Mr. Shivers (18 page)

“I don’t know what to do,” said Connelly. “How can I stop it?”

“Die,” said the young man simply.

“I can’t do that. I can’t choose such a thing.”

“Yes. And who can?”

Connelly looked at the carnage below. Vultures wheeled in the deep blue sky, mimicking the patterns below them, whether they
knew it or not. “They could have never come in here,” said Connelly. “They could have stayed out. Stayed away. Stayed far
away and never come close.”

“That would have meant denying the truth.”

“The truth?”

“The truth of this place. If you were to halt the revolutions of creation, much like slowing a record with a single finger,
and then find the center, that place where it is still and always had been still and always would be still, and then having
found the center you opened up that tiny heart like a locket, why, inside you would see an arena like this one. Two people
trapped within, each scrambling to kill the other.”

“I don’t care,” Connelly said. “I don’t give a damn. A lie would be better. Any lie. I would rather live with a lie than this,
and they could have chosen that.”

“They could have. But they did not.”

Almost nothing lived on the desert floor now. The vultures circled lower. The young man sighed and lifted his face to the
sun. “You will see me soon,” he said. “You will see me soon, Connelly.”

“I will?” asked Connelly.

“Yes,” said the young man. Then he lifted his hand and touched the red on his forehead, and with glistening fingertips he
reached forward and touched Connelly’s brow. “Wake,” he said. “And see.”

Connelly felt consciousness crystallize somewhere within him. He saw darkness. Then the walls of the jail cell formed in the
shadows and he smelled vomit somewhere and knew he was still alive.

“Connelly?” said Peachy’s voice. “Connelly, you there?”

Connelly touched the floor in response, scraping the wood.

“Connelly, I think they did something to your cell. I don’t know what. I think they hid something in it. Something to make
you sick. I-I think I figured out what it is just now.”

He tried to pull himself awake. He knew these words were important but it was difficult to grasp them, like trying to catch
greased snakes.

“Look for something wedged in the cracks,” said Peachy. “Something little, no bigger than a finger. Maybe it’s up in the roof.”

He looked up at the roof. It might as well have been miles away. He could barely stay awake, let alone stand.

Peachy said, “It’ll be making a noise. A funny… a funny kind of song, I think.”

Connelly moved to the corner and pressed his back into it for support. Then with trembling legs he pushed himself up the scarred
wood but fell once, then twice. On the third he was not standing but was on his feet, leaning into the corner of the cell.
Once there he listened carefully, or at least as best he could.

The whine was louder here. It was not an infection. Something in the room was singing to him.

He wiped at his eyes and mouth and found his lips slick with drool. He spat on the floor and then rolled his head to one side.
There the whine was fainter. He rolled his head back in the other direction, still listening. It was louder there, painfully
loud. It made his teeth hurt just to hear it.

“You find it yet?” said Peachy.

Connelly leaned against the wall and stumbled along it, one ear turned toward its cracks. He passed one crack and the whine
was so loud he almost fainted. The room shuddered around him, the light flickering and fading at the corners, like the sound
was choking the very air.

He fumbled at the crack, forcing his fingers deep down into it. Finding nothing, he looked higher, fingers wriggling in the
small space. He touched something, something rough and smooth at the same time, something knobby at one end. He pushed deeper,
fingers toying with the thing’s end, and it fell out and clattered to the floor, the wail intensifying as soon as it was dislodged.

He squatted and looked at it. It was a bone. A small bone, like the thighbone of a chicken or the bone of a man’s foot. It
was gray as ditchwater and on its surface were tiny, fine engravings, writing as thin and ghostly as a cobweb, running in
rings and circles down its edge. He reached down and with shivering hands picked it up and looked at it and as he brought
it close he could hear words in its shrill whine, quiet chanting in some tongue he had never heard before.

He said the sheriff could make the cells sing to you at night. Sing about all the bad things that had happened to you, and
drown you in them.

“Oh my God,” said Connelly.

