Spirit (25 page)

Sheriff Brant nodded toward the remains that were lying on the ground. ‘Dan Philips, poor bastard. Don't even ask me to guess what happened to him.'

Dr Ferris approached the remains with one eye closed against the smoke from his cigarette and the other suspiciously narrowed. ‘Jesus,' he said.

Brant said, ‘Maybe it was acid, what do you think? I saw some goop like that before once, back in White Plains, when some realtor strangled his wife and tried to dissolve her body in sulphuric acid.'

‘This reminds me of when I was in the service,' put in the spotty deputy. ‘We were practising with hand grenades, and one of my pals forgot to let go of his. His belly was nothing but pink paste.'

‘Will you please watch what you're saying,' said Brant. ‘Miss Buchanan's still here; and I reckon that she's probably had more than enough distress for one night.'

‘I'll just go inside if you don't mind,' said Elizabeth. She was feeling trembly and shocked now, and overwhelmed by the strangeness of what had happened. She couldn't stop thinking about that huge dark shape with the snow flying off it, and the crushing crackle of Dan's body falling apart.

‘I'll come along with you,' said Brant. ‘Ned . . . I'll leave the bits and pieces to you for a while. Carl, take pictures of the whole surrounding area, but tread careful. I don't want any evidence being trampled, the way you trampled over that dog-napping case.'

‘Don't worry, Sheriff,' said the photographer. ‘You can count on me.'

Sheriff Brant took Elizabeth by the elbow and guided her inside. She took him into the living-room and poked the fire, so that it began to burn up again.

‘You want a cup of tea, Sheriff?' she asked him.

‘Don't you bother yourself, Miss Buchanan. You've had a pretty serious shock.'

Elizabeth sat down and took out a cigarette. Her hands were shaking so much that Brant had to light it for her. He watched her as she inhaled and blew out smoke.

‘Do you think you can tell me what happened?' he asked her, sitting down next to her.

‘I don't really know,' she told him. ‘We were out in the garden when all of a sudden it turned cold. Bitterly, bitterly cold. It started to snow and Mr Philips and I got separated in
the storm. The next thing I knew he was lying there literally in pieces. It was awful.'

‘Excuse me, did you say that it started to
snow?

She drew on her cigarette, nodded. ‘It was really thick. I couldn't see anything at all.'

‘Miss Buchanan, we haven't had snow since the middle of March. Apart from that, if there was snow, and if that snow was really thick, like you said it was, where is it now?'

Elizabeth shook her head. She couldn't imagine where it was. She could hardly believe that it had fallen at all. She had wondered if she ought to try to explain to Sheriff Brant about the Peggy-girl, and the black shape that had pursued Dan Philips up the garden, but for some dark, tightly-knotted reason she had decided that it would probably be wiser not to.

Sheriff Brant said, ‘Are you all right, Miss Buchanan? You're looking kind of pale.'

‘It's just the shock of it, I think. I can't believe it really happened. He just froze – froze solid – and fell to pieces.'

‘So you actually witnessed him fall to pieces?'

‘One minute he was trying to run, the next he was all broken up. I couldn't see anything. All I could see was poor Mr Philips and all of that snow.'

At that moment, Mrs Patrick came bustling in, still wearing her overcoat. Her nose was red from the cold but otherwise her face was drained of colour. Somebody else came in behind her— Wally Grierson, the previous county sheriff, now retired. He looked like a motheaten old bear these days, big and old and sagging, but his expression was concerned and kindly, and he lifted his hand to Elizabeth in a quick, avuncular wave.

Oh, Lizzie!' sobbed Mrs Patrick, crossing the room and holding out her arms. Oh, Lizzie, what in the Lord's name happened?'

Elizabeth took Mrs Patrick in her arms, and for the first time in her life she found that she was comforting Mrs Patrick,
instead of the other way about. It was another moment of coming-of-age; but she would have given up everything she owned to have it any other way.

Wally Grierson was sitting in the kitchen with Sheriff Brant when Elizabeth came in. Mrs Patrick had brewed up coffee, and they were dunking ginger cookies in their mugs.

‘How're you feeling?' Wally asked her. ‘Pretty darn shaky, I'll bet.'

‘Dopey, more than anything. Dr Ferris gave me a tranquillizer.'

