Ghostwalkers (16 page)

“Yes. It was taken two years ago.”

The man in the photo looked like a hero from some old tale. He stood with two other men, both of whom looked impressive and strong, but Lucky Bob Pearl towered over them. A big man with broad shoulders and a face that could have been chiseled out of granite. Firm chin, high cheekbones, a clear brow, and penetrating eyes that stared frankly out from beneath the flat brim of a black hat. He had an uncompromising gaze, but there was the smallest hint of a self-aware smile. That little smile was not a smirk; there was nothing mocking or condescending about it. This was a man aware of his power and faintly amused by it. Even though power and speed were promised by the lean body and the hard muscles that showed through the tension lines of his clothes, there was nothing of the bully about him. Merely confidence. Grey found that he liked the man in that photo and was damn sorry he wasn't here in Paradise Falls. As he handed the picture back he took another and more appraising look at Lucky Bob's daughter.

She had his strength. That was there in the straightness of her back, the lift of her proud chin, the clarity in her eyes. There was the same intelligence, the same confidence. And it occurred to Grey that he was probably doing a disservice to her in his mind by comparing Jenny to her father. Here was a woman who was powerful in her own way. In a way that was not—and could not be—defined by any man. They were individually powerful in a family that, for all Grey knew, could have been descended from heroes, kings, and queens. Stranger things were possibly in this world.

“He must have been quite a man,” he said as he picked up the clothes again. He gestured with them. “Thanks for these.”

Her eyes hardened. “You can put on my pa's things but you make sure you remember the kind of man whose clothes you're standing up in.”

Grey nodded, seeing the hurt in her eyes. And the challenge. Left to burn, that challenge could turn into an unfair but entirely understandable resentment. So he decided to head it off at the pass.

“Miss Pearl, I wish I'd known your pa. I didn't, but I've known men like him. Not many, 'cause if there were more men like your dad maybe this world wouldn't be in the state it's in. That's not flattery, it's a fact. Men like me—we're tough and we're hard, and a lot of times we talk about how we're meaner than a rattlesnake and tougher than rawhide. But the plain truth is that we all want to be men like you say your dad was. It's humbling to stand here holding his clothes, and it will be an ice-cold day in Hell's backyard before I make claims to deserve to be spoken of in the same breath. I know I'm not that kind of man. I wish I was, but I'm not. You say your dad stepped up when others were hurting. That's what they call nobility. That's honor. And not half an hour ago you stood up to six armed men to draw water for the people in this town. Ever heard the expression about apples and how far they fall from trees?” He took a step toward her and lowered his voice. Jenny watched him with eyes filled with blue challenge. “You don't know the value of my word, so you can choose to accept what I say or not, but I tell you this, Jenny Pearl, that while I wear these clothes, I'll not dishonor the man who owns them.”

Jenny's eyes were locked on his and for a moment neither of them listened to the screaming wind or the pounding rain. Grey felt his heart hammering again, but this time it had nothing to do with fear or ghost rock or the risen dead. His throat went dry and he wanted to clear it, but he dared not break the spell.

The storm, however, had other plans.

There was a massive crack of thunder—many times louder than anything that had come before. It shook the whole house as if a giant had reared back and slammed both fists into it. Jenny cried out and staggered forward; Grey caught her and they ran to stand in the paltry shelter of the doorway, dreading that the whole place was coming down. The windowpanes rattled like chattering teeth. Blue lightning stabbed their eyes and not even when they squeezed their eyes shut could they hide from that glare. Grey and Jenny clung together as the fury of the storm raged and raged. They could hear the blast echoing away, rolling like a threat toward town.

And then past it.

And then off, over the cliffs and out into the ocean.

The trembling timbers stilled. The glasses settled uneasily into the frames.

Slowly, slowly, the terrible tension eased. Even the howl of the demon wind and the barrage of the rain seemed to abate. Not completely, but to a much lower level than before.

Still, they stood there, wrapped in each other's arms with only her thin dress and his wet undershirt and britches between them. It wasn't much, and it soon dawned on him that if they stood there any longer it wasn't going to be enough.