“For God’s sake, Connelly, do something,” pleaded Peachy. “It sounds so awful. Break it or something, please.”

Connelly looked at the little bone for a minute longer, then took it in both hands and tried to break it in half. He found
he was too weak to do so and so he lodged part of it in a crack in the wall and leaned on the exposed end. The bone bent,
then snapped in half and he swore he heard the little bone scream, a yelp like a dog being kicked, and from its broken end
something foul and black and thick poured out, covering his hands and running in streaks down the wall. It reeked of chaw
spit and spoiled beer and old leaves.

“It’s alive,” he heard himself say. “The goddamn thing is alive.”

As soon as he spoke he felt the air around him clear and the light from above him strengthen, and while the cell was by no
means clean or comfortable it felt like bliss after the past days. His head was clear and his heart strong and he felt alive
enough to stand on his own feet without leaning.

“Good God,” said Peachy. “Good God, that sounds so much better.”

Connelly breathed deep, in and then out. “Yeah. Yeah, it does. What the hell was that?”

“I think it was a taint,” said Peachy.

“A what?”

“A taint.”

“Last I checked a taint was the part of you between your asshole and your pecker.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that. I was just thinking about what that old man said and I… I just remembered something
the other night. Maybe it was a dream, I don’t know. I remembered something my momma told me once when I was a boy, something
to scare us, but sort of a joke, you know? She said there used to be a witch in her neighborhood who could take a bone and
put a little bit of her own black soul in it and then she’d hide it in your room and it’d tell you to do things as you slept.
She’d write on the bone what you were supposed to do and the bone would whisper to you and in the morning you’d do it. I thought
it was crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“Think I heard this before,” said Connelly. “From someone else. Said it tainted and poisoned the land.” He shook his head.
“Jesus. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ almighty, things like this don’t happen. Things like this aren’t real.”

“But it did happen,” said Peachy. “It is real.”

Connelly thought about it and said, “Yeah.”

Mr. Shivers

The next day when the deputies dropped off his gruel and water Connelly grabbed the tin plate and ate hungrily. They did not
laugh and reacted with some surprise and he heard their footfalls quickly fall away.

“Going to be trouble,” said Connelly.

“Yeah,” said Peachy.

But there was not. The two of them waited in silence, letting the hours pass by, yet no one came. There was no sound at all.
The entire jail was quiet.

As night fell a gray sheet of clouds crawled over the moon. The wind rose until it hammered the building and the temperature
dropped until the two men shivered and they began to see their breath. Somewhere in Connelly’s belly the animal thing yowled
and cried, full of strange knowledge of being hunted, of something watching out in the night.

“What’s going on?” asked Peachy through the crack in the wall.

“Something’s coming,” said Connelly.

Less than an hour later the sheriff came for him. Two deputies put him in handcuffs and marched him down to the cinderblock
room where the sheriff had beaten them not more than a week ago, by Connelly’s reckoning. He cuffed Connelly to the stool
and looked at him without speaking, eyes heavy as though he was envious of him. Then he took his pistol and whipped Connelly
across the side of the head. Connelly curled in his seat and the sheriff bent down and spat into his face. He looked at Connelly
a moment longer and then left, shutting the door behind him.

Connelly sat and tried to recover. No one else entered. Minutes ticked by. He waited, trying to stay conscious.

Soon he was aware of a horrible stench in the room, a stink of putrefaction and lye. He coughed and tried to find some pocket
of fresh air.

A quiet, cold voice said, “You’re taller than I remember.”

Connelly looked up and around for the source of the voice. At first he saw nothing. Then he spotted a pair of scuffed shoes
in the shadows next to the desk, and above those a pair of patched trousers and a coat the color of trainsmoke with gray-white
hands nestled in its folds like chunks of quartz in granite. And somewhere above that he could make out a face, queerly colorless,
heavily lined, with calm, placid eyes like jet and ribbons of scars running across its cheeks, its forehead, its neck and
brow, a delicate calligraphy of violence.

