The Throat (12 page)

"My unit was just there." His head jerked up. "A mortar round scared
us into the village."

"You saw the place?"

I nodded.

"Funny story." Now he was sorry he had ever mentioned it.

I said that I wasn't asking him to tell me any secrets.

"It's not a secret. It's not even military."

"It's just a ghost town."

Ransom was still uncomfortable. He turned his glass around and
around in his hands before he drank.

"Complete with ghosts."

"I honestly wouldn't be surprised." He drank what was left in his
glass and stood up. "Let's take care of Major Bachelor, Jed," he said.

"Right."

Ransom carried our bottle to the bar.

Ransom and Jed picked up the major between them. They were strong
enough to lift him easily. Bachelor's greasy head rolled forward. Jed
put the .45 into his pocket, and Ransom put the bottle into his own
pocket. Together they carried the major to the door.

I followed them outside. Artillery pounded hills a long way off. It
was dark now, and lantern light spilled through the gaps in the windows.

All of us went down the rotting steps, the major bobbing between the
other two.

Ransom opened the jeep, and they took a while to maneuver the major
into the backseat. Jed squeezed in beside him and pulled him upright.

John Ransom got in behind the wheel and sighed. He had no taste for
the next part of his job.

"I'll give you a ride back to camp," he said.

I took the seat beside him. Ransom started the engine and turned on
the lights. He jerked the gearshift into reverse and rolled backward.
"You know why that mortar round came in, don't you?" he asked me. He
grinned at me, and we bounced onto the road back to the main part of
camp. "He was trying to chase you away from Bong To, and your fool of a
lieutenant went straight for the place instead." He was still grinning.
"It must have steamed him, seeing a bunch of roundeyes going in there."

"He didn't send in any more fire."

"No. He didn't want to damage the place. It's supposed to stay the
way it is. I don't think they'd use the word, but that village is like
a kind of monument." He glanced at me again.

Ransom paused and then asked, "Did you go into any of the huts? Did
you see anything unusual there?"

"I went into a hut. I saw something unusual."

"A list of names?"

"I thought that's what they were."

"Okay," Ransom said. "There's a difference between private and
public shame. Between what's acknowledged and what is not acknowledged.
Some things are acceptable, as long as you don't talk about them." He
looked sideways at me as we began to approach the northern end of the
camp proper. He wiped his face, and flakes of dried mud fell off his
cheek. The exposed skin looked red, and so did his eyes. "I've been
learning things," Ransom said.

I remembered thinking that the arrangement in the hut's basement had
been a shrine to an obscene deity.

"One day in Bong To, a little boy disappeared."

My heart gave a thud.

"Say, three. Old enough to talk and get into trouble, but too young
to take care of himself. He's just gone—
poof.
A couple of months later,
it happened again. Mom turns her back, where the hell did Junior go?
This time they scour the village. The
villagers
scour the village,
every square foot of that place, and then they do the same to the rice
paddy, and then they look through the forest."

"What happens next is the interesting part. An old woman goes out
one morning to fetch water from the well, and she sees the ghost of a
disreputable old man from another village, a local no-good, in fact.
He's just standing near the well with his hands together. He's
hungry—that's what these people know about ghosts. The skinny old
bastard wants
more
. He wants
to be
fed
. " The old lady
gives a squawk and passes out. When she comes to again,
the ghost is gone.

"Well, the old lady tells everybody what she saw, and the whole
village gets in a panic. Next thing you know, two thirteen-year-old
girls are working in the paddy, they look up and see an old woman who
died when they were ten—she's about six feet away from them. Her hair
is stringy and gray and her fingernails are about a foot long. They
start screaming and crying, but no one else can see her, and she comes
closer and closer, and they try to get away but one of them falls down,
and the old woman is on her like a cat. And do you know what she does?
She rubs her filthy hands over the screaming girl's face and licks the
tears and slobber off her fingers."