He forced himself to step back and to push her gently away. And now he did clear his throat. The spell woven by high talk, closeness, shared experience, and the darker magic of the storm, finally snapped like a soap bubble. Jenny suddenly noticed an invisible wrinkle on her skirt and turned aside to smooth it out. Grey scooped up her father's fallen clothes and did his very best to stand behind them in case his interest in her showed. It occurred to him that hiding an erection behind the folded clothes of a woman's murdered father was both sick and wrong. But it was what he had.

“I'll leave you to change,” said Jenny as she headed toward the door. She didn't leave at a dead run, but it was close. Grey stood there and listened to her shoes on the steps. Then he closed his eyes, bent forward, and slowly, deliberately banged his forehead on the doorframe.

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Grey and the other men dressed in bits and pieces of Lucky Bob Pearl's clothes. Their own wet things were draped over the backs of kitchen chairs arranged around the fat-bellied cast-iron stove. Brother Joe—who seemed quite familiar with the inside of the Pearl home—brewed coffee and began frying eggs. Jenny joined them a few minutes later and took heavy coffee mugs from a closet and began filling them.

When Grey tasted the coffee he winced and nearly spat it out, and he was a man who enjoyed his coffee strong enough to pick a fight. But this was hot tar in a cup. When he trusted himself not to actually curse the monk for being a poisoner and a blasphemer against the sanctity of the gods of coffee, he said, “You, um, make a strong cup, Padre.”

Looks Away hid a grin behind his cup.

Brother Joe was unabashed, however. “We don't have much water, so we brew it strong. People drink less of it that way, and still get to enjoy the flavor.”

“Is enjoy really the best word?” Looks Away wondered aloud. “Experience seems more apt.”

If Brother Joe got the joke he did not show it.

The eggs were fried in bacon fat, and they tasted good enough. Grey had eaten many worse things over a life in the saddle.

“I think we should have our talk now,” he said after swallowing a forkful of eggs.

“There's clearly a lot of strange things happening in this town. In your town. I'm a stranger here, so exactly what in the Sam Hill is going on? Who wants to start?”

He expected it to be Looks Away, but Brother Joe surprised him by speaking first.

“I've been living in these parts for many years. I was born near here, but then I followed a missionary down to Mexico and spent six years in a monastery. I took holy orders and came back here to build a church. My father left me some money and it was enough to buy land and materials.”

“I didn't see a church,” said Grey. “Not a Catholic one. Actually not any churches come to think on it.”

Brother Joe shook his head. “There was one, but it's gone now. It was a lovely thing, too, though it's prideful to say so. A tall steeple and a bell so clear and true that you could hear it miles away. Enough pews for four hundred people, and for two full years we filled those pews. People came from other towns for services.”

“When was this?” Grey asked, but he thought he knew the answer already.

“We opened the doors on the first day of spring 1866.”

“Ah,” said Grey. The great Quake was in 1868. “I'm sorry.”

“For the church? No,” said Brother Joe. “Lovely as it was, it was just a building. Brick and stone, nails and paint. But remember that the Great Quake happened on a Sunday.”

Grey winced.

“So many people,” said Brother Joe in a voice that was raw with pain. “And they were good people, Mr. Torrance. Fine, hard-working people. Decent people who worked the land and came to their knees on a Sunday. Maybe not every Sunday, and maybe not every one was the best Christian he or she could be, but everyone sins.”

No one commented on that.

“Everyone,” repeated the monk. “God knows.”

Grey caught a strange note, a deeper sadness in the monk's voice. He saw unshed tears glittering in the man's dark eyes.

Brother Joe took a pull on the bad coffee and seemed to steel himself before he continued. “As sinners must, I want to make a confession,” he began, directing his words only to Grey. “When I said that I was not a priest, I should have said that I was—but am one no longer. Because I sinned a great sin, I lost the blessings of the church. I disgraced myself and have betrayed the love of God.”

Looks Away reached across the table and patted his arm. “There, there, old chap.”

“What happened?” asked Grey.

