Son of the Endless Night, page 43
"That's not necessary. I'll see him in his cell."
Steve smiled in relief. "I was hoping you'd say that."
The lights of the cell, recessed, inaccessible without a ladder, shone brightly. The walls and the floor had been padded with slabs of polyurethane packaged in a tough fabric which fingernails and teeth couldn't shred. The toilet was lidless. The bunk bed bolted to one wall had neither sheets nor a blanket, only a thin mattress of foam rubber covered with the same material as the walls. The prisoner lay on his bunk reading. When he heard the scrape of shoes on the concrete floor outside his cell, he lowered the book, which was The Psychopathic God, a study of Hitler, and shaded his eyes with one hand to look out at Knox Winford and the jailer behind him.
The prisoner said nothing, and Knox didn't speak right away either. He couldn't understand what Steve had been trying to tell him. The prisoner was of average size. He'd been given a jailhouse haircut which wasn't flattering, and he was so pale the hollows of his cheeks looked translucent in that downpour of light, but there was nothing overtly menacing about him. Still, you could never judge a mental patient on appearances. They were cunning and could demonstrate terrifying violence, immense strength. So you took extra precautions.
Knox continued to stare at the prisoner, mildly fascinated but by what aspect of the man he couldn't explain to himself. The prisoner seemed to return the stare, but his eyes were nearly invisible beneath the ledge of the hand he held against his brows.
"I'm Knox Winford," the judge said.
"How's Bonnie?" the prisoner said.
Now, it was conceivable that at some point the prisoner might have heard some jailhouse talk about him, but it was very nearly beyond belief that he would know that Bonnie was Knox Winford's wife. And there was something about the way he had spoken Bonnie's name that detonated little flash points of apprehension all over the judge's skin.
It was all they said to each other. After a few moments the prisoner turned on his side on the bunk and went back to his reading.
That night Knox worked in his study at home trying to write an opinion disallowing the plea of demonic possession. He made several attempts and tore them all up. By then the hour was late and his mind, usually clear and rational no matter how hard he'd been working, felt like a dead tooth. In the kitchen he poured himself a beer and wandered back to the front of the house, which had a deep roofed porch on two sides. He heard the creaking of the porch swing that was suspended on chains from eyebolts in the ceiling. It was rhythmic. Sometimes it could be the wind, but tonight he sensed it wasn't. He had a visitor.
Knox went to the windows of the parlor and leaned over the window seat intending to raise the shade, but he couldn't do it. He froze. There was a thick mass of terror in his throat, which he was unable to swallow. He backed away from the windows and switched off the lights in the parlor and the hall. He returned to the parlor and stood gazing at the shadow of the moving glider on the shades, cast by the streetlight at the northeast corner of his property. There was a figure of a man in the glider. Unmistakable. Knox went softly back into the center hall and opened a closet, took down his loaded shotgun from the brackets above the inside of the door where childish hands couldn't reach, and went outside to the porch.
He found the glider empty and now motionless despite the zephyr playing around the corners of the porch. He took a tour of his still-mushy yard with the shotgun in both hands. The tall trees, two weeks away from coming into leaf, lobbed spidery shadows across the moonlit lawn. He surprised the Hubbards' cat with the wing of a thrush in its mouth, but no other intruders.
In bed he tossed and turned, ultimately waking up Bonnie, who complained.
"Bonnie, when was the last time you were down at the courthouse in Chadbury?"
"Months, I guess. A year. Why?"
"No reason. I think I'd like to have Daddy Perce for dinner Friday week."
"Fine. There's no way I'll have the time to drive all the way up to Ripton to get him."
"I'll do it."
"If you're not sleepy," she said, touching the nape of his neck with a gently flicking finger, "would you mind bringing me a glass of milk and, uh, my diaphragm?"