Connelly was bellowing before he knew what was going on. He strained forward in his seat and planted his legs and pulled until
the cuffs bit into his wrists and his palms were wet with blood. The gray man did not seem to even register it. He let the
screams go on until Connelly was gasping for breath. Then he walked around and looked at where the cement floor was spattered
with blood from Connelly’s wrists. He examined it as though faintly curious and nodded to himself.

“I see,” he said, “that you are still alive.”

“Fuck you,” snarled Connelly.

“You’ve come a long way since Memphis.”

“Fuck you.”

“As have I.”

Connelly growled and heaved himself at the man. The gray man stood just inches away, looking down on him calmly. This close
Connelly could see one scar on his cheek went up into his scalp, cutting his ear in half and nearly splitting half his head.
The gray man seemed strangely still. He did not even seem to need to breathe.

“You should not have followed me,” he said with a trace of sadness.

“Bastard! Bastard!” Connelly howled. “You killed my daughter! You killed my little girl! My little girl, my little fucking
girl!”

“You should not have followed me,” said the gray man again.

“I’m going to kill you,” snarled Connelly. “I’m going to kill you. Cut your throat, you fucking bastard. Kill you.”

“It has been a long time since I have been aware of men,” said the gray man. “A man, more specifically. You are all so alike.
I can no more tell you apart than I could a drop of water in the ocean.”

“Fuck you.”

“It’s so strange. If I were to take a man from the hills of this country on which we stand,” said the gray man, “and then
take another from some foreign place—China, perhaps—and if you were then to cut a foot off of each of those men I am certain
the noises they would make with their mouths would be similar. Their histories and cultures and names would crumble and they
would be the same man then, would they not?”

“Bastard,” said Connelly. “Fucking bastard. You sick, sick bastard.”

“But you are different,” said the gray man. “You and I. I notice you, I even know your name, which is strange in its own right.
We are alike in some fashion which I find difficult to perceive.”

Connelly screamed and heaved himself forward again. The gray man seemed not to notice. His blank eyes were fixed on Connelly
and he might have been blind, seeing but not seeing, staring through everything like all matter and all creatures within his
eyesight were immaterial.

Connelly finished screaming. The gray man said, “You don’t agree?”

“Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell. I am not like you, I’m not.”

“You have taken lives in getting here. You are willing to take more in the future.”

“I don’t kill little girls!” howled Connelly.

The gray man considered this, accepted it with a tilt of the head. “No. You do not. Not yet.”

“I ain’t never going to, neither. I ain’t like you and I ain’t like the goddamn sheriff. I don’t kill, you bastards, I’m no
murderer. You’re all fucking monsters doing whatever the hell you please, ain’t you?”

“The sheriff does as I ask. I see you survived his little poison. I’m somewhat impressed.” Then he reached forward and dropped
something onto the floor. A pile of twigs and string, horribly mauled. Chewed, almost. “An old magic, and a minor one,” he
said. “You fed the taint and made it slow and fat. But it would have gotten you in the end, you know, had you not found it.”

“I’ll kill you both,” said Connelly, now almost sobbing. “Kill the both of you. I don’t understand why the hell you’d bother
to do this.”

“The sheriff is a friend of mine,” said the gray man. “I have given him something very precious and he does small tasks for
me.”

“And what the hell could any man ever want from a bastard like you?”

“Life,” said the gray man. “Peace. These things are valued, yes?”

“I’m going to kill you,” said Connelly. “Maybe not now and maybe not today, but goddamn you, the last thing you see on this
earth is going to be my face. Last image your fucked-up brain is going to take in is going to be my face, and I’ll say her
name. I’ll say her name and that’ll be the last thing you hear because that’s what killed you, the second you touched her
you were dead and I’m going to be the one to do it. And you’ll die knowing it. You’ll die knowing it. I swear.”

The gray man listened to that and once more Connelly saw some strange fear work its way into his face. He said, “Mr. Connelly,
you should go home.”

“Fuck you.”

“You should give up now and go home.”

“Keep running. I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll find you.”