"The next night, two men go looking around the village latrine
behind the houses, and they see two ghosts down in the pit, shoving
excrement into their mouths. They rush back into the village, and then
they both see half a dozen ghosts around the chiefs hut. They want to
eat. One of the men screeches, because not only did he see his dead
wife, he saw her pass into the chief's hut without the benefit of the
door."

"The dead wife comes back out through the wall of the chief's hut.
She's licking blood off her hands."

"The former husband stands there pointing and jabbering, and the
mothers and grandmothers of the missing boys come out of their huts.
All these women go howling up to the chief's door. When the chief comes
out, they push past him and they take the hut apart. And you know what
they find."

Ransom had parked the jeep near my battalion headquarters five
minutes before, and now he smiled as if he had explained everything.

"But what
happened
?" I
asked. "How did you hear about it?"

He shrugged. "I probably heard that story half a dozen times, but
Bachelor knew more about it than anyone I ever met before. They
probably carried out the pieces of the chief's body and threw them into
the excrement pit. And over months, bit by bit, everybody in the
village crossed a kind of border. By that time, they were seeing ghosts
all the time. Bachelor says they turned into ghosts."

"Do you think they turned into ghosts?"

"I think Major Bachelor turned into a ghost, if you ask me. Let me
tell you something. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are
still people."

I got out of the jeep and closed the door Ransom peered at me
through the jeep's window. "Take better care of yourself."

"Good luck with your Bru."

"The Bru are fantastic" He slammed the jeep into gear and sho away,
cranking the wheel to turn the jeep around in a giant circle in front
of the battalion headquarters before he jammed it into second and took
off to wherever he was going.

Once I had started remembering John Ransom, I couldn't stop. I tried
to write, but my book had flattened out into a movie starring Kent
Smith and Gloria Grahame. I called a travel agent and booked a ticket
to Millhaven for Wednesday morning.

The imagination sometimes makes demands the rest of the mind
resists, and Tuesday night I dreamed that the body Scoot was busily
dismembering was my own.

I jerked awake into suffocating darkness.

The sheet beneath me was cold and greasy with sweat. In the morning
the blurry yellow pattern of my body would be printed on the cotton. My
heart thundered. I turned over the pillow and shifted to a dry place on
the bed.

I realized at last that the thought of seeing Millhaven again filled
me with dread. Millhaven and Vietnam were oddly interchangeable,
fragments of some greater whole, some larger story—a lost story that
preceded the fables of Orpheus and Lot's wife and said,
You will lose
everything if you turn around and look back.
You turn around,
you look
back. Are you destroyed? Or is it that you see the missing, unifying
section of the puzzle, the secret, filled with archaic and godlike
terror, you have kept from yourself?

Early Wednesday morning, I showered and packed and went out onto the
street to get a cab.

I got to the gate, boarded the plane, took my seat, buckled myself
in, and it hit me that, at nearly fifty years of age, I was traveling
halfway across the continent to help someone look for a madman.

Yet my motives had been clear from the moment that John Ransom had
told me his wife's name. I was going to Millhaven because I thought
that I might finally learn who had killed my sister.

The stewardess appeared in front of me to ask what I wanted to
drink. My brain said the words, "Club soda, please," but what came out
of my mouth was "Vodka on the rocks." She smiled and handed me the
little airline bottle and a plastic glass full of ice cubes. I had not
had a drink in eight years. I twisted off the cap of the little bottle
and poured vodka over the ice cubes, hardly believing I was doing it.
The stewardess moved on to the next row. The sharp, bitter smell of
alcohol rose up from the glass. If I had wanted to, I could have stood
up, walked to the toilet, and poured the stuff into the sink. Death was
leaning against the bulkhead at the front of the plane, smiling at me.
I smiled back and raised the glass and gave myself a good cold mouthful
of vodka. It tasted like flowers. An unheeded little voice within me
shouted no no no, o god no, this is not what you want, but I swallowed
the mouthful of vodka and immediately took another, because it was
exactly what I wanted. Now it tasted like a frozen cloud— the most
delicious frozen cloud in the history of the world. Death, who was a
dark-haired, ironic-looking man in a gray double-breasted suit, nodded
and smiled. I remembered everything I used to like about drinking. When
I thought about it, eight years of abstinence really deserved a
celebratory drink or two. When the stewardess came back, I smiled
nicely at her, waggled my glass, and asked for another. And she gave it
to me, just like that.