81
Knox Winford's surviving grandfather, on his mother's side, was seventy-seven. He lived by himself in a log cabin alongside a rushing clear stream in a thinly populated area of the state near Breadloaf Mountain. He had had laser surgery three times for macular degeneration, and the last time the surgery hadn't been too successful. He still had enough vision left to look after himself on his sparse acres, and go fishing. His second sight remained impressively sharp. He was a clairvoyant.
Driving down from Ripton, Knox said to his grandfather, "I want to make a detour over Chadbury way. There's somebody I'd like for you to see."
"All right," Daddy Perce said. "Leave time for me to pick up a little something for the kids."
"They're spoiled enough already."
At the Chadbury jail Knox took his grandfather downstairs to the isolation cell. The prisoner was lying on his bunk. He opened his eyes at the approach of Daddy Perce. A smile formed.
Perce stood in front of the bars for a long minute, his eyes narrowed, his Adam's apple jumping. He said to Knox, "It would help to tone those lights down some."
The wattage was lowered until there was very little light at all. The prisoner laughed once; Knox began to feel a numbness along one side of his tongue. He was impatient, even anxious to get out of there.
Finally Perce said, "I've seen all there is to see," and Knox took him upstairs.
When they were in the car and driving toward Braxton, with Daddy Perce enjoying his midafternoon treat, a chocolate sundae from Dairy Queen, Knox asked him, "What did you see in that cell?"
"A black aura. Black flames shooting out from his body, six feet in every direction."
"Have you ever seen anything like that before?"
"No. Not around a living human being."
"What does it mean?"
"It means there's two spirits in one body. A human spirit— but he was so faint I could barely make him out— and an inhuman spirit."
"Oh, dandy," Knox muttered, and drove several more miles while his grandfather placidly cleaned out the sundae cup, going round and round with his little finger until the inside of the cup shone. He would find a use for the cup; he seldom discarded anything that came into his possession. Knox said complainingly, "You know I never have believed in most of that stuff, Daddy Perce." The old man was respectfully silent, his baby blue eyes merely glints in pods of wrinkles. But a mild charge of amusement fluttered his lips. "I do accept auras, which can be photographed, and I accept that auras can tell you a lot about how a person is feeling. Life after death— well, I accept that too. But evil spirits; ghosts; seeing is believing."
"All you're saying is that there are things on this earth, or off it, that you weren't meant to be bothered with. At least until now. What is that boy in jail for?"
"Murder. He killed his girl friend. The facts are not in dispute."
"Are you sitting?"
"I don't know yet if I will. The defense is pleading demonic possession— or trying to."
"For those able to see, the existence of spirits of all kinds is obvious. For those without the sight— well, undoubtedly there are reasons why they shouldn't have such knowledge. Does that help you to reach a decision about your duty?"
"No."
When they arrived at the house Perce, without looking up, became obviously tense. Then, not getting out of the car, he stared at the porch until Knox became uncomfortable.
"Well, is something the matter?"
The old man didn't answer. He opened the car door and, after stepping out, stretched himself carefully. The sun was on his face. They'd had three warm days, the month of May was around the corner, the earth was free of frost, and the azaleas were about to riot. Perce went slowly up to the porch and walked up and down in his boondockers, paying particular attention to the glider.
"Knox, you've had a visitor," he said finally.
"Last night I thought somebody— "
Perce motioned gently for him to be quiet. His eyes were wizened in thought. "He was here, all right. Leaves a powerful taint, like an animal in heat."
"Who was here? You mean— ? Oh, now, Perce— "
"I wish he hadn't been. I don't like it. No, not at all."
Bonnie came outside then to greet Perce and make over the bouquet of pert jonquils they had stopped for at Durwood Brothers' Nursery. There was no further talk of spirits. Daddy Perce's somber mood improved when the children arrived boisterously from school a few minutes later.
But Bonnie said to Knox in the kitchen, "He seems so preoccupied. Not himself. Has he been sick?"
"It was a long winter, Bonnie. And Daddy Perce isn't getting any younger."