‘Do you mind if I ask you some questions?'

Elizabeth unhooked a coffee mug from the hutch, and half-filled it with coffee. ‘You can if you like. But there isn't much else I can tell you. There was snow, that was all. I don't know where it came from and I don't know where it went.'

Wally sniffed. ‘Do you know what Dr Ferris said? He said that for a human body to be so frozen that it actually broke into pieces, it'd have to be chilled down to minus two hundred degrees Centigrade, or more; and, frankly, that's pretty well impossible, out in the garden like that, even in a snowstorm.'

‘I can't explain it,' said Elizabeth. ‘I can't explain the snow, I can't explain how Mr Philips broke to pieces. I wish I could.'

‘Do you know why Sheriff Brant called me over here?' asked Wally. ‘He called me over because of what happened to the Reverend Bracewaite, remember that?'

‘Of course I remember it. Sure.'

‘The Reverend Bracewaite died of frostbite in June. He wasn't so seriously frozen as Dan, not by any means. But what happened to him was just as impossible as what happened here tonight. Intense, unnatural cold, that's what we're talking about. Stranger than fiction, don't you think? But stranger still is the fact that you were the only witness to both of these fatalities.'

‘I know. But I don't know why.'

Wally stood up and walked around the kitchen table until he was standing right behind her. ‘Lizzie – do you have even half an inkling of what this is all about? If you do, you really ought to share it with me, don't you think?'

She shook her head. She didn't quite feel real. But when it came down to it, what was real?
Stranger than fiction
, Wally had said, and Elizabeth thought of the wind-gusted pages that had scattered across Oak Street – pages of a book that hadn't yet been written, and maybe never would be.

The snow must have been real, the cold must have been real, because Dan Philips was dead and Wally Grierson wanted to know why. She was also beginning to suspect that the Peggy-girl was real. It was true that she was capable of appearing and vanishing whenever she wanted to; and that she could raise up snowstorms. It was true that she could collapse into nothing at all, and appear whenever she wanted to. But she was real. She existed just as surely as Peggy had existed.

Something of Peggy had outlived her drowning. But whatever it was, it was more than little Clothes-Peg. Little Clothes-Peg couldn't have caused a blizzard; or summoned up a dark shape that crumbled Dan into lumps of bloody frost.

Mrs Patrick came back into the kitchen. ‘I'll be off now, Lizzie,' she said. ‘I won't be in tomorrow if you don't mind but I'll ask Daisy O'Connell to come over for you.'

Elizabeth said, ‘I'm so sorry. About Dan.'

Mrs Patrick gave Elizabeth a long, sad, complicated look, as if she were searching her eyes for a mystery. ‘Well, you've no need to be sorry. It was a freak of Nature, that's all. The will of God.'

‘I don't think so,' said Elizabeth. ‘God would never have willed your brother dead; never; not until his time.'

‘Maybe his time had come, God bless him.'

Elizabeth stood up and hugged Mrs Patrick tightly. ‘Are you
going to the hospital tomorrow? Give my love to Seamus. Tell him I miss him. Tell him we all miss him. Tell him
Eternity:

‘Eternity?' blinked Mrs Patrick. ‘Why should I tell him that?'

‘He'll know what it means.'

‘Seamus doesn't know what anything means. He's been stricken.'

‘Please, Mrs Patrick. He'll know what Eternity means.'

‘Very well, then,' said Mrs Patrick. She nodded goodnight to Sheriff Brant, and to Wally Grierson, who nodded his head and said, ‘Thank you kindly for the coffee, Katherine. It was appreciated.'

Elizabeth opened the front door for them. The night was crisp and silent, and the moon was low in the sky. As they left, Elizabeth thought:
Katherine
. In all these years I never knew her name was Katherine, and now I do, and all the more vulnerable she looks for it, too.

Wally paused in the hallway, and looked around, and listened.

‘Your clocks have stopped,' he remarked.

‘I know. All of them did, after the snowstorm.'

Wally approached the long-case clock beside the door. It was father's pride and joy, a Thomas Tompion that he had bought in New Canaan after the success of his
Famous Hauntings of Rural Connecticut
. It was veneered with honey-gloss lacquer that looked almost good enough to lick, like hard-shelled candy.