“You think I am running from you?” said the gray man. “Is that what you think?”

Connelly didn’t answer. The gray man bent low. His eyes were huge in his face and his ruined mouth twisted into a snarl. “Dawn
is breaking,” he whispered. “Night has fallen and the dawn comes. It is on the horizon. Do you not feel it? Each breath this
nation and this world takes is one taken in anticipation, for in our future something rears its head, something new and terrible,
and the sun shall show it. These past years have been the long night before it, the long midwinter. But now I ask you, what
will you see once that dawn breaks? What will it reveal? When the cold gray light washes across the face of this earth, will
it be the same earth you fell asleep in? Or will it be something new? Will it be something so great and awesome that it will
deny words and dwarf language, something to belittle all the previous creations of man and beast? Can you say for sure?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Do you not? Why not? Does your life matter so little? It is happening out there!” he cried, pointing westward. “Just out
there! The years and ages line up and somewhere in those endless flats time itself heaves with pangs of labor, a sick, red
cunt that readies to birth a new age! A new era! Do you not understand?”

“You’re crazy. You’re a fucking loon.”

The gray man thought about that and stooped to eye level.

“No,” he whispered. “No.” He leaned close. “Do you know what I’ve seen out there?”

Connelly did not answer.

“I have been to the far reaches,” said the gray man. “I have walked to the edge where the black vaults swallow creation and
I stood on the edge of the world and pissed into nothingness. I’ve seen the things that hide and dance behind the stars in
the sky and I pinned them to the ground and laughed and made them tell me their names one by one, one by one.”

The gray man drew himself up to his fullest height, an impossibly tall man, and as he spoke Connelly swore his scars were
no longer scars but it was all one mouth, enormous and ragged. His voice grew loud and as it did the light seemed to shrink.

“I have walked in dark places where eyeless things of no mind and no soul gnaw the bottoms of mountains and eat rock and stone
the likes of which mankind has never known and will never know. I have watched eons being devoured by crushing waves and as
I watched I knew in my heart that I was the sole witness of their existence and their passing. I have stalked the forests
that ring the top of this earth where snow is thick and silence has gone undisturbed for centuries, and lifetimes may pass before finding a single footprint in the snow. And I have walked toward the center of this vast spinning world,
Mr. Connelly, where light has no meaning and all is consumed, and I looked at the great violation that makes this land’s heart,
that fills it with hunger, and on the sides of that black crack was my name written again and again and again. And again and
again and again. Do you hear me, little man? Do you hear me?”

He looked down on Connelly, eyes still blank. “I have done things which your mind cannot possibly comprehend, which you cannot
ever approach. I am in all shadows and in no shadow, I am in every atom and I am in every heart. And I will not allow the
new day to break. Night everlasting, if it may be so. And you must stop, Mr. Connelly. You must stop. You must leave me be and stop.”

Connelly said, “Then kill me.”

The gray man charged forward, his long white hands grasping out, but they stopped inches away from Connelly’s neck. He saw
the scarred man struggle, face contorted, like he was pulling against an unimaginable force. He shuddered, then withdrew,
his chest heaving and a sheen of sweat across his pallid brow.

“I could,” said the gray man. “I could. I dearly wish to. But there are rules. There is order. Natures which cannot be denied.” He stared down on Connelly. “You will die here. If you follow this path
you will be destroyed. I know. And if you follow me any further, Mr. Connelly, everyone you know and everyone you trust will
find their end here as well. Know that. Know that and do what you will, if you survive the next day.”

The gray man turned to walk away. He opened the iron door and as he stood in the hall light he looked like any tramp again,
just a tired old tramp with a ruined face.

“I want to know something,” said Connelly.

The gray man looked back, his expression inscrutable.

“I want to know why you killed my little girl.”

The gray man cocked his head. There was no thought in his face or his posture. He regarded Connelly for a second and said,
“So that she would die.”

The door shut. Connelly began screaming again. He screamed until the guards came and beat him and threw him back into his
cell.

Mr. Shivers