The pat answer he had supplied for his wife also served to reduce Knox Winford's lingering uneasiness about his grandfather's hushed revelation on the porch. He now regretted having taken the old man to the Chadbury jail; what had he been trying to prove to himself? That there was definable evil in Richard Devon that atavistically affected everyone who came near him? Or that the evil was more than just the product of a thoroughly rancid human personality— in which case Adam Kurland's defense merited serious consideration. Since he didn't want to believe that, he now tried to rationalize Perce's reaction. There was just that little suspicious touch of senility about the old man these days; and the atmosphere of the jail undoubtedly had depressed him. So he had subconsciously translated his depressed emotions into terms he understood best, blaming them on auras, omens, and presentiments of the supernatural.
After dinner Knox was tied up with a long phone call; Perce helped Bonnie with the dishes. He was full of anecdotes about Robert Frost, who had been a neighbor. Bonnie was about to get down to serious work on her master's thesis and trying to find something to say about the poet that hadn't been covered already. When the judge emerged from his study Bonnie was at the kitchen table scribbling notes and the kids were in front of the television in the parlor; Perce was missing.
Knox checked the bathrooms first and then went outside. The old man wasn't on the porch either. Maybe he had decided to go for a walk. Knox strolled around to the deep side yard and stopped there, listening. He thought he had heard a sound, a congested panicked grunting, as if blows were being struck somewhere. He followed a path through a long-untended grape arbor with its trellises and barren fragments of clinging vines to the latticework jewelbox of the gazebo. He heard the mysterious grunting again, and hurried.
Inside the gazebo he found his grandfather sprawled on the floor, his legs moving sluggishly. Despite his years and slowly failing eyesight Daddy Perce had retained much of his physical vigor, and the dignity that went with it. Now he looked shockingly incompetent.
"Perce, what happened?"
"He was here." The old man's eyes, so often a misty blue, had filled with whiteness, the cataracts of wretched insight. He was besotted with phantoms again.
"What?"
"Now I know why."
"Perce, listen, it was wrong of me to— "
His grandfather's hands seized him; hard knuckles hurt Knox Winford's skinny chest. "He's chosen you. That's why you have to do it."
"Do what? Are you talking about the Devon case?"
Knox helped Perce to sit up, and pried his hands from the lapels of the corduroy jacket Knox was wearing. "I've already made up my mind to— "
"But you must preside at his trial. It's what he wants of you. If you don't, he'll come back here, night after night. You don't realize what he can do to you, Knox. He'll make your house unfit to live in. He'll terrorize Bonnie, and the little ones. He'll make all of your lives— hell on earth."
"Perce, stop it!"
The old man wept for his grandson; his eyes, refreshed, became their normal color. "There's nothing else you can do. Give him the trial, and he'll leave you alone."
"Who? Who are you talking about? Not Richard Devon."
"No." Something came across from Perce then, from the depths of his psychic ordeal. It fastened chillingly on the side of Knox Winford's throat, a soulless presence, immaculately lethal, like a crystal spider. "His name is Zarach'."
Knox sat back suddenly, crumpling as if all the breath had disappeared from his body. He had heard the name before, had asked Adam Kurland how it was pronounced. But his grandfather knew nothing about Knox's recent meeting with the lawyer, could not have heard the tape recordings of the supposed manifestations or read the depositions that were locked up in the judge's files. Therefore he could not know the name Zarach'.
But Perce did. He said it again.
The answers Knox had for this phenomenon were all illogical and absurd.
The truth, when he finally settled for it, was devastating in all of its implications.
82
Shortly after Knox Winford's historic decision to allow the defense in the case of Vermont v. Devon to plead demonic possession, Tommie Harkrider was chauffeured up to Vermont to see Gary Cleves.
The famous criminal lawyer spent a full day with the prosecutor, honing him as if Gary were a dull razor he had picked up in a thrift shop. Afterwards Gary and Tommie were ready to meet the press.
All the lights made Gary's hands shake; Tommie basked contentedly in their glow, looking for old friends among the ranks of reporters and TV news correspondents. Gary read the prepared statement in a voice that occasionally became too high-pitched. Tommie tried not to wince.