Wally peered deep into the clock's interior with his head cocked on one side, and then he said, ‘Stopped. Stopped at eleven-oh-two precisely.'

He said, ‘Pardon me, won't you?' and walked back into the living-room, where a wooden ship's clock stood on the shelf above the fire.

‘Stopped!' he called. ‘Eleven-oh-three, but that's near enough for me.'

He went through to the kitchen, then the scullery, then the dining-room. Every clock in the entire house had stopped around 11:02.

Back in the hallway, he said to Elizabeth, ‘Let me see your watch.'

He took her hand in his hand. His fingers were enormous, compared to hers, swollen and red like sausages. All the same, his touch was infinitely gentle, and when he looked at her watch and raised her eyes, she could see how concerned he was.

‘Your watch has stopped, too,' said Wally. ‘Exact same time – eleven-oh-two.'

‘Why do you think
that
happened?' frowned Elizabeth, shaking her wrist, and then listening to see if the watch was ticking again.

‘Some kind of strong magnetic wave, that's what Dr Ferris thinks. The same thing happened when the Reverend Bracewaite died. Even his cudery was shifted, that's how strong it was – one side of the kitchen drawer to the other.'

Sheriff Brant said, ‘Are you finished up, Wally, or what?'

‘I'm just coming,' said Wally. He looked down at Elizabeth and said, One idea. Give me just one idea. This whole thing has been tormenting me all these years.'

‘I don't know,' said Elizabeth. ‘I really don't.'

‘You said Eternity to Mrs Patrick. What did that mean?'

‘It comes from a story,
The Snow Queen
. I used to read it to my sisters when they were small. I guess Seamus must have heard it, too, because he's always quoting bits out of it.'

‘Go on,' Wally urged her.

‘It can't be relevant,' said Elizabeth. ‘Not to what happened to poor Mr Philips.'

‘Still, tell me about it.'

‘All right, then.' Elizabeth sighed. She was feeling desperately fatigued now, and she could scarcely keep her eyes open. ‘It says in the story that the Snow Queen lived in a huge
palace, with a hundred halls, some of which were miles and miles long. She spent most of her days sitting in an empty, interminable saloon all made of snow, and in the middle of the empty, interminable saloon all made of snow lay a frozen lake, which was broken into a thousand pieces, like a Chinese puzzle. She called it the Ice-Puzzle of Reason. The Snow Queen had abducted a boy called Kay, and he spent all his time trying to form these pieces into words, but there was only one word which he could never manage to form, and that was Eternity.

‘The Snow Queen said, “When you can put that word together, you shall become your own master and I will give you the whole world.” '

Sheriff Brant said, ‘Come on, Wally. It's almost two.'

But Wally lifted a hand and said, ‘Wait, I want to listen to this. Why did you say Eternity to Mrs Patrick?'

‘Because if Seamus manages to put back together all of the broken-up pieces in his head, he'll be his own man again, and the whole world will be his.'

Wally thought about that, and then he said, very softly, ‘You think he'll understand that?'

‘I think so. I was brought up with Seamus. Seamus understands more than most people know.'

Wally said, ‘What interests me, Lizzie, is all this talk of snow, all this talk of ice. Look what happened to Dan Philips tonight, and the Reverend Bracewaite. Is this all just coincidence, or are we talking about some kind of connection here . . . I don't know, some kind of missing link between life and stories? What do you think?'

Elizabeth thought of her copy of
The Snow Queen
concealed beneath the garden shed and the guilt that she had felt when she had hidden it. She didn't blush. She was far too tired to blush. But she felt as if an earth-tremor had passed beneath her feet, and temporarily unbalanced her. She felt as if she were
very close to understanding what had happened. But she also felt that when she eventually
did
understand it, when the Ice-Puzzle fitted into place, the answer that it gave her would be dreadful beyond belief.

 

 

At six-thirty in the morning Elizabeth went into her father's room, knocking before she entered, although she expected no reply. The room was chilly and the light was smudged, as if it had been drawn in pencil and half rubbed-out. Nurse Edna had already woken her father and sponged him and given him a drink. His empty orange-juice bottle stood on the nightstand. Nurse Edna was downstairs now, supervising his breakfast. Cream of Wheat, with molasses stirred in, and two softly baked eggs.