alike. To the ten-year-old Martin there seemed something momentous in this fact—an entrée into the mind of God—but he'd never managed to fathom it.

An extravagantly beautiful voice reached his ears, one of Corinne's favorite performances: Loreena McKennitt singing her original musical setting for Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott.”

 

For ere she reach'd upon the tide

The first house by the water-side,