"While I feel that the decision to admit a plea of not guilty by reason of demonic possession sets a dangerous precedent in the annals of American criminal law, I do not intend to challenge this decision by seeking a reversal of the ruling from a higher court. Such an action would result in undesirable delays in bringing the case before a jury. I am confident that we have the evidence to prove that this so-called case of possession is in reality a classic example of multiple personality behavior, which is not, under the laws of this state, regarded as a psychotic condition. We will then prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Richard Devon is guilty as charged of murder in the first degree, and I am confident that the jury will return the appropriate verdict."
83
"What? What was that you said, Linds?" Adam Kurland spoke across a table heaped with papers and lawbooks, cupping one ear with his hand, like an old codger. "I'm still a leetle deef from the sound of Gary's Big Gun going off."
"I said, wouldn't it be interesting if we could persuade Zarach' to pay Gary a little visit some dark and windy night?" Then she covered her mouth with her hand. "Ooops. Maybe that's not so funny after all."
The phone rang. "There it goes again. Let's see, that was twenty-three full seconds of blessed silence that time. Shall we try for our one hundredth crank call of the day?"
"Let the machine get it," Adam advised.
"I think we should put a new tape on. 'Dear Sir or Madam: please excuse us for not taking your irate, demeaning, possibly actionable call at this time. If you choose to leave a message at the sound of the raspberry, prithee, try to refrain from using such terms as "commie," "godless," and "motherfucker." Your cooperation is appreciated. While waiting to deliver the message that is bound to gladden our hearts and rekindle our faith in human nature, may we suggest you pacify yourself by bending over, placing your head in your asshole, and breathing deeply. Thank you so very, very much.' "
84
The prisoner waited.
Silently, in the rank, dirty, unfurnished basement room of the Haden County Courthouse. He was in his strait-jacket. There were three guards in the room with him, all well armed. They did not stand anywhere near the prisoner.
They had only been waiting there for a few minutes, but the three men were delighted to hear the knock on the metal door. One of them hastened, keys jangling at his belt, to open it.
Father James Merlo, in vestments, and Adam Kurland entered the room.
The prisoner raised his head slightly and looked at the priest with the ashen hair. At this altered angle the distortion of the prisoner's face, as if viewed through a prism, was almost sly. Something began to occlude the pupils of his eyes like the bloom on bread. His upper lip lifted until his canine teeth were fully exposed. Merlo returned his stare.
Kurland nodded to the guards and they filed out.
The door remained open.
The prisoner was distracted by this flagrant openness, as if it were an invitation to mischief. Or, symbolically, as if it indicated a lowering of his status. His attention shifted completely from Merlo to something, or someone, intruding at the edge of his preternatural consciousness. He made a sound like a drop of water sizzling on a very hot skillet and drew back slightly, until he was against the far wall. Fascinated, he eyed the doorway.
Edith Leighton walked in.
The sibilant, scalded sound continued. She was wearing a dark gray suit almost clerical in its severity. She carried a gleaming black Hermes briefcase. On a chain around her neck was a miniature gold sundial.
The door was closed, and locked from the outside.
"EDITHHHHHHHHH."
He spat at her like a hiccuping gargoyle with bound wings, eyes protruding greenishly; snaky ribbons of saliva flew through the air and were transformed into a substance that looked like spider's silk but had the strength of steel. They formed a net around her head and shoulders. She never took her eyes from his face, and when she pulled at the net the blister-bright skeins dissolved in her hands.
The prisoner then underwent a number of contortions designed to free him from the straitjacket, which went flying. Noxious odors filled the room and Adam quickly pressed a handkerchief soaked in a solution of holy water to his nose. The priest and the former Queen's Counsel bore this olfactory attack stoically. Merlo had taken a couple of steps to close ranks with her; he wore a crucifix of silver and ebony that hung to the waist of his snugly fitted soutane.