I idly turned around to see who else was on the plane, and the
alcohol in my system instantly turned to ice: two rows behind me, at
the window seat in the last row of the first-class section, was my
sister April. For a moment our eyes met, and then she turned away
toward the gray nothingness beyond the window, her chin propped on her
nine-year-old palm. I had not seen her for so long that I had managed
to forget the conflicting, violent sensations her appearances caused in
me. I experienced a rush of love, mixed as always with grief and
sadness, also with anger. I took her in, her hair, her bored, slightly
discontented face. She was still wearing the blue dress in which she
had died. Her eyes shifted toward me again, and I nearly stood up and
stepped out into the aisle. Before I had time to move, I found myself
staring at the covered buttons on the uniform of the stewardess who had
placed herself between April and myself. I looked up into her face, and
she took a step back.

"Can I help you with anything?" she asked. "Another vodka, sir?"

I nodded, and she moved up the aisle to fetch the drink. April's
seat was empty.

After I sauntered dreamily out into the clean, reverberant spaces of
Millhaven's airport, looking for another upright gray wraith like
myself, I didn't recognize the overweight balding executive in the
handsome gray suit who had been inspecting my fellow passengers until
he finally stepped right in front of me. He said, "Tim!" and burst out
laughing. Finally I saw John Ransom's familiar face in the face of the
man before me, and I smiled. He had put on a lot of pounds and lost a
lot of hair since Camp Crandall. Except for an enigmatic, almost
restless quality in the cast of his features, the man pronouncing my
name before me might have been the president of an insurance company.
He put his arms around me, and for a second everything we had seen of
our generation's war came to life around us, distanced now, a part of
our lives we had survived.

"Why are you always wrecked whenever I see you?" he asked.

"Because when I see you I never know what I'm getting into," I told
him. "But this is just a temporary lapse."

"I don't mind if you drink."

"Don't be rash," I said. "I think the whole idea of coming out here
must have spooked me a little."

Of course Ransom knew nothing of my early life—I still had to tell
him why I had been so fascinated by William Damrosch and the murders he
was supposed to have committed—and he let his arms drop and stepped
back. "Well, that makes two of us. Let's go down and get your bags."

When John Ransom left the freeway to drive through downtown
Millhaven on the way to the near east side, I saw a city that was only
half-familiar. Whole rows of old brick buildings turned brown by grime
had been replaced by bright new structures that gleamed in the
afternoon light; a parking lot had been transformed into a sparkling
little park; on the site of the gloomy old auditorium was a complex of
attractive concert halls and theaters that Ransom identified as the
Center for the Performing Arts.

It was like driving through the back lot of a movie studio— the new
hotels and office buildings that reshaped the skyline seemed illusory,
like film sets built over the actual face of the past. After New York,
the city seemed unbelievably clean and quiet. I wondered if the
troubling, disorderly city I remembered had disappeared behind a
thousand face-lifts.

"I suppose Arkham College looks like Stanford these days," I said.

He grunted. "No, Arkham's the same old rock pile it always was. We
get by. Barely."

"How did you wind up there in the first place?"

"Come to think of it, which I seldom do, that must seem a little
strange."

I waited for the story.

"I went there because of a specific man, Alan Brookner, who was the
head of the religion department. He was famous in my field, I mean
really
famous, one of the
three or four most significant people in the
field. When I was in graduate school, I hunted down everything he'd
ever written. He was the only real scholar at Arkham, of course. I
think they gave him his first job, and he never even thought about
leaving for a more glamorous position. That kind of prestige never
meant anything to him. Once the school realized what they had, they let
him write his own ticket, because they thought he'd attract other
people of his stature."