Brother Joe closed his eyes and his fingers knotted together into trembling knots.

“When the Great Quake tore these lands apart, we were in the middle of a hymn. ‘Nearer My God to Thee
.'
Perhaps the timing was a joke of the Devil. A mockery. The first of many.” He shook his head, eyes still closed. “The tremors struck so quickly. We had no warning, no clue. One moment we were all there, bathed in the shared joy of worship, and then the world split apart. The church itself split apart. All in an instant there was a sound like green wood being split and the floor itself was rent from the doors along the aisle to the transept. It broke apart the church like two halves of an eggshell. The walls leaned away from each other and great masses of the roof came plunging down. Everyone … everyone…”

“Joe,” said Jenny, touching his shoulder, “you don't need to do this.”

He opened his eyes but didn't look at her. Instead he stared at his interlaced hands. Tears rolled down his brown cheeks.

“The people screamed. My parishioners, my flock … my
friends
 … they screamed as our church was torn apart and the pit opened beneath us. Many were … killed … when the roof fell. More died as the steeple plunged down among them. I saw a woman—a lovely young farm wife no older than Miss Pearl—torn to pieces as the stained glass window exploded. I saw her die, still clutching her child as she tried to protect him with her own body. I witnessed people burn as smoke and fire belched up from the bowels of the earth. I saw people try to hold onto the pews, the broken timbers, the floor boards to keep from falling into the inferno. I heard them all scream. I heard them call out to God and His angels to save them. I … I prayed, too. I prayed harder than I ever had before. But, God forgive me, I did not pray for them. I did not pray for the people in my church.” Tears streamed down his face and fell onto his hands. “I prayed to God to save me.
Me.
I begged the Almighty to spare me. Not them. Not the men and women. Not the old. Not the children. I prayed that I would be spared. And I was.” A sob broke in his chest. “I was saved from fiery death because the great hard-carved crucifix that hung above the altar fell down across the crack in the floor. And while everyone I loved, everyone I had sworn to guide and protect
died
I … I … crawled across the body of our Lord to escape.”

He buried his face in his hands and wept. It was terrible to see. The sobs came from such a deep place that they shook his thin body, striking him like blows. Jenny got up and came around behind him, wrapping her arms around the monk's frame, and he half turned and clung to her. The way a drowning person would. The way a child would.

Grey wanted to walk out of the room. He didn't want to see this man's shame and grief and remorse, or to share in any of it. Nor did he know how this related to the matters at hand, but he did not move. Something deep inside his chest, inside his heart, told him to stay. He glanced at Looks Away and the Sioux's face was troubled and sad, so Grey sat there drinking the bitter coffee and thinking bitter thoughts as storms raged outside and inside the old house.

It took Brother Joe a long time to claw himself back from the edge of his personal abyss. Jenny eventually stepped back and reclaimed her chair. The monk wiped his streaming eyes with his sleeve. He took a sip of coffee and coughed his throat clear.

“I'm sorry,” he said, but no one responded to that.

Instead Grey said, “Tell me the rest. What happened after that?”

“After that? Paradise Falls was destroyed,” said Brother Joe. “Most of it, anyway. Three-quarters of the homes and buildings. Nine tenths of the people. Gone. We would learn later that this was not a judgment leveled against us but against many. Most of what had been California had been rent apart and thrown down. Like a bandage removed to reveal a terrible wound, we saw what lay beneath our land. Pits. Great caverns where the foul things of the earth long dwelt in shadows. Bottomless holes and endless caverns from which the earth exhaled a breath of brimstone and ash. Men have come to call it the Maze, but it is the landscape of Satan's burning kingdom revealed.”

Jenny poured him more of the wretched coffee.

“Paradise Falls nearly died on that day. I do not know why any of it survived and I do not pretend to understand God's mysteries. Like many of the survivors did, I left. I went down to Mexico and made a confession to the Cardinal.”

“What happened?” asked Grey.

Brother Joe almost smiled. A rueful, twisted little smile. The kind never associated with a happy memory. “He spat on me.”